Proxima (36 page)

The trek took them two more years.

2193

F
or the last few hundred kilometres, the land rose steadily. The river valleys they had followed since the Mattock Confluence became narrower, with
steeper walls and beds of tumbled, broken rock: they were gouges cut through country that was increasingly hilly, and at times mountainous. Forest crowded the valleys, clumps of squat, sturdy,
wind-resistant, fast-growing trees with wide leaves turned up hungrily to the perpetually cloudy sky. The character of the country was quite different from the plains that seemed to cover much of
the continent that dominated the starward face of Per Ardua, the plains across which they had trekked to get here.

They climbed further, and found lakes nestling in the hills, fed by streams tumbling from the still higher ground ahead, choked by stem beds. And on the slopes above that there was little but a
smear of Arduan lichen, with a few mobile bands of builder-like motiles or kites working the rare stem beds. The ColU speculated that the life up here, sparse as it was, was taking advantage of the
relatively clement conditions of the star winter. Without the drop in temperature brought about by the big reduction in the star’s heat output, this high country would be unliveable for all
but heat-loving extremophile-type life forms.

And on they climbed, into this strange, fractured upland. The valleys became narrower, steeper-walled, the river flows more energetic. They had to walk single file at times, and in the narrowest
valleys they had trouble with their baggage train.

Yuri’s ColU was put to work guiding its lobotomised fellows, which were being used as trucks, dragging their pallets of food and precious topsoil behind them. It had developed a system of
communication and control with trailing fibre-optic cables, which periodically got hung up on rocks or stem clumps, and Beth and Freddie organised parties of children to help out.

‘But they are in continual pain,’ the ColU told Mardina and Yuri. ‘The physical pain of the brutal surgery they underwent. Pain they do not deserve, pain they can never
understand. For they are still conscious, oh yes.’

Yuri had no patience for this. ‘Tell it to the UN,’ he would say, marching on.

With time, the country became more unstable. They would be woken from their sleep by earth tremors, violent enough to shake Yuri on his pallet. Sometimes they passed hot mud pools, scummy with
purple-green bacteria, mud that hissed and bubbled – even geysers in one place, fountains of steam and hot water that erupted with great chuffing noises like a faulty steam engine. The elders
fretted about getting caught in an eruption or quake, while the children told each other stories about the ghost of Dexter Cole turning over in his rocky underground bed. The ColU said they should
expect this kind of activity at this, the planet’s closest point to Proxima, where the star’s gravity was deforming the world’s very shape.

The temperature continued to rise as they plodded ever further south. People didn’t wear much nowadays; on the trek or around the camp they wore shorts and loose tunics, and many of the
kids ran around naked. But the trucks suffered more mechanical breakdowns as they overheated, and the number of the ColU’s complaints increased.

And the giant low-pressure system that dominated the whole province increasingly filled the sky before them, a permanent bank of cloud hundreds of kilometres wide.

The ColU explained the science to anyone who would listen. ‘Warm air is drawn in towards the hot substellar centre, rises and cools, and dumps its water vapour as clouds, rain, storms. The
falling water gathers in rivers and streams that flow radially away from this central point – no doubt in all directions, not just to the north, the track of the rivers we have followed. This
must be the essential water cycle over this Proxima-facing continent . . .’

But no amount of understanding helped when the fringe of the great storm reached out to lash the plodding migrants with wind and rain, and freakish showers of hail, even snow, despite the heat.
Some of the migrants coped with this better than others, Yuri observed. Older folk who had spent too long in the dome-hovels of Mars or in space habs found it difficult to deal with any natural
weather. The children, though, ran around in the heat or the cold, the rain or the snow, accepting it all.

Progress slowed. As the temperatures rose ever higher there were increasing arguments about the wisdom of going on at all.

Yet they persisted. The occasional glimpses of tyre tracks were lures, Yuri sometimes thought, drawing them ever deeper into the navel of the world. And if there
were
ISF people
anywhere on this planet, where else would they be but the most geographically significant point of all?

Then, two years after leaving the Mattock Confluence, they reached a lake that sprawled across their path, and could go no further.

2197

P
enny Kalinski was summoned to the latest international interplanetary summit. More reconciliation talks between the UN and China, this time to be
held at the Chinese capital on Mars.

Her first view of the capital, as she descended from space, was extraordinary. The Chinese name for their city meant something like ‘City of Fire’. This was because in Chinese
tradition there were five elements, each associated with a season, a cardinal direction, and a planet. Mercury, for instance, was associated with water. Fire was associated with summer, the south,
and Mars: hence, City of Fire. But the informal western name for the place, based mostly on images from orbit taken long before anybody other than a Chinese citizen had been allowed near the place,
was Obelisk. And as the shuttle descended gently through the thin air of Mars – the craft was like a pterosaur, its great wings webbing on a lightweight frame – even from altitude Penny
could see why the name was appropriate.

Terra Cimmeria was a chaotic landscape scribbled over by crater walls and steep-sided river valleys; from the high air it reminded Penny of scar tissue, like a badly healed burn. The Chinese
settlement nestled on the floor of a crater called Mendel, itself nearly eighty kilometres across, its floor incised by dry channels and pocked by smaller, younger craters. She glimpsed domes
half-covered by heaped-up Martian dirt, the gleaming tanks and pipes of what looked like a sprawling chemical manufacturing plant, and a few drilling derricks, angular frames like rocket
gantries.

And at the centre of it all was the Obelisk itself, a sculpted finger of Martian stone and concrete and steel and glass – a tower an astounding ten kilometres high, a product of the low
Martian gravity and human ingenuity, far higher than any building possible with such materials on Earth.

On its way in the lander sailed around the flank of the monument.

Sir Michael King, sitting beside Penny, looked over her shoulder. ‘They always do this,’ he said. ‘Make sure you
notice
the damn thing. But you have to allow them
their gesture of pride.’

‘Yes. The very place where Cao Xi made the first landing on Mars, all those years ago.’

‘Well, he didn’t live to see Earth again. But look at all they’ve achieved here since, out in the asteroid belt as well as on Mars. All without kernel technology too . .
.’

And the issue of access to kernel technology was, of course, the reason why this UN delegation had come to Mars.

The shuttle glided down to a landing with remarkable grace, given its size and evident fragility, on a landing strip some distance from the main domes. The shuttle was quite a contrast to the
heavily armed kernel-driven hulk ship in which the UN party had crossed the inner system. But there had been something about the slim, elegant, almost minimalist design of the Chinese-designed
shuttle that impressed Penny; the delicate craft seemed a perfect fit to its environment, the tall air of Mars – an adaptation derived from generations of living here. Coming to Chinese Mars
was like entering some parallel universe, where technological choices had been made differently from the UN worlds.

As soon as the shuttle was still, rovers hurried out to greet the craft, some nuzzling up against the hull to transfer cargo, fuel and passengers, and others, robots with long, spidery
manipulator arms, to begin the elaborate process of folding up the shuttle’s wings, in anticipation of a missile-like launch back to orbit.

The passengers transferred to a well-appointed bus, a blister of some tough transparent material. The driverless vehicle rolled swiftly, heading along a smooth, dust-free road towards one of the
big domes of the central settlement. These were huge structures of brick and concrete in themselves, but mere blisters at the feet of the great monument. Chinese staff moved gracefully through the
bus cabin offering the passengers cups of water, melted from authentic Martian polar ice, so they were told.

They were in the southern hemisphere of Mars, some thirty degrees below the equator, and it was close to local noon. Seen through the bus windows the sun was high, round, faint but well defined,
and the sky was an orange-brown smear – the colour of toffee maybe, Penny thought, remembering home-cooking experiments she and Stef had made as kids, under the kindly but ham-fisted
supervision of their father. Experiments of which, Penny supposed sadly, Stef would have no memory.

It was already, incredibly, seventeen years since the sisters’ conceptually stunning encounter with Earthshine, and his revelation of the gravestone of their father in Paris. They had
continued to keep in touch with Earthshine about the central mystery of their lives, to little avail.

And the careers of the twins, now in their fifties, had, at last, diverged. While, thanks to King and Earthshine, Penny had been gradually drawn into long-term diplomatic efforts to avert war in
an increasingly polarised solar system, Stef was down on Mercury working on more studies of the Hatch. Right now the sisters were separated by something like two hundred million kilometres. It was
scarcely possible for two human beings to be further apart, short of shipping one of them out to Proxima Centauri.

The bus rolled smoothly up to an airlock set in one dome’s curving wall. The uniformed staff, all smiling, ushered the guests off the bus.

Penny followed the crowd into the dome. The interior was crowded with low secondary buildings, but the dome roof itself was visible overhead, its brick and concrete reminding Penny of some great
Roman ruin. Big strip lights hung from the roof, and there were screens with scrolling slogans in a Chinese script Penny couldn’t read. Meanwhile the surface space was evidently only part of
this installation. Massive staircases, escalators and elevator towers invited the newcomers to descend to wide, brightly lit underground galleries, which looked like hives of industry and
habitation. The design of the place, like a cross between a classical pantheon, a shopping mall, and some tremendous high-tech factory, was clearly constrained by the environment of Mars, but it
seemed to have been achieved with a sense of
vision
that was lacking in too many offworld UN installations Penny had visited. She was hugely impressed, as she was no doubt meant to be.

Just inside the entrance plaza, an official party lined up in neat rows to meet the UN delegates. Military stood on guard, wearing Mars-colour-camouflage lightweight pressure suits. There was
even a rank of children dressed in some traditional costume, swirling ribbons in fantastic low-gravity transitory sculptures that seemed to hang in the air. Drone cameras hovered overhead,
capturing the moment.

The focus was on the seniors, of course. Sir Michael King as CEO of UEI, now eighty-two years old, had been a major facilitator of this conference, and he and his equally elderly colleagues were
greeted individually by Chinese officials. But more Chinese came forward, some in military uniform, many in civilian clothes, closing in on the visitors. Penny saw that at least one guide had been
assigned to every member of the visiting party.

Sure enough, one young man broke from the rest and approached her. ‘Colonel Kalinski?’

Penny tried not to flinch; even now, aged fifty-three, she tended to recoil from individual attention. ‘That’s me.’

‘My name is Jiang Youwei.’ He offered a hand, and she shook it. He was tall, slim, dark, composed. He wore a one-piece jumpsuit, utilitarian but smart, even elegant. She thought it
made her own sparkly ISF uniform seem kind of obvious, gaudy. ‘I am twenty-four years old; I am a graduate student in theoretical physics here at our university, and I have been assigned as
your personal guide during your stay here.’

His English was flawless, with a trace of an Australian accent, she thought, maybe tutored by natives of a nation now firmly embedded within the Greater Economic Framework back on Earth. And
– for God’s sake – he was nearly thirty years younger than Penny.

‘Thanks, but I’m kind of self-reliant. I don’t really need—’

‘You are free to choose another companion, though I would be personally disappointed. In fact I volunteered. I have studied your and your sister’s work and career path, as much as
has been made available to us. I am afraid the option of no companion at all is not available. There are, after all, security issues.’ He smiled easily. ‘Sooner me than one of those
fellows with the guns, Colonel.’

She had to laugh, and gave in. ‘All right. So what’s on the agenda?’

‘We have twenty-four hours before the formal sessions begin. There are dinners later, and so forth. Some of your party are required for preliminary press conferences—’

‘Not me, thank the Great Galactic Ghoul,’ Penny said. King had warned her off; the public events would be formal dances of protocol and etiquette with no serious content, and as a
mere science adviser she wouldn’t be needed.