Proxima (46 page)

Penny settled into the rhythms of the journey easily. After the noisy engineering of the ISF hulks, the junk was peaceful. And by comparison with the heavy push of the hulk’s drive, the
microgravity thrust exerted by the ship’s lightsail was barely noticeable, and silent too. Occasionally Penny would feel a faint wash of sensation in her gut, as if she was adrift in some
ocean and caught by a gentle current. Or she would see a speck of dust drift down through the air, settling slowly. The Chinese crew, like Jiang, were polite, orderly – maybe a little
repressed, she thought, but it made for a calm atmosphere. Even the remoteness of the sun gave her a sense of dreaminess, of peace.

She worked when she could concentrate, and exercised according to the routine politely suggested by Jiang, to avoid the usual microgravity loss of muscle tone and bone mass. She slept a lot,
floating in her cocoon-like room, sometimes in darkness, sometimes with the walls set to transparency so that the stars, the sun, the sail with its vast slow ripples were a diorama around her.
After a few days it was hard for her to tell if she was asleep or awake. Sometimes she dreamed of the smooth limbs and deep eyes of Jiang Youwei.

It was almost a disappointment when Ceres came swimming out of the sky, and this interval of calm was over.

A
t Ceres the junk’s modular hull was gently disengaged from its sail tethers, and was towed inwards through the last couple of hundred
kilometres by a small automated tug. Penny, watching the big sail wafting around the sky, could see the logic; the very biggest sails could be a couple of thousand kilometres across or more, bigger
than Ceres itself – big enough to wrap up the dwarf planet like a Christmas present, and you didn’t want any accidental entanglements.

At Ceres, the passengers, including Penny, Jiang and a few crew members who were being rotated here, were politely moved into a small snub-nosed shuttle craft, rows of seats in a cramped cabin.
As they took their places some of the passengers looked faintly queasy, and others rubbed their arms. They had all been put through a brisk decontamination and inoculation update. The separated
pools of humanity, scattered among isolated colonies, were busily evolving their own unique suites of viruses, and each group had to be protected from infection by all the others.

As Penny strapped into her acceleration couch she watched a couple of crew manhandling what looked like a piece of cargo into this passenger cabin. It was a rough cone that bristled with lenses,
grills and other sensors, a retractable antenna array, and a minor forest of manipulator arms, some of which brachiated down to fine tool fittings. The whole was plastered with UEI logos, and
various instruction panels in multiple languages. The crewmen cautiously pushed this gadget into place in a gap between the rows of couches, positioned it so the lenses could peer out of the
windows, plugged it into the shuttle’s onboard power supply, and backed away.

The shuttle doors were sealed, and a chime filled the cabin. Automated voices speaking Chinese, English and Spanish announced that the final transit to Ceres had already begun. As she was pushed
gently back in her couch by the acceleration, Penny stared at the bristling cone. ‘So what the hell’s that?’

Jiang Youwei smiled. ‘What do you imagine it is?’

‘It looks like a Mars lander, circa 2050. A museum piece?’

To her surprise a panel lit up on the flank of the machine, and an urbane face peered out at her, smiling. ‘Good morning, Colonel Kalinski.’

‘Earthshine. You!’

‘Me indeed. Or at least a partial, a download of my primary back on Earth. Lightspeed delays are such a bore, aren’t they? And appear likely to remain so for the indefinite future,
given that even the Hatch bridges are limited to lightspeed transits. I wonder how
that
has constrained the evolution of life and intelligence in the Galaxy . . .’ He smiled, almost
modestly; the face was reproduced authentically, so that Penny had the strong impression that she was speaking to a human being stuck inside this box-like shell. ‘It is good to see you
again.’

‘You say you’re some kind of partial?’

‘Of course. I am considerably limited compared to my primary. However I download my memory store regularly, and when I am returned to Earth there will be a complete
synchronisation.’

Jiang said, ‘That sounds schizophrenic, sir.’

‘Oh, probably,’ Earthshine said breezily. ‘But you should remember that I, or rather my primary, am already a fusion of nine human consciousnesses. Already a chorus of voices
sing inside my head, so to speak.’

Penny was irritated by this distraction from her mission, from the approaching asteroid. ‘I didn’t even know you were aboard the junk.’

‘I considered renewing our acquaintance. Your young guardian here said it might be best not to disturb you during the flight.’

‘He did, did he?’ She glared at Jiang, who, not for the first time in their acquaintance, blushed. ‘What am I, your grandmother?’

‘But we had no urgent business,’ Earthshine said. ‘Though we have our long-standing connection concerning your relationship with your sister. Of course the two of you are now
separated, presumably by light years, presumably for ever.’

She glanced at Jiang. Officially, he knew nothing of her complicated past. His face showed no expression; she could not tell what he knew or not.

She turned back to Earthshine. ‘So why are you here?’

‘Two reasons. First—’

‘The conference?’

‘Yes. Though it is far from a summit, it is one of the most high-profile UN-Chinese contacts proceeding anywhere just now. Your own presence, Colonel, is an indicator of that. And we
– my fellows in the Core – believe we should back, visibly and publicly, such initiatives as the cooperative development of outer solar system resources being discussed here. So here I
am.’

‘And the second reason?’

‘I wanted to see the asteroid belt. Simple as that. I have developed something of an obsession with the violent origins of our currently peaceful worlds . . . Call me a cosmic-disaster
junkie. Ceres, you know, is the only truly spherical asteroid, the only one differentiated, that is with an internal structure of a rocky core, a water ice mantle and a fractured rocky crust. It is
a dwarf planet technically, not an asteroid at all. And it comprises about a third the mass of the whole of the belt. But once there were
thousands
of such objects here in the belt, all of
them relics of the ancient days, of the formation of the solar system.’

‘All gone, except Ceres,’ Penny said.

‘Yes.’ Two manipulator arms swung; two small metal fists collided with a tinny clang. ‘All smashed to pieces in collisions. That’s why there are so many metal-rich
asteroids out there. They are relics of the cores of worlds like Ceres, whole worlds smashed to bits. Violence, everywhere you look! We crawl around our solar system like baffled children in a
bombed-out cathedral.’

Jiang frowned. ‘That is not an original perception. It is the nature of the universe we inhabit.’

‘True. But it’s not the violence of the past that haunts me. It’s the mirror-image violence that may lie in our future . . .’

Penny tried to puzzle this out. She remembered how Earthshine had spoken of being
afraid
, all those years ago, over her father’s grave. Now he seemed to be becoming more
irrational, obsessive. Haunted by visions of primordial cosmic violence? Was it possible for a Core AI to become insane? If so, what would the consequences be? Or perhaps, she told herself, he was
actually becoming
more
sane. Facing realities not yet perceived by mankind. She wasn’t sure which was the more disturbing alternative.

Another chime informed them that the transfer was already nearing its end. Penny felt a soft deceleration pressing her against her restraint, and she strained to look ahead through the
shuttle’s blister carapace. At last she saw Ceres itself, a small world fast approaching. In the attenuated sunlight, it looked at first glance like the far side of the moon, heavily
cratered. But transparent roofs sprawled across swathes of landscape, roofs under which the green of life could be glimpsed. There were towers too, drilling rigs of some kind, so tall that they
bristled at this world’s sharp horizon, and a belt of gleaming metal circled what she presumed was the world’s equator.

‘That belt is the mass driver,’ Jiang Youwei murmured, beside Penny. ‘Or one of them. A great electromagnetic sling that hurls sacks of water ice and other volatiles from Ceres
all over the asteroid belt, and indeed to Mars. Some asteroids, you know, are virtually pure metal, or metallic ore, with not a trace of water or other volatiles, and so are unable to support human
life independently. Because of the water it exports, Ceres has turned out to be the key to the exploitation of the whole belt.’

There was another warning chime. The shuttle tipped up and descended
nose down
, alarmingly, towards a landing field of what looked like concrete, heavily marked with recognition symbols
and surrounded by giant structures. The gravity of Ceres must be so low, Penny thought, that the descent was more like a docking with a huge space station than a landing on a respectable planet, on
Mars or Mercury or Earth.

In the last seconds the craft tipped up with a rattle of attitude thrusters, and the descent slowed to a crawl. They landed, feather-soft.

The shuttle rolled towards a tremendously tall, sprawling building, and nuzzled easily up against a wall. A chime, and the passengers began to unbuckle. Once they were out of their seats, Penny
stumbled slightly in a gravity so low it was hardly there at all.

There was a clicking of latches, and then the shuttle’s nose section swung back, leaving a round portal through which they could walk. A handful of official-looking types in sober business
suits, and a couple of armed soldiers, were waiting beyond the portal. Over their shoulders Penny glimpsed a vast open space, spindly pillars, a high ceiling through which sunlight glinted, and
beneath which huge birds flapped – no, she saw, they were
people
, people flying through the air using some kind of skeletal, bat-like wings. The sunlight was supplemented by the
light of huge fluorescent panels that seemed to be suspended from the ceiling. In this vast, cavernous space, lesser buildings clustered on a smooth floor, entirely contained by the great roof. The
structure was so huge that Penny thought she could see a slight curvature in the floor, as if the building sprawled over the very horizon. Well, perhaps it did.

Two women waited for Penny, with Jiang and Earthshine. The apparent senior, small, sober, perhaps forty years old and dressed in a sombre black suit, introduced herself as Shen Xuelin.
‘Welcome to the Halls of Ceres. I am deputy director of the colony here, and chair of the Resources Futures conference to which you have kindly agreed to contribute.’ Her English was
good, if anything over-precise, her accent a kind of neutral east coast American. She introduced the younger, uniformed woman beside her: Wei Ling, a captain in a dedicated division of the Chinese
national army. ‘I apologise for the presence of an armed officer at my side,’ Shen said. ‘And for our inability to offer you the full freedom you requested, sir,’ she said
to Earthshine.

Penny, turning, saw that the AI’s cone-shaped host was being hoisted by a couple of the shuttle crew onto a kind of hovering platform. She had to laugh. ‘You’re going to be
rolled around like a remote-controlled kid’s toy, Earthshine.’

‘It is purely a routine precaution—’

‘Please don’t apologise, Madam Shen.’ Earthshine’s voice was strong, confident, projected as if a human being was standing here with them. ‘Given the current
political situation it is quite understandable. I half expected you to turn me back altogether.’ Shen checked a watch. ‘The morning session of the conference has another hour to run.
Would you care to join us?’ Shen led them to a walkway that stretched across the floor of the tremendous building. ‘I would advise you to grab the handrail . . .’

The walkway was a track of some yielding material that rapidly built up speed. Penny found herself tilting forward, disconcertingly, though she had no inner sense of tipping. Glancing down, she
saw that the surface of the track had rucked itself up so that it held her at an angle, compensating for the acceleration. A neat low-gravity trick. ‘Clever,’ she said.

Shen said with some pride, ‘An ingenious design but not one that everybody finds comfortable. The mixing up of the vertical and horizontal . . .’

Penny noticed that Jiang had turned very pale. She had to grin. ‘Bearing up, Mars man? If you’re going to vomit I’ll find you a sick bag.’

‘That will not be necessary,’ Jiang said, a little sternly. ‘Madam Shen, I was intrigued by the conference agenda.’

‘Indeed,’ said Shen. ‘We have already had productive sessions on ambitious plans to exploit such resources as the gas giant atmospheres, remote moons like Titan and Triton,
even Kuiper belt and Oort cloud objects. With our experience of Ceres and the asteroids we feel confident about approaching the ice moons and dwarf planets of the outer system, even though we must
seek alternate energy sources to sunlight.’

‘You mean,’ Earthshine said provocatively, ‘you need the kernels.’

‘That is one possibility,’ Shen said, a little stiffly. ‘There are other energy sources. The mining of gas giant atmospheres for fusion fuel, for example. This will require an
industrial effort on a scale of an order of magnitude more ambitious than anything seen in the present day. This is surely a challenge for the next generation, and even then we believe the pooled
resources of all our societies, that is of the Greater Economic Framework and of the nations dominated by the UN quasi-government, will be necessary to achieve such a task.’

Earthshine said sadly, ‘But that cooperation looks a lot less likely than it did a couple of weeks ago.’