When he walked out of the middle chamber and climbed through the second hatch, Yuri found himself back in the Per Ardua chamber he remembered. The lid was closed; he couldn’t see the sky. But there was the builder map on the wall, at which Kalinski stared avidly. There was the ladder from Tollemache’s rover, presumably having stood here for more than eight years. There was even scattered mud on the floor, brought in from the surface by their boots, long dried. ‘Like I’ve never been away,’ he said.
Kalinski leaned with one gloved hand on a wall. Yuri knew she’d been training to cope with Per Ardua’s full Earth-type gravity, but it was going to be hard for a while. ‘I’m relieved it worked. I thought it would, but—’
‘I know. At least we’ve not been dropped in the heart of a sun, or something. I don’t think it works that way, this link system. It all seems too – sensible – for that, doesn’t it? Look, we’re not going to need these suits. What say we dump them?’
‘I guess we could. There are no sim controllers to order us around now, are there?’
‘Welcome to my world, Colonel Kalinski.’
They got out of their suits quickly; they were self-operating, self-opening. Underneath they both wore light, practical coveralls in Arduan pastel colours, and they had backpacks of survival gear and science monitors.
Yuri nodded at Kalinski, hefted his pack, and made his way up the ladder to the closed hatch lid. Braced on a rung, he pressed both hands into indentations in the lid – indentations which, he recalled, had not been there the last time he passed through, and the builder marks seemed to have vanished.
To his relief, the hatch opened smoothly.
He looked up at a dismal cloud-choked grey sky framed by dead-looking trees, and it was cold, he could feel it immediately, cutting through his thin coverall. He’d been gone for eight years, he reminded himself, four years as some kind of disembodied signal passing from Ardua to Mercury, and four years coming back again – even if it only felt like a month to him. Plenty of time for things to change.
He clambered out quickly, and stood on the Arduan ground once more. He watched Kalinski follow cautiously, slowly given the burden of the higher gravity, but her face was full of wonder, or astonishment. Her first moments on an alien world.
Standing together, they turned around. Much had indeed changed. The thick Hub forest still stood, but dead leaves hung limply from the stubby upper stem branches, the undergrowth had died back, and there was a huddle of dead builders, not a purposefully constructed midden but just a heap of corpses, on which, Yuri saw, frost had gathered. Frost, at the substellar. His breath fogged.
‘Hello, Yuri Eden.’
Yuri turned. There was the ColU, its dome smeared with some kind of ash, its upper surfaces rimed with frost. Yuri felt oddly touched. ‘You waited for me.’
‘Yes.’
‘For eight years? Jesus. Looks like you stayed in the very same spot.’
‘No. That would have been foolish. I moved periodically in order to ensure the smooth functioning of my drive mechanisms and—’
‘All right, I get it. This is Stef Kalinski. Colonel in the ISF.’
‘I know of you. Welcome, Colonel Kalinski.’
Kalinski just stared.
‘Yuri Eden, you left Mercury four years ago. We received warning of your coming a short time ago, you and your companion.’
‘Ah,’ said Kalinski. ‘The message beat us, just as when you came through the other way, Yuri. The transit’s not quite lightspeed.’
‘The message was received by Captain Jacob Keller in the hull, who informed me.’
Yuri asked, ‘Keller? What about Brady?’
‘He has not survived. We keep each other company, Captain Jacob Keller and I. Sometimes we play poker.’
Yuri had to laugh. ‘Poker. My God. ColU, the weather – what happened here?’
‘Volcanism, Yuri Eden. It seems that a major volcanic episode has occurred, probably in the northern region, from which we fled with the jilla and the builders.’
‘Ah. All that uplifting.’
‘Yes. It is not an uncommon occurrence on this world, it seems. That is, not uncommon on a geological timescale.’
‘And now,’ Kalinski said, ‘we’re in some kind of volcanic winter.’
‘No doubt for the native life forms it is part of the natural cycle. A spur to evolution perhaps. But the humans here have suffered. Of course the star winter was already a challenge. All this has happened in the interval while you fled, dreamless, between the stars.’
‘My God. If it’s as bad as this here, at the substellar . . . Where are they, Delga and the rest?’
‘Gone from here, Yuri Eden.’
Yuri glanced around, at this utterly transformed wreck of a world, to which he had now been exiled by the mother of his child, as once he had been exiled to the future by his parents. He felt his heart harden, as he stood there in the unexpected cold. ‘OK. Well, there are big changes on the way, ColU. Floods of immigrants are going to be coming through that Hatch. I don’t imagine the UN will wait the eight years it will take for our bad news about the volcanic winter to reach them, for that process to start.’
‘Or even,’ Kalinski said, ‘for confirmation that the Hatch is actually two-way, that it’s safe to pass through. I know Michael King.’
‘We must help them,’ the ColU said.
‘Yeah. But we’ll be in charge,’ Yuri said firmly. Kalinski looked at him strangely, but he ignored her. ‘ColU, let’s go to the hull, and get some warm clothing, and work out where to start.’
‘One thing, Yuri Eden.’
‘Yes?’
‘I heard about the decisions made on Mercury. I’m sorry for your loss.’ It held out a bundle of dried-out stems. Mister Sticks.
Yuri took the doll.
Then the ColU whirred, turned, and rolled away along a track that was now well worn, trampled down by eight years of use. Yuri followed briskly, carefully carrying the beat-up little doll.
SIX
CHAPTER 65
2202
Five years after Stef Kalinski had disappeared into the Hatch to Proxima – and because of the lightspeed delays, with three more years left before Penny could even in principle discover for sure if her sister was alive or dead – Penny was invited to another major UN-China conference, this time on the cooperative exploitation of solar-system resources, to be held on Ceres, the Chinese-held asteroid.
Once again this was going to be all about politics and economics, not physics, and her first instinct was to refuse. But she came under heavy pressure to attend. As Sir Michael King and others pressed on her – she even got a note from Earthshine – for someone like her, so closely associated with kernel physics, to be invited to a conference on Ceres itself on UN-Chinese cooperative projects was a hugely symbolic gesture, just as before. But, aged fifty-eight now, she was a card that had been played too often, she thought. She was like an ageing rock star pulled out of retirement to celebrate the birthday of one too many Secretary Generals. A statement of mutual trust that, in the light of the ever worsening political situation, every time it was repeated had an air of increasing desperation about it.
And meanwhile there was increasingly bad news from all the worlds of mankind. Recently there had been heavily publicised (and suspiciously scrutinised) ‘disasters’ on both political sides: a tsunami in the Atlantic, a dome collapse in a Chinese colony in the Terra Sirenum on Mars soon after . . . At first it looked as if each of these was natural, a gruesome coincidence of timing. Then fingers started to be pointed, accusations began to be made. Fringe groups claimed responsibility for the ‘attacks’, one in retaliation for the other. Some groups claimed responsibility for both.