She didn’t believe that, however. She knew herself, she knew her past, her life. And this past wasn’t hers.
She’d learned not to talk about this, not to anybody—not after the first few minutes of utter bafflement, up there on Mercury, in her pressure suit, in the Hatch, facing a sister she’d never known existed, and everybody had stared at her in dismay as she babbled out her confusion. After all she’d rather be working on kernel super-physics than spend the rest of her life on medication and therapy intended to rid her of “delusions”. She wouldn’t even talk to Penny about it, despite her sister’s tentative attempts to break through the barrier. Stef had been very happy to see Penny posted to a different planet, happy to just get on with her work; at least the work had stayed a constant comfort.
But now here was this summons from Earthshine, evidently intended to bring the two sisters together.
It seemed to Stef that despite much study and commentary, even while everybody acknowledged their power, most experts were unsure what the real agenda of the Core AIs might be. The three antique minds, a legacy of a difficult past, had no formal role in human society, no legal status—no rights, in a sense. But everybody knew that human agencies, from the UN and nation states on downwards, had to deal with them. Their power was recognised the way you would acknowledge the power of a natural phenomenon, a hurricane; you couldn’t ignore them, but they were outside the human world. And unlike hurricanes, the Core AIs could think and communicate.
Now Earthshine had chosen to communicate with Stef and her sister. Why? That depended, Stef supposed, on Earthshine’s own agenda. Maybe Earthshine had some kind of insight to share. But did she want her personal tangle of a life to be unpicked by such a monster?
On a personal level she was repelled. But on an intellectual level she was intrigued.
She acknowledged the note, logged the trip in her personal schedule, and with relief went back to work.
Chapter 42
Stef Kalinski dropped from the moon’s orbit to Earth, following the usual leisurely three-day unpowered trajectory. At Earth orbit she had to wait a day before she was transferred to an orbit-to-ground shuttle, like a snub-nosed plane with black heat tiles and white insulation, its cabin crowded with passengers and luggage.
The little craft glided down through the air with looping, sweeping curves.
On its final track the shuttle crossed the eastern coast of South America, coming down towards a strip of flat coastal savannah. The land glimmered with standing water, flooded by the rising ocean despite crumbling levees that still lined the coast. This was Kourou, Guiana, the old European space agency launch centre, now converted to a surface-to-orbit transit station. Further inland Stef saw bare ground, scrub, some of it plastered with solar-collector arrays like a coat of silver paint. This site was only a few hundred kilometres north of the mouth of the Amazon. Now there was no forest, and the river was reduced to a trickle through a semi-desert.
Only an hour after landing at Kourou Stef was being bundled into a small aircraft for her hop across the Atlantic. Like the shuttle the plane was crowded, fully loaded before it was allowed to take off; these days transport was always communal and always crowded, planes and shuttles and trains and buses, minimal energy usage the key goal.
The plane, powered by turbos driven by a compact microfusion engine, leapt easily into the air. The sky beyond the small, thick windows turned a deep blue; the trajectory was a suborbital hop, and they crossed the Atlantic high and fast, heading north-east towards western Europe, Portugal and Spain.
As the plane dipped back into the atmosphere over the Iberian coast, Stef wished she knew enough geography to recognise how much of this coastline had been changed by the risen sea. Near the shore she saw vapour feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines standing out to sea and deflecting a little more sunlight from the overheated Earth. The ocean itself was green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air.
The plane banked and headed north, streaking at high speed through the air. Southern Spain, long abandoned to desert, was chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with vast silvered bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. Once across the Pyrenees they left behind the mid-latitude desertification zone and the ground gradually became greener. But even in central France Stef glimpsed great old cities abandoned or at least depopulated, the conurbations’ brown stains pierced by green as they fragmented back into the villages from which they had formed. Over northern France the plane swept west, circled, and then descended into an easterly headwind. Stef saw something of the Seine, more abandoned towns on a glistening floodplain. Away from the river olives grew in neat rows on dusty ground, a sight you would once have seen in southern Spain, an agriculture suited to the new age.
At Paris, the big old airports were no longer in use. Instead, with a stab of sharp deceleration, they were brought down at a small airport in a suburb called Bagneux, just south of central Paris itself, a clutter of ugly twentieth-century buildings cleared in great stripes to make room for the runways. There was another brisk transfer made mostly in silence; there was no documentation, but every passenger’s identity, security background and infective status were seamlessly checked with non-invasive DNA scans.
Soon Stef was through the process, and found herself and her minimal luggage alone in a small driverless electric car that whisked her north towards the city centre. She’d not been to Paris before, and the cramped streets swept by at bewildering speed. Somewhere the Eiffel Tower still stood proud, but around her she saw only walls of ancient sandstone stained by floodwater. Although this was still the political capital of the country there were few people around. Wealthy Parisians had long ago decanted to the cooler climes of southern England—Angleterre as it was known now—and the poor, presumably, had died out or drifted away.
She glimpsed the Île de la Cité, standing in the turbid waters of the Seine, where the roofs of Notre Dame were plastered with solar panels. A huge banyan tree sprawled before the cathedral, rooted in the flooded ruins of surrounding buildings.
At last the car brought her to the Champs-Élysées, an avenue even a first-time visitor like Stef could not fail to recognise. There was a fair density of traffic here, and pedestrians hurrying beneath sun-shade awnings. The car stopped outside a high, elaborate doorway, where a man stood in the shade, beside a slim woman in the uniform of the ISF. The man, of course, was Earthshine. And the woman was Penny Kalinski, Stef’s impossible sister.
Earthshine, who cast a convincing shadow when he stepped into the light, bowed to Stef as she climbed out of the car. “Greetings,” he said in his cultured British accent. He made no attempt to shake Stef’s hand, but wafted his fingers through the lintel of the doorway; pixels scattered from his fingertips like fairy dust. “At least in European manners, this is how to announce one is only a virtual presence. I hope this suit—that’s how I think of my various bodies, as ‘suits’—is acceptable to you both.”
“It’s fine,” Penny said. She was looking steadily at Stef. Then she approached her sister, one pace, two.
Stef stood rigid, almost at attention beside her luggage, unwilling to respond. There was a stiff moment.
Penny said, “Here we are, in person together, for only, what, the fourth time, the fifth? Since—”