“I’m fine, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir, for God’s sake. And no more goodbyes?”
“I feel like I already left.”
“Yeah. Me too. Kind of unusual for twins to split up, isn’t it?”
“We’re unusual twins. I’ll tell you about it some time.” She grinned. “And I guess there will be plenty of time. And—Beth?”
He was trying to put out of his head his last encounter with Beth. Neither of them had been able to speak for crying. “The last thing I told her was my true name.”
Kalinski stared at him.
He glanced up. By the light of the ferocious sun, the last few techs were just visible past the edge of the closing lid. One of them got down to her knees and waved. Yuri waved back.
And then the lid closed, silent, heavy, and that was that; they were shut off. The light in here, provided by the glowing walls, roof, floor, was bright enough, yet dimmed compared to the glow of the blocked-out sun.
Yuri glanced at Kalinski. “You OK?”
“Yes. You?”
“I wonder if we made the jump already. I mean in space. You think we’re already on Per Ardua?”
“Impossible to say,” Kalinski said. “But my feeling is that we make the transfer in the central bridging room, not these antechambers. It was in the central room you said you experienced a gravity shift.”
“Maybe. Who knows? Are you ready?”
“Sure.”
They had actually worked through the transition process in virtual simulations, real space-programme stuff. You just pressed your hands into the indentations in the inner doorways. Nobody knew if gloved hands would work, or if, as the indentations came in sets of three on each door, one or two or three people would be necessary to work them.
In the event, two pairs of hands seemed to work just fine. The door swung back.
Just another door, opening ahead of you, Yuri. Just another door, in a long line of doors.
They climbed through easily into the central chamber, and faced the second door, complete with its set of hand marks. They glanced at each other, shrugged, and lifted their hands. The door behind them swung closed.
And when they opened the door before them Yuri immediately stumbled, under heavier gravity. Per Ardua gravity. Was he already back? Had another four years already passed? If so, Beth was gone.
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.”