It was almost a disappointment when Ceres came swimming out of the sky, and this interval of calm was over.
Chapter 66
At 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.