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.”
“Indeed…”
Penny was only half-listening. As she moved deeper into this building she got a deepening sense of its gargantuan scale, the roof far above her like some planetarium sky suspended by needle-slim pillars, the clusters of buildings on the floor like whole villages enclosed by the greater structure. She recognised official buildings, squat military-style bunkers, and refectories, dormitories, hospitals—but there were schools too, around which she saw children playing, leaping, flapping in the air. And bars, games rooms, hotels, and a giant sports arena where, as she glimpsed through a structure of lacy scaffolding, what looked like a low-gravity version of basketball was being played. There was a continual hubbub of noise, reflecting from the hard common floor and from the roof far above, a jumble of human voices, scraps of music, the occasionally whir of air pumps and fans. And around the invisibly slim pillars people flew, many of them young, as Penny might have guessed, gliding easily on extended bat wings strapped to their arms.
“You need not worry.”
The English words were heavily accented. Penny turned to see that the young soldier had spoken to her, Captain Wei Ling, clutching her remote-control slate. Wei smiled.
“I’m not… Worried about what?”
Wei pointed upwards; her hand was encased in a white glove. “That the roof will fall. Even children born here fear that. Our architects take advantage of the low gravity of this small world to create such structures as this, possible on no other world inhabited by humanity. But it seems some primal instinct is violated by the sight of an artificial sky.”
“You sound proud of all this. Were you born here?”
“No. I am a native of Earth. But as a Chinese I am proud to witness this, yes. Access to space has unleashed a native genius in my people, I think. Please prepare yourself for the terminus of the track.”
Chapter 67
The conference hall to which they were led was itself huge, and neatly if conventionally laid out with a large stage, a giant screen, and rows of seats in queasy-looking low-G-steep elevated banks.
But the seats were mostly empty. Something was wrong, Penny saw immediately. The delegates, many arguing loudly, were crowded before big screens filled with a blizzard of images, news channels, science feeds and other updates. Penny recognised some of the delegates, from both China and the UN nations: politicians, scientists, engineers, writers, even a few artists. Such was the noise of raised voices in the room that Penny couldn’t make out a word coming from the multiple talking heads on the screen. A few faces turned to look at the newcomers, especially at Earthshine’s outlandish avatar body, but they soon returned to their frenetic debating.