‘You will be on board in two, three hours. The last to go on, the first to be unloaded.’
Henry led Chloe and Fahad through the stacks of cartons to an oval hatch in a bulkhead. Chloe turned to catch a last sight of Earth, trees and cloudy sky framed by the open doors of the container, and then she ducked through the hatch and that was it: she was committed.
34. The Cloud Tree
Mangala | 30 July
Fighting a headwind all the way, the little Cessna crawled low over the vast red playa and scrub-covered plains, flew out above the forested slopes at the edge of Idunn’s Valley. The sky was tinted a hard cold pink. The sun hung low above what looked like a hazy brown band stretched across half the horizon. The leading edge of the dust storm, according to the pilot.
‘Man, it’s big,’ Vic said. Dressed in a microlight down jacket, jeans and hiking boots, strapped in the seat next to the pilot, he was the only passenger on the plane.
‘More than two thousand kilometres across, and getting bigger all the time,’ the pilot, a laconic Finn with buzz-cut grey hair, said.
Idunn’s Valley was a crooked verdant scar that ran from the edge of the sprawling northern ice cap to the ring sea that girdled the equator. Glaciers fed a slow, wide river that meandered through it; little towns and farming settlements were spreading along a narrow belt pinched between the river and the alien veldt and forests, the latest in a long succession of civilisations that had risen and fallen along the river banks long before the first hominins had walked out across the plains of Africa, the ruins each left behind cannibalised by succeeding Elder Cultures or erased by changes in the river’s course or by dust and sand blown in from the deserts on either side of the valley. So far, prospectors had mapped the outlines of more than three hundred ancient sites along the river, excavating the fossilised remains of alien technology and architecture, uncovering a number of still-active artefacts, eidolons, and other revenants, and novel polymers and metamaterials. Room-temperature superconductors, quantum dust, solar paint, the proton-exchange membranes that were the basis for LEAF batteries and cheap desalination, and half a hundred other prizes.
It was good to get out of Petra, Vic thought, good to be reminded that there was so much more to Mangala than the housing developments and shopping malls, schools and hospitals, office blocks and industrial estates that were spreading from the city centre like the pulsing growth of a bacterial colony, to escape the deepening grip of multinational corporations and the Coca-colonisation of the weird. Out here, you could still have your mind eaten by an alien phantom, stumble upon a lost city, or discover a fraying thread of some kind of weird quantumised metamaterial that could kick-start a new industrial revolution and make you a billionaire. Out here were places not yet mapped. Old dreams and deep mysteries. A world wild and strange and still mostly unknown. And he was a lone avenger, arrowing through the raging weather of this strange planet, ready to speak for his dead.
Static lightning flickered in the air. Dust devils dipped and swayed across the yellow veldt like eccentric dancers. Once, the pilot tapped Vic’s shoulder and pointed off to the left. A cloud tree set alight by a lightning strike was burning in a shroud of blue hydrogen flame and shedding flurries of sparks: clouds of microscopic sporelings that would rise high on the fire’s updraught and seed new life across hundreds of square kilometres.
This vivid portent set an atavistic thrill fizzing in Vic’s blood, triggered memories of his first days on Mangala: the first days of human colonisation. He’d brought a motorcycle with him, and in his free time would choose a random direction and ride out into the playa until all traces of the hand of man were lost in a dry sea of red rock and red sand. Try that now, you’d have to travel a long fucking way to find a place where someone hadn’t set up a campfire, or scrawled graffiti on a rock, or shot up a needle tree, or left behind a litter of fast-food wrappers and soft-drink cans. But back then you didn’t have to go far to find places where no human being had ever before trod. Where you could lie down in the warm light of the fat sun or the steely glitter of the alien stars and lose yourself in the profound silence of the desert, where the only noise was the beating of your heart and the sigh of your lungs, where you could feel your mind unravel into the ancient unknown.
A bend of the broad river gleamed below and the plane turned sharply to follow it. On the far side, ranges of low hills clad in red and orange forest stretched into a dim haze and the turbulent base of the mountainous dust storm. The plane flew low over a patchwork of fields. Acres of fast-growing strains of alfalfa and mustard, gleaming seas of polytunnels, a cluster of grain-storage tanks, a scatter of buildings around a crossroads.
‘Winnetou,’ the pilot said.
The little town where Skip had been murdered.
And then the plane was descending in a sudden swoop towards a dirt runway, bumping down and taxiing towards the Portakabin that served as flight control, administrative offices and waiting room.
The pilot cut the engine and said, ‘This could be my last flight for a while. That monster is advancing faster than predicted. If I can’t return tomorrow, how will you get back?’
‘I haven’t thought that far ahead,’ Vic said.
35. A Different Sun
The Shuttle | 18–22 July
Space travel turned out to be as tedious and cramped as a long-haul plane trip. Canned air, microwaved food, close quarters, the nagging low-level fear of some catastrophic accident. A video link to a spyhole camera bolted to a corner of the shipping container gave a view of the outside, but after the container had been loaded onto the shuttle with airy swoops and alarming clangs and shudders there was little to see. A few glimpses of men and forklift trucks moving about stacks of containers tented with orange webbing. A line of small yellow excavators tethered with cables. Three hours passed. Four. The passengers were boarding, Henry said. First the winners of the emigration lottery, then government and UN officials, and finally Michel Charpentier and the other corporate passengers.
Henry, Chloe and Fahad explored the nooks and crannies of their narrow rectangular living quarters. Three couches. Pop-up screens and pull-out keyboards, the forbidding control panel of the toilet. Lockers under the couches contained caches of clothing and microwaveable meals, bags of fruit, pouches of soup. There was a little refrigerator stuffed with bottles of mineral water and fruit juices and yogurt. They ate lunch: cheese and salami, fresh bread and olives. Chloe tried to read, but the sense of the paragraphs and sentences kept slipping away.
At last, the lights began to blink and a calm, friendly woman’s voice told them to prepare for take-off. They strapped themselves into their couches. It reminded Chloe of lying on a hospital stretcher bed when she’d been a kid, waiting for the operation to remove her appendix. The same dread, the same helplessness. The same dry metallic taste in her mouth. And then, without so much as a premonitory tremor, the force of the smooth and steady acceleration of the alien craft began to press down. The voice told them that it would last eight minutes, told them to breathe slowly and steadily and stay as still as possible. As if Chloe had any choice, crushed by a giant’s fist into the couch. She told herself that millions of people had taken the shuttles to the Jackaroo worlds, that it was about as dangerous as riding a lift, tried not to think of the weird forces that were flattening the fabric of space and squeezing the shuttle into space.