Ship City is in the tropics of New Mars. Darkness came within minutes of the sun’s disappearance behind the horizon. Wilde smiled at Tamara and Ethan, and lit a cigarette.
‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘being able to see in the dark.’ He looked around again. ‘Shit! I can’t!’
‘Shield the cigarette,’ Ethan told him. ‘It’s blinding you.’
‘Damn’ near blinding me,’ Tamara said. ‘No, no, just cup your hands around it, that’s OK.’
Wilde did as he was asked, and shortly threw the butt into the water and gazed up at the stars. With the lights of the human quarter behind them and the less ordered lighting and unpredictable random flares of the Fifth Quarter not far ahead, they were less overpowering than on his first sight of them the previous night, but impressive nonetheless. He gasped at a bolide’s whispering flight, blinked at the flash it made behind the western horizon.
‘The robot called something like that a “waterfall”,’ he said to Ethan. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Cometary ice,’ Ethan explained laconically. ‘Feeds the canals.’
‘It’s a kinda slow terraforming,’ Tamara added. ‘Planet’s habitable, sure, but we want more water and a thicker atmosphere. Take us a couple more centuries, like, but by then it’ll be as green as Earth ever was.’ She paused, as though she’d got a little carried away. ‘Least, that’s what Reid says.’
‘I wonder,’ Wilde murmured, ‘how green Earth is now. Whatever “now” means.’
‘Ah,’ said Ethan promptly. ‘I can tell you that.’ He made a show of looking at his watch. Tamara and Wilde laughed, so loudly that heads turned in the single file of boats strung out behind them in the narrow waterway.
‘Nah, nah,’ Ethan went on. ‘Serious. “Now” is two times. Absolute, if there is such a thing: fuck knows. This way: if’n you got a signal from the Solar system, it would’ve been a long time on the way. Thousands a years, millions, fuck knows. But if you went back through the Malley Mile, that’s the daughter-wormhole gate, right, you’d be right back at 2094 anno domini plus Ship-time. Six point four gigasecs, lemme see…uh, twenty-three-nineties, early twenty-four hundreds, maybe. So now is the twenty-fifth century, outside.’
‘The twenty-fifth century!’ Wilde laughed. ‘Yes, Earth might be Green all right! Or even Red!’
They didn’t get it, and he didn’t explain. He frowned at Ethan Miller.
‘Why “daughter wormhole”?’ he said.
Ethan shrugged. ‘It’s what me old man calls it. He went through, and not as a fucking robot upload, either. He was crew, not crim.’ He pounded his chest. ‘Human all the way back, that’s me.’
‘Carbon chauvinist,’ Tamara chided.
Wilde leaned forward, thoughtlessly lighting another cigarette. ‘Go on.’
‘Well,’ Ethan said, waving a hand at the sky, ‘the wormhole we came through was a spin-off.’ He planed his hand sideways. ‘The main probe, the one the fast folk built before their minds burned out, it went right on. Draggin’ its end of the wormhole to…wherever. Must’ve got there by now.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Whatever “now” means, like you said.’
Wilde sat back, drawing on his cigarette so hard that his cupped hands couldn’t hide the glare.
‘The end of time,’ he said.
He thought for a few moments longer.
‘Oh, hell,’ he said.
‘What’s the problem?’ asked Tamara. She throttled back the engine and the boat coasted towards a spit.
‘Time,’ said Wilde. ‘As in, we don’t have much.’
‘Well,’ Tamara said as the boat grounded, ‘we’re at the Fifth Quarter. Let’s get a move on.’
12
Near Death Experience
Annette had the tubes in her right arm, I in my left. Her left hand reached out and caught my right.
‘Scared?’ I asked.
‘A bit.’
‘Me too.’ I squeezed back.
The township hall was packed with mature people, older people, people like us; on our backs on trolley-beds looking up at the roof-panels. Green-tinged daylight, green-smocked technicians, everything slow: an underwater feel. Big machines connected to the tubes infiltrated tiny machines into our blood. Not nanotech, not full cell-repair, not yet; but it gave us a chance of living until that came along. In the seven decades we’d been alive, our life-expectancies had already extended by at least another four. We felt better than we had at fifty. We looked – well, the early anti-ageing treatments made your skin tougher as well as tauter, so we looked a bit sundried, a bit smoked.
This treatment was different. We hadn’t had it before, though I’d had a microbot injection to deal with a worrying prostate enlargement some years earlier. Now, the microbots had expanded their capabilities, and by one of those trade-offs characteristic of the Republic, the state Health Service was offering these capabilities to citizens in exchange for their state pension rights. The deal was more political than economic, but it had a certain elegant symmetry: swap retirement for longevity and a degree of rejuvenation, and you can work till you drop.
It would never have passed under the old laws. It was risky. One or two in a thousand died under it, though whether they died of it was another matter. It was a heart problem, hard to predict. If you had it, it would get you anyway, soon. So the health companies and the Health Service said.
A technician walked up between our beds, gently parted our hands.
‘Ready?’ she said.
‘Yup,’ said Annette.
‘Ready as I’ll ever be,’ I said. I attempted a grin. ‘Who wants to live for ever?’
‘Well, I know you do, Citizen Wilde. Good luck.’
Here comes nothing, I thought.
She pressed a switch, sending a short-range radio signal to the microbots in my blood and in Annette’s.
I felt my heart stop. It had to. The microbots needed a steady platform for fast work around the vagus nerve, and to give them a chance to shove neural growth factors and cloned foetal nerve-cells across the blood-brain barrier.
Colour faded out, then light. Consciousness went down completely, as in sleep. My heart re-booted with a painful power surge and consciousness came back up, crashed, restored from memory and came up again. I raised my head weakly and looked at Annette, who opened her eyes and stared at me and smiled.
‘We made it,’ she said.
‘We’ll make it,’ I said. ‘We’ll make it to the ships.’
I tried to sit up.
‘If you don’t stay where you are for another half hour,’ the technician admonished, ‘you’ll not make it to the door.’
Out, into the Greenbelt street, under the greenhouse sky. We made our way through the usual Pro-Life picket, who kept yelling ‘Murderers!’ at us from behind a line of armed Republican Guards. It was the foetal tissue – cloned from our own cells – that we’d allegedly murdered, according to the leaflet from the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child that some poor addled soul shoved in my face.
‘SPUC off!’ I called back. ‘You can go to hell! We aren’t even going to die!’