“What? The suspense is killing me, and I’m already dying.”
“I apologize, Yuri Eden. I believe I have seen evidence of superluminal events. Faster-than-light phenomena.”
“What the hell are you talking about now? Warp drive? Some kind of super-starship? A higher civilization?”
“Not that. Not on that scale. Much bigger. Please listen, Yuri Eden. In relativity theory, you know that nothing can travel through space-time faster than light. That was Einstein’s most fundamental discovery. Even a transition through a Hatch, say from Mercury to Per Ardua, by whatever unknown mechanism enables such transitions, is marginally slower than lightspeed. But there is a get-out clause in the physics.”
“Go on.”
“Nothing can travel through space-time faster than light. But space-time is a substance, of a kind; it has structure. It can be distorted… Yuri Eden, waves can propagate in space-time itself. And they can travel faster than light. The theoreticians have wondered if such warps could be used to carry ships at superluminal speeds.”
“Beating light by surfing space-time waves…”
“That’s the idea, Yuri Eden. We never achieved a warp drive. But warp waves, as described by the theory, would emit certain kinds of exotic radiations. Even if we could never create them, we thought we could detect them.
“Yuri Eden, I think I have seen the traces of warp ripples in the cosmic background radiation. Not small, contained signals, as you would associate with a starship. These are relics of events on a tremendous scale. By which I mean billions of light-years wide, events spanning the universe.”
“Larger than galaxies—”
“Larger than superclusters of galaxies.”
“Nurse! I think my drip’s come loose.”
“I apologize, Yuri Eden. I will discuss all this with Colonel Kalinski; perhaps she will be able to make it clearer. But, you see, I am struggling to grasp the hypothesis I am formulating.”
“What hypothesis?”
“Imagine that in the future there is a—cataclysm. A tremendously violent event of some kind, spanning space—spanning the entire universe. This event is so energetic that among its effects are ripples in space-time, tremendous waves—”
“Ah. Warp waves, which can travel back in time.”
“Yes, Yuri Eden. I believe that—in these faint traces of structure in the cosmic background reaction, visible to the Arab astronomers in the silence of their observation capsules—I am witnessing a kind of foreshadowing, echoes traveling back in time…”
“Echoes from the future. But echoes of what, ColU?”
“Something terrible.”
“Umm. Well, you’re not given to exaggeration, ColU.”
“Are you falling asleep, Yuri Eden?”
“Not just yet. All this talk of calamity in the future. You know, ColU, I don’t fear dying. In fact, I feel like I died already, a number of times. All those doors I had to pass through, from my own time to the future, from Mars to Per Ardua…”
“It will just be another door, Yuri Eden.”
“I know, my friend. I know. But I do fear for those I love. Listen— I want you to find Beth, if you can.”
“I know. You asked me this before. But, Yuri Eden, she may not exist, in this new reality. She may have been left behind.”
“Maybe. But maybe not. I know Mardina—or knew her. If there was a way to save Beth, she’d have found it.”
“I always flattered myself that I was close to Beth Eden Jones.”
“You were the kindly monster who made her toy builders with those manipulator arms of yours. Remember Mister Sticks? Find her, ColU. And whoever she’s with now. Tell her you’re her property now. And help her, as best you can. Because I can’t, you see. I can’t help her anymore.”
“Yuri Eden—”
“Promise me.”
“I promise, Yuri Eden. You are tiring. I will ask Michael to call on you.”
“Yeah. Oh, ColU, one thing. This future cataclysm you think you see. When?”
“The whole thing is very partial, Yuri Eden. I can only make preliminary guesses—”
“I remember that ass Lex McGregor, when he dumped us on Per Ardua, telling us that Proxima would shine for thousands of times as long as the sun.”
“Proxima will barely have aged by the time the event is upon us, Yuri Eden.”
“Barely?”
“I have tentatively dated the source of the space-time waves to less than four billion years from now. Perhaps three and a half billion—”
“Four billion years? Ha! Why didn’t you say so? I don’t even have four years, let alone four billion. Four billion years ago the Earth itself had barely formed—right? Why should I worry about running out of time four billion years from now?”
“Because you, or your descendants, will have been robbed of trillions, Yuri Eden. Sleep now, and I will find Michael…”
19
AD 2225; AUC 2978
The Ukelwydd, riding kernel fire as it slowed, slid out of deep space and entered orbit around Mars.
As the drive cut out and the acceleration weight was lifted from her chest, Penny Kalinski, now eighty-one years old, cocooned in a deep couch, uttered a sigh of deep relief. It was her first spaceflight for a dozen years, the first since the Tatania. After spending twelve years as an elderly, eccentric, Earthbound teacher, she’d forgotten how grueling a launch was. Well, now it was done.
In the absence of gravity her feeble old-lady arms had enough strength to push out of the couch. For a few seconds she drifted in the warm air, relishing the absence of weight. Her cabin was small, she was never more than an arm’s length from a wall, and every surface was studded with handholds. It was easy to float over into the small closet that served as her bathroom. The freedom of movement was delicious, marred only by a twinge of arthritic pain in her joints. But in a mirror she saw that her hair had come loose and formed a cloud of fuzzy gray around her head. “Oh, for God’s sake—” She pulled back rogue strands and tucked them into a knot.
She was presentable by the time there was a knock at the door.
Trierarchus Kerys was waiting for her, comfortably hovering in the air. Kerys was around fifty now, solid, competent, smiling, her hair a tangle of black and gray. And, twelve years after she had commanded this ship when it had collected the Tatania and its castaway crew, Kerys had become a friend to Penny Kalinski. She said now, “I thought you would like an escort to the observation cabin. The druidh waits for you there. It will take us some hours to switch over from deep space operations to landing mode; he suggested you might like to view Mars, and what has become of it, before we land.”
After all these years, Penny’s Brikanti was now pretty good. Her Latin wasn’t too bad either, but she was never going to master Xin, despite the patient years poor Jiang had put into trying to teach her. So she understood every word Kerys had said, and picked up the unspoken implications. She meant, Earthshine’s Mars.