But now the trierarchus drifted between Penny and the druidh, and led him away. And a few minutes later a junior crew member found Penny and told her she needed to prepare for a landing, on Mars.
20
As seen from the crude rover that bounced Penny over the surface from the landed Ukelwydd, Earthshine’s base on Mars was an array of glass boxes with their faces tipped toward the sun, low and pale in the northern sky of Hellas—“Hel.” For Penny, the base was a nagging reminder of something she’d seen before.
The rover docked neatly with a port, and she made her way through an airlock with the assistance of a couple of young women in the rough uniforms of the Brikanti Navy. Then she was led through offices filled with pallid Martian light. In the gentle one-third gravity she was able to walk with no more support than a stick.
They arrived in a wide, airy room, and Penny paused to inspect it, leaning on her stick. At its center was a single desk, behind which sat a man in some kind of business suit, indistinct in Penny’s rheumy vision despite the relatively bright light. The desk overlooked a pond, a smooth surface crossed by languid low-gravity waves, and reflecting the faun sky. Again memory nagged.
She was allowed to walk forward alone, her footsteps silent on a thick swath of carpet, a subdued brown to match the Martian color suite. To get to the desk she had to hobble around that central pond, which was glassed over and filled only with a kind of purplish scum, she saw; there were no plants, no fish.
As she neared the desk, the man stood gracefully. Tall, dressed in a sober business suit and collarless shirt, he might have been fifty. On his lapel he wore a brooch, a stone disc carved with concentric grooves. He was Earthshine, of course.
“Please,” he said in his cultured British accent. “Sit down. Would you like a drink? Coffee, water—you always liked soda, as I recall.”
“When I was eleven years old, maybe. I’ll take a water, thank you.” She lowered herself stiffly into a chair before the desk.
Earthshine tapped the desk surface, which opened to allow a small shelf to rise up bearing a bottle of water, a glass. “I’m afraid you’ll have to pour it yourself.”
“I know.”
He sat, fingers steepled, regarding her. “Thank you for coming.”
“Did I have a choice?”
“Not given the logic of our past relationship, and the nature of your own personality. Clearly you are as curious as ever. But I would not have compelled you to come. Could not have.”
“I’m starting to remember all this. Well, mostly. That carpet should be—blue?”
“That would hardly fit with the Martian background.”
“And with a huge Universal Engineering Inc. logo. And Sir Michael King sitting behind that desk, not you.”
“It is to be hoped Sir Michael survived the war, in his bunker under Paris.”
“It seems unlikely. Even if that version of Paris actually exists anymore.”
“Quite so. I have tried to recreate the conditions as you remember them from your first visit to the UEI corporate headquarters—”
“Solstice, Canada. Many years ago. The first time we met. I was summoned there with my sister.”
“Although,” Earthshine said carefully, “since that event came before the great sundering of your own personal history, she would say she went there alone.”
“And the pond,” she said, looking over her shoulder. “Weren’t there some kind of stunt gen-enged carp in there? Whereas now there is just scum.”
“Actually the probe contains something much more exotic than an engineered fish or two. Martians,” he said sepulchrally. “Real-life indigenous Martians, extracted from mine shafts and other workings.”
That took her by surprise. “Really? Bugs from the deep rock?”
“That’s the idea. In fact, in our reality the Chinese discovered them, in the process of excavating water as part of their own terraforming efforts. The specimens I have inspected appear the same as the Chinese discoveries—the pivoting of history made no difference to them. The samples in the pond are real, by the way, though much of the rest of this environment—”
“Is no more real than you. You are just as I remember, at least,” she said. “Right down to that odd brooch on your lapel. Which is just like the chunk of carved concrete, the plaque, you were careful to ship aboard the Tatania, isn’t it? I always wondered what the significance of that was.”
He didn’t rise to the bait. “My goal with this virtual presentation has been to emphasize our shared past. How much we have in common.”
“Well, you’ve done that. But that’s as far as it goes. You’re just as you were then,” she went on. “Whereas—look at me. Withered.”
“You have done well to survive a dozen years here, after all the traumas of your earlier life, and the inadequacy of medicine and health care in this new reality, despite all my own proselytizing—”
“You mean, selling the data you stole from the memory of the Tatania. Lex never forgave you for that, you know.”
“I know,” he said indifferently. “And now it’s too late to apologize.”
“Good old Lex. At least he died well—eighty years old and throwing himself into the site of that tanker crash on the moon, on Luna. The Brikanti built a statue to him.”
Earthshine laughed. “Good for General McGregor. He’d have loved that. And of the others?”
“Jiang has stayed with me, at the Academy. Sadly he’s still not accepted more widely, in Brikanti society. You can’t overcome centuries of xenophobia with a cultured smile—not here, at least. Two of the surviving crew of the Tatania work with me there also. They married, in fact, Marie Golvin and Rajeev Kapur.”
“I did hear. I sent a gift… And what of Beth, and her child?”
“Mardina. Growing now, ten years old. Doing fine. Beth’s forty-eight now, and Mardina makes her feel her age, I think. They’re living independently, but I keep an eye on them. Beth’s estranged from Ari Guthfrithson—the father. Beth does make enemies and then clings to them, if you know what I mean.”
“I do know.”
Penny was puzzled by that response. “Why would she have a grudge against you?”
“Because of something I told her. It was just as we fled the inner solar system in the Tatania—just as the light wavefront from the kernel detonations overtook us, in fact.”
“I don’t understand. What did you tell her?”
“My name. Or one of them.” He said no more, and looked at her steadily.
“All right. Then is that why you asked me here? As a way to get through to Beth? Funnily enough, Ari asked me to do the same thing for him. What am I, a UN mediator?”
“Partly that, yes, for Beth’s sake. And partly because I want you to understand what it is I am doing here, Penny. At least begin to see what it is I am exploring.”
“Why me?”
He laughed. “You are the only specialist in kernel physics in this universe.”
“Ah. And you have a kernel test laboratory up on the higher ground to the north, don’t you?”
“Also you are one of a handful of survivors who lived through the history change.” He grinned. “The ‘jonbar hinge.’” I enjoyed your little joke, in the name of your Academy. And of course you endured an earlier jonbar hinge in your own life.”
She always had to remember, she told herself, that everything that Earthshine did was about advancing his own agenda, not hers; she was a tool here, a pawn. But he did know a hell of a lot about her. She said carefully, “What exactly do you want of me, Earthshine? The truth now.”