He wondered if they were sending him poetry.
Now he looked over the data from Damascus in case he had any last word from his doomed people. They were working away, still – all the machines on the planet were diligently informing him about the unorthodox uses they were being put to, even those in orbit.
Even those in orbit.
He let his enquiries brush past the data without delving, because Baltiel was still in the system and Senkovi suddenly felt like someone in an old house with a murderer, trying not to breathe and listening for the floorboard’s fatal creak. Baltiel hadn’t cut him off from the planet, of course. Baltiel didn’t really care about the octopi and what they were doing. And if Baltiel would overlook it, so would this hybrid thing that sat behind his eyes.
Senkovi let his sweep go past the same points again, downloading a great haystack of data to obscure that one sharp needle. He followed the logic of what he could see happening, did some calculations in his head and, for the rest, decided he would have to trust the vision of Paul and the other octopi.
‘Baltiel. Yusuf,’ he said over the line to the shuttle. ‘Are you in there, really? Is there anything of you that hears this?’
‘Of course we know you, Disra. We are all the knowledge and memory and information of ourselves your good friend, but greater, of wider understanding.’
Does it know what personality is? It’s there in Yusuf’s memories, his relationships with me and the others, his opinions of us, his quirks. But perhaps those just seem to be inefficient imperfections to it.
‘We are glad you have accepted matters,’ Baltiel added, and Senkovi realized he’d stopped trying to hack the command codes a while ago. He let the Baltiel-thing draw what conclusions it would and just watched the movement of vast shapes around Damascus, inferring their shifts from the shadows they cast in the data.
The orbital mirrors, all of them: they had been built about the planet to focus sunlight in the early days, where it would be trapped by the smog of volcanic and microbial emissions, greenhousing the planet to life. Later they had been ferried about Damascus to break up ice in key areas, starting chain reactions of warming and currents, stirring the oceans, diffusing oxygen. Another decade and they would probably have been dismantled, unnecessary. After all, the point of terraforming was to create something stable that didn’t need such toys.
Now they were shifting in a great ponderous dance, changing their facing, cupping the sun in their silvery hands and focusing that light and heat towards a single blistering point. They were flexing, concentrating and concentrating, bringing heat enough to melt an ice age down to a narrow region in the shuttle’s flight path. Senkovi had never dreamt such a thing was possible, but the new rulers of Damascus had seen his Gordian Knot and found a blade to cut it apart.
The focal point was necessarily near the planet. The maths was imprecise, hurried even, if the octopi felt hurry as a human did. Senkovi watched the shuttle cruise obliviously into the crosshairs and take the full brunt of the system’s sun, magnified and magnified until even the re-entry plates peeled away like flayed skin, until the reactor cracked open, the explosive force shunting the shuttle wildly out of the neat approach it had been attempting, the contents of the crew compartment surely boiling like spoiled soup.
And then the shuttle, nosediving, plunged like a white-hot meteorite into the atmosphere and burned all the way down until it met the sea.
PRESENT 3
ROLLING BACK THE STONE
1.
Helena dreams of her grandfather.
He’d been a tough old man, that’s how she remembers him. One of the oldest off the Gilgamesh, both in years lived and most especially in objective time elapsed since his birth. He remembered Old Earth, as almost nobody did – not Kern’s Old Old Earth, but the ruin of it that the second human civilization had clawed its way out of, when there was no other alternative to escape but starve and sicken.
A tough old man, and he outlived many of his juniors amongst that first generation. After Old Man Karst died by misadventure out in space and Vitas never quite adjusted to the new landlords and so many of the others had passed on, Grandad had just clung in there, increasingly gnarled, looked on by the next generation (and the next after that, Helena’s own) as a kind of living monument. Aside from his own stories of How It Had Been, he was the last connection anyone had to Isa Lain, who had guided the humans all the way to where they could finally become Humans.
But Grandad had declined, in his last years. Helena just remembered, from when she was perhaps five or six, how he had woken screaming and shouting, inconsolable, rattling the walls with Lain’s stick. The winters brought it on: not just the inkling of mortality that cold always brings with it to the old, but his own memories of icy awakenings past. And, at his age, even the equator got too cold at night. She remembered his stories – or possibly she was remembering recordings of him telling it, or even recordings from the Gil’s archives, from when he was younger and still in space. His life had been punctuated by horrible awakenings, in and out of cold sleep as the ark ship conducted its centuries-long odyssey. Each time he had found himself in another time, another world, less fit for human habitation. That was what the nightmares were about: not the cold itself, which was only a trigger. Not even that he might not wake, though that had been a real possibility with the Gilgamesh’s failing life support. He feared waking once more into a world he didn’t understand, where everyone else had rushed ahead and left him behind. Adjusting to the hospitality of the Portiids had been hard on all the shipbound survivors – Grandad had lived most of his planetbound later life in a human reservation as people learned the ways of their hosts. He had taken it in his stride, though, because they were all in it together, all moving through time at the same pace. He reserved his dread for losing touch once again with his kin, his species. And yet, ageing in a society undergoing constant mutation as its members established a collective détente with the spiders, that was always going to be his fate. No wonder, then, that his last few winters were plagued with nightly terrors of waking into a world where nobody made sense to him any more.
In the dream she now wrestles clear of, he had been fighting his blankets (silk, of course), hollering and lashing out as he did, and she couldn’t wake him or console him, and all around her the ice had been growing on the walls as it never had on Kern’s World, splintering out into fantastical trees and growths, encroaching on them until the chill of it rooted deep in her bones, and she knew that if she could not snap the old man from his dreams then they would both freeze, because he was bringing the cold of the sleep chambers to them, hauled hand over hand out of his tormented memories.
The dream felt as though it went on forever, but it could only have had purchase on her mind for the last few moments before she woke, passing from suspension to deep sleep through the reach of scattered brain activity and into full consciousness, so cold she feels she is being burned.
She is half out of her suit – or at least one arm, shoulder and breast are bared, as though she embarked on a provocative striptease as she was frozen. The pull that holds her lazily against the metallic floor is partly a weak gravity, mostly an electromagnetic field acting on her equipment. Her exposed skin is clammy and numb, ringed by weirdly fractal bruising, spirals of circles from thumbprint-to freckle-sized in whorls all over. Every joint feels as though it has been wrenched backwards. Sitting up proves a task beyond her capability. She sags back to the freezing metal and her mind drifts again.