“No,” King gloated. “Let’s be honest. It’s appropriation. It’s conquest. It’s going to kill those gerontocrats in New Beijing, when they read about this day, when the security blankets are lifted in fifty or a hundred years’ time, that we haven’t just got the kernels—now we have this.”
“Whatever. Let’s get on with it.” And she held out her arms.
The ISF goons came forward to help too. They braced Trant while she took Stef’s gloved hands in her own, and lowered her into the pit. Stef made them move slowly, while she tried to be hyperaware of any odd sensations, any more of those tidal effects. She felt nothing untoward. It was just a hole in the ground, impossible or not.
When they had lowered her as far as they could they released her hands. Gentle as a snowflake she settled to the floor. She looked up at the opening above her, the circle of visored faces peering in.
Then she turned around slowly, inspecting the walls. “There’s another hatch,” she said. “Another circular seam. Set in this wall. Smaller than the big one up there, but here it is. And, guess what? It has handprint indentations again.”
King called down, “Major, maybe you’ve gone far enough.”
“You’re kidding,” she said, staring at the hatch, raising her hands. “What would you do, if you were down here?”
“Think about it. Maybe any curious, tool-wielding species would react the same way to this set-up. You’d go in, one step after another.”
“You mean—”
“Maybe it’s a trap.”
“And maybe it isn’t,” Stef said, unmoved.
“We aren’t going to stop her, sir,” Trant said. “Stef. You might get cut off. Keep talking to us. All right?”
“I hear you. Here I go, with a handprint lock once again.” She settled her hands into the indentations at twelve o’clock on the wall before her. “It’s opening…” She had to step back smartly as the curved door swung back, as smoothly as the hatch lid itself. “Again, I can’t see a hinge, nothing material attaching door to wall. There’s another chamber beyond. A second chamber, similar to the first in dimension. More of those grey walls, the sourceless light.” She stepped forward cautiously, towards the doorway rim. “And…”
And, standing in the second chamber, before another doorway seam on the far wall, was a figure: a human, in a pressure suit, apparently ISF issue. A human staring back at her.
“What?” An unfamiliar voice in her ear speaker. “What’s wrong?”
No, not unfamiliar, just—unexpected.
“Stef? Penny?” That was Trant’s voice. “Stef, what have you found down there? Penny, you’re still out of our field of view.”
Penny?
The stranger took another step forward, towards the open hatchway. Stef found herself staring into a familiar face, behind the visor. Too familiar. Found herself staring at a familiar name, too, on the suit’s chest patch.
KALINSKI, PENELOPE D.
Four
Chapter 39
2180
The ColU, which was becoming increasingly philosophical as time passed, came up with yet another complex, bewildering observation about life on Per Ardua.
At the time Yuri was letting Beth ride on the ColU’s back with him, on the final fifty-kilometre round-trip trek to the old camp from the new. He’d thought the ColU had been acting oddly all day, but had put it down to the usual program-violation problems it had with moving the camp in the first place. Evidently not.
Luckily Beth was oblivious to all this. Beth Eden Jones was seven years old now, and she had been used to moving all her life. The first shift of the jilla had come in the very month she had been born, and there had been seven shifts since then, around one a year, bringing the lake the best part of two hundred kilometres due south from the starting point. The family had diligently followed along each time, hauling their broken-down dwellings and their tools and all their other possessions, right down to cartloads of topsoil, behind the patient bulk of the ColU.
But the last shift had been all of a year ago, and since then some spark in Beth’s head had lit up. This time she wasn’t a passive passenger any more; now she wanted to make sense of it all. So she had begged to come along on these shuttle trips back and forth between the old campsite and the new. Mardina was happy to let her ride along with Yuri—especially as it got her out of the way while the builders completed their latest brutal war of conquest against their cousins at the jilla’s new position. But on this ride, this last loading up, Beth was fretful.
As soon as they were loaded, the ColU had begun the last haul away from the old campsite, of which little was left but a scuffed patch of ground, a smouldering fire, a couple of garbage dumps, all set beside a muddy lake bed that was already drying out. They headed south once more, following the water courses down which the builders had driven the waters of the jilla. And, wistfully, sitting beside her father on the carapace of the ColU, Beth looked over her shoulder back the way they had come. “Why can’t we ever go that way, Dad?”
“What way, honey? North? What’s the point? There’s nothing there. There’s not even water to drink.”
“I know. But there’s the first camp of all, isn’t there? Back there somewhere.”
“Where you were born.”
“I know that. But I don’t remember it.”
“It’s too far. There’s no water on the way. We couldn’t walk that far.”
“We could ride on the ColU,” she said hopefully. “We could carry water. We could carry our beds and stuff, and Mister Sticks.” Mister Sticks, her favourite toy, had been woven from broken stems by the ColU; the doll was a peculiar mix of human and builder features, like a three-legged puppet.
“That’s not a bad plan, honey. But the ColU wouldn’t carry us that far.”
“It could, though.”
“But it wouldn’t. It… doesn’t want to.”
“You could make it.”
“Only by hurting it. And that would be mean, wouldn’t it?” Which was about as close as he imagined he was going to get to explaining program conflicts in the ColU’s AI to Beth.
“I guess…”
“What do you want to see up there anyhow? It’s just like all the other places we stopped. Just a load of old junk that we dumped when we moved. Abandoned fields…” And a few graves.
“But I want to see the road where the shuttle came down.” She mimed a descending flight with her hand, but she made a noise like the flapping triple vanes of an Arduan kite, the only flying thing she had ever seen. “Flish-flish-flish. Mom says it made tracks that would take you hours to walk along.”
“I guess so. Skid marks kilometres long. And some of it baked solid, when the braking rockets fired. I guess that would be worth seeing, if it’s still there. But we can’t get there, honey. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe one day.”
“Well—”
“Take me there for my birthday one day.” That was Beth’s trump card.
Her birthdays were an issue. Yuri had been slow to realise that even after Beth’s birth Mardina had clung to her belief, or fantasy, that the ISF had never really left, and would some day come out of their hides or down from orbit or whatever, and reveal themselves, and save them all. Maybe the baby being delivered would be the trigger, if the ISF authorities accepted that the colonists had proven their determination to stick it out by breeding. Well, that hadn’t happened. She’d not mentioned it at the time of the birth, and Yuri forgot about it.