‘I think that’s the trouble,’ Mela put in brightly. ‘The trouble is he doesn’t believe you.’
Hektor snarled, ‘Who asked you, Virtual?’
Mela flinched.
Pelle held up her hand. ‘No. She’s right. Symat, we’ve always tried to educate you. But on some level we’ve failed.’ She seemed to be coming to a rehearsed suggestion. ‘So let us show you. Give us one day, that’s all. Just listen, watch, for one day. Try to see things from our point of view. And then you can see how you feel about the booths.’
Symat hesitated. ‘What if I still don’t want to do it?’
‘Then we won’t force you,’ his mother said.
‘In fact we can’t,’ Hektor said stiffly. ‘That’s the law. But you need to understand that we’re going through the booths, with or without you. After that you can do what you want. Stay here. Move away. There are others who choose not to come. Other oddballs and deadbeats—’
‘Just give us one day,’ Pelle said firmly.
Symat glanced at Mela. She nodded. ‘All right,’ he said.
Hektor stood up. ‘Then let’s not waste any more time.’ He spoke to the air. ‘Ready the flitter. We leave in five minutes.’ He clapped his hands, and the bot began to clear away the barely touched food.
Pelle patted Symat’s arm. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘We can always eat on the ship—’
The flitter rose from Mars like a stone thrown from a crimson bowl. The little craft tumbled slowly as it climbed, sparkling. Mela peered out of the flitter’s transparent hull, wide-eyed; evidently she had never seen the world like this.
From here you could clearly see how Mars was divided into two hemispheres, barren landscapes of hot and cold, separated by a narrow belt of endless twilight. The canals, shining blue-black, laced across this precious strip. Kahra, a capital city almost as old as man’s occupation of Mars itself, was a green jewel that glimmered on the desert skin of the planet.
Looking down now, it struck Symat for the first time that Kahra was set slap in the middle of the twilight band, exactly poised between dark and light. But he knew that when Kahra had been founded Mars had still spun on its axis. He wondered if that positioning was a happy accident – or if the slowing rotation of Mars had somehow been managed so that Kahra ended up exactly where it needed to be. He had no idea how you might control the spin of a whole world, but then, it was said, the people of the past had had powers beyond the imagination of anybody now alive.
As the flitter swept through its rapid suborbital hop, the sun rose. Bloated, surrounded by a churning corona, the sun’s scarlet face was pocked by immense spots. Symat’s father had told him that the whole of the sun was a battleground between forces beyond human control, and from here it looked like it.
The flitter swooped down towards Dayside, the sunlit face of Mars. On blasted crimson rock cities still glittered. But there was no sign of life, no movement in the cities, and the canals were bone dry.
Hektor said, ‘Look down there. Nothing left but bugs in the deep rocks. Everything that can burn in those cities has gone already. Son, if you transplanted our villa down there it would turn into a shining puddle of melted glass. And it’s getting worse.’
‘Because the sun is still heating up.’
‘So it is. There is nothing we can do to reverse this. Soon the twilight belt will close, squeezed between hot and cold, and Mars will be uninhabitable, just as it was before humans came and terraformed it. And the last of us will have to leave, or die.’
This desolate prospect filled Symat with gloom, which it was in his nature to resist. ‘It might not come to that. What if the sun cools again?’
Pelle touched Symat’s arm. ‘It won’t. Those who are destroying the sun won’t allow it.’
To swell into a giant would have been the sun’s eventual fate, but not for billions of years yet. This premature destabilisation of the sun was deliberate. Creatures, malevolent and relentless, swarmed in its core, puddling the fusion processes there, and so compressing aeons of a stellar lifetime into mere megayears. And Sol was not the only star being smothered in its own heat. You only had to look around the sky, littered with red stars, to see that. ‘But it’s not personal,’ a teacher had told Symat once, with black humour. ‘The photino birds in the heart of the sun probably don’t even know we humans exist…’
‘The sun is dying,’ Hektor said with bleak finality, ‘and Mars is dying with it, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it. And then there’s the Scourge.’
This was the trap of history, closing in Symat’s lifetime. For even as one agency was murdering the sun, another, the Xeelee, was driving mankind back from the stars.
‘We were left with nowhere to go,’ Hektor said. ‘Until we discovered the booths.’
Symat said suspiciously, ‘Discovered?’
‘Yes, discovered. You didn’t imagine they are a human invention?’
Symat supposed he had, but he had never thought hard about it. Besides, it just wasn’t something you talked about.
A few generations back, the booths had simply appeared at scattered locations, studded around the cities and parks of mankind’s remaining worlds. Their operation was simple, the execution awe-inspiring. If you walked through a booth, you would be transported, not just to another place as if this was some fancy teleport system, but to another universe: a pocket universe, as the cosmologists called it, a fold in the fabric of spacetime stitched to the parent by a wormhole-like umbilical. You could walk between universes with your luggage on your back and your child in your arms. And once you were through you would be safe, preserved from Xeelee and photino bird interventions alike.
Nobody was clear exactly how this common knowledge about the booths had reached the human population. Certainly not from the booths themselves, which were one way: nobody came back to tell the tale of what was on the other side. The folk wisdom just seemed to be there, suddenly, in the databases, in the air. But it was believed widely enough for a steadily increasing fraction of humanity to trust their own futures and their children’s to this strange exit.
Hektor said, ‘Obviously there has been speculation. The booths could be an ancient human design, I suppose; who can say what was once possible? Or they could come from some alien culture, though our habit of enslaving, assimilating or eliminating most aliens we came across might seem to argue against that.’ He said conspiratorially, ‘Perhaps it was the Xeelee themselves. What do you think about that? Our greatest foe, eradicating us from the universe – and yet giving us a bolt-hole in the process.’
‘And this is what you want me to walk into,’ Symat said.
Hektor said stiffly, ‘We can’t tell you anything we haven’t told you a dozen, fifty times before. Somehow it never stuck with you, the way it did with other children.’
‘But I thought that if we showed you,’ Pelle said, ‘showed you the world, the sky, the state of things, then it might make things clearer.’
‘Clearer? But walking into a booth is like dying. You can’t come back. And you don’t know what’s on the other side, because nobody ever came back to tell us. Just like dying.’