‘And Earthshine’s a power in the land now. In your land. What Earthshine wants, Earthshine gets …’
‘But,’ Kerys said confidentially, ‘and I haven’t told you until now, it’s also because you got my nephews through your Academy.’
‘I remember them. Olaf and Thorberg.’
‘Yes. Their father’s a Dane, and their blood is as wild as his. But you got them to sit down for five years of study.’
‘They were a handful, those two. What are they doing now?’
‘Navy, both of them. Best place for them. Here we are.’
She gently guided Penny through an open door and into a room dominated by a large picture window, beyond which an orange-brown landscape slid by. This was the observation cabin, where once, Penny remembered, she had watched a new Earth approach, Terra, a world transformed by the legacy of a different history. Now Mars scrolled past this same window, a landscape of craters and canyons and mountains and dust, magnificent, alien, forbidding. But this was not the Mars she had once known, not the Mars she had left behind – she could see that immediately – for this Mars had been engineered, over centuries. What a remarkable thought that was – how extraordinary it was that she should be here, seeing this, even so many years after the jonbar hinge.
And Ari Guthfrithson was here, watching her reaction.
Penny had known he was on the ship but she had spent the few days of the flight from Earth avoiding him. Now she ignored him while she let Kerys guide her to a handhold.
Then, safely anchored, she faced Ari. ‘You’re not ageing well.’
Ari was in his forties now, growing portly, grey, his face pinched. He laughed, harshly. ‘Well, neither are you, you old crone.’
‘Thanks.’
He turned to face the planet. ‘Look at my Mars! This is what you can do with kernel technology, and a dream …’
Visionaries from her own Earth would have recognised much of what was being done, she thought. In this reality, the engineers had been doing their best to bring Mars to life, even with its own resources, long before Earthshine and his Ceres scheme had arrived. Kernel energy beams melted water ice from the polar caps and poured it into tremendous canals burned into the plains of the Vastitas Borealis to the north, and through the ancient, cratered highlands of the south, Terra Sirenum, Aonia Terra, Noachis Terra, Terra Cimmeria, features with their own Latin or Xin or Brikanti names in this reality. At lower latitudes, deep aquifers were being broken open to release yet more water. The ship passed over the Valles Marineris, the great canyon system become an enclosed sea. For now all this water was frozen over, the ice white against the rusted colours of Mars. But, around the curve of the world, the great blisters of the Tharsis volcanoes, Olympus Mons among them, were being cracked and gouged and stirred in the hope of triggering eruptions from those long-dormant giants, which might belch ash and greenhouses gases to thicken the sparse air.
And already city lights burned on the night side.
A Mars with thick air and cities and brimming canals! A nineteenth-century fantasy back where Penny had come from, made reality here. Maybe, she wondered sometimes, her commanders had been too cautious in their use of the great, unexpected benison of the kernels. So much more could have been done with that magical torrent of energy – as long as you didn’t care about the consequences for what you were reshaping.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Ari said.
‘Do you?’
‘That this is not the Mars you left behind in that other history of yours. Well, it’s true. But soon it will not be the Mars that was here when you arrived.’
‘It will be Earthshine’s Mars.’
‘Yes. That god you brought into our reality is remaking a world. Höd – Ceres – is on its way, spiralling closer with every revolution around the sun. Just now it is …’ He thought about it, glanced at Mars for orientation, and pointed to his right. ‘That way. An object visible to the naked eye, from the Martian ground.’
‘Why are you here, Ari? What do you want of me?’
‘You’re going to speak to Earthshine.’
‘That’s obvious. He summoned me. Although I don’t know what he wants of me.’
‘I knew you would not listen to me, if I had approached you on Terra, or during the flight. It is only now as we prepare to descend that I feel able to speak to you – to make you listen – only now that I can impress on you the urgency of what I ask.’
Penny glanced at Kerys; the trierarchus, tethered to a support bar by one hand, looked on impassively. ‘Kerys, do you know what this is all about?’
‘Leave me out of it. I do know Ari went to the top – to Dumnona itself, the headquarters of the Navy – he pulled a lot of strings to be allowed a berth on this mission.’
‘And all for this one moment, Penny Kalinski,’ Ari said.
‘For what? What do you want, druidh?’
‘It’s simple enough. You will talk to Earthshine. Listen to what he says. Repeat it to me when you return – or if not to me, to the trierarchus, to Dumnona, anybody. Find out what he truly intends, and tell us.’
‘You know what he intends. To terraform Mars, to make Mars live.’
‘That’s what he tells us. I’m convinced there’s something else. Something hidden. We will be landing you there,’ and he pointed to the Hellas basin. ‘We call this Hel. Earthshine has established some kind of habitat here, at the deepest point of the deepest basin on Mars. That is where his personal processing-support unit is now situated. Why there? We don’t know. And he has an establishment a few hundred miles to the north.’
In what Penny’s culture had known as Syrtis Major. ‘Yes?’
‘From the way you have described your own career, I would think you would be familiar with such a place. Penny Kalinski, as far as we can tell from the radiations being released, that is a laboratory where kernels themselves are being studied. Your speciality. Now, why would Earthshine need to delve into the physics of the kernels, if as he claims his priority is the vivifying of Mars?’ He smiled coldly. ‘Perhaps he will ask you to work there alongside him. Perhaps you will write more “papers” for the “journals” read by the learned people of your world—’
Penny snapped back, ‘Oh, give it a rest, you manipulative bore. How’s your wife, Ari?’
‘I have no wife,’ he said neutrally.
‘Fine. Then how’s your daughter?’
‘Mardina’s ten years old now, and she despises me. I see her once a year, and that’s by a court order I had to have drawn up.’
‘So she should despise you. What do you want from her, or her mother? Forgiveness?’
‘I’d settle for understanding. I meant everything for the best, for everybody. Yes, including Mardina!’ Suddenly he looked lost, vulnerable. ‘Couldn’t you tell her that for me?’
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.
CHAPTER 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 towards 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 centre 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.