‘Is what you ordain it to be. I overheard some of your conversation.’
‘Oh, you did? Resourceful, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ said Gerloc without irony. ‘You are trying to avert a tremendous disaster. And you are nauarchus, you are my superior officer.’
‘And so am I, by the way,’ snapped Freydis.
‘I have trained for this, for mobility in battle situations under conditions of thrust—’
‘All right. Get up here as fast as you can, and don’t break a leg on the way.’
‘Already halfway there, nauarchus. See you soon.’
‘Ha! I like her,’ said Kerys.
‘Well, I don’t,’ said Freydis. ‘Is there any way we can increase the thrust of this bucket? That would wipe the grin off her face …’
CHAPTER 31
Once they were off the landed yacht, Mardina tried to help Penny as they made their way through an airlock, and into a cramped elevator that took them down a deep shaft sunk into the Martian ground. Then they followed Earthshine along a short passage crudely cut into the dirt.
They arrived at a bare room, with walls of rust-coloured concrete punctuated by several doors, and furnished with a few couches and low tables of metal tubing and webbing – furniture that looked to Mardina as if it had been scavenged from a spacecraft, from the Celyn, perhaps. Earthshine stood at the centre of the room as the rest filed in. None of them were at ease as they tried to walk in the unaccustomed low gravity – none save Earthshine, who looked as relaxed as if he were in a full gravity on Terra. Mardina found that irritating, as if he was making some point about his own eerie superiority.
Penny picked a chair, eased herself down on it with a lot of help from Mardina, and leaned forward on her stick, scowling at Earthshine. The rest settled: Mardina’s mother and father, Beth and Ari, on chairs as far from each other as they could get, and Chu with the ColU satchel on his back sitting modestly on the floor.
‘So here we are.’ Earthshine pointed. ‘There are facilities – a bathroom through that door, a small galley, a dormitory.’
Penny barked laughter. ‘All rather less fancy than the last time I visited you, Earthshine. The great glass hall at Hellas – the trip into your virtual mine, deep underground, where you spoke of your noostratum.’
Earthshine smiled, unperturbed. ‘I have abandoned the surface facilities now. Down here I can complete my preparations without any interference by the navies of this reality’s squabbling empires.’
Ari smiled. ‘What interference? You manoeuvred an object as enormous as Höd onto a collision course with this planet. And all in full view of the Brikanti and the Romans and the Xin – indeed you persuaded them to give you the facilities to do it!’
Earthshine shrugged. ‘These are not cultures that prepare well for natural disasters – not compared to our own reality, Penny. They don’t track rocks that might fall from space; they don’t have the technology to do it, let alone the imagination. Each other’s ships – that’s what they watch, obsessively. And so it was easy for me to smuggle Ceres onto this destructive course, yes.’
The ColU said levelly, ‘We are here to persuade you to abandon this project—’
Earthshine broke in, ‘Yes, that was your plan, your surface motivation. But under all that, deeper impulses lurk. I am your grandparent, Beth. Whatever you think of me, that remains the truth. I am all that is left of your family from before what you call the hinge. And in the final hours, you have come to me.’ He spread his hands, and looked around, at Beth, Mardina. ‘Even under the fall of the hammer itself, you, my family, have come to me. For you know I will protect you.’
The ColU said evenly, ‘They were pawns, Earthshine. A means of inducing you to allow access to this place. As for your family, what of Yuri Eden? Your son. I was with him when he died. He was far from your protection then.’
Earthshine’s synthesised face became, eerily, more expressionless. ‘I am aware of his death—’
‘It was freezer burn. That was the colloquialism he used. Your decision, Robert Braemann, all those years ago, to consign your son to a cryo tank, ultimately killed him.’
Mardina had been told about this. Even so, having it stated as baldly as this in front of this strange old monster, this relic of her great-grandfather, shocked her.
Earthshine faced Beth and Mardina, and spread his hands. ‘I meant only the best for Yuri. As I mean only the best for you—’
Penny snapped, ‘You’re being absurd. How will you protect these people, your “family”? This sandcastle of a bunker will be useless when Ceres falls.’
‘True. But it is not the bunker that will save us – all of you who choose to come with me.’
Mardina was utterly baffled. ‘Come with you where?’
Ari’s eyes were alight with a kind of greed. ‘I think I understand. You’re talking about another jonbar hinge, aren’t you? Like the gate between your history of the UN and China and our own with Romans and Brikanti, and again between our worlds and the world of the Drowned Culture … I know your own history ended in a war of cosmic savagery, with the release of huge energies. Is that what you’re planning here, Earthshine? To create a hinge?’
Mardina stared at him, barely understanding. ‘Father. The way you’re talking. You sound as if you want this. As if you want everything to be smashed up – everything we’ve grown up with, everything our ancestors built.’
‘Perhaps I do,’ Ari said, and he stood and began to pace. ‘Perhaps I do. Ever since these strangers wandered into our lives – and especially ever since I discovered the evidence of the Drowned Culture for myself – I’ve become addicted to the idea. Addicted – yes, that’s the word. To see everything change in a trice – to see new possibilities for mankind and human expression unfold, before one’s eyes – perhaps to have the power to shape those possibilities. How could any thinking person not be drawn to such an idea?’
‘Billions would die, Ari,’ Penny said softly. ‘No, it’s worse than that. Billions would never have existed at all.’
‘But others would take their place. Don’t you see? It would be like looking through the eyes of a god.’
The ColU said, ‘That’s probably blasphemous, in terms of your interpretation of Christianity. And it’s also wrong. You would be looking through the eyes, not of a god, but of whoever it is who welcomes these adjustments – and whoever has engineered them.’
Ari frowned. ‘And who might they be?’
Penny said, ‘We don’t know, not yet. But we know that their meddling in history has nothing to do with our benefit. It is all about what they want.’
‘Which is?’
‘Kernels,’ she said. ‘And Hatches, Ari. Hatches. Of the kind you and your Roman rivals are merrily building for them, all over the nearby star systems, without ever understanding why, or what they’re for. We know that much.
‘But there’s more to this, isn’t there, Earthshine?’ She held him with her gaze. ‘We’re skirting around elements of a deeper mystery. You came to Mars to explore this noostratum of yours. A layer of bacterial mind, deep in the rocks …’ She stood straight, stiffly. ‘My God. I never thought of it before. Could there be some connection? The Hatches, after all, provide lightspeed links between worlds …’ She faced Earthshine. ‘Are the noostratum minds your Hatch builders, Earthshine? Maybe they aren’t just witnesses. And they are everywhere, presumably, on every rocky world … They are the puppet masters, who control the lesser beings, us, on the planet surfaces. Is that what you’re thinking?’
Earthshine just smiled. ‘What is important in this situation, Penny Kalinski, is what I want of them.’
‘Which is?’
‘For them to reply to me. The Martian noostratum – yes, the Hatch builders, as I believe they are. You know I have been trying to communicate with them – you saw the experimental set-up. All I have wanted is a reply.’