The sound of the rain on the tough fabric of her shelter was almost reassuring for Beth. Almost like a memory of her own childhood, when, as her family had tracked the migration of the builders and their mobile lake her mother had called the jilla, they had stayed in structures that were seldom much more permanent than this.
But no matter how familiar this environment felt to her, Beth was painfully aware that she was alone here, save for an artificial being that seemed to be becoming increasingly remote – even if he was, in some sense, her grandfather. ‘And that’s even before he drives off over the horizon,’ she muttered.
‘I’m sorry?’ Earthshine sat on an inflated mattress beside her, with a convincing-looking representation of a silver survival blanket over his shoulders.
Over a small fire – the first she’d built here since she’d left for Mercury, all those years ago – she was making soup, of stock she’d brought with her in her pack, and local potatoes briskly peeled and diced and added for bulk. Plus she had boiled a pot of Roman tea. She had flashlights and a storm lantern, but in the unending daylight of Per Ardua enough light leaked through the half-open door flap of the tent for her to see to work.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just rambling. I keep thinking I haven’t slept yet, not since the Hatch.’
‘But it’s only been a few hours,’ Earthshine said gently. ‘We’ve seen a lot, learned a lot. It just seems longer.’
‘Maybe. Only half a day, but you’re already planning to light out of here, aren’t you?’
He shrugged, and sipped a virtual bowl of tea. ‘I see no reason to hang around here any longer than it takes the support unit to make itself ready to travel.’
‘Where?’
‘The only logical destination on a planet like this.’
‘The antistellar?’
‘Of course.’
‘Which means a trek across the dark side,’ she said.
‘You are free to come with me,’ he said evenly. ‘There is no rush; we can make preparations. You could even ride on the support unit if you wish. We could rig up some kind of seat.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Alternatively, you are free to stay here, or go where you wish. I will donate some components from the support unit, if you choose that course. A kit: basic environment sensors, food analysers, a medical package to supplement the first aid available from your suit.’ He passed his fingers through the fabric of her sleeve, wincing as he did so. ‘Remember, I won’t need it.’
‘I lived off the land here once, with my family, and I can do it again.’ She did a double take. ‘Our family.’
He didn’t respond to that.
‘Why are you going to the antistellar?’
‘In search of answers.’
‘Answers to what? What’s wrong with being right here?’
He clenched a fist. ‘This is all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. I smashed Mars to make them listen to me – to us, to humanity.’
‘You mean the deep bugs in the rocks.’
‘The Dreamers, yes. As I call them. Our puppet masters, or so I’m coming to believe. They have been disturbing our worlds, trashing our histories, wrecking our painstakingly assembled civilisations with impunity. Well, no more! I made them listen. I made them respond.’
‘Their answer was the Hatch on Mars.’
‘Yes. A Hatch which brought us here. But this isn’t good enough. Not a good enough answer.’
‘I don’t understand—’
‘This is Proxima! Oh, I can’t deny it, Beth, it must be, a Proxima somehow old and withered, but … Proxima, the nearest star. But I wanted to be taken to Ultima, the furthest star of all our legends – or the equivalent for the Dreamers. The place where the answers are – the place where I’ll learn at last why it is they do what they do. And,’ he said darkly, ‘maybe I will stop them. Maybe I can still be Heimdall to their subterranean Loki … Yes, I forced an answer out of them. A response, at least. But it’s not enough. So I will put them to the question again.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know yet. When I get to the antistellar I’ll figure it out.’
She thought that over. ‘Somehow I feel you’re wrong. I don’t know how or why … They brought you here. Maybe the answer you seek is right here, and you just aren’t seeing it.’
‘That’s possible. But even if so it can’t do any harm to go and search some more, can it?’
‘A lot of people thought you should be stopped from pursuing your ambitions. That was always true, all the way back to your early days on Earth, wasn’t it? Even before you became—’
‘What I am now? When I was merely Robert Braemann, bona fide human being, and busy breaking the law to save the world? Or at least that’s the “I”, of the nine of me, who interests you. And then I became Earthshine, a Core AI, one of three rogue minds, once again breaking humanity’s laws to save it. And again they never forgave us. Now here I am alone, trying to save—’
‘The world? Which world?’
‘All the worlds, maybe. I don’t know.’ He was silent a while; the rain continued to hiss on broad Arduan leaves. ‘Do you think you will come with me? I ask for purely practical reasons. The timescale, the preparations—’
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she said curtly. ‘We only just got here … I like it here, even if it isn’t what I quite remember. I like the day side anyhow. I don’t know if I want to go into endless night, so cold I’ll need to wear a spacesuit.’
‘But,’ he said gently, ‘you also aren’t sure if you want to be alone.’
‘Do you want me to come? After all it was you who brought me through the Hatch with you.’
‘I didn’t force you.’
‘Do you really think of us as family, Earthshine? I know my father’s father is only one of you, one of the nine minds … Do you think of him as your son?’
‘Of course I do. I always did the best I could for him – myself and his mother.’
‘Which included shoving him into a cryo freezer for a century, and ultimately killing him?’
He sighed. ‘We were working at the margins of the law. We were trying to save him. We thought that perhaps in a century he at least would be able to live his life out of our shadow. We underestimated the vindictiveness of mankind. Their retrospective tribunals. Their visiting of punishments on the children of the perpetrators. They never forgave us.’
‘Did you love him? Do you love us now?’
He smiled. ‘A part of me does. That’s the best answer I can give you. I’m sorry. Humans aren’t meant to be like this, you see. Like me. Identity, consciousness, isn’t meant to be something you can pour from one container to another, and meld with others as if mixing a cocktail. So you’ll find my reactions are always going to be – off. But at least I’m here, with you, today. Which is all, in the end, you can ask of anyone.’
She smiled back. ‘That’s true. I feel an atavistic urge to hug you, Grandad.’
‘I urge you not to try. I think the rain is stopping. I will go and check on the progress of my support unit.’
‘And I,’ she said, stretching and yawning, ‘think I’ll take a nap. Don’t wake me when you come in.’
‘I’ll try not to.’
In the warm, moist air of the Arduan substellar, she slept as well as she had for years. And for an unknown time too, under the unmoving face of Proxima. Whatever the unanswered questions, whatever the reservations she might have, she was home, she could feel it. Alone or not.
Even if she missed her daughter Mardina with a savage ache, as if a steel cable were attached to her belly, dragging her back to Mars.
When she glanced out of the shelter, she saw Earthshine standing over his support unit as it slowly reassembled itself for the journey.
CHAPTER 44