‘Great heavens, none taken.’

‘That’s true, of course,’ said King. ‘And you know why, don’t you? Because we don’t trust you, Earthshine. We have to deal with you. I have to meet you, what – every other week? But we don’t like you, or trust you. Sitting in your lairs, your hardened bunkers in the bedrock, plugged into all the world’s essential systems. You and your cousins on the other continents, Ifa and the Archangel.’

‘Oh, not cousins. Rivals, perhaps,’ Earthshine said mildly. ‘Companions, sometimes . . .’

Stef got the distinct impression that they had worked together for too long, that King chafed under the burden of a requirement to report to this strange old artificial entity. They were like bickering academics in some crusty institution, she thought.

King said now, ‘Major, you do understand what we’re dealing with here? The big continental AIs, the Core AIs as they are called, were spawned in the first place in the pre-Heroic days. They came out of a global network of transnational companies, a network which collectively controlled much of the world’s economy. Within that network nodes of deeper interconnection and control emerged: “super-entities”, the economic analysts called them. They were still at the level of human culture. But beneath the corporate super-entities, intensive AI capability necessarily clustered. Then came the demands for security for core processors and data backups, hardened refuges linked by robust comms networks. Well, they were given what they wanted.’ He grinned, rueful. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

Earthshine said, ‘The early members of the Core were essential to the great projects of the Heroic Generation. Supremely intelligent.’

‘But they were not human,’ King said sternly.

‘The kernels,’ Stef said, trying to wrench the conversation round to the point. ‘It must have taken a monumental effort to keep the science of the kernels away from the Core AIs.’

King nodded grimly. ‘It did indeed. The fact that the kernels were found on Mercury, and are studied nowhere closer to Earth than the moon, all helped. That and the fact that the danger was spotted immediately.’

‘What danger?’

‘That we would understand,’ Earthshine said, ‘where you do not.’

Stef asked coldly, ‘What don’t I understand?’

‘The true physics. Such as the unified theories known as quantum gravity, among other labels. They remain as tantalisingly out of reach to you as they ever were, have been for centuries. You only know them by limits, low-energy approximations – like relativity, quantum physics. As if you are trying to understand the structure of a diamond by studying a single edge. To explore reality further is beyond your engineering capabilities; to compute more is beyond your intellects. In fact, you’ve learned more by playing with kernels, which are quantum-gravitational toys, than you have from all your theorising in the two hundred years since Einstein.’

Stef scowled. ‘You’re saying that quantum gravity might be too hard for a mere human like me ever to understand.’

‘But not for me,’ Earthshine said. ‘Perhaps, anyhow. Which is why those of small minds and smaller hearts, like Sir Michael here, have kept the kernels from us. What might we achieve if we had such knowledge?’

King looked at Stef. ‘You’ve spent most of your adult life off-planet, Major. See what we have to deal with down here? Crap like this, day after day, decade after decade . . .’

And Stef did see it, saw a fundamental dichotomy between the two branches of mankind as they were emerging in the new era. The spacegoing were outward-looking, expansive, physically exploring the universe. While the Earthbound were stuck in this gravity well, dominated by legacies of the past, such as these dreadful old indestructible AIs cowering in their holes in the ground. Suddenly she longed to be in space, back on the moon – anywhere but here on this old planet, this museum of horrors.

‘Why have you brought me here?’

‘We want you to go to Mercury, Major Kalinski,’ King said. ‘Or rather, go back to Mercury. I will accompany you in person, to the kernel beds, as they have come to be known.’

And there was the opportunity she had come here in hope of, all the way to Earth. But she was baffled. ‘Why? What do you want of me there?’

‘You’re going to have to see for yourself, Major. We’ve found something.’ He glanced at Earthshine. ‘Something so significant, of such long-term importance to mankind, that I feel we’ve no choice but to bring it to the attention of these Core AIs. Because if the buggers are useful for anything, it’s thinking about the long term. And we need someone like you, a kernel physicist. We don’t know what to make of it. We’re hoping you might be able to make informed guesses about it, at least.’

‘About what?’

‘Something strange,’ said Earthshine.

CHAPTER 33

In the endless afternoon of Per Ardua, time flowed unevenly, like the flares that ran across the face of Proxima itself. Sometimes there seemed no interval at all between waking and getting ready to sleep again. And sometimes the days-that-were-not-days dragged, and Yuri felt as if he was back in the solitary tanks in Eden.

Their Earth-based calendars became irrelevant. Increasingly they marked the passage of time by events, by stuff that changed their lives for better or worse. The weather had turned, for one thing; four years after the landing, Proxima’s face was now crowded with massive sunspots, and its flows of heat and light were reduced enough to make a perceptible difference. The climate was more like a crisp late autumn afternoon, from what Yuri remembered of the North Britain of his boyhood. Sometimes there was even a sparkle of frost on the green leaves in the little colony’s fields, and the ColU fretted about its strawberries. Yuri remembered how Mardina had once told him how stable this stellar system was. No dinosaur-killer rocks here, and so on. But the star itself, it seemed, was in fact a source of instability. And the planet too, with that geological uplift they’d long been observing to the north. Not that they could do anything about all that but endure.

And then there was Mardina’s pregnancy.

Once they had begun their awkward, rather businesslike lovemaking, she had conceived quickly, Yuri suspected to their mutual relief. The ColU, in its role as family doctor, had insisted on tracking the stages of the developing pregnancy by the book. So the human-event calendar in their heads had filled up with more memorable moments: the day the morning sickness started, the day the bump was first visible to Yuri, the day Mardina felt the first kick, the day she let Yuri feel a kick. Now she was coming to term, and soon there would be another monumental event for their memories: the birth of a child.

The farm was developing too. With the aid of the ColU it was proving easy for them to extend their few small fields, each coated with terrestrial topsoil and watered by irrigation ditches running from the lake. While the growing stuff, lurid Earth-green, had attracted the attention of the local wildlife – including a flock of spectacular kites the size of herons that periodically came down to investigate – a potato leaf was essentially inedible to an Arduan, and once the crops were established there were no native blights that could harm them. All this had been planned for. The ColU had the capacity to support fourteen people, and their offspring; to provide for one couple was well within its ability.

But after four years on Per Ardua, to Yuri’s eyes – especially when he returned from a hike to the lake or the forest, and he saw it as a whole, from afar – the farm, their little colony, still didn’t look like it fitted in here, in the Arduan landscape. The rectangular fields with their neat rows of Earth-green plants, the tidy geometry of their conical house, the exclusion of the local Arduan life – even the dirt discoloured by their footsteps and the churn of the ColU’s wheels – the whole thing looked like an unhealed wound on the face of this world.