‘Ah. Warp waves, which can travel back in time.’

‘Yes, Yuri Eden. I believe that – in these faint traces of structure in the cosmic background reaction, visible to the Arab astronomers in the silence of their observation capsules – I am witnessing a kind of foreshadowing, echoes travelling back in time …’

‘Echoes from the future. But echoes of what?’

‘Something terrible.’

‘Umm. Well, you’re not given to exaggeration, ColU.’

‘Are you falling asleep, Yuri Eden?’

‘Not just yet. All this talk of calamity in the future. You know, ColU, I don’t fear dying. In fact, I feel like I died already, a number of times. All those doors I had to pass through, from my own time to the future, from Mars to Per Ardua …’

‘It will just be another door, Yuri Eden.’

‘I know, my friend. I know. But I do fear for those I love. Listen – I want you to find Beth, if you can.’

‘I know. You asked me this before. But, Yuri Eden, she may not exist, in this new reality. She may have been left behind.’

‘Maybe. But maybe not. I know Mardina – or knew her. If there was a way to save Beth, she’d have found it.’

‘I always flattered myself that I was close to Beth Eden Jones.’

‘You were the kindly monster who made her toy builders with those manipulator arms of yours. Remember Mister Sticks? Find her, ColU. And whoever she’s with now. Tell her you’re her property now. And help her, as best you can. Because I can’t, you see. I can’t help her any more.’

‘Yuri Eden—’

‘Promise me.’

‘I promise, Yuri Eden. You are tiring. I will ask Michael to call on you.’

‘Yeah. Oh, ColU, one thing. This future cataclysm you think you see. When?’

‘The whole thing is very partial, Yuri Eden. I can only make preliminary guesses—’

‘I remember that ass Lex McGregor, when he dumped us on Per Ardua, telling us that Proxima would shine for thousands of times as long as the sun.’

‘Proxima will barely have aged by the time the event is upon us, Yuri Eden.’

‘Barely?’

‘I have tentatively dated the source of the spacetime waves to less than four billion years from now. Perhaps three and a half billion—’

‘Four billion years? Ha! Why didn’t you say so? I don’t even have four years, let alone four billion. Four billion years ago the Earth itself had barely formed – right? Why should I worry about running out of time four billion years from now?’

‘Because you, or your descendants, will have been robbed of trillions, Yuri Eden. Sleep now, and I will find Michael …’

CHAPTER 19

AD 2225; AUC 2978

The Ukelwydd, riding kernel fire as it slowed, slid out of deep space and entered orbit around Mars.

As the drive cut out and the acceleration weight was lifted from her chest, Penny Kalinski, now eighty-one years old, cocooned in a deep couch, uttered a sigh of deep relief. It was her first spaceflight for a dozen years, the first since the Tatania. After spending twelve years as an elderly, eccentric, Earthbound teacher, she’d forgotten how gruelling a launch was. Well, now it was done.

In the absence of gravity her feeble old-lady arms had enough strength to push out of the couch. For a few seconds she drifted in the warm air, relishing the absence of weight. Her cabin was small, she was never more than an arm’s length from a wall, and every surface was studded with handholds. It was easy to float over into the small closet that served as her bathroom. The freedom of movement was delicious, marred only by a twinge of arthritic pain in her joints. But in a mirror she saw that her hair had come loose and formed a cloud of fuzzy grey around her head. ‘Oh, for God’s sake –’ She pulled back rogue strands and tucked them into a knot.

She was presentable by the time there was a knock at the door.

Trierarchus Kerys was waiting for her, comfortably hovering in the air. Kerys was around fifty now, solid, competent, smiling, her hair a tangle of black and grey. And, twelve years after she had commanded this ship when it had collected the Tatania and its castaway crew, Kerys had become a friend to Penny Kalinski. She said now, ‘I thought you would like an escort to the observation cabin. The druidh waits for you there. It will take us some hours to switch over from deep space operations to landing mode; he suggested you might like to view Mars, and what has become of it, before we land.’

After all these years, Penny’s Brikanti was now pretty good. Her Latin wasn’t too bad either, but she was never going to master Xin, despite the patient years poor Jiang had put into trying to teach her. So she understood every word Kerys had said, and picked up the unspoken implications. She meant, Earthshine’s Mars.

‘Yes, I would like that. And I’m honoured that the trierarchus herself came to escort me.’

‘You’re an honoured guest. As I’ve been telling you since we left Terra. Here, take my arm.’

They began to move cautiously along the corridor, with Kerys pulling herself from handhold to handhold.

‘I’m always amazed how much larger a space seems without gravity,’ Penny said. ‘But the earliest astronauts reported that. I mean, the space travellers in my home timeline …’ As the years had gone by she found it increasingly difficult to keep those two tangled histories separate in her head. ‘But I don’t understand why you’ve all made such a fuss of me all the way here.’

‘Well, Penny Kalinski, partly it is because you are a companion of Earthshine. This mission was mounted specifically to bring you to him, as he requested.’

‘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.