‘But they are in continual pain,’ the ColU told Mardina and Yuri. ‘The physical pain of the brutal surgery they underwent. Pain they do not deserve, pain they can never understand. For they are still conscious, oh yes.’
Yuri had no patience for this. ‘Tell it to the UN,’ he would say, marching on.
With time, the country became more unstable. They would be woken from their sleep by earth tremors, violent enough to shake Yuri on his pallet. Sometimes they passed hot mud pools, scummy with purple-green bacteria, mud that hissed and bubbled – even geysers in one place, fountains of steam and hot water that erupted with great chuffing noises like a faulty steam engine. The elders fretted about getting caught in an eruption or quake, while the children told each other stories about the ghost of Dexter Cole turning over in his rocky underground bed. The ColU said they should expect this kind of activity at this, the planet’s closest point to Proxima, where the star’s gravity was deforming the world’s very shape.
The temperature continued to rise as they plodded ever further south. People didn’t wear much nowadays; on the trek or around the camp they wore shorts and loose tunics, and many of the kids ran around naked. But the trucks suffered more mechanical breakdowns as they overheated, and the number of the ColU’s complaints increased.
And the giant low-pressure system that dominated the whole province increasingly filled the sky before them, a permanent bank of cloud hundreds of kilometres wide.
The ColU explained the science to anyone who would listen. ‘Warm air is drawn in towards the hot substellar centre, rises and cools, and dumps its water vapour as clouds, rain, storms. The falling water gathers in rivers and streams that flow radially away from this central point – no doubt in all directions, not just to the north, the track of the rivers we have followed. This must be the essential water cycle over this Proxima-facing continent . . .’
But no amount of understanding helped when the fringe of the great storm reached out to lash the plodding migrants with wind and rain, and freakish showers of hail, even snow, despite the heat. Some of the migrants coped with this better than others, Yuri observed. Older folk who had spent too long in the dome-hovels of Mars or in space habs found it difficult to deal with any natural weather. The children, though, ran around in the heat or the cold, the rain or the snow, accepting it all.
Progress slowed. As the temperatures rose ever higher there were increasing arguments about the wisdom of going on at all.
Yet they persisted. The occasional glimpses of tyre tracks were lures, Yuri sometimes thought, drawing them ever deeper into the navel of the world. And if there were ISF people anywhere on this planet, where else would they be but the most geographically significant point of all?
Then, two years after leaving the Mattock Confluence, they reached a lake that sprawled across their path, and could go no further.
CHAPTER 51
2197
Penny Kalinski was summoned to the latest international interplanetary summit. More reconciliation talks between the UN and China, this time to be held at the Chinese capital on Mars.
Her first view of the capital, as she descended from space, was extraordinary. The Chinese name for their city meant something like ‘City of Fire’. This was because in Chinese tradition there were five elements, each associated with a season, a cardinal direction, and a planet. Mercury, for instance, was associated with water. Fire was associated with summer, the south, and Mars: hence, City of Fire. But the informal western name for the place, based mostly on images from orbit taken long before anybody other than a Chinese citizen had been allowed near the place, was Obelisk. And as the shuttle descended gently through the thin air of Mars – the craft was like a pterosaur, its great wings webbing on a lightweight frame – even from altitude Penny could see why the name was appropriate.
Terra Cimmeria was a chaotic landscape scribbled over by crater walls and steep-sided river valleys; from the high air it reminded Penny of scar tissue, like a badly healed burn. The Chinese settlement nestled on the floor of a crater called Mendel, itself nearly eighty kilometres across, its floor incised by dry channels and pocked by smaller, younger craters. She glimpsed domes half-covered by heaped-up Martian dirt, the gleaming tanks and pipes of what looked like a sprawling chemical manufacturing plant, and a few drilling derricks, angular frames like rocket gantries.
And at the centre of it all was the Obelisk itself, a sculpted finger of Martian stone and concrete and steel and glass – a tower an astounding ten kilometres high, a product of the low Martian gravity and human ingenuity, far higher than any building possible with such materials on Earth.
On its way in the lander sailed around the flank of the monument.
Sir Michael King, sitting beside Penny, looked over her shoulder. ‘They always do this,’ he said. ‘Make sure you notice the damn thing. But you have to allow them their gesture of pride.’
‘Yes. The very place where Cao Xi made the first landing on Mars, all those years ago.’
‘Well, he didn’t live to see Earth again. But look at all they’ve achieved here since, out in the asteroid belt as well as on Mars. All without kernel technology too . . .’
And the issue of access to kernel technology was, of course, the reason why this UN delegation had come to Mars.
The shuttle glided down to a landing with remarkable grace, given its size and evident fragility, on a landing strip some distance from the main domes. The shuttle was quite a contrast to the heavily armed kernel-driven hulk ship in which the UN party had crossed the inner system. But there had been something about the slim, elegant, almost minimalist design of the Chinese-designed shuttle that impressed Penny; the delicate craft seemed a perfect fit to its environment, the tall air of Mars – an adaptation derived from generations of living here. Coming to Chinese Mars was like entering some parallel universe, where technological choices had been made differently from the UN worlds.
As soon as the shuttle was still, rovers hurried out to greet the craft, some nuzzling up against the hull to transfer cargo, fuel and passengers, and others, robots with long, spidery manipulator arms, to begin the elaborate process of folding up the shuttle’s wings, in anticipation of a missile-like launch back to orbit.
The passengers transferred to a well-appointed bus, a blister of some tough transparent material. The driverless vehicle rolled swiftly, heading along a smooth, dust-free road towards one of the big domes of the central settlement. These were huge structures of brick and concrete in themselves, but mere blisters at the feet of the great monument. Chinese staff moved gracefully through the bus cabin offering the passengers cups of water, melted from authentic Martian polar ice, so they were told.
They were in the southern hemisphere of Mars, some thirty degrees below the equator, and it was close to local noon. Seen through the bus windows the sun was high, round, faint but well defined, and the sky was an orange-brown smear – the colour of toffee maybe, Penny thought, remembering home-cooking experiments she and Stef had made as kids, under the kindly but ham-fisted supervision of their father. Experiments of which, Penny supposed sadly, Stef would have no memory.
It was already, incredibly, seventeen years since the sisters’ conceptually stunning encounter with Earthshine, and his revelation of the gravestone of their father in Paris. They had continued to keep in touch with Earthshine about the central mystery of their lives, to little avail.