So after a flight of several days from Earth, her own kernel-driven hulk slid to a halt alongside a minor but water-rich asteroid, roughly co-orbiting with Ceres but well beyond the million-kilometre cordon. This battered lump of dusty water-ice was a convenient resupply depot, but mostly it served political purposes, as a kind of customs barrier, Penny saw, in the invisible frontier between the zones of influence of the UN nations and China. Here ships from both sides of the divide could gather, refuel, and exchange cargo, and passengers like Penny.
Penny peered out of her cabin window at the motley craft gathering here. In contrast to the blunt solidity of ISF kernel-powered hulks, Chinese ships, known as ‘junks’ to ISF crew, were little more than sails, some of them hundreds of kilometres across. For propulsion the sails gathered sunlight, or the beams of ground-based lasers. It was a proven technology. Ceres was nearly three times as far from the sun as Earth, and sunlight was much less intense here, but robot ships from Earth with big solar-cell panels had been making use of the sun’s energy this far out since the twenty-first century. Robot riggers constantly worked the great sails. The sails were slow to respond to the tugging of the stay cables, and huge ripples crossed their surfaces, with the sharp light of the distant sun reflected in shifting spots and slowly evolving highlights.
Penny transferred to one of the Chinese junks, aboard which it would take another week to get to Ceres. UN-nation citizens were not allowed aboard such vessels without officially appointed ‘companions’. In the event, much to Penny’s relief, the aide assigned her was more than acceptable. It was Jiang Youwei, the young man who had similarly been her ‘guide’ during her first visit to Mars five years ago. Jiang was as polite and attentive as ever, and just as pleasant to talk to as long as they stayed away from taboo subjects like kernel physics. And, though not quite as young as he had been, he was still cute enough to fill her idle hours with pleasant daydreams.
Penny settled into the rhythms of the journey easily. After the noisy engineering of the ISF hulks, the junk was peaceful. And by comparison with the heavy push of the hulk’s drive, the microgravity thrust exerted by the ship’s lightsail was barely noticeable, and silent too. Occasionally Penny would feel a faint wash of sensation in her gut, as if she was adrift in some ocean and caught by a gentle current. Or she would see a speck of dust drift down through the air, settling slowly. The Chinese crew, like Jiang, were polite, orderly – maybe a little repressed, she thought, but it made for a calm atmosphere. Even the remoteness of the sun gave her a sense of dreaminess, of peace.
She worked when she could concentrate, and exercised according to the routine politely suggested by Jiang, to avoid the usual microgravity loss of muscle tone and bone mass. She slept a lot, floating in her cocoon-like room, sometimes in darkness, sometimes with the walls set to transparency so that the stars, the sun, the sail with its vast slow ripples were a diorama around her. After a few days it was hard for her to tell if she was asleep or awake. Sometimes she dreamed of the smooth limbs and deep eyes of Jiang Youwei.
It was almost a disappointment when Ceres came swimming out of the sky, and this interval of calm was over.
CHAPTER 66
At Ceres the junk’s modular hull was gently disengaged from its sail tethers, and was towed inwards through the last couple of hundred kilometres by a small automated tug. Penny, watching the big sail wafting around the sky, could see the logic; the very biggest sails could be a couple of thousand kilometres across or more, bigger than Ceres itself – big enough to wrap up the dwarf planet like a Christmas present, and you didn’t want any accidental entanglements.
At Ceres, the passengers, including Penny, Jiang and a few crew members who were being rotated here, were politely moved into a small snub-nosed shuttle craft, rows of seats in a cramped cabin. As they took their places some of the passengers looked faintly queasy, and others rubbed their arms. They had all been put through a brisk decontamination and inoculation update. The separated pools of humanity, scattered among isolated colonies, were busily evolving their own unique suites of viruses, and each group had to be protected from infection by all the others.
As Penny strapped into her acceleration couch she watched a couple of crew manhandling what looked like a piece of cargo into this passenger cabin. It was a rough cone that bristled with lenses, grills and other sensors, a retractable antenna array, and a minor forest of manipulator arms, some of which brachiated down to fine tool fittings. The whole was plastered with UEI logos, and various instruction panels in multiple languages. The crewmen cautiously pushed this gadget into place in a gap between the rows of couches, positioned it so the lenses could peer out of the windows, plugged it into the shuttle’s onboard power supply, and backed away.
The shuttle doors were sealed, and a chime filled the cabin. Automated voices speaking Chinese, English and Spanish announced that the final transit to Ceres had already begun. As she was pushed gently back in her couch by the acceleration, Penny stared at the bristling cone. ‘So what the hell’s that?’
Jiang Youwei smiled. ‘What do you imagine it is?’
‘It looks like a Mars lander, circa 2050. A museum piece?’
To her surprise a panel lit up on the flank of the machine, and an urbane face peered out at her, smiling. ‘Good morning, Colonel Kalinski.’
‘Earthshine. You!’
‘Me indeed. Or at least a partial, a download of my primary back on Earth. Lightspeed delays are such a bore, aren’t they? And appear likely to remain so for the indefinite future, given that even the Hatch bridges are limited to lightspeed transits. I wonder how that has constrained the evolution of life and intelligence in the Galaxy . . .’ He smiled, almost modestly; the face was reproduced authentically, so that Penny had the strong impression that she was speaking to a human being stuck inside this box-like shell. ‘It is good to see you again.’
‘You say you’re some kind of partial?’
‘Of course. I am considerably limited compared to my primary. However I download my memory store regularly, and when I am returned to Earth there will be a complete synchronisation.’
Jiang said, ‘That sounds schizophrenic, sir.’
‘Oh, probably,’ Earthshine said breezily. ‘But you should remember that I, or rather my primary, am already a fusion of nine human consciousnesses. Already a chorus of voices sing inside my head, so to speak.’
Penny was irritated by this distraction from her mission, from the approaching asteroid. ‘I didn’t even know you were aboard the junk.’
‘I considered renewing our acquaintance. Your young guardian here said it might be best not to disturb you during the flight.’
‘He did, did he?’ She glared at Jiang, who, not for the first time in their acquaintance, blushed. ‘What am I, your grandmother?’
‘But we had no urgent business,’ Earthshine said. ‘Though we have our long-standing connection concerning your relationship with your sister. Of course the two of you are now separated, presumably by light years, presumably for ever.’
She glanced at Jiang. Officially, he knew nothing of her complicated past. His face showed no expression; she could not tell what he knew or not.
She turned back to Earthshine. ‘So why are you here?’
‘Two reasons. First—’
‘The conference?’
‘Yes. Though it is far from a summit, it is one of the most high-profile UN-Chinese contacts proceeding anywhere just now. Your own presence, Colonel, is an indicator of that. And we – my fellows in the Core – believe we should back, visibly and publicly, such initiatives as the cooperative development of outer solar system resources being discussed here. So here I am.’