‘And the second reason?’
‘I wanted to see the asteroid belt. Simple as that. I have developed something of an obsession with the violent origins of our currently peaceful worlds . . . Call me a cosmic-disaster junkie. Ceres, you know, is the only truly spherical asteroid, the only one differentiated, that is with an internal structure of a rocky core, a water ice mantle and a fractured rocky crust. It is a dwarf planet technically, not an asteroid at all. And it comprises about a third the mass of the whole of the belt. But once there were thousands of such objects here in the belt, all of them relics of the ancient days, of the formation of the solar system.’
‘All gone, except Ceres,’ Penny said.
‘Yes.’ Two manipulator arms swung; two small metal fists collided with a tinny clang. ‘All smashed to pieces in collisions. That’s why there are so many metal-rich asteroids out there. They are relics of the cores of worlds like Ceres, whole worlds smashed to bits. Violence, everywhere you look! We crawl around our solar system like baffled children in a bombed-out cathedral.’
Jiang frowned. ‘That is not an original perception. It is the nature of the universe we inhabit.’
‘True. But it’s not the violence of the past that haunts me. It’s the mirror-image violence that may lie in our future . . .’
Penny tried to puzzle this out. She remembered how Earthshine had spoken of being afraid, all those years ago, over her father’s grave. Now he seemed to be becoming more irrational, obsessive. Haunted by visions of primordial cosmic violence? Was it possible for a Core AI to become insane? If so, what would the consequences be? Or perhaps, she told herself, he was actually becoming more sane. Facing realities not yet perceived by mankind. She wasn’t sure which was the more disturbing alternative.
Another chime informed them that the transfer was already nearing its end. Penny felt a soft deceleration pressing her against her restraint, and she strained to look ahead through the shuttle’s blister carapace. At last she saw Ceres itself, a small world fast approaching. In the attenuated sunlight, it looked at first glance like the far side of the moon, heavily cratered. But transparent roofs sprawled across swathes of landscape, roofs under which the green of life could be glimpsed. There were towers too, drilling rigs of some kind, so tall that they bristled at this world’s sharp horizon, and a belt of gleaming metal circled what she presumed was the world’s equator.
‘That belt is the mass driver,’ Jiang Youwei murmured, beside Penny. ‘Or one of them. A great electromagnetic sling that hurls sacks of water ice and other volatiles from Ceres all over the asteroid belt, and indeed to Mars. Some asteroids, you know, are virtually pure metal, or metallic ore, with not a trace of water or other volatiles, and so are unable to support human life independently. Because of the water it exports, Ceres has turned out to be the key to the exploitation of the whole belt.’
There was another warning chime. The shuttle tipped up and descended nose down, alarmingly, towards a landing field of what looked like concrete, heavily marked with recognition symbols and surrounded by giant structures. The gravity of Ceres must be so low, Penny thought, that the descent was more like a docking with a huge space station than a landing on a respectable planet, on Mars or Mercury or Earth.
In the last seconds the craft tipped up with a rattle of attitude thrusters, and the descent slowed to a crawl. They landed, feather-soft.
The shuttle rolled towards a tremendously tall, sprawling building, and nuzzled easily up against a wall. A chime, and the passengers began to unbuckle. Once they were out of their seats, Penny stumbled slightly in a gravity so low it was hardly there at all.
There was a clicking of latches, and then the shuttle’s nose section swung back, leaving a round portal through which they could walk. A handful of official-looking types in sober business suits, and a couple of armed soldiers, were waiting beyond the portal. Over their shoulders Penny glimpsed a vast open space, spindly pillars, a high ceiling through which sunlight glinted, and beneath which huge birds flapped – no, she saw, they were people, people flying through the air using some kind of skeletal, bat-like wings. The sunlight was supplemented by the light of huge fluorescent panels that seemed to be suspended from the ceiling. In this vast, cavernous space, lesser buildings clustered on a smooth floor, entirely contained by the great roof. The structure was so huge that Penny thought she could see a slight curvature in the floor, as if the building sprawled over the very horizon. Well, perhaps it did.
Two women waited for Penny, with Jiang and Earthshine. The apparent senior, small, sober, perhaps forty years old and dressed in a sombre black suit, introduced herself as Shen Xuelin. ‘Welcome to the Halls of Ceres. I am deputy director of the colony here, and chair of the Resources Futures conference to which you have kindly agreed to contribute.’ Her English was good, if anything over-precise, her accent a kind of neutral east coast American. She introduced the younger, uniformed woman beside her: Wei Ling, a captain in a dedicated division of the Chinese national army. ‘I apologise for the presence of an armed officer at my side,’ Shen said. ‘And for our inability to offer you the full freedom you requested, sir,’ she said to Earthshine.
Penny, turning, saw that the AI’s cone-shaped host was being hoisted by a couple of the shuttle crew onto a kind of hovering platform. She had to laugh. ‘You’re going to be rolled around like a remote-controlled kid’s toy, Earthshine.’
‘It is purely a routine precaution—’
‘Please don’t apologise, Madam Shen.’ Earthshine’s voice was strong, confident, projected as if a human being was standing here with them. ‘Given the current political situation it is quite understandable. I half expected you to turn me back altogether.’ Shen checked a watch. ‘The morning session of the conference has another hour to run. Would you care to join us?’ Shen led them to a walkway that stretched across the floor of the tremendous building. ‘I would advise you to grab the handrail . . .’
The walkway was a track of some yielding material that rapidly built up speed. Penny found herself tilting forward, disconcertingly, though she had no inner sense of tipping. Glancing down, she saw that the surface of the track had rucked itself up so that it held her at an angle, compensating for the acceleration. A neat low-gravity trick. ‘Clever,’ she said.
Shen said with some pride, ‘An ingenious design but not one that everybody finds comfortable. The mixing up of the vertical and horizontal . . .’
Penny noticed that Jiang had turned very pale. She had to grin. ‘Bearing up, Mars man? If you’re going to vomit I’ll find you a sick bag.’
‘That will not be necessary,’ Jiang said, a little sternly. ‘Madam Shen, I was intrigued by the conference agenda.’
‘Indeed,’ said Shen. ‘We have already had productive sessions on ambitious plans to exploit such resources as the gas giant atmospheres, remote moons like Titan and Triton, even Kuiper belt and Oort cloud objects. With our experience of Ceres and the asteroids we feel confident about approaching the ice moons and dwarf planets of the outer system, even though we must seek alternate energy sources to sunlight.’
‘You mean,’ Earthshine said provocatively, ‘you need the kernels.’
‘That is one possibility,’ Shen said, a little stiffly. ‘There are other energy sources. The mining of gas giant atmospheres for fusion fuel, for example. This will require an industrial effort on a scale of an order of magnitude more ambitious than anything seen in the present day. This is surely a challenge for the next generation, and even then we believe the pooled resources of all our societies, that is of the Greater Economic Framework and of the nations dominated by the UN quasi-government, will be necessary to achieve such a task.’