CHAPTER 71
Once again Penny Kalinski was flown into the small Parisian airport at Bagneux.
Penny climbed stiffly down from the small plane. Out on the tarmac in the middle of the day it was ferociously hot, even this early in the year. She glanced up at a sky washed out with sunlight. The Splinter was not visible just now, even though, like most of humanity, she knew exactly where to look for it, and knew exactly when it was due to arrive. That big damn rock was on its way. The best predictions were that it would miss the Earth, just, at the conclusion of a countdown that had begun eleven years ago when she’d been at that chaotic resources conference on Ceres, a count that had dwindled down to months, weeks, days – and now, at last, hours. But predictions were just that: predictions, best guesses. Nobody knew what was going to fall out of the sky. And now it was almost here.
Penny had begun to think of the time left in terms of sleeps. Not that, in her late sixties, she slept all that well anyhow. Now, she suspected, she would not sleep again, not before the count ran down.
A large automated car drew up to meet her. Sir Michael King was in the back, with a couple of UEI security goons, one male, one female – and, she was startled to see, Jiang Youwei, her one-time guide on Chinese Mars and Ceres.
King and Jiang climbed out, King awkwardly and with the aid of a stick. King shook Penny’s hand. ‘Thanks for coming.’ His expression was grim, relieved only by the most fleeting of smiles.
Jiang, however, tentatively embraced her. He looked so much older too, more gaunt, older than his forty years – but in his case that might be more to do with the harsh pressure of a full Earth gravity on a frame conditioned to the comparative gentleness of Mars. When he moved, in fact, she heard a subtle whir of exoskeletal support about his body.
‘It’s good to see you, old friend,’ she said to him now. ‘But kind of surprising.’ She pointed at the sky. ‘Given the huge geopolitical boot that is about to stamp on Earth.’
Jiang shrugged. ‘I am here for you, Penelope Kalinski.’
King raised his eyebrows. ‘Actually we’re all here because of Earth-shine, as usual. Look, shall we get back in the damn car? This heat is killing me.’
They all clambered into the car, a bubble of glass and ceramic. The security goons took their places front and back, with King, Penny and Jiang in the middle. The car slid away silent as a soap bubble, heading north out of the airport. When Penny glanced back she saw the airport was empty of activity, not a plane in the sky, only a few craft sitting around on the apron and the terminal buildings lifeless.
King seemed to have visibly aged since she’d last seen him. Despite, presumably, his ongoing courses of anti-senescence treatments. He was ninety-eight years old now. His Aussie accent seemed more pronounced as well – his tone was cruder, as if he could no longer be bothered to mask his true feelings behind conventional civility.
But no doubt she had aged badly too. It was the stress, she supposed. The pressure. The disappointment. If you were anywhere near the centre of human affairs, even to the extent that she was, your predominant emotion had to be disappointment at the way in which in an age when opportunities for humanity had never been greater, old flaws – territorialism, combativeness, a reluctance to transcend cultural barriers, a sheer inability simply to see things from the other guy’s point of view – looked set to bring the sky crashing down on all their heads.
King saw her looking out of the window. ‘Quiet, isn’t it? Everybody who can get out of the city, got. Doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the Splinter does fall, despite everything the Chinese have said, then it won’t matter where the hell you are. But still, people have fled to the country, if they can.’
‘While here we are, rushing to the centre. Where are we headed, the Champs-Élysées again?’
‘Not that. Earthshine’s found himself a better hidey-hole. You’ll see.’
‘I look forward to it,’ Jiang Youwei murmured. ‘I was born on Mars, as you know. I have seen too little of Earth, of the ancestral home of the human race.’
King grunted. ‘Make the most of it. Last chance to see, eh?’
‘It won’t come to that,’ Penny said.
The Splinter – actually an immense chunk of the metallic core of some long-destroyed dwarf planet, a shattered sister of Ceres – was on a grazing trajectory; if left undisturbed it ought to skim the top of Earth’s atmosphere, and pass on more or less harmlessly. The UN’s tame astronomers and the defence agencies had determined this months ago, and the rock hadn’t significantly deviated since then. But the surface of the rock was covered with Chinese technology, from solar-cell arrays to emplacements of what looked suspiciously like their big Mars-terraforming bunker-buster bombs. Some observers even claimed they saw evidence of human activity, teams of taikonauts climbing around on the skin of the weaponised asteroid, even as it sailed in towards the Earth. Nobody in the West knew what the Chinese were up to.
In ignorance, at least, Penny thought, there was still room for optimism, and she tried to express that.
But King didn’t seem to think so. ‘Twenty-four hours out after years of a Cold War stand-off, with that damn thing barrelling in towards the planet – and given it’s won the Chinese damn few of the concessions they demanded – and you’re still hoping for the best, huh?’
‘What choice is there?’
‘To bury yourself in the deepest hole you can find – that’s the alternative. Which is exactly what Earthshine seems to be doing. And which is why we’re all here, invited to the show. He sees me as the most senior figure in UEI, which is kind of true, though many on my board and the major stockholders might not agree after all these years. A lot of water under the bridge. And he sees you as the queen of kernel science, which is what has caused us all this trouble in the first place. He’s trying to intervene in human affairs, the best way he can. And the only way he can do that is by working through humans. Specifically us.’
Penny thought that over. ‘Could be he just thinks of us as friends, Sir Michael. He has known us a long time.’
‘And myself?’ Jiang asked softly.
‘He gets to as many Chinese as he can,’ King said bluntly. ‘In your case, through your relationship with Penny here. Your government and your security agencies are a lot more sceptical of the Core AIs than we are, in the UN countries. The Chinese see them as yet another relic of the capitalist, colonialist era that started with the Opium Wars and finished with the stunts of the Heroic Generation. Your people have long memories. So Chinese are harder to contact for the AIs.’
Jiang shrugged. ‘I am hardly influential. And our peoples are not yet at war. I was, however, warned, by a French consul on Obelisk in fact, about the personal risk I was undertaking by coming here during the event. If there were to be some disastrous consequence—’
‘I wouldn’t worry,’ King said frankly. ‘If the worst comes to the worst there probably won’t be a lamp post left standing for you to be strung up from.’ He laughed, and turned away to look out of the window once more.
Penny saw that they were heading through central Paris now, travelling roughly north-east along a broad avenue. There was very little traffic, a few pedestrians, some in silvery capes, hats and goggles to fend off the ferocious sunlight. Through gaps between the clustered buildings she glimpsed the obvious landmarks, the Notre Dame cathedral up ahead, and the rusted ruin of the Eiffel Tower further in the distance off to the left, a gaunt iron frame rendered blue-grey by the dusty air. Save for the lack of traffic and the basic desertion by its inhabitants, she imagined Paris hadn’t changed much in the last century, or even the century before that; ancient ordinances against development had always preserved a certain look about the city. Paris was just Paris, unique.