He searched his screens. ‘I am sure that—’
Penny swept a hand through his virtual head, brutally; pixels scattered. ‘No more playing human. Time to use your superpowers. Just access and show us.’
He looked shocked, briefly. Then his face went blank and he stood stock-still, not even simulating breathing.
A big screen lit up with a Parisian landscape, buildings of sandstone and concrete and glass and steel under a sun, a blue sky – no, the sky was increasingly less blue, the sun less bright. Even as they watched a greyness gathered, dust grains from thousands of Splinter shards settling into the stratosphere, closing in a shroud around the Earth. A kind of twilight settled over Paris, and the sun, still high in the spring afternoon sky, was reduced to a pale disc, a ghost of itself.
‘What does it mean?’ King asked. ‘Tell me that, one of you. What are they doing? What does it mean?’
‘Winter,’ said Earthshine.
CHAPTER 75
They were ready to depart a single Arduan year-day later: a week and a day.
‘You’re really doing this, aren’t you?’ said Jay Keller, approaching Yuri at the departure site, outside Yuri’s villa at the Mattock Confluence. ‘Makes me feel old.’
‘Peacekeeper, you were born old . . .’
Here came others, Anna Vigil, Frieda Breen, Bill Maven, relics of the Founder communities that had coalesced into a single travelling gang in those days of the star winter, and had made the epic trek down the valley of the North River to the Hub, an episode Yuri suspected the younger generations didn’t believe had happened at all. In her sixties, Anna Vigil, who now had a job advising on the care of children in the UN quarantine camps – Stef had done her own volunteering work with her – had become a comfortable grandmother. There was no trace Yuri could see of the bruised girl who’d had to prostitute herself on the Ad Astra for baby food for Cole, but, no doubt, that trauma was somewhere buried deep down inside. Anna smiled, kissed Yuri on the cheek, and pushed wispy, grey hair back from her brow. ‘So you’re keeping Liu out of jail for a couple of hundred days. But what about when you get back? What then?’
Yuri glanced up at the sky. ‘In my life, Anna, I guess I’ve learned to trust the future. Maybe by the time we’re back their dumb war will have blown over—’
‘Or blown up,’ Anna said grimly. ‘Well, we’ll see, and I’m glad that all of mine are safe here on Per Ardua. Once I never would have thought I’d hear myself say that. Just keep him safe, Yuri. And Stef. She’s a good soul.’
‘I will, I promise.’
The expedition’s rover drove up, a late model plastered with UN and ISF logos, ‘borrowed’ from the Hub facility. Then the ColU rolled alongside, hull gleaming from a final refurbishment. Stef leaned out of the rover’s side door. ‘So, you ready to get this done?’
Yuri climbed up into the cab of the rover, alongside Stef and Liu.
The vehicles rolled off, with the ColU following in convoy. Their friends stood back and applauded. And, to Yuri’s surprise, somebody fired off a flare, a long-treasured relic of their Founder days; trailing brilliant orange smoke it climbed high into the sky, before disappearing into the perpetual Hub cloud layer.
The hundred days’ journey began.
At first, as they travelled out through the Hub-centred disc of human colonisation, the going was easy. They followed the best roads, and, surrounded by habitation, used as little of their own supplies as they could while supplements could be acquired.
And they got plenty of help. Even when they reached the sparser band of farming townships well beyond the central zone, Yuri was surprised by the attention they attracted. There had been much interest in the expedition in the embryonic Per Arduan media, and as Founders Yuri and Liu were both familiar figures anyhow. In some places they were even applauded as they went through, or a little caravan of trucks and kids on Arduan-made pushbikes would follow them out of town. Yuri was surprised, yes, and pleased.
Stef seemed indifferent; she was intent on micro-managing the expedition hour by hour. People weren’t the point, it seemed, to her, in any of her endeavours. And Liu, wary of attention, shielded his face from the cameras that were thrust against the rover windows.
In those first few days they easily exceeded their target of two hundred kilometres a day. Even so it took a full seven days before they had rolled past the last of the sparse new townships, and Yuri was impressed how far out from the centre people had already come, in search, he supposed, of a place of their own, and a little peace, and dignity. And he imagined how the face of Per Ardua must look from space now, with a great spiderweb of lurid Earth green spinning out from the Hub, along the riverbanks, the new roads, even along the inward trails carved out by the Founders as they had limped their way from the shuttle drop points in to the centre, scattering topsoil and seed potatoes and earthly bugs behind them as they went.
By the eighth day, however, there were no more metalled roads, or even tracks. They crossed mostly untravelled ground, and their maps, even of the day side, were too coarse to be relied on without caution. Stef and the ColU between them kept a running record of the ground they crossed, the features they encountered, for the benefit of future generations. And they started to drop markers every fifty kilometres or so, lightweight darts they would fire into a suitable rock or bluff, with short-range radio transmitters. These would serve as beacons so they could find their way back – or to mark their trail for any prospective rescue party, should they need it. Their overnight stops were brief. They collected water when they could, but they had no need to find other provisions. They didn’t even pitch a tent; there was plenty of room for the three of them to sleep easily in the rover.
As for the landscapes they crossed, water was the key to life, as ever in this arid continent. Wherever they came across a river or a lake of some kind there would be the usual menagerie of stem beds and lichen streaks on the rocks, and various species of kite working the water, and, often, the builders with their middens and their nurseries, at work around the margins. And always there were the stromatolites, like tremendous sculptures scattered across the planet’s face by some vanished race of artists.
Sometimes the ColU or Stef would request a stop, if they came across an unusual rock formation, or volcanic feature, or even a novel life form. And the ColU would engage local builder groups in puppet-dance conversation. It was remarkable, the ColU said, that the languages of widely scattered groups was so consistent, even out here; there was little regional variation, little dialect. More evidence of the great antiquity of the species and their culture, the ColU argued. On the other hand, as Liu pointed out, builders rarely had anything interesting to say.
As the days piled up, Yuri began to feel numbed. They just rolled on across the timeless, bowl-like face of this giant continent, kilometre after kilometre. Feeling his age, comfortable in his padded couch in this air-conditioned truck, he sometimes wondered how the hell he and Mardina had ever managed that epic trek across the wilderness, baby and all, with the jilla builders.
Around day twenty they came across the remains of an Ad Astra shuttle drop.
The signs were unmistakable. They crossed the scorched track of a shuttle landing, the long straight line of fused ground still visible after all these years. They cut off their route and followed the track to the remains of a shabby camp, and the smashed relic of a ColU’s bubble dome, wrecked beyond repair – and, the ColU said, mercifully without consciousness. They searched sparse debris for any evidence of identity, of who might have been dropped here. But the settlers seemed to have been efficient in the reuse of their meagre equipment, and little was left behind. The explorers couldn’t even find graves, which was unusual for such a site.