Penny said, ‘I think we’ll have problems if we’re stuck down here too long. Up on Mars, say, you grow up knowing that there’s no escape. Whereas here the kids know there’s a liveable environment up there, outside. When they get older, if we’re still here, we’re going to have a lot of difficult teens.’
‘Interesting. I retain enough of my humanity, I think, to sympathise. The need for personal freedom seems to be ingrained in the human animal, to some extent. We accept compromises where it benefits the family. Beyond that, we resent.’
She had to smile. ‘Is this how you talk to the kids in your school classes?’
‘Not exactly—’
‘Hey!’ A little kid had come up to the fence before them; he had oriental features but a thick Australian accent. Without warning, he took a ball and threw it straight at Earthshine. The ball passed through Earthshine’s body unimpeded, but there was a spray of multicoloured pixels. Earthshine folded slightly with a grunt of discomfort, and his overall image flickered subtly as the consistency routines in his infrastructural software strove to recover.
The kid laughed and ran away. Earthshine, back to normal, smiled indulgently.
‘Come on,’ Penny said, irritated. They walked away from the playground. ‘You shouldn’t let them do that to you. It’s disrespectful.’
Earthshine shrugged. ‘Sooner that than they should fear me, my strange unreality. That is a key purpose of my presenting classes in the school, you know. We are selfish, we three of the Core. Sir Michael’s request to bring down his grandchildren with him changed all that, in a surprising way. Now I see it as my job to protect the children. In a way I think of all of you as family.’
This kind of interaction always seemed irritating and bizarre to Penny, as if Earthshine was trying to acquire humanity, and was telling her about it step by step in full detail. ‘Shouldn’t the children learn that it hurts when your consistency protocols are broken?’
‘I can live with it,’ Earthshine said heavily. ‘They will learn in time. Colonel Kalinski, I think you are mothering me again.’
That annoyed her. ‘What do you mean, again?’
‘It does not hurt greatly to have a rubber ball thrown through my virtual projection. It did not hurt greatly when my nine parents were merged into one, and I was born. It does not hurt greatly to be me, even though I am not human as you are. You should not pity me.’
‘I’ll try to remember that.’
He had sounded stern, aloof, inhuman. Now he grinned, infectiously. ‘But it is pleasant to be mothered, I admit that. And now, I see, we’re overdue to meet Sir Michael.’
King stood beneath the largest of the display screens. Leaning on his stick, ignoring the human bustle around him, he glowered up at the news feeds.
The screen showed a blizzard of images, as usual, and voices competed in the air. Penny let the morning’s data rush wash over her in its multiple streams, gathering an impression of the new day. Maybe this was how it was for Earthshine all the time, she wondered.
She picked out a demonstration in Anchorage, outside the Chinese embassy, to the richest of all the USNA states in the early twenty-third century. The demonstration was, of course, about the effects of the Chinese asteroid winter. Food shortages were already kicking in, in this year without a summer. In the new, modern cities like Solstice in the far north and south, the power supply had collapsed as the paddies and marshlands, wired to supply electricity from gen-enged photosynthesis, had faltered in the shadows of the sky. There were even new refugee flows, heartbreakingly familiar images of families drifting back to the mid-latitude areas once abandoned by their parents or grandparents during the climate Jolts. Even in Paris, Penny had seen a refugee camp set up on the dead grass of the Tuileries.
‘The Chinese got it wrong,’ King growled as they approached. ‘If they wanted to make some gesture of space power they should have stuck to slamming a rock into the moon. But to strike at the Earth itself like this – it’s hit people at a visceral level. You know, there’s a theory that the whole scheme was cooked up offworld, in some think tank on Ceres or Mars, maybe by second-generation colonist types who have no real sympathy for the Earth, who don’t understand how things are down here. As a geopolitical statement it might have seemed a logical thing to do, a finely engineered stunt. But as a human gesture they got it completely wrong.’
‘Well, not completely,’ Earthshine murmured. ‘We are still talking; we have still avoided all-out war.’
‘True. But that’s thanks to you and your siblings. And we’re not out of the woods yet.’ As usual when he felt under pressure, King looked tense, angry; Penny had learned he got restless in any situation he wasn’t fully in control of. ‘The Council of Worlds session is about to make some kind of statement.’ He glanced up at the screen. ‘Bah. Come with me.’ He led the way towards his own quarters.
She followed, reluctantly. ‘We both have duties. The school—’
‘What are you, Kalinski, suddenly some slave to routine? This is more important than anything else going on down here. And as for the school, Earthshine here can just send in a partial . . . Come on.’
CHAPTER 79
King’s quarters were like a villa, compared to the cramped single room Penny shared with Jiang. He had four roomy interconnected chambers, each fitted out with screens and decent furniture, as well as a luxurious bathroom and kitchen that Penny had only ever glimpsed. Then again, it had largely been King’s money and influence that had got this old tunnel up and running as a survival shelter so quickly; Earthshine had huge resources, but of a more specialised and distributed kind. Even Earthshine owed King favours.
As they entered, the room’s big display screen was dominated by a central image of an empty podium with a microphone stand, the centuries-old signal of a press conference waiting to happen. Penny wondered where the podium was, where this event was due to take place; it could be anywhere on the planet, even on the moon.
Penny took a seat alongside Earthshine. As ever, a servo-robot rolled around offering them coffees.
Penny asked, ‘So how far have they got?’
King sat upright on an armchair, hands wrapped around his walking stick. He glared at Earthshine. ‘He knows, better than I do, probably. Ask him. The UN Deputy Secretary General has a statement to make. Remember, you met her on Ceres.’
Penny was no politics junkie; she frowned, trying to think this through. ‘That means she’s making some kind of unilateral statement. Right? If she and the Chinese delegates aren’t appearing together. I’m guessing that’s not a good sign.’
‘You wouldn’t think so, would you?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘She’s overrunning. That’s probably a good sign, if they’re still talking. Or not. Ah, what the hell.’ He rubbed his fleshy face, briefly seeming exhausted. Then he seemed to pull himself together with an effort. He turned on Penny. ‘So how are you?’
She grinned. ‘How do you think I am?’
‘No word from your sister, I guess. Even now, at this time of crisis.’
She shrugged. ‘Why should there be? The news of all this won’t even reach Proxima for four years.’
‘It’s a shame she’s so far away.’
She sensed he was probing for a reaction. She also sensed that he was only talking to fill up some blank time, before the Deputy Secretary General stepped up to that podium. ‘A shame, yeah.’
‘Of course you must miss her. You’re twins. You were supposed to share your lives.’
She shrugged. ‘To Stef, in some sense I didn’t even exist before she stepped into the Hatch. By going off to Proxima the first chance she had, she was saying goodbye to me, loud and clear.’