A little more than four years after the war, Sol flared so brightly that it was, briefly, visible even from the day side of Per Ardua.
CHAPTER 90
Stef looked at Yuri. ‘A gravity shift. Just like the Hatches on Mercury and Per Ardua. So we’re already there. Wherever there is. And in the outside universe more time has passed. Years, maybe, or—’
‘Or centuries.’ Yuri grinned. ‘Shall we?’
There was no ladder in the final chamber, but the closed lid above bore a hand-imprint key. Yuri boosted Stef up on his shoulders so she could work the key. As she fumbled, he grunted. ‘Get on with it, woman.’
‘Look at us. Two old idiots, exploring interstellar space.’
‘But we’re here.’
‘That we are.’
At last the lid swung back. There was a faint pop of equalising pressure. They found themselves looking up at a blue, apparently harmless sky – and the air that rushed in, full of odd smells, was maybe a bit thin and cold, but healthy, oxygen-rich air, undoubtedly. Yuri deliberately kept breathing. They had no stored oxygen; there was no point holding their breath. But he felt no ill effects.
Stef clambered out of the pit, then reached down to help Yuri scramble up. Once again they had some trouble. It was a comedy, Yuri thought, two old stiffs climbing out of a hole in the ground. At last he was out, and they looked at each other, laughed.
Then they stood together and faced a new world.
They were on high ground here, which sloped away to a plain streaked with purple and white, on which stood a scatter of slim orange cones, vegetation perhaps. To the right the ground rose up to a rocky massif – no, it was too regular to be natural, Yuri realised slowly. It was some kind of tremendous building, a sloping face with deep grooved inlets. On the horizon he saw more mountains, mist-shrouded, that again looked suspiciously regular, like tremendous pyramids.
A sun dominated the sky, huge, hanging low, its face pocked with dark spots.
‘Wow,’ said Stef simply.
Yuri dug out his elderly ISF-issue slate, which had a wireless link to the ColU’s processor box, in his chest pack. ‘Can you see all this, old buddy?’
A single green light sparked on the slate.
‘So, any idea where we are?’
‘None at all,’ Stef said. She pointed at the main sun. ‘That looks like another Proxima, another M dwarf. But the Galaxy is full of M dwarfs. We could be anywhere . . .’
A huge shadow swept over the ground to their left. Yuri looked up.
‘I guess we should start walking,’ Stef said, still staring ahead. She hadn’t noticed the shadow, evidently. ‘If we manage to see any stars we might reconstruct a constellation pattern, figure out where we are. I have the 3D positions of the nearby stars loaded on my slate.’
‘Or,’ Yuri said, ‘we could just ask.’ He pointed upwards.
At last she turned to see.
Over their heads, a craft was descending, coming in to land.
It was like a tremendous airship. It moved smoothly, silently. It bore a symbol on its outer envelope, crossed axes with a Christian cross in the background, and lettering above:
S P Q R
Anchors of some kind were dropped from a fancy-looking gondola. When the craft had drifted to a halt a rope ladder unrolled to the ground. And as they watched, astonished, a hatch opened, and a man clambered down the ladder.
As soon as he reached the ground the man started towards them. He wore a plumed helmet, and a scarlet cloak over what looked like a bearskin tunic. His lower legs were bare, above strapped-up boots. He had a sword on one hip, and a gaudy-looking handgun in a holster on the other.
Yuri called, ‘Who the hell are you?’
The man, striding steadily, started shouting back: ‘Fortasse accipio oratio stridens vestri. Sum Quintus Fabius, centurio navis stellae “Malleus Jesu”. Quid estis, quid agitis in hac provincia? Et quid est mixti lingua vestri? Germanicus est? Non dubito quin vos ex Germaniae Exteriorae. Cognovi de genus vestri prius. Bene? Quam respondebitis mihi?
Always another door, Yuri thought. ‘Let me handle this.’ He spread his hands and walked forward, towards the angry stranger.
In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds –
Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse –
In the chthonic silence –
There was satisfaction. The network of mind continued to push out in space, from the older stars, the burned-out worlds, to the young, out across the Galaxy. Pushed deep in time too, twisting the fate of countless trillions of lives.
But time was short, and ever shorter.
In the Dream of the End Time, there was a note of urgency.
AFTERWORD
This novel is about life on an ‘exoplanet’, a planet beyond the solar system. The first such planet orbiting a normal star (as opposed to a pulsar) was discovered as recently as 1995. At time of writing we have discovered thousands of such worlds (for a recent survey see Ray Jayawardhana, Strange New Worlds, Princeton, 2011). The first discovery of a planet in the Alpha Centauri star system was announced in October 2012 (see ‘An Earth Mass Planet Orbiting Alpha Centauri B’ by Xavier Dumusque et al., Nature, 17 October 2012).
Could Per Ardua exist? At the time of writing no planet of Proxima has been detected, but a careful inspection of the star’s apparent movements has put upper limits on the sizes of any possible planets (for a technical paper see Zechmeister, M., Kürster, M., Endl, M., ‘The M Dwarf Planet Search Programme at the ESO VLT+UVES: A Search for Terrestrial Planets in the Habitable Zone of M Dwarfs’, Astron. Astrophys., vol. 505, pp. 859–71, 2009). The planetary system I have invented for this novel fits these limits. Proxima is a red dwarf – an ‘M dwarf’. We used to think that only sunlike stars could host Earthlike worlds. Now we suspect that M dwarfs like Proxima could after all host habitable worlds (see ‘A Reappraisal of the Habitability of Planets Around M Dwarf Stars’, J. Tarter et al., Astrobiology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 30–65, 2007).
The idea of starships driven by very lightweight ‘smart sails’ pushed by microwave beams was suggested by Robert Forward (‘Starwisp: An Ultralight Interstellar Probe’, Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets, vol. 22, pp. 345–50, 1985) and revisited by Geoffrey A. Landis (‘Microwave Pushed Interstellar Sail: Starwisp Revisited’, paper AIAA-2000-3337, presented at the AIAA 36th Joint Propulsion Conference and Exhibit, Huntsville AL, July 17–19, 2000). I have extrapolated wildly beyond these respectable works.
The classic work Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience, ed. Ben Finney and Eric Jones (Berkeley, 1985), contains much speculation on the anthropology and ethics of the colonisation of space.
I’m deeply grateful to Professor Adam Roberts for a brief injection of Latin.
Any errors or inaccuracies are, of course, my sole responsibility.
Stephen Baxter
Northumberland
December 2012
ALSO BY STEPHEN BAXTER FROM GOLLANCZ:
Non-fiction
Deep Future
The Science of Avatar
Fiction
Mammoth
Longtusk
Icebones
Behemoth
Reality Dust
Evolution
Flood
Ark
Xeelee: An Omnibus
Northland
Stone Spring
Bronze Summer
Iron Winter
The Web
Gulliverzone
Webcrash
Destiny’s Children
Coalescent
Exultant
Transcendent
Resplendent
A Time Odyssey (with Arthur C. Clarke)
Time’s Eye
Sunstorm
Firstborn
Time’s Tapestry
Emperor
Conqueror
Navigator
Weaver
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2013
All rights reserved
The right of Stephen Baxter to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 11686 3
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.stephen-baxter.com
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
ONE
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
TWO
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
THREE
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
FOUR
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
FIVE
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61
CHAPTER 62
CHAPTER 63
CHAPTER 64
SIX
CHAPTER 65
CHAPTER 66
CHAPTER 67
SEVEN
CHAPTER 68
CHAPTER 69
CHAPTER 70
CHAPTER 71
CHAPTER 72
CHAPTER 73
CHAPTER 74
CHAPTER 75
CHAPTER 76
CHAPTER 77
CHAPTER 78
CHAPTER 79
CHAPTER 80
CHAPTER 81
CHAPTER 82
CHAPTER 83
CHAPTER 84
CHAPTER 85
CHAPTER 86
CHAPTER 87
CHAPTER 88
CHAPTER 89
CHAPTER 90
AFTERWORD
ALSO BY STEPHEN BAXTER
Copyright