Beyond the light horizon, p.3
Beyond the Light Horizon, page 3
part #3 of Lightspeed Series
The universe did a slow somersault around him, then stabilised in a whine of gyroscopes going in reverse.
‘Interesting system,’ Iskander said. ‘Almost like the Solar system would have been if it had been designed for intelligent life. If I may.’
The outside view was replaced by a diagram, which Iskander talked Grant through.
‘I don’t have access to telescopes, obviously, but from the outboard lenses I can extract quite a bit of information. Stable yellow star, three terrestrial planets all in the habitable zone − imagine Venus a little further out, Earth with two moons and Mars a lot bigger and further in, and moreover all three actually life-bearing. Beyond them is a rich asteroid belt and then three gas giants with lots of moons. And hundreds of these quadrilateral structures, forming a widely spaced ring around the exosun a little way out from the asteroid belt − I can’t see them all, obviously, but I can triangulate the radio sources.’
‘The radio sources − heck, the structures themselves − would be spotted by E-PRIME or even one of the earlier space telescopes, surely?’
‘No − the radio sources are too faint, the structures too small. A minute chance of detection, perhaps − if they had existed a thousand years ago.’
Grant smote his forehead. He’d been caught out like this before, right at the beginning. ‘Of course. The light and the signals haven’t got back to the Solar system yet. Continue.’
‘Nearly all the radio chatter comes from the asteroid belt, the moons and these structures. A little from the rocky planets, mostly from the second one out from the exosun. It has comsats around it, so it may well have people there.’
‘Assuming they’re people.’
‘They’re people all right. I can’t decrypt the machine code, but what radio traffic I can pick up from the second planet is definitely human. We could go to the structures in space, which might include weapons programmed to destroy anything that approaches, or to the inhabited planet, which could − like most of Earth’s own surface − be highly inimical to unprotected human life. Which would you prefer?’
‘What about the other two habitable planets?’
‘You know that “habitable” in this context means possibly having liquid water on the surface? Yes, there’s life: a Gaia-type atmosphere according to what spectroscopy I can run with the available lenses, but if they have no or few human inhabitants I suspect there’s a good reason.’
‘Well, let’s go for the inhabited one, but I want a close approach to the nearest of these structures first.’
‘How close?’
‘A hundred kilometres to start with.’
‘I’ll take us to a thousand.’
‘But—’
Iskander had done that before Grant’s objection was out of his mouth. The jump was so brief it was barely noticeable.
‘Oh − OK.’
A thousand kilometres away, the great lattice hung like some complex mobile sculpture. Hundreds of reflectors, thousands of solar panels. In the middle of the frame a wheel spun like the drive of an enormous jewelled watch. Golden motes drifted and danced around it.
‘Wow. That’s . . . breathtaking.’
‘Yes. And speaking of breath, you don’t have a lot of time to examine it.’
Grant checked the air supply. ‘Less than two hours, and I’ll need time to find a safe place to land on the planet.’ He felt torn between anxiety and curiosity. ‘Any signs that we’re in someone’s sights?’
‘A passing sweep of deep space radar. Nothing locked on.’
‘OK, quick in and out.’
Grant set the navigation app for a hundred kilometres from the structure. The jump passed like a fleeting dark thought. The structure now filled the forward view. It must be − what? A hundred kilometres on the side? He zoomed his glasses on the central wheel. Its hub was a jumble of rock and ice held together by mesh, its rim a clear tube of green and black.
‘It’s a space habitat!’ he said. ‘It must have taken decades to build.’
‘Yes. And it’s still under construction.’
‘Are we in the future?’
‘No. Going by the proper motions of such stars as I’ve been able to identify, we’re back in our own time − give or take a few weeks or months or perhaps longer.’
‘That’s imprecise, for you.’
‘It’s the best I can do without a great deal of further observation, for which we don’t have time. We could be as much as a year out, either way. Which is why I don’t recommend an immediate return to Apis, or Earth. You don’t want to set up another time loop anomaly.’
‘I sure don’t. Any signals? Any comms traffic at all?’
‘Just machine code.’
‘I’m going in closer.’
Ten kilometres. He looked up at the arc of the wheel in his view, and zoomed. Its inner side was an endlessly varied combination of irregular green patches, irregular black patches and angular clusters of what he guessed were buildings. He could even see clouds drifting here and there.
‘The black patches are lakes,’ Iskander said. ‘Reflecting a black sky, and now and then reflecting a space mirror. They and the buildings and parks or fields have been in place for a long time. I’m not seeing or hearing any signs of human life, however. It should be buzzing with traffic, and it isn’t.’
Grant swung the view. Two hundred metres away was a metallic-looking bar or tube that extended beyond the edges of the screen − far beyond, probably. Close to it, apparently working on it, was a spidery little machine. And sitting in the machine was a space-suited figure.
‘Hey!’ Grant said. ‘Company!’
The machine moved a little way up the girder, on a wisp of jet. It swung around. The space-suited figure seemed to be looking straight at him. The turn continued, the work resumed.
‘Get me the highest resolution you can,’ Grant said.
Instant close-up. It wasn’t a person in a space suit. It was too tall, and there was no life support. What had looked like a helmet was a dome in which a dish aerial spun and other sensors were clustered. The limbs, though jointed in the right places, were hollow mesh. There was something odd about its proportions: the torso shorter, the limbs and hands and feet longer than those of an adult human.
‘It’s a robot,’ Grant said.
‘Obviously,’ said Iskander. ‘There are uses for humanoid robots, in structures intended for human habitation. But look closely at the structural member it’s working on.’
Grant peered. ‘What about it?’
‘Micro-meteoroid pitting. That structure has been in space a long, long time.’
‘You think it’s all like this? No people, just machines?’
‘Yes. And as far as I can tell, all the others, too.’
Grant felt desolate. ‘Seems pointless.’
‘Well, that’s robots for you, mindlessly doing what they’re programmed to do, whether it makes sense or not.’
Grant laughed. ‘You should know. Well, I don’t fancy my chances getting inside that habitat before the air runs out, so . . .’
‘Orbit the inhabited planet? On it.’
‘Of course you are.’
‘But first—’
‘What?’
‘We should take a look at a gas giant. If the Fermi are there, it means we’ve arrived sometime after their departure from the rocky worlds last November.’
‘And if they’re not?’
‘Then either we’re in a system where they haven’t been, or we’re in the past.’
‘Let’s find out that much at least,’ Grant said. ‘But be quick about it.’
The jump was slightly more than a blink, followed by another two likewise brief jumps, triangulating the great orb. Grant glimpsed multi-coloured bonds and whorls, bright spots and crescents, the circular shadow of one of these moons a black dot on bright cloud. Then, to his immense relief, he saw a vast black disc with outspread wings.
‘The Fermi,’ Iskander confirmed. ‘So we’re at least some time after their departure.’
‘Going by the structures,’ Grant said, ‘we could be in the distant future! Have you thought it possible you’re mistaken about our current time?’
‘Of course. But I’m not.’
‘OK. On to the second planet.’
The orbit that Iskander picked would have taken the cab around the planet in three hours, which Grant didn’t have. Instead, the AI took him around the planet in a dozen short jumps on a zigzag course that took ten minutes altogether. The night side had a few clusters of light, dimmer than those of the eighteenth-century cities of Earth; the day side, traces of smoke here and there. Blue seas, white whorls of cloud, green and dun land, ice at the poles and at several mountain ranges. Unlike Earth and Apis, the planet had numerous island continents, like so many Australias, Greenlands, New Zealands and Madagascars. These scattered jigsaw puzzle pieces − you could still see they’d been a super-continent once − were spread out evenly around the globe, with no almost-hemispheric ocean. No great oceans at all: there seemed more land than sea. Almost every shore was outlined in white breakers, like a lace thrown over the planet: the tides, with narrow seas and two moons, were evidently ferocious. At each pole a small continent was covered with ice, and their nearby continents were graded from white through varied shades of green. Frost, tundra and forest.
‘Radio traffic?’
‘We’re above the Heaviside layer. Drop to low orbit?’
The cab was over the day side. With luck, its traverse wouldn’t be noticed.
‘Do it.’
The surface became suddenly close.
Iskander turned the sound back on. Grant ranged through the bands. Voices, music, coded chatter. He stopped on what sounded like French, though he couldn’t quite catch the drift through an unfamiliar accent and intonation.
‘Source?’
Iskander replaced the outside view with an image from the zigzag sweep: a continent about the size and shape of France and about as far north as Britain, its neighbouring mini-continents between five hundred and a thousand kilometres away. The radio source was pinpointed as a dark patch beneath haze, at the mouth of a major river.
‘Looks like a port,’ Grant said.
‘Yes.’
‘OK, well, if they speak something like French it’s a safe bet we can breathe. Take us down somewhere in the surrounding countryside, but close enough to walk into town.’
‘What do you intend to do there?’
‘Just nose around, get some idea of the situation. I’ll avoid speaking to anyone if I can. I’m pretty fluent in French, but I might have to rely on your best guesses to understand whatever this local dialect is.’
‘It’s clearly derived from West and Central African variants of vernacular African French. I’m working on it.’
‘OK, OK.’
‘You are wary?’
‘Yes. We’ve no idea what we’re going into.’
‘I have a suggestion. If this cab were to appear in the countryside − in a wood or field, or on wild land − it would be conspicuously out of place. On the outskirts of town, perhaps not so much.’
‘In broad daylight?’
‘You’d be surprised what can pass unnoticed in broad daylight.’
‘Go for it. As long as you don’t put us down in a recycling centre.’
‘I doubt they have recycling. But I will avoid anything that looks like a wrecker’s yard.’
Grant braced himself for gravity.
‘I’m ready.’
He blinked, and they were down.
Through a haze as if of low mist, Grant examined the surroundings. Outdoors. Day. Early morning, going by the shadows. Flat ground, much trampled. Sawdust everywhere. Stacks of trimmed logs here, stacks of planks there. Machinery in the middle distance: a stationary steam engine, and an articulated lorry with a tall and thick chimney at the rear of the cab. Along another aisle between the stacks he could just make out a long trailer.
‘You’ve put us down in a timber yard?’
‘Yes, but no one is around right now. As soon as you’re out of sight I’ll send the cab to a clearing in the forest behind us. You can contact it via the phone when you want to leave. If any serious problems arise I can always send the cab into orbit.’
‘How is the phone going to work here?’
‘I’ve already piggy-backed the local comsats. No sign of my being detected.’
‘Consider me reassured. How’s the air?’
‘Chilly. Definitely breathable. Some airborne microbes and viruses, but nothing your inoculations can’t handle.’
Grant took off his glasses and removed the curved part of the earpieces, then put these parts back behind his ears. They curled neatly into place. He slipped the glasses in his pocket with the phone. Over his usual work shirt and trousers, he was wearing a blue one-piece overall with sturdy boots. Unless local costume was wildly out of kilter with the apparently light-industrial surroundings, he shouldn’t look too conspicuous.
He opened the cab door. One breath and he was coughing.
‘What the fuck is that?’ he wheezed.
‘Air pollution,’ said Iskander. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
CHAPTER TWO
The Origin of the Family
New Rhu, Apis, Wednesday 25 March 2071
There was a fence. It wasn’t much of a fence. An adult could vault it; a child could clamber over. It demarcated a rectangular plot, one of twenty vacant lots on either side of a future street sketched out with marker posts and string. As a barrier the fence was more an idea than a thing. What was inside it wouldn’t be private property, exactly, but for some family or other household it would be their own space for as long as they used it. Inside the plot, a wall lower than the fence marked out in concrete blocks another, smaller rectangle: the foundation.
Myles Grant rolled an empty plastic drum as tall as he was through the gap in the fence where a gate might some day be, flipped it upright and spun it along on its base to a roughly circular hole two metres deep. He edged it to vertical and it kept spinning as it dropped, to land with a hollow, ringing thump and a clearance of ten centimetres from the sides all around.
He stepped back to admire this precise placing, a knack acquired in more repetitions than he cared to count, and picked up a shovel. He filled the gap around the cylinder with dirt from the pile dug out from the hole and packed it down with the flat of the shovel. This took about half an hour. After a break to gulp some water and stretch his back, he scattered and scraped the rest of the dirt over a few square metres. This done, he surveyed the site and checked that everything was in place for the imminent arrival of the ark: the coil of plastic pipe that would connect to the septic tank he’d just embedded; the stack of solar panels for the roof; the water tank and its plastic piping − all these and more were laid out well clear of the foundation on which the ark would settle.
For the final time, Myles checked the foundation walls with a spirit level. This done, he straightened up, rubbed the small of his back and walked out of the plot. Linda Starr, his immediate supervisor, hailed him from across the road, where she was laying the foundations for another ark.
She waved a trowel. ‘All set?’
Myles waved back. ‘Job done. On to the next.’
He checked the schedule on his glasses. The next job was at the end of the street, clearing a new plot. But the gang for that task were still working on another plot down the road, so Myles dawdled. It was a fine morning at the beginning of the dry season. He checked his watch. According to the chunky old Casio the time was 12:52 this particular Wednesday, back on Earth. Locally it was eight and a bit after midnight, and two hours after sunrise local time. The ark for that site was due to arrive at 13:00 GMT, piloted by John Grant. Myles was looking forward to saying hello to his father, and possibly inveigling him into a tea break with the gang. A man from the committee − Paul McAlister, that was it, coming into view in the dust and shimmer − was already walking up the road, ready to welcome the new arrivals, lead them to the hall for a quick refreshment and taking of details, and send them off to their temporary accommodation.
Myles closed his eyes and faced the low sun, breathing in the dusty smells and the sounds of the settlement getting into the swing of the day. Just within earshot, a crowd of small children clamoured and yelled, getting ready for the school to open. Closer by, a dumper truck whined up a ramp, and a crab-drawn cart rumbled. All the faces Myles could see looked cheerful, and he felt more cheerful himself than he’d normally done back home. Part of it was the adventure of it all, but Marie had attributed it to sunshine, of which there was a lot more here than in Scotland: ‘It’s like when Brits move to Australia,’ she’d remarked. ‘Their serotonin levels go up!’
New Rhu had expanded since he, Marie and the others of the first seven hundred settlers had arrived in October, and even more since the Union had changed its settlement policy in November. By now the town’s population was over seven thousand, a fairly typical size for the Union settlement towns now being set up all across the continent of New Mu. The shipping-container arks were lined up, and in some cases stacked several storeys high, in laid-out streets. Other buildings, of local or imported materials, stood among the standard boxes here and there. The home of Myles and Marie, up on the slope towards the woods, was one of them. Myles and a team had dug and laid the stone foundation. The walls, windows and floors were all implausibly thin and stiff sheets of lightweight synthetics. They had been printed on Earth and delivered in flat packs, the fittings in kits and boxes. Myles and Marie had put them all together and raised and furnished the dwelling, a source of inordinate pride to them both. The town extended up the slope to within a hundred metres of the Alliance military stockade, and on the other way out to the fields, where small farms were spreading out in the direction of the Big River. The stream through the middle of the settlement was bridged with stone or timber in three places, and banked. No more floods!
