She hesitated. “How old am I?”
“Ah. Good question. You are a curiosity, Bisesa.”
“Thanks.”
“You were born in 2006, that is sixty-three years ago. One must subtract nineteen years for your time in the Hibernaculum.”
She said carefully, “Which leaves forty-four.”
“Yet your biological age is forty-nine.”
“Yes. And the other five years?”
“Are the years you spent on Mir.”
She nodded. “You know about that?”
“It is highly classified. Yes, I know.”
She lay back in her chair, watched the distant elephants and the shimmering sky of 2069, and tried to gather her thoughts.
“Thank you, Thales.”
“It’s a pleasure.” When he fell silent there was a subtle absence in the air around her.
5: London
Bella Fingal was in the air above London when her daughter first brought her the bad news from the sky.
Bella had been flown in across the Atlantic, and her plane was heading for Heathrow, out in the suburbs to the west of central London. But the pilot told her the flight path would see them over-fly to the east first and then come back west along the path of the Thames, into the headwinds, and on this bright March morning the city was a glittering carpet spread out for her. Bella had the plane all to herself, one of the new scramjets, a fancy chariot for a fifty-seven-year-old grandmother.
But she really didn’t want to be making this trip. The funeral of James Duflot had been bad enough; coming to the grieving family’s home would be worse. It was however her duty, as Chair of the World Space Council.
She had wandered into this job almost by accident, probably a compromise choice by the supra- governmental panel that controlled the Space Council. In a corner of her mind she had thought that her new post would be pretty much an honorary one, like most of the university chancellorships and nonexecutive directorships that had come her way as a veteran of the sunstorm. She hadn’t imagined getting shipped across the planet to be plunged into messy, tearful situations like this.
She had done her bit on the shield. She should have stayed retired, she thought wistfully.
And it was when Edna came on line with her bit of bad, strange news that it was driven home to Bella that she really was the commander-in-chief of a space navy.
“For once the trackers think they’ve found something serious, Mum. Something out in the dark — now approaching the orbit of Jupiter, in fact, and falling in on a hyperbolic trajectory. It’s not on the Extirpator map, though that’s not so unusual; long-period comets too remote for Extirpator echoes are turning up all the time.
This thing has other characteristics that are causing them concern…”
Bella had seen a rendering of the “Extirpator map,” set up like a planetarium inside her own base, the old NASA headquarters building in Washington. An immense, dynamic, three-dimensional snapshot of the whole of the solar system, it had been created on the very eve of the sunstorm by the deep-space explosion of a ferocious old nuke called the Extirpator — a detonation that had also broadcast to the silent stars a wistful concatenation of human culture called “Earthmail,” within which were embedded copies of the planet’s greatest artificial minds, called Aristotle, Thales, and Athena. Within a few hours of the explosion the radio telescopes on Earth had logged X-ray echoes of the blast coming back from every object larger than a meter across inside the orbit of Saturn.
Twenty-seven years after the sunstorm the human worlds and space itself were full of eyes, tracking anything that moved. Anything not shown in the map must be a new entrant. Most newcomers, human or natural, could be identified and eliminated quickly.
And if not — well, then, Bella was learning, the bad news quickly filtered up the Council’s hierarchy to her own ears.
In the cocooned, silent warmth of the plane cabin, she shivered.
Like many of her generation, Bella still had nightmares about the sunstorm. Now it was Bella’s job to listen to the bad dreams.
Edna’s face, in the softscreen on the seat back before Bella, was flawlessly rendered in three dimensions. Edna was only twenty-three, one of the first generation of “Spacers,” as Bella had learned to call them, born in space during Bella’s post-sunstorm rehabilitation stay on the Moon. But Edna was already a captain. Promotions were fast in a navy with few crew in ships so smart, or so Edna said, they even had robots to swab the decks. Today, with her Irish-dark hair pulled severely back and her uniform buttoned up around her neck, Edna looked tense, her eyes shadowed.
Bella longed to touch her daughter. But she couldn’t even speak to her in a natural way. Edna was out in the navy’s operations HQ
in the asteroid belt. The vagaries of orbits dictated that at this moment Edna was some two astronomical units away from her mother, twice Earth’s distance to the sun, a tremendous gap that imposed an each-way time delay of sixteen minutes.
And besides there was a question of protocol. Bella was in fact her daughter’s commanding officer. She tried to focus on what Edna was saying.
“This is just a head’s-up, Mum,” Edna said now. “I don’t have any details. But the scuttlebutt is that Rear Admiral Paxton is flying to London to brief you about it…”
Bella flinched. Bob Paxton, heroic footprints-and-flags explorer of Mars, and a royal pain in the butt.
Edna smiled. “Just remember, he’s got a chest full of fruit salad, but you’re the boss! By the way — Thea is doing fine.” Edna’s daughter, Bella’s three-year-old granddaughter, a second-generation Spacer. “She’ll be on her way home soon. But you should see how she’s taken to microgravity in the low-spin habitats!..”
Edna spoke on of human things, family stuff, lesser events than the destiny of the solar system. Bella hung on every word, as a grandmother would. But it was all so strange, even to Bella, who had served in space herself. Edna’s language was peppered with the unfamiliar. You found your way around a spinning space habitat by going
the navy was essentially an offshoot of the old U.S. seaborne navy, and had inherited much of its culture from that source.
Her daughter and granddaughter were growing away from her, Bella thought wistfully. But then, every grandmother back to Eve had probably felt the same.
A soft chime warned her that the plane was beginning its final approach. She stored the rest of Edna’s message and transmitted a brief reply of her own.
The plane banked, and Bella peered down at the city.
She could clearly make out the tremendous footprint of the Dome. It was a near-perfect circle about nine kilometers in diameter, centered on Trafalgar Square. Within the circumference of the Dome much of the old building stock had been preserved from the sunstorm’s ravages, and something of the character of the old confident London remained, a pale sheen of sandstone and marble. But Westminster was now an island, the Houses of Parliament abandoned as a monument. After the sunstorm the city had given up its attempts to control its river, and had drawn back to new banks that more resembled the wider, natural course that the Romans had first mapped. Londoners had adjusted; you could now go scuba diving among the concrete ruins of the South Bank.
Outside that perimeter circle, much of the suburban collar of London had been razed by the fires of sunstorm day. Now it was a carpet of blocky new buildings that looked like tank traps.
And as the plane dipped further she saw the Dome itself. The paneling had long been dismantled, but some
