Divergence (33 page)

Saskia gazed fixedly at her lap. The Earth had been beautiful ten years ago, but what was waiting out there for them now? Better think of it as it had been.

Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view, her father had said. From the luxury of a penthouse, set in a brilliant blue sky, residents appreciated the harmonious grid of the streets below them. Those who lived in the basement looked out at the skewed perspective of the baffling walls that rose at crazy angles all around, at the rows of brick and lattices of windows that combined to form a pop-art explosion. The Watcher had thought of each and every one of the people in its care and had apportioned out its bounty evenly.

How long could this descent go on for?

Long, shuddering groans rang through the air. What could cause such vibration out there, in the ship, that it was felt even here inside the shuttle? Someone took her hand and squeezed it.
Think happy thoughts, think happy thoughts. Think of old Earth
.

In the hills, in the morning, looking through the thinning mist at the slowly emerging shapes of the surrounding buildings, desolate in the damp greyness, there was sparseness to the scene that brought a longing to the heart of the complacent.

There was a sudden jerk and the feel of the shuttle sliding across the floor of the hold.

“What happened?” called someone. “What happened?”

“Easy,” said Maurice. “There was a buildup of energy in the gravity field. It’s dispersed now. It won’t happen again.” He was trying to sound calm, Saskia knew. Think of old Earth.
Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view
.

Living in the massed city blocks, residents marveled at the way the sunlight reflected back and forth on the cunningly angled windows of the silver spires, now in rose, now in gold, now in silver, forming abstract mosaics that flickered as the Earth slowly revolved. And then the shadow of the Shawl came creeping across the silver mirrors, with the stars shining in reflection in the middle of the day…

This was the legacy of the Watcher: the legacy of the superintelligent AI controlling Earth’s affairs for the past two hundred years, endlessly shaping the environment and the population to perfection.

What would Earth be like now?

It was quiet in the shuttle. The last of the Dark Seeds were gone, batted into nothingness by the Schrödinger kittens.

They sat in silence, listening to the ancient hum of the air conditioning, gazing at Maurice, who was still fiddling with his console. He cleared his throat.

“We’ve landed,” he said. His voice was shaky.

Saskia let out a long sigh. She noted the way that Judy had closed her eyes, and she took hold of the white hand resting beside her on the arm of the flight chair and squeezed it.

“I’m okay,” said Judy.

There was a pause, and then, as if responding to an unspoken signal, they all ripped open the crash webbing constraining them and got to their feet.

“I don’t understand,” Edward said. “Where are we? Have we made it to Earth?”

Constantine was helping Miss Rose up, his metal arm under her frail shoulder.

“Yes, Edward, we’re on Earth. The
Bailero
has gone, though.”

“What do you mean, gone?” Saskia asked.

“It’s no longer out there. It’s destroyed. It’s gone.”

“I don’t think that’s all that’s gone,” Judy murmured.

She had opened the hatch of the shuttle and was peering out into the large white hold. Long feathery white splinters lay scattered over the white tiles. Broken white wooden bones were spread amongst them.

“The venumbs are dead,” she said tonelessly.

Saskia came up behind Judy and saw melted drops of silver metal among the wreckage. Judy, meanwhile, sat on the edge of the hatch and dropped to the floor of the hold beyond.

“Hold on, Judy,” Saskia called in alarm. “Where are you going?”

“Outside, onto the planet, of course,” Judy said, kicking her way across the floor. White splinters stuck to the shoes of her passive suit.

Saskia dropped herself to the floor and ran after her. “But shouldn’t we use the ship’s senses to take a look outside first, see if it’s safe?”

“What’s the point of that?” Judy asked. “This is where I am supposed to be.” She turned back to the shuttle, looking tiny in the vast space of the large hold. Saskia could see the long scars on the shuttle’s side where the venumbs had hit against it during the ship’s descent to Earth.

Now the others were descending from the shuttle. Constantine had stood Miss Rose on the retractable ladder and set it descending. He dropped to the white-tiled floor in time to help her safely onto the ground.

“Constantine, are you coming with me?” Judy asked.

“I think I will,” Constantine said.

Saskia was distraught. “Maurice? Are you just going to let them go?”

“What do you suggest, Saskia? We’ve fulfilled our part of the contract. I say we get Judy off the ship, and then we jump back into space as quickly as possible. If we can, that is.”

“You don’t mean that. You
can’t
mean that. We’ve come this far.”

“Anyway,” Maurice said, “it’s not your decision to make. Edward is in charge. Edward, what do you think? Stay here on the most dangerous planet known, or get out of here while we can, and find some new contracts?”

“Hey, that’s not fair! You’re loading the question!”

But Edward had screwed up his face in concentration. “I don’t understand, Maurice. Why would we leave Judy? Surely we’re all going along with her, to help? Now, are you going to help me with Miss Rose here?” He placed a hand under the old woman’s arm.

Saskia could hear the disbelief in Maurice’s voice. “You can’t mean that we’re taking
her,
too?”

“Of course we are,” Edward said. “Miss Rose has something important to do. Where else would her important work be but here on Earth?”

“This is ridiculous,” Maurice said, pulling the green hood of his active suit over his head.

“So you said,” Saskia said.

Maurice hadn’t wanted to drop the rear ramp. Instead he had had them all crowd into the narrow lift and then set it descending, lowering them to the ground, taking them down to stand on Earth, taking them back to their home, the place where humankind had evolved.

“No one leaves Earth anymore,” Maurice said darkly.

“Do we know that for sure?” asked Saskia.

All things come full circle: from a replicating molecule to single cells, to plants to animals. Humankind had arisen, built cities, built civilizations, and exploded out into the stars. Driven by intelligence, they had almost made it to the next galaxy, but then the Dark Seeds had appeared, and now the Earth had called its children home. Saskia was shivering. Maurice remained businesslike.

“Listen, keep your active suits on at all times. Don’t breathe the air, don’t drink or eat anything while you’re out there. The Watcher controls everything. Don’t give it a way into your soul.”

“Your
soul
, Maurice?” said Judy, giving him a faint smile, but she too reached up and pulled the black hood of her active suit over her head. Saskia and Edward did the same. Constantine was becoming fuzzy; his skin seemed to be losing focus.

The indicator bar on the lift wall glowed blue.

“Okay,” said Maurice, “we’re down. I’ll open the door now….”

Saskia squeezed Miss Rose’s arm. For a moment, for a long moment, she wanted to call out NO!, to have the lift return them to the safety of the
Eva Rye.
But the door was already sliding open. The temperature senses on her active suit relayed to her skin the icy coldness waiting beyond.

“Here we go,” she said.

They stepped through the doorway and out onto the surface of the planet Earth.

Every window on Earth looks out onto a beautiful view
. Saskia looked onto a winter world of burning ice. The pale morning sun shone down through an avenue of frosted poplars; it set the icicles clinging to the lampposts on fire with yellow light. It lit up the gravel squares and the little gardens of the parkland in which they had landed.

Saskia breathed in the fresh cold draft of air that her active suit replicated from the morning outside. She looked this way and that, drinking in the scene around her. There were people everywhere: running children in brightly colored hats and thick mittens, scraping snow off the seats of benches to make snowballs; there were adults walking or standing in groups amongst them laughing and chatting. A young woman in a thick pink coat smiled as she passed a tall young man in a blue-and-white bobble hat. She tucked her hands into the black fur-trimmed pockets of her coat and walked on, looking demurely at the ground as her suitor came loping up behind her.

“It’s beautiful,” said Saskia. “Can you hear music?”

“Don’t listen to it,” Maurice said. “Tune it out. The Watcher is insidious. It can use music to reprogram you…”

Saskia ignored him. The tinkling tune was so pretty, so suitable to the winter’s scene. The way it seemed to slip back and forth between time signatures…

“Hey!” she said as the music clicked off. “That was you, wasn’t it, Maurice?”

“Yes, it was,” Maurice snapped. “I told you to tune it out. Don’t be so silly.”

Judy and Constantine were speaking to a group of men in the thick black coats and the fur-lined hats that seemed to be the fashion in this place. The men had seen them come out of the lift; they resumed their gazing up at the great curved underside of the
Eva Rye
as they spoke, drinking in the details of this strange intruder. Saskia walked up to them, supporting Miss Rose, and caught the end of a question.

“…never seen a ship like it. You say it’s a trading ship?”

“Yes, they are quite common out in the Enemy Domain,” Judy replied.

“Really? I worked there myself some years ago. I don’t recall seeing that type….”

There was a slight accent to their speech, Saskia noted, but nothing more than that. English was now the common language of the Earth Domain. After the arrival of the Dark Seeds, the Watcher had finally succeeded in eradicating the stubborn nationalism that had persisted for so long.

“And why are you here on Earth?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Judy said. “I need to get to somewhere: a place called DIANA. Have you heard of it?”

The men shook their heads. “No, but try the Lite train station. Here, Vanya and I will show you the way.”

“That’s very kind of you, but—”

“I insist, we will take you! But first, it is cold out here! So you will come and drink tea with us? Look, over there, Nadyezhda has a stand with a samovar. You have come so far, you will sit with us? And you too, my metal friend?”

The big man slapped Constantine on the shoulder, his hand making an odd thud as it encountered the robot’s fractal skin.

“I do not need to drink, but thank you for the offer.”

“And sadly we are in a hurry,” Maurice interrupted, “but I thank you anyway. Now, if you could show our friend here the way to the Lite station, we can be off.”

“No,” said Edward, “we are going with Judy. You can stay here if you want to, Maurice.”

Maurice’s active suit was a deep green, and its hood made it difficult to make out his expression, but Saskia could tell by the way that he slumped his shoulders that he would give in and accompany them.

The man introduced as Vanya led them away from under the great white curve of the
Eva Rye
and out across the neat parkland towards the brightly colored buildings with onion domes that lay beyond. Children wove in and out of the chattering adults who thronged the scene: making snowmen, ice-skating on ponds, chasing each other between ornamental holly and bay trees decorated with gold and silver ribbons.

They passed stand after stand selling varieties of food and drink. Through her active suit senses, Saskia could smell tea, fresh and bubbling in the samovar, the rich aroma of chocolate, and the spiciness of mulled wine. As they walked by stalls selling fruit dipped in chocolate, she saw a woman in a head scarf sliding ripe strawberries fixed on a skewer into a pool of bubbling chocolate, then pulling them out in a rich cloud of steam. She hung the dipped fruit from a shelf to cool and harden, then took down another to give to a pretty blond-haired girl who smiled her thanks. Saskia watched as the girl accepted the skewer and took a bite; Saskia could almost taste the warm chocolate and the sweet juiciness of strawberries exploding in her own mouth.

She wanted something to eat so much.

Then came the smell of frying onions and griddled meat, sharp and savory in the cold air.

“Would you like a hot dog, dear?”

A man with a salt-and-pepper mustache held it out to her, thick and fat and glistening, yellow mustard dripping onto his sleeve.

“No, thank you,” said Maurice firmly, as he guided Saskia and Miss Rose onwards. Saskia felt her stomach rumbling.

“MTPH everywhere,” explained Maurice. “I can read it on my console: it’s in the air, in the food, in the water. It sparkles like fairy dust! This whole world is dipped in MTPH, and the Watcher has plugged its senses into everyone here, so that it can feel what
they
can feel.” He waved his hands around the busy crowd. “Do you really want to be part of that?”