In the morning, the flank of Olympus sparkled with frost.
“Wow,” Falcon said, rolling back and forth over the thin rime. “Here’s a sight John Young never dreamed of.”
“Yes, sir. We even get a little snow—I mean, water-ice snow, not the native dry-ice sort—but no rain yet, and no standing water. That will come. One day there will be glaciers in the Valles Marineris for the first time in billions of years . . . Umm, take care with your locomotion just here. There can be ice under the surface, and it can be treacherous.”
“Noted. So, you guys ready to roll . . . ?”
The second day of the climb was as dull and featureless as the first had been. The sky was undeniably beautiful, a blue of an exquisite shade Falcon had never seen on Earth, with high, icy clouds catching the light of the remote sun. But the ground was plain as ever, if not more so, with fresh craters more common at this elevation than skims of lichen or moss. It was as if he was climbing from Earth to Moon, Falcon mused.
As it turned out, the most spectacular sights came at the end of the day.
When they halted for the evening, Pandit emerged from the rover in what looked to Falcon like a bona fide pressure suit. “Just wanted to make sure you take a proper look at the sunset, Commander . . .”
The sun, visibly shrunken from its apparent diameter at Earth, seemed to be resting on the western horizon. Its low, reddened light swept across an Olympian flank of craters, gullies and scarred plains that showed precious few signs of the new life that was being laboriously cultivated here.
But it was not the ground Falcon was supposed to look at but the heavens. Pandit pointed, drawing Falcon’s gaze. Falcon briefly wondered if Pandit wanted to show him the immense solar-collector mirrors that had been hung in orbit around Mars, to drive the terraforming programme—but it was not that.
There, clearly visible against a sky the colour of a deep bruise, was a great semicircle centred on the sun itself, with half its arc hidden beneath the horizon. Falcon tried to measure its scale against the apparent diameter of the sun: it might have been a hundred times the width. This was not a circle, a hoop, but a perspective of the vast sphere of Machines that enclosed the sun; the faint tracery of scattered sunlight was only really visible at the edge, where the optical thickness was greatest.
“The Host,” Falcon said grimly.
“Yes, sir.”
“A shell the size of the orbit of Mercury . . . What a spectacle. What an—obscenity. Is Venus visible yet?”
“It will be later, sir. You know, given the accounts of how the Machines took apart Mercury, many of us are puzzled that they haven’t yet done the same to Venus.”
“Security have been keeping an eye on Venus. We send the odd daring close-in probe—we’re not allowed to land, but much of the atmosphere is gone, and we can see the exposed surface. The Machines are there, working. Building . . . something. Structures whose purpose we can’t identify. It seems they want to experiment, to see if an intact planetary-mass body could be useful to them after all. We forget sometimes how young they are . . .” Indeed it was less than five centuries since Falcon had stood on the deck of the USS Shore with Conseil, the comic serving-bot that had turned out to be the precursor to all of this. “To them a few centuries is as nothing.”
“But it’s an eternity to us humans, sir. And we’re only a little more than halfway to the Jupiter Ultimatum date.” Pandit stared at the strange vista. He asked hesitantly, “What about people on Earth, sir? Do they, umm, believe the threat? I can tell you that day to day we don’t give it a thought.”
Falcon smiled. “That’s because you’ve got a world to build. You’ve something to do.” Which Falcon often envied as he rattled around in his cabin, trapped in the endless cycles of the spinning, orbiting Port Van Allen. “Oh, it’s taken seriously on Earth now. It was the Little Ice Age that changed things, I guess. Even the Mercury war had been just a light show in the sky. Then the war came to Earth itself. At last serious long-term programmes were launched. Cultural treasures stashed off-planet—”
“I know. The Port Skia museum has a pretty impressive Leonardo collection.”
“But a great deal of digital treasure was lost in the Mnemosyne bombing back in ’34 . . .” The Mnemosynes, taking their name from a goddess of memory, had argued that mankind’s ability to deal with the terminal future of the Ultimatum was hampered by a clinging to the past—and that therefore the past should be sloughed off, abandoned. “You can’t save everything, I guess.”
Pandit said, “There are rumours there have been negotiations about mass evacuations. Well, look at the Hellas basin, three thousand kilometres wide and nine deep, and predicted to have a breathable atmosphere well before Ultimatum Day. That would make for a pretty big refugee settlement.”
Or, Falcon thought more bleakly, a concentration camp.
The Martians had already been more than generous, it was generally thought. Hellas was littered with domes containing samples of Earth biomes, from the sub-Arctic tundra to the tropical rainforests. Attempts had even been made to reconstruct Aboriginal songlines in the Martian dust. But in historical terms Mars had barely won its independence from Earth, and unlike the Hermians, swarms of Terran migrants wouldn’t be too welcome.
“Meanwhile,” he said, “Security is pressing for more extreme solutions.”
“Like the hibernacula?”
“That’s one possibility. If we run out of refuges we may have to store whole populations.” The technology that Hope Dhoni was using to sleep-stalk Falcon across the centuries was in fact a spin-off of such last-resort studies. “Or a drastic reduction of numbers. If the population is virtually zero by Ultimatum Day, you see—”
“Those unborn can’t be harmed. We have a high birth rate. We’re trying to fill up an empty world. How strange that must be, culturally.”
“The steady pressure of the Ultimatum is making us a less human society, Jeffrey. Distorting us. Was Earth under the World Government ever a utopia? Well, the shadows are closing in. And it’s going to get a lot worse before the Machines’ work is done.”
Pandit, staring into the dying sun, seemed troubled. He was a thoughtful young human being, Falcon thought, Martian or not. Very carefully—a cybernetic limb and a delicate pressure suit made for a risky combination—Falcon patted Pandit’s back. “Come on. Let’s get back to the trailer. Time I took some more of your salary off you in the poker school . . .”