Gary Gibson - Final Days

‘I guess this is as good a time as any to tell you,’ he said to Mitchell. ‘We’re not going to the Moon.’

Mitchell sat back and glanced between them. ‘Seriously?’

‘Just think about it,’ Jeff continued. ‘Say all three of us went up there together, that only puts us on the surface of the Moon, not even inside Copernicus City or the Lunar Array itself. That means a further trek across the Moon’s surface from our landing site to either one or the other, which means we’d still have to figure out some way to get inside. And you’ve already failed once yourself, which is why you wound up in the cryogenics lab in the first place.’

Mitchell nodded, and Olivia had the uncanny sense he was relieved. She found herself wondering if it was just the strangeness of what had happened to him that made her so uneasy, or if it was something else – something she couldn’t put a name to.

‘So that’s it?’ said Mitchell. ‘You’re going to stay here on Earth, and just wait until the end?’

‘No.’ Jeff shook his head emphatically. ‘You’re forgetting about the outer-system research colonies. The older ones have their own dedicated arrays up north, including the Jupiter platform.’/p>

‘And that’s where you want to go? Back to Jupiter?’

‘Even if we managed to get past all the heavy security, all the way through the Lunar Array to the colonies,’ said Olivia, ‘we’ve no idea how bad things there are going to be, or how much turmoil there’ll be or how long it’s all going to last. Especially if the same people who’ve been trying to kill us here end up in charge there. But we can be safe on the Jupiter platform as long as we sever the wormhole link with Earth.’ She shrugged. ‘Besides, we don’t know what things might be like on Earth, or on the Moon, in fifty years or a hundred, or however long it takes for things to get better again – if they ever do. After all, who’s to say the Earth won’t become habitable again? But, even if it doesn’t, we still have a fighting chance at building something new out there.’

‘Those platforms aren’t set up to be self-sustaining,’ Mitchell pointed out. ‘They constantly depend on supplies from Earth.’

Jeff shook his head. ‘Maybe that was the case when you were still running security there, but things have changed a lot. The station’s grown enormously. I’m not pretending it’s going to be easy, or anywhere near it, but we learned a lot from building large-scale, self-enclosed habitats on Newton as well as the other colonies. We can do the same not just around Jupiter but out at Saturn as well. We have seed banks available, and the means to gene-alter anything we need to. That means we can farm oxygen and water from the Jovian moons and asteroids.’

Mitchell sat back. ‘What about the people already there – the station staff? Have you been in touch with them?’

‘I already talked to Jacob Morello this morning,’ said Jeff. ‘He was working in groundside admin when I was stationed on the platform, but he spends most of his time out there now, and he says they can use both of us. Besides, both me and Olivia know the station inside out, so we know what it’s capable of.’

‘And don’t forget the Inuvik–Jupiter gate is a lot more isolated than the one in Florida,’ said Olivia. ‘They won’t be dealing with the kind of mobs Florida’s been getting – not all the way up in Alaska.’

Mitchell gazed at Olivia, his pupils deep and blue and seemingly infinite. ‘What about me?’ he asked. ‘Are the Roses still going to take me on board, without you there to back me up?’

‘Of course they are,’ said Jeff. ‘We’ll all go to the space-port first, and help arrange everything. Besides, they’re expecting us. They confirmed they had room for three, so they’ll definitely have room for just one.’

‘And you’re both absolutely set on this?’ asked Mitchell, looking back and forth between the two of them.

‘More so than anything else for a long time,’ Olivia replied, clutching Jeff’s hand more tightly.

Mitchell sighed and stood up. ‘Then you’ll have to figure out how to get north. Remember, most of the flights to Inuvik are run by the ASI.’

‘Already thought of that,’ said Jeff. ‘Bob Esquivaz runs mission control for the Roses, and they have a sub-orb that can fly us out there.’

Mitchell looked impressed. ‘Sounds like you’ve really thought this through.’

Jeff stood up as well and nodded towards the door. ‘But, for the moment, we’re all still heading for the space-port. I’ll go pack our stuff in the car. Olivia?’

‘In a minute,’ she said. ‘There’s one other thing I want to ask you first, Mitchell. Jeff told me two of you were caught in those pits. What happened to . . .’ She waved one hand, momentarily unable to recall the other man’s name.

‘Erich Vogel,’ Jeff finished for her, stepping back from the doors and gazing at Mitchell. ‘I already asked you about Vogel, but you never gave me a straight answer.’

One corner of Mitchell’s mouth twitched. ‘He’s not dead, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Then where is he?’ asked Olivia.

‘He went ahead.’

Olivia frowned. ‘Ahead to where?’

The corner of Mitchell’s mouth curled again, into an almost apologetic smile. ‘To the very end of time.’

Olivia stared at Jeff, then back at Mitchell. ‘What?’

‘Look,’ said Mitchell, ‘the exploration teams went a long, long way into the future, but there are routes through the Founder Network that can take you much farther still – so far ahead in time that I don’t even know how to describe it. Except that it’s long after the universe, as we know it, has effectively ceased to exist.’

‘You believe this?’ she asked, looking at Jeff.

Jeff shrugged helplessly. ‘After what I’ve seen during the past couple of weeks, I think I’ll believe pretty much anything.’

‘The Founder Network zigzags across the whole universe,’ Mitchell went on. ‘Jeff told you about it, surely?’

She nodded, and Mitchell reached up to tap the side of his head. ‘The pools – the learning pools, I call them – they put a road map of the whole thing here inside my head.’

‘What about Erich?’ asked Jeff. ‘How could you have spoken to him? There was no sign of himivia starl when we found you.’

‘I can’t tell you exactly how I know, but some time between losing consciousness and when you found me, I talked to him.’

‘Talked? How?’

‘I just know that, before you found me, Erich and I’d . . . communicated in some way. He said he was going up ahead, to find the Founders and the civilization they created close to the end of everything. When I woke up, I was all alone.’

‘Why didn’t you go with him?’ asked Olivia.

Mitchell paused, as if he was being careful to find the right words. ‘There were things I had to do first.’

‘What things?’

‘I had to remember certain things,’ he answered after a pause.

Olivia could feel herself getting angry, again, at what struck her as deliberate obfuscation. ‘ What things?’

‘Everything . . .’ said Mitchell. ‘Like taking a snapshot of everything living on Earth, and preserving it with all its thoughts intact, and carrying it through to the far future. “Remember” isn’t really the right word . . . but the memories will live and breathe and think, put it that way.’

Olivia stared at him, suddenly frightened. ‘And you can do that?’

‘In a sense,’ he replied eventually, his expression almost reverential as he continued. ‘All this would make more sense if you’d seen what those learning pools showed me. Death has no real meaning to the Founders. It’s not a concept they really understand, because they vanquished it so very long ago.’