Proxima (18 page)

There was hardly any light now, and he could hear the little builder and its fellows running around in the dark with a chattering rustle of stems. Suddenly, here in the dark with these strange
creatures, he had a deep, almost phobic reaction; he had to get out of here. He felt for his slate and his pack and backed out into the bright air.

He was still on his hands and knees when the little builders came swarming out after him and scattered.

He got to his feet and followed the smallest, the one he had handled. It made straight for the dense bed of stems where the adult had headed. When he caught up, the adult was standing
stock-still, the little one at its side, in the middle of the stem bed. The adult seemed to be facing Yuri, who slowed to a halt.

The ground was slick underfoot, he saw, the mud here thick with lichen, from which the stems were growing. The stems themselves came up to his waist. They were an unusual kind, darker, flatter,
more like blades than the usual tube-like structures, yet still substantial, still no doubt filled with marrow. The adult had been collecting them, he saw; it had specimens at its feet, carefully
detached from the lichen bed and lain down.

And on every stem, facing him, growing from the muddy ground, a single eye opened.

That was too much for Yuri. He turned and ran, and didn’t stop for breath until he was halfway back to the camp.

W
hen he got back, Yuri found the ColU and Mardina in the middle of an argument.

He blurted out his news. ‘They’re intelligent! They use tools! They have eyes! This is first contact, isn’t it?’ To his dismay nobody was interested in his
discoveries.

Before the half-built house the ColU rolled backwards and forwards in the dirt, an odd little habit it had developed, especially when it faced a stressful decision. Mardina sat on a fold-out
stool hacking at scrawny potatoes with a knife, slicing them up and then dropping them skin and all into a pot. She had bare legs and feet; she wore cut-down jeans that had once belonged to Martha
Pearson, and her curly black hair was pulled back from her forehead. She looked wiry, tough, resilient, practical. She also looked angry.

The ColU at least tried to engage with Yuri over his discoveries. ‘The eye-leaves feature is fascinating, yes. Convergent evolution in action. Of course there must be eyes; eyes developed
many times independently on Earth, with no fewer than nine separate designs—’

‘Oh, keep the lecture,’ Mardina snarled. ‘You stupid tin box. Who cares about you? Everything you know is useless, valueless, everything you say.’

Yuri sat on the ground and sipped water from his pack. ‘What’s going on? Why are you arguing?’

‘Ask
that
,’ Mardina said, making a stabbing motion with her knife.

‘A word,’ the ColU said, with a good approximation of a sigh. ‘We are fighting over a single word. Yet a word which encapsulates a fundamental conceptual issue.’

Yuri thought about that. ‘I don’t know what a fundamental conceptual issue is.’

Mardina said, ‘It won’t have me calling this shack of ours a
wuundu.
Even though that’s what the bloody thing is.’

‘But the word is inappropriate,’ the ColU said patiently. ‘Because, as I understand it, the word means “shelter”, in the sense of something temporary.
This
is not temporary. This is not a shelter. It is a house. It is your home.’

‘Of course it’s temporary. Everything here is temporary.’

Yuri thought he understood. ‘You’re talking about the pickup. Everything is temporary, because all we have to do is survive until the pickup by ISF.’

Mardina shrugged, glaring down at her potatoes.

‘There will be no pickup,’ the ColU said. ‘Not soon. Not ever. You heard what Major McGregor said. There will be no return of the
Ad Astra
, no follow-up
expedition.’

‘I can’t accept that,’ Mardina said simply. ‘Look around. Everybody’s dead, except us. We fucked up, collectively; we killed each other off, all but. You
can’t build a colony out of two people, no matter how many kids I have with this scrawny refugee, how many of our little
muda-mudas
end up running around. I know the ISF. They might
deny they’re watching us, but . . . There’ll be a pickup. We won’t be left here to die.’

‘You are simply wrong in the premises of your argument,’ the ColU said patiently. ‘The two of you
do
have significant genetic diversity to found a colony.’

Mardina seemed outraged. ‘What the hell are you talking about? Adam and Eve was a myth, you joker.’

‘No. In the literature there is a case of a camel drover who came to Australia from the Punjab, called “the Afghan”. He took an Aboriginal woman for his wife, and they went
into the outback . . . In the end he sired children even by his own granddaughter. And six of eight of the great-grandchildren survived. More recently there has been a remarkably similar case on
Mars, where—’

Mardina looked as if she was about to explode. ‘That’s monstrous. And besides I was briefed on the anthropology stuff. I would have heard about this.’

‘Not all of it. Among the crew you were a priority type, genetically. A reserve colonist, so to speak. It was thought best to limit your briefing, no doubt. Lieutenant Jones, the
Aboriginal population was isolated from the rest for tens of thousands of years, and so the two of you are about as genetically diverse from each other as two humans could possibly be. In fact, if
this situation had been devised for an optimal outcome, it could not have been more—’

‘I don’t care about the genetics. This is like one of those horror stories you read, about fathers locking up their daughters in basements as sex slaves. And now you’re telling
me it’s UN policy?’

The ColU said solemnly, ‘The UN is locked in rivalry with China. Proxima must be taken before the Chinese get here. This is the only way to do it. You are soldiers in an as yet undeclared
war. So will your children be.’

Mardina stood, brushed dirt from her legs, and picked up the pan of potatoes. ‘This isn’t going to happen, ColU. To hell with you. I am going to wait for the pickup, and if I die
before it gets here, well then, I will die childless.’ She stuck her knife into the door jamb of the building. ‘And
this
is a
wuundu
, so get used to it.’ She
walked away, carrying her pan.

2165

A
ngelia 5941 woke up with numbers rattling in her head. All around her, the sisters were stirring.

This was the last waking. They would not sleep again, not until Proxima Centauri was reached. And the deceleration routines had now been uploaded to her. At last, Angelia 5941 fully understood the process; they all did. The numbers were brutal.
A final betrayal by Dr Kalinski.

Soon the ship would be as close to Proxima as it had been distant from the sun, after its initial four days of acceleration had been completed: about a hundred and thirty times as far as Earth
was from the sun. The craft would have to be decelerated for another four days, to be brought safely to rest in the Proxima system. But this time there was no welcoming microwave-laser station to
push them back, no Dr Kalinski coordinating the event, no well-trained controllers to guide them home. All there was in the target system was Proxima, and its light. And Angelia was going to have
to use the energies of that light to slow down.

The idea was simple. One by one the sisters would peel away. They would form up in vast arrays of lenses, and focus the light of Proxima on the remnant core ship. Just as Dr Kalinski’s
microwaves had pushed Angelia out of the solar system, so the visible-light photons of Proxima would slow her down from her interstellar cruise.

But Angelia was travelling terribly quickly, and the light of Proxima was feeble; Proxima was a red dwarf star with only a hundredth the luminosity of the sun. As the implications of the final
software download percolated through the sisters’ minds, so the lethal statistics had soon become clear. To slow the remainder at thirty-six gravities, great throngs of sisters would have to
be cast off in the first waves, where the mass to be slowed was greatest and the distance to Proxima was at its longest, to effect the deceleration. More than a
hundred thousand
sisters
would have to go, in the first moments alone. As the remnant core slowed, so the castaways would quickly recede from the ship, still sending back their light, until they had gone too far to be
useful. Then the next wave would be released, and the next.

All this was why, in fact, the castaways each had to be smart. Proxima was not only feeble, it was a star that flared and sputtered, and its light output was unpredictable. The castaways had to
be able to adapt, to make optimal use of the uncertain light that reached them, gathering it to serve the cause, in the few seconds of their usefulness, before they were hurled away, spent.

Eventually
only one
would remain, one sister, to go into orbit around Proxima, with a tremendous array of nearly a million mirror-sisters stretched out across a volume of space before
her – all of them doomed to fly on past Proxima and into the endless dark, all save the one delivered to orbit. It was a nightmarish design: to deliver just one mirror-sister, atom-thin, with
the mass of a mist droplet, nearly a million sisters would have to be sacrificed. But it would work.

Angelia 5941 rejected the cruelty of it. But she could not stop it.

She promised herself that if she survived, somehow, if she was the one, she would reject the goals of those waiting patiently on Earth for news of her arrival. She would formulate her own, more
appropriate goals. And she would seek out the one being who might have some understanding of what she had gone through.

She would find Dexter Cole.

2173

A
s the Arduan day-years rolled by, as the Earth months ticked off on their calendars, they extended their fields bit by bit: churning up the Arduan
ground, scraping off layers of native life from the surface and shovelling them into the ColU’s reactors to be broken down into feedstock, spreading the ColU’s newly minted soil over
the surface. Soon they had grass growing alongside the potatoes, spindly wheat, even a couple of precious apple trees, for now just skinny saplings a long way from producing edible fruit.

They did some homesteading too. To replace their slowly disintegrating clothes they learned to make a kind of cloth, experimenting with fibres drawn from the bark of forest-fringe saplings; you
could pull apart the fibres, beat them, weave them. Mardina was more creative, and she started experimenting with looms. She also made bark sandals, similar to a kind her people had once made from
the bark of gum trees, she said, to give their feet a break from ISF-issue boots. Yuri contented himself with making coolie hats, crudely woven from strips of bark, but useful for keeping off
Proxima’s light on the bad days. It was the kind of work that kept them busy in the hours they had to hide out in the storm shelter from the more violent flares.

You couldn’t call this a colony any more, if it ever had been, Yuri thought. Not with just two people, one farm robot, zero future. But he got some satisfaction from the work even so. He
was building something, after all, something new, on the face of this world that had never known the tread of a human foot until a few years back. And it was something
he
had built, and
that was another thing that was new in the universe. He was twenty-seven years old now. Everywhere else he’d ever lived had been built and owned by somebody else, on Earth, on Mars.

But to neither him nor Mardina, he suspected, would this ever feel like a home. It was a place where they were surviving, on this huge, static, empty world, with no sign of humanity anywhere, no
movement save the pottering of the ColU, no sound but the alien noises of the local life, the flap of the kites over the forest canopy, the rustling of the builders by the lake. He and Mardina were
as isolated on Per Ardua as Neil and Buzz in their lunar module on the lifeless moon.

The ColU seemed content, however. It whirred around busily, inspecting the native life close up, concocting elaborate theories about the solutions produced by billions of years of evolution to
the problem of how to exploit the energies of Proxima’s light.

Yes, they kept busy. Yuri imagined that if they really were being watched by some corps of concealed ISF inspectors, as Mardina continued to seem to believe, they might be given good ratings for
their progress.

But inside his head, out of sight of any unseen cameras, unheard by any hidden microphones, there were days when Yuri felt overwhelmed by a kind of black depression. Maybe it was the static
nature of this world, the sky, the landscape, the stubbornly unmoving sun.
Nothing changed
, unless you made it change. Sometimes he thought that all the work they were doing was no more
meaningful than the marks he used to scribble on the walls of solitary-confinement cells in Eden. And when they died, he supposed, it would all just erode away, and there would be no trace they had
ever existed, here on Per Ardua.

He suspected Mardina felt the same, some of the time, maybe all of the time. He thought he could see it in the way she did her work, always competently, but sometimes with impatient stabs and
muttered curses. He thought he could see it, the black cloud inside, even in the way she walked around the camp.

But they never spoke about it.

A
bout two years after Synge’s killing spree, on a clear, bright Sunday, Yuri and Mardina decided to take a walk to go and see the builders
around the Puddle. They had developed a habit of putting aside Sunday, as marked by their calendars, as a rest day. And the native life was a distraction for all three of them, the ColU
included.