Proxima (23 page)

‘Welcome, Yuri Eden!’ the ColU called, continuing its puppet show.

Yuri kept back from the little group. ‘You look as if you’re actually talking to them.’

‘Indeed! I have made spectacular progress in the months since I was inspired by Lieutenant Jones’s intuitive grasp that the builders’ dancing is a kind of communication. I have
begun to build up an extensive vocabulary of “words”, which—’

‘I didn’t know you’d got so far. You haven’t told us about any of this.’

It sounded faintly offended. ‘I was waiting to complete the project. Or at least bring it to the point where I could make a proper report.’

‘This isn’t an academy.’ That was one of Mardina’s choice lines. ‘Just tell me what you’ve learned.’

‘A lot – or perhaps only a little. You must appreciate the challenge. Humans share a universal grammar that derives from your body shape, the way you interact with your environment,
your experience of birth, life, death. A builder’s experience – the way a creature that is half-animal, half-plant by terrestrial categories apprehends the world – really is quite
alien, and therefore so is its language. Also builder communication has a whole range of components, the most important being the gestural – the dancing – and scent: they emit body
chemicals at will. I get the sense that they are a very old species, Yuri, and their mode of communication is very ancient. I mean ancient in the biological sense. Much older than human languages.
Indeed, it has surely evolved on biological timescales, rather than cultural. As a result their language is wideband, in a way, with many channels of discourse, most of which I suspect I have yet
to discover.

‘So we started with the basics, with simple nouns for obvious concrete objects. “Lake” was the first, as you can imagine.’ Its arm-puppet gave a series of twirls, and
Yuri smelled a sharper tang. The builder audience responded in kind. ‘But even for a simple concept like “lake”, the builder word is much more complex, with many meanings
overlaid; it means something like “the interface between mother and father which brings life”. That is my perhaps clumsy interpretation. It is as if every time I use the word
“lake” I give you its history in terms of a Latin root imported into English via Norman French, together with mythological footnotes—’

‘Mother and father, though?’

‘Ah, yes: to them Proxima is the father, in terms of emotional analogies with the human condition, and the world, Per Ardua, is the mother – or more specifically, I think, the term
refers to the lichen-rich nutrient patches in which their young take root. The adults who actually nurture infants are referred to by a term I think translates as something more like
“midwife” rather than “parent”. From such beginnings I have established many more common terms, for water, earth, sky, hot, cold, big, small—’

‘What do they call us?’

‘We each have our individual names. They don’t have a class name for humans. There are only three of us – including myself – and we are all very different in their eyes.
Your
name, and Mardina’s, are variants on a phrase that means “single stem”.

‘They aren’t great conversationalists, Yuri! Their language is simple, really, with a very wide vocabulary, lots of labels, but only elementary grammatical rules. And much of what
they say to each other consists of stock sayings. Like slogans, or folk sayings.’

Yuri tried to think of an example. ‘Such as, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?’

‘Yes. But a builder analogy might be, “Dig it up before you make it.” This is another aspect of their antiquity, Yuri Eden. We’ve seen them use stone tools. But before
they go to the trouble of making a new tool, they will grub at the ground and see if they can dig up a discard, a tool left by some forebear that might be thousands of years old. They’ve been
wandering here for a long, long time: the ground is evidently rich enough in abandoned artefacts to make that sort of strategy worthwhile. And there isn’t a lot of innovation across the
generations; they expect the tools left behind by their ancestors to be pretty much the same as what they make and use today. The language is the same, a collection of phrases and sayings, bits of
wisdom handed down, polished from overuse.’

‘What do they call themselves? Not builders . . .’

‘ “The Fallen”. That is a human analogy; their term is something like “the semi-disarticulated”. But I think the concept of falling, that is falling from grace, is
appropriate. “Everything is shit, and so are we.” That’s perhaps their most common slogan; they use it to say hello, goodbye, and as an interjection in conversation. Though the
term isn’t “shit”, it is something like “the marrowless and broken husk of a dead stem”. They seem to regard the whole universe as a dismal ruin, with themselves as
worthless as cockroaches picking their way through the rubble. By human standards they are almost comically gloomy, I suspect.’

‘Yet they raise their infants.’ Yuri glanced at the injured builder, who still danced before the ColU’s puppet. ‘And they care for their sick.’

‘That they do—’

It broke off. The arm-puppet stopped ‘dancing’ suddenly, the manipulator arms folded away, and the ColU rolled backwards on its tracks and turned to face the north shore. The
builders stopped too, evidently startled by the ColU; after freezing for a moment they abruptly began a new conversation among themselves.

Yuri looked to the north. An orange spark was climbing into the sky: a flare.

The ColU was already rolling away. Yuri ran after it as fast as he could, but he was easily outpaced.

B
y the time he intercepted the ColU it was already on its way back to the settlement, with Mardina riding on its front unit, leaning back against
its bubble-dome cover. As it rolled along the ColU’s endlessly adaptable manipulator arms were working on Mardina’s belly, massaging it in great downward sweeps.

Yuri jogged alongside. ‘Are you all right?’

‘What does it look like?’ she snarled back. ‘My water’s broken. I’ve had a couple of contractions. And my back’s killing me.’

‘Everything is under control,’ the ColU said calmly, rolling presumably as fast as it dared.

‘Shut up, you.’

‘Here.’ Yuri took off his stem-bark tunic, rolled it up, and shoved it behind Mardina’s back. She accepted this, at least. ‘What else can I do?’

‘You can piss off and leave it to me and my robot doctor here. I –
ow
– oh, you little bastard!’

‘Please run ahead, Yuri Eden,’ the ColU said. ‘We will be using the house; please make it ready, as we have planned.’

Mardina snapped, ‘Just get on with it, you –
ow
!’

So Yuri hurried ahead.

They’d rehearsed all this. At the house he cleared out his own gear to one of the storehouses, moved Mardina’s bed closer to the door, and lit a fire in the hearth. He made sure that
all their remaining ISF-issue medical packs were on hand, close to Mardina’s bed. He widened the doorway too, removing a few panels that they had pre-fitted to ensure the ColU had access to
the house when it needed it.

When the ColU arrived, Mardina was adamant. ‘Out, ice boy. I don’t want you anywhere near me.’

‘It’s my kid too—’

‘It’s my bloody pelvis. Out, out!’

The ColU murmured, ‘I think it’s best, Yuri Eden.’

‘All right, all right.’

‘I will call you when—’

‘I said all right.’ Yuri stamped out.

He had to watch as the ColU cautiously worked its way into the house; it wouldn’t fit all the way inside, and Yuri, on a request by the ColU, draped a tarpaulin over its protruding rear
end, blocking off the entrance to the house.

After that he could see nothing of the birth.

The labour took hours, and sounded difficult. Not that Yuri had any prior experience. He could hear screams and weeping, and the calm voice of the ColU urging its patient to
breathe, breathe.

After a time he wandered off, seeking a chore that might distract him, in the fields, in the little storehouse they had put aside as a workshop. Nothing seemed meaningful. Everything that was
important in his universe, all that mattered on this world, was going on inside the house he had built with Mardina, and he could do nothing to influence it.

On impulse he walked away from the camp, heading back towards the lake.

A cloud of depression gathered. What use was he? He had been on Per Ardua for four years already. In one random bout of clumsy, only half-satisfactory sex he had done all that Mardina had ever
needed of him, or would ever need. He felt as if he had no identity – and he hadn’t, not since his parents had bundled him into the cryo tank in Manchester. Even here, in this little
two-person colony, he didn’t matter, not fundamentally, not when it really came to it. He had had such moods since waking up on Mars. Generally he fought them off with work. It was harder
alone.

He climbed a bluff, from where he had a good view of the lake. He could see those dams and the brimming floods behind them to the north, and those strangely shaped middens to the south. From
here he got a clear sense that the whole layout of the middens really was integrated, somehow, as if all these constructions served a single purpose. And he saw builders moving on those north and
south shores, blurs of movement as they spun, tracked, congregated in little groups that quickly broke up and reformed elsewhere. Mardina was right; they were building up to something, some big
stage in whatever project they were working through.

And all of them, of course, utterly ignored the human being standing alone on this bluff watching them, this visitor from another star. What an astonishing thing – as if Egyptian slaves
had continued labouring over their pyramids while ignoring the silvery UFO that had landed in the shadow of the Sphinx. But why shouldn’t they ignore him? He didn’t matter to his own
people, and never had; why should he matter to these aliens?

There was a kind of cracking sound.

He saw a spray of water rising up from one of those dams to the north, as if it had suddenly been breached. Had it failed? But another crack came, like a cannon shot, and another, and he saw
more sprays of misty water lifting into the air from other dams, and he heard a kind of roar.

It was no accident. Those dams had been
timed
to fail, all at the same time, or were being deliberately demolished, one by one, and the roar he heard was the flow of released water; the
great floods trapped behind the dams must be gushing forward into the lake. But why was all this being done?

And now he heard a popping noise, coming from behind him.

He turned to look back at the camp. Another flare had been fired; a spark of orange light lifted high into the sky, over their conical house.

He climbed down off the bluff and ran back, as hard and fast as he could.

By the time Yuri arrived, the ColU was backing out of the house. It was holding a bundle of blankets. Yuri would never have imagined that a bunch of killer-robot manipulator
arms could have expressed such tenderness.

Abruptly, the ColU began to speak, loudly. ‘What an ugly child! Practically a monstrosity. And it’s going to be badly behaved all its life, I can tell just by looking at it, and
nothing but a burden to its wretched parents . . .’

‘ColU! What the hell are you doing?’

In a more normal tone it said, ‘Following the Lieutenant’s instructions, Yuri Eden. Scaring off the evil spirits that attend every birth, in malevolent hopefulness. And now . .
.’ Carefully, slowly, like some heavy orbital spacecraft gingerly attempting a docking with a space station, the ColU handed the baby to Yuri.

Yuri had had some instruction in this, even practice with bundles of clothes and blankets overseen by a stern Mardina, and he knew how to support the child, how to cradle its head. Deep in the
mass of blankets was a small, crumpled, pink, moist face with closed puffy eyes, and hair plastered down by fluid. The hair was black like its mother’s, but straight like its father’s.
Looking down at the child, Yuri felt something shift and break inside him, like a collapsing dam of his own.

‘Beth,’ the ColU said. ‘Her name is Beth Eden Jones. The mother is fine. Mardina’s going to try to sleep, but she said she will see you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘It was my function. But I appreciate your saying that, Yuri Eden.’

A memory floated to the surface of Yuri’s mind. It seemed distant, almost irrelevant. ‘You might want to take a look at the lake.’

‘The lake?’

‘While you were in there with Mardina – there have been developments.’

‘I will. Go and see the mother, Yuri Eden.’ It turned and rolled away, in the direction of the lake.

Yuri stepped into the house. The tarpaulin he’d hung to cover the ColU’s rump was still dangling from hooks, shutting out the day. Inside the house was a smell of blood and bodies,
and antiseptic, and the scent of the still-burning fire – a stem scent that was suddenly, sharply, redolent of the builders, as if those gloomy, dogged creatures were in here singing a
lullaby. Mardina lay flat on her bed, looking exhausted, but she was cleaned up, in a fresh nightgown, with her hair brushed back, her face washed. She smiled when Yuri stood over her with the
baby. He saw that the cot that the ColU had fabricated, a structure of Arduan stems, stood ready beside her bed.

He asked, ‘Do you want anything?’

‘No. Well, to sleep in a minute. Just wanted to see you.’

‘Nicest thing you ever said to me, astronaut.’

‘Don’t push it, ice boy.’

‘So this is Beth.’

‘My mother’s name. You have any objections?’

‘Of course not. I think I expected your mother’s name to be—’

‘More exotic? “Elizabeth” is what they called her in the school she grew up in, after the Desiccation Resettlement. She was separated from her own mother. Never knew her birth
name.’

‘Beth it is then.’

‘Sure . . . What are you feeling, Yuri?’