Proxima (27 page)

‘Whatever. Let’s get on with it.’ And she held out her arms.

The ISF goons came forward to help too. They braced Trant while she took Stef’s gloved hands in her own, and lowered her into the pit. Stef made them move slowly, while she tried to be
hyperaware of any odd sensations, any more of those tidal effects. She felt nothing untoward. It was just a hole in the ground, impossible or not.

When they had lowered her as far as they could they released her hands. Gentle as a snowflake she settled to the floor. She looked up at the opening above her, the circle of visored faces
peering in.

Then she turned around slowly, inspecting the walls. ‘There’s another hatch,’ she said. ‘Another circular seam. Set in this wall. Smaller than the big one up there, but
here it is. And, guess what? It has handprint indentations again.’

King called down, ‘Major, maybe you’ve gone far enough.’

‘You’re kidding,’ she said, staring at the hatch, raising her hands. ‘What would you do, if you were down here?’

‘Think about it. Maybe any curious, tool-wielding species would react the same way to this set-up. You’d go in, one step after another.’

‘You mean—’

‘Maybe it’s a trap.’

‘And maybe it isn’t,’ Stef said, unmoved.

‘We aren’t going to stop her, sir,’ Trant said. ‘Stef. You might get cut off. Keep talking to us. All right?’

‘I hear you. Here I go, with a handprint lock once again.’ She settled her hands into the indentations at twelve o’clock on the wall before her. ‘It’s opening . .
.’ She had to step back smartly as the curved door swung back, as smoothly as the hatch lid itself. ‘Again, I can’t see a hinge, nothing material attaching door to wall.
There’s another chamber beyond. A second chamber, similar to the first in dimension. More of those grey walls, the sourceless light.’ She stepped forward cautiously, towards the doorway
rim. ‘And . . .’

And, standing in the second chamber, before another doorway seam on the far wall, was a figure: a human, in a pressure suit, apparently ISF issue. A human staring back at her.

‘What?’ An unfamiliar voice in her ear speaker. ‘What’s wrong?’

No, not unfamiliar, just – unexpected.

‘Stef? Penny?’ That was Trant’s voice. ‘Stef, what have you found down there? Penny, you’re still out of our field of view.’

Penny?

The stranger took another step forward, towards the open hatchway. Stef found herself staring into a familiar face, behind the visor. Too familiar. Found herself staring at a familiar name, too,
on the suit’s chest patch.

KALINSKI, PENELOPE D.

2180

T
he ColU, which was becoming increasingly philosophical as time passed, came up with yet another complex, bewildering observation about life on Per
Ardua.

At the time Yuri was letting Beth ride on the ColU’s back with him, on the final fifty-kilometre round-trip trek to the old camp from the new. He’d thought the ColU had been acting
oddly all day, but had put it down to the usual program-violation problems it had with moving the camp in the first place. Evidently not.

Luckily Beth was oblivious to all this. Beth Eden Jones was seven years old now, and she had been used to moving all her life. The first shift of the
jilla
had come in the very month
she had been born, and there had been seven shifts since then, around one a year, bringing the lake the best part of two hundred kilometres due south from the starting point. The family had
diligently followed along each time, hauling their broken-down dwellings and their tools and all their other possessions, right down to cartloads of topsoil, behind the patient bulk of the
ColU.

But the last shift had been all of a year ago, and since then some spark in Beth’s head had lit up. This time she wasn’t a passive passenger any more; now she wanted to make sense of
it all. So she had begged to come along on these shuttle trips back and forth between the old campsite and the new. Mardina was happy to let her ride along with Yuri – especially as it got
her out of the way while the builders completed their latest brutal war of conquest against their cousins at the
jilla
’s new position. But on this ride, this last loading up, Beth
was fretful.

As soon as they were loaded, the ColU had begun the last haul away from the old campsite, of which little was left but a scuffed patch of ground, a smouldering fire, a couple of garbage dumps,
all set beside a muddy lake bed that was already drying out. They headed south once more, following the water courses down which the builders had driven the waters of the
jilla
. And,
wistfully, sitting beside her father on the carapace of the ColU, Beth looked over her shoulder back the way they had come. ‘Why can’t we ever go
that
way, Dad?’

‘What way, honey? North? What’s the point? There’s nothing there. There’s not even water to drink.’

‘I know. But there’s the first camp of all, isn’t there? Back there somewhere.’

‘Where you were born.’

‘I know
that
. But I don’t remember it.’

‘It’s too far. There’s no water on the way. We couldn’t walk that far.’

‘We could ride on the ColU,’ she said hopefully. ‘We could
carry
water. We could carry our beds and stuff, and Mister Sticks.’ Mister Sticks, her favourite toy,
had been woven from broken stems by the ColU; the doll was a peculiar mix of human and builder features, like a three-legged puppet.

‘That’s not a bad plan, honey. But the ColU wouldn’t carry us that far.’

‘It could, though.’

‘But it wouldn’t. It . . . doesn’t want to.’

‘You could
make
it.’

‘Only by hurting it. And that would be mean, wouldn’t it?’ Which was about as close as he imagined he was going to get to explaining program conflicts in the ColU’s AI to
Beth.

‘I guess . . .’

‘What do you want to see up there anyhow? It’s just like all the other places we stopped. Just a load of old junk that we dumped when we moved. Abandoned fields . . .’ And a
few graves.

‘But I want to see the road where the shuttle came down.’ She mimed a descending flight with her hand, but she made a noise like the flapping triple vanes of an Arduan kite, the only
flying thing she had ever seen. ‘
Flish-flish-flish
. Mom says it made tracks that would take you hours to walk along.’

‘I guess so. Skid marks kilometres long. And some of it baked solid, when the braking rockets fired. I guess that would be worth seeing, if it’s still there. But we can’t get
there, honey. I’m sorry.’

‘Maybe one day.’

‘Well—’

‘Take me there for my birthday one day.’ That was Beth’s trump card.

Her birthdays were an issue. Yuri had been slow to realise that even after Beth’s birth Mardina had clung to her belief, or fantasy, that the ISF had never really left, and would some day
come out of their hides or down from orbit or whatever, and reveal themselves, and save them all. Maybe the baby being delivered would be the trigger, if the ISF authorities accepted that the
colonists had proven their determination to stick it out by breeding. Well, that hadn’t happened. She’d not mentioned it at the time of the birth, and Yuri forgot about it.

But on Beth’s first birthday the dam broke, and Mardina went into a rage at a betrayal that, at last, she couldn’t deny. It caused a lot of tension. It was still a birthday. Yuri had
tried baking a cake, with butter and stuff from the iron cow unit inside the ColU. The ColU had even made candles from synthesised fat. Mardina ruined it all. Beth had been too young to understand,
but for Yuri, the memories of The Day Mommy Lost It remained strong.

The next year, with Yuri gently prodding, they had agreed they should celebrate the birthday. After all Beth didn’t have other kids around, she was never going to go to school or college
or enjoy all the other milestones regular children did, even in a dump like Eden on Mars. A birthday, though, one thing that was uniquely hers, could always be marked and celebrated. And, as a tie
to the cycles of time on Earth, it was a reminder of deeper roots too. But by the time that second birthday rolled around the echoes of the first were still strong, and Mardina withdrew into
herself.

Well, since then they had celebrated all Beth’s birthdays, but there was always tension. And Beth, with a little kid’s wiles, picked that up and played on it. Yuri just coped with it
all. Nobody had ever told him life was going to be easy.

‘Listen, it’s late, why don’t you take a nap? That way you’ll be fresh for Mom when you get home.’

‘I don’t
want
to take a nap.’

‘Just try,’ he said in his line-in-the-sand voice, much practised over seven years.

So she complied. She wriggled inside her rope harness until she was lying down on a couple of blankets, and cuddled up against her father’s leg. He put one arm around her and stroked her
short-cut straight hair with his free hand. They had had trouble with her sleeping from the beginning. Born into the endless day of Proxima, she seemed that bit more disconnected from the rhythms
of distant Earth, and didn’t see why she
needed
to go to sleep when her parents did, at what seemed like arbitrary times in the unending light. But if they let her get away without
regular sleep she would burn herself out and crash, so Yuri and Mardina had worked out a process of control between them.

Even the ColU, which had some programming in child care, was drafted into this regime. It always backed up the parents’ diktats, which was just as well, Yuri thought, or it would have
found Mardina decommissioning it enthusiastically. The ColU was the third ‘person’ in Beth’s limited life, and she saw nothing strange in having a robotic farming machine as a
kind of uncle. Proving to be an expert at weaving dolls from dead stem shafts didn’t do its image any harm either.

Soon Beth was asleep; she had a soft, gentle snore.

Yuri had time to inspect the route they were following. After all, it was the last time he expected ever to come this way. The ColU was following its own tracks along the bank of a broad,
braided river bed. Like most of the channels down which the builders guided the flow of their lake this bed had been here already, but was dry as bones before the lake came. Now the bed was
littered with the detritus of the passage of the waters of the lake: snapped stems, a few broken builder traps, dead aquatic creatures from fish analogues to crab analogues and jellyfish analogues,
and others they had yet to identify. There was even some terrestrial-origin seaweed, the gen-enged laver brought to this world by the starship
Ad Astra
.

After years of observation, even the ColU had no real idea how the builders managed these hydrological transfers so effectively. The lake stayed in stable locations for months or years at a time
– it had turned out that the site where the shuttle had landed had been the longest stay so far, and in fact the intervals between moves were generally getting shorter. It was clear the
builders used existing water courses, although they would sometimes dig out or extend canal-like connecting passageways, and their characteristic middens were used to guide the flow of the water
precisely where they wanted it to go.

And, wherever the lake finally pooled, there were always local streams and springs to feed it. The mystery of
that
was that as the land’s wider uplift continued – and the
ColU constantly reminded them that some dramatic geological event was apparently unfolding to the north of here – the pattern of the region’s springs changed all the time, as
underground aquifers were shifted or broken, the water tables realigned. The builders always seemed to know
in advance
where the useful springs would be, and how to re-establish the lake.
The builders didn’t have maps, but they evidently knew about geography; they must be able to visualise the landscape in some way.

It was as Yuri mused on this that the ColU’s theorising broke into his day.

The ColU jolted to a sudden stop.

Beth muttered and stirred. Yuri stroked her head, and she calmed again. He looked around. There was nothing special here, no obvious reason to have stopped.

The ColU backed up a little way, then rolled forward with a grinding of ageing gears. Again Beth stirred, before settling.

Yuri whispered urgently, ‘Hey! What’s wrong with you?’

The ColU’s voice was a matching whisper. ‘Yuri Eden?’

‘Why have you stopped? Get going before this one wakes up, or Mardina will slaughter the lot of us.’

‘I am sorry. I had not realised I had stopped.’ It rolled on with a sight lurch.

‘So what was all that about?’

‘Yuri Eden, call it an existential crisis.’

Yuri groaned inwardly. Not again.

He knew he’d have to tell Mardina about this episode, whatever it was; she was concerned about anything erratic in the ColU’s behaviour. The ColU had made it clear from the beginning
that to have been forced to help transport the colonists across the planet, if they’d attempted to escape from the landing sites that had been planned for them by the starship crew, would
have violated its deepest layers of programming. So when the lake had first shifted, in its algorithmic soul the ColU faced a conflict between mandates to keep its human charges alive, and to stay
close to the original landing site. The preservation of life had won out. But Mardina, who knew a lot more about ISF AIs than Yuri did, fretted that some deep internal damage might have been done.
All of which was over Yuri’s head, let alone the head of his seven-year-old daughter, his little
muda-muda
.

Now, reluctantly, he asked, ‘
What
existential crisis?’

‘I have come to a conclusion which baffles and alarms me. I have just received, from my internal laboratory facilities, the results of the analysis of a novel organism which enabled me to
complete a genetic mapping – you’re aware that among my long-term projects has been the construction of a tree of life, for the Arduan native flora and fauna—’