Proxima (34 page)

The fire itself was a mound of peat, the compressed remains of dead stems that you found stacked in frozen heaps along the banks of the river, which in these parts, far upstream from where Yuri
had met Delga and the mothers, ran deep and fast. You had to dig up the peat and let it thaw and dry out, and even then it burned with a foul stench that reminded Yuri of builders. Not that they
saw builders much any more. But you never saw trees either, and this was the best they could do.

As they waited for Beth and the others to return from their scouting run, none of them spoke. None of them had the energy, Yuri thought. They had all already put in a morning’s hard labour
digging out the latest storm shelters in the frozen ground, and a mutual silence was all they could manage, probably.

Yuri himself was forty-four now. Sometimes he felt a lot older. But at least he’d been spared the worst of the arthritis that plagued many of those on the march, after ten years following
the river’s course as it had wound upstream to the south, years of unending toil, this way of living where you had not just to labour at your farm but every so often you had to break it down
and
move
it further upstream, topsoil and all. No, he’d been spared that, and the worst of the limb breaks and other random injuries that came from the endless travel and labour. And
he’d been spared the rash of cancers that had taken out so many, presumably caused by the radiation that poured down from Proxima’s spitting, flaring face, the star that was now
significantly higher in their sky. Yes, Yuri had kept his health, more or less. But the world had caught up with him even so. Here he was in his forties with a teenage kid, and a partner of sorts
in Mardina, and a share of a responsibility for the lives of fifty-odd people, the relics of six once-separate McGregor drops of colonists.

And still the empty kilometres of Per Ardua stretched endlessly around them, as the babies cried, and the parents grumbled as every morning they went down to crack the ice on the river for the
day’s water . . .

‘Here they come,’ Mardina murmured. She leaned forward for more nettle tea, from the pan bubbling on the range over the fire. She was greying now, gaunt rather than slim, and even
sitting so close to the fire she wore cut-down gloves adapted as mittens. Born, after all, in the Australian outback, she had particular trouble adapting to the cold. But her astronaut eyesight was
as sharp as ever. And her tongue, Yuri thought.

She was right, anyhow. Here came Beth and Freddie, Delga’s son, and two others, running silently across a plain of bare earth, ice patches, snow banks, and the occasional drab green stain
of Arduan life. Seventeen years old now, Beth had grown whip-thin and tall, taller than either of her parents, as had many of her generation. She was darker than Yuri, with more of her
mother’s colour, but her black hair was straight like Yuri’s, lacking Mardina’s tight curls. She looked Arduan, Yuri thought. A member of a new Arduan humanity, not quite like
anybody on Earth, nobody on Mars. A new branch. Born into this world, a new generation who knew and cared nothing of what had gone before, or of any other world, and that was probably a
blessing.

The youngsters stumbled to a halt, panting hard. Beth dropped her thick outer coat, pulled a blanket over her shoulders, kicked off her elderly hand-me-down ISF-issue boots, and slipped on bark
sandals. Yuri passed around mugs of hot tea.

Mardina peered out of her nest of blankets. ‘Well?’

Beth laughed, still breathing hard. ‘Nice welcome, Mom. We saw lots. Not far upstream from here, the river splits. Well, it doesn’t really. If you think of it flowing downstream, two
big tributaries merge.’

‘A confluence,’ Delga said.

‘Yeah. That’s the word. Lots of wet ground, marshes, mostly frozen . . . And we saw
fantômes
.’ She grinned as she made her grand pronouncement.

Yuri focused. ‘Whoa, back up.
Fantômes?
’ Since Delga’s people had first misidentified Yuri himself as the ghost of Dexter Cole,
fantômes
had
become an in-joke word for strangers, more starship-stranded humans. But they had only met a few new groups since. No wonder Beth was excited. ‘How many
fantômes
?’

‘Not many. There’s not much there at all, just a couple of shacks in the green, smoke from the fires. There must be fields and a ColU but we didn’t see them. And the people, we
saw a few adults and kids. A dozen maybe? We didn’t stay to look too closely—’

‘But they saw you.’

‘Oh, yeah. Probably before we saw them.’

Liu Tao leaned forward. ‘
In the green?
Is that what you said? What do you mean?’

‘Arduan green, you know, the darker green. All over the place.’

‘But what about the snow, the ice?’

‘Not so much of that around.’ She shrugged. ‘Not as bad as here. I’m only telling you what we saw.’

‘We know, sweetheart,’ Yuri murmured, trying to reassure her, but that only won him a glare from Beth, who didn’t like those kinds of endearments any more.

The four elders looked at each other.

‘We need to check this out,’ Liu said.

‘Obviously,’ drawled Delga. ‘Beginning with dealing with these people, whoever the hell they are.’

‘ “Deal with them”,’ Mardina said. ‘Still barely civilised, aren’t you?’

Delga grinned. ‘Still barely alive.’

‘More to the point we need to check out this greenery,’ Yuri said. ‘Maybe we should take along the ColU.’ He meant his and Mardina’s original machine, the only
fully functioning unit; every other group they’d encountered had detached or destroyed the AI module of their colonisation unit to get control over the basic functions.

Mardina snorted. ‘That old wreck.’

Delga cackled, and Liu grinned. The tension between Yuri and Mardina was a continuing source of amusement for everybody else.

‘We need to make a stop anyhow,’ Yuri said reasonably to Mardina. ‘The stocks are low. Maybe the existence of this patch of native life is telling us that the location is a
little warmer than the surroundings. A good place to do some planting.’

Liu nodded thoughtfully. ‘Which is why there are people already there, no doubt. We’re all looking for a bit of warmth, in the star winter.’

Yuri shielded his eyes and looked straight up at Proxima, at the huge spots that crowded its face, localised flares showing like scars. When they had landed none of them had been warned about
the star winter, as they had come to call it. There were no Earthlike seasons on Per Ardua, but when its face swarmed with sunspots Proxima evidently delivered winters, winters that arrived
irregularly, and lasted for an unpredictable time. It was another problem that could have been determined in advance if this world had been properly surveyed before people had been dumped on it
like loads of bricks. Well, winter had come, and the whole of the trek south had been a race against the deepening cold.

Now there was this new place.
In the green.

Yuri said, ‘If we could stay there even just a bit longer than usual, get through a few growing seasons, build up some stock . . .’

Mardina scowled. ‘But why the hell should this location be magically warmer than any other?’

‘Could be a hot spring,’ Liu said.

‘Yeah, and so not a healthy place to stick around.’

‘But somebody’s doing just that already,’ Yuri pointed out. ‘We’ll learn nothing by sitting around here debating it. I say we fetch the ColU, and go and see
what’s what.’

Then there was a pause, as Mardina sat, cradling her mug of tea. Everybody waited for her to speak.

She wasn’t the leader, exactly, not really in command. The tradition of the core of this group, the mothers – Delga and Anna Vigil and Dorothy Wynn – was that nobody was in
command, least of all the men. You talked things out and came to a consensus; there were few enough of them, and generally time enough, for that. And certainly Mardina didn’t want the
visibility of authority. Her former-astronaut status had been problematic from the start. Nevertheless, as Liu Tao liked to point out to Yuri over a glass of Klein vodka, you had to get
Mardina’s approval before you could get on with almost anything. It was a kind of negative leadership, Yuri supposed, a leadership by veto not deployed.

‘All right,’ Mardina said at length. ‘Let’s go and see.’ She began to move, stiff, reluctant; she let Beth take her layers of blankets and fold them away.

A
party of four of them, or five if you counted the ColU, made their way along the bank of the river, heading south, upstream to the confluence and
the new community. There was only scattered cloud above, and Proxima hung high in the sky, all but overhead now they had come so far south, and their shadows were shrunken beneath them.

Beth had warned that it would take well over an hour to get around the lake, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Yuri thought. The walk would be good for him, good for them all. Long
before the confluence came into view he was thoroughly warmed up from the steady exercise, his breath steaming in the cold. As Mardina walked she stretched and twisted and worked her arms and neck,
and even practised whipping her crossbow from the backpack she always carried when away from the camp. Meanwhile Delga, the fourth member of the party, stomped along, one sleeve tied off, her own
pack on her back, and no doubt weapons hidden about her person. She seemed just as Yuri had known her all those years ago on Mars, despite the grey hairs, the wrinkled skin of her face distorting
her tattoos. Ageing but ageless, he thought.

As for Beth, Yuri could see how his daughter, bursting with energy despite her own long run this morning, was only just staying patient with the steady plod of the old folk.

They came upon the green cover Beth had described. You could see it from a distance. Yuri saw there was no height to it; it was more like a green blanket pinned directly to the ground, like none
of the native life Yuri remembered seeing before, the stems, the trees.

To avoid trampling the living cover, they stuck close to the riverbank where the ground was more or less bare. The green wasn’t a solid sheet, Yuri saw close to; he made out individual
sprawling plants, blankets of greenish web spread out over the flat ground and firmly rooted by multiple skinny tendrils across their widths. They were like water lilies perhaps, or like the great
triple leaves of the canopies of the northern forests.

‘Fascinating,’ the ColU murmured as it rolled carefully along the bank. ‘Yet another body plan, another life strategy. I must study the phenomenon further.’

‘Hm,’ Yuri murmured. Straight ahead he saw smoke rising. ‘I think we’ve a human phenomenon to deal with first.’

‘Perhaps, perhaps. But look beyond
that
, Yuri Eden. What can you see?’

Yuri had to climb up on its carapace to see what it meant. On the southern horizon was a smear of cloud, thick, black. ‘So? Bad weather for somebody.’

‘You don’t understand, Yuri Eden. We have walked far. Very far.’

‘Strictly speaking
you
haven’t walked anywhere.’

‘I think we are seeing the substellar point, at last. Or evidence of it. Logically there must be a permanent depression there, low pressure caused by the star’s heat at the point of
highest stellar insolation on the planet . . . An endless storm. And this is our first glimpse of that undying substellar weather system. Still hundreds of kilometres away, but a remarkable sight.
I am grateful to have lived long enough to see this.’

‘Now don’t go getting morbid about your built-in obsolescence again,’ Yuri murmured. ‘You know how it upsets Beth—’

There was a sharp cracking sound from directly ahead. They all ducked instinctively.

Yuri said, ‘What was
that
?’

‘A gun shot,’ Delga said. ‘Nice welcome.’ She grinned, evidently relishing the prospect of a confrontation.

Mardina said, ‘Who would get to bring a projectile weapon down from the
Ad Astra
?’

‘One of your lot,’ Delga said. ‘You can talk about old times.’

Yuri said, ‘You think we should send Beth back?’

Beth snorted. ‘Like hell.’

Mardina shook her head. ‘We have to deal with these characters one way or another. Let’s go forward. Proceed with caution. But,’ she said heavily, ‘stay close to the ColU
for cover. OK?’

They nodded, tense, Beth more excited than fearful, Mardina calm, Delga grimly determined, Yuri concerned for his daughter.

The ColU rolled forward once more, and the four of them walked slowly beside it.

Ahead, they soon made out the settlement, smoke rising from a couple of fires, a huddle of huts that were domes of drab Arduan green. Beyond the domes there were fields bearing a lighter green,
Earth green – potatoes, maybe.

And a man in a bright blue uniform, holding some kind of rifle, stood between the approaching party and the settlement. The uniform was a Peacekeeper’s, Yuri saw with surprise.

‘Hold it right there,’ the Peacekeeper called. ‘This thing is loaded, you heard the shot. And I will use it as I was trained.’

To Yuri’s astonishment he recognised the man. ‘Mattock. Hey, Mattock! Is that you?’

He could see the man scowl. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘On the ship, remember?’ Yuri walked forward, hands empty and held wide from his body. ‘You were on my back the whole trip. Well, not just me.’

Mattock held his weapon uncertainly, then let it droop. ‘Eden. The asshole who got cryo-frozen.’

‘And you’re the arsehole who spent the whole trip bragging about the hamburgers and the whores he was going to enjoy back on Earth, while we all spent our lives scrabbling in the
dirt in this forsaken place. Remember
that
?’

Mattock raised the gun again. ‘I’m warning you—’

‘Stand down, Peacekeeper,’ Mardina said now, stepping forward beside Yuri. ‘Jones, Lieutenant, ISF. That’s an order.’

Mattock stared in disbelief at her, a gaunt figure swathed in layers of patched-up clothing. ‘
Lieutenant Jones?
Are you kidding me?’