‘Stromatolites. I know. Bacterial communities, a very old type of formation on Earth. We should take samples. Actually I’ve seen stromatolites back home. There are some survivors near salt lakes in Australia . . . Of course our stromatolites grow in shallow water, with the living layers photosynthesising away at the surface. These are evidently growing on the dry land, transporting nutrients up somehow. More like a tree, maybe.’ She glanced at him. ‘You know I’m from Australia, right? That I’m a pure-blood Aborigine?’
Yuri shrugged. She was the kind of prison warden who wanted to be your buddy. She was going to be gone soon. Where she came from made no difference to him.
Jenny Amsler had always been the kind to keep in with the authority figures, or at least try to. ‘Everybody knows that,’ she said, trying to smile. She had a faintly French accent. Around thirty, she was thin, had been even before the star flight, with a pale, narrow, rather shapeless face. Her smile was obviously forced. Yuri thought she was clinging to him, maybe for protection, and maybe to Mardina too.
Mardina just ignored her. ‘The stromatolite structure might be a universal. Maybe critters like our bacteria must build something like this, on any world, in the water or out of it. She walked a bit further, towards the lake, and glanced down at the mud. ‘Whose footsteps are these?’
Jenny smiled again. ‘That’s Major McGregor. He comes running around the lake every morning. I mean, every ship’s morning.’
‘That’s Lex all right,’ Mardina murmured. ‘Determined to get himself in condition before the long haul home.’ She peered out at the lake, where what looked like reeds protruded from the surface of the water, pale, slim rods. There were bundles of the reeds on the shore too, by the lakeside. Further out there was more evidence of life, drab green patches on the landscape, and the shadowy fringe of the forest to the north. ‘Those reeds are everywhere.’
Yuri said, ‘I’ve been calling them stems.’
Mardina’s sensor unit recorded more images of the patient stems. ‘We knew there was life here, from a smear of evidence of photosynthesis – we could see that even through telescopes back in the solar system. We never did a proper survey, never landed a probe for instance. We just came, and took a chance, for better or worse. Which is kind of characteristic of the space programme, if you look at the history. The Americans, I mean the old US, designed the first lunar landers knowing nothing of the surface they had to land on. The moon might have popped under them, lunar mountains collapsing like meringues, so some feared . . . And anyhow you have to be there. You have to experience a world, directly, physically, to make it real. And I think—’
A bundle of the stems on the shore, like a cage of dried reeds and bamboo shoots, abruptly changed shape, rustling; it rolled along the shore, leaving a textured trail.
‘Wow. Did you see that?’
Yuri said, ‘There are combinations that move. I think there are combinations that have been built around this shore. Made of the stems.’
She looked at him sharply. ‘Built? You mean, by intelligence? Or something like a beaver dam?’
Yuri shrugged. ‘What do I know? I’m not a biologist.’
She just glared at him, as if compelling him to say more.
‘I’ve seen other stuff,’ he said, to deflect any interest in himself. ‘Further out. Big things moving out there, on the plain.’
‘Running?’
‘Not exactly. Moving fast. And flying things.’
‘Birds?’
‘I call them kites. Things like big angular frames. You see them flapping around near the forest.’
She looked that way. ‘You must have sharp eyes. Has anybody else seen this stuff?’
He shrugged. Nobody else seemed to be looking.
Mardina sighed. ‘Maybe we’ll come back with a proper science expedition, when this mad-rush land grab is all over. Show me this observatory of yours.’
From the summit of the Cowpat the Puddle was a flat sheet fringed by clumps of pale stems, and the shuttle was a gaudy bug in the dirt, surrounded by scuffed ground and shabby temporary structures, with the track of its landing a dead-straight scrape that vanished into the distance to the east.
This whole feature, the Cowpat, was maybe half a kilometre across. Exploring, Mardina climbed hillocks and descended into depressions. ‘Curious,’ she said. ‘I’m no geologist. The terrain is sort of sunken, jumbled. But not like a lunar crater; it’s more as if it’s collapsed into some hollow below. There are features like this on Venus. They call them coronas, I think.’
‘You’re going to miss the eclipse,’ Jenny called.
‘What eclipse? OK, show me.’
Yuri had a small optical telescope set up on a stand, pointing up at the star. Behind its eyepiece was a sheet of plastic, pure white, that Jenny was, inexpertly, angling on a heap of rocks, so that the star’s image was projected onto the sheet. There wasn’t much more to the ‘observatory’ than this: a few manual instruments, a sextant, a plumb line, and a slate for Yuri to record his observations. When he wasn’t around he left all this stuff, save the electronics, under the cover of a weighted-down bit of tarpaulin.
Mardina was impressed by the telescope. ‘Where did you get that?’
‘From a theodolite, a bit of surveying gear.’
She frowned. ‘I never heard of an instrument like that that wasn’t electronic.’
‘No. It was specially made for the colony programme. Everything we have is supposed to be old-fashioned, easy to repair, no power sources to run out. No reliance on satellite networks and such, because there isn’t one here. You ought to know that, Lieutenant. It’s your policy.’
She looked embarrassed, but she was fascinated by the image projected onto the plastic sheet. The star’s surface was pocked with huge black scars, and webs of lightning crawled across it. ‘My God. Proxima Centauri. A red dwarf star, just six million kilometres away.’ She glanced up at the star, so its light shone full in her face.
Jenny Amsler laughed nervously. ‘Doesn’t look so red to me.’
‘It’s just an astronomer’s term. The surface is white-hot—’
‘Watch,’ said Yuri. ‘Here it comes.’ He pointed to a brilliant spark near one edge of the illuminated disc on the sheet. ‘Jenny . . .’
She had a watch, and the slate. ‘I’m ready.’
Mardina asked, ‘What are we seeing?’
‘You can’t see much in the sky here, right? Proxima never sets, so you never get a starry sky. But you can see the double star, and one big planet that you can see the disc of—’
‘That’s Prox e. The fifth planet from Proxima. This is the third – a, b, c. That’s a big world up there. Not even the nearest planet in this system.’
‘The planet passes behind the sun. It’s eclipsed. You can see, it’s about to happen now. Jenny . . .’
‘Ready.’
The spark at the edge of the solar disc winked out. ‘Mark!’
‘Got it.’
Mardina laughed, as if pleased.
‘It takes about an hour,’ Yuri said. ‘Then it re-emerges from the other side.’
Mardina sat back on her ankles, thinking. ‘One hour, out of the two hundred or so it takes Prox c to go around its star. Of course. Because Proxima itself spans one two-hundredth of the sky’s arc. But it won’t be quite that, because Prox e is following its own slower orbit . . . Why are you doing this, Eden?’
He shrugged. ‘To get a sense of time.’
She smiled. ‘I see. In the absence of day and night. A clock in the sky.’
Jenny said, with forced eagerness, ‘I wanted to work on this. Clocks and calendars and stuff. I was a jeweller, back in Londres. Well, a jeweller’s assistant, a technician.’
Yuri knew that was true. Maybe one reason she had been clinging to him was that since they had landed she had learned he was British too, though he was from independent North Britain and she was from Angleterre, the southern Euro province. He neither knew nor cared how she had
gone from her jewellery store or whatever in Londres, to the sweep that had delivered her to Prox c.
‘I can do fine work,’ she said now to Mardina. ‘Instruments.’
Mardina eyed her with something like pity, Yuri thought. She took the woman’s hands, turned them over. ‘These are going to be farmer’s hands, Amsler. Not much call for “instruments” here. If you want to make calendars it’s going to be like this, what Eden’s doing. Sticks in the ground. Little telescopes.
‘You know, there’s more in the sky if you look, Eden. This system has six planets in all. Two inside the orbit of Prox c, three outside. Three are the size of Mars, or smaller, but there are two super-Earths, including e, up there. There’s a Kuiper belt and so forth further out, but not much. And no gas giants. Red-dwarf systems don’t seem to have enough mass to grow giants. The furthest-out planet is only thirty-some million kilometres from the star. That would be within the orbit of Mercury. You have a whole toy solar system, all within a Mercury orbit. The planetologists call this a “compact system”. Very common in the Galaxy – more so than systems like our own.
‘And then there’s Alpha A and B, the primary stars. They orbit each other every eighty years, and they each have planets of their own. This is an older system than ours, Yuri. The planetary orbits are locked in and stable; this planet, Prox c, doesn’t wobble on its axis the way Earth’s moon does, say. And the inner system has long been cleaned out of comets and asteroids by impacts. Everything that could happen here has happened already, and now everything just kind of ticks along like clockwork. Tell all that to your grandchildren. I bet you could devise a deep-time calendar based on—’
‘Don’t patronise me.’
She sat back, evidently shocked by that sudden jab. ‘I’m crew. You shouldn’t speak to me that way.’
He held out his wrists, ready for the plastic cuffs.
‘Don’t be absurd.’ She sat with them for a moment more, evidently offended. Then she stood, brushed off the dust, and walked away, back towards the shuttle.
Jenny protested, ‘What did you have to say that for? We were getting on so well.’
He shrugged. ‘She’s only playing at being your friend. Indulging herself. What does she care? She’ll be gone in a couple of days. Nothing we say to her makes a difference.’ For all his defiance Yuri found the prospect of the shuttle leaving, the last link to Earth breaking, terrifying. It was like the prospect of death, an irreversible cut-off. He could see the others felt the same. The difference was, he tried not to show it. Whereas Jenny seemed to think that if she behaved ingratiatingly enough the astronauts might somehow change their minds and take her home. Well, they wouldn’t. He said, ‘Do you want to go back, or will you stay to help me finish this?’
She grumbled, but she stayed, the full hour it took for Prox e to emerge from its eclipse. Then they covered over their gear, packed up, and walked back the way they had come, Jenny in sullen silence.
CHAPTER 13
On the tenth day, the day the shuttle was due to leap back to orbit and rejoin the Ad Astra, Major Lex McGregor called a meeting. A final briefing, he said, for the colonists.
The weather was hot, clear, and the light from Proxima Centauri was heavy. McGregor had an array of fold-out chairs set up in the shade of one of the shuttle’s wings, but they were for the crew and the Peacekeepers only. Yuri found himself sitting with the rest of the colonists in the dirt at the crew’s feet, in the glaring Prox light. Abbey Brandenstein, the killer of Joseph Mullane, was set away from the rest, her arms still cuffed behind her back.
McGregor, lean, smart, his black and silver uniform showing not a speck of dirt, his blond mane shining in the Proxima light, walked up and down before this assembly. He looked fit after his daily regimen of runs around the lake. He had a comms set clamped to his head as he paced; he was keeping them waiting, for a briefing that was presumably going to set the pattern of the whole of the rest of their lives, as he took a call from his buddies on the ship. ‘Yeah . . . Yeah . . . You’re kidding! OK, later, Bill.’ He shut the set down, chuckling. ‘Those guys! What kidders. Ah, well.’
At last he turned to the group on the ground before him. He turned on a smile, beaming like a proud headmaster, Yuri thought. ‘So here we are. The end of the mission for us, in a sense, with just the chore of going home remaining. But for you, of course, it is a beginning – the grandest of beginnings, the birth of a new community, a new world. What a day! And how appropriate that the weather’s so good.
‘But, you know, it did occur to me that you ought to rename this new world of yours. “Proxima c” will scarcely do. That’s an astronomer’s term, not a name for a home. As far as I know none of the other groups have come up with a name yet. You could be the first. So, any ideas?’ He looked around the group.
Everybody seemed faintly stunned to Yuri, unresponsive.
‘Oh, come now. Anybody want to make history?’
At last Mardina Jones spoke up. ‘How about, “Per Ardua”?’
‘I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?’
‘That’s the rest of the phrase that the ship’s name comes from. Ad Astra, you know? The full phrase is, Per ardua ad astra. Through adversity to the stars. It’s the motto of the NBRAF – the North Britain air force, I did some training with them, even though they don’t contribute to the ISF. I think it’s originally from an old Irish family motto.’ She glanced around at the dusty plain, the unmoving star. ‘We’ve brought them to the stars. For these people the adversity is still to come.’
McGregor looked disappointed. ‘Really, Lieutenant, that’s hardly the spirit.’
John Synge, a colonist Yuri barely knew, had once been a lawyer. Now he raised his hand. ‘Per Ardua. Seconded. All those in favour say aye.’
The rest murmured in response, apathetically.
McGregor glared at Synge, frustrated, as if his carefully worked-out presentation had already been spoiled. ‘If you must,’ he said at last. ‘Per Ardua it is. Well, you’ve seen the cargo we’ve unloaded in the last few days. Equipment for you all to use, right? From shovels to slates, even, so you can keep diaries of your pioneering days. Everything you need to build a new homestead here. And now—’ his smile returned ‘—I have a final gift for you all.’ He turned and clapped his hands.
From the shadows of the shuttle’s open hull a mechanism rolled forward. It had a squat six-wheeled base like a small car, and an upper section that was vaguely humanoid, with a torso bristling with manipulator arms of all sizes, and a clear plastic dome for a ‘head’ from within which camera lenses peered, glittering. The lower body was covered with manufacturers’ and sponsors’ logos.
Looking faintly embarrassed, Mardina captured everything with her shoulder-mounted unit.
‘As promised,’ McGregor boomed, grinning widely. ‘Colonists of, ah, Per Ardua, meet your autonomous colonisation unit! The best that UN dollars can buy.’
The unit rolled to a halt. ‘Greetings,’ it said. ‘I am your ColU.’ Its male-sounding voice was clipped, with a neutral mid-Atlantic accent, like a UN Security Council translator, Yuri thought. Its cameras whirred and panned. ‘I am looking forward to getting to know you individually and as a group, and to serving you all. I host a level seven IntelligeX artificial sentience, as you can probably tell. I have significant self-direction and decision-making capabilities, and am additionally capable of responding to your emotional needs. You may wish to give me an informal name. With this model “Colin” is popular—’
‘ColU will do,’ snapped John Synge.
‘ColU it is,’ the unit said. It rolled to a stop. With a hiss of hydraulics, panels opened up in its flanks, revealing glistening internal equipment, like metallic intestines. ‘I contain all you need to initiate your self-sustaining colony. I have a soil-maker to process the native dirt into a suitable habitat for Earth life. I also contain various autonomic and semi-autonomic systems to progress farming efforts. And an iron cow, a manufactory to process grass into meat gr
own from stem cells. The heavy equipment I can deploy includes well-drilling gear and trench-cutters.
‘Other support services I can offer include medical; I can treat traumatic injuries of various kinds, and can synthesise anaesthetics, antibiotics and other essentials. I contain a matter-printer fabrication unit which can produce such components as replacement bones, even some ranges of artificial organs. Later in the process I will be able to serve as a user-friendly “teacher” unit for your sturdy pioneer-type children. And I—’
‘Thank you,’ McGregor said. ‘I think that’s enough for now.’
The ColU rolled back modestly, closing itself up. The ‘colonists’ just stared, silent.
McGregor resumed his pacing. ‘I want to take this last chance to emphasise for you what a marvellous chance you people have been given. I know many of you skipped the briefings in flight—’ he eyed Yuri ‘—and perhaps for the rest of you it didn’t seem . . . well, real. To colonise the planet of another star! It is a centuries-old dream, yet here we are. Here you are. And what an opportunity you have.
‘There are drawbacks to living with a red dwarf star like Proxima, I don’t deny that. It is a flare star, as you know. You have built your shelter, and the ColU can help; you can harden your bodies with vitamin supplements, atropine injections and so forth, and there are post-exposure therapies.
‘However the advantages are huge.’ He lifted up his face to Proxima, and raised his arms. ‘Dwarf stars are tremendously long-lived, compared to stars like our own sun. Both kinds of stars burn hydrogen in the core. But in our sun the helium waste product of the fusion process accumulates; once exhausted, the core will one day collapse and blow the rest apart, leaving most of the sun’s hydrogen unburned. Whereas in Proxima tremendous convection cycles operate, dragging the hydrogen from the outer layers down into the core, until it is all consumed. Our sun has only maybe a billion years of useful lifetime left to it. Proxima, though so much smaller, is so efficient it will keep shining for trillions of years – thousands of times as long . . .’
Proxima Page 7