Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Who cares?’ Lemmy sifted a handful of dry dust. ‘Here we are sitting in shit. Who cares about billions or trillions of years?’

  McGregor wasn’t put off. ‘Then care about this: care about billions of stars. Most of the Galaxy’s stars are dwarfs like Proxima, only a handful are like the sun. And now here you are, the first colonists of the planet of a dwarf star. Once it was thought that no such star could support a habitable planet. The world would have to huddle so close to its faint sun that it would have one face presented permanently to the star, one turned away; maybe the atmosphere would freeze on the dark side. But here you have the living contradiction of those fears. A thick enough atmosphere transports sufficient heat around the planet to keep the far side from becoming a cold sink. Why, it’s already evident that this world hosts its own native life of some kind, though that is irrelevant to our purpose.

  ‘If you succeed, no, when you succeed in taming this wilderness, this world of Proxima Centauri, you will have proven that mankind can colonise this ultimate frontier, a planet of a red dwarf star. And because there are hundreds of billions of red dwarf stars, and because they’ll last trillions of years, suddenly mankind’s future in this Galaxy is all but infinite. And it will all be because of you.

  ‘But there’s a catch.

  ‘Everybody wants to be a pioneer, you see. The first on the moon, like Armstrong. The first on Mars, like Cao Xi. Or they want to be a citizen of the tamed worlds of the future. Nobody wants to be a settler. Labouring to break the ground and build a farm. Their children growing up in a cage of emptiness.

  ‘Which is where you come in . . .’

  There was a stunned silence.

  ‘Just a minute.’ Harry Thorne got to his feet. Harry was a hefty man, and he was evidently suspicious. The Peacekeepers, standing by, watched him warily. ‘I used to be a farmer. You know that, Major. Even if it was just urban stuff, farms on the thirtieth floor of a tower block. And I can tell you that that ColU won’t be much use if it has to serve many more than the ten colonists you’ve landed here.’

  ‘The target for this group was fourteen, of course. If not for the murderous uprising aboard the Ad Astra—’

  ‘There were two hundred of us on that starship. Where’s everybody else?’

  Now Yuri saw the Peacekeepers, in the shade, finger their guns.

  Harry Thorne was stone-faced. ‘Tell us the truth, astronaut.’

  McGregor nodded gravely. ‘Very well. It has never been our intention to mislead you. But all things at the appropriate time, yes?

  ‘Here is the strategy. A strategy, I might add, that has been endorsed at the highest level in the UN. There won’t be any more colonists – not here, not at this site. Oh, all two hundred passengers, or the survivors anyhow, are being delivered to the surface. But we are making scattered drops, squads of fourteen maximum, across the planet’s day side. You must understand that the other groups are out of your reach – will be for ever out of your reach. Some are not even on this continent. We’ve worked it out. The lake here is akin to an oasis in the desert. The distances to the other groups are too extreme, and given the lack of water sources you could never reach them.’

  ‘You’re isolating us deliberately,’ Harry Thorne said. ‘You’re going to kill us off.’

  ‘It’s not like that. Ask the anthropologists. You can have viable communities founded by a small number of individuals – a surprisingly small number. You, and the members of the other groups, have all been chosen for your genetic diversity, your differences from one another. There are no known harmful recessive genes among you; even if there were, your recessives would not match. You have not been selected for this group at random, you see. And remember that a healthy woman can have maybe ten children in her lifetime. With that kind of growth rate, in just a few generations . . .’

  Harry Thorne glared. ‘We’ll be sleeping with the daughters of our wives. Our children breeding with their cousins. What kind of policy is that?’

  McGregor looked around at the colonists. ‘There’s no point debating this. The experts assure us this will work, genetically speaking. And demographically, planting a dozen or so seeds across the face of this world rather than just one delivers a much better chance that at least some of you, some communities like yours, will survive and flourish, and ultimately spread.’ He smiled. ‘I’ve been around space engineering long enough to appreciate the value of redundant components.’

  ‘ “Redundant components?” ’ John Synge’s reply was almost a snarl.

  McGregor affected not to hear that. He became grave again now, and walked up and down before the rows of them seated in the dirt. ‘You must understand that you have no choice in this. And there are parameters by which you must live, rules you must obey.

  ‘You have no resources other than what we have unloaded from the shuttle. The Ad Astra will not return; the UN can’t afford another such flight. And we believe there will be no interstellar attempts by the Chinese for a century or more; according to our intelligence all their efforts are being devoted to the development of the solar system. So they won’t be showing up to save you either. Even the rest of your fellow pioneers on this planet are too far away to help, even if they had the resources. Furthermore, the ColU will last only twenty-five years, maximum. By then you must have equipped yourselves to survive, unsupported.’

  Thorne snorted. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  McGregor said sternly, ‘You must have children. You must raise them, you must have them farming for you, supporting you. Otherwise you will grow old, and you will die, one by one, you will starve to death in this place. There are other things you need to have done by then. To have established a forge, for instance, to be producing your own steel – the ColU can help you with that. But above all, you must have children, or you will not survive yourselves.’

  John Synge said, ‘And what about the rights of those children? Who are you to condemn them, and their children, to lives of servitude on this dismal world – all to serve your ludicrous, Heroic Generation-type scheme of galactic dominance?’

  Martha Pearson stood now. Yuri knew she came from old money on Hawaii; in her late thirties, she was tough, self-contained. ‘And what right do you have to condemn me and the other women here to lives as baby machines?’

  Onizuka stood too. The Peacekeepers began to look more uneasy. Onizuka said, ‘There’s a more basic problem. Whatever your plan was, you’ve left us with six men and four women. Who’s going to get who? Which men will be without a woman? Will you decide this before you fly back up to the sky?’

  McGregor responded by turning, almost gracefully, to a startled Mardina Jones. Without warning he’d taken her pistol from its holster. ‘Actually there will be five women. I’m sorry, my dear.’

  Mardina, still reflexively recording the whole exchange on her shoulder unit, looked startled. ‘What the hell are you doing, Lex?’

  ‘You’re staying. Look, we had a conference about it, the other senior crew and I, under the Captain.’

  ‘A conference?’

  ‘Obviously we couldn’t consult with New New York, given the lightspeed lag. But we do have standing orders. Policies. If the numbers of the colonists fall due to wastage, and they have done, we are expected to make up the numbers by impressing members of the crew. This particular group needs more women. And, genetically speaking, you come from a group that is as remote from the rest as any on Earth—’

  ‘I’m an Aboriginal woman,’ she said, almost softly. ‘That’s why you’re doing this. Lex, have you any idea how I had to fight to build my career from a background like that, to get on that damn ship? And now, after all that, you’re going to dispose of me here, all because of what I am. An Aborigine, a woman.’

  ‘I’m sure with your practical skills, your training, you’ll be a fine addition to this pioneering group . . .’

  Yuri saw John Synge, Harry Thorne, Onizuka exchanging glances. The Peacekeepers tensed. Yuri, sensing trouble coming,
stood himself, grabbed Lemmy’s arm and pulled him behind his back.

  ‘Let’s get them,’ Onizuka said, quite calmly. ‘Let’s get off this fucking dump.’ And he picked up a rock and charged.

  Of course they had no chance. The charging men were felled in the first salvo of anaesthetic darts. McGregor himself took out Mardina immediately; she dropped to the ground in her smart astronaut uniform. Matt Speith ran away. Abbey Brandenstein, cuffed, in the dirt, just laughed.

  Then it looked as if Mattock was going to go for the women. When he raised a riot stick to Pearl Hanks, Lemmy yelled, ‘No!’, pulled away from Yuri, and ran forward.

  And Yuri followed.

  The two Peacekeepers seemed to have been waiting for him to give them an excuse. They charged straight at Yuri.

  Mattock was on him first, slamming him to the ground with a punch to the throat before Yuri had the chance to raise an arm to defend himself. ‘You’re the future of mankind, you little shit,’ Mattock snarled. And he kicked Yuri in the head.

  The ColU, administering simple medicine to the injured members of the group, brought Yuri round before the shuttle took off.

  Then Yuri sat with Lemmy and the others, including Mardina Jones, silent, clearly furious. They watched as the bird screamed back down the trail it had laid down across the dry lake bed and lifted effortlessly into the air.

  And then, as the undercarriage raised, something fell out of the port wing. It tumbled like a rag, buffeted by the shuttle’s slipstream, before falling to the ground and lying limp.

  Lemmy got up and looked hastily around the group, counting heads. ‘Who’s missing? Jenny. That was Jenny Amsler, stowing away in the wing. Stupid bitch.’

  ‘And then there were ten.’ Lemmy laughed, nervous, but nobody joined in.

  The shuttle turned its nose upwards and screamed up into the static light show that was the sky of Proxima c.

  CHAPTER 14

  2155

  ‘This is Angelia 5941. This voice message, which is expressed in non-technical language and contains personal comments as well as summaries of scientific and technological achievements, is intended for public release, and accompanies a more technical download.

  ‘Good morning, to Dr Kalinski, and to Bob and Monica and all my ground crew, and of course to Stef, my half-sister. I have calculated it will be dome-morning in the operations room in Yeats when this message reaches you, in nearly six days’ time.

  ‘Sixteen days after launch I am in an excellent state of health, and all subsystems are operating nominally.

  ‘I have now completed my cruise through the outer reaches of the solar system. Strictly speaking I entered interstellar space about a day after the microwave beam cut-off at the end of acceleration. At that point I passed through the heliopause, the boundary where the thin wind that blows between the stars dominates over the weakening stream from the sun. But since then I have passed through many interesting domains: the radius of the sun’s gravitational focus, where light from distant stars collects, after ten days, and I emerged from the Kuiper belt of Pluto-like ice worlds some days after that. But I am still in the sun’s realm, for I am now passing through the mighty Oort cloud, a sphere of comets around the solar system which it will take me years to cross.

  ‘At this point my configuration changes. In the spaces between the stars there are dust and ice grains – this is known as the interstellar medium – it is sparse, but if I were hit by even a single grain significant damage could be done. Dexter Cole’s craft carried generators to power a mighty magnetic field and laser bank which shattered, electrically charged, and deflected any threatening grains. I, with much less power than was available to Cole, have a more passive defensive strategy.

  ‘I am designed to take up a new form. Actually I am made of programmable matter – essentially a form of smart carbon – and I can take any shape I like. I walked on Mercury in the form of a young woman. Here, on the edge of the Kuiper belt, I am like a tremendous radio-telescope dish. Now I will change again. I will fold down to a needle shape, with a one-square-centimetre cross section and a length of no less than a kilometre, and a density about that of water. I will be like a javelin, spearing straight at Proxima Centauri. And I myself, Angelia 5941, will be like a droplet of water lost in the bulk of that javelin. With such a small cross section, you see, the chances of my being damaged by a grain of dust are much reduced. Of course while I am in this “cruise mode”, without an antenna, I will not be able to communicate with Dr Kalinski.

  ‘I should say why I identify myself as Angelia 5941.

  ‘I am not one Angelia, but a million. Each of us is a sheet only a few tens or hundreds of atomic diameters thick – each of us virtually a single carbon molecule in the form of a hundred-metre disc. We were born in a facility at an Earth-moon Lagrange point, a point of gravitational stability in space, a place of dark and cold and quiet; we were peeled, one by one, from a tremendous mould, given our own identities, and then united.

  ‘Each of us separately, though each massing no more than a droplet of water vapour in a fog, has capabilities. Each of us has sentience. In a sense my entire structure is a kind of neural net, and I began learning from the moment I was “born”. Our separate sentiences were merged for a while, for my journey to Mercury and during my time there living in the human world, and then to receive the microwave acceleration pulse at launch. But our individuality survived this merging, and the de-merging that followed.

  ‘The ability we have to peel off copies of ourselves will be essential when we arrive at Proxima. I know this much about the later stages of the mission, but little else; the software updates concerning deceleration and system exploration are to be downloaded into me later, after further refinement during my ten-year cruise.

  ‘But the facility is to be used during the cruise also, for communication purposes. Some of my multiple selves have been cast away from the main body of the craft, combining to form a reflecting dish much wider than any of us individually. With this I can pick up messages from home, and send replies. Also my scattered sisters collect the energies of the thin, sparse sunlight that reaches this remote radius, and use that to power my systems, including comms. Those cast-off sisters sacrificed themselves for this purpose; pushed away by the sunlight they cannot return to the main body. From a million, we can spare a handful! And I am assured that these disposed-of copies have minimal sentience; they do not suffer in any meaningful sense.

  ‘You may ask why it is me, Angelia 5941, who addresses you. We discussed this, we Angelias, and ran a lottery based on a random-number programme, and I was selected as spokesperson. It is an honour I embrace.

  ‘I will wait for your reply, Dr Kalinski, before assuming my cruise profile. And then, like Dexter Cole before me, I will sleep between the stars until my next scheduled communications attempt . . .’

  ‘Is this on? Oh, I see.

  ‘This is George Kalinski. Good to hear from you, 5941. Your telemetry is coming through fine, and I can see that all your subsystems are functioning as they should. Good. Of course it will take another six days for this message to crawl back out to you. Monica, what time will it be when it gets there? Afternoon. OK. So, good afternoon from Mercury.

  ‘You know this is the last time we’ll speak to you from Mercury. Now you’re successfully launched we’re going to up sticks and relocate to a control room back on Earth, in New Zealand, in fact, in some nice mountainous country with a fine view of Alpha Centauri on a summer night. So the next time you speak to us – when the hell will it be? Anyhow that’s where we’ll be, so you can think of us there.

  ‘Michael King offered us a lift back to Earth on his damn kernel-driven hulk ship, but I’d rather walk back.

  ‘Look – in some ways the most dangerous part of the whole journey, the launch, all that microwave energy concentrated on your delicate structure, is already over. Your chances of coming to harm during the cruise are minimal. But in other ways the challenge of the mission has only jus
t begun, by which I mean the human challenge.

  ‘You know that they ran longevity experiments during the Heroic Generation age. Some of the resulting struldbrugs are still alive, even now, in the UN camps. Despite that, we humans still aren’t too good at running projects that require a long attention span. So we have to find ways to look after you, Angelia, over your decade-long cruise, and the years of exploration that will follow. I’ve done my best to establish a long-term institution here. I’ve tried to lock in the support staff with contracts and bonus structures, though I have my doubts how well that will work out. But I will be here, as long as I am able; and after me, I hope, Stef. Your half-sister, you called her! I like that.

  ‘And, listen to me. Now we have proved that this mission mode is feasible, now we have successfully launched you, I’m looking for funding to send more emissaries after you. After all, the infrastructure is here now, the power station, the lens. The solar power is free, and the incremental cost of manufacturing another you is tiny. It seems crazy not to use all this again. Enjoy Proxima, my dear. You won’t be alone out there for long, I promise.

  ‘Be patient with us mere mortals, Angelia, out there among the stars. And sleep tight.’

  CHAPTER 15

  2170

  Six months in from their stranding, or twenty-two Per Ardua years later, depending which way you looked at it, the colonists decided to mount an expedition to the northern forest belt.

  Four of them, Yuri, Onizuka, Lemmy and Martha, got themselves ready one morning, with packs on their backs and bottles of filtered water, and their crossbows, the only substantial weapons the shuttle crew had left them. They checked out the sky before leaving. They were learning how to read Proxima’s complex face for flare weather, as they called it. They figured they would be safe out in the open for a few hours.

  It was around six kilometres to the forest. They set off along a trail they had already been stamping out: a Forest Road that led off at right angles to the Shuttle Trail, the tremendous straight-line scrape the craft had left running from east to west. They came this way regularly to collect saplings from the forest edge for firewood, but today they were planning to go further. The land rose, gradually, as they headed north, leaving the lake behind. The ColU speculated that there was some kind of big geological event going on up here, a slow uplift across a whole province. Maybe. Sometimes Yuri thought he could smell sulphur, sourness.