‘In the meantime . . .’
Suddenly Angelia 5941 had a brutally clear memory of her own dreams, while supposedly entirely unconscious, immersed with the rest in the kilometre-long javelin form of the interstellar cruise mode. In her dreams she had been the one separated from the rest. She the one cast off and then discarded from the community. She the one banished to die in space. She emitting those horribly familiar wails.
‘I feel . . .’
The castaways had no mind, she had been told. They were ants, their purpose only to serve the community. They could not feel, they could not long. They could not dream!
She could not dream.
But she did dream. Just like the castaways.
‘I feel very far from home. I hope Dr Kalinski is keeping his spirits up. I calculate that this message will reach you on the fifteenth birthday of Stef Kalinski. Please give her my regards. It is to my regret that she chose not to communicate with me after those first few years. I would welcome her company . . .’
Now that struggling castaway found a full voice, and called to her sisters. ‘Let me back! Oh, let me back!’
CHAPTER 19
2171
Yuri and John Synge were out in the Puddle, in their plastic waders, nearly up to their waists in tepid, mildly salty water. The sky was overcast, with only a faintly brighter glow to betray the position of Proxima.
They were raking in seaweed.
It was not a native but a genetically modified laver, an immigrant from Earth. Eighteen months in from their stranding – and a year after the slayings – this seaweed was by far the most successful terrestrial colonist on Per Ardua. It had a tweaked photosynthetic mechanism to enable it to prosper under Proxima’s infrared-rich light: its Earth green was streaked with black. And it had been gen-enged for an aggressive stance towards the native life, breaking it down to acquire basic nutrients for itself.
The point of it was that the colonists could eat the seaweed almost as soon as they pulled it out of the lake. You could rinse it, wash it, boil it down to a mush that would keep for weeks; you could eat it cold, or boil it up or fry it. On Earth this was a very ancient food source, the ColU had said, in its patient, schoolmasterish synthetic voice. And it was a triumph of human ingenuity to have brought this useful organism all the way to Prox: a first stage in the gentle terraforming this world would need to make it fully habitable for mankind. Yuri thought there was a whiff of the Heroic Generation about all this, of his own era that was now so roundly condemned. Hypocrisy. He kept that thought to himself. Mostly the colonists chucked the seaweed into the ColU’s iron cow, to synthesise burgers.
Anyhow, from here, a few metres from the lake shore, Yuri could see how the laver’s more brilliant green was already spreading aggressively, pushing aside the native life. Take me to your leader, Yuri thought.
On the bank, too, the local organisms had been disturbed by the activities of mankind. Yuri and John had dumped their stuff, their boots and jackets and waterproof sacks for carrying the laver, a metre or so back from the water line, and they had crushed a few of the ubiquitous stems in doing so. Now three of the complex little entities they had come to call ‘builders’ were approaching their heap of equipment, as if curious.
Maybe a metre tall, the builders seemed to be the most common of the stem-based ‘animals’ on Per Ardua. Like the rest of the life forms here, the builders were structured to the usual tripod plan around a core of densely meshed stems, and were evidently assembled construction-kit fashion from stems of various lengths, attached at the joints by marrow, and by bits of skin-like webbing. They moved with tentative spins, one support stem after another touching gently down on the ground. The colonists called them ‘builders’ because they seemed to be associated with structures, what looked like dams and weirs at the mouths of the minor streams that fed this lake, and even what appeared to be shelters further back from the water.
Everything living was built out of stems here. Even the huge forest trees were stems grown large for the main trunk; even their leaves had proved to be nothing but more stems, specialised, distorted in form, jointed together, supporting a kind of webbing. The stems themselves, according to the ColU, were assembled from something like the cells that comprised terrestrial life. It was as if on Per Ardua complex life had developed by a subtly different route than on Earth. Rather than construct a complex organism direct from a multitude of cells, Arduan cells were first assembled into stems, and the life forms, from builders to trees to the big herbivores and carnivores of the plains and forest clearings, were all put together from the stems, as if fabricated from standard-issue components.
But the stems themselves were complex affairs. The marrow, the ubiquitous sap, wasn’t inert. The ColU had learned that some kind of photosynthesis was going on in there, the energy of Prox being absorbed by substances inside the stem – whereas most photosynthesising material on Earth life was on the outside of the body, to catch the light. You might have predicted that, because a good proportion of Prox’s radiation energy was in the infrared, heat energy which penetrated to the interior of massive bodies. The ColU had even found photosynthesising bugs below the surface of the ground.
And so, though some stem-based ‘animals’ were like herbivores, extracting energy and nutrients from the photosynthesising stromatolites, they were also like ‘plants’ themselves, in that they gathered energy directly from their sun, in the marrow in their own stem structures. It made sense; Proxima looked big because it was close up, but it was a smaller, dimmer star than Sol, it shed less energy, and life on Per Ardua would naturally make use of every scrap of that energy that it could. Classifications that worked on Earth didn’t map over easily to this world, where even ‘carnivores’ photosynthesised, and Yuri couldn’t see any reason why they should.
Now John picked up a big soggy lump of laver and threw it at one of the builders nosing around the equipment pile. He caught one square and it went down, one of its three big support stems snapping. But it rose again, and hobbled away. Oddly, Yuri saw, touchingly, the other builders waited for it, and they left together. The builders had shown curiosity, and then something like compassion, or cooperation at least.
He said to John, ‘What did you do that for?’
John laughed. ‘Because I can. Because it’s better me chucking green shit at ET than the other way around. But then the ColU does say we’re more highly evolved than anything on Per Ardua, doesn’t it?’
Yuri considered before answering. You had to be careful what you said to John these days, especially since Martha, his lover, had died of her bone cancer a few months before. ‘Not more evolved, John. Differently evolved. That’s what the ColU says.’
‘What does that lump of pig iron know? There’s no Gaia here. That’s what he told me.’
‘Yes, but . . .’
Yuri, a child of the Heroic Generation on Earth, had grown up learning about planetary ecology and environment before he had learned about soccer or girls. ‘Gaia’ was an archaic shorthand for the great self-regulating systems that maintained life on Earth, through huge flows of minerals and air and water, all driven by the energy of the sun and mediated by life. Over the aeons Earth’s sun was heating up, and Gaia had evolved to cope with that; by adjusting the amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Gaia acted like a tremendous thermostat to keep the temperatures on the planet’s surface stable, and equable for life.
But Proxima was not like the sun, and Per Ardua was not like Earth.
‘Per Ardua doesn’t need a Gaia,’ Yuri said now. ‘Proxima is stable. Red dwarf stars don’t heat up, not for trillions of years. That’s what McGregor told us. So on Per Ardua, life settled into a sort of optimal state, with all the Prox light used as efficiently as possible. And now it just sort of sits there.’
John stabbed and poked at the drifting seaweed. ‘So you’re saying Prox life is somehow superior to our sort?’
‘I don’t see why you’ve got to sa
y one is better than the other. They just found different solutions in different environments.’
John straightened up, breathing hard, and inspected Yuri. ‘Yeah, but we built the starship, didn’t we? Not those stick insects over there. We came here; they didn’t come to Earth.’
Yuri shrugged.
‘You know, you’re a puzzle to me, Yuri. To all of us, I guess. We kind of forget the way you’re out of your time. Or I do anyhow. But you have this weird accent – I know a few Brits, I mean North Brits and those southerners who all speak French, and none of them talk quite like you do . . . Come on, you can tell me. I mean, it wasn’t your fault that you were stuck in that cryo tank, was it? You were only a kid at the time.’
Uneasily, Yuri said, ‘I was nineteen. I had to give my consent.’
John snorted. ‘I’m a lawyer, kid. Was a lawyer. Parents or guardians can make you do anything at nineteen, no matter what the law says about consent. They put you under pressure to get in that box, didn’t they? They sent you off into a future where they would be dead, and everybody you knew would be dead.’
‘They thought they were doing the right thing. Sending me to a better age.’
John shook his head. ‘That was the classic argument the Heroic Generation leaders always used. I was a law student at the time of the great trials. We were doing it for you, for the generations to come. That was what they said. It was hugely difficult ethically, because after all their solutions worked, mostly, in terms of stabilising the planet. It’s as if the world had been saved by a bunch of Nazi doctors. You ever heard of the Nazis? Look, you shouldn’t feel guilty about what your parents did, either to the world or to you. You’re a victim. No, you’re more like a kind of walking talking crime scene yourself. That’s the way you should think about it.’
Yuri said cautiously, ‘We’re all victims, John, if you want to put it like that. All of us stuck here on Per Ardua.’
Evidently Yuri had got the mood wrong. From being friendly and familiar, even over-familiar, John’s mood swung abruptly to anger, as it so often did. ‘So I’m a victim, am I? You share my pain, do you? But it doesn’t feel that way to me. Not in the night, under that endless non-setting fucking sun up there.’ He glared at Yuri. ‘You and Mardina.’
‘There is no me and—’
‘Is that why you hung back, eh? When we all paired off. Waiting for the prize, were you?’
‘No—’
‘What can you know, a kid like you from an age of monsters? Don’t presume that you can ever feel as I feel, that you can ever understand. Oh, screw this.’ He hurled his rake at the shore, scattering more of the tentatively curious builders, stalked out of the water and pulled off his waders.
Yuri waded after him. By the time he’d got to the shore, John was already heading off back towards the camp.
Yuri had never quite understood John Synge.
Synge had been a lawyer specialising in intergovernmental treaties before he had somehow been caught up in a corruption scam, and had ended up in the off-world sweep as a way of escaping a prison sentence. John had moved in a supremely complex world a century remote from Yuri’s own time, and Yuri barely understood any of the terms he used, or the issues he addressed. ‘You’re like a Neanderthal trying to understand patent law,’ was how Martha Pearson had once unkindly put it to him.
Then Martha had died.
The cancer had been in the bone, a very aggressive kind. Maybe it was a result of the time she’d spent on Mars, or in the sleeting radiations of interstellar space; maybe one of the flares on Prox had caused it; maybe it was something she had been born with. Whatever, it wasn’t treatable by the functional but limited autodoc capabilities of the ColU. All it could offer was palliative care, and even that was limited. Though John had threatened it with dismantlement with a crowbar, the ColU continued to maintain that it couldn’t call for help, it had no radio transmitter, and there was nobody to call anyhow, the Ad Astra was long gone. Even Mardina was furious; even Mardina, an ISF officer dumped here with the rest, seemed to think the astronauts must have maintained some kind of presence here, and the ColU had to be lying.
And so Martha had died, stoically enough, adding another grave to the small plot they had started.
The funeral, such as it was, had been odd. Nobody here seemed particularly religious, or if they were they had kept quiet about it when the time came to speak over Martha’s body.
The ColU had surprised everybody by rolling forward. ‘She was one of us. Now she gives her Earthborn body to the soil of this new world. She will live on, in the green life to come, under the light of another star . . .’
John had shot it a look of venomous hatred.
Since then John’s mood swung daily, from manic hilarity to over-familiarity to sullen silence to spiky aggression. They had all tried to find ways of coping with him. But they had all shrunk back from him, Yuri thought.
Only five left: Yuri, Mardina, John, Abbey, Matt. You couldn’t even maintain the illusion that this was somehow the seed of a colony, a city of the future, a new world. They were castaways in this place, and after a life of toil, short or long, they were all going to die here, and that was that. The name Mardina had impulsively given to the place seemed ever more fitting. Through adversity, to the grave. John had a right to be difficult. Why the hell not? Effectively, they were all dead already.
Yuri packed up the last of the gear, and the haul of laver, and headed for camp.
CHAPTER 20
Twenty-four hours later the ColU approached Yuri, almost shyly, and asked him to accompany it to one of its test sites to the north.
Though no native life forms had posed a threat so far, they had a rule that nobody left the camp alone, and certainly not the ColU, for they couldn’t afford to lose it. Yuri had some transit sightings to make anyhow. So he pulled on his walking boots, got together a pack of water and dried food, and set off alongside the robot, following the Forest Road to the north.
As they left the little settlement they passed the ColU’s fields, where the robot was manufacturing terrestrial-type soil. A robot, a supreme artefact of a high-tech star-spanning civilisation, making something as humble as soil – it had seemed like a joke to Yuri when he’d first heard about this, but he’d come to understand it was a minor biotech miracle, and essential for their survival here on Per Ardua.
No plant from Earth could flourish in native Arduan dirt. Given enough time, lichen from Earth would break down bare rock to make usable soil, but the colonists didn’t have that much time. So the ColU took in that Arduan dirt, and baked it and treated it chemically to adjust its levels of iron, chloride and sulphide salts. Then it seeded the dirt with a suite of terrestrial bugs: sulphur-reducing bacteria, then cyanobacteria to fix carbon from carbon dioxide, and nitrogen fixers to process the atmospheric gas into ammonia and various nitrates usable for life. The colony’s own waste was fed in, together with compost-starter bacteria to get it to decompose. In the end the ColU even built up the complex structure of the soil, layer by layer, with fine manipulators on the end of its mechanical arms. The colonists joked about how it was coaxing earthworms into the new ground.
Of course the Arduan dirt was actually ‘soil’ already: native soil, supporting native life forms. These were of no use to the colonisation project. They couldn’t even be eaten. The native creatures were eradicated, or broken down into basic nutrients to support the suite from Earth.
The first soil beds were already bearing a crop, gen-enged potatoes, their leaves stained black by their adjusted Prox-friendly photosynthetic chemistry. The spindly roots were nutritious enough but they tasted odd to Yuri, faintly acidic maybe, and with a powdery texture. Potatoes, which after all had originated in the Andes, were a useful crop, robust enough to grow at altitude, or in the cold and damp. You could produce several harvests a year. And potatoes, it seemed, provided all nutrients essential for a human diet except vitamins A and D, and the seaweed helped with that. But the ColU was experime
nting with other Earth crops, some gen-enged, that might be suited to the conditions. Strawberries, that required less light to flower than some plant species, and so were preadapted for Proxima’s feebler daylight. Wheat, flexible crops like soya beans, sweet potatoes, ready-to-eat salad crops like lettuce and spinach.
The ColU told Yuri, and anybody who would listen, that they really were pioneers in a new way of living, here on Per Ardua. On Earth, humans lived in a kind of sea of other organisms, including the bacteria that lived inside and outside their own bodies. Even in a dome on Mars you were living in a kind of closed sample of that wider sea, a droplet. Here, they were trying to recreate that sea of Earth life in an open environment, on an alien world. It scared Yuri to hear that nobody really knew how much of that bacterial sea you actually needed, in the long term, to survive.
And it pissed off everybody else to hear the ColU, and sometimes Mardina, speak of long-abandoned plans for further flights to bring animals out here, perhaps in iron wombs.
It was all marvellous – but somehow fantastically dull at the same time. It was only, after all, soil. The fact that they all seemed doomed to be dead and gone in a few decades, no matter how ingenious the ColU was, made it seem even more futile. Sometimes Yuri felt sorry for the ColU, which wanted to talk about its achievements and discoveries, but there was usually nobody who wanted to listen.
Now, for example, as they walked, the ColU essayed a conversation. ‘You are preparing to make astronomy observations, Yuri Eden.’
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