Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  There was hardly any light now, and he could hear the little builder and its fellows running around in the dark with a chattering rustle of stems. Suddenly, here in the dark with these strange creatures, he had a deep, almost phobic reaction; he had to get out of here. He felt for his slate and his pack and backed out into the bright air.

  He was still on his hands and knees when the little builders came swarming out after him and scattered.

  He got to his feet and followed the smallest, the one he had handled. It made straight for the dense bed of stems where the adult had headed. When he caught up, the adult was standing stock-still, the little one at its side, in the middle of the stem bed. The adult seemed to be facing Yuri, who slowed to a halt.

  The ground was slick underfoot, he saw, the mud here thick with lichen, from which the stems were growing. The stems themselves came up to his waist. They were an unusual kind, darker, flatter, more like blades than the usual tube-like structures, yet still substantial, still no doubt filled with marrow. The adult had been collecting them, he saw; it had specimens at its feet, carefully detached from the lichen bed and lain down.

  And on every stem, facing him, growing from the muddy ground, a single eye opened.

  That was too much for Yuri. He turned and ran, and didn’t stop for breath until he was halfway back to the camp.

  CHAPTER 25

  When he got back, Yuri found the ColU and Mardina in the middle of an argument.

  He blurted out his news. ‘They’re intelligent! They use tools! They have eyes! This is first contact, isn’t it?’ To his dismay nobody was interested in his discoveries.

  Before the half-built house the ColU rolled backwards and forwards in the dirt, an odd little habit it had developed, especially when it faced a stressful decision. Mardina sat on a fold-out stool hacking at scrawny potatoes with a knife, slicing them up and then dropping them skin and all into a pot. She had bare legs and feet; she wore cut-down jeans that had once belonged to Martha Pearson, and her curly black hair was pulled back from her forehead. She looked wiry, tough, resilient, practical. She also looked angry.

  The ColU at least tried to engage with Yuri over his discoveries. ‘The eye-leaves feature is fascinating, yes. Convergent evolution in action. Of course there must be eyes; eyes developed many times independently on Earth, with no fewer than nine separate designs—’

  ‘Oh, keep the lecture,’ Mardina snarled. ‘You stupid tin box. Who cares about you? Everything you know is useless, valueless, everything you say.’

  Yuri sat on the ground and sipped water from his pack. ‘What’s going on? Why are you arguing?’

  ‘Ask that,’ Mardina said, making a stabbing motion with her knife.

  ‘A word,’ the ColU said, with a good approximation of a sigh. ‘We are fighting over a single word. Yet a word which encapsulates a fundamental conceptual issue.’

  Yuri thought about that. ‘I don’t know what a fundamental conceptual issue is.’

  Mardina said, ‘It won’t have me calling this shack of ours a wuundu. Even though that’s what the bloody thing is.’

  ‘But the word is inappropriate,’ the ColU said patiently. ‘Because, as I understand it, the word means “shelter”, in the sense of something temporary. This is not temporary. This is not a shelter. It is a house. It is your home.’

  ‘Of course it’s temporary. Everything here is temporary.’

  Yuri thought he understood. ‘You’re talking about the pickup. Everything is temporary, because all we have to do is survive until the pickup by ISF.’

  Mardina shrugged, glaring down at her potatoes.

  ‘There will be no pickup,’ the ColU said. ‘Not soon. Not ever. You heard what Major McGregor said. There will be no return of the Ad Astra, no follow-up expedition.’

  ‘I can’t accept that,’ Mardina said simply. ‘Look around. Everybody’s dead, except us. We fucked up, collectively; we killed each other off, all but. You can’t build a colony out of two people, no matter how many kids I have with this scrawny refugee, how many of our little muda-mudas end up running around. I know the ISF. They might deny they’re watching us, but . . . There’ll be a pickup. We won’t be left here to die.’

  ‘You are simply wrong in the premises of your argument,’ the ColU said patiently. ‘The two of you do have significant genetic diversity to found a colony.’

  Mardina seemed outraged. ‘What the hell are you talking about? Adam and Eve was a myth, you joker.’

  ‘No. In the literature there is a case of a camel drover who came to Australia from the Punjab, called “the Afghan”. He took an Aboriginal woman for his wife, and they went into the outback . . . In the end he sired children even by his own granddaughter. And six of eight of the great-grandchildren survived. More recently there has been a remarkably similar case on Mars, where—’

  Mardina looked as if she was about to explode. ‘That’s monstrous. And besides I was briefed on the anthropology stuff. I would have heard about this.’

  ‘Not all of it. Among the crew you were a priority type, genetically. A reserve colonist, so to speak. It was thought best to limit your briefing, no doubt. Lieutenant Jones, the Aboriginal population was isolated from the rest for tens of thousands of years, and so the two of you are about as genetically diverse from each other as two humans could possibly be. In fact, if this situation had been devised for an optimal outcome, it could not have been more—’

  ‘I don’t care about the genetics. This is like one of those horror stories you read, about fathers locking up their daughters in basements as sex slaves. And now you’re telling me it’s UN policy?’

  The ColU said solemnly, ‘The UN is locked in rivalry with China. Proxima must be taken before the Chinese get here. This is the only way to do it. You are soldiers in an as yet undeclared war. So will your children be.’

  Mardina stood, brushed dirt from her legs, and picked up the pan of potatoes. ‘This isn’t going to happen, ColU. To hell with you. I am going to wait for the pickup, and if I die before it gets here, well then, I will die childless.’ She stuck her knife into the door jamb of the building. ‘And this is a wuundu, so get used to it.’ She walked away, carrying her pan.

  CHAPTER 26

  2165

  Angelia 5941 woke up with numbers rattling in her head. All around her, the sisters were stirring.

  This was the last waking. They would not sleep again, not until Proxima Centauri was reached. And the deceleration routines had now been uploaded to her. At last, Angelia 5941 fully understood the process; they all did. The numbers were brutal. A final betrayal by Dr Kalinski.

  Soon the ship would be as close to Proxima as it had been distant from the sun, after its initial four days of acceleration had been completed: about a hundred and thirty times as far as Earth was from the sun. The craft would have to be decelerated for another four days, to be brought safely to rest in the Proxima system. But this time there was no welcoming microwave-laser station to push them back, no Dr Kalinski coordinating the event, no well-trained controllers to guide them home. All there was in the target system was Proxima, and its light. And Angelia was going to have to use the energies of that light to slow down.

  The idea was simple. One by one the sisters would peel away. They would form up in vast arrays of lenses, and focus the light of Proxima on the remnant core ship. Just as Dr Kalinski’s microwaves had pushed Angelia out of the solar system, so the visible-light photons of Proxima would slow her down from her interstellar cruise.

  But Angelia was travelling terribly quickly, and the light of Proxima was feeble; Proxima was a red dwarf star with only a hundredth the luminosity of the sun. As the implications of the final software download percolated through the sisters’ minds, so the lethal statistics had soon become clear. To slow the remainder at thirty-six gravities, great throngs of sisters would have to be cast off in the first waves, where the mass to be slowed was greatest and the distance to Proxima was at its longest, to effect the deceleration
. More than a hundred thousand sisters would have to go, in the first moments alone. As the remnant core slowed, so the castaways would quickly recede from the ship, still sending back their light, until they had gone too far to be useful. Then the next wave would be released, and the next.

  All this was why, in fact, the castaways each had to be smart. Proxima was not only feeble, it was a star that flared and sputtered, and its light output was unpredictable. The castaways had to be able to adapt, to make optimal use of the uncertain light that reached them, gathering it to serve the cause, in the few seconds of their usefulness, before they were hurled away, spent.

  Eventually only one would remain, one sister, to go into orbit around Proxima, with a tremendous array of nearly a million mirror-sisters stretched out across a volume of space before her – all of them doomed to fly on past Proxima and into the endless dark, all save the one delivered to orbit. It was a nightmarish design: to deliver just one mirror-sister, atom-thin, with the mass of a mist droplet, nearly a million sisters would have to be sacrificed. But it would work.

  Angelia 5941 rejected the cruelty of it. But she could not stop it.

  She promised herself that if she survived, somehow, if she was the one, she would reject the goals of those waiting patiently on Earth for news of her arrival. She would formulate her own, more appropriate goals. And she would seek out the one being who might have some understanding of what she had gone through.

  She would find Dexter Cole.

  CHAPTER 27

  2173

  As the Arduan day-years rolled by, as the Earth months ticked off on their calendars, they extended their fields bit by bit: churning up the Arduan ground, scraping off layers of native life from the surface and shovelling them into the ColU’s reactors to be broken down into feedstock, spreading the ColU’s newly minted soil over the surface. Soon they had grass growing alongside the potatoes, spindly wheat, even a couple of precious apple trees, for now just skinny saplings a long way from producing edible fruit.

  They did some homesteading too. To replace their slowly disintegrating clothes they learned to make a kind of cloth, experimenting with fibres drawn from the bark of forest-fringe saplings; you could pull apart the fibres, beat them, weave them. Mardina was more creative, and she started experimenting with looms. She also made bark sandals, similar to a kind her people had once made from the bark of gum trees, she said, to give their feet a break from ISF-issue boots. Yuri contented himself with making coolie hats, crudely woven from strips of bark, but useful for keeping off Proxima’s light on the bad days. It was the kind of work that kept them busy in the hours they had to hide out in the storm shelter from the more violent flares.

  You couldn’t call this a colony any more, if it ever had been, Yuri thought. Not with just two people, one farm robot, zero future. But he got some satisfaction from the work even so. He was building something, after all, something new, on the face of this world that had never known the tread of a human foot until a few years back. And it was something he had built, and that was another thing that was new in the universe. He was twenty-seven years old now. Everywhere else he’d ever lived had been built and owned by somebody else, on Earth, on Mars.

  But to neither him nor Mardina, he suspected, would this ever feel like a home. It was a place where they were surviving, on this huge, static, empty world, with no sign of humanity anywhere, no movement save the pottering of the ColU, no sound but the alien noises of the local life, the flap of the kites over the forest canopy, the rustling of the builders by the lake. He and Mardina were as isolated on Per Ardua as Neil and Buzz in their lunar module on the lifeless moon.

  The ColU seemed content, however. It whirred around busily, inspecting the native life close up, concocting elaborate theories about the solutions produced by billions of years of evolution to the problem of how to exploit the energies of Proxima’s light.

  Yes, they kept busy. Yuri imagined that if they really were being watched by some corps of concealed ISF inspectors, as Mardina continued to seem to believe, they might be given good ratings for their progress.

  But inside his head, out of sight of any unseen cameras, unheard by any hidden microphones, there were days when Yuri felt overwhelmed by a kind of black depression. Maybe it was the static nature of this world, the sky, the landscape, the stubbornly unmoving sun. Nothing changed, unless you made it change. Sometimes he thought that all the work they were doing was no more meaningful than the marks he used to scribble on the walls of solitary-confinement cells in Eden. And when they died, he supposed, it would all just erode away, and there would be no trace they had ever existed, here on Per Ardua.

  He suspected Mardina felt the same, some of the time, maybe all of the time. He thought he could see it in the way she did her work, always competently, but sometimes with impatient stabs and muttered curses. He thought he could see it, the black cloud inside, even in the way she walked around the camp.

  But they never spoke about it.

  CHAPTER 28

  About two years after Synge’s killing spree, on a clear, bright Sunday, Yuri and Mardina decided to take a walk to go and see the builders around the Puddle. They had developed a habit of putting aside Sunday, as marked by their calendars, as a rest day. And the native life was a distraction for all three of them, the ColU included.

  So they pulled on their boots, and stuffed backpacks with filtered lake water and food, rain capes and coolie hats.

  The ColU was cautious as it scrutinised the patterns of flaring on Proxima’s broad face this morning. Yuri knew it was trying to improve its predictions of flare weather. When it issued a warning Yuri and Mardina generally listened; it was right perhaps sixty per cent of the time. But this morning, though it spent a long time staring at the star, the ColU issued no such warning.

  The ColU led them by a different trail than usual, longer, heading towards the landmark of the Cowpat, and passing other features, eroded bluffs of sandstone seamed by intrusions of granite or basalt. At one of these the ColU paused. It took samples in its grabber claws of rock, dirt, life forms, and pressed its pod of sensors against rock surfaces. It also had a drill like a mole that would burrow into the ground or beneath a rocky surface, moving independently, but trailing a fibre-optic cable to pass data back.

  All this work disturbed a kite that had been sheltering behind the bluff; it flapped away irritably. There seemed to be at least one solitary species of kite that lived apart from the great flocks of the forests and the lakes, and nested in the shelter of isolated rock outcrops like these.

  Mardina mused, watching the ColU work, ‘You look like a rover. On Mars or Titan. One of those rickety gadgets that they used to control from Earth. Crawling a few centimetres a day, year after year.’ She glanced at Yuri. ‘Maybe you remember them. Or saw them in the museums.’

  Yuri shrugged.

  ‘The analogy is apt,’ the ColU said. ‘You could say that in some regards I am a remote descendant of such probes. I have an onboard analysis suite, including, for example, a mass spectrometer so that I can determine the isotopic composition of samples of air or rock or water solutes. I have also improvised an incubation chamber where I am attempting to grow samples of Arduan life in controlled conditions. In that regard I am imitating the Vikings, early probes that landed on Mars and—’

  ‘What’s the point?’ Yuri snapped. ‘You’ll never be able to report any of this.’

  ‘Earth will recontact Per Ardua one day, though not, as Major McGregor promised, for a century at least. I will long have been terminated before then. But there is no reason to believe the results of my investigations will not survive; I have a number of hardened stores, which if deposited beneath a cairn or some other suitable monument—’

  Yuri laughed. ‘I’ll carve you a statue.’

  The ColU didn’t seem offended. ‘In any event my studies are of their very nature long term. I am endeavouring to establish the story of life on this world. Its origin and its relationship, if any, to
Sol life; the key stages of its development such as the emergence of photosynthesis, of multicellular life—’

  ‘A big statue, then. Anyhow you’re too curious, about the Arduan life. Too theoretical. You’re only supposed to be helping us exploit it.’

  ‘Artificial sentience, all sentience, is untidy, blurred at the edges; it is difficult to constrain curiosity, once imbued. That’s one of the reasons the big AIs constructed in the age of the Heroic Generation would now be considered illegal. Indeed, to equip ColUs like myself for this expedition, the ISF and other off-world agencies were given special dispensation by the sentience-law regulators. And besides, Yuri Eden, I was programmed to support a minimum of fourteen colonists, soon growing in number as the births began. I have the time to wonder.’

  ‘Oh, we aren’t stimulating enough for you?’

  ‘It is as if my mind expands to populate the emptiness. Is this a common property of sapience?’

  Yuri said brutally, ‘You only ever had twenty-five years, and the clock’s ticking, right? Then you’ll shut down and rust. And all the plans and dreams you’re cooking up under that plastic dome and in your expanding mind will just be lost for ever, forgotten.’

  ‘All mortal creatures must face termination. Yuri Eden, I’m surprised you speak to me this way. Is it because I am a made thing? I mean, made by humans. A golem, of sorts. In myth, such creatures are always less than human, because they are one step further from God. Is that how you see me, Yuri Eden?’

  ‘I see you as a symbol of the blind, stupid powers who thought it was a good idea to dump me and Mardina on this alien world.’