Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  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?’

  ‘No. Lieutenant Jones. Who you saw stranded on this dump of a world at gunpoint. Similar to how you ended up here, I imagine. Stand down,’ she repeated more sternly.

  Mattock sighed, lowered his rifle, thumbed a safety. ‘All right. Welcome to Mattockville. You’d better follow me.’ He walked off, limping.

  The ColU excused itself and went rolling away to inspect the mysterious Arduan greenery. Its manipulator arms seemed to twitch with the excitement of sampling yet another alien-life mystery, Yuri thought.

  Yuri trotted up to walk beside Mattock. ‘Hey, Peacekeeper. Do you really call it Mattockville?’

  ‘No.’

  In the little homestead there were just three low dome-shaped shacks, set around a central area where a fire burned fitfully in the open air.

  People came out to see the newcomers, wary, cautious, the children wide-eyed at seeing new faces maybe for the first time in their lives. Yuri counted six adults, all white. They wore the usual remains of ISF-issue clothing, but defied the cold by padding their jumpsuits and overcoats with dried-out stem bark, so they looked like stuffed scarecrows as they waddled around. The little kids were especially comical, and they made Beth laugh.

  Mattock showed them to one of the domed dwellings. It was just a frame of stems lashed together somehow, covered over with a layer of blankets and then heaps of Arduan vegetable matter, presumably taken from the ground-covering plants. The visitors went on in, ahead of Mattock. The dome was empty of people. There were pallets and chests, and bundles of clothes stuffed beneath the walls. A hearth smoked, but no fire was lit. Yuri spotted a heap of dirty ship’s-issue crockery, but there seemed no place to cook in here; maybe that was done in another dome.

  Mardina said, ‘So this is what you can build if you don’t have to move every couple of years.’

  Yuri shrugged. ‘We’d have done better.’

  Mattock came after them into the crowded dome, followed by more adults, a woman, two men, who looked at the newcomers with a kind of nervous hostility.

  Mardina tugged open her coat. ‘Warm around here, even without the fire.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Delga. ‘Thought as much even outside. Even without the fire. What’s the game, Mattock? Sitting on top of a volcano?’

  He said gruffly, ‘You want tea?’

  Delga grinned. ‘If you’ve got any crew-issue coffee left I’ll take some of that.’

  ‘Not here,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Then don’t bother. Oh, here.’ Delga dug into her backpack and produced a bottle.

  Mattock took it cautiously. ‘What the hell’s this?’

  Mardina said, ‘Klein vodka, we call it. From potatoes. Take it easy if you’ve not been used to it. A neighbourly offering.’

  ‘We’d like the bottle back when it’s empty,’ Yuri said.

  ‘Hmph. Once I would have arrested the likes of you for carrying around illicit alcohol.’

  Delga grinned. ‘Sure you would, and then drunk it yourself.’

  Mardina said wearily, ‘Stow it, Delga. Look, Peacekeeper – why don’t you introduce us?’

  Mattock did so with poor grace. ‘Bill Maven, Andrei Allen, Nancy Stiles. Sit down, for Christ’s sake.’

  They sat on the floor, or on rickety chairs, trunks.

  Mardina introduced her group in turn. ‘You’re all passengers, right? Except for you, Mattock.’

  ‘I remember your face,’ Yuri said to Andrei Allen. ‘From the ship.’

  Allen shrugged indifferently.

  ‘I remember you,’ Nancy Stiles said to Mardina.

  Mardina answered cautiously, ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘You never did me any harm, even if you were an astronaut. And anyhow, you’re not an astronaut any longer, are you? Not since they cast you down here with us. Any more than Tom Mattock here is a Peacekeeper, even if he does put on the uniform when he thinks strangers are going to show up.’

  Delga laughed. ‘Really, Tom?’

  ‘You’re the first that ever has, though, since the split.’

  Yuri wondered: the split?

  Mardina said, ‘I’m guessing you didn’t volunteer to stay down here, Mattock.’

  ‘Nah. In this drop group there was a fatality on the way down, I mean in the shuttle itself. Heart attack, out of the blue, triggered by the deceleration. One of the men. I was the closest genetic match, according to the bastards who worked out those things on the Ad Astra. So I had to stay. Just like you, Lieutenant.’

  Delga laughed again. ‘Stories like that make my own shit life worthwhile. You always were a butthole, Mattock, and you got what you deserved.’

  Mattock scowled back. ‘How many in your group?’

  ‘About fifty,’ Mardina said. ‘A good number of children, some of them nearly grown – well, you saw one outside, my daughter.’

  ‘Our daughter,’ Yuri said gently.

  ‘Fifty. Jesus.’

  ‘And you,’ Yuri said, ‘are, what, six adults?’

  Delga asked, ‘So what happened to the other eight, Tom? Murder them in their beds, did you?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Andrei said. ‘They went their way, we went ours.’

  Mardina frowned. ‘They?’

  ‘We’re white. They weren’t. All sorts of shades, but none of ’em like us. Didn’t want them fathering our kids . . . We didn’t do them any harm. They went their way, we went ours,’ he said again.

  ‘That was the split you talked about,’ Yuri said.

  Mattock just nodded.

  They had come across this before. Many of the already tiny parties the Ad Astra shuttle had brought down seemed to have splintered further, separating out by race, usually, or sometimes by religion, or sexual orientation.

  ‘Well,’ Delga said gleefully, ‘we’re all sorts, in our fifty. And our kids are a mixture too. What do you call your Beth, Mardina? A muda-muda. A half-caste. That’s us. Just a big bunch of mixed-up muda-mudas.’ She laughed again, showing her teeth. ‘We’re going to get along just fine with you white boys.’


  ‘Don’t pay her any attention,’ Yuri said. ‘She likes stirring up trouble. We’ll get by.’

  ‘Oh no, we won’t,’ snapped Mattock. ‘You people can just keep right on moving. Pass through our land if you want, but you ain’t stopping here.’

  ‘ “Our land”?’ Delga murmured menacingly.

  Andrei Allen leaned forward. ‘We found this place. We came trekking down the river just like you . . .’

  ‘Good God,’ Mardina murmured. ‘Did nobody stay where McGregor put them?’

  ‘We were trying to get away from the cold, the winter. And we found this place, and it stayed that bit warmer—’

  ‘How come?’ Mardina asked.

  Delga shook her head. ‘These hayseeds don’t know, astronaut. No use asking.’

  ‘We planted our crops and we built our homes and we raised our kids, and we’re not going anywhere,’ Allen said.

  ‘And we’re not sharing,’ Mattock said fiercely.

  Mardina stayed calm. ‘There are fifty of us, Tom, and a half-dozen of you. I reckon that if we decide to stick around here you won’t have much choice about it.’

  Delga laughed again. ‘Might is right, huh, Peacekeeper?’

  Mattock glared back, red-faced. He’d been a bully on the ship, Yuri remembered, and was no doubt a bully in this little community now, lording it over his fellow colonists. A bully who was now being defied. Yuri was aware that he still had his rifle.

  Just at that moment of tension Beth stuck her head in the door. ‘I know,’ she said brightly.

  Mardina asked warily, ‘You know what?’

  ‘Why it’s warmer here, in this place. I heard you arguing.’

  ‘We weren’t arguing—’

  ‘The ColU worked it out. Come and see!’

  The ColU rolled cautiously across the land colonised by the Arduan-green sheets, sticking to open ground. ‘It’s typical of Arduan life,’ it said. ‘These ground-covering “plants” aren’t plants at all. They’re kites!’

  Beth, Yuri and Mardina followed, treading carefully. They had come maybe half a kilometre from the domes of Mattock’s settlement. From here they had a clear view of the river confluence, the two valleys snaking off to the south. And they were surrounded by alien life.

  Cautiously the ColU extended a manipulator arm to prod a nearby growth, right at the junction point of its three sprawling ‘leaves’. The leaves fluttered and shook and rose up, and Yuri saw, yes, it was one end of a kite, and a nearby triple leaf was the other end, a big, fat clumsy kite with the characteristic six vanes of its kind. The vanes trailed tendrils, grubby threads anchored to the ground. Disturbed, the kite shook itself free of the grasping tendrils, flapped and whirled its vanes, and took off, clattering noisily away through the air until it was out of reach of the ColU. It came to a relatively open patch of ground where it settled again and spread out its vanes, snapping them open with what looked like irritation.

  A cloud cleared, and the light of Proxima beat down almost vertically on the ground cover. There was a creak of shifting leaves, they barely moved, but Yuri somehow sensed the kites were basking.

  ‘Those trailing threads are some kind of roots,’ the ColU said. ‘Made up of chains of small, jointed stems.’

  ‘It’s the light, isn’t it?’ Mardina said. ‘It’s all about access to the light.’

  ‘Yes. We’re seeing a local adaptation to the position of the star, and maybe the winter. Life on this world always competes to grab as much of the light flow of the parent star as it can. Up in the north, approaching the terminator, you can best do that by becoming a tree, growing tall and angling your big leaves at the unmoving sun. Here, Proxima is almost directly overhead. You don’t need to go to all the expense of growing a trunk; you can just cover the flat ground and let the light beat down on you. And as long as you maintain that cover, nothing else can take root and grow over you.’

  ‘And if it does,’ Beth said, ‘you can just hop up and fly away to somewhere safer.’

  ‘That’s true, Beth,’ the ColU said. ‘But it seems wasteful to maintain a whole animal metabolism just for that. I believe this sessile mode is an adaptation for the star winter. When the energy is low, all you want to do is lie there and soak it up. When the “summer” returns and there’s more energy around then you can take up flying again. I suspect it’s not just a behavioural adaptation but a genetic one; in changing conditions a new epigenetic expression can deliver rapid adaptations. These winter kites are probably quite different in form from their grandparents, the summer kites. And when the summer returns, the form will switch back again . . .’

  There was a distant rumble of thunder, from the south. Yuri, distracted, turned to look at the substellar point, that tremendous weather system, wondering if such a distant storm could throw thunder this far.

  ‘Yuri Eden?’

  ‘Sorry. Yeah, summer and winter kites. But what’s that got to do with Mattock being kept warm at night in his hovel?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Another clever feature of this life mode. The surfaces of these leaves are a few degrees warmer than their surroundings; they reradiate some waste heat. And this patch of Arduan greenery is so extensive that it’s actually created a local hotspot. It’s a typical ecological feedback loop: the more the plants grow, the more ground they cover, the more they generate the heat that helps them grow.’

  ‘But is it a big hotspot?’ Yuri asked. ‘Will we be able to grow our crops here?’

  ‘I believe so,’ the ColU said. ‘Perhaps we could even encourage the hotspot to spread. Get the kites to breed, or even corral wild ones. The star winter cannot last for ever. Perhaps we can weather it here . . .’

  As Mardina questioned it further, Yuri found his attention drawn again to the south.

  Beth grabbed her father’s arm. ‘Dad? You aren’t listening.’

  ‘Hmm? Sorry, honey. I keep looking at the big weather system over there. It’s just – Beth, we’ve come so far since you were born. This endless trek. You know, the ColU has figured we’ve crossed thousands of kilometres. I mean, the shuttle from the Ad Astra could have covered that in a few minutes. But we had to do it on foot. Carrying our babies.’

  She snorted. ‘And now those babies are carrying you.’

  ‘And we did it knowing that we wouldn’t even find any food to eat; every time we moved we didn’t just have to grow our own food, we had to create the very soil to do it. There can’t have been a trek like it in human history before.’

  ‘Except that everybody else we found was doing the same thing.’

  ‘That’s true. Everybody heading to the substellar, to escape the winter. Everybody heading for that—’ he pointed south ‘—the centre of everything. The navel of the world. Right under the sun . . . We’re getting so close. I’m finding it hard to care much about these kites.’

  ‘Let’s go and see what we can see.’ She linked her arm in his, as she used to when she was younger, and they walked away, leaving Mardina and the ColU and the ground-dwelling kites.

  Father and daughter walked together along the riverbank, heading south. They continued to try to avoid treading on the kite-leaves that plastered the ground. The green cover started to break up maybe a kilometre from the ColU.

  Then Yuri stopped dead. There was something on the ground, right at his feet.

  ‘Dad? You’ve gone quiet again.’

  He looked at her. Then he pointed down, at what he’d found in the dirt, at their feet.

  A tyre track. Not from a ColU, so not created by Mattock’s people. It snaked away from here, following the river, heading straight for the substellar point.

  ‘There’s somebody in there,’ Yuri breathed.

  CHAPTER 49

  The sighting of that track changed everything for the wanderers. They had to follow it, of course.

  They spent a year at the Mattock Confluence, as they called it, resting, raising a crop, preparing. A whole year.

  Then they began their trek to the substellar point
. The weather grew warmer yet, until it passed the norm they remembered from before the star winter, and they shucked off their cold-weather clothes and raised warm-climate crops, and moved on, heading steadily south.

  The trek took them two more years.

  CHAPTER 50

  2193

  For the last few hundred kilometres, the land rose steadily. The river valleys they had followed since the Mattock Confluence became narrower, with steeper walls and beds of tumbled, broken rock: they were gouges cut through country that was increasingly hilly, and at times mountainous. Forest crowded the valleys, clumps of squat, sturdy, wind-resistant, fast-growing trees with wide leaves turned up hungrily to the perpetually cloudy sky. The character of the country was quite different from the plains that seemed to cover much of the continent that dominated the starward face of Per Ardua, the plains across which they had trekked to get here.

  They climbed further, and found lakes nestling in the hills, fed by streams tumbling from the still higher ground ahead, choked by stem beds. And on the slopes above that there was little but a smear of Arduan lichen, with a few mobile bands of builder-like motiles or kites working the rare stem beds. The ColU speculated that the life up here, sparse as it was, was taking advantage of the relatively clement conditions of the star winter. Without the drop in temperature brought about by the big reduction in the star’s heat output, this high country would be unliveable for all but heat-loving extremophile-type life forms.

  And on they climbed, into this strange, fractured upland. The valleys became narrower, steeper-walled, the river flows more energetic. They had to walk single file at times, and in the narrowest valleys they had trouble with their baggage train.

  Yuri’s ColU was put to work guiding its lobotomised fellows, which were being used as trucks, dragging their pallets of food and precious topsoil behind them. It had developed a system of communication and control with trailing fibre-optic cables, which periodically got hung up on rocks or stem clumps, and Beth and Freddie organised parties of children to help out.

  ‘But they are in continual pain,’ the ColU told Mardina and Yuri. ‘The physical pain of the brutal surgery they underwent. Pain they do not deserve, pain they can never understand. For they are still conscious, oh yes.’