Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  Liu grinned. ‘And so you put on your uniforms and you act like good boys before the cameras, for the bosses that abandoned you. Because maybe good boys will get picked up after all. Right?

  ‘In fact our log shows—’

  ‘I bet it doesn’t show what goes on in the dark,’ Delga said. ‘When you put these big floodlights out, and crawl into your bunks. We all need comfort.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Brady.

  Delga said, her voice a slithery hiss, ‘Which one of you’s the bitch?’

  Suddenly Tollemache was at her back. He wrapped his big arm around her throat, and squeezed. Somehow, though she clearly couldn’t breathe, Delga kept smiling.

  ‘Let her go, Peacekeeper,’ Liu said.

  ‘Just remember,’ Tollemache hissed in Delga’s ear, ‘we’re the ones with the guns. Never forget it.’ And he released her.

  She slumped forward, coughing. Beth ran to her, and rubbed her back to help her breathe.

  Cautiously they sat at the table once again. ‘So,’ Liu said, ‘all these years you’ve sat in this tin can. When all the time you’ve got the discovery of the century sitting in the jungle an hour’s walk away.’

  Brady frowned. ‘What’s he talking about?’

  And Yuri told them about the hatch.

  CHAPTER 56

  They rested for a couple of hours. They ate more ISF food.

  They took showers, their first since being bundled out of the Ad Astra all those years ago. Mardina seemed to love it. Yuri couldn’t stand the stink of the soap. Beth hated it, evidently, hated being in this box of metal and fake light. Yuri felt a twinge of sadness that she’d probably never learn to enjoy the Earthside advanced-civilisation-type luxuries he and her mother had grown up with; she could never be pampered. But then she had her own pleasures, her own place, here on Per Ardua.

  Then, none of them ready for sleep, they formed up a party to go and take another look at the hatch. What else could they do?

  Tollemache said he would lead. Yuri guessed he wanted to compensate somehow for letting him and Liu Tao run ahead earlier, and make ‘his’ discovery for him. Yuri would go along, one of the two original discoverers, to be sure they found the way back. Mardina wanted to take a turn to go and see. And Beth was coming, Mardina was firm about that; she had seen the looks passing between these strange, obsessive old crewmen in their rusty hull in the jungle, and she wasn’t about to let her daughter out of her sight for a second.

  They would take the ColU too. Yuri argued that the ColU’s translation skills with the builders could be vital; after all it was the builders that had led him and Liu to the hatch in the first place.

  Tollemache accepted, but with bad grace. ‘Translation? That thing is designed to eat grass and shit out burgers, period. And the fucking woodies are just fucking woodies. What the hell has been going on with you people out there?’

  Tollemache drove the party in the ISF rover, guided by Yuri, with Beth and Mardina on board. He smashed flat the undergrowth, even battering down a few mature trees, to leave a way open for the ColU which rolled complacently behind.

  For Yuri, it was almost comfortable to get out of the hull and to breathe the dense, wet, warm, heavily scented air of Per Ardua again. It wasn’t as if he was at home out here, not exactly. But more so than being back in the carcass of what, for him, had been a prison ship.

  At the site Tollemache parked up, and they walked into the clearing. The ColU rolled quietly after them, sensor pod extended, studying the ground.

  The hatch, set in its panel in the clearing, was just as they had left it.

  Tollemache wore his ice-filled outer suit once more, and he had a kind of camera unit on his shoulder and a science sensor pack in one hand, with links back to the hull base. ‘For the official record,’ he said.

  Mardina snorted. ‘Or so you can claim the official credit.’

  Yuri would have led the way forward, but Mardina touched his arm, prompting him to let Beth go ahead.

  Beth walked alone into the brighter light of the clearing, without apparent fear. She stood over the hatch itself, staring around, gazing at the cover of the hatch with its curious trefoil-groove starburst markings. There was a breeze, hot and clammy; it ruffled her short-cut hair.

  ‘I have no idea what’s going on in her head,’ Yuri murmured to Mardina. ‘She’s been exposed to so much newness, all in a rush. How can she possibly take it all in? It must be knocking her world to pieces.’

  ‘She’s been on the road all her life,’ Mardina said. ‘It’s all been new to her. Just as it has for us. I think she’s going to be fine. And look . . .’

  Almost shyly, builders were emerging from the forest fringe, around the hatch. One by one they skirted the hatch itself, and clambered with cautious pirouettes over the mounds of dirt created earlier by their rough digging-out of the hatch. Yuri counted seven, eight, nine of them. And the builders came up to Beth, spinning, shaking their stem limbs – dance-talking, in the builders’ characteristic way. Beth responded in the way she’d grown up learning instinctively, with simple steps and spins that echoed messages of friendliness and welcome.

  Tollemache was recording all this. He shook his head. ‘Now I’ve seen everything.’

  Yuri ignored him. ‘ColU, you got anything?’

  The ColU was passing a sensor pod back and forth over the ground surface on the end of its long manipulator arm, like a heavy lure on a fishing rod. ‘There is evidence of extensive working in the surrounding area, Yuri Eden. It shows up clearly in my geophysical surveys, in a variety of ways, though invisible to the naked eye. As you see, the structure you call the “hatch” is embedded in a wider sheet of . . . a metal I cannot identify, some alloy. Ask Beth Eden Jones to stamp.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Ask her to stamp her foot. It is a simple request.’

  Yuri was baffled, but Mardina impatiently passed on the request.

  Beth looked puzzled too, but she stepped out onto the grey, gleaming surface, cautious in her bark sandals. ‘It’s not slippery,’ she said, testing it by sliding her foot. ‘Although it looks sheer.’ She raised her right foot and stamped, once, twice. Then she jumped up and down, slamming her feet back down on the surface. To her delight, the builders copied her, flexing their big support stems to leap up and clatter down like wooden toys.

  ‘Thank you,’ the ColU murmured. ‘I now have sonic and seismic data. Yuri Eden, the hatch, and the structure in which it is embedded, is not thick. A couple of centimetres, no more. And beneath it I can detect nothing. I mean, no cavities in the ground.’

  Mardina looked baffled. ‘So what does that mean? No alien treasure chamber?’ she said.

  ‘Evidently not.’

  ‘Then what is it all for?’

  ‘That remains to be determined . . . I told you there are extensive traces of workings in the ground here, all around the panel of which the hatch is the centrepiece, and in the ground further out. Very ancient traces, I should add. Little more than stains in the dirt, discolorations.’ The sensor pod brushed the ground, as if licking it, and returned all but invisible samples to an open flap in the ColU’s hull. ‘And I find traces of the local photosynthetic chemistry, but heavily modified.’

  ‘Engineered?’

  ‘I believe so. As if there was once an extensive sun-catcher plant here. Well, this substellar point is a logical site for such a plant, as the region receives the highest intensity of Proxima light. But there is evidence of other workings here, much more advanced. Traces of structures. Disturbances where foundations were laid. Holes that once took posts. I can infer what was built here, once. I could produce graphical reconstructions with a slate, or—’

  ‘Just tell us.’

  ‘The structures are like builder middens and storm shelters, but on a variety of scales, various detailed forms. Much more massively built. And there are other features – narrow lanes of compressed earth that must have been trackways, wide enough to allow a builder to pass. In
the soil too I have found traces of advanced engineering. Compounds, chemical, metallic, some I can’t immediately identify. Also traces of radioactivity in the past, or at least of a high radiation environment. High energies, too; there are traces of heavy elements in the ground here I have seen nowhere else on the planet. All of this has a triple-symmetry layout which—’

  ‘Builders,’ Mardina said. ‘I don’t get it. We’ve seen the builders, all the way back to the shuttle landing site. We’ve watched them. They use tools, they manage their projects. They moved the damn jilla halfway across the planet. But they only have stone tools. They use bits of their own bodies to build dams. They’re more like beavers than human engineers . . . Aren’t they?’

  The ColU said, ‘This working was more elaborate and on a much grander scale than anything we’ve seen of their activities before. And much more advanced, of course. But the signature of the builder body form is everywhere.’

  ‘OK, ColU, I believe you.’ Yuri looked around, trying to imagine it. ‘So here was some kind of community of builders. They built a sun-catcher plant, and other facilities, with a technology far in advance of anything they have now. This was so long ago that barely anything remains of their work here. Civilisation fell, right?’

  ‘I would not jump to conclusions,’ the ColU said.

  ‘They were gathering stellar energy. To do what?’

  ‘To make something even more exotic,’ Mardina guessed.

  ‘Yes,’ said the ColU. ‘Obviously you have the evidence in front of you, in the shape of the hatch, exotic compounds in the soil. It is strange, to just find this one site. Granted we have hardly surveyed the planet comprehensively, but you would imagine that a high-technology culture would have left traces of their passing everywhere, not just this one installation . . .’

  Tollemache grunted. ‘Wait until they get some real scientists down here, and then you might get some decent answers. Not from this glorified tractor.’

  The ColU dropped its sensor pod towards the ground, as if bowing in submission. ‘I can’t argue with that, Colonel. I am not equipped for this manner of work, not in a specialised way.’

  Now Beth spoke, for the first time since arriving here. ‘What, are you saying we should wait around for eight years, and grow old and probably, like, die before anybody does anything about this?’

  Yuri had to smile. ‘So what would you suggest?’

  Beth gestured. ‘We open the hatch, obviously.’

  Mardina said, ‘But there’s two problems with that, honey. One is that it doesn’t lead anywhere. You heard what the ColU said. There’s nothing underneath.’

  Yuri said, ‘Maybe, but she’s right. This is obviously a hatch. What do you do with a hatch, but open it?’

  ‘OK,’ said Mardina with strained patience, ‘but that raises my second problem. How do we open it? Do you see anything like a handle? A wheel to turn, a combination lock to try?’

  ‘Yes,’ Beth snapped immediately. She walked onto the hatch, to one of the starburst indentations. ‘Look at these grooves. Three of them, each, what, a bit less than a metre long? And this fat indentation in the centre. Can’t you see what they’re for? Look, suppose I was a builder . . .’

  And she lay down on her back over one of the groove sets, with her arms held out at two o’clock and ten o’clock, and her legs together at six o’clock.

  ‘Shit, she’s right,’ Tollemache murmured.

  ‘These little cuttings are meant to hold builders,’ Beth said. ‘Count them. Nine cuttings in this surface, all inside the seam. You think it’s a coincidence that nine builders showed up here today? They know what to do. We just have to get out of the way.’

  ‘Wait,’ Mardina said. She walked forward, as if trying to block the builders off. ‘Are we sure we want to do this? We don’t know what we’re dealing with here. We don’t know what danger this represents.’

  Tollemache took a step backwards. ‘That’s true. Your tractor over there talked about huge energies being deployed. What if it’s a bomb? A booby trap of some kind?’

  Yuri sneered. ‘Who would build a booby trap like this, and leave it in the ground for centuries?’

  The ColU said, ‘The structure is many orders of magnitude older than mere centuries, Yuri Eden.’

  ‘Not a bomb,’ Mardina said. ‘Something else. Something stranger. My head’s swimming, Yuri. Strangeness upon strangeness. This thing was intentionally left here by somebody, builders or not, for some purpose. We’ve no idea what that purpose was. We’ve got no reason to believe it’s likely to be in any way in our interest. We shouldn’t even be here. Humans on this planet, I mean.’

  Beth walked up and took her hands. ‘Mom. You’re freaking me out. But you need to stop protecting me. I’m twenty years old. I can make my own decision.’

  Yuri felt an echo of Mardina’s alarm, but he said, ‘So what is your decision?’

  ‘We open the hatch. Of course we open it. Anything else is going to drive me crazy, for the rest of my life!’

  Tollemache cackled. ‘You’re outvoted, I’d say, Jones.’

  ‘Well, we all are,’ said the ColU, untroubled.

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘The builders.’

  And Yuri saw that the nine builders were already making their way towards the hatch cover, and their engraved beds. They moved in the usual builder way, spinning and clattering, like eerie stringless puppets, but their motions were purposeful, even coordinated, as if each one seemed to know which of the shallow cuttings to pick. Quietly, the nine of them settled into the engraved slots. Which, as Yuri saw, as Beth had first noticed, fit them perfectly.

  The ground under their feet shuddered, as if some vast engine had been woken.

  And puffs of dirt rose up from the circular seam around the hatch.

  CHAPTER 57

  Mardina grabbed Beth and Yuri by the hand and pulled them away. ‘Back,’ she said. ‘You too, ColU.’ She ignored Tollemache, but Yuri saw that the Peacekeeper was stepping back too, keeping his sensor pack trained on the hatch.

  And then, with a deeper shudder in the earth, the hatch lifted. It tipped up, as if it was hinged at a point to Yuri’s left, opening like a lid, slow, ponderous. The builders, evidently living keys in the hatch’s multiple lock, stayed motionless, held in position somehow so they did not fall, even as the hatch approached the vertical. The hatch’s position obscured Yuri’s view of whatever lay beneath the lid, but he saw that light poured out, a pale, pearly glow that underlit the branches of the nearby trees. And he felt a gush of cooler air, coming from beneath the hatch.

  Somewhere a kite took off, startled.

  When the hatch was vertical, it stopped moving. It was a tremendous, evidently massive disc, resting on its edge, invisibly hinged.

  Tollemache, his recorder pack held before him like a weapon, was the first to walk forward. The brilliant light from the ground underlit his jowly face. ‘Holy shit,’ he said. ‘You’d better come and see this. Step carefully now.’

  The rest walked around the open lid. Beth asked, ‘Carefully in case of what?’

  ‘In case you fall in.’

  Somehow it was no surprise at all for Yuri to discover that beneath the opened hatch was a pit, a simple cylinder with plain walls and a flat floor, perhaps four metres deep. The light came from no particular source; rather the walls and floor all glowed with that grey-white light. One part of the wall was broken by what was evidently another hatch, a fine circular seam, with a set of groove-locks to hold just three builders this time. On the wall opposite that was some kind of adornment, what looked like a tapestry made out of stem-bark cloth.

  And it didn’t surprise him either that three of the builders now hopped out of their grooves on the hatch and swarmed down into the pit, clinging somehow to the sheer walls. Once down they began to spin and turn on the floor, joyously.

  The ColU cautiously extended its sensor pack. The four humans peered down, their faces lit from below.

  ‘It’
s real, then,’ Mardina said. ‘I mean, it’s a real hole in the ground, not some kind of visual trick. Given that the builders have climbed down inside it.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said the ColU flatly. ‘My geophysical results were conclusive. There is no hole here. There cannot be.’

  ‘Yet here it is,’ Yuri said.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t stamp hard enough,’ Beth said mischievously.

  ‘No, it wasn’t that. My analysis—’

  ‘I’m teasing you!’

  Yuri said, ‘We’ll have trouble climbing back up from that.’

  ‘I got a ladder in the rover.’ Tollemache went to fetch it.

  ‘Hold on,’ Mardina said. ‘Just hold on. Climbing back up? Are you seriously intending to climb down there? Into that impossible hole?’

  Beth looked at her mother. ‘Sure. What else?’

  ‘It should be safe enough,’ the ColU said.

  Mardina turned on it. ‘What? What? Are you serious? How can you possibly say that?’

  The ColU stayed calm. ‘Evidently we are dealing with some distortion of space and time. There may be some kind of machinery in the mouth of the pit – exotic matter of some kind, perhaps, or a tremendous gravitational engine. But the builders passed safely through the opening. If there are any hazards, tidal effects perhaps, they are evidently gentle enough—’

  ‘Give me that ladder.’ Beth took it from Tollemache and dropped it into the hole. It passed through the hatch opening as easily as the builders had, Yuri noticed. Then she began to clamber down.

  Tollemache watched her admiringly. He murmured to Yuri, ‘I will never know how something as piss-poor as you, ice boy, produced something as lush as that.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ Mardina said simply, her voice taut with anxiety.

  On the pit floor, Beth stepped back from the ladder, looked up, spread her arms, turned around. The builders spun around her, their stem limbs making soft scraping noises on the sheer surfaces. She called, ‘Look at me. Safe as I ever was. Are you coming down, or not?’