Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  A woman in a similar uniform, standing at the door with a slate, stopped Liu and Yuri as they entered. Yuri read her name tag: ISF LT MARDINA JONES. Maybe thirty, she was very dark, with tightly curled black hair. ‘You’re late,’ she said.

  ‘Sorry. Just out of medical.’ Liu gave their names.

  ‘Name tags?’

  Liu dug his out of a pocket and showed it to her; she scanned it with her slate. She turned to Yuri. ‘You?’

  Yuri just shrugged.

  Liu said, ‘Like I said, just out of medical.’

  ‘Just awake, huh.’ Jones shook her head and made a note on her slate. ‘Typical. Make sure you sort it out later.’ She had a thick Australian accent. ‘Sit, you’re late.’

  Finding a seat in the semi-darkened little theatre turned out to be a problem. Three guys sat together on a row of a dozen otherwise empty seats. When Yuri went to sit down in the row Liu prodded him in the back. ‘Move on,’ he whispered.

  Yuri had been quick to anger ever since he’d first woken up on Mars. ‘Why should I?’

  ‘Because that middle guy is Gustave Klein. Wait until you’re beefed up before you take him on.’

  But it was already too late, Yuri realised. Klein was white, maybe fifty years old, hefty if not overweight, head elaborately shaven. His fists, resting on his knees, were like steam hammers. And Yuri had made eye contact with him. He barely noticed the two guys with Klein, typical attack dogs. Klein leered at Liu, taking in his injuries, and looked away, dismissive.

  They moved on, cautious in the dark. ‘What’s so special about him?’

  ‘He was the best Sabatier-furnace engineer in his colony,’ Liu whispered. ‘That’s part of the recycling system – you know that, right? And he fixed it so that nobody else could touch those systems. He was a damn water king. No wonder they shipped him out. And it looks like he’s fixing to get the same hold here.’

  ‘A water king.’ Yuri grinned. ‘Until it rains, right?’

  Liu looked at him strangely.

  Somebody hissed. ‘Yuri! Hey, Yuri! Over here!’ A skinny, shambling form hustled along a row, clearing two spaces, to muttered complaints from the people behind.

  ‘Lemmy?’ It was the first familiar voice he’d heard since waking in the can. Yuri sat beside him, followed by Liu.

  ‘Awake at last, huh?’ Lemmy’s whisper was soft, practised. ‘That bastard Tollemache really shot you up, didn’t he? Well, he got what he deserved.’

  Yuri tried to figure it out. Lemmy Pink, nineteen years old, had been the nearest thing to a friend Yuri had made on Mars. Even if Lemmy was only looking for protection.

  The last Yuri remembered of Mars was that he and Lemmy had busted out of their dome. Yuri had had to get out. Every atom in his body longed to be out there on the Martian ground, frozen, ultraviolet-blasted desert though it might be. He’d been taken through spacesuit and airlock drills for the sake of emergency training, but he’d never been outside. Mostly he never even got to look through a window. So they’d stolen a rover, made a run for the hills, a local feature called the Chaos – flipped the truck, been picked up by the Peacekeepers. He remembered Tollemache. You’re the ice boy, right? Nothing but a pain in the butt since they defrosted you. Well, you won’t be my problem much longer. And with a gloved fist he had jammed a needle into Yuri’s neck, and the red-brown Martian light had folded away . . .

  And he’d woken up in this tank.

  ‘What do you mean, he got what he deserved?’

  ‘He’s here too. In the hull. Ha! He got what was coming to him, all right. But it was because he didn’t stop us pinching that rover in the first place, rather than what he did to you.’

  Yuri mock-punched his arm. ‘Good to see they brought you home too, man.’

  Lemmy flinched back. ‘Don’t touch me. I’m full of the fucking sniffles that are going around this coffin, typical of me to get them all.’

  ‘What about Krafft?’ Lemmy’s pet rat, back in the dome.

  Lemmy’s face fell. ‘Well, they took him off me. What would you expect?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  They were disturbing the astronaut type giving his lecture. Mardina Jones was right behind them, her voice a severe murmur. ‘If you two buttheads don’t shut up and listen to Major McGregor I’ll put you on a charge.’

  They shut up. But when she withdrew, Lemmy was staring at Yuri, in the shadowy dark. ‘What was that you just said?’

  ‘What? About the rat?’

  ‘No. Something about them bringing us home.’

  ‘I don’t know, man. I don’t know if I’m asleep or awake.’ But Lemmy kept staring at him.

  Yuri, disoriented, confused, distracted by the noise of the crowds just half a metre beyond the partition, looked up at the astronaut at the lectern in his glittering black-as-night uniform. On Mars everybody had hated the astronauts, because they were rotated, they got to go home. Yuri tried to concentrate on what he was saying.

  ‘Even a single pixel from these very early images of the new world told the astronomers a great deal. Spectral analysis revealed an atmosphere with free oxygen, methane, nitrous oxide.’

  Major McGregor, maybe late twenties, was tall, upright, whip-thin but athletic, with a healthy glow to his cheeks in the light of the images he showed. He had a slick Angleterre accent, and his hair, blond, brushed, oiled, looked like it got more care than most of the people in this facility.

  ‘Oxygen, think of that! Suddenly we had a habitable world, right on our doorstep. All of you have had experience of the colonies on Mars and the moon – bleak, inhospitable worlds, and yet the best the solar system has to offer. And now, suddenly, this.

  ‘With time, variations of brightness and spectral content told us something about the distribution of continents and oceans. More subtle variations had to reflect changing weather. Not only that, the presence of oxygen is a strong indicator of life, I mean native life, because something has to be putting all that oxygen in the air.’ He displayed graphs, wriggling lines. ‘This prominent feature in the red part of the spectrum indicated the presence of something like our own chlorophyll, some kind of light-harvesting pigment. All deduced from watching a single point of light . . .’

  Yuri had no idea what he was talking about. But he had spent a great deal of his time since being woken on Mars not knowing what the hell was going on around him, and it didn’t seem to make any material difference.

  He was aware that that caveman Klein was watching him. He started to think of how he was going to deal with that, as the astronaut’s voice droned on and on.

  But Lemmy was still staring at him, as if he was working something out. ‘Nobody told you. My God.’

  ‘Told me what?’

  Gustave Klein seemed to have an instinct for trouble. He leaned forward. ‘What’s this?’

  Lemmy ignored him. ‘You said something about being sent home. I just figured it out. You think this is home, don’t you? You think this is—’

  ‘Earth?’ Liu Tao asked now, wondering, staring at Yuri.

  Klein stood up. ‘He thinks what? What kind of asshole—’

  The class was breaking up, the ‘students’ turning in their seats to see what the commotion was. Major McGregor shut up at last, frowning in annoyance before his spectrograms.

  Mardina Jones hurried up again from the back, tapping an epaulette on her shoulder. ‘Peacekeeper to Level 3, lecture room . . . What’s going on here? Is this something to do with you, Eden?’

  Yuri stood, hands spread, but he didn’t reply. He’d long since learned that replying was usually pointless, it made no difference to the treatment he got. But he felt surrounded, by the astronauts, the students grinning to see someone else in trouble. Even Lemmy was staring at him.

  And Gustave Klein was like a malevolent puppet master. ‘He doesn’t know! You’re right, you little runt,’ he said to Lemmy. His accent was thick Hispanic, despite his Germanic-sounding name. ‘He doesn’t have a fucking clue. What a laugh.’


  Now Peacekeeper Tollemache came bustling in, fully uniformed, flanked by two junior officers. They all had nightsticks at the ready – no guns, though, Yuri noticed in those first moments.

  ‘You,’ Tollemache said. ‘Ice boy. I should have known. Out of the med bay for five minutes and trouble already.’ He flexed his nightstick.

  Yuri tensed, preparing to rush him.

  Mardina Jones stood between them. ‘Stop this! That’s an order, Peacekeeper.’

  ‘You don’t outrank me.’

  ‘Oh, yes I do,’ she said coldly. ‘You know the policy. Take it up with the captain if you like. I wanted you down here to keep order, not break more heads. And you – whatever else you are, Yuri Eden, you’re good at making enemies.’

  Tollemache glowered at Yuri, but backed off. ‘You’re the reason I’m in this toilet, you little prick.’

  Yuri grinned. ‘Good to hear it, Peacekeeper.’

  Tollemache held his gaze for one more second. In the background Gustave Klein leered, drinking up the conflict.

  Mardina Jones turned on Lemmy. ‘You. What do you mean, he thinks this is home?’

  ‘Think about it. The Peacekeeper there knocked him out while he was still on Mars! He never saw a thing, the sweep, the loading, he didn’t get any of the briefings we got. Such as they were. Also, he’s out of his time. You must know that. He hasn’t got the background to understand.’

  Mardina frowned, and glanced down at her slate; maybe she hadn’t known that, Yuri thought.

  ‘We all supposed he’d know what was going on. I guess. That he’d be able to figure it. But—’

  ‘But maybe not.’ Major McGregor came up to the little group now, and studied Yuri with amused interest. ‘I heard about you. I knew we had one of you lot aboard, a corpsicle. A survivor of the Heroic Generation, eh? And now, here you are, and so confused. How funny.’ Apparently on impulse he said, ‘Follow me, Mr Eden. Bring your little bedwarmer if you like. You’d better come too, Lieutenant. And you, Peacekeeper, if you can control yourself. Just in case it all kicks off.’

  Mardina asked, ‘Where are you taking him?’

  McGregor grinned and pointed upwards. ‘Where do you think? It will be a fascinating experiment. Come along.’

  CHAPTER 3

  McGregor led a procession out of the lecture space to the spiral stair that wound its way up the wall of the tower. McGregor glanced over his shoulder at Yuri, who followed directly behind him. ‘We have two of these habitat modules, strapped together side by side, for redundancy, you see . . . You’ll have to tell me what you think of the design. For size, it was modelled on the first stage of the old Saturn V moon booster, for nostalgic reasons, I suppose. Of course much of what we are doing is of symbolic as well as practical value.’

  At the top of the tower was a domed roof. They climbed up through that into what was evidently some kind of control room, with a central command chair, vacant just now, arrays of bright screens, and another dome, midnight dark, over their heads. Operatives in astronaut uniforms sat at terminals around the periphery. One or two looked back at McGregor and his party, frowning, disapproving of an incursion into this sanctum of control.

  McGregor was studying Yuri, amused. ‘Where do you think you are now?’

  Yuri shrugged carelessly, though a kind of deep anxiety was gnawing in his stomach.

  Mardina murmured, ‘Lex, go easy—’

  ‘No, really. Tell me. Come on, man, speak up.’

  ‘Top of the tower.’

  McGregor thought that over. ‘Well, yes. That’s correct, sort of. Perceptually speaking anyhow, given the vector of the thrust-induced gravity. But there’s rather more to it than that.’ He clapped his hands. ‘Lights off.’ The wall lamps died, fading quickly. ‘Just look up. Give your eyes a minute to adjust.’

  Yuri obeyed. Slowly, the stars came out across the dome, a brilliant field, like night in the Martian desert. There was a particularly prominent cluster directly overhead.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘Stars. So what? So it’s a clear night.’

  ‘A “clear night”. Where do you think you are?’

  Yuri shrugged. ‘Somewhere with a good sky. Arizona.’ He vaguely remembered a high-altitude site with big astronomical telescopes. ‘Chile?’

  ‘Chile. You understand that what you see is simulated, a live feed from cameras mounted on the ISM shield.’

  ‘ISM?’

  ‘Interstellar medium.’ McGregor clapped his hands again. ‘Wraparound VR star field.’

  The walls and floor of this deck shimmered and melted away. It was as if Yuri, with McGregor, Lemmy, Mardina Jones, Tollemache, Liu Tao, and the handful of operators with their screens, were standing on a floor of glass. And all around him, above and below, he saw stars, with one particularly brilliant specimen directly under his feet.

  McGregor grinned by the light of the stars and the display screens. ‘Now what do you see? Where is the Earth? Where’s the planet you thought you were standing on? Where’s the Earth, Yuri Eden?’

  Yuri felt his head swim, the universe close up around him, as if he was fainting from fluid imbalance again.

  McGregor pointed downwards. ‘There. Down in that puddle of light. That’s the sun. We’ve been travelling from Mars’ orbit for a month. We are now—’ he glanced at a screen ‘—two hundred and thirty astronomical units from the sun. That’s two hundred and thirty times as far as Earth is from the sun – about eight times as far out as Neptune – about a light-day, if I’m not mistaken. You are a long, long way from Earth, my friend.’

  ‘A ship.’ It didn’t sound like his own voice. ‘This is some kind of ship.’

  ‘Not just any old ship. This is the Ad Astra. And we are going—’ he pointed straight up, at the cluster of stars at the zenith ‘—there.’

  ‘You’re on a starship,’ Mardina Jones said, levelly, steadily, looking Yuri in the eye. ‘Heading to Proxima Centauri.’

  ‘Proxima Centauri,’ Yuri said dully. The very name was meaningless to him.

  ‘Yuri Eden, this is the UN International Space Fleet vessel Ad Astra. Two hundred colonists, in two hulls like this one. We’re driven at a constant acceleration, at one gravity, by a kernel engine. This ship is like the hulk that brought you to Mars. But of course you don’t remember that. It’s a bit more than four light years to Proxima. Given time dilation it will take us three years, seven months subjective to get there, of which we’ve already served a month . . .’

  McGregor peered at him, searching for a reaction. ‘What are you thinking, man from the past?’

  Peacekeeper Tollemache was more direct. ‘Ha! He’s thinking, what a prick I am. You thought you were on Earth, didn’t you? Why, you fucking—’

  Yuri couldn’t punch a star, but he could punch Tollemache. He got in one good blow before Mardina Jones, this time, knocked him out.

  It was going to be a long three years, seven months.

  TWO

  CHAPTER 4

  2155

  When Yuri Eden discovered he was on a starship, it was only a little more than a decade after the maiden flight from planet Mercury of a ship called the International-One, the first demonstrator of the new kernel-drive technology that propelled the Ad Astra. Lex McGregor, then seventeen years old and an International Space Fleet cadet, had taken part in that flight.

  And it was thanks to McGregor that Stephanie Penelope Kalinski, then eleven years old, had first got to meet her father’s starship, created from another technology entirely.

  It seemed strange to Stef, as she and her father took the long, slow, unpowered orbit from Earth in towards the sun aboard a UN-UEI liner, that there were to be not one but two new kinds of ships, the International-One and the Angelia, launched from such an unpromising place as Mercury at the same time.

  Her father just rolled his eyes. ‘Just my luck. Or humanity’s luck. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would suspect that those damn kernels have been planted under Mercury�
��s crust in order that we would find them now, just when we are recovering from the follies of the Heroic Generation, and reaching out, with our own efforts, to the stars . . .’

  Stef wasn’t too clear what a ‘kernel’ was. But she was interested in it all, the different kinds of ships, the experimental engineering she’d glimpsed at her father’s laboratories back home on the outskirts of Seattle, the rumours of these energy-rich kernels being brought up from deep mines on Mercury . . . She understood that the International-One was just some kind of interplanetary-capable technology demonstrator, while her own father’s ship, though uncrewed, was going to the stars, the first true interstellar jaunt since the extraordinary journey of Dexter Cole, decades before. But she’d heard hints that these kernels they’d found on Mercury, and which were going to power the I-One, were actually much more exotic than anything her father was working on.

  This was the kind of thing that always snagged her attention. She was doing well with her schooling, scoring high in mathematics, sciences and deductive abilities, as well as in physical prowess and leadership skills. Her father had been paradoxically pleased when she had been flagged up with a warning about having introvert tendencies. ‘All great scientists are introverts,’ he’d said. ‘All great engineers too, come to that. The sign of a strong, independent mind.’ But Stef was always less interested in herself than in all the stuff going on outside her own head. The I-One’s interplanetary mission was a lot less ambitious than the Angelia’s, but it was the I-One that had the hot technology. She was more than interested in it. She was fascinated.

  She didn’t much enjoy the cruise from Earth, though. She had followed the mission profile as their ship descended ever deeper into the heart of the solar system, ever closer to the central fire, and Stef had come to feel oddly claustrophobic. Apparently the UN-led countries and China, who had carved Earth up between them, had shared out the solar system too, but China dominated everything from Earth orbit outward, from Mars and the asteroids to Jupiter’s moons. Looking out from the cramped centre of the system, China seemed to Stef to have the better half of it, with those roomy outer reaches, families of cold worlds hanging like lanterns in the dark.