Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  On Mercury they landed at a big engineering complex in a crater called Yeats. This was not far from the equator, so that during the planet’s day the big looming sun was high in the sky, pouring down the light and energy that fed the square kilometres of solar-cell arrays that carpeted much of the crater’s floor.

  The gravity was lower than home, about a third, and in the high domes, built big so they could house the industrial complexes expected to sprout here in the future, you could go running and leaping and break all kinds of long-jump records. That was interesting, and fun.

  But for Stef the charms of Mercury quickly palled. It was hot enough to melt lead outside, at local noon anyhow. They had come here in the morning on this part of Mercury, and since the ‘day’ here lasted a hundred and seventy-six Earth days (a number that was a peculiar product of the planet’s slow rotation on its axis and its short year, that had taken Stef a while to figure out), the big sun just hung there, low in the sky, dome-day after dome-day, and the long shadows barely moved across the crater’s flat, lava-choked floor. There was, in the end, nothing on Mercury but rock, and there was only so much interest she could feign in solar-cell farms, or even the monumental pipeline systems they had built to bring water from the caches of ice in the permanent shadows at the planet’s poles.

  And she had to spend a lot of time alone.

  Her father was immersed in final tests and simulations for his starship, and Stef knew from long experience when to get out of his way. He’d been just the same when her mother was alive. The trouble was, unlike home, there was nobody else here much less than three times Stef’s age. Mercury was like a huge mine, drifting in the generous energy-giving light of the sun, and not a place to raise kids, it seemed; it was a place you came to work for a few years, made your money, and went back home to spend it. For all that the virtual facilities were just as good as back in Seattle, it got kind of boring, and lonely, quickly.

  Things got a bit better as more people started to show up, shuttling in from Earth and moon for the launches.

  There were actually two crowds arriving here, Stef quickly realised, for the two separate projects, the Angelia and the International-One. Her father’s project, the Angelia, was basically scientific: a one-shot uncrewed mission to Proxima Centauri intended to deliver a probe to study the habitable world the astronomers had found fifty years earlier orbiting that remote star. Since that discovery, of course, a human had actually been sent to Proxima, a man called Dexter Cole, who, launched decades before Stef had even been born, had yet to complete his one-way mission; the Angelia, representing a new technology generation, would almost overtake him. The throng gathering to watch the Angelia launch were mostly scientists and experimental engineers, along with the bureaucrats from state and UN level who were backing the project. They were men and women in drab suits who spent more time staring into each other’s faces over glasses of champagne than looking out of the window at Mercury, a whole alien world, it seemed to Stef.

  The International-One, meanwhile, was a project of a huge industrial combine called Universal Engineering, Inc. – UEI. Its chief executive was a squat, blustering, forty-year-old Australian called Michael King, and he came out here with a much more exotic entourage of the rich and famous. ‘Trillionaire-adventurers’, her father called them dismissively.

  There were even a few Chinese, ‘guests’ of the UN and the UEI, to ‘observe’ the great events taking place here on UN-dominated Mercury, although it seemed to Stef that it was a funny kind of ‘observing’ where you weren’t allowed to have close-up views of anything important at all.

  Stef did have to show up at drinks parties and other functions at her father’s side. Of the trillionaires’ club Michael King was the only one who displayed any kind of interest in her personally, as opposed to treating her as some kind of appendage of her father. When she was introduced by her father, King, avuncular, a glass of champagne low-gravity sloshing in his hand, leaned down and looked her in the face. ‘Good clear eyes. Unflinching gaze. Curiosity. I like that. You’ll go far. You keeping up at school, Stephanie?’

  ‘It’s Stef. Yes, I think so. I like—’

  ‘What are you missing here?’

  ‘Missing?’

  ‘You’re an Earth kid, stuck on Mercury. What’s the one thing I could sell you, right now, that you miss the most from home?’

  She thought that over. ‘Soda,’ she said. ‘Decent soda. Here it’s cold enough, but it’s always flat. Same on the moon.’

  ‘Yeah. This champagne’s kind of flat too.’ King glanced at her father. ‘Something to do with the low gravity, George? The low air pressure in the domes, maybe, messing with the carbonation? Soda. I’ll make a note of that and follow it up. Could be you just earned me another million, kid. So what do you make of all this?’ He waved his glass at the people milling around, the conversations going on high above Stef’s head.

  ‘I feel like I’m lost in some kind of forest of talking trees.’

  King barked laughter. ‘Good for you. Honest answer, and a clear impression. Witty too. Listen to me. I know you’re only a kid – no offence. But you should watch and learn, as much as you can. Textbooks are one thing, people in the wild are another, and it’s the people you have to work with if you want to get on.’ His accent was broad Australian, his enunciation crisp, precise, easy to follow. ‘Look at me. I started out from a poor background. Well, everybody was poor in Oz in those days because of the Desiccation. I made my first living as a coastal scavenger, I was no older than you, we’d go down into the wrecks of oil tankers and seawater-processing factories that had been deliberately beached on the shore, retrieving what materials we could haul out, all for a few UN dollars a day.

  ‘But then age twenty I joined UEI as an apprentice programmer, and after ten years I was on the board. A lot of our early work was deconstruction, taking apart filthy old nuclear reactors. Of course by then we’d relocated to Canada, I mean the northern USNA region as it is nowadays, because Australia, along with Japan, the Far East countries, chunks of Siberia, had become part of the Framework, the Chinese economic empire . . . Well, the details don’t matter. Now here I am about to launch a new breed of spaceship. How much more success could you want? And you know how I got this far?’

  ‘People,’ she said brightly.

  He grinned at her father. ‘George, you got yourself a smart one here. That’s it – people. I had contacts. I knew who to approach in the finance and governance community at national, zonal and UN levels, as well as the technical people, to get it done. Because I’d cultivated those contacts at events like this over years and years. Now it’s your chance, and it’s never too early to start.’

  Her father snorted. ‘Don’t give me all that, Michael. Your most important contact isn’t human at all.’

  ‘Earthshine, you mean.’

  ‘Or one of his Core-AI rivals. Everybody knows they’re your ultimate paymasters.’ Her father looked around the crowd, almost playfully. ‘Got an avatar or two here, has he? Should we be watching what we say?’

  ‘Funny, George, very funny. But I don’t think – oh, excuse me. Sanjai! Over here!’

  And that was it, as he hurried away to another encounter.

  Stef liked Michael King, she decided, whether or not he really was backed by the sinister old Core AIs, entities she found hard even to imagine. Her father sneered about King’s lack of academic or technical qualifications, but Stef was drawn by his energy, his focus, his vigour, and she stored away his advice.

  But she forgot all about Michael King a couple of dome-days later, when the astronauts showed up.

  They were the human crew of King’s new ship the International-One.

  When they walked through a room all the faces turned to the astronauts, like iron filings in a magnetic field. It was like royalty, like King Harold of North Britain, or some media star, or maybe like the Heroic Generation engineers back in their heyday, her father said. They were authentic space pioneers, and
all of them were dressed in the uniform of the UN’s International Space Fleet, an eye-popping jet black spangled with glittering stars.

  And what drew her attention most was the only member of the I-One crew who wasn’t in his fifth decade. Lex McGregor was from Angleterre, the south of Britain – the independent north had not contributed to the ISF – Lex was blond, as tall as the rest, and he was just seventeen. He wasn’t quite part of the crew, it seemed; he was a Space Fleet cadet, still in the early stages of his training. But he’d shown enough promise to win some kind of internal competition to serve as the one cadet on board the I-One for its maiden flight.

  ‘And the fact that he is as photogenic as hell,’ Stef said to her father, ‘probably didn’t harm his chances.’

  He laughed. ‘Much too cynical for your age. Probably right, though. Don’t say “hell”.’

  ‘Sorry, Dad.’

  Just as Lex was the closest person here to Stef’s age, so she was the closest to his, and they kind of gravitated together. She was relieved when he didn’t treat her like some bratty kid. He called her ‘Kalinski’, like she was a cadet herself.

  They would play dumb games and make up athletic competitions in the domes; he was good at figuring out rules so he was handicapped and she had at least a chance of winning. One of her favourites was the roof run, where you ran at a curving dome wall and up it, overcoming the low gravity, sticking to the wall by sheer centrifugal force until you fell back, and then (in theory) executed a slow one-third-G somersault to land on your feet on the cushioned floor. A space cadet’s training regime was pretty intense, and she suspected there was still enough of the kid in Lex to relish the chance to blow off some steam, even to bend the rules a little.

  Which was probably why it was Lex who introduced her to her father’s starship.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was a dome-morning, only a few days before the launch of the I-One. The Angelia’s launch was scheduled a couple of dome-days after that. Paradoxically Lex had more free time just now, as the ISF controllers were trying to get their crew to relax before the stress of the mission.

  So Lex invited Stef to ‘take an EVA’, by which he meant go for a walk on Mercury’s surface.

  He met her at a suit locker built into the dome wall. He grinned when she showed up. ‘Thought you weren’t coming, Kalinski. You didn’t seem keen.’

  ‘I’ve been out on the moon. What’s so special about a bunch of rocks?’

  He winked at her. ‘This is different. Take a look at your suit.’ He palmed a control.

  A section of the wall swept back, to reveal a row of suits that looked like nothing so much as discarded insect carcasses. Each had a hard silvered shell to cover torso, legs and arms, a featureless helmet with a gold-tinted visor, and wings, extraordinary filmy affairs that sprouted from joints behind the shoulders. All the suits had markings of various kinds, coloured stripes and hoops, no doubt to identify who was wearing them.

  Lex asked, ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Ugly.’

  ‘It’s not so bad. Believe me, you won’t even notice it once you’re out there on the surface. I bet you can’t guess what the wings are for.’

  ‘It’s obvious. To radiate heat.’

  ‘Very good,’ he said, sounding genuinely impressed. ‘Most of the folk in this dome say, “For flying.” Then they catch themselves and say, “But there’s no air here so . . .” ’

  ‘I know.’ Stef sighed the way her father did. ‘It gets so wearying.’

  He laughed. ‘OK, Kalinski, quit showing off. Look, putting it on is easy, the suit will seal itself up around you and adapt to fit. Just slip your shoes off . . .’

  The astonishing thing was, once she was in the suit and out through a heavy-duty airlock, she really didn’t notice the suit, not visually anyhow. The suit contained some kind of immersive VR system, so when she looked down it was as if she was standing beside Lex, in their everyday clothes, on a ground of pitted rock, under Mercury’s black sky. The sun, more than twice the size it was as seen from Earth, cast long shadows across a moonlike plain. Experimentally she bent down; she felt a little stiff, and couldn’t fold quite as she was used to. She touched her toes, though, and picked up a loose bit of rock.

  ‘How’s the suit?’

  ‘Fine.’ She explored the rock; her fingers, in her vision, didn’t quite close around it. ‘It feels kind of . . . soapy.’ She threw the rock with a skimming motion. The rock whizzed away, falling, not as fast as it would on Earth, faster than on the moon. It made no sound when it fell; that wasn’t part of the sim.

  ‘Let’s walk.’ Lex strode easily across the surface of Mercury, his shadow long beside him. His voice sounded as if it was coming from him, not from plugs in her ears. ‘The suit will stop you from coming to any harm.’

  ‘I know it will.’ It was only older people who needed reassuring about stuff like that; people of Stef’s age just assumed technology would work. She followed him, watching where she was stepping. In this crater basin the surface was smoother than she had expected, with dust overlying a rocky surface pitted by lesser impacts. She moved easily enough, but felt a little heavy, as if she was over-muscled, like she’d beefed up in a gym. The suit must have exoskeletal multipliers.

  The domes of the Yeats base were big blisters piled high with dirt, for protection from meteorite falls and from the sun’s radiation. Further out there were storage facilities, backup plants for air and water processing, dusty rovers on tracks that led off across the crater’s dirt floor. Not far from the inhabited facilities was the edge of the area of the crater floor panelled by solar cells, a glimmering reflective surface like a pool of molten silver that stretched away for kilometres.

  And further out still she glimpsed some of the mountains that ringed this walled plain, like broken, eroded teeth. Out there stood bigger facilities, marked out by winking warning lights, all far enough from the inhabited domes to allow for safety margins. There was the broad, hardened pad where ships like her own ferry from orbit had come in to land, and fuel and energy stores, and a long shining needle that was the mass driver, which used sun-powered electromagnetism to hurl caches of material out of Mercury’s gravity well and across the solar system. In the shadow of the mountains themselves she saw the big gantries of the UEI’s drilling project, sinking shafts hundreds of kilometres deep through layers of lava and impact-pummelled bedrock to the edge of Mercury’s iron mantle, where the mysterious kernels were to be found.

  And there too, huddling in the shadow, stood a taller gantry, a slim rocket: a strange sight for Stef, like something out of a history book. That was mankind’s newest spacecraft, the International-One, waiting to take Lex and his crew off into space.

  Lex took a step and stamped on the ground, sending up little sprays of dust that sank quickly back down. ‘It’s an interesting little world.’

  ‘So you say.’

  He laughed. ‘I mean it. It’s only superficially like the moon. Look at those drill rigs over there. Here, you only have to drill down a few hundred kilometres before you reach the mantle. You’d have to go ten times deeper into the Earth, say. You know why that is?’

  ‘Of course I know—’

  Like her father, he didn’t always listen before lecturing her. ‘Because, we think, some big explosion on young Mercury, or maybe a big impact, blew off most of the rocky crust.’

  She tried to imagine standing here when that big impact happened. Tried and failed. ‘What I want to know is, has all that got anything to do with the formation of the kernels they found here?’

  Another voice replied, ‘Good question. Well, nobody knows. But I can see why you would ask it. You are Stephanie Kalinski, aren’t you?’

  A woman was walking towards them from the direction of the domes, tall, a little heavy-set perhaps, yet graceful. Evidently projecting a virtual image, she appeared to be in regular clothes; she wore a trim blue jacket and trousers, almost uniform-like, but not as showy as Lex’s ISF suit. Sh
e looked about thirty, but was oddly ageless, as if heavily cosmeticised. Her accent was neutral, perhaps east coast American.

  ‘The name’s Stef,’ she replied automatically. ‘Not Stephanie. I know your face. I’ve seen your picture in my dad’s dossiers.’

  ‘Of course you have,’ Lex said, grinning. ‘Which is why I thought you two ought to meet. Dr Kalinski’s two daughters, so to speak. Because he never would have thought of bringing you together himself, right?’

  ‘I am Angelia,’ said the woman.

  That puzzled Stef. ‘That’s the name of the starship. The Angelia.’

  ‘I know. I am Angelia. I know what you’re thinking. That I am a PR stunt. A model, hired by your father to personify—’

  ‘I don’t actually care,’ Stef said abruptly.

  That surprised Lex. ‘You’ve got an impatient streak, haven’t you, Kalinski?’

  ‘If somebody’s being deliberately obscure, yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Angelia said. ‘I don’t intend to be. If your father had explained to you the mission concept—’

  ‘You know about me. How come?’

  ‘Well, I have got to know your father as we’ve worked together. And he speaks of you, Stef, a great deal. He’s very proud of you.’

  ‘I know,’ Stef snapped, feeling obscurely jealous.

  Lex said, ‘Be nice, Kalinski. Now it’s your cue to ask, “What mission concept?” ’

  ‘Oh, Lex, I don’t care. It’s obvious this woman is some kind of projection.’ On impulse she bent, picked up a pebble, an impact-loosened bit of Mercury rock, and threw it at Angelia.