Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  The other disembarked passengers were sitting in a circle in the dirt, a few paces from the shuttle. Mattock prodded Yuri to go join them. He edged forward, looking around as he walked. Beyond the group, he saw a lake glimmer, blue under the sky. Beyond that, a drab green belt that must be forest. And beyond that, folded mountains. There was no sign of people, no walls, no fences as far as he could see. No dome walls, like on Mars.

  Lieutenant Mardina Jones stood over the passengers. She said to Yuri, ‘The air’s fine, isn’t it? A miracle, really. Given it’s another world, and all.’

  ‘I guess.’

  She watched him curiously. ‘You know, Eden, you’re the only one who’s just stood here and – looked.’ She squinted up at the sun. ‘Strange to think, that sun will just hang there. Never rise, never set, not as long as you live.’

  ‘Really?’

  She stared at him. ‘All those briefings we gave. You really have learned nothing, have you?’

  ‘Where’s everybody else?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The other groups. Brought down by the shuttle before us.’

  ‘A long way from here. Major McGregor will tell you all about it. In the meantime you go sit over there with those others. We’ve got supplies to unload for our stay here, and for your first few weeks and months as residents. Also a ColU.’

  Yuri didn’t know what a ColU was. ‘And then you’re going?’

  She slapped the hull of the shuttle. ‘This bird will scramjet its way back to the sky – yes, we’re going. Now, if I release your hobble will you go and sit with the rest?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She bent down, took a knife from her belt, and slit through the hobble.

  He took a step towards the seated group. Then another step, and another, and then broke into a run. A jog really, it was awkward with his hands tied together, but he could do this. He ran, stretching his legs, the dirt firm under his booted feet.

  Ran right past the seated group, who whooped and hollered.

  He heard voices behind him. ‘Hey, ice boy! Stop or—’

  ‘Or what, Mattock? You going to run him down? Ah, let him go. I mean, where’s he going to run to? A thousand klicks to the next group? He’ll be back. Look, give me a hand with this food pack . . .’

  And Yuri ran and ran, on beyond the dust kicked up by the shuttle on landing, on over the virgin dirt, on far beyond the bounds of any cramped little Martian colony like Eden – on until their voices were small behind him, and when he looked back the shuttle sitting on its undercarriage looked like a black-and-white toy on a tabletop – on towards that forest, and the mountains.

  That was why he was the last to hear that, sometime during the descent when attentions were otherwise engaged, Abbey Brandenstein had stabbed Joseph Mullane in the heart with a sharpened plastic toothbrush.

  CHAPTER 10

  2155

  On Angelia’s last night in the human world, Dr Kalinski cherished her. That was how she thought of it, on later reflection.

  Still in the form of her weighty humanoid body, she was taken to dinner with Dr Kalinski and his daughter Stef, and members of the control crew who would care for her during her ten-year flight to Proxima: people like Bob Develin and Monica Trant, competent twenty- or thirty-somethings, all employees of national space agencies now subsumed into a global UN agency which only the Chinese, their Framework partners and a few outliers like North Britain had declined to join. ‘Only’: much of interplanetary space travel, in fact, was dominated by the new Chinese empire. They spoke openly, loosely, treating Angelia as one of the crew, as human, sometimes even speaking as if she wasn’t there at all, which paradoxically made her feel more welcome, more included.

  But she learned more about their concerns regarding the mission than Dr Kalinski had told her about before. That perhaps it was obsolete, technologically, before it was even launched, given the UEI kernel developments. That it wasn’t very popular politically in higher circles in the UN: it had a whiff of the Heroic Generation, whose projects had been characterised by massive, wasteful engineering, and loaded with AIs of a quality of sentience that had later been made illegal retrospectively. After all, Dr Kalinski had grown up in the wake of the Generation and their mighty works; maybe he was influenced by them. So the whispers went.

  Dr Kalinski had done his best to shield his project from those criticisms. Yes, he had needed some big-scale equipment, but even though he had reused a solar-power station, itself a much-hated relic of the past Heroic age with its hubristic planetary engineering schemes, he would use energies of orders of magnitude less than those that had hurled Dexter Cole to Proxima. As for profit, Dr Kalinski eschewed any cash rewards save for the salary he drew from the academic institutions that employed him. Any patentable technologies would be owned and exploited by those institutions, on behalf of the UN-governed taxpayers that supported them. And, yes, Angelia was an advanced, sentient AI, the mission could not have been achieved without smart onboard technology. She was capable of suffering – that was the price of sentience. But the mission was designed to sustain her, Dr Kalinski said, to deliver her to Proxima Centauri alive and sane. She was being honoured, not mistreated.

  But the team were evasive when they discussed details, and Dr Kalinski would not look Angelia in the eye – or eleven-year-old Stef, Angelia noticed. Evidently there were things she, and Stef, hadn’t been told about certain aspects of the mission.

  Despite such tensions it was a wonderful, warm, immersive final evening for Angelia. And at the end, as the dinner party was breaking up, Stef Kalinski came to her and took her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve been nasty to you,’ Stef said.

  ‘You haven’t been.’

  ‘It’s just a bit difficult for me. My mother died, she was French—’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And then I had Dad all to myself in Seattle. Then you showed up. It’s like . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Like I suddenly had a big sister.’ She screwed up her small face, thinking hard. ‘Like I had to get all my sibling rivalry out in one go.’

  Angelia laughed. ‘You’re very perceptive. And very self-aware. I haven’t been offended. I’m glad I had the chance to get to know you.’

  ‘Yes. Me too.’

  ‘Are you jealous of where I’m going, the adventure I’m going to have?’ It was a reaction she’d encountered from several of the ground crew – Bob Develin, for instance, a thirty-year-old from Florida who’d spent much of his youth working on the underwater archaeology of a drowned Cape Canaveral, and dreaming of space.

  But Stef shook her head. ‘Oh, no. The kernels – that’s what I want to study, even if Dad thinks it’s cheating to use them, or something.’

  ‘You don’t want to go to the stars?’

  ‘What for? Stars are easy to understand . . .’

  Maybe so. But as Stef got up on tiptoe to kiss her synthetic sister on her programmable-matter cheek, Angelia wondered if even a kernel could be as complex as an eleven-year-old girl.

  That was the end of the night. Dr Kalinski showed Angelia to her room, an authentic human space with a regular bed and a wall mirror and everything. He stroked her artificial hair and said goodnight. She laid down on the bed, fully clothed, and entered sleep mode.

  When she woke, she was in space, pinned by sunlight.

  CHAPTER 11

  She no longer had a human form, not remotely. Now she was a disc spun out of carbon sheets, a hundred metres across and just a hundredth of a millimetre thick. Yet she was fully aware, her consciousness sustained by currents and charge stores in the multilayered mesh of electrically conductive carbon of which she was composed. She had slept through this transformation, this atomic-level reassembly conducted by Dr Kalinski and his technicians.

  And she could see, hear, taste the universe, through clusters of microscopic sensors.

  She faced Mercury, a cracked, pitted hemisphere. The lights of humanity glimmered in the shadow
s of ancient crater walls, and crawled along cliffs and ridges. Orbiting the planet she saw the hard, ugly lump of the defunct solar-power station, assembled decades ago in near-Earth space and now hauled here for reuse, and the tremendous lens, a structure of films and threads that dwarfed even her own lacy span, that would throw the station’s microwave beam across the solar system to power her flight. The scale of all this was extraordinary, and the energies to be unleashed were huge. If anything went wrong she would die in a moment, a moth in a blowtorch. She felt a stab of unreasonable fear.

  ‘Angelia?’

  ‘I’m here, Dr Kalinski.’

  ‘How do I sound?’

  ‘Like you’re in a room with me.’

  ‘Good. That’s how I wanted it to be. I’m glad we had time to be human together. Because you are part of humanity, you know. The best and brightest part. You are named for a daughter of Hermes, the Greek version of Mercury. She too was a messenger, a bringer of tidings. You will carry the news of our existence to another star. And you will carry all our dreams. Mine, anyway. Well, we said all that. You know we can’t communicate while the beam is firing. We’ll talk to you in four days, when the acceleration is done. All right?’

  ‘Yes, sir. I think—’

  ‘We won’t put you through a countdown. Godspeed, Angelia . . .’

  The power station lit up in her vision, which was sensitised to the beam’s microwave frequencies. Mercury receded, as if falling down a well.

  The intense radiation, intended originally to deliver compact solar power to the factories and homes of distant Earth, now filled her own hundred-metre-sail body. She felt her skin stretch and billow as terawatts of power poured over her. It was not even necessary for her structure to be solid; her surface was a sparse mesh, a measure to reduce her overall density, but the wavelengths of the microwave photons were so long that they could not pass through this wide, curving net of carbon struts. And the microwave photons, bouncing off the sail like so many minute sand grains, shoved her backwards, at thirty-six gravities, piling up an extra thousand kilometres per hour of velocity with each new second.

  Despite the increasing distance, the intensity of that laser beam, focused by the lens, did not diminish, not by a watt. It was agony. It was delicious. She laughed, deep in her distributed consciousness.

  The intensity did not diminish for four days, by which time she had been flung more than a hundred times Earth’s distance from the sun, far beyond the orbit of the furthest planet.

  From here, the sun, the monster that dominated Mercury’s sky, was no more than a bright star – and a star that was very subtly reddened in her sophisticated sensors, for she had already reached her interstellar cruising speed, of two-fifths of the speed of light. At such a speed she would reach Proxima in a mere decade. Orders of magnitude less energy had been expended to get her this far, this fast, than had been spent on Dexter Cole. But he, cryo-frozen, had been embedded in a thousand-tonne craft; she was a mere eighty kilograms – the mass of a human, as if Cole, naked, had been thrust to the edge of interstellar space.

  She was the craft herself. And she, indeed, was a throng; she would never be alone.

  With an effort of will, a subtle reprogramming of her structure, she turned her senses outward, to the void.

  CHAPTER 12

  2169

  The shuttle was to stay on the ground for ten days, before returning to the Ad Astra.

  The main task for the crew in this interval was unloading, assembling and installing the colonists’ supplies and gear. The colonists, meanwhile, were put to work constructing irrigation ditches to a nearby lake, and making a start on a shelter, dug into the ground.

  The shelter was for protection from stellar storms. Proxima flared. It happened once or twice a day. You could see it with the naked eye; whole provinces would light up on the star’s big dim surface, like a nuclear war going on up there. The planet, Prox c, had a thick atmosphere and a healthy ozone layer, but about once a month, it was thought, there would be a storm severe enough to require more protection. For now, if a bad flare came they would be allowed back in the shuttle. But in future they would be scurrying into holes in the ground.

  For the rest of their lives.

  Ten days until the shuttle left: that was one important time interval in Yuri’s life. The other, told them by the crew, was eight Earth days and eight hours. That was how long the day was on this world, on Prox c, the day and the year, because the world spun around Proxima keeping the same face towards its star – just as the moon kept the same face to the Earth – so that the day was the same length as the year. In fact the stability of Prox c was greater than the moon’s, which wobbled a little as seen from Earth. Not Prox c.

  That was why Lemmy had taunted Yuri about a final sunrise. That big old sun was never going to rise, never going to set; it was going to hang in that one place in the sky, for ever. Oh, the weather changed, there could be cloud, and on the second day there was rain, sweeping down from the forest belt to the north. But in terms of the basic architecture of the world every day was the same, the sun defiantly unmoving, hour after hour. And just as there was no dawn, no sunset, there would be no summer, no winter here. Just day after day, identical as coins stamped out of a press. It was as if time didn’t exist here, as if all the ages had been compressed down into one centuries-thick day.

  Soon all of them were having trouble sleeping – all the colonists, at least, under their canvas outdoors. The astronauts and the Peacekeepers, save those on guard, slept in the shuttle’s cabin, which was slaved to Earth time.

  But Proxima wasn’t the only light in the sky, Yuri noticed. There was a bright double-star system, bright enough to cast shadows: Alpha Centauri A and B, twin suns, the centre of this triple-star system, of which Proxima was really a shabby suburb. There was that one visible planet, that tracked around the sky. And also, for now, there was a starship up there, a spark crawling across the sky. The days were not quite identical, then, the sky not quite featureless. Time passed, even here.

  Yuri kept himself to himself. But he found he was becoming curious about this world, Prox c, in a way he’d never been curious about Mars. But then all he’d seen of Mars had been the inside of domes.

  He watched the sky, the landscape. He scrounged a telescope from a bit of surveying gear. He even looked at Ad Astra through his little telescope, and was surprised to see that only one of the two hulls that had brought the colonists here was still attached to the wider frame that contained the propulsion units and the interstellar-medium particle shields. One hull was missing, then. He didn’t ask anybody about this; he knew he wouldn’t get an answer.

  On the fourth day he set up his own observatory, kind of, on top of a lumpy bit of highland a couple of kilometres west of the shuttle, that they had called the Cowpat.

  He saw stuff moving, around the lake, out on the plain, in the forest to the north. Living things, presumably, native to this world. They’d had no briefing from the astronauts on the nature of the life forms here. Mostly because nobody knew.

  On the fifth day Jenny Amsler, one of the colonists, followed him out, without any kind of invitation from Yuri, to help him with his gear. He mostly ignored her.

  On the seventh day Lieutenant Mardina Jones said she wanted to come too, evidently curious about what he was up to.

  To get to the Cowpat they had to head west, skirting the lake to the north from which the fledgling colony was already drawing water through laboriously dug irrigation ditches. They had defined ‘north’ and ‘west’ based on the orbital plane of the planet; given the stillness of the sun the directions felt abstract. The lake water seemed safe enough once filtered, though it was thick with the local life.

  They called the lake the Puddle.

  Lex McGregor objected to these names, the Cowpat, the Puddle; he wanted more heroic labels. ‘Names to sound down the generations. Lake First Footstep. Mount Terra!’ Or Lake Lex, the colonists joked. They stuck to the Puddle and the
Cowpat. This place was evidently a shithole, but it was their shithole. It was prison-thinking, Yuri thought, now applied to a whole new world. He didn’t care. The lake was the lake, it was a thing in itself, it had been here long before humans, and existed in its own right whatever people called it.

  Now, on this walk out to the Cowpat, Mardina Jones stared around, as if discovering it all for the first time. She had always been one of the more human of the authority types on the ship, Yuri thought. But even she had barely stepped away from the little campsite that had sprung up around the landed shuttle, had barely looked at this world, into which they were all busy driving tent pegs and scraping latrine trenches. But here she was now, apparently determined to see something of Prox c for herself before she was whisked off back to the sky. Like she was on a business trip cramming in a little tourism between sales meetings. Away from the rest of the crew, she did, however, carry a gun.

  By the lake shore, maybe a kilometre from the shuttle, was a formation of what Yuri had decided to call pillows. Mardina slowed to inspect these, fascinated. She had a sensor pack on her shoulder that hummed and whirred as it recorded what she saw. The ‘pillows’ were like heavily eroded rocks, with narrow stems and flat upper surfaces, most no taller than Yuri’s waist. They were irregular lumps, and yet, standing on the muddy shore, they had an odd sense of fitting together, like worn pieces of some thick jigsaw puzzle.

  ‘Fascinating,’ Mardina said. ‘Life! We knew it was here, of course, but here we are, face to face with it. So to speak.’

  Yuri watched her, irritated, as she took her movies to show her buddies back home, in her air-conditioned astronaut’s apartment on an artificial island in the Florida Sea, or wherever. ‘You see these everywhere,’ he said. ‘Doc Poinar took a look at my images and said they were like—’