Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  The weather was overcast, muggy, humid. For such a static world the weather had turned out to be surprisingly changeable, with systems of low or high pressure bubbling up endlessly from the south. It was warm in this unending season, always like a humid summer’s day in North Britain, from what Yuri remembered of the weather. But the ColU, ever curious in its methodical robot way, said it had seen traces of cold: frost-shattered rock, gravel beds, even glaciated valleys in the flanks of features like the Cowpat. Evidence that glaciers had come this way in the past, if not whole ice ages. Somehow this world could deliver up a winter.

  Despite the rise, the walk was easy enough. The years of full gravity on the Ad Astra had hardened up Yuri’s Mars-softened muscles. On Per Ardua the gravity was actually a shade less than Earth’s, according to the ColU, who patiently measured such things. The planet’s radius was a tenth less than Earth’s – Per Ardua was smaller than Venus – but its density was a good bit higher than Earth’s. The ColU speculated that its iron core was more massive, relatively, its mantle of lighter minerals and rocky crust thinner. Nobody listened; nobody cared.

  Yuri thought that patterns of behaviour were emerging. For instance, they’d trekked up this way for firewood before, they’d used the forest, but they’d never explored it. After six months they still knew barely anything about this world on which they were, it seemed, doomed to spend the rest of their lives. Nothing beyond what they could see within the prison of their horizon, and the glimpses they’d had from the shuttle’s windows on the way down, glimpses Lemmy was painstakingly assembling into a map of the substellar side of this one-face world. Nobody cared.

  There was no common spirit. The colony, camp, whatever, was still pretty much a shambles, as it had been from when the astronauts had lifted off, taking the discipline they had briefly imposed with them. Bundles of gear, clothing, food, tools, other stuff, lay around in the dirt where they had been dumped out of the shuttle. Everybody still lived in tents. Even the colony’s two graves, of Joseph Mullane and Jenny Amsler, were left untended.

  Then there was the unending daylight, the changelessness. Lemmy said that humans were evolved from tropical apes. Two million years of adaptation protested against the lack of day and night, and regular sleep was hard to come by. The ColU said that their sleep cycles were staying in synch with each other, roughly, but were gradually lengthening, away from the Earth norm. Nobody seemed to care about that, either.

  Nobody even listened to the ColU – not even Yuri, even though the ColU seemed to think he was more amenable than the rest, and would try to engage him in conversation, such as about the astronomical sightings Yuri kept up sporadically with his bits of equipment, and that the ColU supplemented with its own observations, made with its own sensor pods. All this was a distraction for Yuri, a hobby, something to do to keep him sane. The ColU’s attentions, attracting the mockery of the rest, just embarrassed him.

  And every so often some threat or other, a storm, a bad flare, a threatened flood from their tame lake, would bring everybody down even more.

  Under it all, of course, was the brute reality of their stranding, a rejection many of them would clearly be struggling to accept whatever world they were living on. They drove each other crazy, these strangers forced to become lifelong neighbours, with no hope of escape.

  The ColU was the exception. It quietly got on with its tasks, slowly processing huge rectangular areas of Arduan dirt into terrestrial soil, and sampling the water and the local life, the stem creatures and the lichen and the stromatolites and the bugs. It enthused about bugs it dug out of the ground, as deep as it drilled; on Per Ardua as on Earth, it said, life suffused the deep rocks – there was probably far more biomass down there than on the surface – with complex life just a kind of flourish, a grace note in a symphony of bacterial life.

  Its quiet efficiency, its air of plastic cheerfulness, only irritated people even more, it seemed to Yuri.

  Anyhow, from this squalid little community of reluctant draftees, no leader had yet emerged. Yuri wasn’t even sure who had decided on taking this walk.

  In the early days, Onizuka and John Synge and Harry Thorne had all acted like they were the big men. But Martha Pearson, who had once run a substantial business back on Earth, and Abbey Brandenstein, an ex-cop and proven killer, were pretty strong characters too.

  Mardina Jones had never tried to play the leader, probably wisely. Always a little outside the group, the Lieutenant was a target for insults and mockery as much as sympathy. But Yuri watched her just soak it all up, and get on with her self-appointed tasks. She no longer wore her crew uniform. In fact she seemed to have shed her astronaut persona, her whole ISF career. She had gone from a kind of motherly prison guard into a taciturn survivor, in the blink of an eye. Maybe she was reverting to something deeper, older, a core of her life that had been hidden under the layers above.

  And then the pairing-off had begun, and that had made things worse yet. With six men and four women, none of them partners before the landing, there was always going to be trouble. There seemed to be no gays in the party, which might have made the situation more complicated, or less, though the men joked bleakly about experimenting.

  The pair-ups themselves kind of surprised Yuri. Of the men he’d never have tagged Lemmy as a winner, but pretty soon Pearl Hanks had made clear her preference to be with him. Everybody knew Pearl had once been a hooker, and some of the men, Onizuka, Harry Thorne, still looked at her that way. Maybe she had attached herself to Lemmy precisely because he didn’t react to her like that. And maybe she was calculating on Yuri protecting her, as she might think he protected Lemmy. It was all complicated, a game of human chess.

  Martha Pearson, meanwhile, was sleeping with John Synge. That was less of a surprise, a businesswoman from Hawaii with a lawyer from New New York, they were similar types. But maybe that similarity was why they fought all the time they were together, if they weren’t asleep or screwing.

  And Abbey, maybe the strongest woman of all, had surprised everybody by swooping down on Matt Speith, the artist with no art to make, maybe the most useless, skill-light, disoriented person in the camp. It was obvious who was in control in that relationship. Yuri speculated privately that Abbey had picked Matt as a kind of shield, to keep the other men off. But Mardina was more generous. Maybe she liked his nice soft artist’s hands, she said. Or maybe the ex-cop liked having somebody to protect.

  Mardina herself didn’t pair off with anybody. She’d had approaches, more subtle or less, from the leftover men, Onizuka and Harry – not from Yuri. But she had no trouble brushing these guys off.

  So that left Yuri, Onizuka and Harry without a woman. It drove Onizuka and Harry crazy very quickly, it seemed to Yuri. After all, this was all there was, the ten of them, no more choice of partners – not until their sons and daughters started growing up someday to widen the pool. There had been more choice even in the hulls: lose out now and you’d have lost out for life. Sometimes Onizuka and Harry would talk loudly about sharing partners, bed-hopping. It would be genetically efficient for the women to have babies with more than one partner; it was what Major Lex McGregor would have wanted, so they said. Nobody in a relationship listened.

  Yuri didn’t care. It seemed to him the partnerships had formed up for mutual protection, maybe for comfort. Not for any logic concerning the destiny of the colony in years or decades or generations. And certainly for nothing you’d recognise as love. Right now he didn’t feel like he needed any of that, and nor, it seemed, did Mardina. But Onizuka and Harry glared and spat.

  At least on this trek to the forest they would be able to get away from the camp, if only for a few hours. But as Onizuka snarled at Lemmy, and Lemmy cowered by Yuri’s side, Yuri saw that they hadn’t been able to leave their flaws and rivalries behind.

  As they neared the edge of the forest they came to a bank of stromatolites. They kept calling these bacterial-colony formations by that name, inaccurate as it might seem to a biologist.
These particular specimens were huge structures, much bigger than those near the Puddle – maybe four metres high, like tremendous tables with flat, flaring upper surfaces.

  The ColU had taken samples from various stromatolites in the vicinity of the camp. They were all made of nothing but bugs, of course, layers of bugs and trapped dirt: Arduan bugs of course, like Earth bugs but not identical according to the ColU, in dense, complex layers, joined together in structures that might themselves be millennia old. But the uppermost layers contained photosynthesisers, bugs using the energy of Prox light to break down air and water to produce oxygen – a process similar to what had evolved on Earth, but a different chemistry under a different light. The ColU said it thought the stromatolites were actually this planet’s dominant primary oxygen producers. The ColU was always curious, always speculating; it was its job, it said once, to understand how this world worked, so it could be taken apart to become a human world, with the native life restricted to zones the humans didn’t need, maybe a few parks and botanical gardens. In Yuri’s day, as he recalled while the ColU described all this, they had had tree museums on Earth.

  They didn’t linger long in the stromatolite garden.

  Beyond, Yuri led the way into the deeper forest. The darkness gathered quickly, until they were surrounded by the strange trees of Per Ardua. The trunks rose slim and smooth and tall, without leaves or branches until they reached a canopy high in the air, where immense leaves like tipped plates blocked out the sky. The ground here was dry, compacted soil, covered by a shallow litter, mostly of tremendous leaf fragments like dead water lilies. There was no movement, no sound at first save the ragged breathing of the human party. But Yuri thought he heard a rustle, high in the canopy above.

  Prox trees were different from Earth trees in most ways you could think of. True, your basic tree plan was the same, the roots, the trunk, the green leaves up top. But what the colonists called ‘wood’ self-evidently wasn’t wood at all; each trunk was more like an expanded version of the reed-like stems that grew in the Puddle. The saplings that grew at the southern fringe of the forest particularly provided decent timbers for construction, long and straight and sturdy, and with few branches save near the very top. But they’d learned that you couldn’t just throw a Prox log on the fire. You had to bleed it first, of a sticky, strong-smelling, purplish sap – ‘marrow’, they called it. The marrow itself was useful, however. Harry Thorne had experimented with fixing stone blades to poles with it. Harry had once been a farmer, even if the land he tended had been just a couple of acres in a high-rise, and for a man of densely urban twenty-second-century Earth he was good with his hands, Yuri thought.

  A few hundred metres in they paused, shared water, took stock. Both Onizuka and Martha had crossbows to hand. The air was stained a deep green, deeper than any Earth green.

  ‘So,’ Onizuka said, ‘who knows anything about forests? Don’t ask me, I’m better at the oceans.’

  ‘Not me,’ Lemmy murmured. ‘And even in your time there were no forests left on Earth – right, Yuri? But I do know there’s a belt of this forest right around the face of Per Ardua, where there’s dry land anyhow. It’s the same all the way to the substellar point. You get these circular belts of similar kinds of landscape and vegetation and stuff, depending on the distance from the substellar point, the middle of the world’s face. Places that get the same amount of sunlight, see, get the same kind of growths. What you get is a planet like an archery target. Out here, near the terminator – trees.’

  Onizuka grinned. ‘An archery target, huh?’ He raised his loaded crossbow, pointed it at Lemmy’s face, and mimed pulling the trigger. ‘Click.’

  ‘Oh, you’re funny.’

  Yuri said, ‘These “trees” look like stems to me, like the stems back in the Puddle. Just bigger.’

  Martha rubbed a nearby smooth trunk. ‘So they do. I do know forests, a little. On Earth lots of different species have produced “trees”, palms and ferns for instance. It’s a common form, if you have a situation where you need nutrients from the ground and have to compete for light from the sky. So it’s no surprise to see similar forms here. A universal strategy.’

  Onizuka sneered. ‘You’re an expert, right?’

  She faced him calmly. ‘If you’d ever bothered to speak to me instead of staring at my chest the whole time, you’d know I once made my living out of forests. My grandfather, probably back in your time, Yuri, was a researcher attached to one of the great logging corporations in the final days. He sent cameras in to capture images of the last rainforests and such before they were scraped off the planet.’ She grinned. ‘Eco porn. Fleeing Stone Age-type inhabitants, the huge trees crashing down. My family packaged and repackaged the stuff for years; the more remote it got in time the more exotic it seemed. A real money-spinner, for us. People cheer and place bets on who survives.’

  ‘Yet you ended up here, with us,’ Onizuka said.

  Martha didn’t reply to that. On Per Ardua, and even back on the ship, Yuri had noticed, it was a peculiar kind of bad manners to poke into why and how your companion had ended up in the sweep.

  Instead, Martha stared up. ‘Look at that canopy. See how static it is? And every tree seems to have three big leaves, just three, radial symmetry, one, two, three. See? Every one of them pitched perfectly up at the sun, which is never going to move. If the light condition isn’t going to change, if there are no seasons, I guess you may as well grow just a few huge leaves to capture all the light. Hmm. Why not just one leaf per tree? For redundancy, I guess. There must be something that would chomp on a leaf, even high up there; you would need a spare or two while a lost leaf grew back. Those leaves look like they have the usual dull Arduan green on the sun-facing side, paler on the shadow side, to conserve heat, I guess. Maximum efficiency of usage of sunlight – and that’s why it’s so dark down here. Come on. I think it’s brighter that way—’ she pointed north ‘—maybe some kind of clearing.’

  She led the way, and the rest followed. The trees began to thin out, and Yuri started to see more open sky – free of cloud, but a deeper blue the further north you looked, towards, he supposed, the terminator, and the lands of endless dark.

  Something clattered through the canopy overhead. Yuri looked up, flinching. He had an impression of something big, fragile, a framework with vanes flapping and whirling. It was like the ‘kites’ he had seen over the lake, but much bigger. The kite ducked down towards them, maybe drawn by their movement.

  Onizuka lifted his crossbow and shot off bolts, without hesitation, one, two. Onizuka had been practising with the weapon, with Harry Thorne and Martha.

  The first shot missed, and went sailing up into the canopy. But the second ripped through the flyer’s structure. Yuri thought he heard a kind of screech as fragile vanes folded back. The flyer, driven forward by its own momentum, smashed into a tree trunk and came spinning down towards the ground, tearing and clattering, to hit the litter on the deck with a surprisingly soft impact.

  Onizuka whooped and raised a fist. ‘Got you.’ He led the way, jogging through the leaf debris.

  The fallen creature was a jumble of broken struts and ripped panels of a fine, translucent, brownish skin, like a crashed Wright Brothers aeroplane.

  ‘Wow,’ Lemmy said. ‘Its wingspan must have been three, four metres when it was in flight.’

  ‘But that’s the wrong word,’ Martha said. She knelt, pulled at a panel, unfolded it to revealed ripped skin. ‘ “Wingspan.” These weren’t wings. They’re more like – what, vanes? They were rotating, like chopper blades.’

  Prodding at the fallen creature, they pieced together its structure, or anyhow a best guess at it. There was a stubby cylindrical core body, itself not solid but a mass of rods and fibres. When Yuri plucked a strut at random from the core carcass, it looked just like a stem, one of the reeds from the lake. There had been two sets of vanes, each a triple set – threefold symmetry, like the great leaves of the trees – that had each been attac
hed to the main body by a kind of ball-and-socket joint, lubricated by what looked like tree marrow.

  Martha poked at the main body, working a finger in through a cage of stems. When she withdrew the finger it was sticky with marrow. ‘Yuck. I’m guessing that’s some kind of stomach in there. There’s a mass of stems, and skin stuff, and marrow.’

  ‘Maybe it feeds on the big tree leaves,’ Lemmy said.

  ‘Maybe. Or on smaller critters.’ Martha shrugged, and glanced up into the canopy. ‘Who knows what’s up there?’

  Another rustle, a scrape, this time coming at them along the ground. They stepped back from the flyer and pulled together, instinctively.

  In the canopy shadow Yuri saw creatures moving, built like tripods, maybe a metre tall, each a clattering construct of stems and skin panels, like a toy of wood and canvas. They moved in whirls like spinning skaters, a whole flock of them heading straight for the fallen flyer.

  Straight for the human party, in fact.

  Again Onizuka raised his crossbow.

  Martha grabbed his arm. ‘You don’t need to kill everything we come across.’

  ‘The damn things are heading right at us.’

  ‘Then get out of their way.’ She pulled him aside, into the cover of the trees, and Yuri and Lemmy followed.

  The tripods ignored the humans. Seven, eight, nine of them, they descended on the fallen flyer, and whirred across its body, this way and that, efficiently cutting it to pieces. Yuri saw fine limbs – each multiply articulated, like a spacecraft manipulator arm – pluck at bits of the disintegrated carcass and tuck them into the mesh-like structures that were the cores of the tripods’ own bodies. Yuri had seen beasts like these out on the plains and around the lake, but these were smaller, compact, faster-moving.