Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

But what kind of architecture? They sketched competing designs on their slates, from crude temporary shelters of the kind Mardina’s nomadic people had once built in the outback, to grand halls with steeply pitched roofs. In the end they settled on something like a roundhouse, once common across Britain before the Romans came, as Yuri vaguely remembered and the ColU was able to confirm.

  They sited it on a slope, and dug out drains to protect it from any run-off when it rained. They started the building itself with a circle of rocks, a drystone wall of sandstone blocks hauled from the Cowpat by the ColU, and a few big black basalt slabs from the Lip, the volcanic-extrusion feature to the north, as a base for a hearth. Then, with the ColU’s help, they hauled timbers, long and strong, from the sapling groves at the fringe of the northern forest. They had to cauterise the cut ends to keep the marrow from seeping out.

  Every time Yuri went on a log-collecting expedition with the ColU he found himself being lectured on the gathering signs of the geological event the ColU thought was developing here: an uplifted ground, trace seepages in the air – maybe there really was some kind of big eruption on the way.

  They dug postholes outside the stone wall, and set up the posts in an open cone frame, with their bases outside the wall and their top ends tied together, tepee style. Getting the first three posts up was tricky, but once the basic frame was established the rest was easy. Then they tied crosspieces to the frame, draped the whole structure with tent fabric to keep it dry, and began the intricate labour of building walls of wattle and daub, mud caked over dead stems. Yuri had brought stems of about the right length over from a kind of midden he’d found on the south lake shore, some kind of builder construction.

  It was hard, steady work once they’d begun it. In fact, Yuri wished they had started earlier. It distracted them from their plight. It was satisfying work. Satisfying for him, anyhow.

  Mardina mostly buckled down, but sometimes she would grouse. ‘You never saw Earth, ice boy. I mean, my Earth, twenty-second-century Earth. We had programmable matter. You know what that means? If you wanted a new table, say, you wouldn’t go out and buy a table. Still less would you make one, from bits of splintery old wood. You’d order up the pattern you wanted, download it, and it would assemble itself, from whatever you had lying around that you didn’t need any more.’ She kicked the stem-tree trunk she’d been working on. ‘This stuff is dead. Stupid. It’s not even augmented.’

  ‘Augmented?’

  ‘The whole world is smart now. Even an axe, even a chunk of wood, would be talking to you all the time. Laser beams bouncing off and zapping you straight in the retina.’

  ‘Wow.’

  ‘We got used to making do with less than that in the military. Soldiers have to work in simpler, more robust environments. Same in space, on Mars. But here there’s nothing, nothing but the base stratum, the inanimate.’

  ‘Nothing but what’s real.’

  That only provoked an argument. ‘Information is real. Layers of meaning attached to an object by human intelligence are real. You’d never understand. Oh, get back to your cave paintings and your carved mammoth tusks, ice boy . . .’

  He and Mardina, alone together, got along all right. On the whole. In a sense.

  For now they had plenty of supplies, so there was no conflict about that. They were calm enough when they discussed common projects, like building the house. They were usually civil, at least, just as they had been before Synge’s killing spree. They may or may not have been the strongest personalities in the original group, Yuri reflected, but they had been among the most self-contained. They’d had no reason to come into collision while everybody else was still around, and they mostly managed to avoid that now it was just the two of them.

  They didn’t talk much about the past, those who had killed and died. Even when they did, Mardina never spoke their names. John Synge became ‘the lawyer’, Matt was ‘the artist’, Lemmy was ‘your little chum from Mars’.

  And though they kept up their clocks and calendars, Mardina slaving to Earth time, Yuri cross-checking with his amateur astronomy observations, Mardina seemed to mark time mostly by events: the day the lawyer went crazy, the day the ex-cop took up with the artist, the day they were stranded on Per Ardua in the first place. Since Synge’s killing spree a lot less had happened in their little settlement. Two people, it seemed, didn’t generate much in the way of incidents. But even so there were some meaningful events: the day of the bumper potato crop, the day of the big electric storm, the day the ColU threw a tyre on the way back from the Puddle.

  Yuri didn’t know what all this meant. Maybe she was reaching back to deeper roots, her childhood. Maybe this was how her own people thought and behaved: maybe they never named the dead, maybe they kept track of time by events, not by counting the days. Yuri didn’t know, he didn’t discuss it with Mardina. Yuri had never been to Australia, back in his pre-cryo life on Earth. And besides, the dried-out, emptied, China-dominated Australia of her age was no doubt utterly different from his own time.

  As for the future, they never discussed it, beyond the immediate horizon of their chores. Never, despite the gentle prompting of the ColU. Never, save for the one event that swam in Mardina’s imagination, cut loose from time: the day of pickup, when ISF, she continued to believe, would atone for its crimes by swooping down from the sky to rescue her.

  CHAPTER 24

  Yuri started noticing problems with the heap of fallen stems he had been retrieving from the lake for the walls and the thatch.

  It kept shrinking.

  They didn’t alternate watches, as had been the practice in the colony’s early days. The two of them kept to the same day-night sleep cycle, trusting to the ColU to keep watch over the camp while they slept in their separate tents. And it was during the ‘nights’, their sleep periods, that the heap of stems seemed to be diminishing, sometimes to two-thirds, even half the size Yuri remembered from the day before. It took a couple of simple images on his slate to prove he wasn’t imagining it.

  The ColU denied all knowledge, though it accepted that the solo patrols it ran during the night around the camp, which was now spreading as the ColU created more areas of terrestrial-compatible soil, meant that it couldn’t watch the stem heaps constantly.

  Somebody like Lemmy might have been playing some kind of trick. Not Mardina. Nowadays she walked around in a kind of waking dream, it seemed to Yuri. She barely noticed him most of the time, and she certainly wouldn’t fix on him long enough to figure out an elaborate practical joke.

  In the end Yuri spent a sleepless ‘night’ hidden in a storage tent, peering out at his stem heap.

  And, in the small hours by Yuri’s body clock, and with the ColU on the far side of the colony inspecting a field of fresh-cropped potatoes, they came. Builders. They kept to the shadows of the tents, whirling, rustling things like low stools or tripods, stick limbs attached flexibly to a central core of tangled stems. Builders, from the Puddle! He counted two, four, eight, nine of them: nine, he thought, three threes, a logical number for creatures with threefold symmetry. They made for the stem heap, but paused frequently, apparently listening, or watching.

  When they got to the stems, after maybe a minute of stillness, the builders started buzzing around the heap, plucking out stems with their fine ‘limbs’ of multiply jointed rods and gathering them into loose bundles. Yuri marvelled at the way they worked together, graceful, cooperative, creatures of jointed twigs moving with no more noise than a dry rustle, a sound like a sack full of autumn leaves gently shaken. And he realised they were being pretty smart; whatever they wanted the stems for, this was a pretty good moment to come and get them, in the middle of Yuri’s and Mardina’s sleep cycle, and with the ColU far away. Evidence of observation, of planning.

  But they were robbing his stash.

  He burst out of hiding. He had a saucepan and lid that he clattered together, making as much noise as he could as he ran at them. ‘Get out of here, you little bastards!’
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  The builders froze, just for an instant. Then they scooted off, rolling in their tripod way, much faster than Yuri could give chase. They carried off most of the stems they had stolen, though they dropped a few, leaving a trail of broken stems that led straight back to the lake.

  He didn’t sleep again that shift.

  When Mardina emerged from her tent, barefoot, hair a tangle, he tried to show her the heap, the trail of stems.

  ‘I’m going out after them. We need to know more about those little sods.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’ She filled a pan from the small tank they kept topped up with filtered lake water, and carried it to the fire to boil up.

  He followed her. ‘I thought I would have disturbed you in the night. All that jumping and hollering and lid-banging. Even the builders made some noise.’

  She shrugged, without reply. She was inspecting one of their packs of freeze-dried coffee, precious stuff and irreplaceable; the pack was almost empty, but she shook out enough dust for one more cup.

  ‘You know,’ said Yuri, frustrated, ‘I sometimes feel like you’re barely aware that I’m here at all. Like I’m a ghost.’

  She looked at him directly for the first time that morning. ‘Maybe you are. Maybe I’m a ghost too.’ She pulled a face. ‘Maybe the lawyer got us both, and it happened so quick we don’t know we’re dead. Maybe there’s nobody here on Per Ardua but us ghosts. You, me, and Dexter Cole.’

  He turned away. She was just jabbing at him, but she had learned how to get under his skin. He wasn’t superstitious, he didn’t think, but sometimes the sheer emptiness of this world got to him, and she knew it. ‘I’m going after the builders,’ he said doggedly.

  ‘What about the wuundu?’ Which was her word for the house; the ColU didn’t like her using it.

  ‘A day off won’t hurt.’

  ‘What’s the point? We’ve still got plenty of stems.’

  ‘I’m curious, that’s all.’

  ‘Fine. Go off and be curious. I’m going back to bed.’ Her pan of water had boiled; she poured it carefully into her coffee.

  So Yuri put together a quick pack, food, water, a couple of knives, his slate, rain cape, fold-up sun parasol – and, when he thought it over, a crossbow – and set off.

  The trail left by the fleeing builders was easy enough to track at first, a litter of broken stem fragments. It headed north, towards the Puddle.

  The sky was clear, and the heat of Proxima poured down. The ground was a plain, more or less flat save for occasional outcrops of rock, bluffs of what looked liked sandstone to him, none of them approaching the size of the Cowpat. He remembered McGregor saying this site had been chosen as a shuttle landing site in the first place because it was the bed of a larger dried-up lake, and it certainly felt like that now.

  Not far from the camp the trail petered out. Yuri guessed the builders had realised they weren’t being followed, and had slowed down, taken more care with the precious fragments they were carting home. Lacking any better clues Yuri just kept walking the way he’d been heading, taking a line of sight between the camp and features of the lake: a swampy area by the shore, a cloud of kites flapping in very birdlike flocks over the water.

  And as he approached the lake he saw he was heading straight for the big heap of dead stems, the midden he’d been taking the stuff from in the first place.

  He came to a bluff, a tilted slab of stratified stone taller than he was that offered a little shade. He took a break from the sun, a swig of water from one of his bottles.

  Here in the shade the ground was quite bare, he saw, the rock faces clean of the native lichen. He kept forgetting that here on Per Ardua the shadows never shifted; this little scrap of ground was in permanent shadow, the only light coming from reflection from the ground, so little could ever grow here. Further north, he thought, there must be places where Proxima light never reached, where the ground was forever frozen, the snow never melted. He wondered if he’d ever go that far. Maybe not, if he was stuck by this lake the whole of his life.

  He walked on, coming to the lake shore just to the west of the midden. From here the way the land rose gradually to the north, beyond the lake, was very obvious – and getting more so, if the ColU was right about the geology and the changes.

  The midden itself was a heap of stems, a rough arc facing the water. He could see similar structures further to the west, all along the lake’s southern shore. But he couldn’t remember seeing these before. Were they new, had they been built up? They looked almost like pieces of an incomplete dam, he thought now.

  Before him the lake itself was shallow, nearly choked with banks of the reed-like stems. A flock of kites drifted on the lake. They seemed to feed on the stems in the water; he’d seen them plucking stems and tucking them into their bodies, especially their densely woven cores. But sometimes they would break the stems, and finer appendages on the kites, like drinking straws, would be dipped in to extract the sticky marrow within. He was too far away to see the details of how they did this, how creatures like bundles of sticks in brown paper could manage such fine operations. Then they lifted suddenly into the air, flapping, splashing. They were very birdlike in their movements on the water, like gaunt pelicans maybe, an illusion broken when they flew up and you could see those twin sets of spinning vanes, like some kid’s rubberband toy of a helicopter.

  And he spotted movement on the big midden.

  He stepped back, trying to stay inconspicuous.

  It was a party of builders, tripods silhouetted against the sky – seven, eight, nine of them, burdened with dead stems. Surely the party he’d been following. He saw they’d piled up the bundle they’d taken from the camp on the top of the midden, and with some care were threading the individual stems back into the structure, like reassembling a haystack one straw at a time. This obviously mattered to them, to go to all the trouble of retrieving the stuff, and to handle it so carefully.

  Now another party of builders approached the midden. Just three of them, they moved together, in a fluid triangle of which one vertex moved at a time, so the formation swivelled across the muddy ground. They moved like this because they were carrying something, he saw, handing it off gracefully one to the other as they moved. It looked like just another bundle of stems to Yuri, until they started to climb up the slope of the midden.

  Then he saw that the bundle was actually a body, another tripod-shaped builder, inert, its component stems clattering loosely as the party laboured up the mound.

  Near the top they laid down their burden. With swift, precise movements they began to disarticulate it, separating the stems at the joints. Moving slowly, hoping not to be seen, Yuri dug his small telescope out of his pocket for a closer look. They were using knives, just chips of stone, jet black, basalt from the Lip maybe, gripped in combinations of fine stems like skeletal hands. With these stone knives they cut through the marrow blobs connecting the joints of the corpse. When they were done they began to lay out the disconnected stems across the surface of the midden, setting them down with great care, in a pattern Yuri could not see, and no doubt would not have understood.

  They stood over the remains, the three of them in a neat row, utterly motionless. It was a funeral party, he realised.

  And then, as one, they broke away from each other, spinning off in diverse directions. One of them headed west. Yuri followed it, at random.

  As he walked, he got out his slate and murmured quick notes. ‘They plan. They work together. They have tools, knives at least. They honour their dead. No wonder they raided us. I’ve been robbing their cemetery . . .’

  A little way around the curve of the lake shore, the builder he was following approached a thick bed of reed-like stems, just away from the water’s edge. In the background there was a magnificent row of stromatolites, as big as any Yuri had found elsewhere, tremendous flat-topped mounds whose surfaces shone like bronze. Yuri saw the builder was heading for a kind of dome assembled from stems that reminded Yuri of a bird’
s nest, big, upside down – not that he’d seen a bird’s nest since his parents committed him to cryo. The colonists had always called these things ‘shelters’, but Yuri had no idea if that was their true purpose. The builder pushed its way inside this structure with a rustle.

  Yuri crouched down and waited.

  After a few minutes the builder emerged again, and went spinning off into one of the stem beds near the water.

  Overwhelmed with curiosity, Yuri crept forward to the shelter. Close to, the structure looked densely woven, seamless. But he remembered where the builder had entered it – indeed there were trails in the mud, overlapping circular scrapings where it had passed. The builder had gone in through a soft place in the dome, a slit he could shove his hand inside.

  Yuri got down on his hands and knees and pushed forward into darkness only relieved a little by the daylight seeping in behind him.

  Once inside, he could see nothing. He pulled his pack over his shoulder and rifled through it in the dark. He never carried a torch; you didn’t need a torch, in the unending afternoon of Proxima. But he dug out his slate, tapped it a couple of times to bring up a bright glowing display. He turned it, shining the light into the interior.

  He saw more builders: little ones, stationary, like models, or toys. They stood amid mounds of stems, heaps of stone flakes, other objects he couldn’t identify, just shapes in the uncertain light.

  He set down the slate and picked up the smallest builder. It was only ten centimetres tall, maybe, and it was simple, especially in its internal structure, the mesh core. It was like a stool for a child. He turned it over and over.

  One stem suddenly shot out of the axis of the little builder’s central core, broader, flatter than usual, like a leaf, darker. And, with a rustle, an eye opened, right in the middle of the leaf, an eye that might have been human, with white and an iris and even a pupil, staring right back at him.

  ‘Shit!’ Suddenly the little builder began to squirm in his hands. It was like he was wrestling with an animated bundle of sticks, a wooden puppet come to life, with that eerie eye glaring at him. ‘Shit, shit!’ He dropped the builder, knocking aside his slate in the process.