Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘But I’m not eleven years old any more, Sir Michael.’

  Earthshine laughed out loud.

  King grinned. ‘Speak your mind, don’t you? I remember that about you too. Oh, hell, if you’d prefer something else—’

  ‘No, no.’ She took a diet soda. It tasted more sour than she remembered, but it did bring back some memories.

  King watched her astutely. ‘Takes you back to when you were a kid, right? You had a strange kind of childhood, didn’t you? I remember you lost your mother when you were very young. And then your father was always kind of distracted by his work, I guess.’

  She shook her head. ‘In a way. But I understand. Now I’m distracted. So distracted I don’t have a family at all.’

  ‘I’m sorry for what became of him. The trial and so on.’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s in the past.’

  ‘I, too, sympathise,’ said Earthshine. ‘Being a relic of the so-called Heroic Generation myself. No doubt they would lock me up if they had the chance.’

  King winked at Stef. ‘Believe me, they’ve tried.’

  Stef snapped, ‘Can we get on to the reason you brought me here?’

  King looked surprised, then laughed. ‘Down to business, eh? You always were impatient, I remember that of you as well. You even got restless during the countdown for the launch of that first hulk, the I-One, didn’t you?’

  ‘Not restless. I was just a lot less interested in some big dumb piece of heavy engineering than I was in the kernels that powered it.’

  ‘Yes, the kernels. The objects you have devoted your life to studying, in the end.’

  ‘Strictly speaking, the physics behind them, yes. And that is what you brought me here to discuss, right? But look, Sir Michael. I’m no expert in international law. I do know that kernel science is supposed to be kept from the Core AIs.’ She hesitated, looking at Earthshine. ‘No offence,’ she said awkwardly.

  ‘Great heavens, none taken.’

  ‘That’s true, of course,’ said King. ‘And you know why, don’t you? Because we don’t trust you, Earthshine. We have to deal with you. I have to meet you, what – every other week? But we don’t like you, or trust you. Sitting in your lairs, your hardened bunkers in the bedrock, plugged into all the world’s essential systems. You and your cousins on the other continents, Ifa and the Archangel.’

  ‘Oh, not cousins. Rivals, perhaps,’ Earthshine said mildly. ‘Companions, sometimes . . .’

  Stef got the distinct impression that they had worked together for too long, that King chafed under the burden of a requirement to report to this strange old artificial entity. They were like bickering academics in some crusty institution, she thought.

  King said now, ‘Major, you do understand what we’re dealing with here? The big continental AIs, the Core AIs as they are called, were spawned in the first place in the pre-Heroic days. They came out of a global network of transnational companies, a network which collectively controlled much of the world’s economy. Within that network nodes of deeper interconnection and control emerged: “super-entities”, the economic analysts called them. They were still at the level of human culture. But beneath the corporate super-entities, intensive AI capability necessarily clustered. Then came the demands for security for core processors and data backups, hardened refuges linked by robust comms networks. Well, they were given what they wanted.’ He grinned, rueful. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  Earthshine said, ‘The early members of the Core were essential to the great projects of the Heroic Generation. Supremely intelligent.’

  ‘But they were not human,’ King said sternly.

  ‘The kernels,’ Stef said, trying to wrench the conversation round to the point. ‘It must have taken a monumental effort to keep the science of the kernels away from the Core AIs.’

  King nodded grimly. ‘It did indeed. The fact that the kernels were found on Mercury, and are studied nowhere closer to Earth than the moon, all helped. That and the fact that the danger was spotted immediately.’

  ‘What danger?’

  ‘That we would understand,’ Earthshine said, ‘where you do not.’

  Stef asked coldly, ‘What don’t I understand?’

  ‘The true physics. Such as the unified theories known as quantum gravity, among other labels. They remain as tantalisingly out of reach to you as they ever were, have been for centuries. You only know them by limits, low-energy approximations – like relativity, quantum physics. As if you are trying to understand the structure of a diamond by studying a single edge. To explore reality further is beyond your engineering capabilities; to compute more is beyond your intellects. In fact, you’ve learned more by playing with kernels, which are quantum-gravitational toys, than you have from all your theorising in the two hundred years since Einstein.’

  Stef scowled. ‘You’re saying that quantum gravity might be too hard for a mere human like me ever to understand.’

  ‘But not for me,’ Earthshine said. ‘Perhaps, anyhow. Which is why those of small minds and smaller hearts, like Sir Michael here, have kept the kernels from us. What might we achieve if we had such knowledge?’

  King looked at Stef. ‘You’ve spent most of your adult life off-planet, Major. See what we have to deal with down here? Crap like this, day after day, decade after decade . . .’

  And Stef did see it, saw a fundamental dichotomy between the two branches of mankind as they were emerging in the new era. The spacegoing were outward-looking, expansive, physically exploring the universe. While the Earthbound were stuck in this gravity well, dominated by legacies of the past, such as these dreadful old indestructible AIs cowering in their holes in the ground. Suddenly she longed to be in space, back on the moon – anywhere but here on this old planet, this museum of horrors.

  ‘Why have you brought me here?’

  ‘We want you to go to Mercury, Major Kalinski,’ King said. ‘Or rather, go back to Mercury. I will accompany you in person, to the kernel beds, as they have come to be known.’

  And there was the opportunity she had come here in hope of, all the way to Earth. But she was baffled. ‘Why? What do you want of me there?’

  ‘You’re going to have to see for yourself, Major. We’ve found something.’ He glanced at Earthshine. ‘Something so significant, of such long-term importance to mankind, that I feel we’ve no choice but to bring it to the attention of these Core AIs. Because if the buggers are useful for anything, it’s thinking about the long term. And we need someone like you, a kernel physicist. We don’t know what to make of it. We’re hoping you might be able to make informed guesses about it, at least.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Something strange,’ said Earthshine.

  CHAPTER 33

  In the endless afternoon of Per Ardua, time flowed unevenly, like the flares that ran across the face of Proxima itself. Sometimes there seemed no interval at all between waking and getting ready to sleep again. And sometimes the days-that-were-not-days dragged, and Yuri felt as if he was back in the solitary tanks in Eden.

  Their Earth-based calendars became irrelevant. Increasingly they marked the passage of time by events, by stuff that changed their lives for better or worse. The weather had turned, for one thing; four years after the landing, Proxima’s face was now crowded with massive sunspots, and its flows of heat and light were reduced enough to make a perceptible difference. The climate was more like a crisp late autumn afternoon, from what Yuri remembered of the North Britain of his boyhood. Sometimes there was even a sparkle of frost on the green leaves in the little colony’s fields, and the ColU fretted about its strawberries. Yuri remembered how Mardina had once told him how stable this stellar system was. No dinosaur-killer rocks here, and so on. But the star itself, it seemed, was in fact a source of instability. And the planet too, with that geological uplift they’d long been observing to the north. Not that they could do anything about all that but endure.

  And then there was Mardina’s pregnancy.r />
  Once they had begun their awkward, rather businesslike lovemaking, she had conceived quickly, Yuri suspected to their mutual relief. The ColU, in its role as family doctor, had insisted on tracking the stages of the developing pregnancy by the book. So the human-event calendar in their heads had filled up with more memorable moments: the day the morning sickness started, the day the bump was first visible to Yuri, the day Mardina felt the first kick, the day she let Yuri feel a kick. Now she was coming to term, and soon there would be another monumental event for their memories: the birth of a child.

  The farm was developing too. With the aid of the ColU it was proving easy for them to extend their few small fields, each coated with terrestrial topsoil and watered by irrigation ditches running from the lake. While the growing stuff, lurid Earth-green, had attracted the attention of the local wildlife – including a flock of spectacular kites the size of herons that periodically came down to investigate – a potato leaf was essentially inedible to an Arduan, and once the crops were established there were no native blights that could harm them. All this had been planned for. The ColU had the capacity to support fourteen people, and their offspring; to provide for one couple was well within its ability.

  But after four years on Per Ardua, to Yuri’s eyes – especially when he returned from a hike to the lake or the forest, and he saw it as a whole, from afar – the farm, their little colony, still didn’t look like it fitted in here, in the Arduan landscape. The rectangular fields with their neat rows of Earth-green plants, the tidy geometry of their conical house, the exclusion of the local Arduan life – even the dirt discoloured by their footsteps and the churn of the ColU’s wheels – the whole thing looked like an unhealed wound on the face of this world.

  Mardina, however, looked less out of place. They had both abandoned their ISF-issue outfits by now, and wore looser clothing mostly made from local materials. In her tunic and short-cut trousers, coolie hat and bark sandals, and with her skin coated with grey-orange Arduan dust, Mardina wore the shades of the planet. Humans had come here to colonise Per Ardua. But, Yuri thought, what was really happening was that Per Ardua was colonising the humans.

  And what drew all three of them, including the ColU, away from the farm and deeper into the embrace of Per Ardua were the builders.

  On another dull day, their chores done, on impulse Yuri and Mardina trekked out to the lake. It was midday, by their human clocks. The ColU was already out at the shore, pursuing its own interests.

  Mardina had become fascinated by the builders’ big projects around the Puddle: the dams that obstructed the inflow streams from the higher ground to the north – dams established long enough now to have created extensive floods behind them – and the more mysterious middens on the southern shore, with their banks and arcs. She walked along the lake’s northern shore, capturing images on her slate and sketching maps and diagrams with a stylus. ‘We still have no idea what all this is for. But whatever the hell they’re doing here, it’s evidently a lot more interesting than us digging in a few potatoes. Does it ever strike you how incurious they’ve been about us recently?’

  That was true. The builders around the lake, a few hundred individuals gathered in a dozen small bands, all seemed part of a single community. Once the group around the nursery area on the western shore had got used to the idea that these strange, lanky, stemless creatures and their big rolling box were harmless, the other bands had soon seemed to pick up the same message, and stopped reacting to them. Unless you stood right in front of one and somehow impeded its progress, the builders just ignored the humans, spinning around you as if you were of as little interest as a lump of rock.

  ‘I think they’re working up to something,’ Mardina said now. She sounded breathless, and she sat on a lump of rock, her slate on the ground beside her. It was another chilly day and she wore an old fleece jacket over her stem-bark tunic. ‘All this work, the dams and mounds. They run around like this all the time, but the activity seems to be getting more intense every time I come out here.’ She massaged her lower spine with both hands; backache had plagued her pregnancy.

  ‘Maybe.’ Yuri squatted on the ground beside her, dug a water bottle out of his flask and handed it to her.

  She waved it away. ‘You go find the ColU. I’ll stay and watch a while. Wouldn’t want to miss the show, whatever they’re planning, if it all happens to kick off today.’

  He stood. ‘You’re sure you’re OK?’

  He knew what reaction he’d get for that, and he got it. ‘You’re worse than that bloody nursemaid on wheels. My brain is still functioning, more or less, thank you, so don’t fuss, ice boy. Just piss off and go and annoy the ColU.’

  ‘All right. You’ve got water, you’ve got—’

  ‘The flare pistol, yes, I’ve got it, and I’ll fire it up your defrosted arse if you don’t bugger – off.’

  So he did.

  He soon found the ColU.

  The big machine had rolled up to one of its own favoured sites for builder-watching, which was the eastern shore. Here there was no intense construction activity, as there was at the north and south shores, and no nurseries as at the west. The builders were always busy here, but engaged on smaller-scale tasks. For instance they had built an elaborate series of traps out into the lake water, from which they extracted small fish-like creatures, with stem-based skeletons like the rest of the wildlife but wrapped in a skin-like streamlined webbing – a casing easily unwrapped, and the contents picked apart and incorporated into other bodies.

  And the builders weren’t so busy that they could not be distracted by a dancing robot.

  Of course the ColU couldn’t really dance; it was built more like a tank than a ballerina. But, given Mardina’s lead, it had become ingenious at simulating builder-dancing with the forest of manipulator arms that sprouted from its deck. Now, before an audience of three builders, all adults – of course there would be three, or nine, or twenty-seven of these creatures of three-fold groupings – the ColU put on a show. It held up heavy-duty arms to simulate the three main limbs of a builder, and while it couldn’t literally make its puppet-builder spin around, with a kind of sleight of hand, its smaller arms twisting and writhing, it made it look as if it was spinning, accompanied by the nods, rocks and gestures that characterised builder movements.

  The builders were not watching passively. They spun and dipped in their turn, as if they were speaking to each other as well as to the ColU – as if it had been accepted into some kind of conversation.

  One of them was injured, Yuri saw; it had a damaged leg stem, broken near the base, so that it hobbled, its spinning a little off-balance. And as Yuri approached, he sensed a strange, intense smell, a smell of the lake, the stems – the scent of builders, amplified and enhanced, a scent reproduced artificially by the ColU.

  ‘Welcome, Yuri Eden!’ the ColU called, continuing its puppet show.

  Yuri kept back from the little group. ‘You look as if you’re actually talking to them.’

  ‘Indeed! I have made spectacular progress in the months since I was inspired by Lieutenant Jones’s intuitive grasp that the builders’ dancing is a kind of communication. I have begun to build up an extensive vocabulary of “words”, which—’

  ‘I didn’t know you’d got so far. You haven’t told us about any of this.’

  It sounded faintly offended. ‘I was waiting to complete the project. Or at least bring it to the point where I could make a proper report.’

  ‘This isn’t an academy.’ That was one of Mardina’s choice lines. ‘Just tell me what you’ve learned.’

  ‘A lot – or perhaps only a little. You must appreciate the challenge. Humans share a universal grammar that derives from your body shape, the way you interact with your environment, your experience of birth, life, death. A builder’s experience – the way a creature that is half-animal, half-plant by terrestrial categories apprehends the world – really is quite alien, and therefore so is its language. Also builder commu
nication has a whole range of components, the most important being the gestural – the dancing – and scent: they emit body chemicals at will. I get the sense that they are a very old species, Yuri, and their mode of communication is very ancient. I mean ancient in the biological sense. Much older than human languages. Indeed, it has surely evolved on biological timescales, rather than cultural. As a result their language is wideband, in a way, with many channels of discourse, most of which I suspect I have yet to discover.

  ‘So we started with the basics, with simple nouns for obvious concrete objects. “Lake” was the first, as you can imagine.’ Its arm-puppet gave a series of twirls, and Yuri smelled a sharper tang. The builder audience responded in kind. ‘But even for a simple concept like “lake”, the builder word is much more complex, with many meanings overlaid; it means something like “the interface between mother and father which brings life”. That is my perhaps clumsy interpretation. It is as if every time I use the word “lake” I give you its history in terms of a Latin root imported into English via Norman French, together with mythological footnotes—’

  ‘Mother and father, though?’

  ‘Ah, yes: to them Proxima is the father, in terms of emotional analogies with the human condition, and the world, Per Ardua, is the mother – or more specifically, I think, the term refers to the lichen-rich nutrient patches in which their young take root. The adults who actually nurture infants are referred to by a term I think translates as something more like “midwife” rather than “parent”. From such beginnings I have established many more common terms, for water, earth, sky, hot, cold, big, small—’

  ‘What do they call us?’

  ‘We each have our individual names. They don’t have a class name for humans. There are only three of us – including myself – and we are all very different in their eyes. Your name, and Mardina’s, are variants on a phrase that means “single stem”.