Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘They aren’t great conversationalists, Yuri! Their language is simple, really, with a very wide vocabulary, lots of labels, but only elementary grammatical rules. And much of what they say to each other consists of stock sayings. Like slogans, or folk sayings.’

  Yuri tried to think of an example. ‘Such as, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?’

  ‘Yes. But a builder analogy might be, “Dig it up before you make it.” This is another aspect of their antiquity, Yuri Eden. We’ve seen them use stone tools. But before they go to the trouble of making a new tool, they will grub at the ground and see if they can dig up a discard, a tool left by some forebear that might be thousands of years old. They’ve been wandering here for a long, long time: the ground is evidently rich enough in abandoned artefacts to make that sort of strategy worthwhile. And there isn’t a lot of innovation across the generations; they expect the tools left behind by their ancestors to be pretty much the same as what they make and use today. The language is the same, a collection of phrases and sayings, bits of wisdom handed down, polished from overuse.’

  ‘What do they call themselves? Not builders . . .’

  ‘ “The Fallen”. That is a human analogy; their term is something like “the semi-disarticulated”. But I think the concept of falling, that is falling from grace, is appropriate. “Everything is shit, and so are we.” That’s perhaps their most common slogan; they use it to say hello, goodbye, and as an interjection in conversation. Though the term isn’t “shit”, it is something like “the marrowless and broken husk of a dead stem”. They seem to regard the whole universe as a dismal ruin, with themselves as worthless as cockroaches picking their way through the rubble. By human standards they are almost comically gloomy, I suspect.’

  ‘Yet they raise their infants.’ Yuri glanced at the injured builder, who still danced before the ColU’s puppet. ‘And they care for their sick.’

  ‘That they do—’

  It broke off. The arm-puppet stopped ‘dancing’ suddenly, the manipulator arms folded away, and the ColU rolled backwards on its tracks and turned to face the north shore. The builders stopped too, evidently startled by the ColU; after freezing for a moment they abruptly began a new conversation among themselves.

  Yuri looked to the north. An orange spark was climbing into the sky: a flare.

  The ColU was already rolling away. Yuri ran after it as fast as he could, but he was easily outpaced.

  CHAPTER 34

  By the time he intercepted the ColU it was already on its way back to the settlement, with Mardina riding on its front unit, leaning back against its bubble-dome cover. As it rolled along the ColU’s endlessly adaptable manipulator arms were working on Mardina’s belly, massaging it in great downward sweeps.

  Yuri jogged alongside. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘What does it look like?’ she snarled back. ‘My water’s broken. I’ve had a couple of contractions. And my back’s killing me.’

  ‘Everything is under control,’ the ColU said calmly, rolling presumably as fast as it dared.

  ‘Shut up, you.’

  ‘Here.’ Yuri took off his stem-bark tunic, rolled it up, and shoved it behind Mardina’s back. She accepted this, at least. ‘What else can I do?’

  ‘You can piss off and leave it to me and my robot doctor here. I – ow – oh, you little bastard!’

  ‘Please run ahead, Yuri Eden,’ the ColU said. ‘We will be using the house; please make it ready, as we have planned.’

  Mardina snapped, ‘Just get on with it, you – ow!’

  So Yuri hurried ahead.

  They’d rehearsed all this. At the house he cleared out his own gear to one of the storehouses, moved Mardina’s bed closer to the door, and lit a fire in the hearth. He made sure that all their remaining ISF-issue medical packs were on hand, close to Mardina’s bed. He widened the doorway too, removing a few panels that they had pre-fitted to ensure the ColU had access to the house when it needed it.

  When the ColU arrived, Mardina was adamant. ‘Out, ice boy. I don’t want you anywhere near me.’

  ‘It’s my kid too—’

  ‘It’s my bloody pelvis. Out, out!’

  The ColU murmured, ‘I think it’s best, Yuri Eden.’

  ‘All right, all right.’

  ‘I will call you when—’

  ‘I said all right.’ Yuri stamped out.

  He had to watch as the ColU cautiously worked its way into the house; it wouldn’t fit all the way inside, and Yuri, on a request by the ColU, draped a tarpaulin over its protruding rear end, blocking off the entrance to the house.

  After that he could see nothing of the birth.

  The labour took hours, and sounded difficult. Not that Yuri had any prior experience. He could hear screams and weeping, and the calm voice of the ColU urging its patient to breathe, breathe.

  After a time he wandered off, seeking a chore that might distract him, in the fields, in the little storehouse they had put aside as a workshop. Nothing seemed meaningful. Everything that was important in his universe, all that mattered on this world, was going on inside the house he had built with Mardina, and he could do nothing to influence it.

  On impulse he walked away from the camp, heading back towards the lake.

  A cloud of depression gathered. What use was he? He had been on Per Ardua for four years already. In one random bout of clumsy, only half-satisfactory sex he had done all that Mardina had ever needed of him, or would ever need. He felt as if he had no identity – and he hadn’t, not since his parents had bundled him into the cryo tank in Manchester. Even here, in this little two-person colony, he didn’t matter, not fundamentally, not when it really came to it. He had had such moods since waking up on Mars. Generally he fought them off with work. It was harder alone.

  He climbed a bluff, from where he had a good view of the lake. He could see those dams and the brimming floods behind them to the north, and those strangely shaped middens to the south. From here he got a clear sense that the whole layout of the middens really was integrated, somehow, as if all these constructions served a single purpose. And he saw builders moving on those north and south shores, blurs of movement as they spun, tracked, congregated in little groups that quickly broke up and reformed elsewhere. Mardina was right; they were building up to something, some big stage in whatever project they were working through.

  And all of them, of course, utterly ignored the human being standing alone on this bluff watching them, this visitor from another star. What an astonishing thing – as if Egyptian slaves had continued labouring over their pyramids while ignoring the silvery UFO that had landed in the shadow of the Sphinx. But why shouldn’t they ignore him? He didn’t matter to his own people, and never had; why should he matter to these aliens?

  There was a kind of cracking sound.

  He saw a spray of water rising up from one of those dams to the north, as if it had suddenly been breached. Had it failed? But another crack came, like a cannon shot, and another, and he saw more sprays of misty water lifting into the air from other dams, and he heard a kind of roar.

  It was no accident. Those dams had been timed to fail, all at the same time, or were being deliberately demolished, one by one, and the roar he heard was the flow of released water; the great floods trapped behind the dams must be gushing forward into the lake. But why was all this being done?

  And now he heard a popping noise, coming from behind him.

  He turned to look back at the camp. Another flare had been fired; a spark of orange light lifted high into the sky, over their conical house.

  He climbed down off the bluff and ran back, as hard and fast as he could.

  By the time Yuri arrived, the ColU was backing out of the house. It was holding a bundle of blankets. Yuri would never have imagined that a bunch of killer-robot manipulator arms could have expressed such tenderness.

  Abruptly, the ColU began to speak, loudly. ‘What an ugly child! Practically a monstrosity. And it’s going to be b
adly behaved all its life, I can tell just by looking at it, and nothing but a burden to its wretched parents . . .’

  ‘ColU! What the hell are you doing?’

  In a more normal tone it said, ‘Following the Lieutenant’s instructions, Yuri Eden. Scaring off the evil spirits that attend every birth, in malevolent hopefulness. And now . . .’ Carefully, slowly, like some heavy orbital spacecraft gingerly attempting a docking with a space station, the ColU handed the baby to Yuri.

  Yuri had had some instruction in this, even practice with bundles of clothes and blankets overseen by a stern Mardina, and he knew how to support the child, how to cradle its head. Deep in the mass of blankets was a small, crumpled, pink, moist face with closed puffy eyes, and hair plastered down by fluid. The hair was black like its mother’s, but straight like its father’s. Looking down at the child, Yuri felt something shift and break inside him, like a collapsing dam of his own.

  ‘Beth,’ the ColU said. ‘Her name is Beth Eden Jones. The mother is fine. Mardina’s going to try to sleep, but she said she will see you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It was my function. But I appreciate your saying that, Yuri Eden.’

  A memory floated to the surface of Yuri’s mind. It seemed distant, almost irrelevant. ‘You might want to take a look at the lake.’

  ‘The lake?’

  ‘While you were in there with Mardina – there have been developments.’

  ‘I will. Go and see the mother, Yuri Eden.’ It turned and rolled away, in the direction of the lake.

  Yuri stepped into the house. The tarpaulin he’d hung to cover the ColU’s rump was still dangling from hooks, shutting out the day. Inside the house was a smell of blood and bodies, and antiseptic, and the scent of the still-burning fire – a stem scent that was suddenly, sharply, redolent of the builders, as if those gloomy, dogged creatures were in here singing a lullaby. Mardina lay flat on her bed, looking exhausted, but she was cleaned up, in a fresh nightgown, with her hair brushed back, her face washed. She smiled when Yuri stood over her with the baby. He saw that the cot that the ColU had fabricated, a structure of Arduan stems, stood ready beside her bed.

  He asked, ‘Do you want anything?’

  ‘No. Well, to sleep in a minute. Just wanted to see you.’

  ‘Nicest thing you ever said to me, astronaut.’

  ‘Don’t push it, ice boy.’

  ‘So this is Beth.’

  ‘My mother’s name. You have any objections?’

  ‘Of course not. I think I expected your mother’s name to be—’

  ‘More exotic? “Elizabeth” is what they called her in the school she grew up in, after the Desiccation Resettlement. She was separated from her own mother. Never knew her birth name.’

  ‘Beth it is then.’

  ‘Sure . . . What are you feeling, Yuri?’

  He tried to express it. ‘Like I stepped through another door.’

  ‘Your life has changed again, huh. So now here she is. Phase One of the grand plan, remember? Our retirement insurance, and the loins of the next generation.’

  ‘She’s none of those things. She’s Beth.’ He looked down at the baby, at this piece of himself. ‘None of that Adam and Eve crap. I, we, we’re going to protect her, and nurture her, and give her as full a life as she deserves.’

  Mardina raised her head weakly. ‘That’s a big promise, ice boy. I mean, for instance, how can she ever fall in love? Nothing’s changed in the bigger picture, Yuri. We’re still stuck here, alone.’

  ‘Another door will open,’ Yuri said calmly. ‘Just like before. And I’ll step through it, and I’ll take Beth with me, and you.’

  Mardina smiled. ‘You know, right now, I believe you. But that’s probably the drugs talking. Let me sleep and get back to normal, and I’ll kick your butt properly.’

  ‘I’ll put her in her crib . . .’

  But Mardina, lying back, had already drifted away.

  CHAPTER 35

  Twelve hours later, with Mardina awake, and the baby’s first feeds negotiated successfully, the ColU drove up to the house. It waited outside until Yuri popped his head out of the door.

  ‘Sorry to disturb you, Yuri Eden.’

  ‘That’s OK, buddy.’

  ‘It’s the lake. You alerted me to developments during the confinement. There have been more. I thought perhaps you would both wish to see. Well, all three of you.’

  ‘I’m not sure if—’

  ‘Count me in, ColU.’ Mardina, swathed in a heavy ISF-issue overcoat, pushed her way out of the house. She breathed deeply. ‘Clean air in the lungs. Nothing better. Tell you what, I’ll put on my tracksuit and we’ll jog over.’

  ‘We won’t, you know.’

  ‘I think she is teasing you, Yuri Eden,’ the ColU said.

  She was grinning. ‘You’re so easy, ice boy. We’ll ride on the ColU, and you can walk. Deal?’

  They took their time to get ready for the little expedition, with the ColU laden with blankets, water and hot drinks for Mardina, and expressed milk for the baby. Then they set off towards the lake. The air, under the increasingly mottled face of Proxima, was fresh, even cold.

  Before they reached the eastern shore, they climbed one of the many shallow bluffs that studded this landscape and looked out over the lake.

  Which had changed, dramatically. Those big flooded areas behind the northern dams were drained. But the risen lake water had now broken through its bank on the south side, and, guided apparently by the builders’ middens, was gushing into the dry river channel that Yuri had walked through many times. Already it was beginning to flood a depression some way to the south. Everywhere the builders were on the move, adults with infants, even a few apparent invalids being carried by parties of adults, streaming around the banks of the lake towards the outflow channel.

  ‘They did this deliberately,’ Mardina breathed.

  ‘That’s correct, Lieutenant Jones. This has been engineered by the builders. The sudden release of the trapped flood water behind the northern dams created a surge that broke the southern banks and scoured the outflow channels, deepening and widening them. Now much of the lake, I calculate, will drain away. And it will reform in the depression you see to the south, which extends some way beyond, but which will drain in its turn . . . I have studied the topography. I believe that by the time this manoeuvre is completed, the lake will have been moved some ten kilometres to the south.’

  ‘ “Manoeuvre”,’ repeated Mardina, cradling the baby. ‘ “Moved”. The way you put that makes it sound as if you believe this was purposeful.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I believe, Lieutenant Jones. The builders have engineered this; they have deliberately shifted the lake to the south. And once it is there, presumably, they will replant stem beds, perhaps restock the water with the fish analogues and other creatures . . . They have been aided by that steady uplift to the north, I mean the geological uplift, the magmatic event that appears to be occurring there. But, yes, it seems clear to me that they have moved this lake.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have no answer to that,’ the ColU said. ‘I can only speculate. But there must be a good reason. I suspect we will find out in time.’

  Mardina asked, ‘So what does this mean for us?’

  ‘That’s our only stable supply of water,’ Yuri said. ‘We can’t rely on the rain. We know that. If the lake moves, we have to move with it.’

  The ColU looked pained. ‘I have created whole fields of terrestrial topsoil at this site.’

  ‘So we move the soil as best we can, as much as we can. It’s no use here without water. We’ll have to shift our other stuff too. The house, the buildings – maybe we’ll rebuild in some modular form, for when we have to break it all down again.’

  ‘You mean,’ Mardina said slowly, ‘when the builders shift the lake again, some time in the future.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Why should they do that?’

  ‘If they’v
e done it once, why shouldn’t they do it again?’

  ‘The ISF imagined we’d be stuck here, in this place, for life,’ Mardina said. ‘Tied to the lake for its water. Instead, the lake’s migrating, and so are we.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He grinned. ‘Everything’s changed.’

  ‘And a door’s opened for you, ice boy. Just as you said it would.’

  ‘Damn right. Now all we have to do is to step through. And who knows what we’ll find?’

  ‘ColU,’ Mardina said, ‘what did you say the builder phrase for the lake is?’

  ‘ “The interface between mother and father which brings life”.’

  ‘Hmm. And wherever it travels, yes, it will bring life. It is like the Dreamtime spirit that created the rivers and the waterholes. It is a jilla.’

  Yuri nodded. ‘OK. Better name than Puddle anyhow.’

  The baby started to cry, cold, tired, hungry. The ColU, moving with an oddly balletic grace despite its bulk, turned carefully, disturbing its fragile cargo as little as possible, and headed back to the camp.

  CHAPTER 36

  The flight by UEI hulk ship from Earth to Mercury was a high-energy straight-line blast across the solar system, at a constant one-gravity acceleration. Constant, save for one six–hour interval of microgravity, when the kernel drive was briefly shut down, the systems checked out, and the ship flipped over to begin its deceleration to the destination.

  In this interval, while the drive was inert, Monica Trant invited Stef Kalinski to visit the hulk’s engine room. Led by an ISF crewman, they pulled themselves down a fireman’s pole that ran the length of the axis of the big, spacious tank that comprised the greater part of the hulk, down towards the engines.

  ‘Thanks for this,’ Stef said to Trant. ‘You know how it is. Since I graduated I’ve devoted practically my entire life to a study of the kernels. But I’ve only ever had access to the handful of specimens donated by UEI to the UN moon labs, and even there we’ve never been allowed to run the kind of high-energy experiments—’