Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘And maybe it isn’t,’ Stef said, unmoved.

  ‘We aren’t going to stop her, sir,’ Trant said. ‘Stef. You might get cut off. Keep talking to us. All right?’

  ‘I hear you. Here I go, with a handprint lock once again.’ She settled her hands into the indentations at twelve o’clock on the wall before her. ‘It’s opening . . .’ She had to step back smartly as the curved door swung back, as smoothly as the hatch lid itself. ‘Again, I can’t see a hinge, nothing material attaching door to wall. There’s another chamber beyond. A second chamber, similar to the first in dimension. More of those grey walls, the sourceless light.’ She stepped forward cautiously, towards the doorway rim. ‘And . . .’

  And, standing in the second chamber, before another doorway seam on the far wall, was a figure: a human, in a pressure suit, apparently ISF issue. A human staring back at her.

  ‘What?’ An unfamiliar voice in her ear speaker. ‘What’s wrong?’

  No, not unfamiliar, just – unexpected.

  ‘Stef? Penny?’ That was Trant’s voice. ‘Stef, what have you found down there? Penny, you’re still out of our field of view.’

  Penny?

  The stranger took another step forward, towards the open hatchway. Stef found herself staring into a familiar face, behind the visor. Too familiar. Found herself staring at a familiar name, too, on the suit’s chest patch.

  KALINSKI, PENELOPE D.

  FOUR

  CHAPTER 39

  2180

  The ColU, which was becoming increasingly philosophical as time passed, came up with yet another complex, bewildering observation about life on Per Ardua.

  At the time Yuri was letting Beth ride on the ColU’s back with him, on the final fifty-kilometre round-trip trek to the old camp from the new. He’d thought the ColU had been acting oddly all day, but had put it down to the usual program-violation problems it had with moving the camp in the first place. Evidently not.

  Luckily Beth was oblivious to all this. Beth Eden Jones was seven years old now, and she had been used to moving all her life. The first shift of the jilla had come in the very month she had been born, and there had been seven shifts since then, around one a year, bringing the lake the best part of two hundred kilometres due south from the starting point. The family had diligently followed along each time, hauling their broken-down dwellings and their tools and all their other possessions, right down to cartloads of topsoil, behind the patient bulk of the ColU.

  But the last shift had been all of a year ago, and since then some spark in Beth’s head had lit up. This time she wasn’t a passive passenger any more; now she wanted to make sense of it all. So she had begged to come along on these shuttle trips back and forth between the old campsite and the new. Mardina was happy to let her ride along with Yuri – especially as it got her out of the way while the builders completed their latest brutal war of conquest against their cousins at the jilla’s new position. But on this ride, this last loading up, Beth was fretful.

  As soon as they were loaded, the ColU had begun the last haul away from the old campsite, of which little was left but a scuffed patch of ground, a smouldering fire, a couple of garbage dumps, all set beside a muddy lake bed that was already drying out. They headed south once more, following the water courses down which the builders had driven the waters of the jilla. And, wistfully, sitting beside her father on the carapace of the ColU, Beth looked over her shoulder back the way they had come. ‘Why can’t we ever go that way, Dad?’

  ‘What way, honey? North? What’s the point? There’s nothing there. There’s not even water to drink.’

  ‘I know. But there’s the first camp of all, isn’t there? Back there somewhere.’

  ‘Where you were born.’

  ‘I know that. But I don’t remember it.’

  ‘It’s too far. There’s no water on the way. We couldn’t walk that far.’

  ‘We could ride on the ColU,’ she said hopefully. ‘We could carry water. We could carry our beds and stuff, and Mister Sticks.’ Mister Sticks, her favourite toy, had been woven from broken stems by the ColU; the doll was a peculiar mix of human and builder features, like a three-legged puppet.

  ‘That’s not a bad plan, honey. But the ColU wouldn’t carry us that far.’

  ‘It could, though.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t. It . . . doesn’t want to.’

  ‘You could make it.’

  ‘Only by hurting it. And that would be mean, wouldn’t it?’ Which was about as close as he imagined he was going to get to explaining program conflicts in the ColU’s AI to Beth.

  ‘I guess . . .’

  ‘What do you want to see up there anyhow? It’s just like all the other places we stopped. Just a load of old junk that we dumped when we moved. Abandoned fields . . .’ And a few graves.

  ‘But I want to see the road where the shuttle came down.’ She mimed a descending flight with her hand, but she made a noise like the flapping triple vanes of an Arduan kite, the only flying thing she had ever seen. ‘Flish-flish-flish. Mom says it made tracks that would take you hours to walk along.’

  ‘I guess so. Skid marks kilometres long. And some of it baked solid, when the braking rockets fired. I guess that would be worth seeing, if it’s still there. But we can’t get there, honey. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Maybe one day.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘Take me there for my birthday one day.’ That was Beth’s trump card.

  Her birthdays were an issue. Yuri had been slow to realise that even after Beth’s birth Mardina had clung to her belief, or fantasy, that the ISF had never really left, and would some day come out of their hides or down from orbit or whatever, and reveal themselves, and save them all. Maybe the baby being delivered would be the trigger, if the ISF authorities accepted that the colonists had proven their determination to stick it out by breeding. Well, that hadn’t happened. She’d not mentioned it at the time of the birth, and Yuri forgot about it.

  But on Beth’s first birthday the dam broke, and Mardina went into a rage at a betrayal that, at last, she couldn’t deny. It caused a lot of tension. It was still a birthday. Yuri had tried baking a cake, with butter and stuff from the iron cow unit inside the ColU. The ColU had even made candles from synthesised fat. Mardina ruined it all. Beth had been too young to understand, but for Yuri, the memories of The Day Mommy Lost It remained strong.

  The next year, with Yuri gently prodding, they had agreed they should celebrate the birthday. After all Beth didn’t have other kids around, she was never going to go to school or college or enjoy all the other milestones regular children did, even in a dump like Eden on Mars. A birthday, though, one thing that was uniquely hers, could always be marked and celebrated. And, as a tie to the cycles of time on Earth, it was a reminder of deeper roots too. But by the time that second birthday rolled around the echoes of the first were still strong, and Mardina withdrew into herself.

  Well, since then they had celebrated all Beth’s birthdays, but there was always tension. And Beth, with a little kid’s wiles, picked that up and played on it. Yuri just coped with it all. Nobody had ever told him life was going to be easy.

  ‘Listen, it’s late, why don’t you take a nap? That way you’ll be fresh for Mom when you get home.’

  ‘I don’t want to take a nap.’

  ‘Just try,’ he said in his line-in-the-sand voice, much practised over seven years.

  So she complied. She wriggled inside her rope harness until she was lying down on a couple of blankets, and cuddled up against her father’s leg. He put one arm around her and stroked her short-cut straight hair with his free hand. They had had trouble with her sleeping from the beginning. Born into the endless day of Proxima, she seemed that bit more disconnected from the rhythms of distant Earth, and didn’t see why she needed to go to sleep when her parents did, at what seemed like arbitrary times in the unending light. But if they let her get away without regular sleep she would burn herself out and crash, so Yuri a
nd Mardina had worked out a process of control between them.

  Even the ColU, which had some programming in child care, was drafted into this regime. It always backed up the parents’ diktats, which was just as well, Yuri thought, or it would have found Mardina decommissioning it enthusiastically. The ColU was the third ‘person’ in Beth’s limited life, and she saw nothing strange in having a robotic farming machine as a kind of uncle. Proving to be an expert at weaving dolls from dead stem shafts didn’t do its image any harm either.

  Soon Beth was asleep; she had a soft, gentle snore.

  Yuri had time to inspect the route they were following. After all, it was the last time he expected ever to come this way. The ColU was following its own tracks along the bank of a broad, braided river bed. Like most of the channels down which the builders guided the flow of their lake this bed had been here already, but was dry as bones before the lake came. Now the bed was littered with the detritus of the passage of the waters of the lake: snapped stems, a few broken builder traps, dead aquatic creatures from fish analogues to crab analogues and jellyfish analogues, and others they had yet to identify. There was even some terrestrial-origin seaweed, the gen-enged laver brought to this world by the starship Ad Astra.

  After years of observation, even the ColU had no real idea how the builders managed these hydrological transfers so effectively. The lake stayed in stable locations for months or years at a time – it had turned out that the site where the shuttle had landed had been the longest stay so far, and in fact the intervals between moves were generally getting shorter. It was clear the builders used existing water courses, although they would sometimes dig out or extend canal-like connecting passageways, and their characteristic middens were used to guide the flow of the water precisely where they wanted it to go.

  And, wherever the lake finally pooled, there were always local streams and springs to feed it. The mystery of that was that as the land’s wider uplift continued – and the ColU constantly reminded them that some dramatic geological event was apparently unfolding to the north of here – the pattern of the region’s springs changed all the time, as underground aquifers were shifted or broken, the water tables realigned. The builders always seemed to know in advance where the useful springs would be, and how to re-establish the lake. The builders didn’t have maps, but they evidently knew about geography; they must be able to visualise the landscape in some way.

  It was as Yuri mused on this that the ColU’s theorising broke into his day.

  The ColU jolted to a sudden stop.

  Beth muttered and stirred. Yuri stroked her head, and she calmed again. He looked around. There was nothing special here, no obvious reason to have stopped.

  The ColU backed up a little way, then rolled forward with a grinding of ageing gears. Again Beth stirred, before settling.

  Yuri whispered urgently, ‘Hey! What’s wrong with you?’

  The ColU’s voice was a matching whisper. ‘Yuri Eden?’

  ‘Why have you stopped? Get going before this one wakes up, or Mardina will slaughter the lot of us.’

  ‘I am sorry. I had not realised I had stopped.’ It rolled on with a sight lurch.

  ‘So what was all that about?’

  ‘Yuri Eden, call it an existential crisis.’

  Yuri groaned inwardly. Not again.

  He knew he’d have to tell Mardina about this episode, whatever it was; she was concerned about anything erratic in the ColU’s behaviour. The ColU had made it clear from the beginning that to have been forced to help transport the colonists across the planet, if they’d attempted to escape from the landing sites that had been planned for them by the starship crew, would have violated its deepest layers of programming. So when the lake had first shifted, in its algorithmic soul the ColU faced a conflict between mandates to keep its human charges alive, and to stay close to the original landing site. The preservation of life had won out. But Mardina, who knew a lot more about ISF AIs than Yuri did, fretted that some deep internal damage might have been done. All of which was over Yuri’s head, let alone the head of his seven-year-old daughter, his little muda-muda.

  Now, reluctantly, he asked, ‘What existential crisis?’

  ‘I have come to a conclusion which baffles and alarms me. I have just received, from my internal laboratory facilities, the results of the analysis of a novel organism which enabled me to complete a genetic mapping – you’re aware that among my long-term projects has been the construction of a tree of life, for the Arduan native flora and fauna—’

  ‘You know, I wish I just had a truck.’

  ‘Yuri Eden?’

  ‘Like the rovers on Mars. A truck I could just drive. The number of conversations like this that I’ve had with you over the years—’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ the ColU said, sounding almost miserable. ‘I can’t constrain my curiosity. Nor should I. Until my understanding of this world is complete enough—’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  It paused, as if gathering its thoughts. ‘Yuri Eden, I have told you that life on this world is similar in its fundamentals to life on Earth, but not identical. I believe the two biospheres may be linked by a panspermia process that operated at a very early date. The earliest days of life on Per Ardua might have been like the early days of Earth, a world of simple bacteria, drawing their energy from chemical reactions in the rocks. But all the time much more energy, a hundred times as much, was available, washing down from the sky—’

  ‘Proxima light.’

  ‘Yes. The next step was the development of kinds of photosynthesis, creatures that could draw energy directly from that light. The new kind colonised the surface, while the older ones survived, sinking deeper into the planet. And there they still reside in great reefs, in caverns, in porous rock and aquifers, dreaming unknowable dreams. Just as on Earth, life on Per Ardua is actually dominated by the bugs in the deep layers, mass for mass. But on the surface, as photosynthesis evolved, ultimately oxygen was released as a byproduct.’

  ‘Like the green algae on Earth.’

  ‘Yes, Yuri Eden, this step, oxygen production, was evidently difficult to achieve; on Earth it occurred only once, and in fact came from the coupling of two older photosynthetic processes. I have yet to fully understand the equivalent process on Per Ardua – it is necessarily different because the energy content of the light here is heavy in the infrared – but it is evidently just as complex, just as unlikely to have happened.’

  ‘Yet it did happen.’

  ‘It did, and I have been able to date the event from traces in the Arduan genetic record: some two billion, seven hundred million years ago.’ It paused. When Yuri didn’t react it went on, ‘The next great step in the emergence of Arduan life, again mirrored on Earth, was the development of a new kind of cell: a much more complex organism, a cell with a nucleus, a cell with different kinds of mechanisms within a containing membrane. Of course the energy available from burning up all the oxygen concentrating in the air helped with that. Such complex cells are the basis of all multicellular life, including you, including the builders. This was an information revolution, not a chemical one; these complicated creatures needed about a thousand times as much genetic information to define them as their simpler predecessors.’

  ‘Another unlikely step.’

  ‘Yes. But again it occurred on both worlds. And on Per Ardua this came about some two billion years ago.’ Another pause. ‘Yuri, I am not sure you are grasping the significance of—’

  ‘Just tell me the story,’ Yuri said. He stroked his daughter’s hair, growing sleepy himself.

  ‘Multicellular life emerged some time later – evidently another difficult step to take. Seaweeds first on Earth, like the lavers we imported to Per Ardua . . .’

  The new camp was coming into view, the lake settling into the contours of its latest shoreline. Yuri saw builders busily working all around the lake’s edge, and smoke rising from Mardina’s camp fire.

  The ColU was still talkin
g about ancient life. ‘Of all the great revolutions of life this is the easiest to identify on Earth because it left such clear traces in the fossil record. On Per Ardua, of course, there is no fossil record to speak of. And yet—’

  ‘And yet you, through heroic efforts, have worked it out anyway.’

  ‘I’m just trying to explain, Yuri Eden.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Yes, I have seen traces of this event in the genes, and also in some fringe organisms that have survived on Per Ardua to this day. And – now this is the significant point, Yuri Eden – I have established that all this occurred some five hundred and forty-two million years ago. Do you see? Do you see?’

  ‘See what?’ Beth sat up now, rubbing her eyes. ‘I smelled smoke in my dreams. I thought the ColU was on fire!’

  ‘No, honey, it’s just the camp fire.’ Yuri didn’t see the ColU’s point at all, he couldn’t care less about such abstractions, and as the unit rolled into the camp the conversation was already fading from his mind. ‘Go find your Mom, sweetheart, and I’ll help the ColU get everything put away safely.’

  CHAPTER 40

  Mardina prepared lunch.

  It was a kind of quick picnic assembled from chuno. This was a long-lasting paste you could make from potatoes by freezing, thawing, desiccating them – a smart trick from the Andes that the ColU had taught them, and invaluable for their travelling phases, but the result was a greyish muck in appearance that Beth had always cordially hated. But today she was hungry after the long journey back to the camp, and excited about the move. Certainly she didn’t want to sleep any more. They all had a peculiar mixture of tiredness and energy, Yuri thought, like they had gone on vacation maybe.

  They decided to take the rest of the day off, and go exploring. The ColU, after trying to speak to Mardina about its mysterious science conclusions, grumpily rolled away and began the process of unpacking its last load from the old camp, including another tonne of terrestrial topsoil.