Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  She must mean the hollow that now held the jilla lake.

  She looked at him, shrewd, analytical. ‘You don’t know this area well.’

  ‘No. We’re on the move.’

  She picked that apart. ‘We. Who, how many? How heavily armed? On the move. From where, to where?’ She grinned. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll be sharing soon enough. You know, ice boy, of everybody in that dumb hulk I never picked you out as one of the survivors, here in the Bowl.’

  The Bowl? The air ahead was misty; as they walked he thought he smelled water, but his view was blocked by a low rise, worn hills. ‘Why not me?’

  ‘Because, back in Eden, you came out of that cryo tank like you’d been dropped from the sky. You never fitted in, even on Mars. You didn’t make any contacts, you didn’t have any networks. You didn’t even have a way to pay off the Peacekeepers. We noticed you, though. The ice boy, right? Your name is Yuri. What the hell kind of a name is that?’

  ‘Not my name.’

  ‘Then why are you called it?’

  ‘Some joker called me that when they woke me up, on Mars. It’s the name of an astronaut. Or a cosmonaut. The first one, I think.’

  She shrugged. ‘Never heard of him. So what’s your real name?’

  He looked away.

  ‘You’ve put aside your lousy past, is that it? What kind of accent is that, by the way, Aussie?’

  ‘North British. I grew up in Manchester, at the border with Angleterre, the Euro province.’

  ‘You sound Australian to me.’

  ‘You all sound sort of Hispanic to me.’

  ‘How long were you frozen, a hundred years?’

  ‘Nearer eighty.’

  ‘Were you one of the Heroic Generation? What did it feel like to be a Waster?’

  ‘We weren’t called those names then. I was too young anyhow.’

  She grunted. ‘Surprised they didn’t call you as a witness in the trials. But you escaped it all, didn’t you? You in your freezer tray.’

  He was reluctant to answer, but it was hard to turn away from her iron gaze. The whole conversation, suddenly thrust upon him, was bizarre, like his deepest past suddenly pushing up out of the Arduan ground. ‘It wasn’t my choice. It was an experiment. There were too many of us, my generation. So they tried freezing us in these big honeycomb banks, under the ground, in Antarctica. We’d have less of a footprint that way.’

  ‘Your parents got rid of you. That’s what happened. Whereas now they get rid of us from Earth to Mars. Or even further, right? I suppose it was cheaper to ship you out to Mars still frozen than to deal with you any other way. Well, on behalf of the future, I hope you enjoyed your stay on Mars, my friend. The butthole of the solar system.’

  He glared at her, defiant. ‘If it’s so bad, why were you there?’

  She shrugged. ‘We were there, the UN was there, because the Chinese were there. We can’t let them have Mars all to themselves, can we? And the UN has these big ships now, the hulks, big powerful engines. Nothing like the steam-engine put-puts they had in your day, I bet. Now they can afford to send people to Mars who don’t even want to go. Even to the stars! That’s progress for you.’ She laughed and spat. ‘Funny thing, life. You never know what it’s going to throw at you next.’

  He didn’t like her dismissive tone. ‘So how did you survive here?’

  ‘See for yourself.’

  They rounded the low hills, the view opened up, and Yuri saw a river, a ribbon of blue-black water flowing across the flat, arid landscape. It was an astonishing sight, after all these years stuck by the jilla lake. The bank was lined by the usual beds of stems in their marshes, but he saw no signs of builders or their works, at this first glance.

  And there were people here. People and their stuff. Some kind of tepees, frames hung with cloth, smoke from fires rising reluctantly in the still air. What looked like a cut-down ColU, without the dome and manipulator arms. And the people: women and kids gathered around a hearth, a handful of men further away, clustered around another, smaller fire. Like Delga, they all wore what looked like cut-up ship’s-issue clothing, even the little kids. Yuri recognised none of the adults, at first glance.

  When Yuri was spotted with Delga, some of the women got to their feet and reached for weapons. Yuri could see ISF-issue crossbows, what looked like home-made spears. Delga held up her good arm in a signifier that it was OK, Yuri was no threat. But the women watched and waited, intent. The men by their fire didn’t bother to rise; they just looked on apathetically.

  They walked forward, Yuri wary.

  ‘Look north,’ Delga said. ‘That patch of green? Potatoes, our latest crop. Ready for harvesting soon and we’ll be out of here. And, further north, see?’

  He saw more smoke, a dirty scar on the landscape, figures moving, dimly visible, another couple of ColUs perhaps. ‘More people?’

  ‘Yep. Our difficult neighbours. Klein.’

  ‘Gustave Klein? From the hulk? The big man?’

  ‘He survived. Well, you’d expect him to. We deal with him. No choice, Yuri. Planet’s big, but humanity’s small here.’

  They were approaching the central group now, the women, the big fire. He counted quickly: six women together, a bunch of kids, five men in the other group. The women were being cautious of him, he saw, some of them shepherding the children out of the way, others drawing up in a loose line with their weapons. They were all tattooed, more or less as Delga was – even the older children, some of whom looked as old as ten years maybe, presumably conceived not long after the landings. Yuri made sure he kept his hands open and visible.

  Delga noticed this. ‘I’m not going to tell them you’re no threat. For one thing I’m not a leader here, and they wouldn’t listen to me. Well, we don’t have a leader, haven’t felt we needed one since we put down Hugo Judd. For another I don’t trust you. I mean, you’re obviously lying, right? About your people, where they are. You’re not a good liar, ice boy. Maybe your facial muscles never thawed out from that cryo tank.’

  ‘Yuri?’ One of the armed women broke from the line, and walked forward cautiously.

  ‘Anna, right? Anna Vigil.’ He barely recognised her under the tattoo on her face, behind the spear she wielded easily, as if she’d done a lot of practice. Yet he was relieved to see her.

  ‘God, after all these years – I just assumed you were dead. For sure I never thought I’d see you again. Cole!’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Cole, come here . . .’ One of the children came forward reluctantly, a boy, skinny, wide-eyed, maybe fourteen years old, but already taller than his mother. ‘You’ll remember Cole from the ship.’

  The boy stared suspiciously. Yuri realised how rare it must be for kids like this to meet strangers, how wary they must be. He and Mardina would have to manage Beth through this process, when the time came.

  The boy soon backed away and ran off to join the other kids, who were engaged in some game of running and capturing that must have been broken off when Yuri came wandering in from the plain; now the game was proving more interesting than the stranger, and they returned to it. A couple of them, meanwhile, were throwing stones at a group of builders by the riverbank. Yuri guessed this group hadn’t taken the time to watch the builders that he had. The builders swivelled and scuttled to get away.

  Anna said, ‘You and that buddy of yours, you used to help me – Lemmy?’

  ‘Lemmy Pink.’

  ‘Did he land with you?’

  ‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘He didn’t make it.’

  She nodded, as if she was used to news like that. ‘It’s OK,’ Anna said now to the group. ‘I know this guy. He used to help me out on the ship. Got me supplies for the baby.’

  The rest of the women, none of whom Yuri recognised, backed off, lowering their weapons, but they kept their eyes on him. The other group, the oddly excluded men around their own fire, huddled and muttered, glancing over at him.

  ‘This way, ice boy.’ Delga led Yuri towards the women’s fire. Th
ey had seats set out here in the open air, some of them remnants of ship’s supplies, others improvised from storage drums and crates. All the equipment here, the tents, the furniture and tools, looked mobile to Yuri, easily packed up. They were a people used to moving, as indeed he and Mardina and Beth had become.

  ‘Sit,’ snapped Delga. ‘Talk. Keep your hands where we can see them.’

  Yuri obeyed. Anna, smiling, sat on one side of him, Delga on the other.

  One of the other women, weaponless, approached Yuri. ‘Yuri, right? My name’s Dorothy Wynn. I’m on hearth duty today. You want something to eat, some tea?’ Aged about forty, her greying blonde hair pulled back from a handsome face tattooed like the rest, she had what Yuri, in his own time, would have labelled a brisk US east coast accent.

  ‘Tea?’

  She filled a metal mug from a pan on the fire. ‘Brewed from nettles, Earth nettles I mean. They grow fast here, in compost. Surprisingly useful.’

  ‘Our ColU didn’t bring along any nettles. I mean—’

  She shrugged and sat down. ‘They seem to have had variant programming. I guess they were trying out different possibilities, the mission designers, to see what worked and what didn’t.’

  Delga grinned blackly. ‘And see who died and who didn’t.’

  Dorothy Wynn said, ‘Yuri, Delga is one of our more morbid personalities.’

  Delga said, mimicking her badly, ‘While Dorothy is one of our more sane personalities. Or she thinks she is. Surprising you ended up down in the Bowl with the rest of us, in that case, isn’t it?’

  Wynn seemed unfazed. ‘Oh, ignore her. Yuri, I was a corporate accountant, working for one of the big reclamation companies in New New York. My first crime was to siphon off a little of my employer’s wealth for – well, let’s call it an indulgence. My second crime was to get caught. Unforgivably clumsy. And so I ended up here. You know, Yuri, I never expected to meet you. But I remember the chatter about you on the Ad Astra. The man from the past. How fascinating. More tea?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’ Yuri, stuck alone with Mardina for all these years, felt bewildered, almost shy. He was unused to this kind of complicated interplay between personalities. And he became aware of scrutiny from the men, sitting a way apart. One of them was muttering, staring, pointing. ‘Fantôme . . . il est un fantôme . . .’

  ‘What’s he saying?’

  ‘That you’re a ghost,’ Anna said. ‘His name’s Roland. French Canadian, and he reverts to French when he gets scared.’

  ‘Why a ghost? You have met other groups before, right? Like Klein’s over there.’

  ‘Yes,’ Delga said. ‘But you just came wandering out of nowhere, alone, ice boy. Look at what you’re wearing.’ She fingered his leggings, his tunic of woven stem bark. ‘Like you’ve risen up out of the Bowl dirt.’

  ‘There are stories about ghosts,’ Anna said. ‘Well, one ghost. Of Dexter Cole, you know? The first pioneer who came out here alone . . .’

  ‘Who you named your kid for.’

  ‘They say he haunts this world. Maybe he lives on, in the unending night of the far side. That kind of thing.’

  Strange, Yuri thought, that his own group had come up with much the same story.

  Dorothy snorted. ‘What a crock. If you ask me Gustave Klein just made it all up to keep his boys in check.’

  Yuri looked around at their faces: Anna puzzled but friendly, Delga cynical, Dorothy competent but cautious, the French guy Roland wide-eyed.

  Anna asked, ‘Yuri? Are you OK?’

  ‘To be honest I’m feeling kind of bewildered. Turned around.’

  ‘Maybe we should put him with the men,’ Dorothy said, and they all laughed.

  Anna patted his arm. ‘Look, Yuri. We had some trouble. We were dropped down here, just as you were, I guess. The shuttle landed some way to the north. And after it took off again, after all those speeches by the astronauts —’

  ‘What kind of trouble?’

  ‘With the men,’ Dorothy said with some disgust. ‘Some of them tried to take charge. Others tried to lay claim to us.’ She eyed him. ‘I’m betting it was the same with your group.’

  ‘It got a bit rough,’ he admitted neutrally.

  ‘We had to put one of them down,’ Dorothy said. ‘Two more killed each other, but one of us got caught in the crossfire, so to speak. And so – here we are, the survivors.’

  Delga was watching Yuri’s reaction. ‘What are you making of all this, ice boy? Us and them. We make the decisions here, the women. The men – well, we need them to make babies. Other than that they do what we tell them.’

  Dorothy laughed. ‘That’s pretty much true. Yuri, you might know something about this – I think we’ve got a social structure here like the elephants in the wild. Those old animals, you know? I once took a virtual safari, a corporate team-building thing. I remember the guide saying how a core of females used to be at the heart of elephant society. And the males formed bachelor herds, where they fought the whole time, competing for a chance to mate. In the same way, the men are on the periphery, really.’

  Yuri shrugged, irritated. He thought he’d left all this stuff behind, years ago, people making dumb guesses about the age he’d come from. ‘The only elephant I ever saw was a gen-enged resurrected mammoth in a zoo.’

  Delga was watching him, having fun in her manipulative, intrusive way, he realised. ‘Poor little mammoth, eh? Just like you, out of his time. Poor little ice boy.’

  The children broke out of their circle of play and ran, laughing, down to the river. The water was flowing north, Yuri noticed now, away from the substellar zone to the south, towards the terminator to the north.

  ‘So you had kids,’ he said. ‘Just as Major McGregor ordered you to.’

  Delga laughed. ‘You mean, all that Heinrich Himmler Adam-and-Eve crap? We didn’t take any notice of that bullshit. We just had kids. Even me, Earthman. See if you can spot my little Freddie. We keep our men like stud bulls. Want to join them, Yuri? Your last-century genes would enrich the pool—’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Anna snapped. ‘It’s not like that, Yuri, she’s exaggerating.’

  ‘Your camp – you’re pretty mobile, right?’

  Dorothy said, ‘Well, we stick around long enough to raise a crop of potatoes, grow a field of grass. Raw material for the iron cows – it must be the same for you. Maybe a year in each place. But then, yes, we move on.’

  ‘We’re following the river south,’ Anna said. ‘Upstream.’

  ‘Why that way?’

  Dorothy said, ‘We like the idea of maybe reaching the source one day.’

  ‘Maybe that will be at the substellar,’ Delga said. ‘You remember that place, the storm system, the clump of forest, we all saw it from orbit? The navel of this world. What’s there, do you think?’

  That had never occurred to Yuri, the significance of the substellar point. Maybe because he had never imagined he’d find a way to reach it.

  ‘But it’s not just that,’ Anna said. ‘We need to head south anyhow. Seems to some of us that the weather’s getting colder, bit by bit. You must have noticed the sunspot swarms on Proxima.’

  ‘Yeah. And then there’s the volcanism.’

  Dorothy frowned. ‘What volcanism?’

  ‘To the north of here.’ He meant the slow uplift that seemed to have triggered the builders to move the jilla lake.

  She pressed, ‘How do you know about that?’

  Delga asked, ‘Is that why you’re on the move, Yuri? You and your people?’

  He said nothing.

  Anna touched his arm again, a surprisingly gentle, friendly gesture. ‘Leave him alone. We went through it all with Klein, remember, when we met him and his gang of thugs. Let Yuri tell us whatever he wants, in his own time.’

  He asked now, ‘How did you find the river? We were dumped in the middle of a dry landscape, almost a desert, at a sort of oasis.’

  Delga snapped, ‘If that’s so how did you get out?’


  ‘Hush,’ Anna said. ‘Yuri, it was hard. A trek. But we knew which way to go. We had a map.’

  ‘A map?’

  ‘A map of this whole quadrant of the planet,’ Dorothy said. ‘I’ll show you.’ She stood, and ducked into one of the tents.

  Yuri said sheepishly, ‘We have a map too. Kind of. I always carry it.’ He produced Lemmy’s battered map from his pocket, unfolded it. ‘It doesn’t look much, but Lemmy Pink took weeks over this after the astronauts left . . .’

  Dorothy returned with a map of her own, a single piece of paper. She folded it out on the ground by Yuri’s. Dorothy’s map covered just the north-east quadrant of the starlit face of Per Ardua – or ‘the Bowl’ – but it was a professional piece of work, properly printed, showing coastlines, seas, rivers, mountain ranges, the features even assigned tentative names. And there were little shuttle symbols, scattered across the quadrant, which Yuri guessed signified landing sites. He looked up at Dorothy. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘I bribed an astronaut. Oh, not with sex, the usual currency. I used to move in influential circles, back home. I happened to know something about this woman’s family which she did not want revealed to her colleagues . . . With this we could tell how close we were to the river. It was tough, but we made a dash for it when the children were still small.’

  Delga stared at the two maps. ‘Look. This long scribble of the rat boy’s just has to be our river. Which does go all the way to the substellar point. Wow.’

  ‘We may never get that far,’ Dorothy said. ‘It’s a hell of a long way. Especially if we have to stop to grow a crop of potatoes every fifty klicks. And isn’t the climate there supposed to be difficult? Too hot—’

  ‘If the whole world is getting cold,’ Anna said reasonably, ‘then that might solve the problem.’

  ‘And besides,’ Delga said, ‘where the hell else is there to go?’ She faced Yuri. ‘So what about it, Earthman? You going to join us?’