Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Yes. Quite so. There are different cultural responses to the paradox, interestingly. The Japanese, for example, in their unstable country, used to build their temples of wood, that could be regularly and readily rebuilt – yet the temple stays the same.’ He smiled. ‘I had Japanese engineers manage my transition. While I lay there with my head opened up like a bucket of ice cream, I did not want my doctors to be paralysed by epistemological doubt.’

  ‘Yes,’ Penny said. ‘But in fact they didn’t just pour out one brain to make you, did they, Earthshine? Stef, he had nine donors. Nine parents. Think of that! So much for the Green Brain effort; all it gave us was a better interface to their inhumanity. Earthshine and his buddies plan for the long term, which is a good thing. But their vision of the long term is one that benefits them, ultimately, snug in their bunkers—’

  ‘I did not bring you here to argue over the justification for my own existence,’ Earthshine said. ‘I can only assure you that whatever you think of me, on some level I remain human enough to sympathise with how you must feel at a moment like this.’ He pointed. ‘Your father’s grave is just over there.’

  They found it easily, only a few years old, a modest memorial beside the decades-old grave of their mother.

  Penny said, ‘Weird for both of us, right? We supported each other, that day.’

  ‘No,’ Stef said. She turned away from her sister.

  Earthshine stood now – the three chairs, empty, winked out of existence behind him – and he walked across to join them.

  Stef said, ‘Earthshine, tell me what we’re supposed to see here.’

  ‘No,’ Penny snapped. ‘First, tell us what it is you want of us.’

  ‘I want you to be my allies,’ Earthshine said simply.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because he’s afraid,’ Stef said. ‘He told us that. But afraid of what?’

  ‘Of all this.’ He waved a hand. ‘As you remarked, we AIs differ from you humans – even I, more like you than my siblings – in that we think on long timescales. That is a distinction. And on the longest of timescales, what is there not to fear? We are motes, our very worlds are motes, floating in a universe that was born of unimaginable violence. Our little corner of the universe is tranquil enough now, relatively. But it was not always this way, and why should it remain so? What if our world, the universe itself, is destined to die in violence too, die of ice or fire? That would at least have a certain symmetry to the telling, wouldn’t it?

  ‘And what if we bring that violence down on ourselves? War is the wolf that has stalked mankind since before our ancestors left the trees. Though it’s largely gone unnoticed, my Core brothers and I have been working hard, mainly by influencing human agencies like the UN and the governing councils of the Chinese Greater Economic Framework, to bind up the wolf of war with treaties, with words. And we’ve largely succeeded, so far. Well, the fact that we stand here in the simulated sunshine having this conversation is proof of that. But now we are an interplanetary civilisation. That wolf, if it got loose now, if it got a chance, could smash whole worlds – it could have done that even before we stumbled across these kernels of yours . . .

  ‘But the kernels exist, and now we have a new factor to deal with – a new randomness. This strange discovery at the heart of the solar system, the kernels, this Hatch that leads nowhere – nowhere but to this, a raggedly changed reality. What power implanted the kernels and created the Hatch? What power is now meddling with our history? Who is it? What does it want? How can we deal with it? The very existence of these alien toys is destabilising – surely you can see that? And the more we discover of their power, the more destabilising they become.’

  Stef said, ‘You want us to work with you.’

  ‘I need allies,’ Earthshine said. ‘We do, the three of us in the Core. Human allies. You have kept kernel physics from us; perhaps that is wise. Our priority now is to prevent these new discoveries sparking a devastating war. And if it turns out that the Hatch-makers really do have the power to meddle with our history . . .’

  Penny asked, a little wildly, ‘And you brought us here because you have proof of that?’

  He pointed. ‘Look at your mother’s headstone. Can you read French? Let me translate. Here lies Juliette Pontoin, born – well, you know the dates – accomplished chemist, wife to George Kalinski, beloved mother of Stephanie Penelope Kalinski . . .’

  Mother of Stephanie Penelope Kalinski. Not of Stephanie Karen and Penelope Dianne. One name only. One true name.

  Penny was staring at the stone. She looked devastated. She had lost a piece of her own past, and Stef knew how that felt.

  Stef turned to Earthshine. ‘Another ragged edge.’

  ‘Yes. Now you see – we must work together. Over the years to come. We must keep in touch. Study this, in the background of our other projects.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stef said automatically.

  Penny seemed too stunned to respond.

  ‘And when we discover who is responsible for this . . .’ Earthshine stepped forward, staring at the stone. ‘I am everywhere. And I am starting to hear your footsteps, you Hatch-makers. I can hear the grass grow. And I can hear you.’

  FIVE

  CHAPTER 47

  2190

  It was Beth and the other scouting teenagers who brought back the first news of the upstream community.

  Yuri, Mardina, Delga and Liu Tao were sitting around the fire at the latest rest stop. They were huddled in layers of clothing, heavy stem-cloth overcoats over the remains of ISF-issue coveralls. Most, notably Mardina, had blankets heaped on their laps. Even Delga, who never put warmth before pride, pulled a blanket over her too. After ten years of the star winter – ten years after he and Mardina had joined this group he still thought of as ‘the mothers’, and with a dribble of other groups joining in the years since – they had all grown so old, Yuri suddenly thought, looking at the four of them huddled together like this, the nearest thing this mobile community had to a governing council, like four half-asleep relics in a post-apocalyptic old folks’ home.

  The fire itself was a mound of peat, the compressed remains of dead stems that you found stacked in frozen heaps along the banks of the river, which in these parts, far upstream from where Yuri had met Delga and the mothers, ran deep and fast. You had to dig up the peat and let it thaw and dry out, and even then it burned with a foul stench that reminded Yuri of builders. Not that they saw builders much any more. But you never saw trees either, and this was the best they could do.

  As they waited for Beth and the others to return from their scouting run, none of them spoke. None of them had the energy, Yuri thought. They had all already put in a morning’s hard labour digging out the latest storm shelters in the frozen ground, and a mutual silence was all they could manage, probably.

  Yuri himself was forty-four now. Sometimes he felt a lot older. But at least he’d been spared the worst of the arthritis that plagued many of those on the march, after ten years following the river’s course as it had wound upstream to the south, years of unending toil, this way of living where you had not just to labour at your farm but every so often you had to break it down and move it further upstream, topsoil and all. No, he’d been spared that, and the worst of the limb breaks and other random injuries that came from the endless travel and labour. And he’d been spared the rash of cancers that had taken out so many, presumably caused by the radiation that poured down from Proxima’s spitting, flaring face, the star that was now significantly higher in their sky. Yes, Yuri had kept his health, more or less. But the world had caught up with him even so. Here he was in his forties with a teenage kid, and a partner of sorts in Mardina, and a share of a responsibility for the lives of fifty-odd people, the relics of six once-separate McGregor drops of colonists.

  And still the empty kilometres of Per Ardua stretched endlessly around them, as the babies cried, and the parents grumbled as every morning they went down to crack the ice on the river for the day’s water
. . .

  ‘Here they come,’ Mardina murmured. She leaned forward for more nettle tea, from the pan bubbling on the range over the fire. She was greying now, gaunt rather than slim, and even sitting so close to the fire she wore cut-down gloves adapted as mittens. Born, after all, in the Australian outback, she had particular trouble adapting to the cold. But her astronaut eyesight was as sharp as ever. And her tongue, Yuri thought.

  She was right, anyhow. Here came Beth and Freddie, Delga’s son, and two others, running silently across a plain of bare earth, ice patches, snow banks, and the occasional drab green stain of Arduan life. Seventeen years old now, Beth had grown whip-thin and tall, taller than either of her parents, as had many of her generation. She was darker than Yuri, with more of her mother’s colour, but her black hair was straight like Yuri’s, lacking Mardina’s tight curls. She looked Arduan, Yuri thought. A member of a new Arduan humanity, not quite like anybody on Earth, nobody on Mars. A new branch. Born into this world, a new generation who knew and cared nothing of what had gone before, or of any other world, and that was probably a blessing.

  The youngsters stumbled to a halt, panting hard. Beth dropped her thick outer coat, pulled a blanket over her shoulders, kicked off her elderly hand-me-down ISF-issue boots, and slipped on bark sandals. Yuri passed around mugs of hot tea.

  Mardina peered out of her nest of blankets. ‘Well?’

  Beth laughed, still breathing hard. ‘Nice welcome, Mom. We saw lots. Not far upstream from here, the river splits. Well, it doesn’t really. If you think of it flowing downstream, two big tributaries merge.’

  ‘A confluence,’ Delga said.

  ‘Yeah. That’s the word. Lots of wet ground, marshes, mostly frozen . . . And we saw fantômes.’ She grinned as she made her grand pronouncement.

  Yuri focused. ‘Whoa, back up. Fantômes?’ Since Delga’s people had first misidentified Yuri himself as the ghost of Dexter Cole, fantômes had become an in-joke word for strangers, more starship-stranded humans. But they had only met a few new groups since. No wonder Beth was excited. ‘How many fantômes?’

  ‘Not many. There’s not much there at all, just a couple of shacks in the green, smoke from the fires. There must be fields and a ColU but we didn’t see them. And the people, we saw a few adults and kids. A dozen maybe? We didn’t stay to look too closely—’

  ‘But they saw you.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Probably before we saw them.’

  Liu Tao leaned forward. ‘In the green? Is that what you said? What do you mean?’

  ‘Arduan green, you know, the darker green. All over the place.’

  ‘But what about the snow, the ice?’

  ‘Not so much of that around.’ She shrugged. ‘Not as bad as here. I’m only telling you what we saw.’

  ‘We know, sweetheart,’ Yuri murmured, trying to reassure her, but that only won him a glare from Beth, who didn’t like those kinds of endearments any more.

  The four elders looked at each other.

  ‘We need to check this out,’ Liu said.

  ‘Obviously,’ drawled Delga. ‘Beginning with dealing with these people, whoever the hell they are.’

  ‘ “Deal with them”,’ Mardina said. ‘Still barely civilised, aren’t you?’

  Delga grinned. ‘Still barely alive.’

  ‘More to the point we need to check out this greenery,’ Yuri said. ‘Maybe we should take along the ColU.’ He meant his and Mardina’s original machine, the only fully functioning unit; every other group they’d encountered had detached or destroyed the AI module of their colonisation unit to get control over the basic functions.

  Mardina snorted. ‘That old wreck.’

  Delga cackled, and Liu grinned. The tension between Yuri and Mardina was a continuing source of amusement for everybody else.

  ‘We need to make a stop anyhow,’ Yuri said reasonably to Mardina. ‘The stocks are low. Maybe the existence of this patch of native life is telling us that the location is a little warmer than the surroundings. A good place to do some planting.’

  Liu nodded thoughtfully. ‘Which is why there are people already there, no doubt. We’re all looking for a bit of warmth, in the star winter.’

  Yuri shielded his eyes and looked straight up at Proxima, at the huge spots that crowded its face, localised flares showing like scars. When they had landed none of them had been warned about the star winter, as they had come to call it. There were no Earthlike seasons on Per Ardua, but when its face swarmed with sunspots Proxima evidently delivered winters, winters that arrived irregularly, and lasted for an unpredictable time. It was another problem that could have been determined in advance if this world had been properly surveyed before people had been dumped on it like loads of bricks. Well, winter had come, and the whole of the trek south had been a race against the deepening cold.

  Now there was this new place. In the green.

  Yuri said, ‘If we could stay there even just a bit longer than usual, get through a few growing seasons, build up some stock . . .’

  Mardina scowled. ‘But why the hell should this location be magically warmer than any other?’

  ‘Could be a hot spring,’ Liu said.

  ‘Yeah, and so not a healthy place to stick around.’

  ‘But somebody’s doing just that already,’ Yuri pointed out. ‘We’ll learn nothing by sitting around here debating it. I say we fetch the ColU, and go and see what’s what.’

  Then there was a pause, as Mardina sat, cradling her mug of tea. Everybody waited for her to speak.

  She wasn’t the leader, exactly, not really in command. The tradition of the core of this group, the mothers – Delga and Anna Vigil and Dorothy Wynn – was that nobody was in command, least of all the men. You talked things out and came to a consensus; there were few enough of them, and generally time enough, for that. And certainly Mardina didn’t want the visibility of authority. Her former-astronaut status had been problematic from the start. Nevertheless, as Liu Tao liked to point out to Yuri over a glass of Klein vodka, you had to get Mardina’s approval before you could get on with almost anything. It was a kind of negative leadership, Yuri supposed, a leadership by veto not deployed.

  ‘All right,’ Mardina said at length. ‘Let’s go and see.’ She began to move, stiff, reluctant; she let Beth take her layers of blankets and fold them away.

  CHAPTER 48

  A party of four of them, or five if you counted the ColU, made their way along the bank of the river, heading south, upstream to the confluence and the new community. There was only scattered cloud above, and Proxima hung high in the sky, all but overhead now they had come so far south, and their shadows were shrunken beneath them.

  Beth had warned that it would take well over an hour to get around the lake, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, Yuri thought. The walk would be good for him, good for them all. Long before the confluence came into view he was thoroughly warmed up from the steady exercise, his breath steaming in the cold. As Mardina walked she stretched and twisted and worked her arms and neck, and even practised whipping her crossbow from the backpack she always carried when away from the camp. Meanwhile Delga, the fourth member of the party, stomped along, one sleeve tied off, her own pack on her back, and no doubt weapons hidden about her person. She seemed just as Yuri had known her all those years ago on Mars, despite the grey hairs, the wrinkled skin of her face distorting her tattoos. Ageing but ageless, he thought.

  As for Beth, Yuri could see how his daughter, bursting with energy despite her own long run this morning, was only just staying patient with the steady plod of the old folk.

  They came upon the green cover Beth had described. You could see it from a distance. Yuri saw there was no height to it; it was more like a green blanket pinned directly to the ground, like none of the native life Yuri remembered seeing before, the stems, the trees.

  To avoid trampling the living cover, they stuck close to the riverbank where the ground was more or less bare. The green wasn’t a solid sheet,
Yuri saw close to; he made out individual sprawling plants, blankets of greenish web spread out over the flat ground and firmly rooted by multiple skinny tendrils across their widths. They were like water lilies perhaps, or like the great triple leaves of the canopies of the northern forests.

  ‘Fascinating,’ the ColU murmured as it rolled carefully along the bank. ‘Yet another body plan, another life strategy. I must study the phenomenon further.’

  ‘Hm,’ Yuri murmured. Straight ahead he saw smoke rising. ‘I think we’ve a human phenomenon to deal with first.’

  ‘Perhaps, perhaps. But look beyond that, Yuri Eden. What can you see?’

  Yuri had to climb up on its carapace to see what it meant. On the southern horizon was a smear of cloud, thick, black. ‘So? Bad weather for somebody.’

  ‘You don’t understand, Yuri Eden. We have walked far. Very far.’

  ‘Strictly speaking you haven’t walked anywhere.’

  ‘I think we are seeing the substellar point, at last. Or evidence of it. Logically there must be a permanent depression there, low pressure caused by the star’s heat at the point of highest stellar insolation on the planet . . . An endless storm. And this is our first glimpse of that undying substellar weather system. Still hundreds of kilometres away, but a remarkable sight. I am grateful to have lived long enough to see this.’

  ‘Now don’t go getting morbid about your built-in obsolescence again,’ Yuri murmured. ‘You know how it upsets Beth—’

  There was a sharp cracking sound from directly ahead. They all ducked instinctively.

  Yuri said, ‘What was that?’

  ‘A gun shot,’ Delga said. ‘Nice welcome.’ She grinned, evidently relishing the prospect of a confrontation.

  Mardina said, ‘Who would get to bring a projectile weapon down from the Ad Astra?’

  ‘One of your lot,’ Delga said. ‘You can talk about old times.’

  Yuri said, ‘You think we should send Beth back?’