Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘So,’ Yuri said, prompting Beth. ‘You’re back earlier than you thought.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Beth sat on her haunches, sipped her tea, and glanced around the group, confident in herself. ‘You know we hoped to go all the way round the lake. We started on the north side, and went west and skirted that shore, and came to the southern shore. Then we came to a river we couldn’t cross, a heavy flow that comes down from the higher ground to the south.’

  Freddie said, ‘The river water pushes right out into the lake. You could see the mix of colours, the mud it raised.’

  ‘OK,’ Mardina said. ‘And can you get any further south?’

  Beth said, ‘You could follow the river valley. But it looks like it gets pretty narrow, and there’s a steep climb.’ She grinned at Yuri. ‘Dad, there’s a waterfall! You should see it. And beyond that the ground just rises up, and there’s a sort of forest. Not like the trees at home.’ By which she meant the place she had been born, near the stately forests of the far north. ‘These are short, lots of branches, rattled around by the wind. It’s hot and steamy. I can’t imagine us ever clearing it, and living there. But . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  She grinned. ‘We saw more tyre tracks. Heading off south into that jungle.’

  Mardina murmured, ‘There has to be some kind of base in there. A technologically advanced base, sitting at this pivotal point on the planet, while the rest of us scrabble in the dirt.’ She glanced at the cloud-covered sky. ‘ISF. Presumably resupplied from orbit. Maybe even relieved by the return of the Ad Astra, or some other ship. Christ. I was right all along. They never did leave.’

  Delga said, ‘Well, we’re going in to see. Right?’

  The ColU said, ‘If I may speak, Lieutenant Jones—’

  Mardina said, ‘When have I ever been able to stop you?’

  ‘There is another reason to go into the Hub.’

  Yuri said, ‘ “The Hub”, ColU?’

  ‘Forgive me. That is the local builders’ term for the substellar point. Probably a term used across the planet, in fact. “Hub” being my translation of a term that also refers to the cylindrical core of their stem bodies.’

  Delga snorted. ‘You’ve been talking to those spindly little jokers again. What a waste of time.’

  ‘I cannot agree,’ said the ColU precisely. ‘I learn a great deal whenever I meet a new community. Their language is very ancient, quite static; their culture is locally variable, but there are many universals. Such as the concept of the Hub. This is my interpretation of a complex idea . . . To the builders, the substellar point is the centre of the world, a pivotal place. Yet it is a lost place. It is their Garden, Lieutenant Jones. That is where they lived before they Fell, they believe. It is the centre of their consciousness. Much of this is a very old apprehension. Memories deep and old, like relics of animal ancestries. You humans have the trees, from which your ancestors once descended. The builders have the Hub.

  ‘Yet there is a newer layer of meaning. These local builders seem to speak of recent events. They did return to the Hub, I mean in living memory – why, I am not certain, but surely to perform some task. That is what builders do. They worked here. But now they are excluded.’

  ‘By the ISF team in there,’ Mardina said grimly.

  ‘Presumably.’

  Liu Tao said, ‘What concerns me is how we’re going to live here.’ Since leaving the confluence Liu had taken a young wife, a daughter of Dorothy Wynn, who had given him a child, a daughter called Thursday October – named that way for her Earth-calendar birthday. Yuri had seen how Liu’s priorities had changed dramatically once the kid had arrived. ‘Whatever we do about the ISF and the Hub, let’s get it done, so we can get out of here.’

  ‘I would agree,’ the ColU said. ‘The star winter won’t last for ever. I have in fact been making this point for some time.’

  ‘We know you have,’ said Yuri.

  ‘When normal temperatures return, this region will become uninhabitable—’

  ‘We know.’ Mardina looked at Yuri, Delga – even Mattock the former Peacekeeper, who was scowling furiously at the idea of some kind of well-equipped ISF base on this planet, from which he was obviously excluded too. ‘We’ll go back north,’ Mardina said. ‘But not before we go and see what’s in this jungle. We’ve come this far. Anybody object violently to that?’ There was no reply. Mardina stood up. ‘OK. We’ll take the trucks, or at least one of them. Beth, Freddie, you scouted it out. Work out a route, a way in. Yuri, you can work with the ColU on how to manage the trucks. We’ll take our time. Get ready properly. Then we go in,’ she said evenly.

  ‘What about weapons?’ Liu asked. He looked around the group. ‘I’m just asking.’

  Delga laughed.

  Mardina asked, ‘Is there any of that tea left?’

  CHAPTER 53

  The party to travel was pretty much self-selecting.

  Mardina and Mattock, stranded astronaut and Peacekeeper respectively, had the strongest personal reasons for going to seek out whatever the ISF had left behind in the Hub. Mattock even put on the remains of his Peacekeeper uniform, though he was going to be way too hot in it. Delga and Liu were going in as representatives of their factions. As a captured Chinese, Liu had even less motive than the rest to go near any semblance of UN authority. But he had a group behind him too, roughly those who had once endured the rule of Gustave Klein, and they had to be represented.

  Yuri had to go, because Mardina was going in with Beth, who had scouted out the route. Where his family went, he must go too.

  And, incredibly, they took a bunch of builders. The ColU somehow talked them into it. If the authoritarian-type humans in the Hub, a builder name for a builder location, had thrown these natives out, maybe it was right to take them back in.

  The other kids watched the adults getting ready to go. They seemed bemused by the whole thing, uncaring; to them the ISF was a fantasy of their parents’, as unreal as the ghost of Dexter Cole.

  The party walked in a convoy, the ColU and one of the dumb trucks at the centre, the humans walking alongside. They all wore packs, with some food, water, weapons, though most of their stuff was on the back of the truck. Beth went ahead, running with a natural fluidity despite the heat. Tom Mattock trailed behind. He looked ridiculous in his Peacekeeper uniform, he was hampered by his limp, and he was soon overheating.

  And a little party of builders, Yuri counted nine, all adults, came spinning and skimming behind.

  They skirted the southern shore of the lake and made it to the estuary where Beth and Freddie had had to give up their attempted circumnavigation of the lake. The river they’d found flowed out of a belt of forest, dense and green, and Yuri thought he could feel the humid heat radiating from the forest even from this distance, a few kilometres away.

  ‘Look,’ Beth called, pointing. ‘You can see the tracks we made before.’ A half-dozen sets of human footprints, one of them barefoot, Yuri saw, snaking off to the south.

  Mardina grunted. ‘And beside them, this.’ She pointed to a set of tyre tracks, more footprints of booted feet, another set of tracks heading back to the jungle. ‘They saw you, Beth. They came out for a look.’ She glanced up at the jungle. ‘They know we’re on the way.’

  Liu shrugged. ‘They probably always did. What’s the point of them being here at all if not to watch us?’ He glanced up at the sky. ‘We Chinese have plenty of stealth sats in orbit around Earth, and Mars, that no UN body has ever spotted. Probably the other way round too.’ He waved into the air. ‘Hi, Major McGregor!’

  They walked on, Mardina leading the way south, along the river valley. She said, ‘But they haven’t done anything about it. Maybe they can’t do anything. They’ve been here twenty-plus years already. Shit breaks down.’

  ‘Or they don’t know what to do about us,’ Yuri said. ‘I mean, we aren’t supposed to be here, are we?’

  ‘True,’ said the ColU. ‘Each dropped group was programmed to be sedentary. And besi
des, the belt of heat and aridity around this Hub should have excluded foot travellers.’

  Yuri said mildly, ‘But nobody at the ISF seems to have “programmed” a migrating lake. Or a star winter.’

  ‘Or human nature,’ Liu said with a grin. ‘And here we are.’

  They had to climb up a rock face, past the pretty impressive waterfall Beth had told Yuri about.

  Then, after a couple of hours, they reached the rough boundary of the central forest. As Beth had described, the trees were not like those of the great canopy forests of the higher latitudes; these were shorter, with stout, squat trunks, and multiple leaves sprouting from stubby branches. But their trunks were just the usual scaled-up stems, the short branches and small leaves no doubt local adaptations to the turbulent substellar weather.

  Mardina called a halt before they took on the forest interior. There was a pond nearby, thick with stems, and the builders skittered off that way.

  They parked the truck and the ColU well away from the forest and its unknown dangers, and set up camp for the night. They built a fire for washing water and to boil up tea, and prepared to take turns to stand watch, under the unchanging grey sky.

  Yuri found it difficult to sleep, under a quickly erected tepee. It wasn’t like in the permanent camps, there were no little kids running around, nobody getting drunk on Klein vodka. But Peacekeeper Mattock did snore like his throat had been slit. And one of the mutilated ColUs gave off an endless low hum of small sounds, a whir of pumps, a hiss of hydraulics, the occasional cough of some small engine. Yuri’s ColU blamed its lobotomy; its ‘subconscious’, the semi-autonomic systems that ran the truck’s infrastructure, were full of small malfunctions as a result. Beth suggested the truck was having bad dreams. The ColU said that was more true than not.

  In the camp morning they packed up and got ready to push on into the alien jungle. Beth, who’d been up early and had done some scouting, thought she had found a path.

  The ColU, deploying its sensor arm, confirmed it. ‘Vehicles have travelled this way, leaving characteristic traces – even faint radioactivity in places – though an attempt has been made to cover up the tracks. Nevertheless, a way exists.’ It plugged its fibre-optic cable into the dumb truck, said, ‘All aboard,’ and set off without hesitation into the jungle, leading its passive partner.

  Yuri, Mardina and Beth clambered aboard the ColU as it rolled off. Mattock, Delga and Liu took the truck. The builders, without apparent concern, followed in their wake, but they kept away from the human-made track, preferring to work their own way through the thicker undergrowth.

  As soon as they got into the shade of the trees Yuri was immediately hit by the increased heat, the humidity; it was like entering some huge mouth, and he was glad he wasn’t walking. Yuri heard Mattock wheezing as he gulped down water.

  The light had an oddly liquid quality, as if they pushed through some murky pond, stained with Per Ardua’s sombre green. The canopy here was low, not the virtually solid roof of the high-latitude forest; the smaller leaves let plenty of light get through to the ground level, where a healthy undergrowth sprouted. When a wind blew up – bringing the travellers no relief, the moving air itself was hot and moist – the stubby branches of the trees shook and rattled. Insects, or insect-analogues, fluttered around, the size of butterflies but built from sticklike stems and bits of filmy webbing. They landed on the skin of the people, only to lurch away again apparently disappointed, but they kept coming back for another try. Yuri suspected they would be a plague until they got out of the jungle.

  And they started to see animal life, some of it built on an impressive scale: hefty-looking kites in the trees’ upper branches, smaller than those of the high-latitude forests but more powerful-looking to Yuri’s eye, and smaller, even stronger-looking flightless versions that scuttled across the forest floor. One big beast with flight-vanes like samurai blades sat and watched them go by, with multiple upright eye-leaves.

  Beth was holding a crossbow, loaded. ‘I do not like the look of that.’

  ‘I think we must expect vigorous variants of life here,’ the ColU said as it rolled forward. ‘More energy is available from Proxima here than anywhere else on the planet. Rather like the forests that once swathed Earth’s tropics, there is plenty of opportunity for life here, for speciation. Perhaps, for example, the kites first evolved here. Some may have migrated to the high-latitude forests and adapted. Others might have settled on the lakes and marshes. Yet others might have stayed here and given rise to the flightless predatory forms we have glimpsed.’

  ‘Just so long as they don’t try predating on me,’ Beth murmured.

  Rain fell.

  Just like that. There was no sense of a start or a finish to the storm; it just descended, all at once, sheets of water piling down vertically between the trees, or dripping from foliage that seemed to be of no use in shielding the party.

  They were all soaked immediately. And when the water started running over the ground, the vehicles had to slither to a stop. They found what shelter they could, under the trees, huddled against the ColU. Beth put her arm around Mardina. Yuri held up his face to the rain, hoping for some relief from the heat, but the water itself was warm, and faintly briny when it worked into his mouth, perhaps evaporated from some salty inland sea.

  There was a tremendous crack of thunder, a flash of lightning that seemed to light up the whole forest.

  Then the rain stopped, as suddenly as it had started. Still, however, the water dripped from the trees in a shower on their backs and heads. The light got a bit brighter, but there was no direct sunlight, no break in the cloud layer.

  And Mattock was groaning.

  Yuri looked back. The Peacekeeper, with his soaked uniform open to the waist, was doubled over in the mud, gasping, like he was drowning. Liu and Delga were trying to grab hold of him, to get him on his back.

  Mardina slapped the hull of the ColU. ‘He’s sick. Do your stuff.’

  The ColU lumbered around, sending up a spray of watery mud and leaf matter, and rolled back. With a combined effort of all five of them – ‘One, two, three!’ – they lifted Mattock off the ground and onto the ColU’s carapace. They laid him out, tucking spare clothing under his head, while the ColU’s fine manipulator arms took his pulse, checked his airways, took his temperature with a fine probe in the mouth. Then an equipment bay in the ColU’s flank opened up and a drip feed snaked into his upper arm.

  Liu asked, ‘So what’s wrong with him, autodoc?’

  ‘The heat,’ Delga snarled. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘That’s true,’ the ColU said. ‘I believe he may have had a mild heart attack. He needs proper treatment – his temperature needs to be reduced quickly—’

  Yuri said, ‘But we’re stuck here. The ground is a pond after that storm. If we try to move, even if we back out of here, we’ll end up smashing into a tree.’

  Beth watched all this. ‘We need help, then,’ she said. She walked a few paces into the forest, the mud splashing her bare legs. ‘The game’s over!’ she shouted. Her voice echoed in the forest, and somewhere there was a bird-like fluttering as a startled kite flew away. ‘You blokes in the IFS!’

  ‘ISF,’ her mother murmured gently.

  ‘Whatever. We know you’re watching us. Well, you can see how we’re fixed. Mr Mattock is going to die unless you help him. So come on. No more of these stupid games you people play. Come on out, ready or not. Why, he even put on his nice blue uniform just for you—’

  And there was a crash of foliage, lights that glared bright. A truck – no, a kind of armoured car, Yuri thought, like a beefed-up Mars rover – came barrelling out of the heart of the jungle. It was basically a camouflage drab green, but it had mud-splashed logos, of the UN, the ISF, even the name of the Ad Astra carefully lettered on its side. And Yuri saw goggled eyes peering at him from out of a slit window.

  CHAPTER 54

  The rover skidded to a halt, just feet away from the ColU, sending up a
mud spray. Beth flinched back, hiding behind Yuri. He reflected that, Ardua-born, she’d never seen a vehicle travel so fast.

  ‘ISF,’ said the ColU.

  ‘ISF,’ said Yuri.

  ‘Told you so,’ said Mardina.

  The ColU said, ‘I have misled you. After all this time . . . but not intentionally. I did not know they were here.’

  ‘They lied to you, just as much as to us,’ said Yuri.

  The ColU went ominously silent.

  ‘Later, ColU,’ Mardina said. ‘Don’t go crashing on us now.’

  A heavy door opened with a hiss of hydraulics. The man that emerged looked overdressed to Yuri, given the heat, in a heavy coat and trousers in the drab green shades of Per Ardua, and he carried another thick jacket. He had a weapon at his waist, Yuri saw, a vicious-looking handgun, clearly visible. He faced the group, who stood around the suffering Mattock on the ColU. He looked seventy, at least. Under a blue Peacekeeper’s beret, greying hair was plastered down by sweat.

  Yuri knew who this was. ‘Peacekeeper Tollemache,’ he said, wondering. Decades older, heavier, but undoubtedly him. ‘I thought I’d enjoyed your company enough on the ship.’

  Tollemache sneered. ‘Shame you still haven’t got the bruises I gave you, you little shit. I can’t say I’m glad to see you again. Or any of you losers. Good Christ, look at you, you’re a pack of scarecrows.’