Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  Mardina remained cautious. She made her daughter climb back out first, just to ensure that it was possible, that they weren’t dealing with some kind of one-way trap.

  Then Tollemache was the first to follow Beth back into the hole. ‘Me next. I’m not missing out on this.’ He made sure his camera pack followed his own progress down the ladder. ‘Just like Dexter Cole. One small step for a man, like he said. Or was that Cao Xi on Mars?’

  Beth blew a raspberry into his camera.

  Mardina and Yuri exchanged glances. ‘I’ll go,’ said Yuri. ‘You wait.’

  ‘No way. I’m not letting Beth out of reach.’

  ‘Well, I’m not letting the two of you go anywhere without me.’

  ‘We can’t both go. Somebody ought to stay up top, in case—’

  The ColU said gravely, ‘I can call for help if there is trouble. I can even block the lid if it descends, perhaps. This is a human adventure, Lieutenant Jones, Yuri Eden. Perhaps in some ways it is why humans have come to this world.’

  Mardina frowned. ‘What does that mean? Oh, the hell with it.’ She went down the ladder.

  Yuri patted the ColU’s battered hull. ‘See you later, buddy.’

  As he climbed down the ladder in his turn, he felt nothing as he entered the pit, passing from the world of the real into the realm of the impossible. No tugging, no tide effects, no shift of perception.

  At the bottom, he was just in some smooth-walled hole in the ground, with the three others. They looked at each other, then stared around. There was plenty of room for them all, and the spinning, darting builders. Up above Yuri saw the cloudy sky of Per Ardua’s substellar point, with a fringe of foliage, and the ColU’s sensor pod held out over them all, quietly watching, recording.

  Mardina passed her hands over the wall surface. The glowing light shadowed the bones within the flesh. ‘It feels slick, frictionless.’

  Beth was inspecting the tapestry on the wall. ‘This looks like it’s stuck on with stem marrow.’

  Yuri, Mardina and Beth stood together before the object. Maybe a half-metre square, it was made of some kind of fine-woven stem-bark cloth held open by a frame of four neat stems, which looked the right size once to have been builder limbs. It bore an image of a disc, washes of brown and blue-grey, hanging before a watery blue sky, all marked in some kind of pigment. If you looked more closely there was a great deal of detail, a furry fringe at the perimeter of the circle, a dense grey navel at the very centre, and fine blue threads that crisscrossed the disc, linking at dense nodes. The threads reminded Yuri of a chart of great-circle airline routes.

  ‘It is a map, isn’t it?’ Beth asked. ‘Just as it looks.’

  Yuri shrugged. ‘What else can it be?’

  ‘A map of the whole world,’ Mardina said, wondering. ‘Just like we’d draw. The world as seen from space, from Proxima. There’s the substellar point at the centre. There’s the fringe forest. Look at that big bay cutting into the main continent – in the west? Builders made this.’

  Yuri hesitated. ‘I’ve never seen a builder make a map. But they know their way around the landscape, we know that.’

  Beth seemed defensive of the builders. ‘The ColU seems to think they built this whole place.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Mardina said. ‘But this map’s a lot cruder. And it’s just stuck on the wall.’

  Yuri said, ‘So the builders once made high-tech installations, like this, with radioactivity and heavy elements, and other shit. Then, later, all they could make was a map to stick on the wall. And now all they can do is spin around keeping the mud off – if we let them.’

  Beth looked troubled. ‘What does it all mean, Dad?’

  ‘Damned if I know, sweetie.’

  ‘I wonder how old it is,’ Mardina said. ‘The map. Maybe we could tell if it’s drawn accurately enough, from continental drift, or something.’

  ‘That takes millions of years to make a difference. This can’t be that old . . . can it?’

  Mardina shrugged. ‘All the ColU could find of some kind of advanced industrial installation outside was a few scrapings of polluted dirt. It would take a fusion plant, say, a long time to break down that far.’

  Beth traced the mesh of lines that overlaid the map of the world. ‘What are these?’

  ‘They look like canals,’ Yuri said. ‘They make Per Ardua look like Mars was supposed to be.’

  Neither of them knew what he was talking about. Before their time.

  ‘The builders don’t do canals,’ Mardina said.

  ‘Not that we’ve seen. But they do a lot of water management. They move lakes.’

  ‘Nothing on this scale. Why, some of these canals cross the heart of the continent – they have to be channelled through bedrock. If they had ever existed, they’d leave a trace, even if ice ages had come and gone across the face of this world. In the Ad Astra, we did make some surveys from orbit. We’d have seen canals. And on the ground, we walked a long way. We’d have noticed the things, we’d have had to cross them.’

  ‘Then the map’s wrong.’

  ‘Or maybe the map’s right,’ said Beth. ‘And the world is wrong.’

  Yuri stared at her. ‘That makes no sense. Does it?’

  ‘There’s something else you’re missing,’ Tollemache called.

  They looked over. The three builders had shimmied up the frictionless walls and were inserting themselves into the three sets of grooved ‘key’ beds in the hatch in the wall.

  ‘The second hatch,’ Yuri said. ‘Shit. I forgot. And these builders are about to open it. Here’s another of those choice points. Do we go on, or go back?’

  Mardina said tensely, ‘I was trained up as an astronaut. And one thing that was driven home to us was that you don’t go opening hatches just because they’re there.’

  ‘Well, we’re not in space, Mom,’ Beth said.

  The three builders were settling into their positions.

  ‘Last chance to run,’ Tollemache said.

  None of them moved. The decision made itself. Mardina grabbed Yuri’s and Beth’s hands. Tollemache seemed to brace himself.

  With a soft sigh, the hatch in the wall swung away, taking the spread-eagled builders with it.

  CHAPTER 58

  The chamber beyond the wall hatch was almost an anticlimax. It seemed to be a copy of the room they were leaving, another cylinder a few metres across, though with a closed roof just as seamlessly joined to the walls as the floor, and similarly glowing with a sourceless mother-of-pearl light. But there was yet another hatch on the far side of the room, once again engraved with builder-body lock grooves.

  The three builders leapt through the second hatch and spun around the floor, joyful once more, as if glad to be back here.

  The humans walked through, one by one, led by Beth. Mardina brought up the rear. Yuri looked at his group. Beth was full of wonder. Tollemache, heavy in his ice coat in a room that seemed distinctly cooler than the world outside, seemed greedy for discovery. Mardina remained the most cautious, yet she had come through with the rest.

  Yuri grabbed her hand. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘We’re all together.’

  ‘It’s just my training, I guess. I keep expecting something to happen—’

  ‘Mom! The door!’

  Yuri turned, too late, to see the hatch behind them swing closed, sealing itself neatly.

  ‘Like that,’ Mardina said angrily. ‘I keep expecting something like that to happen.’

  Yuri’s first reaction, oddly, was to think of the ColU, suddenly shut off.

  ‘So we’re stuck,’ Tollemache said. ‘We’re fucking stuck.’

  ‘Don’t swear at me, you ass,’ Mardina said. ‘You could have stayed out there. You could have blocked the hatch.’

  ‘What with? Your husband’s head?’

  ‘Well, he’s not my husband. Nice idea however . . .’

  Things started happening quickly. The builders had scuttled over to the
hatch in the far wall, and were already settling into place in their grooves.

  And Beth went back to the previous hatch and ran her hands over its surface. ‘Mom. Dad. Stop arguing. You’re missing it again.’

  ‘What?’ Yuri snapped.

  ‘What’s important. Look at these.’

  She had found indentations on the inner surface of the closed hatch – not builder profiles this time, but the imprints of human hands, three sets of them.

  ‘I will swear,’ Tollemache said heavily, ‘on your mother’s grave, ice boy, that those shapes were not there a minute ago.’

  Yuri glanced across at the far door where the builders were almost settled in place. ‘But their meaning is obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘We do have a way back,’ Mardina said.

  ‘Yeah. Look, we have a choice. We can go back – if this door works as it looks like it will. Or—’

  ‘We go on,’ Beth said, grinning. ‘Come on. There’s no real choice, is there?’

  Once again they waited until it was too late; once again the choice made itself. The builders settled into their slots, and the second wall hatch swung back, just like the first.

  And it felt as if the floor fell away beneath them.

  CHAPTER 59

  2197

  The Obelisk negotiations started late on Penny’s second day on Mars, to allow for the visitors’ misaligned biological clocks.

  The talks were held in a panoramic conference room, on a floor of the Obelisk even higher than Penny’s hotel room. The main players sat at a long table, with the UN Deputy Secretary General and the chief Chinese official, a local provincial governor, facing each other across the centre of the table, with translators scattered around. Penny was here purely to advise Sir Michael King, so she sat back from the table just behind him, coming forward only when he beckoned her.

  It seemed to Penny that the talks proceeded pretty well, on a broad-brush level. The delegates on both sides set out goals, aspirations, rather than demands or decrees. Visitors from UN nations should be allowed access to the Chinese offworld operations – especially the asteroid Ceres, the hub of development in the main belt, which was currently entirely closed to the UN. Similarly UN zone corporations should be granted licences to begin a share of exploitation of asteroid resources; after all, there was enough for everybody. On the other hand the Chinese wished for some kind of access to the kernels, at least to the wild developments in physics theory they had spawned, if not to the objects themselves. There were no blank refusals on either side, not yet.

  Most of the discussion concerned matters of principle rather than details of the kernel science that was Penny’s speciality, and she had plenty of time to kick back and stare out of the window at the view. They were so high up that Mars’s tight horizon visibly curved, as if she was in some aircraft, not in a solid structure at all.

  In a break, Penny stood with Sir Michael King and her assigned companion Jiang Youwei at a window, clutching coffees. King agreed that progress had been reasonable. ‘Here you have two societies with competing strategic goals, but with an almost entire lack of understanding of each other. A classic recipe for war, no matter how long we talk about zones of influence and such. But today, war is unthinkable.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jiang Youwei said seriously. ‘Both sides command enormous energies, the UN with its kernels, the Chinese with our interplanetary economy. Yet the populations of both sides are hugely fragile, we under our domes, the UN nations with their sprawling masses under an open sky—’

  ‘Not to mention the sprawling masses in China itself,’ King said sternly.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘At the same time,’ King said, ‘we each have a monopoly of something we don’t want the other guy to share. We the kernels, you the asteroids, roughly speaking. So what we’re each doing is prising open our treasure chests and letting each other at least sniff the gold. Everything is symbolic. The very fact that we made the effort to come all the way out here rather than just send a delegation to New Beijing on Earth is itself a token of our willingness to cooperate.’

  He was right, of course. It was all about symbols, on a level beneath the torrents of words. Penny understood that as a ‘face’ of kernel physics, internationally known, her presence too was a symbolic gesture. Even if she never opened her mouth.

  Jiang said, straight-faced, ‘And of course your immense hulk ship in orbit around Mars is itself another symbol.’

  King raised his eyebrows, and mock-toasted the boy’s answer with his coffee.

  ‘Maybe free trade will be possible some day,’ Penny said. ‘That’s generally a way to avoid war.’

  King glanced at Jiang. ‘Maybe. But would your society, here on Mars for instance, be “free” enough for that? What does freedom here actually mean for you?’

  Jiang might have taken offence, Penny realised. In the formal talks both sides had shied away from any comment on the other’s political system. But, from what she had seen of the city of Obelisk, she was curious about this herself. ‘We never did have our conversation on that topic.’

  Jiang merely nodded thoughtfully. ‘It is an interesting question. We of Chinese descent are products of a stable society now centuries old—’

  King snorted disrespectfully. ‘All framed by a value system that goes back to Karl Marx and Chairman Mao.’

  ‘But within any system, the challenges of ensuring freedom under conditions that pertain in an offworld colony – even here, in the largest offworld colony of all at the present time – are significant.’

  ‘In our Western tradition the freedom of the individual is paramount.’

  ‘Yes,’ Jiang said, ‘as I understand from my own school studies. But even in your own offworld colonies the freedom of the individual must be curtailed, if the collective good is to be maintained. The problem is the fragility of the colonies. One cannot challenge the most repressive dictator, if that dictator is the only one who can control the air supply.

  ‘We have philosophers exploring ways of ensuring individual freedom within a tightly constrained collective system. This is after all the condition under which most of mankind is likely to live for the foreseeable future. We reach back to old traditions; a citizen of the Roman Empire, for example, would have placed less value on individual liberty in the modern Western sense than on collective responsibility – a collective liberty, if you like. Actually it is a system-wide debate, for us. An ongoing participation for all our citizens, on Earth as well as offworld. Though we are not minded to follow your example, as evidenced at your Eden colony on Mars – I have been there myself – of excessive individual freedom kept in check by excessive policing.’

  King laughed, and clapped his shoulder. ‘You got me there. Who’d want to live in a dump like that? Well, let’s hope these talks work out and we get to see a future where we can try out these experiments in liberty. Right, Colonel Kalinski? Colonel?’

  But Penny had been distracted by a commotion. A door opened, and a harassed-looking official bustled in with a slate that he showed to the leading Chinese delegates. The news, whatever it was, spread quickly. Something about Mercury, she overheard them muttering, something extraordinary.

  And then, it felt like, everybody in the room stared at Penny.

  CHAPTER 60

  They all staggered. Yuri and Mardina reached for each other, and for Beth. Tollemache backed up to a wall.

  Beth clasped her stomach. For the first time in this whole episode she looked genuinely scared. Nearly in tears, she stumbled across to her mother, who held her tight. ‘Mom? What just happened?’

  Tollemache said, ‘It feels like the elevator just went down.’

  Mardina said, ‘Or the drive thrust just cut. But we’re not in a spacecraft.’

  ‘Or,’ Yuri said, ‘the gravity just weakened.’ He bounced on his toes; he drifted back down slowly. What was this, about a third Earth-normal? Like Mars? He was distracted by motion he glimpsed through the open doorway. He walked t
hat way, slow-motion swimming in the low gravity. Through the open hatch he saw another cylindrical chamber, a third, just like this second one, like the first. But though the walls glowed with that same eerie grey-white radiance, Yuri thought there was something different about the light in there. As if there was another source, shining from above.

  A figure walked past the open hatch, back turned. A black costume, spangled with silver.

  He looked wildly at Mardina. ‘That looked like—’

  ‘An ISF uniform.’

  ‘Then who the hell is that?’

  ‘Only one way to find out.’ Mardina led Beth across the floor and climbed through the doorway to the next chamber, and helped Beth through. Then Tollemache came, and finally Yuri.

  This third chamber was another smooth-walled cylinder, just like the rest. A ladder had been attached somehow to the curving wall. Elsewhere on the wall small sensors had been fixed, anonymous white boxes, evidently human made. Yuri saw, glancing up, that some kind of translucent dome had been set up over the open pit, through which could be seen a roof of rock, as if they were stuck in some deep cavern.

  That figure in the black and silver astronaut uniform, a woman, her back to the new arrivals, was working her way along the row of sensors, referring to a slate as she did so. Tall, blonde-haired, she was softly singing some tune about flying around the universe with her lover. She might have been in her fifties.

  Beth turned to Yuri, grinning gleefully, thrilled at this new development, her low-gravity queasiness forgotten. She pointed at the woman’s back. Her meaning was clear. She doesn’t even know we’re here!

  Mardina raised her eyebrows. Then, gently, she coughed.

  The woman jumped, whirled like a Per Arduan builder, dropped her slate, and backed against the wall. ‘Holy shit. Who are you? And how did you get in here?’

  Tollemache took charge. He strode forward, pointing his finger. ‘Never mind that, lady. Who are you? And how come I don’t know about you? This whole damn planet is full of illegals and stowaways.’