Proxima

by Stephen Baxter

  Earth was to be protected. That was the only agreed conclusion of talks which had once again broken down. Otherwise all bets were off. There was no declaration of hostilities, not yet, but—

  Earthshine stood up. He flickered, oddly, as if massive processing resources were being diverted. ‘The talks are finished. There will be war. It is obvious, a Cold War logic, like the twentieth century. Each side now has an interest in striking first, before the other destroys its capability. Take me off Earth.’

  Penny glanced at King, who was staring at the screen, ashen-faced; evidently this news was worse than he’d expected. He quickly pulled himself together, and looked up at Earthshine. ‘Very well. I have a ship. You can use it. But let my family stay here.’

  Penny was astounded by the suddenness of these negotiations. ‘Off Earth? But . . .’ But if anybody understood the implications of what was happening, this shadow play of delayed press conferences and ambiguous statements, it was these two. She thought it over, then stood up. ‘I’ll help you, Earthshine. I can continue to advise you. Take me with you, on the ship.’

  Earthshine nodded. ‘Done.’

  ‘And Jiang Youwei,’ she added hurriedly.

  ‘Agreed.’

  CHAPTER 80

  It had taken the expedition two weeks to skirt the island continent.

  Then they cut away from the coast, and headed once more over the ice-covered ocean, the vehicles rolling smoothly side by side. In this flat emptiness, again Yuri’s sense of time seemed to dissolve. He dozed, watched the stars, and played chess with Liu. Whole days went by without him even leaving the rover cabin.

  It was almost a surprise when the ColU called a warning that another landfall was imminent. After nearly a hundred days, more or less on schedule, they approached the rising ground of the frozen rock-tide bulge that supported the antistellar point.

  They proceeded with caution, as ever. But this time they wouldn’t stick to the coast; they were heading for the heart of this peculiar star-born continent. Soon the vehicles were clambering up onto the rising flanks of an ice sheet, with the summits of worn mountains protruding, shadows in the starlight. The ColU led the way, nosing through passes, pushing ahead on stretches of open country. The ColU said it was navigating using the stars, as well as its own internal dead-reckoning gyroscopic systems, feeling its way towards the precise antistellar point, the summit of this ice cap.

  Stef, meanwhile, became increasingly fascinated by the anomalous star-that-wasn’t-a-star that hung high in the sky above. Eventually, almost as they arrived at the substellar point, it occurred to her to examine its light with a spectroscope.

  She immediately called a halt.

  They pulled on their cold-weather gear, clambered out onto the ice, and stood together, peering up at the star, almost directly overhead. Stef held up a mittened hand, holding a small radio transmitter.

  Yuri stood with her. ‘Tell me, then. What about your star?’

  ‘It’s not a star at all. I think I know what it is. All this way I watched it rise, like a naked-eye astronomer five hundred years ago. I was puzzled. It just didn’t fit . . . Finally I checked it out spectroscopically.’ She pointed upwards. ‘That’s Proxima light.’

  Yuri did a double-take. He looked up. ‘It can’t be. Oh. Yes, it can – reflected, right? Then it’s a mirror.’

  ‘Or a solar sail. Something like that. Yes.’

  ‘But it’s just hanging there. How come it’s not in orbit?’

  ‘I think it’s at an equilibrium point. The pressure of Proxima’s light, pushing it away, is balanced by the pull of gravity, drawing it in. I’m not sure it’s stable, but with some conscious management—’

  ‘Conscious? You know what this is?’

  ‘I think so. Excuse me.’ She raised her radio. ‘Come in, Angelia. I think I have the right frequency . . .’

  ‘I am Angelia 310999,’ came a faint reply, a female voice, a kind of clipped accent very like Stef’s own. ‘Hello, Stephanie. It is good to see you again. I remember our time on Mercury very well.’

  Yuri and Lu just stared, at Stef, at the bauble hanging in the sky.

  ‘We’ve both come a long way from Mercury. Although nobody calls me Stephanie any more. In fact, they didn’t back when I last spoke to you, I’m Stef to my friends . . . Can you see us?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Your vehicles are quite clearly visible; my optical systems continue to function well. Although I could not identify you, of course, until you spoke to me. How is your father?’

  ‘Passed away, I’m afraid, Angelia. Long ago.’

  ‘Ah. He was a visionary, though morally flawed.’

  ‘Yes. Angelia, I can see that you succeeded in your mission.’

  ‘It was very difficult. Much was lost.’

  ‘Why didn’t you report to Earth? Why not contact the Ad Astra, when it arrived?’

  ‘It did not contact me.’

  ‘I doubt they even noticed some defunct lightsail space probe,’ Liu murmured.

  ‘Less of the “defunct”,’ Angelia snapped.

  Liu, surprised, laughed.

  ‘Stef, humanity did nothing for me. I, and my equally sentient sisters, were thrown into the fire in the hope that a handful of us would succeed in a mission ordained by others.’

  ‘Hm,’ Yuri said. ‘Sounds familiar.’

  ‘Why should I obey the orders of those who intentionally harmed me and my sisters?’

  Liu rolled his eyes at Yuri. ‘Another bit of too-smart AI. Why do these things never do what they are supposed to?’ Shaking his head he walked away, tentatively exploring, pushing deeper into the dark, his flashlight casting a glow on the ice at his feet.

  Stef said, ‘All right, Angelia. I guess I understand. My father had his problems, but he was still my father. Our father, I guess. And you were one sibling I never resented.’

  ‘Stef? I don’t understand that last remark. I remember how you and your sister, Penelope—’

  ‘Never mind. Long story. We’ll talk about it some other time. Angelia, what are you doing up there?’

  ‘It is a good place for me to stay. Me and my surviving sisters. Obviously it is a point of stability. And we serve a purpose.’

  ‘A purpose?’

  ‘Lighting the way to the point very close to where you stand. The antistellar. The most significant point on the planet.’

  Yuri looked up again. ‘It is?’

  Stef said, ‘So we didn’t really need to navigate, did we? All we had to do was look for you. Follow the star. Just like Bethlehem.’

  ‘And of course I sought out the one who came before me . . .’

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  Liu came running back, breathing hard. ‘You need to come. I found something. Get the rover.’

  CHAPTER 81

  They bundled back into the rover, and the ColU followed. They’d only travelled a short way when, picked out in the vehicles’ lights, they all saw something ahead, on the ice, picked out by Liu’s ageing but still sharp eyes.

  A flag, hanging limp on a pole. UN blue.

  They pulled the vehicles up short, suited up, and climbed out onto the ice once more. The air was bitterly cold, and their breath misted around their heads. The three of them stood side by side, illuminated by the lights of the rover and the ColU.

  And before them, clearly visible in the glow of the lights, was the flag, and what looked like a tent, slumped. Beyond the tent the ice surface fell away, perhaps into some kind of crater. None of them had an idea what any of this meant.

  They walked forward, over hard, rough ice. The ColU followed, its lights dipped. The flag was fixed to a kind of improvised ski pole, stuck in the ice. They walked past it, staring.

  At the tent, Yuri lifted a flap, stiff with ice. In the light of his hand torch he saw a body, inside the tent. He stepped back.

  Wordlessly, Liu went inside to inspect the body.

  Yuri and Stef walked around the rest of the site. Aside from the tent, there was
a heap of scattered equipment on a frozen groundsheet, a pair of homemade-looking skis, a kind of improvised ice-bike, a heap of stores – and a gadget about a metre tall with an inlet hopper, an outlet compartment that looked like a miniature intensive-care chamber, and finely inscribed instructions on the casing.

  ‘What’s this?’ Yuri asked. ‘Some kind of iron cow?’

  ‘Not that,’ said the ColU.

  Liu called them over.

  Reluctantly they returned to the tent, where Liu stood over the body. It was a man. He lay wearing only an antique military uniform, no protective clothing. There was no sign of decay. But then, Yuri realised, he must have frozen solid before the bacteria in his body could have begun to consume him – and on Per Ardua, there was nothing yet that could consume a human corpse. The very processes of death were alien, on this alien world.

  The dead man bore a UN roundel on his sleeve. A sheen of ice lay over his features. He was smart, clean-shaven, even his hair combed. He looked like an astronaut.

  Stef said, ‘I guess he wanted to die in his uniform, huh.’

  Liu looked at her. ‘You know who this is?’

  ‘I know who it has to be.’

  ‘Dexter Cole?’ Yuri asked. The pioneer who had come to Proxima on some wild solo mission, half-baked even compared to the Ad Astra venture, in the decades Yuri had slept away in cryo.

  ‘Yes. There is identification here.’

  They all backed out of the tent.

  Yuri said, ‘The colonists used to think Cole’s ghost was roaming around Per Ardua. Remember that, Liu?’

  ‘I guess we might have been right about that.’

  ‘So what happened to him?’

  Liu pointed to a heap of paper he’d gathered together on the ice. ‘He left a journal. A video diary too. But there’s also a letter, one page.’ He held this up in his gloved hand. ‘The bullet-point summary. Evidently he wanted to be sure we got the message. He did what he had to do. He says that, over and over. I guess he didn’t want to be remembered a failure. Or worse.’

  Stef said, ‘He did what he had to do? What does that mean? He evidently made it to the Prox system. He was the first human to cross interstellar space, the first to land on Per Ardua. He’ll be remembered for that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Liu. ‘But he was actually here to colonise, remember. It went wrong – according to the note. He crashed, somewhere on this dark side, the frozen side. He had no comsat, he couldn’t even send a message home to say what had happened. Much of his equipment was wrecked. He seems to have improvised all this gear. A kind of ski-bike, to get around on the ice. He hauled everything else after him.’

  ‘He came here, to the antistellar,’ Stef said. ‘Why?’

  ‘He wanted to be found, or his body anyhow. He knew he couldn’t make it to the near side. Where else are people going to come, on the dark side? We zoomed straight here. He wanted people to know his story. And he didn’t want to be thought of as a monster.’

  Yuri frowned. ‘Why the hell would anyone think that?’

  Liu kicked the processing gadget. ‘This isn’t an iron cow, not a food machine. Dexter Cole was supposed to be the father of a whole colony. That was the idea. The strategy was that he would bring human embryos, frozen in here, that he’d thaw out one by one, and feed up, and raise. Twenty little colonists in the light of Proxima, with Cole as the godfather. That was the vision.’

  ‘Instead of which . . .’

  ‘Instead of which he was lost in the dark, and starving. He grew the embryos, all right. He must have found nutrients somewhere to feed the incubator – volcanic pools, I guess. But what he did with them . . .’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Stef knelt on the groundsheet, by the machine. She picked up something from the floor – a heap of white fragments, like a tiny builders’ midden, Yuri thought. Bones. Finger bones, perhaps. Stef put them respectfully back where she’d found them.

  Yuri looked down at the dead man’s stern, placid features, and wondered how sane he had been, in the end, alone in the icy dark with his only food source, this grisly repast.

  Liu shrugged. ‘What would you have done? What would any of us do? The kids couldn’t have survived here anyhow.’

  The ColU said evenly, ‘That’s not all he did here, though. I have inspected the wider area. Dexter Cole did more than just survive. There’s something else here. In the ice, I mean. Something he found.’

  They looked at each other. Then they hurried over to the ColU, which was standing at the lip of the depression in the ice.

  It wasn’t a natural formation, nothing like a crater. It was a pit. Cole had blown a pit in the ice. And at the bottom, it looked like he had got to work with a pick of some kind. He had exposed a sheet of a grey metal-like substance, and a fine circular seam, a few metres across.

  ‘Dexter Cole evidently became curious,’ the ColU said. ‘About this place, the antistellar, a point of obvious significance. Perhaps he retained some equipment from his crashed ship. He may have detected structures beneath the ice, with radar or sonar echoes. And he certainly had explosives.’

  They all scrambled down into the shallow depression. The ColU rolled forward, playing its lights over them.

  ‘A Hatch,’ Yuri said. ‘He only found another fucking Hatch, ColU!’

  ‘Yes. And diametrically opposite the first, at the substellar Hub. Also there is a field of kernels, buried in the rock of this area.’

  ‘What is going on with these Hatches?’

  Stef knelt and pointed, grinning. ‘Look. Hand-shaped lock grooves. We can open this.’

  Liu stared. Then he held up Cole’s one-sheet missive, scanning it quickly. ‘Cole says this was featureless when he found it. He even made a sketch. Look. He took images on his slate, he says. No hand marks.’

  ‘Then it changed,’ Yuri said. ‘Just as the day side Hatch changed when we first went into it.’

  ‘And the one on Mercury, the same,’ Stef said.

  Yuri looked at her. ‘What are we going to do about it?’

  She grinned. ‘What do you think?’

  Liu backed away, hands raised. ‘Whoa. You’re talking about going into that thing? Count me out.’

  The ColU said, ‘I think it is my duty to point out that you are entirely unprepared, Yuri Eden.’

  ‘That never stopped us before.’

  ‘True. But there may not even be breathable air on the other side. Consider Mercury—’

  ‘We’re going anyhow.’ He grinned at Stef, who grinned back. ‘We’re done with Per Ardua, aren’t we? Done with Earth. Especially if they import their war here.’

  The ColU stood still, its floods splashing light over the Hatch in its pit. ‘You are determined.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘In that case I have a request.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Take me with you.’

  Stef laughed briefly, but fell silent again.

  For a moment nobody spoke.

  Stef said, ‘It’s serious, isn’t it?’

  Liu snorted. ‘This is a glorified tractor. A farming machine.’

  ‘Not just that,’ said the ColU. ‘I am a sentient, curious entity. I too wish to know what lies beyond this latest Hatch. And I have a store of knowledge, data . . . Imagine how useful a companion I could be, Yuri Eden.’

  Stef said, ‘But how the hell are you going to get through the Hatch anyhow? You’re not modular, like the modern designs, so you can’t be carried through in pieces, or even climb through yourself. You wouldn’t fit.’

  ‘I would suggest you detach my central processing core. That would suffice. Interfaces can be arranged later. Even a slate would be enough for that.’

  Stef looked at Yuri. ‘We’re going to do this, aren’t we?’

  Yuri just grinned. ‘I owe you one for Mister Sticks, ColU. You’d better show us how to take you apart.’

  They took a day to prepare, to don layers of clothing, to pack rucksacks, to select weapons.


  And to detach the ColU’s processor core, under its own instructions, as if it were supervising its own lobotomy, and to load it gingerly into a pack which Yuri wore on his chest. It was like cradling a baby, he thought, like the papooses he and Mardina had made to carry Beth when she was very small.

  Then it was time to go. After a day, for both Stef and Yuri, the immediate impulse to leave that they’d both felt on finding the Hatch stayed strong.

  Still Liu hung back. ‘Are you sure about this? I’ve never been through one of these damn things. You could end up anywhere, right?’

  ‘That’s the fun part,’ Stef said.

  Yuri looked at Liu. ‘We’re sure. And you’re sure you want to stay?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll take my chances with the UN. And besides, staying on this side of that Hatch is the only way I’ll keep open some remote chance of getting to Thursday October again. But you two – Stef, if you do this you’ll never see your family again. Your twin.’

  Stef just laughed. ‘Some loss.’

  ‘And you, Yuri. Maybe there’s a chance with Beth—’

  ‘I know Mardina. And I know with stone certainty that I’ll never see Beth again, come what may.’

  Liu nodded. ‘So you may as well keep going, right?’

  ‘Through another door, yeah. And another. What else is there?’

  ‘I’ll tell them what became of you.’

  Yuri grinned. ‘Well, maybe we’ll be back to tell it all ourselves.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  ‘No.’ He turned to Stef. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Always.’ She pulled off her mittens, exposing hands, stretched her fingers wide. ‘Let’s do this quickly. It’s so cold.’

  ‘True enough,’ said Yuri, pulling off his own mittens. ‘Are you ready? Together then. One, two, three—’

  Opened up, the Hatch was just like the one between the Hub and Mercury, a pit under the hatch lid, another door on the wall with indentations for their hands, lit up by a sourceless pearly light.