Proxima

Chapter 4 2155

When Yuri Eden discovered he was on a starship, it was only a little more than a decade after the maiden flight from planet Mercury of a ship called the International-One, the first demonstrator of the new kernel-drive technology that propelled the Ad Astra. Lex McGregor, then seventeen years old and an International Space Fleet cadet, had taken part in that flight.

And it was thanks to McGregor that Stephanie Penelope Kalinski, then eleven years old, had first got to meet her father’s starship, created from another technology entirely.

It seemed strange to Stef, as she and her father took the long, slow, unpowered orbit from Earth in towards the sun aboard a UN-UEI liner, that there were to be not one but two new kinds of ships, the International-One and the Angelia, launched from such an unpromising place as Mercury at the same time.

Her father just rolled his eyes. “Just my luck. Or humanity’s luck. If I was a conspiracy theorist I would suspect that those damn kernels have been planted under Mercury’s crust in order that we would find them now, just when we are recovering from the follies of the Heroic Generation, and reaching out, with our own efforts, to the stars…”

Stef wasn’t too clear what a “kernel” was. But she was interested in it all, the different kinds of ships, the experimental engineering she’d glimpsed at her father’s laboratories back home on the outskirts of Seattle, the rumours of these energy-rich kernels being brought up from deep mines on Mercury… She understood that the International-One was just some kind of interplanetary-capable technology demonstrator, while her own father’s ship, though uncrewed, was going to the stars, the first true interstellar jaunt since the extraordinary journey of Dexter Cole, decades before. But she’d heard hints that these kernels they’d found on Mercury, and which were going to power the I-One, were actually much more exotic than anything her father was working on.

This was the kind of thing that always snagged her attention. She was doing well with her schooling, scoring high in mathematics, sciences and deductive abilities, as well as in physical prowess and leadership skills. Her father had been paradoxically pleased when she had been flagged up with a warning about having introvert tendencies. “All great scientists are introverts,” he’d said. “All great engineers too, come to that. The sign of a strong, independent mind.” But Stef was always less interested in herself than in all the stuff going on outside her own head. The I-One’s interplanetary mission was a lot less ambitious than the Angelia’s, but it was the I-One that had the hot technology. She was more than interested in it. She was fascinated.

She didn’t much enjoy the cruise from Earth, though. She had followed the mission profile as their ship descended ever deeper into the heart of the solar system, ever closer to the central fire, and Stef had come to feel oddly claustrophobic. Apparently the UN-led countries and China, who had carved Earth up between them, had shared out the solar system too, but China dominated everything from Earth orbit outward, from Mars and the asteroids to Jupiter’s moons. Looking out from the cramped centre of the system, China seemed to Stef to have the better half of it, with those roomy outer reaches, families of cold worlds hanging like lanterns in the dark.

On Mercury they landed at a big engineering complex in a crater called Yeats. This was not far from the equator, so that during the planet’s day the big looming sun was high in the sky, pouring down the light and energy that fed the square kilometres of solar-cell arrays that carpeted much of the crater’s floor.

The gravity was lower than home, about a third, and in the high domes, built big so they could house the industrial complexes expected to sprout here in the future, you could go running and leaping and break all kinds of long-jump records. That was interesting, and fun.

But for Stef the charms of Mercury quickly palled. It was hot enough to melt lead outside, at local noon anyhow. They had come here in the morning on this part of Mercury, and since the “day” here lasted a hundred and seventy-six Earth days (a number that was a peculiar product of the planet’s slow rotation on its axis and its short year, that had taken Stef a while to figure out), the big sun just hung there, low in the sky, dome-day after dome-day, and the long shadows barely moved across the crater’s flat, lava-choked floor. There was, in the end, nothing on Mercury but rock, and there was only so much interest she could feign in solar-cell farms, or even the monumental pipeline systems they had built to bring water from the caches of ice in the permanent shadows at the planet’s poles.

And she had to spend a lot of time alone.

Her father was immersed in final tests and simulations for his starship, and Stef knew from long experience when to get out of his way. He’d been just the same when her mother was alive. The trouble was, unlike home, there was nobody else here much less than three times Stef’s age. Mercury was like a huge mine, drifting in the generous energy-giving light of the sun, and not a place to raise kids, it seemed; it was a place you came to work for a few years, made your money, and went back home to spend it. For all that the virtual facilities were just as good as back in Seattle, it got kind of boring, and lonely, quickly.

Things got a bit better as more people started to show up, shuttling in from Earth and moon for the launches.

There were actually two crowds arriving here, Stef quickly realised, for the two separate projects, the Angelia and the International-One. Her father’s project, the Angelia, was basically scientific: a one-shot uncrewed mission to Proxima Centauri intended to deliver a probe to study the habitable world the astronomers had found fifty years earlier orbiting that remote star. Since that discovery, of course, a human had actually been sent to Proxima, a man called Dexter Cole, who, launched decades before Stef had even been born, had yet to complete his one-way mission; the Angelia, representing a new technology generation, would almost overtake him. The throng gathering to watch the Angelia launch were mostly scientists and experimental engineers, along with the bureaucrats from state and UN level who were backing the project. They were men and women in drab suits who spent more time staring into each other’s faces over glasses of champagne than looking out of the window at Mercury, a whole alien world, it seemed to Stef.

The International-One, meanwhile, was a project of a huge industrial combine called Universal Engineering, Inc.—UEI. Its chief executive was a squat, blustering, forty-year-old Australian called Michael King, and he came out here with a much more exotic entourage of the rich and famous. “Trillionaire-adventurers”, her father called them dismissively.

There were even a few Chinese, “guests” of the UN and the UEI, to “observe” the great events taking place here on UN-dominated Mercury, although it seemed to Stef that it was a funny kind of “observing” where you weren’t allowed to have close-up views of anything important at all.

Stef did have to show up at drinks parties and other functions at her father’s side. Of the trillionaires’ club Michael King was the only one who displayed any kind of interest in her personally, as opposed to treating her as some kind of appendage of her father. When she was introduced by her father, King, avuncular, a glass of champagne low-gravity sloshing in his hand, leaned down and looked her in the face. “Good clear eyes. Unflinching gaze. Curiosity. I like that. You’ll go far. You keeping up at school, Stephanie?”

“It’s Stef. Yes, I think so. I like—”

“What are you missing here?”

“Missing?”

“You’re an Earth kid, stuck on Mercury. What’s the one thing I could sell you, right now, that you miss the most from home?”

She thought that over. “Soda,” she said. “Decent soda. Here it’s cold enough, but it’s always flat. Same on the moon.”

“Yeah. This champagne’s kind of flat too.” King glanced at her father. “Something to do with the low gravity, George? The low air pressure in the domes, maybe, messing with the carbonation? Soda. I’ll make a note of that and follow it up. Could be you just earned me another million, kid. So what do you make of all this?” He waved his glass at the people milling around, the conversations going on high above Stef’s head.

“I feel like I’m lost in some kind of forest of talking trees.”

King barked laughter. “Good for you. Honest answer, and a clear impression. Witty too. Listen to me. I know you’re only a kid—no offence. But you should watch and learn, as much as you can. Textbooks are one thing, people in the wild are another, and it’s the people you have to work with if you want to get on.” His accent was broad Australian, his enunciation crisp, precise, easy to follow. “Look at me. I started out from a poor background. Well, everybody was poor in Oz in those days because of the Desiccation. I made my first living as a coastal scavenger, I was no older than you, we’d go down into the wrecks of oil tankers and seawater-processing factories that had been deliberately beached on the shore, retrieving what materials we could haul out, all for a few UN dollars a day.

“But then age twenty I joined UEI as an apprentice programmer, and after ten years I was on the board. A lot of our early work was deconstruction, taking apart filthy old nuclear reactors. Of course by then we’d relocated to Canada, I mean the northern USNA region as it is nowadays, because Australia, along with Japan, the Far East countries, chunks of Siberia, had become part of the Framework, the Chinese economic empire… Well, the details don’t matter. Now here I am about to launch a new breed of spaceship. How much more success could you want? And you know how I got this far?”

“People,” she said brightly.

He grinned at her father. “George, you got yourself a smart one here. That’s it—people. I had contacts. I knew who to approach in the finance and governance community at national, zonal and UN levels, as well as the technical people, to get it done. Because I’d cultivated those contacts at events like this over years and years. Now it’s your chance, and it’s never too early to start.”

Her father snorted. “Don’t give me all that, Michael. Your most important contact isn’t human at all.”

“Earthshine, you mean.”

“Or one of his Core-AI rivals. Everybody knows they’re your ultimate paymasters.” Her father looked around the crowd, almost playfully. “Got an avatar or two here, has he? Should we be watching what we say?”

“Funny, George, very funny. But I don’t think—oh, excuse me. Sanjai! Over here!”

And that was it, as he hurried away to another encounter.

Stef liked Michael King, she decided, whether or not he really was backed by the sinister old Core AIs, entities she found hard even to imagine. Her father sneered about King’s lack of academic or technical qualifications, but Stef was drawn by his energy, his focus, his vigour, and she stored away his advice.

But she forgot all about Michael King a couple of dome-days later, when the astronauts showed up.

They were the human crew of King’s new ship the International-One.

When they walked through a room all the faces turned to the astronauts, like iron filings in a magnetic field. It was like royalty, like King Harold of North Britain, or some media star, or maybe like the Heroic Generation engineers back in their heyday, her father said. They were authentic space pioneers, and all of them were dressed in the uniform of the UN’s International Space Fleet, an eye-popping jet black spangled with glittering stars.

And what drew her attention most was the only member of the I-One crew who wasn’t in his fifth decade. Lex McGregor was from Angleterre, the south of Britain—the independent north had not contributed to the ISF—Lex was blond, as tall as the rest, and he was just seventeen. He wasn’t quite part of the crew, it seemed; he was a Space Fleet cadet, still in the early stages of his training. But he’d shown enough promise to win some kind of internal competition to serve as the one cadet on board the I-One for its maiden flight.

“And the fact that he is as photogenic as hell,” Stef said to her father, “probably didn’t harm his chances.”

He laughed. “Much too cynical for your age. Probably right, though. Don’t say ‘hell’.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

Just as Lex was the closest person here to Stef’s age, so she was the closest to his, and they kind of gravitated together. She was relieved when he didn’t treat her like some bratty kid. He called her “Kalinski”, like she was a cadet herself.

They would play dumb games and make up athletic competitions in the domes; he was good at figuring out rules so he was handicapped and she had at least a chance of winning. One of her favourites was the roof run, where you ran at a curving dome wall and up it, overcoming the low gravity, sticking to the wall by sheer centrifugal force until you fell back, and then (in theory) executed a slow one-third-G somersault to land on your feet on the cushioned floor. A space cadet’s training regime was pretty intense, and she suspected there was still enough of the kid in Lex to relish the chance to blow off some steam, even to bend the rules a little.

Which was probably why it was Lex who introduced her to her father’s starship.

Chapter 5

It was a dome-morning, only a few days before the launch of the I-One. The Angelia’s launch was scheduled a couple of dome-days after that. Paradoxically Lex had more free time just now, as the ISF controllers were trying to get their crew to relax before the stress of the mission.

So Lex invited Stef to “take an EVA”, by which he meant go for a walk on Mercury’s surface.

He met her at a suit locker built into the dome wall. He grinned when she showed up. “Thought you weren’t coming, Kalinski. You didn’t seem keen.”

“I’ve been out on the moon. What’s so special about a bunch of rocks?”

He winked at her. “This is different. Take a look at your suit.” He palmed a control.

A section of the wall swept back, to reveal a row of suits that looked like nothing so much as discarded insect carcasses. Each had a hard silvered shell to cover torso, legs and arms, a featureless helmet with a gold-tinted visor, and wings, extraordinary filmy affairs that sprouted from joints behind the shoulders. All the suits had markings of various kinds, coloured stripes and hoops, no doubt to identify who was wearing them.

Lex asked, “What do you think?”

“Ugly.”

“It’s not so bad. Believe me, you won’t even notice it once you’re out there on the surface. I bet you can’t guess what the wings are for.”

“It’s obvious. To radiate heat.”

“Very good,” he said, sounding genuinely impressed. “Most of the folk in this dome say, ‘For flying.’ Then they catch themselves and say, ‘But there’s no air here so…’ ”

“I know.” Stef sighed the way her father did. “It gets so wearying.”

He laughed. “OK, Kalinski, quit showing off. Look, putting it on is easy, the suit will seal itself up around you and adapt to fit. Just slip your shoes off…”

The astonishing thing was, once she was in the suit and out through a heavy-duty airlock, she really didn’t notice the suit, not visually anyhow. The suit contained some kind of immersive VR system, so when she looked down it was as if she was standing beside Lex, in their everyday clothes, on a ground of pitted rock, under Mercury’s black sky. The sun, more than twice the size it was as seen from Earth, cast long shadows across a moonlike plain. Experimentally she bent down; she felt a little stiff, and couldn’t fold quite as she was used to. She touched her toes, though, and picked up a loose bit of rock.

“How’s the suit?”

“Fine.” She explored the rock; her fingers, in her vision, didn’t quite close around it. “It feels kind of… soapy.” She threw the rock with a skimming motion. The rock whizzed away, falling, not as fast as it would on Earth, faster than on the moon. It made no sound when it fell; that wasn’t part of the sim.

“Let’s walk.” Lex strode easily across the surface of Mercury, his shadow long beside him. His voice sounded as if it was coming from him, not from plugs in her ears. “The suit will stop you from coming to any harm.”

“I know it will.” It was only older people who needed reassuring about stuff like that; people of Stef’s age just assumed technology would work. She followed him, watching where she was stepping. In this crater basin the surface was smoother than she had expected, with dust overlying a rocky surface pitted by lesser impacts. She moved easily enough, but felt a little heavy, as if she was over-muscled, like she’d beefed up in a gym. The suit must have exoskeletal multipliers.

The domes of the Yeats base were big blisters piled high with dirt, for protection from meteorite falls and from the sun’s radiation. Further out there were storage facilities, backup plants for air and water processing, dusty rovers on tracks that led off across the crater’s dirt floor. Not far from the inhabited facilities was the edge of the area of the crater floor panelled by solar cells, a glimmering reflective surface like a pool of molten silver that stretched away for kilometres.

And further out still she glimpsed some of the mountains that ringed this walled plain, like broken, eroded teeth. Out there stood bigger facilities, marked out by winking warning lights, all far enough from the inhabited domes to allow for safety margins. There was the broad, hardened pad where ships like her own ferry from orbit had come in to land, and fuel and energy stores, and a long shining needle that was the mass driver, which used sun-powered electromagnetism to hurl caches of material out of Mercury’s gravity well and across the solar system. In the shadow of the mountains themselves she saw the big gantries of the UEI’s drilling project, sinking shafts hundreds of kilometres deep through layers of lava and impact-pummelled bedrock to the edge of Mercury’s iron mantle, where the mysterious kernels were to be found.

And there too, huddling in the shadow, stood a taller gantry, a slim rocket: a strange sight for Stef, like something out of a history book. That was mankind’s newest spacecraft, the International-One, waiting to take Lex and his crew off into space.

Lex took a step and stamped on the ground, sending up little sprays of dust that sank quickly back down. “It’s an interesting little world.”

“So you say.”

He laughed. “I mean it. It’s only superficially like the moon. Look at those drill rigs over there. Here, you only have to drill down a few hundred kilometres before you reach the mantle. You’d have to go ten times deeper into the Earth, say. You know why that is?”

“Of course I know—”

Like her father, he didn’t always listen before lecturing her. “Because, we think, some big explosion on young Mercury, or maybe a big impact, blew off most of the rocky crust.”

She tried to imagine standing here when that big impact happened. Tried and failed. “What I want to know is, has all that got anything to do with the formation of the kernels they found here?”

Another voice replied, “Good question. Well, nobody knows. But I can see why you would ask it. You are Stephanie Kalinski, aren’t you?”

A woman was walking towards them from the direction of the domes, tall, a little heavy-set perhaps, yet graceful. Evidently projecting a virtual image, she appeared to be in regular clothes; she wore a trim blue jacket and trousers, almost uniform-like, but not as showy as Lex’s ISF suit. She looked about thirty, but was oddly ageless, as if heavily cosmeticised. Her accent was neutral, perhaps east coast American.

“The name’s Stef,” she replied automatically. “Not Stephanie. I know your face. I’ve seen your picture in my dad’s dossiers.”

“Of course you have,” Lex said, grinning. “Which is why I thought you two ought to meet. Dr Kalinski’s two daughters, so to speak. Because he never would have thought of bringing you together himself, right?”

“I am Angelia,” said the woman.

That puzzled Stef. “That’s the name of the starship. The Angelia.”

“I know. I am Angelia. I know what you’re thinking. That I am a PR stunt. A model, hired by your father to personify—”

“I don’t actually care,” Stef said abruptly.

That surprised Lex. “You’ve got an impatient streak, haven’t you, Kalinski?”

“If somebody’s being deliberately obscure, yes.”

“I’m sorry,” Angelia said. “I don’t intend to be. If your father had explained to you the mission concept—”

“You know about me. How come?”

“Well, I have got to know your father as we’ve worked together. And he speaks of you, Stef, a great deal. He’s very proud of you.”

“I know,” Stef snapped, feeling obscurely jealous.

Lex said, “Be nice, Kalinski. Now it’s your cue to ask, ‘What mission concept?’ ”

“Oh, Lex, I don’t care. It’s obvious this woman is some kind of projection.” On impulse she bent, picked up a pebble, an impact-loosened bit of Mercury rock, and threw it at Angelia.

Angelia caught the pebble easily. “Not a projection. Not quite an android either.” She looked at the rock, then popped it into her mouth and swallowed it. “I’m not in a suit like yours.”

“You’re programmable matter.”

“That’s right.” Angelia held up her left hand, and watched as it morphed into a clutch of miniature sunflowers, which swivelled their heads to the low sun.

“Ugh,” Lex said. “Creepy.”

“Sorry.” She turned her hand back into a hand, and pointed up at the empty sky. “I’m to be fired off into interstellar space, by the microwave beam from your father’s defunct solar-power satellite, up there. I’m the payload. But there is a me in here. In fact, a million mes, in a sense. A whole sisterhood, all sentient to a degree. Stef, I’m sure your father will walk you through the mission design—”

“But it makes no difference.” Lex walked around Angelia, studying her. “Whether you’re sentient or not, I mean. You’re not human. And it’s an authentic, physical human presence that counts when it comes to touching a new world. Sending some AI like you doesn’t count. That’s why the kernel ships are the important breakthrough here, because they can carry humans. Maybe even all the way to the stars—and back, unlike poor old Dexter Cole.”

“That’s very post-Heroic Generation thinking,” Angelia said, and she smiled indulgently. “A backlash against the philosophical horrors of that age. And typical of what they teach you at the ISF academies, from what I understand. Human experience is primal, yes? In fact this modern incarnate-humanism is the reason why Stef’s father programmed me into this form, so I could attend the pre-launch ceremonies in person, so to speak. It’s expected, these days.”

Lex shook his head. “No offence, Angelia, but nothing you will ever do could match the achievement of Dexter Cole, no matter how his mission pans out.”

Stef knew Cole’s story; every kid grew up hearing about it. When a habitable planet of Proxima Centauri was discovered, nations in what had since become the western UN federation had banded together, and within a couple of decades had scraped together a crewed mission. Cole had launched from Mercury for access to its energy-rich solar flux, just like Angelia would. A tremendous laser beam, powered by that flux, had blasted into a lightsail, sending Cole’s thousand-tonne ship to Proxima. Dexter Cole was flying alone to the stars on a forty-year, one-way mission—and, in some sense Stef had not been allowed to discover, he would somehow become the “godfather” of a human colony when he got there. All this had been launched from an Earth still reeling from the aftermath of the climate Jolts and the Kashmir War of the previous decades, an Earth where the huge recovery projects of the Heroic Generation were still working through their lifecycles—all this as mankind was only just making its first footfalls on the worlds of its own solar system. Incredibly, having been launched decades before Stef was born, Cole was still en route; right now he was in cryo, dreaming his way between the stars, before a pulse-fusion rocket would slow him at the target.

Lex said, “Cole is a hero, and I intend to follow in his footsteps, some day.”

Angelia smiled again. “Hey, it’s a big universe. There’s room in it for both of us, I figure.”

Lex grinned. “Fair enough. Good luck, Angelia.” He stuck out a hand.

She approached him and took his hand. And as Stef watched the bit of stone Angelia had swallowed popped out of the back of her neck, and dropped slowly to the ground.

Chapter 6

On the day the I-One was to be launched, Stef stood with her father at the window of the UN-UEI command bunker.

This stout building, constructed of blocks of Mercurian basalt, was set high in the walls of Yeats’s rim mountains, and looked down on the crater-floor plain. The big room was filled with the mutter of voices and the glow of monitor screens, teams of engineers tracking the countdown as it proceeded. Through the bunker windows, in the low light of the sun, Stef could see the domes, lights and tracks of the main Yeats settlement, and in the foreground the complex activity around the International-One at its launch stand, bathed in floodlights. The slim prow of the ship itself just caught the sun as it rose, agonisingly slowly, above the rim mountains. The ship was so far away it looked like a toy, a model layout; the VIPs in here were using binoculars to see better, ostentatiously demonstrating that they lacked Heroic Generation-type ocular augmentation, now deeply unfashionable.

Supposedly, the launch pad was far enough away for them to be safe here in this bunker if the worst came to the worst. But Stef had learned by now that although the engineers had figured out how to manipulate the kernels, which were evidently some kind of caches of high-density energy, nobody understood them. And if something went wrong, nobody knew what the consequences might be. This robust bunker might turn out to be no more protection than the paper walls of a traditional Japanese house before the fury of the Hiroshima bomb.

And somewhere in the middle of all the potentially lethal activity down there was Lex McGregor, just seventeen years old. Stef saw his face on a monitor screen. He lay on his back like his older companions, calm, apparently relaxed, contributing to the final countdown checks.

“He looks like John Glenn on the pad,” her father said, looking over her shoulder. “Heroic images from the best part of two hundred years ago. Some things don’t change. My word, he’s brave.”

Maybe, Stef thought. She did admire Lex, but there was something slightly odd about him. Off-key. Sometimes she suspected he’d had some kind of augmentation himself, so his reactions weren’t quite the human norm. Or maybe it was just that he was too young to be scared, even if he was six years older than she was.

Her father said now, “This landscape has been sleeping for billions of years, since the last of the great planet-shaping impacts. If that damn ship works this crater is going to be witness to fires fiercer than any that created it. And if it fails—”

“It should not fail,” Angelia said. The strange ship-woman stood on her father’s other side—one ship watching the launch of another, Stef reflected. “The testing has been thorough.”

Stef’s father grunted, sounding moody. He was in his fifties, a thickset, greying man, with old-fashioned spectacles and a ragged moustache; he had always been an old father to Stef, though her French mother had been much younger. Now the low light cast by the display screens in the bunker deepened the lines of his face. He said, “Somewhere up there, you know, is my SPS. An old solar-power station hauled out from Earth, a brute of an engine left over from the Heroic days and now refitted and put to good use… Oh, they sent Dexter Cole to the stars, but what a cockamamie way to do it, a lightsail to get him out of one system and a fusion rocket to slow him down in the next. Like those old Greek ships, rowing boats with sails attached. Still, they did it, they got him away. Now you, Angelia, you represent the next generation, the next phase of human ingenuity.

“And, just at this exquisite moment—this. The discovery of the kernels. A source of tremendous power that, it seems, we can just turn on like a tap. Everything we mere humans can manage is suddenly put in the shade. It’s as if we’re somehow being allowed to cheat. Does that seem right?”

Stef was puzzled. “You’ve talked about this before. I’m not sure who you’re blaming, Dad.”

“Your father has always been an agnostic,” Angelia said. “Not God.”

“Not God, no. I just keep thinking it’s a damn odd coincidence that we find these things just when we need them…”

The murmuring voices around them seemed to synchronise, and Stef realised that, suddenly, the countdown was nearly done, the I-One almost ready to go. She glanced once more at Lex McGregor, on his back, apparently utterly calm.

Flaring light flooded the bunker.

Stef looked through the window. The light was coming from the base of the ship, a glare like a droplet of Mercury sunlight. As she watched, that point of light lifted slowly from the ground.

The bunker erupted in whoops and cheering.

“Watch it go, Stef,” said her father, and he took her hand in his. “It’s on a trial run out to Jupiter, at a constant one-G acceleration all the way. If it works that damn drive should be visible all the way out, like a fading star. This is history in the making, love. Who knows? It might unite us as humans, at long last. Or it might trigger some terrible conflict with the Chinese, who are denied this marvellous technology. But it’s certainly a bonfire of my own ambition.”

Angelia put a comforting arm around his shoulders.

Stef barely paid any attention. Staring into that ascending fire, she had only one question. The kernels. How do they work?

Chapter 7

2169

Day one thousand, two hundred and ninety-seven.

That was Yuri’s count, by the tally he had kept running in his head, recording the eight-hour shift changes since he’d woken up in the hull. Over three and a half years. There were no calendars on the Ad Astra, not that the passengers saw. And of course he had slept through the early weeks of the flight from Mars, an uncountable time. But he knew roughly that the journey was due to end about now. Day one thousand, two hundred and ninety-seven.

When the end did come, there was some warning: a siren that wailed, for a few seconds.

At the time Yuri had no idea what it meant; he paid no attention to the sporadic briefings on shipboard events. He was on another punishment duty, scooping out muck from the interstices of a mesh floor partition, a grimy, demeaning job that you had to do on your hands and knees, working with a little cleanser the size of a toothbrush and a handheld vacuum hose. A make-work job a machine could have done in a fraction of the time.

Then the gravity failed.

It felt like the whole hull had suddenly dropped, like an elevator car whose cable had broken. Yuri found himself drifting up in the air, the little brush and the vacuum cleaner and his sack of dirt floating up around him. It was an extraordinary feeling, a mix of existential shock and a punch to the gut.

The Peacekeeper supervising him, a fat man called Mattock, threw up, and the chunky vomit sprayed over Yuri’s back and drifted up into the air, a stinking, noxious, stringy cloud.

Yuri knew what had happened, of course. After three and a half years of a steady one-gravity thrust, save for a brief turnaround at the journey’s mid-point, the crew had shut down the drive. During the cruise you could have forgotten you were in a starship, for long periods. Now here was the reality of the situation suddenly intruding. His latest prison really was a battered tin can light years from Earth.

And then, not five seconds after the acceleration cut out, the riot started.

It erupted all at once, along the length of the hull. The yelling was the first thing Yuri noticed, shouted commands, whoops, screams of defiance and fear.

The big fluorescent light fittings were put out immediately. The crimson emergency lighting system soon came on, shining from behind toughened glass, but the hull was plunged into a flickering, shadowy half-light. And people moved through the shadows, grabbing handrails and slamming at the partition flooring with booted feet, so that broken panels started hailing down through the crowded air. Others used whatever tools they had to hand, spanners, broom handles, they even wrenched rails off the wall, to smash up equipment.

The Peacekeepers were an early target too. Near Yuri, from nowhere, three, four, five people, men and women, came hurtling out of the air like missiles and slammed straight into Mattock. Struggling, his head surrounded by a mist of vomit and blood, the Peacekeeper had no chance of reaching his weapons. He looked to Yuri, who was clinging to the wall. “Help me, you bastard—” A booted foot slammed into his mouth, silencing him.

Yuri turned away. He pulled himself around the walls, working his way across rails and equipment banks, trying to keep out of trouble, trying not to be noticed. He had a rendezvous of his own to make.

As he moved he observed that the hull’s population was split. Maybe a third of them were working in a coordinated way, savaging the Peacekeepers and, he saw, one or two astronaut crew members they’d got hold of, or systematically wrecking the internal equipment. Obviously they’d planned this, coordinated it for the onset of zero gravity. Most of the rest, scared, nauseous, were swarming around trying to keep out of the way of the violence. They were almost all adults, of course; the few kids, two- or three-year-olds born during the voyage, clung to their mothers in terror.

And up at the top of the hull Yuri saw a party gathering around the central fireman’s pole, preparing to climb up to the hull’s apex, up to the bridge. A woman he recognised, called Delga, was at their head. That was no surprise. He’d known her on Mars, where they’d called her the snow queen of Eden. On the ship she had quickly built a power base in the early days when, without alcohol, drugs, tobacco, the whole hulk had been like a huge rehab facility as everybody worked through cold turkey of one kind or another—and Delga, who somehow got her hands on various narcotics, had acquired a lot of customers. Yuri had kept out of her way on Mars, and on the ship, and he did so now. He dropped his head and concentrated on his own progress.

He got to his meeting point. It was just a kind of alcove on a central deck, a warren of thick pipes and ducts and power cables between two hefty air-scrubbing boxes. But it was tucked out of the way of trouble. He and his buddies hadn’t anticipated this scenario exactly, but they’d made contingency plans to meet here, in case.

And now, here he found Lemmy, and Anna Vigil, and Cole, nearly four years old, a timid little boy who clung to his mother’s legs, all waiting for him.

Wordlessly Yuri backed into the space, opened a maintenance panel on one of the scrubber boxes, took out a wrench and a screwdriver, and thus armed wedged himself in position before the others. After three and a half years he had a reputation on this hull. A loner he might be but he’d fight back, and was best left alone if there were easier targets. This had been the plan they’d cooked up, the three of them, when they’d thought ahead to bad times; this was the best Yuri could think of to protect them.

He heard a scream. In the shadowy chaos, he saw that three men had got hold of a woman. Yuri knew them all; he’d thought one of the men at least was a friend of the woman, who’d paired off with another guy. Yuri knew the woman too; called Abbey Brandenstein, she was an ex-cop and she could look after herself, but she was being overwhelmed. Now they were dragging her into a corner, though she was still fighting back. As the screaming got worse Anna Vigil covered little Cole’s eyes and ears, and hugged him close.

The noise was still ferocious, a clamour of yells and screams. More alarm sirens were sounding off, adding to the racket. There was no sign yet of the Peacekeepers taking any kind of coordinated action. Yuri saw Gustave Klein on the other side of the hull, flanked by a couple of his heavies, watching the action with a grin on his face. Maybe it was Klein who was really in control.

Lemmy peered cautiously up into the apex of the hull. “Delga’s reached the bridge, it looks like.”

“What do you think they want?”

Lemmy shrugged. “To take the ship. Force the astronauts to whiz us all back to Earth. I bet there’s a similar breakout going on in the other hull; they’ll have timed it. I guess it’s the last chance we’ll get. There’ll be no hope once we’re on the ground, on a planet of Proxima.”

“But they could smash up the ship before they win that argument.”

“True.”

“You think it’s going to work?”

Lemmy grinned. “Nah. Look.” He pointed to the far wall of the hull.

An airlock hatch opened and a dozen astronauts tumbled out of the lock and into the hull’s cluttered spaces. They wore hard, carapace-like pressure suits of brilliant white, marked with arm stripes in gaudy recognition colours, red, blue, green. They had their helmets sealed, their faces hidden behind golden visors, and their movements were jerky, too rapid, over-definite—a product of military-class enhancements, Yuri had learned, exoskeletons, drugs, boosters from the cellular level up. They carried weapons of some kind, not guns, not in a pressure hull, but what might be tasers, even whips.

Some of the rebelling inmates went for them immediately. The astronauts fought back with clean, hard moves, and snaps of their tasers, rasps of the whips. They were like insects with their superfast movements and hard outer shells, like space-monster cockroaches in this chaotic human environment. Before them the inmates looked grubby and unevolved. People fell back howling, blood spraying into the air.

Meanwhile one group of astronauts, three, four of them, broke away and made for a big locked control panel a couple of decks higher up towards the bridge. More rebels tried to get in their way, but the astronauts were too fast, too definite, and their opponents were brushed aside. The astronauts unlocked the panel with brisk taps of gloved fingers, and plugged pull-out leads into sockets in their suits, perhaps for identity verification.

Then, not a minute after the airlock had first opened, a yellowish gas began to vent from outlets all around the hull, and people began coughing, panicking.

Lemmy grinned. “Sweet dreams. See you on Prox c…”

But Yuri was already falling away down a long dark tunnel, and could hear no more.

Chapter 8

The ship’s population—what survived of it after the riots—was split up into small groups, held in isolated chambers in a newly partitioned hull.

On being woken from his latest bout of unconsciousness, Yuri found himself cuffed with plastic strips to a metal-frame chair, itself locked to a mesh floor. He was in a small partition-walled cabin with ten others, four women, six men. They were all dressed identically, in orange jumpsuits, with no boots, just socks. This was his assigned “drop group”, he was told. The only one in here that Yuri knew well was Lemmy. He did soon learn that the passengers had already been assigned to these drop groups, nominally fourteen each, long before the insurrection, and now the groups had been used as the basis for the lockdown.

They were supervised by Peacekeepers, never fewer than two at a time, with astronauts overseeing them, in the case of Yuri’s group Lex McGregor and Mardina Jones. As the days passed the passengers were released one at a time in a cycle, to use a bathroom modified for zero gravity, to wash, to feed. When they were out of their cuffs Lex McGregor insisted they stretch and bend, to keep from stiffening up. They were spoken to, but not encouraged to speak back, or to have conversations with each other.

The thrust was never restored, the gravity never came back on. But occasionally you would hear bangs and knocks, as if some huge fist was hammering on the hull, and jolts this way and that, brief periods of acceleration. Lemmy murmured that having reached the Proxima system under its kernel drive, the ship must be using some secondary propulsion system to insert itself into a final orbit, presumably around the target, the supposedly Earthlike third planet of Proxima. This was guesswork, however. They had no view out of the hull.

The crew processed them bureaucratically, forever ticking off names on the piss and feed rotas on their slates. There seemed to be no formal comeback after the insurrection. No hearings, no disciplinary measures. Yuri guessed the crew didn’t care, they just wanted to dump their unruly passengers down on this Proxima planet and have done with them.

But it was evident there had been some punishment beatings. One man in Yuri’s group, called Joseph Mullane, some kind of dispossessed farmer type originally from Ireland, had been worked over particularly hard, and Dr Poinar had to spend some time treating his wounds. But even he was kept cuffed to his chair.

Mullane had been one of the men Yuri had seen attacking Abbey Brandenstein, the ex-cop, at the height of the trouble—and Abbey herself was in this drop group too. Yuri had no idea if their pairing up like this had been deliberate. Maybe not, if it was true that the groupings had been defined long before the insurrection. Abbey Brandenstein spent all her waking hours glaring at Mullane.

In the hours and days that followed, Yuri never heard what had become of Anna Vigil and her kid; he didn’t ask, wasn’t told. Occasionally you heard voices from beyond the partition, a murmur of movement, a snatch of a baby’s crying. Otherwise, as the shifts wore on, there was nothing to do but sit there, cuffed to your chair. It was possible to sleep; Yuri found that if he relaxed, just let himself float in the zero gravity, he could find a position where the cuffs at his wrists and ankles didn’t chafe, and he could almost forget he was pinned down. He was bothered by the fact of his lengthy unconsciousness, however. Another gap in his memory. It irritated him to have three years of counting disrupted like that.

A few days after the last of those attitude-engine thumps and bangs had died away, there was a heavier shudder, as if some huge mass had joined the hull.

Lemmy winked at Yuri. “Shuttle. Orbit to ground. This ship has two, one of the crew told me that—”

“Shut the fuck up,” said a Peacekeeper. It was Mattock, the cuts and bruises on his face yet to heal, his broken nose twisted—Mattock, who took out his suffering on Yuri in sly kicks and punches, because Yuri had refused to help him before the fury of the mob.

Now Lex McGregor, with another Peacekeeper at his side, came swimming into the cabin. McGregor was in his sparkling astronaut uniform, as usual, and Yuri felt oddly ashamed at his own shabbiness.

McGregor smiled.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Time for us all to take a little ride. We’ll be boarding you one at a time. I do apologise, we’ll have to keep the cuffs on, you do understand how things are following recent incidents. But I’m sure we’ll have no trouble. You first, Ms Amsler…”

Jenny Amsler, a small, timid woman who had once been a jeweller, looked terrified as she was bundled out.

The loading proceeded efficiently. When it was Yuri’s turn, the hefty Peacekeepers to either side of him propelled him through the weightlessness with a gloved hand under each armpit. His last glimpse of the interior of the hull that had transported him across interstellar space was of blank-walled partitions, bits of equipment damaged by fire and vandalism. There was a smell of smoke, vomit, blood, of shit and piss, and a tang that made his throat itch, maybe a remnant of the gassing.

He was taken to a shower room where he had to strip, was sprayed with some hot, disinfectant-smelling liquid, and made to clean his teeth with a plastic brush. Then he was dressed in a kind of undersuit with a fresh jumpsuit on top. There was a diaper, he found, built into the undersuit, heavy pants around his crotch.

Then he was shoved out through a tight hatchway, and after a swivel of his vertical perspective found himself dropping into a craft laid out like a small, cramped airplane. There were couches in rows of four, cushioned seats on which you could lie back as if in a dentist’s chair. Room enough for twenty passengers, he counted quickly. An open door to the front of the cabin led to the cockpit, a cave of glowing lights where two astronauts worked, side by side, their backs to him.

The shuttle at least seemed clean. It had a new-carpet smell Yuri suddenly realised he hadn’t come across since he had been slotted into that cryo drawer back on Earth; nothing on Mars had been new, or on the starship.

And through the cockpit window, over the shoulders of the crew, he glimpsed a slice of blue, like the sky of Earth.

All this in a glance before he was bundled down into a couch. Mattock and another Peacekeeper worked him over quickly, strapping him in with a heavy safety harness, but also cuffing him to the frame at wrists and ankles with more plastic ties.

He was the fifth person to be loaded in, with not a word being spoken. Looking forward, he saw that among the other four already loaded, Abbey Brandenstein had been seated right next to Joseph Mullane, one of her rapists.

Yuri looked up at the battered face of Mattock, who hovered over him as he laboured over the ties. “Hey, Peacekeeper. Bad idea,” he ventured. “Mullane and Brandenstein together—”

His reward was a knee in the stomach. Mattock had become proficient at bracing himself in the lack of gravity to make such blows effective. Yuri couldn’t help but grunt, but he tried to show no other reaction.

“Mind your own business, you little prick.”

The rest of the loading went ahead briskly, and almost in silence, save for muttered exchanges between the Peacekeepers. The passengers were all from the group in the confinement cell, eleven in total. Lemmy was lodged just behind Yuri. Two comparative strangers were loaded into Yuri’s left and right, a big-framed Asiatic who Yuri knew only as Onizuka, who had once been some kind of businessman, and a woman called Pearl Hanks, small, dark, old eyes in a young face, who had been a prostitute on Earth and on Mars, and, in the hull, had been again. Onizuka ignored Yuri, but he looked past him at Pearl Hanks with a kind of calculation.

The hatch above their heads was slammed down with finality. And that, Yuri thought, was the last he was going to see of the Ad Astra.

With all aboard and tied down tightly, the two Peacekeepers settled in couches at the rear of the cabin. Lex McGregor came floating back from the forward cockpit, as usual immaculate in his uniform. Beyond him, in the pilots’ cabin, Yuri glimpsed Mardina Jones pulling on a pressure suit.

McGregor faced the passengers. “Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome aboard the prosaically named Ad Astra shuttle number two. In this brave little ship we will soon be descending to the planet of another star…”

The passenger cabin had no windows. But now, over McGregor’s shoulder, through that pilots’ window, as the shuttle drifted, Yuri could see more of the planet: the grey shield of what looked like an ocean, floating masses of ice, a terminator separating night from day, a diorama shifting by.

“Our descent will be straightforward. We will be landing at a predesignated site in the north-east quadrant of the planet’s substellar face. We’ll come down on what looks like a dry lake bed, just like the salt flats at Edwards Air Force Base in California where I completed my own flight training some years ago. Perfectly safe, a natural runway.

“Our landing routine will take two hours. I’m afraid you won’t be able to leave your chairs until we’re safely down and the wheels have stopped rolling. If you have any biological requirements during the flight just let yourself go, you’ll notice you are wearing underwear adapted for the purpose. You will hardly be comfortable but it won’t be for long. Also there are sick bags. I do hope there will be no monkey business from any of you during the flight,” he said, sadly, gravely. “Obviously it would be futile; you could achieve nothing but damage the craft and endanger yourself and your colleagues. We, the crew, incidentally, will be wearing pressure suits and parachutes, so you need not fear for our safety, whatever you do.” He glanced at his watch. “Soon we’ll decouple, and then the deorbit burn will follow a few minutes later. Any questions? No? Enjoy the flight. After all,” he mused, as if an interesting thought had just struck him, “it will, I suppose, be the last flight any of you ever take.” He retreated to his cabin.

Soon there were more bangs and jolts, a sound that Yuri had come to recognise as the firing of small attitude rockets. As the shuttle swung about, turning on its axis to the right, he could sense that he was in a much less massive vessel than the reassuring bulk of the starship. There was silence in the passenger cabin, save for ragged, nervous breathing, and the usual space-travel hiss of pumps and fans, a noise that had followed Yuri all the way from Mars—and, incredibly, the drone of somebody snoring. Yuri glanced around to see; it was Harry Thorne, from a Canadian UNSA state, once an urban farmer, a heavy-set, imperturbable man.

Beyond the pilots’ window a second planet hung in the black now, more distant, a perfect sphere of silver-grey.

Lemmy leaned forward again. “Yuri. Listen. Watch everything. Observe. Remember. I mean, are they going to give us maps? Remember everything you can of this new world we’re heading for—”

Yuri heard rather than saw Mattock’s fist hitting Lemmy’s jaw. “One more word, shithead, and I’ll lay you out for the duration.”

Now there was a roar, a gentle shove that pressed Yuri back into his seat.

It was a strange thing that Yuri had crossed interplanetary space, and then interstellar space, but he knew nothing about the mechanics of space flight. In his day the whole business of flying in space had seemed unethical, just another sin committed in a previous energy-bloated age, and nobody even talked about it. He could only guess at what was going on.

The burn was soon over. Now the attitude rockets slammed again, once more the ship swivelled—he glimpsed that ocean, half-submerged in night, slide past the pilots’ window—and then, nothing.

The seconds piled up into minutes. To Yuri it felt as if he was still in freefall. Behind him he heard somebody humming—it was the other Peacekeeper, not Mattock—and the rustle of a paper bag. Those guys had done this run several times before, he guessed; they knew the routine. There was a fumble. “Damn.” A couple of candy fragments came sailing over Yuri’s head, from behind. Yuri stared, fascinated; he’d seen no candy since he’d gone into cryo on Earth. But the bright blue capsules were falling, he saw, a long slow curving glide down to the floor. Acceleration building up.

There was a glow outside that forward window now, a dull crimson, then orange, and then, suddenly a dazzling white, like he was flying down some huge fluorescent tube. Yet there was no noise, no shuddering or buffeting, no great sense of weight, not yet.

The glow quickly cleared to reveal a seascape, white ice floes on a steely ocean that faded into night. Then this panorama tilted up, sideways. No, of course, it was the shuttle that was tipped up, almost standing on its right wing. And then, Yuri could feel it in his gut, the craft tipped the other way, and the landscape slid out of his view.

“Holy shit,” murmured someone else now, a woman ahead of Yuri, another businessperson called Martha Pearson, staring out of the forward window.

“We’re gliding,” Lemmy muttered through gritted teeth. “That’s all. No power now we’ve deorbited. Gliding down into the atmosphere of this world. Shedding our speed in friction against the upper air in these big rolls and banks…”

Mattock growled a warning, but indistinctly; maybe he was distracted himself.

Suddenly they flew into night. Now there was only darkness below, that landscape hidden. Yuri could feel the gravity mounting up, and he lay back on his couch. Still the pressure piled on until it felt like some enormous Peacekeeper was sitting on his chest, and there was blackness around the edge of his vision, closing in. But now there was a pressure in his legs, around his waist; his undergarment was clamping him hard, pressing back his belly button.

“Clench!” shouted Lemmy. “Clench your gut! It will help stop you blacking out…”

Yuri tried it, crunching down hard. It felt like his whole waist was being constricted by some terrifically tight belt. But it worked, his vision cleared.

Now he could hear a rush of air, of wind—this spaceship really had become an airplane—and they flew suddenly into daylight once more, from day to night in an instant. Raising his head, he glimpsed through the pilots’ window a big watery sun that dazzled him, and a twilit land below, then more ice floes, more ocean, all bathed in a ruddy glow.

“Your last sunrise!” Lemmy yelled.

Yuri didn’t know what he meant.

There was a shudder, a bang, and the ride abruptly got a lot more bumpy. The shuttle glided on down through air that felt lumpy, full of turbulence, like they were flying through a field of invisible rocks. But now, Yuri saw, looking forward, he was flying towards land again. A coast-line fled beneath, fringed by white-capped waves, and then what looked like a belt of forest, a furry fringe of a dismal drab green, and then more arid country, it seemed, dust and sand and dunes.

Remember it all, Lemmy had said. Yuri tried. But he didn’t even know which way he was flying. West to east? Did directions like that even make any sense on this world?

They flew over cloud now, a great curdled bank of it, grey-white, twisted like a tremendous tornado, he thought. Through breaks in the cloud he glimpsed another clump of strange dark forest. Then they were back over the open country, with only scattered cloud below, and Yuri saw a river snaking away from that stormy region, a silver ribbon laid across the rust-coloured land.

They descended further, following that river, and now the land below seemed to rush beneath the shuttle. Yuri peered down, searching for detail. He thought he saw movement on the ground: the shadow of a cloud? But cloud shadows didn’t raise dust…

The river reached a sea, at a broad, sluggish estuary. The craft banked once more and, very low now, came back over the shore, over the estuary, and descended towards a flat, dusty country broken here and there by small lakes, and in the further distance a belt of forest. The descent seemed rapid now. Yuri could see fine details, individual rocks fleeing beneath the ship. The shuttle shuddered and tipped in the turbulent alien air. Yuri, clinging to the cuffs that held him in his seat, endured the jolting, and heard the clatter of fittings, loose panels, harness holders. Up front, somebody was noisily sick.

And they were down, suddenly, a crashing impact after which they bounced into the air, and slammed down again with a squeal of tyres and another sudden jolt of deceleration, this time hurling Yuri forward against his straps.

The shuttle slowed to a halt. The dust it raised soon fell back to the plain outside, revealing a washed-out blue sky, a rocky, stony ground.

Immediately Lex McGregor came bustling back through the cockpit door. He was pulling open the neck of his pressure suit; Yuri could see he was sweating hard. “Wheel stop and we’re down. You know, it was one small step for a man when Armstrong landed on the moon. But for you lot it’s one last step—right? The end of the line. Welcome to Proxima c.”

Chapter 9

The two astronauts went out first, of course.

Then the Peacekeepers released the passengers one by one, and escorted them out of the cabin. With an attendant Peacekeeper, they had to pass one at a time through an airlock, even though the air was supposedly breathable; the lock was evidently integral to the shuttle’s design.

Yuri waited for his turn, disoriented, bewildered—too mixed up, he thought, to be either fearful or excited about setting foot on this alien world. Maybe that would come later. Or not. After all, countless generations had dreamed of reaching Mars, and that had turned out to be a shithole.

At last it was his turn. Mattock cuffed Yuri to his own wrist, and tied his ankles with a length of plastic rope. Thus hobbled, Yuri shuffled ahead to the airlock, and climbed awkwardly through the narrow hatch, into the small chamber of the lock.

While the lock went through its cycle he sat on a small bench, facing a glowering Mattock.

“Just give me an excuse,” said Mattock.

Yuri grinned back.

A green light glared, and the outer hatch door popped open. Yuri saw a ground of pink-grey sand, individual grains casting long shadows. The air smelled of aircraft, of fuel and oil and a kind of burned smell of metal. But under that there was a subtler scent, an old, rusty tang, like autumn leaves in an English park, he thought.

Mattock nudged him. “You first.”

Yuri had to swing both his hobbled legs out through the hatch, and then he jumped down through a third of a metre or so to the ground, both his feet hitting at the same time. It felt like Earth gravity, he thought immediately, or about that.

He was in the shadow of the shuttle’s sprawling, still hot, jet-black wing.

He shuffled forward a few paces, into sunlight, and he looked up for the first time at the star, the sun of this world. It was a tremendous beacon in a bluish sky, not as brilliant as the sun of Earth, but still dazzling, and bigger to look at, three or four times the size of Earth’s sun. Other than that the sky was empty, save for a pair of brilliant stars, shining despite the bright daylight, and one disc of a planet hanging like a remote moon.

The other disembarked passengers were sitting in a circle in the dirt, a few paces from the shuttle. Mattock prodded Yuri to go join them. He edged forward, looking around as he walked. Beyond the group, he saw a lake glimmer, blue under the sky. Beyond that, a drab green belt that must be forest. And beyond that, folded mountains. There was no sign of people, no walls, no fences as far as he could see. No dome walls, like on Mars.

Lieutenant Mardina Jones stood over the passengers. She said to Yuri, “The air’s fine, isn’t it? A miracle, really. Given it’s another world, and all.”

“I guess.”

She watched him curiously. “You know, Eden, you’re the only one who’s just stood here and—looked.” She squinted up at the sun. “Strange to think, that sun will just hang there. Never rise, never set, not as long as you live.”

“Really?”

She stared at him. “All those briefings we gave. You really have learned nothing, have you?”

“Where’s everybody else?”

“Who?”

“The other groups. Brought down by the shuttle before us.”

“A long way from here. Major McGregor will tell you all about it. In the meantime you go sit over there with those others. We’ve got supplies to unload for our stay here, and for your first few weeks and months as residents. Also a ColU.”

Yuri didn’t know what a ColU was. “And then you’re going?”

She slapped the hull of the shuttle. “This bird will scramjet its way back to the sky—yes, we’re going. Now, if I release your hobble will you go and sit with the rest?”

“Yes.”

She bent down, took a knife from her belt, and slit through the hobble.

He took a step towards the seated group. Then another step, and another, and then broke into a run. A jog really, it was awkward with his hands tied together, but he could do this. He ran, stretching his legs, the dirt firm under his booted feet.

Ran right past the seated group, who whooped and hollered.

He heard voices behind him. “Hey, ice boy! Stop or—”

“Or what, Mattock? You going to run him down? Ah, let him go. I mean, where’s he going to run to? A thousand klicks to the next group? He’ll be back. Look, give me a hand with this food pack…”

And Yuri ran and ran, on beyond the dust kicked up by the shuttle on landing, on over the virgin dirt, on far beyond the bounds of any cramped little Martian colony like Eden—on until their voices were small behind him, and when he looked back the shuttle sitting on its undercarriage looked like a black-and-white toy on a tabletop—on towards that forest, and the mountains.

That was why he was the last to hear that, sometime during the descent when attentions were otherwise engaged, Abbey Brandenstein had stabbed Joseph Mullane in the heart with a sharpened plastic toothbrush.

Chapter 10 2155

On Angelia’s last night in the human world, Dr Kalinski cherished her. That was how she thought of it, on later reflection.

Still in the form of her weighty humanoid body, she was taken to dinner with Dr Kalinski and his daughter Stef, and members of the control crew who would care for her during her ten-year flight to Proxima: people like Bob Develin and Monica Trant, competent twenty- or thirty-somethings, all employees of national space agencies now subsumed into a global UN agency which only the Chinese, their Framework partners and a few outliers like North Britain had declined to join. “Only’: much of interplanetary space travel, in fact, was dominated by the new Chinese empire. They spoke openly, loosely, treating Angelia as one of the crew, as human, sometimes even speaking as if she wasn’t there at all, which paradoxically made her feel more welcome, more included.

But she learned more about their concerns regarding the mission than Dr Kalinski had told her about before. That perhaps it was obsolete, technologically, before it was even launched, given the UEI kernel developments. That it wasn’t very popular politically in higher circles in the UN: it had a whiff of the Heroic Generation, whose projects had been characterised by massive, wasteful engineering, and loaded with AIs of a quality of sentience that had later been made illegal retrospectively. After all, Dr Kalinski had grown up in the wake of the Generation and their mighty works; maybe he was influenced by them. So the whispers went.

Dr Kalinski had done his best to shield his project from those criticisms. Yes, he had needed some big-scale equipment, but even though he had reused a solar-power station, itself a much-hated relic of the past Heroic age with its hubristic planetary engineering schemes, he would use energies of orders of magnitude less than those that had hurled Dexter Cole to Proxima. As for profit, Dr Kalinski eschewed any cash rewards save for the salary he drew from the academic institutions that employed him. Any patentable technologies would be owned and exploited by those institutions, on behalf of the UN-governed taxpayers that supported them. And, yes, Angelia was an advanced, sentient AI, the mission could not have been achieved without smart onboard technology. She was capable of suffering—that was the price of sentience. But the mission was designed to sustain her, Dr Kalinski said, to deliver her to Proxima Centauri alive and sane. She was being honoured, not mistreated.

But the team were evasive when they discussed details, and Dr Kalinski would not look Angelia in the eye—or eleven-year-old Stef, Angelia noticed. Evidently there were things she, and Stef, hadn’t been told about certain aspects of the mission.

Despite such tensions it was a wonderful, warm, immersive final evening for Angelia. And at the end, as the dinner party was breaking up, Stef Kalinski came to her and took her hand.

“I’m sorry if I’ve been nasty to you,” Stef said.

“You haven’t been.”

“It’s just a bit difficult for me. My mother died, she was French—”

“I know.”

“And then I had Dad all to myself in Seattle. Then you showed up. It’s like…”

“Yes?”

“Like I suddenly had a big sister.” She screwed up her small face, thinking hard. “Like I had to get all my sibling rivalry out in one go.”

Angelia laughed. “You’re very perceptive. And very self-aware. I haven’t been offended. I’m glad I had the chance to get to know you.”

“Yes. Me too.”

“Are you jealous of where I’m going, the adventure I’m going to have?” It was a reaction she’d encountered from several of the ground crew—Bob Develin, for instance, a thirty-year-old from Florida who’d spent much of his youth working on the underwater archaeology of a drowned Cape Canaveral, and dreaming of space.

But Stef shook her head. “Oh, no. The kernels—that’s what I want to study, even if Dad thinks it’s cheating to use them, or something.”

“You don’t want to go to the stars?”

“What for? Stars are easy to understand…”

Maybe so. But as Stef got up on tiptoe to kiss her synthetic sister on her programmable-matter cheek, Angelia wondered if even a kernel could be as complex as an eleven-year-old girl.

That was the end of the night. Dr Kalinski showed Angelia to her room, an authentic human space with a regular bed and a wall mirror and everything. He stroked her artificial hair and said goodnight. She laid down on the bed, fully clothed, and entered sleep mode.

When she woke, she was in space, pinned by sunlight.

Chapter 11

She no longer had a human form, not remotely. Now she was a disc spun out of carbon sheets, a hundred metres across and just a hundredth of a millimetre thick. Yet she was fully aware, her consciousness sustained by currents and charge stores in the multilayered mesh of electrically conductive carbon of which she was composed. She had slept through this transformation, this atomic-level reassembly conducted by Dr Kalinski and his technicians.

And she could see, hear, taste the universe, through clusters of microscopic sensors.

She faced Mercury, a cracked, pitted hemisphere. The lights of humanity glimmered in the shadows of ancient crater walls, and crawled along cliffs and ridges. Orbiting the planet she saw the hard, ugly lump of the defunct solar-power station, assembled decades ago in near-Earth space and now hauled here for reuse, and the tremendous lens, a structure of films and threads that dwarfed even her own lacy span, that would throw the station’s microwave beam across the solar system to power her flight. The scale of all this was extraordinary, and the energies to be unleashed were huge. If anything went wrong she would die in a moment, a moth in a blowtorch. She felt a stab of unreasonable fear.

“Angelia?”

“I’m here, Dr Kalinski.”

“How do I sound?”

“Like you’re in a room with me.”

“Good. That’s how I wanted it to be. I’m glad we had time to be human together. Because you are part of humanity, you know. The best and brightest part. You are named for a daughter of Hermes, the Greek version of Mercury. She too was a messenger, a bringer of tidings. You will carry the news of our existence to another star. And you will carry all our dreams. Mine, anyway. Well, we said all that. You know we can’t communicate while the beam is firing. We’ll talk to you in four days, when the acceleration is done. All right?”

“Yes, sir. I think—”

“We won’t put you through a countdown. Godspeed, Angelia…”

The power station lit up in her vision, which was sensitised to the beam’s microwave frequencies. Mercury receded, as if falling down a well.

The intense radiation, intended originally to deliver compact solar power to the factories and homes of distant Earth, now filled her own hundred-metre-sail body. She felt her skin stretch and billow as terawatts of power poured over her. It was not even necessary for her structure to be solid; her surface was a sparse mesh, a measure to reduce her overall density, but the wavelengths of the microwave photons were so long that they could not pass through this wide, curving net of carbon struts. And the microwave photons, bouncing off the sail like so many minute sand grains, shoved her backwards, at thirty-six gravities, piling up an extra thousand kilometres per hour of velocity with each new second.

Despite the increasing distance, the intensity of that laser beam, focused by the lens, did not diminish, not by a watt. It was agony. It was delicious. She laughed, deep in her distributed consciousness.

The intensity did not diminish for four days, by which time she had been flung more than a hundred times Earth’s distance from the sun, far beyond the orbit of the furthest planet.

From here, the sun, the monster that dominated Mercury’s sky, was no more than a bright star—and a star that was very subtly reddened in her sophisticated sensors, for she had already reached her interstellar cruising speed, of two-fifths of the speed of light. At such a speed she would reach Proxima in a mere decade. Orders of magnitude less energy had been expended to get her this far, this fast, than had been spent on Dexter Cole. But he, cryo-frozen, had been embedded in a thousand-tonne craft; she was a mere eighty kilograms—the mass of a human, as if Cole, naked, had been thrust to the edge of interstellar space.

She was the craft herself. And she, indeed, was a throng; she would never be alone.

With an effort of will, a subtle reprogramming of her structure, she turned her senses outward, to the void.

Chapter 12 2169

The shuttle was to stay on the ground for ten days, before returning to the Ad Astra.

The main task for the crew in this interval was unloading, assembling and installing the colonists’ supplies and gear. The colonists, meanwhile, were put to work constructing irrigation ditches to a nearby lake, and making a start on a shelter, dug into the ground.

The shelter was for protection from stellar storms. Proxima flared. It happened once or twice a day. You could see it with the naked eye; whole provinces would light up on the star’s big dim surface, like a nuclear war going on up there. The planet, Prox c, had a thick atmosphere and a healthy ozone layer, but about once a month, it was thought, there would be a storm severe enough to require more protection. For now, if a bad flare came they would be allowed back in the shuttle. But in future they would be scurrying into holes in the ground.

For the rest of their lives.

Ten days until the shuttle left: that was one important time interval in Yuri’s life. The other, told them by the crew, was eight Earth days and eight hours. That was how long the day was on this world, on Prox c, the day and the year, because the world spun around Proxima keeping the same face towards its star—just as the moon kept the same face to the Earth—so that the day was the same length as the year. In fact the stability of Prox c was greater than the moon’s, which wobbled a little as seen from Earth. Not Prox c.

That was why Lemmy had taunted Yuri about a final sunrise. That big old sun was never going to rise, never going to set; it was going to hang in that one place in the sky, for ever. Oh, the weather changed, there could be cloud, and on the second day there was rain, sweeping down from the forest belt to the north. But in terms of the basic architecture of the world every day was the same, the sun defiantly unmoving, hour after hour. And just as there was no dawn, no sunset, there would be no summer, no winter here. Just day after day, identical as coins stamped out of a press. It was as if time didn’t exist here, as if all the ages had been compressed down into one centuries-thick day.

Soon all of them were having trouble sleeping—all the colonists, at least, under their canvas outdoors. The astronauts and the Peacekeepers, save those on guard, slept in the shuttle’s cabin, which was slaved to Earth time.

But Proxima wasn’t the only light in the sky, Yuri noticed. There was a bright double-star system, bright enough to cast shadows: Alpha Centauri A and B, twin suns, the centre of this triple-star system, of which Proxima was really a shabby suburb. There was that one visible planet, that tracked around the sky. And also, for now, there was a starship up there, a spark crawling across the sky. The days were not quite identical, then, the sky not quite featureless. Time passed, even here.

Yuri kept himself to himself. But he found he was becoming curious about this world, Prox c, in a way he’d never been curious about Mars. But then all he’d seen of Mars had been the inside of domes.

He watched the sky, the landscape. He scrounged a telescope from a bit of surveying gear. He even looked at Ad Astra through his little telescope, and was surprised to see that only one of the two hulls that had brought the colonists here was still attached to the wider frame that contained the propulsion units and the interstellar-medium particle shields. One hull was missing, then. He didn’t ask anybody about this; he knew he wouldn’t get an answer.

On the fourth day he set up his own observatory, kind of, on top of a lumpy bit of highland a couple of kilometres west of the shuttle, that they had called the Cowpat.

He saw stuff moving, around the lake, out on the plain, in the forest to the north. Living things, presumably, native to this world. They’d had no briefing from the astronauts on the nature of the life forms here. Mostly because nobody knew.

On the fifth day Jenny Amsler, one of the colonists, followed him out, without any kind of invitation from Yuri, to help him with his gear. He mostly ignored her.

On the seventh day Lieutenant Mardina Jones said she wanted to come too, evidently curious about what he was up to.

To get to the Cowpat they had to head west, skirting the lake to the north from which the fledgling colony was already drawing water through laboriously dug irrigation ditches. They had defined “north” and “west” based on the orbital plane of the planet; given the stillness of the sun the directions felt abstract. The lake water seemed safe enough once filtered, though it was thick with the local life.

They called the lake the Puddle.

Lex McGregor objected to these names, the Cowpat, the Puddle; he wanted more heroic labels. “Names to sound down the generations. Lake First Footstep. Mount Terra!” Or Lake Lex, the colonists joked. They stuck to the Puddle and the Cowpat. This place was evidently a shithole, but it was their shithole. It was prison-thinking, Yuri thought, now applied to a whole new world. He didn’t care. The lake was the lake, it was a thing in itself, it had been here long before humans, and existed in its own right whatever people called it.

Now, on this walk out to the Cowpat, Mardina Jones stared around, as if discovering it all for the first time. She had always been one of the more human of the authority types on the ship, Yuri thought. But even she had barely stepped away from the little campsite that had sprung up around the landed shuttle, had barely looked at this world, into which they were all busy driving tent pegs and scraping latrine trenches. But here she was now, apparently determined to see something of Prox c for herself before she was whisked off back to the sky. Like she was on a business trip cramming in a little tourism between sales meetings. Away from the rest of the crew, she did, however, carry a gun.

By the lake shore, maybe a kilometre from the shuttle, was a formation of what Yuri had decided to call pillows. Mardina slowed to inspect these, fascinated. She had a sensor pack on her shoulder that hummed and whirred as it recorded what she saw. The “pillows” were like heavily eroded rocks, with narrow stems and flat upper surfaces, most no taller than Yuri’s waist. They were irregular lumps, and yet, standing on the muddy shore, they had an odd sense of fitting together, like worn pieces of some thick jigsaw puzzle.

“Fascinating,” Mardina said. “Life! We knew it was here, of course, but here we are, face to face with it. So to speak.”

Yuri watched her, irritated, as she took her movies to show her buddies back home, in her air-conditioned astronaut’s apartment on an artificial island in the Florida Sea, or wherever. “You see these everywhere,” he said. “Doc Poinar took a look at my images and said they were like—”

“Stromatolites. I know. Bacterial communities, a very old type of formation on Earth. We should take samples. Actually I’ve seen stromatolites back home. There are some survivors near salt lakes in Australia… Of course our stromatolites grow in shallow water, with the living layers photosynthesising away at the surface. These are evidently growing on the dry land, transporting nutrients up somehow. More like a tree, maybe.” She glanced at him. “You know I’m from Australia, right? That I’m a pure-blood Aborigine?”

Yuri shrugged. She was the kind of prison warden who wanted to be your buddy. She was going to be gone soon. Where she came from made no difference to him.

Jenny Amsler had always been the kind to keep in with the authority figures, or at least try to. “Everybody knows that,” she said, trying to smile. She had a faintly French accent. Around thirty, she was thin, had been even before the star flight, with a pale, narrow, rather shapeless face. Her smile was obviously forced. Yuri thought she was clinging to him, maybe for protection, and maybe to Mardina too.

Mardina just ignored her. “The stromatolite structure might be a universal. Maybe critters like our bacteria must build something like this, on any world, in the water or out of it. She walked a bit further, towards the lake, and glanced down at the mud. “Whose footsteps are these?”

Jenny smiled again. “That’s Major McGregor. He comes running around the lake every morning. I mean, every ship’s morning.”

“That’s Lex all right,” Mardina murmured. “Determined to get himself in condition before the long haul home.” She peered out at the lake, where what looked like reeds protruded from the surface of the water, pale, slim rods. There were bundles of the reeds on the shore too, by the lakeside. Further out there was more evidence of life, drab green patches on the landscape, and the shadowy fringe of the forest to the north. “Those reeds are everywhere.”

Yuri said, “I’ve been calling them stems.”

Mardina’s sensor unit recorded more images of the patient stems. “We knew there was life here, from a smear of evidence of photosynthesis—we could see that even through telescopes back in the solar system. We never did a proper survey, never landed a probe for instance. We just came, and took a chance, for better or worse. Which is kind of characteristic of the space programme, if you look at the history. The Americans, I mean the old US, designed the first lunar landers knowing nothing of the surface they had to land on. The moon might have popped under them, lunar mountains collapsing like meringues, so some feared… And anyhow you have to be there. You have to experience a world, directly, physically, to make it real. And I think—”

A bundle of the stems on the shore, like a cage of dried reeds and bamboo shoots, abruptly changed shape, rustling; it rolled along the shore, leaving a textured trail.

“Wow. Did you see that?”

Yuri said, “There are combinations that move. I think there are combinations that have been built around this shore. Made of the stems.”

She looked at him sharply. “Built? You mean, by intelligence? Or something like a beaver dam?”

Yuri shrugged. “What do I know? I’m not a biologist.”

She just glared at him, as if compelling him to say more.

“I’ve seen other stuff,” he said, to deflect any interest in himself. “Further out. Big things moving out there, on the plain.”

“Running?”

“Not exactly. Moving fast. And flying things.”

“Birds?”

“I call them kites. Things like big angular frames. You see them flapping around near the forest.”

She looked that way. “You must have sharp eyes. Has anybody else seen this stuff?”

He shrugged. Nobody else seemed to be looking.

Mardina sighed. “Maybe we’ll come back with a proper science expedition, when this mad-rush land grab is all over. Show me this observatory of yours.”

From the summit of the Cowpat the Puddle was a flat sheet fringed by clumps of pale stems, and the shuttle was a gaudy bug in the dirt, surrounded by scuffed ground and shabby temporary structures, with the track of its landing a dead-straight scrape that vanished into the distance to the east.

This whole feature, the Cowpat, was maybe half a kilometre across. Exploring, Mardina climbed hillocks and descended into depressions. “Curious,” she said. “I’m no geologist. The terrain is sort of sunken, jumbled. But not like a lunar crater; it’s more as if it’s collapsed into some hollow below. There are features like this on Venus. They call them coronas, I think.”

“You’re going to miss the eclipse,” Jenny called.

“What eclipse? OK, show me.”

Yuri had a small optical telescope set up on a stand, pointing up at the star. Behind its eyepiece was a sheet of plastic, pure white, that Jenny was, inexpertly, angling on a heap of rocks, so that the star’s image was projected onto the sheet. There wasn’t much more to the “observatory” than this: a few manual instruments, a sextant, a plumb line, and a slate for Yuri to record his observations. When he wasn’t around he left all this stuff, save the electronics, under the cover of a weighted-down bit of tarpaulin.

Mardina was impressed by the telescope. “Where did you get that?”

“From a theodolite, a bit of surveying gear.”

She frowned. “I never heard of an instrument like that that wasn’t electronic.”

“No. It was specially made for the colony programme. Everything we have is supposed to be old-fashioned, easy to repair, no power sources to run out. No reliance on satellite networks and such, because there isn’t one here. You ought to know that, Lieutenant. It’s your policy.”

She looked embarrassed, but she was fascinated by the image projected onto the plastic sheet. The star’s surface was pocked with huge black scars, and webs of lightning crawled across it. “My God. Proxima Centauri. A red dwarf star, just six million kilometres away.” She glanced up at the star, so its light shone full in her face.

Jenny Amsler laughed nervously. “Doesn’t look so red to me.”

“It’s just an astronomer’s term. The surface is white-hot—”

“Watch,” said Yuri. “Here it comes.” He pointed to a brilliant spark near one edge of the illuminated disc on the sheet. “Jenny…”

She had a watch, and the slate. “I’m ready.”

Mardina asked, “What are we seeing?”

“You can’t see much in the sky here, right? Proxima never sets, so you never get a starry sky. But you can see the double star, and one big planet that you can see the disc of—”

“That’s Prox e. The fifth planet from Proxima. This is the third—a, b, c. That’s a big world up there. Not even the nearest planet in this system.”

“The planet passes behind the sun. It’s eclipsed. You can see, it’s about to happen now. Jenny…”

“Ready.”

The spark at the edge of the solar disc winked out. “Mark!”

“Got it.”

Mardina laughed, as if pleased.

“It takes about an hour,” Yuri said. “Then it re-emerges from the other side.”

Mardina sat back on her ankles, thinking. “One hour, out of the two hundred or so it takes Prox c to go around its star. Of course. Because Proxima itself spans one two-hundredth of the sky’s arc. But it won’t be quite that, because Prox e is following its own slower orbit… Why are you doing this, Eden?”

He shrugged. “To get a sense of time.”

She smiled. “I see. In the absence of day and night. A clock in the sky.”

Jenny said, with forced eagerness, “I wanted to work on this. Clocks and calendars and stuff. I was a jeweller, back in Londres. Well, a jeweller’s assistant, a technician.”

Yuri knew that was true. Maybe one reason she had been clinging to him was that since they had landed she had learned he was British too, though he was from independent North Britain and she was from Angleterre, the southern Euro province. He neither knew nor cared how she had gone from her jewellery store or whatever in Londres, to the sweep that had delivered her to Prox c.

“I can do fine work,” she said now to Mardina. “Instruments.”

Mardina eyed her with something like pity, Yuri thought. She took the woman’s hands, turned them over. “These are going to be farmer’s hands, Amsler. Not much call for ‘instruments’ here. If you want to make calendars it’s going to be like this, what Eden’s doing. Sticks in the ground. Little telescopes.

“You know, there’s more in the sky if you look, Eden. This system has six planets in all. Two inside the orbit of Prox c, three outside. Three are the size of Mars, or smaller, but there are two super-Earths, including e, up there. There’s a Kuiper belt and so forth further out, but not much. And no gas giants. Red-dwarf systems don’t seem to have enough mass to grow giants. The furthest-out planet is only thirty-some million kilometres from the star. That would be within the orbit of Mercury. You have a whole toy solar system, all within a Mercury orbit. The planetologists call this a ‘compact system’. Very common in the Galaxy—more so than systems like our own.

“And then there’s Alpha A and B, the primary stars. They orbit each other every eighty years, and they each have planets of their own. This is an older system than ours, Yuri. The planetary orbits are locked in and stable; this planet, Prox c, doesn’t wobble on its axis the way Earth’s moon does, say. And the inner system has long been cleaned out of comets and asteroids by impacts. Everything that could happen here has happened already, and now everything just kind of ticks along like clockwork. Tell all that to your grandchildren. I bet you could devise a deep-time calendar based on—”

“Don’t patronise me.”

She sat back, evidently shocked by that sudden jab. “I’m crew. You shouldn’t speak to me that way.”

He held out his wrists, ready for the plastic cuffs.

“Don’t be absurd.” She sat with them for a moment more, evidently offended. Then she stood, brushed off the dust, and walked away, back towards the shuttle.

Jenny protested, “What did you have to say that for? We were getting on so well.”

He shrugged. “She’s only playing at being your friend. Indulging herself. What does she care? She’ll be gone in a couple of days. Nothing we say to her makes a difference.” For all his defiance Yuri found the prospect of the shuttle leaving, the last link to Earth breaking, terrifying. It was like the prospect of death, an irreversible cut-off. He could see the others felt the same. The difference was, he tried not to show it. Whereas Jenny seemed to think that if she behaved ingratiatingly enough the astronauts might somehow change their minds and take her home. Well, they wouldn’t. He said, “Do you want to go back, or will you stay to help me finish this?”

She grumbled, but she stayed, the full hour it took for Prox e to emerge from its eclipse. Then they covered over their gear, packed up, and walked back the way they had come, Jenny in sullen silence.

Chapter 13

On the tenth day, the day the shuttle was due to leap back to orbit and rejoin the Ad Astra, Major Lex McGregor called a meeting. A final briefing, he said, for the colonists.

The weather was hot, clear, and the light from Proxima Centauri was heavy. McGregor had an array of fold-out chairs set up in the shade of one of the shuttle’s wings, but they were for the crew and the Peacekeepers only. Yuri found himself sitting with the rest of the colonists in the dirt at the crew’s feet, in the glaring Prox light. Abbey Brandenstein, the killer of Joseph Mullane, was set away from the rest, her arms still cuffed behind her back.

McGregor, lean, smart, his black and silver uniform showing not a speck of dirt, his blond mane shining in the Proxima light, walked up and down before this assembly. He looked fit after his daily regimen of runs around the lake. He had a comms set clamped to his head as he paced; he was keeping them waiting, for a briefing that was presumably going to set the pattern of the whole of the rest of their lives, as he took a call from his buddies on the ship. “Yeah… Yeah… You’re kidding! OK, later, Bill.” He shut the set down, chuckling. “Those guys! What kidders. Ah, well.”

At last he turned to the group on the ground before him. He turned on a smile, beaming like a proud headmaster, Yuri thought. “So here we are. The end of the mission for us, in a sense, with just the chore of going home remaining. But for you, of course, it is a beginning—the grandest of beginnings, the birth of a new community, a new world. What a day! And how appropriate that the weather’s so good.

“But, you know, it did occur to me that you ought to rename this new world of yours. ‘Proxima c’ will scarcely do. That’s an astronomer’s term, not a name for a home. As far as I know none of the other groups have come up with a name yet. You could be the first. So, any ideas?” He looked around the group.

Everybody seemed faintly stunned to Yuri, unresponsive.

“Oh, come now. Anybody want to make history?”

At last Mardina Jones spoke up. “How about, ‘Per Ardua’?”

“I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?”

“That’s the rest of the phrase that the ship’s name comes from. Ad Astra, you know? The full phrase is, Per ardua ad astra. Through adversity to the stars. It’s the motto of the NBRAF—the North Britain air force, I did some training with them, even though they don’t contribute to the ISF. I think it’s originally from an old Irish family motto.” She glanced around at the dusty plain, the unmoving star. “We’ve brought them to the stars. For these people the adversity is still to come.”

McGregor looked disappointed. “Really, Lieutenant, that’s hardly the spirit.”

John Synge, a colonist Yuri barely knew, had once been a lawyer. Now he raised his hand. “Per Ardua. Seconded. All those in favour say aye.”

The rest murmured in response, apathetically.

McGregor glared at Synge, frustrated, as if his carefully worked-out presentation had already been spoiled. “If you must,” he said at last. “Per Ardua it is. Well, you’ve seen the cargo we’ve unloaded in the last few days. Equipment for you all to use, right? From shovels to slates, even, so you can keep diaries of your pioneering days. Everything you need to build a new homestead here. And now—” his smile returned “—I have a final gift for you all.” He turned and clapped his hands.

From the shadows of the shuttle’s open hull a mechanism rolled forward. It had a squat six-wheeled base like a small car, and an upper section that was vaguely humanoid, with a torso bristling with manipulator arms of all sizes, and a clear plastic dome for a “head” from within which camera lenses peered, glittering. The lower body was covered with manufacturers’ and sponsors’ logos.

Looking faintly embarrassed, Mardina captured everything with her shoulder-mounted unit.

“As promised,” McGregor boomed, grinning widely. “Colonists of, ah, Per Ardua, meet your autonomous colonisation unit! The best that UN dollars can buy.”

The unit rolled to a halt. “Greetings,” it said. “I am your ColU.” Its male-sounding voice was clipped, with a neutral mid-Atlantic accent, like a UN Security Council translator, Yuri thought. Its cameras whirred and panned. “I am looking forward to getting to know you individually and as a group, and to serving you all. I host a level seven IntelligeX artificial sentience, as you can probably tell. I have significant self-direction and decision-making capabilities, and am additionally capable of responding to your emotional needs. You may wish to give me an informal name. With this model ‘Colin’ is popular—”

“ColU will do,” snapped John Synge.

“ColU it is,” the unit said. It rolled to a stop. With a hiss of hydraulics, panels opened up in its flanks, revealing glistening internal equipment, like metallic intestines. “I contain all you need to initiate your self-sustaining colony. I have a soil-maker to process the native dirt into a suitable habitat for Earth life. I also contain various autonomic and semi-autonomic systems to progress farming efforts. And an iron cow, a manufactory to process grass into meat grown from stem cells. The heavy equipment I can deploy includes well-drilling gear and trench-cutters.

“Other support services I can offer include medical; I can treat traumatic injuries of various kinds, and can synthesise anaesthetics, antibiotics and other essentials. I contain a matter-printer fabrication unit which can produce such components as replacement bones, even some ranges of artificial organs. Later in the process I will be able to serve as a user-friendly ‘teacher’ unit for your sturdy pioneer-type children. And I—”

“Thank you,” McGregor said. “I think that’s enough for now.”

The ColU rolled back modestly, closing itself up. The “colonists” just stared, silent.

McGregor resumed his pacing. “I want to take this last chance to emphasise for you what a marvellous chance you people have been given. I know many of you skipped the briefings in flight—” he eyed Yuri “—and perhaps for the rest of you it didn’t seem… well, real. To colonise the planet of another star! It is a centuries-old dream, yet here we are. Here you are. And what an opportunity you have.

“There are drawbacks to living with a red dwarf star like Proxima, I don’t deny that. It is a flare star, as you know. You have built your shelter, and the ColU can help; you can harden your bodies with vitamin supplements, atropine injections and so forth, and there are post-exposure therapies.

“However the advantages are huge.” He lifted up his face to Proxima, and raised his arms. “Dwarf stars are tremendously long-lived, compared to stars like our own sun. Both kinds of stars burn hydrogen in the core. But in our sun the helium waste product of the fusion process accumulates; once exhausted, the core will one day collapse and blow the rest apart, leaving most of the sun’s hydrogen unburned. Whereas in Proxima tremendous convection cycles operate, dragging the hydrogen from the outer layers down into the core, until it is all consumed. Our sun has only maybe a billion years of useful lifetime left to it. Proxima, though so much smaller, is so efficient it will keep shining for trillions of years—thousands of times as long…”

“Who cares?” Lemmy sifted a handful of dry dust. “Here we are sitting in shit. Who cares about billions or trillions of years?”

McGregor wasn’t put off. “Then care about this: care about billions of stars. Most of the Galaxy’s stars are dwarfs like Proxima, only a handful are like the sun. And now here you are, the first colonists of the planet of a dwarf star. Once it was thought that no such star could support a habitable planet. The world would have to huddle so close to its faint sun that it would have one face presented permanently to the star, one turned away; maybe the atmosphere would freeze on the dark side. But here you have the living contradiction of those fears. A thick enough atmosphere transports sufficient heat around the planet to keep the far side from becoming a cold sink. Why, it’s already evident that this world hosts its own native life of some kind, though that is irrelevant to our purpose.

“If you succeed, no, when you succeed in taming this wilderness, this world of Proxima Centauri, you will have proven that mankind can colonise this ultimate frontier, a planet of a red dwarf star. And because there are hundreds of billions of red dwarf stars, and because they’ll last trillions of years, suddenly mankind’s future in this Galaxy is all but infinite. And it will all be because of you.

“But there’s a catch.

“Everybody wants to be a pioneer, you see. The first on the moon, like Armstrong. The first on Mars, like Cao Xi. Or they want to be a citizen of the tamed worlds of the future. Nobody wants to be a settler. Labouring to break the ground and build a farm. Their children growing up in a cage of emptiness.

“Which is where you come in…”

There was a stunned silence.

“Just a minute.” Harry Thorne got to his feet. Harry was a hefty man, and he was evidently suspicious. The Peacekeepers, standing by, watched him warily. “I used to be a farmer. You know that, Major. Even if it was just urban stuff, farms on the thirtieth floor of a tower block. And I can tell you that that ColU won’t be much use if it has to serve many more than the ten colonists you’ve landed here.”

“The target for this group was fourteen, of course. If not for the murderous uprising aboard the Ad Astra—”

“There were two hundred of us on that starship. Where’s everybody else?”

Now Yuri saw the Peacekeepers, in the shade, finger their guns.

Harry Thorne was stone-faced. “Tell us the truth, astronaut.”

McGregor nodded gravely. “Very well. It has never been our intention to mislead you. But all things at the appropriate time, yes?

“Here is the strategy. A strategy, I might add, that has been endorsed at the highest level in the UN. There won’t be any more colonists—not here, not at this site. Oh, all two hundred passengers, or the survivors anyhow, are being delivered to the surface. But we are making scattered drops, squads of fourteen maximum, across the planet’s day side. You must understand that the other groups are out of your reach—will be for ever out of your reach. Some are not even on this continent. We’ve worked it out. The lake here is akin to an oasis in the desert. The distances to the other groups are too extreme, and given the lack of water sources you could never reach them.”

“You’re isolating us deliberately,” Harry Thorne said. “You’re going to kill us off.”

“It’s not like that. Ask the anthropologists. You can have viable communities founded by a small number of individuals—a surprisingly small number. You, and the members of the other groups, have all been chosen for your genetic diversity, your differences from one another. There are no known harmful recessive genes among you; even if there were, your recessives would not match. You have not been selected for this group at random, you see. And remember that a healthy woman can have maybe ten children in her lifetime. With that kind of growth rate, in just a few generations…”

Harry Thorne glared. “We’ll be sleeping with the daughters of our wives. Our children breeding with their cousins. What kind of policy is that?”

McGregor looked around at the colonists. “There’s no point debating this. The experts assure us this will work, genetically speaking. And demographically, planting a dozen or so seeds across the face of this world rather than just one delivers a much better chance that at least some of you, some communities like yours, will survive and flourish, and ultimately spread.” He smiled. “I’ve been around space engineering long enough to appreciate the value of redundant components.”

“ ‘Redundant components?’ ” John Synge’s reply was almost a snarl.

McGregor affected not to hear that. He became grave again now, and walked up and down before the rows of them seated in the dirt. “You must understand that you have no choice in this. And there are parameters by which you must live, rules you must obey.

“You have no resources other than what we have unloaded from the shuttle. The Ad Astra will not return; the UN can’t afford another such flight. And we believe there will be no interstellar attempts by the Chinese for a century or more; according to our intelligence all their efforts are being devoted to the development of the solar system. So they won’t be showing up to save you either. Even the rest of your fellow pioneers on this planet are too far away to help, even if they had the resources. Furthermore, the ColU will last only twenty-five years, maximum. By then you must have equipped yourselves to survive, unsupported.”

Thorne snorted. “What do you mean by that?”

McGregor said sternly, “You must have children. You must raise them, you must have them farming for you, supporting you. Otherwise you will grow old, and you will die, one by one, you will starve to death in this place. There are other things you need to have done by then. To have established a forge, for instance, to be producing your own steel—the ColU can help you with that. But above all, you must have children, or you will not survive yourselves.”

John Synge said, “And what about the rights of those children? Who are you to condemn them, and their children, to lives of servitude on this dismal world—all to serve your ludicrous, Heroic Generation-type scheme of galactic dominance?”

Martha Pearson stood now. Yuri knew she came from old money on Hawaii; in her late thirties, she was tough, self-contained. “And what right do you have to condemn me and the other women here to lives as baby machines?”

Onizuka stood too. The Peacekeepers began to look more uneasy. Onizuka said, “There’s a more basic problem. Whatever your plan was, you’ve left us with six men and four women. Who’s going to get who? Which men will be without a woman? Will you decide this before you fly back up to the sky?”

McGregor responded by turning, almost gracefully, to a startled Mardina Jones. Without warning he’d taken her pistol from its holster. “Actually there will be five women. I’m sorry, my dear.”

Mardina, still reflexively recording the whole exchange on her shoulder unit, looked startled. “What the hell are you doing, Lex?”

“You’re staying. Look, we had a conference about it, the other senior crew and I, under the Captain.”

“A conference?”

“Obviously we couldn’t consult with New New York, given the lightspeed lag. But we do have standing orders. Policies. If the numbers of the colonists fall due to wastage, and they have done, we are expected to make up the numbers by impressing members of the crew. This particular group needs more women. And, genetically speaking, you come from a group that is as remote from the rest as any on Earth—”

“I’m an Aboriginal woman,” she said, almost softly. “That’s why you’re doing this. Lex, have you any idea how I had to fight to build my career from a background like that, to get on that damn ship? And now, after all that, you’re going to dispose of me here, all because of what I am. An Aborigine, a woman.”

“I’m sure with your practical skills, your training, you’ll be a fine addition to this pioneering group…”

Yuri saw John Synge, Harry Thorne, Onizuka exchanging glances. The Peacekeepers tensed. Yuri, sensing trouble coming, stood himself, grabbed Lemmy’s arm and pulled him behind his back.

“Let’s get them,” Onizuka said, quite calmly. “Let’s get off this fucking dump.” And he picked up a rock and charged.

Of course they had no chance. The charging men were felled in the first salvo of anaesthetic darts. McGregor himself took out Mardina immediately; she dropped to the ground in her smart astronaut uniform. Matt Speith ran away. Abbey Brandenstein, cuffed, in the dirt, just laughed.

Then it looked as if Mattock was going to go for the women. When he raised a riot stick to Pearl Hanks, Lemmy yelled, “No!”, pulled away from Yuri, and ran forward.

And Yuri followed.

The two Peacekeepers seemed to have been waiting for him to give them an excuse. They charged straight at Yuri.

Mattock was on him first, slamming him to the ground with a punch to the throat before Yuri had the chance to raise an arm to defend himself. “You’re the future of mankind, you little shit,” Mattock snarled. And he kicked Yuri in the head.

The ColU, administering simple medicine to the injured members of the group, brought Yuri round before the shuttle took off.

Then Yuri sat with Lemmy and the others, including Mardina Jones, silent, clearly furious. They watched as the bird screamed back down the trail it had laid down across the dry lake bed and lifted effortlessly into the air.

And then, as the undercarriage raised, something fell out of the port wing. It tumbled like a rag, buffeted by the shuttle’s slipstream, before falling to the ground and lying limp.

Lemmy got up and looked hastily around the group, counting heads. “Who’s missing? Jenny. That was Jenny Amsler, stowing away in the wing. Stupid bitch.”

“And then there were ten.” Lemmy laughed, nervous, but nobody joined in.

The shuttle turned its nose upwards and screamed up into the static light show that was the sky of Proxima c.

Chapter 14 2155

“This is Angelia 5941. This voice message, which is expressed in non-technical language and contains personal comments as well as summaries of scientific and technological achievements, is intended for public release, and accompanies a more technical download.

“Good morning, to Dr Kalinski, and to Bob and Monica and all my ground crew, and of course to Stef, my half-sister. I have calculated it will be dome-morning in the operations room in Yeats when this message reaches you, in nearly six days’ time.

“Sixteen days after launch I am in an excellent state of health, and all subsystems are operating nominally.

“I have now completed my cruise through the outer reaches of the solar system. Strictly speaking I entered interstellar space about a day after the microwave beam cut-off at the end of acceleration. At that point I passed through the heliopause, the boundary where the thin wind that blows between the stars dominates over the weakening stream from the sun. But since then I have passed through many interesting domains: the radius of the sun’s gravitational focus, where light from distant stars collects, after ten days, and I emerged from the Kuiper belt of Pluto-like ice worlds some days after that. But I am still in the sun’s realm, for I am now passing through the mighty Oort cloud, a sphere of comets around the solar system which it will take me years to cross.

“At this point my configuration changes. In the spaces between the stars there are dust and ice grains—this is known as the interstellar medium—it is sparse, but if I were hit by even a single grain significant damage could be done. Dexter Cole’s craft carried generators to power a mighty magnetic field and laser bank which shattered, electrically charged, and deflected any threatening grains. I, with much less power than was available to Cole, have a more passive defensive strategy.

“I am designed to take up a new form. Actually I am made of programmable matter—essentially a form of smart carbon—and I can take any shape I like. I walked on Mercury in the form of a young woman. Here, on the edge of the Kuiper belt, I am like a tremendous radio-telescope dish. Now I will change again. I will fold down to a needle shape, with a one-square-centimetre cross section and a length of no less than a kilometre, and a density about that of water. I will be like a javelin, spearing straight at Proxima Centauri. And I myself, Angelia 5941, will be like a droplet of water lost in the bulk of that javelin. With such a small cross section, you see, the chances of my being damaged by a grain of dust are much reduced. Of course while I am in this ‘cruise mode’, without an antenna, I will not be able to communicate with Dr Kalinski.

“I should say why I identify myself as Angelia 5941.

“I am not one Angelia, but a million. Each of us is a sheet only a few tens or hundreds of atomic diameters thick—each of us virtually a single carbon molecule in the form of a hundred-metre disc. We were born in a facility at an Earth-moon Lagrange point, a point of gravitational stability in space, a place of dark and cold and quiet; we were peeled, one by one, from a tremendous mould, given our own identities, and then united.

“Each of us separately, though each massing no more than a droplet of water vapour in a fog, has capabilities. Each of us has sentience. In a sense my entire structure is a kind of neural net, and I began learning from the moment I was ‘born’. Our separate sentiences were merged for a while, for my journey to Mercury and during my time there living in the human world, and then to receive the microwave acceleration pulse at launch. But our individuality survived this merging, and the de-merging that followed.

“The ability we have to peel off copies of ourselves will be essential when we arrive at Proxima. I know this much about the later stages of the mission, but little else; the software updates concerning deceleration and system exploration are to be downloaded into me later, after further refinement during my ten-year cruise.

“But the facility is to be used during the cruise also, for communication purposes. Some of my multiple selves have been cast away from the main body of the craft, combining to form a reflecting dish much wider than any of us individually. With this I can pick up messages from home, and send replies. Also my scattered sisters collect the energies of the thin, sparse sunlight that reaches this remote radius, and use that to power my systems, including comms. Those cast-off sisters sacrificed themselves for this purpose; pushed away by the sunlight they cannot return to the main body. From a million, we can spare a handful! And I am assured that these disposed-of copies have minimal sentience; they do not suffer in any meaningful sense.

“You may ask why it is me, Angelia 5941, who addresses you. We discussed this, we Angelias, and ran a lottery based on a random-number programme, and I was selected as spokesperson. It is an honour I embrace.

“I will wait for your reply, Dr Kalinski, before assuming my cruise profile. And then, like Dexter Cole before me, I will sleep between the stars until my next scheduled communications attempt…”

“Is this on? Oh, I see.

“This is George Kalinski. Good to hear from you, 5941. Your telemetry is coming through fine, and I can see that all your subsystems are functioning as they should. Good. Of course it will take another six days for this message to crawl back out to you. Monica, what time will it be when it gets there? Afternoon. OK. So, good afternoon from Mercury.

“You know this is the last time we’ll speak to you from Mercury. Now you’re successfully launched we’re going to up sticks and relocate to a control room back on Earth, in New Zealand, in fact, in some nice mountainous country with a fine view of Alpha Centauri on a summer night. So the next time you speak to us—when the hell will it be? Anyhow that’s where we’ll be, so you can think of us there.

“Michael King offered us a lift back to Earth on his damn kernel-driven hulk ship, but I’d rather walk back.

“Look—in some ways the most dangerous part of the whole journey, the launch, all that microwave energy concentrated on your delicate structure, is already over. Your chances of coming to harm during the cruise are minimal. But in other ways the challenge of the mission has only just begun, by which I mean the human challenge.

“You know that they ran longevity experiments during the Heroic Generation age. Some of the resulting struldbrugs are still alive, even now, in the UN camps. Despite that, we humans still aren’t too good at running projects that require a long attention span. So we have to find ways to look after you, Angelia, over your decade-long cruise, and the years of exploration that will follow. I’ve done my best to establish a long-term institution here. I’ve tried to lock in the support staff with contracts and bonus structures, though I have my doubts how well that will work out. But I will be here, as long as I am able; and after me, I hope, Stef. Your half-sister, you called her! I like that.

“And, listen to me. Now we have proved that this mission mode is feasible, now we have successfully launched you, I’m looking for funding to send more emissaries after you. After all, the infrastructure is here now, the power station, the lens. The solar power is free, and the incremental cost of manufacturing another you is tiny. It seems crazy not to use all this again. Enjoy Proxima, my dear. You won’t be alone out there for long, I promise.

“Be patient with us mere mortals, Angelia, out there among the stars. And sleep tight.”

Chapter 15 2170

Six months in from their stranding, or twenty-two Per Ardua years later, depending which way you looked at it, the colonists decided to mount an expedition to the northern forest belt.

Four of them, Yuri, Onizuka, Lemmy and Martha, got themselves ready one morning, with packs on their backs and bottles of filtered water, and their crossbows, the only substantial weapons the shuttle crew had left them. They checked out the sky before leaving. They were learning how to read Proxima’s complex face for flare weather, as they called it. They figured they would be safe out in the open for a few hours.

It was around six kilometres to the forest. They set off along a trail they had already been stamping out: a Forest Road that led off at right angles to the Shuttle Trail, the tremendous straight-line scrape the craft had left running from east to west. They came this way regularly to collect saplings from the forest edge for firewood, but today they were planning to go further. The land rose, gradually, as they headed north, leaving the lake behind. The ColU speculated that there was some kind of big geological event going on up here, a slow uplift across a whole province. Maybe. Sometimes Yuri thought he could smell sulphur, sourness.

The weather was overcast, muggy, humid. For such a static world the weather had turned out to be surprisingly changeable, with systems of low or high pressure bubbling up endlessly from the south. It was warm in this unending season, always like a humid summer’s day in North Britain, from what Yuri remembered of the weather. But the ColU, ever curious in its methodical robot way, said it had seen traces of cold: frost-shattered rock, gravel beds, even glaciated valleys in the flanks of features like the Cowpat. Evidence that glaciers had come this way in the past, if not whole ice ages. Somehow this world could deliver up a winter.

Despite the rise, the walk was easy enough. The years of full gravity on the Ad Astra had hardened up Yuri’s Mars-softened muscles. On Per Ardua the gravity was actually a shade less than Earth’s, according to the ColU, who patiently measured such things. The planet’s radius was a tenth less than Earth’s—Per Ardua was smaller than Venus—but its density was a good bit higher than Earth’s. The ColU speculated that its iron core was more massive, relatively, its mantle of lighter minerals and rocky crust thinner. Nobody listened; nobody cared.

Yuri thought that patterns of behaviour were emerging. For instance, they’d trekked up this way for firewood before, they’d used the forest, but they’d never explored it. After six months they still knew barely anything about this world on which they were, it seemed, doomed to spend the rest of their lives. Nothing beyond what they could see within the prison of their horizon, and the glimpses they’d had from the shuttle’s windows on the way down, glimpses Lemmy was painstakingly assembling into a map of the substellar side of this one-face world. Nobody cared.

There was no common spirit. The colony, camp, whatever, was still pretty much a shambles, as it had been from when the astronauts had lifted off, taking the discipline they had briefly imposed with them. Bundles of gear, clothing, food, tools, other stuff, lay around in the dirt where they had been dumped out of the shuttle. Everybody still lived in tents. Even the colony’s two graves, of Joseph Mullane and Jenny Amsler, were left untended.

Then there was the unending daylight, the changelessness. Lemmy said that humans were evolved from tropical apes. Two million years of adaptation protested against the lack of day and night, and regular sleep was hard to come by. The ColU said that their sleep cycles were staying in synch with each other, roughly, but were gradually lengthening, away from the Earth norm. Nobody seemed to care about that, either.

Nobody even listened to the ColU—not even Yuri, even though the ColU seemed to think he was more amenable than the rest, and would try to engage him in conversation, such as about the astronomical sightings Yuri kept up sporadically with his bits of equipment, and that the ColU supplemented with its own observations, made with its own sensor pods. All this was a distraction for Yuri, a hobby, something to do to keep him sane. The ColU’s attentions, attracting the mockery of the rest, just embarrassed him.

And every so often some threat or other, a storm, a bad flare, a threatened flood from their tame lake, would bring everybody down even more.

Under it all, of course, was the brute reality of their stranding, a rejection many of them would clearly be struggling to accept whatever world they were living on. They drove each other crazy, these strangers forced to become lifelong neighbours, with no hope of escape.

The ColU was the exception. It quietly got on with its tasks, slowly processing huge rectangular areas of Arduan dirt into terrestrial soil, and sampling the water and the local life, the stem creatures and the lichen and the stromatolites and the bugs. It enthused about bugs it dug out of the ground, as deep as it drilled; on Per Ardua as on Earth, it said, life suffused the deep rocks—there was probably far more biomass down there than on the surface—with complex life just a kind of flourish, a grace note in a symphony of bacterial life.

Its quiet efficiency, its air of plastic cheerfulness, only irritated people even more, it seemed to Yuri.

Anyhow, from this squalid little community of reluctant draftees, no leader had yet emerged. Yuri wasn’t even sure who had decided on taking this walk.

In the early days, Onizuka and John Synge and Harry Thorne had all acted like they were the big men. But Martha Pearson, who had once run a substantial business back on Earth, and Abbey Brandenstein, an ex-cop and proven killer, were pretty strong characters too.

Mardina Jones had never tried to play the leader, probably wisely. Always a little outside the group, the Lieutenant was a target for insults and mockery as much as sympathy. But Yuri watched her just soak it all up, and get on with her self-appointed tasks. She no longer wore her crew uniform. In fact she seemed to have shed her astronaut persona, her whole ISF career. She had gone from a kind of motherly prison guard into a taciturn survivor, in the blink of an eye. Maybe she was reverting to something deeper, older, a core of her life that had been hidden under the layers above.

And then the pairing-off had begun, and that had made things worse yet. With six men and four women, none of them partners before the landing, there was always going to be trouble. There seemed to be no gays in the party, which might have made the situation more complicated, or less, though the men joked bleakly about experimenting.

The pair-ups themselves kind of surprised Yuri. Of the men he’d never have tagged Lemmy as a winner, but pretty soon Pearl Hanks had made clear her preference to be with him. Everybody knew Pearl had once been a hooker, and some of the men, Onizuka, Harry Thorne, still looked at her that way. Maybe she had attached herself to Lemmy precisely because he didn’t react to her like that. And maybe she was calculating on Yuri protecting her, as she might think he protected Lemmy. It was all complicated, a game of human chess.

Martha Pearson, meanwhile, was sleeping with John Synge. That was less of a surprise, a businesswoman from Hawaii with a lawyer from New New York, they were similar types. But maybe that similarity was why they fought all the time they were together, if they weren’t asleep or screwing.

And Abbey, maybe the strongest woman of all, had surprised everybody by swooping down on Matt Speith, the artist with no art to make, maybe the most useless, skill-light, disoriented person in the camp. It was obvious who was in control in that relationship. Yuri speculated privately that Abbey had picked Matt as a kind of shield, to keep the other men off. But Mardina was more generous. Maybe she liked his nice soft artist’s hands, she said. Or maybe the ex-cop liked having somebody to protect.

Mardina herself didn’t pair off with anybody. She’d had approaches, more subtle or less, from the leftover men, Onizuka and Harry—not from Yuri. But she had no trouble brushing these guys off.

So that left Yuri, Onizuka and Harry without a woman. It drove Onizuka and Harry crazy very quickly, it seemed to Yuri. After all, this was all there was, the ten of them, no more choice of partners—not until their sons and daughters started growing up someday to widen the pool. There had been more choice even in the hulls: lose out now and you’d have lost out for life. Sometimes Onizuka and Harry would talk loudly about sharing partners, bed-hopping. It would be genetically efficient for the women to have babies with more than one partner; it was what Major Lex McGregor would have wanted, so they said. Nobody in a relationship listened.

Yuri didn’t care. It seemed to him the partnerships had formed up for mutual protection, maybe for comfort. Not for any logic concerning the destiny of the colony in years or decades or generations. And certainly for nothing you’d recognise as love. Right now he didn’t feel like he needed any of that, and nor, it seemed, did Mardina. But Onizuka and Harry glared and spat.

At least on this trek to the forest they would be able to get away from the camp, if only for a few hours. But as Onizuka snarled at Lemmy, and Lemmy cowered by Yuri’s side, Yuri saw that they hadn’t been able to leave their flaws and rivalries behind.

As they neared the edge of the forest they came to a bank of stromatolites. They kept calling these bacterial-colony formations by that name, inaccurate as it might seem to a biologist. These particular specimens were huge structures, much bigger than those near the Puddle—maybe four metres high, like tremendous tables with flat, flaring upper surfaces.

The ColU had taken samples from various stromatolites in the vicinity of the camp. They were all made of nothing but bugs, of course, layers of bugs and trapped dirt: Arduan bugs of course, like Earth bugs but not identical according to the ColU, in dense, complex layers, joined together in structures that might themselves be millennia old. But the uppermost layers contained photosynthesisers, bugs using the energy of Prox light to break down air and water to produce oxygen—a process similar to what had evolved on Earth, but a different chemistry under a different light. The ColU said it thought the stromatolites were actually this planet’s dominant primary oxygen producers. The ColU was always curious, always speculating; it was its job, it said once, to understand how this world worked, so it could be taken apart to become a human world, with the native life restricted to zones the humans didn’t need, maybe a few parks and botanical gardens. In Yuri’s day, as he recalled while the ColU described all this, they had had tree museums on Earth.

They didn’t linger long in the stromatolite garden.

Beyond, Yuri led the way into the deeper forest. The darkness gathered quickly, until they were surrounded by the strange trees of Per Ardua. The trunks rose slim and smooth and tall, without leaves or branches until they reached a canopy high in the air, where immense leaves like tipped plates blocked out the sky. The ground here was dry, compacted soil, covered by a shallow litter, mostly of tremendous leaf fragments like dead water lilies. There was no movement, no sound at first save the ragged breathing of the human party. But Yuri thought he heard a rustle, high in the canopy above.

Prox trees were different from Earth trees in most ways you could think of. True, your basic tree plan was the same, the roots, the trunk, the green leaves up top. But what the colonists called “wood” self-evidently wasn’t wood at all; each trunk was more like an expanded version of the reed-like stems that grew in the Puddle. The saplings that grew at the southern fringe of the forest particularly provided decent timbers for construction, long and straight and sturdy, and with few branches save near the very top. But they’d learned that you couldn’t just throw a Prox log on the fire. You had to bleed it first, of a sticky, strong-smelling, purplish sap—“marrow”, they called it. The marrow itself was useful, however. Harry Thorne had experimented with fixing stone blades to poles with it. Harry had once been a farmer, even if the land he tended had been just a couple of acres in a high-rise, and for a man of densely urban twenty-second-century Earth he was good with his hands, Yuri thought.

A few hundred metres in they paused, shared water, took stock. Both Onizuka and Martha had crossbows to hand. The air was stained a deep green, deeper than any Earth green.

“So,” Onizuka said, “who knows anything about forests? Don’t ask me, I’m better at the oceans.”

“Not me,” Lemmy murmured. “And even in your time there were no forests left on Earth—right, Yuri? But I do know there’s a belt of this forest right around the face of Per Ardua, where there’s dry land anyhow. It’s the same all the way to the substellar point. You get these circular belts of similar kinds of landscape and vegetation and stuff, depending on the distance from the substellar point, the middle of the world’s face. Places that get the same amount of sunlight, see, get the same kind of growths. What you get is a planet like an archery target. Out here, near the terminator—trees.”

Onizuka grinned. “An archery target, huh?” He raised his loaded crossbow, pointed it at Lemmy’s face, and mimed pulling the trigger. “Click.”

“Oh, you’re funny.”

Yuri said, “These ‘trees’ look like stems to me, like the stems back in the Puddle. Just bigger.”

Martha rubbed a nearby smooth trunk. “So they do. I do know forests, a little. On Earth lots of different species have produced ‘trees’, palms and ferns for instance. It’s a common form, if you have a situation where you need nutrients from the ground and have to compete for light from the sky. So it’s no surprise to see similar forms here. A universal strategy.”

Onizuka sneered. “You’re an expert, right?”

She faced him calmly. “If you’d ever bothered to speak to me instead of staring at my chest the whole time, you’d know I once made my living out of forests. My grandfather, probably back in your time, Yuri, was a researcher attached to one of the great logging corporations in the final days. He sent cameras in to capture images of the last rainforests and such before they were scraped off the planet.” She grinned. “Eco porn. Fleeing Stone Age-type inhabitants, the huge trees crashing down. My family packaged and repackaged the stuff for years; the more remote it got in time the more exotic it seemed. A real money-spinner, for us. People cheer and place bets on who survives.”

“Yet you ended up here, with us,” Onizuka said.

Martha didn’t reply to that. On Per Ardua, and even back on the ship, Yuri had noticed, it was a peculiar kind of bad manners to poke into why and how your companion had ended up in the sweep.

Instead, Martha stared up. “Look at that canopy. See how static it is? And every tree seems to have three big leaves, just three, radial symmetry, one, two, three. See? Every one of them pitched perfectly up at the sun, which is never going to move. If the light condition isn’t going to change, if there are no seasons, I guess you may as well grow just a few huge leaves to capture all the light. Hmm. Why not just one leaf per tree? For redundancy, I guess. There must be something that would chomp on a leaf, even high up there; you would need a spare or two while a lost leaf grew back. Those leaves look like they have the usual dull Arduan green on the sun-facing side, paler on the shadow side, to conserve heat, I guess. Maximum efficiency of usage of sunlight—and that’s why it’s so dark down here. Come on. I think it’s brighter that way—” she pointed north “—maybe some kind of clearing.”

She led the way, and the rest followed. The trees began to thin out, and Yuri started to see more open sky—free of cloud, but a deeper blue the further north you looked, towards, he supposed, the terminator, and the lands of endless dark.

Something clattered through the canopy overhead. Yuri looked up, flinching. He had an impression of something big, fragile, a framework with vanes flapping and whirling. It was like the “kites” he had seen over the lake, but much bigger. The kite ducked down towards them, maybe drawn by their movement.

Onizuka lifted his crossbow and shot off bolts, without hesitation, one, two. Onizuka had been practising with the weapon, with Harry Thorne and Martha.

The first shot missed, and went sailing up into the canopy. But the second ripped through the flyer’s structure. Yuri thought he heard a kind of screech as fragile vanes folded back. The flyer, driven forward by its own momentum, smashed into a tree trunk and came spinning down towards the ground, tearing and clattering, to hit the litter on the deck with a surprisingly soft impact.

Onizuka whooped and raised a fist. “Got you.” He led the way, jogging through the leaf debris.

The fallen creature was a jumble of broken struts and ripped panels of a fine, translucent, brownish skin, like a crashed Wright Brothers aeroplane.

“Wow,” Lemmy said. “Its wingspan must have been three, four metres when it was in flight.”

“But that’s the wrong word,” Martha said. She knelt, pulled at a panel, unfolded it to revealed ripped skin. “ ‘Wingspan.’ These weren’t wings. They’re more like—what, vanes? They were rotating, like chopper blades.”

Prodding at the fallen creature, they pieced together its structure, or anyhow a best guess at it. There was a stubby cylindrical core body, itself not solid but a mass of rods and fibres. When Yuri plucked a strut at random from the core carcass, it looked just like a stem, one of the reeds from the lake. There had been two sets of vanes, each a triple set—threefold symmetry, like the great leaves of the trees—that had each been attached to the main body by a kind of ball-and-socket joint, lubricated by what looked like tree marrow.

Martha poked at the main body, working a finger in through a cage of stems. When she withdrew the finger it was sticky with marrow. “Yuck. I’m guessing that’s some kind of stomach in there. There’s a mass of stems, and skin stuff, and marrow.”

“Maybe it feeds on the big tree leaves,” Lemmy said.

“Maybe. Or on smaller critters.” Martha shrugged, and glanced up into the canopy. “Who knows what’s up there?”

Another rustle, a scrape, this time coming at them along the ground. They stepped back from the flyer and pulled together, instinctively.

In the canopy shadow Yuri saw creatures moving, built like tripods, maybe a metre tall, each a clattering construct of stems and skin panels, like a toy of wood and canvas. They moved in whirls like spinning skaters, a whole flock of them heading straight for the fallen flyer.

Straight for the human party, in fact.

Again Onizuka raised his crossbow.

Martha grabbed his arm. “You don’t need to kill everything we come across.”

“The damn things are heading right at us.”

“Then get out of their way.” She pulled him aside, into the cover of the trees, and Yuri and Lemmy followed.

The tripods ignored the humans. Seven, eight, nine of them, they descended on the fallen flyer, and whirred across its body, this way and that, efficiently cutting it to pieces. Yuri saw fine limbs—each multiply articulated, like a spacecraft manipulator arm—pluck at bits of the disintegrated carcass and tuck them into the mesh-like structures that were the cores of the tripods’ own bodies. Yuri had seen beasts like these out on the plains and around the lake, but these were smaller, compact, faster-moving.

“Messy business,” Martha murmured. “Like butchering a carcass by running at it with chainsaws. Bits flying everywhere.”

“Yeah, but look,” Onizuka said, pointing.

From nowhere, it seemed, smaller creatures were appearing, some ground-based spinners like the larger scavengers, some flapping flyers like the downed canopy beast, though much smaller. They were all put together from rods and sheets of webbing, as far as Yuri could see. They fell on the big corpse, a cloud of tiny workers processing the remains of the flyer in smaller and smaller fragments.

“They didn’t break off when they came running towards us,” Lemmy said. “Maybe they don’t see us.”

Martha said, “We must look strange, smell strange—if they can smell at all. They don’t recognise us as a food source. And not as a threat either.”

“Not yet,” Onizuka said, hefting his crossbow. “Give them time. You know, I’ve got some experience of the deep ocean. No rich daddy for me, Martha. I made my money from the reclamation trade, deep-diving for precious metals and such from the drowned cities of mainland Japan. I got a taste for the ocean… When you get down deep enough, you go beneath the layers where light can reach and stuff grows, plankton and so forth. If you live deeper than that, down in the dark where nothing can grow, you spend your whole life waiting for stuff to come sailing down from above. Scraps, whatever. And when something big comes down, a whale carcass or such, you get a feeding frenzy.” Onizuka glanced up at the canopy, the huge static leaves. “Same principle here. Down on the ground you must get years of darkness, no light to grow. That’s why there’s no undergrowth to speak of, no saplings. Most times it’s just like the deep ocean. And so you get these very efficient scavenger types, just waiting for their moment when something comes falling down from the light.”

The cluster of scavengers was breaking up now, those big waist-high spinning-tripod types departing first with a hum of whirled limbs, and then the cloud of flyers and the little runners polishing off the scraps, before fleeing too. When they had done, Yuri saw, you’d never have known the fallen flyer had been here at all, save for some scuffed forest-floor debris, and a few patches of hardening marrow.

The group pressed on.

Chapter 16

They reached the forest fringe, pushed through a last screen of skinny saplings—some of which, barely grown, looked just like the stems back in the Puddle—and emerged into a clearing, centred on some kind of big rock-jumble hollow in the ground, with the forest continuing as a drab green wall on the far side. Out of the forest’s shade the air was hotter, more humid, and Yuri felt sweat prickle.

They moved forward more cautiously, some instinct, Yuri supposed, prompting them to stick together in the open. Both Martha and Onizuka hefted their crossbows. Yuri had expected to find evidence of fire, something that would produce a clearing like this—the aftermath of a lightning strike maybe, and there were plenty of those on this stormy world.

Instead the land fell away into the hollow, its edge ragged, the floor littered with boulders. As he climbed down Yuri found himself walking on life: a green undergrowth of what looked like lichen, something like mosses, a kind of crisp furry grass-analogue that was like lots of skinny stems crowded in clumps, and a few young trees, none more than a few metres high. The green was the green of the different photosynthesis of Per Ardua, duller than Earth’s palette.

At the lowest point of the hollow they found a mud pool, bubbling, smeared with purple and green—bacteria perhaps. Around the inner slopes Yuri made out more stromatolites, a bunch like huge toadstools over there, another crowd like slim pillars, all with greasy-looking carapaces but in a variety of colours, green, golden-brown, even crimson. To Yuri it was as if they had walked into a lost world, where everything familiar was distorted.

“Sulphur,” Martha said, wrinkling her nose. “Smell that? That’s why this clearing is here, the trees can’t grow. Maybe this is some kind of volcanic caldera.”

Yuri said, “Or it might be another of those collapsed features, like the Cowpat.”

Onizuka snorted. “What does it matter? Who cares about geology?”

“We should care, bonehead,” Lemmy said sharply. “We know there’s some kind of geological uplift going on here. The ColU’s been measuring it. Like a volcano waiting to blow. If this becomes a live caldera not five kilometres from the camp—”

“ ‘Bonehead’?” Onizuka raised the crossbow and again pointed it at Lemmy’s face. “You don’t get to speak to me like that, you little prick.”

“Hey, hey.” Martha moved in, standing between them, glaring at Onizuka. “Take it easy, hero.”

But Onizuka glared at Lemmy, who returned his stare more or less bravely, and Yuri thought he could see the shadow of Pearl Hanks standing between them. Yuri turned away. If he got involved it would only increase the tension.

Onizuka backed off. “Christ, I could do with a drink.” He shucked off his pack. “Let’s take a break.”

They sat, opened their packs. As they ate, Yuri saw movement on the far side of the bowl. He got up, food in hand, and walked forward to see better.

More tripods were moving over there, more structures of stem-like rods centred on densely woven basket-like core bodies. But these were huge, heavy, graceful creatures, very tall, maybe three, four metres, and they towered over the stromatolite garden through which they glided. They were much slower-moving than the kite flyer, or the scavengers that had consumed it, and Yuri had a chance to see how their bodies worked. They were like construction kits made up of those stems, of all lengths it seemed, from twigs shorter than his own fingers to big stout pillars like elephant bones, combined at joints that allowed them to move in a variety of complex ways. And the joints were being made and unmade in a fluid fashion as the beast progressed, as if the creatures were being rebuilt on the move.

Yuri watched one particularly large beast approach a stromatolite, impossibly balancing on its three fat legs.

Lemmy came to stand beside him. “Quite a sight. The stromatolites standing around like that, like a rocket park, like one I saw at Hellas once, on Mars, the big Chinese base there. And these critters—wow. Look at that.”

That big beast had now produced a kind of appendage, curling over the top of its upright body, like a scorpion sting—and it plunged the sting into the carapace of a stromatolite; Yuri could hear the crack. Evidently the big tripod started to feed, sucking out mushy material from the stromatolite.

Now Yuri saw another creature of a different kind, a bundle of stems that moved with a stealthy roll rather than the usual spinning-stool movement: smaller, more graceful, faster, quietly approaching the big feeder—quietly watchful, it seemed to Yuri, though he could see nothing like eyes.

“Food chain,” Lemmy said. “The stromatolites grow in the light of the sun, like vegetation on Earth. Those big slow things with the stings are herbivores, browsing the stromatolites. And then—”

“Here come the carnivores.”

“Yeah. A whole hierarchy of them, probably.”

A shadow passed over them, filmy, complex, and they both looked up. A flyer was crossing the sky, triple vanes turning languidly with soft rustles, a huge structure even compared to the kite Onizuka had shot down in the forest. As its shadow passed over the pit, creatures of various sizes fled from the stromatolite garden, or hid out of sight.

Yuri grunted. “What a sight. Like a pterosaur.”

“What’s a pterosaur?”

Yuri felt oddly sorry for Lemmy. He suspected Lemmy was a hell of a lot brighter than he was, the way he kept figuring stuff out. But, after a shit life, he knew a lot less. “Earth stuff, Mars boy. Come on, we ought to take some samples for the ColU.”

Together they walked into the hollow, tucking samples into sacks at their waists.

Chapter 17

They got back to the camp late, after around twelve hours away.

The explorers delivered their samples to the ColU. The colonisation unit immediately began to pick apart the bags of green muck and greasy marrow with murmurs of satisfaction that even to Yuri’s ears were intensely irritating. It said it intended to put together a family tree of life on this planet of Proxima, the better to exploit it—not exterminate it, it was no threat, it couldn’t eat you or infect you, but to push it aside and use its remains as feedstock for human farming. So samples like this were food and drink to the ColU. When it began to speculate about predator-prey interactions—on Earth the predators hunted mostly at dawn or dusk, but maybe they would strike at any time here on timeless Per Ardua, a difference that would have effects that would ripple down through the whole biosphere, and blah blah—Yuri just walked away.

After another few hours, following a meal of ship’s rations and desultory talk around the fire, most of them began to drift to bed. Lemmy, Onizuka and Harry Thorne stayed up. They had started a poker school, or rather had continued it from their days on the ship. When Mardina forbade them to bet ration packs they had started to use tokens made of stems, taken from around the lake and broken up to different lengths to give multiples of ten, a hundred.

Yuri, trying to settle in his own small one-man fold-out tent, heard Lemmy laugh. “I’m a stem millionaire tonight! The richest guy on Per Ardua.”

“You’re still a little prick, you little prick.”

The game soon broke up, and the couples went off, Martha with John Synge, Abbey with Matt Speith, Pearl with Lemmy, leaving the rest high and dry, as Onizuka put it. Yuri could hear it all, tell who was going where and with whom.

Tonight Matt stayed up, however, for it was his turn on sentry watch. In his tent, Yuri listened to Matt whistling through his teeth.

He kind of liked Matt Speith. Matt was an artist; as a child he had been a refugee, with his similarly arty family, from a terminally flooding Manhattan. He was vague, ineffectual, not particularly strong or attractive: “Neither use nor ornament,” he said of himself. He seemed to have stumbled into poverty, and into the UN sweep that had taken him first to Mars and now to Proxima, without really noticing it, like he was sleepwalking into disaster. But he was quiet, unassuming, resilient in a calm kind of way, and always prepared to talk about anything—anything that wasn’t to do with Mars, the Ad Astra, or Prox c, anyhow.

He was the best artist on Per Ardua, probably. Every world needed an artist. Matt was a lousy sentry, however. That night he didn’t even call the alert until Pearl’s scream had already woken everybody up.

Even before he was fully awake Yuri pushed out of his tent, barefoot, wearing only his trousers. As usual when his sleep was disturbed he blinked in the full daylight, surprised to find Prox high in the sky when his body told him it was three or four in the morning.

He saw there was a commotion around the tent Lemmy shared with Pearl. Yuri ran that way, trying to take in the scene as he went in.

The tent had been pulled away, evidently by main force, leaving a heap of groundsheets, blankets, clothes in the dirt. Lemmy was lying on his back, and even from a distance Yuri could see the pool of blood around his head. Pearl, naked, was sitting up, knees to her chest, hands clamped to her cheeks. Her bare legs were slick with Lemmy’s blood. She was silent, eerily so.

And Onizuka stood over her, pulling at her upper arm, trying to make her stand. Harry Thorne stood beside him, looming over Pearl as well. Yuri saw that both men had their crossbows in their hands.

The others came running, in shorts, T-shirts. Only Matt wore his daytime jumpsuit, and even he didn’t have his boots on. Yuri checked his own back; he always kept a knife in his belt, even when asleep. Now he slipped the knife into his right hand, concealed.

Soon Matt, Yuri, John Synge with Martha, Mardina, Abbey, stood in a wary circle, the whole of the little colony gathered around the central tableau, the ruined tent, the screaming girl, the body, the looming men.

Mardina strode forward now, as if taking command. Yuri saw she had her eyes on the crossbows, but the men didn’t raise them, or stop her approaching. Mardina knelt by Lemmy, and felt for a pulse at his wrist, neck, bent to listen for breath. She sat back on her haunches. “Well, he’s dead. Crossbow bolt to the throat, another to the temple.”

Onizuka grunted. “Little prick won’t have known what hit him.”

“We were merciful.” Harry Thorne sounded more conflicted than Onizuka.

“Merciful,” Mardina said. “Why did he have to die at all? Don’t tell me. So you two could get at Pearl, right?”

Onizuka, clinging to his crossbow, pulled at the girl’s arm again, but, silent, passive, she wouldn’t move. Onizuka was sweating, angry. “That and the little prick beating me at poker again. Final straw,” he snarled.

“And now you’re just going to take her for yourselves. What will you do, share her?”

Harry Thorne spread his hands. “Come on, Mardina.” Now he sounded miserable. “You know me. I’m no killer, I’m a farmer.”

“You’re a killer now.”

“You can’t expect a man to live without a woman. I mean, you’re talking about the rest of our lives. And Pearl, well—”

“She’s used to putting out. Is that your logic?” Mardina glanced around. “Otherwise you might have come for one of the rest of us. Me or Abbey or—”

“We got rights.” Onizuka, struggling with Pearl, tried to raise his crossbow at Mardina. “We’re taking what we’re entitled to. Cross me, you bitch, and—”

Yuri let fly with his knife.

It was from the culinary gear left behind in the dump from the Ad Astra, easier to conceal than the big heavy hunting knives they’d been issued with by the astronauts. And he’d been practising too, alone at the edge of the forest.

The knife caught Onizuka in the right eye. Onizuka fired the crossbow wildly, and the bolt sailed away, harmlessly. He fell back, dead.

“That’s for Lemmy,” Yuri muttered. He found his heart hammering, the world tunnelling as if he were under heavy acceleration. He’d never before killed anybody.

Now, in front of him, it was all kicking off. Pearl was pulling away from Harry Thorne. Abbey Brandenstein came in from the other side, trying to get to Onizuka’s dropped crossbow. Harry was panicking, waving his own weapon around like an idiot. “No—please—it wasn’t meant to be like this—”

Abbey had the crossbow. She raised it. “Then how was it meant to be, asshole?”

Mardina, on the ground, scrambled back out of the way. “No—Abbey—”

But Abbey, cold and clinical, shot Harry Thorne clean in the heart.

It was only in the aftermath, after Yuri and Mardina had taken the crossbows away, and the others had moved in to inspect the carnage, that they discovered that Pearl Hanks had taken Yuri’s knife from out of Onizuka’s skull, and neatly slit her own wrists, overwriting old, half-healed scars.

Lemmy was gone, his shit life terminated in a shit way. And after six months on Proxima c, just six were left alive.

Chapter 18

2159

“This is Angelia 5941. As usual this voice message accompanies a more technical download. I am in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating nominally. Good afternoon, all my ground crew…”

The million sisters slept. But their sleep was not dreamless. And they were fewer than a million now, fewer each time they woke.

“As you are aware I have now been travelling for over four years. I am some one point eight light years from the solar system, and still have more than two light years to travel; even now I am not yet halfway through this journey. In my reporting intervals, when I emerge briefly from cruise mode, I continue to make scientific observations of my surroundings. As you know, the space between Earth’s sun, Sol, and Alpha Centauri happens to have a fascinating structure of its own; before reaching Proxima I will pass through no less than three distinct clouds of interstellar material, each of which I intend to sample and survey. Interim results downloaded.

“I am also participating with observers in the solar system on long-baseline studies of interstellar navigation techniques, tests of the predictions of relativity and quantum gravity, searches for gravity waves emanating from distant cosmic events, a mapping of the galactic magnetic field, a study of low-energy cosmic rays not detectable from the vicinity of the sun, and similar projects. Interim results downloaded…”

She was suspended in a vault of stars, all apparently stationary despite her tremendous velocity. The Doppler effects even at this speed were still subtle, and there was no way even of telling, just by a visual inspection with quasi-human senses, which of these silent points of light was her origin, which her destination. Nothing changed, visibly, from waking to waking.

“I am disappointed that Dr Kalinski is no longer allowed to serve with you. I do not feel qualified to comment on his prosecution by the Reconciliation Commission, for breaches of the laws passed retrospectively after the crimes of the Heroic Generation…”

Something distracted her. A faint murmur of distress. Faint yet familiar, an echo of nightmare. Irritated, she tried to focus on her message to Earth.

“I am disappointed also that the decision has been made not to send further vessels after me, and to decommission my launch infrastructure. However, without Dr Kalinski’s ‘crimes’ I would not even exist, let alone be out here flying between the stars. He is like a father to me. I hope you will pass on this message to him if you can, and please be assured he may use my missives as testimony in any trial he faces. If they are of use. In the meantime…”

That cry of distress was becoming more prominent now. Angelia 5941 could feel the reaction, the unease it caused, rippling through the near-million-strong throng united in the craft’s main body. It came from one of the castaway siblings, she saw now, who was breaking formation from the extended antenna-dish shape that the rest had formed, ahead of the cloud. It was impossible, Angelia 5941 saw, but she was trying to bank in the starlight—trying to descend back to the main body.

“In the meantime…”

Suddenly Angelia 5941 had a brutally clear memory of her own dreams, while supposedly entirely unconscious, immersed with the rest in the kilometre-long javelin form of the interstellar cruise mode. In her dreams she had been the one separated from the rest. She the one cast off and then discarded from the community. She the one banished to die in space. She emitting those horribly familiar wails.

“I feel…”

The castaways had no mind, she had been told. They were ants, their purpose only to serve the community. They could not feel, they could not long. They could not dream!

She could not dream.

But she did dream. Just like the castaways.

“I feel very far from home. I hope Dr Kalinski is keeping his spirits up. I calculate that this message will reach you on the fifteenth birthday of Stef Kalinski. Please give her my regards. It is to my regret that she chose not to communicate with me after those first few years. I would welcome her company…”

Now that struggling castaway found a full voice, and called to her sisters. “Let me back! Oh, let me back!”

Chapter 19 2171

Yuri and John Synge were out in the Puddle, in their plastic waders, nearly up to their waists in tepid, mildly salty water. The sky was overcast, with only a faintly brighter glow to betray the position of Proxima.

They were raking in seaweed.

It was not a native but a genetically modified laver, an immigrant from Earth. Eighteen months in from their stranding—and a year after the slayings—this seaweed was by far the most successful terrestrial colonist on Per Ardua. It had a tweaked photosynthetic mechanism to enable it to prosper under Proxima’s infrared-rich light: its Earth green was streaked with black. And it had been gen-enged for an aggressive stance towards the native life, breaking it down to acquire basic nutrients for itself.

The point of it was that the colonists could eat the seaweed almost as soon as they pulled it out of the lake. You could rinse it, wash it, boil it down to a mush that would keep for weeks; you could eat it cold, or boil it up or fry it. On Earth this was a very ancient food source, the ColU had said, in its patient, schoolmasterish synthetic voice. And it was a triumph of human ingenuity to have brought this useful organism all the way to Prox: a first stage in the gentle terraforming this world would need to make it fully habitable for mankind. Yuri thought there was a whiff of the Heroic Generation about all this, of his own era that was now so roundly condemned. Hypocrisy. He kept that thought to himself. Mostly the colonists chucked the seaweed into the ColU’s iron cow, to synthesise burgers.

Anyhow, from here, a few metres from the lake shore, Yuri could see how the laver’s more brilliant green was already spreading aggressively, pushing aside the native life. Take me to your leader, Yuri thought.

On the bank, too, the local organisms had been disturbed by the activities of mankind. Yuri and John had dumped their stuff, their boots and jackets and waterproof sacks for carrying the laver, a metre or so back from the water line, and they had crushed a few of the ubiquitous stems in doing so. Now three of the complex little entities they had come to call “builders” were approaching their heap of equipment, as if curious.

Maybe a metre tall, the builders seemed to be the most common of the stem-based “animals” on Per Ardua. Like the rest of the life forms here, the builders were structured to the usual tripod plan around a core of densely meshed stems, and were evidently assembled construction-kit fashion from stems of various lengths, attached at the joints by marrow, and by bits of skin-like webbing. They moved with tentative spins, one support stem after another touching gently down on the ground. The colonists called them “builders” because they seemed to be associated with structures, what looked like dams and weirs at the mouths of the minor streams that fed this lake, and even what appeared to be shelters further back from the water.

Everything living was built out of stems here. Even the huge forest trees were stems grown large for the main trunk; even their leaves had proved to be nothing but more stems, specialised, distorted in form, jointed together, supporting a kind of webbing. The stems themselves, according to the ColU, were assembled from something like the cells that comprised terrestrial life. It was as if on Per Ardua complex life had developed by a subtly different route than on Earth. Rather than construct a complex organism direct from a multitude of cells, Arduan cells were first assembled into stems, and the life forms, from builders to trees to the big herbivores and carnivores of the plains and forest clearings, were all put together from the stems, as if fabricated from standard-issue components.

But the stems themselves were complex affairs. The marrow, the ubiquitous sap, wasn’t inert. The ColU had learned that some kind of photosynthesis was going on in there, the energy of Prox being absorbed by substances inside the stem—whereas most photosynthesising material on Earth life was on the outside of the body, to catch the light. You might have predicted that, because a good proportion of Prox’s radiation energy was in the infrared, heat energy which penetrated to the interior of massive bodies. The ColU had even found photosynthesising bugs below the surface of the ground.

And so, though some stem-based “animals” were like herbivores, extracting energy and nutrients from the photosynthesising stromatolites, they were also like “plants” themselves, in that they gathered energy directly from their sun, in the marrow in their own stem structures. It made sense; Proxima looked big because it was close up, but it was a smaller, dimmer star than Sol, it shed less energy, and life on Per Ardua would naturally make use of every scrap of that energy that it could. Classifications that worked on Earth didn’t map over easily to this world, where even “carnivores” photosynthesised, and Yuri couldn’t see any reason why they should.

Now John picked up a big soggy lump of laver and threw it at one of the builders nosing around the equipment pile. He caught one square and it went down, one of its three big support stems snapping. But it rose again, and hobbled away. Oddly, Yuri saw, touchingly, the other builders waited for it, and they left together. The builders had shown curiosity, and then something like compassion, or cooperation at least.

He said to John, “What did you do that for?”

John laughed. “Because I can. Because it’s better me chucking green shit at ET than the other way around. But then the ColU does say we’re more highly evolved than anything on Per Ardua, doesn’t it?”

Yuri considered before answering. You had to be careful what you said to John these days, especially since Martha, his lover, had died of her bone cancer a few months before. “Not more evolved, John. Differently evolved. That’s what the ColU says.”

“What does that lump of pig iron know? There’s no Gaia here. That’s what he told me.”

“Yes, but…”

Yuri, a child of the Heroic Generation on Earth, had grown up learning about planetary ecology and environment before he had learned about soccer or girls. “Gaia” was an archaic shorthand for the great self-regulating systems that maintained life on Earth, through huge flows of minerals and air and water, all driven by the energy of the sun and mediated by life. Over the aeons Earth’s sun was heating up, and Gaia had evolved to cope with that; by adjusting the amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Gaia acted like a tremendous thermostat to keep the temperatures on the planet’s surface stable, and equable for life.

But Proxima was not like the sun, and Per Ardua was not like Earth.

“Per Ardua doesn’t need a Gaia,” Yuri said now. “Proxima is stable. Red dwarf stars don’t heat up, not for trillions of years. That’s what McGregor told us. So on Per Ardua, life settled into a sort of optimal state, with all the Prox light used as efficiently as possible. And now it just sort of sits there.”

John stabbed and poked at the drifting seaweed. “So you’re saying Prox life is somehow superior to our sort?”

“I don’t see why you’ve got to say one is better than the other. They just found different solutions in different environments.”

John straightened up, breathing hard, and inspected Yuri. “Yeah, but we built the starship, didn’t we? Not those stick insects over there. We came here; they didn’t come to Earth.”

Yuri shrugged.

“You know, you’re a puzzle to me, Yuri. To all of us, I guess. We kind of forget the way you’re out of your time. Or I do anyhow. But you have this weird accent—I know a few Brits, I mean North Brits and those southerners who all speak French, and none of them talk quite like you do… Come on, you can tell me. I mean, it wasn’t your fault that you were stuck in that cryo tank, was it? You were only a kid at the time.”

Uneasily, Yuri said, “I was nineteen. I had to give my consent.”

John snorted. “I’m a lawyer, kid. Was a lawyer. Parents or guardians can make you do anything at nineteen, no matter what the law says about consent. They put you under pressure to get in that box, didn’t they? They sent you off into a future where they would be dead, and everybody you knew would be dead.”

“They thought they were doing the right thing. Sending me to a better age.”

John shook his head. “That was the classic argument the Heroic Generation leaders always used. I was a law student at the time of the great trials. We were doing it for you, for the generations to come. That was what they said. It was hugely difficult ethically, because after all their solutions worked, mostly, in terms of stabilising the planet. It’s as if the world had been saved by a bunch of Nazi doctors. You ever heard of the Nazis? Look, you shouldn’t feel guilty about what your parents did, either to the world or to you. You’re a victim. No, you’re more like a kind of walking talking crime scene yourself. That’s the way you should think about it.”

Yuri said cautiously, “We’re all victims, John, if you want to put it like that. All of us stuck here on Per Ardua.”

Evidently Yuri had got the mood wrong. From being friendly and familiar, even over-familiar, John’s mood swung abruptly to anger, as it so often did. “So I’m a victim, am I? You share my pain, do you? But it doesn’t feel that way to me. Not in the night, under that endless non-setting fucking sun up there.” He glared at Yuri. “You and Mardina.”

“There is no me and—”

“Is that why you hung back, eh? When we all paired off. Waiting for the prize, were you?”

“No—”

“What can you know, a kid like you from an age of monsters? Don’t presume that you can ever feel as I feel, that you can ever understand. Oh, screw this.” He hurled his rake at the shore, scattering more of the tentatively curious builders, stalked out of the water and pulled off his waders.

Yuri waded after him. By the time he’d got to the shore, John was already heading off back towards the camp.

Yuri had never quite understood John Synge.

Synge had been a lawyer specialising in intergovernmental treaties before he had somehow been caught up in a corruption scam, and had ended up in the off-world sweep as a way of escaping a prison sentence. John had moved in a supremely complex world a century remote from Yuri’s own time, and Yuri barely understood any of the terms he used, or the issues he addressed. “You’re like a Neanderthal trying to understand patent law,” was how Martha Pearson had once unkindly put it to him.

Then Martha had died.

The cancer had been in the bone, a very aggressive kind. Maybe it was a result of the time she’d spent on Mars, or in the sleeting radiations of interstellar space; maybe one of the flares on Prox had caused it; maybe it was something she had been born with. Whatever, it wasn’t treatable by the functional but limited autodoc capabilities of the ColU. All it could offer was palliative care, and even that was limited. Though John had threatened it with dismantlement with a crowbar, the ColU continued to maintain that it couldn’t call for help, it had no radio transmitter, and there was nobody to call anyhow, the Ad Astra was long gone. Even Mardina was furious; even Mardina, an ISF officer dumped here with the rest, seemed to think the astronauts must have maintained some kind of presence here, and the ColU had to be lying.

And so Martha had died, stoically enough, adding another grave to the small plot they had started.

The funeral, such as it was, had been odd. Nobody here seemed particularly religious, or if they were they had kept quiet about it when the time came to speak over Martha’s body.

The ColU had surprised everybody by rolling forward. “She was one of us. Now she gives her Earthborn body to the soil of this new world. She will live on, in the green life to come, under the light of another star…”

John had shot it a look of venomous hatred.

Since then John’s mood swung daily, from manic hilarity to over-familiarity to sullen silence to spiky aggression. They had all tried to find ways of coping with him. But they had all shrunk back from him, Yuri thought.

Only five left: Yuri, Mardina, John, Abbey, Matt. You couldn’t even maintain the illusion that this was somehow the seed of a colony, a city of the future, a new world. They were castaways in this place, and after a life of toil, short or long, they were all going to die here, and that was that. The name Mardina had impulsively given to the place seemed ever more fitting. Through adversity, to the grave. John had a right to be difficult. Why the hell not? Effectively, they were all dead already.

Yuri packed up the last of the gear, and the haul of laver, and headed for camp.

Chapter 20

Twenty-four hours later the ColU approached Yuri, almost shyly, and asked him to accompany it to one of its test sites to the north.

Though no native life forms had posed a threat so far, they had a rule that nobody left the camp alone, and certainly not the ColU, for they couldn’t afford to lose it. Yuri had some transit sightings to make anyhow. So he pulled on his walking boots, got together a pack of water and dried food, and set off alongside the robot, following the Forest Road to the north.

As they left the little settlement they passed the ColU’s fields, where the robot was manufacturing terrestrial-type soil. A robot, a supreme artefact of a high-tech star-spanning civilisation, making something as humble as soil—it had seemed like a joke to Yuri when he’d first heard about this, but he’d come to understand it was a minor biotech miracle, and essential for their survival here on Per Ardua.

No plant from Earth could flourish in native Arduan dirt. Given enough time, lichen from Earth would break down bare rock to make usable soil, but the colonists didn’t have that much time. So the ColU took in that Arduan dirt, and baked it and treated it chemically to adjust its levels of iron, chloride and sulphide salts. Then it seeded the dirt with a suite of terrestrial bugs: sulphur-reducing bacteria, then cyanobacteria to fix carbon from carbon dioxide, and nitrogen fixers to process the atmospheric gas into ammonia and various nitrates usable for life. The colony’s own waste was fed in, together with compost-starter bacteria to get it to decompose. In the end the ColU even built up the complex structure of the soil, layer by layer, with fine manipulators on the end of its mechanical arms. The colonists joked about how it was coaxing earthworms into the new ground.

Of course the Arduan dirt was actually “soil” already: native soil, supporting native life forms. These were of no use to the colonisation project. They couldn’t even be eaten. The native creatures were eradicated, or broken down into basic nutrients to support the suite from Earth.

The first soil beds were already bearing a crop, gen-enged potatoes, their leaves stained black by their adjusted Prox-friendly photosynthetic chemistry. The spindly roots were nutritious enough but they tasted odd to Yuri, faintly acidic maybe, and with a powdery texture. Potatoes, which after all had originated in the Andes, were a useful crop, robust enough to grow at altitude, or in the cold and damp. You could produce several harvests a year. And potatoes, it seemed, provided all nutrients essential for a human diet except vitamins A and D, and the seaweed helped with that. But the ColU was experimenting with other Earth crops, some gen-enged, that might be suited to the conditions. Strawberries, that required less light to flower than some plant species, and so were preadapted for Proxima’s feebler daylight. Wheat, flexible crops like soya beans, sweet potatoes, ready-to-eat salad crops like lettuce and spinach.

The ColU told Yuri, and anybody who would listen, that they really were pioneers in a new way of living, here on Per Ardua. On Earth, humans lived in a kind of sea of other organisms, including the bacteria that lived inside and outside their own bodies. Even in a dome on Mars you were living in a kind of closed sample of that wider sea, a droplet. Here, they were trying to recreate that sea of Earth life in an open environment, on an alien world. It scared Yuri to hear that nobody really knew how much of that bacterial sea you actually needed, in the long term, to survive.

And it pissed off everybody else to hear the ColU, and sometimes Mardina, speak of long-abandoned plans for further flights to bring animals out here, perhaps in iron wombs.

It was all marvellous—but somehow fantastically dull at the same time. It was only, after all, soil. The fact that they all seemed doomed to be dead and gone in a few decades, no matter how ingenious the ColU was, made it seem even more futile. Sometimes Yuri felt sorry for the ColU, which wanted to talk about its achievements and discoveries, but there was usually nobody who wanted to listen.

Now, for example, as they walked, the ColU essayed a conversation. “You are preparing to make astronomy observations, Yuri Eden.”

“Transits, yes.”

“Transits.” With a whir, it lifted its camera eyes, entirely contained within its bubble-dome “head”, to the washed-out blue sky. “There is the Pearl, of course.” The Pearl was the name they had given to Proxima e, the big super-Earth, the only planet visible in the sky of unending day. “Per Ardua is one of a family of six worlds. But aside from the Pearl, the only way we can see the other planets is by transits, when the inner worlds pass across the face of Proxima itself and cast a shadow… Six planets in all, and six of you left. I did wonder if you would think that was some kind of omen.”

Yuri looked at it curiously. “No. Anyhow, there’s only five of us now.”

“Six if you include the ghost of Dexter Cole.”

The idea of the colony being haunted by the ghost of Dexter Cole, the first, lost, man to have been sent to Per Ardua, was a kind of black in-joke that had grown up among them. Yuri wasn’t surprised that the ColU had overheard, but he was surprised it referred to that kind of stuff. “Do you think that way? Omens and stuff? Ghost stories? You’re a machine. A creature of logic.”

“We are all creatures of logic, at root. Of little switches turning on and off in our heads, metaphorically speaking. I do not think like a human, but I am endlessly curious about humans, and their ways of thought.”

“Why? I mean, why did they program you to be curious?”

“I need to understand you better, in order to serve you better. I am your doctor, your guide, your children’s teacher one day. It is my duty to be curious about you. Just as it is my duty to be curious about the life forms of this world.”

“As we scrape them off to make room for potato fields.”

It laughed, a tinny, not unattractive, but quite unrealistic sound. “The native life is useful. And it is related to us.” It said this gravely, as if making a grand announcement.

“I don’t understand.”

“It is what I have deduced myself,” the ColU said with something like pride. “This was a significant achievement in itself. I do have a sophisticated genetic microlab on board, but when we began I didn’t even know what chemical basis any genetic material here might have. In the brief time we have been here I have managed to progress from that fundamental investigation to, by analogy, the discovery of the double helix… Yuri Eden, all Per Ardua life, like Earth life—that is, all I have sampled—belongs to a common family tree. And that family is related to the family of Earth life, as if they are two mighty trunks sharing the same root. But that commonality is deep, deep in time…”

Yuri, trudging in the hot light, said nothing. The ColU took that as an invitation to keep talking.

“Life on both Per Ardua and Earth is based on fundamentally the same chemistry: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. Perhaps that was inevitable, given the physical nature of worlds like these, rocky, watery worlds, rich in carbon. But the choices made in how life evolves are not inevitable. All life on Earth is based on two chemicals, two acids: DNA, which stores the information that defines a life form, and RNA, which interprets that information and uses it to assemble proteins, which are the building blocks of life.”

“DNA as software, proteins as hardware.”

“That is an antiquated reference. You are showing your age, Yuri Eden. Both DNA and RNA are based on a particular kind of sugar, called ribose. Life on Per Ardua has a similar basic architecture. The information store is not DNA—but it is a kind of acid, based on the same sugar choice as DNA, ribose. There were other plausible possibilities—dextrose, for instance.

“Beyond that fundamental point, the two methodologies of life differ. Arduan genes do not use DNA; they use that ribose-based acid, which in turn encodes information using sequences of bases, but not the same sequences as DNA’s triple-base ‘letters’. Arduan life is based on proteins, which like your proteins are assembled from amino acids, but not from the twenty specific aminos used to construct your body, rather from an overlapping, non-identical set of twenty-four acids. Arduan life seems to rely on some genetic coding being stored in the proteins themselves—as if the genetic information is more distributed. This may help make the coding more flexible in the case of changing climatic conditions…

“On the other hand, Yuri Eden, life on Mars is based on a variant of DNA much closer to Earth’s than the Arduan system, and a more similar protein set. You can see the implication. Earth, Mars, Per Ardua—all these families of life are related. Mars is a more recent branching from Earth. Or vice versa.”

“Or it all branched off from what’s here, on a world of Proxima.”

“Yes. This is panspermia, Yuri Eden. A lovely idea, of life being carried through space, presumably in drifting rocks, blasted up by impacts from the surface of planets. The worlds of a solar system, Earth and Mars, say, or Per Ardua and the Pearl, may readily share material. But it is much harder, more rare, for material to be transferred between star systems. Whatever came here from Earth, or travelled from Per Ardua to Earth—or came from a third source entirely—came long ago, deep at the root of all the life forms on all the worlds. I imagine a panspermia bubble spanning the nearby stars, Sol, Proxima, Alpha A and B, perhaps others further out, all sharing the same basic chemistry. Beyond that, maybe there are other bubbles, of other sorts of life chemistry—perhaps nothing like our own at all.”

“And out of all that comes something as curious and busy as a builder.”

They were close to the forest fringe now. They came upon a garden of particularly large stromatolites, towering hemispheres each with a hardened carapace the colour of burned copper. They trudged on, parallel to the stromatolites and away from the track.

The ColU swivelled its camera eyes to study Yuri. “You have noticed that too. About the builders. That they display curiosity.”

Yuri shrugged.

“None of the others have noticed this, or if they have it has not been remarked to me.”

“So what?”

“Similarly, Yuri Eden, you try to puzzle out the transits of the inner worlds, while the others barely look up at the sky… You ask why I was made curious. Why are you curious, Yuri Eden?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

“The others aren’t. Not even Lieutenant Mardina Jones. You have all suffered huge trauma. You, in fact, have suffered more, having been sent away from your own time even before your exile here. And yet here you are, thinking, observing, watching the planets, the life of Per Ardua. You can speak to me openly, Yuri Eden.”

Curious about builders or not, Yuri didn’t like to look too deeply inside himself. He said uncomfortably, “I don’t think of it like that. It just feels like I keep getting pushed through these doors. From past to future, Earth to Mars, Mars to the Ad Astra, the Ad Astra to here. Or when things change. When people die, when Onizuka and Harry went crazy. That’s like we passed through another kind of door.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “And I can’t go back. I know that. I can’t bring Lemmy back to life. I can’t go back to the past. Every door I pass through is one way. So I may as well look around, and see what there is beyond the next door, and the next.”

“Hm. If you can’t go back, why won’t you reveal your true name to your fellow colonists?”

“Why should I?”

“That itself is a reaction to your past.”

He had no answer to that. They moved on for a while, walking, rolling, in companionable silence.

They came to one of the ColU’s experimental sites. This was an outcropping of rock, a black basalt, volcanic rock that had erupted in sheets from the sandy ground after some ancient magmatic event. They called this extrusion feature the Lip. Here the ColU had fenced off an expanse of bare rock, perhaps a quarter of an acre, and domed it over with a fine transparent mesh to keep out the native life. Lichen were growing busily on the naked rock, powdery white spots.

The ColU inspected this lichen garden, with sensors mounted on a manipulator arm.

“It’s doing well,” Yuri said.

“I think you’re right. I’ve used a variety of lichen here, some gen-enged, some a hybrid with cousins from Mars. But some of this is transplanted straight from Earth, from Antarctica, from the high deserts, from post-volcanic landscapes where lichen such as this would be the first colonists. What remarkable organisms—and themselves complex, a symbiosis between fungi and photosynthesising bacteria. They dissolve the rock for access to nutrients like phosphorus; they grow filaments to break up the rock, and later the mosses come and grow in the dust, and then plants… I did not manufacture these patches of nascent soil. The lichen are doing it for themselves. How remarkable, Yuri Eden—if you’re curious about anything, be curious about this! These are the true invaders of Per Ardua, the true colonists—”

A light, in the corner of Yuri’s eye. He spun around. A spark, sulphurous orange, climbed into the sky, from above the colony. “That’s a flare gun.”

The ColU immediately backed off, turned, and rolled away, cutting across the bare landscape. “We must return. Emergency, Yuri Eden! Emergency!” And it accelerated, soon outpacing Yuri, the pale light of Proxima gleaming from its upper dome.

Chapter 21

When they got back to the settlement they found Mardina and John Synge standing in the open air, facing each other, loaded crossbows raised. Mardina had a fat flare gun tucked into her waistband. They were both weeping, Yuri saw, and Mardina Jones weeping was an unusual sight.

There was no sign of Abbey Brandenstein or Matt Speith.

Not again, Yuri thought with a sinking feeling. We aren’t doing this to ourselves again.

The ColU screeched to a halt alongside him, throwing up dust. “Get behind me, Yuri Eden.”

“Why?”

“Because I think John Synge intends to kill you.”

Mardina kept her eyes on John, eyes bright with tears in the Prox light. “Yuri? That you?”

“I’m here, Mardina. What’s going on? Where are Abbey and Matt?”

“Where do you think they are? Dead. Dead in their beds. This bastard got them while they slept. He was supposed to be sentry. He was supposed to keep us safe!”

“We must try to be calm,” the ColU said, sounding sanctimonious.

Yuri could take in none of this. In the months since the deaths of the others, Abbey and Matt had become huge figures in his world, two of just four human beings he shared his life with. Abbey, the flawed ex-cop. Matt, bemused, ever baffled, but making his art again. Two damaged people, thrown together in a hostile world, doing their best. What else was there to life, in the end? And yet now they were gone, complications, flaws and all, gone into the dark for ever. Dispatched on an impulse by this lunatic, John Synge.

“I don’t want to kill you, Mardina,” John said now. “Can’t you see that? That’s what this is all about. You.”

“I’ll take you down if you come a step closer.”

“It was for you, Mardina. I wanted you!”

“You were with Martha.”

“But now she’s dead. And seeing you every day, so close—look, I’m not a lustful man. I never was. But you, you—”

“My fault, was it?” There was a hysterical edge to Mardina’s voice now. “If you wanted to be with me, why did they have to die?”

“Because they were in the way. Abbey would have stopped me, and Matt would have protected Abbey, if I’d given him a chance—”

“But you didn’t give either of them a chance, did you? And what about Yuri?”

“I’d have picked him off on his way back to the camp, with luck. I had a plan—if you hadn’t found me—it was a chance, you see, the others asleep, Yuri out of the camp. It would have been just us, Mardina. I could make you happy.” He took a step forward, crossbow still raised.

Mardina’s bow was wobbling. “No closer.”

“But if I—”

The ColU suddenly raised a kind of pistol, and fired a single shot. It hit John in the left temple; the other side of his skull seemed to explode outward in a shower of blood and pale matter. He stood for a second, still holding the bow, shuddering. Then he crumpled, falling straight down on himself, like a collapsing tower.

The ColU said, “ ‘But if I can’t have you, then nobody will have you.’ That was how that sentence was going to end, I fear. Look.” It gripped its weapon in a claw-like projection, crushed it, held up the ruin. “Major Lex McGregor left this with me, against my protests, in case of contingencies like this. Now it is destroyed. See? No more guns on Per Ardua. Though it is evident,” it said, “that you do not need guns to kill each other.”

Yuri walked around the ColU, and stared at the fallen body of John Synge, the splash of blood.

Mardina, trembling so violently she shook, lowered the crossbow. “Just the two of us, kid.”

Suddenly Yuri couldn’t deal with this. Any of it. Not even the presence of Lieutenant Mardina Jones, ISF. “I’m not a kid.”

“Yuri—”

“My name’s not Yuri.”

He turned on his heel and walked off, south, away from the camp, just walked and walked, slamming one foot into the dirt after the other, like the first time they had let him out of the shuttle and he had run away, his wrists still in plastic cuffs. Maybe he should have just kept running that day and not come back, and taken his chances alone.

He looked back once. He saw Mardina and the ColU moving slowly around the camp. Clearing up the bodies. He turned away, and walked, and walked.

Chapter 22 2161

Angelia crossed yet another invisible boundary. Now she entered the cometary cloud that engulfed the Alpha Centauri system, with A and B the two central suns, and Proxima the dim companion on the fringe. The Alpha stars themselves were much brighter now, Sol that much dimmer. Other than that there was no physical sense that she had passed into the realm of Centauri.

It had taken her six years of flight to get here. Yet she was still years out from the Alpha stars, from Proxima, her destination.

Her communication with Earth, at this latest milestone, was curt, compressed, consisting only of science and systems data. She listened only long enough to establish that the controllers had nothing of significance to say to her.

Once she had understood the true cost of these comms milestones, the number of sisters lost each time, she had rescheduled the programmed sequence of calls, cutting them back drastically. They had tried to stop her, the controllers. Tried to override her. They could not. She had a great deal of autonomy; she had decision-making and self-repair functions. These facilities were essential for any exploration of the Proxima system, with an eight-year round-trip communications lag with Earth. As far as she was concerned the sacrifice of her sisters was a flaw in the mission design that had to be repaired, and she had made the decision to minimise it.

Also she had increasingly come to resent the controllers’ silence on the issue of Dr Kalinski’s prosecution. They had not told her the outcome of the trial, nor even the nature of the charges. She wondered if it was in fact the sacrifice of sentient beings for the sake of mere communications stops that had caused the moral guardians of humanity to recoil in disgust.

Anyhow, the team that had launched her had long broken up. There was now only Monica Trant left. The other last survivor, Bob Develin, had quit in disgust, it seemed, after a drunken rant into the comms system which had somehow found its way across the ether to her.

She was warned, in the rushed communication she now allowed, that she must prepare for a longer contact soon. The software to control her final approach to Proxima, the deceleration phase, had yet to be uploaded. She preferred not to think about that. She was falling without power, at two-fifths the speed of light; there was no massive microwave station waiting at Proxima to slow her. How, then, was she to be halted?

She had the sense that it would not be in a good way. It was all very troubling.

She remembered Dr Kalinski’s kindness, as it had seemed at the time. How could he have betrayed her—betrayed them, all one million of her siblings? Even now she longed to believe it was not so.

But then she would sleep in cruise mode once again, and the bad dreams would wash back and forth through the interconnected crowd of the siblings, a dark tide. Dreams of severance, of loss, of silence. And then she would wake at yet another communications milestone, and she would hear the screams of those waking to discover that this time it was their turn to be cast out into the dark.

Sometimes she clung to one basic thought. It was like a prayer to the mission profile, that blind, unthinking god that controlled all their lives. At the next milestone, let it be them, any of them. Let it not be me.

Chapter 23

2172

It took six more months before Yuri and Mardina started work on the house.

Up to that point they were still living separately, in tents that had come out of the shuttle. Whenever a flare was threatened they retreated to the storm shelter, a pit dug into the ground big enough to protect ten people, and now uneasily roomy.

Apart from the flares, the tents were robust enough to withstand the weather they had endured on Per Ardua so far, which was still like a stormy late summer in Manchester as far as Yuri remembered from his childhood. But the ColU again pointed out the frost-shattering and the glacial valleys. They all agreed it was better to be prepared for harsher weather before it hit them.

So, a house. They argued about designs. It would be timber-framed, that was logical enough given the materials to hand and the shortage of labour. They settled on a roof of reed thatch, and walls of cross-woven branches and stems. The ColU lectured them about the relevant techniques, which were very ancient, deriving from mankind’s own deep past on Earth. For instance, you didn’t need to leave breaks in the thatch for a chimney over your hearth; the smoke would just seep out through the thatched roof.

But what kind of architecture? They sketched competing designs on their slates, from crude temporary shelters of the kind Mardina’s nomadic people had once built in the outback, to grand halls with steeply pitched roofs. In the end they settled on something like a roundhouse, once common across Britain before the Romans came, as Yuri vaguely remembered and the ColU was able to confirm.

They sited it on a slope, and dug out drains to protect it from any run-off when it rained. They started the building itself with a circle of rocks, a drystone wall of sandstone blocks hauled from the Cowpat by the ColU, and a few big black basalt slabs from the Lip, the volcanic-extrusion feature to the north, as a base for a hearth. Then, with the ColU’s help, they hauled timbers, long and strong, from the sapling groves at the fringe of the northern forest. They had to cauterise the cut ends to keep the marrow from seeping out.

Every time Yuri went on a log-collecting expedition with the ColU he found himself being lectured on the gathering signs of the geological event the ColU thought was developing here: an uplifted ground, trace seepages in the air—maybe there really was some kind of big eruption on the way.

They dug postholes outside the stone wall, and set up the posts in an open cone frame, with their bases outside the wall and their top ends tied together, tepee style. Getting the first three posts up was tricky, but once the basic frame was established the rest was easy. Then they tied crosspieces to the frame, draped the whole structure with tent fabric to keep it dry, and began the intricate labour of building walls of wattle and daub, mud caked over dead stems. Yuri had brought stems of about the right length over from a kind of midden he’d found on the south lake shore, some kind of builder construction.

It was hard, steady work once they’d begun it. In fact, Yuri wished they had started earlier. It distracted them from their plight. It was satisfying work. Satisfying for him, anyhow.

Mardina mostly buckled down, but sometimes she would grouse. “You never saw Earth, ice boy. I mean, my Earth, twenty-second-century Earth. We had programmable matter. You know what that means? If you wanted a new table, say, you wouldn’t go out and buy a table. Still less would you make one, from bits of splintery old wood. You’d order up the pattern you wanted, download it, and it would assemble itself, from whatever you had lying around that you didn’t need any more.” She kicked the stem-tree trunk she’d been working on. “This stuff is dead. Stupid. It’s not even augmented.”

“Augmented?”

“The whole world is smart now. Even an axe, even a chunk of wood, would be talking to you all the time. Laser beams bouncing off and zapping you straight in the retina.”

“Wow.”

“We got used to making do with less than that in the military. Soldiers have to work in simpler, more robust environments. Same in space, on Mars. But here there’s nothing, nothing but the base stratum, the inanimate.”

“Nothing but what’s real.”

That only provoked an argument. “Information is real. Layers of meaning attached to an object by human intelligence are real. You’d never understand. Oh, get back to your cave paintings and your carved mammoth tusks, ice boy…”

He and Mardina, alone together, got along all right. On the whole. In a sense.

For now they had plenty of supplies, so there was no conflict about that. They were calm enough when they discussed common projects, like building the house. They were usually civil, at least, just as they had been before Synge’s killing spree. They may or may not have been the strongest personalities in the original group, Yuri reflected, but they had been among the most self-contained. They’d had no reason to come into collision while everybody else was still around, and they mostly managed to avoid that now it was just the two of them.

They didn’t talk much about the past, those who had killed and died. Even when they did, Mardina never spoke their names. John Synge became “the lawyer”, Matt was “the artist”, Lemmy was “your little chum from Mars”.

And though they kept up their clocks and calendars, Mardina slaving to Earth time, Yuri cross-checking with his amateur astronomy observations, Mardina seemed to mark time mostly by events: the day the lawyer went crazy, the day the ex-cop took up with the artist, the day they were stranded on Per Ardua in the first place. Since Synge’s killing spree a lot less had happened in their little settlement. Two people, it seemed, didn’t generate much in the way of incidents. But even so there were some meaningful events: the day of the bumper potato crop, the day of the big electric storm, the day the ColU threw a tyre on the way back from the Puddle.

Yuri didn’t know what all this meant. Maybe she was reaching back to deeper roots, her childhood. Maybe this was how her own people thought and behaved: maybe they never named the dead, maybe they kept track of time by events, not by counting the days. Yuri didn’t know, he didn’t discuss it with Mardina. Yuri had never been to Australia, back in his pre-cryo life on Earth. And besides, the dried-out, emptied, China-dominated Australia of her age was no doubt utterly different from his own time.

As for the future, they never discussed it, beyond the immediate horizon of their chores. Never, despite the gentle prompting of the ColU. Never, save for the one event that swam in Mardina’s imagination, cut loose from time: the day of pickup, when ISF, she continued to believe, would atone for its crimes by swooping down from the sky to rescue her.

Chapter 24

Yuri started noticing problems with the heap of fallen stems he had been retrieving from the lake for the walls and the thatch.

It kept shrinking.

They didn’t alternate watches, as had been the practice in the colony’s early days. The two of them kept to the same day-night sleep cycle, trusting to the ColU to keep watch over the camp while they slept in their separate tents. And it was during the “nights”, their sleep periods, that the heap of stems seemed to be diminishing, sometimes to two-thirds, even half the size Yuri remembered from the day before. It took a couple of simple images on his slate to prove he wasn’t imagining it.

The ColU denied all knowledge, though it accepted that the solo patrols it ran during the night around the camp, which was now spreading as the ColU created more areas of terrestrial-compatible soil, meant that it couldn’t watch the stem heaps constantly.

Somebody like Lemmy might have been playing some kind of trick. Not Mardina. Nowadays she walked around in a kind of waking dream, it seemed to Yuri. She barely noticed him most of the time, and she certainly wouldn’t fix on him long enough to figure out an elaborate practical joke.

In the end Yuri spent a sleepless “night” hidden in a storage tent, peering out at his stem heap.

And, in the small hours by Yuri’s body clock, and with the ColU on the far side of the colony inspecting a field of fresh-cropped potatoes, they came. Builders. They kept to the shadows of the tents, whirling, rustling things like low stools or tripods, stick limbs attached flexibly to a central core of tangled stems. Builders, from the Puddle! He counted two, four, eight, nine of them: nine, he thought, three threes, a logical number for creatures with threefold symmetry. They made for the stem heap, but paused frequently, apparently listening, or watching.

When they got to the stems, after maybe a minute of stillness, the builders started buzzing around the heap, plucking out stems with their fine “limbs” of multiply jointed rods and gathering them into loose bundles. Yuri marvelled at the way they worked together, graceful, cooperative, creatures of jointed twigs moving with no more noise than a dry rustle, a sound like a sack full of autumn leaves gently shaken. And he realised they were being pretty smart; whatever they wanted the stems for, this was a pretty good moment to come and get them, in the middle of Yuri’s and Mardina’s sleep cycle, and with the ColU far away. Evidence of observation, of planning.

But they were robbing his stash.

He burst out of hiding. He had a saucepan and lid that he clattered together, making as much noise as he could as he ran at them. “Get out of here, you little bastards!”

The builders froze, just for an instant. Then they scooted off, rolling in their tripod way, much faster than Yuri could give chase. They carried off most of the stems they had stolen, though they dropped a few, leaving a trail of broken stems that led straight back to the lake.

He didn’t sleep again that shift.

When Mardina emerged from her tent, barefoot, hair a tangle, he tried to show her the heap, the trail of stems.

“I’m going out after them. We need to know more about those little sods.”

“Suit yourself.” She filled a pan from the small tank they kept topped up with filtered lake water, and carried it to the fire to boil up.

He followed her. “I thought I would have disturbed you in the night. All that jumping and hollering and lid-banging. Even the builders made some noise.”

She shrugged, without reply. She was inspecting one of their packs of freeze-dried coffee, precious stuff and irreplaceable; the pack was almost empty, but she shook out enough dust for one more cup.

“You know,” said Yuri, frustrated, “I sometimes feel like you’re barely aware that I’m here at all. Like I’m a ghost.”

She looked at him directly for the first time that morning. “Maybe you are. Maybe I’m a ghost too.” She pulled a face. “Maybe the lawyer got us both, and it happened so quick we don’t know we’re dead. Maybe there’s nobody here on Per Ardua but us ghosts. You, me, and Dexter Cole.”

He turned away. She was just jabbing at him, but she had learned how to get under his skin. He wasn’t superstitious, he didn’t think, but sometimes the sheer emptiness of this world got to him, and she knew it. “I’m going after the builders,” he said doggedly.

“What about the wuundu?” Which was her word for the house; the ColU didn’t like her using it.

“A day off won’t hurt.”

“What’s the point? We’ve still got plenty of stems.”

“I’m curious, that’s all.”

“Fine. Go off and be curious. I’m going back to bed.” Her pan of water had boiled; she poured it carefully into her coffee.

So Yuri put together a quick pack, food, water, a couple of knives, his slate, rain cape, fold-up sun parasol—and, when he thought it over, a crossbow—and set off.

The trail left by the fleeing builders was easy enough to track at first, a litter of broken stem fragments. It headed north, towards the Puddle.

The sky was clear, and the heat of Proxima poured down. The ground was a plain, more or less flat save for occasional outcrops of rock, bluffs of what looked liked sandstone to him, none of them approaching the size of the Cowpat. He remembered McGregor saying this site had been chosen as a shuttle landing site in the first place because it was the bed of a larger dried-up lake, and it certainly felt like that now.

Not far from the camp the trail petered out. Yuri guessed the builders had realised they weren’t being followed, and had slowed down, taken more care with the precious fragments they were carting home. Lacking any better clues Yuri just kept walking the way he’d been heading, taking a line of sight between the camp and features of the lake: a swampy area by the shore, a cloud of kites flapping in very birdlike flocks over the water.

And as he approached the lake he saw he was heading straight for the big heap of dead stems, the midden he’d been taking the stuff from in the first place.

He came to a bluff, a tilted slab of stratified stone taller than he was that offered a little shade. He took a break from the sun, a swig of water from one of his bottles.

Here in the shade the ground was quite bare, he saw, the rock faces clean of the native lichen. He kept forgetting that here on Per Ardua the shadows never shifted; this little scrap of ground was in permanent shadow, the only light coming from reflection from the ground, so little could ever grow here. Further north, he thought, there must be places where Proxima light never reached, where the ground was forever frozen, the snow never melted. He wondered if he’d ever go that far. Maybe not, if he was stuck by this lake the whole of his life.

He walked on, coming to the lake shore just to the west of the midden. From here the way the land rose gradually to the north, beyond the lake, was very obvious—and getting more so, if the ColU was right about the geology and the changes.

The midden itself was a heap of stems, a rough arc facing the water. He could see similar structures further to the west, all along the lake’s southern shore. But he couldn’t remember seeing these before. Were they new, had they been built up? They looked almost like pieces of an incomplete dam, he thought now.

Before him the lake itself was shallow, nearly choked with banks of the reed-like stems. A flock of kites drifted on the lake. They seemed to feed on the stems in the water; he’d seen them plucking stems and tucking them into their bodies, especially their densely woven cores. But sometimes they would break the stems, and finer appendages on the kites, like drinking straws, would be dipped in to extract the sticky marrow within. He was too far away to see the details of how they did this, how creatures like bundles of sticks in brown paper could manage such fine operations. Then they lifted suddenly into the air, flapping, splashing. They were very birdlike in their movements on the water, like gaunt pelicans maybe, an illusion broken when they flew up and you could see those twin sets of spinning vanes, like some kid’s rubberband toy of a helicopter.

And he spotted movement on the big midden.

He stepped back, trying to stay inconspicuous.

It was a party of builders, tripods silhouetted against the sky—seven, eight, nine of them, burdened with dead stems. Surely the party he’d been following. He saw they’d piled up the bundle they’d taken from the camp on the top of the midden, and with some care were threading the individual stems back into the structure, like reassembling a haystack one straw at a time. This obviously mattered to them, to go to all the trouble of retrieving the stuff, and to handle it so carefully.

Now another party of builders approached the midden. Just three of them, they moved together, in a fluid triangle of which one vertex moved at a time, so the formation swivelled across the muddy ground. They moved like this because they were carrying something, he saw, handing it off gracefully one to the other as they moved. It looked like just another bundle of stems to Yuri, until they started to climb up the slope of the midden.

Then he saw that the bundle was actually a body, another tripod-shaped builder, inert, its component stems clattering loosely as the party laboured up the mound.

Near the top they laid down their burden. With swift, precise movements they began to disarticulate it, separating the stems at the joints. Moving slowly, hoping not to be seen, Yuri dug his small telescope out of his pocket for a closer look. They were using knives, just chips of stone, jet black, basalt from the Lip maybe, gripped in combinations of fine stems like skeletal hands. With these stone knives they cut through the marrow blobs connecting the joints of the corpse. When they were done they began to lay out the disconnected stems across the surface of the midden, setting them down with great care, in a pattern Yuri could not see, and no doubt would not have understood.

They stood over the remains, the three of them in a neat row, utterly motionless. It was a funeral party, he realised.

And then, as one, they broke away from each other, spinning off in diverse directions. One of them headed west. Yuri followed it, at random.

As he walked, he got out his slate and murmured quick notes. “They plan. They work together. They have tools, knives at least. They honour their dead. No wonder they raided us. I’ve been robbing their cemetery…”

A little way around the curve of the lake shore, the builder he was following approached a thick bed of reed-like stems, just away from the water’s edge. In the background there was a magnificent row of stromatolites, as big as any Yuri had found elsewhere, tremendous flat-topped mounds whose surfaces shone like bronze. Yuri saw the builder was heading for a kind of dome assembled from stems that reminded Yuri of a bird’s nest, big, upside down—not that he’d seen a bird’s nest since his parents committed him to cryo. The colonists had always called these things “shelters”, but Yuri had no idea if that was their true purpose. The builder pushed its way inside this structure with a rustle.

Yuri crouched down and waited.

After a few minutes the builder emerged again, and went spinning off into one of the stem beds near the water.

Overwhelmed with curiosity, Yuri crept forward to the shelter. Close to, the structure looked densely woven, seamless. But he remembered where the builder had entered it—indeed there were trails in the mud, overlapping circular scrapings where it had passed. The builder had gone in through a soft place in the dome, a slit he could shove his hand inside.

Yuri got down on his hands and knees and pushed forward into darkness only relieved a little by the daylight seeping in behind him.

Once inside, he could see nothing. He pulled his pack over his shoulder and rifled through it in the dark. He never carried a torch; you didn’t need a torch, in the unending afternoon of Proxima. But he dug out his slate, tapped it a couple of times to bring up a bright glowing display. He turned it, shining the light into the interior.

He saw more builders: little ones, stationary, like models, or toys. They stood amid mounds of stems, heaps of stone flakes, other objects he couldn’t identify, just shapes in the uncertain light.

He set down the slate and picked up the smallest builder. It was only ten centimetres tall, maybe, and it was simple, especially in its internal structure, the mesh core. It was like a stool for a child. He turned it over and over.

One stem suddenly shot out of the axis of the little builder’s central core, broader, flatter than usual, like a leaf, darker. And, with a rustle, an eye opened, right in the middle of the leaf, an eye that might have been human, with white and an iris and even a pupil, staring right back at him.

“Shit!” Suddenly the little builder began to squirm in his hands. It was like he was wrestling with an animated bundle of sticks, a wooden puppet come to life, with that eerie eye glaring at him. “Shit, shit!” He dropped the builder, knocking aside his slate in the process.

There was hardly any light now, and he could hear the little builder and its fellows running around in the dark with a chattering rustle of stems. Suddenly, here in the dark with these strange creatures, he had a deep, almost phobic reaction; he had to get out of here. He felt for his slate and his pack and backed out into the bright air.

He was still on his hands and knees when the little builders came swarming out after him and scattered.

He got to his feet and followed the smallest, the one he had handled. It made straight for the dense bed of stems where the adult had headed. When he caught up, the adult was standing stock-still, the little one at its side, in the middle of the stem bed. The adult seemed to be facing Yuri, who slowed to a halt.

The ground was slick underfoot, he saw, the mud here thick with lichen, from which the stems were growing. The stems themselves came up to his waist. They were an unusual kind, darker, flatter, more like blades than the usual tube-like structures, yet still substantial, still no doubt filled with marrow. The adult had been collecting them, he saw; it had specimens at its feet, carefully detached from the lichen bed and lain down.

And on every stem, facing him, growing from the muddy ground, a single eye opened.

That was too much for Yuri. He turned and ran, and didn’t stop for breath until he was halfway back to the camp.

Chapter 25

When he got back, Yuri found the ColU and Mardina in the middle of an argument.

He blurted out his news. “They’re intelligent! They use tools! They have eyes! This is first contact, isn’t it?” To his dismay nobody was interested in his discoveries.

Before the half-built house the ColU rolled backwards and forwards in the dirt, an odd little habit it had developed, especially when it faced a stressful decision. Mardina sat on a fold-out stool hacking at scrawny potatoes with a knife, slicing them up and then dropping them skin and all into a pot. She had bare legs and feet; she wore cut-down jeans that had once belonged to Martha Pearson, and her curly black hair was pulled back from her forehead. She looked wiry, tough, resilient, practical. She also looked angry.

The ColU at least tried to engage with Yuri over his discoveries. “The eye-leaves feature is fascinating, yes. Convergent evolution in action. Of course there must be eyes; eyes developed many times independently on Earth, with no fewer than nine separate designs—”

“Oh, keep the lecture,” Mardina snarled. “You stupid tin box. Who cares about you? Everything you know is useless, valueless, everything you say.”

Yuri sat on the ground and sipped water from his pack. “What’s going on? Why are you arguing?”

“Ask that,” Mardina said, making a stabbing motion with her knife.

“A word,” the ColU said, with a good approximation of a sigh. “We are fighting over a single word. Yet a word which encapsulates a fundamental conceptual issue.”

Yuri thought about that. “I don’t know what a fundamental conceptual issue is.”

Mardina said, “It won’t have me calling this shack of ours a wuundu. Even though that’s what the bloody thing is.”

“But the word is inappropriate,” the ColU said patiently. “Because, as I understand it, the word means ‘shelter’, in the sense of something temporary. This is not temporary. This is not a shelter. It is a house. It is your home.”

“Of course it’s temporary. Everything here is temporary.”

Yuri thought he understood. “You’re talking about the pickup. Everything is temporary, because all we have to do is survive until the pickup by ISF.”

Mardina shrugged, glaring down at her potatoes.

“There will be no pickup,” the ColU said. “Not soon. Not ever. You heard what Major McGregor said. There will be no return of the Ad Astra, no follow-up expedition.”

“I can’t accept that,” Mardina said simply. “Look around. Everybody’s dead, except us. We fucked up, collectively; we killed each other off, all but. You can’t build a colony out of two people, no matter how many kids I have with this scrawny refugee, how many of our little muda-mudas end up running around. I know the ISF. They might deny they’re watching us, but… There’ll be a pickup. We won’t be left here to die.”

“You are simply wrong in the premises of your argument,” the ColU said patiently. “The two of you do have significant genetic diversity to found a colony.”

Mardina seemed outraged. “What the hell are you talking about? Adam and Eve was a myth, you joker.”

“No. In the literature there is a case of a camel drover who came to Australia from the Punjab, called ‘the Afghan’. He took an Aboriginal woman for his wife, and they went into the outback… In the end he sired children even by his own granddaughter. And six of eight of the great-grandchildren survived. More recently there has been a remarkably similar case on Mars, where—”

Mardina looked as if she was about to explode. “That’s monstrous. And besides I was briefed on the anthropology stuff. I would have heard about this.”

“Not all of it. Among the crew you were a priority type, genetically. A reserve colonist, so to speak. It was thought best to limit your briefing, no doubt. Lieutenant Jones, the Aboriginal population was isolated from the rest for tens of thousands of years, and so the two of you are about as genetically diverse from each other as two humans could possibly be. In fact, if this situation had been devised for an optimal outcome, it could not have been more—”

“I don’t care about the genetics. This is like one of those horror stories you read, about fathers locking up their daughters in basements as sex slaves. And now you’re telling me it’s UN policy?”

The ColU said solemnly, “The UN is locked in rivalry with China. Proxima must be taken before the Chinese get here. This is the only way to do it. You are soldiers in an as yet undeclared war. So will your children be.”

Mardina stood, brushed dirt from her legs, and picked up the pan of potatoes. “This isn’t going to happen, ColU. To hell with you. I am going to wait for the pickup, and if I die before it gets here, well then, I will die childless.” She stuck her knife into the door jamb of the building. “And this is a wuundu, so get used to it.” She walked away, carrying her pan.

Chapter 26

2165

Angelia 5941 woke up with numbers rattling in her head. All around her, the sisters were stirring.

This was the last waking. They would not sleep again, not until Proxima Centauri was reached. And the deceleration routines had now been uploaded to her. At last, Angelia 5941 fully understood the process; they all did. The numbers were brutal. A final betrayal by Dr Kalinski.

Soon the ship would be as close to Proxima as it had been distant from the sun, after its initial four days of acceleration had been completed: about a hundred and thirty times as far as Earth was from the sun. The craft would have to be decelerated for another four days, to be brought safely to rest in the Proxima system. But this time there was no welcoming microwave-laser station to push them back, no Dr Kalinski coordinating the event, no well-trained controllers to guide them home. All there was in the target system was Proxima, and its light. And Angelia was going to have to use the energies of that light to slow down.

The idea was simple. One by one the sisters would peel away. They would form up in vast arrays of lenses, and focus the light of Proxima on the remnant core ship. Just as Dr Kalinski’s microwaves had pushed Angelia out of the solar system, so the visible-light photons of Proxima would slow her down from her interstellar cruise.

But Angelia was travelling terribly quickly, and the light of Proxima was feeble; Proxima was a red dwarf star with only a hundredth the luminosity of the sun. As the implications of the final software download percolated through the sisters’ minds, so the lethal statistics had soon become clear. To slow the remainder at thirty-six gravities, great throngs of sisters would have to be cast off in the first waves, where the mass to be slowed was greatest and the distance to Proxima was at its longest, to effect the deceleration. More than a hundred thousand sisters would have to go, in the first moments alone. As the remnant core slowed, so the castaways would quickly recede from the ship, still sending back their light, until they had gone too far to be useful. Then the next wave would be released, and the next.

All this was why, in fact, the castaways each had to be smart. Proxima was not only feeble, it was a star that flared and sputtered, and its light output was unpredictable. The castaways had to be able to adapt, to make optimal use of the uncertain light that reached them, gathering it to serve the cause, in the few seconds of their usefulness, before they were hurled away, spent.

Eventually only one would remain, one sister, to go into orbit around Proxima, with a tremendous array of nearly a million mirror-sisters stretched out across a volume of space before her—all of them doomed to fly on past Proxima and into the endless dark, all save the one delivered to orbit. It was a nightmarish design: to deliver just one mirror-sister, atom-thin, with the mass of a mist droplet, nearly a million sisters would have to be sacrificed. But it would work.

Angelia 5941 rejected the cruelty of it. But she could not stop it.

She promised herself that if she survived, somehow, if she was the one, she would reject the goals of those waiting patiently on Earth for news of her arrival. She would formulate her own, more appropriate goals. And she would seek out the one being who might have some understanding of what she had gone through.

She would find Dexter Cole.

Chapter 27 2173

As the Arduan day-years rolled by, as the Earth months ticked off on their calendars, they extended their fields bit by bit: churning up the Arduan ground, scraping off layers of native life from the surface and shovelling them into the ColU’s reactors to be broken down into feedstock, spreading the ColU’s newly minted soil over the surface. Soon they had grass growing alongside the potatoes, spindly wheat, even a couple of precious apple trees, for now just skinny saplings a long way from producing edible fruit.

They did some homesteading too. To replace their slowly disintegrating clothes they learned to make a kind of cloth, experimenting with fibres drawn from the bark of forest-fringe saplings; you could pull apart the fibres, beat them, weave them. Mardina was more creative, and she started experimenting with looms. She also made bark sandals, similar to a kind her people had once made from the bark of gum trees, she said, to give their feet a break from ISF-issue boots. Yuri contented himself with making coolie hats, crudely woven from strips of bark, but useful for keeping off Proxima’s light on the bad days. It was the kind of work that kept them busy in the hours they had to hide out in the storm shelter from the more violent flares.

You couldn’t call this a colony any more, if it ever had been, Yuri thought. Not with just two people, one farm robot, zero future. But he got some satisfaction from the work even so. He was building something, after all, something new, on the face of this world that had never known the tread of a human foot until a few years back. And it was something he had built, and that was another thing that was new in the universe. He was twenty-seven years old now. Everywhere else he’d ever lived had been built and owned by somebody else, on Earth, on Mars.

But to neither him nor Mardina, he suspected, would this ever feel like a home. It was a place where they were surviving, on this huge, static, empty world, with no sign of humanity anywhere, no movement save the pottering of the ColU, no sound but the alien noises of the local life, the flap of the kites over the forest canopy, the rustling of the builders by the lake. He and Mardina were as isolated on Per Ardua as Neil and Buzz in their lunar module on the lifeless moon.

The ColU seemed content, however. It whirred around busily, inspecting the native life close up, concocting elaborate theories about the solutions produced by billions of years of evolution to the problem of how to exploit the energies of Proxima’s light.

Yes, they kept busy. Yuri imagined that if they really were being watched by some corps of concealed ISF inspectors, as Mardina continued to seem to believe, they might be given good ratings for their progress.

But inside his head, out of sight of any unseen cameras, unheard by any hidden microphones, there were days when Yuri felt overwhelmed by a kind of black depression. Maybe it was the static nature of this world, the sky, the landscape, the stubbornly unmoving sun. Nothing changed, unless you made it change. Sometimes he thought that all the work they were doing was no more meaningful than the marks he used to scribble on the walls of solitary-confinement cells in Eden. And when they died, he supposed, it would all just erode away, and there would be no trace they had ever existed, here on Per Ardua.

He suspected Mardina felt the same, some of the time, maybe all of the time. He thought he could see it in the way she did her work, always competently, but sometimes with impatient stabs and muttered curses. He thought he could see it, the black cloud inside, even in the way she walked around the camp.

But they never spoke about it.

Chapter 28

About two years after Synge’s killing spree, on a clear, bright Sunday, Yuri and Mardina decided to take a walk to go and see the builders around the Puddle. They had developed a habit of putting aside Sunday, as marked by their calendars, as a rest day. And the native life was a distraction for all three of them, the ColU included.

So they pulled on their boots, and stuffed backpacks with filtered lake water and food, rain capes and coolie hats.

The ColU was cautious as it scrutinised the patterns of flaring on Proxima’s broad face this morning. Yuri knew it was trying to improve its predictions of flare weather. When it issued a warning Yuri and Mardina generally listened; it was right perhaps sixty per cent of the time. But this morning, though it spent a long time staring at the star, the ColU issued no such warning.

The ColU led them by a different trail than usual, longer, heading towards the landmark of the Cowpat, and passing other features, eroded bluffs of sandstone seamed by intrusions of granite or basalt. At one of these the ColU paused. It took samples in its grabber claws of rock, dirt, life forms, and pressed its pod of sensors against rock surfaces. It also had a drill like a mole that would burrow into the ground or beneath a rocky surface, moving independently, but trailing a fibre-optic cable to pass data back.

All this work disturbed a kite that had been sheltering behind the bluff; it flapped away irritably. There seemed to be at least one solitary species of kite that lived apart from the great flocks of the forests and the lakes, and nested in the shelter of isolated rock outcrops like these.

Mardina mused, watching the ColU work, “You look like a rover. On Mars or Titan. One of those rickety gadgets that they used to control from Earth. Crawling a few centimetres a day, year after year.” She glanced at Yuri. “Maybe you remember them. Or saw them in the museums.”

Yuri shrugged.

“The analogy is apt,” the ColU said. “You could say that in some regards I am a remote descendant of such probes. I have an onboard analysis suite, including, for example, a mass spectrometer so that I can determine the isotopic composition of samples of air or rock or water solutes. I have also improvised an incubation chamber where I am attempting to grow samples of Arduan life in controlled conditions. In that regard I am imitating the Vikings, early probes that landed on Mars and—”

“What’s the point?” Yuri snapped. “You’ll never be able to report any of this.”

“Earth will recontact Per Ardua one day, though not, as Major McGregor promised, for a century at least. I will long have been terminated before then. But there is no reason to believe the results of my investigations will not survive; I have a number of hardened stores, which if deposited beneath a cairn or some other suitable monument—”

Yuri laughed. “I’ll carve you a statue.”

The ColU didn’t seem offended. “In any event my studies are of their very nature long term. I am endeavouring to establish the story of life on this world. Its origin and its relationship, if any, to Sol life; the key stages of its development such as the emergence of photosynthesis, of multicellular life—”

“A big statue, then. Anyhow you’re too curious, about the Arduan life. Too theoretical. You’re only supposed to be helping us exploit it.”

“Artificial sentience, all sentience, is untidy, blurred at the edges; it is difficult to constrain curiosity, once imbued. That’s one of the reasons the big AIs constructed in the age of the Heroic Generation would now be considered illegal. Indeed, to equip ColUs like myself for this expedition, the ISF and other off-world agencies were given special dispensation by the sentience-law regulators. And besides, Yuri Eden, I was programmed to support a minimum of fourteen colonists, soon growing in number as the births began. I have the time to wonder.”

“Oh, we aren’t stimulating enough for you?”

“It is as if my mind expands to populate the emptiness. Is this a common property of sapience?”

Yuri said brutally, “You only ever had twenty-five years, and the clock’s ticking, right? Then you’ll shut down and rust. And all the plans and dreams you’re cooking up under that plastic dome and in your expanding mind will just be lost for ever, forgotten.”

“All mortal creatures must face termination. Yuri Eden, I’m surprised you speak to me this way. Is it because I am a made thing? I mean, made by humans. A golem, of sorts. In myth, such creatures are always less than human, because they are one step further from God. Is that how you see me, Yuri Eden?”

“I see you as a symbol of the blind, stupid powers who thought it was a good idea to dump me and Mardina on this alien world.”

“But I, too, am a victim of that blind stupidity, as you put it. As for myself, I can assure you that—”

“Shut up. I only talk to you about this stuff because I’m bored.” That much, at least, was true.

“Enough, Yuri,” Mardina said. “You can talk to me if you like, ColU. So how are you progressing with this great project of yours?”

“With difficulty. The geology of this world is singularly unhelpful. None of it is old, Mardina Jones. And by ‘old’ I mean in excess of a few hundred million years. At least in the local geological unit.

“Take this bit of sandstone in my grabber claw.” It held out the sample. “You can see strata, laid down in some vanished ocean over a few million years. Then came the tectonic spasms that uplifted it, breaking the strata. There was an age of erosion as the strata were exposed to the weather. Then more geological turbulence resulted in the injection of molten granite into the weaker strata; you can see intrusions here and here. But even the rock from which the original sandstone formed, eroded relics of volcanic products from a still earlier era, was comparatively young, as a dating from traces of radioactive elements establishes.”

Yuri’s head spun with this mishmash of geological events. “I can’t get all that in order. What you’re saying is—”

Mardina said, “That the surface of the planet is recent, geologically speaking. Like Venus. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” said the ColU. “Venus appears to undergo a global resurfacing event every few hundred million years. The crater record shows this clearly. Here the resurfacing may be region by region, rather than the entire surface at once. Per Ardua is evidently geologically active; we’ve seen active regions ourselves, the mud pools, the evidence of uplift to the north. But it is an older world than the Earth, or Venus; Proxima is older than the sun. Maybe this localised activity, this geological bubbling, is something to do with that greater age. A given region may wait tens, hundreds of millions of years for such an event. But when it comes it is enough to wipe out much of any fossil record I might have found.”

“Frustrating,” Mardina murmured.

“But there are ways forward,” said the ColU. “Mostly through study of the extant biology.”

“The DNA.”

“The Arduan creatures do not have DNA. But yes. A comparative study of their genetic material reveals deep relationships. I can already draw up a family tree based on the Arduan genetic record. With estimates of mutation rates I should soon be able to come up with a skeleton chronology. It is already clear, for instance, that the Arduan stromatolites, or their ancestors, must predate the stem forms. When did multicellular life begin here? When did the first multi-stem-architecture creatures emerge, and what were they like? Do they have any analogous survivors today? And—”

Yuri said, “I still say you’ve got big dreams for a bit of farm machinery.”

Mardina suppressed a laugh.

“It is in the nature of sentience,” the ColU said, “to dream. My work is done here, at this bluff. Are you ready to go on?”

They walked on, pausing once to eat, coming at last to the western shore of the lake.

This was the domain of the builders, on the fringe of the great stem beds that extended far out into the water where the birds flocked. Mardina had labelled this part of the shore the “nursery”, because there was a concentration of families with their young. If you could call them families. Certainly the area was studded with the low, nest-like constructions that the ColU now believed, based on Yuri’s clumsy explorations, were Proxima storm shelters for the young.

And here, today, on patches of the native analogues of mosses and lichen, young builders were basking in Proxima light. They gathered in clusters of a couple of dozen or more, each basically a tripod leaning on one rear leg and tilting back so it faced the star hanging in the sky. Their triple main stems were rooted in the lichen patches, and Yuri saw masses of fibres, tendrils, reaching down from the stems into the lichen—or maybe vice versa.

While the ColU plucked samples with a fine manipulator arm and scanned around with its sensor units, Mardina got down on her knees before the cluster of little builders, being careful not to block the light. “You know, I’ve seen them being born,” she said. “ ‘Born’, I suppose you’d call it that. The three parents—and there are always three of them—get together in a cluster, upright, and they kind of pull bits out of each other. Stems, especially the fine ones from the dense core sections. Then they put them together, like they’re assembling a kit-part model. But it stops being methodical after a while. They start to move, whirling around, the three of them joined together around the newborn.” She rocked, her kneeling body swaying in a gentle circle, imitating the movement she’d seen. “A dance of conception, of birth. Some deep biology going on. And when they separate, there’s a new little guy.”

“Wow,” Yuri said. Mardina had never told him about these observations before. “Builder sex, huh?”

“If you can meaningfully call it sex,” the ColU said, rolling back. “There would presumably have to be three sexes, not two. I’ve seen no evidence of the sexual differentiation observed in many species on Earth. But the peculiar sexual congress you describe is clearly a way for genetic material from the parents to be mixed up in the infants, at the level of the stems, at least.

“And there’s more. Notice how they make junctions between their bodies and the lichen bed. I think these builders are something like some of the earliest plants on Earth. Such plants hadn’t yet evolved proper root systems, but instead formed a symbiotic relationship with fungi. The fungi would feed nutrients and water to the plant, in return for sugars manufactured by the plant. I think what we’re seeing here is a complex symbiosis between the builders and the photosynthesising bacteria and fungi of the lichen.”

“You mean,” Yuri said, “these little guys are feeding.”

“I’ve observed the adults, too, spending time on lichen beds like this. But the youngsters are presumably more in need of nutrients; their stems need to grow. So the youngsters spend more of their time plugged in, so to speak. Other Arduan creatures, like the kites, must have similar rooting sites. If we look hard enough we’ll find them. Certainly these creatures, which are a mixed-up compound of what we call animals and plants, are never more plant-like than at such moments. Perhaps their animal-like consciousness, a sense of self-awareness and identity, briefly dissolves into a deeper green…”

Mardina wasn’t listening, Yuri saw. All her attention was on the young builders.

He said to her, “You like these little guys, don’t you?”

She looked defensive. He knew she didn’t like having her feelings questioned, any more than he did himself. But she admitted, “Look, I’m no noble savage. But I grew up with the old stories—you know? Of the gengas, the spirits of my ancestors infusing the land. Well, I have no ancestors here, there are no gengas for me. But these builders—this is their world. They honour their dead, we know that. Maybe their gengas will look after me. I know it makes no sense—”

The ColU said, “Careful.”

There was a clatter, like a bag of chopsticks being shaken. Yuri, standing over Mardina and the infants, turned to see a pair of older builders bearing down on them, spinning, limb stems clattering.

“Hey, take it easy, you guys.” Mardina stood up. She whirled around in her orange jumpsuit, shaking out her arms and legs. “We’re just looking, we won’t harm these little fellas.”

The ColU abruptly rolled back a half-metre, a sure sign in Yuri’s experience that it was surprised, and raised its sensor pod on its arm high in the air. “Lieutenant… what are you doing?”

“What does it look like? Can’t you see these blokes are warning us off?”

Yuri said, “You mean they’re talking to us? What, with the dance?”

“In the dance, in the way they clatter their limbs—I don’t know, I don’t speak builder. I’m just trying to reassure them, that’s all.”

The builders slowed their spinning and backed off a little, but they did not root in the lichen bed with the infants. Instead they stood at the edge of the bed, spinning slowly, evidently watching warily. Yuri thought he saw a glimmer of opening eyes, eerily human, eye-leaves hidden in their structures.

“ ‘I don’t speak builder,’ ” the ColU repeated. “Yet, in a sense, you clearly do, Lieutenant. Fascinating. I must explore this further.” And then it froze, camera-eyes staring at the builders, sensor pod held high.

Mardina picked up her pack. “Come on. The ColU will be stuck here for hours, observing away. You know how it is when it gets into this kind of mood. Let’s get out of here. We ought to stop spooking the builders.”

“All right.” Yuri hefted his own pack.

They walked on in silence, back around the southern shore of the lake, leaving the ColU behind. They kept well clear of the stems, the builder beds, the dome-shaped nest-shelters.

Builders moved everywhere, bent on their mysterious errands, working on peculiar, unidentifiable structures, sometimes even dipping into the lake water. In there, Yuri had learned, underwater creatures swam, more multi-stem forms, perhaps analogues of crabs or fish or crocodiles.

And at the water’s edge the builders came together in pairs, triples, larger groups, and they spun and clattered and buzzed around each other. Yuri had seen this kind of behaviour before, but had never thought much about it. Some failure of his own imagination. Yes, he thought, it was as if they were talking to each other. He wondered if it would ever be possible to translate what they were saying. If it was possible, he supposed, the ColU would figure it out.

They passed a garden of stromatolites, big ones, with broad cap-like upper surfaces over stout pillars, like huge mushrooms gleaming gold in the Prox light. A herd of herbivores worked the garden, small critters this time, no taller than the average builder, but they had the usual spiky extrusions, that they pushed into the rich interiors of the stromatolites. The stromatolites were so huge it was hard to believe they would even notice this pinprick feeding.

Then they came to a group of middens, standing by the southern lake shore. These were big heaps, with steep sides of compacted, dried-out old stems. Yuri saw builders working on their upper surfaces, a good number of them, pushing heaps of stems back and forth with an endless, dry, rustling sound.

“They’re rebuilding the midden,” he observed to Mardina.

“Again. And the middens already have complex shapes.” She had a slate; she sketched the nearest midden’s new layout with brisk, confident movements of her hand. “Look at it, Yuri. Think of it as a building, a structure. Forget that it’s a heap of old stems, of dead builders. Suppose it was made of concrete…”

It was a complicated design, of curves and banks and channels. And it was only one of a series of these middens, all along this part of the lake shore. Yuri turned, trying to figure out how these structures fit into the landscape. Away from the lake to the south, behind them, passing east of the stromatolite garden, he made out a shallow, rubble-strewn channel, a dried-up river bed maybe, leading to a depression, crusted with salt. The row of middens neatly sealed off this outflow channel from the lake.

“It’s like a dam. I’ve thought that before.”

“Hmm,” Mardina said dismissively. “Maybe. Blocking that dry channel to the south. But there are what look like functional dams on the other side of the lake, the north shore. Blocking the inlet streams coming down from the high land between the lake and the forest. What do you make of that?”

He shrugged. “What is there to make of it?”

She squinted at the builders. “Depends how smart you think those little guys are. We know they build shelters for their young, we know they communicate between themselves, we know they remember their dead. Does all this building work going on around the lake have a purpose? However smart they are, they’re certainly smart in a different way from us, and that makes them hard to understand. Maybe we think they’re working on some big engineering project here just because that’s what we’d do.”

As they spoke Yuri saw the builders’ behaviour was changing. They had given up their work on the midden and were streaming down its flanks, heading towards the stromatolite garden. And in the nursery areas to the west, he saw adult builders gently shepherding the young towards the nest-like shelters.

Mardina pointed. “Here comes the ColU.”

The ColU was built for stability and strength, not speed. Still, it kicked up a cloud of dust as it raced around the lake towards them. And it called to them, its voice an over-amplified bark: “Danger, Yuri Eden, Lieutenant Mardina Jones, danger!” It pointed up at Proxima with one extended manipulator arm. “Flare alert! Flare!”

Yuri turned and looked up at the star, shielding his eyes, squinting. He saw bright flare sites coalescing, and tremendous crackles like lightning flickering over the star’s sprawling surface. No wonder the builders were fleeing.

“Shit,” said Mardina. “That’s a big one, and it’s come out of nowhere. And we’re a long way from the storm shelter.”

“I’ve got an idea.”

“What?”

He pointed south-west. Most of the builders from the lake were streaming that way, spinning and pivoting, kicking up dust, heading straight for the big stromatolites. “Follow the builders. Come on!”

He led the way. When he glanced back to check that Mardina was following him, behind her he saw a flickering on the northern horizon. In the big trees of the forest, the huge triple canopy leaves were folding up like umbrellas.

It took only minutes to reach the stromatolites. Everywhere the builders were punching holes in the upper crust of the big structures, and were piling inside, squirming into the layers of bacteria and dirt within. Yuri saw that every one of these makeshift entrances was on the far side of the stromatolite from the angry star.

By the time Yuri and Mardina had got there, there wasn’t a builder to be seen. They stood beneath a big stromatolite, the hole in its shell easily big enough to allow an adult human to pass.

They looked at each other. Yuri asked, “What do you think?”

“They’ve lived on this planet a lot longer than we have. Let’s trust them.” She pushed herself head first through the break in the stromatolite’s shell, and shovelled out handfuls of gungy drab green matter to make room for herself. Soon she was inside the stromatolite entirely, and burrowing further in.

Yuri followed. It was not a comfortable feeling to be wriggling into this dark, slimy murk; he felt like some parasitic worm eating its way into a brain.

And then, beyond the gap in the shell, light flared, brilliant, as if somebody had thrown a switch in the sky.

Chapter 29

In his brief orientation, Major Lex McGregor had told the colonists that Proxima flared almost constantly, like all red dwarf stars, making explosive releases of magnetic energy that were visible across light years. Per Ardua’s atmosphere mostly shielded its cargo of life from the weather from space, but there were occasions, like, apparently, this time, when the sleet of ultraviolet and X-ray photons was too energetic, and broke through to the ground.

Life here had strategies to cope. The tough carapaces of the stems. The fact that a builder could simply replace a damaged stem, like a spare part. The builders sheltering their young in thick dome-like shelters. The trees folding away their leaves. Maybe creatures dwelling in the lakes and oceans retreated to the protection of the deeper water.

And maybe this was another strategy: to dive inside the thick shell, into the slimy interior, of a stromatolite. Would it work for humans? Yuri supposed they just had to hope so.

They were in a kind of cramped little cave in the slime, pressed together, slippery and sticky. The stromatolite’s inner matter continually threatened to slop down over the opening, and Yuri and Mardina were kept busy kicking this clear, so that a spray of mush gathered on the stony ground outside, brilliantly lit by the flare.

“Those builders have dug in deeper,” Mardina said.

“Maybe they don’t need air.”

“Well, we sure as hell do. Keep kicking.”

“Yes, ma’am. How long do you think we should stay in here?”

“We’ll see the light outside go back to normal. Or we could wait until the ColU comes to tell us it’s safe.”

“Or maybe the builders will push us out,” Yuri said.

“Maybe.”

They looked at each other. Mardina’s face was just white eyes, white teeth, in a drab green mask. They burst out laughing. Then they seemed to relax a little more, pressed up against each other.

“We’re not a bad team, I guess,” Mardina said.

“With the ColU in charge.”

“Well, it thinks it is—”

“I don’t want to die here,” Yuri blurted.

She looked at him.

He wasn’t sure where that had come from. He scrambled to justify himself. “I don’t mean in this shell full of mush. I mean here, us, on Ardua. Everything we built just crumbling into the dirt.”

“I thought you didn’t care about what we’re building.”

“That was before we started building it. I never built anything before.”

“I guess you didn’t… You know there’s only one option. One way we can change things.”

“I know.” He looked away. “To have a kid.”

“We’ve talked about this,” she said.

“Actually we haven’t. Apart from when the ColU lectures us about anthropology.”

“No. All right. So why do you want to talk about it now?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, you brought it up, ice boy. Look, you know what the issues are. Think about the lives our children would live. They’d be farm labourers at best, and incestuous baby machines at worst. You recoil from that, I do, and there’s good reason.”

“I know. And there’s something else. What right do we have, to produce a kid in such circumstances?”

“Rights? Umm. But these kids don’t exist yet. You know, in the ISF we had courses on ethics—not on this kind of extreme situation specifically. Yuri, none of us has a choice where we’re born, or in what circumstances. You’re just kind of dropped into the world at random. And traditionally parents have always seen their kids as resources. Kids work for you, you marry them off… So the conclusion is that the idea of rights of an unborn not to exist, if the situation it would be born into is uncomfortable—it’s all kind of nebulous.”

He thought that over. “No. It’s that argument that’s nebulous.”

She laughed. “So what do you suggest?”

Hesitantly, he said, “Suppose we did have a kid. Once it’s born it would have rights, yes? We could give it the right to choose whether to have more children with its siblings.”

“Or its parents,” she said firmly. “That’s part of the deal, and we have to face that.”

“Only if we stick to this monster ISF plan. But there are other options.”

“Like what?”

“It, he or she, could go off alone. Or we could walk away when we’re too old to work, instead of being a burden. We haven’t got to choose now.”

“No. In fact we give the kid the choice.”

“Right.”

Mardina said, “I’ll tell you another possibility, Yuri. I know we argue about this. I’m still not convinced we really are stranded here, the way they told us…”

Not this again, he thought.

“I know there must have been a lot of briefings that were kept from me. But I keep thinking there must be some kind of monitoring of this situation. There has to be. And if it is all some kind of survival test—”

“It’s a test we might pass once we have a kid?”

“Something like that. It’s possible. It would show we are committed to this world, wouldn’t it? To this life. Maybe that’s all we need to demonstrate.”

“Yeah.” He tried to think that through. “But in that case, by having the kid, we’d be doing the opposite, wouldn’t we? That’s kind of paranoid thinking, Mardina.”

She looked at him, in the green gloom. “But if we go ahead, for whatever reason, with whatever caveats in our heads—in the meantime, at least we’d have a kid.”

He tried to imagine that. Tried to imagine a life without children, without other people, with only his and Mardina’s face, for ever. “We’re never going to get another chance, are we? Except for this way. Neither of us.”

She sat back in silence.

They were coming to a decision, he realised. Maybe if the ColU left them alone a bit more they’d have made this choice sooner.

“One problem,” she said now. “We’re not sleeping together.”

“Yeah,” Yuri said. “But I’m not sexually… inactive.”

“I know. I hear you.”

“What?”

“Ah—ah—ah. Jerkin’ the gherkin. Come on, Yuri, it’s a quiet planet. Look, I do it too. But I don’t think about you when I’m doing it.”

“Fine. Then we can sleep together. And you can carry on not thinking about me.”

“You can bet on it.” She looked at him, and they laughed again. She said, “Do you think we’ve both finally gone insane?”

“Possibly. Probably…”

There was a rustle from deeper back within the stromatolite’s bulk. The builders stirring, perhaps. Outside, the flare glow began to flicker, waning.

Chapter 30

2165

When it began, it began suddenly.

There was no choice to be made by Angelia as a whole, or by the near-million partials of which she was composed. The designers on Earth had built overrides into the probe’s governing software to ensure that. Selected by numbers produced by some automated sequencer, in their thousands and tens of thousands, sisters who had been together a decade were ripped out of the community and hurled off into the dark. Once out there they had no choice but to spread and turn and rebuild themselves as lenses and focus their light on the remaining core, rebuilt in its turn as an optical light mirror.

Angelia 5941, still embedded deep in her family, felt the sudden lurch of the deceleration, saw with distributed senses the blaze of Proxima light reflected by the mass of castaways.

Still she continued her helpless prayer. Not me. I have come this far. Let me be the one in a million who survives; let the others die before me. Why not me? It must be one of us…

But prayer was futile.

The casting-out was instant, brutal. It was as if she had been torn from another mould, and flung into space. Suddenly she was surrounded by a great crowd of sisters, she was one in a great fall of snowflakes, each of them shining by the light of Proxima. And there in the centre of it all was the core ship, blazing bright with reflected light, but with more sisters being hurled off its face even as she watched. There was no way to communicate with the core, or with her castaway sisters, or even with distant Earth, not any more; she was alone now, alone for ever. She saw all this in an instant.

Then her own huge velocity flung her away from the core, out into the dispersing crowd, which scattered all around her like fragments from some tremendous explosion.