Proxima
Authors: Stephen Baxter
PROXIMA
STEPHEN BAXTER
GOLLANCZ
LONDON
In the hearts of a hundred billion worlds –
Across a trillion dying realities in a lethal multiverse –
In the chthonic silence –
Minds diffuse and antique dreamed the Dream of the End Time.
2166
I
’m back on Earth.
That was Yuri’s very first thought, on waking in a bed: a hard bed, stiff mattress and lightweight sheets and blankets, but a bed nonetheless, not a barrack bunk stacked four high in a
dome on Mars.
He opened his eyes to bright light, from fluorescent bars on the walls. A clean-looking ceiling. People moving around him wearing green shirts and hygiene caps and masks, a low murmur of
competent voices, machines that bleeped and chimed. Other beds, other patients. A classic hospital set-up. He saw all this in his peripheral vision; he hadn’t turned his head yet, he felt so
heavy.
The last thing he remembered was the needle jabbed into his neck by that arsehole Peacekeeper Tollemache. He had no idea how long he’d been out – months, if he’d been shipped
back to Earth – and he remembered from his recovery after his decades in the cryo that it paid to take care on waking.
But he knew he was on Earth. He could feel it in his bones. Yuri had been born on Earth in the year 2067, nearly a hundred years ago, and, dozing in a cryo tank, had missed mankind’s
heroic expansion out into the solar system. He had woken up in a colony on what he had learned, gradually, was Mars. But now, after another compulsory sleep, this was different again. He risked
lifting his hand. The muscles in his arm ached, just doing that, and he felt tubes dragging at him as he moved, and the hand fell back with a satisfyingly heavy thump. Beautiful Earth gravity, not
that neither-one-thing-nor-the-other floaty stuff on Mars. It could only be Earth, home.
He had a million questions. Such as,
where
on Earth? Why had he been sent back instead of being left to rot on Mars? And what kind of institution was he in now, what kind of prison this
time? But not having answers didn’t bother him. He’d had very few answers about anything since waking up on Mars, and besides he hadn’t cared enough to ask. The worst kind of cage
on Earth, and no matter how much the place had changed since he’d gone into the cryo tank, was better than the finest luxury you could find on Mars. Because on Earth you could always just
open the door and breathe the air, even if it was an overheated polluted soup, and just keep on walking, for ever . . .
He closed his eyes.
‘Rise and shine, sleepy head.’
There was a face looming over him, a woman, black, wearing a green shirt with a name tag he couldn’t read, her hair tucked into a green cloth cap. She wasn’t wearing a mask, and she
smiled at him. She looked tired.
He tried to speak. His mouth was dry, and his tongue stuck painfully to the roof of his mouth. ‘I . . . I . . .’
‘Here. Have a sip of water.’ She held a nippled bottle, like a baby’s, for him. The water was warm and stale. She seemed to be having trouble holding up the bottle, like she
was weak herself. ‘Do you know your name?’ She glanced at the foot of the bed. ‘Yuri Eden. That’s all we have for you. No recorded next of kin. Is that right?’
He just shrugged, a tentative movement, flat on his back.
She looked him over, peered into his eyes, checked some kind of monitor beside the bed. ‘My name is Dr Poinar. I’m ISF, I have a crew rank but you can call me Doctor. You’ve
taken your time coming out of the induced coma the Peacekeepers put you into. Still, it was easier to ship you through the launch that way. More than half the crew dreamed it all away, in fact.
I’m going to see if I can sit you up. OK?’ She pressed a button.
With a whir of servos the back of his bed began to tip up, lifting him, bending him at the waist. He felt weak, and his head was like a tub of sloshing liquid. The ward greyed around him. He
felt a crawling sensation in his right arm, some kind of fluid being pumped into him.
Dr Poinar watched him carefully. ‘You OK? All right. Here’s the five-second briefing – you’ll be put through a proper induction process later, everybody’s going
through that in stages, classroom stuff and data access first while you get your strength back, then physical work later, including your share of maintenance chores.’ She glanced at his
notes. ‘More of that if you end up on a punishment detail, and looking at your record that seems more than likely. But the priority for you is reconditioning. Your body needs to relearn how
to handle full gravity. The nerve receptors that handle your posture, positioning and movement are all baffled right now. Your inner ear doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. Your
fluid balance is all wrong, and you’re going to have low blood pressure symptoms for a while. Here, drink this.’
She handed him another flask, and this time he took it for himself. It was a briny fluid that made him splutter.
‘You’ll get courses of injections to rectify your bone calcium loss, and such. And physio to build up your muscle strength and bone mass. Do
not
skip those. Oh, and your
immune system will be hit. Every virus everybody brought into this hull has been running around like crazy; you’ll have a few weeks of fun with that. Later on there will be further medical
programmes, pre-adaptation for Prox, preventive surgery of various kinds.’ She grinned, faintly cruelly. ‘How are your teeth? But that won’t be for another year or
more.’
Prox?
A baby started to cry, not far away.
Dr Poinar asked, ‘Any questions? Oh, I’m sure there are masses. Just use your common sense. For now just sit there and let the dizziness pass.
Don’t
lie down again.
I’ll come by later and see if you can take some solid food. And watch out for the catheter, the nurse will remove that later. Take it easy, Yuri Eden.’ She walked out of his view.
Still that baby cried, not far to his left.
Very cautiously he turned his head that way; the greying returned, and a ringing in his ears, but he waited until it passed. He saw more beds crowded into a room that couldn’t have been
more than seven, eight metres across, smaller than he had expected. Some of the beds had cloth partitions around them. More medical types and a couple of servo robots glided through the narrow
spaces between the beds. Equipment dangled from the ceiling, including what looked like a teleoperated surgical kit, all manipulator arms and laser nozzles and knives.
In the bed closest to Yuri, to his left, lay a young woman, a girl really, pale, blonde hair, fragile-looking. Intensely beautiful. She cradled a baby, a bundle of blankets; as she rocked it,
the crying slowly subsided. She saw Yuri looking. He turned his head away, making his vision spin again. At Eden he’d developed the habit of avoiding eye contact, of giving people their own
bubbles of privacy.
‘It’s OK.’ Her accent was soft, maybe eastern European.
He looked back. ‘Didn’t mean to stare.’ His voice was a husk.
‘Well, little Cole was crying, disturbing everybody.’ She smiled. ‘Sorry if he woke you up.’
That puzzled him. Then he realised she was joking. He tried to smile, but he had no idea what kind of grimace his numb face was pulling.
‘My name is Anna Vigil.’
‘I’m Yuri.’
‘Yuri Eden. I heard the doctor say.’ Little Cole wriggled and gurgled softly. ‘He’s fine. I’m the one who had to come in here, a cold virus laid me out, I’m
still weak from nursing. Of course we shouldn’t be here at all. I was heavily pregnant when the sweep came. There was a mix-up. Cole’s the only child in here.’
‘Cole, huh. Nice name.’
She seemed to think that over, as if his responses were a little off. ‘I named him for Dexter Cole, of course. The first guy to Proxima.’
Of course
. Who? Where? He backed away from the puzzling little conversation, retreated into himself.
‘Hey, buddy.’
He turned his head to the right.
In the bed on that side was a man, around thirty, Asiatic. His scalp was swathed in bandages, and the left side of his face was puffed up with bruising that almost closed one eye. Even so, he
smiled. ‘You OK?’
Yuri shrugged stiffly.
‘Listen. It’s just the go-to-sleep stuff the cops give you. They don’t use it sparingly. I took a couple of doses of that myself, while I tried to explain in a calm manner that
as a foreign national I did not belong in their sweep for the
Ad Astra
. Takes you time to wake up from that. Don’t worry, the fog will clear.’ His accent sounded American, west
coast maybe, but Yuri’s ear was a hundred years out of date.
Yuri said, ‘Thanks. But I’m guessing that’s not why you’re in here. The sleep thing.’
‘You ought to be a doctor. No, the big guy put me in here this time. Although the time before it was a couple of Peacekeepers, they managed to break a rib while persuading
me—’
‘The big guy?’
‘Gustave Klein, he’s called. I guess you wouldn’t know that. King of the Hull, or thinks he is. Watch out for him. So, Yuri Eden, huh? I never came across you on Mars. My name
is Liu Tao.’ He spelled it out.
‘You American?’
‘Me? No. But I learned English in a school for USNA expats in New Beijing. That’s why my accent is kind of old-fashioned, everybody picks up on that. I’m Chinese. I’m
actually an officer in the People’s space fleet. Yuri Eden? Is that really your name? You lived in Eden, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What was it like?’
Lacking any kind of common reference with this guy, Yuri tried to describe it. Eden had been the UN’s largest outpost on Mars, and one of the oldest. People lived in cylindrical bulks like
Nissen huts that were the remains of the first ships to land, tipped over and heaped with dirt and turned into shelters, and in prefabricated domes, and even in a few buildings of red Martian
sandstone blocks. The whole place had had the feel of a prison to Yuri, or a labour camp. And all this was just a pinprick, a hold-out; the scuttlebutt was that a colony like this would be dwarfed
by the giant cities the Chinese were building on the rest of the planet, like their capital, Obelisk, in Terra Cimmeria.