Proxima (14 page)

‘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!’

2171

Y
uri 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.