Proxima (20 page)

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.

I
n 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.

2165

W
hen 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.

2173

S
tef Kalinski was summoned to Earth. Specifically to the office of Sir Michael King, at the corporate headquarters of Universal Engineering, Inc.,
in Solstice, Northwest Territories, United States of North America.