Proxima (48 page)

So a rover was soon provided for them.

Stef Kalinski drove rapidly, steadily, safely, inwards to the Hub. Though she was as much an absorbed intellectual as she ever had been, Yuri observed that Stef had found ways to fit in, here on
this very different world. Thanks to her ISF military training she had come equipped with common sense, courage, and practical competences. And, Yuri suspected, she was a lot happier with a
thickness of four light years between her and her unwanted ‘twin’ – though even after all this time he still wasn’t sure he believed all the kooky stuff she’d
tentatively shared with him about that. In any event, Stef was a silent, focused driver, even when she let the rover navigate itself. That wasn’t unwise, as the world, still recovering from
its volcanic winter, was an unpredictable place.

Liu sat silently too, staring at the road ahead as they drove south. For him the ride was clearly just an interval to be endured before he got on with the issue of saving his daughter.

So, in the quiet, Yuri had time to stare out of the window at his changing world.

This road, metalled in places, was a rough descendant of the track he and Mardina and the rest had trodden out as they had marched south to the substellar all those years ago, heading upstream
along the course of the great river system that flowed north out of the Hub uplands – a feature now called, logically enough, the North River. For years the track had run across a frozen
landscape. Now the road ran on thawed-out but firm ground past meltwater lakes, and on rough bridges over gushing tributary streams.

The long cold was passing now, the volcanic ash screen that had exacerbated the effects of the star winter clearing at last, and you rarely saw ice this far south any more. The winter had caused
misery for humanity, particularly for the new arrivals on this world, utterly unprepared.

But Arduan life itself was hardier, and was surely adapted to a changeable climate. The ColU said it had observed shoots of new stems springing up from beneath the fallen ash within weeks of the
volcanic event. By now the lakes, emerging from beneath the ice, were already hosts to new communities of builders, with their nurseries and middens and traps.
The builders knew
, the ColU
said; the builders had memories and legends, it believed, spanning the cycles of the deep, deep past. Yuri, using what influence he had, had tried to set up a kind of exclusion zone around the
jilla
, the migratory lake that had guided him and Mardina south. He wanted to know if the same builders would now guide that lake back north again, to begin the cycle again . . .

As for the stromatolites, those great dreaming mounds barely seemed to notice the winter. And, the ColU said, the bugs in the deep rocks, where the bulk of Per Ardua’s biomass resided, as
on every rocky world, would have been entirely unaware.

But the post-winter landscape of Per Ardua was dramatically different from before. It had become a human landscape, crowded with people and their works. Now the rover drove past farming villages
founded by the new colonists with the help of their own ColUs, cut down, more flexible modern units. For a decade immigrants had been emerging from that single central point at the Hub, the Hatch,
a doorway just a few metres across, like oil seeping from a well in the desert. And they had been pushing out of the Hub in all directions across the patient face of Per Ardua, north and south,
east and west, but especially following the great rivers. It was an odd pattern of colonisation, Yuri thought – and a big contrast to the scattered pattern of the Founders’ first
communities, dropped almost at random from the sky by the shuttles from the
Ad Astra
.

Further in towards the Hub they passed through a more densely populated belt of industrialisation. Here were forges and smelters, plants churning out tools and engines, diggers and borers,
factories built of local-dirt concrete and stem-forest timber and fed by river water carried by gleaming pipelines. In this industrial zone, already a pall of smoke from the local coal and timber
hung in the air, a genuine smog on some still days, blanketing the factories and processing plants and dormitory-block apartments, over which the vertical light of Proxima Centauri steadily beat
down. Like the farming communities further out, there was a whole band of this kind of development spread in a rough circle around the pivotal point of the Hub, though pushing further out wherever
the major rivers ran.

It was a remarkable flowering after just a few decades of human presence on the planet, and had accelerated in the years since the big influx of immigrants had got under way. Soon roads and rail
lines would be laid down, and the spokes of this great complex wheel of colonisation would be extending much further, to areas rich in minerals such as metals and uranium, and the seams of
coal-like deposits that had been found just inward of the rim-forest belt. A flow of commodities would head on back into the centre, as the whole substellar face of Per Ardua began a steady
integrated development.

Yuri and the people around him had made a great deal of money by laying claim to land likely to be taken by the new settlers, then allowing themselves to be bought out by the UN. Now they were
busily claiming vast tracts of land further out from the Hub, that were apparently too cold and dry to be worth considering for colonisation yet. In time they would be sold back too, when the
weather warmed up. The newcomers, and even the UN authority that attempted to control them, wouldn’t listen to the ragged survivors of the
Ad Astra
when they said the world
wouldn’t
always
be this cold. It seemed to be in the nature of humanity, Yuri was learning as he grew older, not eventually to listen to the old folk, not to learn from history. He
was patient. Per Ardua would tame them all, eventually.

And in the meantime Yuri’s own wealth was piling up, some in the local scrip, and some in the banks run by UN officials at the Hub. Better yet, the new factories were now turning out goods
that you could spend your money on, from decent clothes that
weren’t
the uniform of some UN military force, to fancy cutlery and crockery and furniture and fabrics, and even luxury
foods: there were salmon farms in some of the rivers, and chicken runs, with real live beating-heart birds running around.

There was some talk of a civilian local government, elections. Even a civilian justice system to replace the UN military tribunals. But as they got closer in to the centre, and approached the
zone controlled directly by the UN forces, there were increasing reminders that this world was still more or less a military-controlled colony run by a remote, quasi-imperial power – you
didn’t need to know about a girl being arrested for having a Chinese father to see that. They drove through an area dominated by neat rows of tents and prefabricated buildings, all marked
with prominent UN, ISF and Peacekeeper logos, and connected by tracks of crushed Per Arduan basalt. The Hub base was a military fortress, basically, the headquarters of an occupation supported by a
tithe imposed on the farming communities further out.

Now they passed a feature new to Yuri: camps, fenced off with barbed wire and watchtowers. Again there were UN logos everywhere, even on the gun towers. Children watched from within the fences,
blank-eyed, as their rover rolled by.

Liu stabbed a finger. ‘In there. One of their new internment centres. That’s where she’ll be, my Thursday.’

‘Not yet,’ Stef said. ‘I’ve been checking as we’ve been driving. They still have her at the Peacekeeper HQ further in. They know she’s your daughter, Liu.
They don’t want to offend a Founder more than they have to, evidently.’

‘Maybe.’ He sat staring out, elbow on the window ledge, the fingers of his right hand working nervously, as if manipulating an invisible coin. ‘This feels bad, bad.’

‘Hey, take it easy,’ Yuri said. ‘We’ll get through this, Liu. It’s just some UN arsehole being an arsehole—’

‘You don’t know, Yuri. You don’t
know
. Me and Thursday October, when her mother died, and then her grandmother too, I was all she had. You weren’t there, when
she was a little kid. You didn’t
see
our lives . . .’

It was true. By passing back and forth through the Hatch, Yuri had effectively skipped eight brutal, wintry years which Liu and all those he’d known on Per Ardua had had to live through,
had met their challenges, raised their kids . . . Yuri, still in his fifties biologically speaking, wasn’t even as
old
as them any more. The fact that he had missed all their
triumphs and their pain somehow invalidated his own loss, his irrevocable sundering from Beth. Once again he had been cast adrift.

It had made him grow closer to Stef, however, who had left her own life behind, and jumped forward in time with him. Stef did have the consolation of the science, the alien world into which
he’d suddenly been projected, the exploration of the mysteries of the Hatches and the tech they represented. But Yuri’s relationship with Liu and the others had never been the same.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said now.

Liu looked at him, from within his own private cage of worry and uncertainty. ‘Whatever.’

The rover’s nose rose slightly, and the engine growled; they were beginning the long climb into the fractured upland that characterised the Hub, the summit of Per Ardua’s frozen
rocky tide. Now, under the perpetual clouds of the substellar, they came to more post-Hatch structures, cut into the recovering forest. This was an area set aside for immigrant processing: camps
surrounded by barbed wire and gun towers, the first places you would be taken to if you came through the Hatch. Here, new arrivals were quarantined, screened, inoculated, then given basic kit,
including clothing, starter packs of local money, basic education and orientation – or siphoned off to an internment camp if their background didn’t fit. Yuri sometimes wondered how it
must be to be put through the bewildering mystery of a space transport to Mercury, a mysterious trans-dimensional hop between the stars, an emergence onto an alien world – and after all that
to be taken away from your family, stripped and thrown into a shower hut.

‘I hate these places,’ Liu said, as they rolled through this zone.

‘Me too,’ admitted Stef. ‘I did some volunteer work in one of them. I couldn’t bear the crying of the children at night in those big dormitories. Not knowing where they
were. They were terrified.’

Yuri looked at her. He said drily, ‘But you’re a scientist. Here we are becoming an interstellar species. We are achieving greatness. Isn’t it worth a little pain?’

She said, ‘Not if individuals suffer on the way to achieving species goals. No. There must be a better method, to whatever you want to achieve. Probably requiring more patience.’

Liu said, ‘But even the builders achieved greatness, in their way. They constructed the Hatch, somehow. At least it looks like that. We found traces of their factories and such,
right?’

‘Yes,’ Stef said. ‘But they also built their canals. The Hatch map proves it, even if we still haven’t found any trace of them out on the planet itself. Now
that
was a great achievement, that suits the nature of the builders, rather than some gate to the stars. What was the point of the Hatch for them? What use is a world like Mercury to a builder from Per
Ardua? Yet they turned their backs on their canals, and they built their Hatch, and then – what? They gave up and went home again, it seems. They may as well have built a statue of a builder
a kilometre high, right at the Hub, thumbing its nose at Prox. Wouldn’t have been any less use.’

That made Yuri laugh. ‘Nice image. Although they don’t have noses. Or thumbs.’

Stef stayed serious. ‘Maybe it’s no wonder the builders are so gloomy, as the ColU tells us. Somehow they know their history is – all wrong. And because of the Hatch, it seems.
I’m not sure that the Hatch had anything to do with the builders’ goals at all, their own fate as a species. After all,
we’re
now merrily using the Mercury-Ardua Hatch
system to colonise this world, but we’ve somehow forgotten that whatever it was built for, surely it wasn’t for
that
.’

‘What is it for, then?’ Liu asked.

‘I don’t know. Even though I’ve studied related phenomena for decades. Even though the Hatches are already part of human history.’

‘Hm,’ Yuri said. ‘Well, I hope we last long enough to find the answer.’

T
hey came at last to the UN base, deep within the Hub province, close to the Hatch.

The base had been hugely extended from the days of Tollemache and his crew. The old
Ad Astra
hull was now at the centre of an elaborate complex of buildings, with the flags of the UN,
ISF and other agencies hanging limply overhead, while wide areas of forest had been cleared, fenced off and connected to immigrant processing blocks by tall wire fences. There was talk of turning
the hull itself into a museum of the pioneering days on the planet, and Yuri had mischievously suggested bringing back Conan Tollemache himself to run it.

And over the Hatch itself, above the rough transparent dome that now sheltered it from the substellar climate, was a big wrought-iron sign in the six major languages of the UN zones, the first
thing you would see when you came scrambling through from Mercury:

Yuri and the others were prominent enough citizens of the ‘protectorate’ to be allowed through the security barriers with minimal formalities. They were escorted by
a young soldier to the headquarters of the new Emergency Powers corps of the Peacekeepers, a formidable building of Arduan concrete studded with automatic gun emplacements and security cameras.

Liu barely endured all this, his nerves clearly on a knife edge.

Inside the building they were met by Freddie Coolidge, sitting behind a desk. ‘Sit down,’ he said curtly. He tapped his desk; a built-in slate lit up. ‘I know why you’re
here, obviously.’ Then he stared intently into the slate, drawing out the moment. Delga’s son, his surname taken from his father, was in his late thirties. He wore the uniform of a
sergeant of the Peacekeepers. He looked nothing like his mother, not any more. He’d even removed the tattoos his mother had had engraved on his face as an infant.