Proxima (10 page)

‘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.

2155

‘T
his 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.