Proxima (24 page)

He tried to express it. ‘Like I stepped through another door.’

‘Your life has changed again, huh. So now here she is. Phase One of the grand plan, remember? Our retirement insurance, and the loins of the next generation.’

‘She’s none of those things. She’s Beth.’ He looked down at the baby, at this piece of himself. ‘None of that Adam and Eve crap. I, we, we’re going to protect
her, and nurture her, and give her as full a life as she deserves.’

Mardina raised her head weakly. ‘That’s a big promise, ice boy. I mean, for instance, how can she ever fall in love? Nothing’s changed in the bigger picture, Yuri. We’re
still stuck here, alone.’

‘Another door will open,’ Yuri said calmly. ‘Just like before. And I’ll step through it, and I’ll take Beth with me, and you.’

Mardina smiled. ‘You know, right now, I believe you. But that’s probably the drugs talking. Let me sleep and get back to normal, and I’ll kick your butt properly.’

‘I’ll put her in her crib . . .’

But Mardina, lying back, had already drifted away.

T
welve hours later, with Mardina awake, and the baby’s first feeds negotiated successfully, the ColU drove up to the house. It waited outside
until Yuri popped his head out of the door.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Yuri Eden.’

‘That’s OK, buddy.’

‘It’s the lake. You alerted me to developments during the confinement. There have been more. I thought perhaps you would both wish to see. Well, all three of you.’

‘I’m not sure if—’

‘Count me in, ColU.’ Mardina, swathed in a heavy ISF-issue overcoat, pushed her way out of the house. She breathed deeply. ‘Clean air in the lungs. Nothing better. Tell you
what, I’ll put on my tracksuit and we’ll jog over.’

‘We won’t, you know.’

‘I think she is teasing you, Yuri Eden,’ the ColU said.

She was grinning. ‘You’re so easy, ice boy. We’ll ride on the ColU, and you can walk. Deal?’

They took their time to get ready for the little expedition, with the ColU laden with blankets, water and hot drinks for Mardina, and expressed milk for the baby. Then they set off towards the
lake. The air, under the increasingly mottled face of Proxima, was fresh, even cold.

Before they reached the eastern shore, they climbed one of the many shallow bluffs that studded this landscape and looked out over the lake.

Which had changed, dramatically. Those big flooded areas behind the northern dams were drained. But the risen lake water had now broken through its bank on the south side, and, guided apparently
by the builders’ middens, was gushing into the dry river channel that Yuri had walked through many times. Already it was beginning to flood a depression some way to the south. Everywhere the
builders were on the move, adults with infants, even a few apparent invalids being carried by parties of adults, streaming around the banks of the lake towards the outflow channel.

‘They did this deliberately,’ Mardina breathed.

‘That’s correct, Lieutenant Jones. This has been engineered by the builders. The sudden release of the trapped flood water behind the northern dams created a surge that broke the
southern banks and scoured the outflow channels, deepening and widening them. Now much of the lake, I calculate, will drain away. And it will reform in the depression you see to the south, which
extends some way beyond, but which will drain in its turn . . . I have studied the topography. I believe that by the time this manoeuvre is completed, the lake will have been
moved
some
ten kilometres to the south.’

‘ “Manoeuvre”,’ repeated Mardina, cradling the baby. ‘ “Moved”. The way you put that makes it sound as if you believe this was purposeful.’

‘That’s exactly what I believe, Lieutenant Jones. The builders have engineered this; they have deliberately shifted the lake to the south. And once it is there, presumably, they will
replant stem beds, perhaps restock the water with the fish analogues and other creatures . . . They have been aided by that steady uplift to the north, I mean the geological uplift, the magmatic
event that appears to be occurring there. But, yes, it seems clear to me that they have moved this lake.’

‘Why?’

‘I have no answer to that,’ the ColU said. ‘I can only speculate. But there must be a good reason. I suspect we will find out in time.’

Mardina asked, ‘So what does this mean for us?’

‘That’s our only stable supply of water,’ Yuri said. ‘We can’t rely on the rain. We know that. If the lake moves, we have to move with it.’

The ColU looked pained. ‘I have created whole fields of terrestrial topsoil at this site.’

‘So we move the soil as best we can, as much as we can. It’s no use here without water. We’ll have to shift our other stuff too. The house, the buildings – maybe
we’ll rebuild in some modular form, for when we have to break it all down again.’

‘You mean,’ Mardina said slowly, ‘when the builders shift the lake again, some time in the future.’

‘Right.’

‘Why should they do that?’

‘If they’ve done it once, why shouldn’t they do it again?’

‘The ISF imagined we’d be stuck here, in this place, for life,’ Mardina said. ‘Tied to the lake for its water. Instead, the lake’s migrating, and so are
we.’

‘That’s right.’ He grinned. ‘Everything’s changed.’

‘And a door’s opened for you, ice boy. Just as you said it would.’

‘Damn right. Now all we have to do is to step through. And who knows what we’ll find?’

‘ColU,’ Mardina said, ‘what did you say the builder phrase for the lake is?’

‘ “The interface between mother and father which brings life”.’

‘Hmm. And wherever it travels, yes, it
will
bring life. It is like the Dreamtime spirit that created the rivers and the waterholes. It is a
jilla.
’

Yuri nodded. ‘OK. Better name than Puddle anyhow.’

The baby started to cry, cold, tired, hungry. The ColU, moving with an oddly balletic grace despite its bulk, turned carefully, disturbing its fragile cargo as little as possible, and headed
back to the camp.

T
he flight by UEI hulk ship from Earth to Mercury was a high-energy straight-line blast across the solar system, at a constant one-gravity
acceleration. Constant, save for one six–hour interval of microgravity, when the kernel drive was briefly shut down, the systems checked out, and the ship flipped over to begin its
deceleration to the destination.

In this interval, while the drive was inert, Monica Trant invited Stef Kalinski to visit the hulk’s engine room. Led by an ISF crewman, they pulled themselves down a fireman’s pole
that ran the length of the axis of the big, spacious tank that comprised the greater part of the hulk, down towards the engines.

‘Thanks for this,’ Stef said to Trant. ‘You know how it is. Since I graduated I’ve devoted practically my entire life to a study of the kernels. But I’ve only ever
had access to the handful of specimens donated by UEI to the UN moon labs, and even there we’ve never been allowed to run the kind of high-energy experiments—’

‘Like the ones our engineers run down in the engine rooms of hulks like the
Shrapnel
every day,’ Trant said drily. ‘I know. Well, given the strangeness of what they
seem to have found on Mercury, they’ve decided they need theoreticians after all. So fill your boots.’

They reached a security gate set in the base of the hulk, where a crewman held them up to verify their security-scan access to the engine room. Stef, weightless, clung to her pole and peered up
into the great tank of the ship’s hull, brightly lit by fluorescent strips. On this trip the hull was more or less empty – incredibly, the main purpose of this high-velocity
interplanetary flight seemed to be to bring
her
to Mercury – but she could see brackets and shadows in the paintwork where partition floors, loading cranes and other fixtures could
be fitted. Right now ISF crew swarmed in the air, taking the chance to clean out clogged air filters and perform other chores in corners hard to access under gravity.

A hulk like this was regularly used to transport massive cargoes between the planets. Science samples, for instance. A century back, planetologists had crowed about samples returned to Earth
from Mars by robot craft, samples which had been measured in
grams.
Now they brought back rocks that weighed tonnes, and kilometre-long cores of Martian polar ice. They had even run an
experimental ship across interstellar space, to the habitable world that had been detected orbiting Proxima Centauri. And, routinely nowadays, hulks like this were used to transport
hundreds
of colonists to the UN bases on the moon and Mars. Stef thought she could smell the stink of all the people who had travelled in this ship, sweat and urine and baby milk, suffused
into the very fabric of the ship.

Monica Trant saw her looking. ‘Not pretty, is it? But very effective. The
Shrapnel
is one of the more reliable members of UEI’s little interplanetary fleet.’

‘Why
Shrapnel
? I thought the ship’s name was
Princess Aebbe
.’ In the passenger lounges there were little animations of the launch of the ship from its dry
dock at an Earth-moon Lagrange point by the youngest daughter of the North British King, and the royal family’s ‘Fighting Man’ standard was splashed in lurid red and gold all over
the hull, amid UN roundels and UEI logos.

‘So it is. But all these hulks have more familiar names given them by their engineers. We don’t trust the kernels because we don’t understand them. So – the
Mushroom
Cloud
, the
Shrapnel
, the
Pancake
.’

‘Black humour.’

Trant looked at her quizzically. She was in her late thirties now, her hair greying and pulled back, but she looked fit, lean, clearly competent in her world. ‘Black humour, yes. You
don’t spend much time around people, do you? I always remembered that about you, even when we were running Angelia from Yeats with your father. You were a withdrawn little kid, always had
your nose pressed up to some screen or other.’

‘You know kids, do you?’

‘I’ve one of my own. Little Rob. Two years old now. Back home with his father . . .’

‘You didn’t stick around long on the Angelia project.’

Trant seemed cautious. ‘I lasted a few years. Since Angelia went quiet there’s been nothing to do but archiving and recontact attempts. Look, Major—’

‘Call me Stef.’

‘Sure. No offence, I know Angelia was your late father’s pet project, but it was obsolete before it was launched. So I moved to where the action was, the new field of kernel
engineering. As did you, in a way, right? I used contacts I made at the launch of the
I-One.
And now I’m one of UEI’s top internal consultants on kernel engineering.
That’s how life is.’

Stef shrugged. Personal conversations like this, about people’s excuses for their life choices, didn’t interest her much.

‘And you ought to feel honoured,’ Trant said now. ‘These craft hardly ever fly empty, not since their proving flights. They must really want to get you to Mercury, huh?’
She sounded faintly envious.

‘I hope I can make a contribution,’ Stef said neutrally.

At last the crewman got their access approved. He opened the hatch, and they passed out of the hulk’s big internal space, down through a thick bulkhead. They had to cycle through a kind of
airlock, and Stef was aware of various kinds of security scans being run; shimmering lines, laser guides, swept over her.

‘Just routine,’ Trant said.

‘Why’s it necessary? If any sabotage was attempted to the drive, probably the whole ship would be destroyed, saboteur and all. The energies are such that—’

‘I do know,’ Trant said, a little testily. ‘But we carry hundreds of colonists across the solar system, and some of them figure out on the way that they’re not too happy
about becoming colonists after all, whether or not they were given a choice about it. They can get kind of desperate. People don’t always act rationally, Major Kalinski. And then
there’s the Chinese factor.’

‘You can’t be serious.’

‘Well, there you have a major power who’s still excluded from any share of this advanced, and very powerful, technology. If the UEI and ISF
aren’t
riddled with Chinese
spies, if not saboteurs, I’d be surprised. So we take security seriously.’

They were passed through, and dropped down into a rest area, with a lavatory, a couple of bunk beds, a small galley.

And here Sir Michael King was waiting for them, loosely strapped to a couch, sipping coffee through a plastic cup with a nozzle. He was wearing a kind of coverall, deep royal blue, cut to fit
his squat, heavy frame, that simultaneously looked practical and expensive. When Trant and Stef entered, swimming down from the ceiling, he pushed himself out of his chair. ‘Glad to see you
made it down here, Major Kalinski.’

‘Why wouldn’t I, sir?’

‘Most passengers, especially those from Earth, spend most of their time during the accel-decel handover locked in their cabins chucking up.’

‘I’m a veteran of the Earth-moon run. My body’s used to microgravity.’

‘Well, mine isn’t,’ King said. ‘I had to swallow a whole pharmacopeia.’ He grinned, his face pale, sweating. ‘But I wouldn’t miss it for the
world.’

Trant nodded at the ISF crewman who, discreet and unspeaking, had followed them in here. ‘Let’s get on with it.’

The crewman opened another hatch, in the floor. Below, Stef saw, was a kind of carpet, speckled with lights that shone bright in a relative gloom. They followed the crewman down through the
hatch, and spread out.

There were three, four crew already in this wide chamber, in their jet-black ISF uniforms, swimming over the illuminated carpet, carrying slates, making notes and murmuring to each other. The
‘carpet’ was actually another bulkhead that spanned the width of the hulk, Stef saw now, and the lights that sparkled in the floor, more or less uniformly distributed, were a display.
Flux lines swept between the lights, uniting them in a pleasing, swirling geometry – a three-dimensional geometry, Stef saw, as she shifted her head from side to side. The whole was littered
with tiny labels, numbers and English letters; the systems sensed whatever she was looking at, and the labels magnified in her vision.