Proxima (31 page)

She must mean the hollow that now held the
jilla
lake.

She looked at him, shrewd, analytical. ‘You don’t know this area well.’

‘No. We’re on the move.’

She picked that apart. ‘
We
. Who, how many? How heavily armed?
On the move
. From where, to where?’ She grinned. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll be sharing soon
enough. You know, ice boy, of everybody in that dumb hulk I never picked you out as one of the survivors, here in the Bowl.’

The Bowl?
The air ahead was misty; as they walked he thought he smelled water, but his view was blocked by a low rise, worn hills. ‘Why not me?’

‘Because, back in Eden, you came out of that cryo tank like you’d been dropped from the sky. You never fitted in, even on Mars. You didn’t make any contacts, you didn’t
have any networks. You didn’t even have a way to pay off the Peacekeepers. We noticed you, though. The ice boy, right? Your name is Yuri. What the hell kind of a name is that?’

‘Not my name.’

‘Then why are you called it?’

‘Some joker called me that when they woke me up, on Mars. It’s the name of an astronaut. Or a cosmonaut. The first one, I think.’

She shrugged. ‘Never heard of him. So what’s your real name?’

He looked away.

‘You’ve put aside your lousy past, is that it? What kind of accent is that, by the way, Aussie?’

‘North British. I grew up in Manchester, at the border with Angleterre, the Euro province.’

‘You sound Australian to me.’

‘
You
all sound sort of Hispanic to me.’

‘How long were you frozen, a hundred years?’

‘Nearer eighty.’

‘Were you one of the Heroic Generation? What did it feel like to be a Waster?’

‘We weren’t called those names then. I was too young anyhow.’

She grunted. ‘Surprised they didn’t call you as a witness in the trials. But you escaped it all, didn’t you? You in your freezer tray.’

He was reluctant to answer, but it was hard to turn away from her iron gaze. The whole conversation, suddenly thrust upon him, was bizarre, like his deepest past suddenly pushing up out of the
Arduan ground. ‘It wasn’t my choice. It was an experiment. There were too many of us, my generation. So they tried freezing us in these big honeycomb banks, under the ground, in
Antarctica. We’d have less of a footprint that way.’

‘Your parents got rid of you. That’s what happened. Whereas now they get rid of us from Earth to Mars. Or even further, right? I suppose it was cheaper to ship
you
out to
Mars still frozen than to deal with you any other way. Well, on behalf of the future, I hope you enjoyed your stay on Mars, my friend. The butthole of the solar system.’

He glared at her, defiant. ‘If it’s so bad, why were you there?’

She shrugged. ‘We were there, the UN was there, because the Chinese were there. We can’t let them have Mars all to themselves, can we? And the UN has these big ships now, the hulks,
big powerful engines. Nothing like the steam-engine put-puts they had in your day, I bet. Now they can afford to send people to Mars who don’t even want to go. Even to the stars! That’s
progress for you.’ She laughed and spat. ‘Funny thing, life. You never know what it’s going to throw at you next.’

He didn’t like her dismissive tone. ‘So how did you survive here?’

‘See for yourself.’

They rounded the low hills, the view opened up, and Yuri saw
a river
, a ribbon of blue-black water flowing across the flat, arid landscape. It was an astonishing sight, after all these
years stuck by the
jilla
lake. The bank was lined by the usual beds of stems in their marshes, but he saw no signs of builders or their works, at this first glance.

And there were people here. People and their stuff. Some kind of tepees, frames hung with cloth, smoke from fires rising reluctantly in the still air. What looked like a cut-down ColU, without
the dome and manipulator arms. And the people: women and kids gathered around a hearth, a handful of men further away, clustered around another, smaller fire. Like Delga, they all wore what looked
like cut-up ship’s-issue clothing, even the little kids. Yuri recognised none of the adults, at first glance.

When Yuri was spotted with Delga, some of the women got to their feet and reached for weapons. Yuri could see ISF-issue crossbows, what looked like home-made spears. Delga held up her good arm
in a signifier that it was OK, Yuri was no threat. But the women watched and waited, intent. The men by their fire didn’t bother to rise; they just looked on apathetically.

They walked forward, Yuri wary.

‘Look north,’ Delga said. ‘That patch of green? Potatoes, our latest crop. Ready for harvesting soon and we’ll be out of here. And, further north, see?’

He saw more smoke, a dirty scar on the landscape, figures moving, dimly visible, another couple of ColUs perhaps. ‘More people?’

‘Yep. Our difficult neighbours. Klein.’

‘Gustave Klein? From the hulk? The big man?’

‘
He
survived. Well, you’d expect him to. We deal with him. No choice, Yuri. Planet’s big, but humanity’s small here.’

They were approaching the central group now, the women, the big fire. He counted quickly: six women together, a bunch of kids, five men in the other group. The women were being cautious of him,
he saw, some of them shepherding the children out of the way, others drawing up in a loose line with their weapons. They were all tattooed, more or less as Delga was – even the older
children, some of whom looked as old as ten years maybe, presumably conceived not long after the landings. Yuri made sure he kept his hands open and visible.

Delga noticed this. ‘I’m not going to tell them you’re no threat. For one thing I’m not a leader here, and they wouldn’t listen to me. Well, we don’t have a
leader, haven’t felt we needed one since we put down Hugo Judd. For another I don’t trust you. I mean, you’re obviously lying, right? About your people, where they are.
You’re not a good liar, ice boy. Maybe your facial muscles never thawed out from that cryo tank.’

‘Yuri?’ One of the armed women broke from the line, and walked forward cautiously.

‘Anna, right? Anna Vigil.’ He barely recognised her under the tattoo on her face, behind the spear she wielded easily, as if she’d done a lot of practice. Yet he was relieved
to see her.

‘God, after all these years – I just assumed you were dead. For sure I never thought I’d see you again. Cole!’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Cole, come here . .
.’ One of the children came forward reluctantly, a boy, skinny, wide-eyed, maybe fourteen years old, but already taller than his mother. ‘You’ll remember Cole from the
ship.’

The boy stared suspiciously. Yuri realised how rare it must be for kids like this to meet strangers, how wary they must be. He and Mardina would have to manage Beth through this process, when
the time came.

The boy soon backed away and ran off to join the other kids, who were engaged in some game of running and capturing that must have been broken off when Yuri came wandering in from the plain; now
the game was proving more interesting than the stranger, and they returned to it. A couple of them, meanwhile, were throwing stones at a group of builders by the riverbank. Yuri guessed this group
hadn’t taken the time to watch the builders that he had. The builders swivelled and scuttled to get away.

Anna said, ‘You and that buddy of yours, you used to help me – Lemmy?’

‘Lemmy Pink.’

‘Did he land with you?’

‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘He didn’t make it.’

She nodded, as if she was used to news like that. ‘It’s OK,’ Anna said now to the group. ‘I know this guy. He used to help me out on the ship. Got me supplies for the
baby.’

The rest of the women, none of whom Yuri recognised, backed off, lowering their weapons, but they kept their eyes on him. The other group, the oddly excluded men around their own fire, huddled
and muttered, glancing over at him.

‘This way, ice boy.’ Delga led Yuri towards the women’s fire. They had seats set out here in the open air, some of them remnants of ship’s supplies, others improvised
from storage drums and crates. All the equipment here, the tents, the furniture and tools, looked mobile to Yuri, easily packed up. They were a people used to moving, as indeed he and Mardina and
Beth had become.

‘Sit,’ snapped Delga. ‘Talk. Keep your hands where we can see them.’

Yuri obeyed. Anna, smiling, sat on one side of him, Delga on the other.

One of the other women, weaponless, approached Yuri. ‘Yuri, right? My name’s Dorothy Wynn. I’m on hearth duty today. You want something to eat, some tea?’ Aged about
forty, her greying blonde hair pulled back from a handsome face tattooed like the rest, she had what Yuri, in his own time, would have labelled a brisk US east coast accent.

‘Tea?’

She filled a metal mug from a pan on the fire. ‘Brewed from nettles, Earth nettles I mean. They grow fast here, in compost. Surprisingly useful.’

‘Our ColU didn’t bring along any nettles. I mean—’

She shrugged and sat down. ‘They seem to have had variant programming. I guess they were trying out different possibilities, the mission designers, to see what worked and what
didn’t.’

Delga grinned blackly. ‘And see who died and who didn’t.’

Dorothy Wynn said, ‘Yuri, Delga is one of our more morbid personalities.’

Delga said, mimicking her badly, ‘While Dorothy is one of our more
sane
personalities. Or she thinks she is. Surprising you ended up down in the Bowl with the rest of us, in that
case, isn’t it?’

Wynn seemed unfazed. ‘Oh, ignore her. Yuri, I was a corporate accountant, working for one of the big reclamation companies in New New York. My first crime was to siphon off a little of my
employer’s wealth for – well, let’s call it an indulgence. My second crime was to get caught. Unforgivably clumsy. And so I ended up here. You know, Yuri, I never expected to meet
you. But I remember the chatter about you on the
Ad Astra.
The man from the past. How fascinating. More tea?’

‘No, I’m fine.’ Yuri, stuck alone with Mardina for all these years, felt bewildered, almost shy. He was unused to this kind of complicated interplay between personalities. And
he became aware of scrutiny from the men, sitting a way apart. One of them was muttering, staring, pointing.
‘Fantôme . . . il est un fantôme . .
.
’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘That you’re a ghost,’ Anna said. ‘His name’s Roland. French Canadian, and he reverts to French when he gets scared.’

‘Why a ghost? You have met other groups before, right? Like Klein’s over there.’

‘Yes,’ Delga said. ‘But you just came wandering out of nowhere, alone, ice boy. Look at what you’re wearing.’ She fingered his leggings, his tunic of woven stem
bark. ‘Like you’ve risen up out of the Bowl dirt.’

‘There are stories about ghosts,’ Anna said. ‘Well, one ghost. Of Dexter Cole, you know? The first pioneer who came out here alone . . .’

‘Who you named your kid for.’

‘They say he haunts this world. Maybe he lives on, in the unending night of the far side. That kind of thing.’

Strange, Yuri thought, that his own group had come up with much the same story.

Dorothy snorted. ‘What a crock. If you ask me Gustave Klein just made it all up to keep his boys in check.’

Yuri looked around at their faces: Anna puzzled but friendly, Delga cynical, Dorothy competent but cautious, the French guy Roland wide-eyed.

Anna asked, ‘Yuri? Are you OK?’

‘To be honest I’m feeling kind of bewildered. Turned around.’

‘Maybe we should put him with the men,’ Dorothy said, and they all laughed.

Anna patted his arm. ‘Look, Yuri. We had some trouble. We were dropped down here, just as you were, I guess. The shuttle landed some way to the north. And after it took off again, after
all those speeches by the astronauts —’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘With the men,’ Dorothy said with some disgust. ‘Some of them tried to take charge. Others tried to lay claim to us.’ She eyed him. ‘I’m betting it was the
same with your group.’

‘It got a bit rough,’ he admitted neutrally.

‘We had to put one of them down,’ Dorothy said. ‘Two more killed each other, but one of us got caught in the crossfire, so to speak. And so – here we are, the
survivors.’

Delga was watching Yuri’s reaction. ‘What are you making of all this, ice boy?
Us and them
. We make the decisions here, the women. The men – well, we need them to make
babies. Other than that they do what we tell them.’

Dorothy laughed. ‘That’s pretty much true. Yuri, you might know something about this – I think we’ve got a social structure here like the elephants in the wild. Those old
animals, you know? I once took a virtual safari, a corporate team-building thing. I remember the guide saying how a core of females used to be at the heart of elephant society. And the males formed
bachelor herds, where they fought the whole time, competing for a chance to mate. In the same way, the men are on the periphery, really.’

Yuri shrugged, irritated. He thought he’d left all this stuff behind, years ago, people making dumb guesses about the age he’d come from. ‘The only elephant I ever saw was a
gen-enged resurrected mammoth in a zoo.’

Delga was watching him, having fun in her manipulative, intrusive way, he realised. ‘Poor little mammoth, eh? Just like you, out of his time. Poor little ice boy.’

The children broke out of their circle of play and ran, laughing, down to the river. The water was flowing north, Yuri noticed now, away from the substellar zone to the south, towards the
terminator to the north.

‘So you had kids,’ he said. ‘Just as Major McGregor ordered you to.’

Delga laughed. ‘You mean, all that Heinrich Himmler Adam-and-Eve crap? We didn’t take any notice of that bullshit. We just had kids. Even me, Earthman. See if you can spot my little
Freddie. We keep our men like stud bulls. Want to join them, Yuri? Your last-century genes would enrich the pool—’

‘Leave him alone,’ Anna snapped. ‘It’s not like that, Yuri, she’s exaggerating.’