Proxima (41 page)

‘Who by?’

‘The builders.’

And Yuri saw that the nine builders were already making their way towards the hatch cover, and their engraved beds. They moved in the usual builder way, spinning and clattering, like eerie
stringless puppets, but their motions were purposeful, even coordinated, as if each one seemed to know which of the shallow cuttings to pick. Quietly, the nine of them settled into the engraved
slots. Which, as Yuri saw, as Beth had first noticed, fit them perfectly.

The ground under their feet shuddered, as if some vast engine had been woken.

And puffs of dirt rose up from the circular seam around the hatch.

M
ardina grabbed Beth and Yuri by the hand and pulled them away. ‘Back,’ she said. ‘You too, ColU.’ She ignored Tollemache,
but Yuri saw that the Peacekeeper was stepping back too, keeping his sensor pack trained on the hatch.

And then, with a deeper shudder in the earth, the hatch lifted. It tipped up, as if it was hinged at a point to Yuri’s left, opening like a lid, slow, ponderous. The builders, evidently
living keys in the hatch’s multiple lock, stayed motionless, held in position somehow so they did not fall, even as the hatch approached the vertical. The hatch’s position obscured
Yuri’s view of whatever lay beneath the lid, but he saw that light poured out, a pale, pearly glow that underlit the branches of the nearby trees. And he felt a gush of cooler air, coming
from beneath the hatch.

Somewhere a kite took off, startled.

When the hatch was vertical, it stopped moving. It was a tremendous, evidently massive disc, resting on its edge, invisibly hinged.

Tollemache, his recorder pack held before him like a weapon, was the first to walk forward. The brilliant light from the ground underlit his jowly face. ‘Holy shit,’ he said.
‘You’d better come and see this. Step carefully now.’

The rest walked around the open lid. Beth asked, ‘Carefully in case of what?’

‘In case you fall in.’

Somehow it was no surprise at all for Yuri to discover that beneath the opened hatch was a pit, a simple cylinder with plain walls and a flat floor, perhaps four metres deep. The light came from
no particular source; rather the walls and floor all glowed with that grey-white light. One part of the wall was broken by what was evidently another hatch, a fine circular seam, with a set of
groove-locks to hold just three builders this time. On the wall opposite that was some kind of adornment, what looked like a tapestry made out of stem-bark cloth.

And it didn’t surprise him either that three of the builders now hopped out of their grooves on the hatch and swarmed down into the pit, clinging somehow to the sheer walls. Once down they
began to spin and turn on the floor, joyously.

The ColU cautiously extended its sensor pack. The four humans peered down, their faces lit from below.

‘It’s real, then,’ Mardina said. ‘I mean, it’s a real hole in the ground, not some kind of visual trick. Given that the builders have climbed down inside
it.’

‘Impossible,’ said the ColU flatly. ‘My geophysical results were conclusive. There is no hole here. There cannot be.’

‘Yet here it is,’ Yuri said.

‘Maybe I didn’t stamp hard enough,’ Beth said mischievously.

‘No, it wasn’t that. My analysis—’

‘I’m teasing you!’

Yuri said, ‘We’ll have trouble climbing back up from that.’

‘I got a ladder in the rover.’ Tollemache went to fetch it.

‘Hold on,’ Mardina said. ‘Just hold on.
Climbing back up?
Are you seriously intending to climb down there? Into that impossible hole?’

Beth looked at her mother. ‘Sure. What else?’

‘It should be safe enough,’ the ColU said.

Mardina turned on it. ‘What?
What?
Are you serious? How can you possibly say that?’

The ColU stayed calm. ‘Evidently we are dealing with some distortion of space and time. There may be some kind of machinery in the mouth of the pit – exotic matter of some kind,
perhaps, or a tremendous gravitational engine. But the builders passed safely through the opening. If there are any hazards, tidal effects perhaps, they are evidently gentle
enough—’

‘Give me that ladder.’ Beth took it from Tollemache and dropped it into the hole. It passed through the hatch opening as easily as the builders had, Yuri noticed. Then she began to
clamber down.

Tollemache watched her admiringly. He murmured to Yuri, ‘I will never know how something as piss-poor as you, ice boy, produced something as lush as
that
.’

‘Fuck you,’ Mardina said simply, her voice taut with anxiety.

On the pit floor, Beth stepped back from the ladder, looked up, spread her arms, turned around. The builders spun around her, their stem limbs making soft scraping noises on the sheer surfaces.
She called, ‘Look at me. Safe as I ever was. Are you coming down, or not?’

Mardina remained cautious. She made her daughter climb back out first, just to ensure that it was possible, that they weren’t dealing with some kind of one-way trap.

Then Tollemache was the first to follow Beth back into the hole. ‘Me next. I’m not missing out on
this
.’ He made sure his camera pack followed his own progress down
the ladder. ‘Just like Dexter Cole. One small step for a man, like he said. Or was that Cao Xi on Mars?’

Beth blew a raspberry into his camera.

Mardina and Yuri exchanged glances. ‘I’ll go,’ said Yuri. ‘You wait.’

‘No way. I’m not letting Beth out of reach.’

‘Well, I’m not letting the two of you go anywhere without me.’

‘We can’t both go. Somebody ought to stay up top, in case—’

The ColU said gravely, ‘I can call for help if there is trouble. I can even block the lid if it descends, perhaps. This is a human adventure, Lieutenant Jones, Yuri Eden. Perhaps in some
ways it is
why
humans have come to this world.’

Mardina frowned. ‘What does that mean? Oh, the hell with it.’ She went down the ladder.

Yuri patted the ColU’s battered hull. ‘See you later, buddy.’

As he climbed down the ladder in his turn, he felt nothing as he entered the pit, passing from the world of the real into the realm of the impossible. No tugging, no tide effects, no shift of
perception.

At the bottom, he was just in some smooth-walled hole in the ground, with the three others. They looked at each other, then stared around. There was plenty of room for them all, and the
spinning, darting builders. Up above Yuri saw the cloudy sky of Per Ardua’s substellar point, with a fringe of foliage, and the ColU’s sensor pod held out over them all, quietly
watching, recording.

Mardina passed her hands over the wall surface. The glowing light shadowed the bones within the flesh. ‘It feels slick, frictionless.’

Beth was inspecting the tapestry on the wall. ‘This looks like it’s stuck on with stem marrow.’

Yuri, Mardina and Beth stood together before the object. Maybe a half-metre square, it was made of some kind of fine-woven stem-bark cloth held open by a frame of four neat stems, which looked
the right size once to have been builder limbs. It bore an image of a disc, washes of brown and blue-grey, hanging before a watery blue sky, all marked in some kind of pigment. If you looked more
closely there was a great deal of detail, a furry fringe at the perimeter of the circle, a dense grey navel at the very centre, and fine blue threads that crisscrossed the disc, linking at dense
nodes. The threads reminded Yuri of a chart of great-circle airline routes.

‘It is a map, isn’t it?’ Beth asked. ‘Just as it looks.’

Yuri shrugged. ‘What else can it be?’

‘A map of the whole world,’ Mardina said, wondering. ‘Just like we’d draw. The world as seen from space, from Proxima. There’s the substellar point at the centre.
There’s the fringe forest. Look at that big bay cutting into the main continent – in the west? Builders made this.’

Yuri hesitated. ‘I’ve never seen a builder make a map. But they know their way around the landscape, we know that.’

Beth seemed defensive of the builders. ‘The ColU seems to think they built this whole place.’

‘Hmm,’ Mardina said. ‘But this map’s a lot cruder. And it’s just stuck on the wall.’

Yuri said, ‘So the builders once made high-tech installations, like this, with radioactivity and heavy elements, and other shit. Then, later, all they could make was a map to stick on the
wall. And
now
all they can do is spin around keeping the mud off – if we let them.’

Beth looked troubled. ‘What does it all mean, Dad?’

‘Damned if I know, sweetie.’

‘I wonder how old it is,’ Mardina said. ‘The map. Maybe we could tell if it’s drawn accurately enough, from continental drift, or something.’

‘That takes millions of years to make a difference. This can’t be
that
old . . . can it?’

Mardina shrugged. ‘All the ColU could find of some kind of advanced industrial installation outside was a few scrapings of polluted dirt. It would take a fusion plant, say, a
long
time to break down that far.’

Beth traced the mesh of lines that overlaid the map of the world. ‘What are these?’

‘They look like canals,’ Yuri said. ‘They make Per Ardua look like Mars was supposed to be.’

Neither of them knew what he was talking about. Before their time.

‘The builders don’t do canals,’ Mardina said.

‘Not that we’ve seen. But they do a lot of water management. They move lakes.’

‘Nothing on this scale. Why, some of these canals cross the heart of the continent – they have to be channelled through bedrock. If they
had
ever existed, they’d leave
a trace, even if ice ages had come and gone across the face of this world. In the
Ad Astra
, we did make some surveys from orbit. We’d have seen canals. And on the ground,
we
walked a long way. We’d have noticed the things, we’d have had to cross them.’

‘Then the map’s wrong.’

‘Or maybe the map’s right,’ said Beth. ‘And the world is wrong.’

Yuri stared at her. ‘That makes no sense. Does it?’

‘There’s something else you’re missing,’ Tollemache called.

They looked over. The three builders had shimmied up the frictionless walls and were inserting themselves into the three sets of grooved ‘key’ beds in the hatch in the wall.

‘The second hatch,’ Yuri said. ‘Shit. I forgot. And these builders are about to open it. Here’s another of those choice points. Do we go on, or go back?’

Mardina said tensely, ‘I was trained up as an astronaut. And one thing that was driven home to us was that
you don’t go opening hatches
just because they’re
there.’

‘Well, we’re not in space, Mom,’ Beth said.

The three builders were settling into their positions.

‘Last chance to run,’ Tollemache said.

None of them moved. The decision made itself. Mardina grabbed Yuri’s and Beth’s hands. Tollemache seemed to brace himself.

With a soft sigh, the hatch in the wall swung away, taking the spread-eagled builders with it.

T
he chamber beyond the wall hatch was almost an anticlimax. It seemed to be a copy of the room they were leaving, another cylinder a few metres
across, though with a closed roof just as seamlessly joined to the walls as the floor, and similarly glowing with a sourceless mother-of-pearl light. But there was yet another hatch on the far side
of the room, once again engraved with builder-body lock grooves.

The three builders leapt through the second hatch and spun around the floor, joyful once more, as if glad to be back here.

The humans walked through, one by one, led by Beth. Mardina brought up the rear. Yuri looked at his group. Beth was full of wonder. Tollemache, heavy in his ice coat in a room that seemed
distinctly cooler than the world outside, seemed greedy for discovery. Mardina remained the most cautious, yet she had come through with the rest.

Yuri grabbed her hand. ‘It’s OK.’

‘Is it?’

‘We’re all together.’

‘It’s just my training, I guess. I keep expecting something to happen—’

‘Mom! The door!’

Yuri turned, too late, to see the hatch behind them swing closed, sealing itself neatly.

‘Like that,’ Mardina said angrily. ‘I keep expecting something like
that
to happen.’

Yuri’s first reaction, oddly, was to think of the ColU, suddenly shut off.

‘So we’re stuck,’ Tollemache said. ‘We’re fucking stuck.’

‘Don’t swear at me, you ass,’ Mardina said. ‘You could have stayed out there. You could have blocked the hatch.’

‘What with? Your husband’s head?’

‘Well, he’s not my husband. Nice idea however . . .’

Things started happening quickly. The builders had scuttled over to the hatch in the far wall, and were already settling into place in their grooves.

And Beth went back to the previous hatch and ran her hands over its surface. ‘Mom. Dad.
Stop arguing.
You’re missing it again.’

‘What?’ Yuri snapped.

‘What’s important. Look at these.’

She had found indentations on the inner surface of the closed hatch – not builder profiles this time, but the imprints of human hands, three sets of them.

‘I will swear,’ Tollemache said heavily, ‘on your mother’s grave, ice boy, that those shapes were not there a minute ago.’

Yuri glanced across at the far door where the builders were almost settled in place. ‘But their meaning is obvious, isn’t it?’

‘We do have a way back,’ Mardina said.

‘Yeah. Look, we have a choice. We can go back – if this door works as it looks like it will. Or—’

‘We go on,’ Beth said, grinning. ‘Come on. There’s no real choice, is there?’

Once again they waited until it was too late; once again the choice made itself. The builders settled into their slots, and the second wall hatch swung back, just like the first.