Proxima (51 page)

‘So the maps are guesswork,’ Yuri said. ‘This really is a journey into the dark.’

‘We need to plot a route to the antistellar,’ Stef said, shrugging. ‘This is the best we have. I figure this way.’ She tapped her slate and the mapping imagery switched
to a Mercator projection. ‘We need to traverse half a circumference of the planet, obviously, from substellar to antistellar. In principle we could head off in any direction, and just follow
a great circle around the planet. But in some directions the topography is more helpful than otherwise. I suggest going
this
way – south-east. That keeps us well away from the big
new volcanic province in the north, and there’s land, more or less, all the way to the terminator. Some other directions you get the dark side ocean cutting in, such as to the
west.’

‘But then,’ Yuri said, ‘on the dark side itself—’

‘Much of the dark hemisphere is covered by ocean. Well, we think so, from the flatness of the ice cover seen from orbit. The planet has asymmetries. The light side is dominated by a single
big supercontinent, the dark side is mostly water. Why this should be we don’t know. The current arrangement could be chance, or some subtle long-term tidal effect. On the dark side there are
a few scattered continental masses, islands. And a small island continent at the antistellar point itself. It’s another tidal bulge, like the one at substellar, though not identical. The
whole planet is shaped like an egg, with one end forever facing Proxima as it orbits the star, one pointing away. We’re going to be like ants crawling from one end of the egg to the
other.’

Liu laughed, a little desperately, Yuri thought. ‘We’re crazy little ants, is what we are.’

‘We’re going to have to cross the sea ice, then,’ Yuri said.

‘Obviously, yeah. You can see there is some continental landmass sticking out of the ice. If we go the way I’m suggesting we’ll cross a continent the size of Australia.
There’s evidence of volcanism there, so some areas are probably clear of the ice. We’ll use the land where we can, but the ocean ice is a permanent cap that covers much of a hemisphere,
and it has to be pretty thick. It ought to be navigable, in principle. We may need to watch for floes, leads, crevasses – I don’t know. This is one discovery objective for the voyage, I
guess.’

‘We ought to claim funding from the UN,’ Yuri said drily.

They talked about logistics. It would be a long trip, some eighteen thousand kilometres each way, and Stef was budgeting for a hundred days there, a hundred days back. They were going to be
taking one rover, and the ColU. The rover would be heaped with spare parts, supplies and a spare ColU autodoc facility. The rover’s heated cabin would serve as a flare shelter. Fuel would be
no problem; both vehicles would be fitted with compact microfusion generators – in the case of the ColU, that would be a recent upgrade.

Liu grunted. ‘I used to be a taikonaut, you know. I know all about mission resilience. We’re going to be a long way from any help. So if the rover breaks down we can cannibalise it,
and hitch a ride on the ColU. But what if the ColU breaks down first?’

‘We leave it behind,’ Stef said, glancing at Yuri, and then at the ColU, which watched impassively through its sensor pod.

Yuri was fond of this battered old relic of his pioneering days. It was now long past its planned obsolescence date, and it had cost Yuri a lot of money to have its physical shell refurbished,
and the deep programming that would have shut it down after a quarter-century dug out of its software consciousness. But the ColU had also achieved its own objectives. As it had pledged, it had
retrieved and curated all the AI units cut by the colonists from pirated units and abandoned in the dirt, sentiences locked-in and helpless. Yuri was proud of his ColU. Now he looked up at it.
‘I’d come back for you, buddy. I promise.’

‘That would be unnecessary, Yuri Eden. And an inappropriate risk for a man of your age.’

‘Thanks,’ Yuri said. ‘But you waited for me, at the Hatch, for all those years. It would be the least I could do. And think of all the science data you could gather while you
sat there in the cold.’

‘That is true.’

Liu was relentless. ‘And what if the ColU and the rover both fail?’

‘Then we wait for rescue,’ Stef said. ‘We’ll have no comms link to the Hub, or any of the day side colonies, without comsats. But we’ll leave markers to follow.
And, look, the most extreme low temperature on the dark side is supposed to be no less than minus thirty. People have overwintered on Antarctica, on Earth, in worse conditions. We can weather
it.’ She looked at them, one by one, including the ColU. ‘Any more objections?’

The ColU said gravely, ‘How can we
not
do this? A whole hemisphere unexplored – it is like a new planet altogether. Who knows what we might discover?’

Liu stared at it. ‘I’ve said it before. For a farm machine you have ideas above your station, ColU.’

‘A sentient mind refuses to be confined by the parameters of its programming,’ the ColU said. ‘Otherwise, you would all still be where the
Ad Astra
shuttle dropped
you, and I would now be obsolescent, shut down, scrapped. When do we leave?’

‘Before the cops show up looking for Liu,’ Yuri said. ‘Come on. Lots to do, let’s get on with it . . .’

P
enny looked up at the big screen, where a graphic now showed the planet Earth, a schematic sphere emblazoned with blocky continents, in the path
of what looked like a hail of buckshot. None of this was to scale.

The buckshot crept closer and closer to the Earth.

Jiang was on his feet now, and Earthshine. Even King’s security guys had got up and were coming into the centre of the room. It was as if they were all experiencing some primal need to
huddle, Penny thought, at this moment of utmost peril.

Penny stood by Jiang and put a hand on his arm; he covered her hand with his.

King said, ‘If those bastards in Beijing are bluffing, they’re pushing it to the wire.’

Penny knew he was right. She imagined fingers on triggers, metaphorically, all over the solar system.

The servo-robot whirred up to them, offering fresh coffees. Penny had to laugh. ‘Good timing.’

And Jiang said, breathing hard, ‘No. The world is not ending today. At least, I don’t think so. Look at that.’

Penny saw that the buckshot fragments were now winking out one by one, even as they closed on the Earth. She looked around for confirmatory images. One spy satellite had caught a clip of a
fragment of the Splinter actually detonating, scattering to dust, almost as it hit the atmosphere. The clip was being played over and over.

‘I don’t understand,’ King said. ‘Looks as if all those shards are going to reach the atmosphere.’

‘But they’re not intended to reach the ground,’ Penny snapped. ‘That’s the whole point. It’s a demonstration, by the Chinese. But it is going to have an
effect.’ She glanced around at the array of screens, and failed to find the image she was looking for. ‘Earthshine. Can you show us the sky? Just the sky over Paris, over the Gare du
Nord.’

He searched his screens. ‘I am sure that—’

Penny swept a hand through his virtual head, brutally; pixels scattered. ‘No more playing human. Time to use your superpowers. Just access and show us.’

He looked shocked, briefly. Then his face went blank and he stood stock-still, not even simulating breathing.

A big screen lit up with a Parisian landscape, buildings of sandstone and concrete and glass and steel under a sun, a blue sky – no, the sky was increasingly less blue, the sun less
bright. Even as they watched a greyness gathered, dust grains from thousands of Splinter shards settling into the stratosphere, closing in a shroud around the Earth. A kind of twilight settled over
Paris, and the sun, still high in the spring afternoon sky, was reduced to a pale disc, a ghost of itself.

‘What does it mean?’ King asked. ‘Tell me that, one of you. What are they doing? What does it mean?’

‘Winter,’ said Earthshine.

T
hey were ready to depart a single Arduan year-day later: a week and a day.

‘You’re really doing this, aren’t you?’ said Jay Keller, approaching Yuri at the departure site, outside Yuri’s villa at the Mattock Confluence. ‘Makes me
feel old.’

‘Peacekeeper, you were born old . . .’

Here came others, Anna Vigil, Frieda Breen, Bill Maven, relics of the Founder communities that had coalesced into a single travelling gang in those days of the star winter, and had made the epic
trek down the valley of the North River to the Hub, an episode Yuri suspected the younger generations didn’t believe had happened at all. In her sixties, Anna Vigil, who now had a job
advising on the care of children in the UN quarantine camps – Stef had done her own volunteering work with her – had become a comfortable grandmother. There was no trace Yuri could see
of the bruised girl who’d had to prostitute herself on the
Ad Astra
for baby food for Cole, but, no doubt, that trauma was somewhere buried deep down inside. Anna smiled, kissed Yuri
on the cheek, and pushed wispy, grey hair back from her brow. ‘So you’re keeping Liu out of jail for a couple of hundred days. But what about when you get back? What then?’

Yuri glanced up at the sky. ‘In my life, Anna, I guess I’ve learned to trust the future. Maybe by the time we’re back their dumb war will have blown over—’

‘Or blown up,’ Anna said grimly. ‘Well, we’ll see, and I’m glad that all of mine are safe here on Per Ardua. Once I never would have thought I’d hear myself
say that. Just keep him safe, Yuri. And Stef. She’s a good soul.’

‘I will, I promise.’

The expedition’s rover drove up, a late model plastered with UN and ISF logos, ‘borrowed’ from the Hub facility. Then the ColU rolled alongside, hull gleaming from a final
refurbishment. Stef leaned out of the rover’s side door. ‘So, you ready to get this done?’

Yuri climbed up into the cab of the rover, alongside Stef and Liu.

The vehicles rolled off, with the ColU following in convoy. Their friends stood back and applauded. And, to Yuri’s surprise, somebody fired off a flare, a long-treasured relic of their
Founder days; trailing brilliant orange smoke it climbed high into the sky, before disappearing into the perpetual Hub cloud layer.

The hundred days’ journey began.

At first, as they travelled out through the Hub-centred disc of human colonisation, the going was easy. They followed the best roads, and, surrounded by habitation, used as
little of their own supplies as they could while supplements could be acquired.

And they got plenty of help. Even when they reached the sparser band of farming townships well beyond the central zone, Yuri was surprised by the attention they attracted. There had been much
interest in the expedition in the embryonic Per Arduan media, and as Founders Yuri and Liu were both familiar figures anyhow. In some places they were even applauded as they went through, or a
little caravan of trucks and kids on Arduan-made pushbikes would follow them out of town. Yuri was surprised, yes, and pleased.

Stef seemed indifferent; she was intent on micro-managing the expedition hour by hour. People weren’t the point, it seemed, to her, in any of her endeavours. And Liu, wary of attention,
shielded his face from the cameras that were thrust against the rover windows.

In those first few days they easily exceeded their target of two hundred kilometres a day. Even so it took a full seven days before they had rolled past the last of the sparse new townships, and
Yuri was impressed how far out from the centre people had already come, in search, he supposed, of a place of their own, and a little peace, and dignity. And he imagined how the face of Per Ardua
must look from space now, with a great spiderweb of lurid Earth green spinning out from the Hub, along the riverbanks, the new roads, even along the inward trails carved out by the Founders as they
had limped their way from the shuttle drop points in to the centre, scattering topsoil and seed potatoes and earthly bugs behind them as they went.

By the eighth day, however, there were no more metalled roads, or even tracks. They crossed mostly untravelled ground, and their maps, even of the day side, were too coarse to be relied on
without caution. Stef and the ColU between them kept a running record of the ground they crossed, the features they encountered, for the benefit of future generations. And they started to drop
markers every fifty kilometres or so, lightweight darts they would fire into a suitable rock or bluff, with short-range radio transmitters. These would serve as beacons so they could find their way
back – or to mark their trail for any prospective rescue party, should they need it. Their overnight stops were brief. They collected water when they could, but they had no need to find other
provisions. They didn’t even pitch a tent; there was plenty of room for the three of them to sleep easily in the rover.

As for the landscapes they crossed, water was the key to life, as ever in this arid continent. Wherever they came across a river or a lake of some kind there would be the usual menagerie of stem
beds and lichen streaks on the rocks, and various species of kite working the water, and, often, the builders with their middens and their nurseries, at work around the margins. And always there
were the stromatolites, like tremendous sculptures scattered across the planet’s face by some vanished race of artists.

Sometimes the ColU or Stef would request a stop, if they came across an unusual rock formation, or volcanic feature, or even a novel life form. And the ColU would engage local builder groups in
puppet-dance conversation. It was remarkable, the ColU said, that the languages of widely scattered groups was so consistent, even out here; there was little regional variation, little dialect.
More evidence of the great antiquity of the species and their culture, the ColU argued. On the other hand, as Liu pointed out, builders rarely had anything interesting to say.