Authors: Stephen Baxter
‘At this point my configuration changes. In the spaces between the stars there are dust and ice grains – this is known as the interstellar medium – it is sparse, but if I were
hit by even a single grain significant damage could be done. Dexter Cole’s craft carried generators to power a mighty magnetic field and laser bank which shattered, electrically charged, and
deflected any threatening grains. I, with much less power than was available to Cole, have a more passive defensive strategy.
‘I am designed to take up a new form. Actually I am made of programmable matter – essentially a form of smart carbon – and I can take any shape I like. I walked on Mercury in
the form of a young woman. Here, on the edge of the Kuiper belt, I am like a tremendous radio-telescope dish. Now I will change again. I will fold down to a needle shape, with a
one-square-centimetre cross section and a length of no less than a kilometre, and a density about that of water. I will be like a javelin, spearing straight at Proxima Centauri. And I myself,
Angelia 5941, will be like a droplet of water lost in the bulk of that javelin. With such a small cross section, you see, the chances of my being damaged by a grain of dust are much reduced. Of
course while I am in this “cruise mode”, without an antenna, I will not be able to communicate with Dr Kalinski.
‘I should say why I identify myself as Angelia 5941.
‘I am not one Angelia, but a
million
. Each of us is a sheet only a few tens or hundreds of atomic diameters thick – each of us virtually a single carbon molecule in the form
of a hundred-metre disc. We were born in a facility at an Earth-moon Lagrange point, a point of gravitational stability in space, a place of dark and cold and quiet; we were peeled, one by one,
from a tremendous mould, given our own identities, and then united.
‘Each of us separately, though each massing no more than a droplet of water vapour in a fog, has capabilities. Each of us has sentience. In a sense my entire structure is a kind of neural
net, and I began learning from the moment I was “born”. Our separate sentiences were merged for a while, for my journey to Mercury and during my time there living in the human world,
and then to receive the microwave acceleration pulse at launch. But our individuality survived this merging, and the de-merging that followed.
‘The ability we have to peel off copies of ourselves will be essential when we arrive at Proxima. I know this much about the later stages of the mission, but little else; the software
updates concerning deceleration and system exploration are to be downloaded into me later, after further refinement during my ten-year cruise.
‘But the facility is to be used during the cruise also, for communication purposes. Some of my multiple selves have been cast away from the main body of the craft, combining to form a
reflecting dish much wider than any of us individually. With this I can pick up messages from home, and send replies. Also my scattered sisters collect the energies of the thin, sparse sunlight
that reaches this remote radius, and use that to power my systems, including comms. Those cast-off sisters sacrificed themselves for this purpose; pushed away by the sunlight they cannot return to
the main body. From a million, we can spare a handful! And I am assured that these disposed-of copies have minimal sentience; they do not suffer in any meaningful sense.
‘You may ask why it is me, Angelia 5941, who addresses you. We discussed this, we Angelias, and ran a lottery based on a random-number programme, and I was selected as spokesperson. It is
an honour I embrace.
‘I will wait for your reply, Dr Kalinski, before assuming my cruise profile. And then, like Dexter Cole before me, I will sleep between the stars until my next scheduled communications
attempt . . .’
‘Is this on? Oh, I see.
‘This is George Kalinski. Good to hear from you, 5941. Your telemetry is coming through fine, and I can see that all your subsystems are functioning as they should. Good. Of course it will
take another six days for this message to crawl back out to you. Monica, what time will it be when it gets there? Afternoon. OK. So, good afternoon from Mercury.
‘You know this is the last time we’ll speak to you from Mercury. Now you’re successfully launched we’re going to up sticks and relocate to a control room back on Earth,
in New Zealand, in fact, in some nice mountainous country with a fine view of Alpha Centauri on a summer night. So the next time you speak to us – when the hell will it be? Anyhow
that’s where we’ll be, so you can think of us there.
‘Michael King offered us a lift back to Earth on his damn kernel-driven hulk ship, but I’d rather walk back.
‘Look – in some ways the most dangerous part of the whole journey, the launch, all that microwave energy concentrated on your delicate structure, is already over. Your chances of
coming to harm during the cruise are minimal. But in other ways the challenge of the mission has only just begun, by which I mean the human challenge.
‘You know that they ran longevity experiments during the Heroic Generation age. Some of the resulting struldbrugs are still alive, even now, in the UN camps. Despite that, we humans still
aren’t too good at running projects that require a long attention span. So we have to find ways to look after you, Angelia, over your decade-long cruise, and the years of exploration that
will follow. I’ve done my best to establish a long-term institution here. I’ve tried to lock in the support staff with contracts and bonus structures, though I have my doubts how well
that will work out. But I will be here, as long as I am able; and after me, I hope, Stef. Your half-sister, you called her! I like that.
‘And, listen to me. Now we have proved that this mission mode is feasible, now we have successfully launched you, I’m looking for funding to send more emissaries after you. After
all, the infrastructure is here now, the power station, the lens. The solar power is free, and the incremental cost of manufacturing another
you
is tiny. It seems crazy not to use all this
again. Enjoy Proxima, my dear. You won’t be alone out there for long, I promise.
‘Be patient with us mere mortals, Angelia, out there among the stars. And sleep tight.’
2170
S
ix months in from their stranding, or twenty-two Per Ardua years later, depending which way you looked at it, the colonists decided to mount an
expedition to the northern forest belt.
Four of them, Yuri, Onizuka, Lemmy and Martha, got themselves ready one morning, with packs on their backs and bottles of filtered water, and their crossbows, the only substantial weapons the
shuttle crew had left them. They checked out the sky before leaving. They were learning how to read Proxima’s complex face for flare weather, as they called it. They figured they would be
safe out in the open for a few hours.
It was around six kilometres to the forest. They set off along a trail they had already been stamping out: a Forest Road that led off at right angles to the Shuttle Trail, the tremendous
straight-line scrape the craft had left running from east to west. They came this way regularly to collect saplings from the forest edge for firewood, but today they were planning to go further.
The land rose, gradually, as they headed north, leaving the lake behind. The ColU speculated that there was some kind of big geological event going on up here, a slow uplift across a whole
province. Maybe. Sometimes Yuri thought he could smell sulphur, sourness.
The weather was overcast, muggy, humid. For such a static world the weather had turned out to be surprisingly changeable, with systems of low or high pressure bubbling up endlessly from the
south. It was warm in this unending season, always like a humid summer’s day in North Britain, from what Yuri remembered of the weather. But the ColU, ever curious in its methodical robot
way, said it had seen traces of cold: frost-shattered rock, gravel beds, even glaciated valleys in the flanks of features like the Cowpat. Evidence that glaciers had come this way in the past, if
not whole ice ages. Somehow this world could deliver up a winter.
Despite the rise, the walk was easy enough. The years of full gravity on the
Ad Astra
had hardened up Yuri’s Mars-softened muscles. On Per Ardua the gravity was actually a shade
less than Earth’s, according to the ColU, who patiently measured such things. The planet’s radius was a tenth less than Earth’s – Per Ardua was smaller than Venus –
but its density was a good bit higher than Earth’s. The ColU speculated that its iron core was more massive, relatively, its mantle of lighter minerals and rocky crust thinner. Nobody
listened; nobody cared.
Yuri thought that patterns of behaviour were emerging. For instance, they’d trekked up this way for firewood before, they’d used the forest, but they’d never explored it. After
six months they still knew barely anything about this world on which they were, it seemed, doomed to spend the rest of their lives. Nothing beyond what they could see within the prison of their
horizon, and the glimpses they’d had from the shuttle’s windows on the way down, glimpses Lemmy was painstakingly assembling into a map of the substellar side of this one-face world.
Nobody cared.
There was no common spirit. The colony, camp, whatever, was still pretty much a shambles, as it had been from when the astronauts had lifted off, taking the discipline they had briefly imposed
with them. Bundles of gear, clothing, food, tools, other stuff, lay around in the dirt where they had been dumped out of the shuttle. Everybody still lived in tents. Even the colony’s two
graves, of Joseph Mullane and Jenny Amsler, were left untended.
Then there was the unending daylight, the changelessness. Lemmy said that humans were evolved from tropical apes. Two million years of adaptation protested against the lack of day and night, and
regular sleep was hard to come by. The ColU said that their sleep cycles were staying in synch with each other, roughly, but were gradually lengthening, away from the Earth norm. Nobody seemed to
care about that, either.
Nobody even listened to the ColU – not even Yuri, even though the ColU seemed to think he was more amenable than the rest, and would try to engage him in conversation, such as about the
astronomical sightings Yuri kept up sporadically with his bits of equipment, and that the ColU supplemented with its own observations, made with its own sensor pods. All this was a distraction for
Yuri, a hobby, something to do to keep him sane. The ColU’s attentions, attracting the mockery of the rest, just embarrassed him.
And every so often some threat or other, a storm, a bad flare, a threatened flood from their tame lake, would bring everybody down even more.
Under it all, of course, was the brute reality of their stranding, a rejection many of them would clearly be struggling to accept whatever world they were living on. They drove each other crazy,
these strangers forced to become lifelong neighbours, with no hope of escape.
The ColU was the exception. It quietly got on with its tasks, slowly processing huge rectangular areas of Arduan dirt into terrestrial soil, and sampling the water and the local life, the stem
creatures and the lichen and the stromatolites and the bugs. It enthused about bugs it dug out of the ground, as deep as it drilled; on Per Ardua as on Earth, it said, life suffused the deep rocks
– there was probably far more biomass down there than on the surface – with complex life just a kind of flourish, a grace note in a symphony of bacterial life.
Its quiet efficiency, its air of plastic cheerfulness, only irritated people even more, it seemed to Yuri.
Anyhow, from this squalid little community of reluctant draftees, no leader had yet emerged. Yuri wasn’t even sure who had decided on taking this walk.
In the early days, Onizuka and John Synge and Harry Thorne had all acted like they were the big men. But Martha Pearson, who had once run a substantial business back on Earth, and Abbey
Brandenstein, an ex-cop and proven killer, were pretty strong characters too.
Mardina Jones had never tried to play the leader, probably wisely. Always a little outside the group, the Lieutenant was a target for insults and mockery as much as sympathy. But Yuri watched
her just soak it all up, and get on with her self-appointed tasks. She no longer wore her crew uniform. In fact she seemed to have shed her astronaut persona, her whole ISF career. She had gone
from a kind of motherly prison guard into a taciturn survivor, in the blink of an eye. Maybe she was reverting to something deeper, older, a core of her life that had been hidden under the layers
above.
And then the pairing-off had begun, and that had made things worse yet. With six men and four women, none of them partners before the landing, there was always going to be trouble. There seemed
to be no gays in the party, which might have made the situation more complicated, or less, though the men joked bleakly about experimenting.
The pair-ups themselves kind of surprised Yuri. Of the men he’d never have tagged Lemmy as a winner, but pretty soon Pearl Hanks had made clear her preference to be with him. Everybody
knew Pearl had once been a hooker, and some of the men, Onizuka, Harry Thorne, still looked at her that way. Maybe she had attached herself to Lemmy precisely because he
didn’t
react
to her like that. And maybe she was calculating on Yuri protecting her, as she might think he protected Lemmy. It was all complicated, a game of human chess.
Martha Pearson, meanwhile, was sleeping with John Synge. That was less of a surprise, a businesswoman from Hawaii with a lawyer from New New York, they were similar types. But maybe that
similarity was why they fought all the time they were together, if they weren’t asleep or screwing.
And Abbey, maybe the strongest woman of all, had surprised everybody by swooping down on Matt Speith, the artist with no art to make, maybe the most useless, skill-light, disoriented person in
the camp. It was obvious who was in control in
that
relationship. Yuri speculated privately that Abbey had picked Matt as a kind of shield, to keep the other men off. But Mardina was more
generous. Maybe she liked his nice soft artist’s hands, she said. Or maybe the ex-cop liked having somebody to protect.