For the rest of their lives.

Ten days until the shuttle left: that was one important time interval in Yuri’s life. The other, told them by the crew, was eight Earth days and eight hours. That was how long the day was on this world, on Prox c, the day and the year, because the world spun around Proxima keeping the same face towards its star – just as the moon kept the same face to the Earth – so that the day was the same length as the year. In fact the stability of Prox c was greater than the moon’s, which wobbled a little as seen from Earth. Not Prox c.

That was why Lemmy had taunted Yuri about a final sunrise. That big old sun was never going to rise, never going to set; it was going to hang in that one place in the sky, for ever. Oh, the weather changed, there could be cloud, and on the second day there was rain, sweeping down from the forest belt to the north. But in terms of the basic architecture of the world every day was the same, the sun defiantly unmoving, hour after hour. And just as there was no dawn, no sunset, there would be no summer, no winter here. Just day after day, identical as coins stamped out of a press. It was as if time didn’t exist here, as if all the ages had been compressed down into one centuries-thick day.

Soon all of them were having trouble sleeping – all the colonists, at least, under their canvas outdoors. The astronauts and the Peacekeepers, save those on guard, slept in the shuttle’s cabin, which was slaved to Earth time.

But Proxima wasn’t the only light in the sky, Yuri noticed. There was a bright double-star system, bright enough to cast shadows: Alpha Centauri A and B, twin suns, the centre of this triple-star system, of which Proxima was really a shabby suburb. There was that one visible planet, that tracked around the sky. And also, for now, there was a starship up there, a spark crawling across the sky. The days were not quite identical, then, the sky not quite featureless. Time passed, even here.

Yuri kept himself to himself. But he found he was becoming curious about this world, Prox c, in a way he’d never been curious about Mars. But then all he’d seen of Mars had been the inside of domes.

He watched the sky, the landscape. He scrounged a telescope from a bit of surveying gear. He even looked at Ad Astra through his little telescope, and was surprised to see that only one of the two hulls that had brought the colonists here was still attached to the wider frame that contained the propulsion units and the interstellar-medium particle shields. One hull was missing, then. He didn’t ask anybody about this; he knew he wouldn’t get an answer.

On the fourth day he set up his own observatory, kind of, on top of a lumpy bit of highland a couple of kilometres west of the shuttle, that they had called the Cowpat.

He saw stuff moving, around the lake, out on the plain, in the forest to the north. Living things, presumably, native to this world. They’d had no briefing from the astronauts on the nature of the life forms here. Mostly because nobody knew.

On the fifth day Jenny Amsler, one of the colonists, followed him out, without any kind of invitation from Yuri, to help him with his gear. He mostly ignored her.

On the seventh day Lieutenant Mardina Jones said she wanted to come too, evidently curious about what he was up to.

To get to the Cowpat they had to head west, skirting the lake to the north from which the fledgling colony was already drawing water through laboriously dug irrigation ditches. They had defined ‘north’ and ‘west’ based on the orbital plane of the planet; given the stillness of the sun the directions felt abstract. The lake water seemed safe enough once filtered, though it was thick with the local life.

They called the lake the Puddle.

Lex McGregor objected to these names, the Cowpat, the Puddle; he wanted more heroic labels. ‘Names to sound down the generations. Lake First Footstep. Mount Terra!’ Or Lake Lex, the colonists joked. They stuck to the Puddle and the Cowpat. This place was evidently a shithole, but it was their shithole. It was prison-thinking, Yuri thought, now applied to a whole new world. He didn’t care. The lake was the lake, it was a thing in itself, it had been here long before humans, and existed in its own right whatever people called it.

Now, on this walk out to the Cowpat, Mardina Jones stared around, as if discovering it all for the first time. She had always been one of the more human of the authority types on the ship, Yuri thought. But even she had barely stepped away from the little campsite that had sprung up around the landed shuttle, had barely looked at this world, into which they were all busy driving tent pegs and scraping latrine trenches. But here she was now, apparently determined to see something of Prox c for herself before she was whisked off back to the sky. Like she was on a business trip cramming in a little tourism between sales meetings. Away from the rest of the crew, she did, however, carry a gun.

By the lake shore, maybe a kilometre from the shuttle, was a formation of what Yuri had decided to call pillows. Mardina slowed to inspect these, fascinated. She had a sensor pack on her shoulder that hummed and whirred as it recorded what she saw. The ‘pillows’ were like heavily eroded rocks, with narrow stems and flat upper surfaces, most no taller than Yuri’s waist. They were irregular lumps, and yet, standing on the muddy shore, they had an odd sense of fitting together, like worn pieces of some thick jigsaw puzzle.

‘Fascinating,’ Mardina said. ‘Life! We knew it was here, of course, but here we are, face to face with it. So to speak.’

Yuri watched her, irritated, as she took her movies to show her buddies back home, in her air-conditioned astronaut’s apartment on an artificial island in the Florida Sea, or wherever. ‘You see these everywhere,’ he said. ‘Doc Poinar took a look at my images and said they were like—’

‘Stromatolites. I know. Bacterial communities, a very old type of formation on Earth. We should take samples. Actually I’ve seen stromatolites back home. There are some survivors near salt lakes in Australia . . . Of course our stromatolites grow in shallow water, with the living layers photosynthesising away at the surface. These are evidently growing on the dry land, transporting nutrients up somehow. More like a tree, maybe.’ She glanced at him. ‘You know I’m from Australia, right? That I’m a pure-blood Aborigine?’

Yuri shrugged. She was the kind of prison warden who wanted to be your buddy. She was going to be gone soon. Where she came from made no difference to him.

Jenny Amsler had always been the kind to keep in with the authority figures, or at least try to. ‘Everybody knows that,’ she said, trying to smile. She had a faintly French accent. Around thirty, she was thin, had been even before the star flight, with a pale, narrow, rather shapeless face. Her smile was obviously forced. Yuri thought she was clinging to him, maybe for protection, and maybe to Mardina too.

Mardina just ignored her. ‘The stromatolite structure might be a universal. Maybe critters like our bacteria must build something like this, on any world, in the water or out of it. She walked a bit further, towards the lake, and glanced down at the mud. ‘Whose footsteps are these?’

Jenny smiled again. ‘That’s Major McGregor. He comes running around the lake every morning. I mean, every ship’s morning.’

‘That’s Lex all right,’ Mardina murmured. ‘Determined to get himself in condition before the long haul home.’ She peered out at the lake, where what looked like reeds protruded from the surface of the water, pale, slim rods. There were bundles of the reeds on the shore too, by the lakeside. Further out there was more evidence of life, drab green patches on the landscape, and the shadowy fringe of the forest to the north. ‘Those reeds are everywhere.’