Yuri said, ‘I’ve been calling them stems.’

Mardina’s sensor unit recorded more images of the patient stems. ‘We knew there was life here, from a smear of evidence of photosynthesis – we could see that even through telescopes back in the solar system. We never did a proper survey, never landed a probe for instance. We just came, and took a chance, for better or worse. Which is kind of characteristic of the space programme, if you look at the history. The Americans, I mean the old US, designed the first lunar landers knowing nothing of the surface they had to land on. The moon might have popped under them, lunar mountains collapsing like meringues, so some feared . . . And anyhow you have to be there. You have to experience a world, directly, physically, to make it real. And I think—’

A bundle of the stems on the shore, like a cage of dried reeds and bamboo shoots, abruptly changed shape, rustling; it rolled along the shore, leaving a textured trail.

‘Wow. Did you see that?’

Yuri said, ‘There are combinations that move. I think there are combinations that have been built around this shore. Made of the stems.’

She looked at him sharply. ‘Built? You mean, by intelligence? Or something like a beaver dam?’

Yuri shrugged. ‘What do I know? I’m not a biologist.’

She just glared at him, as if compelling him to say more.

‘I’ve seen other stuff,’ he said, to deflect any interest in himself. ‘Further out. Big things moving out there, on the plain.’

‘Running?’

‘Not exactly. Moving fast. And flying things.’

‘Birds?’

‘I call them kites. Things like big angular frames. You see them flapping around near the forest.’

She looked that way. ‘You must have sharp eyes. Has anybody else seen this stuff?’

He shrugged. Nobody else seemed to be looking.

Mardina sighed. ‘Maybe we’ll come back with a proper science expedition, when this mad-rush land grab is all over. Show me this observatory of yours.’

From the summit of the Cowpat the Puddle was a flat sheet fringed by clumps of pale stems, and the shuttle was a gaudy bug in the dirt, surrounded by scuffed ground and shabby temporary structures, with the track of its landing a dead-straight scrape that vanished into the distance to the east.

This whole feature, the Cowpat, was maybe half a kilometre across. Exploring, Mardina climbed hillocks and descended into depressions. ‘Curious,’ she said. ‘I’m no geologist. The terrain is sort of sunken, jumbled. But not like a lunar crater; it’s more as if it’s collapsed into some hollow below. There are features like this on Venus. They call them coronas, I think.’

‘You’re going to miss the eclipse,’ Jenny called.

‘What eclipse? OK, show me.’

Yuri had a small optical telescope set up on a stand, pointing up at the star. Behind its eyepiece was a sheet of plastic, pure white, that Jenny was, inexpertly, angling on a heap of rocks, so that the star’s image was projected onto the sheet. There wasn’t much more to the ‘observatory’ than this: a few manual instruments, a sextant, a plumb line, and a slate for Yuri to record his observations. When he wasn’t around he left all this stuff, save the electronics, under the cover of a weighted-down bit of tarpaulin.

Mardina was impressed by the telescope. ‘Where did you get that?’

‘From a theodolite, a bit of surveying gear.’

She frowned. ‘I never heard of an instrument like that that wasn’t electronic.’

‘No. It was specially made for the colony programme. Everything we have is supposed to be old-fashioned, easy to repair, no power sources to run out. No reliance on satellite networks and such, because there isn’t one here. You ought to know that, Lieutenant. It’s your policy.’

She looked embarrassed, but she was fascinated by the image projected onto the plastic sheet. The star’s surface was pocked with huge black scars, and webs of lightning crawled across it. ‘My God. Proxima Centauri. A red dwarf star, just six million kilometres away.’ She glanced up at the star, so its light shone full in her face.

Jenny Amsler laughed nervously. ‘Doesn’t look so red to me.’

‘It’s just an astronomer’s term. The surface is white-hot—’

‘Watch,’ said Yuri. ‘Here it comes.’ He pointed to a brilliant spark near one edge of the illuminated disc on the sheet. ‘Jenny . . .’

She had a watch, and the slate. ‘I’m ready.’

Mardina asked, ‘What are we seeing?’

‘You can’t see much in the sky here, right? Proxima never sets, so you never get a starry sky. But you can see the double star, and one big planet that you can see the disc of—’

‘That’s Prox e. The fifth planet from Proxima. This is the third – a, b, c. That’s a big world up there. Not even the nearest planet in this system.’

‘The planet passes behind the sun. It’s eclipsed. You can see, it’s about to happen now. Jenny . . .’

‘Ready.’

The spark at the edge of the solar disc winked out. ‘Mark!’

‘Got it.’

Mardina laughed, as if pleased.

‘It takes about an hour,’ Yuri said. ‘Then it re-emerges from the other side.’

Mardina sat back on her ankles, thinking. ‘One hour, out of the two hundred or so it takes Prox c to go around its star. Of course. Because Proxima itself spans one two-hundredth of the sky’s arc. But it won’t be quite that, because Prox e is following its own slower orbit . . . Why are you doing this, Eden?’

He shrugged. ‘To get a sense of time.’

She smiled. ‘I see. In the absence of day and night. A clock in the sky.’

Jenny said, with forced eagerness, ‘I wanted to work on this. Clocks and calendars and stuff. I was a jeweller, back in Londres. Well, a jeweller’s assistant, a technician.’

Yuri knew that was true. Maybe one reason she had been clinging to him was that since they had landed she had learned he was British too, though he was from independent North Britain and she was from Angleterre, the southern Euro province. He neither knew nor cared how she had gone from her jewellery store or whatever in Londres, to the sweep that had delivered her to Prox c.

‘I can do fine work,’ she said now to Mardina. ‘Instruments.’

Mardina eyed her with something like pity, Yuri thought. She took the woman’s hands, turned them over. ‘These are going to be farmer’s hands, Amsler. Not much call for “instruments” here. If you want to make calendars it’s going to be like this, what Eden’s doing. Sticks in the ground. Little telescopes.

‘You know, there’s more in the sky if you look, Eden. This system has six planets in all. Two inside the orbit of Prox c, three outside. Three are the size of Mars, or smaller, but there are two super-Earths, including e, up there. There’s a Kuiper belt and so forth further out, but not much. And no gas giants. Red-dwarf systems don’t seem to have enough mass to grow giants. The furthest-out planet is only thirty-some million kilometres from the star. That would be within the orbit of Mercury. You have a whole toy solar system, all within a Mercury orbit. The planetologists call this a “compact system”. Very common in the Galaxy – more so than systems like our own.

‘And then there’s Alpha A and B, the primary stars. They orbit each other every eighty years, and they each have planets of their own. This is an older system than ours, Yuri. The planetary orbits are locked in and stable; this planet, Prox c, doesn’t wobble on its axis the way Earth’s moon does, say. And the inner system has long been cleaned out of comets and asteroids by impacts. Everything that could happen here has happened already, and now everything just kind of ticks along like clockwork. Tell all that to your grandchildren. I bet you could devise a deep-time calendar based on—’

‘Don’t patronise me.’

She sat back, evidently shocked by that sudden jab. ‘I’m crew. You shouldn’t speak to me that way.’

He held out his wrists, ready for the plastic cuffs.