‘I feel . . .’

The castaways had no mind, she had been told. They were ants, their purpose only to serve the community. They could not feel, they could not long. They could not dream!

She could not dream.

But she did dream. Just like the castaways.

‘I feel very far from home. I hope Dr Kalinski is keeping his spirits up. I calculate that this message will reach you on the fifteenth birthday of Stef Kalinski. Please give her my regards. It is to my regret that she chose not to communicate with me after those first few years. I would welcome her company . . .’

Now that struggling castaway found a full voice, and called to her sisters. ‘Let me back! Oh, let me back!’

CHAPTER 19

2171

Yuri and John Synge were out in the Puddle, in their plastic waders, nearly up to their waists in tepid, mildly salty water. The sky was overcast, with only a faintly brighter glow to betray the position of Proxima.

They were raking in seaweed.

It was not a native but a genetically modified laver, an immigrant from Earth. Eighteen months in from their stranding – and a year after the slayings – this seaweed was by far the most successful terrestrial colonist on Per Ardua. It had a tweaked photosynthetic mechanism to enable it to prosper under Proxima’s infrared-rich light: its Earth green was streaked with black. And it had been gen-enged for an aggressive stance towards the native life, breaking it down to acquire basic nutrients for itself.

The point of it was that the colonists could eat the seaweed almost as soon as they pulled it out of the lake. You could rinse it, wash it, boil it down to a mush that would keep for weeks; you could eat it cold, or boil it up or fry it. On Earth this was a very ancient food source, the ColU had said, in its patient, schoolmasterish synthetic voice. And it was a triumph of human ingenuity to have brought this useful organism all the way to Prox: a first stage in the gentle terraforming this world would need to make it fully habitable for mankind. Yuri thought there was a whiff of the Heroic Generation about all this, of his own era that was now so roundly condemned. Hypocrisy. He kept that thought to himself. Mostly the colonists chucked the seaweed into the ColU’s iron cow, to synthesise burgers.

Anyhow, from here, a few metres from the lake shore, Yuri could see how the laver’s more brilliant green was already spreading aggressively, pushing aside the native life. Take me to your leader, Yuri thought.

On the bank, too, the local organisms had been disturbed by the activities of mankind. Yuri and John had dumped their stuff, their boots and jackets and waterproof sacks for carrying the laver, a metre or so back from the water line, and they had crushed a few of the ubiquitous stems in doing so. Now three of the complex little entities they had come to call ‘builders’ were approaching their heap of equipment, as if curious.

Maybe a metre tall, the builders seemed to be the most common of the stem-based ‘animals’ on Per Ardua. Like the rest of the life forms here, the builders were structured to the usual tripod plan around a core of densely meshed stems, and were evidently assembled construction-kit fashion from stems of various lengths, attached at the joints by marrow, and by bits of skin-like webbing. They moved with tentative spins, one support stem after another touching gently down on the ground. The colonists called them ‘builders’ because they seemed to be associated with structures, what looked like dams and weirs at the mouths of the minor streams that fed this lake, and even what appeared to be shelters further back from the water.

Everything living was built out of stems here. Even the huge forest trees were stems grown large for the main trunk; even their leaves had proved to be nothing but more stems, specialised, distorted in form, jointed together, supporting a kind of webbing. The stems themselves, according to the ColU, were assembled from something like the cells that comprised terrestrial life. It was as if on Per Ardua complex life had developed by a subtly different route than on Earth. Rather than construct a complex organism direct from a multitude of cells, Arduan cells were first assembled into stems, and the life forms, from builders to trees to the big herbivores and carnivores of the plains and forest clearings, were all put together from the stems, as if fabricated from standard-issue components.

But the stems themselves were complex affairs. The marrow, the ubiquitous sap, wasn’t inert. The ColU had learned that some kind of photosynthesis was going on in there, the energy of Prox being absorbed by substances inside the stem – whereas most photosynthesising material on Earth life was on the outside of the body, to catch the light. You might have predicted that, because a good proportion of Prox’s radiation energy was in the infrared, heat energy which penetrated to the interior of massive bodies. The ColU had even found photosynthesising bugs below the surface of the ground.

And so, though some stem-based ‘animals’ were like herbivores, extracting energy and nutrients from the photosynthesising stromatolites, they were also like ‘plants’ themselves, in that they gathered energy directly from their sun, in the marrow in their own stem structures. It made sense; Proxima looked big because it was close up, but it was a smaller, dimmer star than Sol, it shed less energy, and life on Per Ardua would naturally make use of every scrap of that energy that it could. Classifications that worked on Earth didn’t map over easily to this world, where even ‘carnivores’ photosynthesised, and Yuri couldn’t see any reason why they should.

Now John picked up a big soggy lump of laver and threw it at one of the builders nosing around the equipment pile. He caught one square and it went down, one of its three big support stems snapping. But it rose again, and hobbled away. Oddly, Yuri saw, touchingly, the other builders waited for it, and they left together. The builders had shown curiosity, and then something like compassion, or cooperation at least.

He said to John, ‘What did you do that for?’

John laughed. ‘Because I can. Because it’s better me chucking green shit at ET than the other way around. But then the ColU does say we’re more highly evolved than anything on Per Ardua, doesn’t it?’

Yuri considered before answering. You had to be careful what you said to John these days, especially since Martha, his lover, had died of her bone cancer a few months before. ‘Not more evolved, John. Differently evolved. That’s what the ColU says.’

‘What does that lump of pig iron know? There’s no Gaia here. That’s what he told me.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

Yuri, a child of the Heroic Generation on Earth, had grown up learning about planetary ecology and environment before he had learned about soccer or girls. ‘Gaia’ was an archaic shorthand for the great self-regulating systems that maintained life on Earth, through huge flows of minerals and air and water, all driven by the energy of the sun and mediated by life. Over the aeons Earth’s sun was heating up, and Gaia had evolved to cope with that; by adjusting the amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Gaia acted like a tremendous thermostat to keep the temperatures on the planet’s surface stable, and equable for life.

But Proxima was not like the sun, and Per Ardua was not like Earth.

‘Per Ardua doesn’t need a Gaia,’ Yuri said now. ‘Proxima is stable. Red dwarf stars don’t heat up, not for trillions of years. That’s what McGregor told us. So on Per Ardua, life settled into a sort of optimal state, with all the Prox light used as efficiently as possible. And now it just sort of sits there.’

John stabbed and poked at the drifting seaweed. ‘So you’re saying Prox life is somehow superior to our sort?’