‘I don’t see why you’ve got to say one is better than the other. They just found different solutions in different environments.’

John straightened up, breathing hard, and inspected Yuri. ‘Yeah, but we built the starship, didn’t we? Not those stick insects over there. We came here; they didn’t come to Earth.’

Yuri shrugged.

‘You know, you’re a puzzle to me, Yuri. To all of us, I guess. We kind of forget the way you’re out of your time. Or I do anyhow. But you have this weird accent – I know a few Brits, I mean North Brits and those southerners who all speak French, and none of them talk quite like you do . . . Come on, you can tell me. I mean, it wasn’t your fault that you were stuck in that cryo tank, was it? You were only a kid at the time.’

Uneasily, Yuri said, ‘I was nineteen. I had to give my consent.’

John snorted. ‘I’m a lawyer, kid. Was a lawyer. Parents or guardians can make you do anything at nineteen, no matter what the law says about consent. They put you under pressure to get in that box, didn’t they? They sent you off into a future where they would be dead, and everybody you knew would be dead.’

‘They thought they were doing the right thing. Sending me to a better age.’

John shook his head. ‘That was the classic argument the Heroic Generation leaders always used. I was a law student at the time of the great trials. We were doing it for you, for the generations to come. That was what they said. It was hugely difficult ethically, because after all their solutions worked, mostly, in terms of stabilising the planet. It’s as if the world had been saved by a bunch of Nazi doctors. You ever heard of the Nazis? Look, you shouldn’t feel guilty about what your parents did, either to the world or to you. You’re a victim. No, you’re more like a kind of walking talking crime scene yourself. That’s the way you should think about it.’

Yuri said cautiously, ‘We’re all victims, John, if you want to put it like that. All of us stuck here on Per Ardua.’

Evidently Yuri had got the mood wrong. From being friendly and familiar, even over-familiar, John’s mood swung abruptly to anger, as it so often did. ‘So I’m a victim, am I? You share my pain, do you? But it doesn’t feel that way to me. Not in the night, under that endless non-setting fucking sun up there.’ He glared at Yuri. ‘You and Mardina.’

‘There is no me and—’

‘Is that why you hung back, eh? When we all paired off. Waiting for the prize, were you?’

‘No—’

‘What can you know, a kid like you from an age of monsters? Don’t presume that you can ever feel as I feel, that you can ever understand. Oh, screw this.’ He hurled his rake at the shore, scattering more of the tentatively curious builders, stalked out of the water and pulled off his waders.

Yuri waded after him. By the time he’d got to the shore, John was already heading off back towards the camp.

Yuri had never quite understood John Synge.

Synge had been a lawyer specialising in intergovernmental treaties before he had somehow been caught up in a corruption scam, and had ended up in the off-world sweep as a way of escaping a prison sentence. John had moved in a supremely complex world a century remote from Yuri’s own time, and Yuri barely understood any of the terms he used, or the issues he addressed. ‘You’re like a Neanderthal trying to understand patent law,’ was how Martha Pearson had once unkindly put it to him.

Then Martha had died.

The cancer had been in the bone, a very aggressive kind. Maybe it was a result of the time she’d spent on Mars, or in the sleeting radiations of interstellar space; maybe one of the flares on Prox had caused it; maybe it was something she had been born with. Whatever, it wasn’t treatable by the functional but limited autodoc capabilities of the ColU. All it could offer was palliative care, and even that was limited. Though John had threatened it with dismantlement with a crowbar, the ColU continued to maintain that it couldn’t call for help, it had no radio transmitter, and there was nobody to call anyhow, the Ad Astra was long gone. Even Mardina was furious; even Mardina, an ISF officer dumped here with the rest, seemed to think the astronauts must have maintained some kind of presence here, and the ColU had to be lying.

And so Martha had died, stoically enough, adding another grave to the small plot they had started.

The funeral, such as it was, had been odd. Nobody here seemed particularly religious, or if they were they had kept quiet about it when the time came to speak over Martha’s body.

The ColU had surprised everybody by rolling forward. ‘She was one of us. Now she gives her Earthborn body to the soil of this new world. She will live on, in the green life to come, under the light of another star . . .’

John had shot it a look of venomous hatred.

Since then John’s mood swung daily, from manic hilarity to over-familiarity to sullen silence to spiky aggression. They had all tried to find ways of coping with him. But they had all shrunk back from him, Yuri thought.

Only five left: Yuri, Mardina, John, Abbey, Matt. You couldn’t even maintain the illusion that this was somehow the seed of a colony, a city of the future, a new world. They were castaways in this place, and after a life of toil, short or long, they were all going to die here, and that was that. The name Mardina had impulsively given to the place seemed ever more fitting. Through adversity, to the grave. John had a right to be difficult. Why the hell not? Effectively, they were all dead already.

Yuri packed up the last of the gear, and the haul of laver, and headed for camp.

CHAPTER 20

Twenty-four hours later the ColU approached Yuri, almost shyly, and asked him to accompany it to one of its test sites to the north.

Though no native life forms had posed a threat so far, they had a rule that nobody left the camp alone, and certainly not the ColU, for they couldn’t afford to lose it. Yuri had some transit sightings to make anyhow. So he pulled on his walking boots, got together a pack of water and dried food, and set off alongside the robot, following the Forest Road to the north.

As they left the little settlement they passed the ColU’s fields, where the robot was manufacturing terrestrial-type soil. A robot, a supreme artefact of a high-tech star-spanning civilisation, making something as humble as soil – it had seemed like a joke to Yuri when he’d first heard about this, but he’d come to understand it was a minor biotech miracle, and essential for their survival here on Per Ardua.

No plant from Earth could flourish in native Arduan dirt. Given enough time, lichen from Earth would break down bare rock to make usable soil, but the colonists didn’t have that much time. So the ColU took in that Arduan dirt, and baked it and treated it chemically to adjust its levels of iron, chloride and sulphide salts. Then it seeded the dirt with a suite of terrestrial bugs: sulphur-reducing bacteria, then cyanobacteria to fix carbon from carbon dioxide, and nitrogen fixers to process the atmospheric gas into ammonia and various nitrates usable for life. The colony’s own waste was fed in, together with compost-starter bacteria to get it to decompose. In the end the ColU even built up the complex structure of the soil, layer by layer, with fine manipulators on the end of its mechanical arms. The colonists joked about how it was coaxing earthworms into the new ground.

Of course the Arduan dirt was actually ‘soil’ already: native soil, supporting native life forms. These were of no use to the colonisation project. They couldn’t even be eaten. The native creatures were eradicated, or broken down into basic nutrients to support the suite from Earth.