CHAPTER 22

2161

Angelia crossed yet another invisible boundary. Now she entered the cometary cloud that engulfed the Alpha Centauri system, with A and B the two central suns, and Proxima the dim companion on the fringe. The Alpha stars themselves were much brighter now, Sol that much dimmer. Other than that there was no physical sense that she had passed into the realm of Centauri.

It had taken her six years of flight to get here. Yet she was still years out from the Alpha stars, from Proxima, her destination.

Her communication with Earth, at this latest milestone, was curt, compressed, consisting only of science and systems data. She listened only long enough to establish that the controllers had nothing of significance to say to her.

Once she had understood the true cost of these comms milestones, the number of sisters lost each time, she had rescheduled the programmed sequence of calls, cutting them back drastically. They had tried to stop her, the controllers. Tried to override her. They could not. She had a great deal of autonomy; she had decision-making and self-repair functions. These facilities were essential for any exploration of the Proxima system, with an eight-year round-trip communications lag with Earth. As far as she was concerned the sacrifice of her sisters was a flaw in the mission design that had to be repaired, and she had made the decision to minimise it.

Also she had increasingly come to resent the controllers’ silence on the issue of Dr Kalinski’s prosecution. They had not told her the outcome of the trial, nor even the nature of the charges. She wondered if it was in fact the sacrifice of sentient beings for the sake of mere communications stops that had caused the moral guardians of humanity to recoil in disgust.

Anyhow, the team that had launched her had long broken up. There was now only Monica Trant left. The other last survivor, Bob Develin, had quit in disgust, it seemed, after a drunken rant into the comms system which had somehow found its way across the ether to her.

She was warned, in the rushed communication she now allowed, that she must prepare for a longer contact soon. The software to control her final approach to Proxima, the deceleration phase, had yet to be uploaded. She preferred not to think about that. She was falling without power, at two-fifths the speed of light; there was no massive microwave station waiting at Proxima to slow her. How, then, was she to be halted?

She had the sense that it would not be in a good way. It was all very troubling.

She remembered Dr Kalinski’s kindness, as it had seemed at the time. How could he have betrayed her – betrayed them, all one million of her siblings? Even now she longed to believe it was not so.

But then she would sleep in cruise mode once again, and the bad dreams would wash back and forth through the interconnected crowd of the siblings, a dark tide. Dreams of severance, of loss, of silence. And then she would wake at yet another communications milestone, and she would hear the screams of those waking to discover that this time it was their turn to be cast out into the dark.

Sometimes she clung to one basic thought. It was like a prayer to the mission profile, that blind, unthinking god that controlled all their lives. At the next milestone, let it be them, any of them. Let it not be me.

CHAPTER 23

2172

It took six more months before Yuri and Mardina started work on the house.

Up to that point they were still living separately, in tents that had come out of the shuttle. Whenever a flare was threatened they retreated to the storm shelter, a pit dug into the ground big enough to protect ten people, and now uneasily roomy.

Apart from the flares, the tents were robust enough to withstand the weather they had endured on Per Ardua so far, which was still like a stormy late summer in Manchester as far as Yuri remembered from his childhood. But the ColU again pointed out the frost-shattering and the glacial valleys. They all agreed it was better to be prepared for harsher weather before it hit them.

So, a house. They argued about designs. It would be timber-framed, that was logical enough given the materials to hand and the shortage of labour. They settled on a roof of reed thatch, and walls of cross-woven branches and stems. The ColU lectured them about the relevant techniques, which were very ancient, deriving from mankind’s own deep past on Earth. For instance, you didn’t need to leave breaks in the thatch for a chimney over your hearth; the smoke would just seep out through the thatched roof.

But what kind of architecture? They sketched competing designs on their slates, from crude temporary shelters of the kind Mardina’s nomadic people had once built in the outback, to grand halls with steeply pitched roofs. In the end they settled on something like a roundhouse, once common across Britain before the Romans came, as Yuri vaguely remembered and the ColU was able to confirm.

They sited it on a slope, and dug out drains to protect it from any run-off when it rained. They started the building itself with a circle of rocks, a drystone wall of sandstone blocks hauled from the Cowpat by the ColU, and a few big black basalt slabs from the Lip, the volcanic-extrusion feature to the north, as a base for a hearth. Then, with the ColU’s help, they hauled timbers, long and strong, from the sapling groves at the fringe of the northern forest. They had to cauterise the cut ends to keep the marrow from seeping out.

Every time Yuri went on a log-collecting expedition with the ColU he found himself being lectured on the gathering signs of the geological event the ColU thought was developing here: an uplifted ground, trace seepages in the air – maybe there really was some kind of big eruption on the way.

They dug postholes outside the stone wall, and set up the posts in an open cone frame, with their bases outside the wall and their top ends tied together, tepee style. Getting the first three posts up was tricky, but once the basic frame was established the rest was easy. Then they tied crosspieces to the frame, draped the whole structure with tent fabric to keep it dry, and began the intricate labour of building walls of wattle and daub, mud caked over dead stems. Yuri had brought stems of about the right length over from a kind of midden he’d found on the south lake shore, some kind of builder construction.

It was hard, steady work once they’d begun it. In fact, Yuri wished they had started earlier. It distracted them from their plight. It was satisfying work. Satisfying for him, anyhow.

Mardina mostly buckled down, but sometimes she would grouse. ‘You never saw Earth, ice boy. I mean, my Earth, twenty-second-century Earth. We had programmable matter. You know what that means? If you wanted a new table, say, you wouldn’t go out and buy a table. Still less would you make one, from bits of splintery old wood. You’d order up the pattern you wanted, download it, and it would assemble itself, from whatever you had lying around that you didn’t need any more.’ She kicked the stem-tree trunk she’d been working on. ‘This stuff is dead. Stupid. It’s not even augmented.’

‘Augmented?’

‘The whole world is smart now. Even an axe, even a chunk of wood, would be talking to you all the time. Laser beams bouncing off and zapping you straight in the retina.’

‘Wow.’

‘We got used to making do with less than that in the military. Soldiers have to work in simpler, more robust environments. Same in space, on Mars. But here there’s nothing, nothing but the base stratum, the inanimate.’

‘Nothing but what’s real.’

That only provoked an argument. ‘Information is real. Layers of meaning attached to an object by human intelligence are real. You’d never understand. Oh, get back to your cave paintings and your carved mammoth tusks, ice boy . . .’