‘What do they call us?’

‘We each have our individual names. They don’t have a class name for humans. There are only three of us – including myself – and we are all very different in their eyes. Your name, and Mardina’s, are variants on a phrase that means “single stem”.

‘They aren’t great conversationalists, Yuri! Their language is simple, really, with a very wide vocabulary, lots of labels, but only elementary grammatical rules. And much of what they say to each other consists of stock sayings. Like slogans, or folk sayings.’

Yuri tried to think of an example. ‘Such as, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”?’

‘Yes. But a builder analogy might be, “Dig it up before you make it.” This is another aspect of their antiquity, Yuri Eden. We’ve seen them use stone tools. But before they go to the trouble of making a new tool, they will grub at the ground and see if they can dig up a discard, a tool left by some forebear that might be thousands of years old. They’ve been wandering here for a long, long time: the ground is evidently rich enough in abandoned artefacts to make that sort of strategy worthwhile. And there isn’t a lot of innovation across the generations; they expect the tools left behind by their ancestors to be pretty much the same as what they make and use today. The language is the same, a collection of phrases and sayings, bits of wisdom handed down, polished from overuse.’

‘What do they call themselves? Not builders . . .’

‘ “The Fallen”. That is a human analogy; their term is something like “the semi-disarticulated”. But I think the concept of falling, that is falling from grace, is appropriate. “Everything is shit, and so are we.” That’s perhaps their most common slogan; they use it to say hello, goodbye, and as an interjection in conversation. Though the term isn’t “shit”, it is something like “the marrowless and broken husk of a dead stem”. They seem to regard the whole universe as a dismal ruin, with themselves as worthless as cockroaches picking their way through the rubble. By human standards they are almost comically gloomy, I suspect.’

‘Yet they raise their infants.’ Yuri glanced at the injured builder, who still danced before the ColU’s puppet. ‘And they care for their sick.’

‘That they do—’

It broke off. The arm-puppet stopped ‘dancing’ suddenly, the manipulator arms folded away, and the ColU rolled backwards on its tracks and turned to face the north shore. The builders stopped too, evidently startled by the ColU; after freezing for a moment they abruptly began a new conversation among themselves.

Yuri looked to the north. An orange spark was climbing into the sky: a flare.

The ColU was already rolling away. Yuri ran after it as fast as he could, but he was easily outpaced.

CHAPTER 34

By the time he intercepted the ColU it was already on its way back to the settlement, with Mardina riding on its front unit, leaning back against its bubble-dome cover. As it rolled along the ColU’s endlessly adaptable manipulator arms were working on Mardina’s belly, massaging it in great downward sweeps.

Yuri jogged alongside. ‘Are you all right?’

‘What does it look like?’ she snarled back. ‘My water’s broken. I’ve had a couple of contractions. And my back’s killing me.’

‘Everything is under control,’ the ColU said calmly, rolling presumably as fast as it dared.

‘Shut up, you.’

‘Here.’ Yuri took off his stem-bark tunic, rolled it up, and shoved it behind Mardina’s back. She accepted this, at least. ‘What else can I do?’

‘You can piss off and leave it to me and my robot doctor here. I – ow – oh, you little bastard!’

‘Please run ahead, Yuri Eden,’ the ColU said. ‘We will be using the house; please make it ready, as we have planned.’

Mardina snapped, ‘Just get on with it, you – ow!’

So Yuri hurried ahead.

They’d rehearsed all this. At the house he cleared out his own gear to one of the storehouses, moved Mardina’s bed closer to the door, and lit a fire in the hearth. He made sure that all their remaining ISF-issue medical packs were on hand, close to Mardina’s bed. He widened the doorway too, removing a few panels that they had pre-fitted to ensure the ColU had access to the house when it needed it.

When the ColU arrived, Mardina was adamant. ‘Out, ice boy. I don’t want you anywhere near me.’

‘It’s my kid too—’

‘It’s my bloody pelvis. Out, out!’

The ColU murmured, ‘I think it’s best, Yuri Eden.’

‘All right, all right.’

‘I will call you when—’

‘I said all right.’ Yuri stamped out.

He had to watch as the ColU cautiously worked its way into the house; it wouldn’t fit all the way inside, and Yuri, on a request by the ColU, draped a tarpaulin over its protruding rear end, blocking off the entrance to the house.

After that he could see nothing of the birth.

The labour took hours, and sounded difficult. Not that Yuri had any prior experience. He could hear screams and weeping, and the calm voice of the ColU urging its patient to breathe, breathe.

After a time he wandered off, seeking a chore that might distract him, in the fields, in the little storehouse they had put aside as a workshop. Nothing seemed meaningful. Everything that was important in his universe, all that mattered on this world, was going on inside the house he had built with Mardina, and he could do nothing to influence it.

On impulse he walked away from the camp, heading back towards the lake.

A cloud of depression gathered. What use was he? He had been on Per Ardua for four years already. In one random bout of clumsy, only half-satisfactory sex he had done all that Mardina had ever needed of him, or would ever need. He felt as if he had no identity – and he hadn’t, not since his parents had bundled him into the cryo tank in Manchester. Even here, in this little two-person colony, he didn’t matter, not fundamentally, not when it really came to it. He had had such moods since waking up on Mars. Generally he fought them off with work. It was harder alone.

He climbed a bluff, from where he had a good view of the lake. He could see those dams and the brimming floods behind them to the north, and those strangely shaped middens to the south. From here he got a clear sense that the whole layout of the middens really was integrated, somehow, as if all these constructions served a single purpose. And he saw builders moving on those north and south shores, blurs of movement as they spun, tracked, congregated in little groups that quickly broke up and reformed elsewhere. Mardina was right; they were building up to something, some big stage in whatever project they were working through.

And all of them, of course, utterly ignored the human being standing alone on this bluff watching them, this visitor from another star. What an astonishing thing – as if Egyptian slaves had continued labouring over their pyramids while ignoring the silvery UFO that had landed in the shadow of the Sphinx. But why shouldn’t they ignore him? He didn’t matter to his own people, and never had; why should he matter to these aliens?

There was a kind of cracking sound.

He saw a spray of water rising up from one of those dams to the north, as if it had suddenly been breached. Had it failed? But another crack came, like a cannon shot, and another, and he saw more sprays of misty water lifting into the air from other dams, and he heard a kind of roar.

It was no accident. Those dams had been timed to fail, all at the same time, or were being deliberately demolished, one by one, and the roar he heard was the flow of released water; the great floods trapped behind the dams must be gushing forward into the lake. But why was all this being done?

And now he heard a popping noise, coming from behind him.