And, standing in the second chamber, before another doorway seam on the far wall, was a figure: a human, in a pressure suit, apparently ISF issue. A human staring back at her.

‘What?’ An unfamiliar voice in her ear speaker. ‘What’s wrong?’

No, not unfamiliar, just – unexpected.

‘Stef? Penny?’ That was Trant’s voice. ‘Stef, what have you found down there? Penny, you’re still out of our field of view.’

Penny?

The stranger took another step forward, towards the open hatchway. Stef found herself staring into a familiar face, behind the visor. Too familiar. Found herself staring at a familiar name, too, on the suit’s chest patch.

KALINSKI, PENELOPE D.

FOUR

CHAPTER 39

2180

The ColU, which was becoming increasingly philosophical as time passed, came up with yet another complex, bewildering observation about life on Per Ardua.

At the time Yuri was letting Beth ride on the ColU’s back with him, on the final fifty-kilometre round-trip trek to the old camp from the new. He’d thought the ColU had been acting oddly all day, but had put it down to the usual program-violation problems it had with moving the camp in the first place. Evidently not.

Luckily Beth was oblivious to all this. Beth Eden Jones was seven years old now, and she had been used to moving all her life. The first shift of the jilla had come in the very month she had been born, and there had been seven shifts since then, around one a year, bringing the lake the best part of two hundred kilometres due south from the starting point. The family had diligently followed along each time, hauling their broken-down dwellings and their tools and all their other possessions, right down to cartloads of topsoil, behind the patient bulk of the ColU.

But the last shift had been all of a year ago, and since then some spark in Beth’s head had lit up. This time she wasn’t a passive passenger any more; now she wanted to make sense of it all. So she had begged to come along on these shuttle trips back and forth between the old campsite and the new. Mardina was happy to let her ride along with Yuri – especially as it got her out of the way while the builders completed their latest brutal war of conquest against their cousins at the jilla’s new position. But on this ride, this last loading up, Beth was fretful.

As soon as they were loaded, the ColU had begun the last haul away from the old campsite, of which little was left but a scuffed patch of ground, a smouldering fire, a couple of garbage dumps, all set beside a muddy lake bed that was already drying out. They headed south once more, following the water courses down which the builders had driven the waters of the jilla. And, wistfully, sitting beside her father on the carapace of the ColU, Beth looked over her shoulder back the way they had come. ‘Why can’t we ever go that way, Dad?’

‘What way, honey? North? What’s the point? There’s nothing there. There’s not even water to drink.’

‘I know. But there’s the first camp of all, isn’t there? Back there somewhere.’

‘Where you were born.’

‘I know that. But I don’t remember it.’

‘It’s too far. There’s no water on the way. We couldn’t walk that far.’

‘We could ride on the ColU,’ she said hopefully. ‘We could carry water. We could carry our beds and stuff, and Mister Sticks.’ Mister Sticks, her favourite toy, had been woven from broken stems by the ColU; the doll was a peculiar mix of human and builder features, like a three-legged puppet.

‘That’s not a bad plan, honey. But the ColU wouldn’t carry us that far.’

‘It could, though.’

‘But it wouldn’t. It . . . doesn’t want to.’

‘You could make it.’

‘Only by hurting it. And that would be mean, wouldn’t it?’ Which was about as close as he imagined he was going to get to explaining program conflicts in the ColU’s AI to Beth.

‘I guess . . .’

‘What do you want to see up there anyhow? It’s just like all the other places we stopped. Just a load of old junk that we dumped when we moved. Abandoned fields . . .’ And a few graves.

‘But I want to see the road where the shuttle came down.’ She mimed a descending flight with her hand, but she made a noise like the flapping triple vanes of an Arduan kite, the only flying thing she had ever seen. ‘Flish-flish-flish. Mom says it made tracks that would take you hours to walk along.’

‘I guess so. Skid marks kilometres long. And some of it baked solid, when the braking rockets fired. I guess that would be worth seeing, if it’s still there. But we can’t get there, honey. I’m sorry.’

‘Maybe one day.’

‘Well—’

‘Take me there for my birthday one day.’ That was Beth’s trump card.

Her birthdays were an issue. Yuri had been slow to realise that even after Beth’s birth Mardina had clung to her belief, or fantasy, that the ISF had never really left, and would some day come out of their hides or down from orbit or whatever, and reveal themselves, and save them all. Maybe the baby being delivered would be the trigger, if the ISF authorities accepted that the colonists had proven their determination to stick it out by breeding. Well, that hadn’t happened. She’d not mentioned it at the time of the birth, and Yuri forgot about it.

But on Beth’s first birthday the dam broke, and Mardina went into a rage at a betrayal that, at last, she couldn’t deny. It caused a lot of tension. It was still a birthday. Yuri had tried baking a cake, with butter and stuff from the iron cow unit inside the ColU. The ColU had even made candles from synthesised fat. Mardina ruined it all. Beth had been too young to understand, but for Yuri, the memories of The Day Mommy Lost It remained strong.

The next year, with Yuri gently prodding, they had agreed they should celebrate the birthday. After all Beth didn’t have other kids around, she was never going to go to school or college or enjoy all the other milestones regular children did, even in a dump like Eden on Mars. A birthday, though, one thing that was uniquely hers, could always be marked and celebrated. And, as a tie to the cycles of time on Earth, it was a reminder of deeper roots too. But by the time that second birthday rolled around the echoes of the first were still strong, and Mardina withdrew into herself.

Well, since then they had celebrated all Beth’s birthdays, but there was always tension. And Beth, with a little kid’s wiles, picked that up and played on it. Yuri just coped with it all. Nobody had ever told him life was going to be easy.

‘Listen, it’s late, why don’t you take a nap? That way you’ll be fresh for Mom when you get home.’

‘I don’t want to take a nap.’

‘Just try,’ he said in his line-in-the-sand voice, much practised over seven years.

So she complied. She wriggled inside her rope harness until she was lying down on a couple of blankets, and cuddled up against her father’s leg. He put one arm around her and stroked her short-cut straight hair with his free hand. They had had trouble with her sleeping from the beginning. Born into the endless day of Proxima, she seemed that bit more disconnected from the rhythms of distant Earth, and didn’t see why she needed to go to sleep when her parents did, at what seemed like arbitrary times in the unending light. But if they let her get away without regular sleep she would burn herself out and crash, so Yuri and Mardina had worked out a process of control between them.

Even the ColU, which had some programming in child care, was drafted into this regime. It always backed up the parents’ diktats, which was just as well, Yuri thought, or it would have found Mardina decommissioning it enthusiastically. The ColU was the third ‘person’ in Beth’s limited life, and she saw nothing strange in having a robotic farming machine as a kind of uncle. Proving to be an expert at weaving dolls from dead stem shafts didn’t do its image any harm either.