Then there was the unending daylight, the changelessness. Lemmy said that humans were evolved from tropical apes. Two million years of adaptation protested against the lack of day and night, and regular sleep was hard to come by. The ColU said that their sleep cycles were staying in synch with each other, roughly, but were gradually lengthening, away from the Earth norm. Nobody seemed to care about that, either.
Nobody even listened to the ColU—not even Yuri, even though the ColU seemed to think he was more amenable than the rest, and would try to engage him in conversation, such as about the astronomical sightings Yuri kept up sporadically with his bits of equipment, and that the ColU supplemented with its own observations, made with its own sensor pods. All this was a distraction for Yuri, a hobby, something to do to keep him sane. The ColU’s attentions, attracting the mockery of the rest, just embarrassed him.
And every so often some threat or other, a storm, a bad flare, a threatened flood from their tame lake, would bring everybody down even more.
Under it all, of course, was the brute reality of their stranding, a rejection many of them would clearly be struggling to accept whatever world they were living on. They drove each other crazy, these strangers forced to become lifelong neighbours, with no hope of escape.
The ColU was the exception. It quietly got on with its tasks, slowly processing huge rectangular areas of Arduan dirt into terrestrial soil, and sampling the water and the local life, the stem creatures and the lichen and the stromatolites and the bugs. It enthused about bugs it dug out of the ground, as deep as it drilled; on Per Ardua as on Earth, it said, life suffused the deep rocks—there was probably far more biomass down there than on the surface—with complex life just a kind of flourish, a grace note in a symphony of bacterial life.
Its quiet efficiency, its air of plastic cheerfulness, only irritated people even more, it seemed to Yuri.
Anyhow, from this squalid little community of reluctant draftees, no leader had yet emerged. Yuri wasn’t even sure who had decided on taking this walk.
In the early days, Onizuka and John Synge and Harry Thorne had all acted like they were the big men. But Martha Pearson, who had once run a substantial business back on Earth, and Abbey Brandenstein, an ex-cop and proven killer, were pretty strong characters too.
Mardina Jones had never tried to play the leader, probably wisely. Always a little outside the group, the Lieutenant was a target for insults and mockery as much as sympathy. But Yuri watched her just soak it all up, and get on with her self-appointed tasks. She no longer wore her crew uniform. In fact she seemed to have shed her astronaut persona, her whole ISF career. She had gone from a kind of motherly prison guard into a taciturn survivor, in the blink of an eye. Maybe she was reverting to something deeper, older, a core of her life that had been hidden under the layers above.
And then the pairing-off had begun, and that had made things worse yet. With six men and four women, none of them partners before the landing, there was always going to be trouble. There seemed to be no gays in the party, which might have made the situation more complicated, or less, though the men joked bleakly about experimenting.
The pair-ups themselves kind of surprised Yuri. Of the men he’d never have tagged Lemmy as a winner, but pretty soon Pearl Hanks had made clear her preference to be with him. Everybody knew Pearl had once been a hooker, and some of the men, Onizuka, Harry Thorne, still looked at her that way. Maybe she had attached herself to Lemmy precisely because he didn’t react to her like that. And maybe she was calculating on Yuri protecting her, as she might think he protected Lemmy. It was all complicated, a game of human chess.
Martha Pearson, meanwhile, was sleeping with John Synge. That was less of a surprise, a businesswoman from Hawaii with a lawyer from New New York, they were similar types. But maybe that similarity was why they fought all the time they were together, if they weren’t asleep or screwing.
And Abbey, maybe the strongest woman of all, had surprised everybody by swooping down on Matt Speith, the artist with no art to make, maybe the most useless, skill-light, disoriented person in the camp. It was obvious who was in control in that relationship. Yuri speculated privately that Abbey had picked Matt as a kind of shield, to keep the other men off. But Mardina was more generous. Maybe she liked his nice soft artist’s hands, she said. Or maybe the ex-cop liked having somebody to protect.
Mardina herself didn’t pair off with anybody. She’d had approaches, more subtle or less, from the leftover men, Onizuka and Harry—not from Yuri. But she had no trouble brushing these guys off.
So that left Yuri, Onizuka and Harry without a woman. It drove Onizuka and Harry crazy very quickly, it seemed to Yuri. After all, this was all there was, the ten of them, no more choice of partners—not until their sons and daughters started growing up someday to widen the pool. There had been more choice even in the hulls: lose out now and you’d have lost out for life. Sometimes Onizuka and Harry would talk loudly about sharing partners, bed-hopping. It would be genetically efficient for the women to have babies with more than one partner; it was what Major Lex McGregor would have wanted, so they said. Nobody in a relationship listened.
Yuri didn’t care. It seemed to him the partnerships had formed up for mutual protection, maybe for comfort. Not for any logic concerning the destiny of the colony in years or decades or generations. And certainly for nothing you’d recognise as love. Right now he didn’t feel like he needed any of that, and nor, it seemed, did Mardina. But Onizuka and Harry glared and spat.
At least on this trek to the forest they would be able to get away from the camp, if only for a few hours. But as Onizuka snarled at Lemmy, and Lemmy cowered by Yuri’s side, Yuri saw that they hadn’t been able to leave their flaws and rivalries behind.
As they neared the edge of the forest they came to a bank of stromatolites. They kept calling these bacterial-colony formations by that name, inaccurate as it might seem to a biologist. These particular specimens were huge structures, much bigger than those near the Puddle—maybe four metres high, like tremendous tables with flat, flaring upper surfaces.
The ColU had taken samples from various stromatolites in the vicinity of the camp. They were all made of nothing but bugs, of course, layers of bugs and trapped dirt: Arduan bugs of course, like Earth bugs but not identical according to the ColU, in dense, complex layers, joined together in structures that might themselves be millennia old. But the uppermost layers contained photosynthesisers, bugs using the energy of Prox light to break down air and water to produce oxygen—a process similar to what had evolved on Earth, but a different chemistry under a different light. The ColU said it thought the stromatolites were actually this planet’s dominant primary oxygen producers. The ColU was always curious, always speculating; it was its job, it said once, to understand how this world worked, so it could be taken apart to become a human world, with the native life restricted to zones the humans didn’t need, maybe a few parks and botanical gardens. In Yuri’s day, as he recalled while the ColU described all this, they had had tree museums on Earth.
They didn’t linger long in the stromatolite garden.
Beyond, Yuri led the way into the deeper forest. The darkness gathered quickly, until they were surrounded by the strange trees of Per Ardua. The trunks rose slim and smooth and tall, without leaves or branches until they reached a canopy high in the air, where immense leaves like tipped plates blocked out the sky. The ground here was dry, compacted soil, covered by a shallow litter, mostly of tremendous leaf fragments like dead water lilies. There was no movement, no sound at first save the ragged breathing of the human party. But Yuri thought he heard a rustle, high in the canopy above.