But Abbey, cold and clinical, shot Harry Thorne clean in the heart.
It was only in the aftermath, after Yuri and Mardina had taken the crossbows away, and the others had moved in to inspect the carnage, that they discovered that Pearl Hanks had taken Yuri’s knife from out of Onizuka’s skull, and neatly slit her own wrists, overwriting old, half-healed scars.
Lemmy was gone, his shit life terminated in a shit way. And after six months on Proxima c, just six were left alive.
Chapter 18
2159
“This is Angelia 5941. As usual this voice message accompanies a more technical download. I am in an excellent state of health and all subsystems are operating nominally. Good afternoon, all my ground crew…”
The million sisters slept. But their sleep was not dreamless. And they were fewer than a million now, fewer each time they woke.
“As you are aware I have now been travelling for over four years. I am some one point eight light years from the solar system, and still have more than two light years to travel; even now I am not yet halfway through this journey. In my reporting intervals, when I emerge briefly from cruise mode, I continue to make scientific observations of my surroundings. As you know, the space between Earth’s sun, Sol, and Alpha Centauri happens to have a fascinating structure of its own; before reaching Proxima I will pass through no less than three distinct clouds of interstellar material, each of which I intend to sample and survey. Interim results downloaded.
“I am also participating with observers in the solar system on long-baseline studies of interstellar navigation techniques, tests of the predictions of relativity and quantum gravity, searches for gravity waves emanating from distant cosmic events, a mapping of the galactic magnetic field, a study of low-energy cosmic rays not detectable from the vicinity of the sun, and similar projects. Interim results downloaded…”
She was suspended in a vault of stars, all apparently stationary despite her tremendous velocity. The Doppler effects even at this speed were still subtle, and there was no way even of telling, just by a visual inspection with quasi-human senses, which of these silent points of light was her origin, which her destination. Nothing changed, visibly, from waking to waking.
“I am disappointed that Dr Kalinski is no longer allowed to serve with you. I do not feel qualified to comment on his prosecution by the Reconciliation Commission, for breaches of the laws passed retrospectively after the crimes of the Heroic Generation…”
Something distracted her. A faint murmur of distress. Faint yet familiar, an echo of nightmare. Irritated, she tried to focus on her message to Earth.
“I am disappointed also that the decision has been made not to send further vessels after me, and to decommission my launch infrastructure. However, without Dr Kalinski’s ‘crimes’ I would not even exist, let alone be out here flying between the stars. He is like a father to me. I hope you will pass on this message to him if you can, and please be assured he may use my missives as testimony in any trial he faces. If they are of use. In the meantime…”
That cry of distress was becoming more prominent now. Angelia 5941 could feel the reaction, the unease it caused, rippling through the near-million-strong throng united in the craft’s main body. It came from one of the castaway siblings, she saw now, who was breaking formation from the extended antenna-dish shape that the rest had formed, ahead of the cloud. It was impossible, Angelia 5941 saw, but she was trying to bank in the starlight—trying to descend back to the main body.
“In the meantime…”
Suddenly Angelia 5941 had a brutally clear memory of her own dreams, while supposedly entirely unconscious, immersed with the rest in the kilometre-long javelin form of the interstellar cruise mode. In her dreams she had been the one separated from the rest. She the one cast off and then discarded from the community. She the one banished to die in space. She emitting those horribly familiar wails.
“I feel…”
The castaways had no mind, she had been told. They were ants, their purpose only to serve the community. They could not feel, they could not long. They could not dream!
She could not dream.
But she did dream. Just like the castaways.
“I feel very far from home. I hope Dr Kalinski is keeping his spirits up. I calculate that this message will reach you on the fifteenth birthday of Stef Kalinski. Please give her my regards. It is to my regret that she chose not to communicate with me after those first few years. I would welcome her company…”
Now that struggling castaway found a full voice, and called to her sisters. “Let me back! Oh, let me back!”
Chapter 19
2171
Yuri and John Synge were out in the Puddle, in their plastic waders, nearly up to their waists in tepid, mildly salty water. The sky was overcast, with only a faintly brighter glow to betray the position of Proxima.
They were raking in seaweed.
It was not a native but a genetically modified laver, an immigrant from Earth. Eighteen months in from their stranding—and a year after the slayings—this seaweed was by far the most successful terrestrial colonist on Per Ardua. It had a tweaked photosynthetic mechanism to enable it to prosper under Proxima’s infrared-rich light: its Earth green was streaked with black. And it had been gen-enged for an aggressive stance towards the native life, breaking it down to acquire basic nutrients for itself.
The point of it was that the colonists could eat the seaweed almost as soon as they pulled it out of the lake. You could rinse it, wash it, boil it down to a mush that would keep for weeks; you could eat it cold, or boil it up or fry it. On Earth this was a very ancient food source, the ColU had said, in its patient, schoolmasterish synthetic voice. And it was a triumph of human ingenuity to have brought this useful organism all the way to Prox: a first stage in the gentle terraforming this world would need to make it fully habitable for mankind. Yuri thought there was a whiff of the Heroic Generation about all this, of his own era that was now so roundly condemned. Hypocrisy. He kept that thought to himself. Mostly the colonists chucked the seaweed into the ColU’s iron cow, to synthesise burgers.
Anyhow, from here, a few metres from the lake shore, Yuri could see how the laver’s more brilliant green was already spreading aggressively, pushing aside the native life. Take me to your leader, Yuri thought.
On the bank, too, the local organisms had been disturbed by the activities of mankind. Yuri and John had dumped their stuff, their boots and jackets and waterproof sacks for carrying the laver, a metre or so back from the water line, and they had crushed a few of the ubiquitous stems in doing so. Now three of the complex little entities they had come to call “builders” were approaching their heap of equipment, as if curious.
Maybe a metre tall, the builders seemed to be the most common of the stem-based “animals” on Per Ardua. Like the rest of the life forms here, the builders were structured to the usual tripod plan around a core of densely meshed stems, and were evidently assembled construction-kit fashion from stems of various lengths, attached at the joints by marrow, and by bits of skin-like webbing. They moved with tentative spins, one support stem after another touching gently down on the ground. The colonists called them “builders” because they seemed to be associated with structures, what looked like dams and weirs at the mouths of the minor streams that fed this lake, and even what appeared to be shelters further back from the water.
Everything living was built out of stems here. Even the huge forest trees were stems grown large for the main trunk; even their leaves had proved to be nothing but more stems, specialised, distorted in form, jointed together, supporting a kind of webbing. The stems themselves, according to the ColU, were assembled from something like the cells that comprised terrestrial life. It was as if on Per Ardua complex life had developed by a subtly different route than on Earth. Rather than construct a complex organism direct from a multitude of cells, Arduan cells were first assembled into stems, and the life forms, from builders to trees to the big herbivores and carnivores of the plains and forest clearings, were all put together from the stems, as if fabricated from standard-issue components.