But the stems themselves were complex affairs. The marrow, the ubiquitous sap, wasn’t inert. The ColU had learned that some kind of photosynthesis was going on in there, the energy of Prox being absorbed by substances inside the stem—whereas most photosynthesising material on Earth life was on the outside of the body, to catch the light. You might have predicted that, because a good proportion of Prox’s radiation energy was in the infrared, heat energy which penetrated to the interior of massive bodies. The ColU had even found photosynthesising bugs below the surface of the ground.
And so, though some stem-based “animals” were like herbivores, extracting energy and nutrients from the photosynthesising stromatolites, they were also like “plants” themselves, in that they gathered energy directly from their sun, in the marrow in their own stem structures. It made sense; Proxima looked big because it was close up, but it was a smaller, dimmer star than Sol, it shed less energy, and life on Per Ardua would naturally make use of every scrap of that energy that it could. Classifications that worked on Earth didn’t map over easily to this world, where even “carnivores” photosynthesised, and Yuri couldn’t see any reason why they should.
Now John picked up a big soggy lump of laver and threw it at one of the builders nosing around the equipment pile. He caught one square and it went down, one of its three big support stems snapping. But it rose again, and hobbled away. Oddly, Yuri saw, touchingly, the other builders waited for it, and they left together. The builders had shown curiosity, and then something like compassion, or cooperation at least.
He said to John, “What did you do that for?”
John laughed. “Because I can. Because it’s better me chucking green shit at ET than the other way around. But then the ColU does say we’re more highly evolved than anything on Per Ardua, doesn’t it?”
Yuri considered before answering. You had to be careful what you said to John these days, especially since Martha, his lover, had died of her bone cancer a few months before. “Not more evolved, John. Differently evolved. That’s what the ColU says.”
“What does that lump of pig iron know? There’s no Gaia here. That’s what he told me.”
“Yes, but…”
Yuri, a child of the Heroic Generation on Earth, had grown up learning about planetary ecology and environment before he had learned about soccer or girls. “Gaia” was an archaic shorthand for the great self-regulating systems that maintained life on Earth, through huge flows of minerals and air and water, all driven by the energy of the sun and mediated by life. Over the aeons Earth’s sun was heating up, and Gaia had evolved to cope with that; by adjusting the amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, Gaia acted like a tremendous thermostat to keep the temperatures on the planet’s surface stable, and equable for life.
But Proxima was not like the sun, and Per Ardua was not like Earth.
“Per Ardua doesn’t need a Gaia,” Yuri said now. “Proxima is stable. Red dwarf stars don’t heat up, not for trillions of years. That’s what McGregor told us. So on Per Ardua, life settled into a sort of optimal state, with all the Prox light used as efficiently as possible. And now it just sort of sits there.”
John stabbed and poked at the drifting seaweed. “So you’re saying Prox life is somehow superior to our sort?”
“I don’t see why you’ve got to say one is better than the other. They just found different solutions in different environments.”
John straightened up, breathing hard, and inspected Yuri. “Yeah, but we built the starship, didn’t we? Not those stick insects over there. We came here; they didn’t come to Earth.”
Yuri shrugged.
“You know, you’re a puzzle to me, Yuri. To all of us, I guess. We kind of forget the way you’re out of your time. Or I do anyhow. But you have this weird accent—I know a few Brits, I mean North Brits and those southerners who all speak French, and none of them talk quite like you do… Come on, you can tell me. I mean, it wasn’t your fault that you were stuck in that cryo tank, was it? You were only a kid at the time.”
Uneasily, Yuri said, “I was nineteen. I had to give my consent.”
John snorted. “I’m a lawyer, kid. Was a lawyer. Parents or guardians can make you do anything at nineteen, no matter what the law says about consent. They put you under pressure to get in that box, didn’t they? They sent you off into a future where they would be dead, and everybody you knew would be dead.”
“They thought they were doing the right thing. Sending me to a better age.”
John shook his head. “That was the classic argument the Heroic Generation leaders always used. I was a law student at the time of the great trials. We were doing it for you, for the generations to come. That was what they said. It was hugely difficult ethically, because after all their solutions worked, mostly, in terms of stabilising the planet. It’s as if the world had been saved by a bunch of Nazi doctors. You ever heard of the Nazis? Look, you shouldn’t feel guilty about what your parents did, either to the world or to you. You’re a victim. No, you’re more like a kind of walking talking crime scene yourself. That’s the way you should think about it.”
Yuri said cautiously, “We’re all victims, John, if you want to put it like that. All of us stuck here on Per Ardua.”
Evidently Yuri had got the mood wrong. From being friendly and familiar, even over-familiar, John’s mood swung abruptly to anger, as it so often did. “So I’m a victim, am I? You share my pain, do you? But it doesn’t feel that way to me. Not in the night, under that endless non-setting fucking sun up there.” He glared at Yuri. “You and Mardina.”
“There is no me and—”
“Is that why you hung back, eh? When we all paired off. Waiting for the prize, were you?”
“No—”
“What can you know, a kid like you from an age of monsters? Don’t presume that you can ever feel as I feel, that you can ever understand. Oh, screw this.” He hurled his rake at the shore, scattering more of the tentatively curious builders, stalked out of the water and pulled off his waders.
Yuri waded after him. By the time he’d got to the shore, John was already heading off back towards the camp.
Yuri had never quite understood John Synge.
Synge had been a lawyer specialising in intergovernmental treaties before he had somehow been caught up in a corruption scam, and had ended up in the off-world sweep as a way of escaping a prison sentence. John had moved in a supremely complex world a century remote from Yuri’s own time, and Yuri barely understood any of the terms he used, or the issues he addressed. “You’re like a Neanderthal trying to understand patent law,” was how Martha Pearson had once unkindly put it to him.
Then Martha had died.
The cancer had been in the bone, a very aggressive kind. Maybe it was a result of the time she’d spent on Mars, or in the sleeting radiations of interstellar space; maybe one of the flares on Prox had caused it; maybe it was something she had been born with. Whatever, it wasn’t treatable by the functional but limited autodoc capabilities of the ColU. All it could offer was palliative care, and even that was limited. Though John had threatened it with dismantlement with a crowbar, the ColU continued to maintain that it couldn’t call for help, it had no radio transmitter, and there was nobody to call anyhow, the Ad Astra was long gone. Even Mardina was furious; even Mardina, an ISF officer dumped here with the rest, seemed to think the astronauts must have maintained some kind of presence here, and the ColU had to be lying.