And so Martha had died, stoically enough, adding another grave to the small plot they had started.
The funeral, such as it was, had been odd. Nobody here seemed particularly religious, or if they were they had kept quiet about it when the time came to speak over Martha’s body.
The ColU had surprised everybody by rolling forward. “She was one of us. Now she gives her Earthborn body to the soil of this new world. She will live on, in the green life to come, under the light of another star…”
John had shot it a look of venomous hatred.
Since then John’s mood swung daily, from manic hilarity to over-familiarity to sullen silence to spiky aggression. They had all tried to find ways of coping with him. But they had all shrunk back from him, Yuri thought.
Only five left: Yuri, Mardina, John, Abbey, Matt. You couldn’t even maintain the illusion that this was somehow the seed of a colony, a city of the future, a new world. They were castaways in this place, and after a life of toil, short or long, they were all going to die here, and that was that. The name Mardina had impulsively given to the place seemed ever more fitting. Through adversity, to the grave. John had a right to be difficult. Why the hell not? Effectively, they were all dead already.
Yuri packed up the last of the gear, and the haul of laver, and headed for camp.
Chapter 20
Twenty-four hours later the ColU approached Yuri, almost shyly, and asked him to accompany it to one of its test sites to the north.
Though no native life forms had posed a threat so far, they had a rule that nobody left the camp alone, and certainly not the ColU, for they couldn’t afford to lose it. Yuri had some transit sightings to make anyhow. So he pulled on his walking boots, got together a pack of water and dried food, and set off alongside the robot, following the Forest Road to the north.
As they left the little settlement they passed the ColU’s fields, where the robot was manufacturing terrestrial-type soil. A robot, a supreme artefact of a high-tech star-spanning civilisation, making something as humble as soil—it had seemed like a joke to Yuri when he’d first heard about this, but he’d come to understand it was a minor biotech miracle, and essential for their survival here on Per Ardua.
No plant from Earth could flourish in native Arduan dirt. Given enough time, lichen from Earth would break down bare rock to make usable soil, but the colonists didn’t have that much time. So the ColU took in that Arduan dirt, and baked it and treated it chemically to adjust its levels of iron, chloride and sulphide salts. Then it seeded the dirt with a suite of terrestrial bugs: sulphur-reducing bacteria, then cyanobacteria to fix carbon from carbon dioxide, and nitrogen fixers to process the atmospheric gas into ammonia and various nitrates usable for life. The colony’s own waste was fed in, together with compost-starter bacteria to get it to decompose. In the end the ColU even built up the complex structure of the soil, layer by layer, with fine manipulators on the end of its mechanical arms. The colonists joked about how it was coaxing earthworms into the new ground.
Of course the Arduan dirt was actually “soil” already: native soil, supporting native life forms. These were of no use to the colonisation project. They couldn’t even be eaten. The native creatures were eradicated, or broken down into basic nutrients to support the suite from Earth.
The first soil beds were already bearing a crop, gen-enged potatoes, their leaves stained black by their adjusted Prox-friendly photosynthetic chemistry. The spindly roots were nutritious enough but they tasted odd to Yuri, faintly acidic maybe, and with a powdery texture. Potatoes, which after all had originated in the Andes, were a useful crop, robust enough to grow at altitude, or in the cold and damp. You could produce several harvests a year. And potatoes, it seemed, provided all nutrients essential for a human diet except vitamins A and D, and the seaweed helped with that. But the ColU was experimenting with other Earth crops, some gen-enged, that might be suited to the conditions. Strawberries, that required less light to flower than some plant species, and so were preadapted for Proxima’s feebler daylight. Wheat, flexible crops like soya beans, sweet potatoes, ready-to-eat salad crops like lettuce and spinach.
The ColU told Yuri, and anybody who would listen, that they really were pioneers in a new way of living, here on Per Ardua. On Earth, humans lived in a kind of sea of other organisms, including the bacteria that lived inside and outside their own bodies. Even in a dome on Mars you were living in a kind of closed sample of that wider sea, a droplet. Here, they were trying to recreate that sea of Earth life in an open environment, on an alien world. It scared Yuri to hear that nobody really knew how much of that bacterial sea you actually needed, in the long term, to survive.
And it pissed off everybody else to hear the ColU, and sometimes Mardina, speak of long-abandoned plans for further flights to bring animals out here, perhaps in iron wombs.
It was all marvellous—but somehow fantastically dull at the same time. It was only, after all, soil. The fact that they all seemed doomed to be dead and gone in a few decades, no matter how ingenious the ColU was, made it seem even more futile. Sometimes Yuri felt sorry for the ColU, which wanted to talk about its achievements and discoveries, but there was usually nobody who wanted to listen.
Now, for example, as they walked, the ColU essayed a conversation. “You are preparing to make astronomy observations, Yuri Eden.”
“Transits, yes.”
“Transits.” With a whir, it lifted its camera eyes, entirely contained within its bubble-dome “head”, to the washed-out blue sky. “There is the Pearl, of course.” The Pearl was the name they had given to Proxima e, the big super-Earth, the only planet visible in the sky of unending day. “Per Ardua is one of a family of six worlds. But aside from the Pearl, the only way we can see the other planets is by transits, when the inner worlds pass across the face of Proxima itself and cast a shadow… Six planets in all, and six of you left. I did wonder if you would think that was some kind of omen.”
Yuri looked at it curiously. “No. Anyhow, there’s only five of us now.”
“Six if you include the ghost of Dexter Cole.”
The idea of the colony being haunted by the ghost of Dexter Cole, the first, lost, man to have been sent to Per Ardua, was a kind of black in-joke that had grown up among them. Yuri wasn’t surprised that the ColU had overheard, but he was surprised it referred to that kind of stuff. “Do you think that way? Omens and stuff? Ghost stories? You’re a machine. A creature of logic.”
“We are all creatures of logic, at root. Of little switches turning on and off in our heads, metaphorically speaking. I do not think like a human, but I am endlessly curious about humans, and their ways of thought.”
“Why? I mean, why did they program you to be curious?”
“I need to understand you better, in order to serve you better. I am your doctor, your guide, your children’s teacher one day. It is my duty to be curious about you. Just as it is my duty to be curious about the life forms of this world.”