Chapter 23
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It took six more months before Yuri and Mardina started work on the house.
Up to that point they were still living separately, in tents that had come out of the shuttle. Whenever a flare was threatened they retreated to the storm shelter, a pit dug into the ground big enough to protect ten people, and now uneasily roomy.
Apart from the flares, the tents were robust enough to withstand the weather they had endured on Per Ardua so far, which was still like a stormy late summer in Manchester as far as Yuri remembered from his childhood. But the ColU again pointed out the frost-shattering and the glacial valleys. They all agreed it was better to be prepared for harsher weather before it hit them.
So, a house. They argued about designs. It would be timber-framed, that was logical enough given the materials to hand and the shortage of labour. They settled on a roof of reed thatch, and walls of cross-woven branches and stems. The ColU lectured them about the relevant techniques, which were very ancient, deriving from mankind’s own deep past on Earth. For instance, you didn’t need to leave breaks in the thatch for a chimney over your hearth; the smoke would just seep out through the thatched roof.
But what kind of architecture? They sketched competing designs on their slates, from crude temporary shelters of the kind Mardina’s nomadic people had once built in the outback, to grand halls with steeply pitched roofs. In the end they settled on something like a roundhouse, once common across Britain before the Romans came, as Yuri vaguely remembered and the ColU was able to confirm.
They sited it on a slope, and dug out drains to protect it from any run-off when it rained. They started the building itself with a circle of rocks, a drystone wall of sandstone blocks hauled from the Cowpat by the ColU, and a few big black basalt slabs from the Lip, the volcanic-extrusion feature to the north, as a base for a hearth. Then, with the ColU’s help, they hauled timbers, long and strong, from the sapling groves at the fringe of the northern forest. They had to cauterise the cut ends to keep the marrow from seeping out.
Every time Yuri went on a log-collecting expedition with the ColU he found himself being lectured on the gathering signs of the geological event the ColU thought was developing here: an uplifted ground, trace seepages in the air—maybe there really was some kind of big eruption on the way.
They dug postholes outside the stone wall, and set up the posts in an open cone frame, with their bases outside the wall and their top ends tied together, tepee style. Getting the first three posts up was tricky, but once the basic frame was established the rest was easy. Then they tied crosspieces to the frame, draped the whole structure with tent fabric to keep it dry, and began the intricate labour of building walls of wattle and daub, mud caked over dead stems. Yuri had brought stems of about the right length over from a kind of midden he’d found on the south lake shore, some kind of builder construction.
It was hard, steady work once they’d begun it. In fact, Yuri wished they had started earlier. It distracted them from their plight. It was satisfying work. Satisfying for him, anyhow.
Mardina mostly buckled down, but sometimes she would grouse. “You never saw Earth, ice boy. I mean, my Earth, twenty-second-century Earth. We had programmable matter. You know what that means? If you wanted a new table, say, you wouldn’t go out and buy a table. Still less would you make one, from bits of splintery old wood. You’d order up the pattern you wanted, download it, and it would assemble itself, from whatever you had lying around that you didn’t need any more.” She kicked the stem-tree trunk she’d been working on. “This stuff is dead. Stupid. It’s not even augmented.”
“Augmented?”
“The whole world is smart now. Even an axe, even a chunk of wood, would be talking to you all the time. Laser beams bouncing off and zapping you straight in the retina.”
“Wow.”
“We got used to making do with less than that in the military. Soldiers have to work in simpler, more robust environments. Same in space, on Mars. But here there’s nothing, nothing but the base stratum, the inanimate.”
“Nothing but what’s real.”
That only provoked an argument. “Information is real. Layers of meaning attached to an object by human intelligence are real. You’d never understand. Oh, get back to your cave paintings and your carved mammoth tusks, ice boy…”
He and Mardina, alone together, got along all right. On the whole. In a sense.
For now they had plenty of supplies, so there was no conflict about that. They were calm enough when they discussed common projects, like building the house. They were usually civil, at least, just as they had been before Synge’s killing spree. They may or may not have been the strongest personalities in the original group, Yuri reflected, but they had been among the most self-contained. They’d had no reason to come into collision while everybody else was still around, and they mostly managed to avoid that now it was just the two of them.
They didn’t talk much about the past, those who had killed and died. Even when they did, Mardina never spoke their names. John Synge became “the lawyer”, Matt was “the artist”, Lemmy was “your little chum from Mars”.
And though they kept up their clocks and calendars, Mardina slaving to Earth time, Yuri cross-checking with his amateur astronomy observations, Mardina seemed to mark time mostly by events: the day the lawyer went crazy, the day the ex-cop took up with the artist, the day they were stranded on Per Ardua in the first place. Since Synge’s killing spree a lot less had happened in their little settlement. Two people, it seemed, didn’t generate much in the way of incidents. But even so there were some meaningful events: the day of the bumper potato crop, the day of the big electric storm, the day the ColU threw a tyre on the way back from the Puddle.
Yuri didn’t know what all this meant. Maybe she was reaching back to deeper roots, her childhood. Maybe this was how her own people thought and behaved: maybe they never named the dead, maybe they kept track of time by events, not by counting the days. Yuri didn’t know, he didn’t discuss it with Mardina. Yuri had never been to Australia, back in his pre-cryo life on Earth. And besides, the dried-out, emptied, China-dominated Australia of her age was no doubt utterly different from his own time.
As for the future, they never discussed it, beyond the immediate horizon of their chores. Never, despite the gentle prompting of the ColU. Never, save for the one event that swam in Mardina’s imagination, cut loose from time: the day of pickup, when ISF, she continued to believe, would atone for its crimes by swooping down from the sky to rescue her.
Chapter 24
Yuri started noticing problems with the heap of fallen stems he had been retrieving from the lake for the walls and the thatch.
It kept shrinking.
They didn’t alternate watches, as had been the practice in the colony’s early days. The two of them kept to the same day-night sleep cycle, trusting to the ColU to keep watch over the camp while they slept in their separate tents. And it was during the “nights”, their sleep periods, that the heap of stems seemed to be diminishing, sometimes to two-thirds, even half the size Yuri remembered from the day before. It took a couple of simple images on his slate to prove he wasn’t imagining it.
The ColU denied all knowledge, though it accepted that the solo patrols it ran during the night around the camp, which was now spreading as the ColU created more areas of terrestrial-compatible soil, meant that it couldn’t watch the stem heaps constantly.