Somebody like Lemmy might have been playing some kind of trick. Not Mardina. Nowadays she walked around in a kind of waking dream, it seemed to Yuri. She barely noticed him most of the time, and she certainly wouldn’t fix on him long enough to figure out an elaborate practical joke.
In the end Yuri spent a sleepless “night” hidden in a storage tent, peering out at his stem heap.
And, in the small hours by Yuri’s body clock, and with the ColU on the far side of the colony inspecting a field of fresh-cropped potatoes, they came. Builders. They kept to the shadows of the tents, whirling, rustling things like low stools or tripods, stick limbs attached flexibly to a central core of tangled stems. Builders, from the Puddle! He counted two, four, eight, nine of them: nine, he thought, three threes, a logical number for creatures with threefold symmetry. They made for the stem heap, but paused frequently, apparently listening, or watching.
When they got to the stems, after maybe a minute of stillness, the builders started buzzing around the heap, plucking out stems with their fine “limbs” of multiply jointed rods and gathering them into loose bundles. Yuri marvelled at the way they worked together, graceful, cooperative, creatures of jointed twigs moving with no more noise than a dry rustle, a sound like a sack full of autumn leaves gently shaken. And he realised they were being pretty smart; whatever they wanted the stems for, this was a pretty good moment to come and get them, in the middle of Yuri’s and Mardina’s sleep cycle, and with the ColU far away. Evidence of observation, of planning.
But they were robbing his stash.
He burst out of hiding. He had a saucepan and lid that he clattered together, making as much noise as he could as he ran at them. “Get out of here, you little bastards!”
The builders froze, just for an instant. Then they scooted off, rolling in their tripod way, much faster than Yuri could give chase. They carried off most of the stems they had stolen, though they dropped a few, leaving a trail of broken stems that led straight back to the lake.
He didn’t sleep again that shift.
When Mardina emerged from her tent, barefoot, hair a tangle, he tried to show her the heap, the trail of stems.
“I’m going out after them. We need to know more about those little sods.”
“Suit yourself.” She filled a pan from the small tank they kept topped up with filtered lake water, and carried it to the fire to boil up.
He followed her. “I thought I would have disturbed you in the night. All that jumping and hollering and lid-banging. Even the builders made some noise.”
She shrugged, without reply. She was inspecting one of their packs of freeze-dried coffee, precious stuff and irreplaceable; the pack was almost empty, but she shook out enough dust for one more cup.
“You know,” said Yuri, frustrated, “I sometimes feel like you’re barely aware that I’m here at all. Like I’m a ghost.”
She looked at him directly for the first time that morning. “Maybe you are. Maybe I’m a ghost too.” She pulled a face. “Maybe the lawyer got us both, and it happened so quick we don’t know we’re dead. Maybe there’s nobody here on Per Ardua but us ghosts. You, me, and Dexter Cole.”
He turned away. She was just jabbing at him, but she had learned how to get under his skin. He wasn’t superstitious, he didn’t think, but sometimes the sheer emptiness of this world got to him, and she knew it. “I’m going after the builders,” he said doggedly.
“What about the wuundu?” Which was her word for the house; the ColU didn’t like her using it.
“A day off won’t hurt.”
“What’s the point? We’ve still got plenty of stems.”
“I’m curious, that’s all.”
“Fine. Go off and be curious. I’m going back to bed.” Her pan of water had boiled; she poured it carefully into her coffee.
So Yuri put together a quick pack, food, water, a couple of knives, his slate, rain cape, fold-up sun parasol—and, when he thought it over, a crossbow—and set off.
The trail left by the fleeing builders was easy enough to track at first, a litter of broken stem fragments. It headed north, towards the Puddle.
The sky was clear, and the heat of Proxima poured down. The ground was a plain, more or less flat save for occasional outcrops of rock, bluffs of what looked liked sandstone to him, none of them approaching the size of the Cowpat. He remembered McGregor saying this site had been chosen as a shuttle landing site in the first place because it was the bed of a larger dried-up lake, and it certainly felt like that now.
Not far from the camp the trail petered out. Yuri guessed the builders had realised they weren’t being followed, and had slowed down, taken more care with the precious fragments they were carting home. Lacking any better clues Yuri just kept walking the way he’d been heading, taking a line of sight between the camp and features of the lake: a swampy area by the shore, a cloud of kites flapping in very birdlike flocks over the water.
And as he approached the lake he saw he was heading straight for the big heap of dead stems, the midden he’d been taking the stuff from in the first place.
He came to a bluff, a tilted slab of stratified stone taller than he was that offered a little shade. He took a break from the sun, a swig of water from one of his bottles.
Here in the shade the ground was quite bare, he saw, the rock faces clean of the native lichen. He kept forgetting that here on Per Ardua the shadows never shifted; this little scrap of ground was in permanent shadow, the only light coming from reflection from the ground, so little could ever grow here. Further north, he thought, there must be places where Proxima light never reached, where the ground was forever frozen, the snow never melted. He wondered if he’d ever go that far. Maybe not, if he was stuck by this lake the whole of his life.
He walked on, coming to the lake shore just to the west of the midden. From here the way the land rose gradually to the north, beyond the lake, was very obvious—and getting more so, if the ColU was right about the geology and the changes.
The midden itself was a heap of stems, a rough arc facing the water. He could see similar structures further to the west, all along the lake’s southern shore. But he couldn’t remember seeing these before. Were they new, had they been built up? They looked almost like pieces of an incomplete dam, he thought now.
Before him the lake itself was shallow, nearly choked with banks of the reed-like stems. A flock of kites drifted on the lake. They seemed to feed on the stems in the water; he’d seen them plucking stems and tucking them into their bodies, especially their densely woven cores. But sometimes they would break the stems, and finer appendages on the kites, like drinking straws, would be dipped in to extract the sticky marrow within. He was too far away to see the details of how they did this, how creatures like bundles of sticks in brown paper could manage such fine operations. Then they lifted suddenly into the air, flapping, splashing. They were very birdlike in their movements on the water, like gaunt pelicans maybe, an illusion broken when they flew up and you could see those twin sets of spinning vanes, like some kid’s rubberband toy of a helicopter.
And he spotted movement on the big midden.
He stepped back, trying to stay inconspicuous.
It was a party of builders, tripods silhouetted against the sky—seven, eight, nine of them, burdened with dead stems. Surely the party he’d been following. He saw they’d piled up the bundle they’d taken from the camp on the top of the midden, and with some care were threading the individual stems back into the structure, like reassembling a haystack one straw at a time. This obviously mattered to them, to go to all the trouble of retrieving the stuff, and to handle it so carefully.