Now another party of builders approached the midden. Just three of them, they moved together, in a fluid triangle of which one vertex moved at a time, so the formation swivelled across the muddy ground. They moved like this because they were carrying something, he saw, handing it off gracefully one to the other as they moved. It looked like just another bundle of stems to Yuri, until they started to climb up the slope of the midden.
Then he saw that the bundle was actually a body, another tripod-shaped builder, inert, its component stems clattering loosely as the party laboured up the mound.
Near the top they laid down their burden. With swift, precise movements they began to disarticulate it, separating the stems at the joints. Moving slowly, hoping not to be seen, Yuri dug his small telescope out of his pocket for a closer look. They were using knives, just chips of stone, jet black, basalt from the Lip maybe, gripped in combinations of fine stems like skeletal hands. With these stone knives they cut through the marrow blobs connecting the joints of the corpse. When they were done they began to lay out the disconnected stems across the surface of the midden, setting them down with great care, in a pattern Yuri could not see, and no doubt would not have understood.
They stood over the remains, the three of them in a neat row, utterly motionless. It was a funeral party, he realised.
And then, as one, they broke away from each other, spinning off in diverse directions. One of them headed west. Yuri followed it, at random.
As he walked, he got out his slate and murmured quick notes. “They plan. They work together. They have tools, knives at least. They honour their dead. No wonder they raided us. I’ve been robbing their cemetery…”
A little way around the curve of the lake shore, the builder he was following approached a thick bed of reed-like stems, just away from the water’s edge. In the background there was a magnificent row of stromatolites, as big as any Yuri had found elsewhere, tremendous flat-topped mounds whose surfaces shone like bronze. Yuri saw the builder was heading for a kind of dome assembled from stems that reminded Yuri of a bird’s nest, big, upside down—not that he’d seen a bird’s nest since his parents committed him to cryo. The colonists had always called these things “shelters”, but Yuri had no idea if that was their true purpose. The builder pushed its way inside this structure with a rustle.
Yuri crouched down and waited.
After a few minutes the builder emerged again, and went spinning off into one of the stem beds near the water.
Overwhelmed with curiosity, Yuri crept forward to the shelter. Close to, the structure looked densely woven, seamless. But he remembered where the builder had entered it—indeed there were trails in the mud, overlapping circular scrapings where it had passed. The builder had gone in through a soft place in the dome, a slit he could shove his hand inside.
Yuri got down on his hands and knees and pushed forward into darkness only relieved a little by the daylight seeping in behind him.
Once inside, he could see nothing. He pulled his pack over his shoulder and rifled through it in the dark. He never carried a torch; you didn’t need a torch, in the unending afternoon of Proxima. But he dug out his slate, tapped it a couple of times to bring up a bright glowing display. He turned it, shining the light into the interior.
He saw more builders: little ones, stationary, like models, or toys. They stood amid mounds of stems, heaps of stone flakes, other objects he couldn’t identify, just shapes in the uncertain light.
He set down the slate and picked up the smallest builder. It was only ten centimetres tall, maybe, and it was simple, especially in its internal structure, the mesh core. It was like a stool for a child. He turned it over and over.
One stem suddenly shot out of the axis of the little builder’s central core, broader, flatter than usual, like a leaf, darker. And, with a rustle, an eye opened, right in the middle of the leaf, an eye that might have been human, with white and an iris and even a pupil, staring right back at him.
“Shit!” Suddenly the little builder began to squirm in his hands. It was like he was wrestling with an animated bundle of sticks, a wooden puppet come to life, with that eerie eye glaring at him. “Shit, shit!” He dropped the builder, knocking aside his slate in the process.
There was hardly any light now, and he could hear the little builder and its fellows running around in the dark with a chattering rustle of stems. Suddenly, here in the dark with these strange creatures, he had a deep, almost phobic reaction; he had to get out of here. He felt for his slate and his pack and backed out into the bright air.
He was still on his hands and knees when the little builders came swarming out after him and scattered.
He got to his feet and followed the smallest, the one he had handled. It made straight for the dense bed of stems where the adult had headed. When he caught up, the adult was standing stock-still, the little one at its side, in the middle of the stem bed. The adult seemed to be facing Yuri, who slowed to a halt.
The ground was slick underfoot, he saw, the mud here thick with lichen, from which the stems were growing. The stems themselves came up to his waist. They were an unusual kind, darker, flatter, more like blades than the usual tube-like structures, yet still substantial, still no doubt filled with marrow. The adult had been collecting them, he saw; it had specimens at its feet, carefully detached from the lichen bed and lain down.
And on every stem, facing him, growing from the muddy ground, a single eye opened.
That was too much for Yuri. He turned and ran, and didn’t stop for breath until he was halfway back to the camp.
Chapter 25
When he got back, Yuri found the ColU and Mardina in the middle of an argument.
He blurted out his news. “They’re intelligent! They use tools! They have eyes! This is first contact, isn’t it?” To his dismay nobody was interested in his discoveries.
Before the half-built house the ColU rolled backwards and forwards in the dirt, an odd little habit it had developed, especially when it faced a stressful decision. Mardina sat on a fold-out stool hacking at scrawny potatoes with a knife, slicing them up and then dropping them skin and all into a pot. She had bare legs and feet; she wore cut-down jeans that had once belonged to Martha Pearson, and her curly black hair was pulled back from her forehead. She looked wiry, tough, resilient, practical. She also looked angry.
The ColU at least tried to engage with Yuri over his discoveries. “The eye-leaves feature is fascinating, yes. Convergent evolution in action. Of course there must be eyes; eyes developed many times independently on Earth, with no fewer than nine separate designs—”
“Oh, keep the lecture,” Mardina snarled. “You stupid tin box. Who cares about you? Everything you know is useless, valueless, everything you say.”
Yuri sat on the ground and sipped water from his pack. “What’s going on? Why are you arguing?”
“Ask that,” Mardina said, making a stabbing motion with her knife.
“A word,” the ColU said, with a good approximation of a sigh. “We are fighting over a single word. Yet a word which encapsulates a fundamental conceptual issue.”
Yuri thought about that. “I don’t know what a fundamental conceptual issue is.”
Mardina said, “It won’t have me calling this shack of ours a wuundu. Even though that’s what the bloody thing is.”
“But the word is inappropriate,” the ColU said patiently. “Because, as I understand it, the word means ‘shelter’, in the sense of something temporary. This is not temporary. This is not a shelter. It is a house. It is your home.”