“Of course it’s temporary. Everything here is temporary.”
Yuri thought he understood. “You’re talking about the pickup. Everything is temporary, because all we have to do is survive until the pickup by ISF.”
Mardina shrugged, glaring down at her potatoes.
“There will be no pickup,” the ColU said. “Not soon. Not ever. You heard what Major McGregor said. There will be no return of the Ad Astra, no follow-up expedition.”
“I can’t accept that,” Mardina said simply. “Look around. Everybody’s dead, except us. We fucked up, collectively; we killed each other off, all but. You can’t build a colony out of two people, no matter how many kids I have with this scrawny refugee, how many of our little muda-mudas end up running around. I know the ISF. They might deny they’re watching us, but… There’ll be a pickup. We won’t be left here to die.”
“You are simply wrong in the premises of your argument,” the ColU said patiently. “The two of you do have significant genetic diversity to found a colony.”
Mardina seemed outraged. “What the hell are you talking about? Adam and Eve was a myth, you joker.”
“No. In the literature there is a case of a camel drover who came to Australia from the Punjab, called ‘the Afghan’. He took an Aboriginal woman for his wife, and they went into the outback… In the end he sired children even by his own granddaughter. And six of eight of the great-grandchildren survived. More recently there has been a remarkably similar case on Mars, where—”
Mardina looked as if she was about to explode. “That’s monstrous. And besides I was briefed on the anthropology stuff. I would have heard about this.”
“Not all of it. Among the crew you were a priority type, genetically. A reserve colonist, so to speak. It was thought best to limit your briefing, no doubt. Lieutenant Jones, the Aboriginal population was isolated from the rest for tens of thousands of years, and so the two of you are about as genetically diverse from each other as two humans could possibly be. In fact, if this situation had been devised for an optimal outcome, it could not have been more—”
“I don’t care about the genetics. This is like one of those horror stories you read, about fathers locking up their daughters in basements as sex slaves. And now you’re telling me it’s UN policy?”
The ColU said solemnly, “The UN is locked in rivalry with China. Proxima must be taken before the Chinese get here. This is the only way to do it. You are soldiers in an as yet undeclared war. So will your children be.”
Mardina stood, brushed dirt from her legs, and picked up the pan of potatoes. “This isn’t going to happen, ColU. To hell with you. I am going to wait for the pickup, and if I die before it gets here, well then, I will die childless.” She stuck her knife into the door jamb of the building. “And this is a wuundu, so get used to it.” She walked away, carrying her pan.
Chapter 26
2165
Angelia 5941 woke up with numbers rattling in her head. All around her, the sisters were stirring.
This was the last waking. They would not sleep again, not until Proxima Centauri was reached. And the deceleration routines had now been uploaded to her. At last, Angelia 5941 fully understood the process; they all did. The numbers were brutal. A final betrayal by Dr Kalinski.
Soon the ship would be as close to Proxima as it had been distant from the sun, after its initial four days of acceleration had been completed: about a hundred and thirty times as far as Earth was from the sun. The craft would have to be decelerated for another four days, to be brought safely to rest in the Proxima system. But this time there was no welcoming microwave-laser station to push them back, no Dr Kalinski coordinating the event, no well-trained controllers to guide them home. All there was in the target system was Proxima, and its light. And Angelia was going to have to use the energies of that light to slow down.
The idea was simple. One by one the sisters would peel away. They would form up in vast arrays of lenses, and focus the light of Proxima on the remnant core ship. Just as Dr Kalinski’s microwaves had pushed Angelia out of the solar system, so the visible-light photons of Proxima would slow her down from her interstellar cruise.
But Angelia was travelling terribly quickly, and the light of Proxima was feeble; Proxima was a red dwarf star with only a hundredth the luminosity of the sun. As the implications of the final software download percolated through the sisters’ minds, so the lethal statistics had soon become clear. To slow the remainder at thirty-six gravities, great throngs of sisters would have to be cast off in the first waves, where the mass to be slowed was greatest and the distance to Proxima was at its longest, to effect the deceleration. More than a hundred thousand sisters would have to go, in the first moments alone. As the remnant core slowed, so the castaways would quickly recede from the ship, still sending back their light, until they had gone too far to be useful. Then the next wave would be released, and the next.
All this was why, in fact, the castaways each had to be smart. Proxima was not only feeble, it was a star that flared and sputtered, and its light output was unpredictable. The castaways had to be able to adapt, to make optimal use of the uncertain light that reached them, gathering it to serve the cause, in the few seconds of their usefulness, before they were hurled away, spent.
Eventually only one would remain, one sister, to go into orbit around Proxima, with a tremendous array of nearly a million mirror-sisters stretched out across a volume of space before her—all of them doomed to fly on past Proxima and into the endless dark, all save the one delivered to orbit. It was a nightmarish design: to deliver just one mirror-sister, atom-thin, with the mass of a mist droplet, nearly a million sisters would have to be sacrificed. But it would work.
Angelia 5941 rejected the cruelty of it. But she could not stop it.
She promised herself that if she survived, somehow, if she was the one, she would reject the goals of those waiting patiently on Earth for news of her arrival. She would formulate her own, more appropriate goals. And she would seek out the one being who might have some understanding of what she had gone through.
She would find Dexter Cole.
Chapter 27
2173
As the Arduan day-years rolled by, as the Earth months ticked off on their calendars, they extended their fields bit by bit: churning up the Arduan ground, scraping off layers of native life from the surface and shovelling them into the ColU’s reactors to be broken down into feedstock, spreading the ColU’s newly minted soil over the surface. Soon they had grass growing alongside the potatoes, spindly wheat, even a couple of precious apple trees, for now just skinny saplings a long way from producing edible fruit.
They did some homesteading too. To replace their slowly disintegrating clothes they learned to make a kind of cloth, experimenting with fibres drawn from the bark of forest-fringe saplings; you could pull apart the fibres, beat them, weave them. Mardina was more creative, and she started experimenting with looms. She also made bark sandals, similar to a kind her people had once made from the bark of gum trees, she said, to give their feet a break from ISF-issue boots. Yuri contented himself with making coolie hats, crudely woven from strips of bark, but useful for keeping off Proxima’s light on the bad days. It was the kind of work that kept them busy in the hours they had to hide out in the storm shelter from the more violent flares.