Yuri himself was forty-four now. Sometimes he felt a lot older. But at least he’d been spared the worst of the arthritis that plagued many of those on the march, after ten years following the river’s course as it had wound upstream to the south, years of unending toil, this way of living where you had not just to labour at your farm but every so often you had to break it down and move it further upstream, topsoil and all. No, he’d been spared that, and the worst of the limb breaks and other random injuries that came from the endless travel and labour. And he’d been spared the rash of cancers that had taken out so many, presumably caused by the radiation that poured down from Proxima’s spitting, flaring face, the star that was now significantly higher in their sky. Yes, Yuri had kept his health, more or less. But the world had caught up with him even so. Here he was in his forties with a teenage kid, and a partner of sorts in Mardina, and a share of a responsibility for the lives of fifty-odd people, the relics of six once-separate McGregor drops of colonists.
And still the empty kilometres of Per Ardua stretched endlessly around them, as the babies cried, and the parents grumbled as every morning they went down to crack the ice on the river for the day’s water…
“Here they come,” Mardina murmured. She leaned forward for more nettle tea, from the pan bubbling on the range over the fire. She was greying now, gaunt rather than slim, and even sitting so close to the fire she wore cut-down gloves adapted as mittens. Born, after all, in the Australian outback, she had particular trouble adapting to the cold. But her astronaut eyesight was as sharp as ever. And her tongue, Yuri thought.
She was right, anyhow. Here came Beth and Freddie, Delga’s son, and two others, running silently across a plain of bare earth, ice patches, snow banks, and the occasional drab green stain of Arduan life. Seventeen years old now, Beth had grown whip-thin and tall, taller than either of her parents, as had many of her generation. She was darker than Yuri, with more of her mother’s colour, but her black hair was straight like Yuri’s, lacking Mardina’s tight curls. She looked Arduan, Yuri thought. A member of a new Arduan humanity, not quite like anybody on Earth, nobody on Mars. A new branch. Born into this world, a new generation who knew and cared nothing of what had gone before, or of any other world, and that was probably a blessing.
The youngsters stumbled to a halt, panting hard. Beth dropped her thick outer coat, pulled a blanket over her shoulders, kicked off her elderly hand-me-down ISF-issue boots, and slipped on bark sandals. Yuri passed around mugs of hot tea.
Mardina peered out of her nest of blankets. “Well?”
Beth laughed, still breathing hard. “Nice welcome, Mom. We saw lots. Not far upstream from here, the river splits. Well, it doesn’t really. If you think of it flowing downstream, two big tributaries merge.”
“A confluence,” Delga said.
“Yeah. That’s the word. Lots of wet ground, marshes, mostly frozen… And we saw fantômes.” She grinned as she made her grand pronouncement.
Yuri focused. “Whoa, back up. Fantômes?” Since Delga’s people had first misidentified Yuri himself as the ghost of Dexter Cole, fantômes had become an in-joke word for strangers, more starship-stranded humans. But they had only met a few new groups since. No wonder Beth was excited. “How many fantômes?”
“Not many. There’s not much there at all, just a couple of shacks in the green, smoke from the fires. There must be fields and a ColU but we didn’t see them. And the people, we saw a few adults and kids. A dozen maybe? We didn’t stay to look too closely—”
“But they saw you.”
“Oh, yeah. Probably before we saw them.”
Liu Tao leaned forward. “In the green? Is that what you said? What do you mean?”
“Arduan green, you know, the darker green. All over the place.”
“But what about the snow, the ice?”
“Not so much of that around.” She shrugged. “Not as bad as here. I’m only telling you what we saw.”
“We know, sweetheart,” Yuri murmured, trying to reassure her, but that only won him a glare from Beth, who didn’t like those kinds of endearments any more.
The four elders looked at each other.
“We need to check this out,” Liu said.
“Obviously,” drawled Delga. “Beginning with dealing with these people, whoever the hell they are.”
“ ‘Deal with them’,” Mardina said. “Still barely civilised, aren’t you?”
Delga grinned. “Still barely alive.”
“More to the point we need to check out this greenery,” Yuri said. “Maybe we should take along the ColU.” He meant his and Mardina’s original machine, the only fully functioning unit; every other group they’d encountered had detached or destroyed the AI module of their colonisation unit to get control over the basic functions.
Mardina snorted. “That old wreck.”
Delga cackled, and Liu grinned. The tension between Yuri and Mardina was a continuing source of amusement for everybody else.
“We need to make a stop anyhow,” Yuri said reasonably to Mardina. “The stocks are low. Maybe the existence of this patch of native life is telling us that the location is a little warmer than the surroundings. A good place to do some planting.”
Liu nodded thoughtfully. “Which is why there are people already there, no doubt. We’re all looking for a bit of warmth, in the star winter.”
Yuri shielded his eyes and looked straight up at Proxima, at the huge spots that crowded its face, localised flares showing like scars. When they had landed none of them had been warned about the star winter, as they had come to call it. There were no Earthlike seasons on Per Ardua, but when its face swarmed with sunspots Proxima evidently delivered winters, winters that arrived irregularly, and lasted for an unpredictable time. It was another problem that could have been determined in advance if this world had been properly surveyed before people had been dumped on it like loads of bricks. Well, winter had come, and the whole of the trek south had been a race against the deepening cold.
Now there was this new place. In the green.
Yuri said, “If we could stay there even just a bit longer than usual, get through a few growing seasons, build up some stock…”
Mardina scowled. “But why the hell should this location be magically warmer than any other?”
“Could be a hot spring,” Liu said.
“Yeah, and so not a healthy place to stick around.”
“But somebody’s doing just that already,” Yuri pointed out. “We’ll learn nothing by sitting around here debating it. I say we fetch the ColU, and go and see what’s what.”
Then there was a pause, as Mardina sat, cradling her mug of tea. Everybody waited for her to speak.
She wasn’t the leader, exactly, not really in command. The tradition of the core of this group, the mothers—Delga and Anna Vigil and Dorothy Wynn—was that nobody was in command, least of all the men. You talked things out and came to a consensus; there were few enough of them, and generally time enough, for that. And certainly Mardina didn’t want the visibility of authority. Her former-astronaut status had been problematic from the start. Nevertheless, as Liu Tao liked to point out to Yuri over a glass of Klein vodka, you had to get Mardina’s approval before you could get on with almost anything. It was a kind of negative leadership, Yuri supposed, a leadership by veto not deployed.
“All right,” Mardina said at length. “Let’s go and see.” She began to move, stiff, reluctant; she let Beth take her layers of blankets and fold them away.