Jenny Amsler had always been the kind to keep in with the authority figures, or at least try to. “Everybody knows that,” she said, trying to smile. She had a faintly French accent. Around thirty, she was thin, had been even before the star flight, with a pale, narrow, rather shapeless face. Her smile was obviously forced. Yuri thought she was clinging to him, maybe for protection, and maybe to Mardina too.
Mardina just ignored her. “The stromatolite structure might be a universal. Maybe critters like our bacteria must build something like this, on any world, in the water or out of it. She walked a bit further, towards the lake, and glanced down at the mud. “Whose footsteps are these?”
Jenny smiled again. “That’s Major McGregor. He comes running around the lake every morning. I mean, every ship’s morning.”
“That’s Lex all right,” Mardina murmured. “Determined to get himself in condition before the long haul home.” She peered out at the lake, where what looked like reeds protruded from the surface of the water, pale, slim rods. There were bundles of the reeds on the shore too, by the lakeside. Further out there was more evidence of life, drab green patches on the landscape, and the shadowy fringe of the forest to the north. “Those reeds are everywhere.”
Yuri said, “I’ve been calling them stems.”
Mardina’s sensor unit recorded more images of the patient stems. “We knew there was life here, from a smear of evidence of photosynthesis—we could see that even through telescopes back in the solar system. We never did a proper survey, never landed a probe for instance. We just came, and took a chance, for better or worse. Which is kind of characteristic of the space programme, if you look at the history. The Americans, I mean the old US, designed the first lunar landers knowing nothing of the surface they had to land on. The moon might have popped under them, lunar mountains collapsing like meringues, so some feared… And anyhow you have to be there. You have to experience a world, directly, physically, to make it real. And I think—”
A bundle of the stems on the shore, like a cage of dried reeds and bamboo shoots, abruptly changed shape, rustling; it rolled along the shore, leaving a textured trail.
“Wow. Did you see that?”
Yuri said, “There are combinations that move. I think there are combinations that have been built around this shore. Made of the stems.”
She looked at him sharply. “Built? You mean, by intelligence? Or something like a beaver dam?”
Yuri shrugged. “What do I know? I’m not a biologist.”
She just glared at him, as if compelling him to say more.
“I’ve seen other stuff,” he said, to deflect any interest in himself. “Further out. Big things moving out there, on the plain.”
“Running?”
“Not exactly. Moving fast. And flying things.”
“Birds?”
“I call them kites. Things like big angular frames. You see them flapping around near the forest.”
She looked that way. “You must have sharp eyes. Has anybody else seen this stuff?”
He shrugged. Nobody else seemed to be looking.
Mardina sighed. “Maybe we’ll come back with a proper science expedition, when this mad-rush land grab is all over. Show me this observatory of yours.”
From the summit of the Cowpat the Puddle was a flat sheet fringed by clumps of pale stems, and the shuttle was a gaudy bug in the dirt, surrounded by scuffed ground and shabby temporary structures, with the track of its landing a dead-straight scrape that vanished into the distance to the east.
This whole feature, the Cowpat, was maybe half a kilometre across. Exploring, Mardina climbed hillocks and descended into depressions. “Curious,” she said. “I’m no geologist. The terrain is sort of sunken, jumbled. But not like a lunar crater; it’s more as if it’s collapsed into some hollow below. There are features like this on Venus. They call them coronas, I think.”
“You’re going to miss the eclipse,” Jenny called.
“What eclipse? OK, show me.”
Yuri had a small optical telescope set up on a stand, pointing up at the star. Behind its eyepiece was a sheet of plastic, pure white, that Jenny was, inexpertly, angling on a heap of rocks, so that the star’s image was projected onto the sheet. There wasn’t much more to the “observatory” than this: a few manual instruments, a sextant, a plumb line, and a slate for Yuri to record his observations. When he wasn’t around he left all this stuff, save the electronics, under the cover of a weighted-down bit of tarpaulin.
Mardina was impressed by the telescope. “Where did you get that?”
“From a theodolite, a bit of surveying gear.”
She frowned. “I never heard of an instrument like that that wasn’t electronic.”
“No. It was specially made for the colony programme. Everything we have is supposed to be old-fashioned, easy to repair, no power sources to run out. No reliance on satellite networks and such, because there isn’t one here. You ought to know that, Lieutenant. It’s your policy.”
She looked embarrassed, but she was fascinated by the image projected onto the plastic sheet. The star’s surface was pocked with huge black scars, and webs of lightning crawled across it. “My God. Proxima Centauri. A red dwarf star, just six million kilometres away.” She glanced up at the star, so its light shone full in her face.
Jenny Amsler laughed nervously. “Doesn’t look so red to me.”
“It’s just an astronomer’s term. The surface is white-hot—”
“Watch,” said Yuri. “Here it comes.” He pointed to a brilliant spark near one edge of the illuminated disc on the sheet. “Jenny…”
She had a watch, and the slate. “I’m ready.”
Mardina asked, “What are we seeing?”
“You can’t see much in the sky here, right? Proxima never sets, so you never get a starry sky. But you can see the double star, and one big planet that you can see the disc of—”
“That’s Prox e. The fifth planet from Proxima. This is the third—a, b, c. That’s a big world up there. Not even the nearest planet in this system.”
“The planet passes behind the sun. It’s eclipsed. You can see, it’s about to happen now. Jenny…”
“Ready.”
The spark at the edge of the solar disc winked out. “Mark!”
“Got it.”
Mardina laughed, as if pleased.
“It takes about an hour,” Yuri said. “Then it re-emerges from the other side.”
Mardina sat back on her ankles, thinking. “One hour, out of the two hundred or so it takes Prox c to go around its star. Of course. Because Proxima itself spans one two-hundredth of the sky’s arc. But it won’t be quite that, because Prox e is following its own slower orbit… Why are you doing this, Eden?”
He shrugged. “To get a sense of time.”
She smiled. “I see. In the absence of day and night. A clock in the sky.”
Jenny said, with forced eagerness, “I wanted to work on this. Clocks and calendars and stuff. I was a jeweller, back in Londres. Well, a jeweller’s assistant, a technician.”
Yuri knew that was true. Maybe one reason she had been clinging to him was that since they had landed she had learned he was British too, though he was from independent North Britain and she was from Angleterre, the southern Euro province. He neither knew nor cared how she had gone from her jewellery store or whatever in Londres, to the sweep that had delivered her to Prox c.
“I can do fine work,” she said now to Mardina. “Instruments.”
Mardina eyed her with something like pity, Yuri thought. She took the woman’s hands, turned them over. “These are going to be farmer’s hands, Amsler. Not much call for ‘instruments’ here. If you want to make calendars it’s going to be like this, what Eden’s doing. Sticks in the ground. Little telescopes.