But on Beth’s first birthday the dam broke, and Mardina went into a rage at a betrayal that, at last, she couldn’t deny. It caused a lot of tension. It was still a birthday. Yuri had tried baking a cake, with butter and stuff from the iron cow unit inside the ColU. The ColU had even made candles from synthesised fat. Mardina ruined it all. Beth had been too young to understand, but for Yuri, the memories of The Day Mommy Lost It remained strong.
The next year, with Yuri gently prodding, they had agreed they should celebrate the birthday. After all Beth didn’t have other kids around, she was never going to go to school or college or enjoy all the other milestones regular children did, even in a dump like Eden on Mars. A birthday, though, one thing that was uniquely hers, could always be marked and celebrated. And, as a tie to the cycles of time on Earth, it was a reminder of deeper roots too. But by the time that second birthday rolled around the echoes of the first were still strong, and Mardina withdrew into herself.
Well, since then they had celebrated all Beth’s birthdays, but there was always tension. And Beth, with a little kid’s wiles, picked that up and played on it. Yuri just coped with it all. Nobody had ever told him life was going to be easy.
“Listen, it’s late, why don’t you take a nap? That way you’ll be fresh for Mom when you get home.”
“I don’t want to take a nap.”
“Just try,” he said in his line-in-the-sand voice, much practised over seven years.
So she complied. She wriggled inside her rope harness until she was lying down on a couple of blankets, and cuddled up against her father’s leg. He put one arm around her and stroked her short-cut straight hair with his free hand. They had had trouble with her sleeping from the beginning. Born into the endless day of Proxima, she seemed that bit more disconnected from the rhythms of distant Earth, and didn’t see why she needed to go to sleep when her parents did, at what seemed like arbitrary times in the unending light. But if they let her get away without regular sleep she would burn herself out and crash, so Yuri and Mardina had worked out a process of control between them.
Even the ColU, which had some programming in child care, was drafted into this regime. It always backed up the parents’ diktats, which was just as well, Yuri thought, or it would have found Mardina decommissioning it enthusiastically. The ColU was the third “person” in Beth’s limited life, and she saw nothing strange in having a robotic farming machine as a kind of uncle. Proving to be an expert at weaving dolls from dead stem shafts didn’t do its image any harm either.
Soon Beth was asleep; she had a soft, gentle snore.
Yuri had time to inspect the route they were following. After all, it was the last time he expected ever to come this way. The ColU was following its own tracks along the bank of a broad, braided river bed. Like most of the channels down which the builders guided the flow of their lake this bed had been here already, but was dry as bones before the lake came. Now the bed was littered with the detritus of the passage of the waters of the lake: snapped stems, a few broken builder traps, dead aquatic creatures from fish analogues to crab analogues and jellyfish analogues, and others they had yet to identify. There was even some terrestrial-origin seaweed, the gen-enged laver brought to this world by the starship Ad Astra.
After years of observation, even the ColU had no real idea how the builders managed these hydrological transfers so effectively. The lake stayed in stable locations for months or years at a time—it had turned out that the site where the shuttle had landed had been the longest stay so far, and in fact the intervals between moves were generally getting shorter. It was clear the builders used existing water courses, although they would sometimes dig out or extend canal-like connecting passageways, and their characteristic middens were used to guide the flow of the water precisely where they wanted it to go.
And, wherever the lake finally pooled, there were always local streams and springs to feed it. The mystery of that was that as the land’s wider uplift continued—and the ColU constantly reminded them that some dramatic geological event was apparently unfolding to the north of here—the pattern of the region’s springs changed all the time, as underground aquifers were shifted or broken, the water tables realigned. The builders always seemed to know in advance where the useful springs would be, and how to re-establish the lake. The builders didn’t have maps, but they evidently knew about geography; they must be able to visualise the landscape in some way.
It was as Yuri mused on this that the ColU’s theorising broke into his day.
The ColU jolted to a sudden stop.
Beth muttered and stirred. Yuri stroked her head, and she calmed again. He looked around. There was nothing special here, no obvious reason to have stopped.
The ColU backed up a little way, then rolled forward with a grinding of ageing gears. Again Beth stirred, before settling.
Yuri whispered urgently, “Hey! What’s wrong with you?”
The ColU’s voice was a matching whisper. “Yuri Eden?”
“Why have you stopped? Get going before this one wakes up, or Mardina will slaughter the lot of us.”
“I am sorry. I had not realised I had stopped.” It rolled on with a sight lurch.
“So what was all that about?”
“Yuri Eden, call it an existential crisis.”
Yuri groaned inwardly. Not again.
He knew he’d have to tell Mardina about this episode, whatever it was; she was concerned about anything erratic in the ColU’s behaviour. The ColU had made it clear from the beginning that to have been forced to help transport the colonists across the planet, if they’d attempted to escape from the landing sites that had been planned for them by the starship crew, would have violated its deepest layers of programming. So when the lake had first shifted, in its algorithmic soul the ColU faced a conflict between mandates to keep its human charges alive, and to stay close to the original landing site. The preservation of life had won out. But Mardina, who knew a lot more about ISF AIs than Yuri did, fretted that some deep internal damage might have been done. All of which was over Yuri’s head, let alone the head of his seven-year-old daughter, his little muda-muda.
Now, reluctantly, he asked, “What existential crisis?”
“I have come to a conclusion which baffles and alarms me. I have just received, from my internal laboratory facilities, the results of the analysis of a novel organism which enabled me to complete a genetic mapping—you’re aware that among my long-term projects has been the construction of a tree of life, for the Arduan native flora and fauna—”
“You know, I wish I just had a truck.”
“Yuri Eden?”
“Like the rovers on Mars. A truck I could just drive. The number of conversations like this that I’ve had with you over the years—”
“I can’t help it,” the ColU said, sounding almost miserable. “I can’t constrain my curiosity. Nor should I. Until my understanding of this world is complete enough—”
“Just tell me.”
It paused, as if gathering its thoughts. “Yuri Eden, I have told you that life on this world is similar in its fundamentals to life on Earth, but not identical. I believe the two biospheres may be linked by a panspermia process that operated at a very early date. The earliest days of life on Per Ardua might have been like the early days of Earth, a world of simple bacteria, drawing their energy from chemical reactions in the rocks. But all the time much more energy, a hundred times as much, was available, washing down from the sky—”