Now from the pit came a sound like small crossbows being fired. She glanced down and saw that two hooks, supported by suckers, had fixed themselves to the rim of the pit. Fine cables laced down to the support unit, and with a whir of hidden winches, the unit began to rise up from the pit floor. So that was how it got about.
Leaving the unit to its business, Beth turned and looked around.
She was in a forest, surrounded by trees with stout trunks and big, sprawling leaves that caught the light streaming down from above. But there was plenty of open ground – there was no continuous canopy, evidently no permanent cover. The Hatch structure itself sat in a broad clearing, with saplings sprouting beside trunks like fallen pillars, trunks infested with what looked like lichen, mosses, fungi. All of this was tinged in shades of green, some of it drab, some of it more vivid, brilliant in the wan light of the star overhead. In one direction, she saw, the view was more open, revealing water glimmering in the light. What looked like stubby reeds pushed out of the water. And, by the water’s edge, a cluster of glistening forms stood, almost like huge mushrooms. ‘Stromatolites.’ She said the word aloud, letting it roll on her tongue. She remembered how hard it had been for her to learn that word as a little kid, and how confused she had been when her mother had told her that the name was wrong, really, that it had been taken from an Earth organism that was like the structures she saw around her but not quite, structures that grew in the water, but not on land …
All this was familiar. And yet, she thought, it was not.
The support unit laboured to haul itself out of the hole in the ground. As it made the last perilous step, and extended stubby caterpillar tracks to claw at the ground, Beth stood by, trying to think of ways she could help if the hefty unit started to topple back into the pit.
Earthshine, meanwhile, paid no attention. He stalked back and forth, impatiently. ‘Nothing here,’ he growled.
Beth frowned. ‘Nothing? Nothing but the trees. The undergrowth. The water over there, a lake maybe. Life—’
‘Just this damn Hatch unit, sitting on the ground. Look at it …’
It was like every other Hatch she’d ever seen, a square of smooth, greyish material with the circular lid raised up over the cylindrical shaft beneath. ‘Just like the Hatch on Mercury, the first I came out of with my mother and father and the Peacekeeper. Just like the first I walked into, on Per Ardua.’
‘But there’s nothing here. No buildings, no structures, no community – no people …’
She raised her face, closed her eyes in the light.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he snapped.
‘It’s not what I think. It’s what I feel. I grew up on Per Ardua. I know its air, its scents, the way its gravity pulls on my bones.’
‘You think this is Per Ardua. That that star up there is Proxima.’
‘What else could it be? Look around, Earthshine. You’ve never been here before but you’ve seen the records, I’m sure of that. You’ve seen the analysis the scientists did once we came back to the solar system, the data the UN teams returned later. Look at these stems, pushing out of the ground. Stems, the basis of all complex Per Arduan life, all the way up to the builders.’
‘You really think that’s Proxima?’ He was squinting up into the light, his supporting software casting perfectly formed shadows across his face. ‘Kind of bland-looking, don’t you think? Where are the stellar flares? Where are the starspots?’
That was a point, and, oddly, she hadn’t noticed it before. The star’s surface, seen through scrunched-up eyes, was smooth, almost featureless, marked by only a few patches of greyish mottling – not the map of restless stellar energies she’d grown up beneath, not the uneasy god that had inflicted particle storms and starspot winters on its hapless planets.
Planets, yes. She walked a few steps and turned around, looking up at the sky, which was a featureless bronze wash. Proxima had had more than one planet. In the permanent daylight of its star-facing hemisphere, the stars and planets had been forever invisible – all save one, a brilliant beacon … ‘There,’ she said, pointing at a spark of light unwavering in the sky. ‘Proxima e, the fifth planet. We called it the Pearl.’ She laughed. ‘Just where I left it.’
He walked around, growing increasingly angry. ‘You seem to be seeing the similarities and screening out the differences. Such as the life forms. These tree-like structures, the “stromatolites” – they are like the samples shown in images retrieved from Proxima c, from Per Ardua. But they aren’t identical, are they? And what about this?’ He pointed dramatically at a small clump of plants at his feet, with sprawling bright green leaves. ‘How does this fit in?’
She crouched down to see. No, this didn’t fit in with her memories of a childhood on Per Ardua at all, at least not of the wild country away from the farms she and her parents and the ColU had laboured to create. These leaves bore the green, not of Arduan life, but of Earth life, a brighter and more vivid colour born under a more energetic star. You’d never have found such things growing in the wild. She dug her fingers into the soil – it was rust brown, quite dry – and found a mass of small tubers. ‘These look like potatoes, or a distant relative.’
Earthshine snapped, ‘So what do you conclude?’
She stood, clutching a couple of the tubers, brushing the dirt from her hands. Even the texture of the dirt felt familiar. ‘This is Per Ardua. That is Proxima. If there are potatoes here, people must have brought them – people must have been here. But—’
‘But it’s not the Per Ardua you remember. Not quite. If this is the substellar, where’s the UN base? Where’s the relic of the Ad Astra? Yes, you see, I did my homework. Where are all the people?’
‘And where are the builders?’ she mused. ‘Of course, they might have learned to keep away from people and all their works, given enough time.’ She glanced up at Proxima – if it was Proxima. ‘How much time?’ she wondered.
‘This may be another reality strand,’ Earthshine said. ‘Correction: it probably is another reality strand. That’s what the Hatches do, don’t they? Knit up the timelines. Even if it is Per Ardua, this may not be the version of history in which your family pioneered.’
‘Maybe not,’ she admitted. ‘But there have been people here.’ She held out the tubers in her palm. ‘Somebody brought these.’ She broke one of the tubers, revealing crisp white flesh within a sleeve of dirt-matted skin. ‘Looks edible.’ She nibbled the raw flesh, avoiding the skin; it was crisp, moist, cool, all but flavourless.
‘Well, if you live for a few more hours we’ll know if that’s true or not, won’t we?’
‘At least I’m not going to starve here,’ Beth said. The light changed, subtly. She glanced up and saw clouds, thin streaks of white, drifting over the face of the star. ‘Looks like there’s still weather here after all. I’ll make camp.’
She got to work hauling her pressure suit and pack up from the Hatch with her rope.
In the pack she had a pop-up inflatable shelter, emergency blankets, a small stove, and scrunched-up disposable clothes: a space-age Roman legionary’s survival gear, all she needed to endure a few days in the wilderness. She soon had the shelter erected. She shoved the rest of her gear, the pack, the pressure suit, the helmet, inside the tent, and began to haul the whole lot towards the nearest dense-looking clump of trees, seeking anchorage.
Earthlight grunted. ‘I apologise I can’t help with your chores.’ He rubbed his palms together and glanced at the sky. ‘If this is Per Ardua, and I still reserve judgement, it is a quieter Per Ardua. Look at the ground, the soil. The rust colour, like Australia, like Mars. Per Ardua always had a peculiar way of letting out its tectonic energy …’