Free Proxima by Stephen Baxter Page A

That was how long the day was
on this world, on Prox c, the day
and
the year, because the world spun around Proxima keeping the same face towards its star – just as the moon kept the same face to the Earth
– so that the day was the same length as the year. In fact the stability of Prox c was greater than the moon’s, which wobbled a little as seen from Earth. Not Prox c.
    That was why Lemmy had taunted Yuri about a final sunrise. That big old sun was never going to rise, never going to set; it was going to hang in that one place in the sky, for ever. Oh, the
weather changed, there could be cloud, and on the second day there was rain, sweeping down from the forest belt to the north. But in terms of the basic architecture of the world every day was the
same, the sun defiantly unmoving, hour after hour. And just as there was no dawn, no sunset, there would be no summer, no winter here. Just day after day, identical as coins stamped out of a press.
It was as if time didn’t exist here, as if all the ages had been compressed down into one centuries-thick day.
    Soon all of them were having trouble sleeping – all the colonists, at least, under their canvas outdoors. The astronauts and the Peacekeepers, save those on guard, slept in the
shuttle’s cabin, which was slaved to Earth time.
    But Proxima wasn’t the only light in the sky, Yuri noticed. There was a bright double-star system, bright enough to cast shadows: Alpha Centauri A and B, twin suns, the centre of this
triple-star system, of which Proxima was really a shabby suburb. There was that one visible planet, that tracked around the sky. And also, for now, there was a starship up there, a spark crawling
across the sky. The days were not quite identical, then, the sky not quite featureless. Time passed, even here.
    Yuri kept himself to himself. But he found he was becoming curious about this world, Prox c, in a way he’d never been curious about Mars. But then all he’d seen of
Mars had been the inside of domes.
    He watched the sky, the landscape. He scrounged a telescope from a bit of surveying gear. He even looked at
Ad Astra
through his little telescope, and was surprised to see that only one
of the two hulls that had brought the colonists here was still attached to the wider frame that contained the propulsion units and the interstellar-medium particle shields. One hull was missing,
then. He didn’t ask anybody about this; he knew he wouldn’t get an answer.
    On the fourth day he set up his own observatory, kind of, on top of a lumpy bit of highland a couple of kilometres west of the shuttle, that they had called the Cowpat.
    He saw stuff moving, around the lake, out on the plain, in the forest to the north. Living things, presumably, native to this world. They’d had no briefing from the astronauts on the
nature of the life forms here. Mostly because nobody knew.
    On the fifth day Jenny Amsler, one of the colonists, followed him out, without any kind of invitation from Yuri, to help him with his gear. He mostly ignored her.
    On the seventh day Lieutenant Mardina Jones said she wanted to come too, evidently curious about what he was up to.
    To get to the Cowpat they had to head west, skirting the lake to the north from which the fledgling colony was already drawing water through laboriously dug irrigation ditches. They had defined
‘north’ and ‘west’ based on the orbital plane of the planet; given the stillness of the sun the directions felt abstract. The lake water seemed safe enough once filtered,
though it was thick with the local life.
    They called the lake the Puddle.
    Lex McGregor objected to these names, the Cowpat, the Puddle; he wanted more heroic labels. ‘Names to sound down the generations. Lake First Footstep. Mount Terra!’ Or Lake Lex, the
colonists joked. They stuck to the Puddle and the Cowpat. This place was evidently a shithole, but it was
their
shithole. It was prison-thinking, Yuri thought, now applied to a whole