Free Proxima by Stephen Baxter Page B

new
world. He didn’t care. The lake was the lake, it was a thing in itself, it had been here long before humans, and existed in its own right whatever people called it.
    Now, on this walk out to the Cowpat, Mardina Jones stared around, as if discovering it all for the first time. She had always been one of the more human of the authority types on the ship, Yuri
thought. But even she had barely stepped away from the little campsite that had sprung up around the landed shuttle, had barely
looked
at this world, into which they were all busy driving
tent pegs and scraping latrine trenches. But here she was now, apparently determined to see something of Prox c for herself before she was whisked off back to the sky. Like she was on a business
trip cramming in a little tourism between sales meetings. Away from the rest of the crew, she did, however, carry a gun.
    By the lake shore, maybe a kilometre from the shuttle, was a formation of what Yuri had decided to call pillows. Mardina slowed to inspect these, fascinated. She had a sensor pack on her
shoulder that hummed and whirred as it recorded what she saw. The ‘pillows’ were like heavily eroded rocks, with narrow stems and flat upper surfaces, most no taller than Yuri’s
waist. They were irregular lumps, and yet, standing on the muddy shore, they had an odd sense of fitting together, like worn pieces of some thick jigsaw puzzle.
    ‘Fascinating,’ Mardina said. ‘Life! We knew it was here, of course, but here we are, face to face with it. So to speak.’
    Yuri watched her, irritated, as she took her movies to show her buddies back home, in her air-conditioned astronaut’s apartment on an artificial island in the Florida Sea, or wherever.
‘You see these everywhere,’ he said. ‘Doc Poinar took a look at my images and said they were like—’
    ‘Stromatolites. I know. Bacterial communities, a very old type of formation on Earth. We should take samples. Actually I’ve seen stromatolites back home. There are some survivors
near salt lakes in Australia . . . Of course
our
stromatolites grow in shallow water, with the living layers photosynthesising away at the surface. These are evidently growing on the dry
land, transporting nutrients up somehow. More like a tree, maybe.’ She glanced at him. ‘You know I’m from Australia, right? That I’m a pure-blood Aborigine?’
    Yuri shrugged. She was the kind of prison warden who wanted to be your buddy. She was going to be gone soon. Where she came from made no difference to him.
    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,