Crash

by Guy Haley

  “I suppose I’d better say thank you,” said the woman. “My name’s Cassandra De Mona, first pilot. Or, I was first pilot. Now I have nothing to fly. Call me Sand.”

  “Dariusz Szczeciński, geoengineer.” He held out his hand.

  Sand gave Dariusz a look he didn’t understand. “You people,” she said. “Why are your names so damn hard?”

  “Call me Darius if you like. I am used to it. Or Darek.”

  She shook her head. There was a determination about her, a hardness, that Dariusz found at once off-putting and attractive. “Darius is not your name, is it? I have to make an effort. How do you say it?”

  “Darry-oosh Shche-chin-ski,” he said slowly.

  “Dayoosh? Darry-oosh? Dariusz,” said the woman. It was a reasonable attempt. She seemed happy with it. She grasped his hand. “I’m not even going to try the second one. Show me where this buggy of yours is, I’m dog sick of walking.”

  “Do you have anything to drink? I am very thirsty.”

  Sand looked up, to the shelter the robot was holding up, upon which drummed the quick tattoo of the rain. She raised her eyebrows, pursed her lips, and burst into unexpected laughter.

  “Okay, I see. The rain... Sand,” he said.

  “You see?” she said with the trace of a smile. “American names. Easy.”

  THE RIVER LEVEL rose as the rain continued, the sandy sides of the creek collapsing into the water with soft, weighty splashes, streams of water pouring down the valley sides and making their footing treacherous.

  Dariusz wondered at the source of the water. On the seifs, the sand would suck down most of the rain quickly; it would not have time to gather into a flood. The valley was rocky, the ground less permeable. He had passed through a broad field of rock formations emerging from the sand some way back; perhaps the sand gave out and the rocky area became more extensive upriver. That’s where the water must come from. If so, the extent of the storms was enormous.

  They spoke little. The robot had to cling to the valley side and had no hand spare to shelter them, and it was too steep for the sled. He, Sand and the elder girl had to help the younger ones, and eventually they ended up carrying the smallest.

  The rain maintained the same, heavy beat, as unvarying as the hidden sun. It was concussive, a barrage of precipitative artillery, not rain, and the softer areas of sand they passed were pocked with miniature craters.

  Sand made to turn out of the valley, but Dariusz stopped her. “This way,” he said, pointing downriver. “That is where my ATV is.”

  It was five long hours before they emerged from the valley back onto the pan. With the sand now scrubbed from the air, a low, sand-blasted mountain range had emerged in the distance beyond the flats, shadowy through the rain. The landscape was gargantuan, an empty planet, and Dariusz despaired at the thought of filling it.

  It was a landscape in the process of transformation. Streams snaked across the flats, crawling out of countless gulleys to form wide, braided rivers. The lightning flashed once, twice, three times, flickering up the tiny, dark shape of Danieł’s deck – his tomb. The ATV stood not far from it. The ground shone wetly around both.

  They were watching the birth of a sea. Water took his wife, and now it was taking his son. Danieł had always loved the sea; it seemed fitting, in a way.

  “Wow,” said Sand.

  “A seasonal lake,” said Dariusz. “This world is perhaps not so bad.”

  “This is not my idea of not bad,” she said.

  Dariusz shrugged. “I only mean it could be worse. The water, at least, is still free,” he said, remembering.

  “Is that a deck segment out there?” she said.

  “There is no one alive on it now.”

  “Is that why you were out here?”

  “My son,” was all he said. His tone told Sand all she needed to know.

  “I... I’m sorry,” said Sand. “His mother?”

  “She was deemed unstable, and was not selected for the journey. She told us to go, and then drowned herself.”

  Sand froze momentarily, thought of the parents on the ship. Dariusz said no more, and so she changed the subject. “Let’s get the kids on the sled. This way?”

  Dariusz oriented himself. “This way.”

  They walked on, faster now. The children were so tired they fell asleep on the sled in the rain. The water was pleasantly warm, cool enough to refresh but not to chill. The lake grew all the while, small waves clashing on its surface.

  The dayside was coming to life. Small animals, and things analogous to insects, pushed themselves from cracks in the rock, or hauled themselves from burrows in the sand. Close by the water, fissures yawned in the sand. Shells pushed themselves out of the ground, opening up as they came; their openings were metres long, their lips scalloped to lock together. They gaped wide into the rain. Convulsive movements forced tissues out into the downpour, ribbed sheets flung outward that covered the ground around each shell. The desert became a mat of flesh around these creatures, swelling as it engorged with water.

  Dariusz expected plants of some kind to follow, in the coming days.

  Dariusz made them stop once, pulled them into the shelter of a cliff. Sand questioned him.

  “Something’s coming.”

  She looked about anxiously. “The beetles?”

  “No, the things in the air. They’re dangerous.”

  “Things in the air, too? Great,” she said.

  He pointed to the sky.

  Flocks of leather-winged horrors came soaring in to joust with one another in the sky. They disported in the leaden veils of rain, rutting amid the lightning. The largest flew at each other again and again; sometimes, the losers fell with tattered wings to splash in the young lake, other times they pulled back to circle each other and swoop again. There were hundreds of them.

  They fed, stooping over the growing lake, skimming over the filling dips, wings kissing the choppy surfaces of ponds that grew and reached out to one another. A group of the creatures wheeled high, and fell upon something only they could see below, plummeting as one. Thunder rumbled. Darius imagined their hooks ripping chunks of flesh from the clam-like animals.

  “They have killed several people already,” he said. “But I do not think they are interested in us today.”

  Sand’s nerve wavered. Things in the air, things under the ground. All big. All hungry. She followed Dariusz anyway. There was nothing else to do.

  “Come on,” he said, casting a wary glance at the sky. “We better be quick, or the ATV will be submerged.”

  They skirted the lake. Only once did a creature dive at them. Piotr called out a warning, and they huddled under the robot’s protection. It made another pass, then flew away, leaving its awful call and the smell of cinnamon on the air.

  Danieł’s tomb grew nearer. The ATV was close.

  When the vehicle’s signal sang out in their inChips and tablets, Sand nearly cried. They reached it twenty minutes later. Water lapped around its tall wheels, and so they had the robot ferry them out into the flood in twos and threes. They bundled the children into the back. Dariusz secured the equipment boxes from inside to the roof rack while Sand stripped the kids of their wet clothes and had them curl up together under the cover of survival blankets. Without exception, they were asleep in minutes.

  “Thank you,” said Sand as they sat in the cabin. The rain’s racket was soft on the roof. After the fury and vastness of the skies, the cabin was peculiarly intimate; they felt close as lovers. Their world shrank, small and full of the padding of outdoor gear and the thickness of evaporating rain. Condensation clouded the windows. Small noises – breathing, the creak of seats, the rustle of fabric – rescaled everything to a human level. They felt larger, in control of their surroundings. Outside the vehicle, they were ants before the tempest; inside it, surrounded by the work of man, demigods again. “I’m sorry about your boy.”

  Dariusz could not say anything. He wanted to confess, but he did not. Sand t
ouched something in him. He knew she would recoil in horror should he tell her what he had done. He knew the time would come when he would have to tell, but at that moment, he could not bear it. Nor speak of Danieł. To do so would be to collapse. He needed the proximity of his fellow man, to grieve privately, but in company. His disgust with himself and his need for companionship warred inside him, and he could give voice to neither.

  “We’ll get the robot to follow, and go to Desert One. From there, they can take us to First Landing. Home,” he said.

  “They still have shuttles?”

  “They have two.”

  Sand’s smile was radiant.

  “The robot,” repeated Dariusz.

  “The robot,” said Sand. “I’ll be right back.”

  Sand popped the door, letting the ravenous blast of the wind into the cabin. The ATV rocked with it. Then the door was shut, and silence returned.

  A few seconds later, Sand opened the door again.

  “I’m having a problem,” she said.

  Dariusz raised his eyebrows in a question. “The water?”

  She shook her head. “No, no. The robot. It won’t come.”

  “Won’t?”

  “It’s not the first time. It’s been a little... wiggy.”

  “Wiggy?”

  “Behaving oddly,” she said in Lingua Anglica.

  Dariusz unclipped himself and stepped outside. By comparison with the stillness of the ATV, the violence of the weather seemed redoubled. A purplish light tinted the desert, the landscape bruised by the storm’s violence. Dariusz followed Sand down the ladder. They plashed into the deepening water, up to his thighs now. They made their way to the rear of the ATV.

  The robot stood sentinel in the lashing rain, still as an idol to a forgotten god.

  “I’ve tried direct access, verbal commands, nothing...” she said.

  Could this be a side effect of the virus? The robot’s brain was organic, like the Syscore. Robots never said no. They couldn’t say no. What other explanation could there be?

  “Follow us!” he shouted.

  Silence.

  “Unit 7, respond!”

  The robot towered over him. In all his many interactions with such machines – and Dariusz was used to operating construction androids – he had never felt ill at ease. He did now. The robot’s intransigence highlighted their size difference. It could, if it chose, crush him in one fist.

  “No,” it said.

  Dariusz’s next order died in his throat. Instead he asked, “Why?”

  The robot’s head looked down at him. Faint light glowed from the high-light-gain retinas at the back of its eyes.

  “I remain,” it said. Its face returned to the storm.

  “Leave it,” said Dariusz firmly.

  “What?”

  “Just leave it. It will not come. Something is happening to it.”

  “No!” she said. “Don’t we need it?”

  He grabbed Sand’s arm; she looked at him with hostility, but did not pull away.

  “We have to go. I do not think it is safe.”

  They backed away.

  The robot spoke one more time as they ascended the ladder to the cab. “Look to your children. Children are the gateway to tomorrow.” It spoke without moving, and Dariusz became half-convinced it had said nothing at all, and that he had imagined it.

  They left the robot standing in the growing lake.

  A recovery team returned for Unit 7 under blue skies a week later, before the virus got to the shuttles and grounded them for good. The lake was an unbroken expanse five metres deep by then, covering the pans in crosshatched ripples, and the robot was hidden beneath it. Hampered by clouds of biting insects and the flocks of aerial creatures feasting upon them, the salvage crew opted to leave the robot until the water had retreated. When it finally did so, the robot had gone.

  RAIN HAMMERED INTO the windows as Leonid watched his father’s letter again.

  He was in the command post at First Landing, three prefabbed units stacked one atop the other to make an ugly tower block. The view was obscured by the weather, but he’d been told that the river below the two mesas was running with water.

  Rain, in a desert. Not much of a surprise. There were a few meteorologists on the crew, and they talked about temperature exchanges and moisture loads and seasonal winds and blah, blah, blah. Leonid could understand it – it was important he understand it – but he could not concentrate on it. All he could think of was Ilya’s letter, Ilya’s fucking letter.

  As the scientist droned on, Yuri had interrupted them and said, “So, gentlemen and ladies, what you are telling my good brother and I is that it does actually rain here, so there is a fighting chance we’re not all going to die on this shitbox of a planet?”

  They murmured their assent.

  “Thanks so much. Goodbye.”

  Yuri. Yuri was as Yuri did. He’d rallied remarkably, now they were on the ground, taking a lead where Leonid thought he would be a liability. Leonid was unsure of himself, and glad of his presence, he helped parse the meanderings of what was left of their tech and science staff down into simple phrases. They all needed simple phrases. They needed to act fast, the colonists needed hope, and Leonid, most of all, needed matters putting simply. Because of Ilya’s letter.

  The letter had tumbled, unexpectedly, out into his inChip when his salvaged datacore had come online. A holo, a shimmer, a breath of light from his long-dead father. It began in the usual manner, the pompous assertion of their right to wealth, the glory of the Petrovitches. It moved into less familiar territory, as Ilya praised both sons, highlighting qualities he saw in them both, and laying bare his trust in them; praise they had never received on Earth. No doubt the letter – which only Leonid was authorised to watch – existed in several forms. Knowing his father, there would be one in the case of his survival and Yuri’s death, one if Yuri survived and Leonid did not, and this one, if they both survived. Leonid decided he would strip mine the datacore later for the variants.

  He rather wanted to match the letters up, to triangulate the depth of their father’s manipulation. That was Ilya’s great flaw. He had no real trust, and so his sons had no trust in him. His praise was a hollow edifice, founded on lies.

  Leonid’s suspicions were fuelled by the fact that this letter had not been in the Syscore, but in his personal datacore. Already he was thinking, could it be possible, was his father responsible for the downing of the Mickiewicz? Had he expected this to happen?

  Leonid was harshly amused at the thought of the Pointers sitting there, waiting for the wormhole to open. He wondered what happened. Did they turn it on anyway when they did not receive the entanglement signal, fifty years after they had departed? Did it explode, sucking the sun to its doom? Or did it simply not work, the field generators spinning around an empty space that should have contained an even emptier space? He wondered if they’d managed to track the fleet down, helplessly watched it break up. Had the world ended as Ilya prophesied? They’d travelled at around 0.8c all the way; while 500 years had passed for everyone on the ship, nearly 900 had passed back on Earth.

  “Yours is the task of preparing the way, yours is the joy of making a new home in the stars,” said Ilya to him through the holo (would he say the same to Yuri, or would his be different? Rationally, it should not matter to Leonid, but it did, it mattered a great deal, and he hated his father a little more). Ilya’s expression softened. He was drawing Leonid in to familial intimacy. Another manipulation. “We have had our differences, you and I, but you are the most capable of my offspring.” (Would Yuri’s version say the same, naming him as favoured son? he wondered again.) “You will come to see, in time, that men yearn to be led. To a greater degree, women will not be so easily commanded, but must be convinced. Once they are, they will push the men for you. You must lead them from the fore and by guile. One man is fit for this role; not many, not consensus. Go the route of government by the many, and perish. The state embodied in
one man is more powerful, more reactive, more adaptable, than the state embodied in the will of the people. This has proved true time and again here on Earth, and it is a truth that will become ever more apparent to you as you attempt to build a world in more...” – that half moon smile again, mocking and condescending; like Yuri’s, but his father lacked his brother’s charm – “Challenging circumstances. And many challenges await you. An army cannot function by democratic consent, and a society is no different, especially one under stress as yours will be. Hierarchy is the natural state of humanity. You, through the gifts I have given you, through the efforts of our family, are at the top of that hierarchy. You deserve to be at the head of it. The forces of evolution themselves have appointed you. Now is the time to put aside childish things and become a man. Embrace your birthright. Your task, my son, is to be worthy of the obedience of those that will follow you. I have every faith that you will be so. Anderson will be the guarantor of your success; Yuri also, should you employ him correctly.”

  Ilya paused.

  “My own brother said it was vanity to utilise my own genetic code as the basis for our family’s Alts, and perhaps he was correct. Whatever the truth of his opinion, I will, in a sense, always be with you. God bless you, my son.”

  The holo crackled out.

  Leonid leaned back in his chair until it balanced on its two rear legs, and rubbed at his forehead.

  He sat forward suddenly, the chair legs thumping down hard. “No,” he said aloud. “No, no, no, no, no.” Anderson was a clone of his father? What did that make them, brothers? Pressure built behind his eyes. He looked nothing like Ilya, but that could be changed easily. Cold terror gripped him. He thought he’d escaped his father, but in a very real sense he hadn’t, not at all.

  We’ll see, he thought. I’m not going to live his fantasy for him. First thing I’m going to do is set up a council to run this place, then maybe I’ll just fuck off into the desert. They had so much to do, collect as much as they could from the crash, locate the main body of the wreck and retrieve the Syscore, then there was food, shelter... The kind of thing he’d never had to think about before. He couldn’t do that on his own. He wouldn’t.