The Scavenger Door

by Suzanne Palmer

  “Thanks. Cameras?” Fergus asked.

  “Yes! I have synced them with our encrypted pager disk network, so Whiro and I can see too,” ey said. “Then if you step in trouble, Whiro can drop a bomb on Perth, and while everyone is looking over there, we sneak you both away!”

  “Uh . . . the bomb thing is a joke, right?” Fergus asked.

  “Haha ahaha! It must be, yes?” Ignatio answered. Ey slapped Fergus hard in the chest and grinned so wide, Fergus could see the razor-thin, purplish baleen-like structures at the back of eir mouth. “You will avoid trouble now because you cannot be certain. It is my great plan.”

  “Whiro doesn’t carry bombs,” Fergus said, “do you, Whiro?”

  “I feel it is prudent at this time not to answer that question,” Whiro replied.

  Fergus threw up his hands in frustration. “Can we just go?” he said.

  “That would probably be best,” Whiro said.

  Fergus dropped the camera pin in his pocket, grabbed his things, and followed Isla into the shuttle.

  * * *

  —

  The Port Hedland Shuttleport was small. The air smelled of dust, and everything within it vaguely of old, settled-in smoke, but the facilities were otherwise clean and good. They landed in what was late evening local time; the sun had just set over the Indian Ocean to the west, the lights of the city and surrounding town visible in the dusk against the yellow-orange horizon, and another, more ominous and formless, red-orange glow to the southeast.

  The private hangar that Whiro had contracted with was just off-port, and as soon as they had disembarked, the service truck connected up to his shuttle and smoothly slid away with it. Brightly lit signs warned about trying to evade body customs and the penalties of bringing unchecked illnesses into the continental interior.

  Every time he’d returned to Earth since first leaving, he’d either snuck in or relied on the Shipbuilders’ solid permits to get him around any but the most cursory and superficial of entrance checks. Western Australia, however, seemed to have no such mechanism he could exploit to get through.

  Isla put a hand on his upper arm, hesitantly. “Is this . . . you know, okay? For you?” she asked quietly.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Fergus said. “Probably, but if a lot of alarms go off, pretend you don’t know me.”

  Inside the customs building, they were split up and sent through separate doors. Fergus walked as confidently and casually as he could into a narrow, white, featureless room, and was relieved when he was met there by a medic in full protective gear instead of being directed toward an automated medical scanning booth; after a traumatic experience in a Dr. Diagnosis had led to him being briefly the subject of a citywide manhunt on Mars, he felt his paranoia entirely justified.

  On the other hand, so was the government’s paranoia about germs. After the twenty-second-century Ancou pandemic had swept the globe—fourth and worst of a series of them in a century and a half—the semi-independent Western Australian government had decided it was not going to suffer those kinds of catastrophic casualties ever again. With its rejection of the surveillance-state mentality that had taken a firmer grip on the eastern coast, that meant, at least for human travelers, a quick but mandatory antibody check and chemical-trace scan, neither of which should pick up any of Fergus’s more unusual biological features.

  The anonymous medic—no name tag, a mirrored face shield—had him take off his exosuit and dump his things on a scanner platform. Then they directed him to roll up his sleeve so they could slap a long, sticky patch on his arm. It was prickly and itchy, and after a moment, small blocks of color began to appear until the whole surface was a patchwork.

  While they waited, the medic checked his temperature, peered in his eyes, had him stick out his tongue, and for some reason Fergus couldn’t fathom, took a swab from each of his armpits. When the strip stopped changing, the medic peeled it off in one fast jerk without warning.

  “Aaaah, fuck!” Fergus swore as it took a healthy amount of arm hair with it.

  “Antibodies are good, Mr. Maxwell,” the medic said. “Might want to get a hepatitis E vaccine booster in the next few years if you plan on spending a lot of time on the eastern coast, but that’s their problem and yours, not mine. You want the report?”

  “Uh, sure,” Fergus said.

  “I’ll have it sent up to your ship,” the medic said. They punched a long sequence into their handheld unit, and past the desk, a door at the far end of the room opened. “You’re clear. Enjoy Australia.”

  Fergus gathered back up his things, arm still smarting, and escaped through the far door and out into the port concourse, where Isla was waiting, rubbing her own arm in irritation.

  He had to admit it felt good to be on a job again, even if it wasn’t one he’d picked, wanted, or thought he could possibly do. Hey, worst case? he thought. At least Isla will get to see a bunch of the Earth before it gets eaten.

  “You’re making an odd face,” she said.

  “Just thinking about the future,” he said.

  “In an optimistic way?” she asked. “Or the other?”

  “In a ‘we have to get up really early tomorrow’ way,” he lied. “It’s going to be brutal till we adjust off Mars time. Planet-hopping really messes with your body clock.”

  “For you, maybe. I think I’m still on Scotland time,” she said.

  At the front gate they caught an auto-taxi to a nearby hotel. It was a relic of the city’s old days as a mining town, a survivor of all three twenty-third-century tsunamis, and though it had been clearly renovated many times, there was still a faint smell of oil and rust in the halls. Once they’d checked in and stashed their stuff in adjoining rooms, he left Isla to some alone time and wandered down the street to a small pub outlined in neon pink lights. He liked to tell himself there was nothing he missed about Earth, nothing there that he couldn’t find just as good elsewhere, but grilled cheese sandwiches had never, ever been quite the same anywhere else, and he savored it—and a second—like a man who had stumbled on an oasis after years lost in the desert who had forgotten the taste of water. The third he carefully left wrapped and out of sight in his bag to bring back to Isla.

  Other than a few brief, friendly conversations with the waiter, his meal was blissfully uninterrupted, and he felt himself relax incrementally. He took a bottle of a local ale to go and wandered back to his hotel room, handed over the sandwich between the connecting doors, then collapsed face-down on the bed in relief with the ale left unopened on the side table near the door.

  * * *

  —

  At dawn, Fergus woke Isla up, dragged himself into the shower, woke Isla up again, then they caught another auto-taxi to the local Hikerpod site. He had slept so soundly, his brain felt petrified inside his skull, and by the silent, dull stare of his sister out the window, she was equally unprepared for any kind of intelligent interaction.

  Together, they loaded their stuff into the pod, including several bottles of water he’d picked up on the way. Once inside and buckled in, he read through and agreed to the various safety and usage terms on the pod’s console, then a drone detached from the racks in the hangar behind him and picked the pod up like a mother bird carrying its egg, and moments later they were up and soaring smoothly southward over Port Hedland toward the interior.

  Isla pulled a thermos of coffee out of her bag and the tiny pod interior filled with the complex, sweet-bitter smell. Once she’d had a few sips, she sighed deeply. “This is all automated, I guess?”

  “Mostly,” Fergus said. “We have some limited controls, but there are trajectory, speed, and safety constraints.”

  “Too bad. It looks like it could be fun to fly,” she said.

  “What have you flown so far?” he asked.

  She took another sip of coffee. “Triumph.”

  Fergus laughed. “When thi
s is all over, if you want to try flying, we can take Whiro’s shuttle out.”

  “Do ye really think this will ever be over and things will go back to normal?” she asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Fergus said. “You have to act like it will; otherwise, how do you convince yourself to keep going?”

  “Usually by promising myself ice cream,” she said.

  “That would also work,” he said. Once they’d cleared city limits and the anemic town huddled up against its outskirts, the drone allowed him to direct it lower down. The red, arid ground below was, as if the universe lacked imagination, not dissimilar to either Mars or the Southwest Territories, though the vegetation was subtly thinner, wispier, sharper-looking than the latter, and the few birds they saw flitting between were vastly more colorful. There was a road just visible to their west, and a train track roughly parallel to it with a heavy freight hauler keeping pace with Fergus’s pod. Here and there, small clusters of buildings appeared alongside them and vanished just as quickly again. There were a few other aircraft out, mostly in-atmosphere flyers and what he thought might be another Hikerpod ahead of him heading due west. A dirty haze hung low to the horizon where he’d seen the glow the night before, far enough away that it almost seemed more shadow than smoke, but in the direction they were going, the skies were blue and bright and empty.

  As they passed over another small town, he closed his eyes and tried to reach out with his odd sense and feel the houses below, but the pod and drone were too overwhelming.

  “What’re ye doing?” Isla asked.

  “Listening,” Fergus said. “Sort of. Electricity, you know.”

  “D’ye hear anything?” Isla asked.

  “Too much of the wrong things,” he said, and settled back in his seat for the remainder of the ride.

  A large button on the pod dash began to blink red. So used to sudden disasters, it was almost more of a shock that the label on the button read narrative information available. Isla reached out and pressed it, and an almost comically broad Australian voice—no doubt played up for tourist expectations—began to speak.

  “In approximately four minutes, we will pass overhead one of the seven heritage groups—or mobs—of red kangaroo in the Pilbara region. Once nearly extinct, each mob is carefully managed to maintain a healthy population. Perth University, rebuilt after the devastating tsunami of 2366, monitors the mobs and periodically redistributes prime individuals to strengthen the genetic diversity within each pool. If you would like more information on kangaroos, Perth University, tsunamis, or an explanation of genes, please speak your subject of interest.”

  There was a pause as it waited for either Isla or Fergus to speak, but instead, they just looked at each other. Daring me to say something, he wondered, or daring me not to?

  Ahead he could now see movement. From this distance, it looked like the ground itself was wobbling, but as they got closer, he could make out the individual animals moving among the vegetation. “They’re bigger than I thought,” Isla said. A few on the edges of the mob stopped and stood up, watching his pod pass with wary curiosity, before catching up with the others.

  “Crikey, look at ’em go!” the narrator said, and Fergus turned it off. He’d heard enough exaggerated Scottish accents in his lifetime that he didn’t feel the need for some tourist-facing prompt system pandering to expected stereotypes. Isla didn’t protest, so he assumed she felt the same.

  “You’ve been quiet,” he said.

  “Ignatio dumped a lot of physics and math on me,” she said. “Mind ye, I asked. But it’s a lot to process, and some of it conflicts with our science, and I don’t know if it’s because I don’t understand it, or Ignatio didn’t communicate it well, or because our science is wrong. Or all of those.”

  “See, this is why I’m glad you’re the brains in the family,” Fergus said. “I’d rather get my ear cut off again than have to think that hard.”

  She thumped him on the shoulder with her fist. “Not funny,” she said.

  “When it first started regrowing? It looked like a bright pink chunk of cartoon cauliflower sticking out of the side of my head. And the itching—”

  “Okay, just shut yer gob now,” she said. “I’d rather think about the math.”

  Burringurrah was a popular-enough destination that the Hikerpod company had it on their standard list of places to go. There were a trailhead and visitor’s center at the foot of the mountain, which was, according to the research he’d done, not so much a mountain as a single enormous rock plunked down and slowly eroding into the earth. Terms like monocline and anticline had been offered up for the more geologically curious, but Fergus had already decided that Burringurrah was an unsubtle physical metaphor from the universe for the single enormous task that had been set down into the path of his own life.

  Perversely, the anticipation of some dangerous thieving ahead cheered him up immensely. Isla caught his smile and smiled back at him, and he was grateful she didn’t ask what he was thinking about. For her part, it was hard to tell if she was lost in the scenery or her own mathematical knots, but he left her to it.

  It was midafternoon when the big, orange-brown shape of Burringurrah distinguished itself at last from the horizon, and the drone dropped down to gently deposit their pod at a landing pad beside a trio of low-slung buildings covered in solar tiles.

  As soon as the drone recharged, it would take them the last forty kilometers or so and set the pod down right at the foot of the summit trail. The pod was fully functional as a shelter and, unlike the pop-shelter Gavin had lent him to go fetch Duff’s sheep, had its own power, air systems, and a mini bathroom. He’d paid more to sleep in much worse places.

  In the meantime, the screen in the pod made good effort to sell them on any number of fashionable hiking accessories and gear available at the trailhead supply store, which Fergus assumed Hikerpod got a commission on. In the end, Isla gave in and got a wide-brimmed hat, and he let it talk him into a walking stick; one thing about Earth’s gravity is that it did like to remind him, every now and then, about the harpoon gun incident. Probably, he thought, Isla did not want to hear about that, either. The dry air of Australia was a lot kinder on him than the bone-seeping moist chill of Scotland, but eventually he’d be happy for the assist. And anyway, the stick fit in with his imagined persona of Murdoch Maxwell: Hapless Travel Enthusiast.

  The hotel had a small cafe-style restaurant attached, so they retreated there while the drone recharged.

  At least a few items among the tea-set information cache that Whiro had dumped to his handpad overnight were reports from hikers who’d passed through this waypoint, including a trio who’d seen the debris come down on the night of the explosion, and assorted reports of government activity to and from at the site a little over a year later. Nineteen months after that, a white van had driven out into the park itself, despite prohibitions against civilian wheeled vehicles, and kicked up enough dust that unhappy hikers posted extensively on community media about it. Last, another year on, there was a mention of an odd little religious group in plain linen clothes, matching bad sunburns, and mild heat exhaustion lost off one of the smaller trails that had to be guided back down, all four of which—three men and one woman—had refused medical treatment and signed a waiver indemnifying the tour service they’d wandered away from.

  Whatever behavioral algorithm that the drone was programmed with must have decided that the optimum window for impulse shopping in the gift shop had unfavorably shifted instead toward a growing potential for customer dissatisfaction over delay, because it pinged him on his handpad that it was ready to go. With true marketing optimism, it then recommended several more products to him he may wish to check out before departure.

  They climbed back into the pod, and the drone took them up for the last stretch south toward the mountain itself. It deposited them gently at a campsite pad and departed, a mechanical
vulture silhouetted against the late afternoon sky.

  “So, this is camping?” Isla asked. “So far, not bad.”

  “I don’t think this technically counts,” Fergus said.

  There were two other occupied camps not far away: one more pod and an actual old-style pole-and-fabric tent that looked like it had been there for a while. The tenters were a pair of women, probably around Fergus’s age or a little older, who had a roaring fire going in the firepit at their site, and were working on being loudly, happily roaring drunk along with it. A large, scruffy hound lay snoozing near the fire, oblivious to the noise around it. By contrast, the older couple in the other pod were less than amused, and after a short while standing there glaring at the women across the campground through the inadequate screen of eremophilas, they went back inside their pod, and forty minutes later, a drone arrived and took them away.

  Lacking much else to do until the sun set and he could go out skulking on the mountain in the dark with his magic space-door-detector alien gut bees, he nudged Isla out of her studies and picked up the box of lime sugar cookies he’d picked up at the base lodge. “Should we go over and make friends?” he asked.

  “Aye, absolutely,” she said, and dumped her handpad onto the charging mat without hesitation.

  Outside, there was the gentle buzzing of insects all around, less raspy than crickets, more subdued either because they were still unsettled by the pod’s arrival or because it was almost time for the shift change over to the night crew bugs. Mixed in, at long but regular intervals, was the faint blip of the fire monitor drone nearby, doing its periodic check of the perimeter. The ground around the fire was packed dirt, hard and bone-dry, and faint lines radiating around it suggested the women had swept it free of anything that could conceivably catch.

  The dog raised its head as they approached, studied them intently for a few seconds, then went back to dozing. Feeling appropriately vetted, Fergus introduced themselves as Murdoch and Ella, and offered up the cookies. They were Jesika and Julia, childhood best friends from Los Angeles, and amateur mycologists. Once a year, they picked some new spot in the world to hike, got drunk, and hunted mushrooms, careful not to do the last two at the same time. “Spotted death caps down near Perth,” Julia said, as she dug a pair of fluted champagne glasses out of their tent, filled them and most of the ground below them with white wine, and handed them over. “Got some lovely scans and images of it, for our collection.”