The Avatar

by Poul Anderson

  Waxing toward extinction, the sun had already forced much of the atmosphere off into space by heating and by solar wind, against which Pandora no longer had a strong magnetic field for shelter. Water had followed. The drying oceans gave up dissolved carbon dioxide, and greenhouse effect-sent temperatures soaring.

  Though furious rainstorms might still take place in some regions, especially around sunset and dawn, most land was parched and its winds gritty. The tropics might be seared to death; at least, searchers found no trace of life in them. Sparse vegetation survived in what had been the temperate and polar zones. There, winters as long as Earth’s and nights twenty-five times as long grew bitterly cold. Day was always an inferno.

  And this would worsen for some two billion years, until at last the red giant filled the sky and devoured its child, before sinking down to black dwarf oblivion.

  “We’ve identified what may be ruined cities,” Brodersen continued. “We’ve positively spotted what could be a large ground base, which emits steady beeps, and we’ve inspected the broadcasting satellite, which is probably to simplify navigation for visitors after they come through the gate.”

  He and Weisenberg had flitted in spacesuits to examine the latter. It was a metal sphere about the diameter of Chinook, featureless except for pitting by micrometeoroids. (That suggested how ancient it was, in this system where few small bodies were left.) The men had guessed that transducers in the alloy turned solar energy into radio-frequency code. While effective, it didn’t fit Brodersen’s notion of what the Others would have done. More disappointing was the failure of any beings to come welcome the new arrivals or respond to repeated signals.

  He thrust his jaw forward. “Well, you know this,” he said. “The question before the house is what we do about it. I claim we should send Williwaw for a sniff-around. Somebody must call here occasionally, or somebody may be on hand, waiting to see what we’re like. Agreed?”

  It was.

  He put on his most genial manner. “Fine, fine. Okay, next we decide who of us goes. First off, me…. Hold on! Listen!

  “This is not a Danu situation. There the boat mainly had atmosphere and gravity to cope with—nature. Here the crew will have to disembark, or what’s the point of the whole maneuver? We may need a soldier, a diplomat, a woodsman, anything. With due modesty, which is mighty little, I remind you that I’ve handled a lot of such-like jobs.

  “Shut up, Phil! Could be you were right earlier about the captain being indispensable; but we’ve been shaking down since. I can name three or four of you who could take over from me and soon be running things as well. Besides, if I can’t exercise my machismo once in a while, I’ll go all soggy.

  “I have spoken. Let’s consider who else we can best send.”

  Debate converged faster than Brodersen had expected. Dozsa, again, for chief pilot; Rueda, again, for co-pilot and general backup (Su Granville looked still more anguished than when the skipper had appointed himself); Fidelio for his experience with xenosophonts (the Betan gravely assented); Caitlín, this time for medical help should that be needed (Leino stood locked into silence).

  Pegeen—oh, no, no! I really let things get out of hand, didn’t I? She bounced about, caroling. Pegeen, what if things go wrong on yonder hellhall?

  XXXIV

  Chinook DROPPED INTO a low orbit, canted in such wise as to make it easiest for Williwaw to reach her goal. The boat came forth, vapor gushed, she fell toward the planet. Its darkling shield swelled to fill the view; it was no longer ahead but below.

  Strapped behind Dozsa and Rueda, helpless, Brodersen reached for Caitlín beside him and caught her hand. She gripped back, hard. The next minutes would be the tough and perhaps fatal ones. Intensively though the atmosphere had been studied from space, it was not familiar. It might have any number of tricks in it to send a craft flaming. There was no ground control to talk her down. The mother ship couldn’t help, outside of brief and widely separated whiles, until she had climbed back up to a synchronous position. She had had to descend for the launch because of the radiation that seethed from the sun, against which the boat had no electrostatic protection.

  Brodersen’s palm was so sweaty he couldn’t tell whether Caitlín was dry or not. She gave him a grin and a thumbs-up sign. Abruptly she twisted around to stroke her free hand across Fidelio, who squatted aft in a specially rigged harness. The Betan laid claws on her head for a moment, most gently: a blessing?

  They pierced the sky. A thin whistle grew slowly to a roar, while impacts shocked through the hull and it often lurched. After a time, though, Dozsa glanced back, his own countenance streaming, and called, “Okay, we’ve made it.”

  Brodersen cheered. Damn! he thought ungratefully. Why do we have to be cocooned in so I can’t reach Pegeen to kiss her? Well just you wait till we land, my girl, just you wait.

  On a long, heat-dissipating slant, Williwaw glided downward across the world. Brodersen stared, fascinated, eerily aware that he would set foot on it. (How did Armstrong really feel? He was such a private man.) A night sea rolled thickly under the small moon; a ghastly stretch of salt flats ended at an escarpment kilometers high; beyond lay the plateau which had been a continent; sunrise revealed it bare, ocherous, soil baked into brick, cracked and scored; a dust storm was momentarily blinding; along a dry canyon reared a few sharp, brightly colored tall snags above mounds of rubble. Had they been a city?

  Dozsa started the airjets. Rueda navigated for him, at first by the sun according to calculations made in advance, eventually by homing on the transmissions from their destination.

  As they traveled northeast, the land rose; the season helped too, fall in the northern hemisphere; temperatures dropped and more and more life came in sight. Scattered shiny-leathery shrubs and isolated large plants, vaguely suggestive in their grotesqueness of saguaros or Joshua trees, grew closer together; streams flowed into pools; a reddish sward strengthened from patches to ground cover; stands of dendriforms became a forest, whose gleaming brown-violet fronds rippled in the wind. Overhead, heaven was cloudless, purple rather than blue, with a tinge of green from the sun, which stood well-nigh motionless behind the spacecraft.

  Fidelio spoke. Brodersen must concentrate to follow his hoarse, wheezy Spanish: “I think the seasons are more extreme here than on any of our planets, biologically as well as in weather. Nothing grows in the long nights, nor in the winter that is approaching, nor, I would suppose, at the terrible height of summer. Animals must needs be adapted to this. We have likely arrived at a time of ingathering and feverish making ready.”

  Brodersen started to say that this guess jumped far beyond the available facts, but decided not to. The Betans did have knowledge of a variety of worlds—nothing like Pandora, of course, but a couple were included which had some resemblances. Besides, at present his own interest in the local ecology was quite incidental to—

  There the goal was!

  Caitlín cried out, Brodersen and Dozsa muttered astounded oaths, Rueda crossed himself, Fidelio stirred and his iodine smell sharpened. Photographs taken from space conveyed little of the reality which was here.

  A city certainly had existed, long and long ago. Remnants of walls still lifted in a few places above crowding wild wood, their vivid primary hues and soft pastels undimmed. Where turf decked glades, great blurry-edged blocks lay tilted, only half buried.

  North of the ruins stood a complex of several buildings, seemingly intact. Dozsa swung the jets down and hovered to let his companions observe. At first the structures were hard to see as anything but gaudy masses; then the eye began to track the design and found a solemn kind of beauty. Hexahedrons upbearing colonnades fitted harmoniously into each other, around a central tower made of arches and spirals, crowned by a three-dimensional golden sunburst. An enclosed bridge soared between the outermost eastern and western edifices in an arc of bird’s-wing delicacy that somehow also belonged.

  Two kilometers farther north, wilderness stopped, debarred, forced to grow
around what must be a base for spacecraft (and for what else?). Impressive though it was, and in spite of being the lure which had brought the voyagers here, this offered much less to vision. Mostly they saw a sweep of turquoise-tinted paving, close to four kilometers square. Hemicylinders (sheds? barracks?) fenced it, the same color, their curves elaborated by what might be entrances and scanners. Near the remote end of the field was a large, dove-gray dome. Lesser bubbles clustered about it. A complex metal web rose and spread above, doubtless pertaining to the radio transmitter and possibly to other equipment. Squinting at the flat surface, they made out broad circles traced in it by grooves. Were those hatches, leading to silos wherein ships might safely rest?

  That fine detail was barely discernible, for a slight waveriness enclosed the whole ensemble, like a hemispherical heat-shimmer.

  Tears ran quietly down Caitlín’s cheek. “Glory be to Creation,” she faltered, “another race in the universe that knows, thinks… and they not dead.”

  “What?” Rueda asked absently. He was at work trying to raise Chinook, which ought to be stationed in synch by now. “What do you mean?”

  “Is it not clear, man? The countryside lies desolate, the cities fallen, save here where we see a bit of restoration—in the ancient style; for look, the port before us is not of the same architecture at all, at all. Who but the Pandorans themselves would come back and erect such a memorial, after they went through the gate to a young world?”

  She had spoken in English. Brodersen put the question in Spanish to Fidelio, who opined, ‘That seems reasonable, fellow swimmer, though a fang remains caught in its flesh. Why should they go to so much trouble for mere—ang’gh k’hrai—basking? Sentiment? Yes, for mere sentiment. Data storage can preserve every memory of the mother planet, for hologrammic re-creation at will, better than a few unused houses on this crumbling reef.”

  Dozsa took the boat out of hover mode and started her circling. “The answer to that,” he suggested meanwhile, “is that the houses are not unused. They get visitors.”

  “Why?” Rueda asked. “What visitors? Tourists? Hardly, when nothing but fragments are left, aside from yonder bit of copywork. Fidelio’s right, electronics can give more of Old Pandora. Scientists, then, keeping track of what’s happening? They wouldn’t need facilities this big and elaborate, I’m sure, especially with an astronautical technology that must be equal or superior to Beta’s.”

  “Earlier I proposed a few thoughts on life cycles here,” Fidelio said softly. “They were reasonable, yet they may well be afloat with no roots in truth. Dogmatizing about sophonts we have never met is whirlpool unreason. If ever we find out what these are like, the single certainty is that we will be surprised.”

  “To be alive is to be forever surprised,” Caitlín said. “How good that is.”

  “Never mind now,” Brodersen interrupted. “Let’s first see whether we can make contact…. God damn it, Carlos, are theyasleep up in orbit?”

  As if summoned, the lean features of Weisenberg, acting captain, sprang into the screen. His usual calm snapped apart. “How are you?” he almost yelled. “Are you safe?” He relaxed a bit when he heard the report and saw the pictures, both direct and off tape. Joelle, enmeshed in holothesis, took everything straight into her brain. The rest of the crew watched at their posts.

  “Doesn’t seem like anybody’s home,” Brodersen finished with a sigh. “Well, we’ll explore, and maybe get a clue to when the next ship is scheduled in, or figure a way to leave a note, or—I dunno.”

  Weisenberg frowned. “Someone’s minding the store,” he warned. “Or something is. Else that field would be covered by wind-blown dirt and brush taking root, not to mention animals making messes. Have a care how you approach.”

  “M-m-m, yeah, good point. We’d better keep ourselves in gear, though. Stay tuned for another thrilling episode.”

  After a conference inboard, Williwaw swung about and neared the base from above. She had a machine gun in either wing. Dozsa sent a burst. Nobody was present to be hurt or angered, and it was a simple, handy kind of probe. Rueda tracked it; Brodersen monitored a camera for slow-motion playback under magnification.

  The bullets struck the diaphanous canopy. The tracers among them skittered fierily aside. Dozsa brought the boat around in a grab of swiftness and snarl of jets, and headed for clear sky.

  No person spoke until they had examined Brodersen’s record. Not a slug had penetrated more than a few centimeters before rebounding, flattened by the impact. “Hoo-ha,” he muttered. “If we’d come sailing cheerily into that—Fidelio, have you any notion what it might be?”

  The Betan made an indescribable gesture. “Conceivably hypersonic waves of ultra-high amplitude, heterodyned to form a quasi-solid shell. Conceivably a more subtle and efficient type of field, unknown to my people. Pandoran ships, descending, must transmit a signal that turns it off for them, but I disbelieve the signal is one we could hit upon by trial and error.”

  “Me too. Okay, what’s next?”

  Brodersen’s question was rhetorical. From the beginning, they had expected to go out on foot—were determined to. Dozsa brought the flyer back down, low and slow. Midway between the base and the handsome complex, an opening in the forest seemed to offer a spot for a vertical landing and later takeoff. Dozsa descended ultra-cautiously, jets loud at their labor. Close scanning showed the ground did not yield under that pressure, save for the low ruddy growth on it. Nonetheless he kept wheels retracted and extended skids, which he could drop off if they got mired or otherwise trapped.

  Williwaw came to a firm, level halt. The engines whined into a silence that rang in the ears. A popping in them followed, and a hiss, as air was bled out to equalize with the lower Pandoran pressure. Folk unbuckled. Caitlín beat Brodersen to the kiss he had promised himself.

  “Well,” he said after shaking hands all around elsewhere, “let’s commence. Get your firearms ready.” Taking an automatic rifle, he writhed past seats in the cabin, went down a ladder to the belly of the vessel, and operated the airlock. Through that he cycled as if into poison… which might be the case, no matter what spectroscopes related.

  He didn’t expect it. Chichao Yuan had died on Beta from a lethal dose of naturally produced gas, but that was a most unlikely happenstance, unprecedented in the Betans’ own experience. Still less plausible was catching a native disease, fungal, microbial, viral, anything, when the two most similar biologies known to Fidelio did not even base their heredities on the same nucleotides. Ordinarily the expedition would nonetheless have proceeded more deliberately than this, sending remote-controlled machines out to collect samples for analysis in a segregated chamber before the first member ventured forth, and maybe quarantining him afterward. Chinook, however, lacked trained personnel. Therefore the skipper claimed the proud privilege of being guinea pig.

  He swung himself out, to the ground, and stood as if in a dream. Me, old Dan Brodersen, I have betrod a new world, the first man ever. Feeling almost giddy, he stooped to touch the soil, grub some up, roll it between his fingers. It was warm and dry and smelled like… charcoal?

  Heat smote him, savage as in the Sahara Desert. Parched, the air sucked moisture from nostrils till they stung, lips till they cracked. Though its rarity dulled hearing somewhat, a wind boomed loud, making branches creak and fronds rustle. He felt it like a breath from a furnace. Tarry odors filled it.

  He peered around. Now that he was outdoors, the green glare changed colors more than he had awaited: on springy dull-red turf, murky boles and limbs rising three or four man-heights, deep-hued serrations that grew from them, shadowy reaches beyond where bushes cast back sun-flecks in mica-like glints, the skin on the back of his hand. The sky brooded Tyrian. A dozen winged creatures flapped across, bronze-bright. Midget flyers that could not be insects, returned, after the alarm of the landing, to buzz about.

  “Dan, darling love, how do you fare?” Caitlín’s dread ripped from his walkie-talkie.

  “
Fine,” he answered. “Honest. Calm down. Sit back, remember our doctrine of caution, wait till I’m sure.”

  I won’t he sure, of course, he thought. Never can he. Might be inhaling death at this minute. He found that the idea didn’t worry him, far-fetched as it was. Then why do I hate the notion of letting Pegeen come out?

  I can’t postpone that much longer.

  Stumping around, he noticed for the first time how he weighed a little more; Pandora’s gravity exceeded Earth’s by a few percent. On a log inside the woods, he spied a cat-sized animal, and froze while he stared. It was a tailless quadruped with glabrous, pale-blue, shiny skin, a beak, three eyes—the third on back of the head—and a fanlike dorsal fin. Noticing him in turn, it folded that member and bounded off.

  “Too fast for a reptile or lower-grade critter like that,” Brodersen said when he had given a description over the radio. “Equivalent of a Terrestrial mammal? I dunno, but I expect I’d never have seen it if my shape and smell weren’t too outlandish for instant recognition. My guess is, therefore, that’s the basic animal shape here, four-limbed, three-eyed, beaked. The sail may be a cooling device; could have a sense organ built in too, I suppose.”

  The miracle of that small beast struck home in him. A whole evolution, an entire face of life itself. And Ira Quick wanted to keep humankind stanchioned in his sociological cattle stalls.

  Brodersen continued. Partway around the glade, he stopped once more. This time, what he saw was a trail.

  Underbrush was scant and presented no real obstacle. Yet a meter-wide strip of bare, hard-beaten loam ran straight into the forest: as nearly as he could gauge, straight toward the buildings that were his next goal. He stood thoughtful, in the blistering wind, before he continued his round. On the opposite verge, he found the same trail, equally linear, likewise vanishing from his view into the depths.