Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  Light nods. “Do, do.”

  Orange sorts through holographic shapes and fishes out two closely conjoined spheres, exactly like the images of the otters above her head. I see Dark and Light, one in each sphere; my own head floats in the intersection of the two. My face grimaces, and words come from my mouth.

  All I want is to go back to my project—my machines and their beautiful numbers. They’re down there waiting for me. I built them the best protection I could, but they can still drift off course if we leave them too long. That’s all I care about right now.

  Orange says, “This is the first statement. There is no witness of prior claim.”

  Blue turns to Doris. “Truth, that! If you wish to dispute, you must prove your Purpose upon the project. Show us that you pursue.”

  “Show, show,” Orange agrees. “Explain the beauty of this project from the eyes of your Purpose, as Lynn has done.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” says Doris. “Dr. K was the expert, and you killed him.”

  “Then you have no claim,” says Blue.

  “Truth,” says Orange. “The project belongs to Lynn GreatTreePurpose.”

  “Witnessed.”

  Doris flushes red. “This is outrageous! I’ll have Terrafirm on all of you for this, and anyway, you’ll find there is no project. You killed it when you killed everyone with your stupid mistake—four people on Base isn’t enough, no matter how much Lynn thinks she knows.”

  Doris is right. I hold out my hands to Blue and Orange, and the alien faces above their heads. “Please—can you help us? Do you have a transmitter we could modify?” I suspect transmitting to Terrafirm will be the easy part—knowing what to say will be much harder.

  A webbed hand touches my left shoulder and Light peers into my face. “You may call for help,” she says.

  “Certainly,” agrees Dark from my right, “but for now the Great Tree Purpose can mobilize to skim your wake.”

  I blink at them. “When you say mobilize, do you mean—”

  Light holds up one hand. “Possible,” she says, nodding toward the albinos and the holographic witnesses. “If other Purposes do not wish to contest the claim.”

  Blue shakes his head so his earrings jingle. “The Pattern Purpose is already satisfied in its pursuit, for we have touched the planet.”

  “Truth, that!” says Orange, and turns her face upward. “Let the Form Purpose and Performance Purpose speak claim if they wish.”

  “The Performance Purpose maintains claim without dispute,” comes a voice, one of two aliens with thin parallel ridges above their eyes. Its twin adds, “Resolved. Our dance celebration can go forward without harming the Great Tree Purpose.”

  Another pair speaks. “We speak for the Form Purpose,” says one, and the other, “Truth. Why not pursue as we began, upon the existing structure?” “Hear, hear. In this way the human breath-bubble may be restored, and the structure be improved as a fitting monument to Form.” “Proposed.”

  Orange and Blue don’t look for my approval, but give a decisive nod. Looks like there’s some kind of party coming, and Base will probably never be the same—but it’s clear the aliens are helping us now, and I really like the human breath-bubble part. Remodel or not, life gets a hell of a lot easier if Base is livable until Terrafirm gets here.

  Blue announces, “Resolved!”

  “The consensus is released,” says Orange. She waves an arm and the holographic faces shrink back into the whirl.

  My eyes and temples ache after too much input. “What do we do now?” I ask. “How long until we can get started?”

  “We can start now, swift as snatching fish!” says Dark.

  “Witnessed!” cries Light with a delighted trill. She pats the sphere at her neck. “Oh Lynn, the creation of a living planet, what a sparkling project for the Great Tree Purpose, a jewel in the great star pattern.”

  “Truth,” Dark agrees. “Tell us how to begin.”

  “Tell us.”

  With Doris giving me the look of death, I can’t answer. “Uh—can I talk to the guys for a minute first?”

  “Yes.” “Certain.”

  I try to take Sung and Kenneth aside, but Dark and Light are following us. “Privately?” I ask.

  Dark extends his whiskers. “Why?”

  “Yes, why?” asks Light. “Why would you endanger your claim to ideas by expressing them without witness?”

  “Oh, dear God,” says Kenneth.

  “Lynn,” murmurs Sung, “what have you just gotten us into?”

  I swallow hard. “Look, I don’t know—but it’s not a war, and right now we need their help. Don’t we?”

  Kenneth takes a deep breath. “I guess we do. Of course, when Terrafirm gets here we'll be in a royal mess.”

  Sung nods. “And then come the diplomats.”

  “Yeah, well—I guess we deal with those guys when they get here.” What matters right now is that we can pursue a common purpose: restore our Base and honor the work of our lost colleagues by keeping the numbers flowing, painting the barren dust, creating a work of art unlike anything the Universe has ever seen. I look around at them all: Kenneth, Sung, Dark, and Light. We need every member of this team. “So,” I say, “let’s go find ourselves a shuttle.”

  The sooner we get started, the sooner we’ll see a real cloud.

  Copyright © 2010 Juliette Wade

  Next Article

  Previous Article Next Article

  Novelettes

  The Unfinished Man

  By Dave Creek

  The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

  Of boyhood changing into man;

  The unfinished man and his pain…

  —William Butler Yeats,

  A Dialogue of Self and Soul

  Mike Christopher couldn’t tell which felt stronger, the fury of the gale-force winds assaulting the rover or the pounding of his pulse behind his right ear. And the worst of it, he thought, is that I was sent here to rescue someone who doesn’t think he needs to be rescued.

  Those winds pummeled the small vehicle, seemingly threatening to overturn it despite the claw-like supports dug several meters into the hard ground of the planet Keleni. Through the narrow slits in the rover’s armor, Mike saw a landscape where the only plant life huddled close to the ground, presenting as little surface area to the buffeting winds as possible. Winding rivulets of water poured down narrow, well-worn paths as dark, thick clouds rushed across a moonless sky. Mike shouted to his companion over the din: “Shouldn’t we turn on the gravitics? If those supports let go—”

  “Nonsense,” Leo Bakri yelled back. He and Mike were sitting across from one another in a cramped galley and sleeping area immediately behind the pilot’s module. “This is how I read the storm.” The veteran explorer was eighty-five years old, barely into late middle age, but time had been unkind to him. Leo’s face was as furrowed as the surrounding landscape, and his body was thin and frail, largely supported by a smart-metal exoskeleton beneath his clothing that enhanced his fading physical abilities and his provided his body with both chemical and nanotechnological assistance as needed. He said, “This is just a little zephyr—one day I’ll take you into the Great White Spot!”

  “And you say we’re going out into this?” Mike asked.

  “You can’t explore from a rover, son. You gotta get out there and feel the wind in your face and reach down and scoop up some dirt with your hands.”

  “I thought we were going to examine some of the planet’s life forms.”

  The lines at the corners of Leo’s eyes and mouth grew deeper as his smile grew wider. “It’s all of a piece, Mike. Can’t separate one from the other.” Leo placed his hand against the side of the rover. “Feel that?”

  Mike did the same with his own hand. “The storm’s letting up.”

  “Winds are down to about seventy-five kph and falling fast—that’s pretty calm here.” Keleni’s rapid spin, nearly three times Earth’s, generated constant thunderstorms, more vio
lent jet streams, and hurricanes that maintained themselves over months or years. “You ready to take that walk? Sun-up was nearly an hour ago—we barely have three hours of daylight left.”

  “I came here to rescue you,” Mike said. “But who’s going to rescue me?”

  Leo reached for the latch on the inner airlock door. “Don’t worry, Mike. I admit I came here to die—but not just yet.”

  As Leo opened the hatch, Mike pressed the middle finger of his left hand into his palm and his lifesuit nanotech activated—it would protect him from small debris and harden into armor if anything large enough to crush his body or even break a bone came hurtling toward him.

  As for Leo, besides his own lifesuit, he depended on his exoskeleton to allow him to make headway against the wind. Mike made a fist and checked the wrist sensor on his left hand—winds were down to sixty-five kph, but Mike still had to keep low and push against the wind to make any progress.

  Leo’s broad strides took him quickly away from the rover, across a muddy field festooned with various species of plant life, none of which grew higher than his knees. The dominant vegetation featured broad cylindrical leaves of red and blue along with wide roots that anchored the plants deeply into the soil. “I call these sunnysiders,” Leo said. “Do you know why their leaves are cylinders?”

  “Uh . . . no, I don’t.”

  “They face toward the track the sun will take in the sky. That’s a movement they can make day to day. But when it comes to tracking the sun across the sky hour by hour, that’s beyond them. The cylinder shape means they can catch the sun’s rays the entire day.”

  “Anytime it’s not storming, you mean.”

  “All the more reason to soak up as much as you can when you can.”

  The cloud cover was just beginning to lift, and Keleni’s primary glowed softly in the east, about halfway to zenith. Leo made his way toward a shallow ravine, went to one knee and motioned for Mike to do the same. Mike did, as Leo pointed to a narrow rock outcropping about fifty meters distant. “Keep looking right there.”

  “For what?”

  “Your first glimpse of the animal life here—it doesn’t waste a lot of time once the winds start to die down. Look—here come some trackers.”

  Those were animals about the size of armadillos, with similar armor. They ran out from behind the rock outcropping and rushed around sticking their long beaks into the soft soil nearby. Their chests were broad to accommodate the strong lungs needed to draw a breath in high winds.

  “They feed on a type of grub, mostly,” Leo said. “Look at their legs—they’re as pointy as their beaks.”

  “They get a grip on the soil by sticking their legs down into it,” Mike said.

  “You got it. They have a hard time scrambling over rocky areas, but they like to live near them for protection.”

  “Sounds like life is tough for them.”

  Leo turned his wizened face toward Mike. “No different than for most living things. My so-called friends who sent you here should’ve realized that.” Mike’s ship, the Earth Unity exploratory craft Asaph Hall, had been asked to divert on its way back to Earth to check on Leo.

  Mike had agreed to be the one dropped here on Keleni, mostly hoping this task would keep his mind off the disturbing news that the same message had delivered to Mike, something he hadn’t shared with anyone else yet, even his closest friends aboard ship.

  Mike swept one hand to indicate their surroundings. “Winds so strong there’s hardly a grain of dust left to blow around, not a single plant that dares to lift itself more than knee-height, and oceans with eternal hurricanes—don’t you think you’ve made it a little tougher for yourself than you needed to?”

  Leo’s eyes were hooded for a long moment, then his wide smile reasserted itself. “Hell, Mike, the tough thing is sitting around in a care home talking about the good old days. Especially when some of them weren’t so goddam good to begin with.” He nodded toward the trackers. “Those things are a lot better company sometimes.”

  Mike said, tentatively, “I heard some of what you went through during the Great Human War.”

  “Hmmpf! Wasn’t so great. Just a lot of death and destruction, like all wars. And don’t you realize why those trackers are better company?”

  “They . . . don’t ask a lot of nosy questions?”

  Leo slapped him on the back, and Mike’s breath whoofed out of his lungs, Leo’s exoskeleton giving the slap more power than he expected. “Now you’re getting it. Look there—now the manta gliders are coming out.”

  Mike’s eyes widened at the sight of these five new creatures; they looked like nothing more than Earthly manta rays adapted for land travel. Anywhere from half a meter to two meters wide, their wing-shaped bodies glided across the ground. “How the hell do they do that?” Mike asked.

  “Tens of thousands of tiny legs,” Leo said. “Like flagella, only a lot stronger. They can also literally glide a little bit—they tilt their bodies so they get a bit of lift underneath in these winds.”

  The manta gliders moved smoothly across the plain, and the trackers that happened to be in their path scurried away. Mike asked, “Do the mantas eat the trackers?”

  “No—mostly they live on insects I call grippers, and the same grubs as the trackers. But they’re especially fond of some smaller animals I call nesters. As you can imagine from the name, they’re pretty sedentary. The gliders sting them with a poison that immobilizes them. Only problem is, then the manta’s slowed down quite a bit if it has that big a meal. It could end up being eaten by other beasties—mud walkers, wind sprinters, any number of things faster or stronger than they are.”

  Mike watched as the trackers continued to feed on the grubs they plucked up from the mud and the manta gliders glided past them for now in search of easier prey. The storm clouds finally departed as quickly as they’d arrived and the sun finally shone down in full force. “Is it even possible to make weather forecasts on this planet?” Mike asked.

  “You can try, but it’s a waste of time,” Leo said. “Everything’s just too volatile.” Leo gave Mike another grin and said, “My mother cried—she was so scared—when I told her I wanted to live out in space. That’s seventy years ago, mind you. But how could I pass up the chance to experience a world like this?” Leo stood up, so Mike did, as well. “C’mon, we can follow those manta gliders—I bet they’re looking for a pretty good nest of grippers up ahead.”

  Suddenly Leo paused, and pressed one hand to his chest. “Are you all right?” Mike asked.

  “Fine. Just . . . a little twinge there. And I’m a little faint. Nothing . . .”

  Leo collapsed. Several of the trackers looked up, startled, then ran away.

  Mike went back down on one knee and grasped Leo by the shoulders. Leo was conscious and his eyes were alert. “Are you all right?” Mike asked. “Can you stand?”

  “I’m fine,” Leo insisted. “Just stand back.”

  “I can help you get back to the rover.”

  “You have to let me do this myself.”

  Leo got his legs underneath him and stood as if his strength had miraculously returned. The exoskeleton, Mike realized. It’s lifting his limp body. Leo turned and strode with a mechanical gait back toward the rover. Mike trotted ahead, meaning to open the vehicle’s hatch, but Leo told him, “No—it opens on its own.” Mike stood aside and watched as the hatch eased open and Leo’s body marched past him as if it were a marionette.

  Leo stepped into the rover, with Mike right behind. “What can I do?” he asked as Leo sat in his previous position in the galley again.

  “Just sit and watch,” Leo said. “This will actually be good for you to see.”

  As Mike looked on, Leo sat back and closed his eyes. His breathing grew shallow, and Mike wondered if the other man had fallen asleep or even lost consciousness. But Leo took a sudden deep breath, his back arched, and he opened his eyes. When he saw Mike looking at him, his smile was open and reassuring. “See? Just that
simple.”

  “Simple, hell—what happened back there?”

  Leo’s eyes narrowed. “Every once in awhile I overexert myself. This was one of those times. I’m glad you saw I can take care of myself.”

  “So your exoskeleton drags you back here—”

  “Just to make sure some predator doesn’t get hold of me, and to give my personal biotech time to check me out and give me a boost. I’ll sit here a minute, and be fine.”

  “So your friends were right to be worried.”

  “My friends are jealous. They may be healthier than I am, but I’m more alive. They need to take a lesson from my mother.”

  “I take it she finally got over your decision to become a spacer?”

  “Oh, yeah. In fact, she’s lived on Minerva Habitat for the past fifty-something years.” A resigned shrug. “Now I can’t ever convince her to leave there, even for a holiday.”

  Mike said, “Tell me you’re not going back out there right away.”

  “If it’ll make you feel better, I won’t just yet. But you’re an explorer. I looked up some things about you—first contact with the Drodusarel, your work on Splendor, taking on the Jenregar, all that. Do you ever expect just to sit at home and read or view other people’s adventures?”

  “I just don’t want to see anyone else die. I’ve had enough of that for awhile.”

  “Coming back from a tough mission?”

  “From the Moruteb system. There and back has taken nearly a year. Another star, Neska, grazed it with a couple planets. We saw some amazing things, learned a lot.”

  Leo said, “But the cost was high?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Someone you loved?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I noticed you’re down to one shuttle. That’s why they dropped you off and took it back up.”

  Mike said, “I notice we’re talking about me now, instead of you.”

  “You look like a man with something on his mind.”

  “Maybe I am,” Mike said. “But that’s not the point.”

  Leo stood. “You know, there really isn’t any reason to go back out there right now. Let’s keep moving.” He went to the pilot’s module and sat in the left seat. Mike moved forward and took the right-hand seat. Once again, Leo asked that Mike just sit and watch as Leo operated the controls that raised the rover’s armor and retracted the support claws from the earth around them. The next task was to redeploy the rover’s six wide wheels from their protective wells. As those wheels extended outward, then touched the ground, the rover lifted gently, gaining the ground clearance it needed to move forward.