Analog Science Fiction and Fact 01/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  But out there, some distance away, two caterpillar crawlers had been caught in the midst of their exploratory mission, and the electrical storm made communication with them very difficult. Orson Leibovitz didn’t know how big an area was affected by the phenomenon, or how long it might last, and didn’t know whether the crawlers had been affected by the downpour. He hoped their occupants had had the good judgment to park the vehicles where they were until it had blown over.

  “I’ve consulted the archives from Earth,” the Caretaker told him, standing motionless at his side. Since the colonists had stopped being space travelers and settled in the pyramids, he too had divided, the Caretaker of the ship and the Caretaker of the planet, two independent physical entities but a single mind tied to the ship, two doubles sharing a single brain. “This kind of sudden storm is not unusual in very dry environments. In general they’re intense but very brief. We’re well protected here inside. All we can do is wait till it passes. And it’s not necessary to give any warning. There’s no need to alarm the people unnecessarily.”

  “But . . .”

  “What they don’t know, they won’t fear,” said the Caretaker, and his voice sounded definitive.

  Orson Leibovitz frowned but held his tongue.

  In her pyramid (Number Three), Veronica Julia found out what was happening from some colonists who were rushing in from outside. She went to see her father.

  “Yes, we have a strong storm up there,” Melo Spiegel told her. “Rain, wind, thunder, and lightning.” Some of the thunder could be heard faintly through the vibration of the pyramids’ structure. “It’s best that we stay protected here inside until it’s all over.”

  “But Imma Assumpta says the rain is really hard.” Imma Assumpta was the woman who had brought news of the storm when she came in from outside. “What will happen to the rollers?”

  The question caught Melo Spiegel off guard. It took Veronica Julia, with the classic, brutally clear insight of a child, to make him see. “Their burrows are on the mountainside! With the storm so strong, they’ll be flooded! They’ll all die!”

  Only then did the zoologist grasp the import of his daughter’s words. He thought for a moment, then shook his head sadly. “But there’s nothing we can do,” he murmured. “Not until the storm is over.”

  Veronica Julia hugged her doll hard and began to cry disconsolately.

  The storm lasted more than an hour before stopping, almost as suddenly as it had begun, on its way toward the east and its own self-destruction. In less than ten minutes the sun again shone brilliantly in the sky and the porous soil had absorbed all the water and returned the landscape to aridity, giving the impression, except for a few puddles drying slowly on the metal platform of the pyramids’ roof, that it hadn’t rained in months.

  But it had. And the people of the pyramids suddenly felt terrified by an atmospheric event whose violence they had never before experienced.

  And when Orson Leibovitz finally reestablished contact with the crawlers he learned the second terrible news. The two exploration vehicles were some fifty kilometers from the pyramids and on their way back when the storm caught them by surprise. At first they didn’t give it much thought and kept going, but when they saw that the rain was getting harder, the thunder and lightning became an intimidating spectacle, and a stretch of unstable ground opened up in front of them, they decided to stop and wait. Maybe it was the wrong decision: A few moments later, when the rain had stopped (or perhaps because of it), the unstable ground under one of the vehicles gave way, and the crawler somersaulted down a sloping mound and burst into flames at the bottom. By the time the other crawler could get to its side, it was too late to do anything for its occupants.

  Diaspora had always been a safe, stable environment where the violent natural phenomena—floods, hurricanes, earthquakes—that periodically devastated the Earth were impossible and soon forgotten. Perhaps because of that, since the very beginning of the journey, death had been no more than another natural element in the life of the pilgrims, an everyday thing and accepted as such: inevitable, but never traumatic. In the calm security of the ship, where accidents hardly ever happened and violence was all but forgotten, people died of old age, sometimes (ever more seldom) of sickness, but always in a serene and predictable way. There was even a god of death who carried the deceased peacefully to a place of calm and happiness and to whom people prayed often to keep him propitious: a generous and merciful god, not feared but venerated, in whom one trusted blindly for the hypothetical life after death.

  A violent death changed all the rules. It was something unthinkable, monstrous, horrendous, especially when it resulted from a disturbance of nature. The two colonists had been burned to death: burned alive. It was as if Earth Two were rebelling against their presence.

  It was a hard idea for the colonists to get their minds around.

  The ship quickly organized a farewell ceremony for the victims, simultaneously on Diaspora and on the ground, officiated solemnly by the twin Caretakers in a ritual symbiosis. It tried to alleviate the shock with a long, meditative, and tremendously elaborate ceremony, even trying to revive unconscious memories through ancient rituals of the original Hebrew religion and other religions. It was almost a kind of brainwashing, but it didn’t accomplish much. The general feeling, as much among the pilgrims still aboard the ship as among the affected colonists on the planet, was of shock: Earth Two didn’t like the colonists of Diaspora and was rejecting them. “We’re intruders here,” was the sentence often said in a low voice. The Caretakers and the ship quickly realized that the general sentiment was tearing them apart.

  And then, as if to rub salt in the recently opened wound, in the same week as the storm came the third death, this time caused by another pathogen—virus, bacteria, or whatever—native to the planet.

  From the beginning the pathogens of Earth Two had seemed, even in the most virulent cases, benign for humans. In the almost eight months of occupation of the planet there had been a few outbreaks of infections, all mild and controllable, that had run their course with minimal symptoms and passed quickly. In those almost eight months more than fifty indigenous infectious and contagious processes had been isolated, identified, and successfully fought; and a whole arsenal of immunizations had been provided to the fearful new colonists who kept coming down to the surface from their sterile, infection-free environment.

  It was the beginning of the second phase of colonization that changed everything. This second phase began with introducing to Earth Two a limited number of terrestrial plants and animals and studying their interaction with the planet’s native flora and fauna. Specimens of several selected animals were cloned, and a number of carefully chosen transgenic plants, and a set of enclosures for them were set up on the surface next to the pyramids: farm fields, gardens, barns, and stockyards. The idea was to give them as much exposure to the planet as possible and see whether, since in their storage as clonable cells they had not been subjected to seven centuries of sterility like the pilgrims, they still had their natural defenses, or were also vulnerable to all sorts of diseases.

  It turned out that they were.

  Jerusa Stein, one of the livestock keepers, began to feel ill three days after the crawler accident. The first symptoms were those of trichinosis: fever, gastroenteritis, and an intestinal parasite. But Jerusa Stein was strictly vegetarian, and besides, there were no pigs in the ship’s clone banks; they weren’t kosher. Although, the epidemiologists were quick to point out, the trichina does not parasitize only pigs. The lab results soon showed that the larva in the stock keeper’s intestinal wall, although similar to trichina, was apparently native to Earth Two and had not come from the ship’s clone banks and was not transmitted orally but by skin contact. The researchers hurriedly looked for a way to combat and eliminate it: They found one, but too late for Jerusa Stein. The larva had entered not her muscles but her bloodstream and had blocked an artery, causing a catastrophic heart failure.

&nb
sp; Eighteen more cases of pseudotrichinosis appeared in the next two weeks, in people who had had contact with Jerusa or the stockyards. Fortunately, they were all treated in time and none died, though three were considered in critical condition and a fourth spent five days in a coma.

  After the crawler accident, Jerusa Stein’s death and the other eighteen cases, even though none proved fatal, were a new blow that suddenly made the colonists more acutely aware than ever of their own vulnerability on the planet. The question now was: How many more contagious diseases peculiar to Earth Two could spread to humans and become pandemics, given the terribly precarious state of human defenses against outside attacks? How many of them could be successfully combated? And on the other hand: How many diseases of terrestrial animals brought from Earth as embryos for cloning could be transmitted to the colonists themselves and to the planet once they were cloned? Everything is interrelated; everything affects everything else. The colonists began to wonder very seriously about all that.

  And, high above, so did the ship itself.

  Everything is interrelated; everything affects everything else.

  The ship knew that very well. It had known it since the beginning of the trip, when it integrated its extensions into itself, when it took upon itself the responsibility and control of all in its charge.

  Now it had to confront a new problem.

  The pilgrims had arrived at their destination, and with that the mission of the ship as such, at least theoretically, had ended. Diaspora, with its machine logic, was very conscious of that. Throughout the trip it had been the mother bird protecting her chicks till their time came to abandon the nest and begin to fly. Now, with the arrival at Earth Two, that final and definitive state had been reached: The pilgrims had become colonists, the chicks had to become independent and take flight on their own. But, after more than seven centuries of absolute dependence, were they ready for that?

  Diaspora had not been designed to descend to the surface of a planet. No one had anticipated that it should; it was strictly a starship. What should its mission be from this point on? To fly eternally over Earth Two in its geostationary orbit and keep watching over its emancipated children like a patriarchal God keeping watch over his creatures from heavenly heights? Certainly it could keep doing so with no problem, through the Caretaker and the servants, but what would that accomplish? It realized that, in the last analysis, the reactions and the attitude toward the planet of a good many of the pilgrims went well beyond the mere agoraphobia induced by centuries of cloistered life. They were, he ventured to suggest, a clear manifestation of the syndrome of clinging to the womb. They didn’t want to be born. The ship had for so long been—and still was—such a secure and protective maternal bosom. And the planet was still s o unknown.

  So Diaspora faced a new and terrible dilemma. Two possible roads stretched in front of it, both drawn from examples in the history of Old Earth. It could abruptly and completely sever its contact with the pilgrims, abandon them to their fate, forget them, let them grow on their own without interference. Or it could keep teaching them from orbit, keep acting as vigilant mother, protector, father, and God. Neither solution was satisfactory, and the first could be traumatic for the new colonists, especially after the most recent traumatic events. Diaspora’s brain, which foresaw everything, cursed itself for not foreseeing this. With an inadmissible self-complacency, perhaps instilled by the Project’s original instructions themselves, the ship had from the beginning limited its role to guiding the journey. It had never needed to go beyond that: When they reached their destination, its circuits told it, its responsibility would end, replaced by that of the pilgrims themselves, now transformed into colonists.

  But that wasn’t exactly true.

  The idea of reprogramming itself a third time to adapt to the new circumstances passed through its mind. It would have to think very hard about this.

  The storm had devastated the rollers’ home.

  An aerial infrared examination of the interior of the huge warren showed not one occupant alive within it. Gravity probes showed clumps of what might have been piled-up corpses in what earlier the explorations had shown to be roomy caverns full of the concentrated warmth of life. Now there appeared to be nothing still alive in that enormous underground city.

  Melo Spiegel thought he saw in the situation, despite the general misfortune, the welcome possibility of finally studying the rollers firsthand, though only by examining the cadavers he expected to be able to get. Of course, he said nothing of that to his daughter. He ordered an accessible section of the burrow opened very discreetly, and found two surprises. First, not one roller body was found in the tunnels; they all must have taken refuge in the great hollows of the “dormitories,” as if they had gathered there to die. Second, when the first of those hollows was reached, it turned out that they weren’t exactly dormitories. The concentrations of mass the instruments had detected there were indeed cadavers—but of insects.

  The big double surprise led to an obvious double conclusion. The rollers were an insectivorous species, which was hardly strange on a planet where insects were by far the most abundant and varied type of animal. But the most surprising thing was the fact that they not only ate insects, but bred them like cattle, somehow keeping them conf ined in underground “corrals” until they were ready to be slaughtered and eaten. It made sense: Under the imminent threat of the storm, they had hastily fled their home, leaving their cattle behind since they couldn’t take them along under the pressure of time, and presumably intending to gather new flocks once they had returned home.

  Which clearly confirmed the theory that the rollers were, if not the most intelligent, at least the most highly evolved species among all those discovered on the planet so far.

  “But they can’t have all gone away!” exclaimed Veronica Julia, stamping her foot, when her father f inally told her the result of his explorations. “There were so many! Where could they be now?”

  Melo Spiegel prudently declined to speculate. Despite the disappointment of not finding any rollers, he was excited about the great quantity and diversity of insects they were going to be able to study. He immediately appointed a whole team to go to find, collect, classify, and bring them to the pyramids and preserve their bodies in stasis fields, a treasure of specimens beyond any he had dared dream.

  Jerusa Stein’s funeral was held the week after the crawler accident. It was crowded and emotional. Jerusa Stein had been very popular on Diaspora: her main job on the ship had been the care of children (“my little lambs,” she called them), so the descent to the surface hadn’t significantly changed her work. Her husband was a cloning specialist. Both were still young, and Jerusa always said that now that they had descended to the planet and the strict limits on population growth had disappeared, she wanted to have at least five children. Unfortunately, said her husband in the eulogy, that could now never be, but in a sense all the children of Diaspora could be considered hers.

  One problem to be resolved was the disposition of the bodies. It would be absurd to recycle them as had been done during the journey, so the ship revived an old religious custom from Earth—burying the bodies in the planet’s soil. Some colonists protested against “feeding our dead to the vermin of Earth Two,” to which the Caretaker argued that the dead on the planet belonged to the planet, just as their predecessors had belonged to the ship. As an alternative he proposed cremation, but the general opinion was that this would be a flagrant violation of the mortal remains—and the memory of how the two members of the crawler crew had died remained vivid in everyone’s mind. Finally, a consensus was reached to bury them in hermetically sealed metal coff ins to preserve the bodies against external agents. The Caretaker couldn’t help thinking, not without a certain mechanical irony, that that couldn’t protect them against the agents of decay in the bodies themselves.

  Hardly had the funeral ended, outside on the platform of the pyramids, and almost all the participants retired to the interior, wh
en the rollers returned.

  They did it in a rush.

  The news ran like the wind through all the pyramids. They came down the mountainside, a whole multitude of them, appearing from nowhere, and took up positions on the ground around the perimeter of the platform, a tight circle of furry balls swaying slowly as if rocked by a nonexistent breeze or to the beat of an inaudible melody. It was nightfall, their favorite time, and the setting sun, already almost on the horizon, cast golden reflections on their coats. It was a sight to see.

  The colonists rushed back outside to gather on the platform, forming a second concentric circle inside that of the rollers. They did nothing either, they just stood there facing the new arrivals as if waiting, for they knew not what. The servants came out with them, evidently to maintain order and control if necessary. There was no sign of the Caretaker.

  Veronica Julia went outside as soon as she heard the news, with her inseparable Claudia Antonia in her hand, and began walking around the double circle on the platform—colonists within, rollers without—as if her roller, her Pffft, would come forth to meet her when he saw her and would unfold before her. She went all the way around the circumference, but no roller came forward.

  The other children of the colony, who had heard much about Veronica Julia and her contact with the rollers, then decided almost without thinking, moved by their childish curiosity and despite the passivity of their elders, to take the initiative. First a few, then a few more, until finally almost all detached themselves from the rest of the colonists and moved beyond their ring. They took a few timid steps and stopped.

  And then the incredible happened. A few rollers also detached themselves from that circle. They rolled slowly forward and stopped, one in front of each child, to wait a few moments and then unfold, almost lazily, and stand motionless in front of them, solemnly upright, braced on their hind paws and broad flat tails. Their big eyes sparkled in their flat faces, as if lit from within.