Analog SFF, November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  To the north, rising plumes of steam lit by a faint red glow reminded him that he was on the rim of an active volcano.

  The star patterns were unfamiliar and were dominated by a brilliant red star so bright that it cast a shadow and degraded his night vision. He had to block it with his hand to see the Milky Way. But a group of second magnitude stars caught his attention; it looked like Orion's belt. With a start, he realized that it could indeed be Orion's belt, but viewed from hundreds of light-years farther away, and, if the still brilliant red and blue stars above and below it were Betelgeuse and Rigel, somewhat off to the side. 36 Ophiuchi lay near Scorpius; Orion hunted on the opposite side of Earth's sky. So the brilliant red star to its right could be Antares. If so, they had passed a few light-years beyond the heart of the Scorpion. With a bit of searching, he found what he thought were the Pleiades. Somewhere in the direction he was looking would be Sol, maybe a hundred times dimmer than the dimmest star he could see. The compact binoculars in his emergency kit required power, of course.

  He would build a telescope to see Sol, some day. He could grind and polish an obsidian mirror, silver it somehow, and use the lenses from the binoculars as an eyepiece. If he couldn't get home again, he vowed he would at least see home again.

  A brisk wind hit him from behind and a great dark void filled the sky where brilliant stars had been moments ago. Some primordial instinct seized him and he threw himself down to the lava as something he couldn't see went whoosh-clunk above him. The stars reappeared as the black shadow flew off to the east. It was some kind of bird or bat, but the size of a large aircraft—a megabat. With the Milky Way behind it, he could see it bank and begin to return. Terrified, he scrambled on all fours back to his lava tube. There was an audible, hollow thump-crunch outside as if a giant had jumped down on the lava field.

  Jacques fumbled for his staff and basket and moved farther into the lava tube, glad that he had chosen a small one. Loud scraping sounds commenced at the tube entrance, followed by the thumps of falling rock. Eventually they stopped, but Jacques stayed awake sitting on his haunches and gripping his staff the rest of the night.

  When it got light enough to see, he tended the variety of scrapes and scratches he'd gotten from blundering around blind and naked in the sharp lava field. Then noting the monster's excavation efforts hadn't shortened the tube significantly, he lay down on his space blanket and slept.

  When he woke, he gathered his things and cautiously poked his head out of the lava tube. The sun was high, peeking through occasional gaps between impossibly tall, dark-bottomed clouds that were rapidly filling the sky.

  He emerged and looked around—not a hundred meters to his left, sitting in a depression of lava sand, were three huge eggs; he recognized the mottled shells.

  Did he risk the climb down to the lake? He hadn't seen anything on the way up; maybe the megabat only hunted at night. Was there any point? The megabat was another reason not to expect to find any other survivors. Or maybe it wasn't a threat at all and was only protecting its clutch. Supposing that he risked a search, what would be the best way of doing it? Going along the rough lava ashore would be time-consuming and increase exposure to the megabats. But if he were on or in the water, he could dive to escape it—trusting that said dive didn't take him into the jaws of a parrot-beaked shark.

  He could make a boat of some kind. A hollow blackwood log should float nicely enough if one could stop up the ends. Bitterwood pulp dried out to something like cork, so that might work. He could braid ropes of green twine. He headed back down the hill and established a working camp at a level where there were logs of about the right size, a running brook, and a lava tube cave just the right size for him and nothing bigger. He called it Forest Camp.

  Two weeks later, on Day 25, on the first landing beach, he had assembled four blackwood logs, stopped and sealed, about thirty centimeters across and four meters long—as large as he could carry—along with a coil of three-centimeter-thick green twine rope, numerous flute plant shafts, and a pile of mature blackwood leaves. The next morning, he pondered whether to follow his plan and go for one more log or just go with what he had. One more log would make the raft about 1.5 meters across instead of 1.2. He looked at the high waves and decided to do it.

  By this time, the path was well traveled. Carrying a log on the way back, with an overnight stop at Rim Cave, would take a day and a half. But unburdened, he could do it in half a day, so he took off immediately, intending on arriving at Forest Camp by early evening. As he approached the rim, he witnessed an astounding sight. A group of kangasaurs had gathered at the megabat nest and were apparently trying to break open one of the eggs.

  Almost by instinct Jacques rushed toward them, waving his arms, hoping to scare them away and save the eggs from the kangasaurs and the kangasaurs from momma megabat. But the kangasaurs didn't scare and one of them started toward him. Jacques slowed and prepared to do battle with his staff. Then he saw a long scar on the head of one of the kangasaurs that stayed by the eggs. Could it be the same one he hit before? Jacques began to whip his staff around, creating the low moaning sound and approached slowly. The scarred kangasaur left the egg clutch and started heading downhill; the rest followed. The one that had come to challenge him looked back at the retreating group, looked a Jacques, then back at the retreating group and abruptly turned and bounded after them. Jacques was curious about how much damage the kangasaurs had done to the eggs, but decided discretion dictated that he not approach the nest.

  Instead, he continued quickly along his trail to Forest Camp. A distant movement caught his eye. A huge megabat was coming in for a landing. Though it must have been moving rather quickly, it was so large that even rapid movements took time. In this slow motion, it settled to the ground among the trees as if using some antigravity mechanism.

  Jacques scolded himself about curiosity and went to take a look anyway, careful to stay in the cover of the trees. The megabat itself was an ugly chimera of familiar-seeming things: a bear's head with a parrot's beak on the body of a bat. On the ground it squatted on its hindquarters, balancing with a pair of clawed fingers that projected from halfway out on its wings. Its neck didn't seem long in proportion, but still could extend some distance from its body.

  What it held nearly made him retch. It had pulled something out of the wreckage of a CSU, a bloated, white thing that nonetheless had recognizable arms and legs. The corpse fell in half as the megabat's beak lifted it, and the monster gulped the half it retained with a quick motion of its head. Then it went back down for the rest. Shuddering, Jacques hid behind a blackwood tree until the megabat lifted off with a single mighty beat of its huge wings and vanished into the gloomy, clouded sky.

  He went forward to see what had happened. It turned out that the CSU was not badly damaged—the megabat only dented it in the process of biting off the flexidiamond canopy. The fall, he realized, would not have been so bad. Terminal velocity for something the size of a CSU in this dense atmosphere and low gravity would be a fraction of what it was on Earth—maybe less than ten meters per second, and even that may have been broken by the tree canopy.

  The occupant had made a camp around the CSU, apparently hoping to be rescued. A crude table and chair sat beside the CSU, made of flute plant shafts lashed together with green twine.

  There was a basket, not unlike his, with personal effects in it. The remains of a handwritten book remained open, several pages having come off. Fearing the worst, he compared the page he had been carrying with the book. It matched; the CSU had been that of Ascendant Chryse.

  His nose told him that she had been dead for a while when the megabat found her. He nerved himself to look into the CSU. Her decayed head was mercifully turned away from him amidst the scattered, putrid gore left by the unfastidious megabat. He hoped the bacteria in her body would kill the thing. But probably not—parasites coevolve with their hosts.

  The shadow of the caldera had moved over him by this time. He would have to get ba
ck to Forest Camp quickly—the megabats, apparently, were already about their appointed rounds. He looked around for her emergency kit items, finding the bag, space blankets, canteen—everything but the solar array and wrist comp. Was the array working? It had to be around somewhere. He couldn't find it, however.

  He was about to leave when he remembered the CSU memory; it might have a more complete record than his own. He found the access panel and the right side and, hopefully, turned the power on. The tiny engineering status screen display lit up immediately—her CSU had probably used much less power than his after landing. For one thing, it wouldn't have needed to make air.

  But the external intake status was “off.” That didn't make sense to him. With the power off and the canopy shut and the vents closed, she would have suffocated. Had she simply given up hope and killed herself? That didn't make sense, but the evidence seemed to point that way.

  Shadows were deepening. He pulled the systems control module out of the CSU and took it and the diary back with him to Forest Camp.

  That night, in his lava tube by the light of glowing charcoal, he got to know Ascendant Chryse and her history. She would not, he thought, have killed herself expecting to go to heaven—as an adult, she had utterly rejected the New Reformist mythology she'd been taught by the people who had abused her childhood. She had become a conforming Anglican, though with private doubts. She hated the New Reformation. The last pages of her diary flamed with her determination.

  He wouldn't be able to play back her CSU's record of the Resolution's journey until he found another undamaged CSU, but in the last pages of her diary, she vowed to “...get revenge for the sabotage that diverted Resolution from 36 Ophiuchi.” There was no despair in this writing, or anything like it.

  Needing some closure, he tore out an empty page of Ascendant's diary after her last entry. Some of the cells of her body would be on that, along with her fingerprints. Also, it represented her future, the unwritten pages of a life that might have extended to the end of time itself. Gone now. He took the page and lit it afire from his charcoal lamp. Its brilliance filled his small cave for a few seconds, then flickered out.

  He sang Heinlein's Green Hills of Earth softly and went to sleep with tears in his eyes and an unanswered question in his mind.

  Sabotage required a saboteur. Who? It would have been a suicide mission ... or maybe not. He was alive, after all.

  * * * *

  Chapter 5

  Beyond Survival

  He arrived at Rim Camp in early evening. Days had become noticeably warmer and longer since he'd emerged, but the sun still rose at nearly the same place on the horizon each day. At least it did as far as he could tell without stopping to build some kind of a Stonehenge to measure it. The change must be due to orbital eccentricity, he thought. He stuck his thumb out at arm's length to cover less of the sun.

  Two days later, after some thought and exploration, Jacques assembled the log raft Resolution II on a black sand beach three hundred meters clockwise from where he originally came ashore. The area had a small protected cove, an unusual two-story lava tube cave, and a shoreline of about thirty meters or so of deep black sand. There, he had room to lay the five corked blackwood logs parallel and rope them together with green twine. On top of the logs, he laid out a dozen smaller blackwood branches at right angles and tied them down with a lot of green twine. On top of the middle three of those, he lashed a platform of some thirty flute plant shafts, about three meters long and 1.5 meters wide, each jammed into its own hole in a blackwood log, fore and aft. On top of this, he secured a block of dried bitterwood to serve as a seat. Three long, reasonably straight blackwood branches served as oars—one was a spare.

  He launched Resolution II on Day 30. It worked reasonably well in the relatively calm waters of the cove, but tipped so much in the higher waves of the lake that he had great difficulty staying on his seat. He rowed back to the beach and made another trip to the forest for more green twine and provisions.

  Finally, on Day 33, having made a green twine seat belt with a whittled buckle, he felt ready for open water. While the waves were high and steep, they moved slowly, and he was able to get into a rhythm of waves and oars that let him progress at maybe two meters a second without too much effort.

  He wore his emergency suit—mainly for the clear visor that let him see well underwater. Every hundred yards or so, he would unstrap, dive, and look for a CSU. About a quarter of the way around the lake, he found one.

  The CSU was perhaps at half the depth of his and still functional. Its occupant was a man of medium height, a deep tan, and straight black hair. Jacques didn't recognize him. He tied a line to the CSU and opened its panel to start the revival process. Then he went back to the raft to catch a breath and wait. After what he judged to be about twenty minutes, he dove again. The man seemed about as startled to see him as Jacques had been to see the parrot-beaked shark—a thought that made Jacques glance around nervously.

  By placing his inflated hood right against the CSU, Jacques was able to tell the man what to do, and soon the two of them were together on the raft.

  "What happened!?” was the first thing the man said after pulling his hood off. “My CSU couldn't tell me anything. It was barely functional.” He was a wiry, dark man and spoke with what Jacques thought was a slight British or Australian accent.

  Jacques shook his head. “The same thing for me. I'm not at all certain, but apparently the Resolution could not, or was not allowed to, decelerate at 36 Ophiuchi, and its AI or its crew or both did the best they could to find this place and dump the CSUs here. So far, I've found one who didn't make it, and you."

  "Submahn Roy,” he said and offered a hand. “From Bengal. Just call me Soob. I was a park ranger and safari leader. I was going to have a hand at occupation logistics."

  Jacques gave Soob the basics of his lonely odyssey. “I have Chryse's CSU control module. It may have more data, but I need another CSU to play it. We might try to raise yours."

  "I'm not good for much physically, right now. But as soon as I am, we should look for others."

  Jacques nodded. Time was running out on the underwater CSUs, and more people would make the job easier. He dove to recover his line and mark Soob's CSU with a green twine-tethered blackwood buoy, then they rowed back to the beach.

  Soob recovered as rapidly as Jacques in hyperbaric oxygen, and they were able to set out again the next day to look for others. The first CSU they found was occupied by Lieutenant Collette Obota, an African woman from the Congo. She was a member of the expedition's twenty-person police force—tiny, but any actual fighting would have been done by robots under human direction. A tall, personable, lady with a big grin, Jacques had not met her before, but liked her instantly.

  The occupant of the next CSU they found had clearly expired some time ago. The same for the next two. But the fourth was different. Its occupant looked to be of Asian ancestry and was still in hibernation. Jacques started the revival process from the access panel, and soon the occupant was aboard the raft. He introduced himself as Yu Song-Il, a psychiatrist who had been born on Hanguk'i Habitat in the Proxima belt. Almost two hundred years old biologically, he greeted his new circumstances with the joy of discovery.

  Not long after they pulled him aboard, it began to rain in huge cold drops that reminded Jacques of water balloons. They had to struggle to row against a gentle but surprisingly insistent wind and monster waves to get back to their beach. Green twine lashings began to fray and snap as the Resolution II flexed alarmingly.

  A huge wave broke Jacques’ basket open and its precious cargo of emergency kits and food spilled aft. Unhesitatingly, Collette dove after them.

  For a second, Jacques froze, then shouted. “Soob, Doc Yu, take the oars and try to keep us steady.” Then he scrambled after the remaining supplies on all fours as the raft pitched up and down. His hand clamped on a coil of nanotube line before it had a chance to slither overboard. He wrapped this around the broken bas
ket several times in a crude repair. Reluctantly, he cut that part off with the multi-tool, tied the end around several deck boards and tied the other end to a loop on his emergency suit. Then he dove into the water to look for Collette. It had all taken several minutes and she was nowhere to be seen.

  "Collette!” he screamed at the top of a wave. Three times he screamed.

  "Over here!” he heard at last. He swam toward the sound.

  It became difficult to breathe as the drops became more and more dense. It was impossible to avoid inhaling water, and he coughed as he struggled. He lost his direction. There was nothing to do but tread water and call again.

  Something brushed against his foot. Instinctively, he kicked. Suddenly he felt a strong tug on his boot and a sharp pain. Ducking underwater, he saw that a three-meter parrot-beaked fish had clamped its jaws around his foot. Unable to pierce the emergency suit, it was still exerting crushing force. In desperation, he bent double and punched it in the eye with all the strength his full-gravity muscles could manage.

  No effect.

  Trying to calm himself, he got his multitool out, opened the blade, and sank it deep into the fish's skull. Nothing. Lungs burning, he slashed behind its head, once twice.

  On the third cut, it released him and swam erratically away. Jacques pushed himself to the surface.

  "Over here!” he heard. Not twenty meters to his right, Collette was treading water with two emergency kits in her arms. With arms that felt like lead, he stroked over to her. With Collette gripping him with her legs, she pulled them both back to the raft.

  It held together, barely, for the immeasurable time it took to get back to the cove. When they arrived, Jacques could see that the wave line of the lakeshore had already advanced almost a meter. Together, they dragged the raft as far up onto the shore as they could, tied it to a stick they wedged into a small lava tube and carried what was left of their supplies into the lava cave. They had lost all the indigenous food, but only one bag of emergency gear.