The Fourth Science Fiction Megapack

by Isaac Asimov

  “‘Just the overload burst,’” she mimics. “I got fried, Cruz!”

  “I know. I can’t scan you without an interface suit, though. Check with medical, please.”

  She sinks back into the chair, careful of her burns. Not exactly the response she’s looking for. But then what did she expect? She grunts (intolerable little shit!) and wonders what the hell she ever saw in him.

  “How’s the stock?” she asks. As planet-fall coordinator and biofarmer she needs to know that the colonists for this particular drop are unharmed. It has taken over sixteen stops this time to find a suitable host-planet, one with an eco-system from

  which their nanos can grow the living habitats, like the ship grows her a terrestrial body for ground work. Diversity of terrestrial biologicals is not necessary, even a small ecosystem will do.

  “Organiform nodules seem undamaged, although I can’t get a proper signal from its grid. If we can’t verify its authenticity, we’ll have to consider the stock contaminated. In which case, as resident biofarmer, I’ll need your signature on the liability forms.”

  Her heart freezes. This is not what she had anticipated. She’s never lost stock before. Never. Liability forms? Had it come to this for her already? Why not? She had already felt the slow process of marginalisation creeping about her months ago. “You could be wrong, Cruz.”

  “And what would you have me do? Start up the sequence? If there is even a slight chance of contamination, bringing them to life could be the cruellest thing we could do.”

  “I want a thorough check, and a second opinion. I’m not convinced,” she says.

  “Well, luckily you don’t have to be.”

  “Wrong,” she replies. “We are in disagreement, and so protocol demands third-party inquest.”

  “Just a minute, please—”

  “You need me to be in full agreement with you on all and any aspects concerning the possible loss of stock. And I call for direct committee intervention.”

  All department heads and their lieutenants sit on the committee. That includes Cruz and herself. But they will both be excluded from the voting process, as they can’t be seen as being unbiased: a conflict of interest in regard to the greater good.

  “We both know that will take time. Time we don’t have. Karlyn,” he says in a low and even tone, leaning his round face into the camera, “stop fighting me.” She knows he’s tired of fighting her. He’s always fighting her.

  “Already logged and received,” she spits out.

  “Great.”

  “I’m gonna run a diagnostic,” she insists. “A direct interface with its grid.”

  He sighs in resignation. “Knock yourself out.”

  “Grow me another suit. I’ll schedule a walk as soon as it is ready.”

  “Sure. But first let’s run through the information on Beta’s failure.” Cruz begins rerunning the recorded data. “Funny. It shouldn’t be doing that!” he says to himself.

  “Should take about five hours for the suit to be ready. Right?”

  Milky ice crystals now form on the bubble as the sun sinks fast, smudging the view, producing an eerie, cloudy-white glow.

  “Isolating pattern buffers,” he continues, then mumbles: “It shouldn’t do that!”

  “I’ll be down in medical if you need me.”

  She looks up through the bubble transparency and notices a group of humanoid aboriginals, squatting in the brush and tall flower-trees nearby. Some fondle with a loving fascination the twisted bits of biohabitat, supports bent in upon themselves, tips blackened, then turn to stroke each others faces with a slow, deliberate caressing, as they always do.

  “Sixty percent corruption of Beta’s data,” he continues. “Still might be able to save it.”

  A handful of the little hominids are watching her, now. Childishly, she sticks her tongue out at them.

  “Karlyn, isolate the induction flow subroutines. We’re gonna need.…Always intrigued by bloody mud crawlers.…Hey! Do you hear what I’m saying?”

  “Clear as ice,” she snaps, getting up, and flips her camera the finger.

  * * * *

  The first sign that something was going down came when Beta’s AI Systems Platform developed a flutter in her bioprogramming matrix. Karlyn thought it nothing at first, probably a power surge somewhere that shot through the system. Happens. Cruz had let it pass too, so even he had thought it not worth mentioning. But then it happened four times.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” says Cruz, voice booming through the bug’s speakers. “Find the problem and get back up here.”

  Karlyn watches the morning sunlight ooze its way through the foliage, like a thick soup. Similarly, her mind oozes through her brain—An after effect of last night’s uneven sleep. She can hear the hanging foliage brush against the cloudy transparency in the breeze. A scratching sound, wanting to get in.

  “If you think you can do it better, Cruz,” she replies, closing the last seal on her new biolastic suit, wincing, as her skin is still a bit raw, “by all means, feel free to join me.”

  “No thanks. Terrestrial mud crawling is not my idea of a good time. The stench, the filth, bad working conditions, nah!”

  This place isn’t the only thing that stinks, she thinks sourly as she rubs her eyes, attempting to wipe away the dream that follows her from the bed in medical. In the dream she was in a deep forest, surrounded by flowers, pollen gliding through the air rich in golden sun rays. Nice fairy tale image. Sniffing a bloom, the flower’s petals closed around her face, fine tentacles rushed down her throat. She felt like her insides were being ripped out. She awoke with a start, her body burning, throbbing.

  She brushes the vision aside and now gets herself a cup of vitajuice from the service kitchen and proceeds to stalk through the empty lower deck to the equipment locker, her bones feeling heavy, her skin tough. It seems like only yesterday that she had been enjoying the ease of one-third gravity in the bioring ship, before climbing into the reconstruction couch and going into stasis to wake up here. Wherever here is.…

  She touches a panel and the locker door melts away. She stares at the untidy shelves.

  .…and to wake up here with him. With him. It never stops surprising her that she had renewed her work contract. Especially when he had been made supervisor of her beloved farming program. Four hundred years of seeding experience and that asshole gets the big chair. She rolls her eyes in disgust. Committee politics, and he was good at playing the game, his new squeeze toy being the assistant chairperson. Her stomach twists with that thought.

  Farming has been her life. Now, would he dare threaten to take that, too?

  She considers the pulse gun, hanging in its display.

  Karlyn had renewed her registration of monogamy too, despite the demise of their affair. She had discovered later that he had never registered as monogamous when they were together. By rights he didn’t have too, but he should have informed her out of courtesy at least. Instead, he had let her heart accumulate unfair romantic notions, notions of unity and familial obligations, setting down roots, notions he had no intention of entertaining.

  “This is who I am,” he had said, after she pleaded for him to reconsider their relationship. “Didn’t you know?”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “You needed me,” she said accusingly. “To get on the committee.”

  “Karlyn.…”

  “We never had a chance, did we? Did it mean anything to you? Did I?”

  He spoke slowly. “It all means something to me.”

  She kept to herself for a few weeks, taking time off from her duties. When she returned, six months later, she learned that he had been promoted. So what was she to him, then? Another one of his many partners, for sure. Most likely a stepping-stone, she had concluded. And he had left quite a footprint on her back.

  And it had all gone downhill from there. And in her self-imposed social solitude, regressive feelings of anger and dejection, spawned from the depths of her
wounded heart, began to bubble.

  She frowns at the ceiling. “Where’s your dedication to the stock?”

  “Whose stock? Theirs or ours?”

  “Funny. I remember learning that there really isn’t much of a difference.”

  He makes a guttural sound in his throat. “Huddling together in the slime like slugs.”

  “Maybe mud dwellers like the sense of being grounded to something. Belonging.”

  “Belonging to what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. To each other.”

  “Let ’em. We’re the flowers of the wide open spaces, my dear.”

  “Wrong analogy,” she corrects him, digging through her mess for the equipment, ignoring the weapon on the shelf. “Try bees. Going from stem to stem. No,” she says to herself aloud. “Bees have a deep communal system. Wind bursts. Carrying wild new seed to unknown grounds. That might be the type of prosaic, expressive crap you’re looking for.”

  He sniffs. “You stay down there any longer and I might recommend you for psychological re-adaptation sessions.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time. Farmers have the usual interview session after every ground assignment. The shock and discomfort of being grounded does involve variations of disorientation and discomfort when adapting to a harsh gravity well, discomfort that can inhibit the usual motor coordination in conjunction with the ability to concentrate, to find her core.

  She fumbles getting to the control bubble. She can hear the leg brace machinations purring. The ice crystals melt away in the morning’s quick and heavy heat. The distant images wriggle in the melting frost and warp into their proper shapes.

  Cruz is still chattering in the background, his voice grating on her ears.

  “Yeah, well, thanks for the chit-chat,” she blurts.

  “Sure, but remember to wash when you’re done.”

  “I’m laughing,” she says, flatly.

  “Glad I could lighten your day. See you on the uplift.” The speakers snap off.

  She tries to clear her mind as she heads for the antechamber, a hand running absently over her thigh as the muscles work their strange power.

  * * * *

  We interrupt this program.…

  Karlyn slashes her way through the foliage, her sonic blade perfectly slicing the stalks of thin young trees in half. The humidity hangs in the air like slowly moving vapor clouds. Her digivisor works to keep her faceplate clear as she hacks her way to the clearing and the organiform nodules. Following close behind, as expected, come a swarm of aboriginals, dodging through the thick growth with ease.

  She stops, teasing them, and they all stop, holding frozen their positions as if suddenly encased in ice. She moves suddenly, then stops. They do the same. She plays this little game with them for some time.

  The curious little hominids had shown up the morning after landing, touching the bug, caressing, as if feeling its every living millifiber. When they had first arrived, her initial survey failed to report on other land creatures other than Species One, the “gelatins” (small, soft squirming creatures less than twenty centimeters long that lived high up in the flower-trees, either lain in the flower buds or placed there after birth, seemingly unattended, evidently being fed by them). As the seasons changed, she discovered that Species One was in fact an infant stage of Species Two. After completing their gestation externally, they then venture down to the soil for good.

  She had spent some time observing them. She had sat with them, followed them, examined as best she could their close-knit, communal relationships. They appeared non-progressive as there was nothing of unnatural construction around, their villages being close groupings of flower-trees and large-leafed bushes that hung in an umbrella shape and provided shelter, as if the vegetation grew to accommodate them. When they slept, she used a nano probe to examine their genetic history, the history of a species unaltered in a billion years. An evolutionary dead end; she had concluded that it was safe to proceed with the seeding.

  She bounces over fallen trees, dodges bushes, stops, zig-zags through the growth. Her playful audience is not far behind, imitating, simulating, like a group of over-excited preschool children at playtime.

  She makes the clearing and stops to catch her breath. The hominids freeze where they are, looking as if they could go on like this for an hour or so, unfazed.

  She feels something’s wrong. She looks up.

  “Shit on me!”

  The Beta habitat, or something resembling it, has sprung up during the night like a wild grouping of jungle vines, twisted and interlocking. Filaments resembling veins wander out across the smooth areas of lattices and giant cylindrical leafy enclosures.

  “Shit.…on.…me,” she whispers, and quickly switches channels over to Beta. Although it is mumbling incoherently the Platform’s biosystems check out five-by-five down the line.

  Her interface chimes.

  Before she knew what she was doing, she was standing at the habitat, hand outstretched, rubbing the smooth lattices and snaking branches. At the centre sit the nodules in their mouldings, undisturbed. The aboriginals follow close behind, but avoid getting too close to the structure. They seem content to sit off at the clearing’s edge and watch her.

  Her interface clangs.

  She has never seen anything like it. Although mutations do occur to a small degree (all dependent on the differences in each planet’s particular biology) the sequencers have fail-safe coding to prevent extensive mutations; coding that behaves like dominant genes, intent on preventing any large scale rewriting.

  But something broke through. Suddenly she is overwhelmed with fear, the fear of failure. She needs to check the nodules.

  Her interface rattles for her attention. She tries to ignore it. His voice from earlier in the day is still echoing in the back of her head. Irritation threatens to multiply with each rattle.

  Not now!

  She sends the call to her answering service.

  * * * *

  She has been plugged into the drop-grid for no more than five minutes when the short, leathery skinned aboriginals suddenly come swarming over to her, poking their heads around at her, hands probing her body with their little, spidery fingers, pulling at her. One bangs on her helmet, another begins tugging at her breast pocket. She brushes the little mud crawlers aside and continues working. The “inside” of the grid looks a bit.…well.…intoxicated.

  She picks up a nodule from the moulding and examines it for a second time. And for a second time an aboriginal who had been sitting nearby quietly reaches for her and grips her wrists, softly but firmly, while another takes the nodule from her and places it back in the mould. The hominid lets her go and turns away, again.

  She watches this lone alien now as it returns to its rocky perch to sit and watch, a solemn look to its brown face. Its small black eyes search her face with a kind of questioning sadness.

  What? she wants to ask it. You don’t want me to touch the nodule? Is that it? You don’t understand why I touch it? Or is it something else?

  They seem to grow bored now and move off a distance to touch each other, encompass each other in their long, skeletal arms, locking in full embrace. Sensory communication? Or simply overly affectionate? She had never been able to establish whether they possessed a true, structured language system. But they did seem to be communicating with each other.

  She watches them now. She wishes for communication, the right kind, the soft kind, gentle and soothing, hands moving, skin on skin, motion and rhythm.…

  She closes her eyes, but cannot picture it. Not anymore. She opens her eyes, disheartened.

  A group of youths have shaped a giant maroon-coloured leaf into a bowl, and catch the water dripping off the trees in the humidity. They hand it back and forth between one another. She knew that if she drank some, it would taste sweet.

  * * * *

  “Just where the hell have you been?”

  Karlyn tries several routes in order to reach the main template without s
uccess, the nanopolice bounce back at her without any reasonable explanation. Her frustration mounts.

  “I’ve been busy,” she says and sighs, looking up at the towering structure before her.

  “Busy,” he mumbles. Then says: “Well, about an hour ago I started receiving a strange pulsing over Beta channel. Thing just came back online. All of a sudden. Just like that!”

  “I know. I’m looking right at it.”

  “Looking at what?”

  “The habitat. It’s up and running. Although she’s deformed somewhat.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  She adjusts her biolastic suit’s camera eye. “See that?”

  He whistles.

  “Try boosting the bandwidth,” she says. “You should be getting a pulsing sound. I’m attempting to hack into the nodules. So far, no luck.”

  Cruz is stunned; she knows this because for the first time since she could remember he has little or nothing to say.

  “Damn it! Damn it, damn it, damn it all!” she shrieks.

  “What now?”

  “The buffers on the grid just melted,” she huffs, millifibers untwisting, silicrobes breaking apart and floating away. “There’s no way to tell if the coding sequence has been affected unless we activate it.”

  “Gee, do you think?” Cruz remarks. “I’ve been saying that the moment Beta went down. And that hiccup earlier? I’ve traced the source and it’s not in the system. It’s from outside.”

  She scoffs. “Nothing can get in from outside! That’s what the filters are for.”

  “It can if its own coding comes across as a latent paragene, waiting for instructions,” he says flatly. “One of the most extreme probabilities, which is probably why we—why you—missed it.”

  Here we go! She puts her fists up and bangs her own helmet several times. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! It was such a remote danger she’d never had the biofilters check for such a problem.

  You’ve been waiting for something like this to happen. Haven’t you? she thought. Little man.

  “So what’s that, like, a point-two percent probability?” She sits back on her thighs.

  “Something like that,” says Cruz. “Well, it gets better. Every time we booted up to restart, the induction flow flushed the system, and the resulting surge multiplied the paragenes by a factor of three.”