Alien Earth

by Megan Lindholm

  He cycled the hatch open, and she followed him down the collapsible stairway that was little better than a ladder. For a long moment she stood on the bottom step, watching him walk away. His booted feet scuffed small clouds of reddish dust. He didn’t attempt to avoid stepping on the plants. She felt a queasy reluctance to step clear of the shuttle. “What about the radio?” she called after him. “What if Tug tries to reach us?”

  “I left a message on the computer, and it’ll record any messages that come in. Come on, Connie. If Tug decides to call us after all this time, he’ll keep calling until we answer. The beacon is still working, so he’ll be able to pinpoint where we are. There’s really no reason for you to stay in the shuttle.”

  She stepped off the ladder and followed him reluctantly. Plants crunched under her feet and snagged on her suit. She put up a hand to push her breathing mask tightly to her face. “And no good reason to leave it, either,” she muttered.

  He heard her.

  He paused and waited for her. As she came up alongside him, he said, almost pleadingly, “Will you just take a look around yourself? Everything you see is made of the same stuff we are. Once we were a part of this planet; an intrinsic part of the ecology. We didn’t get in trouble here until we forgot we were a part of things, and tried to run the place, like we have to run Castor and Pollux just to make it work. But here it was the wrong thing to do. Half the time, when we thought we were helping, we were just messing it up worse….”

  His words ran down as he met her cold stare.

  “And your point is?” she asked.

  “My point is that if we do survive this and get back to Evangeline, twenty or a hundred years from now, you’re going to wish that you’d stepped out and taken a look around.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “And maybe not,” she added when he continued to stare at her. She still hadn’t forgiven him for calling her a hormonal pube. Today’s new sincerity was as grating as his previous abrasiveness had been. She suspected he finally felt bad about making her cry, and that hurt her pride. But her attempt to sting him out of it failed, for he only shrugged and resumed walking. She fell in behind him.

  John set a pace that she forced herself to match. In a short time, she was sweating. Although dawn was just breaking, the temperature of the air was too warm to be comfortable. The breathing mask was an added impediment. It was an effort to suck in air through it, and beneath it her face was even sweatier than the rest of her. She looked up at John’s back a dozen meters ahead of her, muttered “Dick,” and pulled the mask down to dangle around her neck. She opened the suit to maximum ventilation. She was still uncomfortably warm, but she’d cope.

  She glanced back once at the shuttle, and was disconcerted to find it invisible. Evidently the land rose and fell more than was apparent. This became glaringly apparent when she topped a small rise and could actually look down on John as he walked ahead of her. Reluctantly she followed him down.

  The vegetation changed abruptly, became more lush and green. The scents of the Earth assaulted her. As the rising sun touched these moister lands, the smells rose in their richness. The leaves of the plants were thick and fat, and when she was forced to step on them, they gave way with sharp snappings. She hated the sounds, but was entranced by the sharp odor of the crushed plants. She thought once that she had spotted a flower, but a closer look revealed it was only the tips of vegetation turned yellow with disease or age. She rose and hurried after John.

  He led her through a series of depressions; walls of earth gradually rose up around them. Gullys, that was the word for this geologic formation. Caused by uncontrolled erosion because of poor land management. There had been a gully scandal on Castor once. Something about a footpath in the wrong place being used too much. She didn’t remember too much about it, only that it was disgraceful, and she was glad she hadn’t lived anywhere near it. But the memory made her wonder what had caused this gully. She’d been taught that gullys were caused by Human negligence, but here there had been no Humans for centuries.

  The land became softer beneath its cushion of succulent plants. Before long she found herself walking in a small trickle of water. John was walking beside the stream, his eyes constantly roving as he moved. His wariness shocked her into an alertness of her own.

  She was surrounded. The walls of the gully dripped plants. Bared roots clutched at thin air grotesquely. Other plants were a cloak of greenery over the yellowed or browned rivals they had smothered. The variety was bewildering; Connie felt overwhelmed. She glanced back at her feet, only to have something small and green suddenly dislodge itself from the bank and leap with a plop into the water. At her gasp, John came hurrying back.

  “What was it?” he demanded excitedly.

  “I don’t know.” She pointed to where it had struck the water. She was shaking. An animal. She had come this close to an animal. It was unnerving. Other than her brief glimpse of one the night of the storm, she had never seen one. Oh, there were animals on the Rabby’s planet, but Humans were so disharmonious with their ecology that no one had ever walked the surface of Raab. Pictures of animals weren’t the same as having one leap up suddenly right before her feet.

  “What did it look like?” John demanded. He had gone to one knee beside her, heedless of the mud and water. He bent low over the water.

  “Green. Little. About the size of my thumb. And shiny, sort of. Or maybe it was just wet.”

  “Well, it’s gone now,” he said, and sighed. As he stood up, he instructed her, “Next time you see something like that, try not to scare it, okay?” He looked at her white face and added more kindly, “It won’t hurt you, you know.”

  “Sure,” she agreed sarcastically, and looked pointedly at his ankles. The tiny bumps the flying insects had left there were little round scabs now that John still scratched at night. He shrugged off her worry.

  “Come on. It’s not far now.”

  “Can’t we just get the water here, and go back?”

  He paused, considering, then shook his head. “I want to get my suit back. And I want you to see the ocean, and the river going into it. There are waves moving on the beach, and birds flying, and all these plants moving up and down with the water. Come on. This stream gets bigger and feeds into the river, and then the river goes into the sea. Come on.” For an instant he held out his hand as if he expected her to take it and walk beside him. Only an instant, and then he dropped it as if aware of how silly he’d looked.

  It was all very un-John like, and as she followed him, she felt herself become more cautious. Was it just his hormones, or was it repeated exposures to Earth’s raw atmosphere manifesting themselves? She surreptitiously tugged her breathing mask up over her face again.

  She was so busy watching her feet lest other small green things attack her that when she looked up, the open vista was a shock. She had never seen so much water moving in one direction. Silver and bronze, the river filled her vision.

  During this decade, the river had chosen to wander closest to the bank Connie had just descended. A dozen steps would have put her feet in its shallows. To her right it was undercutting the bank, adding yet more area to its swath. In front of her, it swung out, and downstream to her left it rounded the bank and disappeared behind a wall of earth and trees.

  Trees. Real trees, slender and tall and reaching, so that she suddenly understood that the squat, stubby branched things on Castor that she had called trees were no relation at all to these. The stiff fleshy appendages she had learned to call leaves were not leaves at all. These were leaves, in every conceivable shade of green, thin as film, and moving, moving, moving. Everything was green and rustling in the windy breath of the river. The individuality of each moving leaf was reflected in the myriad lights glinting off the moving plane of water. All was light, motion, and life. Like a curtain lifting, Connie saw the real objects that had inspired the colonists to give such names to items scarcely similar on Castor and Pollux. This, then, this was river and tree, leaf and
pebble, grass and wind. This was life, in all its abundance.

  She lifted her eyes to break the spell. In the distance, beyond the river’s other shore, striated walls of rock arose. Between the rock wall and the river’s far bank was an undulating plain. Green and unruly, it rioted in the constant wind that flowed over it. Connie felt it could reach out and swallow her, make her but one more speck of life in its vastness. The threat of all that openness and random life set her heart to thundering.

  “Wouldn’t you love to get over there and walk through that?”

  She turned incredulous eyes on John. He was grinning as if sedated, all his teeth showing. She’d seen people that wildly enthused before. At the Readjustment center. They were kept separate and treated very kindly.

  “To grow up like I did, in a series of corridors inside a chunk of rock, and then to see this … it makes me alive.” He must have seen the confusion in her eyes, for he unabashedly confessed, “Come on, I know Tug told you I was an unadjusted child. Hell, he threatened to often enough—you know, I don’t care if he told you or not. It doesn’t bother me now. I was so damn young when they classified me and banished me to a station that I don’t even remember what it was I did to deserve it. Just that from that time on, I was inferior. Dangerous, demented, undeserving of anything I ever got. Never allowed on a planet. Not under open skies anyway, and never Castor or Pollux. And the few I’ve visited as Evangeline’s captain, I always had to wear a breather pack or a radiation suit, or stay in an integrating chamber. I never saw their skies or their plants or animals without there being immense barriers. And what I did see, I never felt any kinship with. But I look out at this, I breathe it, I taste the river, I walk on the plants, and it’s right. It’s all so damn right!”

  He was moving as he spoke, grinning and gesturing, nearly dancing. He stopped suddenly, gripped a handful of the greenery he walked on and tore it free of its roots. He crushed it in his hand as he came toward her, and then held it out toward her, saying, “Here, smell this, just smell this.”

  She stepped back from him hastily, lifting a hand to hold her mask more securely to her face. The suit was awkward, and the ground uneven. She lost her footing and sat down hard, landing squarely amid a patch of low-growing greenery. Something tiny and brown hopped out of it in alarm, landed briefly on the knee of her suit, and then hopped on. She couldn’t even make a sound. She looked up from that horror to find John still standing over her with his handful of crushed plants. Her eyes told him everything.

  His hand dropped to his side, and his stained fingers released the slaughtered leaves. “You still don’t understand, do you?” he asked quietly. Disappointment and more. As if she had said something that went beyond insulting him. “You still think it was something wrong with me. Don’t you see? It’s all okay. I can pick a handful of leaves, and let them fall, and they’re still part of the whole thing. I’m still part of the whole thing. I could die right here, and it wouldn’t hurt a thing. No one would have to gather me up and take me to a composting bin and render me down until Castor or Pollux could handle me. Right here, living or dying, I’m a part of it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Growing or rotting, eating or being eaten, even killing or being killed. It’s all okay. It’s right.” His voice broke and suddenly dropped an octave. “Why don’t you see that?”

  She shook her head at him, felt the sudden tears flood her eyes. She was stuck here alone with him, and he wanted to make her as crazy as he was. And he’d probably succeed if he had enough time. And since they were never getting off this damn planet, he’d have plenty of time. Forever.

  He turned from her suddenly and set off at a furious pace, almost running. He left a swath of crushed and ruptured plant life in his wake. Horrifyingly, most of them sprang up and unbent but a few moments after he had stomped them down. His course paralleled the flowing river; in a moment it took him around the bend and out of sight.

  She sat there, at first in shock, and then as an act of defiance. She’d be damned if she’d follow him. He was getting stranger and more dangerous by the hour. She wasn’t a bit surprised that he’d been an unadjusted child. She should have guessed that months ago. The only surprising thing was that he’d ever gained the status of Beastship captain. Most UC’s ended up in menial positions on the stations—as dockers or maintenance. Just her luck to find the rare exception. If he was. Maybe he’d faked his credentials to get his position. Maybe that was the awful secret that Tug had always hinted John had.

  She had just decided to get up and find her way back to the ship when the sounds began. First on her left, as two brief and questioning creaks erupted from the foliage beside her. She shifted to try to see what was causing the noise, and the sound ceased immediately. An instant later it began again, farther away and to her right. She froze and listened to it, trying to imagine what could be making it. Just as she decided it was some acoustic trick of water over rock, the sound began again to her left. She turned her head slowly, but couldn’t see the cause. She was still looking for it when the bird came.

  Perhaps it had been on the bank behind her all the time. It swooped, in and settled so abruptly that it could not have come from far away. It landed in the gravelly soil closest to the river, and then began a busy, prancing, poking stroll along the water’s edge. It had long skinny legs and a little body that balanced atop them. It had a pointy tail, and a long pointy nose. It lifted its feet high for every step, and paused often to probe at the gravel with its nose. It must have pulled its wings into some recess of its body, for there were no signs of them, though Connie had seem them quite clearly as it landed.

  When she turned her head to track its busy progress, it suddenly halted and stood motionless atop one leg. It turned its head to regard her with a single bright black eye.

  “Hello,” she said softly, and raised a hand, but at the first sign of her movement, it lifted its wings and was gone. The creakings around her suddenly stilled, leaving only the sounds of the wind and the water. In all the wide tableau of water and stone and greenery, only she moved with life as she slowly stood. Just like on Castor, she thought, but could not find the comfort she had sought in the comparison. It was suddenly strange and lonely to be the only moving living creature in the landscape.

  “John!” she called out abruptly. The murmur of the river swallowed her voice. There was no answer. She was suddenly aware of how heavy her suit was, and how warm the day had become.

  She glanced back the way she had come. She could go back to the shuttle. It was just up that gully, and then over the plain. She was almost sure she could find it easily. Almost. But suddenly she needed the company of another human more than she needed the security of the ship. The tall foliage still bore the mark of John’s passage.

  She followed him, arms high to avoid the brushing touch of the tall foliage. The long, thin leaves licked against her as she waded through them. She was glad of the suit’s protection.

  The projection of the bank forced her closer to the river’s edge. The water ran through the vegetation here; she walked through clinging muck, on stones that shifted unexpectedly. The trees on the bank above her leaned out trailing branches to snag at her face, making the coolness of their shade threatening.

  And then as she rounded the tip of the promontory and came out of the shrouding trees, it all changed. Light flooded, making her squint her eyes. The river turned silver and ran wide of the bank, veered out into the open and broke into a fan of a dozen riverlets that flowed swift and furious into the ocean.

  The ocean.

  She stood perfectly still and stared. It was as big as the sky overhead. It went to the very edges of existence, restless and blue and salt. Birds, white and grey, slid down the sky above it, crying. John was a tiny figure, far down the beach. The white of his abandoned suit was like an empty seed husk, crumpled on the shore. He was threading his way through immense stones toward it. The shushing song of the ocean painted the world a gentler color.

  Blues upon
blues upon greens of moving water.

  There was too much of it: the bare grey rock of the beach, the varying coarsenesses of the sands, the strands and clumps of shining green seaweed that littered the shore. There were whitened pieces of trees like old teeth, wet grasses festooned through their snaggly roots. Wet green bladders of leaves popped under her feet as she made her way to the water’s edge. Tiny white things clung to the rocks. They crunched alarmingly when she stepped on them, and once, when she slipped and caught herself, one bit redly into the palm of her hand. And the birds dipped and wheeled and suddenly began crying, as Connie had cried when she was small, thin and breathlessly, hopelessly. She was aware of it all, but in the same way that she was aware of her heart beating, pumping warm salt liquid through her system, or her lungs pulling in the oxygen-rich atmosphere and forcing out the waste gases.

  Cradle of life, whispered a half-forgotten poem.

  The suite made an odd wheezing sound as it crumpled to the damp pebbles and sand, sighing out in relief or despair. Then the rounded wet stones were cold beneath her bare feet, and as salt water rushed in to kiss them all over, pebbles, sand, and feet, she gasped in the coldness of the caress.

  The birds were crying out her name, frantically, warningly, but their voices came from too far away to be important. All that was important now was how her breath kept perfect time with each reaching wet wave. Light and water and sky as far as her eyes could see, and John had been right, she was a part of it and it was part of her and it was all perfect, all right. If you were a part of this, it was okay to be Human.