A Stranger in Paradise

by Edward M. Lerner

  I had no reason to doubt her inference that the area had, within the last few years, been cleared by a forest fire. “Caused by lightning,” she insisted. “There are no careless campers here.” Charred, often toppled, boles of tree-analogues dominated the landscape. Beyond the devastation towered vast expanses of the spiky, fern-like plants. Patches of new growth poked, scrub-like, through ashy soil. “You getting this?” she radioed, surveying the landing site on foot. She wore an envirosuit although every sensor showed the area to be safe. That was protocol: Thorough checkout took time. Videocams on the lander panned slowly.

  “Good place to take up charcoal drawing,” I commented from orbit. I had no difficulty imagining her answering smile.

  “Not among my talents, and I don’t see staying here long enough to cultivate new skills.” Her suit radio conveyed faint crunching sounds as she walked. Saplings became denser as she progressed towards the closest unmarred growth. “What luck with the slowboat’s computer?”

  “Not much,” I admitted. Computing was one of the technologies at which the Firsters excelled. The Corps had, over time, reverse-engineered a few of their tricks, but the systems on every slowboat differed. Each crossing took generations . . . why should their technology stand still? “Maybe you can charm it . . .” I trailed off.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Stand still.” She froze. “Speed up panning.” Her helmet camera did. The matching view on my display swept across the countryside, then reversed direction. Fern saplings trembling in the breeze showed the only motion.

  “What did you see, Cameron?”

  “Apparently nothing.” The videocam again reversed its arc.

  Something shot across the screen.

  “Did you see that?” she shouted. Her gloved fist, one finger outstretched, blocked a corner of the camera’s field of vision. Ground-hugging fronds still rustled where she pointed.

  I was advancing, frame by frame, through captured images of a scuttling, six-legged, ankle-high alien something when Amanda whooped excitedly. Her helmet camera swung wildly. “What is it?” I yelled back. “What do you see?” The image stabilized; from the change in perspective it was clear she was squatting. Green glowing eyes studied Amanda from deep within shadowy underbrush. My gut clenched. “What is that?”

  Moments later, a clearly terrestrial calico cat sauntered out of the undergrowth to sniff Amanda’s still outstretched finger.

  The slowboat was a wreck. I tell myself that if I had skills beyond gleaning clues from traces of hints of ruins, I would have brought the old systems on-line soon enough to have made a difference. Or that if I’d somehow stitched together the colonists’ story faster, I’d have gotten Amanda offworld in time.

  But I don’t believe it.

  I had followed these colonists across four interstellar hops. That was a record . . . most slowboats were worn out after two; a few managed three. The problem was always biosphere collapse. A crossing Amanda and I could reasonably call a hop was to the Firsters a multigenerational odyssey. By the time the colonists reached Paradise, the slowboat’s ecology was exhausted and dying. They had no choice but to descend to the surface.

  They were up to something neither Amanda nor I could comprehend. I kept exploring, kept reconstructing the spotty surviving records for some clue how these Firsters expected to live here, how they thought to avoid ravaging a thriving native ecology to transplant their own.

  Now that it is too late, I do understand.

  What did Amanda see in me? Given my looks—straw-colored hair, a pasty complexion, features I’ve always thought a bit awry, and the tall-and-gangly frame common to Belters—there was always ample speculation. I’ve overheard enough whispers to grasp the popular explanation, and it makes me crazy: That it is a marriage of convenience. She gets the career benefit of my semi-spooky skills at tracking down Firsters. I get . . . her. It’s hardly flattering for either of us.

  As I said, it drives me crazy.

  She met, she loves, an artist. When I could no longer bear the stubborn refusal of planet and slowboat to relinquish their secrets, I sought refuge—looked, in a way, for Amanda—in my art.

  There are many restored recordings of Firster music; by those standards my compositions are arrhythmic, overly complex, and discordant. Each of my melodies has a visual setting, forming a sight-and-sound poem. The first time I shared one with her, back at the Academy, she gazed at me in silent wonder. What a rare treat it was to bask in someone’s appreciation.

  Years later, I cannot experience that piece without memories flooding my mind. Recalling her, recalling that moment, my heart aches.

  So what did Amanda see in me? The person. Mine is not the only sixth sense.

  Recovering data and restoring limited operations in the balky Firster computers involved one part inspiration and twenty parts head scratching. The work left plenty of time for watching Amanda through landing-site cameras. I missed her.

  I miss her now.

  DNA from a blood sample proved Amanda’s new friend was, without doubt, a terrestrial cat. She was playing with the feline, teasing it with a dangling bit of vine, the game by way of apology for the needle stick, when two landing-site motion sensors gave alarms.

  Moments after the alert—trilling discreetly in her personal communicator and booming from my console in our orbiting starship—someone strode from the brush, as obviously a human as the cat was a cat. The burly figure wore a knee-length tunic of clearly natural fibers, cinched at the waist by a braided sash from which hung a cloth sack and various wood-and-stone implements. The loosely woven garment left no doubt that her caller was a man.

  “Amanda,” I whispered.

  “I see him.”

  He ambled casually towards her, greasy hair hanging past his shoulders. If he understood the lander’s stungun turret slow swiveling to track his progress, he gave no sign. His body language seemed somehow disdainful of the ship. He sniffed repeatedly, a puzzled expression on his face.

  “Amanda,” I whispered again. “What’s he doing?”

  “You tell me,” she whispered back.

  The stranger sniffed again. His meandering path took him past the flat rock on which lay the galley scraps Amanda had set out for the cat. He bent slightly, inhaled, and then continued slowly towards her. He seemed no more impressed by home-world food than had the cat.

  After the linguistic drudgery of the initial colony rediscoveries, the Corps had painfully reconstructed passable versions of the Firster languages. Modern survey ships carried translation software attuned to all major colonist dialects—that is, to the versions deduced to have been spoken when the slowboats were leaving solsys. It didn’t take many utterances by the visitor to recognize English as the root of his speech. The lander’s computer took longer, but not much, to derive many of the pronunciation shifts and some divergent vocabulary. From a speculative understanding of roughly every third word, Brian—his name was one thing we did ascertain—was most interested in discussing the weather.

  “His vocabulary appears limited,” Amanda said. She had cranked up the sensitivity of her implanted communicator sufficiently to capture her subvocalizations.

  We both knew the computer had already reached that conclusion, and she wasn’t one to repeat the obvious. “What’s worrying you?”

  “Why isn’t he more curious? This,” and she gestured at the lander, the stacks of equipment she’d unloaded, and herself in the crinkly envirosuit, “must be strange to him.”

  Paradise’s sun, almost overhead at the beginning of the visit, nearly touched the horizon. I was hungry, although I had snacked throughout the session. Improvised cat food sat, scarcely touched, in a corner of my screen. Chicken scraps . . . funny that the cat still had not attacked them. “Not curious fails to do it justice.” The Academy had drummed into us that body language is not universal, but I indulged myself once more
. “He’s yawning a lot. Fidgety.” I fast-scanned backward. “Bored? And the angle at which he cocks his head, the tension in his jaw, the squint of his eyes . . . it’s as though he has a headache.”

  Brian loosened the drawstrings of the bag that hung from his belt. He removed two pieces of lumpy, red-orange fruit. He bit into one, pulpy juice trickling into a matted beard. The second piece he offered to Amanda. If he considered the head-to-toe encapsulation of her envirosuit strange, or an impediment to her ability to sample the local cuisine, he kept it to himself. “These need little rain.”

  “Thank you.” To me, she subvocalized, “I’ll analyze it later.” She set his gift on a portable workbench, and then unsealed an emergency ration. Insinuating food through the helmet port of an envirosuit is neither easy nor pretty; she mimed tasting a cookie before offering one to her visitor.

  Brian spit seeds in several directions before giving the cookie a perfunctory sniff. This time his expression was too foreign for me to hazard a guess—but the snack went unsampled into his sack. The headache I inferred him to have seemed to have worsened. “I must leave.” He pivoted without ceremony and began walking purposefully back the way he had come.

  “Will you return?” Amanda called. “Will you tell others?”

  He stopped, less to answer, it seemed, than to reposition a box. A frond that had been bent by the crate sprung straight. “Why?”

  Without further comment or explanation, he disappeared into the woods.

  “So what do you think?” Amanda spoke around a mouthful of the autogalley’s finest. She had a heroic metabolism and an appetite to match. The lunch foregone due to the inconveniences of the envirosuit only made her that much hungrier. A still frame of the disinterested colonist occupied the wall screen behind her.

  Halfway around the world I was also eating. “About Brian?”

  “About whether it’s time to lose the suit.” She chewed a mouthful of greens. “Obviously Brian is fine without one.”

  What could I say? That I had a bad feeling about this? I did, and she laughed.

  “You have a bad feeling about everything.” She turned her attention to a cookie like the one she had given her visitor. “However.” Her eyes darted to the lab containment unit in which were arrayed row after row of culture dishes with smears and thin sections of native fruit glob. “That no earthly mold or bacterium has taken hold on the fruit he eats is puzzling enough that I’m going to stay protected for a while.”

  Things stayed the same for a time. Fruit globs, while non-toxic by every test known to the ship’s computers, were also entirely lacking in dietary value. Nor was the mystery limited to the one native species. Amanda made several trips to the edge of the forest—Brian made plain, without lucid explanation, that he did not want her entering—to collect roots and tubers and growths of every type remote sensors captured Brian eating. All hid their nutrients well.

  She had no better luck with snared specimens of the six-legged native things we’d taken to calling mice—because that’s what you call what a cat stalks. The wireless cameras Amanda had strewn around the landing site and nearby woods had yet to catch her furry friend hunting anything else. It did not eat many Earth-food scraps either. “She,” I was repeatedly corrected. “Calico cats are always female.”

  Ship’s sensors had failed to find people on the surface for a good reason: Weaving and woodworking are not industries one observes from orbit. Now, with Brian as an example of the survivors, I switched tactics. Low-flying microbots spotted plenty of other humans. Their shelters were primitive: caves, hide tents, and lean-tos and shacks made of fallen branches. They lived alone or in, we guessed, family units. Nothing bigger.

  That dispersion was one more mystery. Even for hunters and gatherers, there appeared to be more than enough food to support many times the current population.

  Brian remained nearby, rarely venturing from the densest parts of the fern woods. If he ever saw other humans, those encounters were as elusive as the nutrients that sustained him.

  With power and supplies from my docked starship, I restored to habitability an insignificant portion of this ancient and mummified miniworld. The fragile, recreated bubble of life evoked in me some essence of the long-departed crew. Grudgingly, and in elusively suggestive fragments, repaired computer archives surrendered their secrets.

  Only constant nurturing of the ecosystem had enabled completion of the slowboat’s fourth voyage. In the process, the crew became devoted—by most standards, fanatical—to ecological sanctity. They were overwhelmed when, another interstellar voyage clearly impossible, the prospective home finally within reach after lifetimes of travel proved too Earth-like. They would not consider wreaking ecological havoc to give Earthly life a chance to take root; they could not survive any longer aboard ship.

  I’m a rock boy, asteroid born and bred, so maybe my comments are uninformed. Still, studying the slowboat’s records, I didn’t consider the planet the colonists were so mystically protective of all that special. The planet at which they had arrived, that is. In the intervening few thousand years, it had flourished.

  All I knew for certain was that the colonists had done something—found some course of action between extinction and their principles. What that compromise was, I could not say.

  “The damnedest thing,” Amanda said. She did not puzzle easily, or admit to it readily.

  She had been poring over long-range fauna surveys from microsats I had deployed and low-flying drones she had deployed. “We’ve got very stable populations. The herbivores don’t overgraze anywhere, which means the carnivores are keeping them in balance. The carnivores are nicely dispersed, too. Very uniform.”

  From our years together, I more or less understood her point. Natural systems tend toward equilibrium—but outside shocks to the system disturb that equilibrium: forest fires, earthquakes, volcanoes. Disaster strikes; in that region, one species or other is disproportionately killed off. Surviving species burst into a new niche, for a while with dis-equilibrating effects. Why weren’t there more areas in which the predator/prey balance is off? “What do you make of it?”

  “Nothing.” She grimaced at the camera. “I’m not getting it.”

  Constantly vidding Amanda made separation that much harder. I even found myself jealous of Brian. The neighborhood primitive showed no interest in her, but at least he had the unused option of seeing her, in person. Until, with no obvious reason, he was back.

  Back to the fringes of the burned-out region, that is. He was in plain sight of the lander and Amanda’s outside equipment, but he did not come close. His attention was on planting seedlings even when she donned her envirosuit and hiked to visit him. When she asked if anyone else would join them, the translator’s best guess at his answer was confusion.

  I was running out of excuses why Amanda should maintain isolation from Paradise’s environment—although, as the mission’s biologist, that decision was logically and factually hers. Why I sought excuses was unclear. A planet declared safe would mean our reunion. My innate caution outweighing my loneliness, I speculated. Airless “worlds” like the rock I grew up inside had no tolerance for mistakes.

  Long searching eventually revealed some poisonous vegetation, but no more than could be found on large swatches of Earth. Mice (the four-legged, Earthly kind) set outside sniffed and peered about curiously, perfectly content within their wire cages. The big mystery remained how Brian’s people lived on what grew here. Amanda’s lab animals had ignored samples put into their enclosures. As long as that critical detail eluded us she agreed, reluctantly, to continue avoiding all exposure to the biosphere.

  And then . . .

  “These guys were brilliant.”

  We kept comm channels open at all times. Amanda’s whoop roused me from deep sleep. I had reset my body clock to sun time at the landing site, where it was now far from daylight. Why was she up? “A chip
ped rock is their idea of advanced engineering,” I grumbled. It was an attitude I knew I had to lose. The reunification protocols—our reason for being here, after all, and my job to implement once I was on the ground—were meant to be executed with an open mind.

  “Trust me.” On-screen, her eyes shone. She could be so enthusiastic; that passion for her work is yet another reason I love her. “I couldn’t sleep, so I got up to finish some lab work.” She brushed an unruly lock of hair from her forehead. “Cameron, I know how they eat here.”

  That brought me fully awake.

  “The Firsters left Earth many thousands of years ago, and we don’t know the human genome of the time in detail. Ever since, they’ve been an isolated, in-bred community. And shipboard shielding is never perfect: There are always the random effects of generations spent exposed to increased cosmic radiation. We always expect to find minor genetic drift in rediscovered colonists.” She finally paused for breath. “I think this bunch made a genetic change on purpose.”

  I found I did not share her enthusiasm, even if genetic tinkering had enabled the colonists’ survival. “What, exactly, did you find?”

  “Gifts from Patches.” The lander’s galley was tiny; Amanda’s body blocked my view of whatever late-night snack she had cooking. A buzzer announced the completion of something. I saw only her back as she turned to remove something from the infrared oven. “From Brian, too, although he is equally oblivious.” She turned back to the camera, a mug of steaming whatever clasped in her hands.

  Patches was the calico cat. “What did . . . she”—a dazzling smile rewarded me—“give you?”

  “Gnawed exoskeletons of the local mice. In Brian’s case, spit fruit-glob seeds. In both cases, piles of excrement.”

  “And?”

  “Enzyme traces, Cameron.” An arm waved excitedly in, I knew, the direction of her lab. “Enzymes like I’ve never seen. In the saliva. In the excrement. Enzymes that convert indigenous biochemicals into amino acids and sugars our enzymes can process. The colonists must have reengineered themselves, in a way we’re not smart enough to manage.”