The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  Erni responded to the news with a rather rough jerk at the steering controls; his partner fully sympathized but made the signal to change drivers. The younger man had enough self-control to obey, and the runabout set off in a new direction with Jellyseal now off toward its left rear. The sky and its omnipresent clouds flickered even more brightly than usual, as though in sympathy – or perhaps derision. Fortunately, neither driver had reached the state of personalizing the indifferent world. No one even considered how close this state might be.

  It would not of course have bothered the planet, but could easily have distorted important judgments.

  Cloud, whose telemetry had of course reported the moment of rough driving, was a little worried; but there seemed nothing he could do, and nothing he should say, about the matter.

  The two thousand kilometres took three infuriating days, though the last few hours were eliminated by Jellyseal’s luckily, though apparently fortuitously, moving to a more accessible spot and actually stopping for a time.

  The pause might have been due to her being in the centre of a twenty-kilometer nearly circular hollow – almost certainly not an impact crater – with eight different narrow valleys leading from it. She had already explored two of these, according to Senatsu, and been forced to turn back; maybe the drivers were debating which to try next, Ben suggested.

  Neither husband could believe this for a moment. They knew their wives would have planned such a program much earlier. The faces behind their breathing masks were now grim. They made no answer to Cloud, but Erni, now driving again, sent them zigzagging at the highest practical speed along a rock-littered canyon which Senatsu had assured them would lead to the hollow. Nic did not object. The sooner they were out from between the looming eighty-metre walls, the better their chance of living to see –

  Whatever might be there to be seen. The satellite images were, after all, only computer constructs.

  Rocks fell, of course, but continued to miss. Neither man had any illusions about how much of this was due to driving skill, but neither gave it much conscious thought. The canyon opened into the valley twenty kilometres ahead.

  Fifteen. Ten. Five.

  They were there, and neither even felt conscious relief as the threatening cliffs opened out. They could not at once spot the tanker, and stopped to look more carefully.

  The trouble was that none of the vehicle’s lights were on. Deeplights might of course be out because it was not moving, but the floods, and the smaller but sharp and clear running and identity-pattern lights which should have been on were dark, too. It was long, long moments before Erni perceived the tanker’s outline against the faint, flickering, and complex illumination of the lightning-lit background.

  He pointed, and Dominic nodded. The younger man had been driving through the valley, but now Nic took over and approached their motionless, lightless, and possibly – probably? – lifeless goal. Erni was calling frantically into the short-range multiwave communicator. Neither was surprised at the lack of an answer; frantic was a better word.

  Tracks, wheels, and much of the lower body of the tanker were crusted with something white, but the men paid only passing attention to this.

  There should at least have been light coming from the cockpit. There wasn’t. Something else strange about the windows seized the attentions of both men, but the Quarterback was within fifty metres of the other machine before this got the door of consciousness open.

  Lights inside or not, the windows should have been visible as more than dark slots. Anything transparent, silicate or not, reflects some of the light trying to get through.

  But the sky, which was a good deal brighter than the ground, was not being reflected from Jellyseal’s windows. They were lightless gaps in the not-very-bright upper body. And the reason now became clear to both observers, drowning out the screaming denials of hope.

  The windowpanes were not there. Maybe, of course, the occupants weren’t there either, but where else could they possibly be? And more important, where else could they possibly be alive? What besides local air was in the tanker’s cockpit? Even Dominic, with the means of looking waiting at his fingertips, had trouble making the fingers act.

  But they did, slowly and much less surely than usual. He slipped into waldo gloves, and a servobug emerged from the runabout. Briefly – perhaps less briefly than usual – it checked out its limbs and lights, and made its way across to the tanker’s relatively monstrous hulk.

  It could climb, of course. There were holds on the outer shells of all Nest’s vehicles, the bug had grasping attachments on its “legs”, and the machines had been designed and grown to be used in rescue techniques as well as more general operations. It made its rather fumbling way up Jellyseal’s front end, and finally reached the openings which had once held barriers intended to keep in the flotation water, keep out one of the few environments in the known universe more corrosive than Earth’s, and still let light through. Nic was guiding the little machine by watching it from where he was. Not even Erni asked why the bug’s own eyes had not been activated yet.

  Yes, the windowpanes were gone. Yes, the bug could climb inside with no trouble. Yes, the last excuse for not using its own vision pickups was gone. Without looking at his partner, Nic turned on the bug’s eyes and his own screen.

  It could not at once be seen what was in the cockpit. Nothing human showed, but that might have been because vision reached little more than a metre into the chamber. It was blocked by a seemingly patternless tangle of twisted branches, ranging from the thickness of a human middle finger down to rather thin string. The colours filled the usual range for Halfbaked vegetation, from very dark maroons and browns to dead black.

  The stuff was very brittle, far more so than anything living should have been. Nic tried to get farther inside. The bug, under his waldoed direction, reached out to one of the thicker stems and tried to use it as a climbing support. Several centimetres of the growth vanished in dust and the machine overbalanced and fell into the cockpit. It left an elevator shaft as it pulverized its way to the floor, and Nic had to go through cleaning routines as black dust slowly settled through the dense air around and upon his mechanical agent.

  Both men were now watching the relay screen, but things weren’t much improved. The bug was still surrounded by the tangle, and as it moved slowly across the floor kept smashing its way through a three-dimensional fabric of seemingly charred growths. The stuff was brittle, but not really frail. A significant push, comparable to the bug’s weight, was needed actually to break the thickest of the branches. It was only when they broke that they went to powder.

  The cockpit was far larger than that of the Quarterback, more than five metres across and eight long, and it was many minutes before most of the floor had been examined. The bug was now moving around under an artistically tangled ceiling twenty centimeters or so high, supported by many pillars of unharmed branches. It left tracks as it went in a two-or three-millimetre-thick layer of black powder containing many short fragments of the branches.

  There was no sign of a human form, living or otherwise, anywhere on the floor, but there was all the evidence anyone could ask that the tangle above could never have supported a human body in the local gravity, and flotation water was gone. Erni finally reported this aloud, his voice as expressionless as he could make it, and summarized the observations forcing this conclusion. Ben acknowledged and opened channels for everyone at Nest.

  “We want to look farther, not consult!” Nic objected. “There ought to be some sort of indication what happened. Where did the windows go, anyway?”

  “They’d probably be the first things to give if the refrigeration failed and the water boiled suddenly over in the daylight,” Cloud pointed out reluctantly, “unless someone who knows the structure better doesn’t think so. Speak up if anyone does. Anyway, it seems better for you to bring the tanker back here for really close checking, and if at all possible not spoil any more evidence in the cockpit. The growths you r
eported seem to be very frail, and therefore different from the ones we’ve seen, and it would be better if there were something besides powder to be examined here. Don’t think we’re forgetting about the girls, but if there’s to be any hope of learning what happened, we need data. You can see that.”

  “We can see it,” retorted the younger driver, “but there are still items we’d like to examine ourselves.”

  “What? There was only that one compartment they could have lived in. The whole rest of the machine was paraffin tank, with its contents melted wax for the last part of their trip, and presumably native air for the return – unless you think it was evacuated when the cargo was unloaded, and you’d have seen if it were flattened. So would Sen. What do you think you can find, anyway? You’re not set up for microscopic or high-class chemical testing.”

  “We could find leaks, if they were big enough to – to make things happen so quickly there couldn’t be any alarm sent back.”

  “I’d think small ones could have wrecked communication before they knew anything was wrong. But all right, I’ll take it on my responsibility – go ahead and look for leaks between cockpit and tank, but do leave something of the stuff you’ve been smashing up for people to study.”

  “All right. But how do you expect us to get Jellyseal back with her cockpit uninhabitable? There’s no way for us to refill it with water even if we could reseal the window openings.”

  “We’re working on that. Go ahead and make your search.”

  The men obeyed, Erni rather sullenly, Nic more thoughtful. The floor and rear bulkhead of the cockpit and the rear third of each side wall were between living chamber and cargo space, so there was a large area to be examined. How this could be managed without destroying all contact between walls and branches was not very evident. Human remains are large enough so that the first search had left many columns of undamaged vegetation still touching the floor, but to examine the walls for pinholes or even nail holes would be another matter. Nic thought for two or three minutes before trying anything, his partner waiting with growing impatience.

  “You know,” Yucca said slowly at last, “if there was actually a leak between cockpit and tank, would the windows have blown out? There’s a lot of volume back there for steam to expand into, even if it was nearly full of wax. There were several cubic metres full of local air to allow for the paraffin’s expanding as it warmed, whether it melted or not.”

  “I still want to look.”

  “I know. I don’t want to give up either. But think. Whatever chance the girls have of being alive, it’s not on board that machine. The natives could have –”

  “You mean they might have. But would they have known how? Could we keep one of them alive anywhere near Nest, when we have no idea about what they need – except maybe in temperature? And if they’re alive, why haven’t they called us?”

  Dominic gestured towards the tanker a few metres away. “What with? Do you think any of the comm gear is still in working shape?”

  “You two find that out, pronto,” came Ben’s voice. “There’s a good chance, the design crew thinks. If enough of it works you can use the bug that’s in there now to handle it. You find out whether it can still be set to receive short-range stuff from you, or if the controls are in shape to be handled by the bug itself. In one case, it may be possible to set up for Jelly to follow you by homing on transmission from your car. In the other, it’ll be a lot harder, but one of you using the bug’s handlers should be able to drive Jelly while the other runs Quarterback. That’ll be almighty slow, since you’ll have to stop to rest pretty often instead of swapping off, but it should be possible.”

  “But –” started Erni.

  Cloud spoke more gently, and much more persuasively. “You both know most of what little chance there is that they’re alive is if they’re somewhere under the sun. We don’t know just how smart these natives are, but remember that they got in touch with us, after hearing our satellite and vehicle transmissions. Let’s get that machine back here and find out what we can from it. Even if time is critical, and I can’t say it isn’t, aren’t the odds better this way? We can try to ask the natives, too, though a lot of language learning will have to come first, I expect.”

  “How do you know the odds are better?” Erni was snapping again.

  “I don’t, of course,” Ben maintained his soothing tone, “but to me they seem better with a whole population of smart people working on finding out just what did happen.”

  Nic nodded slowly, invisibly to Cloud but not to Erni.

  “I suppose that makes sense.”

  “Something else makes sense, too,” Erni added grimly.

  “What.”

  “Tricia got the idea that the natives were pleased with the variety of hydrogen compounds we’d supplied. I wonder just how big a variety they got.”

  “And I pointed out that the tanker did have a lot of different hydrocarbons, which I think the locals call carbon hydrides,” Nic countered instantly. There was at least a minute of silence.

  “All right. We’ll bring it back if we can. But I’d like to know one thing, if Tricia can decode it from the local static.”

  “What?” asked Ben.

  “Do the locals know what water is, or at least do they have a recognizable symbol for it even if they call it oxygen hydride, and – did they thank us for any?”

  Again there was a lengthy pause while implications echoed silently around in human skulls. No one mentioned that the request was for two things; it didn’t seem to be the time.

  “She’ll try to find out,” Ben answered at last, in as matter-of-fact a tone as he could manage.

  “Okay. We’ll go over Jelly’s controls.” Dominic, too, tried to sound calm.

  The controls did seem to be working. This was not as startling as it might have been; all such equipment was of solid-state design and imbedded – grown into – the structures of the various vehicles. There might be mechanical failure of gross moving parts, but any equipment whose principal operating components were electrons stood a good chance of standing up in Halfbaked’s environment as long as diamond or silicon were not actually exposed to fluorine.

  There seemed, however, to be no way to set up the tanker’s system simply to home on a radiation source, moving or not. No one had foreseen the need when the machine was designed. The closest thing to an autodriver in any of the vehicles was the general-shutdown control. There were no smooth paved highways with guiding beacons or buried rails on the planet. While systems able to avoid the ordinary run of obstacles on an ordinary planet were part of the common culture and could have been incorporated in the Halfbaked-built machines, these were exploring vehicles. Avoiding obstacles was simply not their basic purpose. It had been taken for granted that they would be operated by curious, intelligent people who had a standard sense of self-preservation but would be willing to take risks when appropriate.

  That left trying to drive Jellyseal with the handling equipment of a servobug. This proved possible but far from easy, and even Erni agreed that an hour or two’s practice in the open area was probably a good idea. With some confidence established by both, Dominic sent the Quarterback toward the valley by which they had entered while his younger companion, looking through the rear window of the cockpit, concentrated on keeping the larger vehicle a fixed distance directly behind them.

  He was feeling pretty confident, almost relaxed, by the time the entrance narrowed before them.

  With a brief exchange of one slightly questioning and one somewhat shaky “Okay” they entered the passage, very conscious that even at its empty weight the larger vehicle was much better able to shake the walls down on them than was their own runabout. Of course, Jelly also made a bigger target; but possibly a few dents or even a few holes in its body might not be critical now. Of course assuming that a house-sized boulder with the potential energy provided by a hundred-metre cliff under seven plus gravities would merely dent its target did seem unreasonably optimistic.
Both men were optimists, even with the present probable status of their wives, but they were also reasonable; and while Nic did fairly well at concentrating on his driving, Erni’s eyes kept wandering much too often from Jellyseal’s bulk behind them to the cliffs beside and above.

  As earlier experience had warned, rocks did shake loose from time to time. It seemed very likely that the vibration of their own passage was the principal cause, since most of them slashed across the narrow way somewhat behind the Quarterback and its companion.

  Not quite all. Four times a deafening bell-like clang reached the men’s ears, deafening in spite of the poor impedance matching between the planet’s atmosphere and their vehicle’s body, and between the latter and the water inside. The bodies of the machines were not, of course, of metal, but they had enough metallic elasticity to ring on impact.

  Jellyseal was the victim all four times. Fortunately the missiles were much less than house-sized and Jelly seemed not to suffer enough damage to keep her from following. This fact did not cause Dominic to relax until they were out of the danger zone and had started to backtrack their way around the Patch of Frustration, as they had named it.

  At this point, Ben called again.

  “There’s a new track for you. You don’t have to go back around to the way you came. Stand by for directions –”

  “Stand by for directions –”

  “Stand by for directions –”

  That became the routine through their waking hours and days for the ensuing weeks. What with sleep time and difficulties in guiding their “tow”, they averaged less than seventy kilometres an hour. The weeks went by, the monotony relieved by Senatsu’s messages, variations in wind and weather, and local biology. No more animals had been seen, or gliders, though the latter had inspired much argument at Nest. Neither had anything been said about the pot the two drivers had presumably won on the way out; neither man thought to mention it, and for some reason no one at Nest brought the matter up.