by Дэн Симмонс
What now? Wait for dawn, I guess.
What if there’s no dawn on this world? Wait for the pain to die down then.
Why would it die down? The fractured femur is obviously tearing at nerve and muscle. You have a wild fever. God knows how long you were lying here in the rain and torn plant material, unconscious, wounds open to every killer microbe that wants to get in. Gangrene could be settling in. That rotting vegetation stink you smell could be you.
Gangrene doesn’t happen that quickly, does it? No answer.
I tried hanging on to the tree trunk with my left arm and feeling along my injured thigh with my right hand, but the slightest touch made me moan and sway. If I passed out again, I could easily pitch off this branch. I settled on testing my lower right leg: it was numb in most places, but felt intact. Perhaps just a simple break in the lower thighbone. Just a simple break, Raul? On a jungle world in a storm that might be permanent for all we know. With no medkit, no way to make a fire, no tools, no weapons. Just a shattered leg and a high fever. Oh, well… as long as it’s just a simple fracture. Shut the fuck up. I weighed alternatives as the rain pounded on me. I could cling here for the rest of the night… which might be ten minutes or another thirty hours… or I could try to lower myself to the jungle floor. Where the predators are waiting? Good plan.
I said shut up. The jungle floor might give me a place to shelter from the rain, find a soft place to rest my leg, offer branches and vines to make a splint. “All right,” I said aloud, and groped around in the dark to find a shroud line or vine or branch so that I could start my descent.
My guess is that it took me between two and three hours to lower myself. It might have been twice that or half that. The lightning part of the storm had passed and it would have been almost impossible to find handholds in the near absolute darkness, but a strange, faint, almost invisible reddish glow began above the thick jungle canopy and allowed my eyes to adapt enough to find a line here, a vine there, a solid branch here.
Sunrise? I thought not. The glow seemed too diffuse, too faint, almost chemical.
I guessed that I had been about twenty-five meters up in the canopy. The thick branches continued all the way down, but the density of razor-edged palm fronds diminished as I neared the bottom. There was no ground. Resting in the crotch of two branches, recovering from the pain and dizziness, I began lowering myself again only to find surging water beneath me. I pulled my left leg up quickly. The reddish glow was just bright enough to show me water all around, torrents of water flowing between the spiraled tree trunks, eddies of black water washing by like a torrent of oil.
“Shit,” I said. I wasn’t going any farther this night. I had held vague notions of building a raft. I was on a different world, so there must be a farcaster upstream and another downstream. I’d gotten here somehow. I had built a raft before.
Yeah, when you were healthy, well fed, with two legs and tools… like an axe and a flashlight laser. Now you don’t even have two legs. Please shut up. Please. I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The fever was making me shake from chills now. I ignored it all and tried to think of the stories I would tell Aenea when we saw each other next. You don’t really believe that you’ll ever see her again, do you? “Shut the fuck up,” I said again, my voice lost in the sound of rain on jungle foliage and against the swirl of raging water half a meter beneath me. I realized that I should climb a couple of meters up the branches I had just lowered myself on through such pain and effort. The water might rise. Probably would rise again. Ironic to go to all that trouble just to make it easier to be swept away. Three or four meters up would be better. Would start in a minute. Just catch my breath first and let the waves of pain steady a bit. Two minutes at the most.
I awoke to a thin gruel of sunlight. I was sprawled across several sagging branches, just centimeters above the swirling, gray surface of a flood that moved between the spiraled trunks with a visible current. It was still as dim as a deep twilight. For all I knew I had slept away the day and was ready to enter another endless night. It was still raining, but this was little more than a drizzle. The temperature was tropical warm, although my fever made it hard to judge, and the humidity was near absolute.
I ached everywhere. It was hard to separate the dull agony of the shattered leg from the ache in my head and my back and my guts. My skull felt as if there were a ball of mercury in it that shifted ponderously long seconds after my head itself turned. The vertigo made me sick again, but I had nothing left to vomit. I hung on the tangle of branches and contemplated the glories of adventure.
Next time you need an errand run, kiddo, send A. Bettik.
The light did not fade, but neither did it grow brighter. I shifted position and studied the water moving by: gray, ripped by eddies, carrying detritus of palm fronds and dead vegetation.
I looked up, but could see no sign of the kayak or parasail. Any fiberglass or fabric that had dropped down here during the long night had long since been swept away. It looked like a flood, like the spring runoff through the Fens above Toschahi Bay on Hyperion where the silt was deposited for another full year, a temporary inundation, but I knew that this drowned forest, this endless everglades of a watery jungle, could just as easily be the permanent state of affairs here. Wherever here is.
I studied the water. It was opaque, murky as gray milk, and could have been a few centimeters or many meters deep. The drowned trunks gave no clue. The current was quick, but not so quick as to carry me away if I kept a good grip on the branches that hung low above the roiling surface of the water. With luck, with no local equivalent of the Fens’ mud cysts or dracula ticks or biting garr, I might be able to wade toward… something.
Wading takes two legs, Raul, m’boy. Hopping through the mud is more like it for you.
All right then, hopping through the mud. I gripped the branch above me with both hands and lowered my left leg into the current while keeping my injured leg propped on the wide branch where I lay. This led to new agonies, but I persisted, lowering my foot in the clotted water, then my ankle and calf, then my knee, then shifting to see if I could stand… my forearms and biceps straining, my injured leg sliding off the branch with a rending surge of agony that made me gasp.
The water was less than a meter and a half deep. I could stand on my good leg while water surged about my waist and splashed my chest. It was warm and seemed to lessen the pain in my broken leg.
All those nice, juicy microbes in this warm broth, many of them mutated from seedship days. They’re licking their chops, Raul, old boy.
“Shut up,” I said dully, looking around.
My left eye was swollen and crusted with scab, but I could see out of it. My head hurt.
Endless trunks of trees rising from the gray water to the gray drizzle on all sides, the dripping fronds and branches so dark a gray-green that they appeared almost black. It seemed a slight bit brighter to my left. And the mud underfoot seemed a little firmer in that direction. I began moving that way, shifting my left foot forward as I changed handholds from branch to branch, sometimes ducking beneath hanging fronds, sometimes shifting aside like a slow-motion toreador to allow floating branches or other debris to swirl past. The move toward brightness took hours more. But I had nothing better to do.
The flooded jungle ended in a river. I clung to the last branch, felt the current trying to pull my good leg out from under me, and stared out at the endless expanse of gray water. I could not see the other side—not because the water was endless, I could see from the current and eddies moving from right to left that it was a river and not some lake or ocean, but because the fog or low clouds roiled almost to the surface, blotting out everything more than a hundred meters away. Gray water, gray-green dripping trees, dark gray clouds. It seemed to be getting dimmer. Night was coming on. I had gone as far as I could on this leg.
Fever raged. Despite the jungle heat of the place, my teeth were chattering and my hands were shaking almost uncontrollably. Somewhere in my awkward pr
ogress through the flooded jungle, I had aggravated the fracture to the point where I wanted to scream. No, I admit, I had been screaming. Softly at first, but as the hours went by and the pain deepened and the situation worsened, I screamed out lyrics to old Home Guard marching songs, then bawdy limericks I had learned as a bargeman on the Kans River, then merely screams.
So much for the building the raft scenario.
I was getting used to the caustic voice in my head. It and I had made a peace when I realized that it wasn’t urging me to lie down and die, just critiquing my inadequate efforts to stay alive.
There goes your best chance for a raft, Raul, old boy.
The river was carrying by an entire tree, its braided trunk rolling over and over again in the deep water. I was standing shoulder-deep here, and I was ten meters from the edge of the real current.
“Yeah,” I said aloud. My fingers slipped on the smooth bark of the branch to which I was clinging.
I shifted position and pulled myself up a bit.
Something grated in my leg and this time I was sure that black spots dulled my vision. “Yeah,” I said again. What are the odds that I’ll stay conscious, or that it will stay light, or that I’ll stay alive, long enough to catch one of those commuter trees? Swimming for one was out of the question. My right leg was useless and my other three limbs were shaking as if palsied. I had just enough strength to cling to this branch for another few minutes. “Yeah,” I said again. “Shit.”
“Excuse me, M. Endymion were you speaking to me?” The voice almost made me lose my grip on the branch. Still clinging with my right hand, I lowered my left wrist and studied it in the dimming light. The comlog had a slight glow that had not been there the last time I had looked. “Well, I’ll be damned. I thought that you were broken, Ship.”
“This instrument is damaged, sir. The memory has been wiped. The neural circuits are quite dead. Only the com chips function under emergency power.”
I frowned at my wrist. “I don’t understand. If your memory has been wiped and your neural circuits are…”
The river pulled at my torn leg, seducing me into releasing my grip. For a moment I could not speak.
“Ship?” I said at last.
“Yes, M. Endymion?”
“You’re here.”
“Of course, M. Endymion. Just as you and M. Aenea instructed me to stay. I am pleased to say that all necessary repairs have been…”
“Show yourself,” I commanded. It was almost dark.
Tendrils of fog curled toward me across the black river.
The starship rose dripping, horizontal, its bow only twenty meters from me in the central current, blocking the current like a sudden boulder, hovering still half in the water, a black leviathan shedding river water in noisy rivulets. Navigation lights blinked on its bow and on the dripping black shark’s fin far behind it in the fog.
I laughed. Or wept. Or perhaps just moaned.
“Do you wish to swim to me, sir? Or should I come in to you?”
My fingers were slipping. “Come in to me,” I said, and gripped the branch with both hands.
There was a doc-in-the-box on the cryogenic fugue cubby-deck where Aenea used to sleep on the voyage out from Hyperion. The doc-in-the-box was ancient—hell, the whole ship was ancient—but its autorepair worked, it was well stocked, and—according to the garrulous ship on the way out four years earlier—the Ousters had tinkered with it back in the Consul’s day. It worked.
I lay in the ultraviolet warmth as soft appendages probed my skin, salved my bruises, sutured my deeper cuts, administered painkiller via IV drip, and finished diagnosing me.
“It is a compound fracture, M. Endymion,” said the ship. “Would you care to see the X rays and ultrasound?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “How do we fix it?”
“We’ve already begun,” said the ship. “The bone is being set as we speak. The bondplast and ultrasonic grafting will commence while you sleep. Because of the repair to damaged nerves and muscle tissue, the surgeon recommends at least ten hours’ sleep while it begins the procedure.”
“Soon enough,” I said.
“The diagnostic’s greatest concern is your fever, M. Endymion.”
“It’s a result of the break, isn’t it?”
“Negative,” said the ship. “It seems that you have a rather virulent kidney infection. Left untreated, it would have killed you before the ancillary effects of the broken femur.”
“Cheery thought,” I said.
“How so, sir?”
“Never mind,” I said. “You say that you’re totally repaired?”
“Totally, M. Endymion. Better than before the accident, if you don’t mind me bragging a bit. You see, because of the loss of some material, I was afraid that I would have to synthesize carbon-carbon templates from the rather dross rock substrata of this river, but I soon found that by recycling some of the unused components of the compression dampers made superfluous by the Ouster modifications that I could evince a thirty-two percent increase in autorepair efficiency if I…”
“Never mind, Ship,” I said. The absence of pain made me almost giddy. “How long did it take you to finish the repairs?”
“Five standard months,” said the ship. “Eight and one-half local months. This world has an odd lunar cycle with two highly irregular moons which I have postulated must be captured asteroids because of the…”
“Five months,” I said. “And you’ve just been waiting the other three and a half years?”
“Yes,” said the ship. “As instructed. I trust that all is well with A. Bettik and M. Aenea.”
“I trust that too, Ship. But we’ll find out soon enough. Are you ready to leave this place?”
“All ship’s systems are functional, M. Endymion. Awaiting your command.”
“Command is given,” I said. “Let’s go.”
The ship piped in the holo showing us rising above the river. It was dark out, but the night-vision lenses showed the swollen river and the farcaster arch only a few hundred meters upstream. I had not seen it in the fog. We rose above the river, above the swirling clouds.
“River’s up from the last time I was here,” I said.
“Yes,” said the ship. The curve of the planet became visible, the sun rising again above fleecy clouds. “It floods for a period of some three standard months every local orbital cycle, which equals approximately eleven standard months.”
“So you know what world this is now?” I said. “You weren’t sure when we left you.”
“I am quite confident that this planet was not among the two thousand eight hundred sixty-seven worlds in the General Catalogue Index,” said the ship. “My astronomical observations have shown that it is neither in Pax space nor in the realm of the former WorldWeb or Outback.”
“Not in the old WorldWeb or Outback,” I repeated. “Where is it then?”
“Approximately two hundred and eighty light-years galactic northwest of the Outback system known as NNGC 4645 Delta,” said the ship.
Feeling slightly groggy from the painkiller, I said, “A new world. Beyond the Outback. Why did it have farcasters then? Why was the river part of the Tethys?”
“I do not know, M. Endymion. But I should mention that there is a multitude of interesting life-forms which I observed by remotes while resting on the river bottom. Besides the river manta-ish creature which you and M. Aenea and A. Bettik observed downriver, there are more than three hundred observed species of avian variety and at least two species of humanoids.”
“Two species of humanoids? You mean humans.”
“Negative,” said the ship. “Humanoids. Definitely not Old Earth human. One variety is quite small—little more than a meter in height—with bilateral symmetry but quite variant skeletal structure and a definite reddish hue.”
A memory flitted by of a red-rock monolith Aenea and I had scouted on the lost hawking mat during our short stay here. Tiny steps carved in the smooth stone. I shook my head t
o clear it. “That’s interesting, Ship. But let’s set our destination.” The curve of the world had become pronounced and stars were gleaming unblinkingly. The ship continued to rise. We passed a potato-shaped moon and moved farther from orbit. The unnamed world became a blinding sphere of sunlit clouds. “Do you know the world known as T’ien Shan, or the ‘Mountains of Heaven’?”
“T’ien Shan,” repeated the ship. “Yes. As far as my memory serves, I have never been there, but I have the coordinates. A small world in the Outback, settled by refugees of the Third Chinese Civil War late in the Hegira.”
“You won’t have any trouble getting there?”
“None would be anticipated,” said the ship. “A simple Hawking-drive jump. Although I recommend that you use the autosurgeon as your cryogenic fugue cubby during the jump.”
I shook my head again. “I’ll stay awake, Ship. At least after the doc heals my leg.”
“I would recommend against that, M. Endymion.”
I frowned. “Why? Aenea and I stayed awake during the other jumps.”
“Yes, but those were relatively short voyages within the old WorldWeb,” said the ship. “What you now call Pax space. This will be a bit more extensive.”
“How extensive?” I said. My naked body felt a sudden chill. Our longest jump—to Renaissance Vector System—had taken ten days of ship travel time and five months of time-debt for the Pax Fleet waiting for us. “How extensive a trip?” I said again.
“Three standard months, eighteen days, six hours, and some minutes,” said the ship.
“That’s not too bad a time-debt,” I said. I last saw Aenea just after her sixteenth birthday. She would gain a few months on me. Her hair might be longer. “We had a greater time-debt jumping to Renaissance System.”
“That is not time-debt, M. Endymion,” said the ship. “That is shiptime.” This time the chill along the length of my body was real. My tongue seemed thick.
