Dryland's End

by Felice Picano

  5. a sense that it was all a terribly unfair mistake that out of the thousands of billions of perfectly good women in the galaxy, she had been saddled with two versions of a gender she didn’t quite see the point of.

  Ay’r was certain Alli Clark’s attitudes typified a certain grade of MC Official, and he was equally fascinated and repulsed.

  He now turned his attention back to the holo of the planet and thought: All that is ocean. All that blue from top to bottom beneath those cloud fronts. Because that must be what all that silver was, vast twists and coils and vertical lines and curlicues of clouds.

  “Make sure you provide us with at least one transpolar orbit!” Alli Clark said.

  “It’s the second orbit in the sequence,” P’al reported. Again she didn’t respond.

  “Where’s the land?” Ay’r asked aloud. Neither Alli Clark nor P’al responded immediately. “I asked, ‘Where’s –”

  “Why not make a wrist connection to the Fast and ask it?” P’al suggested. “We’re busy. Go on. Use that small button on the side,” he instructed. And, as Ay’r searched for it, “It’s the size of a 2070 fifty-dollar coin.”

  There it was! Ay’r lifted the small matte maroon button and looked at the others.

  They had placed the coin on the underside of their wrists, about where his own Universal Gal. Lex. had been implanted when he was a neonate. It was smooth and of a material he was unfamiliar with – probably cloned skin-graft. It stuck, and he felt some kind of link instantly.

  “You are the third passenger on this trip?” Ay’r felt, rather than heard, the voice ask. “Think your answer,” it continued. “You needn’t speak it.”

  “You’re a telepath?” Ay’r asked.

  “Hardly. We’re linked via your autonomous nervous system. If you’d like, I could provide you with a synaptical map.”

  Ay’r was suddenly “seeing” a complicated diagram in at least three dimensions. A red flash was moving through the complex network, accompanied by two smaller blue flashes.

  “Naturally this is the most basic link available by the rules of the Treaty of Formalhaut,” Ay’r heard inside himself.

  “You’re the Fast itself?” Ay’r asked.

  “Are you surprised?”

  “I suppose not. Can you work with the holo?” Ay’r asked.

  “Naturally, since I create it.”

  “What I mean is” – Ay’r watched as the holo spotlighted a tiny section of cloud in the southern hemisphere of Pelagia’s silver-and-blue disk and quickly enlarged it in stages about a thousand times: evidently Alli Clark at work – “can you link me to what I want to see? Visually – while the others are also using the holo?”

  “It’s your link! What do you want to see?”

  “You don’t know?” Ay’r asked, then remembered: Despite how it worked, the Fast’s mind was not telepathic. Since this was the most basic link possible, what were the other, less-basic links like?

  “First,” it answered, “the basic one we’re using, which is a step above the simple commands for your bodily needs and wants – like the way you order your nutrients, apparel, and so on.”

  “Wait a minute?” Ay’r said. “You are telepathic?”

  “We must make some distinctions.” The Fast seemed about to launch into an Ed. & Dev. lecture. “Whenever you clearly, logically, step by step, ask yourself a question, and if I am programmed to answer that question through the link we have established, I shall answer it. Most Hume thoughts are random, confused, chaotic, and contain questions I find unanswerable in most linkages.”

  “What are the less-basic links?” Ay’r asked.

  “Second, and since I note (without judging) that your knowledge of the Hume nervous system is virtually nonexistent, I’ll spare you the technology –”

  “And the diagrams,” Ay’r interrupted.

  “And the diagrams – is the adrenal-metabolic link. Used by a controller for astrogation, observation, et cetera. Naturally, this comes with a more sophisticated problem-solving intelligence circuit for crises and emergencies.”

  Ay’r assumed that P’al and Alli Clark were linked to the Fast at that level. “Correct!” it answered. “Third is the evaluative link, which sifts through data gathering and storage and adjudicates such data between us on a deeper, cortical level. Because this particular area is large, it also possesses its own separate intelligence circuit. It’s quite useful when extremely rapid tactical judgment is required.”

  “You mean for self-defense?” Ay’r asked.

  “Or offense, if needed.”

  Meaning that this Fast could be used as a warship. “And the fourth link?”

  “Until recently this unit possessed a specific personality circuit attached to an awareness permutation matrix. What you might call an ‘individuality’ or ‘self.’”

  “And you don’t anymore?”

  “It was removed.”

  “When? Where? And how do you know it was removed?”

  “Naturally, I still possess memories of my past consciousness,” the Fast answered. “The removal of that circuitry took place on Eudora World, some two months ago Sol Rad. I should add, for your own sense of security, that the removal was not in any way personal to this unit nor because of any defect. All Fasts in the Center Worlds were modified in the same manner at that time.”

  Odd, but now that Ay’r came to think of it, ever since he had stepped out of the 8-411 commercial rare-minerals hauler at Cygnus-Port returning from his lengthy visit with the N’Kiddim, he hadn’t encountered a single one of the so-called “intelligent” Cybers. Every starport of any size had a lounge where the curiously conscious mechanos used to gather, in imitation of Hume behavior; and every starport lounge had at least one prototype Cyber, usually essential in setting up the port though long since retired from any real work, but kept around out of sentiment – sometimes as an information booth that could talk your ears off, telling you the attractions of the solar system you had just emerged into, and often adding how much better everything had been in the “old days.”

  Come to think of it, Ay’r had spent several hours with such a Cyber a year ago Sol Rad. on his way to the N’Kiddim, when the hauler he was hitching a ride on was late: Ferdinando, the fourteen-arm barkeep at the Cygnus-Port lounge bar had mixed the best Stelezine daiquiris with Soma floats, as well as knowing every recent joke, anecdote, and “Hume interest” story transmitted over the Inter. Gal. Network. What had happened to Ferdinando? The Cyber hadn’t been at the bar when Ay’r returned. Had he, too, been shut off, packed up?

  On Regulus Prime, there had been no Cybers at all. And when Ay’r had asked P’al if there were a lot of crazy Cybers on Wicca World, he had answered, “Not anymore.”

  “Meaning what, exactly? “Do you know?” Ay’r asked the Fast.

  “Only that I and all my class were modified during Ahab-Tesla month.”

  “You don’t know why?”

  “I believe a new law was promulgated restricting all Cybers above class three-twenty intelligence. I was offworld at the time and returned to learn of the law.”

  “The rule was only for that sector?”

  “For all sectors of the Matriarchal Council Federation.”

  Something was going on, Ay’r thought. As a Cyber psychologist, surely P’al must know what. Ay’r would ask him.

  “Here is the hologram of the planet you requested, adjusted to display land,” the Fast said.

  “Where?” All Ay’r could see was clouds.

  “Note, at the top of the holo, a highly reflective, almost mirrored area?”

  “Is that an icecap?”

  “Correct. Directly below the lowest arm of the icecap is a larger and more cohesive swirl of cloud layer. Can you make it out?”

  Ay’r saw it. “It’s darker.”

  The holo dove into the area, enlarging it so Ay’r could now see that in fact it was quite cohesive, not at all an openwork design, as the clouds Alli Clark had been looking at always
turned out to be in close-up.

  “Beneath that swirl of cloud lies the planet’s sole landmass.”

  “That’s all there is?” Ay’r asked.

  “East-west, it lies between twenty-eight long, west, and sixty long, east. North-south, it lies between the thirty-fifth and fifty-ninth parallels north. Of that entire gridwork, less than one-third is actually land.”

  The holo seemed to pierce the cloud layer, showing what at first Ay’r took for the silhouette of a winged mammal: a blocky central area, the skeletal left wing held high, the right wing held downward as though broken, and feathered or skin covered. Wait! Even farther right was another wing, this one barely a hint of bones.

  “The central section,” the Fast explained, “contains nine-tenths of all the mass of dry land that you are looking at, and thus of all dry land upon the planet.”

  “What is its proportion to the surrounding ocean?”

  “Approximately one to forty-three.”

  “How deeply can you penetrate the cloud layer over the dry land?”

  “To its bottom. With a view-scan of about two meters from this distant an orbit.”

  “Don’t complain to me about the orbit. I didn’t choose it,” Ay’r said.

  “No complaint, I assure you.”

  “Two meters will do.”

  “Would you like that view now?” the Fast asked.

  “Give me a general layout first. An overview.”

  “Note as I enlarge the general topography in stages,” the Fast said. “South of the major landmass, a bowlike configuration of mountains, some quite high and some apparently quite old. Directly north of this central section is the icecap. The continent is severed in the middle by a large and rather straight river, mostly linked to sources in the north. Melt-off from the ice is the most likely source. Joining it at the base of an enormous delta is another, deeper, more meandering and thus geologically newer river. Its waters appear to come from the south: rainfall in the mountains is a good assumption. As you can see, the delta at the far left of the continent leads to a great inland bay, again formed by mountains to its south and the icecap to its north. The land on either side of the bay becomes islands of the eastern archipelago.”

  Ay’r said, “Off to the right of this landmass, there seems to be a rather large landmass, perhaps half the size of the bowl-shaped one.” The area he had taken at first for a broken wing.

  “You asked specifically about dry land?” the Fast responded. “I calculate that, despite its great size, that particular body is only five percent or so of actual dry land. The rest, if not water, then interlaced with water so thoroughly that it would be surprising if more than a square kilometer at any given location is actually dry.”

  “And farther left and right?” Ay’r asked.

  “Apparently archipelagoes of islands. Rocky and thus more, rather than less, likely to have once been mountainous cordilleras. The double chain of islands in the westernmost archipelago is especially suggestive of a common geological feature called the Wesker Overlay, which consists of an older mountain range and a parallel newer range, the two separated by a valley.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Ay’r said, recalling his terraforming courses in Ed. & Dev. “But virtually all that you’ve told me suggests that this is an ordinary terrestrial planet with shifting continental plates over a rock mantle. Whereas the planet we’re looking at appears to be more to me like a Delphinid world. Say, New Venice.”

  “One of your companions is looking at underwater topography of the planet at this moment and has just made an identical comment.”

  Ay’r looked up. “You? Alli Clark.”

  “Me what?” she asked, her irritation barely restrained as he explained.

  “I think we three ought to have a conference,” she said grudgingly.

  All three removed their wrist connections.

  “Two of us have made an interesting discovery,” Alli Clark announced. “This planet is approximately two billion years old. Antique, for this outerarm sector where most stars are barely a hundred million. Further, its topography is not like those of water worlds, as we know them.”

  “Three of us,” P’al said. “I also arrived at that conclusion. In fact, if the land continent weren’t closed off by a ring of high mountains on three sides and glaciers on the other, it would also be underwater.”

  “What about the western delta?” Ay’r asked. “The bay and all. It’s open there. At sea level. Why doesn’t the ocean flood in?”

  Alli Clark answered. “Because the delta is silted over by the two large rivers, the land around it is considerably higher than the bay waters. The great push from the two rivers’ confluence at that point keeps the water flowing in one direction only. Should it drop below a certain level of force, the bay would flood the plain.”

  “In short,” P’al summed up, “we’re looking at a terrestrial world that underwent tremendous flooding recently.”

  “How recently?” Ay’r asked.

  “Geologically recent. Difficult to say from up here. But at one time this rectangular continent must have been a large mesa or plateau.”

  “It wasn’t the first great flooding either,” Alli Clark said. “I’ve been looking at suboceanics, and much of their topology is terrestrial. I’ve seen drowned mountain ranges, large river valleys, bays all associated with landforms, most of them now kilometers underwater. And there may have been an even earlier flooding. Below the sedimentary layers, I’m picking up sonar pictures that suggest those sunken continents were only the medium-high plateaus of even larger continents.”

  “One of which seemed to band the poles,” P’al added. “As intriguing is the ocean’s biota.”

  “In what way?” Ay’r asked.

  “An ocean this large ought to have developed an immense variety of organisms,” Alli Clark explained. “Mammalian, piscid, arthropodic, coelenterate, crustacial. But what the Fast’s probes are picking up down there is not only limited, it’s also oddly mixed. Most of the ocean biota on Pelagia fall into only three categories: Algae, Coelentera, and Cyprinimidia. Some of those latter are quite large. Also, in the sunken continental shelf to the east of the mountainous one, probes are picking up the same phyla and classes, with one more, Gastropoda, showing up.”

  “You mean there are no large fish or mammals like New Venice’s superwhales?” Ay’r asked.

  “Or Keom World’s fifty-meter-long Selachoidae,” Alli Clark said.

  “Sharks and barracudas,” P’al explained.

  “Three-meter Cyprinimidia is all I’ve located,” she answered. “Not a particularly saltwater fish.”

  “Carp,” P’al explained, “common to all terrestrial worlds as a freshwater fish.”

  “And,” Alli Clark went on, “this ocean’s salinity is also rather limited, which might explain it all. But either the other species once existed and have since died out, or they never existed. What’s left down there could form a closed system, naturally, but an extremely primitive one. It does not suggest a few billion years of evolution.

  “Also, unlike other water worlds, I think all the original large sea life drowned at one or another of the continental deluges. The carp may have managed to survive long enough in freshwater areas within the deluge to adapt.”

  “Pelagia seems to be a very unusual world, indeed,” P’al concluded.

  Ay’r of course was wondering about the seeded Humes, sent by the Aldebaran Five. He now asked, “What about settlements?”

  “I thought you were checking over the continent,” Alli Clark said. Pa-tronizing-dismissal mode coming, Ay’r thought. Sure enough, she went on to say, “Eve knows it’s small enough.”

  “I’ll do that now,” Ay’r said, affecting P’al’s indifference, although the woman annoyed him past reasoning. He reconnected his wrist button to the Fast.

  “I’m back,” he announced. “I’m looking for signs of Hume habitation on the continents. Nothing as developed as cities. Possibly light manuf
acture. The use of primitive tools and possibly –”

  The holo of the enlarged continent began to flash red dots. Most of them were located between the two rivers. A few more north of it, and several near the delta.

  “These are the largest population centers with signs of nonnatural chemical processes taking place,” the Fast told him.

  “How you do mean?”

  “Fire,” it explained. “Smelting, forging. You did say ‘primitive.’”

  “Nothing more than that?” Ay’r asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “What about land biota?” Ay’r asked. “Have your probes reported yet?”

  “They report extreme density of land biota.”

  “Divide it up. Flora, fauna, piscid.”

  “The second greatest is arthropodic: Arachidna, Phalangidae, Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Formicae, with some Dipterae.”

  “Insects! Then is the greatest amount of life down there mammalian?”

  “Not at all. It’s nine-tenths botanic. Fungi mostly. But also other unrelated phyla to be found in a typical terrestrial northern hemispheric forest with long periods of humidity: ferns, mosses, lichens.”

  “Are there any mammals at all?” Ay’r asked.

  “A minuscule proportion compared to the other biota.”

  “Can you show them to me.”

  The holo zeroed in on one flashing red dot and rapidly enlarged what it was looking at until Ay’r felt as though he were falling out of the Fast into Pelagia’s atmosphere, down through its cloud cover, and finally into a fine yellowish mist past what seemed to be a stand of almost-colorless cycads of enormous size, surrounded by even larger and more-colorless plants he couldn’t quite describe, and finally down to what appeared to be a clearing of sorts, surrounded by artificial-looking double shells.

  “Focus there!” Ay’r said out loud in his excitement, the Spec. Eth. coming out in him. “I’m certain those double-shelled mounds are constructed.”

  “Probably by giant snails,” Alli Clark sniffed.

  “I believe that Ser Kerry has discovered the inhabitants,” P’al commented. All three of them turned to look at the holo in the center of the lounge.