Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  A man clad in only the skintight one-piece garment worn under pressure suits, arms folded across his chest, black face gleaming in the light of Bea’s helmet-lamp. Was he smiling? Bea didn’t stay to find out. She turned and ran as fast as the bad knee joint in her pressure suit would allow, shrieking in fright and almost falling over when a flurry of snake-things shot out of a dust heap. She managed to swerve around them and ran on toward the bleary sunlight that filled the end of the tunnel.

  It took her more than four hours to reach her gig. She half expected to find it as wrecked as Linval Palmer’s lander, but the hatch was firmly dogged, and inside everything was as she had left it. She powered up the lifesystem, patched the leaky hatch seal with duct tape, and collapsed onto one of the couches, breathing hard inside her suit and listening to her pulse thump in her ears, while Hades’ unbreathable atmosphere was flushed out and the cabin was repressurized with the standard oxygen/nitrogen mix. Then she unlatched her helmet and raised the ship on the radio.

  Tor Torqvist answered, cheerful, impossibly sane. Bea told him that John-Jane Smith and the bodyguard had put themselves out of the picture but refused to go into details. The whole story could wait until she was off this dusty hellhole—if she was allowed to escape, that is. Tor told her that the Mary had locked him in a cabin, and he’d sealed the air vents with his clothes, accessed the ship’s lifesystem via the cabin’s air-conditioning unit, and increased the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the air circulating through the rest of the ship.

  “I gave her ten minutes, then cracked the door manually and dashed to the nearest emergency station and strapped on a breathing mask. The vicious little bitch was out cold on the bridge. I suppose she thought she could control the ship from there.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Hold four, with provisions and a portable toilet. She kicked out the video cameras, but there’s nothing else she can damage.”

  “Now you have control of the ship, why haven’t you lit out of there?”

  “If you care to check the signal doppler, Captain, you’ll see that I’m on my way. I promise I’ll be back inside twenty days with a rescue party.”

  “You’ll probably have to sell shares in the ship to raise funds. Let me give you formal authorization,” Bea said. She set up a camera and did just that.

  The ship was a heavy hauler, retrofitted with Mercedes pulse fusion motors, that she’d inherited from her mother and father. She’d grown up in it, and after her parents had died in a stupid accident when a run-about had explosively depressurized, she’d worked it hard for the past ten years. Losing it would be almost as bad as losing her parents—but better that than dying down here on this dusty rock.

  When she was finished, Tor asked, “Are you sure you can hold out until I get back?”

  “I’m going into hibernation. After I connect my suit to the gig’s power supply, I can sleep out a whole year if I have to.”

  Bea talked with Tor while she made her preparations. She stripped off her pressure suit and cleaned herself as best she could with wipes, then climbed back into the suit again. She plugged a line into the gig’s food maker, which would supply her suit with water doped with glucose and essential amino acids, plugged a cord into the ship’s batteries, and powered down the gig’s systems again and said good-bye to Tor.

  “Don’t worry, Captain. I’ll be back before you know it. Pleasant dreams.”

  Bea called up the headup display and initiated the hibernation mode. A needle stung her neck, and she fell into warm swoony darkness. . . .

  And woke, thrashing to escape the embrace of something tight and confining, a cocoon of skin that ripped and fell away. She sat up, tried to breathe and couldn’t, and after a panicky minute discovered that she didn’t need to.

  She was sitting naked on a bare hillside. Dust-laden wind carressed her bare skin. The storm was still raging, but it seemed less primordial now, more like weather than a catastrophe. The whine of wind over the rock was as calming as the tinkling of a mountain stream. Great curtains of dust rippled overhead like an aurora, and around her dust parted here and there to reveal low hills saddling away in every direction.

  She stood up, kicking away the tattered remnants of her cocoon. Her skin was black, gleaming like oiled leather, cool but supple, and completely hairless. She ran her tongue over her teeth. Her mouth was as dry as the dust that blew over her, and when she touched them she found that her eyes were dry too, as hard as pebbles. She put her hand on her chest, and after half a minute felt her heart beat once. The dull light of the sun fell on her like a blessing, energizing and invigorating her.

  She knew what had happened to her and wondered why she felt serene, improbably happy, instead of being angry or in a deadly panic.

  People were moving toward her now, through silky skeins of blowing dust. Three, five, six of them. John-Jane Smith, no longer a neuter but the woman she’d been before the operations and gene therapy, reached Bea first, handed her a suit liner. After Bea had climbed into it, the men moved forward.

  Linval Palmer’s grin split his gleaming black face. “I bet you’re wondering what the hell happened to you.”

  “I know what happened to me. I’m wondering where your brother is.”

  The figure Bea had glimpsed in the tunnel before she’d fled had been Isham Palmer. She’d identified him while trudging back to her gig, after she’d enhanced the brief movie taken by her suit’s movement tracker.

  “How’s your balance? Can you walk? Let me show you something,” Linval Palmer said, and led her up the hill toward the shallow bowl of the cirque and the entrance to the tunnel system.

  The others followed. John-Jane Smith and the xenoarchaeologist and the three mercenaries walking through the dust storm as if strolling through a spring meadow on Earth or First Foot.

  “My bodyguard didn’t make it,” Linval Palmer said, when Bea asked about the Mary. “She killed too many of our good friend’s little helpers. It didn’t like that, so instead of remaking her it recycled her, poor thing.”

  He explained that the members of Isham’s expedition who had died in the crash or shortly afterward had been recycled too. Their biomass had been used to create the snake-things and hand-crabs, as well as the cocoon that had transformed Isham. He’d lured Linval and his people into a trap, and while they were being remade, he’d spotted the descent of Bea’s gig, smashed up Linval’s lander, and lain in wait for his rescuers. After Bea had escaped and gone into hibernation to await her own rescue, he had tracked her down and brought her here.

  Bea absorbed all this as calmly as if it were an old story about someone she knew hardly at all. “Your brother found what he was looking for, didn’t he? He lucked out and found some kind of working alien technology.”

  “The dust,” Linval said.

  “The dust?”

  Linval grinned. “Smart dust, in the tunnel. I think it’s some kind of medical kit.”

  “We can’t really be sure what it was originally used for, because its context no longer exists,” the xenoarchaeologist said. He was a short lean man with an eager expression, telling Bea, “As for what it is, it’s almost certainly some kind of nanotechnology. Smart bacteria, or smart machines the size of bacteria. . . . I’d kill for a scanning electron microscope. All I have down here are cameras that don’t have adequate resolution. . . .”

  Linval said, ‘We know what it can do. That’s the important thing.”

  John-Jane Smith said, “It infected us and it remade us.”

  The xenoarchaeologist said, “It’s in our blood, probably in every one of our cells, too. We’re a symbiosis, like the stromatolites.”

  “We don’t need to eat or drink or breathe,” Linval said. “If we stay out of sunlight too long, we begin to slow down; there’s some kind of photoelectric or thermoelectric effect recharging us.”

  The xenoarchaeologist said, “We’ll probably need to eat sooner or later, if only to replace lost mass. The lander’s medikit
suggests that we have a hydrogen to methane respiration cycle based on sulfur-bond chemistry. If I had the right equipment, I could tell you more. I could tell you how long we can expect to live like this.”

  “We might live a century, or we might all keel over after a year,” Linval said. “But there’s no point worrying about the unknown.”

  “Like what it’s done to our minds,” Bea said.

  Linval smiled. “It’s the old paradox. If it has changed who we are, how can we know?’

  Bea looked at John-Jane Smith. “You know it changed you. Aren’t you angry at what it did?’

  The woman shrugged. “I believe that I am more used to change than you. And if it hadn’t changed me, I would have died.”

  The xenoarchaeologist said, “If it can change us so that we can live on Hades without life support, it can adapt us to other environments too. In the right environment, it can change us back to what we were.”

  Perhaps they were right. Perhaps the nanotech symbiosis had simply done its best to save Isham Palmer by rebuilding his body, adapting him to Hades. But why had he changed Linval and the others? Why had he dragged Bea from her gig and changed her? Perhaps the symbiosis had turned him into some kind of agent or extension of itself, which meant that she and the others were agents too, with only an illusion of freewill. . . .

  Bea gestured at herself and asked, “How long did this take?”

  The xenoarchaeologist said, “According to the chip in my pressure suit, the metamorphosis took about ten days.”

  Linval said, “We woke up about a day before you did. We’re still finding our feet.”

  “And my gig?”

  Linval said, “Isham smashed up my lander. I expect he smashed up your gig too.”

  John-Jane Smith said, “We’ll go there, of course. In case there is anything you want to take with you.”

  Bea said, “Take with me?”

  One of the mercenaries said, “This is our home now.” He was a big man with a joyful expression, and there was a murmur of agreement around him.

  For the first time, Bea felt a stir of unease. In another ten days or so, Tor would return through the wormhole with a rescue party. It was possible, she thought, that Isham Palmer hadn’t lucked out after all, that the Jackaroo trader had known all along what he would find down here. Isham Palmer had been changed by what he’d found, and then he’d infected Linval and the others. He’d infected Bea. Suppose they were all the first victims of a plague that would utterly transform the human race? Was this how ascension happened, leaving the First Empire empty, ready to be sold by the Jackaroo to its next tenants?

  At the junction deep inside the tunnel, Linval put a hand on Bea’s shoulder, guiding her past silky dust heaps, past the tattered remains of six cocoons. She didn’t need any more than the feeble sunlight angled down the length of the tunnel to read the single line scratched into the smooth slick curve of the wall beyond:

  Have gone east, brother, to seek wonders.

  “Isham,” Linval explained. “We are thinking of following him.”

  “There’s a whole world to explore,” one of the mercenaries said.

  “Who knows what else we might find,” the xenoarchaeologist said. “If only I had the equipment I left on your ship. . . .”

  Linval studied Bea, his expression playful. “Of course you don’t have to come with us.”

  “Of course I’ll come,” Bea said.

  By the time Tor and the rescue party returned, she would be long gone, walking east toward the spot on the surface of the world where the sun hung directly overhead, walking across dusty plains and lava fields, climbing low mountains carved by millions of years of dust and wind, climbing the cliffs of shield volcanoes. . . .

  And with that thought, she realized that she was free. She realized that the symbiosis was not an infection after all, but a gift. That she was on the threshold of a wonderful adventure.

  She smiled at her companions and said, “What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

  Tiger, Burning

  Alastair Reynolds

  It was not the first time that Adam Fernando’s investigations had taken him this far from home, but on no previous trip had he ever felt quite so perilously remote, so utterly at the mercy of the machines that had copied him from brane to brane like a slowly randomizing Chinese whisper. The technicians in the Office of Scrutiny had always assured him that the process was infallible, that no essential part of him was being discarded with each duplication, but he only ever had their word on the matter, and they would say it was safe, wouldn’t they? Memory, as always, gained foggy holes with each instance of copying. He recalled the precise details of his assignment—the awkward nature of the problem—but he couldn’t for the life of him say why he had chosen, at what must have been the very last minute, to assume the physical embodiment of a man-sized walking cat.

  When Fernando had been reconstituted after the final duplication, he came to awareness in a half-open metal egg, its inner surface still slick with the residue of the biochemical products from which he had been quickened. He pawed at his whorled, matted fur, then willed his retractile claws into action. They worked excellently, requiring no special effort on his part. A portion of his brain must have been adapted to deal with them, so that their unsheathing was almost involuntary.

  He stood from the egg, taking in his surroundings. His color vision and depth perception appeared reassuringly human-normal. The quickening room was a gray-walled metal space under standard gravity, devoid of ornamentation save that provided by the many scientific tools and instruments that had been stored here. There was no welcoming party, and the air was a touch cooler than conventional taste dictated. Scrutiny had requested that he be allowed embodiment, but that was the only concession his host had made to his arrival. Which could mean one of two things: Doctor Meranda Austvro was doing all that she could to hamper his investigation, without actually breaking the law, or that she was so blissfully innocent of any actual wrongdoing that she had no need to butter him up with formal niceties.

  He tested his claws again. They still worked. Behind him, he was vaguely aware of an indolently swishing tail.

  He was just sheathing his claws when a door whisked open in one pastel gray wall. An aerial robot emerged swiftly into the room: a collection of dull metal spheres orbiting each other like clockwork planets in some mad, malfunctioning orrery. He bristled at the sudden intrusion, but it seemed unlikely that the host would have gone to the bother of quickening him only to have her aerial murder him immediately afterward.

  “Inspector Adam Fernando, Office of Scrutiny,” he said. No need to prove it: The necessary authentication had been embedded in the header of the graviton pulse that had conveyed his resurrection profile from the repeater brane.

  One of the larger spheres answered him officiously. “Of course. Who else might you have been? We trust the quickening has been performed to your general satisfaction?”

  He picked at a patch of damp fur, suppressing the urge to shiver. “Everything seems in order. Perhaps if we moved to a warmer room. . . .” His voice sounded normal enough, despite the alterations to his face: maybe a touch less deep than normal, with the merest suggestion of a feline snarl in the vowels.

  “Naturally. Doctor Austvro has been waiting for you.”

  “I’m surprised she wasn’t here to greet me.”

  “Doctor Austvro is a busy woman, Inspector, now more than ever. I thought someone from the Office of Scrutiny would have appreciated that.”

  He was about to mention something about common courtesies, then thought better of it: Even if she wasn’t listening in, there was no telling what the aerial might report back to Austvro.

  “Perhaps we’d better be moving on. I take it Doctor Austvro can find time to squeeze me into her schedule, now that I’m alive?”

  “Of course,” the machine said sniffily. “It’s some distance to her laboratory. It might be best if I carried you, unless you would rather locomote.�
��

  Fernando knew the drill. He spread his arms, allowing the cluster of flying spheres to distribute itself around his body to provide support. Small spheres pushed under his arms, his buttocks, the padded black soles of his feet, while others nudged gently against chest and spine to keep him balanced. The largest sphere, which played no role in supporting him, flew slightly ahead. It appeared to generate some kind of aerodynamic air pocket. They sped through the open door and down a long, curving corridor, gaining speed with each second. Soon they were moving hair-raisingly fast, dodging round hairpin bends and through doors that opened and shut only just in time.

  Fernando remembered his tail and curled it out of harm’s way.

  “How long will this take?” he asked.

  “Five minutes. We shall only be journeying a short distance into the inclusion.”

  Fernando recalled his briefing. “What we’re passing through now—this is all human built, part of Pegasus Station? We’re not seeing any KR-L artifacts yet?”

  “Nor shall you,” the aerial said sternly. “The actual business of investigating the KR-L machinery falls under the remit of the Office of Exploitation, as you well know. Scrutiny’s business is confined only to peripheral matters of security related to that investigation.”

  Fernando bristled. “And as such . . .”

  “The word was ‘peripheral,’ Inspector. Doctor Austvro was very clear about the terms under which she would permit your arrival, and they did not include a guided tour of the KR-L artifacts.”