Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  With that, the engineer turned on his heel and walked away, leaving me puzzled by the turns of our brief conversation.

  Those first nights on the planetoid, before we’d named it Eventide, we housed within the escape pod itself. But the close quarters were not suitable for an extended stay, the air was stifling, and my fitful sleep was plagued by nightmares. In short order we sought alternatives. At Kloster’s suggestion, and with considerable physical exertion, we managed to break loose some fractal branches from the crystalline fronds, the native flora, and used these as our building materials. The resulting structures proved better protection against the flyers than the Phonix’s escape pod had been, and in little time our band of survivors had blossomed into a miniature community of rough-built frond shelters.

  Still, though, my sleep was troubled, and I dreamed dark dreams. And still the sun did not set.

  I think it may have been our adherence to pair-bonding that drove us into underspace in the first place. We of Disocur are instilled from an early age with the need to partner, an essential message of the education of organic children and synthetic intelligences alike. We are taught from the cradle that—whatever one’s gender, orientation, species, or provenance—to be partnered in a pair-bond is the preferred mode of existence. Singletons, unpaired individuals, are vanishingly rare, most often occurring when one member of a pair-bond dies before the other—though nearly all made singletons in this way seek out a new partner as quickly as possible. Perhaps the reason that most Disocurenes are so uncomfortable around singletons—and, for that matter, one of the reasons why we transit the Threshold to other worlds so infrequently, where singletons are the norm—is that they serve as reminders of our own mortality.

  The hope that there might be other branches of humanity, out in the galaxy, to whom we could reconnect, I suspect, was driven by this same impulse to pair and to shun the singleton. Travel between the established worlds of civilization is easy and as close to instantaneous as to make no difference. But no one knows how many other worlds were settled during the centuries of the Diaspora, when humans left Old Earth for the stars in fusion-engine rockets traveling at ponderous subluminal speeds. In the hundreds of generations since the first Thresholds were initiated, each wormhole a doorway connecting two distant worlds, humanity in its many forms and guises—including uplifted animals, synthetics, and others of blended or uncertain provenance—had become fairly complacent. A journey of a few steps could carry one at no cost a span of light years. So what if travel was restricted to established destinations and that the vast bulk of the galaxy remained uncharted and unexplored? If the cost of visiting these distant stars and discovering lost cousins of humanity was to live for decades or centuries in interstellar space, it was too high a price to pay.

  There was an alternative, of course, as there always is. And while it was no less expensive—quite the reverse—the price was paid in a different coin.

  Only the Disocurene, with our fanatical longing to pair that which is left alone, were willing to pay the price. It took the bulk of our planetary economy for several centuries to fund the development and construction of the underspace impellers, and several generations more to perfect the integration of the drives onto a manned vessel. The technology, which allowed for superluminal flight by traversing another spacetime continuum, contiguous to our own but in which distances were shorter, had been hypothetical for long centuries, and it nearly bankrupted our world to move it into the actual. But in the end, the Underspace Ship Phonix was completed, and our journey was ready to begin. A crew of three dozen pairs of Disocurenes was selected by the Chancellery, an Ambassador Extraordinary created who could speak to anyone we might encounter with the voice of Disocur, and with much celebration we were launched out into the darkness.

  It was only when the Phonix attempted the reinsertion into normal space, after three hours travel in underspace, that the problems began.

  Kloster could not explain why the planetoid was locked in a perpetual twilight, and none of the rest of us had the science to venture a hypothesis. The distant sun, whose faint light warmed us, pinked the sky over the western horizon, and the stars shone above the east, but sun never set, and the stars never wheeled in place. The light was gray, forever frozen in the gloaming. Nayrami, who had more of the poet in her than any of the rest of us, finally named this unknown planetoid “Eventide.” It meant evening, or so she said, and seemed as good a name as any.

  Back then, none of us expected that we would be staying for long, so it hardly seemed to matter.

  I had served as assistant astrogator on the Phonix, and Serj had been the second-shift pilot, and so between us we had a fair handle on the functioning of the ship’s impellers and the nature of the transition between normal space and underspace. As best we could work out, talking it over in our shelter at night—or in that period we survivors had determined the “night” by fiat, since every hour was the same as every other—when the Phonix returned to normal space, it had not been at the reinsertion point the astrogator had plotted. I had seen enough of the starfields surrounding us to realize they didn’t match the charts before the hull imploded on the lower decks, killing half the crew in an instant, Serj’s partner among them. Instead, it was as if the ship had been drawn to some other region of space entirely.

  When next we saw Kloster, late the following “day,” we told the engineer our theory. He merely shrugged and said, “I see nothing objectionable in your hypothesis.”

  “And do you think that whatever drew us here also accounts for the frozen sun and stars?” Serj asked, casting his amber gaze skyward. This surprised me, as I hadn’t considered the connection before.

  While I smiled slightly, warmed by my good fortune in selecting such a fine partner—a physique and a mind, together!—the engineer merely shrugged again and absently glanced at the immobile sky above.

  “Perhaps,” Kloster said, and turned away.

  We passed the time as best we could, waiting for the rescue vessel whose arrival, we were sure, was imminent. We theorized that the Chancellery would take one of the prototype underspace impellers and affix it to a subluminal craft with little effort and only marginal expense to come searching for the Phonix when it failed to return home. In the meantime, we put on little comedies and dramas, following the scripts as best we could recall. Or competed in games of chance and skill, pair-bond against pair-bond, or men against women, or any other combination of players we could imagine. Or told stories, or sang songs, or rutted in the privacy of our shelters of fronds or in the hidden places of the cavern.

  All but the engineer. Kloster kept to himself, more often than not, and seemed to have aged whole years in the scant few days since the crash.

  Still I was plagued by strange dreams—murders, strange pairings, jealousies, and rage. Whenever I woke from one of these troubling visions, there always followed a brief period of confusion, and I could not recall which was my waking life and which the dream. The stolid presence of Serj, slumbering beside me on our makeshift cot, was always a comfort, pulling me back to reality, and I clung to him as though I were adrift at sea and he was the only thing keeping me afloat.

  We knew little about each other’s lives before our arrival on Eventide. Our time spent aboard the Phonix had been brief, just a few days powering out from Disocur and the short hours in underspace, and after arriving on the planetoid we had little desire to dwell on all we had lost.

  I tried to make a pet of one of the scurries, though Serj laughed at my efforts, and the women thought I was sure to catch some disease from it. The middle of the three-tiered Eventide food chain, the scurries were small, twelve-legged organisms, about the length of my foot. Their hairless hides were rough and knobby, their heads diamond-shaped and eyeless, dominated by large mouths and the circle of small pits that Kloster theorized were used for some form of echolocation. The scurries’ diet consisted entirely of water lapped up from the ponds of condensation that dotted the irregular Eventide la
ndscape and the fronds.

  The fronds were a kind of crystalline plant or fungus, which grew massive leafy protrusions that exfoliated with fractal complexity. They drew sustenance from the molecules of the soil, air, and water, converting them into the complex sugars that gave their leafy appendages their crystalline structure. The basic components of the fronds were organic, but the crystalline structures were difficult to break and virtually impossible for a human’s digestive system to process. Luckily for the survivors of the Phonix, the harsh digestive acids and massive grinding jaws of the scurries were equal to the task, and as soon as the escape pod’s limited food stores were exhausted, scurries roasted on a spit became a staple of our diet.

  The scurries were themselves the sole form of sustenance for the flyers, the batwinged predators that lurked on the looming peaks of the Eventide horizon and swooped down to prey on the scurries when they matured beyond a certain length. The circle was completed when one of the flyers died, their decomposing remains providing the necessary cocktail of molecules that the spores of the fronds required to germinate.

  The flyers had attacked us early on, perhaps seeing us as more substantial prey than the scurries. Fortunately, Kloster had outfitted us with sidearms from the escape pod’s stores—the Disocurene Chancellery had not known what the Phonix might find in its search for the lost branches of humanity and had wanted the crew to be prepared for any eventuality—and as vicious and tough as the predators were, the Flyers proved no match for a disruptor’s concentrated beam.

  Farise chided me for wanting to make a pet of a creature I might be forced to eat in a matter of days, his voice sounding tinny and hollow through the Mind’s small speakers. Nayrami and Phedra joined hands and sang a popular children’s song about a boy who pair-bonds with a pet rodent instead of a sentient. And, finally, Serj and Tamsin sat side by side, shoulders rubbing, holding their sides with laughter.

  I told them all I didn’t care what they thought. I named my pet Phonix—deciding at the last moment that naming it Dobeh would be in poor taste—and did my level best to bestow some affection on it, despite the scurry’s best efforts to escape.

  The next day, while I attempted to teach the creature to stand up on its hind pairs of legs, my pet scurry bit me on the hand. Kloster returned from his explorations of the caves, looking older than ever, and treated my wound with the emergency medical kit retrieved from the pod. He said the injury was unlikely to leave a scar, but I was unconvinced.

  At our evening meal, everyone insisted that I get the choicest cut of meat, and Phonix proved to be quite tasty, indeed.

  My hair had grown in, in the weeks since the crash. I typically kept the follicles on my head switched off, preferring to leave my skull hairless, but since arriving on Eventide the resequencers had dissipated into my bloodstream, leaving the follicles to follow their inborn genetic imperatives, and in short order I had a shaggy, unkempt mess of hair atop my head. Serj said he didn’t mind and that he somewhat preferred my new appearance, but I was just grateful for the shortage of reflective surfaces on the planetoid.

  Tamsin, though, the statuesque protocol officer on the Phonix, was less than thrilled when her own phenotype began to reassert itself. When we’d arrived on Eventide, her skin had been coded a tasteful shade of emerald, and her hair and eyes a matching shade of crimson, the red of a dying main sequence star. After a few weeks, the luster began to fade, and she began slowly to revert to the more typical Disocurene coloration, skin the light brown hue of wet sand, hair a reddish copper. Phedra was short, compact, and tightly muscled, and she wore her body as genetics and nature intended, though honed to a razor’s edge. She joked that her partner would in short order need to take cosmetic advice from her, but if Tamsin was amused at the thought of looking like the ship’s fabricator, she did a good job of hiding it. They made for an odd pair-bond, but they had each other, and that was what counted.

  No rescue vessel appeared, nor any sign of any other escape pods from the ship. It was difficult to measure the passage of time, but it was no more than a few weeks before we gave up all hope of being rescued. We confessed to one another that we hadn’t ever really thought it possible that help would arrive. In time, we even came to believe it.

  My dreams grew worse, such that it was rare that a night passed without some terror rousing me from my sleep. When I mentioned these to the others, even those who claimed not to have been troubled by nightmares indicated with their haunted expressions that they in fact had been. We wondered whether there might not be some characteristic of our diet, perhaps undetected microorganisms in the condensation, that could account for these nightly visions, but when we finally had a chance to ask Kloster his opinion, on one of his rare appearances at mealtime, he claimed that his own sleep was untroubled and that he had no notion which might be disturbing the rest of us. He put it down to stress over our circumstances, and he went about his business.

  I wanted to believe the engineer was right, but when I awoke from a dream, the image fresh in my mind—of my hands wrapped around Nayrami’s thin bird-like neck, or of Phedra standing over me with a disruptor pistol in hand, or of coming upon Serj lying in pieces on the ground, his entrails a feast for a flock of flyers—I found it hard to dismiss it so easily.

  We began to explore, more to stave off boredom than to pursue any curiosity. We carried disruptors at our belts, of course, to fend off any errant flyers, but we were quite safe, for all that.

  The planetoid of Eventide was denser and more massive than its small dimensions would suggest. This we knew, but until one of us did it, we had no notion than a person on foot could walk in a circuit around the planetoid’s surface in the equivalent of just a few days. Eventide’s gravitational attraction was a substantial portion of Earth-normal, only a few percent less than that of Disocur. And, despite our best efforts, we found no other members of the local ecosystem than the fronds, the scurries, and the flyers, as much as our palates—weary of a steady diet of condensation and roasted scurry—would have preferred some variety.

  That such an unlikely environment supported a single organism, much less three, was hardly a surprise. Since the days of the Diaspora, humanity had learned that life was ubiquitous, hiding in virtually every imaginable planetary crevasse.

  If life itself was everywhere, however, sentience sadly was not. The only self-aware beings humanity encountered out among the stars were those that they brought with them, or those which they engendered once they arrived. With sufficient time, resources, and desire, it was conceivable that we survivors could uplift the simple organics of Eventide into proper sentience, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble, even in purely theoretical terms.

  And, in short order, we had explored all that there was to explore. Except for the caves. The planetoid was riddled with subterranean passages, from microfissures to massive caverns, but they were cold, and dark, and foreboding, and none of us liked to linger too long in them. None but the engineer. Kloster seemed to have found a new home, there in the dark recesses of Eventide, and as time went on, he visited our little community of frond-built structures less and less. When he did return to the surface, on rare occasions, it was only for brief visits, during which he would question each of us in turn about all that had happened in his absence, as though he were compiling a personal history of our collective experiences.

  Still my dreams grew worse, and from their haggard and haunted looks I knew that the others’ sleep was no less troubled. In our waking hours, we found it difficult to separate the real people before us from the actions our minds had attributed to them in our nightmares. In some cases, such as the dreams of strange pairings, as when I dreamed that I was pair-bonded to Phedra and not to Serj, this made for uncomfortable encounters, when I forgot that the affection I felt was only imagined, and a tender caress in passing gave offense. But mine was not the first such transgression, and tempers quickly calmed.

  One night, I dreamed that Kloster had failed to construct the makeshif
t Mind that housed the ghost of Farise, and that he had bonded to Nayrami. But their pair-bond, in my dream, was an unhappy one, and ended badly.

  The population of scurries around our encampment grew thinner as time went on, forcing us to go further and further afield to find meat for our table. I took to hunting alone in the “mornings,” going out with my disruptor sidearm—at its lowest setting the beam was sufficient to kill the creatures without disintegrating them altogether—and returning hours later with enough food for all of us.

  On the day it happened, I managed to catch only two scurries, and I knew that we’d be eating slim for dinner that night. I called to Serj as I stepped inside our frond shelter, joking that he’d have to curb his appetite for one night, at least, but that I’d make it up to him when we doused the lights.

  There he was, in our cot, lying naked next to vast amount of green-tinged skin, cascades of copper-reddish hair falling over his chest.

  It took me a moment to work out the tangle of limbs and flesh, but then I have never been very quick.

  “Tamsin?” I said aloud, as she and my partner turned, eyes wide, startled by my early return.

  “Zihl, wait . . .” Serj said, raising a hand to me.

  My disruptor was at my belt, and then it was in my hand. I don’t recall a transition between the two states, though there must have been. My vision went red, and my thoughts boomed in my head like the sound of the Phonix’s lower decks imploding. I could see Serj’s lips moving, but nothing he said made it into my head. I thumbed the disruptor’s beam to full dispersal and fired.

  Serj and Tamsin, locked in a final embrace, faded like an afterimage as their bodies’ quanta decohered, subatomic particles displaced in all directions, accompanied only by a low, sullen hiss from the sidearm’s barrel.