Forbidden Planets

by Peter Crowther (Ed)

  In the real world, I think those hummingbirds mostly get eaten by fish. But at least there is the beauty of the insects’ dance.

  Right. Example. Forest.

  They said they were hanging together, but something about the way things looked started to frighten them. “Stay close,” I warned them. “Touching close. Can you remember the way you came?”

  “That’s the problem,” Karen said. “We can remember it, but it isn’t there.”

  I heard Sean in the background saying that they were going to count off every five minutes, just to make sure that in their panic they wouldn’t leave anyone behind.

  The first three counts came to six. The fourth came to five.

  Tricia Kassarjian was gone.

  “Where’d she go?” Sean was screaming. “She was right here!”

  Yes, they all agreed. She had been right there. Someone had helped her over a fallen log not thirty seconds before; someone else had snapped at her for shining her flashlight up in their faces. “I heard her breathing right next to me,” said our pilot, an ex-military botanist named Lee Young-pyo. “I mean just now.”

  “Tricia!” Sean called.

  And this is the worst of it: She answered. I could hear her calling to them. They stayed together and worked the search the way they were supposed to. Tricia said she would stay put, and they would use the sound of her voice to locate her.

  Eventually, though, she stopped talking. No panic, no cries for help. She just stopped answering.

  When the team made the decision to return for her after they’d gotten back to where they’d parked the rover, they counted off.

  One, two, three . . . four.

  It went like that. The forest closed them off, not so they could see it but so that every time they made progress back toward where they were sure they needed to be, suddenly there was no way to get there. Sean was the last one to go. Tobin and I talked to him the whole time. He knew he wasn’t going to make it, and he told us that, and right before he stopped responding he said to me, “What kind of a place is this? How does this happen?” Mystified, like a toddler who has cut himself on safety scissors.

  I didn’t have an answer for him then, and I don’t now.

  Tobin said . . . ah, goddammit. For a minute there I almost had it. Whatever it was, I remember thinking I hoped it wasn’t the last thing Sean ever heard.

  A little while later, Tobin went outside for good.

  I think there was another incident after the loss of the survey team, but when I go back and do the arithmetic in my head, the answer I get means that everyone but Tobin and me died in that forest. My mind is stubborn, though; I know there was something else. I’m fairly certain someone else died.

  It is a difficult thing to be unsure whether your apprehension of the world is the correct one; far worse not even to know if your thoughts about what you see, feel, taste, etc., are yours or projections of someone else. If all tools are amplifiers, then what was left here amplified the capability of the mind to affect the phenomenal world. It’s only natural, I suppose, for that tool to have wanted to find its way into the mind that would make the most use of it.

  Without looking back at what I’ve already written, I think that probably I haven’t given enough attention to the problem of what I should have done differently. The way we all felt about Tobin—and we here includes Tobin himself; his many fine qualities did not include modesty—meant that there were times when we looked to him. If we were children (what group social interaction cannot be explained in terms of the playground?), Tobin would have been the kid everyone wanted to be like, and he didn’t always desire or respond well to our expectations. On the way here, he just wanted to be left alone to do his job; once we were on the ground, he forgot about the job and just wanted to be left alone with the creations of his mind.

  I should have handled myself better. Possibly I should have acted more aggressively as some kind of corrective to Tobin, and I failed to be that. Was never that. Could not have been that. From the moment our feet touched the ground of this world, he was different. He was of this place, I think, before he ever got here—which is a fatalistic thing to say, given what happened, but I believe it.

  Here’s another fatalistic sentiment: also I believe that once this world knew of him, there was no way things could have happened other than how they did. Which doesn’t let me off the hook.

  I said what was left here a few sentences ago. Tobin said to me once that the world was the tool, that whatever they—They—did turned it into a giant psychological tuning fork. Psychokinetic might be a better word, since thoughts here are able to manifest themselves as expenditures of kinetic energy.

  Who could have done that, I wondered then. Still do. Maybe Tobin knows.

  And where did they go?

  Here’s what it feels like: Once, I became certain that the world itself was not just speaking to me but speaking through me, living through me, that I had become a conduit for this consciousness that was curious, eager, jealous, lonely . . . and then it was gone. While it was present, however, I could feel the matter of the world transforming around me. I was in a good mood, and the clouds in the sky cleared; I was excited about an experiment I was close to finishing, and birds burst from the trees all around me; I was fearful that the experiment would fail, and one of the birds dropped dead at my feet. The experience lasted just a moment, but Lee and I went back and looked later; the dead bird was there, and within a hundred meters of the spot we cataloged sixteen species of flower, each visually resembling a terrestrial species I knew and each utterly absent from the rest of the planet . . . at least insofar as we were able to determine.

  More than human companionship, I miss that feeling, which may say more about my failure to connect with my mission colleagues than about whatever made those flowers grow.

  Anyway, if you read this, it means I’ve aged, and died, and that the only one left is Tobin. I don’t think age and death are things he has to worry about now.

  Don’t expect him to come and greet you, but he’ll send a message.

  I haven’t gone back inside the MC for a while . . . perhaps since the night the survey team disappeared. I’m trying to hear the voice Tobin heard, trying to feel the ground below my feet responding to my steps the way it must respond to his.

  Look for me under your bootsoles. And while you’re at it, look for Tobin there, too.

  God, I feel like I’m doing this to myself. Maybe that’s part of the guilt I was talking about earlier, but what do I have to be guilty about? Didn’t do anything. That was Tobin. Wish I could remember that line. Then I would know.

  Me•topia

  Adam Roberts

  The first day and the first night.

  They had come down in the high ground, an immense plateau many thousands of miles square. “The highlands,” said Murphy. “I claim the highlands. I’ll call them Murphyland.” Over the next hour or so he changed his mind several times: Murphtopia, Murphia. “No,” he said, glee bubbling out in a little dance, a shimmy of the feet, a flourish of the hands. “Just Murphy, Murphy. Think of it! Where do you come from? I come from Murphy. I’m a Murphyite. I was born in Murphy.” And the sky paled, and then the sun appeared over the mountaintops, and everything was covered with a tide of light. The dew was so thick it looked like the aftermath of a heavy rainstorm.

  Sinclair, wading out from the shuttle’s wreckage through waist-high grass, drew a dark trail after him marking his path, like the photographic negative of a comet.

  “I don’t understand what you’re so happy about,” said Edwards. It was as if he could not see this new land, a world that popped out of nowhere. As if all he could see was the damage to the ship. But that was how Edwards’ mind worked. He had a practical mind.

  “Ach, are you sad for your ship,” sang Murphy, with deliberately overplayed oirishry, “all buckled and collapsed and it is?” Of course, Murphy was a neanderthal, a homo neanderthalis. The real deal. All four of these crewmen were.
Of course, you know what that means.

  “You should be sad too, Murphy,” said Edwards, speaking in a level voice. “It’s your ship too. I don’t see how we are to get home without it.”

  “But this is my home,” declared Murphy. And then sang his own name, or perhaps the name of his newly made land, over and over: “Murphy! Murphy! Murphy!”

  The sun moved through the sky. The swift light went everywhere. It spilled over everything and washed back. The expanse of grassland shimmered in the breeze like cellophane.

  Edwards climbed to the top of the buckled craft. The plasmetal bodywork was oily with dew, and his feet slipped several times. At the top he stood as upright as he dared and surveyed the world. Mountains away to the west, grass steppes leading away in every direction, north south and east, flowing downhill eastward toward smudges of massive forestation and the metallic inlaid sparkle of rivers, lakes, seas. That was some view, eastward.

  The sun was rising from the west, which was an unusual feature. What strange world rotated like that? There were no Earth-sized planets in the solar system that rotated like that.

  Did that mean they were no longer in the solar system? That was impossible. There was no way they could have traveled so far. Physics repudiated the very notion.

  The air tasted fresh in his mouth, in his throat. Grass scent. Rainwater and ozone.

  And for long minutes there was no sound except the hushing of the grasses in the wind and the distant febrile twitter of birds high in the sky. The sky gleamed, as full of the wonder of light as a glass brimful of bright water. Vins called up, “There are insects. I’ve got insects here, though they seem to be torpid.” He paused, and repeated the word, torpid. “When the dew evaporates a little they’ll surely come to life.”

  Edwards grunted in reply, but his eye was on the sky. Spherical clouds, perfect as eggs, drifted in the zenith. Six of them. Seven. Eight. Edwards counted, turning his head. Ten.

  Twelve.

  And the air, moist with dew and fragrant with possibility, slid past him, the slightest of breezes. And light all about. And silence stained only by the swishing of the wind.

  Murphy was dancing below, kicking his feet through the heavy, wet grass. “Maybe Murphy isn’t such a good idea, by itself,” he called, to nobody in particular. “As a name, by itself. How about the Murphy Territories? How about the Land of Murphy?” And then, after half a minute, when neither Edwards nor Vins replied, he added, “Don’t be sore, Vins. You can name some other place.”

  Vins went into the body of the shuttle to fetch out some killing jars for the insects.

  Sinclair was away for hours. The sun rose, and the dew steamed away in wreathy banks of mist. The grass dried out, and paled, and then bristled with dryness. It was a yellow, tawny sort of grass. By midday the sky was hot as a hot plate, and Murphy had stripped off his chemise.

  Sinclair returned, sweating. “It goes on and on,” he said. “Exactly the same. Steppe and more steppe.”

  The sun dropped over the eastern horizon. It quickly became cold.

  The night sky was cloudless, stars like lit dewdrops on black; breath petaled out of their mouths in transient, ghostly puffs. Edwards slept in the shuttle. Sinclair and Vins chatted, their voices subdued underneath the enormity of the night sky. Murphy had a nicotine inhaler; he lay on the cooling roof of the crashed shuttle looking up at the stars, puffing intermittently. Later they all joined Edwards in the shuttle and slept. Over their thoughtless, slumbering heads the stars glinted and prickled in the black clarity. Hours passed. The the sky cataracted to white with the coming dawn. Ivory-colored clouds bubbled into the sky from behind the peaks of the highlands and swept down upon them. Before dawn rain started falling. Edwards woke at the drumroll sound of rain against the body of the crashed ship, sat up disoriented for a moment, then lay down again and went back to sleep.

  “We’re dead, we’ve died, we’re dead,” said Murphy, perhaps speaking in his sleep.

  The second day and the second night.

  At breakfast, after dawn, it was still raining. The four of them ate inside the shuttle, with the door open. “Ah,” said Edwards, looking through the hatch at the shimmering lines of water. “The universal solvent.”

  “But I should hate you,” said Murphy. “Because you can look at water and say ah the universal solvent.”

  Edwards cocked his head on one side. “I don’t see your point,” he said.

  “No, no,” said Murphy. “That’s not it. Oh, water, oh? This beautiful thing, this spiritual thing, purity and the power to cleanse, to baptize even. Light on water, is there a more beautiful thing? And all you can say when you see it is ah the universal solvent.”

  Edwards put his mouth in a straight line. “But it is the universal solvent,” he said. “That’s one of its functions. Why do you say oh water oh?”

  The rain outside was greeting their conversational interchanges with sustained and rapturous applause. The color through the hatch was gray. The air looked like metal scored and overscored with myriad slant lines.

  “Can we lift off?” asked Sinclair. “Is there a way off of this place?”

  “Feel that,” Edwards instructed. He was not talking about any particular object, not instructing any of the crew to lift any particular object. What he meant was: Feel how heavy we are. “That’s a full g. That’s what is to be overcome. We came down hard.”

  “Hard,” confirmed Murphy.

  “We weren’t expecting,” said Sinclair, “a whole world to pop out of the void. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then a whole world. We snapped our spine on this rock.”

  “Let’s get one thing straight,” said Edwards, in his brusque and matter-of-fact voice. “This world did not pop out of nowhere. Worlds don’t pop out of nowhere.” He glowered at his colleagues. “That’s not what happened.”

  “Turn it up, Captain,” said Murphy. He applied the title sarcastically. It was the nature of this ship that its crew worked without ranks such as captain, second-in-command, all that bag-and-baggage of hierarchy. No military ship, this. This was not a merchant vessel either. They hadn’t been sliding along the frictionless thread of Earth-Mars or Earth-Moon hauling goods or transporting soldiery or anything like that. This was science. Science isn’t structured to recognize hierarchy.

  “I’m only saying,” said Edwards, sheepishly. “I don’t want to suggest that I’m in charge.”

  They were silent for a while, and the rain spattered and clattered enormously all about them. Encore! Encore!

  It occurred to Edwards, belatedly, that Murphy might have been saying eau, water, eau.

  “Right,” said Vins. “We’re all in a kind of intellectual shock, that’s what I think. We’ve been here two days now, and we haven’t even formulated a plausible hypothesis of what’s going on. We haven’t even tried.” He looked around at his colleagues. “Let’s review what happened.”

  Murphy had his stumpy arms folded over his little chest. “Review, by all means,” he said. But then, when Vins opened his mouth to speak again, he interrupted immediately: “I’ve formed a hypothesis. It’s called Murphy. This is prime land, and I claim it. When we get back, or when we at least contact help and they come get us, I shall set up a private limited company to promote the settlement of Murphy. I’ll make a fortune. I’ll be mayor. I’ll be the alpha male.”

  “Why you think,” said Edwards, thinking literally, “that such a contract would have any legal force upon Earth is beyond me.”

  “Let’s review,” said Vins, in a loud voice.

  Everybody looked at him.

  “We’re flying. We drop below the ecliptic plane, no more than a hundred thousand klims. More than that?”

  None of the others said anything. Then Sinclair said, “It was about that.”

  “We saw a winking star,” Vins said. He did not stop talking, he continued on, even though Murphy tried to interrupt him with a sneering, “Winking star, oh, that’s good on my mother’s health that’s good.” Vin
s wasn’t to be distracted when he got going. “It was out of the position of variable star 699, which is what we might have thought it otherwise. Except that it wasn’t where 699 should have been. As we flew, it grew in size, indicating a very reflective asteroid, or perhaps comet, out of the ecliptic. You,” Vins nodded at Sinclair, “argued it was a particolored object rotating diurnally. But it was a fair way south of the ecliptic. Then what happened?”

  “‘We all know what happened,” said Murphy. They may all have been homo neanderthalis, but they were bright. They all had their scientific educations. The real deal.

  “Let’s review,” said Vins. “We need to know what’s happened. Act like scientists, people.”

  “I’m a scientist no longer,” cried Murphy, with a flourish of his arm. “I’m the king of Murphytopia.”

  “What happened,” said Edwards, slowly, thinking linearly and literally, “was we were tracking the curious wobble of the asteroid. Or whatever it was. We flew close, and suddenly there was a world, a whole world, and—we came down. We reentered sideways, and there was heat damage to the craft, and then there was collision damage, and now it’s broken. And we’re sitting inside it.”

  “Now,” said Vins. “Here’s a premise. Worlds don’t appear out of nowhere. Do we agree?”

  Nobody disagreed.

  “It’s a mountain and Mohammed thing,” offered Sinclair. “Put it this way, which is more likely? That a whole Earth-sized planet pops out of nowhere in front of us? Or that we, for some reason, have popped into a new place?”

  “I say we’re back on Earth,” said Murphy. “It looks like a duck, and it smells like a duck, and it, uh, pulls the gravity of a duck, then it’s a duck.”