"Works for me," agreed Jensen.
They went to work with practiced skill. In minutes Jensen had the tents sprouted, loud orange mushrooms that seemed to blend right into the local near-flora, while Balan disassembled the survival cooking equipment and hung it on the emergency wire between the game trail and the tents. "A nap is warranted, now. Doctor recommended, strictly for digestive purposes." Balan actually had an MD, though it was four decades out of date. "Me first."
"Also a doctor's recommendation?" Jensen inquired, archly. He laughed. "I'll stand guard." Jensen settled onto a large rock near the tent.
Time passed, uneventfully, for once. Sulla IV's sun was slumping towards the west when at last a suite of pounding and crashing sounds down the trail brought Balan out of the tent. Both men scrambled for their long survival knives. "What's that?"
"Out on the game trail," Jensen indicated with the tip of his knife, raising his voice over the noise. "Take a look?"
"Sure." Balan set off purposefully, Jensen following.
They crept up on the trail, pushing aside the near-plants for a better view. A few score meters away, they could see a troop of the large grazers of the plains, ambling at a snail's pace along the game trail, pushing over the near-plants and ripping out their fronds with their prehensile second pair of appendages. The first pair, as usual, acted as mouth parts that fed the near-plant chunks into the creature's prominent grinding mouth parts. Digestive juices dripped from their nightmarish mouths. The remaining two pairs of appendages formed trunk-like legs that flattened out at the bottom, clawless. The first two pairs of body segments were much smaller, the rearward segments enormous, painted in swaths of red. Jensen thought they looked like an old Earth ankylosaur crossed with a beetle, blown up to the size of a mastodon. He shuddered.
"Ugly bastards."
"Yes, but can they be hunted?" Balan hefted his knife in calculation.
"With just that knife! Something that big? You're insane!"
"Am I?" He stood. "They've never seen a predator before. I bet I can just walk right up to one and shove this right through whatever it uses for a braincase."
Jensen considered this for a moment. "I remember the survey said they come in two sexes and give birth to live young. They travel in herds. That suggests protective behaviors," he pointed out. "Predators are not the only thing that kill offspring. Sometimes own-species members do as well."
"Pessimist." Balan dismissed him. He turned and stepped deliberately out of the near-bushes and onto the game trail.
The effect was electric. The troop of big grazers looked up as one, dropping foliage everywhere. Jensen quickly counted more than twenty of the monsters. They could crush us like bugs, he thought. Balan took a step forward.
Like a herd of distorted water buffalo, the creatures, each easily more than twice as tall as the little man, shied away, backing down the trail. There was no question of their fear. Balan continued toward them, then broke into a run, knife flashing in his hand. The troop scattered, gigantic snails lumbering away in terror. The trailing animal halted, stolid, facing the human: a challenge. Jensen shot to his feet, knife in hand. "Wait—!"
The huge creature leaned forward to intersect the obnoxious biped's path toward its troop. It leaned, and leaned, grasping appendages extended, body tilted. Evidently it expected combat to be an affair of leverage. But it moved with dreamlike slowness, hours behind Balan's knife, which came slashing down on one of its forward segments, rending it in half, showering the man with fluids. The human danced away as the massive animal's lean became a topple. It crashed to the ground, legs twitching, mouth parts opening and closing. Balan spitted the other forward segment. Movement ceased.
The two men watched as the herd moved off, hissing, back down the game trail. Jensen moved to stand over the body of the grazer. "That was easy," he observed, impressed.
"Yes, I kind of thought it would be," Balan answered calmly, inspecting himself for wounds.
"You kind of thought it would be?"
"Considering the state of technology on this plateau."
"Technology? What technology? What are you talking about? There isn't any technology here!"
Balan turned to him, plucking a nearby frond to wipe the knife. "The forest itself is a technology, Chris," he explained patiently. "The whole plateau is a managed forest. The game trails were deliberately cleared, not made by animals. Why would those big grazing animals—so easy to kill!—come all the way up here, unless guided? What keeps their numbers under control in the absence of predators? The North American aborigines did the same thing in their forests, carving paths to bring in the buffalo from points further west. Those hummocks everywhere on this plateau—I'd bet my salary, if they ever pay us, that the soil is aerated and drained with stones or even ceramics underneath, classic Amazon terra prieta style. Did you notice how the fruit trees love them? The pools in the stream, with the rocks neatly arranged so they can be moved to drain or fill them, as necessary. The medicinal properties of the near-plants. The incredible ratio of fruit trees to ordinary trees. Everything edible, but no parasites to eat it. Whole ecologies of creatures missing—there's not a single mobile organism between the size of those big grazers and the size of your palm. Nothing flies, and there are no sizable scavengers. There must have been predators, we saw some in the river, remember? But something has removed or suppressed the creatures that might fill these niches. Even the temperatures fall between twenty-one and thirty, year round. I wonder if there are whole groups of near-plants, specially selected to manage the climate." Balan nodded at the forest in satisfaction at a job well done. "It's a paradise, all right, but a made paradise, made for minimal work and maximum return on effort." He shrugged. "They couldn't replicate their old electronic society. So they took another path."
Jensen sucked in his breath in awe, eyes widening. "They who?"
"The survivors of the crash up north." His gaze swept across the forest and down the river, searching. "Somewhere on this planet there are unContacted humans. Maybe they don't want to be found. But we're going to find them."
Jensen spun, suddenly realizing that around them, as if listening, but in fact waiting, the forest had gone still. He thought: just like last—
* * *
This Quiet Dust
Karl Bunker | 5699 words
Illustrated by Kurt Huggins
If it had been human, if it had had a voice, perhaps it would have cried out. With shock, amazement, and with some fear, it might have made a sound, trembled, widened its eyes, quickened its heartbeat. In its own way, it did all those things. And it watched; shocked and amazed and afraid, it watched the object descend out of the sky.
Long and sleek, with three pairs of wings extending from its body, the small craft spiraled down. When it was only a few meters above the ground its wings flexed, extended, and caught the air in a way that pitted forward momentum against downward. It seemed to hang suspended for a moment as its landing struts reached out, and it touched down with the delicacy and grace of a bird.
Far above, grazing through the outer fringes of the solar system, was the small craft's mothership, the Kahutara. The Kahutara was on a voyage with no return. Mountains of matter had been consumed to bring it up to a small fraction of light speed, and it would never slow from that pace. Nothing was built into it to allow it to slow, to stop, to swallow up its momentum and come to rest. It followed a swaying trajectory into the galaxy, passing through a star system every few centuries. At each system the crew would come out of hibernation and explore. For this exploration they used the longboats, small craft that could speed ahead of the Kahutara and visit a planetary system in its path, studying one or more planets for days or weeks. The longboats could orbit, sometimes land on a planet's surface, gathering data as quickly as man and machine could manage. But after a painfully short time they would have to dart away, racing to catch up with their mothership.
The hundreds of individuals aboard the Kahutara had given their li
ves to the journey. Until the far-off day of their death, they would cycle in and out of hibernation, visiting star after star. All that they learned they transmitted back to Earth, but by this point in their travels any message that might have been sent in response was too faint for the Kahutara's receivers. They had no way of knowing if the vast treasure of information in their transmissions was being heard, or even if anyone was there to hear them. They were connected to what had once been their home world only by this ghostly filament of uncertain communication.
Henrick took a few steps away from the hatch of the longboat and stood, breathing deeply, savoring the air. The steady breeze ruff led his gray hair and blew his coverall tight against his tall, thin body. The longboat had landed in the center of a gently rolling prairie that was carpeted with ankle-high grassy vegetation. In one direction, under the rising sun, there were hills covered with taller, tree-like plants. To the north was a wandering stream. White clouds dotted a sapphire sky. Henrick turned to face into the warm sunlight. "Beautiful," he said.
He got down in a squat. In the patch of ground immediately around his feet, he quickly tallied a dozen different species of plant; beyond that he began to lose track of which ones he'd already counted. Behind him, he heard the three other members of the team unloading and setting up equipment. An autonomous rover was already trundling off over the uneven ground, and several flying drones had been released from the longboat while it was still in the air. Close beside Henrick, Emilie was setting up a multisensor, pushing its spiked tripod legs into the dirt and then working at its keyboard. She'd done this unnecessarily close to Henrick, and her hurried, decisive actions contrasted conspicuously with his inert posture.
Henrick stood up, wincing momentarily as his knees straightened. He set his com to broadcast to the team. "Still no sign of animal life on land or in the air?" he asked. Ursule and Kent answered with "no" through their coms, and a moment later Emilie muttered the same response. Still broadcasting, Henrick said, "I see structures on some of the plants that appear to release or receive pollen, but nothing that looks like it's there to encourage pollen transfer by insects." He switched off his com and scanned the landscape around him, finishing with his gaze on Emilie. "No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, " he recited, raising his voice, "no fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,—November!" With a smile he added, "Thomas Hood, eighteen-something-or-other."
Emilie's expression was like stone. "Henrick, we all have a great deal of work to do...."
"We have a thousand lifetimes worth of work to do, Emilie. A million lifetimes. A whole planet to study, and only a few days to do it in. So yes, you're quite right. I'd better get busy." He turned and started back toward the longboat. As he walked he thumbed commands into his wristband that instructed the servos to offload his pallet of tools and equipment and set it on the ground.
Some hours later, as Henrick was gathering samples, something caught his eye. A long-stemmed plant stood waist high in front of him, and near the top, just below a cluster of leaves, there was a gray, conical protuberance, about half a centimeter across the base. He reached out a finger to touch it, but as his hand approached, the little structure suddenly fell apart into powder, dropping down from the plant and drifting away on the breeze.
"That old man shouldn't have been put on this mission," Emilie was saying. "He's burned out at best, and at worst entering senile dementia. You can see in his attitude, in the things he says, that he doesn't take our work seriously. It's all a joke to him. He'd rather be sitting under a tree, chewing on a sprig of grass and reciting poetry."
Ursule spoke without looking up from the screen she was facing. "Emilie, Dr. Tarkowski is the most respected botanist in the whole of the Kahutara. And his data feed for this mission shows he's been doing excellent work so far."
"You mean he's managed to collect some samples while muttering 'Ode to an Earthworm' to himself?"
"I don't know that one," Henrick said, stepping through the open hatch into the main cabin of the longboat. "And in any case, there aren't any earthworms on this planet, so such an ode would be rather wasted, don't you think?"
"You're late, Henrick," Ursule said. "We've been waiting for you."
"My apologies." Henrick was looking down at his wristband, tapping out commands. "Has anyone else noticed these structures?" The display in the combination screen and tabletop that dominated the cabin was filled with an image. It showed a small, powdery cone, this one attached to the trunk of a tree.
"Henrick," Ursule began, "these meetings are supposed to adhere to a certain agenda—"
"Dust," Kent said from the far end of the table. "We've known since pre-orbit that this planet has a lot of carbon in its crust, mostly in the form of silicon carbide. Well, it turns out that much of that exists as wind-blown dust. The silicon carbide granules build up a static electrical charge as they're blown around by the wind." He began touching his own wristband, and other images were added to Henrick's on the tabletop. "Anyway, these little cones are lumps of carbon-rich dust, pulled into that configuration by their static charge. They're everywhere."
"They don't like being touched," Henrick said.
"Yes, I noticed that." Kent was young, but deep lines appeared on his face when he smiled, as he did now. "If you get too close, the electrostatic field around your body draws away the static charge that holds them together." He gestured, f lipping his hand palm-up. "At least that's what I assume is happening. Doing a full analysis and modeling will have to wait until we're back on the ship." He turned to Ursule. "As a matter of fact, this relates to my primary finding for this meeting...." He made a questioning expression.
"Please, continue," Ursule said.
"This dust," Kent said, "it's the source of the low-level radio noise we detected emanating from the surface. There are dozens of different basic types of dust granules, with varying mineral impurities in the silicon carbide. Each type has distinct electrostatic characteristics. Sometimes the static charge will redistribute itself across an array of granules with a series of microscopic sparks—hence the radio noise. There are many different types of interactions that occur between and within collections of dust granules. So far the computer has only been able to model some tentative approximations of the simpler interactions." He tapped at his wristband again, and the table screen became crowded with a series of images and pages of formulae. "In short, the aeolia of this world can be considered as a highly complex and dynamic system, and one that's quite unique in our experience."
"Aeolia?" Henrick asked.
"The portion of the regolith that's transported by air movement," Kent said. "From 'Aeolus,' the Greek god of the winds, I believe."
"Ah. Of course."
"Have you found any indication that this dust is related to the absence of non-aquatic animal life here?" Ursule asked.
"No, I don't see any explanation for that in the mineralogy. There's no reason to think the dust or the amount of carbon in the planet's crust would inhibit surface animal life."
"If there's a central puzzle to this planet, that's it," Ursule said. "The absence of animal life. That's what we should all be keeping in mind as we collect data. The surface plant life is diverse, and the sea life appears to be evolved well past the point where animal life on Earth started inhabiting dry land, though of course we don't know how universal that model is." She turned to Emilie. "Any theories, Emilie?"
"The partial pressure of O 2 here is only slightly above current Earth-normal," Emilie said. "It was much higher on Earth when the first land animals evolved. Maybe the relatively low oxygen here prevents the sea animals from making the evolutionary leap to air-breathing."
"Oh stuff and nonsense," Henrick said. "I refuse to believe that life is so timid or evolution so hesitant." Smiling, he flicked a glance in Emilie's direction. "Give me a minute and I'll think of a poem to that effect."
Toward noon of the next day, Henrick was sitting on a rock, rubbing at his left knee. A nearby movement caught
his eye, but he saw it was only a branch swaying in the wind. He continued to stare at the branch for some time. "Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth," he murmured. "To some good angel leave the rest; For Time will teach thee soon the truth, There are no birds in last year's nest!" He lifted his head and squinted into the sky. "Where are your birds, planet?" he said, his voice louder. "Where are your beasts of the earth, your fowl of the air? Don't you know that it's no good having all these plants, all this green life, without animals? You're a dead world without animals. Dead and empty and wasted." Dropping his eyes, he noticed that there was a cone of dust on a rock near the one he was sitting on. This cone was slanted somewhat, its apex pointed toward his face. Slowly he bent forward and reached out, bringing an extended finger toward the cone. When his fingertip was several centimeters away, the cone dispersed, its component dust disappearing in the steady breeze. "Ah," Henrick sighed. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust. That's T. S. Elliot, nineteen-something."
"Here's an interesting thing," Henrick said later, at the nightly team meeting. "I had a low-flying drone take a picture of me from overhead while I was collecting samples. Then I went through the picture looking for the little dust-cones. I found seven of them." On the table screen an image appeared, showing Henrick from above. Then circles appeared at seven locations within the image. "Here are blow-ups of the cones." The sections of the image within the circles expanded, each one zooming in on a central point. "Anyone notice anything?" He looked around the table, waiting a beat. "They're all pointed at me," he said. His face broke into a grin, and with his finger he traced several lines on the monitor screen, the lines converging on the image of himself. The picture on the table changed. "And here is our redoubtable Emilie, busily programming a rover I believe, photographed from the same height. Eight cones, all of them pointed at her." Again the image changed. "And lastly, here are several pictures of random patches of ground, with none of us in the vicinity; same altitude, same scope. I could only find one or two cones in each of these, and they were always pointing in nonintersecting directions."
Analog Science Fiction and Fact - Jan-Feb 2014 Page 31
