Pop… She loves me not!
Ah! Death! Shall my pollen never dust her perfectly formed ovaries? Oh, wicked, balanced, so blandly symmetrical even universe!
In his rage, Fropome ripped the silvery covering right off the lower half of the leaking, weakly struggling seedlet.
Oh unfair life! Oh trecherous stars!
The growling grazer cub hefted the burner device into its mouth.
Something clicked. The cub’s head exploded.
Fropome didn’t pay too much attention. He was staring intently at the bark-stripped creature he held.
…wait a moment… there was something left. Up there, just where the roots met…
Thank heavens; the thing was odd after all!
Oh happy day!(pop)
She loves me!
Descendant
I am down, fallen as far as I am going to. Outwardly, I am just something on the surface, a body in a suit. Inwardly…
Everything is difficult. I hurt.
I feel better now. This is the third day. All I recall of the other two is that they were there; I don’t remember any details. I haven’t been getting better steadily, either, as what happened yesterday is even more blurred than the day before, the day of the fall.
I think I had the idea then that I was being born. A primitive, old-fashioned, almost animal birth; bloody and messy and dangerous. I took part and watched at the same time; I was the born and the birthing, and when, suddenly, I felt I could move, I jerked upright, trying to sit up and wipe my eyes, but my gloved hands hit the visor, centimetres in front of my eyes, and I fell back, raising dust. I blacked out.
Now it is the third day, however, and the suit and I are in better shape, ready to move off, start travelling.
I am sitting on a big rough rock in a boulderfield halfway up a long, gently sloping escarpment. I think it’s a scarp. It might be the swell towards the lip of the big crater, but I haven’t spotted any obvious secondaries that might belong to a hole in the direction of the rise, and there’s no evidence of strata overflip.
Probably an escarpment then, and not too steep on the other side, I hope. I prepare myself by thinking of the way ahead before I actually start walking. I suck at the little tube near my chin and draw some thin, acidic stuff into my mouth. I swallow with an effort.
The sky here is bright pink. It is mid-morning, and there are only two stars visible on normal sight. With the external glasses tinted and polarized I can just see thin wispy clouds, high up. The atmosphere is still, down at this level, and no dust moves. I shiver, bumping inside the suit, as though the vacuous loneliness bruised me. It was the same the first day, when I thought the suit was dead.
'Are you ready to set off?' the suit says. I sigh and get to my feet, dragging the weight of the suit up with me for a moment before it, tiredly, flexes too.
'Yes. Let’s get moving.'
We set off. It is my turn to walk. The suit is heavy, my side aches monotonously, my stomach feels empty. The boulderfield stretches on into the edges of the distant sky.
I don’t know what happened, which is annoying, though it wouldn’t make any difference if I did know. It wouldn’t have made any difference when it happened, either, because there was no time for me to do anything. It was a surprise: an ambush.
Whatever got us must have been very small or very far away, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, still alive. If the module had taken any standard-sized warhead full on there would be only radiation and atoms left; probably not an intact molecule. Even a near miss would have left nothing recognizable to the unaided human eye. Only something tiny — perhaps not a warhead at all but just something moving fast — or a more distant miss, would leave wreckage.
I must remember that, hold on to that. However bad I may feel, I am still alive, when there was every chance that I would never get this far, even as a cinder, let alone whole and thinking and still able to walk.
But damaged. Both of us damaged. I am injured, but so is the suit, which is worse, in some ways.
It is running mostly on external power, soaking up the weak sunlight as best it can, but so inefficiently that it has to rest at night, when both of us have to sleep. Its communications and AG are wrecked, and the recycle and medical units are badly damaged too. All that and a tiny leak we can’t find. I’m frightened.
It says I have internal bruising and I shouldn’t be walking, but we talked it over and agreed that our only hope is to walk, to head in roughly the right direction and hope we’re seen by the base we were heading for originally, in the module. The base is a thousand kilometres south of the northern ice cap. We came down north of the equator, but just how far north, we don’t know. It’s going to be a long walk, for both of us.
'How do you feel now?'
'Fine,' the suit replies.
'How far do you think we’ll get today?'
'Maybe twenty kilometres.'
'That’s not very much.'
'You’re not very well. We’ll do better once you heal. You were quite ill.'
Quite ill. There are still some little bits of sickness and patches of dried blood within the helmet, where I can see them. They don’t smell any more, but they don’t look very pleasant either. I’ll try cleaning them up again tonight.
I am worried that, apart from anything else, the suit isn’t being completely honest with me. It says it thinks our chances are fifty-fifty, but I suspect it either doesn’t have any idea at all, or knows things are worse than it’s telling me. This is what comes of having a smart suit. But I asked for one; it was my choice, so I can’t complain. Besides, I might have died if the suit hadn’t been as bright as it is. It got the two of us down here, out of the wrecked module and down through the thin atmosphere while I was still unconscious from the explosion. A standard suit might have done almost as well, but that probably wouldn’t have been enough; it was a close run thing even as it was.
My legs hurt. The ground is fairly level, but occasionally I have to negotiate small ridges and areas of corrugated ground. My feet are sore too, but the pain in my legs worries me more. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep going all day, which is what the suit expects.
'How far did we come yesterday?'
'Thirty-five kilometres.'
The suit walked all of that, carrying me like a dead weight. It got up and walked, clasping me inside it so I wouldn’t bump around, and marched off, the wispy remains of its crippled emergency photopanels dragging over the dusty ground behind it like the wings of some strange, damaged insect.
Thirty-five klicks. I haven’t done a tenth of that yet.
I’ll just have to keep going. I can’t disappoint it. I’d be letting the suit down. It has done so well to get us here in one piece, and it walked all that long way yesterday, supporting me while I was still rolling my eyes and drooling, mumbling about walking in a dream and being the living dead… so I can’t let it down. If I fail I harm us both, lessening the suit’s chances of survival, too.
The slope goes on. The ground is boringly uniform, always the same rusty brown. It frightens me that there is so little variety, so little sign of life. Sometimes we see a stain on a rock that might be plant life, but I can’t tell, and the suit doesn’t know because most of its external eyes and tactiles were burned out in the fall, and its analyzer is in no better condition than the AG or the transceiver. The suit’s briefing on the planet didn’t include a comprehensive Ecology, so we don’t even know in theory whether the discolourations could be plants. Maybe we are the only life here, maybe there’s nothing living or thinking for thousands and thousands of kilometres. The thought appals me.
'What are you thinking about?'
'Nothing,' I tell it.
'Talk. You should talk to me.'
But what is there to say? And why should I talk anyway?
I suppose it wants to make me talk so I’ll forget the steady march, the tramp-tramp of my feet a couple of centimetres away from the ochre soil of this barren place.
I remember that when I was still in shock, and delirious, on the first day, I thought I stood outside us both and saw the suit open itself, letting my precious, fouled air out into the thin atmosphere, and I watched me dying in the airless cold, then saw the suit slowly, tiredly haul me out of itself, stiff and naked, a reptile-skin reverse, a chrysalis negative. It left me scrawny and nude and pathetic on the dusty ground and walked away, lightened and empty.
And maybe I’m still afraid it will do that, because together we might both die, but the suit, I’m fairly sure, could make it by itself quite easily. It could sacrifice me to save itself. It’s the sort of thing a lot of humans would do.
'Mind if I sit down?' I say, and collapse onto a large boulder before the suit can reply.
'What hurts?' it asks.
'Everything. Mostly my legs and my feet.'
'It’ll take a few days for your feet to harden and your muscles to tone up. Rest when you feel like it. There’s no sense in pushing yourself too hard.'
'Hmm,' I say. I want it to argue. I want it to tell me to stop whining and keep walking… but it doesn’t want to play. I look down at my dangling legs. The suit’s surface is blackened and covered in tiny pits and scars. Some hair-fine filaments wave, tattered and charred. My suit. I’ve had the thing for over a century and I’ve hardly used it. The brain’s spent most of its time plugged into the main house unit back home, living at an added level of vicariousness. Even on holidays, I’ve spent most of my time on board ship, rather than venture out into hostile environments.
Well, we’re sure as shit in a hostile environment now. All we have to do is walk half-way round an airless planet, overcome any and all obstacles in our way, and if the place we’re heading for still exists, and if the suit’s systems don’t pack up completely, and if we don’t get picked off by whatever destroyed the module, and if we aren’t blown away by our own people, we’re saved.
'Do you feel like going on now?'
'What?'
'We’d better be on our way, don’t you think?'
'Oh. Yes. All right.' I lower myself to the desert floor. My feet ache intensely for a while, but as I start to walk the pain ebbs. The slope looks just the way it did kilometres back. I am already breathing deeply.
I have a sudden and vivid image of the base as it might be, as it probably is: a vast, steaming crater, ripped out of the planet during the same attack that downed us. But even if that is the reality, we agreed it still makes sense to head there; rescuers or reinforcements will go there first. We have a better chance of being picked up there than anywhere else. Anyway, there was no module wreckage to stay beside on the ground; it was travelling so fast it burned up, even in this thin atmosphere, the way we very nearly did.
I still have a vague hope we’ll be spotted from space, but I guess that’s not likely now. Anything left intact up there is probably looking outwards. If we’d been noticed when we fell, or spotted on the surface, we’d have been picked up by now, probably only hours after we hit the dirt. They can’t know we’re here, and we can’t get in touch with them. So all we can do is walk.
The rock and stones are getting gradually smaller.
I walk on.
It’s night. I can’t sleep.
The stars are spectacular, but no solace. I am cold, too, which doesn’t help. We are still on the slope; we travelled a little over sixteen kilometres today. I hope we’ll come to the lip of the escarpment tomorrow, or at least to some sort of change in the landscape. Several times today, while I walked, I had the impression that for all my effort, we weren’t moving anywhere. Everything is so uniform.
Damn my human-basic ancestry. My side and belly are hurting badly. My legs and feet held out better than I expected, but my injuries torment me. My head hurts as well. Normally, the suit would pump me full of painkiller, relaxants or a sleeping draught, and whatever it is helps your muscles to build up and your body to repair itself. My body can’t do those things for itself, the way most people’s can, so I’m at the mercy of the suit.
It says its recycler is holding out. I don’t like to tell it, but the thin gruel it’s dispensing tastes disgusting. The suit says it is still trying to track down the site of the leak; no progress so far.
I have my arms and legs inside now. I’m glad, because this lets me scratch. The suit lies with its arms clipped in to the sides and opened into the torso section, the legs together and melded, and the chest expanded to give me room. Meanwhile the carbon dioxide frosts outside and the stars shine steadily.
I scratch and scratch. Something else more altered humans wouldn’t have to do. I can’t make itches go away just by thinking. It isn’t very comfortable in here. Usually it is; warm and cosy and pleasant, every chemical whim of the encased body catered for; a little womb to curl up in and dream. The inner lining can no longer alter the way it used to, so it stays quite hard, and feels — and smells — sweaty. I can smell the sewage system. I scratch my backside and turn over.
Stars. I stare at them, trying to match their unblinking gaze through the hazy, scratched surface of the helmet visor.
I put my arm back into the suit’s and unclip. I reach round onto the top of the blown-out chest and feel in the front pack’s pocket, taking out my antique still camera.
'What are you doing?'
'Going to take a photograph. Play me some music. Anything.'
'All right.' The suit plays me music from my youth while I point the camera at the stars. I clip the arm back and pass the camera through the chest lock. The camera is very cold; my breath mists on it. The viewer half unrolls, then jams. I tease it out with my nails, and it stays. The rest of the mechanism is working; my star pictures are fine, and, switching to some of the older magazines from the stock, they come up bright and clear too. I look at the pictures of my home and friends on the orbital, and feel — as I listen to the old, nostalgia-inducing music — a mixture of comfort and sadness. My vision blurs.
I drop the camera and its screen snaps shut; the camera rolls away underneath me. I raise myself up painfully, retrieve it, unroll the screen again and go on looking back through old photographs until I fall asleep.
I wake up.
The camera lies beside me, switched off. The suit is quiet. I can hear my heart beat.
I drift back to sleep eventually.
Still night. I stay awake looking at the stars through the scarred visor. I feel as rested as I ever will, but the night here is almost twice standard, and I’ll just have to get used to it. Neither of us can see well enough to be able to travel safely at night, besides which I still need to sleep, and the suit can’t store enough energy during the hours of sunlight to use for walking in the darkness; its internal power source produces barely enough continuous energy to crawl with, and the light falling on its photopanels provides a vital supplement. Thankfully, the clouds here never seem to amount to much; an overcast day would leave me doing all the work whether it was my turn or not.
I unroll the camera screen, then think.
'Suit?'
'What?' it says quietly.
'The camera has a power unit.'
'I thought of that. It’s very weak, and anyway the power systems are damaged beyond the junction point for another source of internal energy. I can’t think of a way of patching it in to the external radiation system, either.'
'We can’t use it?'
'We can’t use it. Just look at your pictures.'
I look at the pictures.
There’s no doubt about it; education or not, once you’ve been born and brought up on an O you never quite adjust to a planet. You get agoraphobic; you feel you are about to be sent spinning off, flying away into space, picked up and sent screaming and bawling out to the naked stars. You somehow sense that vast, wasteful bulk underneath you, warping space itself and self-compressing, soil-solid or still half-molten, quivering in its creaky, massy press, and you; stuck, perched here on the outside, half-terrified that despite all you know you’ll lose your grip and
go wheeling and whirling and wailing away.
This is our birthplace though, this is what we deserted long ago. This is where we used to live, on balls of dust and rock like this. This is our home town from before we felt the itch of wanderlust, the sticks we inhabited before we ran away from home, the cradle where we were infected with the crazy breath of the place’s vastness like a metal wind inside our love-struck heads; just stumbled on the scale of what’s around and tripped out drunk on starlike possibilities…
I find that I’m staring at the stars, my eyes wide and burning. I shake myself, tear my sight away from the view outside, turn back to the camera.
I look at a group photograph from the orbital. People I knew; friends, lovers, relations, children; all standing in the sunlight of a late summer’s day, outside the main building. Recalled names and faces and voices, smells and touches. Behind them, almost finished, is — as it was then — the new wing. Some of the wood we used to build it still lies in the garden, white and dark brown on the green. Smiles. The smell of sawdust and the feel of pushing a plane; hardened skin on my hands and the sight and sound of the planed wood curling from the blade.
Tears again. How can I help but be sentimental? I didn’t expect all of this, back then. I can’t cope with the distance between us all now, that awful gap of slow years.
I flick through other pictures; general views of the orbital, its fields and towns and seas and mountains. Maybe everything can be seen as a symbol in the end; perhaps with our limited grasp we can’t help but find similarities, talismans… but that inward facing plate of orbital looks false to me now, down here, so far away and lonely. This globe of ordinary, soft, accidental planet seems the cutting edge and the flat knife of twinned adamantine thoroughness, our clever, efficient little orbitals, lacking that fundamental reality.
The State of The Art c-4 Page 4
