I think of my companions, the argonauts of Iris, and wonder how their expectations will affect the planet. Our first impressions will shape our second ones, and those will shape the expectations of whoever comes after, till the planet is remade in our image forever. Are we the proper people to remake Iris? Do we carry with us desires like viruses that will infect the planet, and kill off the fragile truth?
None of us has the qualifications to be first to witness a new world. But who does? It is not a skill you can learn, for who could teach it? All I know is, we are embarked on a mission of invention, and what we find will say as much about us as it does about Iris.
* * *
On the day when the shuttle was launched, all activity on the questship came to a temporary halt, as people gathered around monitors to watch. A great deal depended on one cranky old machine that had spent a few centuries in mothballs, since if the shuttle were lost there was no other simple way to get the lightbeam receiver onto the planet.
On the feed from the copilot’s headset, they watched the shuttle dip into the atmosphere. Sound came back, bringing the sense of velocity entirely missing in space. Soon the elemental roar of air on the hull drowned out all but the dry, crackly exchanges of the flight crew. Outside the window, the sky gradually brightened to a startling aquamarine above the sparkling land. Suddenly the horizon tilted, as the craft banked to approach the landing site. Jets roared, landing gear clunked into place, and with a thump, the shuttle landed on alien soil.
All across the questship, cheers went up and people who had been suspicious and cold now slapped each other on the back and shook hands.
It would take several orbits of the questship for the shuttle’s crew to test the lightbeam receiver and deploy some robots to perform safety checks outside. Even so, the six members of the first expeditionary team were impatiently assembling their gear. When Sara arrived with her rucksack in the corridor outside the lightbeam translator, she met Touli with two big field detectors, one under each arm. Descriptive Science had elected to send him down to set up a grid of sensors to study their gravitational anomaly.
“Sure you have enough of those?” Sara asked as he set the machines down by the door to the lightbeam translator. Descriptive had already filled half the cargo bay of the shuttle with equipment.
He sighed heavily. “Everyone in the department wants to measure something different. It’s going to take me a week to set it all up.”
Sara, by contrast, was traveling light: a headnet and recorder, a change of clothes, and equipment for camping in primitive surroundings. She wore plain, durable coveralls with many pockets.
The scientists were assembled in the corridor and waiting for the go-ahead when Mr. Gibb, the publicist, showed up in a state-of-the-art headset helmet with the controls clipped to his belt. He was already recording his experiences, and gave a low narration as he drew near. “The exploring party is all here, waiting to step into the unknown. What is on their minds? Let’s see.” He surveyed them, then zeroed in on Thora Lassiter. “Emissary Lassiter,” he said, fixing her with the glassy gaze that came over people who were recording their perceptions. It was as if they felt transformed into machinery, and had no more social graces than a camera. “How does it make you feel to be going into danger again?”
“Oh, piss off, Gibb,” Sara intervened. “That is so tasteless.”
Defensively, he said, “But people are interested in the personal stuff.” He had curly brown hair and an eager, puppy-dog face. Disliking him seemed a little like wanting to pull the arms off a stuffed bear. Sara was ashamed at how easy it was.
“Well, pester someone else,” she said.
“But Emissary Lassiter”—he turned to her with a winning smile—“you’re the perfect focus for this piece. You’ve got name recognition back home, a dramatic past, and my god you look like some sort of Hindu goddess…”
In a booming voice, Touli said, “Stop emitting pheromones, there.”
“Oh, for pete’s sake,” Gibb grumbled, and went off to document his own reactions.
When the all-clear came, the anticipation was quiet but electric. The three security guards went through first. When Sara’s turn came, it all seemed oddly routine. She lay down on the slab, as she had a thousand times before, and the next moment she was on a new planet.
The shuttle was hot and crowded inside because the guards weren’t letting anyone out till the whole group was assembled. Atlabatlow was there, having decided to command the security detail himself. His face was intent as a cat’s, quiet but poised to spring.
When everyone had arrived, Atlabatlow turned to the air lock. It held only two at a time, and he motioned one of his guards to come with him, leaving another posted to make sure no one else exited without permission. The scientists waited in various stages of impatience, irritation, and boredom till the guards had had time to circle the craft and verify its safety. The lapel radio of the inside guard sputtered with some coded message, and he opened the inner door. “Two at a time,” he said.
Sara had somehow ended up at the front of the line, along with Touli, so they were the first pair through. The outside air rushed in with a tangy, sour smell, and Sara sneezed. Touli wrinkled his nose. “This place stinks,” he said fastidiously.
“Get used to it,” Sara said. She was feeling elated and eager. A whole new world was before them, a story just beginning.
The landscape outside was blindingly bright. Squinting and fumbling for her sunshades, Sara saw that the shuttle had landed on a level plain of grasslike plants, their blades reflective as polished metal. In contrast to the land, the sky above seemed dark. It did no good to shade her eyes with her hand, because the brilliance was all from below. A warm breeze gusted across the prairie toward them, making the grass bend and dance till she had to close her dazzled eyes. Even the sound it made was strange—a harmonic whistling rather than the normal rustle.
The shuttle steps were already lowered, so Sara and Touli descended onto the soil of Iris. Sara knelt to look at the grass—the first human scientist, she thought with a thrill, to see a non-Terran life-form. The stalks grew almost knee-high, the ground underneath covered by a mossy green mat that looked and smelled distinctly Terran. Sara took a broad blade of grass in her hand. The top of it was like polished chrome, but the underside was rough and dull. As she ran it across her finger, a bright slit of blood appeared on her thumb. The blade edge was sharp as a razor. She put her thumb in her mouth and reached into one of her pockets for a bandage.
Atlabatlow appeared from around the end of the shuttle, where he had been scanning the horizon for threats. The legs of his pants were shredded from the knee down, his shiny black boots showing through. “This is wicked grass,” Sara said.
“Yes,” he agreed. “We need to use caution.” He sat on the steps to tuck the remains of his pants into his boots.
The second pair of explorers came through the air lock, and Sara called to them, “Tell everyone to bring sun goggles. And tuck your pants into your boots; the grass out here is like knives.”
For the next hour the scientists laughed and joked like children as they took samples and recordings, any differences forgotten in the sheer wonder of it all. Mr. Gibb wandered around, recording scenes of excitement and delight.
It took them only minutes to solve one mystery, that of the oxygen-rich atmosphere. “It has been terraformed,” said Hua Ming, the ecologist from System Sciences, holding up a leaf that was unmistakably clover. “There are two systems of life here—one Terran and one alien—coexisting and independent. Somehow, the Terran life-forms must have taken an ecological niche that the native biota could adapt to. Oh, this is going to be fun to model.”
And yet, Iris quickly proved that she could not be taken at face value. They found that the grass was thick with tubrous plants whose only aboveground manifestation was a three-inch spike as strong as metal, and pointing straight up. It was only by sheer luck that no one had impaled a foot on one of them, for they
were easily able to pierce a boot sole. After this discovery, no one needed any reminder to be cautious.
Sara had noticed a slight ticking sound near the shuttle, but thought nothing of it till one of the guards gave a curse of pain and plucked something out of his neck. They all gathered round to look. It was an insect of sorts—a silver body shaped like a straight pin sharpened on both ends, with netlike wings. It had embedded itself a quarter inch deep in the man’s skin. Ming put it in a sample box. Now that they knew what to look for, it was easy to see a cloud of them high in the air around the shuttle, glinting in the sun.
“They don’t seem drawn by us,” Touli observed. “It’s the ship they’re interested in. Our body chemistry must not appeal to them.”
“Lucky for us,” Sara said.
“Keep your goggles on,” Atlabatlow warned. “Even if they’re not after us, they can obviously hit us.”
All this time Sara had been keeping an eye on Thora Lassiter, who had the look of a sleepwalker in paradise. Twice she had wandered away into the grass, and Atlabatlow had intercepted her, like a herding dog jittery to be out of control. Now Sara spotted her wandering away again, and set out to corral her.
When Sara came up, Thora was standing still as an ivory figurine of a woman, gazing out into the prairie, her dark goggles pushed up on her forehead.
“How can you stand to look at it?” Sara said.
Thora slid her goggles down guiltily, as if caught doing something forbidden. “It’s the light,” she said. “I could bathe in it all day.”
“You’re giving Security fits, you know.”
Thora glanced over her shoulder to where Atlabatlow was standing, watching them. Her expression was complicated, and Sara felt sure there was some insight into the woman’s past hidden here. In a low voice Sara asked, “Does he bother you?”
“No more than … I just…” Her voice trailed off. Then she shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Here we are on a new planet—none of us has any past here. We can all start over from scratch.”
If only that were true, Sara thought. We packed our past in our baggage. We always do.
It was getting close to noon, and the sealike brilliance all around was becoming wearing, but no one wanted to gather in the shadow of the shuttle for fear of the pinflies. So when Touli rumbled something about scouting the anomaly island, everyone wanted to go.
The shuttle had landed as close to the odd gravitational feature as the pilots had dared, but it was still a mile or two away. Touli aligned the map on the screen of his navigational slate to the topography around them, and pointed west. Sara squinted into the distance. On the horizon was something irregular that would have looked like a low hill, if it had not been brighter than the surrounding plain.
They returned to the shuttle to rest their eyes and prepare for the short journey. By consensus they decided to help Touli by bringing along some of the more portable of the sensing devices he would have to set up.
“You all have locator beacons on your belts,” Atlabatlow instructed them. “Please set them to transmit. If you get separated, we will be able to locate you. Please do not proceed ahead of the security personnel.”
They set out in single file across the prairie, Atlabatlow first, parting the grass carefully with a walking stick to locate spikeplants and a kind of low ground cactus with metallic needles that they had also discovered in the grass. There was little conversation except for the occasional warning or exclamation when a pinfly pierced someone’s coveralls. Behind her, Sara could hear Mr. Gibb narrating notes to himself. “The explorers are setting out to penetrate a virgin planet and lay her secrets bare. Iris, veiled in mystery, and so on and so forth.”
It was slow going. Their eyes were, necessarily, on the ground ahead, and so they heard the anomaly shortly before seeing it.
Over the whistling of the wind on the grass, there was a faint, musical undertone, not unlike wind chimes. By now the boundary of the area was plain to see ahead, and they came to a halt, perplexed.
Sara could make not the slightest sense of what she was looking at. One moment it looked like a vertical lake surface; the next, like a mass of angular fissures, cracks in the day. For a moment she felt she was looking down, over the edge of a precipice, and put a foot forward to break her fall, only to find that the ground was still horizontal, though she was swaying, disoriented.
“What the hell?” she breathed.
Thora, beside her, was gazing in entranced fascination. “It’s something our senses are not evolved to perceive,” she said.
Surprisingly, it was Mr. Gibb who figured it out. “Oh, I get it,” he said suddenly. “It’s a forest.”
“What?” Sara could see no organic shape at all in it—at least, not as humans defined organic.
“The leaves are all the little reflections,” he explained. “The trunks are the vertical surfaces, like faceted mirrors. Some of them have these reflective fronds and streamers instead of leaves. That’s why it’s so hard to see the trunks.”
With a mental effort, Sara could begin to see what he meant. It was like looking at a visual paradox, and making herself see the two faces instead of the vase.
“That is very clever,” Thora said softly, “and very wrong.”
Wrong or not, the shimmering wall of reflections now resolved into a kind of cubist origami scene that at least made a sort of weird sense. The music was coming from inside.
“Chime trees,” Sri Paul said. He had his pocket recorder in hand, and now set it to play a Chorister campania. When the first chord of the bell concerto rang out, it was instantly echoed back from the forest. An arpeggio followed, mimicked a split second later in liquid chimes. Paul paused the recording, and the forest music returned to the more complex harmonies of its previous state. “Record it and play it back,” Ming suggested. Paul did, and the music from the trees jangled joyfully in reply.
“You must be setting off some sort of sympathetic vibration,” Touli said.
“Mirror images,” Thora mused, almost to herself.
Cautiously, they approached the edge of the forest. Close up, Sara had to make yet another mental effort to see the trees. Their bases looked like clumps of transparent crystal, rock sugar on a stick. Around them hung the “leaves”—long, dangling prism-shaped things, transparent as glass, that rang as they struck each other when stirred by the wind.
The chime-leaves formed a thick curtain at the forest edge, reaching almost to the ground. They cast rainbow shadows as they shifted and turned. A spectrum chased across Atlabatlow’s intent face as he reached out with his cane to touch one of the largest leaves, nearly as tall as he. But instead of making contact with the surface, his cane passed through the leaf, and the end emerged on the other side, at a sixty-degree angle from the way it had gone in. Slowly he drew it out, and they gathered around to inspect it. It looked perfectly whole, unaffected.
“It’s got to be some sort of optical illusion,” Touli said. Then, before anyone could react, he stepped forward and reached out to touch the leaf himself. His hand passed through the mirrorlike surface and protruded on the other side, twisted backward at an impossible, broken angle. It looked so horrible that several people gasped. But he withdrew his arm whole, looking at it curiously and wiggling his fingers.
“Please be more cautious in future,” Atlabatlow said gravely. “We do not have a doctor with us.”
“What did it feel like?” Thora asked intently.
“Like passing through a surface, like water,” Touli rumbled thoughtfully. “I don’t think it is an optical illusion after all.”
The chime-leaf had rotated in the wind, and Atlabatlow now reached out with his cane to spin it back. The instant it contacted the leaf edge the stick fell apart in two pieces, cut as cleanly as with a silent buzz saw.
Everyone looked at Touli, glad he had not tried that experiment.
“I think this would be a good place to set up some monitors,” Touli said.
The party sp
ent most of the next hour assembling a solar power array, aiming the satellite dish to send data direct to the ship, and plugging everything in. While the others worked, Thora and Sara strolled northward along the forest edge as far as they could while staying in sight of the base camp. They found that the boundary was uneven, and in places the grassland penetrated quite far into the forest in chains of clearings connected by alleys of grass. Sara was just glancing back to see if they could get away with exploring one when their radios both sputtered to life with a request from Atlabatlow to return to the base camp.
When they reported what they had found, Touli wanted to take some monitors to set up as far within the forest as they could safely reach, while the others wanted to stay and pursue their own studies. So Touli, Thora, Sara, and Atlabatlow each slung some equipment on their backs and set out, promising to return within the hour. As they skirted the edge of the forest, Touli tried to map its irregular contours. He kept shaking and tapping his navigational slate, and finally asked to borrow Sara’s. “Mine keeps freezing,” he said.
Soon they came to one of the inlets where the prairie penetrated the woods, and followed it inward. Once they were surrounded by trees, the sound changed timbre, and deep gonging vibrations kept the air alive all around them. Beyond the edge growth, the chime-leaves became larger, like huge dangling doorways. The explorers followed a twisting path of grass that split and re-formed in S-curves, like a braided waterway, deep into the forest.
Touli, who had been trying to keep track of their position, finally shook his head and gave back Sara’s nav slate. “Now this one has stopped working,” he said. “There must be some sort of interference.”
Hearing this, Atlabatlow immediately tried his radio link with the guard they had left at base camp. When he spoke, his own greeting came from the speaker, transmitted back to him in overlapping waves. “A radio echo,” Touli observed. “That’s different.”
“We had better set up the equipment and withdraw,” Atlabatlow said. “We are cut off from base.”
Dark Orbit Page 6
