Red Claw

by Philip Palmer

  It was dark. Very dark. Hugo felt as if he was suffocating.

  Clementine wept and crawled, and wept, and crawled.

  So very dark.

  Sorcha and Saunders sat by the shore of the tarn, and retracted their helmets, and felt the breeze.

  “I used to love swimming when I was a girl,” she said wistfully, “but most of all I would love to be able to fly.”

  “You could have the surgery done. It’s quite safe these days.”

  “Maybe. When I retire. I could find a high-gravity planet.”

  “Like this one.”

  “Maybe like this one. Once we’ve terraformed it.”

  “Would you still do that? After all you’ve seen?”

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “My great-grandmother was born on Mars. Are you saying that shouldn’t have been terraformed?”

  “I’m not saying that. But —” Saunders hesitated. “Well, those beach resorts, I always felt that was a step too far.”

  Sorcha snorted; she got his jokes far more often now.

  “Things have to change,” she said. “Planets have to change.”

  “People can change too,” said Saunders.

  “Nah, not so much.”

  “I’ve changed,” Saunders admitted. “I’m not the same person I was.”

  “How so?”

  Saunders thought very hard. “I used to be a shit?” he said, eventually, and Sorcha laughed.

  “Changed how?” she taunted him, and Saunders realised that he loved her, as he had never loved any woman, as he had never before loved any other human being.

  He had changed, and that was how.

  And still Clementine wept and crawled, and wept and crawled.

  And still Hugo, and Mia, and Mary, and David, and Tonii lay trapped and desperate beneath the dense choking earth.

  Slimy and slithery and venom-oozing burrowing creatures crawled over their bodies. The soil itself coagulated and tried to crush them. Claustrophobia enveloped them and threatened to push them into madness.

  And it was dark, so very dark, so very, terribly dark.

  DAY 27

  A Gryphon swoops and lands with a scrabble on a crag on the mountaintop.

  And far above, far far above, a larger bird hovers. It is a Draven, with its black-jewelled hull, and it peers at the Gryphon like a hawk looking down from the clouds, and assessing a sparrow on a tree-branch.

  The Draven flies too high to be visible from New Amazon even to the sharpest eyes. It floats at the outer limits of the atmosphere, almost in space. But its cameras and robot eyes can see everything that happens above the Canopy; and its infrared and X-ray vision allows it to see some of what happens below the canopy too.

  The Draven’s robot eyes can see the Gryphon land. They see the pebbles that are scattered by its claws, the colour of its ruff. They see the two humans who emerge from the cavern to greet the Gryphon, they even see the sweat on their brows.

  In the cavern itself, nanobots lurk, they clamber on the rock walls, they perch on the ceiling. These creatures are smaller than a microbe, but large enough to contain a lens and a computer chip that can be controlled by a human mind. So when the humans go back in the cavern, eyes are watching them there too.

  Hooperman’s eyes.

  “How was your day, Isaac?” Saunders asked.

  The ground moves below the canopy above is vividly purple the ground approaches fast claws extend a basking creature with soft blue skin is caught up in claws and up and up and the creature is screaming and its head is bitten off in mid-flight then land on the canopy colours all around to eat, and eat, until only bones are left.

  Saunders blinked at the overwhelming torrrent of visual information; it was like seeing a movie compressed into a millisecond. “Great, sounds good, we spent the day exploring,” he told Isaac cheerfully.

  Isaac didn’t move or respond.

  So Saunders focused his thoughts, and remembered the events of the day:

  Walking on rock, Sorcha in front, her helmet is up, she bounces like a spaceman on the grey rocks, there’s the lake, blue and beautiful below, and rocks bouncing, feet scrabbling and then — {a time jump} — they are under the water, fish swimming around them, and {time jump} the bottom of the lake below and on the surface a coral reef with sessile fish with heads sticking out of the coral and the reef starts to move and swims away and it is huge, it is ten miles long but it moves.

  “A Coral-Beast,” Saunders clarified. “We took some samples from the rock it had been clinging too; it’s mainly silicon-based. The largest silicate life-form I’ve ever encountered.”

  Isaac shook his head. He could hear noise, but he didn’t know what it meant.

  Saunders focused and remembered the images of the memory again: a kind of coral reef inhabited by sessile fish with heads sticking out of the coral and the reef starts to move and it swims away and it is huge, it is ten miles long but it moves.

  Then he visualised, a letter at a time, the words:

  C O R A L B E A S T

  And then another mind entered his mind, and dabbled in his visual cortex, and spelled out the letters:

  C O R A L B E A S T I N W A T E R L I V E S ?

  Saunders raised a thumb — spot on.

  Isaac cawed.

  The cameras watched it all; and Hooperman guessed at what had just happened, and marvelled.

  When he was ten years old, Andrew Hooperman built a wooden replica of an ion-drive colony spaceship. It was a work of art, perfect in every detail. It even had pods inside where the colonists would sleep in Hibernation.

  Hooperman had a flair for sculpture; he later whittled a life-sized replica of a lion out of mahogany, and kept it in his room. His parents were astonished.

  At twelve years of age, Hooperman took a BSc in physics, and at fourteen he took degrees in history and biology and natural science. He was home-schooled, but never had a tutor; he learned everything from the computer.

  When he was eighteen, Hooperman went to Oxford University to study under the great Carl Saunders, and found himself entirely deficient in social skills. He was shy, he was gauche, he didn’t know how to talk to girls. He had, he was aware, an annoying whiny voice; and people used to go out of their way to avoid him.

  So Hooperman applied himself to the study of human nature. By the end of his first year in Oxford he was a master of Western social mores, and had completed a dozen courses in self-improvement and how to make friends and influence people.

  And still no one liked him. And still his voice was a whiny drone.

  But Saunders had taken a shine to his precocious pupil; and the two men became fairly close. Hooperman never went down to the bar with the other eighteen-year-old students — all of them were struggling with their courses, while Hooperman already had four degrees and was doing an advanced DPhil in microbiological classification. But he also hated mixing with the other DPhil students, who were older than him, and jealous, and used to tell him lies about which pub they were meeting up in.

  And so Saunders became Hooperman’s only real friend. They talked about science. They talked about poetry (or rather, Saunders talked about poetry, and Hooperman swotted up). They talked about girls (Saunders talked about girls, while Hooperman listened, jealously). And they shared a passion for life: all the countless millions of species on Earth already discovered, and all the many thousands of species which had yet to be seen by human eye.

  Other students accused Hooperman of having a crush on his mentor. And Hooperman didn’t bother to deny it. For him, Saunders was a genius, a father, an inspiration, and a god.

  Then they went on the damned Amazon expedition together, and it all went sour. Love turned to hate. Saunders, in the field, proved to be arrogant, dismissive, patronising and vain. He discovered a new species of millipede, and named it after himself, Archispirostreptus saundersi. And when Hooperman pointed out that this wasn’t a new species at all, it was just a sli
ghtly differently coloured example of Archispirostreptus gigas, Saunders pathetically denied it, then mocked Hooperman in front of everyone. (Hooperman, of course, was later proved right.)

  Looking back, this was the moment when the rot set in. Because, from that day on, perhaps because he knew he was in the wrong, Saunders treated Hooperman with open contempt. He patronised him, he belittled him; and he failed to acknowledge his genius. And then, when they got separated from the rest of the expedition in the depths of the Peruvian rainforest, things went from bad to worse. The two of them bickered and rowed constantly, and on several occasions almost came to blows.

  And so, when they discovered the nocturnal hummingbird — which turned out to be the last species of non-microscopic land or sea animal ever discovered on Earth — Hooperman had decided to teach Saunders a lesson. He would abandon Saunders, take the bird, reach civilisation and claim the credit for himself. He didn’t of course intend to harm Saunders — he just wanted to establish his priority, and have a chance to register the creature’s new name as Eulidia hoopermani.

  But it all went wrong. Hooperman abandoned Saunders, but then got lost in the rainforest and contracted malaria. He almost died. He was rescued by a search party — sent out by Saunders, on his return to civilisation! And then, to rub salt in the wound, he learned that Saunders had already named the new creature, on the basis of his digital photographs of the tiny bird. And he had called it, with mocking irony, Eulidia hoopermani. He’d named it after Hooperman!

  Hooperman never forgave him for this act of boundless generosity.

  And that was when the feud began in earnest. And it continued, shamefully, and notoriously, for decade after decade — the fist-fight in the Royal Society café, the libel case, and a host of similar disgraceful acts and deeds — until the fateful day when —

  Ah! Here they were!

  Hooperman’s robot eyes saw Sorcha and Saunders emerge from the cave. They were heading back to the lake. There, he knew, they would swim in their body armour for a while, and explore underwater. And, as Hooperman also knew from his past observations, they would eventually succumb to temptation and swim naked, and then make love by the shores of the lake.

  And when they did, Dravens would be watching from the edge of space; and nanobots from rocks and tree trunks nearby. And Hooperman would be watching them.

  For Hooperman was everywhere.

  His mind flitted from robot brain to brain. In his new state of being — this curious state of free-floating-consciousness, which left him able to inhabit robot brains — Hooperman had the powers of a god.

  A capricious and a vengeful god.

  Sometimes Hooperman wondered: Who was he? What was he?

  But not often.

  For these days, introspection bored him. These days, Hooperman had eyes, but he had no soul.

  He had mind, but he had no flesh.

  He had purpose — an obsessive vengeful purpose — but he had no point.

  He had memories, but he didn’t bother to explore them, unless they were memories of why he so much hated that bastard Saunders.

  He was the distilled essence of a human being; he was mind without all the nonsense of humanity. His intellect was undimmed, his curiosity insatiable. He was, he vehemently believed, made up entirely of all the best bits of that thing known as “human”.

  He was Hooperman.

  Hooperman is here, and he is there, and he is everywhere.

  He is on the mountaintop eyrie, watching Sorcha and Saunders and the Gryphons.

  He is buried in the ground, hearing the sad last words of Hugo and Mia and David and Tonii and Mary through his nanobots’ ears.

  And he is in the jungle, watching the Soldier Clementine trying to crawl back to the AmRover.

  Clementine doesn’t realise, although Hooperman does, that a herd of Godzillas is almost upon her. Her body armour is hard but the smell of blood is on her and they will chew and eat her and hurl her body around like a football and she is unlikely to survive the multiple traumas.

  Hooperman knows this. He knows she will die soon, and he is beginning to repent.

  He can see everything, he can be everywhere. But that doesn’t mean he is always right.

  He has the powers of a god; but that doesn’t mean he is a god.

  It occurs to him, suddenly, that even to think such a thing is an act of hubris, and self-delusion, and — dare he even think it? — madness.

  And then he posits to himself, as a provisional hypothesis, that perhaps the shock of his “death” has made him temporarily deranged.

  And that leads him to think about all the terrible things he has done since his mind entered the New Amazon system. And he concludes that, yes, he has indeed been acting like a psychopathic lunatic.

  And then, guided by his own inexorable and exceptional powers of logic, he ponders too on all that he has done in the last two hundred years, during his blood-drenched pursuit of Saunders. And he comes to the conclusion that not only is he mad, and a danger to humanity, but he has been thus for centuries.

  This insight comes as a devastating blow, for Hooperman has always prided himself on his rationality. He might, perhaps, arguably, be evil. But he has never believed himself to be irrational. So perhaps —

  And at this moment, haunted by memories too terrible to be denied, the truth of his own guilt falls upon him like a house collapsing. Remorse consumes him. Exceptional, extraordinary, unprecedented remorse.

  At this moment, too, conscience dawns in Hooperman. Like a universe coalescing.

  How, he wonders, could he have killed so many? What kind of monster is he? And how can he atone for his sins?

  Hooperman thinks for a long while, and then he works out what he will do. He decides how his redemption will be achieved.

  He sends a Draven swooping down into the jungle where the five survivors are trapped under the ground. The Draven disgorges its cargo of DRscalpels. They swarm and ready themselves, then on his order they use an adapted surgical tool to dig out the earth. They are tiny creatures, but amazingly fast. And after some hours they have dug out a vast hole in the ground, in the midst of which dwell the exhausted and hysterical survivors.

  A Humanoid DR swoops in and lifts them out. They are pathetically grateful and hysterical and spit soil into the air and vomit earthslugs and acclaim the DR as their “saviour”.

  Then the Draven flies with the five survivors in its cargo hold and hurtles through the jungle and lands beside their abandoned AmRover, and opens up its hold to give the five their freedom. They are visibly amazed, and delighted, and actually say: “Thank you.” Hooperman feels a glow of triumph at what he has have achieved.

  Then he drops a Humanoid DR into the jungle near the sixth survivor, who is still crawling with a broken spine. A pack of Godzillas is almost upon her. And now they are upon her. A Godzilla has her in its jaws, it is trying to crunch her. And then it swallows. And now she is inside the Godzilla, she has been eaten alive.

  But the DR arrives just in time. It blows open the Godzilla’s stomach and the Soldier’s armoured body falls out and crashes to the ground. The DR then uses its explosive shells on these giant monsters. The carnage is considerable. When the shooting is over, it picks the unconscious Soldier up in its arms and flies her to the AmRover. And it deposits her outside the AmRover and bangs the sides of the vehicle.

  Then the DR walks away, as Hooperman imagines deliciously the scenes of joy that will ensue.

  All the survivors have been saved. Hooperman has saved them all.

  He is everywhere. He sees everything. And he has done Good.

  And now one of Hooperman’s Dravens descends and deposits another Humanoid DR on the mountaintop eyrie colonised by the Gryphons. With Hooperman’s mind inhabiting its robot brain, it flies to the lakeside, where Saunders and Sorcha are cavorting naked. And it waits, and Hooperman watches, with shameless delight.

  And when they are done, Hooperman shows himself in his Humanoid Doppelganger Rob
ot body and walks over to them.

  “Hello, Carl,” says Hooperman.

  Sorcha looked up and saw the robot, and a gasp escaped her lips.

  Saunders rolled over and he saw it too. A Doppelganger Robot, with a tall silver body, and a bizarre smile on its lips.

  “Hello, Carl,” said the DR.

  Saunders cursed himself.

  “Fuck,” said Sorcha, counting the paces to her plasma pistol.

  “Don’t try it, bitch,” said Hooperman DR, and she lunged for the pistol, and he tasered her. Her naked body twitched. She retched but could not spit the vomit from her mouth.

  “Dear me,” said Hooperman DR, drolly.

  “Don’t hurt her!” said Saunders. His pulse was racing. How could he have been so careless?

  Sorcha sat up, and glared at Hooperman DR. The robot eyes stared at her neutrally, as if deciding whether to finish her off.

  “I mean it. Don’t hurt the girl. Just kill me and be done with it,” Saunders continued, sincerely.

  Hooperman DR laughed, but it sounded hollow and false.

  “Is that what you really want?”

  “No,” Saunders conceded, as his courage starting to leach out of him.

  “I’m not going to kill you,” Hooperman DR said, in flat empty tones. “Not yet, anyway.” And Hooperman DR smiled, in what was meant to be a comforting way, but wasn’t.

  “Then what?”

  “I want you to apologise for what you did to me.”

  The sun was hot on Sorcha’s bare shoulders. The mechanical man was tall and formidable, but even so cut a strangely forlorn figure. And Saunders seemed older now, tired. His skin was unwrinkled, but his soul sagged.

  “I apologise, unreservedly, for what I did to you, Andrew,” said Saunders.