The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “You should have been there when we landed! Paralyzed by the cloud of tugs hooked to her circumference, she deployed her corolla of multicolored filaments and whipped the air, trying to trap the metal birds that flew within reach. She was magnificent and dangerous, a real carnivorous flower. No one could have forced her to obey if I’d dropped the reins.

  “Of course, those who supervised the project had taken their precautions. Paranamanco was the first animalcity that we’d moored and, to date, she’s still the only one; the others are parked between the asteroids, waiting for the authorities to reach a decision. The idea of using a life-form like this as an inhabitable zone on the surface of a colonized world is interesting, but it’s not to everyone’s liking. Many colonists would prefer us to build them something more conventional. Some categorically refuse to settle in a dwelling whose walls are made of living organic tissue.

  “We all make the mistake of judging the animalcities by their appearance. A city is just a city, the imbeciles say, nothing surprising about that. That’s stupid, even dangerous. These creatures have nothing other than the most superficial points in common with the human species. Their architecture, their existence depends on rules beyond our knowledge, even though it does appear easy to apply our own rules to them. We can use them, but we can never understand them. Take heed: this is important!

  “Everyone was walking on eggs at that time. The head honchos came here to supervise the operations and prevent any possible problems from causing too many waves.

  “Finally they gave the explorers the go-ahead. That’s when the problems started….”

  With a sigh, I pour him another drink. I’ve learned to recognize those points when stories wind down if they’re not fuelled—with alcohol, compliments, or, occasionally, forgiveness. It all depends on the storyteller. The old man wasn’t looking for absolution; he just wanted to drink.

  “I went there too,” I said.

  He gazed at his glass in the light of a mood lamp and noisily drained a good half of it.

  “I wasn’t looking to make my fortune. Capturing Paranamanco had already made me rich and, in any case, I’d never believed those tales of treasure buried in the animalcities’ entrails. No, I was bored. Setting out to hunt in deep space didn’t thrill me anymore. Any prey would have appeared minuscule to me after that catch.

  “I’d started drinking, seriously drinking if you know what I mean. I set out on a whim one morning. I think that I was even getting tired of the alcohol and I was afraid of what would come next.

  “I chose to explore the eighteenth sector, starting out from the base camp established in the heart of the city. The instructions provided for a spiral exploration of the neighboring streets, followed by satellite reconnaissance of the outlying neighborhoods. At that rate, it would have taken ten years to map the main arteries. Paranamanco wouldn’t have been inhabitable for a century.

  “It’s impossible to realize just how vast she is if you haven’t tried to cross her alone. She’s brimming with optical illusions, fake terraces, and underground arteries. The guide satellites are no use at all. Animalcity skin is impervious to radio waves; even the remote-controlled units get lost. To bring her back to more human proportions, she had to be marked out with beacons filled with signs, and pointers; the chaos of her alleys had to be corrected, the still wild neighborhoods had to be domesticated.

  “So, I set out to identify the most direct route possible to the edge of the city. If everyone else had done the same, we could have completed the map in two years and taken charge of the terrain.

  “It’s a game, you see. Draw a map and you control the territory. The more accurate your map is, the more efficient your control is.

  “Do you know how a new world is opened up for colonization? There are the mechanical caterpillars that lay kilometers and kilometers of fiber-optic cables in a few hours. Release thousands of those machines on the surface of any planet and they lay out a grid of high-capacity lines and communication nodes, while sterilising the surface. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, you can rest assured that, after they’ve finished their job, there isn’t a single nook or cranny that hasn’t been explored. There’s always a telephone booth on the horizon. At any given time, you’re a thirty-minute shuttle ride from civilization.

  “I took one of those caterpillars with me….

  “I don’t know why, but those caterpillars had no success with Paranamanco. They would either get lost or go completely crazy. They built closed lines that held them prisoner or wove electrified webs in which they hid, waiting for their prey. Apparently, some have even been found enveloped in a veritable cocoon, a prelude to an impossible metamorphosis. I’m only repeating what I’ve heard, but you know as well as I do that where there’s smoke there’s usually a fire.

  “So, I headed off in the direction of the periphery with that caterpillar purring as it laid its wire. My belongings sat at the peak of its central ring, firmly moored to magnetic clamps. I walked ahead, hands in my pockets, as carefree as a Stanley who didn’t give a rat’s ass about Livingstone, while she crawled along behind me.

  “About every ten kilometers, she’d stop to lay a new communication node, wrapped in placental tissue. It’s a curious sight, but you get tired of it quickly. After a day, I stopped paying attention. Besides, people say you shouldn’t get too close to those machines at such times. Now and then, their maternal love makes them dangerous. I made the most of these stops to stroll about the narrow alleys in the vicinity or I’d drink a glass to Paranamanco’s health. My supplies were supposed to last two months. That’s the main reason I’d brought the caterpillar along. With all the bottles, my luggage was too heavy for my old shoulders.

  “After two days, we were navigating by sight between the constructions erected like pustules on the city’s bituminous skin. Most were empty and naked, with a faint smell of dried sweat. Others, encumbered by cartilage partitions or blood red drapes, would have driven an interior decorator mad. I didn’t have time to visit them all, so I settled for glancing inside the closest ones, so I could map those I considered inhabitable.

  “The road we were following sloped down gently before branching out into narrower and narrower catwalks that led to the peaks of the buildings. Often, a building would be superimposed over the main artery and we’d move ahead into a dark tunnel, out of the range of the observation satellites. In such cases, our progress would be jerkier, the caterpillar’s headlights hesitantly sweeping away the dark. I’d keep my hand on its head ring, to reassure it.

  “The farther we proceeded into the invisible levels of the city, the more uncontrollable my caterpillar’s reactions became. Her dilated sphincters released bunches of embryonic booths, most irreversibly deformed, exuding machine oil. I’d kick their protective envelope into bits, to alleviate their agony and prevent the development of interference in the communication network. When we got back to the surface, the caterpillar returned to normal. I stopped in a clearing so she could recharge her solar batteries.

  “It was during one of these breaks that I realized we were no longer alone.

  “Our trail was easy to follow; all they had to do was keep sight of the wires. Yet, I’d never have thought that someone would have bothered to tail us, the machine and me. We weren’t carrying anything valuable, apart from my booze, and I’d have willingly shared a bottle. And don’t for a minute think that we were surrounded by unknown creatures drawn from the depths of the city. Our trackers were human and they weren’t making much of an effort to hide.

  “I could have set a trap for them, ambushed them in any alleyway. They’d had a dozen opportunities to do the same earlier, so…I stopped the caterpillar and waited for them, a bottle of alcohol in my hand. I know the rules.

  “They, on the other hand, didn’t. They took so long to show their faces that I was three-quarters drunk by the time they arrived. I no longer clearly remember what they told me that evening; the next morning, all my bottles were broken and my s
kull was buzzing. Luckily, the girl made good coffee.

  “There were two of them. A guy and a girl. About your age. I had him pegged right off: taciturn, with the long, slender fingers of a pianist. She was something completely different. A china doll, skin and bones, the type who has never turned anyone away and has decided that it’s time for things to change. Apart from that, she was as silent as he was.

  “After a few cups of java, I felt up to chewing them out for the loss of my bottles prior to hearing their side of this. They let me shout out my drunkenness before speaking with me. Good idea! I was too angry to do anything but vent my spleen. Plus, yelling almost drowned out the buzzing in my skull.

  “They had a map to show me. Not a buried-treasure map, that wasn’t their style, or one of those esoteric diagrams that the so-called Paranamanco fortune-tellers specialize in. They’re supposed to be able to read your future in the topographical maps of the city, you know, and show the future colonists the best places to settle. If necessary, they find the settlers a neighborhood where the layout of the streets corresponds to the lines on their hands. Utter stupidity.

  “My two followers were a different sort of bright spark than I’d possibly come across before. They both worked in the department that tracked the data transmitted by the orbital satellites. The computer had highlighted anomalies in the aerial photos taken of Paranamanco, inconsistencies in the routes taken by certain streets, the type of detail that neither you nor I would have noticed but which the machines regularly set their sights on. They’d each been looking on their own for months, without joining forces, then they decided to pool their observations. They found the solution almost immediately.

  “A fragment on the map of the city was repeated identically forty-four times. A single fragment, but because of this duplicated element, the computer crashed every time it tried to reconstitute the Paranamanco jigsaw. Discouraged, the girl had drawn a map indicating the locations of the famous fragment.

  “Once the coffee had its effect, they rolled their map out to show me. Forty-four spots were spread over the disk of the city, with no apparent symmetry or regularity. Yet, their pattern looked familiar to me. I got out my own map, the one showing the animal’s nerve centers, which I’d drawn during my deep space exploration. Mine was cruder, but there was nothing haphazard about the resemblance. Strangely, mine was offset one hundred and ninety degrees from theirs; a semicircle, as if the two phenomena were of equal importance, but opposite in meaning.

  “The route taken by the caterpillar was heading straight towards the closest spot, which is why they had decided to follow me. I believe they suspected my intentions were the same as theirs. As the first one to explore the creature, I was supposed to know more about her than anyone else. They thought I already had an inkling as to what the identical sectors hid, that the government had some secret goal when it had Paranamanco land and that it was exploring her through me. I didn’t disabuse them. They wouldn’t have believed me anyway.

  “When we set out again, the caterpillar was carrying three packs instead of one, which didn’t seem to affect her all that much, and I had an audience to whom I could recount my memories of deep space. They knew how to listen, that much I can say for them, a bit like you, but then you’re paid to listen so it doesn’t count. The guy, Geoff, never said more than a few words at a time, and settled for moving ahead at his own pace. From time to time, he’d look back to see if the girl was still following. I’ve forgotten her name, but it will certainly come back as I talk.

  “We were a good day’s walk from the interesting zone, which gave us time to review a fair number of hypotheses and invent a few new ones. The most curious thing was that, seen from the satellite, there was nothing particular about the duplicated fragment: three or four streets, completely ordinary outgrowths for buildings. Same old, same old. I could have walked through them without noticing a thing. Geoff thought it was some sort of visual illusion and that we should expect something else, underground tunnels maybe, or vast rooms filled with strange machinery. He fixated on that idea: the animalcities were once used as spacecraft by a humanoid race and had outlived their creators. This made for a good story, completely valid, when you have twelve hours of walk ahead of you and nothing else to do than survey the streets and christen them as you see fit.

  “In any case, no one knew anything at all about the animalcities at the time, and we’ve learned precious little since. The colonization of Paranamanco was interrupted and it won’t start up again any time soon. As for the rest of the herd, it’s wandering carefree about the asteroids. If we knew how to kill a wild city, our problems would be resolved for the most part, but I doubt we’ll ever reach that point. I’m starting to think that the entire operation is plain old stupidity, but no one’s asked me for my opinion in a long time.

  “So, there we were, walking ahead of the caterpillar, because of the exhaust fumes, without even taking the time to visit the structures that surrounded us. We had the entire city to ourselves and the only thing that interested us was a block of three streets, which didn’t even have the excuse of being unique. At the time, that didn’t strike us. The idea only came to me on our way back.

  “Imagine: today, there are almost one million colonists on Paranamanco, there’s noise, electricity, eleven official religions, an entire microcosm of the human species gathered on the surface of a flat organism that had the good sense to be inhabitable. I know that it will take at least half a billion people for the place to even start looking settled, but at the time that the three of us were walking along unexplored avenues there was no one within a two-hundred-kilometer radius. Not a soul! I don’t think that an ocean or a desert could give such an impression of solitude. Weirdly it wasn’t until the other two arrived that I even noticed.

  “Then the wind started to blow down the empty streets and we stopped for shelter on a porch. Evening fell slowly. The buildings created unusual shadows, stretching in unexpected directions. I hadn’t had a drop to drink since the previous night, yet my usual hallucinations settled over the façades of the neighboring buildings. They were remodelling the scene that surrounded us. I desperately needed a drink and felt my nightmares swirling in around me, waiting for night to torment me. I didn’t have the strength to resist.

  “We were approaching our goal. I suppose it was the first symptoms of Paranamanco’s influence, although the base doctor has talked to me about delirium tremens with a knowing smile. People like that always have a better explanation than yours and there’s no way to make them change their minds.

  “The next day the others decided, without consulting me, to leave me there for the entire day while they went out to do some reconnaissance. I’d have refused if I’d known, but that double dose of sleeping pills in the coffee would have put anyone out like a light. When I opened my eyes, I was trapped in an unbreakable cocoon of cables and the caterpillar, which had been reprogrammed, was vigilantly standing guard over me.

  “I’d wanted to warn the base that a couple of loonies were holding me prisoner so that someone would come and get me. It seemed easy; I was surrounded by communication booths. The caterpillar had woven a delicious little concentration camp for one where transmission cables replaced the barbed wire and booths replaced watchtowers. The only problem was that I didn’t have enough tokens.

  “Before I even reached the base operator, my supply had run out. I was stupid enough to try to kick the box apart to collect its contents. My first mistake was choosing a freshly hatched booth; my second was forgetting the caterpillar’s maternal instinct.

  “Possibly her reflexes should have been altered by the reprogramming, but that didn’t stop her from charging at me with the full speed of her segments, tearing her way through the cables she’d woven. We played a deadly game of tag, in which the neutral zones were the booths. Bit by bit, I was trying to draw her away from the breach she’d made in the network of wires that held me prisoner. When I thought it was a good time, I raced off towards the
closest building, expecting to be caught and pulverized at any time. I’ve rarely been afraid, but I was that day.

  “Once safe, I caught my breath before glancing behind me. The caterpillar hadn’t followed me at all; she stood motionless in the middle of her cocoon. On her back, the girl was waving in my direction.

  “I turned about slowly, savoring my anger as it swept over me. I was preparing myself for one of those explosions that make novas look minor. In two days these two clueless young people had deprived me of my bottles, drugged me, and forced me into a rodeo with a thirty-ton caterpillar. I had enough insults in mind to turn the air blue. Then I saw the tears rolling down the girl’s cheeks and I fell silent….What else could I have done?

  “We broke camp in ten minutes. I cut the cable ahead of the anarchic section and made a splice directly on the machine’s hindquarters, short-circuiting the delirious skin that had imprisoned me. One more puzzle for the archeologists of the future. I allowed myself the luxury of using an iron bar to pulverize the booth that held my tokens and recovered them. I’m the first official vandal on Paranamanco. Don’t forget to mention that in your article.”

  “Why were you in such a rush to leave?”

  My voice rises out of the cube reader with an irritating fidelity, asking the right question at the right time.

  In front of me, on the back wall of my office, the red warning light flashes in vain. I don’t feel like answering any call, especially right now.

  “Geoff had disappeared in the unknown sector. The girl, Evalane (I knew her name would come back to me, Geoff called her Evie), well the girl had been afraid to continue their research on her own and had come back to release me so I could help her. Ten seconds later and she’d probably have found the caterpillar nibbling on a pancake-shaped cadaver. Bio-machines can be quite strange at times. My caterpillar would’ve probably laid flesh pink booths, with dial pads incrusted with eyes rather than keys. Just the thought of dialling a number under those conditions, fingers in eyes…Evie acknowledged that it was lucky for me that Geoff had chosen that particular moment to evaporate. How was I supposed to respond to that? I grumbled that luck had been smiling on me ever since they’d arrived, but the girl was insensitive to sarcasm.