by Rich Horton
* * * *
Kylie punched through, and the sudden light shift dazzled her.
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ME-TOPIA, by Adam Roberts
"He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky"—Elizabeth Bishop
* * * *
The first day and the first night.
They had come down in the high ground, an immense plateau many thousands of miles square. “The highlands,” said Murphy. “I claim the highlands. I'll call them Murphyland.” Over an hour or so he changed his mind several times: Murphtopia, Murphia. “No,” he said, glee bubbling out in a little dance, a shimmy of the feet, a flourish of the hands. “Just Murphy, Murphy. Think of it! Where do you come from? I come from Murphy. I'm a Murphyite. I was born in Murphy.” And the sky paled, and then the sun appeared over the mountain tops and everything was covered with a tide of light. The dew was so thick it looked like the aftermath of a heavy rainstorm.
Sinclair, wading out from the shuttle's wreckage through waist-high grass, drew a dark trail after him marking his path, like the photographic negative of a comet.
"I don't understand what you're so happy about,” said Edwards. It was as if he could not see the new land, this world that had popped out of nowhere. As if all he could see was the damage to the ship. But that was how Edwards's mind worked. He had a practical mind.
"And are you sad for your ship,” sang Murphy, with deliberately overplayed oirishry, “all buckled and collapsed as it is?” Of course Murphy was a homo neanderthalis. The real deal. All four of these crewmen were. Of course you know what that means.
"You should be sad too, Murphy,” said Edwards, speaking in a level voice. “It's your ship too. I don't see how we are to get home without it."
"But this is my home,” declared Murphy. And then sang his own name, or perhaps the name of his newly made land, over and over: ‘Murphy! Murphy! Murphy!"
* * * *
The sun moved through the sky. The swift light went everywhere. It spilled over everything and washed back. The expanse of grassland shimmered in the breeze like cellophane.
* * * *
Edwards climbed to the top of the buckled craft. The plasmetal was oily with dew, and his feet slipped several times. At the top he stood as upright as he dared, and surveyed the word. Mountains away to the west, grass steppes in every direction, north south and east, flowing downhill eastward towards smudges of massive forestation and the metallic inlaid sparkle of rivers, lakes, seas. That was some view, eastward.
The sun was rising from the west, which was an unusual feature. What strange world rotated like that? There were no earth-sized planets in the solar system that rotated like that.
Did that mean they were no longer in the solar system? That was impossible. There was no means by which they could have travelled so far. Physics repudiated the very notion.
* * * *
The air tasted fresh in his mouth, in his throat. Grass-scent. Rainwater and ozone.
* * * *
And for long minutes there was no sound except the hushing of the grasses in the wind, and the distant febrile twitter of birds high in the sky. The sky gleamed, as full of the wonder of light as a glass brimful of bright water. Vins called up, “There are insects, I've got insects here, though they seem to be torpid.” He paused, and repeated the word, torpid.” When the dew evaporates a little they'll surely come to life."
Edwards grunted in reply, but his eye was on the sky. Spherical clouds, perfect as eggs, drifted in the zenith. Six of them. Seven. Eight. Edwards counted, turning his head. Ten.
* * * *
Twelve.
* * * *
And the air, moist with dew and fragrant with possibility, slid past him. And light all about. Silence, stained only by the swishing of the breeze.
Murphy was dancing below, kicking his feet through the wet grass. “Maybe Murphy isn't such a good idea, by itself,” he called, to nobody in particular. “As a name, by itself. How about the Murphy Territories? How about the Land of Murphy?” And then, after half a minute when neither Edwards nor Vins replied, he added: “Don't be sore, Vins. You can name some other place."
Vins, went into the body of the shuttle to fetch out some killing jars for the insects.
* * * *
Sinclair was away for hours. The sun rose, and the dew steamed away in wreathy barricades of mist. The grass dried out, and paled, and then bristled with dryness. It was a yellow, tawny sort of grass. By mid-day the sky was hot as a hot-plate, and Murphy had stripped off his chemise.
Sinclair returned, sweating. “It goes on and on,” he says. “Exactly the same. Steppe, and more steppe."
The sun dropped over the eastern horizon. It quickly became cold.
The night sky was cloudless; stars like lit dewdrops on black. Breath petalled out of their mouths in transient, ghostly puffs. Edwards slept in the shuttle. Sinclair and Vins chatted, their voices subdued underneath the enormity of night sky. Murphy had a nicotine inhaler, and lay on the cooling roof of the crashed shuttle looking up at the stars puffing intermittently. Later they all joined Edwards in the shuttle and slept. Over their thoughtless, slumbering heads the stars glinted and prickled in the black clarity. Hours passed. The the sky cataracted to white with the coming dawn. Ivory-coloured clouds bubbled into the sky from behind the peaks of the highlands and swept down upon them. Before dawn rain started falling. Edwards woke at the drumroll sound of rain against the body of the crashed ship, sat up disoriented for a moment, then lay down again and went back to sleep.
"We're dead, we've died, we're dead,” said Murphy, perhaps speaking in his sleep.
* * * *
The second day and the second night.
At breakfast, after dawn, it was still raining. The four of them ate inside the shuttle, with the door open. “Ah,” said Edwards, looking through the hatch at the shimmering lines of water. “The universal solvent."
"But I should hate you,” said Murphy. “Because you can look at water and say ah the universal solvent."
Edwards cocked his head on one side. “I don't see your point,” he said.
"No, no,” said Murphy. “That's not it. Oh, water, oh? This beautiful thing, this spiritual thing, purity and the power to cleanse, to baptise even. Light on water, is there a more beautiful thing? And all you can say when you see it is ah the universal solvent."
Edwards put his mouth in a straight line. “But it is the universal solvent,” he said. “That's one of its functions. Why do you say oh water oh?"
The rain outside was greeting their conversational interchanges with sustained and rapturous applause. The colour through the hatch was grey. The air looked like metal scored and overscored with myriad slant lines. It was chill.
"Can we lift off?” asked Sinclair. “Is there a way off-of this place?"
"Feel that,” Edwards instructed. He was not talking about any particular object, not instructing any of the crew to lift any particular object. What he meant was: feel how heavy we are. “That's a full g. That's what is to be overcome. We came down hard."
"Hard,” confirmed Murphy.
"We weren't expecting,” said Sinclair, “a whole world to pop out of the void. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then a whole world. We snapped our spine on this rock."
"Let's get one thing straight,” said Edwards, in his brusque and matter-of-fact voice. “This world did not pop out of nowhere. Worlds don't pop out of nowhere.” He looked at his colleagues in turn. “That's not what happened."
"Turn it up, captain,” said Murphy. He applied the title sarcastically. It was the nature of this ship that its crew worked without ranks such as captain, second-in-command, all that bag-and-baggage of hierarchy. No military ship, this. This was not a merchant vessel either. They hadn't been sliding along the frictionless thread of Earth-Mars or Earth-Moon hauling goods or transporting soldiery or anything like that. This was science. Science isn't structured to recognise hierarchy.
"I'm only say
ing,” said Edwards, sheepishly. “I'm not wanting to suggest that I'm in charge."
They were silent for a while, and the rain spattered and clattered enormously all about them. Encore! Encore!
It occurred to Edwards, belatedly, that Murphy might have been saying eau, water, eau.
"Right,” said Vins. “We're all in a kind of intellectual shock, that's what I think. We've been here two days now, and we haven't even formulated a plausible hypothesis of what's going on. We haven't even tried.” He looked around at his colleagues. “Let's review what happened."
Murphy had his stumpy arms folded over his little chest. “Review, by all means,” he said. But then, when Vins opened his mouth to speak again, he interrupted immediately: “I've formed a hypothesis. It's called Murphy. This is prime land, and I claim it. When we get back, or when we at least contact help and they come get us, I shall set up a private limited company to promote the settlement of Murphy. I'll make a fortune. I'll be mayor. I'll be the alpha male."
"Why you think,” said Edwards, thinking literally, “that such a contract would have any legal force upon Earth is beyond me."
"Let's review,” said Vins, in a loud voice.
Everybody looked at him.
"We're flying. We drop below the ecliptic plane, no more than a hundred thousand klims. More than that?"
None of the others say anything. Then Sinclair says, “It was about that."
"We saw a winking star,” Vins said. He did not stop talking, he continued on, even though Murphy tried to interrupt him with a sneering “Winking star, oh, that's good on my mother's health that's good.” Vins wasn't to be distracted when he got going. “It was out of the position of variable star 699, which is what we might have thought it otherwise. Except it wasn't where 699 should've been. As we flew it grew in size, indicating a very reflective asteroid, or perhaps comet, out of the ecliptic. You,” Vins nodded at Sinclair, “argued it was a parti-coloured object rotating diurnally. But it was a fair way south of the ecliptic. Then what happened?"
"We all know what happened,” said Murphy. They may all have been homo neanderthalis, but they were bright. They all had their scientific educations. The real deal.
"Let's review,” said Vins. “We need to know what's happened. Act like scientists, people."
"I'm a scientist no longer,” cried Murphy, with a flourish of his arm. “I'm the king of Murphtopia."
"What happened,” said Edwards, slowly, thinking linearly and literally, “was we were tracking the curious wobble of the asteroid. Or whatever it was. We flew close, and suddenly there was a world, a whole world, and—we came down. We re-entered sideways, and there was heat-damage to the craft, and then there was collision damage, and now it's broken. And we're sitting inside it."
"Now,” said Vins. “Here's a premise. Worlds don't appear out of nowhere. Do we agree?"
Nobody disagreed.
"It's a mountain and mohammed thing,” offered Sinclair. “Put it this way, which is more likely? That a whole Earth-sized planet pops out of nowhere in front of us? Or that we, for some reason, have popped into a new place?"
"I say we're back on Earth,” said Murphy. “It looks like a duck, and it smells like a duck and it, uh, pulls the gravity of a duck, then it's a duck."
"The sun is rising,” Sinclair pointed out, “in the west. It is setting in the east."
"Oh. And the asteroid was the beacon of a dimensional sffy gateway through time and space,” mocked Murphy: “and we fell through, like in a sffy film, and now we're on the far side of the galaxy?” He pronounced “SF-y” as a two-syllable word, with a ludicrous and prolonged emphasis on the central “f” sound.
"That can't be true,” said Edwards. “Our first night, the stars were very clear. All the constellations were there. Familiar constellations."
"Which's what we'd expect if we were back on Earth,” said Murphy.
"But the sun rises in the west...” said Sinclair again.
"Maybe the compasses are broken, somehow. Distorted. Maybe you think west is east and versy-vice-a."
"All of them? All the compasses? And besides, at night you can see the pole star, great bear, all very clearly. Oh there's no doubt where the sun's rising."
"Well let's look at another hypothesis,” said Murphy. “There is a whole, a whole Earth-sized planet, about a hundred thousand kilometres south of the ecliptic between Earth and Venus. And nobody on earth for six centuries of dedicated astronomy has noticed it. Nobody saw a whole planet, waxing and waning, between us and the sun? No southern hemisphere observatory happened to see it? Is that what you're saying?"
"That is,” Vins conceded, “hard to credit."
"So,” said Murphy. He got up, and stepped to the hatch, and looked out at the hissing and rapturous rainfall. “Here's what I think happened. We were off investigating your winking star, Vins, and then we all suffered some sort of group epilepsy, or mass hysteria, or loss of consciousness, and without realising it we piloted the ship back up and towards earth."
"We were days away,” Vins pointed out.
"So perhaps we were in a fugue state for days. Anyway, we weren't shaken out of it until we slammed into the atmosphere, and now we've crashed in the highlands in Peru, or Africa maybe."
"There's nowhere on earth,” Vins pointed out, “as lovely as this. Where is there anywhere as mild, or balmy, as this? Peru, you say?"
"You ever been to Peru?” asked Edwards.
"I been a lot of places, and there's ice wherever I've been."
"Never mind the climate,” said Edwards. “What about the sunrises?"
"How is it,” agreed Vins, “that the sunrise is in the west if this is Peru?"
"I don't know. But the advantage of my hypothesis is that it's occam's razor on all the stuff about planets appearing from nowhere, and it reduces all that to a single, simple problem. The sunrise."
"And another problem,” Edwards pointed out, “which is the lack of radio traffic."
"The radio's broken,” said Murphy. “I'm not happy about it."
"The radio?"
"No, not happy about the Murphy, the Murphy-topia. I'm not happy about the status of my kingdom. I was looking forward to claiming the highlands as my personal kingdom. But if it's, you know, Peru, then there'll be some other alpha male who's already claimed these highlands."
"The radio's not broken,” said Edwards. “We can pick up background chatter. Bits and pieces. We just can't seem to locate any—to get a fix upon—"
"Vins,” said Murphy, sitting himself down again. “Vins, Vins. What's your theory? You haven't told us your theory."
"I think we've landed upon a banned world,” said Vins. He said this in a bright voice, but his mouth was angled downwards as he spoke. “A forbidden planet. That's SF-y, isn't it?” He pronounced each of the letters in sfy separately, trisyllabic.
"A banned world,” said Murphy, as if savouring the idea. “What an interesting notion. What a fanciful notion. What a dark horse you are, to be sure, Vins."
* * * *
The rain stopped sometime in the afternoon, and the clouds rolled away, leaving the landscape washed and gleaming under the low sun as if glazed with strawberry and peach. The long stretch of grassland directly beneath them retained some of its yellow, and moved slowly, like the pelt of a lion. In the distance they could see a long inlaid band of bronze, curved and kinked like the marginal illustration in a celtic manuscript: open water, glittering in the sun. And the sun went down and the stars came out.
Edwards, trying to identify where the Earth should be from their last known position, noticed something they should all have seen on the first night: that the stars hardly moved through the sky. He woke the others up.
"Earth,” he said, “is just below the horizon.” He pointed. “There. Mars, I think, is over there."
"Send them a signal."
"I did. But why should they be listening for a signal from this stretch of space? It's not even on the ecliptic. It's not as i
f there are any astronomers on Mars. And if there were, if there were any, you know, amateurs, why should they be looking down here? No, that's not what I woke you up to show you."
"What then?"
"The stars aren't moving. I've been watching for an hour. I was waiting to see Earth come up over the horizon so I could send them a message. But it's not coming up."
"You thought it was an hour,” said Murphy, crossly. “Clearly it wasn't an hour. You probably sat there for five minutes and got impatient."
So they settled down together, and all checked their watches, and looked east to where the sun had set, where familiar stars pebbled the sky. And an hour passed, and another, and the stars did not move.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
"Somebody has stopped the stars in their courses,” said Murphy. “We're dead, we're all in the afterlife. Is that what happened? We crashed the ship and died, and this is the land of the dead."
"I thought you were the one, Murphy, who wanted to apply occam's razor?” chided Edwards. “That's a pretty elaborated explanation for the facts, don't you think? I don't feel dead. Do you? You feel that way?"
"Certainly not,” said Vins.
"But we've no idea what it feels like to feel dead,” Murphy pointed out.
"Exactly. It's a null hypothesis. Let's not go there. There must be another explanation."
"The other explanation is that we're not rotating."
"Except we saw the sun go round and set, so we are rotating. An earth-sized world, pulling an earth-strength gravity rotates for half a day and then stops rotating? That makes no sense."
"I'll tell you what makes sense,” said Murphy, hugging himself against the cold. “This is a banned world. We are not supposed to be here. That's what makes sense."
"Of course we're not supposed to be here,” agreed Vins. “Supposed to be Venus, that's where. That's where we're supposed to be orbiting. Not here. But that's not to say it's a forbidden planet."
