by Neal Asher
‘Snooper, activate,’ he said.
Over the other side of the room Snooper unfolded from its alcove. The quadruped robot was battered and worn now after twenty years of perambulating around this area with him. Fortunately its capacitor battery had only lost a quarter of its functionality and the solar panels he had taken from the shuttle served to charge it up in just a couple of days. Briefly, it looked like an eager headless dog as it came upright and moved towards him, but with a body like a section of a wide cylinder – the legs attached to its circumference – the illusion disappeared when it squatted in waiting position.
Heaving out of his chair, Ben wandered around inside his shack collecting the things he needed. His laser carbine still worked as intended and still charged up from the solar panels on the roof, though of late it had developed a strange colour change. The beam, which used to shine red if it hit any vapour or smoke to reveal it, was now shading to purple. A weapon being a necessity outside the shack, and this change to his carbine, was why over the last night on this old biotech world of Afthonia, he had made a crossbow, which he also took up. This weapon did not shoot standard bolts but chevrons of metal he had cut from the shuttle’s hull and spent a long time sharpening with corundum gritstone out of a podule. It was perfect for chopping through the neck of a mantid, should his shooting be accurate enough with his failing eyesight and the tremor his hands had developed. How it would do against the Stalker he had no idea. He had never, in all the long years he had been here, seen the thing clearly.
He collected up his backpack too, strapped on his belt with its carry sacks, then went to the door, opening it carefully and checking outside down the sight of the carbine, then moving out as quickly as he could to turn and take a look at the roof. Nothing nasty had moved into the location, so he returned to the door to close and bolt it. He paused, catching his breath, and looked around. The Stalker confined itself to the night and its visits were infrequent. Perhaps he should consider himself lucky that a thing that size – he knew it was bigger than a man – did not come out in the day. Or perhaps he should consider that unlucky, because in daylight he would have had a better chance at killing the thing.
He went round the shack closing the shutters and finally arrived at his lean-to. A dirt turtle that had taken up residence at the back stuck out its head to peer at him for a moment, then swiftly retracted it. He left it alone since though the meat of the creature tasted sour, its proximity might provide emergency rations. Within a few years of being stranded on Afthonia his need for food had grown enormously. He did not know why but speculated that maybe the food here was not as nutritious as it seemed.
In the lean-to sat his barrow loaded with tools. He uncovered it and, putting his carbine and crossbow in with the tools, trundled it out. Only when he had walked a few hundred yards did it register with him that he had taken the route out onto the plain. It wasn’t the best choice for victuals with night approaching, but stubbornness kept him going.
He followed the path he had tramped down over his years of journeys out onto the plain, Snooper walking silently behind him. Near his shack, bubble grass, herbs and other low-growing plants cloaked the ground. He often collected many of these for flavourings but little grew here of any nutritional value because he had denuded the area in the early years. He had walked a couple of miles before seeing anything different and potentially edible but, even so, the plants were sparsely scattered and their growth did not look healthy – growths from pieces of root he had left in the ground, or small bulbs to fiddly to peel – and certainly there were none of the familiar sprouts of podules so close to his shack.
The walking helped ease away his internal aches and pains but aggravated the sores and other lesions on his skin. Even so, as he warmed up, he began to feel positively buoyant for the first time in a while. He decided to put a good distance between himself and his shack today, but then hesitated when he saw the thick sprout jutting from the ground. There would be a podule below, but the green and black chequered leaf had yet to unfold and there were no old stalks on the ground around it, so the thing was newly grown and had yet to pack itself with…whatever it happened to contain.
‘No,’ he said, then looked around as if he had expected someone to overhear. He kept going, through an area where more sprouts protruded and where some had opened out leaves that harvested sunlight to power their chemistry but also sunlight to turn into electricity to run some of the other processes inside. Further on he passed low mounds free of vegetation and kept a more wary eye on his surroundings. Next passing another such area, he saw three big mantids rise up to watch him like nightmare meerkats. But they stayed precisely where they were. He grunted dismissively. In his first years here the mantids had always attacked on sight, but now they had learned that this particular moving protein source burned off their heads and took them home for lunch. Or rather, surviving mantids had learned that’s what he did with their less fortunate fellows.
Finally he reached and area where the path hardly showed through the vegetation and branched off in many directions. He hadn’t come out so far in many days – those ‘days’ consisting of three hundred hours of darkness and the same of daylight, but with seasonal variations of eighty hours. Around him he recognised the foliage of edible roots, of podules, and berry bushes, but here he only stopped to examine a ring of grey-topped mushrooms similar to edible ones he had picked before.
‘Over here,’ he said, taking a laser pointer off his belt, triggering it and selecting one of the mushrooms.
Snooper scuttled up beside him then stalked forwards like a cat getting ready to pounce on a mouse, but instead stepped daintily over the mushroom he had selected and squatted. After a moment the screen on the robot’s top turned on and began running an analysis that was mostly opaque to him. He knew he was missing out on a great deal because of this, for Snooper was detailing useful chemicals and perhaps pharmaceuticals, but as a shuttle engineer the language was as much gobbledegook as the code he understood would be to a bio-technician. After a short while the readout came to an end and awaited instructions. He input what he had managed to learn via the touchpad and received a terse summation. The mushrooms would not poison him but their nutritional value was low. He moved on, again considering another attempt to hook up the almanac to Snooper. In previous years it had not been an urgent consideration. His body had been tough standard human and ran a basic nanosuite which meant that without suite adjustments or visits to a doctor AI he could live, barring accident and exotic maladies, for over a hundred and seventy years. He had lived for a hundred and twenty years. In the last twenty he had suffered accidents and poisonings that should have been no problem for the suite. However, it seemed he had also somehow returned to some ancient age whereby sicknesses afflicted him with irritating then worrying regularity. And now it appeared he was suffering the maladies of age – that accumulation of damage – early, and some pharmaceuticals might come in useful.
After a while he turned from the half-seen path, passed some mantid mounds and moved into an area he might have visited before but, by the quality of the growth here, not for some time. He dug up black parsnips and blue potatoes that Snooper told him were non-toxic and nutritious, found a large puffball the same and packed a bag with spinach-like greens. He then focused his attention on one of the podule sprouts, its leaves well spread and crinkling at the edges. Old growth of previous sprouts dry and brown on the ground around this indicated a podule that had been growing for five or six ‘days’. He took his shovel and pick from the barrow and began digging. Within a few minutes he revealed the upper tough rind of the thing which, by its curve, indicated an oblate podule maybe two feet across, and he thanked the gods of biotechnology. Carefully digging around it he cut through soft wet roots then finally cleared enough soil to get his shovel underneath it. As he levered the thing out of the ground he knew he would pay for this later and the next time he climbed out of bed it would be to an hour or so of suffering.
>
With the podule up on the surface, large and heavy as a sack of potatoes, he called Snooper over and had the robot do its thing. Immediately a light flashed up in the corner of the screen, which then ran a long list of the thing’s contents. The green light indicated all the contents fit for human consumption, so he heaved it whole into the barrow, then peered towards the pink bloated sun sitting above the horizon. Sixteen or seventeen hours of daylight remained. Call it fourteen hours, since he wanted to be home before the lengthy twilight brought out the innocular flies. However, he had plenty of time to dig up another podule.
Fifty or so feet away another mature sprout poked from the ground. As he headed over, the barrow wheel bounced over something and he spotted a shiny object sunk in the earth. Pulling the barrow back he used his pick to lever up a short pipe of bright metal. After inspecting it for a while he put it in the barrow beside the podule. It might come in useful, though he acknowledged that similar finds of old tech had risen into a heap behind his shack of which he had only used one or two pieces. Next setting to work around the sprout, he revealed a podule smaller than the previous one but, by the dark honeycomb pattern on its skin. knew it might contain items more useful than food. He felt a brief surge of excitement as he chopped through the roots around it and in his eagerness it took him a moment or two to realise he wasn’t managing to cut through one of the roots, though he did break through a thin tough membrane. Peering at the thing in puzzlement, he took in its odd shape, then puzzlement turned to shock as he recognised the membrane as badly degraded plas-wrap about a human hand.
Ben just stared for a long moment – his reasoning no longer as fast as it had once been. This could not be a corpse buried here because the ground had obviously lain undisturbed for a long time. Any human corpse would have decayed to bones by now. Quickly coming to a decision, he further dug around the podule, levered it out and put it in the barrow beside the other one. He then began digging back from the hand, revealing more plas-wrap about an arm. He took out a chainglass knife and tried it on the wrap, and it split open as it should not have, so it had to be very old. After closely inspecting the skin on the arm he made a small cut to reveal inner layers, confirming what he had first thought. He had found part of or the whole of a Golem android. He kept digging, wincing at the prospect of how he would feel later, but unable to stop. He revealed a shoulder then a head, all tightly wrapped. Finally he had the thing revealed in total, face-down to the ground. He split the wrapping and pulled it away to reveal the body of a Golem clad in a monofilament overall. Silvery hair dropped away in tufts from the head when he touched it. He now saw at the lower back where the monofilament and artificial skin and flesh had been burned away right down to composite bones inlaid with meta-circuitry. More artificial flesh had been burned from the lower legs and, when he managed to heave the heavy thing over, he saw that she had also lost half her face covering and that the burn he had seen on her back had resulted from a shot at belly level from the front. It looked like she had been hit with a laser carbine.
The sensible thing to do now would be to leave her here on the ground and get back to his shack. He could return after the long night to collect her, for she would receive no more damage than she now had. Another sensible thought, immediately dismissed, was that he was wasting his time here. A burnt up Golem that had not managed to repair itself wasn’t much use to him. Quite probably the crystal mind in her chest had been fractured, the power supply had become depleted or wiped out, her micro circuitry corroded by exposure through damaged syntheskin to the environment. But the stubbornness that led him out here and to which he also attributed his survival on Afthonia, persisted.
He pulled his barrow as close as he could and set about heaving her onto it. She was heavier than a human of the same size and he struggled for some time, at one point tipping the barrow over and spilling out the podules. Immediately on top of this he felt a sick flush through his body and broke into a hot sweat. His chest hurt and then the pain spread to his neck and left arm. He knew exactly what that meant but ignored it, for what could he do? Instead he went and sat on a nearby tuft of stringy grass and thought about how he should deal with the Golem.
During the long rest to let the pain ease, he had time to ponder, and next went over to kneel on her with his knees on her hips, grabbed her shoulders and pulled. Some little movement indicated he was on the right track and he kept at it, her hip joints slowly bending as if set in hardening glue. Finally he got her into a position sitting upright with her legs out in front of her, and she showed no sign of collapsing back down. He emptied the barrow of podules and tools, ran it up behind her and tipped it, bringing the front down against her buttocks, reached over and grabbed her under the armpits and pulled her back into the barrow. As her weight entered the thing it tipped back towards him and down on its back two wheels. She rested inside firmly, backside down in the bottom of the barrow, legs sticking out the front, one arm out to the side and the other sticking straight upright.
Ben again rested, then wandered about until finding some cranberries, ate them and then wished he had brought water. Returning to the barrow he loaded the podules on top of her and jammed in the tools and weapons where he could. Next, conceding to his urge for neatness, he went to work on her arms, pushing against intransigent joint motors to bend them until her hands rested down on the podules. He then worked on bending her knees so her legs did not stick up so ridiculously, and later, looking at her sitting there, wondered if what he had done had been more about making her look more dignified than about neatness.
He began the journey back to the shack, tired and thirsty but still warm enough from the work not to ache yet. A glance at the horizon showed him the sun just touching it and he knew he would not get back before the innocular flies were out. The barrow was heavy and lifting it up on the forward wheel made it unstable, so he turned it round and towed it down on all three wheels, wondering if it would stand up to the punishment, since he had made it from a luggage loading trolley from the shuttle, which he had been pushing around for a lot longer than its intended life. He took frequent rests, aching now because of his unnatural position reaching back to grasp the handles. At one point he stopped and tried fashioning a towing strap out of his belt. This worked for a little while until the barrow tipped over, dragging him to the ground and twisting his back – it clicking ominously as he struggled to his feet. Again he loaded her and the podules and tools. Again he set out.
As the hours passed he began to feel quite unwell, and knew that if he was back in his house to set the almanac screen to mirror he would see a complexion that looked almost grey. When the light turned to pink Champagne close to twilight, he considered dumping her out and just heading home with his other finds. The first innocular fly landing on his neck and digging in made him yell in frustration. He slapped and crushed the thing, pulled it from his neck and inspected it. It looked like a big mosquito with a tiger-striped body and, recognising the type that caused pain, he knew the exposed skin of his arms and head would be covered with itchy bumps from the ones that did not cause pain and were hardly visible. He hated the things and found the effects of their bites disturbing. Sometimes he would break out in horrible rashes or end up suffering some nameless malady. Other times he slept like the dead afterwards and woke with one or other of his maladies in remission. And yet other times he felt variously drugged – sometimes as if with amphetamines other times as if with an opiate. But as he continued on, he soon saw that the innocular flies were the least of his problems.
With the light fading and shadows stretching out towards infinity, he glimpsed movement to his right and left. Mantids did venture from their burrows during the day to hunt, but they much preferred the night. He counted perhaps two of them over to his right and one to his left that had edged close enough for him to see its almond shaped body, thorny limbs and, above gyrating mandibles, two bulbous compound eyes studying him. He put the barrow down, reached for the crossbow and then
hesitated. He had used this weapon only once before and it had proved very effective. But it had then taken him a couple of hours to find the sharpened missile. It took a great deal of work to make each of them and he did not want to lose them. In this light he was sure to.
Instead he selected the carbine, turned it on and noticed that the charge bar was not at maximum as it should have been. The sight of that made him nervous, but obviously the sight of the carbine made the nearest mantid nervous too, for it quickly scuttled away out of sight. As ever he wondered at their intelligence. They were obviously capable of learning but, seriously, how much knowledge could a brain the size of a shelled walnut retain? Looking over at the other two he saw that they had frozen in place. Should he fire a shot to scare them off? He didn’t like the idea – now thinking his carbine had a limited number of shots remaining. He hung the weapon from his shoulder by its strap, hoisted up the barrow and trudged on. He then had to stop to bat away an innocular fly that had landed on his nose. A mantid, lying flat to the ground beside the path, chose that moment to attack.
