Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  ‘It’s a shame about Afthonia,’ she said at one point.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have the podules and the other things that grow here. The weather is never any worse than the brief daytime rainfall and seasonal variation is small – on many other worlds the winters or the summers would have killed you quite soon.’

  ‘But I was fortunate that the mantids and other creatures did not,’ he pointed out. He then added, ‘And the innocular flies.’

  She shrugged. ‘The like of mantids and other dangerous creatures can be found on most worlds. With the right equipment I could design and build methods of control, quite possibly using podule technology and some of this brute technology.’ She waved a hand at their work.

  ‘So where is the shame?’ he asked, though he had an intimation of what she meant.

  ‘That there is no population here. Afthonia could easily be returned to the paradise it once was, though,’ and she smiled at him, ‘without any foolish choices having to be made about the purity of biotech.’

  ‘Yes, it certainly could.’

  He looked back towards his house and imagined it being how he had once dreamed it could be: a couple of floors, balconies, constant power and water supply and so much besides. The dream had been a way to occupy his mind during the long nights and he had once made plans which even now still resided in the almanac. But that was before the constant sicknesses left him little more time than he needed to ensure survival. He then looked out onto the plain and imagined a city there, but then turned and positioned it up in the mountains. He put ships in the sky, bringing goods from a massive reach of star systems.

  ‘Do you know what Afthonia means?’ she abruptly asked.

  ‘It’s not something I’ve even thought about.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s a word from an ancient Earth language. It means “plenty”.’

  ‘What business did they do here?’ he asked.

  ‘The products of podules which, cultivated grew to three times the size you see out there.’ She pointed to the plain. ‘The nanites were always in demand. Biotech of many different kinds. Here your compass is limited but many strange and useful things were grown and bred. We of course don’t know what survived.’

  ‘Give me some examples,’ he said.

  ‘Cactuses from which we tapped a variety of alcoholic drinks were popular. Meta-material membranes in many plants.’ She pointed to the house. ‘Your house stays warm throughout the night because of the turtle-tree leaves you used on the roof. They have nigh perfect insulating layers in them.’ She gestured beyond into the mountains. ‘You found edible funguses up there but also many you could not eat. You probably could not because they are the kind that gather and consolidate rare metals. While there are other plants that grow quantum processing gems in their seed pods.’

  ‘I see,’ and he did. ‘This is not a place to leave behind.’

  It took four days and four nights. Boiling and stilling extra water for the power supply had been one of the easiest tasks. In the latter part of the fifth day he walked out and gazed at the shuttle. It looked battered and some of the patches were ugly, but they had done the best they could.

  ‘We can wait until we have a full day ahead of us,’ he told Anna. He felt a decided lack of enthusiasm about the prospect and knew he was looking for further reasons for delay. He had enjoyed the last five days more than any other time he had spent on Afthonia and found himself drawing out certain tasks – being more pernickety than needed.

  She gazed at him – her look unreadable – then shook her head. ‘We have to at least try out what we have done.’

  ‘I suppose…’

  She dipped her head and strode past him. ‘I’ll get the power supply installed.’

  ‘Okay, and I’ll see to the panels,’ he turned to look up at the roof.

  They set about their tasks with grim resolution. As he climbed up onto the roof, Ben felt this was more about completing something rather than any wish for it to be completed and to move onto the next thing. He had also begun thinking about the danger. They had flown the shuttle once and then only ten or twenty feet off the ground, and now they aimed to take it into orbit. The thought of sitting inside it with its inefficiently maintained air pressure while wearing his leaky envirosuit made him sweat just a little. He would be risking his life, but not in any sense to save it, as he would have supposed before, but just to reach for a change he was not so sure he wanted.

  He detached and took down the panels, leaning them against the house, aware that this was a job he could not have done alone a few weeks back. By the time he started carting them to the shuttle, Anna had moved the power supply inside, and was attaching it up. He began taking the panels up onto the roof and securing them. She came out of the shuttle at one point to watch him.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said.

  ‘Careful – that’s always dangerous,’ he replied, glancing down at her.

  She grimaced. ‘I’ve been thinking that taking the shuttle straight up into orbit is a rather ambitious start. We should run some tests. Make a flight at low elevation then go higher when we’re confident our repairs have worked.’

  ‘That seems sensible.’ He tried not to let the relief show in his voice, and returned to work with more enthusiasm.

  But she wasn’t done. ‘We can take tools with us. You’ve denuded this area of mature podules and there may be other things to find.’ She gestured to the shuttle. ‘This is a lot more useful than your wheelbarrow.’

  ‘I agree.’ He nodded enthusiastically. ‘With the things you’ve told me about – the other biotech that grows here – we could find many useful things.’

  ‘And when we return to the house,’ she added, ‘we’ll land nearer… so the cable reaches…’

  ‘You are being very sensible today.’ He grinned at her.

  ‘Someone has to be.’ She returned inside to continue her work.

  With all the solar panels in place and connected as they were before, twenty years ago, he clambered down and went to collect tools. Bringing them inside, he observed the power supply bolted to the floor just behind the cockpit. All the cables and pipes were connected up and secured, and Anna was pouring in the pure water they had stilled throughout the last night. It reached the fill level and she put the container aside before carefully capping the tank.

  She turned to him. ‘Bring heat sheets too, and cooking items. We’ll make this an outing. And anything else you can think of.’

  He returned inside to collect those items and she followed him a few minutes later. It took a number of trips to ferry across what they felt they needed, and now, rather than this whole episode being a serious risky venture, it had turned into a potentially enjoyable adventure. Finally they were inside the shuttle and nothing remained but to secure their safety straps into newly oiled sockets and head out.

  Anna no longer had the almanac plugged into the console, though they had brought it with many other tools – one of their contentions being that they needed all this stuff if the shuttle went wrong. She reached forwards and clicked down a manual switch and the console came on. Next working a touch screen she brought the grav engine online and this time there was no backwash at all. Ben listened, but all he could hear was the low hum of things working correctly. Taking hold of the joystick she lifted it and the shuttle rose smoothly from the ground until she brought it to a halt fifty feet above the house. Here she tried the steering, first feathering grav to make the vehicle slide through the air to one side then to the other.

  ‘You got grav planing working,’ he observed.

  ‘Just a matter of programming.’

  She similarly slid the shuttle forwards and then backwards. This was good, because it meant they could still get wherever they wanted to go even if the thrusters packed up, which was more likely with them having moving parts. She then used the thrusters to set the vehicle in a slow spin.

  ‘So
which direction?’ she asked.

  He pointed out towards the plain. ‘That way. If we come down that should make things easier. Up in the mountains it gets a bit rugged.’

  She used the thrusters to set them in motion, then switched over to grav planing. The low hiss of them passing through the air grew louder and louder. Ben was unsurprised – the repairs had not been helpful with aerodynamics. Underneath them the path he had made over frequent treks unravelled, frayed, and then disappeared. The plain unrolled ahead and recognising the vegetation down there he felt a surge of acquisitiveness seeing the intermingled dark green of food podules foliage and the red of the other kind. But to land now seemed far too soon.

  They sped on and over to the right something rose out of the level landscape. It looked at first like a rocky mount, but as Anna swung the shuttle towards it he noticed a degree of regularity.

  ‘Ruins,’ she said a minute later.

  He had seen the like before during surveys. They had landed at one mass and found little of interest but the empty coral and foamstone walls of homes and other buildings. He had wanted to explore more, but their remit had been to get a general overview and such ruins were scattered all over the planet.

  ‘Do you see?’ Anna pointed at the ground.

  Here the podules foliage was dense, which was heartening, but then he saw what she meant. That foliage formed vague but even patterns. It seemed likely he was looking at where the things were originally grown.

  ‘Shall we take a look?’

  ‘Yes, why not? We can load up too and see how this operates with more weight inside.’ Why he chose those particular words he wasn’t sure, because it was not as if they needed to know how it would handle with extra weight – not for going into orbit.

  She took the vehicle lower, and now Ben could see the straight lines of old irrigation or drainage ditches. She took them in closer to the ruins then slowly brought them down, finally landing just twenty feet from a standing coral wall and the maze of buildings beyond that. The shuttle crunched down into vegetation, grav steadily winding down, and she knocked off the power.

  Ben unstrapped and headed in back, collecting up the carbine and then, because it was a long standing habit, his backpack and collection bags. Anna took the belt of bags from him and slung them over one shoulder, then took up the machete. He knew without talking that first they would explore the ruins, and he had no doubt they were the kind of place where night denizens would aestivate during the day. He opened the door to luxuriant dark red podule vegetation, stepped into it with his feet crunching down in a thick layer of old stalks. Looking at the thickness of the new stems he surmised that the ground below must be packed with podules butting up against each other – all older and more mature than anything he had dug up for many years.

  ‘There’s probably an artesian well here it might be possible to activate,’ she said. ‘But this far from the mountains means limited biotech growing in the area.’

  ‘Limited vistas too,’ Ben observed, and didn’t feel inclined to question her observation.

  Wading through the vegetation they came to the wall which he saw, drawing close, still stood because it was still alive. Occasional sparkles across the even pink and grey surface indicated air-feeding polyps feeding. Moving along it to a doorway, to the left of which a dead wall had collapsed, they went through. On the inside the slow advance of the wall showed by its fallen sheets of nacre – broken up and weathering into flakes. It had moved by about a foot in a thousand years.

  ‘Must have got messy in their houses like this,’ he commented.

  ‘It was a way of keeping the inside walls fresh,’ Anna replied. ‘About once every three solstan years they peeled evenly to leave a clean nacre surface or, depending on certain additives they gave to the coral, inner walls of any colour or texture they chose.’

  ‘And the houses would continuously be changing size and shape,’ he noted.

  ‘Only as much as they wanted,’ she explained. ‘This wall has been moving but a little tweak of the biology and it would stay exactly where it is.’

  ‘I see.’ Ben pushed his toe through the debris, then nearer to the inside of the wall lifted up a sheet of nacre three feet across. Surely he could find a use for something like this, perhaps even have it somewhere in his house simply for its beauty? He then eyed the wall itself. Since the stuff was still alive it would be a simple thing to chop some away and layer it on the exterior of his house. A spray of nutrients that he had no doubt Anna knew about, would set it into vigorous primary growth. All speculative stuff based on his previous needs and irrelevant should they get off Afthonia. He shrugged and rested the sheet against the wall by the doorway, certain they would come back this way. No reason not to take that with them.

  They moved on through the ruins – through rooms choked with low growing weeds a bit like bubble grass but not as slippery, bright green vines overgrowing walls and piles of debris. Shoving away some of that with his boot, and the thick layer of plant debris underneath, revealed translucent slabs, then a pile of roof tiles that looked like huge fish scales. Amidst these were other remains of ceilings and roofs: broken ceramic pipes, lengths of petrified wood and triangular chunks of insulating foamstone. When he was building his house this place would have been a bonanza.

  They continued. He found a water tank made of composite lying on one side of the room. Grabbing a protruding pipe he lifted up one end easily, then rapidly backed off when something scuttled about inside. Another room brought them to a still standing door. He ran his hand over the gnarled wooden surface.

  ‘Tea oak,’ Anna explained. ‘It’s very durable and was probably injected with special preservatives.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said, thinking of his own wooden door and how long it had taken him to cut and join the wood even though then the atomic shear had still been working.

  ‘Everything here was,’ she replied. ‘With so many of the necessities of life produced by biotech they had time to make everything as pleasing as possible.’ She stepped forwards, grabbed a handle green with corrosion and tried to twist it. The thing shattered in her hand. As if angry, she gave the door a hard shove, further metal components breaking and the thing falling into the space beyond.

  ‘But it became apparent,’ she added, ‘that having time on their hands was not such a good thing.’ She stepped through.

  ‘I note you refer to those who lived here as “them” as if you weren’t one of them.’

  Stepping out after her he saw they had now reached some sort of street. She halted and turned to gaze at him.

  ‘I stopped feeling like I was one of them when they started arguing and then fighting about the most foolish things. I fought with one side because if the other side won that meant I would be shut down.’

  ‘You would be killed, you mean,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  She was definitely angry – he could see it now. They walked along the street and when something crunched under his foot he stepped back and looked down. He recognised a human skull but the bone had been much decayed and was as frangible as egg shell. Seeing the brownish white powder much of it had decayed into he began noting that elsewhere. No large masses of it as if from whole skeletons, however. Picking up one whole but fragile rib bone he saw the scores of mantid mandibles on its surface.

  ‘It’s a sad place,’ Anna commented.

  Without even discussing the matter they turned round and headed back to the shuttle.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, as they waded back through the vegetation. ‘Podules.’

  She nodded curt agreement and they fetched tools. It soon became apparent that, as he had thought, the ground was packed with the things. Some were thin and rooted between others almost three feet across. Sweating in the sun, they freed up one of these and managed to lever and heave it out of the ground. Anna then picked the thing up and carried it into the shuttle. Ten huge podules later they moved across to dark gre
en vegetation and uprooted five of the food bearing ones. As, again without discussing it because they both knew, they prepared for departure, he gazed at the wealth of podules. They had made just a small hole here and the things stretched for acres and acres.

  ‘Where now?’ she asked.

  ‘Back towards the mountains maybe?’

  ‘Other things to be found I should think. We’ll keep away from the rugged terrain and look at an area away from the house.’

  ‘Seems a plan.’

  The flight parallel to the mountains revealed further ruins and then an old road for ground vehicles. Now it had been pointed out for him Ben could see the shape of old fields, drainage ditches and at one point what looked like the remains of a pumping station. He considered investigating the glint of solar panels and what other equipment might be useful there. It had been sitting there like that for a thousand years, but then, Anna had been sitting in the ground for as long. But what would be the point in investigating that place?

  Their mood was sombre after the ruins and they flew for some time in silence. Below the landscape changed, becoming more arid and the drainage ditches fading out of existence. Vegetation turned to brown and beige and became steadily patchy. He could see tree-like growths but without leaves. Anna slowed the shuttle and pointed. ‘There.’