To Climb a Flat Mountain

by G. David Nordley

  The cliffs turned out to be not as barren as he thought. Here and there, small trees had begun to colonize the caldera wall. He hadn’t recognized them because their leaves were a very dark blue green—almost black—and indistinguishable from the lava. The higher he got, the bigger the trees, and the bare rock between them became covered with dark soil.

  In a rare level clearing, he tripped and righted himself easily in the low gravity. The culprit was a ground vine with dark, grasslike leaves. I’ll call it “tanglegrass,” he thought with a frown. At the clearing edge was a thirty-meter tree. He tested its bark with a blade from his multitool; it was very soft and wet, maybe waterlogged—not like a tree at all, but rather more like ice plant.

  Was the pulp of the tree edible? It should, of course, be thoroughly tested and analyzed. He laughed at that notion and cut out a finger-sized piece, bit off a little, and spat it out. Acidic, bitter, and with an odor of rotten flesh—he would have to be very, very hungry to try to eat that. He washed the taste out with water from the fabric canteen. That was Earth water, he thought, from a thousand years ago. He ought to treat it with reverence.

  No, get hold of yourself, he told himself. Water was water.

  It was getting noticeably dark, though not noticeably cooler. Here and there around the roots of the bitterwood tree were pockets of sand and gravel that were reasonably soft and level. He made camp.

  The next day he reached the rim of the caldera in early morning. It was anomalously clear when he worked his way around a last boulder to the relatively flat top. The red dwarf sun appeared noticeably larger than Sol in a sky that seemed a somewhat lighter shade of blue. A few more steps took him clear of the brush and rocks.

  What he saw made no sense to him—a vast triangular plain stretched out before him, its sides converging to an impossibly distant vertex ahead of him. The plain was divided into great fuzzy arcs of color—gray, white, red, black, green, blue, and green again—apparently centered on himself, with the outermost almost tangent to the triangle’s sides.

  To his left, haze and clouds obscured the distant view, but to his right, through breaks in high creamy clouds, he thought he could glimpse a repetition of the pattern in front of him. Apparently, the planet had at least two huge conical volcanoes, as perfect in form as Mount Fuji, and so high that they extended beyond the limits of what must be a very extended atmosphere. Could they be in isostatic equilibrium? He shook his head; such calculations would need to be put off for now.

  Immediately below him was the rocky mountainside, mostly bare but dotted with trees. Below that was a dark green forest. That yielded to a sea or a very wide river. Beyond its misty, distant shore was another very dark band: probably more forest. That thinned out to a band of lighter green, which merged into a ruddy brown. The last complete arc was white. Beyond that, banding the base of the remaining tip of the triangle were bands of distant clouds. The peak itself was almost geometrically sharp, a dark lunar gray, and apparently cratered.

  Scanning the edge of the forest, he spotted a trail, a narrow and very Earth-like path leading down into the forest. What had made it? Other survivors? Natives or local animals? Something edible? Something dangerous?

  Well, he had best get going. On the way, something crunched under his foot. It looked for all the world like a piece of curved green and black mottled plastic. If it had been part of a sphere, the whole thing might be half a meter in diameter. Was it part of a broken lava bubble? An eggshell? Of what monster, if so? But there was no time to spend on these questions. Survival called and he would have to concentrate on the trail.

  The scale of the trees became evident as he descended. The largest were easily a hundred meters tall and five across, like California redwoods. These trees were not at all like the bitterwood tree he had cut into earlier; their wood was dark and suitably woody. They had a bark of sorts, black, smooth and chitinous in the mature trees, with longitudinal ridges that seemed to run the length of the tree. He decided to call it blackwood, and cut a sapling for a hiking pole and a potential defensive staff.

  As he looked carefully, he saw evidence of frequent fire. The darkness of the soil, the great space between the trees—there was a very open feeling to this forest. There was no brush taller than he was, and much of that was composed of immature bitterwood and blackwood. Everything seemed soft—no thorns or scratchy plants.

  He came across a running brook and filled his canteen, fine bubbles foaming out of its neck filter. It was only half Earth water now. If he never emptied it, there would always still be some molecules from the home planet in that canteen, in ever decreasing proportion, of course. He considered boiling it, but time was pressing. The filter would catch the microbes and his enhanced immunological system would be pretty tough on viruses that hadn’t coevolved with terrestrial life.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught something scurrying away from the trail, a kind of furry ball with red and black markings that seemed to have too many legs. Why would it be afraid of him? There must be something about his size and shape that was dangerous. He thought about lashing his multitool to a blackwood sapling spear, with its blade deployed. But if he lost that tool!

  Given the volcanic nature of the hillside, there should be some obsidian around, but he didn’t know what to look for, nor did he have any confidence in his ability to whack raw obsidian into a spear point. Then his eyes fell on a dead blackwood branch. He scrambled off the path to pick it up. The bark had dried into plasticlike hardness. When he scraped out the rest of the rotten pulpwood, he was left with a hard, hollow cylinder. He cut one end of this at a steep angle and jammed the other over the end of his walking stick. Then, with the ludicrous image of himself as a Pleistocene hunter in his head, he threw the improvised spear into a bitterwood tree.

  It sank in with a satisfying thwump. He made three more slanted cylindrical spear points, put them in his emergency kit bag, and continued his descent.

  In his second day down the mountainside, ravenously hungry, with only five nutrition bars left, he decided whatever he was doing was not working. He was seriously thinking of the fish trapped in the CSU—could he find it again, dive down, and kill the fish? It had been big—maybe a hundred kilos of meat on it. He should have taken that opportunity when he was there.

  Okay, he wasn’t going to just run into something to eat walking down the trail. Why not try setting up a blind and watching for what might come by? He could give that a day.

  It was a long boring day, but that evening something did come by. It seemed vaguely like a cross between a kangaroo and a dinosaur, so he mentally dubbed it a kangasaur. It was at least twice his height, and its head bobbed from side to side. Jacques readied his spear, then got a look at the fierce claws on the kangasaur’s feet and thought better of it. It stared in his direction, but he stayed perfectly still. It ambled over to a bitterwood tree, reached up about as far as its neck would extend, and worried away at something under a bitterwood leaf. Then it left. What had it found? Could he climb a bitterwood tree? Their lowest branches were about three meters up, and the bark, though not as slick as the shiny blackwood bark, was still very smooth. But gravity was low. An experimental leap up brought his eye level perhaps six meters above the forest floor. He jumped for a branch, clumsily slung himself under it, sloth-like, and shinnied out to look under its leaves. It was barren; he would have to climb higher than he could leap.

  Jacques remembered going to an art museum with his class and seeing a picture of a man climbing a tree with rope around the trunk, holding himself to the bark that way. There was a coil of carbon-nanofiber twine in the emergency kit, 100 meters according to the label.

  It took some experimentation and a couple of falls, but the next morning Jacques made it up a bitterwood tree and looked under its leaves. He had to go higher than the first level of branches, but finally discovered a cluster of teardrop-shaped fruits. The rind was tough, but no match for the steel of his multitool blade, and he got at the pulp beneath
.

  He knew the risks, but he had to find something edible. He nibbled at it. It was mostly soft fibers, almost like pasta, and relatively flavorless; nothing sharp, bitter, or otherwise deadly seeming. Ten minutes after the first taste, he took a mouthful. It seemed to go down okay.

  He put a couple of fruits in his kit bag, which was beginning to become stuffed, and dropped down to the ground. He would wait a day to see how his body reacted before eating more. He camped by a brook, sealed in his tent despite the warm humidity of the place, and slept fitfully.

  The next day, not having gotten sick, he ate the whole thing, minus the hard seeds toward the center of the fruit. So far so good, he thought, and headed downhill.

  Part of the apparent flatness of the landscape from the caldera rim, he realized, was because the trees got taller as he descended. As a guess, the tallest blackwoods were almost three hundred meters high and five meters across. He felt like a squirrel in a forest of giant sequoia. Their oval leaves were longer than he was tall, with stiff hollow veins and webbing like sheets of felted canvas. Picking one up, he felt like an ant, able to lift several times his own body mass.

  By the end of the day, he was still healthy. With food, he could survive. Under a leaf lean-to, cushioned by soft loam, he lay down. The next thing he knew, morning had arrived.

  * * * *

  Chapter 3

  The Killer Ape

  Deeper into the forest, rocks had become fewer and fewer; the floor was a rich, soft loam. His cairns were now teepees of fallen blackwood branches. Over the next week, he taught himself to weave a passable basket out of blackwood saplings, discovered a thin fibrous green vine that was surprisingly strong, found a mildly sweet edible berry to break the monotony of bitterwood fruit, found a hollow “flute plant” that grew perfectly straight but no higher than about a meter, and identified six native animals, including the furry spider-like thing he’d seen on his first day. But he was getting increasingly tired—bitterwood fruit and berries alone might not be an adequate diet.

  The furry spiderlike things—he decided to call them hirachnoids—foraged on a mushroomlike plant that grew beneath fallen blackwood tree leaves. He didn’t try eating those—not a rational decision considering all the other chances he was taking, but eating things that looked like mushrooms made him nervous. He gathered up some of these and put them under his basket, weighted it down with a hunk of lava, then propped it up with a twig to which he attached a string, the idea being to pull the twig out when the furry spiderlike thing was underneath the basket.

  This didn’t work well—the little animals were able to skitter out before the rim fell. That, he realized, was a consequence of the low gravity—no matter how much weight you put on something it would only fall so fast. If he could only push it down.... The answer was a long fallen blackwood branch resting on the top of the trap. The trick was to pull the string attached to the stick first and step on the branch immediately afterward: one, two. If his timing was ever so slightly off and the pressure from the lever came first, the stick wouldn’t come out at all, but if he left too much time between string and foot, the critter would escape.

  After a couple of tries, he caught one. Up close, it actually looked very spiderlike, with compound eyes, but six instead of eight legs and seemingly no segments—a big hairy ball maybe half a meter across. Its mouth irised open like an anus to allow a forked appendage to shoot out and grab pieces of the mushroomlike plant. Despite being trapped, it ignored him and worked away at eating the bait.

  Jacques hesitated. He had never killed anything before. But he had only two nutrition bars left. He needed to survive, and to survive he would probably need protein. Protein meant meat because he had no way of determining if the vegetation had any. Still it was all guesswork; he didn’t know that killing this thing would solve his problem. He didn’t know how smart it was, whether it would suffer, or even retaliate in some very effective way. He pondered this for several minutes, then put one of his spear tips on his walking stick and struck the thing hard right between the eyes. It collapsed immediately.

  Dissection proved a problem; the hirachnoid’s hair was as stiff and bristly as it looked and longer than the blade of his multitool knife. He ended up lashing the multitool to a flute plant shaft with green twine and going at it whaler style. The first cut produced not meat, but a fountain of mucous yellow ichor that stank like rotten eggs. He almost gagged, then recovering himself, made another cut.

  Suddenly, the creature’s corpse began to pulsate and flop around. Jacques recoiled in disgust. Then out of the cut, a procession of miniature hirachnoids emerged—miniatures of the first except for a lack of hair. Jacques’ stomach began to get queasy, especially when the little ones dragged pieces of their mother’s—or their host’s—innards out of the incision and ate them.

  Sickened, Jacques backed away from the trap and sat down to collect himself. Periodically, thereafter, he checked the trap.

  By evening, nothing was left of the hirachnoid but the skin and legs. He held a leg up—it was tough and horny, like a crab leg, and felt massive enough to contain some meat. He gathered the other legs and took them back to his camp by the brook. Using some stones, he cracked one open and found some white fibrous meat inside; obviously the leg muscle.

  He pulled it out, cut a small piece off with his blade, washed it in the creek and tasted it. It was extraordinarily rich and tasted somewhat like buttered lobster, but was much softer than he remembered lobster being—indeed, it seemed to melt in his mouth.

  Jackpot, he thought. Maybe. Would the rest keep until morning? He should wait to make sure nothing untoward happened to him as a result of his bite, but it was too good. He took another bite, then, in an act of incredible self-control, he wrapped the remainder in leaves and sealed it in his emergency kit bag. There was no room for the other legs, so he put them in the basket and hung that by a rope from a branch.

  Then he improvised a hammock with green twine and bitterwood leaves and went to sleep.

  He woke up with the first light, feeling better than he had in days. The remaining part of the first leg didn’t smell right after sitting overnight, so he threw it away and cracked open another. It tasted about as good as the first leg had the previous day, so he ate the whole thing and waited. He didn’t get sick and considered himself incredibly lucky.

  On the morning of the tenth day since Jacques woke up in the CSU, he had starch, protein, and fruit, and his emergency kit was intact. There were a dozen hirachnoid legs and four bitterwood tree fruits in his basket. He had painstakingly depilated a hirachnoid pelt and sewn it into another bag. He’d constructed a back frame from flute plant stalks and green twine to carry things in. He laughed at himself; he was becoming a stone age man of substance.

  He had now stayed at the same campsite for three days. It had a running brook, in which he’d bathed without incident—if there were local parasites, they didn’t recognize him as food. He had been through a local rain shower, kind of a warm, gently descending mist with the lightest of breezes that nevertheless had managed to soak everything. He had taken to going around naked—less itching, less sweating, and less wear and tear on an emergency suit he might need later.

  He had fire, though it had taken hours of experiment with a green twine bow and stick to get something going. Then he had a hell of a time containing it—the Resolution had found a planet with perhaps an Earthlike percentage of oxygen in its atmosphere, but the pressure here must be something like three or four atmospheres—so the partial pressure of the combustion-supporting gas was that much higher as well. He glanced around him at widely spaced trees, the largest ones being succulent bitterwood, or chitin-barked blackwood. No mystery there. It turned out that tanglegrass ignited easily and dried bitterwood charcoal would glow for days. He was beginning to feel like an old hand.

  He estimated that he now only needed to spend only about a quarter of his waking time hunting and gathering and could spend the rest doing something e
lse. What should that be? Did he have enough to do the trek back into the crater? It might mean someone else’s life, though he considered that possibility faint. Another thought was of salvaging his CSU. If he could rig up some kind of power source, he might get it partially functioning again. From the rim, he could study more of the puzzling geography of this world and maybe see some stars long enough to orient it in space. He could do such projects later; for now, he had to focus on a rescue effort.

  Okay, he thought, back to the rim. He left a scratched rock plaque by his fire pit:

  * * * *

  Deliverance Creek Camp

  First Human Settlement

  Jacques Song

  Day 7-10.

  * * * *

  He frowned; he was into double digits now.

  There was another trail across the creek; he had seen kangasaurs of various types going by on it. Why did they go up to the rim? he wondered. Well, he would have plenty of time later to study such matters. He spent the rest of the day trapping and gathering, then set off the next morning.

  Upward with a full kit was still no stress whatsoever in the low gravity and hyperbaric oxygen. Eventually, he thought, he might be able to build an aircraft. Even a small wing area would support a lot of mass here.