To Climb a Flat Mountain

by G. David Nordley

  He was lost deep in thought when a three-meter kangasaur attacked. He heard it coming and managed to turn and ward off the kick with his staff more by instinct than reason. “Where in the blue sky did you come from!” he yelled in surprise as he swatted another kick with his staff and backed away. His Earth-gravity-bred strength, the quickness of his reactions, and the extension of his reach with the staff seemed to confuse the would-be predator, and for a moment, the two bipeds froze, eying each other warily, the beaked head of the kangasaur bobbing back and forth.

  Sensing hesitation, Jacques Song, Killer Ape, roared as loudly and fiercely as he could manage and advanced on the confused beast, whipping his staff back and forth. Being hollow, it made a frightening moan in the dense air. The kangasaur jumped back, turned, and began running away up the path.

  Jacques stood there laughing, naked, sweaty and exhilarated. But as he turned to march back up the trail, he heard a much larger crunch. The kangasaur had returned with a pair of much larger ones, probably six meters tall, behind him. Unable to think of anything else to do immediately, Jacques swung his staff again. The smaller one immediately jumped back behind the large ones. After a heart-stopping five or six seconds the larger one jumped, its clawed foot—almost a meter across—looking to come right down on Jacques.

  On Earth, he would have been dead meat, but it took much longer for things to happen here. Jacques stepped aside, then jumped himself as high as he could. The huge kangasaur’s head followed the leaping human with an open beak. In midair, Jacques whipped his staff across the skull of the monster. There was a cracking splintering sound, and it wasn’t from Jacques’ staff. The monster squealed in an incongruously high-pitched voice and put its head between its front forelimbs.

  “Sorry, I may have overreacted,” Jacques said to it, in the humor of relief, as he sprinted up the trail away from the trio. It was the first time he had tried to run quickly since he’d arrived, and he found he had to carefully control his stride to keep from bouncing too high and losing speed to air resistance. The kangasaurs didn’t pursue him, though, and he stopped after a few hundred meters.

  “I may regret this,” he told himself, but unable to control his curiosity, he retraced his steps. The small kangasaur family was clustered around the wounded animal, the other two nudging it with their beaks as it continued to hold its head in its forelimbs. A very bright red fluid, apparently blood, had wetted its foreclaws and limbs. Eventually, it stood up and tried to walk, but blundered into a nearby tree. In an entirely human gesture, the smaller one reached for the forelimb of its wounded mother or father—Jacques thought of them as a family—and led it away from the forest and back down the path the way it had come. The other large one stayed behind, looking back up the trail. Its eyes met Jacques’. Jacques whipped his staff around in a circle and it made the odd moaning sound. The kangasaur’s head bobbed, looking up at Jacques and then back toward the rest of its family. Finally it turned and followed them down the trail.

  Jacques exhaled and continued upward on the trail, much more alert now, walking softly and looking up and down the trail at every turn. The era of carefree strolls in the park was over.

  * * * *

  Chapter 4

  Requiem for a Martian

  The trees began to shrink and the forest to thin as he approached the rim. The sky became soft and hazy with mist. The sun overhead was red and faint to the point where Jacques could look right at it; indeed, through the haze it began to look like what some pre-astronautical artists had thought a red dwarf would look like from a planet. Upward. While his eyes were on the increasingly jagged path through the lava ahead of him, the light suddenly dimmed. Jacques looked up in time to see the last of some great, indistinct silhouette pass across the large red disk. He shivered despite the warmth of air, thinking about wing loading in a dense atmosphere under low gravity with plenty of oxygen. Something was up there. Something big.

  He looked at the trees—cover was beginning to get scarce. He built a stone cairn and scratched a crude picture of a batlike thing on a piece of smooth pahoehoe lava. This he put on the cairn just under the top stone. As he brushed his hands off, he noticed a piece of paper caught between two stones on the ground. It was such an ordinary piece of litter that he almost turned away without recognizing its implication.

  He was not alone.

  Excited, he lunged for the paper before it blew away. It turned out to be a page from an old-fashioned diary—something one might indeed take into one’s CSU. The ink had smeared and faded, but he could read some of the entries:

  ...daddy spanked me—not ready for church on time...

  ...went to Blu River concert with Fredrika, Gus, and Tsen...

  ...algebra is too hard!!!! maybe Gus will help me but I won’t let daddy know...

  ...went to Solis Lacus Temple Sunday, really, really beautiful. I feel inspired...

  ...Fredrika’s 14th birthday party really fun but sad. Her folks sold her to Will Tharsis so goodbye. I wonder who daddy will sell me to? Just one more year—I want to go. I’m afraid.

  Feeling like a voyeur, Jacques didn’t read any more. These were scenes from a New Reformationist childhood on Mars—and an understandable excuse to volunteer for a century-long expedition to liberate a people suffering from theocratic tyranny. Was this just a page come loose or had something bad happened? Jacques looked around for clues—but the page might have blown from anywhere by now.

  The writer was probably female, he thought. Who? There was someone called Ascendant Chryse, a biotechnician in the third squad; she wasn’t necessarily the only Martian farm girl on the expedition, though—just one whose name was memorable. She was tall and reserved, with long straight hair, and had been a bit of a loner. But something had burned in her eyes, and she’d worn her jumper open low enough to show cleavage.

  He put the diary page in his breast pocket. In the best of all possible worlds, he would have a chance to return it. Adam and Eve scenarios sprang unbidden in his mind.

  He reached the rim before sunset. It was too hazy to watch the sun go down; things simply got dark with their usual suddenness. In the fading light, he managed to find a lava tube with a view to the East across the caldera and set up his bivouac on a hollow filled with soft volcanic sand.

  He woke when it was still dark. Had he heard a noise? He listened carefully, but everything was silent now. He pulled the boots from his shipsuit on and felt his way out to relieve himself. Outside, he was greeted by one of the clearest and steadiest skies he had ever seen. The air was dead still and only the faintest stars shimmered ever so slightly.

  To the north, rising plumes of steam lit by a faint red glow reminded him that he was on the rim of an active volcano.

  The star patterns were unfamiliar and were dominated by a brilliant red star so bright that it cast a shadow and degraded his night vision. He had to block it with his hand to see the Milky Way. But a group of second magnitude stars caught his attention; it looked like Orion’s belt. With a start, he realized that it could indeed be Orion’s belt, but viewed from hundreds of light-years farther away, and, if the still brilliant red and blue stars above and below it were Betelgeuse and Rigel, somewhat off to the side. 36 Ophiuchi lay near Scorpius; Orion hunted on the opposite side of Earth’s sky. So the brilliant red star to its right could be Antares. If so, they had passed a few light-years beyond the heart of the Scorpion. With a bit of searching, he found what he thought were the Pleiades. Somewhere in the direction he was looking would be Sol, maybe a hundred times dimmer than the dimmest star he could see. The compact binoculars in his emergency kit required power, of course.

  He would build a telescope to see Sol, some day. He could grind and polish an obsidian mirror, silver it somehow, and use the lenses from the binoculars as an eyepiece. If he couldn’t get home again, he vowed he would at least see home again.

  A brisk wind hit him from behind and a great dark void filled the sky where brilliant stars had been moments ago. Some pr
imordial instinct seized him and he threw himself down to the lava as something he couldn’t see went whoosh-clunk above him. The stars reappeared as the black shadow flew off to the east. It was some kind of bird or bat, but the size of a large aircraft—a megabat. With the Milky Way behind it, he could see it bank and begin to return. Terrified, he scrambled on all fours back to his lava tube. There was an audible, hollow thump-crunch outside as if a giant had jumped down on the lava field.

  Jacques fumbled for his staff and basket and moved farther into the lava tube, glad that he had chosen a small one. Loud scraping sounds commenced at the tube entrance, followed by the thumps of falling rock. Eventually they stopped, but Jacques stayed awake sitting on his haunches and gripping his staff the rest of the night.

  When it got light enough to see, he tended the variety of scrapes and scratches he’d gotten from blundering around blind and naked in the sharp lava field. Then noting the monster’s excavation efforts hadn’t shortened the tube significantly, he lay down on his space blanket and slept.

  When he woke, he gathered his things and cautiously poked his head out of the lava tube. The sun was high, peeking through occasional gaps between impossibly tall, dark-bottomed clouds that were rapidly filling the sky.

  He emerged and looked around—not a hundred meters to his left, sitting in a depression of lava sand, were three huge eggs; he recognized the mottled shells.

  Did he risk the climb down to the lake? He hadn’t seen anything on the way up; maybe the megabat only hunted at night. Was there any point? The megabat was another reason not to expect to find any other survivors. Or maybe it wasn’t a threat at all and was only protecting its clutch. Supposing that he risked a search, what would be the best way of doing it? Going along the rough lava ashore would be time-consuming and increase exposure to the megabats. But if he were on or in the water, he could dive to escape it—trusting that said dive didn’t take him into the jaws of a parrot-beaked shark.

  He could make a boat of some kind. A hollow blackwood log should float nicely enough if one could stop up the ends. Bitterwood pulp dried out to something like cork, so that might work. He could braid ropes of green twine. He headed back down the hill and established a working camp at a level where there were logs of about the right size, a running brook, and a lava tube cave just the right size for him and nothing bigger. He called it Forest Camp.

  Two weeks later, on Day 25, on the first landing beach, he had assembled four blackwood logs, stopped and sealed, about thirty centimeters across and four meters long—as large as he could carry—along with a coil of three-centimeter-thick green twine rope, numerous flute plant shafts, and a pile of mature blackwood leaves. The next morning, he pondered whether to follow his plan and go for one more log or just go with what he had. One more log would make the raft about 1.5 meters across instead of 1.2. He looked at the high waves and decided to do it.

  By this time, the path was well traveled. Carrying a log on the way back, with an overnight stop at Rim Cave, would take a day and a half. But unburdened, he could do it in half a day, so he took off immediately, intending on arriving at Forest Camp by early evening. As he approached the rim, he witnessed an astounding sight. A group of kangasaurs had gathered at the megabat nest and were apparently trying to break open one of the eggs.

  Almost by instinct Jacques rushed toward them, waving his arms, hoping to scare them away and save the eggs from the kangasaurs and the kangasaurs from momma megabat. But the kangasaurs didn’t scare and one of them started toward him. Jacques slowed and prepared to do battle with his staff. Then he saw a long scar on the head of one of the kangasaurs that stayed by the eggs. Could it be the same one he hit before? Jacques began to whip his staff around, creating the low moaning sound and approached slowly. The scarred kangasaur left the egg clutch and started heading downhill; the rest followed. The one that had come to challenge him looked back at the retreating group, looked a Jacques, then back at the retreating group and abruptly turned and bounded after them. Jacques was curious about how much damage the kangasaurs had done to the eggs, but decided discretion dictated that he not approach the nest.

  Instead, he continued quickly along his trail to Forest Camp. A distant movement caught his eye. A huge megabat was coming in for a landing. Though it must have been moving rather quickly, it was so large that even rapid movements took time. In this slow motion, it settled to the ground among the trees as if using some antigravity mechanism.

  Jacques scolded himself about curiosity and went to take a look anyway, careful to stay in the cover of the trees. The megabat itself was an ugly chimera of familiar-seeming things: a bear’s head with a parrot’s beak on the body of a bat. On the ground it squatted on its hindquarters, balancing with a pair of clawed fingers that projected from halfway out on its wings. Its neck didn’t seem long in proportion, but still could extend some distance from its body.

  What it held nearly made him retch. It had pulled something out of the wreckage of a CSU, a bloated, white thing that nonetheless had recognizable arms and legs. The corpse fell in half as the megabat’s beak lifted it, and the monster gulped the half it retained with a quick motion of its head. Then it went back down for the rest. Shuddering, Jacques hid behind a blackwood tree until the megabat lifted off with a single mighty beat of its huge wings and vanished into the gloomy, clouded sky.

  He went forward to see what had happened. It turned out that the CSU was not badly damaged—the megabat only dented it in the process of biting off the flexidiamond canopy. The fall, he realized, would not have been so bad. Terminal velocity for something the size of a CSU in this dense atmosphere and low gravity would be a fraction of what it was on Earth—maybe less than ten meters per second, and even that may have been broken by the tree canopy.

  The occupant had made a camp around the CSU, apparently hoping to be rescued. A crude table and chair sat beside the CSU, made of flute plant shafts lashed together with green twine.

  There was a basket, not unlike his, with personal effects in it. The remains of a handwritten book remained open, several pages having come off. Fearing the worst, he compared the page he had been carrying with the book. It matched; the CSU had been that of Ascendant Chryse.

  His nose told him that she had been dead for a while when the megabat found her. He nerved himself to look into the CSU. Her decayed head was mercifully turned away from him amidst the scattered, putrid gore left by the unfastidious megabat. He hoped the bacteria in her body would kill the thing. But probably not—parasites coevolve with their hosts.

  The shadow of the caldera had moved over him by this time. He would have to get back to Forest Camp quickly—the megabats, apparently, were already about their appointed rounds. He looked around for her emergency kit items, finding the bag, space blankets, canteen—everything but the solar array and wrist comp. Was the array working? It had to be around somewhere. He couldn’t find it, however.

  He was about to leave when he remembered the CSU memory; it might have a more complete record than his own. He found the access panel and the right side and, hopefully, turned the power on. The tiny engineering status screen display lit up immediately—her CSU had probably used much less power than his after landing. For one thing, it wouldn’t have needed to make air.

  But the external intake status was “off.” That didn’t make sense to him. With the power off and the canopy shut and the vents closed, she would have suffocated. Had she simply given up hope and killed herself? That didn’t make sense, but the evidence seemed to point that way.

  Shadows were deepening. He pulled the systems control module out of the CSU and took it and the diary back with him to Forest Camp.

  That night, in his lava tube by the light of glowing charcoal, he got to know Ascendant Chryse and her history. She would not, he thought, have killed herself expecting to go to heaven—as an adult, she had utterly rejected the New Reformist mythology she’d been taught by the people who had abused her childhood. She had become a conforming
Anglican, though with private doubts. She hated the New Reformation. The last pages of her diary flamed with her determination.

  He wouldn’t be able to play back her CSU’s record of the Resolution’s journey until he found another undamaged CSU, but in the last pages of her diary, she vowed to “...get revenge for the sabotage that diverted Resolution from 36 Ophiuchi.” There was no despair in this writing, or anything like it.

  Needing some closure, he tore out an empty page of Ascendant’s diary after her last entry. Some of the cells of her body would be on that, along with her fingerprints. Also, it represented her future, the unwritten pages of a life that might have extended to the end of time itself. Gone now. He took the page and lit it afire from his charcoal lamp. Its brilliance filled his small cave for a few seconds, then flickered out.

  He sang Heinlein’s Green Hills of Earth softly and went to sleep with tears in his eyes and an unanswered question in his mind.

  Sabotage required a saboteur. Who? It would have been a suicide mission ... or maybe not. He was alive, after all.

  * * * *