To Climb a Flat Mountain

by G. David Nordley

  Collette laughed. “But very comfortable. How do you put up with that ... skin?”

  “Smoked, scraped, soaked, scraped, and soaked. Rendered some fat to oil and soften it.”

  “Really?” Collette sounded skeptical. “Gabe, do you know more about how we got here?”

  “More than what?” There was a hint of wariness in this answer of a question with a question.

  “None of our CSUs seem to have a full record of what happened at 36 Ophiuchi, except that the homing lasers failed. Resolution didn’t stop there and ended up here.”

  “Mem’ry triage,” Gabe said quickly. “Takes power to correct and refresh memory—when the CSUs get low, they skip whatever ain’t immediately needed. I’d guess we all been here a while. Wakin’ someone up alone at the bottom of the sea is kind of the last resort.”

  The power needed to refresh memory was trivial, but Jacques didn’t want to start out on Eddie’s wrong side. He simply said, “That’s interesting. Do you have any ideas, Collette?”

  “Those who crashed on land may have used more power for cooling than those of us deep in the lake needed for oxygen,” she said. “That’s why there’s still hope to rescue some more.”

  “You kill a dinoroo, yet Jacques?” Gabe asked

  “Dinoroo? There is an animal I call a kangasaur. That’s a bipedal hopper about six meters tall as an adult, pretty much hairless?”

  “That’s a dinoroo!”

  “I almost killed one by hitting it in the head when it came at me. They’ve left me alone since—I wonder if they aren’t able to communicate the danger to each other?”

  “Wouldn’t know. I got me a whole family of ‘em with a spear thrower, though—great meat and useful skins. Almost like the Lord put ‘em there for us. Haven’t seen many around lately, though.”

  “Me neither,” Jacques answered. “I suspect something seasonal.” He saw movement on the path ahead of them. “There’s Soob and Doc!” During the conversation, they’d caught up with the tree-bearers. Collette gave her emergency bag to Jacques and rushed forward to help.

  With three people carrying the blackwood log, they were able to arrive at Rim Cave well before sunset. Excited by the new arrival, they talked well into the night, comparing notes. Gabe told of hunting at night, from blinds, and had observed a list of critters Jacques hadn’t seen, including what he called a “roachrunner,” a hairy beetlelike thing that went after any meat left out for more than an hour.

  “You wouldn’t believe how they fly,” he said. “No sound at all. They just float up. I swatted one once; it kind of popped.”

  For his part, Gabe was surprised that the legs of “spinyballs,” as he called the hirachnoids, were edible. Jacques offered him one of the last remaining ones, but Gabe turned it down. “Got my own meat,” he said.

  The next morning Jacques and Collette got up to watch the sunrise. It was even bigger and redder near the horizon.

  “I don’t believe this character,” Collette said. “New Jerusalem?”

  Jacques shook his head. “New Jerusalem is a big Baptist space colony at the Earth-Sun L4 point. We had a lot of old line Christians among the volunteers. From our point of view, it may seem like a family fight, but nobody was more ready to go after this New Reformation fringe group than the Old Reformation.”

  Collette nodded. “I get the picture. Well, he’s going to need to realize this isn’t New Jerusalem, and it isn’t going to be.”

  “We’re all in this together now,” Jacques said.

  “Watch,” Collette said. “Just watch.”

  The walk from the rim down to the beach only took an hour in the relatively cool morning. The water had receded since the storm and the Resolution II was laid out on the sand, its five logs barely held together—mostly by the remaining lashings of its deck braces. The cargo basket was pretty much gone, but they’d brought the makings of another. With five people working, the expanded raft was shipshape again before sunset.

  At daybreak the four men lifted the raft and carried it to the water. “I’m not much of a swimmer, so you three go on,” Gabe said. “I’ll hold down the fort here.”

  At that point, Collette carried a supply basket down to the raft and handed it up to Doc. She and Jacques pushed the back end of the raft off the sand, jumped on, and waved goodbye to Gabe. Gabe stood on the shore alone, dressed in his Robinson Crusoe costume, open-mouthed, then seemed to recover himself and returned their waves.

  It was very hot on the lake and surprisingly still. As they rowed, they had time to talk.

  “It is too bad we do not have any working electronics,” Doc said.

  Jacques nodded. “Given a thousand years with no maintenance, it’s not that surprising. Even my photovoltaic unit didn’t work.”

  “You thought it might?” Collette said. “Maybe we should try mine.”

  Focused on the rescue effort, they had been too busy during daylight hours to perform any such experiments. Collette got her emergency kit and they spread the array on the slightly rolling deck and plugged it into the kit’s wristcomp. Nothing happened. They tried Jacques’. It stayed dark. Then they tried Soob’s. The comp screen glowed. Jacques felt a surge of relief. Maybe they wouldn’t have to reinvent everything.

  “Time?” Soob said. But the screen stayed blank. The device refused to recognize any commands.

  “We have power,” Jacques said at last. “And five wrist comps. When we get back, maybe I can make a working one using pieces of all five.”

  “People!” Doc shouted. “Below us, a CSU!”

  Jacques scrambled over to Doc’s side and looked down—it was deep, maybe as deep as his had been. That was hopeful.

  Collette donned her emergency suit. By consensus, she and Jacques were the best swimmers. Soob tossed overboard green twine line weighted by a net full of rock to serve as an anchor and communication line. After first sticking their heads in the water to look for parrot-beaked sharks, they dove.

  They came up with Edith Lu. She had spent a day trying to get her damaged CSU to release its canopy—which Jacques managed in seconds from the controls under its access panel. Once on deck, she threw her arms around Jacques and sobbed.

  By sunset, they had completed their circumnavigation of the lake and counted two new companions and four nonsurvivors. Besides Edith Lu, they found social engineer Maria Lopes. Despite being in shallow water, Lopes’ CSU seemed to be in the best shape, and they took careful note of its location for potential future salvage.

  The Resolution II rowed out the next two days, crisscrossing the lake, but no more CSUs were found. Submahn, however, operating on the hunch that behavioral evolution may have had some parallels, made a trap and snared a two-meter parrot-beaked shark. He also caught a previously unseen, flat, eel-like critter and what looked to be a lacustrine version of a hirachnoid. The shark proved delectable.

  When they returned, they had three more mouths to help eat it.

  Leo Suretta, a weapons engineer, had left his CSU-based campsite in the forest and, like Gabe, had followed Jacques’ cairns to New Landing. A small, dark man with straight black hair, he had little to say. Evgenie Malenkov, a tall, blond biologist from Coriolis, Luna, an expert in artificial ecologies, had wandered in from a CSU landfall the other side of the mountain with Arroya Montez, a diminutive cyberneticist of striking beauty, who stayed very close to Evgenie and spoke very little.

  Maria Lopes was another matter entirely. A talkative forester from a Portuguese family, she almost immediately started a theological debate with Evgenie, who Jacques took to be Reformed Orthodox, or something of the sort. Lopes was Roman Catholic.

  Edith Lu nodded her head to the theological discussion. “Ascendant would have loved that.”

  “You knew her?” Jacques asked.

  “We were physical skills training partners. She was convinced the Anglican communion had found its way to a world view that was both Christian and consistent with ‘the book of nature,’ as she called it. She liked
to quote Bacon.”

  “Are you part of any belief system?” Jacques asked. He’d been raised Buddhist, himself, but had given it up, unwilling to swallow the notion of rebirth, and unwilling to ignore it.

  Edith shook her head, “As far as I can tell, what you see is what you get. My people have some wonderful old rituals that are fun to reenact, as long as you take them allegorically, and not too seriously at that. I suppose I’m Confucian, in a way. I like traditions and feel comfort in them, but I don’t ascribe magical powers to them.”

  At dusk, they retreated to the cave, created more rooms, and then slept as people got tired. Sometime in the night, Edith found her way to Jacques’ “room” and nestled in beside him.

  “Are you sure this is wise?” he asked.

  “You’re the only one I know,” she said. “Just hold me. Please don’t send me away.”

  Jacques didn’t. They’d had one night together while at the academy, a very sweet but unexciting experience for him. While he was fond of Edith in a brotherly way, he hadn’t seen her as a partner; they were both too reticent. In a good pairing, he thought, people’s natures would be complementary, filling in each other’s weaknesses and abating each other’s enthusiasms. He dreamed of a strong partner, to compensate for his own hesitation and diffidence.

  On Day 37, the CSUs of Helen Gorgos and Dominic Oporto were found in deep water not far north of New Landing. Helen, a physicist, struck Jacques as a gentle, thoughtful lady while Dominic was short, bright, and bubbly.

  After he’d recovered from his ascent from his CSU and been apprised of the situation, Dominic announced that he was not giving up the mission. “I will return to 36 Ophiuchi!” he declared. “I do not care if a thousand years have passed. If things have not changed there, I will try to change them. That is what I left everything to do, so it is my life. It is my goal.”

  Jacques smiled at that. “Mine as well. If I have to rebuild civilization from the stone age up to do so, I will do it!”

  * * * *

  Finally, on Day 39, they declared the rescue effort over. Of 200 CSUs on the Resolution, they had found a total of fifteen in the lake, six with live occupants. If there were others, elsewhere on this planet, they were beyond reach for now.

  Gabe, who had some experience as a lay minister, led a memorial service at the lakeshore. “We give up them up to God,” he concluded, “and pray for his guidance as we take up the task of our own survival.”

  That night, they sat around a fire on the beach and talked about what they wanted to do. They might explore nomadically as a group or they might establish a settlement, then send out expeditions. Doc and Gabe, respectively, were the proponents of these positions.

  “We have much to learn about this world,” Doc argued. “And what we learn will affect what we do. We may find a much better place to start a city. It is very hot here, and this is an active volcano.”

  “But we gotta get our feet on the ground,” Gabe countered, “start acting like human beings instead of a bunch of naked savages—not that I mind the scenery, but the Lord made other plans for us long ago. Anyway, we need some place for explorers to come back to, if they run into trouble. If we all go exploring, it’s a single point failure. One disaster and boom, we’re all gone!”

  “Smaller exploration parties would be easier,” Soob said. “The surplus from the labors of the larger group can be concentrated to supply the exploration group and they can operate more efficiently, spending less time on provisioning.”

  “Yes, at some point,” Doc said. “But it should be sited at a better place. There are four huge mountains around us. There will be some place on their slopes where the air and the temperature are more Earth-like.”

  “Maybe even above the altitude where the dragons fly,” Collette added

  Even she, Jacques thought, had started using Gabe’s names for the life forms on this planet. He had, almost pointedly, refused to adopt Jacques’ names, and it being a matter of no particular importance to anyone, others had begun to adopt Gabe’s nomenclature to avoid confusion.

  The trouble was, on the issue at hand, Jacques agreed with Gabe. Small exploration parties made more sense. The dilemma was that to support that position would be to accede leadership to Gabe, which, for some reason, bothered him greatly. But he didn’t want any kind of formal leadership position for himself. He might lead by example—not by argument or politics.

  The discussion was winding down without his input, in favor of Gabe’s. But many were waiting for him to say something. He was, after all, the first settler and the one who had organized their rescues. That should still count for something. What could he say?

  “I am,” he said, finally, “going to look for a better place for a colony on this world, and, eventually, a way to rejoin the rest of humanity. But I think it would be best to spend a few weeks in this area to recover more technology and learn more about where we are. Will it be a permanent settlement? That is a question for the future. If the volcano is active, it is not very active. The cave here at New Landing is large enough to house us for the foreseeable future. We can fish. We can try growing flute plant or even bitterwood. We can forage over the rim.”

  Doc looked at him thoughtfully. “I would choose days instead of weeks. Each day grows hotter, and to reach cooler high elevation we must first descend into even warmer low elevations and cross an ocean. Each day we wait will make that more difficult. But I must concede we are not ready to go today.”

  There were murmurs of assent around.

  “Well then, it’s settled,” Gabe said. “Now let’s start organizing who does what. Arroya, why don’t you get busy with the other women and come up with some clothes for us. Evgenie and Doc, we need some more fish. I’ll take Soob over the rim and get some more game for us. Jacques, why don’t you go up to the rim and try to figure out where we are. Okay, everyone?”

  Most agreed immediately. Jacques felt something important had happened to which he should object, but couldn’t come up with a clear reason or argument against anything Gabe had proposed. Even spending time on clothes—if they went up a mountain to where it should be cool enough in the hot season, it might be too cool when the weather turned. So he stayed silent.

  But Collette did not. “I will go to the rim with Jacques.”

  Gabe frowned momentarily, then said. “Let’s go, everyone. God be with you.”

  Suretta and Arroya stood up, then stopped as everyone else sat still.

  Jacques simply stood up and nodded. The others then rose and dispersed as well.

  * * * *

  Chapter 7

  Finding a Place in the Universe

  Jacques thought he would be glad for Collette’s company, but what he got on the ascent to Rim Cave was a tongue-lashing.

  “You are letting him walk all over you,” she concluded after rehashing the morning’s events.

  She was in the lead, and her flute plant staff sent shards of lava flying to punctuate every point she made. There was actually a kind of cadence to it; she was a natural orator, he decided. A pause in her monologue perhaps meant he should say something to defend himself.

  “Really, Gabe was just making common sense observations about what needs to be done. I would have said very similar things.”

  “No, you would not have! You would not have relegated all the women to making clothes. You would not have ignored everything I said because I’m a woman. You would not slip in references to mythological deities every other time you open your mouth.”

  Jacques had to admit she was right. “Okay, he betrays his origins. That’s probably the way it is on New Jerusalem. We’ll straighten that out when we get back. I think Doc and Soob can keep him in check. Collette, he gave me just what I wanted; a chance to get away from politics and worrying about who does what and how everyone’s going to eat. I have a couple of days now to stop and think about where we are, what we’ve got and how we can get back.”

  She stopped, turned, and walked into his a
rms. He held her for what seemed minutes.

  Finally she said, softly, with her lips at his shoulder. “Jacques, I just do not want any part of what Mr. Gabe is dishing out. I am thinking I may just go away and start my own civilization. I would like to bring you along. Also, I have a mass murder and an individual murder to solve.”

  Jacques was still focused on recovering their technology base and getting out of here. “Perhaps that’s a bit premature.”

  “Is it?”

  “Collette, how can I tell? I’m an engineer. Give me an engineering problem and I fix it. I don’t like fighting with people.” He squeezed her a little tighter. “If there’s a split, though, I think I’d rather be with you.”

  She kissed him, then broke away. “We have to hurry up to Rim Cave before we become dragon meat.”