To Climb a Flat Mountain

by G. David Nordley

  “The captain risked a great deal by sending one low-power encrypted message back to the base in the 36 Ophiuchi Oort cloud explaining what happened and pleading for a rescue if possible. But we aren’t expecting rescue—any such attempt would reveal the base and endanger seventy-plus other inbound starships. Against that, we’re expendable, may the bastard that did this rot in hell! We all said our good-byes and went to sleep.”

  “Including the saboteur,” Collette said in a hushed when the record finished. “Ascendant made it through all that only to get murdered again! What sort of monster could do this?”

  Jacques shrugged. “A fanatic willing to make the sacrifice? Or maybe one who thinks that some supernatural force would intervene.”

  In the silence that followed he heard something skitter down the slope above him. He turned his head in time to dodge a small stone heading for them, probably loosened by the warming day. A happenstance, certainly. But he looked around anyway. We are programmed to suspect some agency in everything that happens, he thought. Even when you know it’s a random event, you look. Intervening gods, or devils, are easier to imagine than pointless chance.

  Collette shook her head. “The saboteur probably wiped all the CSU records before going into cold sleep himself. He might have come across her camp while she was asleep or away, read her diary, then destroyed the incriminating pages and silenced her, not suspecting she’d left another record.”

  She looked at him, worry on her face. She clearly had devils of the nonsupernatural kind on her mind. “Gabe. Does he know you have her CSU memory?”

  Jacques went through the events of the past few days in his head. “I’ve not told anyone but Soob about Ascendant’s CSU control module.”

  “We’ll need to hide it,” Collette said, “and bring Soob into our confidence.”

  “What about the shuttle?” Jacques asked.

  “Assuming Gabe is the saboteur, it would be under his control, wouldn’t it?”

  Jacques thought carefully about that. “If the AI were intact, and convinced that Gabe, or whoever the saboteur is, had been responsible for human death, it might respond to another human authority. But someone who really knew what they were doing might have been able to degrade the AI just enough so that it wouldn’t respond to higher function programming, but would still be flyable.”

  “So we’re screwed?” Collette threw a small pebble at a nearby rock, clearly angry and not willing to submit to that fate.

  “Maybe not. If the Al is intact, with Ascendant’s record, I might gain control by argument. If not, it might not be able to stop me from getting physical access to the systems I would need to bring its higher functioning back on line. But there’s a problem. The shuttle would certainly be programmed to report any attempt at access immediately. We’d have to be much closer to it—on site, preferably.”

  “Jacques, there’s something else I think we should keep up our sleeve.”

  “Yes?”

  “Our megabat ride—I’m not sure I want to do it again, but it’s a transportation option maybe someone else shouldn’t know we have.”

  Jacques nodded. “CSU, what’s your power state?”

  The display read 23 percent.

  “That’s up!” Collette exclaimed.

  Jacques smiled. “But yes! We have some energy storage. CSU, what is the design width of your casing?”

  It displayed 10.25 centimeters.

  Jacques grinned. “We can now measure space and time accurately. We are about to leave the stone age!”

  They plugged in the wrist comp and got temperature and humidity—about 35 C and 20 percent. Atmospheric pressure was a whopping 3,123 millibars, and they were at least four kilometers above the lake.

  By evening, they had determined with a pendulum that local gravity was 14.38 percent of Earth’s. By the next morning, they had the local day pegged at 28.25 hours—significantly longer than Jacques had guessed. By the time they went to bed, they had a working hypothesis that their world was approximately moon-sized, though somehow managing more extreme elevation differences. The orbital period was 91.48 Earth days, give or take a little—almost exactly 79 local days. It got substantially less insolation than Earth; it was hot where they were because of the deep, high-pressure atmosphere—it would probably be well below freezing at the one bar level.

  * * * *

  Chapter 9

  Social Issues

  They returned to the lakeshore about noon the next morning to find their small colony almost fully clothed. All the men except Doc Yu were wearing parrot-beaked fish-skin kilts. Edith and Maria were wearing muumuu-like tents. Helen Gorgos, the female exception, was talking to Doc, away from the others.

  As soon as they came into camp, Edith ran up to Collette and handed her a dress.

  Collette sighed and smiled at her. “Edith, I’m really comfortable the way I am.”

  Edith looked crestfallen and glanced back at Gabe and Leo, who were looking in their direction, then back at Collette. “I made it just for you,” she said, plaintively. “Look, I even put your name on it.” She held it out wide, with a hand on each shoulder.

  There, just under the neckline, Jacques saw “Collette” embroidered in cursive letters on the parrot-beaked fish skin with green twine.

  “Will you just try it on for me? Please?”

  Collette laughed, took the garment, and pulled it on over her head. She gave Edith a hug. “That must have taken a lot of work. I’m sure this will come in handy when we get in a colder place.”

  Edith beamed.

  Gabe came up to them and thrust a piece of cloth at Jacques. “Well, looks like at least some of us are gettin’ civilized.”

  Jacques took the cloth with a smile, but simply held it. Then he yelled, “Come on over, everyone, I’ve got news.”

  “Hey...” Gabe said.

  “Jacques,” Leo said. “We appreciate what you’ve done, rescuing people and getting things started, but we’ve done some organizing while you’ve been away and—”

  “Welcome back!” Doc said, holding out his hand.

  “I was talking,” Leo said, stepping between Doc and Jacques.

  Jacques and Doc stepped around him to greet Evgenie and Helen.

  Gabe put a hand on Jacques’s shoulder. “What you being so impolite for? We got things to get clear here, about who’s running things and how, and you need to listen up!”

  “Stuff it, Gabe,” Helen said, standing with her feet spread and her arms folded.

  Dominic Oporto trotted up behind Gabe. “Something wrong?”

  Jacques noted that they’d found themselves in two groups. Gabe, Leo, and Dominic with Edith and Maria cowering nervously behind them, facing Jacques, Doc, Evgenie, Helen, and Collette. Arroya and Soob were nowhere to be seen.

  “Aw, nuts,” Gabe said. “Look, we had a kind of election and I got myself elected mayor. It’s no big deal and if you want to have another election, I guess that’s all right.”

  “Are you sure?” Dominic asked.

  “God will take care of it,” Gabe said.

  “Okay, okay,” Leo said. “Look, we had a discussion about where we’re going, what we’re going to do, and why. Maybe we should have waited for you two, but there it is.”

  “More of a bunch of assertions than a discussion,” Doc said. “With some of us a little too busy to participate fully.”

  “If you let me tell you what we’ve found out,” Jacques said, “I think it will give us a better idea of what to do next. Now please give me a little room. I’m going to draw in the sand.”

  With some grumbling from Leo, they backed off and Jacques drew a square with his staff.

  “All the land we can see is in the form of what looks to be a pretty geometric square. Now the gravity field is radially symmetric, so the atmosphere and ocean surface are spherical. So the corners of the square stick up out of the atmosphere and the oceans bulge out of the center a bit.” He drew a circle inside the square. “The breathable air w
ould be limited to a radius of something like this a few hundred kilometers from the center, where we are.”

  He drew a tiny circle in the center. “We are on a roughly circular island, maybe a hundred and twenty or thirty kilometers across, with a crater lake in the middle.”

  He drew another pair of nested circles, leaving what looked like an archery target inside the square. “It’s surrounded by forest and grassland; more forest to the east, more grassland to the west, down to the ocean shore.

  “The ocean is maybe three hundred and fifty kilometers wide. There’s forest on the other side, thinning out more and more as it moves out and the air gets thinner. There’s snow or frost just inside the breathable atmosphere ring, then it gets pretty bare beyond that. The land looks pretty flat to the naked eye, but I got some binoculars powered up, and it’s actually pretty rough—almost terraced as you go farther out.”

  “I don’t see how this can be an accident,” Collette added. “I think it’s a designed place.”

  “The whole universe is a designed place,” Gabe said.

  There was a moment of tense silence. “Well, this looks like it’s a little more designed than usual, Gabe,” Doc said, to muffled laughter, “by someone or something with a bit of an artistic sense, or maybe a sense of humor. Jacques, you don’t suppose the whole world could be a cube, do you?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Dominic said. “This is all just a trick of perspective. Out in space, it probably doesn’t even look square. We’re just in a huge crater, like Hellas on Mars, and the rim just happens to look like this from the center.”

  “Well, maybe,” Helen said. “In any event, we’re on a volcanic pimple at the bottom of a bowl, gravitationally speaking, summer is starting, and it’s already forty in the shade. We’re better able to stand heat than our ancestors, but still we should be thinking of moving elsewhere.”

  “You seem to be comfortable enough with heat,” Gabe said, getting chuckles from Dominic and Leo and a bit of titter from Edith. “Seriously, we’ve put a lot of work into this here new town, and if we credit what Jacques’s saying, in a few days we’ll be past periwhatever and it will start getting cooler.”

  Helen shook her head. “No, it won’t. Thermal lag, Gabe. Especially with an atmosphere this thick and massive. This is the start of local summer. Maria, I think you have something to say?”

  Gabe frowned at Helen, but Maria hesitantly stepped forward. When she was rescued, she was chatty and exuberant. What, Jacques wondered, had happened in three days?

  “There are only two kinds of tall trees in the forest,” Maria said. “Both are well adapted to fire. It’s been dry for the last ten days or so. The brush plants, edenhemp, tanglegrass, ablecane, and others have gone to seed and are drying out. The dinoroos have vanished and we haven’t seen a spinyball for days. I ... I think things are getting ready for a fire. It’s probably part of the natural life cycle here.”

  “Well, we can wait it out,” Gabe said. “We got all we need right here with the lake.”

  “Not exactly,” Doc said. “I can’t do a proper analysis, but we’re probably getting a lot of what we need from the plants we’ve been eating. Ascorbic acid definitely—nobody’s getting scurvy, and we’ve been here about long enough.”

  “Aw, that’s just a pointy-headed theory of yours,” Gabe said. “You don’t have an AI to ask.”

  “If the fire starts while we go through the forest,” Dominic said urgently, “then we’re in for a real disaster! I think we’re safer here. Like Gabe says.” He smiled at Gabe.

  Gabe smiled back.

  “This is an active volcano,” Helen said. “And we’re near at the point of maximum tidal stress.”

  Jacques looked at the north side of the caldera. What he remembered as wisps of steam had become a fairly constant cloud.

  Gabe groaned, “Aw, bullfeathers! We could wait a million years for an eruption!”

  “Or an hour,” Doc said.

  “Has anyone seen Soob?” Jacques asked.

  “He’s still hunting,” Gabe said. “I had to come back and get things organized.”

  And it just so happened he wasn’t there to oppose you, Jacques thought. “Where were you?” he asked.

  Gabe waved a hand toward the north. “Down by where my CSU crashed. Hunting’s better.”

  “It’s getting dark,” Leo said. “Let’s say a prayer for him tonight and discuss what we’re going to do. We can send a search party at first light tomorrow.” He stared right at Jacques.

  Do I challenge him? Jacques asked himself. Not over something that he’s right about. “Okay, let’s talk.”

  “Tell him, Gabe,” Leo said.

  “Yes, tell him,” Dominic said.

  “We need to think about what kind of life we’re going to make here,” Gabe said. “Now, I’m no New Reformationist myself; I’d been a real Christian for seventy years before I joined this expedition. But if you take away all that nonsense about the face on Mars, they have some ideas about how to organize a colonial agricultural society that really work.”

  “Like keeping women in their place?” Collette asked.

  “There’s a natural division of labor; it’s in our genetic makeup. Child-rearing, making clothes, domestic stuff and all that. Most women want it that way.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Collette said.

  “Okay, well, so maybe we make a few exceptions to start with. Now there needs to be some firm secular authority. We can’t be forever debating on what to do. And there needs to be some spiritual authority, too, someone to remind us that we’re human beings made in God’s image.”

  Doc cleared his throat and said very softly and mildly, “I’m not going to practice or pay lip service to your religion.”

  Gabe waved his hands, “And I wouldn’t want to make you do so. But now just think downstream a little. We get ourselves all sorts of kids, and kids can be unruly if they aren’t afraid they’re going to get caught. Even adults; God knows what we’d do if we didn’t know someone was watching us and judging us!”

  “The golden rule gives me a sufficient standard,” Helen said. “The laws of the physical universe show us the consequences of our actions to others, and to ourselves.”

  “But we don’t all have Ph.D.s in physics. What’s going to keep everyone else in line? We need, I say we need, some kind of religion, something to scare people to do the right thing that can’t think it through themselves all the time. I mean, what’s it going to be like when we have a thousand, ten thousand people here? What’s going to keep them all in line?”

  Jacques’ patience was wearing thing. “We are not going to stay here and found a colony. We are going to recover our technology, build a starship, and go home.”

  “But how are we going to do that?” Dominic asked. “It’s not possible. We’ve got one wristcomp and solar array that’s just barely working. There are only a dozen of us. We have to spend most of our time just finding enough to eat and keep from being dragonoid meat. Be realistic. Maybe in a few years, some of us will have some spare time to work on the problem. Meantime, we need to accept reality. I think Gabe can give us some real common sense leadership, and we’re going to need that to get through this.”

  This was the same man who, just days ago, had so emotionally stated his commitment to finishing their mission! Jacques wanted to tell him about the shuttle, but realized that would reveal his knowledge to the saboteur.

  “I think someone who doesn’t have a religious agenda would be more appropriate,” Doc Yu said. “Helen, for instance.”

  Gabe shot him a look of pure contempt. “An atheist nudist! You expect me to follow that!”

  Helen laughed. “No, I don’t suppose you would. Perhaps we can compromise. Gabe has the energy and desire to organize things. So he can be our CEO. But we can be the board and vote on policy matters, and I would think Jacques should be our chairman. Can we make that work?”

  “It seems a lot more complicated than we have time for,
” Dominic said.

  “Do you want to split the community already?” Doc said.

  “Do you?” Dominic retorted.

  Leo touched Gabe’s arm. Gabe nodded and opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, a new voice echoed off the rocks.

  “Hello, everyone, someone give me a hand!” It was Soob, from somewhere in the dark.

  Jacques ran into the shadows toward the voice and found the missing hunter dragging the better part of a kangasaur carcass on a travois of blackwood branches.