by Dan Simmons
Logic would have dictated that the entire memory of flying on the Jovian cloud world and being taken in by a tentacled squid-thing had been a fever dream—that I had farcast here … wherever here was … after escaping Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and all the rest was dreamscape. But there were the remnants of the deployed parasail all around me in the wet night. And there was the vividness of my memories. And there was the logical fact that logic did not work on this Odyssey.
The wind shook the tree. The broken kayak slid along the precarious nest of shattered fronds and branches. My broken leg sent stabs of agony through me.
I realized that I had better apply some logic to this situation. At any moment the kayak was going to slide, or the branches would break, and the entire mass of shattered fiberglass, clinging nylon-10 risers, and wet memory-canvas parasail tatters was going to crash down into the darkness, dragging me and my broken leg with it. Despite the flashes of lightning … which came with less regularity now, leaving me in the pitching, wet darkness … I could see nothing below me except more branches, gaps of darkness, and the thick, gray-green trunks of trees that wound around themselves in a tight spiral. I did not recognize that sort of tree.
Where am I? Aenea … where have you sent me now?
I stopped that sort of thing. It was almost a form of prayer, and I was not going to get into the habit of praying to the girl I had traveled with and protected and eaten dinner with and argued with for four years. Still and all, I thought, you might have sent me to some less difficult places, kiddo. If you had a choice in the matter, I mean.
Thunder rumbled but no lightning flashed to light the scene. The kayak shifted and sagged, the broken bow tilting suddenly. I reached behind me and flailed around for the thick branch I had seen there during the earlier flashes of lightning. There were broken branches galore, razor-sharp splintered frond stems, and the sawtooth edges of the fronds themselves. I grabbed and pulled, trying to leverage my broken leg out of the broken cockpit of the kayak, but the branches were loose and I came only halfway out, reeling in nausea from the pain. I imagined that black dots were dancing in my vision, but the night was so dark that it made no difference. I retched over the side of the rocking kayak and tried again to find a firm handhold in the maze of splintered branches.
How the hell did I get in these treetops, anyway?
It did not matter. Nothing mattered at the moment except getting out of this mess of broken fiberglass and tangled shroud lines.
Get my knife, cut my way out of this clinging tangle.
My knife was gone. My belt was gone. The pockets of my vest had been ripped away and then the vest torn to a few tatters. My shirt was mostly gone. The flechette pistol I’d held like a talisman against the airborne cuttlefish-squid thing was gone … I dimly remembered it and my backpack dropping out when the passing tornado had ripped the parasail to shreds. Clothes, flashlight laser, ration pak … everything gone.
Lightning flashed, although the thunder-rumble had moved farther away. My wrist glinted in the downpour.
Comlog. That goddamn band must be indestructible.
What good would the comlog do me? I wasn’t sure, but it was better than nothing. Raising my left wrist close to my mouth in the drumming rain, I shouted, “Ship! Comlog on … Ship! Hey!”
No response. I remembered the device flashing overload warnings during the electrical storm on the Jovian world. Inexplicably, I felt a sense of loss. The ship’s memory in the comlog had been an idiot savant, at best, but it had been with me for a long time. I had grown used to its presence. And it had helped me fly the dropship that had carried us from Fallingwater to Taliesin West. And …
I shook away the nostalgia and thrashed around for a handhold again, finally clinging to the shroud lines that hung around me like thin vines. This worked. The parasail streamers must have caught firmly in the upper branches, and some of the shroud lines bore my weight as I scrabbled with my left foot on slick fiberglass to pull my dead leg from the wreckage.
The pain made me black out again for a few moments … this was as bad as the kidney stone at its worst, only coming at me in jagged waves … but when my mind came back into focus, I was clinging to the spiral-wrapped trunk of the palm tree rather than lying in the wreckage. A few minutes later a microburst of wind bulled through the jungle canopy and the kayak fell away in pieces, some being arrested by the still-intact shroud lines, others tumbling and crashing into darkness.
What now?
Wait for dawn, I guess.
What if there’s no dawn on this world?
Wait for the pain to die down then.
Why would it die down? The fractured femur is obviously tearing at nerve and muscle. You have a wild fever. God knows how long you were lying here in the rain and torn plant material, unconscious, wounds open to every killer microbe that wants to get in. Gangrene could be settling in. That rotting vegetation stink you smell could be you.
Gangrene doesn’t happen that quickly, does it?
No answer.
I tried hanging on to the tree trunk with my left arm and feeling along my injured thigh with my right hand, but the slightest touch made me moan and sway. If I passed out again, I could easily pitch off this branch. I settled on testing my lower right leg: it was numb in most places, but felt intact. Perhaps just a simple break in the lower thighbone.
Just a simple break, Raul? On a jungle world in a storm that might be permanent for all we know. With no medkit, no way to make a fire, no tools, no weapons. Just a shattered leg and a high fever. Oh, well … as long as it’s just a simple fracture.
Shut the fuck up.
I weighed alternatives as the rain pounded on me. I could cling here for the rest of the night … which might be ten minutes or another thirty hours … or I could try to lower myself to the jungle floor.
Where the predators are waiting? Good plan.
I said shut up. The jungle floor might give me a place to shelter from the rain, find a soft place to rest my leg, offer branches and vines to make a splint.
“All right,” I said aloud, and groped around in the dark to find a shroud line or vine or branch so that I could start my descent.
MY GUESS IS THAT IT TOOK ME BETWEEN TWO AND three hours to lower myself. It might have been twice that or half that. The lightning part of the storm had passed and it would have been almost impossible to find handholds in the near absolute darkness, but a strange, faint, almost invisible reddish glow began above the thick jungle canopy and allowed my eyes to adapt enough to find a line here, a vine there, a solid branch here.
Sunrise? I thought not. The glow seemed too diffuse, too faint, almost chemical.
I guessed that I had been about twenty-five meters up in the canopy. The thick branches continued all the way down, but the density of razor-edged palm fronds diminished as I neared the bottom. There was no ground. Resting in the crotch of two branches, recovering from the pain and dizziness, I began lowering myself again only to find surging water beneath me. I pulled my left leg up quickly. The reddish glow was just bright enough to show me water all around, torrents of water flowing between the spiraled tree trunks, eddies of black water washing by like a torrent of oil.
“Shit,” I said. I wasn’t going any farther this night. I had held vague notions of building a raft. I was on a different world, so there must be a farcaster upstream and another downstream. I’d gotten here somehow. I had built a raft before.
Yeah, when you were healthy, well fed, with two legs and tools … like an axe and a flashlight laser. Now you don’t even have two legs.
Please shut up. Please.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. The fever was making me shake from chills now. I ignored it all and tried to think of the stories I would tell Aenea when we saw each other next.
You don’t really believe that you’ll ever see her again, do you?
“Shut the fuck up,” I said again, my voice lost in the sound of rain on jungle foliage and against the swirl of raging wate
r half a meter beneath me. I realized that I should climb a couple of meters up the branches I had just lowered myself on through such pain and effort. The water might rise. Probably would rise again. Ironic to go to all that trouble just to make it easier to be swept away. Three or four meters up would be better. Would start in a minute. Just catch my breath first and let the waves of pain steady a bit. Two minutes at the most.
I AWOKE TO A THIN GRUEL OF SUNLIGHT. I WAS sprawled across several sagging branches, just centimeters above the swirling, gray surface of a flood that moved between the spiraled trunks with a visible current. It was still as dim as a deep twilight. For all I knew I had slept away the day and was ready to enter another endless night. It was still raining, but this was little more than a drizzle. The temperature was tropical warm, although my fever made it hard to judge, and the humidity was near absolute.
I ached everywhere. It was hard to separate the dull agony of the shattered leg from the ache in my head and my back and my guts. My skull felt as if there were a ball of mercury in it that shifted ponderously long seconds after my head itself turned. The vertigo made me sick again, but I had nothing left to vomit. I hung on the tangle of branches and contemplated the glories of adventure.
Next time you need an errand run, kiddo, send A. Bettik.
The light did not fade, but neither did it grow brighter. I shifted position and studied the water moving by: gray, ripped by eddies, carrying detritus of palm fronds and dead vegetation. I looked up, but could see no sign of the kayak or parasail. Any fiberglass or fabric that had dropped down here during the long night had long since been swept away.
It looked like a flood, like the spring runoff through the Fens above Toschahi Bay on Hyperion where the silt was deposited for another full year, a temporary inundation, but I knew that this drowned forest, this endless everglades of a watery jungle, could just as easily be the permanent state of affairs here. Wherever here is.
I studied the water. It was opaque, murky as gray milk, and could have been a few centimeters or many meters deep. The drowned trunks gave no clue. The current was quick, but not so quick as to carry me away if I kept a good grip on the branches that hung low above the roiling surface of the water. With luck, with no local equivalent of the Fens’ mud cysts or dracula ticks or biting garr, I might be able to wade toward … something.
Wading takes two legs, Raul, m’boy. Hopping through the mud is more like it for you.
All right then, hopping through the mud. I gripped the branch above me with both hands and lowered my left leg into the current while keeping my injured leg propped on the wide branch where I lay. This led to new agonies, but I persisted, lowering my foot in the clotted water, then my ankle and calf, then my knee, then shifting to see if I could stand … my forearms and biceps straining, my injured leg sliding off the branch with a rending surge of agony that made me gasp.
The water was less than a meter and a half deep. I could stand on my good leg while water surged about my waist and splashed my chest. It was warm and seemed to lessen the pain in my broken leg.
All those nice, juicy microbes in this warm broth, many of them mutated from seedship days. They’re licking their chops, Raul, old boy.
“Shut up,” I said dully, looking around. My left eye was swollen and crusted with scab, but I could see out of it. My head hurt.
Endless trunks of trees rising from the gray water to the gray drizzle on all sides, the dripping fronds and branches so dark a gray-green that they appeared almost black. It seemed a slight bit brighter to my left. And the mud underfoot seemed a little firmer in that direction.
I began moving that way, shifting my left foot forward as I changed handholds from branch to branch, sometimes ducking beneath hanging fronds, sometimes shifting aside like a slow-motion toreador to allow floating branches or other debris to swirl past. The move toward brightness took hours more. But I had nothing better to do.
THE FLOODED JUNGLE ENDED IN A RIVER. I CLUNG TO the last branch, felt the current trying to pull my good leg out from under me, and stared out at the endless expanse of gray water. I could not see the other side—not because the water was endless, I could see from the current and eddies moving from right to left that it was a river and not some lake or ocean, but because the fog or low clouds roiled almost to the surface, blotting out everything more than a hundred meters away. Gray water, gray-green dripping trees, dark gray clouds. It seemed to be getting dimmer. Night was coming on.
I had gone as far as I could on this leg. Fever raged. Despite the jungle heat of the place, my teeth were chattering and my hands were shaking almost uncontrollably. Somewhere in my awkward progress through the flooded jungle, I had aggravated the fracture to the point where I wanted to scream. No, I admit, I had been screaming. Softly at first, but as the hours went by and the pain deepened and the situation worsened, I screamed out lyrics to old Home Guard marching songs, then bawdy limericks I had learned as a bargeman on the Kans River, then merely screams.
So much for the building the raft scenario.
I was getting used to the caustic voice in my head. It and I had made a peace when I realized that it wasn’t urging me to lie down and die, just critiquing my inadequate efforts to stay alive.
There goes your best chance for a raft, Raul, old boy.
The river was carrying by an entire tree, its braided trunk rolling over and over again in the deep water. I was standing shoulder-deep here, and I was ten meters from the edge of the real current.
“Yeah,” I said aloud. My fingers slipped on the smooth bark of the branch to which I was clinging. I shifted position and pulled myself up a bit. Something grated in my leg and this time I was sure that black spots dulled my vision. “Yeah,” I said again. What are the odds that I’ll stay conscious, or that it will stay light, or that I’ll stay alive, long enough to catch one of those commuter trees? Swimming for one was out of the question. My right leg was useless and my other three limbs were shaking as if palsied. I had just enough strength to cling to this branch for another few minutes. “Yeah,” I said again. “Shit.”
“Excuse me, M. Endymion. Were you speaking to me?”
The voice almost made me lose my grip on the branch. Still clinging with my right hand, I lowered my left wrist and studied it in the dimming light. The comlog had a slight glow that had not been there the last time I had looked.
“Well, I’ll be damned. I thought that you were broken, Ship.”
“This instrument is damaged, sir. The memory has been wiped. The neural circuits are quite dead. Only the com chips function under emergency power.”
I frowned at my wrist. “I don’t understand. If your memory has been wiped and your neural circuits are …”
The river pulled at my torn leg, seducing me into releasing my grip. For a moment I could not speak.
“Ship?” I said at last.
“Yes, M. Endymion?”
“You’re here.”
“Of course, M. Endymion. Just as you and M. Aenea instructed me to stay. I am pleased to say that all necessary repairs have been …”
“Show yourself,” I commanded. It was almost dark. Tendrils of fog curled toward me across the black river.
The starship rose dripping, horizontal, its bow only twenty meters from me in the central current, blocking the current like a sudden boulder, hovering still half in the water, a black leviathan shedding river water in noisy rivulets. Navigation lights blinked on its bow and on the dripping black shark’s fin far behind it in the fog.
I laughed. Or wept. Or perhaps just moaned.
“Do you wish to swim to me, sir? Or should I come in to you?”
My fingers were slipping. “Come in to me,” I said, and gripped the branch with both hands.
THERE WAS A DOC-IN-THE-BOX ON THE CRYOGENIC fugue cubby-deck where Aenea used to sleep on the voyage out from Hyperion. The doc-in-the-box was ancient—hell, the whole ship was ancient—but its autorepair worked, it was well stocked, and—according to the garrul
ous ship on the way out four years earlier—the Ousters had tinkered with it back in the Consul’s day. It worked.
I lay in the ultraviolet warmth as soft appendages probed my skin, salved my bruises, sutured my deeper cuts, administered painkiller via IV drip, and finished diagnosing me.
“It is a compound fracture, M. Endymion,” said the ship. “Would you care to see the X rays and ultrasound?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “How do we fix it?”
“We’ve already begun,” said the ship. “The bone is being set as we speak. The bondplast and ultrasonic grafting will commence while you sleep. Because of the repair to damaged nerves and muscle tissue, the surgeon recommends at least ten hours’ sleep while it begins the procedure.”
“Soon enough,” I said.
“The diagnostic’s greatest concern is your fever, M. Endymion.”
“It’s a result of the break, isn’t it?”
“Negative,” said the ship. “It seems that you have a rather virulent kidney infection. Left untreated, it would have killed you before the ancillary effects of the broken femur.”
“Cheery thought,” I said.
“How so, sir?”
“Never mind” I said. “You say that you’re totally repaired?”
“Totally, M. Endymion. Better than before the accident, if you don’t mind me bragging a bit. You see, because of the loss of some material, I was afraid that I would have to synthesize carbon-carbon templates from the rather dross rock substrata of this river, but I soon found that by recycling some of the unused components of the compression dampers made superfluous by the Ouster modifications that I could evince a thirty-two percent increase in autorepair efficiency if I …”
