Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 181
Collette released her hold on the monster’s ear, worked her way back, settled beside him, and roped herself to him. They kissed briefly and she fell asleep. Too far out to think about swimming back, they were going wherever this megabat was going.
Two hours out over the ocean, when Collette and Soob revived enough to listen, Helen held forth. She had rigged a circle of lines on the megabat’s back by braiding patches of megabat hair into short ropes that could be knotted to their lines. With this, everyone felt more secure, though the megabat had hardly tilted at all during the flight.
“So I think Doc’s cube world idea is correct,” she concluded.
“On this side, anyway,” Soob said, “the biosphere is a fluid bulge on a square face.”
“Indeed,” Helen responded. “The ocean and the atmosphere respond to gravity and intersect the cube in circles. See how the snow line curves up toward the mountain peaks? If there were only four mountains, the thing would be unbalanced, I think. It works better as a sphere with eight huge mountains the shape of triangular pyramids, arranged symmetrically.”
“Why don’t the mountains collapse?” Soob asked. “My memory is a little hazy, but I thought planets this size would inevitably assume a more or less spherical form.”
Helen shook her head. “They should. I can only guess that the mountains are made of something very strong and lightweight. Made is the operative word. I think this is a manufactured world.”
“But why would anyone do this?” Collette asked.
“The mountains and the ridges connecting their peaks extend beyond the atmosphere,” Soob observed.
Helen nodded. “All but the last traces. Each face of the cube would be isolated from the other faces, for things not able to travel through vacuum. It could harbor six separate biomes, but each with the same insolation and resources.”
“A zoo?” Jacques speculated. “With life forms from different worlds?”
“You wouldn’t need a perfect cube for that,” Soob said. “I suspect some esthetic motivation as well—form and function. It’s architecture on a scale we’ve only begun to think about. I’d like to meet whoever came up with this.”
Everyone fell silent at that point, gazing at the incredible sight below them. Jacques felt an unjustified, giddy relief. Saboteurs, murderers, and fire lay behind them. In the alien forests and cliffs ahead of them, somewhere, was a link to the civilization they had lost. If they could find it. If they could feed themselves. If they could avoid being eaten.
TO BE CONCLUDED.
To Climb a Flat Mountain
Conclusion
Even in a place as bizarre as Cube World, the worst problems humans face are likely to come from other humans.
Part I synopsis
Jacques Song wakes up from cold sleep to find himself underwater looking up through the transparent cover of his cold sleep unit (CSU) at a large predatory fish with a huge parrotlike beak. He went to sleep in a hotel room expecting to wake up at a base in the Kuiper Belt of the 36 Ophiuchi system. There he was to take part in a huge expedition to liberate a colony taken over by a cult nasty enough to justify an attempt at interstellar warfare. Something had gone very wrong.
The CSU’s computer has only limited knowledge of what has happened and no knowledge of why. Jacques’ starship, the Resolution, failed to engage its deceleration pellet stream at 36 Ophiuchi and had spent the last thousand years decelerating by other means, losing the last of its velocity by crashing into the atmosphere of the only habitable planet it could reach and dumping its cargo of CSU stored passengers into and around a volcanic crater lake. Running out of power, the CSU has revived Jacques to fend for himself.
With an emergency kit nobody thought would ever have to be used and no source of power, Jacques must escape the lake floor, evade the predatory fish, and reach shore. All the electronics in the emergency kit are dead. Fortunately, the skin-tight all-purpose survival suit is powered by his body heat and motion and works perfectly. Enclosed in his suit, Jacques is able to flood the CSU, pop the lid, evade the fish, reach the surface, and navigate through huge but gentle waves to a black sand beach. In this effort, he finds himself feeling exceptionally strong and vigorous.
The world’s gravity, it turns out, is about equal to that of the Moon. Still, the feeble stellar wind from its old red dwarf star has apparently been insufficient to blow the atmosphere away. Indeed, where Jacques has landed, the pressure appears to be several times that of Earth’s atmosphere. The partial pressure of oxygen also seems greater, accounting for some of his endurance and strength.
Jacques will attempt to rescue other survivors, but first he has to assure his own survival. The vegetation inside the caldera is sparse, so he sets out over the crater rim to find what he can on the exterior slopes. At the rim of the crater-lake caldera, Jacques discovers three impossibly huge distant mountains right, left, and in front of him whose perfect triangular peaks and connecting ridges seem to rise above the atmosphere.
Descending into the forest below the ridge, Jacques manages to find sustenance among the native life, though he comes close to the end of his emergency rations. He has close calls with huge creatures that resemble a cross between a kangaroo and a dinosaur and with batlike scavengers the size of a small airliner. With no recorder or even paper and pencil, Jacques is reduced to scratching short notes in stone to record his progress. He leaves these on cairns that he builds at his various campsites.
On his way back to the crater-lake, he discovers a windblown page from the diary of a woman he knew briefly in training—Ascendant Chryse. Arriving at the rim in evening, Jacques finds a lava tube for shelter. Rising before sunrise, he spots the shrunken, distorted constellation of Orion. It is still recognizable because the Resolution had come from that direction. But Just off to the side is an intensely bright red star. It can only be Antares—which means the Resolution had bypassed the supergiant star and they were now farther from Earth than it was. Jacques’ stargazing is then interrupted by a hungry megabat and he must hide deep in his cave.
After sunrise, Jacques decides to build a raft for the rescue effort. He goes back into the forest to get logs and twine. There he establishes “Forest Camp” and commutes back and forth to Second Landing beach carrying one log at a time. On his last logging trip, he stumbles on Ascendant Chryse’s CSU just in time to watch a “megabat” break into her CSU and carry away her body. On reaching the CSU and her camp, he finds that she had been murdered when someone, or something, turned off the power to her CSU while she slept, trapping and suffocating her. He finds her diary and on its last pages reads that someone on the ship had sabotaged its deceleration mechanism. He takes her diary and the memory module from the CSU and holds a brief ceremony for her that night in his shelter.
Back at his crater-lake shore camp, “Second Landing,” Jacques builds a raft, the Resolution II, and is able to find and rescue three people: Submahn “Soob” Roy, a former park ranger and logistics expert; Collette Obota, an expedition policewoman; and Dr. Yu Song-II, a psychiatrist they call “Doc.” The raft almost falls apart during the trip and they barely reach shore alive.
Needing more food and a bigger raft, the group of four set out for the other side of the Caldera Rim. While Soob and Doc are bringing back the hollow logs packed with food, Jacques and Collette stop by the Ascendant Chryse site to salvage more electronics. On the way back to the rim they are hailed by a large man draped, Robinson Crusoe-like, in a kangasaur skin tunic.
His name is Gabe Eddie, a psychowarfare expert from a Baptist space colony, New Jerusalem, in the Solar System. He tells them his CSU landed in the forest and he found them by following Jacques’ cairns. To save their survival suits and keep comfortable in the hot, high-pressure climate, Jacques and the others have gone naked. This bothers Eddie, as do Collette Obata’s assertiveness and questions. In turn, she and Jacques find Gabe’s answers and manner a little bard to believe.
Once back at Second Landing, they rebuild the raft and rescue Edith Lu and María Lopes from CSUs. When they get back to camp they find that Leo Suretta, Evgenie Malenkov, and Arroya Montez have joined the group, apparently walking in from the forest. These tend to side with Gabe on several issues.
One more rescue voyage is attempted, which finds physicist Helen Gorgos and Dominic Oporto. The small community now sends out foraging expeditions. Jacques and Collette go on one and in addition to supplies, salvage more of Ascendant’s CSU. Jacques is able to get some of the equipment working and discovers that a shuttle from the Resolution apparently survived reentry and is somewhere west of them. They suspect Gabe and Leo, at least, have not been fully honest.
They also have a close encounter with another megabat and by necessity discover that they can jump on the creatures, ride them, and even steer them somewhat by pulling on their ears. They get a great view of the geography of their planet and decide that what they can see is a square, and suspect the entire world may be cube shaped.
When they return, they find things have been heating up, physically and politically. Gabe and Leo have staged a sort of coup. Forest fires have broken out, and Gabe decides the group should remain at the lake, while Jacques and others think they would starve there and opt for escaping to the sea surrounding the volcanic island, as most other large animals seem to have done. No agreement can be reached and the community splits acrimoniously, with Jacques, Collette, Soob, Doc, and Helen striking out for the coast.
The small breakaway group crosses the rim and heads toward the coast as fast as they can. They barely survive the fire sweeping the island by staying close to Deliverance Creek. Exhausted and hungry, they manage to jump on a megabat feeding on a kangasaur carcass. It doesn’t stop at the coast; it carries them west toward the unknown slopes of the great flat mountain on the other side of the sea.
Chapter 12
At the Edge of Forever
Hours passed and the western shore came into view, then passed beneath them. The land, so flat from a distance, was anything but as they neared it—filled with terraces, gulches, waterfalls, and ridges. Their approach was disorienting. Their eyes told them the megabat was diving down into a roughly flat landscape, while all their other senses told them it was flying level.
“Keep thinking ‘mountainside,’ ” Doc said. “Or you could get sick. Look at the angle the trees make with the land.”
That helped quiet Jacques’ stomach, at least. But the fact that they could see individual trees also rang an alarm bell. Whether descending or flying into a mountainside, they were rapidly approaching the end of their flight.
“We need to get ready to get off!” he shouted. “We’ll need to run for the trees, or someone will be its next snack.”
Though famished, everyone was well rested. They quickly untied the lines, stowed them, and helped each other strap on their kits. The megabat settled down in the tree-crowned top of a huge pillar that had become slightly detached from a terrace cliff. As it settled down in a clearing, a number of much smaller versions of itself—each still twice as large as a person—came hopping out of the surrounding wood to greet it. That proved more than enough distraction for the humans to jump off and run for shelter.
“Okay, gang,” Collette said, on catching her breath. “We’ve eaten one tiny meal in two days and we’re trapped on a sky island plateau filled with huge predators. Why do I feel like I just got out of school?”
“Stress relief,” Doc said. “We still have big problems, but they aren’t immediate problems.”
Everyone laughed. Something scurried away—a hirachnoid.
“Dinner, anyone?” Soob asked.
“We need a place to sleep and I don’t see anything resembling a cave,” Collette observed.
“The trees are different here,” Jacques noted, thinking aloud. “They have more branches and a wider crown. There might be a place to build a platform. Over there.” He pointed to a tree with wrinkled gray bark and two lower branches that came out at almost the same level, about three meters up. “Okay. Soob, Collette, and Doc, why don’t you forage. Helen and I will try to make a platform for us.”
As the hunter-gatherers left on their mission, Jacques and Helen constructed the nest, using the nearly indestructible line from Helen’s emergency kit to make a web between the branches. They filled that web with whatever branches they could find lying around and secured those with a local vine that, while not green twine, served almost as well. Helen called it pseudotwine. Jacques left the construction to Helen while he gathered material.
“Come on up,” Helen said, throwing down a pseudotwine vine tied to an overhead branch. He pulled himself up easily hand over hand in the low gravity and lowered himself onto the platform; it was springy, but didn’t feel like it was going anywhere.
Still, he felt better sitting down. Helen had resumed her customary state and stowed her shipsuit in her kit, which was hanging from an overhead branch. She waved at it, saying, “Save the suits for when we need them.”
Despite having gone unclothed, or nearly so, in for over a month, having been clothed for a few hours had put Jacques back into another cultural mode, and he hesitated. With a sly smile, Helen reached over and, starting at his collar, began to peel his suit off like a banana skin.
When she got it off him, she began to cuddle. “Time for dessert,” she said.
He laughed and gently pushed her away. “Too tired, Helen. I’m just too worn out.”
They spent the next few days resting, hiding from megabats, and foraging. The clear day of their arrival proved a fortunate rarity; more typical were misty mornings and gentle midday showers. It was more temperate here, with daytime temperatures in the high 20s; air pressure was down to around 3,000 millibars and more variable than at New Landing. The view from the tree was spectacular, but a week after their arrival, they were rested and provisioned; it was time to move on.
They packed up camp at noon the next day, with the megabats safely in their daily slumber, and explored the western edge of their sky island, looking for a way across the gap.
“It’s like Meteora, in Greece,” Helen said. “Except ten times bigger. People built monasteries on top of natural pillars like this; they looked impossible to get to. The megabats keep their chicks here for the same reason, I think. But there is usually a back way, a thin bridge or connection with the rest of the plateau; not an easy way, but much more negotiable than the sheer fronts and sides. We just have to find it.”
Jacques spotted it on the second day of looking, toward the south side of the pillar. About three hundred meters below the plateau, flutes from the pillar and plateau extended to meet each other. Almost. There was a gap of perhaps ten meters, with a treacherous narrow ridge leading to it on either side.
“Everyone. Over here,” he called.
“An easy jump in this gravity,” Soob said as he arrived, surveying the gap. “But staying where you land, maybe not so easy.”
“There’s a tree about four meters up,” Colette said. “I was a long jumper in college. I think I can make it with a rope around my waist.”
“Remember the air is three times thicker here,” Doc said. “You’ll lose speed quickly.”
“What about a bridge?” Helen asked. “There are logs long enough, and we have line.”
“Hmmm,” Jacques said.
It was, possibly, the first suspension bridge on the planet; certainly the first human-built one. They used two twelve-meter logs; the first was erected vertically on the sky island side, set in a hole and held in place by rocks piled around it. A line, anchored to a tree, went over its top and was tied to the far end of the other log. This they pushed out over the gap, playing the line out as it went until it hung swaying over the far end. They anchored the near end with a pile of rocks, then raised and lowered the far end onto the far side of the chasm until it had pounded a secure groove for itself in the loose soil there. The party crossed one at a time, with lines around their waists in case they slipped.
To get up the gravel on the other side, they made a human road to the nearest tree. Doc lay down on the slope with his feet securely on the log. Jacques craw led up over him and, with Doc’s help, placed his feet on Doc’s shoulders and lay down, extending the human road another meter and a half. Helen followed, then Collette with a line that she tied to the tree toehold on the plateau. Using the bridge and ropes, they got their gear across the gap and up to the level part of the plateau. It took them most of the day. They made camp on a secure flat near the edge of the cliff. It was somewhat risky, but they were beyond tired and the view of sea cliffs below, the sea, and the top of the mist-shrouded island they’d fled was to die for.
“It’s like we’re on the edge of forever,” Doc said.
The next morning, Jacques put up a cairn and on the more or less flat face of a rock, scratched their names and:
Day 54. Camp Edge of Forever.
The plateau proved to be one of the terraces Jacques had seen from the far shore; three kilometers in, they were faced with a kilometer-tall rock face.
“In this gravity, a piece of cake,” Collette said, looking at the rough, crevice-filled rock face. She showed them how to jam flute plant stems in cracks as big, ersatz pitons and they scaled the thing in a couple of hours.
They had enough provisions for three days’ climb, which took them up over a half dozen “terraces.” Jacques welcomed the break from breaking trail through the forest and the view at the top of each cliff. If they found an exceptionally tall tree at the top of a cliff, they would climb it and look back. The ocean would cover the eastern horizon, perhaps slightly bowed upward as it conformed to gravity and not the flat topography. In the far east, they could see a dark smudge, so small now that they could cover it with a hand. Smoke still rose from it like a strange plant with wispy gray leaves reaching impossibly high into the sky.
