Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 225
That would give him about four hours. He felt like he needed it. “Sleeping in microgravity without anything for a restraint is easier said than done, unfortunately.” He tried to pull a vine off to tie himself down, but it crumbled to dust in his hand.
Inspired, Marianne brought the butt of her staff down hard on the smallish branch they had chosen for their stopping place and was rewarded when a big piece of it caved in. “Hollow,” she said. The hollow proved less than a meter wide and the “wood” inside seemed almost polished. Akil was able to wedge across it to hold himself with his back to the wood. Exhaustion did the rest.
“Akil?”
He cleared his head. This time there had been no dreams about Kita or anyone else. “I’m awake.”
“Second eclipse. Look below. It’s glowing.”
Instead of pitch dark there was a deep, diffuse kind or redness. Even this far up, the air had a tinge of sulfur in it.
“The eruption is still in progress – I can smell it. No escape that way.”
“Could we make it to Shadow?” She looked into his eyes.
This was a test for her, he thought. Hell, it was a test for both of them. “I haven’t given up on Sharada and Olympia,” he told her quietly.
“Look, we seem to be safe here, but there’s no food, no water, and little oxygen and what the bloody hell are we going to do stark naked on the Forest People’s home court?”
He squeezed her hand and smiled ruefully. “They aren’t as smart as we are, or have you changed your mind about that?”
She shook her head. “Maybe someone’s directing them. Maybe Sharada.”
“Oh, in that case, what do we have to worry about?”
She laughed grimly at his irony. “Remembered what happened last time we went to sleep? Akil, have you ever been betrayed, I mean really dumped and crapped on by someone you loved?”
“My ex, kind of. Somehow, after sixty years, I hadn’t expected it to happen. But she didn’t hurt me beyond that.” Though that, he thought, had been enough. “Sharada couldn’t have planned for you to be the one to come after her. It could have been anyone. That’s not really her fault.”
Marianne sighed. “She set the stage. Can you imagine what Olympia’s going through? I asked you whether you’d been betrayed. Have you ever experienced anything like this before?”
Unfortunate memories came back to Akil, and he shuddered. “Once, as a kid,” he said. “A girl I knew talked me into doing it with her, then she changed her mind at the last minute after, well, I was ready. I didn’t know she had a microcam on us; she showed it to all her girlfriends. I had to tell my parents and change schools.”
Marianne touched his arm. “That counts. Chaos, our ancestors wanted real sexual equality, they changed the genome to get it, and be careful what you wish for.”
Akil yawned. Most men were less assertive than their ancestors and women were more so. Women were also taller, stronger, less emotionally dependent, better at math, and so on than the previous norm. Men were less angry and more verbal. Humanity had become a race more suited to communitarian sensibility than survival in the primeval forest; less frustration all the way around. Those decisions had been made over a century ago, and it seemed pointless to Akil to rehash them now. But Marianne needed to talk more than sleep. Whatever, he thought. “As I remember, it cut the homicide rate way down and made adolescence tolerable. Anyway, it’s all statistical; any given person can still be anything people ever were.”
“Yeah, in theory. But that makes us a different species, really. All that’s left of sexual dimorphism is the different reproductive plumbing. But once upon a time there was a rich dimorphic culture with all kinds of literature that feels irrelevant now, written by people who delved into a human nature that doesn’t exist anymore.”
Akil smiled. “Most of that part of human nature was just culture, I thought.”
Marianne shook her head. “Most modern people have no idea of what Ulysses felt when he returned and saw the suitors after Penelope. Othello is a complete mystery. I can relate to some of that, the way I feel about losing Sharada to, to this. But I’m a throwback, ‘the last human woman’ I called myself in college.” She laughed. “And then I fall for another woman and then she does this. What a bloody damn mess!”
Akil could barely see her face in the dim light, but it seemed as if she were near tears. He reached and touched her hand, to reassure her. Time to change the subject, perhaps. “What college?”
“Queen’s on New Brisbane, the space colony. My folks were from royalist refugee stock. Conservative in other areas, too. I don’t know that they retroengineered me, or anything like that, but it would have been in character. Why did she leave you?”
“Huh?”
“Your ex, Kit or something, what happened?”
“Her name was Kita. I’m boring, Marianne. Six decades of steady sensibility was enough for her.” He smiled ruefully. “So if you want excitement . . .”
She shook her head and her eyes glistened. “Had enough of that, haven’t I?”
She held tight on to his hand, then slipped through the hole in the trunk, slid herself beside him and artlessly pressed the rest of her bare body against his, trustingly, as a child might.
He put his arms around her and rocked her gently. It felt beautiful, but he thought this could have nothing to do with desire on her part, especially after her experience with the Forest People. So he simply held her until the tears dried and she slipped into a deep sleep.
Then he slipped away from her, adjusted the position of the staff to keep her from floating away, and left the hole. Far above, it must have been midafternoon, but even Hazian daylight was more like diffuse moonlight this near the dead core of the interforest.
People, he thought, as much as they were intrigued by the new also liked to conserve things, liked to keep them the way they used to be. Earth was turning into a museum; every species, every building preserved just the way it was in the era that people first became aware of it. If they could stop the drift of the continents, they would. Perhaps, as Marianne said, they didn’t like to see the efforts of their forebears turned into irrelevant dust. He understood Marianne’s nostalgia for times gone by. But Marianne preferred women, which was certainly not an ancient human tradition, at least not in most cultures. Was this a contradiction?
Or was it that Sharada was simply the most passionate and assertive person within fifty light years and Marianne had simply had to have that, the best cave man available, plumbing being beside the point.
The engineers had done a good job, Akil thought, at least with him. His libido was distinctly laid back. But part of him wondered what it felt like, back then, to be so compelled, so motivated. Two steps forward, one back.
He wondered about the Forest People – perhaps Sharada and everyone else had it wrong. Perhaps they were not a nascent culture, but one that had been intelligent once upon a time and had simply given it up to stop torturing themselves. The Forest People certainly could be the products of advanced engineering; as far as fifty years of data collection by sensors and two months with observers in the field could tell, they never got sick, they never aged, they never fought, they never seemed bored or unhappy.
He shook his head and looked around him. The L1 point was an atmospheric Sargasso sea; debris from all over the central part of the forest would be brought here either by gravity from around it or by the warm winds from the planets. The low oxygen and absolute dryness might mean that some of this stuff was very, very old. Maybe, he told himself, old enough to preserve some record of evolution on these worlds.
He wandered away from Marianne’s sleeping place a little, exploring branches, logs, trunks, and dried leaves that crumbled when he touched them. He found more spears, bones, skeletons, and whole mummified animals, both on the primitive (he assumed) ring plan of the Forest People and the double-spine of the pseudosimians. The winged critters tended toward the ring plan, but put on edge so the lower part of the ring worked as a breast bone. In the monkey-like things, the limb opposite the head had become long and tail-like, though it still retained a functional hand on its end.
He wondered again about Marianne’s concern with the fossilized skeleton they’d found embedded in the tree. Everything he found was easily recognizable from his training, though it had to be very, very, old. Yes, evolution seemed to have stopped dead in its tracks here and it seemed deliberate. But who had done it and why?
Then he found a rock. Probably a meteorite, from its rough, pocked surface. A tool. He broke off a dry branch from a nearby trunk and scraped it, then scraped it some more, putting an experimental point on the stick. It crumbled; he needed greener wood.
A large mass embedded in the trunk turned out to be volcanic glass, and a blow from the stone produced some obsidian shards that were sharp enough to use as a knife or a scraper. Akil laughed at himself. He’d progressed from precultural to Neolithic in an hour. Given enough time maybe he could build a starship.
He had nothing to carry his new found treasures in; for that he would need living leaves and root vines that had enough moisture to be tough and flexible. They would need to make an expedition back to the fringe of life, tap some roots for water, some food, and gather some material–if they could avoid the forest people. With a stone in each hand, Akil made his way back to the hole in the trunk to wait for Marianne to wake.
Four eclipses later, they had lots of stringy root fibers for “thread,” numerous very straight sticks, a dozen tough elephant ear leaves, several fruits that Marianne assured him were edible, and a wicker cage with a big ball of water – about a kilo, Akil figured – in it.
They’d also had a close encounter with Forest People and had spent an eclipse frozen in place in a tree hollow shared with some understanding balloon birds; they were larger versions of the ground-nesting “bubble birds,” and it had been disconcerting to watch the workings of their innards through the thin translucent skin stretched over their circular skeleton.
“Our own bones are starting to show, too,” Marianne had joked.
Akil had smiled, but they both knew this could go on only so long. Searchers were out by now, he was sure. But they would be looking far, far below the null point.
After another four eclipses they each had a crude obsidian knife, a couple of dozen meters or so of crude twine, canteens made of hollow branches capped with elephant-ear leaf patches and sealed with megavine resin. They also had elephant-ear leaf capes, belly bags to carry their primitive treasures, and stout, springy staffs cut from tree foliage.
“The secret, I think, is not to stop,” he told Marianne. “Just keep jumping out; we can move faster than the forest people. Once we get outside the trees, our bodies should show up like infrared beacons to every sensor pointed at the general area. They should see us.”
“If they’re looking.”
“Sensors have been looking at the outside of this place at centimeter resolution or better for over a standard year. It gets down to freezing and below at the forest edge. The sensors will see us. We’ll just have to trust that they’re programmed to notice us. Or some person looking at the data sees us.”
Marianne nodded. “Okay. That’s our best shot, I guess.” She took a deep breath. “I suppose, if we get out of this, we’ll look back and say, ‘What an adventure!’ I hope I remember how I feel right now if that time ever comes.”
“It will,” Akil said, trying to convince himself as much as Marianne.
They planned. It was approximately 120 kilometers out to the edge of the forest in the thinner air that surrounded the L1 point. Thin by Hazian standards, Akil reminded himself – it would be still thicker than Earth’s at sea level. But with very little oxygen and cold. It would feel even colder than it was because dense air conducts heat more efficiently. The cold would be uncomfortable, but survivable. Assuming, he told himself, they didn’t run out of fuel. It had been five days since they’d had a real meal with all the vitamins, minerals, and proteins they needed. You can’t live on sugar alone.
It grew dark outside. “Shadow eclipse. We should get another night’s sleep.”
“First shift,” Akil volunteered.
“Akil, we haven’t seen a Forest Person or anything else living down here for three standard days. I think the rest will do us more good than standing watch, or to put it the other way, being run down is a worse danger than getting found here by the Forest People. We’re way down on energy stores; if food is sleep, sleep is food. Our bodies need the down time. Mine does, anyway.”
That made sense to Akil, and they settled into the log together. Marianne cuddled up against him like a child. She looked into his eyes, and slowly, tentatively, began to caress him. He began to respond, and felt embarrassed.
“You’re gay,” he said.
“Shut up,” she said. “That was a million years ago. Now I’m scared.”
When they woke, he lay awake looking at her for several minutes, thinking she was the most beautiful person he’d ever seen. Then he slid out of the hole and did his private things over a hollow that was “up” to the few microgees that remained here. Marianne was awake when he returned, and he automatically gave her a hand to help her out of the hole in the trunk. She held it a little tighter than usual.
“Ready?” he asked her after they’d tied their meager belongings around their waists.
“Yeah. No, wait.”
She took her obsidian knife from her pack and scraped “M&A” in the dry surface of the dead, hollow trunk that had been their home for the last three standard days. “I don’t have a camera, so that will have to do.” She grinned, one of the few times Akil had seen her smile in the last few days.
Akil laughed. “You realize that tourists will be come to see that for millions of years, or longer?” He put a hand on her arm. It was inevitable, he realized, that he would feel protective toward her; the ancient genetic programming that governed pair bonding, however muted, was asserting itself, and the ache in his soul where Kita had lived was becoming a memory.
If they got out of this, he knew the time would come for an effort of will to return to his chosen life and commitments. And Marianne would inevitably feel hurt by that, but, if he judged her right, she had enough understanding and will power to take that in stride.
Then, he thought, remembering the skeleton around the spear, this could be all the life they might have together before an end filled with desperate efforts and pain. He imagined being transfixed by one of those spears and left alive against a vine like a still-living butterfly pinned to the backing of a collection box. He imagined being absorbed by it, woody fibers slowly covering his limbs, torso, head and finally his eyes and nose. He returned Marianne’s embrace, needing the comfort as much as she did.
Their bodies urged them to dally, but they knew any further time lost lessened their already slim chances. After a moment, by some common unspoken consent, they released each other.
“Okay.” Marianne said. “Let’s do it. Out the way we came?”
Akil shook his head. “Aside from trying to avoid the place the Forest People gather, the forest is a little thinner along its north-south axis because gravity constrains it more. It will be a bit cooler that way too – better contrast for the optics.”
“We stick together?”
Akil thought. Separate efforts would have the significant advantage of redundancy, but two going together would give them more eyes and hands and combine their complementary knowledge of the Hazian system. Where logic didn’t give him a clear choice, his feelings did.
“Together. But, Marianne, if one of us gets caught, the other should press on. Our best shot is to let everyone else know where we are and get help.”
She nodded, tight lipped. “Which way is north?”
“Good question. Thinking out loud, uh, where they took us when we were captured . . .” He pointed. “. . . that way, was on the east side I think. Haze’s inner pole is that way, toward the glow. Those directions define a plane, so at right angles to that plane, this way . . .” He pointed through a relatively dense section of dead wood and vines. “. . . should be north. Once we get away from the core, we’ll be able to judge by how even the light is.”
“Good,” Marianne said. “In twenty kilometers or so, we should start seeing patches of sky. It isn’t as dense as it looks.”
“Thank providence for that. Okay, I’ll take the first point.” With that, Akil found hand holds on “their” trunk, pulled his legs under him, and pushed off for the north.
Marianne followed. They usually jumped, but occasionally found a vine going the right direction and pulled themselves along it with a kind of pull-glide motion.
They set out as the next shadow eclipse ended.
Eclipse followed eclipse until they had reached the first live roots that tapped the ancient debris for minerals. Another hour brought them to where house-sized microgravity versions of the “mushrooms” lived.
“Time to be more alert?” Akil spoke the first words they’d shared in several hours.
“Yeah. We should probably hole up and get some rest now. It might not be safe to do so later. Let’s find some water, too. We can make the big push tomorrow.”
After tapping a “mushroom” root, they found a hollow in a small dead branch, just big enough for both of them, and slithered in. Akil couldn’t remember when he’d been so tired; he fell asleep almost instantly.
When they woke, they realized that they’d lost track of eclipses, and thus time. Marianne found some sweet fruit, and they made a meal of it as they waited for the next eclipse.
The eclipse twilight started to brighten without reaching complete darkness. “Haze eclipse,” Akil said. “So, assuming we’ve been out more than three hours, we’ve either slept for nine hours or fifteen.”
