Collected Short Fiction, page 794
Our early years followed the same familiar track, but the Earth we watched had changed again. An ice age held it. Antarctica had grown enormously. Europe was white. Glaciers spread south from the polar cap to the Himalayas and across most of North America. Yet Casey and I had not failed. The white dust was gone. We found a broad belt of living green across Australia and southern Asia. Africa and the Americas bewildered us when we had grown old enough to be bewildered.
Our mission to restore it looked to be an awesome challenge, but this time the computer had cloned Cal DeFort to help us face it. Perhaps the last Arne, in his dread of possible alien invaders, had expected us to need DeFort, but the current Arne was never happy with him. Cal was a gangly redhead, freckled and pugnacious, bitter because he had no father.
His original live father died on the first landing on Earth, before programs had been created to keep anything of his mind alive in the tank. The robot father designed to care for him had been lost on Earth. Growing, he always tried too hard to make believe he never needed him, yet always felt too proud of who he was.
“You know my Dad,” he used to boast. “The genius who built the station and saw the impact coming and brought us here to terraform the Earth. I’m him, alive again and still the boss. I always will be.”
Arne never agreed. The battles began when they were five years old. They used to get black eyes and bloody noses from knocking each other off the floor in the Moon’s light gravity. Arne was taller and bigger and stronger, but Cal was never willing to quit till Dian stopped them to let her look after Arne’s bruises. She loved Arne. Cal never seemed to care if anybody loved him.
OUR HOLO PARENTS KEPT US BUSY AS WE GREW UP, STUDYING THE science and skills we would need on Earth. Cal was always eager to get there, to explore the planet and find a site for our first colony. Sad that the first expedition had not been able to leave any animals, because there would be no food for them till vegetation grew, he learned all he could about the frozen embryos and the equipment we would need to breed and nurture them.
His enthusiasm alarmed Arne, who was afraid for anybody to go back, afraid of the alien invaders Iris elder self had feared, afraid to do anything that might betray the existence of tire station. What we saw in Africa and tire Americas frightened him.
“Asia looks alive,” my holo father said. “Tire plants we seeded are apparently thriving, ready to feed animals when we can breed them. I hope to feed us. But Africa?” He shook his head with an impatient frustration that made him look ready to climb out of tire tank and take off to look at for Earth himself. “And tire Americas? What tire hell has happened to them?”
Looking for answers, we haunted tire dome through all our childhood, squinting into telescopes and spectroscopes, pestering the robots and our parents, keyboarding queries to the master computer itself. The world no longer fit our maps. Glacial ice, piling up on land, had lowered the oceans, dried up tire strait between Siberia and Alaska Gibraltar had closed, the Mediterranean shrunk to a long, salt lake.
That sterile whiteness had vanished from Africa, but nothing green had grown to replace it Tire Sahara was brown again, but the rest of the continent had turned dark red. The Nile was a narrow red line. Red rinmred tire Mediterranean lake. Scanning the continent, we found grids of faint brown lines scattered over the south, one at tire Red Sea mouth of tire Nile.
“City streets?” Cal wondered. “And roads running from them, if Arne’s aliens do build cities, running out into that red stuff, whatever it is.”
“Which means they’re still there!” Arne scowled uneasily. “They’ve killed our kind of life off the planet to let them take it over. Ready to kill us if they ever detect us.”
“Maybe.” Cal shook his head. “But Earth’s a quarter million miles away. Too far off to us tell us much.”
The lower half of North America and most of South America looked just as strange, the land an odd greenish-blue, spotted with islands of changing shades of red and orange and gold in patterns turned different every time we looked.
“Nothing I like.” Arne scowled at the telescope. “We’ve studied the spectrographs, Dian and I. We’ve run computer records.” He made an anxious face. “An ugly riddle. It may be life, but not our kind.”
Casey asked how he knew. Arne had studied molecular biology. He tried to explain that some molecules twist polarized light. He said our kind of protoplasm gave it left-handed rotation. The tests were difficult he said, and hard to interpret, but he and Dian claimed from their spectroscopic evidence that the life on the Americas was right-handed.
“Alien protoplasm! It must have come from outside the solar system. It could be poison to anybody crazy enough to go down there.”
“Count me crazy,” Cal told him. “I’m going down as soon as I can.”
CAL FIRST SAID THAT WHEN HE WAS HARDLY 12 YEARS OLD. ARNE NEVER wanted anybody to go, but Cal’s determination never failed. The year he was 16, he began asking the computer to permit an expedition. When we turned 21, it agreed. He called us into the dome to announce that he was getting a plane ready for it.
“Not yet,” Arne looked around to see who might stand with him. Dian nodded. “We’ve got to be cautious. I don’t know what has happened to America, but something alien is certainly established in Africa. The same aliens, likely, that sterilized the planet to let them take it over.”
“Maybe.” Cal shook his head. “We don’t know.”
“We know enough.” Arne’s jaw stuck out, covered with a pale yellow stubble. “And I’m afraid of them. Afraid of whatever it is in the Americas. Too many questions that need more study. I see no reason to risk a landing. Or even to talk about it for another 10 or 20 years.”
“Ten or 20 years?” Cal snorted. “I’m taking off tomorrow.”
“Think again.” Arne dropped his voice. “I won’t endanger the station and the mission till we know what we face.”
“We’ll never know unless we look.” Casey turned to Cal. “I’ll go with you.”
“Sorry.” Arne glared at then. “I can’t allow—”
“Let them go,” Pepe told him. “We’ve hidden long enough.”
“I won’t—” Arne scowled into Casey’s black Chinese face, glanced uncertainly at Dian and saw that he was beaten. He turned abruptly to me. “Okay. Okay. You go with them, Dunk. Keep your records for the future, if we have a future. I’ll stay with the girls. We’ll by to keep the station going.”
Tanya kissed me goodbye with teaks in her eyes.
“Come back, Dunk.” She held me close for a moment. “Come back if you can.”
I hadn’t known she cared.
Over the inviting green vastness of Asia, we considered possible landing sites. Over red Africa, we debated the nature of those faint gray lines. Over the Americas, we were baffled again when we turned the telescope on those blue-green lowlands and the many-colored highlands. Southern Asia welcomed us with vast reaches of rich familiar green.
When we finally landed, it was in the Vale of Kashmir.
“Paradise!” Cal whispered when he climbed down from the airlock and looked around him. “We ought to name it Eden.”
The valley floor was a lush carpet of the grasses that last expedition had sowed. Dense forest clothed the lower mountain slopes. Naked cliffs beyond them climbed stark to the Himalayan peaks that walled us in. We stood silent a long time there, staring up at the snow-crowned summits, inhaling the fresh scents of life, springing on the balls of our feet to test the gravity, stooping to pluck blades of green native grass.
“Damn! Damn!” Breathing deep, Casey stood craning at the needle peaks and the azure sky. “I wish I had the words for it.”
When the full Moon had climbed over the peaks into radio range, Cal called the station to report that we had found a perfect spot for the colony. A natural fortress, he said, safe from flood and drought and nearly anything but another impact Its isolation should help secure it from discovery.
“That’s enough!” Dian’s sharp voice crackled to interrupt him. “Sign off! Arne ordered you not to alert die aliens.”
“No aliens yet,” Cal said. “No hint of any high technology. Only those thin lines across the red stuff, almost too faint to follow. We’re taking off at dawn for a closer look. We’ll let you know what we find.”
“Don’t!” Arne’s angry voice. “Don’t throw yourselves away.”
“Our heirs will need to know—”
“Stop transmission.” His voice rang higher. “Stay on the ground. We won’t be coming down to plant any colony, not if you claim a hundred Edens. For the mission’s sake, don’t give us away.”
“Dunk?” Tanya was on the speaker, her voice quick and anxious. “You’ve done you what you wanted. Can’t you come back now? Do you have fuel?”
“Barely enough,” Casey said. “If we take off now.”
“We’re taking off,” Cal said. “For Africa and then the Americas. Not for the Moon.”
“Dunk—Dunk—”
Her broken voice was cut off.
THE ICE-WALLED VALE WAS SPLENDID BY MOONLIGHT, BUT WE TOOK OFF at dawn. High in the stratosphere, alert for hostile action, we cruised over Africa No radar locked onto us. No missiles rose. No craft rose to challenge us. Searching with binoculars, we found dark dots in motion on those thin, gray lines. Casey said he had made them out from orbit.
“Traffic,” he said. “Roads with something moving on them. Nothing directed at us.”
“Cities.” He had sketched those puzzling lines and patches on a map of the continent as it had been. There were target patterns of tiny concentric circles, most of them near the coast, three near the mouths of the Limpopo, the Nile, and the Congo, one on the Kenyan plateau, another on the north shore of the Mediterranean lake.
“They have to be cities, because of geography. They stand where we used to live. On rivers or fertile plains.”
“So Arne’s aliens are really here?” Casey nodded. “And likely not to want us?”
“Could be.” Cal frowned at his map. “We don’t know. The mission’s dead if we do nothing. They may have conquered Africa, but they’re still a long way from any colony we might plant in Asia.”
Casey was our pilot.
“Pick a point,” he said. “And I’ll set us down.”
WE CAME DOWN AT NIGHT ON THE KENYAN PIATEAU near a line on Casey’s map that he thought was a road running down to the Indian Ocean from what he thought might be an alien city. When day came, we found a flat plain around us, grown over with what looked like tall red grass. Kilimanjaro stood far off in the south, a mantle of cloud around the white summit. We waited there for hours, watching, listening. We heard no sound, nothing on the radio. A long, red ridge cut off our view of the road.
“If anybody saw us,” Cal said, “they don’t seem to care.”
Still in radio range, the waning Moon still high, we called the station. I reported the landing and described what we could see around us. We heard no answer. Cal took the mike.
“There’s something here,” he said. “We see no indication of any industrial culture, no sign of any technology able to cross space. Whatever they are, the creatures don’t build long bridges; their roads don’t cross large rivers. We get nothing on the electromagnetic spectrum. I doubt that they are detecting this signal.”
We waited half a minute and heard nothing from the Moon.
“I hope for more to add,” Cal went on. “We’re down only two or three miles from the road. I saw something even closer as we came in. Something that could be a habitation. A circular clearing half a mile across, a dome-roofed building at the center. I’m going out to attempt some kind of contact.”
CASEY STAYED ABOARD. I CLIMBED DOWN BEHIND CAL, INTO RED vegetation so dense that he disappeared just a few yards away. The air was motionless and oven-hot, almost suffocating. An acrid, bitter scent set me to coughing. In dread of too many strange unknowns, I retreated to the ladder. Thick clumps of saw-toothed blades crowded close around us. Narrow as rapiers and tipped with feathery purple plumes, they had the red-black hue of dried blood. They stood twice our height, and I felt lost among them.
“I’ve seen enough.” Coughing again, I shouted at Cal. “It’s no place for people.”
“Okay.” He looked back through the thorny tangle. “Stay here and report anything that happens. If I don’t get back, go on to North America.”
Picking a wary way through the blades, he vanished again and never returned.
4.
CASEY AND I TOOK TURNS IN THE COCKPIT, WAITING FOR CAL TO COME back out of that tangle of thorns. The slow sun sank toward blue volcanic cones far west of us. A high anvil cloud rose over Kilimanjaro in the south and spread to hide the sky. A sudden wind whipped the red-black blades. Lightning flickered. Thunder crashed. Rain and hail battered us. The storm passed. Stars came out I slept uneasily in the navigator’s seat until Casey woke me to watch a red dawn break, watch a red sun rise.
Kilimanjaro stood as serenely high over the crimson landscape as it had stood over our own green world before the impact. No aliens came out of the jungle, but Cal did not return. Our hope began to fade. At noon, over our lunch of the fruit and frozen stuff we had brought from the station, Casey peered bleakly at me.
“Without a weapon, without food or even water—” Gloomily, he shrugged. “I should have gone with him.”
“We have his orders,” I said. “Report to the station. Go on to look at America.”
“So we will.” He finished a banana and wiped his lips. “But right now I want to look for Cal.” He pulled his boots on. “Give me 12 hours. If I’m not back, take off without me.”
Those hours crawled on forever. The afternoon was bad enough, but when the evil spell of that red world began to overwhelm me, a glance at Kilimanjaro could always bring me back to the reality of Earth. After dark I found no escape from the monsters I imagined. Once, trying to break that intolerable anxiety, I opened the lock and looked out.
The blooms that tipped those rapier blades shone faintly, quilting the jungle with a ghostly violet. The stillness was deathly still until I heard a whisper of wind that scattered blood-red sparks, perhaps pollen grains. The humid air was fouled with a faint but sickening stench I found no name for.
I stood an hour there, listening for Casey’s voice, shouting his name on the chance that he was lost and wandering through that alien jungle, until shadows began changing into shapes so monstrous that I shivered from a chill of dread and sealed the valve against them.
THE DOZEN HOURS HE ASKED FOR DOUBLED AND MORE. DUSK WAS falling again, and my eyes were blurred and swollen, before I saw him stumbling out of that tangle of red-black blades. His clothing was ripped to shreds, his skin scarred and bleeding. He staggered to the ladder. I helped him through the lock. He reeled into the navigator’s seat.
“Take us off,” he gasped at me. “Take us off.”
Of course I couldn’t. He had studied astronautics with Pepe’s holo father and trained in the simulator. I had not. All I could do was hand him a bottle of water when his haggard eyes fixed on it. He drained it and sank out of the world before he spoke another word.
I WATCHED AGAIN AS LONG AS I COULD STAY AWAKE. NOTHING came to follow him back. He lay snoring in his seat, muttering and jerking now and then as if fighting some invisible enemy. Groggy for sleep of my own, I dropped into the pilot’s seat. Sometime in the night he jogged my arm to get me out of his way and lifted us off.
I found snack packets when we were safely in the air, and asked if he wanted to eat. He had me open an aid pack instead. Blood had dried black on long slashes down his arms. His ankle was bruised and swollen. The barbs had left scratches everywhere, swollen and inflamed. He was hot with fever when I touched him.
He didn’t want to talk, but he let me help him clean the wounds and spray them with healant.
It did no good. The spray should have killed the pain, but he said it burned like fire. He was shaking, yet he stayed hunched over the controls, eyes on the instruments. I asked no questions, but at last, when we were in the high stratosphere over the Atlantic, he drew a ragged breath and pulled himself straighten “If you want to know—” His voice at first was hoarse and broken. “If you want to know what became of Cal—”
“If you can talk.”
“I never found him.” His pale lips twisted. “Never did. But you’ll need the story for the records—if we live to get them back.”
I found the audiorecorder. He sat there a long time, clutching it in a shaking hand, but silent minutes were gone before he gathered himself to recite our names, our latitude and longitude, the date. He stopped to draw a long, unsteady breath and shake his head at me.
“We searched from orbit for evidence of possible extraterrestrials in Africa.” His words were labored and slow when he began, his tone painfully formal, but he spoke more freely as he went on. “Markings we observed from space appeared to be artificial. Down on the savanna between the Great Rift and the Indian Ocean, near what we took to be a traveled roadway, we found ourselves in a dense growth of unfamiliar plants. When Commander DeFort failed to return from a probe into our surroundings, I undertook—”
He closed his eyes and sank down in the seat, perhaps groping for the will to continue, perhaps to phrase his words for the computer and our heirs a thousand years from now. I saw him shiver, but he sat straighter and spoke with a clear and even voice.
“I undertook to follow him through that thorn jungle. It was a dense tangle of dark-red three-edged spears armed with sharp barbs along the edges. It would have been impassable, but the spears stood in thick clumps with a little space between them, far enough apart that DeFort had been able the pick his way through them.
“The soil was loose and sandy. He had left footprints I thought I could follow, yet I had to steel myself again for the search. The tropic sun burned at tire zenith. The air was motionless and oven-hot, and the blooms that tipped the blades had a nauseating odor that made it almost unbreathable. Sweat drenched me before I had taken a dozen steps. I stopped, looking back at the plane, unwilling to leave it “But of course I had to go on. DeFort had been my friend, even back on Earth before we were cloned; our letters and diaries showed that. He had listened to my story, made a job for me at tire station, taught me what it meant to him. Arne Linder may want to hear no more from us, but we must get all we can learn back to the master computer. For Cal’s sake, anyhow. His own life seemed to matter more to me, there and then, than all the unknown future of the Earth.
