Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction Part 19

Vasiliy shook his head. "Impossible. Life on Earth didn't even reach the multicellular stage for billions of years. This star is twelve million years old at most."

"And Ballock's...o...b..t is unstable," said Krishna. "Temperatures too variable for life to arise.""These lines cross rivers at the narrowest points," Susan replied, "and mountains at the lowest points-I've seen evidence of bridges, and cleared pa.s.ses. And the places where roads come together have an infrared signature consistent with disturbed soil. Cities!"

"Pah!" Vasiliy waved a hand dismissively. "Primitives, even if they do exist. Let the automated cameras and surface probes do their work. We have more important things to spendour time and bandwidth on."

"Primitives or not, thesepeople are about to die!" Susan didn't even come up to Vasiliy's shoulder, but her intensity made him take a step back. "We have a moral responsibility to save as many of them as we can."

"We aren't the Red Cross," Leonard said in a reasonable tone. "We're astrophysicists. We are just one small s.h.i.+p-we couldn't evacuate more than a few of them."

"Well, at least we can use some of our precious bandwidth to send this data to Earth," Susan fumed.

"Maybe someone there has the decency to mount a rescue mission."

Martin spoke up from the back of the crowd. "I'm afraid that's not going to be possible."

Everyone turned to him.

"We are eight days' reals.p.a.ce travel time from the nearest point in the system where a Simultaneity transition can be made safely. That means a sixteen-day round trip, even if another s.h.i.+p with acceleration as good as ours were available to leave Earth right now. And the iron flash will take place in . . . " he looked at his watch. "Fourteen days and eleven hours."

"Fourteen days!" Vasiliy roared, his voice rising above the others.

"And eleven hours."

Leonard was livid. "You guaranteed you could give us two weeks' notice!"

"I was going to announce it at today's staff meeting. That would have been seven hours more than two weeks."

Leonard shook his head. "Well, there's nothing to be done about it now. All of you need to revise your observation schedules for the new drop-dead date. I want to see updated PowerPlan files in my inbox by two o'clock." He turned to me. "Gray, you and J.J. determine the absolute minimum safe travel time to the transition point. I don't want to leave orbit any sooner than we have to, and to make that happen I'm prepared to jettison anything and everything we can get along without. Despite my first impulse, that does not include Dr. Lake. Any questions?"

Five people started talking at once.

"No questions? Good. Now get back to work."

With our month of observation time reduced to six days, plus whatever limited observations we could make during eight days accelerating away, the scientists kept me hopping. So I was asleep on my keyboard when my phone queeped three days later.

"Yuh?" I managed.

"Gray, this is Leonard. Can you join me and Susan in my office?""Uh, sure."

Leonard closed the door behind me. Susan was sitting on the edge of his desk. "Gray, can you fly the landers?"

"Sure. Part of my safety training." The s.h.i.+p's two eight-pa.s.senger landers were our lifeboats in case we had to abandon s.h.i.+p.

Susan and Leonard glanced at each other. Then Leonard spoke. "Please understand that this is not an order. I want you to think carefully about your answer, and make your own decision. As a human being, not an Implex employee."

My heart got very loud in my ears. "Go on."

Susan looked me right in the eyes. "Will you take Leonard and me to the surface?"

"Uh." I sat down on Leonard's guest chair. "Why?"

"To gather information and samples," said Leonard. "To make contact with the natives, if any. To preserve whatever tiny fragments we can."

It took me a moment to find my voice. "I'm surprised to hear you say that, Leonard. I mean, Susan, yeah, but not you. You were the one who said we aren't the Red Cross."

"I've had a few days to think about the situation."

"And I haven't given him a moment's peace," said Susan.

Leonard gave her a wry grin. "That's true, but this decision came from within. I agreed to come out of retirement and head up this expedition for two reasons: to advance human knowledge, and to make a name for myself. This is the only opportunity anyone will ever have to study this planet and these people, and if I turned it down I would be neglecting both those reasons. Besides, this might be my last chance to get out and do some real science."

I thought about how the s.h.i.+p's systems might collapse in my absence.

I thought about radiation, and s.p.a.ce-suit failure, and all the other hazards of leaving the s.h.i.+p.

I thought about stepping out of the lander onto a landscape of weird alien trees and strange life forms.

I said, "I'm in."

J.J. was none too pleased to see us go, but Leonard was in charge and she couldn't quite justify a veto on safety grounds. "We'll be back in forty-eight hours," I told her.

"You'd better be, because we're leaving in fifty-one and I'm not waiting up for you."

It took about twelve hours each way with the lander's little engine, which gave us at most twenty-four hours on the surface. With only time for one landing, we selected a site near one of Susan's "cities" on the red/blue terminator. Even if we didn't meet the road builders, at least we could study the life forms in both their red-day and blue-day behaviors.

Susan was the first one out the door. "It's wonderful!"The first thing I saw as I followed her out was the star Charlie, a glaring blue-white circle sitting right on the horizon like a plate on a mantelpiece, bisected by the diagonal line of the accretion disk. To my right loomed Ballock, a pockmarked half-moon appearing six or seven times the diameter of Luna. Behind the lander towered the roiling red wall of Magnus. A few high thin clouds streamed across the sunset-colored sky, and off to my left rippled a bright aurora, pale green and neon pink-visible evidence of the stream of charged particles a.s.saulting the planet. Though the air was breathable, we wore our s.p.a.ce suits against the radiation.

We had come down on a bare rock outcropping, but all around it was a riot of greenery. The predominant plant life consisted of oval plates, hand-sized to chest-sized, intersecting each other at odd angles. Each plate was covered with spiky scales, like a cross between a pineapple and a cactus.

Leonard snapped off a plate and dropped it into a container; the broken surface sealed itself as we watched.

The light of the two suns made everything look outlandish and theatrical. Shadows were deep red, not black, and a vague blue anti-shadow stretched away in the opposite direction. A steady wind blew from the blue side to the red side, whistling in my helmet.

Susan tapped on some rocks with a wrench. "Igneous, and very hard. But look how worn! They must be very old."

"They can't be older than twelve million years," said Leonard.

"Unless the planet came from somewhere else," Susan replied.

"They could be younger than they look. Given Ballock's...o...b..t, this spot has seen both glaciers and seventy-degree days in the past twenty years." But I imagined the planet Pointless drifting through interstellar s.p.a.ce, domed cities covered by a miles-deep blanket of frozen air. Technology beyond anything we'd yet encountered, undreamed-of power sources . . .

We'd find out soon enough.

"Forget the rocks," I said. "Look at that."

Visible beyond a nearby rise was, without question, a road. Flat stones of various shapes and sizes had been fitted precisely together into a surface as smooth as anything the Romans ever built.

On it was a group of living things, heading our way.

The natives looked like the aftermath of a collision between crabs. Green and rough, bristling with spikes, their flat segmented bodies ranged from one to two meters long. Each was about half as wide as its length, and twenty to thirty centimeters in height. Jointed legs of various sizes poked out at random points on the body's perimeter; empty sockets and stumps showed where other legs once had been. There were many other scars, as well.

Life on Pointless was clearly not easy.

They moved fast, scuttling around and over each other. The lead creature raised its front segment, seeming to study us, though its tiny black eyes did not show the direction of its gaze. Mouthparts rasped together, making a chirruping sound.

"Keep it talking," said Susan. We had a reserved Simultaneity channel to the database of alien languages and translation software at the Smithsonian. Humanity was still paying the Lilliandree for that, and wouldcontinue to do so for decades, but it had already proved its value in several first-contact situations.

I couldn't help myself. "Take us to your leader."

Within a few hours the translation had become reasonably fluent and the natives brought us to their "city"-really more of a village. It consisted of several dozen low buildings, broader at the bottom than the top, constructed from solid slabs of stone as tightly fitted as the road. Each had an entrance slot at ground level, just large enough to accommodate one native, and no other openings. "These look like they could survive anything," Susan said.

Fifteen earthquake this season, no building fail, one of the natives said, the words appearing above it in my helmet display. The word "season" represented the planet's 120-day orbital period.

"Do you use ornamentation or decoration at all?" asked Leonard. Chirruping sounds came from his helmet speaker.

Don't understand.

"Patterns, colors, or textures, to please the eye and other senses."

No use if building fail.It waved a limb.Building not fail, that please me.

"Do you have any religion?" asked Susan. "G.o.ds? Supernatural beings of great power?"

Four G.o.d.This from the largest, most scarred native, which limped along on only three limbs. It pointed into the sky.Big red G.o.d sends drought, tiger, hurricane. Little blue G.o.d sends cancer, blindness, fever. Big black G.o.d sends darkness, glacier, chill. Then it gestured at the ground beneath its feet.

Biggest G.o.d sends earthquake, stingweed, locust.

"Are there any rites or practices? Prayers or sacrifices?"

Don't understand.

"Statements or activities meant to please the G.o.ds and bring good fortune?"

Build well. Plant well. Hide well. Hope G.o.d not see me.

"Sounds like their religion is just to stay out of trouble," I said. "Too bad it's not going to work for much longer."

Why not work?Too late, I realized I'd spoken on the open channel.

Leonard shot me a look. "Your big red G.o.d is very old."

Yes. Long time ago, small and yellow. Now big and red. Old.

"How could they know that?" I asked-on the private channel this time. "It was millions of years ago."

"They don't," Susan replied. "It's just a legend."

Leonard was still on the open channel. "Even the G.o.ds must die when they get old enough."

I know. Big red G.o.d getting sick. Die soon.

"How do you know this?"Bigger. Redder. Spotty.

"What will you do when the big red G.o.d dies?" asked Susan.

Die.

Leonard and I went off with some of the natives to take pictures and samples of their agriculture and engineering, while Susan remained in the village with the oldest native, the one with three limbs.

When we returned, one of the stones that paved the village's central square had been pried up and moved to one side like a manhole cover. It was a couple of meters across and half a meter thick. "How did they do that?" I asked.

"They used big levers. They are also very strong."

"More to the point," said Leonard, "whydid they do it?"

"You see those doorways around the edge of the square?" I had thought they were for drainage, but now I saw they were the same size as the doors of the natives' buildings. "I asked them where they went.

Keun-Hang said they led to 'Legacy.' Naturally I asked if I could see it." Keun-Hang was Susan's name for the three-limbed one. It was a Korean name; the translation software just called the native "[Proper Name 7]."

The "Legacy" was an elaborately carved rock, three meters long and shaped something like a coffin.

Slots, or doorways, penetrated into it from its five sides.

"I thought these folks didn't go in for ornament," I said.

Susan shook her head. "It's not decoration. It's writing."

Yes. The Legacy is the record of all I have done and seen over many, many generation,said Keun-Hang.

"How oldare you?" I asked.

I have been in this place over two thousand season.Six hundred years!Every time I survive something new, I carve words on the Legacy. Keun-Hang pointed to a row of simple symbols running around the stone at its eye level.This writing is basic. Any person finding this can read. Even person who does not know of writing can learn to read. More complex writing here. More complex still, here. Most complex inside. Walls, roof, floor.

Another native spoke up.Each tribe has Legacy. Often all person die, but Legacy remain. Many season pa.s.s, then new person come. No mind. Seek shelter, crawl inside. Learn. Tools. Fire. Soon, new mind. New tribe.

Keun-Hang dragged itself to the top of the Legacy, bringing itself to our eye level.All may die, but while Legacy remain, I live.