by Guy Haley
He accessed his inChip – a comnet was in place within the settlement, a fragile, underpopulated thing – to put a call in to Yuri. He’d talk to him first, before he did anything. Yuri might have enjoyed the trappings of their wealth more than he did, but he had as much stomach for playing the autocrat as Leonid. He was surprised when the door banged open and Yuri tumbled in before he’d started to speak.
Yuri was sopping wet, rain streaming off his shaved head. He had been running, and was out of breath. Yuri had never been very fit; too much revelry. Behind him, rain slanted in the wind.
“Leo!” he panted. “Come on! You’ve got to come. The robots...”
“What?”
“They’re leaving.”
“What!?” Leonid raised an overview of the settlement on his inChip. A map on one level, the forum on another. The simple net was choked with babble. Fifteen large and twenty-seven small triangular icons marked the locations of the thinking machines; they were all moving away from First Landing. He could gain no access to them.
He ran out into the storm after his brother to see shapes stalking the gloom, and his father’s words echoed round his skull.
Many challenges await you. An army cannot function by democratic consent, and a society is no different, especially one under stress as yours will be.
I will always be with you.
“Do something!” shouted Yuri. “You have to do something!”
Leonid froze. What could he do?
PART IV
The Evening Country
7 months after crash
Guided Cultural Propagation has been compared to the design of artificial utile bacilli. We concede that there are similarities between the two sciences. In designing an artificial lifeform for a particular role, biotechnologists first select an organism whose biology best accords with the environment in which it will be required to live, and whose habits, abilities and natural tendencies will enable it to perform the function it is intended to perform...
And so with Guided Cultural Propagation. There is no such thing as an ideal society, but there is such a thing as a society suited to survival in a particular environment, under particular stresses. And so we have examined the cultural propensities of many of our contemporary nations in order to best identify certain beneficial memes that will allow our colonists to flourish on the diverse worlds to which they shall travel. Taking under consideration the highly interdependent, globalised nature of 22nd century civilisation, we are perforce to be subtle in our selections, because the larger differences apparent only two hundred years ago are all but extinct. But we can be thorough, matching not just useful cultural leanings, the differing neurolinguistic biases of particular language groups, or the minor physiological advantage from various subdivisions of the world population to particular anticipated environments, but also the matching of the traits of individuals to the societies we wish to engineer, as well as individuals to individuals. This includes the pair-bonding policies intended for fifteen of the colony craft.
Take the example of the ESS Adam Mickiewicz and ESS Goethe. We see the ships themselves, if you’ll permit me, as our synthetic DNA scaffold. Added to these, we have two different social genomes – one Central Germanic, the other Western Slavic, two middle-European cultures which have long influenced each other, and yet remain sufficiently removed to be noticeably different. Certain characteristics have been selected for, others suppressed. There will be little need for purely manual labourers, so our proto-society includes no one below the fourth degree of the Baccalaureate. The time of the masses will come later.
It is important to note here that individually, cultural norms are extremely malleable. It is only on the macro-level that cultural determinism comes into play. There is, in most regards, no such thing as the ‘typical Pole,’ but there is such a thing as a typical Polish town. It is to the collective behaviour of the group – its group consciousness – and not that of its smallest particle, the individual, that we appeal at the uppermost level of our engineering.
The individual passengers for each of these craft have been carefully selected to bring certain national characteristics to the fore in the formation of the initial colony. It is expected that the two groups will naturally polarise. A sense of competition between them will push them to greater efforts, the sense of bonding they will share as they explore each other’s differences will bring them closer. It resembles a marriage, of sorts, and it will function as such, on a meta-scale, the two making something greater than the one. A leavening of others from across Earth’s large population adds further to this formula, the formula for a driven, competitive society that will build, trade, and prosper. A mono-culture gives us a large amount of stability, but in isolation risks becoming stagnant, a multi-culture may well be more dynamic, but lacks the stability and the comforts of shared identity that will provide our colonists with a sense of home and place. It is my belief that bi-cultural programming is our best chance of success.
Why do this at all? I know that there are those among us who are sceptical of the concept of social engineering, and insist we would be better served simply selecting our colonists on individual personal merits. I refer you to the great profit employment of social engineering has yielded to planetary stability this past century.
There is, of course, another, sadder, outcome, and one that I must confess to you all has been deliberately engineered into our planning. In circumstances of extreme exigency, you must understand.
Co-operation is the natural state of humanity, and it is this that we sincerely hope to accentuate. The sad corollary to this is that war has always been the greatest driver of human development.
– Excerpt from a secret briefing to the heads of the thirty-seven Pointer families involved in the Gateway project on Guided Cultural Propagation
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Besieged
DARIUSZ WAS AT the borehole with his engineering team when a thin wail sounded from the settlement.
“Damn it, is that the alarm?” said Günther Plock, one of the four people in Dariusz’s team. He paused in tightening the pipe with his wrench. “Not now! We’ve four in, we’re nearly there. Two more lengths and we’ll be done.”
Pipes lay in neat rows amid rattling stalks of dry grass, waiting to be bolted to the end of the line. The pipeline was nearly all the way out to the borehole. Dariusz wondered if they should have put the well closer in, even though there they’d have been drilling through the granite skirts of the mesas.
“You know what Anderson says,” said Marina. They all looked different, so many months after the crash. Marina’s hair had grown down to her shoulders. Her face was pinched with hunger, but the colonists had lost their anonymity. Individuals had emerged from the mass of scared faces and shaven heads.
“Fuck Anderson,” said Wróblewski, the water systems specialist. “We’re nearly through to the aquifer. And I don’t want to leave all these pipes out. If they work their way around the village, they’ll wreck them or worse.”
“What do you suggest?” said Marina scathingly. “Pick them all up?”
“No, no.” Wróblewski took his gloves off and threw them at the ground. “We’re behind already.”
“Well we can’t stay here and defend them. There’s only one of them with us,” Plock inclined his head toward Athangelos Ayvazian, the trooper assigned as their protection. “You’ve seen what those things can do. We’ll be crying over a lot more than broken pipes if we stay out here and they decide to come for us, eh? You want to be dinner for some fucking alien, be my guest, but not me, my friend.” He downed his wrench and wiped the sweat from his brow. “Let’s head back. Dariusz, what do you say?”
Dariusz looked back toward the mesas, two broken teeth poking through the parched gums of the desert, topped with ugly prefabs and converted containers, all fenced in by lattices of electrified mesh. The mesas were granitic extrusions, the remains of a volcano. Forced up into the softer rock by the fury of the planet,
left sentinel as the sandstone was ground away around them. They were lonely in the endless sand, a fitting place for a crowd of lonely men and lonely women. The loneliness was worst for cultural isolates like Ayvazian, the colony’s sole Armenian – at least there were other Poles – but they all felt it: the worry that they might be the last people in existence. They huddled together on their stones in the sand, besieged by a hostile world.
“Hey, Dariusz, you hear that?” Ayvazian called from the pile of piping where he kept watch. “Load up, we have to go back.”
Dariusz put his hands on his hips. He wore a wide-brimmed hat to shield his eyes from the sun, a troublesome presence even in the liminal zone. First Landing was situated in the country of early evening, where everything was cast in bronze. The sun glared at his back from its perpetual sunset. Dariusz’s shadow was monstrous in front of him. He found the effect disturbing, a reminder of his effect on the colony. Here, the man, small and impotent in the face of an alien world; there, his shadow cast upon it, monstrous and significant.
Real monsters approached their home. The creatures they called ‘the natives,’ for their seeming intelligence. Unspeaking things that poked at their defences.
He sucked air through his teeth. It was pleasantly warm. His brain had not yet tuned the ever-present cinnamon odour of the world out; he doubted it ever would.
“We better go back,” he said.
Swearing and sounds of relief emanated from his work crew, depending on their attitude. Günther was wary of the natives, but happy to go along with what the group decided. Marina, having seen the crabhawks in action, was as terrified of the planet’s life as she was fascinated by it. Wróblewski was contemptuous; for him the job was all, natives or not. Dariusz tended to Marina’s point of view: Wróblewski had not been out in the desert, and had suffered neither crabhawk nor tiger beetle. Wróblewski had witnessed firsthand only the natives, and their ineffectual plucking at the fences did little to frighten him.
The planet’s lifeforms had amply demonstrated their hostility. The danger the more animalistic forms posed was at least something all the council agreed upon. Whether the natives were intelligent or not, or if they were a threat or not, was not a consideration. Inside the perimeter, they were safe. Let the natives have their strange ritual.
Other vehicles were moving to the mesas. A sand plume in the distance marked the return of some of Anderson’s outer pickets.
“Looks like everyone else is going for it. Come one,” Dariusz said.
They boarded their ATV.
Dariusz drove quickly. The alarm continued to wail. There was, as yet, no sound of gunfire. They should make the gates before the natives came. He followed the road along the pipeline.
Eventually, this would be farmland. It had to be; they would starve without it. A surfeit of food surrounded them, and they could eat none of it. The proteins of Nychthemeron’s life were incompatible with the cellular machinery of the settlers. Enzymatically, the stomachs of Earthmen and the meat of the creatures matched: flesh was broken down, sugars were assimilated. But catabolism was problematic. The amino acids of Nychthemeron and those of Earth were foreign to one another, and the sugars of the new world were subtly different to those of the old. Earth proteins and Nychthemeron proteins did not key. When fed on Nychthemeron organics, the citric acid cycle of the colonists became inefficient. They felt sated, and ketosis kept them functioning for a while, until they began to starve with their bellies full. It had been seen in some of the survivor groups retrieved from the desert.
The colonists had fallen back on the stocks of emergency rations, supplemented by produce from their prefabricated hydroponics gardens, but it was insufficient. They were all hungry. Dissent latched onto hunger, and tempers grew short. The colony was racing against time to feed itself.
Other problems dogged them. After the robots departed, they had discovered that the virus had afflicted most of their devices in transit. One by one, the machines were locking out the colonists. They’d saved several of the fabrication units and other machines by painstakingly activating them in isolation, then disabling their higher functions. The fabrication datacore libraries, they’d saved the same way. All devices ran in isolation. Without what they had left, the colony would not be viable; they lived in perpetual fear of their remaining tools rebelling.
Others machines had been gutted. The ATV Dariusz drove lacked the sophisticated systems it once had had. Simple, easily-fabricated electronics took their place. His more active part in driving, like so much else, had taken time to become accustomed to. The shuttles, their engines reliant on multiple smart systems, had been grounded until the colony engineers could figure out a way to build an electronic computer of sufficient power to manage them. But no one had built a computer like that for generations, and the techs could not keep its size down. Their inChips had been deactivated when it was pointed out the virus could potentially infect those too. Their network was limited to short-wave radio and voice communication. They were slipping back further into the technological past. There was a timetable – the colony council had so many timetables – to replace the old computing infrastructure, but Dariusz feared they would not manage it, and would lose more ground. They were wholly reliant on their machines, and now their machines were deserting them.
The ATV crunched through the dry vegetation. The flush of coppery leaves brought by the rain had grown, bloomed, seeded and died, rapidly. The plants had lasted longer in the liminal zone, but now only their bones remained. The council meteorologist, Jan Słońce, gave the intervals between dayside precipitation events at anywhere between two and seven Earth years.
Dayside. Dariusz missed the night. Evening Country’s constant promise of darkness unfulfilled gave the liminal zone a sombre air. It was a gloomy place, and for more than a want of strong light. A graveyard full of marmoreal geologic features, the brittle remains of seasonal vegetation, and the weird skeletons of alien life. The dim redness of the sun had a soporific effect, without easing sleep. Evening was a melancholy time, when the day is done and the pleasures of the night are yet to come. Yet their days never started, and the pleasures of night never came. They were pinned to the turn of a day that did not turn. Dariusz was drowsy and clumsy. Lethe, he called this cuspated state, the Gardens of Lethe.
Better than the desert, Sand said. Not that she used those exact words. Sand was overly fond of profanity.
The road curled around the western mesa, the colonists having widened the way with earthmoving machines. Further west, the first road to the airfield and cargo drop zone had been joined by several others, laid out in a grid. This was to be the plan of their town, or had been, before the natives came.
Other teams were coming in from the surrounding area, all of them in front of Dariusz. Some were on foot. He offered lifts until the ATV was full.
They arrived at the West Mesa gate. Their home had had no time to become a home before it had been forced to become a fortress. He drove through into a narrow space hemmed by towering containers. Machine gun nests on the tops of the wall guarded either side, the black muzzles of the weapons poking out from sandbags. The guards on the ground scowled at him as they ticked his team off on their pads. “You’re late, Stettinski,” said one.
“That’s it! All in! All in!” called another. He whirled his finger around in the air. “Close the gates!”
Two sides of a repurposed cargo container were rolled across the gap and barred. Thick bolts of scavenged metal sank deep into holes in the stone. The gates to First Landing were closed.
The natives were coming.
FROM THE WALKWAY near the summit of the comms tower, Anderson scanned the horizon with his binoculars. The scrub was empty of movement. The sea was a dark band to the west, glittering in the perpetual sunset; the nightside glowered in the north. The boy Leonid – Anderson thought of him as a boy, so much less a man than his father – stood by him. He shivered, although it was not cold. He had become more ill at ease around
the Alt since the crash, if such a thing were possible, and spoke to him only when he had to. Leonid resented him, although Anderson did not question why and did not care.
“Are they here?”
Anderson depressed the button of his radio and consulted his men.
“No sign of them, as yet, sir,” said Anderson. “May I order the fence powered?”
Leonid nodded. “Do what you must, captain.”
Anderson barked out an order into his radio. The fence came on. Anderson sensed it, a tension in the air invisible to the non-Alts. He had his own reasons to be tense.
From the comms tower, he could see across the whole of First Landing. The mesas were roughly the same size, cliffs seventeen metres tall rising above the surrounding sands, tops flat and six hundred metres or so across. The formations were not entirely isolate; the rock dipped to form a low saddle of the same hard, volcanic rock that joined them, but it was seven metres below the mesa tops, and so in effect forty metres of empty space separated them. On West Mesa, the command and control structures, the council offices, the multi-church, food stores, A-barracks, and the infirmary. On East Mesa, much of the accommodation for the lower-ranking colonists, the fabrication units, materials warehousing, and main hospital. Anderson had his men split between them. There were fifty-six left: twenty had died en route, two in the crash, twelve to alien lifeform activity since. Fifty-six soldiers; a paltry army to fight a world.
The radio crackled. “Movement. Northeast, three kilometres out.”
Leonid started to speak, but Anderson silenced him. It was an impertinence he would never allow himself ordinarily, but battle took precedence. The Alt scanned the smooth bed of the river to the north. The water had finally sunk back under the bed, some months after the rains, but its banks were crowded with hardy thorn trees. It was along this corridor they always came. Anderson had tried mining it, but they detected the bombs somehow. He had ruled out ambush as too dangerous, after what had happened to the patrol, and the council had ruled out tracking them back to wherever they came from for the same reason.