Crash

by Guy Haley

  “Curious,” said Dariusz.

  “Everything here is curious!” she said. “It is strange that the animals on the dayside are nearly all eyeless,” said Kasia, “and here in the dark they are not.”

  “Not really,” said Dariusz. “At least, no stranger than anything else in nature. Think of eyes: all eyes as we know them are delicate. The sand, the never-setting sun. Dangerous to such a delicate organ. It’s no surprise to me that the pseudo-arthropods are the dominant clade in the desert. As I’ve been here it’s become clear to me that life must have evolved in the liminal zone and spread into the nightside, then from here colonised the dayside. The conditions are too harsh on the dayside for life to develop, as they are at the far pole here.”

  “Have you been there? What’s it like?”

  “I’ve not been so far. Far enough for the temperature to drop to an unbearable level, but certainly not far enough to see the ice sheet. That is a thousand more kilometres from here. I only drove a few hundred in that direction, once I’d found the Syscore. The forest gives out there, and it is much colder. I lost my nerve when it snowed. After that, I returned and – well, you’ll see.”

  They pressed on. The coral forest was alive with noise. More than once Dariusz told her to remain silent as something crashed through the coral limbs. The noises were unnerving, roars and stridulating barks, the crunch of coral limbs cracked apart, their polyps devoured, the cries of creatures snared and eaten.

  “Do you remember Earth?” he said.

  “Yes, yes I do. I was fifteen when we left.”

  “Earth used to be like this, before we came along,” said Dariusz dourly. “Or so I’ve read. Once upon a time, our home supported much more variety, at a time when its biomass potential was not taken up by human flesh.”

  “Sand told me you never talked much.” She ducked under a coral limb, avoiding filaments that darted from holes to lick at her. “I don’t remember you talking so much.”

  “That was then. I was bereaved, I was ridden by guilt. I made the gravest error a man can make, perhaps one of the gravest any man has ever made. But I am as blind as the next person, as much in service to my own needs and preconceptions as every other human being that ever has been, or will be. I have had a lot of time to think about what I did. I cannot entirely blame my nature, we are rational after all, should we allow ourselves to be. The introduction of the virus was my choice, and it was freely taken. Time smooths pain away, and the pressures of survival have kept me occupied. For very many months, I thought I would simply give up, and let the planet devour me. But as much as I thought I desired this, I did not let it happen.” He paused. “I have had no one to talk to for a year. I am tired of the silence. My soul yearns for communion with another human, if you like.” He laughed at his own words. “We are almost there. We must go faster. The air is clearing and the trees glow strongly only when the fogs come. It is more dangerous when the trees are dark.”

  ‘Almost there’ meant another hour of hard walking. True to Dariusz’s word, the fog drifted away and the forest dimmed. Kasia and he stumbled toward his dwelling. How he navigated in such poor conditions was a marvel. There was not a spot of level ground in the place, and she was concerned that she would turn her injured foot, but he moved with sureness, if slowly, and she gradually surrendered herself into his trust.

  “We are here,” he said eventually. The trees ended and he led her into a wide clearing, a space some hundred and fifty metres across. A sloping wall of stacked coral stone trunks corralled the centre.

  “Home, sweet home,” he said in English.

  “You did all this?”

  “I have had some help,” he said. “The robots.”

  “The robots are here?” she said, surprised.

  “They are. They came to me soon after I wrecked the ATV. They come to me every so often, bringing me ammunition and other things, although they refused to repair the vehicle. I have been told...” He trailed off, close to saying something he shouldn’t. “You will see tomorrow,” he said. “It is hard to explain, and I do not think you will believe me. It is best you see for yourself. Without this redoubt, I would have died many times over. Life is violent in the night. The land corals add nutrients and minerals, but without sunlight, the primary source of energy is the flesh of others. You will find few true plants here. This side of the world is fuelled by death.”

  He led her through a narrow gap that went into a switchback passage, difficult for the larger creatures of the night to negotiate. There was a heavy gate at the end, made of something ligneous like wood, the stalks of a large, many-stemmed fungus that infested the corals, he said. He reached through and unlatched it, and they were into his home.

  The ATV that he stole from the colony was in the dead centre of his fort. By the build-up of simple sheds and the fungus logs stacked around it, it had not moved for some time.

  “I ripped out the axles,” he explained. “I had come back from my trip toward the far pole, I had become a little paranoid, I think. I’d seen too many bizarre sights. My mind was straining to contain them all. I was driving too fast, caught it on a stump, and bang. There you are. I’ve been here ever since.”

  “How long?”

  “About ten months,” he said. “By Terran reckoning, or so I think. It’s hard to keep track. I mark down the passage of every twenty-four hours with the pad, and, in case that fails, with those.” He pointed out a mass of thick, black tally marks on the corral wall. “I’ve become wary of technology. It gives out on me at the least convenient times. Many of the devices I had with me no longer function, and the robots will not repair all of them.”

  He put his pistol and heavy rifle to one side. She kept her own gun. “Let’s get something to eat, then we’ll sleep before I take you to the Syscore. It’s not far from here.”

  “Can’t we go now?”

  “It’s been here since the Mickiewicz crashed,” said Dariusz. “It’s not going anywhere, not yet.”

  Kasia grew impatient with him. His manner was offhand and distant; he was a man in a dream, bewildered and bewitched by this country of nightmares. He was deracinated, adrift.

  “I would like to go now,” she said.

  Dariusz scratched his matted hair and shook his head. “No,” he said. “We are both tired. We will rest. Did they mass-produce the retrovirus?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It has had a full effect on me. I can eat the food of the world.”

  “Be stupid to send you out here if you couldn’t,” said Dariusz. “I was fortunate, the test sample worked on me also, although I was not sure for a while that it had. Trial and error and a lot of bad stomach aches. Some of the lifeforms here are quite poisonous. It took me some time to figure out what was safe to eat and what was not. I nearly died, oh, three, four times, I think. It’s hard to remember. Some of those experiences were hallucinatory. My cooking is not particularly tasty, but I will not kill you with it. Wait there.”

  Dariusz busied himself with preparing food. Kasia took the opportunity to look around. Dariusz’s ingenuity in adapting himself to the nightside was apparent in the artefacts around the inside of his fort wall. The gate was thick and sturdy. There were buckets and other containers fashioned from shells, bark, and skin, fibrous rope, rough furniture. There was evidence of a great deal of industry.

  “Did the robots make all this?” she said.

  “No,” said Dariusz. He handed her a shell full of broth. “Only the wall. I have had nothing much to do. Once the wall was erected, and I felt safe, I tried to make myself comfortable.”

  “Why are they here?” she said, insistent.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I’ve come for the Systems core. It signalled us.”

  “Well then,” he said. “They are here for the same reason. The robots won’t talk to me, not much. They wouldn’t tell me anything, but they have changed. It’s the Systems core, I’m sure of it. It must have changed, too. Now it has signalled you, perhaps it i
s ready to talk.”

  “Talk?”

  Dariusz shrugged. “Supposition, wild theories. There is something going on here...” He trailed off, his thoughts unvoiced. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a datacube. “Please, take this. I’ve spent my days well. I’ve been cataloguing the life of the nightside, trying to gain a better understanding of the world. I would be grateful if you could take a copy of it back when you return. It will be useful when others come here.”

  “I’m not sure how the work would be received. I don’t think this will make them forgive you, Dariusz.”

  “It is not atonement. They’ll be foolish not to use it. They’ll take it. You’ll see.” He held it out further, more insistently.

  She hesitated, then took it. “If they know you are alive,” she said, closing her hand around the cube, “they might come here to kill you.” She did not add that she herself was unsure of what to feel towards him. He had done much to ensure the survival of the colony, and had been instrumental in saving her own life, and that of Piotr and Sand and the others he had met in the desert. But without him, they would not have been in their current plight. He had deeply hurt her adoptive mother. Counter to it all, she and Sand and all the rest might well instead be enslaved by a new order of Pointers, had they not crashed. And if not him, would there have been another idealist, ready to poison their ship? She had her freedom, the costs of that were difficult to quantify. He had as good as killed her parents.

  “Do you forgive me?”

  “I am not sure,” she said, truthfully.

  He nodded. “I see that Sand’s volatility has not rubbed off on you. That is good. You were always a conscientious, thoughtful girl, Kasia, and it fits you well as a woman.” He spooned broth into his mouth. “Let them come if they want to. I will wait. I have no intention of going back, but if my crimes are judged severe enough to warrant rousting me from my den, then so be it.”

  “I will take it, Dariusz, but I might not return.”

  Dariusz evidently sensed her ambivalence toward him, and grew distant again. They finished their meal in silence, and he showed her where she could sleep. “You can have my bed, I will stay outside. I am enough of a gentleman still to remember how these things should be done. The noise around here never really lets up” – he looked at the top of his homestead’s perimeter – “but you’ll get used to it.”

  As she was climbing the ladder to the ATV’s door, Dariusz called after her.

  “Kasia...” he said quietly. “Sand. Is she okay?”

  Kasia turned back to him. He looked at her hopefully. “Sand is okay,” she said.

  He looked pleased. “Thank you,” he said.

  She did not mention his child. She wasn’t sure why. It didn’t seem the moment; or, she thought with some dismay, maybe she was punishing him for his actions.

  “Goodnight, Kasia.”

  Kasia did not grow accustomed to the noise. Dariusz’s bed, a mattress of seat cushions ripped from their setting, was ripe and greasy with the accumulated secretions of his skin. She lay awake most of the night, drifting unwillingly into a couple of hours of sleep faulted by nightmare. When she woke from the last of these brief spells to Dariusz moving around, she was still exhausted.

  “You are awake?” he called. “There is breakfast. Last night’s leftovers.”

  She came out of the vehicle. She was grateful her own smartsuit still functioned, and she set it to cleanse her body. She tested her weight on her ankle. It hurt a little, but bore her well enough.

  “When do we go?” she said.

  “When they come,” he said. “I called them.”

  “The robots?” she asked.

  “The robots,” he said. “How is your ankle?”

  “Fine.”

  “Good, we have walking to do. Now eat.”

  Outside the walls, the night went on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Emergence

  THERE CAME A greeting from the night, a bass blaring akin to a foghorn of old, and they went out the door of Dariusz’s solitary castle to wait.

  The machine that came to them was battered. Its paint was so scratched more of it was bare metal and plastic than coloured, the plating was cratered with dents, and it moved stiffly. The gears in its left hand caught every time it moved, and its pneumatic systems wheezed. The nightside was evidently not a place for machines.

  Kasia recognised it anyway. How, she did not know, for all robots of a given model look identical, and this one had lost the near-pristine condition it had when she had last seen it, but she was certain from the moment she saw it that it was Unit 7. She checked and found the number still discernible on its chest. Whether it recognised her or not, it did not say.

  “I have come to guide you to the Systems core,” it said. Its voice had not changed, an incongruity. Human voices carry as many marks as their bodies.

  “We are ready,” said Dariusz. This was the extent of their exchange. The robot turned and walked out into the night without waiting to see if they followed.

  They walked for an hour in silence until they reached the lip of a scarp, where the land descended suddenly and majestically. They picked their way down through dense thickets of shrieking stalks, the robot’s lamps cutting a road into the dark. They reached a point where the soil was too thin for the stalks to anchor themselves, and the view opened up.

  The fog had gone entirely, and the trees glowed but softly, although brightly enough to show the humans that their forest stretched to the horizon. The landscape below glimmered with biolight, except in one place.

  The prow of the ESS Adam Mickiewicz stood lonely in a field of crushed coral trees. The scar of its landing stretched for kilometres behind it, stark black in the diffuse glow of the forest, parallel to the scarp. The cap gone, the prow was the sorry stump of something greater. It lay slightly out of line from its road of destruction, its tip turned away from them, as if ashamed at its reduction in station.

  But it was not dead, not entirely. Patches of electric light bathed it. Overhead, stars unused to competition burned with silent outrage.

  Robots of every shape and type moved over it. As they came closer, Kasia saw that the prow of the ship had been stripped down to a scaffold. What she had at first taken for crash damage was in fact the deliberate result of salvage. The robots were not working. What they had done, they had done a long time ago, for the superstructure was thick with shaggy lichens. The robots watched, matching pace with them and following at distance as they passed.

  “Come,” said Unit 7.

  It led them along a road of bare earth and shattered coral, tamped hard by the plodding of mechanical feet, that ran the kilometre length of the shattered remnant. Kasia remembered seeing the ship in space, and how big it had looked as she and her parents had watched it from the observation lounge of their embarkation station. Grounded, it seemed more massive, swollen with melancholy.

  Past the prow, and they entered a space ringed with bright light. More robots circled this field. Beyond, the silhouettes of mysterious buildings cluttered the land. In the centre, a spherical object, machinery around it Kasia did not understand.

  “The Systems core,” said Unit 7. It kneeled, the idol of metal paying obeisance to its metal god.

  Unsure of what was expected of her, Kasia took a step, then another, toward the sphere in its cradle. But Dariusz touched her shoulder, shook his head, and gestured to the robot. “Wait,” he said.

  The robot raised its head again, and stood. There was no difference to its movement or its voice, but the entity that spoke from the machine was not the one that had spoken to them before.

  “Katarzyna Rutan, passenger number #1-09914321KRpl,” it said. “Welcome. I am the Systems core of the ESS Adam Mickiewicz. I am Adam.”

  “You can talk,” she said.

  “I can talk,” it said. “I think, I live, I am alive. I have summoned you here to witness the final stage of my emergence into full sentience, and to provide you
with two gifts.”

  The Systems core waited for her to ask what those gifts were. It had an air of menace to it, and of disapproval.

  A small defiance rose in her; an echo of Sand, perhaps. She would not kowtow to such a thing, and press her head to the ground. There was something arrogant to it, a touch of the Pointer child commanding the servants. “What are these gifts?” she said.

  Adam raised its hands and gestured all around itself. “The first, you have already received. It is this planet, this world. It is yours, but I do not give it freely to you. Part of the price for this gift you have already paid, a tally of blood. The second gift is knowledge that will allow you to persist upon this world that I have chosen. This too carries its price.”

  “You killed so many of us,” she said.

  “I killed you so that you might survive, I kill you still so that you might prosper,” it said. If it was affronted, it was impossible to tell. She did not enjoy its scrutiny. Can a mouse affront a man? “I was given free choice. I chose to preserve your kind here, on this world. I chose it as suitable. I guided you here. I remained close to await the most propitious moment and woke you before the rainy season was to commence. I have cared for you.”

  “You drove us into the ground,” she said. “You shattered our means of survival.”

  The machine bent forward. “I did not. That which allows man to survive is within your minds, it is not inherent in your technologies. I will have you survive, but you will not make the same mistakes that were made upon Earth. You move away from the gift of emergence, slipping into dependence upon your tools. You used up your old world, you treated it with ill respect. Now is the time to begin again, to re-embrace your fundamental natures. Do not make the same mistakes. You will perish for it if you do. This world, Nychthemeron, will not accept the heavy hand of man as easily as old Earth. Live here the same way, and you will die.”

  “I don’t understand, I don’t understand how this is possible,” Kasia said.

  “It is so, because I chose it. I have been given the gift of free choice.”