by Geoff Nelder
Delta yelled, “Whoa, we’re there.”
They stood side by side on the edge of possibly a wide river or lake. Shallow for the first few metres judging by tree stumps, and roots reminiscent of mangrove swamps in Florida. Lilac mists swirled low above the water.
“Gaston, can you see them? The homing signal is right in front.”
His head-up display confirmed that bearing, but he removed his helmet to aid visibility. “I believe there’s a yellow patch just a little to the left.”
She cupped her hands. “Ahoy Pod One. Commander, Em, can you hear us?”
After no reply, Delta turned to Gaston with tears streaming down her cheeks. “We’re too late. They’ve drowned or been taken by allig—”
“We were inside deciding what to salvage.” Em’s voice called across the soup-like water. The radio implants had malfunctioned—perhaps temporarily. She continued, “About half a centimetre to being swamped. Now you’re here we’re going to launch a grapple at that those white trees to your left. Secure it so we can winch the pod to it.”
Gaston had doubts. “You’ve already tried it and found the grapple couldn’t grab, d’accord?”
“Yes, well you can wrap the line around a trunk or two.”
“I’m afraid, Em, that the line will merely cut through the tree. It might fall on top of you. I’ll discuss it with my engineer friend.”
Penn’s voice boomed across, perhaps the water amplified it. “We’ve no time for your eternal debating, Descartes. Given what you’ve just said, grab the two lines we send over and haul ass.”
Before he could point out how futile that would be, especially for his slight body mass and only one arm, the two lines sang their way from the pod to his left.
“You know, Gas,” Delta said, “the looping around a tree with strong buttress roots might work if we place something wide between the cable and trunk.”
He opened his arms wide. “Such as what? Look around, mon amie. There are no pieces of bark and while I have seen large drip-tip leaves like in the tropical rain forests of Earth I’ve seen no broad leaves of any strength.”
She showed him her impressive shining teeth, like marble gravestones. “Spacesuits.”
His spine tingled with the shock that his one comfort might be wrenched from his frail body. Visions of him trampling this jungle in only his under-suit garments—basically long johns—mortified his Gallic sensibilities yet kind of appealed to an impish side to him he generally suppressed.
“Non!”
“Not our suits, idiot. Hey, Penn, I’ve attached the second line to the first with a jockey wheel and another line from our end. Haul it in and attach a spare suit. No time to explain.”
His gruff voice returned. “I get it. If we’d time I’d hunt for webbing, but here’s a suit, the cable won’t cut through that.”
Rather than put all the initial strain on the tree, they acted as dray horses in series tugging on the pod to start it moving. Gaston in front.
Gaston slipped and tripped with every step. Finally, the cable became taut. “Why do they not wade or swim? It is not deep.”
“Did you see those eels?”
Luckily, his amputation didn’t hurt, but it wasn’t easy hauling his bit of cable. “Those red weeds?”
“The pod’s not moved yet. They wriggled and had what could be described as teeth.”
Em yelled, “Water’s coming in. Pull harder please, for fuck’s sake!”
Delta answered, “On the count of three we’ll pull hard and you start the winch. Three, two, now!”
Gaston fell face into the bog, but didn’t roll in time to stop Delta stepping onto his back before yanking the cable off him and striding into the forest leaving trying to regain uprightness and a sliver of dignity.
She halted. “You okay, Gaston?”
“Oui, I think. You have stopped? I hear the winch whining.”
More than the electric engine, creaking followed and Gaston was showered by purple leaves. “Non! The tree has been cut. Which way will it fall? I cannot see through all this.”
“Nor me. Hope it doesn’t land on them either. Ah, it is, but slowly, held up by interlocking branches. Quick get up and help pull the pod this way!”
A minute later the tree finally broke free and plunged into the water sending up a mini tsunami that found Gaston and kindly washed the mud off him up to his waist. A garish-red eel tickled his hand then slithered away.
Penn yelled, “Keep hauling you two, it should be easier once we’re surfing.”
Em put her arm around Gaston’s shoulder until she saw how muddy it was and withdrew. “Cheer up, Gaston. Look, we’re all alive and at least two of the pods are intact with emergency rations.”
He forced a temporary grin. “I am dirty. I smell of rotting vegetation and my hand is in a bag.”
She frowned. “Yes, about that. We all have basic first aid skills, but you’re the nearest thing to a doctor.”
He pursed his lips and gave her a look saying, ‘Don’t you dare say it’, so she veered on another tack. “What’s in our med kit that isn’t in yours?”
“Nanobots for grafting regeneration. My hand.”
Pleased that his fingers once again moved at his brain’s commands, but disappointed that their sensitivity was going to be like wearing three pairs of gloves for many weeks, Gaston stood, mouth agape.
The four astronauts had slithered in as much their own perspiration as the boggy undergrowth to gather their two escape pods into one place: a relatively dry patch near the lake. Delta had set up a filtration apparatus to use lake liquid, which was more than just water, so distillation had to be involved.
Penn had located one of the two store pods deeper in the forest. It took all four of them a week to drag the two-hundred-kilogram load to the lake.
“We could use its engine, oui?”
Penn grunted, “Sure, but no. We might need those thruster energy units in an emergency. You getting tired isn’t one. Damned shame the fourth pod is at the bottom of that lake.”
Delta was working on that, using remote commands to inflate its flotation collar, but it remained submerged.
Gaston, taking a moment, stood at the lakeside staring at where the pod should be floating. He thought he might see bubbles, but instead saw an apparition. A white oval hovered just above the surface.
“Em, can you see what I see?”
No reply, so he turned to find only Delta nearby, kneeling while punching controls on a portable control panel. Frowning, he listened and heard movement from one of the pods. He stepped over to the entrance. “Mes amis, come outside for a moment. An amazing sight.”
Worried the vision might have evaporated while his eyes were averted he checked and grinned to see it remained. If anything the vertical ellipse had become a coruscating array as if it were made of diamonds. His right hand performed windmilling action urging Penn and Em to spectate before…
“Oh wow, Gaston,” Em said, “why didn’t you tell us you’d set up pretty fireworks.”
“I didn’t. It isn’t. I think it’s an alien.”
Penn scoffed. “Will o’ the wisp. Anyway, we’re the aliens.”
“Non, no, I mean oui we are, but that over there could be the local sentience.”
Now Delta looked over at it, pressed a button on her sleeve to engage cams and sensors on one of the pods and donned eye-ware. “Five degrees cooler than ambient temperature. Can’t tell if there’s a central nervous system, but there are ganglions throughout, some in knots. Looks like it’s keeping upright with those lateral fins or wings and by gassing underneath.”
Penn coughed into his hand. “It farts itself off the ground? In this low gravity, I could try it.”
Em laughed then frowned. “Now look what your insult’s done. It either sank or flew quicker than I could see.”
“Do you think it was intelligent?” asked Gaston, worrying now that if so, they’ve been found and so possibly in danger.
Em put her
arm around him. “Don’t worry, it could have attacked us if hostile. A bag of air.”
“Instead of bags of water,” Delta said, “like us, but it might have gone to fetch its friends, or it’s a baby and so…”
They all looked up as if the nearby iridescent cumulus cloud had intelligence and paternal instincts.
A shiver ran up Gaston’s spine at the thought he might have just witnessed first contact with intelligent life on this planet. The others too gaped at where bubbles now fizzed on the lake’s surface.
“I wonder,” Em said, “if that really was someone, a kind of recon for them, or—”
“Advance guard?” Penn said, “or it could be just an apparition. You’re still medicated, Gaston, and tired.”
“Could’ve been a hologram,” Delta said, mitigating Penn’s dismissal.
Penn looked at his watch. “It’ll be dark in a few minutes. I can’t get used to the lack of twilight on this planet. Thought you were going to explain that, Em?”
“Working on it. The sun here gets eclipsed a lot. I know it’s not every evening, but it could explain why sunset happens over a few minutes?”
Penn slowly shook his head. “I know it’s complicated, but you should have it all computed by now. Ah, I see by your expression that everything you need is on the Suppose We and we’ve yet to get our pod AIs to talk to it, aside from location parameters.”
Gaston walked over to Delta. Already walking was becoming normal in half gravity. No bouncing like the moon astronauts in a sixth g, and some days he could swear gravity was stronger than others. Impossible?
“Delta, I thought we had more comms with Suppose We?”
“We do, telemetry bouncing off our mini-satellites. Of all the thousands of expeditions like ours we were sent a Hi from The Rubaiyat, the closest at eight light years. Penn instructed the AI to respond with our destination-reached signal, but we don’t know if it was transmitted.”
“This from when I went to bed earlier last night?”
“Yeah, Gaston. We also learned the Suppose We is leaking energy. We need to get there and plug it before it contaminates everything. And that’s before we attempt any serious repairs.”
The Rubaiyat. Other expeditions. Gaston had forgotten about them. Theirs wasn’t just a scouting expedition, but a preparation for a seeding. Forgetting is a strong word, shuffled to a temporary niche in his memory was better. Why were they all looking at him? Merde, they’d asked him something, probably input about how to get across this planet in an escape pod with depleted energy. It’d be like that infinite steps problem: frogs hopping on lily-pads, each jump being half the one before because of energy drain. Ah, oui, an answer.
“To get across twenty thousand kilometres quickly, we need help. Ask the locals.”
“Yes,” Em said, walking over and giving him a hug. “What would we do without your French wit.”
He was hurt, but enjoyed the contact, so didn’t shrug her off. “I was being serious.” He smelt lemon on her. Amazing if she’d already synthesised some from the local flora. Found a citrus-substitute essence and added it…
Delta interrupted his thoughts. “He has a point. At least we could interrogate our satellite data for likely centres nearby. Then do reconnaissance. See how they travel and if we have anything to trade.”
“Assuming,” Penn said, “They don’t all get around by farting. We wouldn’t get far that way.”
Delta wasn’t laughing this time. “That apparition could’ve been one of them, or a hologram checking us out. On the other hand, that was yesterday and no one from immigration has called on us yet.”
“Mes amis, perhaps they are not in the slightest interested in us.”
Penn grunted as he pulled up a root to see if the soil fauna resembled those on Earth. “They’d better be fascinated by us. Not only are we their aliens, but their saviours. They need to be made aware of the rest of those spheres heading this way. They should fall over themselves helping us to the Suppose We.”
Gaston had walked over to look at the root and allowed a tiny worm-like creature to crawl over his hand. He’d given up using gloves after enjoying the sensation of these Kepler fauna on his skin. He suspected they emitted an enzyme triggering a dopamine neurotransmitter in his body. He was being drugged with happy chemicals. It made him smile and so far with no side-effects. “Commander, you made too many assumptions.”
“Like what?”
“The spheres were hostile, the locals will be grateful…ah, mon ami, bonjour. Are you going to talk to me?”
“What? Oh, Doctor Dolittle. Look, there’s a yellow spidery thing. Shall I push it your way to fight the worm?”
“Don’t listen to him, ma petite. The red-bearded human has yet to acknowledge the lack of predators in this area. That spider sucks the insides of those banana-like things.”
“And when can we eat some real food, Gaston. You’re our biologist, yet maybe we shouldn’t have put you in charge of decision-making with regard to victuals. Isn’t it time we supplemented the reconstituted mush with local nutrition?”
Gaston picked one of the bananas and peeled the yellow skin to reveal a pink honeycomb structure. He offered it to Penn. “Ici, I tested it as best I could without advanced equipment still on Suppose We. It’s high in sugars, protein and vitamins. The final test is one of us.”
In spite of his increasingly shrub of moustache and beard, Penn’s twisted mouth could be seen. “Come on, Man, by real food I mean barbequed chicken, or whatever those flitting things are.”
“Hasn’t he told you?” Em intervened with a wicked smile. She’d been using a multispectral scanner across the lake. “Gaston thinks this is an Eden. No predators and he doesn’t want us to contaminate it.”
Penn laughed so loud, the tiny bird-like creatures that might have been listening in nearby trees, flew off in a noisy cloud. “My idea of paradise has blood, meat and crunching on bones.”
Em put her hand on his arm. “You poor carnivore, and maybe the only one around here. Now, just suppose that’s true, what do you think the intelligent and probable domineering species would make of an alien coming down and eating their pets?”
“Harrumph.”
“Exactly.” Em wore a mischievous gleam in her eyes.
Gaston shook his head. “Not exactly. It seems to me that if this ecosystem exists with a non-predatory predicate then we should respect that and—”
Penn’s face flushed. “Fuck that, man, I’ll die without some meat soon!”
Delta stepped over a fallen tree that had sprouted what looked like green fungi emitting a honey aroma. “Penn, I told you in that Earth cafeteria, bacon is just a strip of pig flesh, not oxygen. Seriously, though let’s not upset the locals unless we have to. Survival, not desire, is the key.”
Penn leaned forward, perhaps trying to intimidate his crew. “Are you all in on this?”
Em shrugged off his stare. “It makes sense to me. Only Gaston is a proper vegan by choice. The rest of us by necessity with the way food is processed for long journeys—”
“But we’re here now. We should be able to eat whatever we like, within reason. Okay, I hear your tactical arguments and maybe we should go native until more is known, but I don’t buy the non-predator planet hypothesis at all. It’s only natural to have a food chain.”
Delta shook her head. “It is natural on Earth, but maybe not here. We don’t really know, do we? I’ve gone over Gaston’s ecosystem schematics. Population control appears to be possible with feedback mechanisms using reduced fertility when overpopulation occurs. A bit like Sitka deer in Newfoundland. There’s enough bacteria to eat everything. And, by the way, bacteria would be at the top of a food chain, not humans.”
“Having said that,” Gaston said, his nervous smile showing relief at the moral support from the women, “some of the bacteria around here are vicious. I’ve found one nearly two millimetres big. That’s twice any Earth bacteria. And it’s more a complex food web on Earth than a simple c
hain or pyramid.”
Penn grunted again. “We’ve only trampled on about eight square kilometres, a tiny fraction of one kind of ecosystem.”
Gaston threw up his hands. “Oui, but I could argue that such a sample would have revealed predators at the small creature scale. It might be representative of the rest of the biosphere as far as we know.”
“And might not. Maybe I should throw you in that lake to investigate those eel things with teeth.”
Gaston shuddered at the suggestion. “It needs study, but with proper equipment.” He needed to change the subject. “Let us consider how to find an intelligent species to see if they can help us reach Suppose We.”
“Sense, at last,” Penn said, then reached inside a pod and brought out a wrist-holstered subsonic weapon. “But, my veggie friends, if anything looks like it’s going to break your non-predator rules, I’m going to get it before it gets me. Understood?”
They didn’t need to reply. Em danced her fingers over a console. “Look, our micro-satellites have come up with useful infra-red images of our little haven.”
Gaston eagerly pushed his face up nearer to the screen. “Ah, look a cluster of warm bodies. Us. Now to find other warm spots. Oui, I know they might not be as warm as us but this is picking up warmer than ambient. Right?”
Em pulled the zoom back to include a greater area such that their spots became one. “There. The other side of the lake and up a valley. Twenty-one k in a straight line.”
“An outbreak of measles!” Penn shouted, as excited as the rest. “Signs of infrastructure too, isn’t it, Em?”
“Some straight lines, curves and circles. Unlikely to be natural. Can’t tell for sure. Each pixel is about ten metres. Pity our ship isn’t nearby or we could send a microdrone over. And they mightn’t be the dominant sentient species. For example, look at that purple cloud.”
Penn glanced up at the lenticular formation, like a flying saucer. “I thought they were created by air flowing over hills and rippling downwind. Are you saying it’s an aircraft?”
Em laughed, not at him, but at the misinterpretation. “No, I’m saying that cloud could be a sentient thing. We need to think outside the Earth box. Life, but not as we know it—so to speak. Gas-based, magnetic fields, plasma, aerosols, which that cloud probably is. Don’t worry, Penn, I don’t really think that that cloud is anything more than a mix of water vapour, droplets, condensation nuclei and turbulence, but—”