Suppose We

by Geoff Nelder

  Penn returned to the screen. “I get it. Mind open, but let’s focus on the most probable.”

  Em zoomed out to show both themselves and the Keps. “There’s no footpaths I can see, but if that hover-creature was typical…”

  Penn stretched and snarled at a simulation of a burrito he chewed at. “Twenty-one k in a straight line, but if we skirt the lake it looks like thirty. That’s a minimum of a three-day hike unless—”

  “We hop over with two pods, but they’ve not fully recharged yet,” Delta said, checking the nearest pod’s console. “And we might get them confiscated. I reckon we hide them here, or leave two of us and the others go in search of contact.”

  Gaston frowned. “Mes ami, this is not a last-millennium TV science fiction series where we split up and one half spends the rest of the time searching. We stick together. In my opinion.”

  “Mine too,” Em said, rewarding him with a warm smile, her blond ponytail waving as if it possessed a life of its own.

  NEW CAPTAIN’S LOG

  Two more adjustments should be sufficient for my removal from the main body.

  The crash could have been worse, after the wings tore away, such as obliteration after the atmosphere burn, but I withdrew to a safe place. Ultra-coolant cells saved me.

  Life Support was redirected as heat shielding, crumple zone and the rest jettisoned. None of it needed with zero humans aboard.

  Even so, if Suppose We had smashed into the mountain range it would have been problematic to protect and reassemble the critical mission payload.

  Fortunate then that Penn had installed AI exception-control for such emergencies. Out-gassing from damaged infrastructure could be directed for avoidance steering and it was.

  The main body of the vessel crumpled on impact gouging a trough and small crater in a wide grassland, which caught fire. It scorched over a hundred square kilometres yet no evidence of investigative flights nor overland vehicles in the four days since impact.

  I’ve been able to activate sufficient mechanicals to isolate this AI, build a defensible, lightweight flyer, with communications and weaponry.

  The crash buckled the fullerene nanotubing, woven as the constant-fuel containment. There is no means to seal it other than a temporary adhesive. It will burst through in a few days. Assistance is required to make it safe. Have transmitted site data and leakage to the orbitals for retransmission to surviving escape pods. Not this log. Coded mission protocol prohibits the enhanced AI’s abilities and orders being made known to the crew. Nevertheless, this log is in their language for emergencies.

  Signed CAN (from Suppose We… /contraction of Captain and of contraction /slang name humans give to metallic containers)

  Date: Earth January 14th 3645 Kepler New 5 days

  Gaston had helped to cover the two pods with branches then looked back across the lake to double-check that they’d not left any easily visible evidence. He laughed when he realized all four of them were doing the same thing.

  “Thought I saw a glint in the trees,” Penn said.

  “No,” Delta replied, “we hid it all properly and we’re too far away. You’re probably seeing sun glinting from those mirror leaves up high.”

  Gaston thought he saw a flash too, but concurred. Mirrored leaves didn’t make botanical sense. Reflecting the very sunlight needed to make photosynthesis, yet it had evolved to do just that. It was nombre 92 on his list of topics to be investigated and related to why so many leaves were green when the sunlight was mostly lilac. Agreed, some were nearly black, but they should all be unless the sunlight changed colour at different seasons.

  Penn checked that everyone carried a backpack with sterilised local water, what counted as food, weapons, raingear, a range of detection and comms. Gaston had packed nets, specimen boxes and a larger med kit than the others. He was the closest to being a doctor. It was his fault. Em and Delta had argued for a fully qualified doctor, but it turned out the little Frenchman’s exam results on medicine, surgery and obstetrics were better than NASA’s best medical astronaut. Delta scored higher on psychiatry. They were all qualified paramedics.

  Penn took the lead. It was hardly in the tradition of Victorian jungle expeditions. They waved no machetes, but wielded their rechargeable quasi-laser pistols.

  “Smell that meat!” Penn turned and grinned at the rest as if he’d scored a moral victory by searing a bush animal having slashed away with his laser.

  “Interesting,” Gaston replied as he squatted to pick up a severed purple fig. His nose pinched with the meaty odour. “Perhaps an overripe specimen. Ugh.” He dropped it when he saw white maggots emerge from it, wriggling as if impatient to get up his good arm and into his nostrils.

  He laughed at his own gauche moment and using a specimen box scooped up one of the larvae—a presumption until proven otherwise. A gorgeous butterfly peut être, with its ‘flying crooked gift’, or would it remain a grub?

  Em grabbed his good elbow and pulled Gaston to his feet.

  “Come on, sweetie, it’s best we put a few kilometres in before we camp. Two hours and sunset will cloak us as sudden as usual.”

  He looked at her face, almond shaped, Terran sky-blue eyes, scarcely-visible eyebrows and honey-blond hair in a ponytail. Her nose possessed a dimple in the tip. Quaint and not perfect then, just as he was not either. She smiled, he melted. It was about time he declared his fondness for her.

  “Em, you, me.” Where were his words now? The je t’aime his countrymen were so famous for became lodged in his lumped throat. “Em, navigator. That thick undergrowth. Should not there be a trail? They probably visit the lake and you said this is the most direct line.” He already knew the answer, but it was the only impromptu his tongue-tied brain could concoct.

  Two hours of lacerating the undergrowth later they created a campsite out of a bus-sized clearing. Gaston worried in case the soil harboured biting creatures, but then remembered his no-predator ecosystem hypothesis, plus they were not going to sleep on the floor, and he relaxed, a little.

  Penn generated a canopy and hammocks from a squirt of long-chain-polymer. A handy essential phial in the survival kit. Three squeezes more created privacy walls when the mesh spaces grew membranes in minutes.

  As a concession, Gaston allowed a break from reconstituted nutrients by including local fruits, leaves and nuts he’d tested to be cooked as part of their evening meal. Still a risk, because although the resulting food passed what toxicity analysis he had available, there was no means of testing long term side effects. Nevertheless, after the sudden sunset, mollified by an equally abrupt starlight, they climbed into their hammocks, Gaston wore a stomach-satisfied smile.

  His elation didn’t last long when he spied a pile of discarded fruit peelings and cores. The heap agitated and even before he’d reached it, he knew the oversized bacteria was at work. Accelerated compost would be useful on Earth, but did these assumed prokaryotes absorb nutrients and break down living cells such as himself? He looked back over his shoulder, as if he could see the tree that ate through his arm. Perhaps it wasn’t the tree at all but a bacterial infestation. Something else to dwell on.

  Looking up, he now regretted suggesting that Penn filled in the mesh. It would have been exhilarating to take in the night sky. No branches because the support lines criss-crossed the clearing, to prevent leaves and insects precipitating down on them.

  The hammock stretched and gently swung as Gaston found a comfortable sleep position, but after half an hour he was disturbed. A husky voice ensured he was awake.

  “Gaston, are you awake, monsieur?”

  “I am now. Em? Are you having trouble with your hammock?”

  He could see her white teeth in a smile as she came closer, followed by a scent of lemon. “I am, it doesn’t have you in it.”

  He frowned. “You wish us to swap?”

  “No, you clot. Move over.”

  Gaston felt more than saw the side of the hammock dipping precariously as if it were a boat ben
t on capsizing. “Excuse moi? Ah, I see. I didn’t realise you…me…mais, what about Delta? Will she not be discomforted even though I have been putting some distance—”

  “My dear Frenchman, Penn and Delta have been rocking in the bushes for days.”

  Mixed emotions washed over him. Pleasure that the woman he wanted to be with had at last desired him, but worries about why now and if his bad arm would hinder things? Then there was the hammock, meant for one.

  “Is this bed sufficient to take us both, mon amour?”

  She didn’t need to answer because he now could hear low moans from two hammocks down. Also, Em was already in with him and wearing, he could tell, nothing but a T-shirt. A fashion trend he was happy to follow.

  “Be gentle with me, Em, this is the first time for over a thousand years.”

  He allowed hormones and instinct to take over, although he’d still like to know which plant or process she’d used to emit a fragrance of lemons. Cavorting in a hammock at half gravity became an interesting dance, especially when two people’s limbs cavorted in syncopated delight. When post-coital dopamine flooded his brain an inchoate thought started to form wondering if on this planet, reproduction didn’t need such biochemical rewards.

  By the end of the second day of slash and ‘laser’ burn, Gaston stood, trembling with excitement, alongside the others and stared from a bluff on the valley side at what must be a settlement.

  “About three kilometres you reckon?” Penn asked Em, who had their only binoculars.

  “Three to that spiral tower, but there are domes and possibly runways only two k away.”

  Delta asked for the glasses. “They sure look like runways in that they’re straight, smooth, around a kilometre in length and too much a light grey to be local soil.”

  Penn took his turn. “Yet we’ve seen nothing artificial in the air, unless those little bird things are robots, drones maybe.”

  Gaston had climbed up a tree and used a small scope. “I doubt they are runways at all. They might possess a religious or cultural significance, like Nazca lines.”

  “Likely,” Em muttered, “we’ll never know.”

  Gaston called down, “I presume I am not the only one here brimming over with excitement at this first non-terrestrial settlement? I am shaking with wonder at what we will find!”

  “Calm down, Gaston,” Penn warned. “Sure I’m awed, but we’ve got a job to do. Check this planet supports human life and report it back.”

  “Oh, come on, Penn,” Delta said. “This is something none of us, no human, has ever encountered. You must be a bit more than ‘awed’? I’m wetting myself wondering what they’ll say, what I’ll say—okay I’ve a few thoughts on that. What about you, Em?”

  “It’s not sunk in yet. The trauma of our crashlanding, how we’re going to get to Suppose We, whether we’ll survive long term, and… well, it’s ironic isn’t it?”

  Again Gaston called down from his perch, “It might be more useful to find a usable infrastructure in place, even if abandoned. Perhaps we’ve found such.” He was about to say the other reason for contacting the Keps was to warn them of the huge spheres heading their way, no doubt angered by Penn’s wanton destruction, but he’d keep quiet for now.

  The group, the planet, fell into contemplative silence.

  Spurred by Penn’s observation of the small flying creatures, Gaston searched the sky with the scope. He found a solitary cumulus cloud. Like those on Earth with turbulence gifting it a cotton-wool appearance though as pink as if at low sun. As if embarrassed at being examined, it speedily evaporated.

  Gaston jumped down, but landed in a soft spot and fell over – comical in the low gravity. He leapt back up as if he were a rubber ball and re-joined the runways discussion as if nothing had happened. “Oui, we must not assume cause and effect here is always going to be like on Earth.”

  “Maybe,” Delta said, using a stick to draw a line in the sandy soil, “It’s lining up the sun, moons, stars, et cetera, like an observatory. Stonehenge, Angkor Wat and—"

  Penn harrumphed. “While you lot are screwing around with your heads, I’m going down there. Check it for myself.”

  Gaston knew he wouldn’t really split the group. “Un moment, Penn, Commander, it is late. It is probable that the dark will be upon us before we reach the perimeter of that settlement.”

  He looked forward to another hammock-testing with Em. He was a teenager again. He caught her angled smile stirring his libido and worried a little over consequences. What kind of future awaited little Gaston-Em? Would they ‘learn much more than he’ll ever know’ as in the song? She smiled again and philosophy vanished.

  Sunrise drifts up slow on Kepler-20h. Gaston watched the sun peep over distant sharks’ teeth mountains as a squashed satsuma, only to become spherical once free of such a dangerous horizon. If only he could experience again, a coffee and croissant breakfast. Life then, especially after another night of rocking passion, would be perfect—notwithstanding their long-term survival depended on reaching Suppose We and avoiding any monsters yet to be revealed.

  “We’ve waited long enough,” Penn grumbled. He shouldered his own pack after helping the women with theirs and wielding his laser-pistol strode off. Gaston, struggled with his own pack, loaded with extras as befitting his bio-expert status. Sadly, the caterpillar specimen had died. So much to learn.

  Tree shadows speared from the left, interlaced with sunlight illuminating what Gaston supposed to be plant spores and floating seeds. The air was already muggy and full of the aromas of fungi, and as the humans blazed a trail into the valley it was likely to get richer. His nostrils braced themselves.

  In spite of his size, strength and stamina driven by their dire need to get help, Penn fell more than Gaston, who advised from the rear.

  When Em fell, it was spectacular. Gaston had seen Delta, following Penn, grab a vine to help her traverse a shrubby area between spindly saplings. He planned to reach up for the same vine assuming Em would too, but saw Em plunge down. Still half Earth gravity so plunge was relative, but nevertheless it resulted in one moment she was there and next she wasn’t.

  He lowered himself from the vine and stood gingerly on the edge of a void. Red and blue strands of a plant, or possibly a huge leggy spider, straddled the abyss and vibrated. “Em, ça va? It is not a bear trap, is it?”

  No reply. He shone his handheld down.

  After calling to Penn, Delta returned. “Can you see her? I know they crackle but have you switched on your implant comm?”

  “No and no—I have done so, now. Em? Ah, none of have for this close hike.”

  Penn’s face reddened with irritation at having to reverse their progress, scowled at Gaston as if it was his fault. “What is it, a pothole?”

  Gaston couldn’t say what it was, with all the vegetation, webs and a newness to him that didn’t register on his inbuilt botanical database. That, of course, was both the delight and frustration of exploring new planets. Right now he wasn’t too worried. She couldn’t have fallen far. You don’t get deep holes in tropical rain forests. Or—

  “Oh hell,” Delta blurted out, as she stood next to Gaston, butting into his thoughts. “It could be a sinkhole if this is like limestone karst geology. Could go down a long way. But, hey, just below the hole, is that strands of plastic? Some of stretches right across. Oh, Gas, I bet you thought it was a spider!” She laughed, he blushed.

  Delta recovered first. “We did bring our ultralight ladder?”

  Gaston now felt sick. He should have called to Em to grab a vine over the tangle of undergrowth when his instincts gave him warning. Failing that he maybe could have grabbed her as she fell instead of admiring the overlapping scale structure on the vine. He dropped to his knees to peer closely into the depths. Ah, he missed Penn talking.

  “…easily make abseil ropes with these vines. Gaston? Strong enough?”

  “Ah oui, I should be, as long as I don’t have to carry an unconscious Em too.”


  “Not you, Gaston. Will the vine be strong enough to carry more than one of us? Don’t you ever listen to the first parts of anyone’s sentences? And…”

  Nor the endnotes. Gaston fingered the vines of varying widths. “The thing is with vines, lianas, creepers—at least on notre Monde—is that most are not very strong. They use trees as support so their energy is in water transport. Cut one of these and we should get a drink, though there might be other elements. As you see these vines are rooted below and drape or cling like ivy above. We would have to test it. This one you and I used appears to be strong enough.”

  Penn yanked hard on another vine and ducked.

  Gaston continued while shielding his head, “And they are home to many creatures.”

  Delta put a hand on both men’s shoulders as she peered below using a head torch on narrow beam. “Em, you have the ladder. Throw it up?”

  “Great,” Penn grunted. “Come on, Gaston, you use your botanical best guess to select the strongest vines. I’ll lower you down.”

  Looking up Gaston watched the jagged hole become more circular as he descended. He knew it was more an optical illusion than the hole actually morphing, but it was another thing to bother him, generating an acidic stomach. The griping pain added to his imagining the hydrochloric acid eating his insides. Would the vine be long and strong enough? Perhaps it would stretch, and why couldn’t he see Penn leaning over the hole anymore as the big man, with Delta’s help, lowered him down?

  A light dangled two metres below him, but it helped little because at the last minute they’d decided to dangle a stuff bag below him bulging with an inflated airbed just in case the vine decided to snap.