Synthesis

by Rexx Deane

  ‘Where are you going?’ Aryx put down the wooden bowl he was examining and went after him.

  Outside, Sebastian leaned against one of the veranda posts, arms folded, hugging himself. His voice trembled when he spoke. ‘Where is Achene? This place makes no sense. There’s a gas giant and a boiling planet. Nowhere the Folians could live. It isn’t here! I’ll never get to the bottom of this.’ He slid down the post and sat on the wooden floor, rocking. ‘Who am I kidding? I can’t do it. Oh, my father would have loved to see this. Detective work! I finally get handed some responsibility and fail miserably.’

  Aryx put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. ‘You can’t be expected to know everything, so stop beating yourself up about it or I’ll kick your arse. There’s got to be something here. Come on.’ He strode down the steps and headed up the grassy slope to the north, towards the centre of town.

  Sebastian trudged along behind with his head down.

  ‘Cheer up!’

  ‘I can’t help it. I just feel like we’re getting nowhere and now we’re stuck at a dead end …’ He looked up. ‘Why did they just take the metal items with them and not the wood they’d cut?’

  It was tough walking up the hill, even with the pack doing most of the work, and Aryx spoke between laboured breaths. ‘Maybe they thought they could get wood elsewhere, or it was too bulky … Their ship probably had a fusion assembler … That would have allowed them to create heavier elements, but a lot of the metal would have been … radioactive if they hadn’t got nucleic shunts to stop the reactions afterwards … so any non-radioactive metal they had would have been valuable.’ He slowed to catch his breath.

  Sebastian overtook but stopped when he reached the top of the hill. He staggered back.

  ‘What now? Are you okay?’

  ‘You’ll see when you get here. Whoa!’ Sebastian caught Aryx’s arm as he clambered up the slope and nearly lost his footing at the top. ‘You don’t want to end up down there.’

  The brow of the hill fell away into a large, shady depression at least a hundred metres across and twenty metres deep. Several trees grew at the base of the crater, their tops barely level with the rim. Large moss-covered boulders sat near the centre and looked as though they had tumbled down years ago. It was no wonder they hadn’t noticed it from above: the stockade ran around the crater and up along the far edge, and from the sky it had looked like a patch of scrub at the end of the town.

  ‘This doesn’t look volcanic,’ Sebastian said.

  ‘I think you’re right.’ Aryx stared at the base of the depression; its contours were all wrong. ‘I think a ship landed here.’

  ‘That would make sense,’ Sebastian said. ‘The colonists must have used their ship as the focal point of the town and built out from there. Let’s see if there’s anything useful left behind.’ He turned and headed back down the slope.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Aryx called after him.

  ‘Anything that refers to other planets in the system. See if there are any recording devices left behind. Logs, surveys, that kind of thing.’

  ‘I’ll start checking the buildings up this end. You start from the bottom.’ He smiled as Sebastian jogged back down the hill; at least now he wasn’t slouching – maybe he’d found his motivation again.

  Aryx walked several yards down the hill, towards the first of the buildings on the eastern side of the street. The door hung open at ninety degrees, onto the small porch covering the entrance. Shattered glass lay strewn across the wooden boards, and the top half of the door was missing. Whoever built the town must have liked verandas and porches – almost every building had one.

  Inside, the building consisted of a single room and lacked any other doors. A primitive cork pinboard hung on the left-hand wall where several scraps of bleached, tattered paper flapped in the breeze. A thick layer of gritty dust coated the floorboards, which creaked underfoot. To the right, below the window, stood a heavy wooden desk covered with large sheets of paper held down with chunks of rock.

  He began rifling through the papers. Hand-drawn geological surveys. The contours on the topmost map depicted the hill on which the town stood, with the clearing to the south ringed with a dotted line and a faint, barely legible note. The writing was smudged and blurred by years of rain blown in through the exposed broken window. Aryx bent over to read it and, not yet used to the balance of the mobipack, stumbled forwards. He put his hand out, but found only loose sheets that gave no support and pain shot through his arm as he slid off the end of the desk, dragging documents to the floor with him.

  He sat, rubbing his elbow. ‘Christ, that hurt.’ As he examined the graze, he glanced at the papers he’d dragged off the table.

  The note at the top … it was readable: Earmarked for town construction material. Another section of forest was also highlighted, a mile west of the town: For later collection and shipping / stripped for farming.

  He picked up the map and stood, using the desk for support. The legs were fine for rough terrain, but for hard floors, it was probably better to stick with the chair. He was about to put the map back on the desk when the wind blew the papers again, uncovering another map. It showed a mineral survey, the results indicated by a coloured key on the top left – the same corner damaged by the rain on the others.

  ‘Bloody typical,’ he said, lifting the sheet.

  Under the mineral survey was a sketch of the town: a preliminary plan of the settlement with no building names, but clearly showing the arrangement of streets fanning out from the top of the hill where the outline of the colonists’ ship, labelled Iceni, indicated the landing site.

  ‘At least we were right about that bit.’ With no useful information, he moved on to the next building on the opposite side of the street.

  The second building was larger than the first. A veranda extended across the front of the building, and this time the front door was almost intact. The window frames had split and cracked, but all the glass remained. He pushed open the door into a room barely large enough to accommodate the small desk and chair that were set off to the right, facing outwards. Behind the desk was a closed door, giving him the impression that this was a reception area of some kind. He made his way around the desk and pushed at the door. It opened easily, but the handle was missing, and he had no desire to get stuck in the building if a gust of wind came through, so he pulled the chair into the opening.

  In the next room, two crude wood and canvas couches sat either side of a small coffee table made from a square frame topped with a wooden board. He moved on through an open doorway to his left, into a room with small cupboards fixed to the walls, and a gaping hole in a worktop where a sink must have once resided. With nothing else of immediate interest, he pushed open the closed door on the far side of the kitchen.

  The fourth room contained a low, wooden cot flanked by two small cupboards. The canvas stretched across the frame had sagged with age; a large brown stain in the middle surrounded by a patch of mouldy, rotting fabric indicated the presence of a tiny hole in the ceiling. Just a house, nothing interesting – time for the next building. As he exited from the lounge into the reception, his foot caught the chair he’d placed to keep the door open and he stumbled. Cursing, he kicked it out of the way. The lower leg shot forwards at ninety degrees.

  The chair hurtled across the room and shattered against the wall.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Aryx lost his balance and fell backwards. Adrenaline kicked in, slowing the scene, and he caught himself in the doorway. He sat on the desk and turned off the mobipack. While he got his breath back and waited for his hands to stop shaking, he took out the infoslate and examined the settings.

  Several sliders appeared on the display, indicating the state of the sensors. The lack of mass in the prosthetics meant the reaction to the kick had thrown him, and there was nothing he could do about that. The miscalibration of the sensors hadn’t helped, either, so he stored the current preferences under unsafe. After increasing the dampening on the n
erve sensitivity, and stopping the legs from bending backwards, he saved the change as inertial restriction.

  ‘That should do it.’ He shuffled to the edge of the desk and reactivated the pack. The legs appeared and, swinging them a couple of times to make sure they weren’t going to fly out at odd angles again, he headed back across the street.

  The third building was much longer than the others he’d encountered so far, and the now-familiar veranda ran across the front, shielding several small windows. Double doors at the northern end gave it the appearance of a high-traffic facility. He pushed them but the frames were swollen and stiff. Bracing himself, he barged them with his shoulder and one of the doors gave way into a small lobby area. Another pair of double doors, set with several small panes of glass, formed large screens that had remained intact. They opened easily, into a large room that took up the full length of the building. Ten dusty, primitive beds, arranged five each side, filled the room.

  He stepped through an open doorway in the wall ahead and his eyes were immediately drawn to a desk, upon which rested a red, leather-bound book.

  Chapter 18

  Sebastian reached the bottom of the hill and made his way to the eastern side of the street – they had already investigated the bar on the opposite side, after all. The first building he came to was small, lacked a porch, and the front wall extended straight up. As with all the other buildings he had passed, it had a simple, solid wooden door with wooden hinges and a sliding bar to fasten it. The colonists must have trusted each other implicitly; there was no evidence of even a simple locking mechanism. He pushed the door, but even with both hands it resisted. He took a step back and kicked. As his foot collided, the hinges gave way and the door thudded to the floor, a plume of dust billowing out from beneath it.

  The building consisted of a single room, large enough to comfortably house two people at most. Above, the slope of the roof ran down towards the far wall and sunlight shone in through several small holes and cracks in the bare shingles. At the back, in what must have been the kitchen area, a bean plant crept its way in through openings around the glass of a tiny porthole window. To his right, beneath the front window, lay a single bed frame, but there were no chairs or seating of any kind.

  Sebastian surveyed the scene with a critical eye. Given the lack of furnishings, the place probably belonged to someone whose time was largely spent working long hours outdoors. He rooted through the cupboards and, finding nothing of use, he stepped over the broken door and made his way around to the rear of the house. It was odd how everything personal had been taken. The colonists must have had time to pack – it wasn’t exactly the Marie Celeste; the departure was deliberate and planned.

  A low, wooden fence surrounded the back of the worker’s house, providing a demarcation of property rather than a barrier. The bean plant that climbed in through the window commanded the space at the rear, and the garden was a chaotic, writhing morass of vines, leaves and bean pods. The tangle continued up over the rear wall and onto the sloping roof, where layer upon layer of weeds had built up over the decades, obscuring the shape of the building entirely. The next few houses up the street had similar patches of vegetation growing behind them, most of which spilled out into the surrounding ground, engulfing the partition fences. A mass of potato plants grew in the second garden, and oversized cauliflower and cabbages in the third.

  He returned to the street and continued to the next house. Its door had already caved in, the wooden hinges rotted away long ago, and grit and sand crunched underfoot as he entered. A shaft of sunlight came through a hole in the roof, of which a large potato plant growing through the floorboards had taken advantage. Something shiny glinted in the corner shadows and he crouched down to examine it.

  A broken hurricane lamp lay on its side, the glass smashed, and a small, unlabelled plastic bottle of liquid lay next to it. He picked it up, unscrewed the top, and sniffed at the contents. The oily odour took him back to memories of his grandfather lighting the old miner’s lamp with a stash of his precious paraffin oil. He refastened the lid and shook the bottle and, satisfied it was intact, he stashed it in his rucksack. With little else of interest, he stood, but as he turned to leave, his wristcom bleeped.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’d better look at this,’ Aryx said. ‘I’ve found something.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Near the top of the town, in a long building. Can’t miss it – it’s not far from the chapel.’

  ‘On my way.’

  The chapel stood out prominently; the building stood taller than the others, with a distinctive cross carved above the arched entrance. Two doors up was the long building Aryx had mentioned.

  Sebastian squeezed through the partly open doors.

  Aryx looked up from a book he was reading. ‘Ah, there you are.’

  ‘Is this a barracks?’

  ‘Hospital. I found a medic’s diary.’ Aryx held up the book. ‘There’s also this …’ He beckoned for Sebastian to follow him, and pointed at one of the beds in the next room. Unlike the others, it still had the mattress on it. The covering was a crude cotton canvas, topped with a dirty, blood-stained sheet.

  ‘What happened in here?’

  He held up the diary again. ‘This may have the answer. I skimmed through and found some interesting bits. I’ll show you.’ He opened the diary at a page near the front and handed it over, pointing to the relevant section.

  It was written in English.

  Journal of Kibble Vardstrom, Chief Medical Officer, colonial ship Iceni.

  Aryx stood behind Sebastian, following along over his shoulder, and after several pages he pointed out the first part of interest.

  2045-07-11

  After weeks of travel, we’ve finally arrived at our destination. At least, it felt like weeks of travel, but the pilots say we’ve taken decades to get here. I don’t understand the physics of it at all, and I can’t believe that we’ve been travelling that long!

  Cullen has drawn up the plans for building a small town, and they are being put into action since there’s an abundance of wood on this moon. The initial scans indicate the gravity on the planet below might be a little high, so we’re going to stay put.

  2045-07-12

  The navigators have confirmed our travel time, and they say given the star positions, we’ve taken 162 years to get here! How is that even possible?

  I don’t know what to do. If it’s true, all my family back on Earth will be dead by now! They must be wrong! I wish I’d paid attention in the briefings, and I wish I’d never come!

  2207-07-12 (date amended)

  I’ve calmed down a bit now. I still can’t believe it. I knew it was a one-way trip from the beginning, but it’s completely different when you actually experience it. Either way, I’ve got a job to do. I’ll adjust my diary entries accordingly from this point on, but without any way of knowing what the actual date is, it’s only a guess, so I’ve only changed the year.

  2207-08-29

  After weeks of work, the town buildings are almost complete. We’ve built them around the Iceni, since Cullen thought it would be unwise to dismantle her for resources. The tools we brought with us are enough to work wood and smelt ore for basic metals. Scans indicated some mineral deposits a few miles away, so Cullen has sent Duggan Simmons with a few teams to investigate.

  2207-09-04

  Duggan’s surveys have found some useful minerals we can refine using the equipment on the ship. They also reported some other strange mineral that they encountered while mining. They didn’t take samples, as it seemed to evaporate quickly after being uncovered. I don’t have the kinds of scanners to be able to analyse the stuff, and I’m not going to go and check it out. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s not a medic’s job to do geology.

  ‘They must have found carbyne.’

  ‘Sounds like it.’ Aryx took the diary and started flipping through the pages. ‘You’ll need to go on ahead here; there’s nothing that in
teresting for the next couple of years. Most of the bits in between are boring medical crap. Cuts and bruises. They didn’t seem to have brought any viruses with them. They had a colony without the common cold.’ He handed back the book.

  2209-04-10

  Duggan announced his intent to leave the outpost today. He wants to take William Kennett with the aim of surveying the planet below. Cullen was unwilling to let them go, as he thinks this moon’s got plenty of resources and felt it would be a waste of effort to survey it. I added my concerns about the higher gravity to the argument, but Duggan was vehement: he said it would be a wasted opportunity if we didn’t send someone down to explore another potentially habitable planet.

  2209-04-14

  They left the outpost today in one of the runners. When I questioned Cullen about his decision to allow them to go, he was a little cagey about why he’d agreed, but he did mention something about mineral deposits. Duggan must have convinced him somehow.

  Everyone thought Duggan was a little weird, living out in the sticks away from the compound like a hermit, and I wonder if Cullen was secretly pleased to let him go. Why William went with him, I don’t know. I personally always felt him to be a little impressionable, but I hope no harm comes to them.

  ‘Jump forwards a few pages. I can’t stand here all day. These straps are starting to hurt.’

  2209-05-10

  Duggan and William have been gone for weeks now. I asked Cullen if he’d heard back from them, but he said he hasn’t. I would have thought that they would have contacted us by now, as it’s nearly been a month. I’m quite worried. Duggan usually acts cautiously, and it’s concerning that he hasn’t checked in.

  2209-06-22