The Spacetime Pit Plus Two

by Eric Brown

  It wasn’t a good plan, but it was all she had.

  There was movement in the field before her.

  The Eetee was kneeling beside a row of the beet stuff, facing away from her. It straightened, and stared up into the empty sky.

  Reptile, she thought immediately: specifically, a frog. A silicon-based frog. The thing was bilaterally symmetric: two arms, two legs. Its portly torso stood on spindly legs; its skin colour was a lustrous brown, almost as if lacquered. It wore a length of dun cloth over its loins area. Modesty? A tool belt?

  The Eetee turned around. Its domed head was even more frog-like: two bulbous eyes, a wide slit of a mouth—but the eyes were sheltered under the mouth. It looked as if its head was upside down. Its naked chest was patterned with three mustard-yellow chevrons.

  When its gaze met Wake’s, it froze, staring at her.

  Slowly she raised her hand in salute. Any tool-making biped ought to respond to the gesture. Wake crossed the field, between the rows of leafy plants. Two metres from the Eetee she started to speak, making random greetings.

  The Eetee was small, barely reaching her midriff. Its yellow eyes triangulated on her face. The Eetee issued a series of sibilant burbles. After a couple of minutes the vocoder blipped .

  “...my field? What do you want? Have you come to damage the crops? What...”

  “I am a traveller. My name is Katerina Wake.” She pointed to herself. “And you?”

  The Eetee peered up from under its mouth, listening to words that weren’t synchronised with her oddly-placed lips. “I am a planter and grower of crops. I am–” A gurgle. The vocoder projected a transliteration onto her eyeball. “F’han Lha.”

  “What do you call your people?”

  It just looked back at her.

  That was a bad sign. A lack of a name to distinguish the locals meant the Eetee didn’t know of anyone beyond its immediate group. Even in theory. And if this Eetee thought that this squalid little community contained the only people in the world, there couldn’t be much in the way of travel, trade, communication.

  Not likely to be any spaceships, either. I’ve landed in a silicon-based Middle Ages.

  F’han’s gaze dropped from Wake’s face and regarded the locket at her neck. She pulled the locket over her head and held it before the Eetee’s fascinated eyes, let the hologram cycle.

  F’han reached out with three-fingered hands. No opposable thumb, she noticed.

  “For me?”

  “No. I’m sorry.” She slipped the locket back over her neck .

  Three more Eetees came clambering down a ladder in the underside of the stilted hut. They loped towards her, their gait low and regular. “F’han!”

  F’han ran through the field towards the others. The newcomers must have been as tall as Wake; one of them clutched F’han’s head protectively. I’ve been talking to a child.

  Quickly, the four Eetees climbed the rickety wood-analogue ladder and disappeared into the dark underside of the dwelling.

  ~

  She walked back up the valley wall to Pod.

  She could stretch Pod’s supplies to ten or fifteen days by going to half-rations. And she could always spin out her time on the surface by going back into stasis, inside Pod. Pod was self-maintaining. She could last down here for months, years, if she had to, living a few hours at a time... But for what? So she could starve next year instead of this?

  Of course F’han was only a kid. It wouldn’t know everything. Maybe there was a glittering city just beyond the hills... But she would have seen it from orbit. Face it, Wake. This is all there is. Silicon-based subsistence farmers: nothing more or less.

  These Eetees had to be generations away from developing a technology sufficient to help her: to sustain her complex biochemical needs, to lift her back to orbit.

  If A fails, try B! If B fails, try C! .. .

  Well, if the Eetees couldn’t help her now , she’d just have to wait until they could. She’d climb into Pod and wait it out as long as was necessary for these Eetees to scratch their way to some kind of technology; she could hold out a hell of a long time, in Pod.

  Into the face of the rock behind Pod she lasered a low crevice, and then, over the next hour, she pushed Pod into the narrow overhang. She banked up earth and rock against the length of Pod; now it would be protected from the weather, and, when the grass-analogue grew on the earthworks, hidden from easy observation.

  She climbed into Pod.

  “Instructions?”

  How long? She needed to wait out enough time to see if the Eetees were on an upwards technological curve, or not. But not so long that she stranded herself out of time.

  Fifty years?

  In fifty years, Ben would probably be dead. And the girls would be middle-aged women—as old as Wake was now. She found it hard to accept that in subjective seconds the people she loved most would have lived their lives without her.

  But she didn’t have a lot of choice, she thought bleakly.

  “Fifty years. Earth standard.”

  She closed her eyes, and submitted to the embrace of the subdermals.

  ~

  She awoke, and lay there waiting for the lid to open.

  She felt no different, as if she’d barely closed her eyes. She left Pod and pushed through the soil and undergrowth. The sky looked unchanged. To the south west she could see Mother, a spark of light unmoving in the green-blue sky.

  She put on the vocoder and made her way down the valley. She took a footpath across a fallow field towards the farm where, fifty years ago, she’d spoken with F’han Lha.

  A group of Eetees laboured in their stony fields. The spindly-limbed frog people had their wood-analogue ploughs shackled to their backs, and they scraped furrows through the crimson earth. The workers looked up, observed her progress for a few seconds, then returned incuriously to their toil.

  More labourers were standing in line by the silver river. As Wake watched, they passed containers fashioned from gourds along the line. The last workers tipped the water onto the earth. It was laborious, fantastically inefficient.

  She could see no signs of change.

  She felt a sharp contempt for the Eetees. For how many centuries had they lived like this, enduring their bucolic existence of birth, work in the fields, death?

  The orange sun beat down on her head; she was hot, ragged, hungry, alone. So much for my plan. Well, then, she thought with a trace of angry desperation, she would just have to tip the damn Eetees out of their dull, comfortable equilibrium.

  She went to stand in the shade of the stilted farmhouse, and waited.

  What she was planning wasn’t exactly ethical. But ethics, for a mankind spreading desperately across new planets, were a luxury.

  Ethical behaviour wasn’t even in her training.

  ~

  When the sun got to its highest point, the workers trudged from the fields and the river. They shaded themselves under the farmhouse, and pushed mashed beet into the mouths on the tops of their skulls.

  Wake stood before them. As the Eetees ate, they watched her blankly. “Where I come from we do things differently. Better. Easier.” She picked up a sharp rock and began to scratch a crude diagram into the wood- analogue panels of the farmhouse. It was a tube curled into a spiral, around a central cylinder. If the diagram didn’t work she’d make a couple of simple models.

  One of the Eetees came closer, apparently curious, a tall, wispy individual with a ring of green spots on its carapace.

  “We draw water with this. It is easier. This device is called an Archimedes screw...”

  ~

  “Instructions .”

  She kissed the locket. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

  She was sliding deeper into this pit in space and time. But what choice was there? I’m falling in, because there’s nothing I can hold onto...

  This is one hell of a plan, Wake.

  “Instructions,” Pod repeated.

  She closed her eyes. “Two hundred years
. Earth standard.” Maybe that would be long enough for the seed she’d planted to bear fruit.

  If A fails, try B! If B fails, try C! ...

  ~

  She opened her eyes. Above her, the crystal cover was cracked.

  She pushed open the canopy and climbed out. She was stiff, her limbs sore, her stomach constricted. It was night; the clouds above her head were thick, rain-laden, and a sulphur yellow glow illuminated their undersides.

  Change, she thought immediately, and she exulted.

  Her earthwork was gone, and Pod had been dragged out of its crevice and set on an apron of stone cobbles, surrounded by tall iron railings. Along Pod’s silver flank there were scrapes and dents; it looked as if someone had tried to prise open the canopy.

  Her heart beat faster. I’ve induced curiosity, then.

  She crossed the cobbles, gripped the railings and peered through. She was still in the foothills—the worn mountains loomed behind her, dark, deserted—and to the south the valley, faintly outlined, fell away beyond this little compound. But now artificial lights glowed across the valley, in tight yellow splashes. She saw that roadways criss-crossed what had been a wide green plain. Stone dwellings filled the valley bottom, clustered about dark, oppressive buildings: mills, factories perhaps. The river had been straightened out, dammed; huge spiral devices that she recognised as remote descendants of her Archimedes screw lined the engineered valley, pumping water into rectilinear irrigation ditches. At the mouth of the valley, remote, she saw the lights of a town, densely-packed streets, smog-laden air.

  Through the hazy air she could just see a crude harbour at the edge of the ocean beyond.

  She gazed into the south west sky, looking for Mother. But the clouds were thick, and a haze of smog hung over the valley.

  “...Halt! Do not move.”

  The command, with Eetee sibilants overlaid by her vocoder’s whisper, came from behind her. She raised her hands in the air, showing them empty.

  “Turn. Slowly.”

  Again, she obeyed.

  Two solid-looking Eetees, garbed in black, tight uniforms, stood outside the Pod compound. They were covering her with what looked like crossbows. She could see the bolts; they were sharp, massive and grooved with a spiral rifling. Evidently, she thought wryly, her Archimedes-screw revolution had had a few unexpected spin-offs.

  One of the Eetees opened a heavy gate and entered the compound. It raised its inverted head and glared at her with golden eyes. Then it crossed to Pod, and peered through the closed crystal canopy. It hissed something at its companion, too fast for the vocoder, then left the compound and started working at a squat machine at the brow of the valley. She heard the crackle of electricity. From the machine, sulphurous light glared out over the valley, in a dot-dash sequence. A signal. They’ve been watching, waiting for me to emerge. And now that I have, they’re signalling.

  After that, they waited. The Eetees wouldn’t let her return to Pod, so she sat down on the cobbles, miming weariness.

  After half an hour a growling rumble came up out of the valley. She stood, and the Eetees let her come to the railings.

  A squat steam-truck was climbing the wall of the valley. Two Eetees in glittering ponchos sat on its roof, grandly, before a pair of funnels which spouted steam. The wheels were big, wood-spoked, iron-rimmed. Whatever boiler was hidden inside the boxy frame of the vehicle wasn’t strong enough to haul the truck up the hill, and there was a crude harness arrangement in front of the truck. A dozen or more Eetees were strapped into the harness, dragging at the truck as it bumped over the uneven ground. A serf looked up at her vaguely, its mouth gaping open. It had a mustard yellow chevron on its bare chest, and—she was astonished to see—a crude locket, carved from wood, around its neck. The locket was obviously a clumsy imitation of her own. Perhaps, then, the serf was a descendant of F’han Lha; could the memory of her last brief emergence have been passed down the generations?

  The two Eetees on top looked fat, sleek and well-dressed. The harnessed serfs, by comparison, appeared scrawny, exhausted, bruised.

  You’ve become a serpent in paradise, Wake , she thought.

  The truck pulled up in front of the railings.

  Two serfs helped one of the riding Eetees down to the ground. It approached Wake, waddling imperiously. Its poncho glowed crimson with copper inlays. She saw that its upper carapace had a marking, a circle of green dots, and it wore a pendant of its own, in the shape of an Archimedes spiral.

  She felt overwhelmed. These people must have been ready for stimulation. Receptive. They’d taken the fragments she’d given them and built whole subcultures; she felt as if aspects of her personality were being reflected back at her, extrapolated to absurd lengths.

  She held her hands out, palm up, questioning. “What do you want?”

  The Eetee pointed to her vocoder, her clothes, Pod. It said something; it was a crude attempt to pronounce ‘Archimedes’ .

  She was starting to feel breathless; already she needed to get back to Pod. Damn it. There just wasn’t time to think any of this through.

  These people did not appear motivated to help her. They just wanted what she had. She had to find out if they were a positive threat.

  She pointed at Pod. “Mine,” she said bluntly. “Not yours.”

  The serfs, still strapped into their brutal harnesses, stirred at this. She was hardly an expert at Eetee body language, but it seemed to her they were finding some kind of inspiration in her words of defiance. Interesting. Maybe there was an angle there she could exploit.

  Green-Ring gestured. A soldier type raised its spiral crossbow and aimed at her head.

  Wake’s heart hammered, and she felt saliva pool at the back of her throat. So. A threat, indeed. What now, Wake?

  She had to adjust their attitude. Make them focus on a goal we can all share.

  She said, “Key. For Pod—for my tomb.” She held her hands up, and started to lower them slowly towards her belt, to the laser pistol there.

  Green-Ring seemed to be hesitating. She could see the soldiers’ triple fingers tightening around their crossbow triggers.

  She got the pistol out. She held it up for them to see, gambling they wouldn’t recognise it as a weapon. “Key. Okay? ”

  She turned, holding the pistol up above her head, and started to walk back to Pod.

  Then, with one movement, she turned and thumbed the laser’s power switch. A wand of red light, intense in the smoggy gloom, arced over her head, supernaturally straight. Before the Eetees could move she brought the beam slicing down over a soldier, neatly lopping away an arm. Its crossbow clattered to the ground.

  The soldier stared down at the stump, which was pumping out some dark blood-analogue. Then it fell backwards, its eyes rolling up, its remaining limbs in spasm.

  She advanced on the Eetees. She held up the locket and let the hologram cycle, glittering Earth green and blue. “Hear me! I will return in–” she calculated quickly “–one hundred years. Then, I will give you, your children, this light, the contents of my tomb. But in return... ” She stabbed the wand of light at the clouds. “In return, you will build a machine to lift me into the sky. Take me to the light which orbits.” The vocoder couldn’t translate that. “The star which shines, steady in the sky.” Enough. They had generations to figure it out. “Do it, or I will call down more light from the sky, and destroy your fields and factories, and turn the rivers and seas to steam, and cut your children to small pieces...”

  The serfs—the descendants of the peasant-boy F’han, maybe—were shouting at her now, waving their arms in the air, holding up their crudely carved copies of her locket. Good grief, she thought. They think I’m a god. She hadn’t anticipated that. Would it help, or harm her?

  This culture, this valley world, was like a tub of paraffin into which, periodically, she was throwing lighted matches. She couldn’t predict how this was going to turn out, if this latest absurd gamble would pay off.

  It was too late
to do anything about it.

  She turned her back and walked to Pod, stiffly, expecting a crossbow bolt between her shoulder blades at each step.

  She accepted the embrace of the sub-dermals with relief.

  ~

  Pod shook; muffled booms reached her cocooned cabin.

  Beyond the canopy’s starred glass there was a flare of light. Lightning? No, it burned orange red.

  Like aircraft fuel.

  She pushed open the canopy and sat up; she felt old, stiff, beaten up.

  The sky was huge, aquamarine, clear again. She located Mother, a spark of light in its south west station, sailing serene above it all. But the sky was marred by contrails, white puffs of explosions, remote bangs.

  The ancient hills still rose behind her, but something about them was different: in several places their profile had been altered, notched. In one place she saw the distant glint of glass, of fused rock.

  She walked to the lip of the valley. The cobbled pavement was cratered rubble, the railings a tangle of rusting iron. There was an extensive barricade around Pod’s enclosure now: earthworks, and what looked like tank traps.

  The earthworks extended down into the valley bottom: miles of them, bristling with gun emplacements and something like barbed wire.

  Bedraggled Eetee soldiers moved through the mud. She saw several injured: stumps of amputated limbs, crudely bandaged carapaces. Many of the wounds looked infected. Evidently medical science hadn’t advanced as much as the art of war.

  Beyond the earthworks the valley was desolated, the ground smashed, the small trees reduced to burned stumps. The port town she remembered in the distance had been flattened, reduced to a rectilinear grid of foundations. Fires burned, unattended, and she thought she could see ragged Eetees picking their way through rubble. The smog was gone, though. This war must have dragged on for years; there could have been no industry in this valley for a long time. Now, she could easily see all the way to the coast...

  And there she made out a row of gantries, stark and grey, and at each there was a slender spire, glowing pearl white in the sun, wreathed with vapour .

  Her breath caught. More convergent evolution. It might have been Canaveral or Tyuratam, Mergui or Tanega Shima: any of Earth’s spaceports. It worked, by God. They are preparing to loft me to orbit.