by Eric Brown
A few hundred yards below her, a soldier in the earthworks spotted her. It started jabbering to its companions. More of them poked their carapaced heads above the trenches, and shouted. Then they began to clamber out, some of them awkward on injured limbs, and came towards her. Most of them were wearing amulets around their necks, and they held them up, aping the gesture she’d made yesterday... or fifty Earth standard years before.
They began to chant, and the vocoder whispered. I will call down light from the sky. I will destroy your fields and factories, and turn the rivers and seas to steam, and cut your children to small pieces ... They were gathering into a mob, and climbing the slope towards her.
She backed off, making sure she had a way back to Pod. So her scheme had worked. It was obvious these people worshipped her, to some degree; in fact they were defending Pod’s site. (From who?) Maybe these were the descendants of the oppressed serfs she’d seen last time. Maybe, inspired by her memory, they’d thrown off their masters.
And this was their millennium: the second coming she had predicted, and was now fulfilling .
Right now, she was scared of being worshipped to death. And for all their fervour these people weren’t much use to her anyhow. She had to get to that coastal launch complex...
The ground shuddered. Cobbles exploded into the air. She threw herself to the ground and covered her head with her arms; the Eetee troops fell back, screaming.
What now? Artillery? But she’d seen no flash, or smoke, and surely she would have heard any incoming projectile. A quake, then?
The shuddering went on and on. Smashed paving hailed down around her.
The ground broke open, not ten feet away. A metal snout shoved upwards, out of the earth, gleaming silver, spinning with a whine of worn bearings. The craft hauled its way out of its pit, laboriously, and tipped forward onto the surface. It was a fat cylinder with a spiral screw blade wrapped around its hull, like an Archimedes screw writ large and lethal. The blade stopped turning, and round hatches in the flanks of the craft tipped outwards. Troops spilled out of the steaming metal hull, shouting, bearing heavy rifles; they wore copper- coloured ponchos strapped tightly to their bodies, laden with ammunition and other equipment.
So the oppressing class is still around. In fact it made sense; it must be the ‘oppressors’, more technically advanced than the soldiers in the trenches, who had developed that launch complex .
She got to her feet. The siege-busting Eetees spotted her immediately; they pointed and shouted.
Her mind whirled. Should she throw in her lot with these poncho types, let them take her to the launch complex on the coast?
But they didn’t look all that friendly. She remembered the naked greed of Green-Ring. These people evidently didn’t venerate her; they just wanted what she had. And, despite the existence of that launch complex, they might be prepared to rob her without fulfilling their half of their bargain. At least the serfs were trying to protect her.
What do I do? Which side do I pick?
There was a growl from the trenches beyond the lip of the plateau. The ponchos turned, raising their weapons. A broad iron muzzle poked over the lip; huge tracked wheels sent earth spraying across the smashed cobbles. It was some kind of primitive tank, venting steam from a row of stacks, climbing up from the trenchworks. Behind it, serf trench troops were clambering onto the cobbled platform, shouting and waving their weapons.
The muzzle of the tank’s main gun swivelled to point at the earth burrower, and the ponchos ran forward to engage the trench troops. The burrower’s spiral screw began to spin, as if it was trying to get away.
It was all happening too quickly for Wake. When in doubt, follow your gut.
She made her choice. She ran forward, reaching for the burrower’s closing hatches .
Before she got to the burrower, light flashed from the coast, dazzling, white and orange. Wake threw herself to the ground once more. The tank, the battling troops, were thrown into grotesque silhouette.
The noise arrived then, an immense clatter, so violent it rattled her chest cavity.
She lifted up her face. Rocket light. She stood up and shoved her way forward, past the dazzled, mesmerised troops, to the lip of the plateau.
The rockets on the coast had been launched. White smoke billowed in great plumes from the launch pads. She counted three, four, five of the slim white needles, thrusting towards the greenish sky on droplets of intense yellow light.
She felt panic clutch at her chest. Too early! They launched too early! I’m not aboard, damn it!
Then she looked more closely. The rising rockets were of a crude design: mostly fuel tank, with a small cone for payload at the tip. Too small to carry a human, or an Eetee.
They weren’t spaceships, she realised. They were missiles.
It was impossible to be sure with the naked eye, but it looked as if they were climbing up to meet Mother, the bright, steady star in the south west.
The pieces fell into place quickly. These ponchos had no intention of helping me. They want to destroy Mother. So I won’t be able to bring down fire on their children, as I threatened ... And when Mother’s gone, they’ll come for me.
One hell of a plan, Wake.
But these primitives surely couldn’t damage Mother, even if the missiles reached their target.
She thought of the notched hills, the glassy crater.
Nukes. They have nukes. And they’ve used them already.
Mother couldn’t survive a nuclear attack.
Mother was powered by a colour-force drive: chromodynamics, the strong nuclear force. An order of magnitude more energy-dense than the weak forces involved in fission explosions. If the Eetees managed to disrupt Mother’s hull, if the colour drive went up, then this damn planet would be wiped clean.
The nuclear-tipped missiles had almost risen out of sight. She turned and ran to Pod. It was the only place she might be safe.
The bands of Eetees, their shock at the launches fading, had started to wade into each other once again. Some of them broke off to chase after her. The burrower was pulling itself back into its pit in the ground.
She threw herself into Pod and dragged shut the canopy. Eetees clustered around Pod, hammering on the starred and scuffed surface.
“Instructions.”
“Heuristic algorithms,” she said quickly.
Distorted frog faces pressed up against the crystal canopy. The sub-dermals embraced her .
A light blossomed above her, far brighter than the sun.
Thumbless hands scrabbled at the canopy, leaving trails of slime that blistered and burned dry.
Then even the shadows were burned away, and she was enfolded in light.
~
The lid lifted . Sunlight, bright orange, flooded Pod’s interior, but a deep cold worked into her bones.
Wake pushed herself up. She felt weak, fragile. She pulled at the cloth of her flight suit; pieces of it came away in her fingers. Rotted.
She stood up. She had to stand still, as the sky spun around her. She felt as if she had been out for...
How long?
She stepped out of Pod. The sun hung in an empty, washed-out, green-blue sky, shedding no heat. No contrails.
No Mother.
Some of the floor cobbles survived, but they were smashed, eroded smooth as pebbles. No grass- analogue grew between them. Ice coated the exposed earth. There was ash, soot, mixed in with the ice, little grains of it.
She walked to the lip of the plateau. The atmosphere was thin, as if she was at high altitude; her lungs strained, trying to extract oxygen from the cold air.
The valley was a sculpture in white and brown. Here and there rock, fused and glassy, protruded through the compacted snow. It looked as if a glacier was forming here. There was no grass, no trees. Nothing moved. No bird sang. She could see no sign of the scar in the hillside left by Shuttle’s crash.
She shielded her stinging eyes and looked out to the coast. The town was gone,
the harbour. There was an angular form that looked like the stump of one of the launch gantries. Huge icicles dangled from it. On the sea, white glinted. Bergs.
The cold was astonishing.
She was gasping. The oxygen content was way down on what she’d observed before. She returned to Pod and pulled out an air mask, fitted it over her face. “Atmospheric content,” she said to Pod. “Interpretation.”
“Combustion of biota. Global. Free oxygen removed.”
“But no replenishment?”
“Not observed. Oxygen levels continue to decline. Crew survival not assured.”
“How long was I out?”
“Forty-two thousand, five hundred and–”
Jesus. Tens of millennia.
Long enough for the radioactive products of that last nuclear war and Mother’s destruction to decay to harmlessness. Long enough for the ash of the burned biosphere to fall to the ground in rain and, later, snow; long enough for the ruined planet to tip to a new climatic equilibrium: permanent winter, coated with ice, reflecting most of the sun’s heat back to space .
Nothing left alive. I’ve killed the children of F’han Lha. I’ve even killed the forests and the algae and the plankton, or whatever silicon-based equivalent used to pump oxygen into this air.
Crew survival not assured, indeed.
She still had the locket around her neck. She took hold of the little pendant, held it up, turned it. It was dark. The hologram had failed, its tiny internal battery emptied.
She grieved.
Now what?
The random thought made her laugh, gasping into the mask.
I’ve stranded myself in this spacetime pit: a hundred light years from home, and forty thousand years out of my time. Longer than my species existed on Earth, before my own birth.
Now here’s my plan.
~
Actually, she discovered after a while, she did have a plan.
Of course it was absurd. But the alternative was to give up.
~
She spent a day of consciousness, a whole precious day, working through her scheme.
She dug a hole in the frozen ground with her laser. She buried a heater in the permafrost, and stretched a power line between the heater and Pod .
She cannibalised Pod’s digestive sac. She set it to process the inert soil into amino acids, nucleotide bases, sugars: aminos for proteins, bases and sugars for nucleic acids, the building blocks of terrestrial life.
She took a sample of her own stomach bacteria and stored it cryogenically. She set the capsule to release gut bacteria samples, at timed intervals.
Her scheme was simple, elemental. She would propagate terrestrial life on this planet.
She’d nurture life, for as long as it took, and repopulate the world. Next time she climbed out of Pod there should be carbon-based biomass that Pod could process to feed her.
It was a fine plan. All she had to do was create life, evolve a sentient race, and educate them to take her home: whatever she might find there, anyhow, after forty millennia.
Simple. If A fails, try B! If B fails, try C!
While the machinery was setting up, she sat on the frozen ground, her knees tucked up against her chest, and thought about F’han Lha. F’han, whose descendants she had wiped out of history. All to save herself.
The morality of it was too big for her. All she’d been doing was following her training, damn it.
Wake was no hero. She wouldn’t pretend to be. She’d been out here doing a job, for a fixed term, for a salary. Now things had gone wrong, and she just wanted to go home. Lying down and dying wasn’t in her job description .
That ought to be enough morality for anybody.
It hurt her to think about it.
~
She climbed, without regret, back into Pod.
“Instructions.”
“Open on request.” From the rescue team, golden, wise advanced. “Or on reverse of oxygen trend. Or on detection of significant terrestrial biomass. Or–”
She hesitated.
Pod waited, infinitely patient.
“Or, after five million years.”
She enfolded the locket in her hand. She was shamed to realise that its tiny failure upset her more than the death of this alien world. She rested her closed fist on her chest.
She closed her eyes.
~
She was immersed in white. Pod’s canopy was so badly scarred and frosted over she couldn’t see out of it.
She lifted her hand from her chest. Dust trickled out of her closed fist. That had been the locket. Oh, shit.
“How long?”
Pod’s voice was blurred by phasing. “Five million–”
The canopy opened, but with a creak. Thick, ancient ice snapped away from the hinge. Air flooded in, needle-cold .
It was day, again, in this remote future. The sky was still green-blue. She stood. Save for her boots she was naked, her flight suit long rotted away.
The ground was still ice-bound, locked by permafrost. There were layers upon layers of ice now, the ash of burned biomass long buried. The valley—desolate, empty—fell away from her towards a white-flecked sea, apparently unchanged. She felt her lungs drag at the air. She could check with Pod, but she was sure the oxygen content hadn’t increased.
Before Pod, there was a neat disk of melted mud, a hundred feet wide, set in the white-coated ground. As she watched, a huge bubble rose and broke, belching, from its interior.
She took a multiprobe from Pod and stepped, stiffly, out of the compartment.
She could feel the cold of the ground through her boots. Her lungs ached already. She couldn’t feel her bare skin, but she could see the goosebumps down her arms, see the frosting of her breath. She couldn’t stay out here for long.
She reached the melted circle, and thrust in the probe.
There were aminos and nucleotides and sugars in there. There were organisms which had evolved, significantly, from her gut bacteria. How about that. Maybe the plan is going to pay off.
Naked, alone in the spacetime pit, shivering over the muddy, primeval pond, she laughed at herself.
~
It was late afternoon, here, five million years deep in the future. She decided to use up another few precious hours of consciousness, to see the night fall. She climbed back into Pod and tried to get warm, wrapping her arms round her bare body.
She plumbed Pod’s memory for details of photosynthesis. That was what her little colony needed, to become self-sustaining, to feed from the plentiful sunlight. Pod told her that the first photosynthetic organisms on Earth were colonies of bacteria. They left behind fossils the size of basketballs, called stromatolites...
Wake tried to listen, but could take in very little of this, could make no plans on the basis of the information. She didn’t have any resources, anyhow. Her gut-bacteria children would have to make their own way.
Night fell. The stars came out. She inspected the sky. Five million years was enough time to colonise the Galaxy. So close to Earth as this, she’d expect to see signs : stars rearranged to suit human needs, encased in immense structures, Dyson spheres.
The constellations she saw were random, the spaces between them empty, unstructured.
Was humanity extinct, then? Or fallen back to Earth, its grandiose ambitions lost?
She was alone here .
She lay back in her couch, and let the sub-dermals crawl over her, unfeeling.
“Instructions.”
When you’re in a pit, and you can’t climb out, what do you do?
You keep digging , she told herself.
“Half a billion years,” she said.
~
Rain pelted against the canopy, thick, heavy drops. Beyond Pod was darkness.
Her boots had gone, and so had most of the soft material in Pod; only hard surfaces remained.
She climbed out. The rain fell against her face. It was warm. When she touched her scalp she found no hair. No eyebrows,
lashes, pubic hair.
It looked like day, but the clouds were thick, heavy. She couldn’t see anything of the valley, but the basic geology seemed more or less unchanged. On this little plateau the ice was gone, the ground turned uniformly to mud. Her feet sank into the ground; she found it hard to pull her ankles free for each new step.
She couldn’t even tell where her primeval-life pond had been.
She let the rain run into her mouth. It was silty, muddy, salty. Sea-bottom mud.
This planet had suffered an impact: a comet, an asteroid maybe .
It happened, in every stellar system, if you hung around long enough. Life on Earth had been obliterated dozens of times, by impacts in the primeval Solar System, before catching hold. Maybe it had happened here.
She dug around in Pod, in the intervals she could function outside the canopy, trying to see if she could recreate her nutrient pond. But most of Pod’s systems had failed, or were rotting away. Pod had been smart, she saw, in cannibalising its own components in order to keep the basic life support functions operating. Good design, by some anonymous engineer a half-billion years dead. Stretching my handful of days across aeons, always diminishing but never finishing, like a paradox of infinite convergent series ... She wasn’t expert enough to see what she could take out of this mess and use, that wouldn’t finally wreck Pod.
Maybe it didn’t matter. If her gut-bacteria babies had survived the impact, maybe they were flourishing, scattered, breeding, somewhere on this warm, wet world. There was nothing more she could do, anyhow.
She brushed the rain off her flesh, as best she could, and climbed back into Pod.
“Instructions.”
She listened to the rain against the canopy. It reminded her of L5: the artificial rain storms beating against the walls, when she’d cradled Ben until he’d slept.
She was taking great strides into her pit now, leaping from home in huge logarithmic strides.
“Let’s see if the series converges,” she said .
“Instructions.”
“I’m sorry, Pod. Five billion years.”
~
She couldn’t get out of Pod.