He dozed off, and dreamed that he was back at his capsule with the stenciled name UCSS FETCH. He was again staring up through the irregular hole made when the craft had torn through the treetops to half embed itself in the forest floor. This time, though, across the crisp blue sky there coasted a massive black shape, triangular in outline—a pyramid, actually—from the flat bottom of which dangled a nest of sluggishly coiling cords or tubes.
The space traveler’s eyes flicked open. Absolute darkness, but he oriented himself by the close smell of decaying leaves blanketing soft soil. He remained very still, careful not to make any noise by shifting his body, because something was out there in the blackness, crunching drying leaves under its feet.
Light approached, yellow like a patch of sunset that had been left behind and was trying to catch up. It grew brighter, as the footsteps crunched more loudly. He propped the butt of the pistol on his thigh, pointing it toward the opening of his shelter. The light became a flame. Someone was carrying a torch. He heard it snap even over the crackle of the torchbearer’s footfalls. Was the light enough to expose him in his lair? Was the torchbearer hunting for him?
The glare as the fire came even with the cleft hurt his eyes and he curled his finger around the trigger.
Whether they were hunting him or not, the flame passed by. The footfalls receded. Eventually, both were gone. He had gone unnoticed.
It was a long time before he was able to doze off again. Close to dawn, he slept another hour at best.
He reopened his eyes to the bluish haze of pre-dawn, with a subtle hum shivering inside his body as if he were feeling the vibration of a powerful machine through the ground. Was it this vibration that had awakened him?
He saw something strange in front of him through the crevice. At first he thought he’d only imagined it. When he saw it happen again, he thought he might still be dreaming… but he wasn’t dreaming.
He’d seen a leaf—one of those with a mitten-like shape—rise from the forest floor and continue climbing upward, rocking, as if in slow motion. Borne by the breeze? But why had only this one leaf been stirred? Then another leaf rose up, climbed in lazy spirals. It floated toward a tree he could see straight ahead of him through the crack. When it reached the underside of the tree’s foliage, the leaf appeared to rejoin it. As if it had reattached itself to the twig from which it had dropped away at some earlier time.
Was it possible? Was this how the trees here, though always shedding leaves, never depleted themselves? By being continually replenished? But how was it possible? Even on an alien world, it defied any kind of natural law. At least, the natural laws he knew.
As he lay there throughout the unfolding of this mystery, he was so disoriented and disturbed it was as if he were unable to move, even if he’d willed it with every muscle working in concert; even his breathing seemed suspended. Eventually, though—after he witnessed no more leaves returning to their branches—the strange spell was broken.
He noticed that odd vibration had passed away.
He inched out of the crack in the boulder like a newborn soul, born feet-first. He ate a dab more paste, swallowed a few more gulps of water. He’d need more water very soon. He feared running out of water now, more than he did the stranger or strangers he shared these woods with.
And on again, still thirsty and ill-rested.
* * *
Incongruous color showed through the clouds of leaves ahead of him, like snatches of blue sky, but this was too near to the ground to be that. A body of water, then, reflecting sky?
He stealthily crept up on the color, seeing more and more blue between the trees, until finally he peered cautiously around the black pillar of a trunk at the color’s source. In an open spot too small to be called a clearing, a tent had been erected. Someone had made it from the blue material of his capsule’s parachute.
Yet it couldn’t be; it had to be a tarp of a similar hue. This material looked too old and faded. Ragged at the edges, almost worn through in spots, and plastered with leaves as if it had been here a long time. The tent dipped in the middle, and fallen leaves had collected thickly there. But then again, it was a parachute like his own and not a tarp, after all: he could see where its suspension lines had once been attached, and it was segments of these cords that had been used to support the tent, their ends attached to sticks hammered into the ground.
He noted there was a fire pit just outside the tent’s opening, ringed in stones and full of gray ashes and fallen leaves. It hadn’t been lit in a while.
After watching the tent for long minutes, and seeing no one emerge from it, and hearing no sounds from within, he stepped out from behind the tree and stole up on it, pistol in hand.
He crouched, set his helmet down, shifted aside the opening’s flap with his free hand and pointed the handgun inside. The tent was unoccupied.
After glancing over his shoulder, he crawled in on hands and knees.
The ground inside had been cleared of leaves and stones. In the far corner was a small pile of rotting mushrooms, deep red in color like liver but breaking down into a white gelatinous mass. The mushrooms when fresh must be edible, or else why would they have been collected? Yet they had been abandoned along with the camp. These specimens were beyond eating, but if one could find them so could another.
The only other item in the tent was a hard white backpack just like his own. He opened it to find it empty except for the first-aid kit, which still contained some of its supplies.
Why had the tent been forsaken? Camped out in the open like this, had the tent’s occupant been surprised, dragged out and killed? Had these meager leavings been considered too inconsequential to take? Or, venturing out to search for water or more food, had this person met with misfortune, and never returned? Maybe he or she had discovered better shelter?
He was sorely tempted to make use of the tent himself, but it was so conspicuous, so vulnerable. Then again, eventually he would have to risk camping somewhere, in order to get more sleep.
He decided to decide on whether to use the camp later. For now, he would search in the immediate area for more mushrooms, and for water.
After what he would have gauged to be only an hour he found a number of large mushrooms, beautifully dark red, nestled between the roots of several trees. He took a nibble from the edge of one and found its taste not bad, though he wondered if he might try roasting them over a fire. He refrained from eating another bite, in case the mushroom ended up disagreeing with him or set off an allergic reaction, but in the meantime he picked the rest that he had found and placed them in the bowl of his helmet.
As he was plucking the last of them, he noticed an odd, soft pattering sound… on the leaves overhead, and the ground all around him. Then a drop of cold water struck the back of his neck and he flinched. He tilted back his head and another drop struck the center of his forehead like a liquid bullet. It had begun to rain.
His decision had been made for him; he started back hastily in the direction of the tent.
He managed to get there before the rain had strengthened too much, though it had wetted his hair. He scooped up the rotting mushrooms, carried them outside and tossed them, then dumped the new mushrooms inside on a little bed he made of fallen leaves. He put his helmet outside, propped by stones with the open end up, to catch water. He carried the forsaken backpack outside, removed the first-aid kit, and left the backpack open on the ground to collect more water. He also cleared away the leaves that had gathered atop the tent in its slumped hollow, hoping to catch some water there, too.
The rain finally mounted to a downpour that came crashing unhindered through the leaves above, and he was grateful to be inside. He weighed the trailing flap of the opening shut with his own backpack. Then, he stretched out on his side in the murk and listened to the rain tapping all across the blue membrane, his pistol on the ground by his hand.
The sound of the rain made him feel insulated inside this fragile womb, soon coaxing him to sleep.
/> He awoke in the night, finding the rain hadn’t ceased but had at least become subdued again. He drank some water from his container. He peeked out through the tent’s flap but was greeted only by unmitigated blackness.
As he lay back again he mused that he did not feel lonely. His anxiousness was not for company, but only for survival. He still could recall nothing concrete of his life back home, wherever home had been, but he felt no hint of an aching void such as would be filled by returning to a wife or children, or even close friends. He might have all these things, for all he knew, or he might have had them once and lost them over time, but whatever the case his current aloneness was not in itself vexing. He could keep himself alive, but other people might try to prevent him from that. Other people might wish him harm, wish him dead. People were like that; he didn’t need to remember any names or faces to know it. The way he felt right now, at least, was that he wouldn’t mind being alone for the rest of his life.
* * *
Under his bulky space suit he wore a closefitting long-sleeved top and long johns, white in color, and warm enough that he stripped down to just these. Thin sneaker-like shoes inside his boots enabled him to put the heavy boots in a corner. He folded his space suit and left it in the tent to use as a pillow. He drank as much water as he wanted now (emptying the helmet), ate a bit of his paste, and chanced a few larger bites of mushroom for his breakfast. He left his spare backpack, still holding water, in the tent but brought his own backpack with him as he set off to do some more exploring. His intention, though—after having comfortably bonded with the tent last night—was to maintain the camp as his base of operations until something more secure presented itself. He had his gun, and maybe he could set some booby-traps around the camp.
Now that he was not trapped in a space capsule, and had found that both water and food were to be had, his early state of fear had dulled to a more feral kind of wariness. He just had to stay on his toes and avoid these other… survivors?
As he walked along, stopping occasionally to leave more markers, he asked himself what it was he hoped to discover or achieve, beyond finding better shelter and more nourishment. Of course he wanted to determine where he was, to learn whether he was on his home world. But if not, did he hope there was a way to be rescued, or to acquire a craft to take into space again? Well, he supposed he did want to return home. Maybe home was actually a worse place for him than this, but wasn’t going home what one would be expected to want? Mainly, though, truth be told, right now he just wanted to understand more in general, to fill the frustratingly shrunken chamber of his mind. He felt like a newborn with no parents to instruct or guide him. Well, he would have to be his own parent. Born again.
He found a mushroom growing against the base of a tree, and as he stooped to collect it and place it in his helmet he noticed one of his stone markers arranged beside it. One small stone atop a larger stone, and a stone to the left of these pointing back in the direction he had come from. And yet, he didn’t think he had left a marker here previously. No, he was sure he hadn’t been this way yet. If so, he would have already plucked the mushrooms, unless they grew that quickly. Was someone copying his markers, intending to confuse him, to get him to lost in circles? It would be odd if another person had devised the exact same method of marking their trail.
He straightened up, scanning about him as if he thought he might see someone in the distance half hidden behind a tree, giggling at him, but he was still alone. Well, as it happened this marker pointed him back toward his camp and saved him the trouble of having to lay down a new one himself. It left him uneasy, though, as he resumed his exploration.
Just a short while later, he came upon the space capsule.
Another space capsule. He knew it wasn’t his own for several reasons. For one, it was badly burned from too precipitous a descent, its smooth white shell scorched black. (Maybe its retrorockets hadn’t fired?) Instead of lying across the ground like his capsule’s chute, the parachute—still attached, though it might not have deployed correctly—was snagged in the branches directly above, intact but also blackened. For another thing, the cockpit window was still in place, not ejected.
He wiped at the window with his sleeve, clearing the greasy black grime away just enough for him to see something of the shadowy interior. It looked blackened by fire in there, too, without even the tiny red jewels that would indicate emergency power. But he flinched back from the window when he saw that the pilot’s chair was not unoccupied.
After composing himself, he stepped up to the window again and cupped his hands around the spot he had cleaned.
The pilot in his blackened space suit was slumped a little to one side, his seat harness thrown off. His helmet’s visor was up; maybe he had lost air to his suit and in desperation had lifted it. The face framed within the helmet was that of a charred skull. Had the flames trapped within the capsule eaten his flesh, or had time done that?
He backed away from the window, examined the outside of the craft again. Moving around to one side, this time he spotted letters showing a little more black under the charring. Again he used his sleeve to wipe at the capsule, to give himself a better look. Then he backed off and read the letters he had uncovered. They spelled: UCSS FETCH.
This craft couldn’t have the same name as his own. That is, multiple craft wouldn’t bear a single name. This could only mean, he reckoned, that FETCH was the name of a mothership and these capsules were just lifepods, as he had speculated earlier. What other explanation could there be?
In any case, this poor bastard had not been as lucky as he.
There was nothing to be salvaged here. He could do no more than move on, but he felt a little goodwill toward the dead man because he didn’t pose a threat to him, so he gave the burnt pilot a little salute before he slipped past the capsule into the forested depths ahead.
* * *
He was following a hum. He had noticed it a little while ago. Not so much an audible hum, as a deep bass resonance in his chest. It only deepened the further he went, growing to an almost uncomfortable inner vibration. It reminded him of the vibration he had felt while sheltering in the halved boulder, but more intense.
The hum led him to a great clearing, larger than anything he had thus far encountered and floored with long, blondish grass. He hung back at its edge, though, hiding himself behind a tree, as he gazed in fear and wonder at the source of the heavy vibration quivering through him. A structure had been built within the field, or maybe this spot of land has originally been cleared of trees to accommodate it.
It was a pyramid, towering imposingly against the vivid blue sky. It called forth images of a series of famous pyramids in a desert of his home world, but he didn’t know if this one was quite as tall as those, and the angles of its sides seemed more steep. Also, rather than being composed of millions of blocks of limestone, this structure appeared to be carved from one titanic mass of coal-black matter, its surfaces oddly textured, giving the impression of black clay covered in the thumbprints of some giant that had molded it.
As he stared at the black pyramid, he realized another of those odd paralyzing spells had come over him. He couldn’t will himself to move the hand he had placed on the tree trunk. He wasn’t even sure if he was drawing breath into his lungs. He could not blink, and he was peripherally aware that mitten-shaped fallen leaves were floating up from the ground around him, spiraling upward and reattaching themselves to branches overhead.
The vibration inside him suddenly spiked to an internalized earthquake, as the pyramid began floating upward off the grass it had crushed flat.
Beneath it, a slowly writhing tangle of sinuous black appendages—like colossal tentacles—was revealed, rooted to the hovering pyramid’s base. They coiled ponderously as the looming structure rose higher, blotting out much of the beautiful sky like some triangular-shaped heavenly body.
Higher it rose, higher, until it seemed as far above the world as an airplane. Then, the pyramid moved laterall
y… until finally it passed beyond his range of sight and was gone, leaving that open circle of blue sky marred only by an innocuous fleet of white clouds.
As the thing had ascended, the vibration had gradually weakened again, tapering off and then disappearing altogether when the pyramid was lost from sight. When that happened, he was released from his paralysis. He dropped to his knees and vomited.
The leaves had stopped floating in reverse.
When he was able to stand again, he turned back toward his camp, and rested in his tent until his organs no longer felt shaken and poisoned by the vibration that had filled him.
* * *
He stayed on at the camp he’d discovered, but he never let down his guard. He found a less plentiful, smaller and white variety of mushroom, and after risking a tentative bite established that it was edible, too. Though he never encountered any higher animals such as squirrels, birds, or even insects, he learned that if he dug down into the black soil he could easily uncover good-sized earthworms. And it rained often enough that water was no longer a concern. He could even spare it to wash himself occasionally.
He thought to shave by scraping his face with the blade of his multi-tool, but why should he shave? For whom? He became bearded.
Then one afternoon, after returning from foraging with his helmet full of mushrooms and squirming worms, he discovered two men at his camp. He dropped the helmet and drew his gun from his waistband.
One man, with long graying hair and a thick beard like a wild man, his closefitting long-sleeved shirt and long johns dark with grime, lay on his back with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead, blood streaming thickly down the sides of his face. He lay just outside the tent, having partially fallen across the fire pit, which was currently only full of ashes.
Out of the Ruins Page 20