“Would you like me to lower the landing legs? It’s just, I notice you haven’t deployed them, and thought it best we do so before we…” Kevin’s voice trailed away. “Oh. It seems that we’ve already landed.”
There was a creak, then a groan, then a sensation of slow, inexorable movement as the ship toppled sideways onto the sand.
“Well,” breathed Cal, once the Untitled had finally settled. “It was nice while it lasted.”
Thirteen
Cal dragged himself up until he stood on the edge of the open airlock door, adjusted the Symmorium Sentience to make sure it was safely held beneath his arm, then jumped.
It wasn’t a long way from the airlock to the ground. It was even less than it usually was, in fact, thanks to the angle at which the ship was leaning. Despite that, it was almost a full ten seconds before his feet thacked down onto the surface, sending fragments of stone shrapnel spinning lazily into the air.
“Hey, check it out,” Cal said, his voice crackling over the speaker of his spacesuit. He kicked off from the ground, ran for several seconds in midair, then touched down a dozen feet from where the Untitled had landed.
It had been a while since he’d had to wear the suit. Most places they visited had a breathable atmosphere, but scans had suggested that this one was a mix of several unpleasant things. Cal couldn’t remember what Mech had called any of the atmospheric gases, but the list of potential side-effects he’d read out still burned fresh and clear in Cal’s mind.
So, spacesuit it was. Cal hadn’t been looking forward to trudging around in the cumbersome suit, but that was before he’d discovered the planet’s low gravity.
Inside the suit, Splurt flopped limply against Cal’s chest, still hanging scarf-like around his shoulders.
“Think a happy thought, buddy!” Cal encouraged, then he bent his knees and sprang up into the air, twisting like a ballerina as he soared up, up, up, then drifted down, down, down somewhere back close to the Untitled.
“This is awesome!” Cal laughed. “Why haven’t we done this before? Check it out—backflip!”
He crouched, threw himself up and over, and backflipped. Then he backflipped again. Then he backflipped for a third time, struck a Karate Kid style crane kick pose in the air, and alighted on one leg.
“Can we live here?” he asked, his voice reverberating around inside his space helmet. “Guys? Can we live here.”
“No, we cannot fonking live here!” Mech’s voice hissed in Cal’s earpiece.
“Spoilsport,” Cal told him. He kicked away from the ship again, drifted horizontally in the air for a while like Burt Reynolds on a bearskin rug, then brought his feet down in time to nail the landing.
He’d been in space for a while now. Hell, if you counted the fifty years he’d spent trapped on the cruise ship with Splurt, he’d been in space longer than at least half the crew.
Most of that time had been spent aboard ships with artificial gravity, or on planets with the natural kind. Sure, he’d ventured into zero-gravity situations before, but he’d never been able to go leaping and flying around on a planet with low gravity.
At least, he didn’t think so, although he’d sustained quite a number of head injuries along the way, and there was a chance he’d been on a number of similar planets, but had subsequently forgotten all about them.
He chose to believe this was the first time, and performed a technically perfect one-handed cartwheel in celebration.
“Will you quit messin’ around?” Mech barked in his ear. The voice had an odd echo to it, and Cal turned to see Mech stepping from the airlock and gliding down onto the sand a short distance away.
“Hey, big guy! Check me out.” Cal did a one-armed star jump, struck a number of elaborate poses, then alighted gently just a few feet from where Mech stood. He grinned. “What do you say? Jumping contest?”
Mech regarded him with something bordering on disdain.
“That’s the spirit!” Cal said. He tucked the Sentience more firmly under his arm. “OK, we go on three. One—”
“I ain’t having no fonking jumping contest,” Mech snapped.
“Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?” Cal clucked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mech demanded.
“I mean you need to lighten up, big guy,” Cal said. “You’re always so… so… Mech, you know? Your springs are wound too tight. If you don’t cut loose every once in a while, you’re going to go crazy. Hell, it’s already started.”
“Bullshizz!” the cyborg retorted. “I ain’t crazy.”
“You made space bagpipes, Mech,” Cal reminded him. “Space bagpipes that you can’t even play.”
“It’s called a Blufflebag. And I’m adapting it so that I can play it,” Mech said.
“How are you adapting it?” asked Cal, interested despite himself.
“I made this kind of bellows-type—” Mech tutted, annoyed. “Know what? It don’t matter how I’m adapting them. The point is, I ain’t crazy.”
“Prove it,” said Cal, squaring up. “Jumping contest.”
“How will that prove anything?” Mech barked.
“Are you scared? Is that it? You afraid, Disselpoof?”
“No, I ain’t scared of no damn jumping contest. I just don’t want to do it.”
“Buuuuck-buck-buck,” Cal clucked.
Mech shook his head. “I don’t even know what that’s supposed to be.”
Cal strutted around, thrusting his head out and flapping the arm that wasn’t currently occupied by carrying a god.
“I don’t even know what you’re doing right now,” Mech pointed out.
“Bu-buuuuck!”
“Fine! Know what? Fine. I’ll do the motherfonking jumping contest. Let’s do it. But you’re going down, man. You are going down.”
“Well, that’d be completely the wrong direction, but alright,” Cal cheered. “Jumping contest it is! Me and you. Clash of the jumping titans. Man versus machine in what will surely be considered one of the greatest, most all-time epic—”
“Just hurry the fonk up,” Mech barked.
“OK, you got it, big guy. Let’s do this,” said Cal. He jammed the Sentience between a couple of rocks, then spent a few seconds limbering up. “OK. Ready?”
“Let’s just get it over with,” Mech grunted.
“That’s the spirit! OK. One, two, three, go!”
Cal crouched, then launched himself toward the sky, one arm stretching above his head, the other tucked in at his side. He whooped as he lifted off, feeling like Superman hurling himself to the sky. There was no way that big heavy lug could jump this high. No fonking way.
“No fonking way!” Cal protested, watching Mech sail past him, rockets blazing from the soles of his feet. “No fair, that’s cheating!” he yelled, as the feeble gravity finally took hold and he drifted back to the surface.
Mech landed a few seconds later, sending little chunks of rock tumbling in all directions as his feet touched down.
“Eat that, shizznod,” Mech crowed. “I win.”
“You’re disqualified. You’re not allowed to use rocket feet,” Cal insisted.
“Bullshizz, I’m disqualified. That’s the only way I can jump,” Mech retorted.
“Well, I’m very sorry to hear that, Mech. But ultimately? I don’t care. Rules are rules, and rocket feet? Those are against the rules.”
“What rules? You didn’t tell me about no rules.”
“At-at-at,” said Cal, gesturing for the cyborg to zip his lip. “You’re out, mister. That’s all there is to it. You’re out. I totally won that,” Cal said. “And I will take you to goddam court over it, if I have to.”
Mech turned away. “Whatever man,” he grunted as he regarded the toppled ship. “I don’t even care.”
“What’s happening out there?” asked Loren, her voice sounding in both their ears.
“Jumping contest,” Cal explained. “Which I comfortably won, in case you were wondering.”
&n
bsp; There was a moment of exasperated silence.
“Right. Well done. And what’s happening with the ship?” Loren inquired. “How’s it looking?”
“Sideways,” said Mech. “It’s looking sideways.”
“Can you fix it?”
“You mean can I lift an entire spaceship high enough for you to deploy the landing legs you should have deployed on the way down?”
There was a pause, then a crackle.
“Can you?”
Reaching up, Mech placed a hand against the hull of the Currently Untitled and gave it a push. The tip of one of the wings, which had been resting on the sand, was raised a few inches off of it.
Mech carefully lowered it back again. The Untitled groaned, as if disappointed.
“In normal gravity, not a chance,” Mech said. “But in this? Yeah. Yeah, I can do it.”
“Can I help?” asked Cal.
Mech’s head whirred as it turned. “Help? Lift this? You?” He gave it some thought. “Sure. Sure, you can help. You can help by standing back there.”
Cal looked down at the spot where he stood. “Here?”
“No. Back up,” said Mech, motioning with his hand. “Further. A little more. A little more. Good. Now, a little more.”
Cal sighed. “How about I just leave it to you?”
“Perfect,” said Mech. “Let’s go with that plan.”
“Fine. Gives me more time to do this,” said Cal, handspringing into a technically complex Arabian Double Front with a pre-flight twist. Of course, he didn’t know this was what he’d done, only that he’d spun in the air for quite a long time and in a number of different directions, then landed with a, “Ta-daa!” that had echoed inside his helmet like a fanfare.
After a few more flips, Cal took some time to check out their surroundings. The low-gravity thing was a lot of fun, but the rest of the place looked drably familiar.
“How come there are so many rocky planets?” he wondered. “We always seem to end up on rocky planets. Like that mine place with the mustard. That was a rocky planet.”
“That was a moon,” Loren corrected in his ear.
“Same thing,” said Cal.
“No, it’s not the same thing,” Loren insisted.
“Fine. I mean, if you’re going to be an uptight shizznod about it, fine.”
Loren gave a little gasp of offense. It was playful, though, and he could practically hear her smile. “I’m not an uptight shizznod!”
“OK. Sorry. You’re right. ‘Shizznod’ was harsh,” Cal said. “You are uptight, though.”
“And whose fault is that?” Loren asked.
Cal reacted in mock-horror. “Mine? You’re blaming it on me?”
“Totally your fault,” Loren replied. “You’re so annoying you make me like this.”
“Annoying?” Cal gasped. “I mean, I’d take ‘endearingly frustrating,’ but annoying?”
“Meh. Not so much with the endearing part,” Loren retorted. “But frustrating, you can have.”
This was… easier, somehow, Cal thought. Being unable to see her helped stop him from becoming some mumbling, tongue-tied teenager. It was good. Nice.
“You know I can hear all this, right?” said Mech. “You know I’m linked into this conversation? What you may not know, is that it’s making me want to throw up. And I ain’t even got a stomach. So, if you wouldn’t mind keeping… whatever the fonk it is you’re doing until some other time—ideally one where I ain’t forced to listen to every word you both say—then I’d appreciate it.”
Neither Cal nor Loren said anything for a while. It was Cal who finally broke the deadlock.
“OK, now him? He’s annoying.”
To Cal’s immense disappointment, Loren’s response was back to business.
“Rocky planets are just more common than others,” she explained.
Cal tutted and bounced around in a circle. “Well, that’s boring. We should go somewhere nice next time. Somewhere where there’s a color other than orange. Somewhere moist.”
“Moist?” said Loren, and the sound of it coming out of her mouth made Cal blush for only the fifth or sixth time in his adult life.
Retrieving the Symmorium Sentience, he tossed it from hand to hand like a basketball, and briefly considered dribbling it before concluding that this was, on balance, probably a bad idea.
The Sentience was still mostly a dark, forest green, but there was a faint glimmer deep in its center that at least suggested it was still alive.
“So, how is this a library?” Cal wondered. He kicked a stone and watched it sail off until it was too far away for him to see. “Maybe it’s a rock library,” he thought aloud. “I mean rock rocks. Not rock music. Which would be better.”
As it did sometimes, the mention of rock music brought an image of a furious Black Sabbath frontman, Ozzy Osbourne, unbidden into his mind. Cal flinched, shuddered briefly, then pushed the memory back down.
“Are the scanners telling us anything yet?” he asked.
“Not really,” said Loren. “Nothing we wouldn’t expect. Looks like there’s nothing here.”
Cal leaned back and shielded his eyes with one gloved hand. “Then why did the Sentience brings us here? And why go to the trouble of building a fake sun?” he asked. “Those can’t be cheap, can they? Unless they are, in which case, let’s get one.”
“Why the fonk would you want an artificial sun?” asked Mech, clearing some debris from beneath the Untitled.
“Are you serious? Why the fonk wouldn’t we want to have our own sun?” Cal replied. “Think of all the things we could do with it!”
“Name one,” said Mech.
Cal sniffed. “I’ll name a hundred.”
Mech shrugged. “Fine.”
“Well, not a hundred, obviously,” said Cal. “I didn’t mean an actual hundred. I’ll name ten.”
Mech shrugged again. “Fine.” From his tone, it was clear he was starting to regret getting involved.
“OK, ten,” said Cal. “But I’ll give you three now, and seven at a later date. So.” He began to count on his fingers. “One…”
He clicked his tongue against his teeth a few times and idly passed the Symmorium Sentience from hand to hand.
“Solar power,” he announced, after some thought. “We could power the ship with solar.”
“No, we couldn’t,” said Mech.
Cal tutted. “Look, just because you might not be able to get the technology worked out, don’t turn that around to be my fault, Mech,” he said. “The first one stands. Now. Two. Suntans. Who doesn’t like a suntan?”
The act of counting on his fingers made the action of catching the Symmorium Sentience somewhat more difficult. So much more difficult, in fact, that he completely failed to. It flew through the air at a downward angle, clacked off a rock, then rebounded and began to climb.
“Fonk, fonk, fonk,” Cal muttered, kicking off and launching himself after the lazily spinning god-sphere. “I got it, I got it.”
His fingers brushed against it, sending it into a sideways rotation away from him.
“Damn it,” Cal cursed. He ran in the air and did a sort of reverse flap with his arm, trying to hurry his descent.
“What the fonk are you doing?” Mech demanded. He was hidden behind the Untitled, unable to see Cal’s frantic attempts to recover the Sentience. “You got what?”
“Huh? Oh, just a joke someone once told me,” Cal replied. “Took a while but I finally understood it. I’ll tell it to you sometime.”
Thack. Cal’s boots touched down and he kicked off again, propelling himself toward the Sentience. “OK, this time, baby, this time,” he said.
“This time what?” Mech snapped.
“Jesus, Mech, do you have to listen in to everything I say?” Cal grumbled, stretching his arms out like a soccer goalkeeper about to make the save of his career.
“Well, you’re currently saying it right in my ear,” Mech pointed out. He emerged from behind the Untitled and s
tood, frozen, as he watched Cal go flying after the spinning Symmorium Sentience. “Oh, what the fonk have you done now?”
“What is it?” asked Loren. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing!” Cal insisted. “Everything’s fine. Everything’s totally fine!”
He felt gravity tug gently but firmly at his spacesuit. He roared with effort, throwing his arms out as far as he could, hands grabbing for the Sentience’s smooth sides.
No! His upward flight became a downward descent. He watched, helplessly, as his fingertips fell short of their goal, and barely had time to bring his feet around below him before he crunched back onto the desert floor.
“Fonk. Missed it,” he grimaced.
He was readying himself to jump again when the Sentience landed on the sand beside him. Cal glanced up at the sky, then down at the sphere by his feet. “Oh, yeah. Gravity,” he said. He looked across at Mech and grinned. “For some reason, I thought it was going to float off into space, or something. But, yay gravity.”
Bending, he scooped the Sentience up and brushed off some of the dust and sand. He blew on it to speed up the cleaning process, reacted with surprise when a gust of air blew back in his face, then remembered he was wearing a helmet.
“I saw that, man,” Mech called over.
Cal chose to ignore the comment. Balancing the Sentience in one hand, he raised it victoriously above his head. “And to think you two were worried,” he said, grinning.
“I wasn’t worried,” said Loren. “Should I have been worried?”
“He dropped the Sentience,” Mech said.
“He what?!”
“The point is, it’s fine now,” said Cal. He lowered the orb and tucked it under his arm. “I got it back, and I’m going to keep a tight grip on it from now on.”
“Yeah, you’d better,” Mech grunted.
“Relax, big guy,” Cal said. “It’s fine. We’re golden. Nothing else is going to go wrong.”
The ground beneath his feet trembled. Cal’s eyebrows met quizzically as he looked down.
A perfectly circular area of sand snapped open beneath him, and gravity suddenly began to have a much greater sense of urgency about it.
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