Freuchen made notes on his map, and began walking again, “Ve should probably continue on for another couple of hours before ve make camp for the night, I vould suggest that ve—” He stopped, dead in his tracks, staring up into the forest.
“Peter? What’s wrong… oh!” Following the direction of Freuchen’s gaze, I saw what had caught his attention. About a mile or so away, a tower jutted out of the forest’s canopy. Actually, it was the ruin of a tower; its gull-white walls rose in a gradual spiral like a twist of licorice, but there were ragged gaps here and there on the exterior. The tower projected upward at an odd angle. It reminded me of pictures of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It must have had some kind of addition at its top, but that was long gone, leaving behind only a broken web of what I took for support beams and pieces of ragged material that could have been the remains of a floor or another wall, it was impossible to tell from here.
“Vat do you think?” Freuchen said, over his shoulder to us. “Should ve make a detour?”
“Hell, yeah,” I said, with honest enthusiasm. “This is the first sign of any civilization on the island. We can’t just ignore it.”
“I would not be too hopeful,” said Chou, “It is obviously in an advanced state of disrepair. And we should also be aware that other survivors may well have made their way there already… it is hardly inconspicuous.”
Freuchen tossed his ax from one hand to the other three times, as if relishing the idea of a fight. “If ve pick up our pace, ve should reach it before evening,” he said. “Ready, ladies?”
“Better mark this one down on your little map,” I said, as Chou and I stepped past him and walked into the forest.
“I vill take that as a yes,” Freuchen chortled and set off after us.
I had badly underestimated the distance from the beach to the tower. Rather than the mile I’d first guessed, it turned out to be closer to three; all uphill, too. My calves were burning by the time we found the first debris from the tower strewn across the forest floor. We spotted several pieces of what looked like highly-polished aluminum or steel poking up from the layer of dead leaves covering the forest floor. Kneeling, Freuchen wiped the leaves from a large piece of it that was easily as tall and just as wide as the man himself, and at least five inches thick. There was no sign of rust or scratches or any kind of weathering or degradation.
“I think it’s some kind of metal,” Freuchen said. He placed his legs in a wide stance and lowered his butt to the ground, sliding both hands beneath the huge sheet of metal, bracing himself as he started to lift the piece of the shattered tower.
Freuchen’s eyes widened as he easily lifted the large sheet off the ground.
“Wow!” I said as he waved the sheet in front of him like it was made of cardboard.
“It is impossibly light,” Freuchen said, tossing the sheet from one hand to the other. “And look at these edges.”
He offered the piece of the tower to me, and I braced myself to have to drop it but, as Freuchen had said, it was incredibly light, given its size, weighing no more than a half-pound, if even that. The edges were fringed, uneven, like a sheet of paper torn from a spiral notebook with no visible sharp edges or burrs, not at all like how normal metal twists and deforms when it’s put under stress. It didn’t look like any kind of building material I had ever seen.
Chou picked up a second piece of the tower, this one about the size of a shoebox and began to examine it. “We have similar metamaterials in my time,” she said, “but this is definitely more advanced. Although it looks like solid metal, it is in fact constructed of very precise nanotrusses which account for its incredible lightness. The nanotrusses are then layered with an outer covering of material such as aluminum or ceramic, then coated in a weather-repellent or self-cleaning finish.” Chou turned to Freuchen. “Try and bend it or break it,” she told him, with a nod of encouragement.
Freuchen shrugged, smirked as if he had been given an easy task and tried to do what Chou had asked, placing his hands on both of the short sides and squeezing. The piece flexed outward slightly but that was all. Next, he tried to break it over his knee, but it refused to bend more than an inch. Freuchen continued to apply his considerable strength in an attempt to warp the metal, his face growing more and more red from the exertion until, finally, he gave up and tossed it to the ground. It instantly sprang back to its original shape.
“Another characteristic of nanotrusses are their incredible strength,” Chou said, with a little chuckle that brought a smile to my face too.
“Ve should continue on to the tower,” Freuchen said, obviously a little put out.
We followed the growing debris field up the hill until, at long last, we emerged into an area that had probably been a clearing at some point in the distant past judging by the younger trees that populated the large circular area. Although bushes and grass had pushed up at its edges, an uninterrupted pathway of what looked like wet silver ran down the hill and disappeared into the forest twenty feet to our right. The path was connected to the base of the tower, a bulbous fifty-foot-circumference section made of the same strange metal material. The tower gradually tapered in on both sides, vase-like at its mid-point, which I guessed was about one-hundred-fifty to one-hundred-seventy feet above us before expanding outward again until it was just as wide at the top as it was at ground level.
The overall effect reminded me of an hourglass. Spaced at regular gaps around the circumference of the tower, large, flat, tulip-shaped protrusions jutted out horizontally. They were made from the same material as the rest of the tower, and I wondered if they were observation decks or if they maybe served some other purpose.
The top section of the tower was, as I had thought when we first spotted the building from the beach, nothing but a latticework of crisscrossing beams and remnants of what, I surmised, had once been floors and walls and ceilings. There had obviously been something up there at some point, but the remnants of it now lay all around us. Despite the evident destruction up top, as my eyes moved up the outside of the tower, I saw that it remained pristine, unblemished in any way. No lichen grew on it. No vines or ivy wound up its sides. No weathering of any kind at all.
“If it wasn’t for the mess up top,” I said, “you’d think this thing had just been built today.”
“Look,” said Freuchen, pointing toward the rear of the base of the tower. “There’s the reason it’s leaning at such an odd angle.”
At some point in the past, a slab of the mountain had broken away behind the tower, sending an avalanche of boulders ranging from suv-sized boulders to smaller rocks the size of my head smashing into the tower. A rocky debris field lay all around it, covered in lichen and other plants, which seemed to indicate the rockfall had happened a few seasons ago at least. A large amount of that rockslide, millions of tons, had flowed past the tower, leaving a huge drift of rock piled up around the base of the structure.
“If that had happened to a building in my time,” Freuchen said, “there vould have been nothing left but matchsticks and dust. He knelt and pulled a piece of the tower from between two rocks. “But this incredible material the tower is made of must be vy it has only tilted instead of toppled.”
I pressed the flat of my hand against the side of the tower. “It’s very warm,” I said, “especially given how little sunshine it must get.”
Chou and Freuchen did the same.
“You’re right,” Freuchen said. “Very strange.”
“It is possible that there is some kind of thermoelectric system built into the structure still gathering energy,” Chou mused. “Perhaps the outer layer is a kind of solar collector, or there may be a subterranean heating system that is still operational.”
We scouted the circumference of the tower’s base for as far as we could, climbing over and around the rubble. There was no obvious entrance in the tower’s wall, but it could just as easily be hidden behind the sixty-percent or so obscured by the rockfall.
“At least there’s no s
ign that anyone else got here before us,” Chou said.
“Yes,” said Freuchen, “if there is anything inside it, then it should be ours… if ve can find a vay in.”
I took a few steps back from the tower, just to get a better look at the higher section when a flash of something metallic in the rocks and boulders of the debris field caught my eye.
“Hey!” I called back to Chou and Freuchen. “Come take a look at this.”
My two companions picked their way over to where I stood.
“What do you think that is?” I asked, pointing toward a thick tangle of vines twisted between a tightly clustered group of trees off to our left. “See, right there in the rock pile between those two trees.” I pointed as best as I could. “Can you see it?” Through a few gaps in the twisted, snake-like vines and the rocks that had accumulated around them, the rays of the afternoon sun reflected off of something gold and glittering.
“Vat is that?” said Freuchen. He scrambled over the boulders and picked his way toward the trees, Chou and me right behind him. We began tugging at the vines but quickly figured out it was useless; they were too tightly wound together and incredibly strong.
“Stand aside,” Freuchen said. He leaned his ax against the trunk of the nearest tree, pulled the machete from his belt, placed a boot on the rough surface of a large boulder for balance, and set to work, slashing at the vines with short, powerful, precise cuts. He sheathed the machete and began pulling some of the smaller boulders from the pile and tossing them away. A couple of minutes later, he stepped back, perspiration and bits of vine peppering his hands and face.
I gasped in amazement. “I think it’s another robot,” I said breathlessly. I couldn’t be absolutely sure because most of it was still hidden beneath the vines and rocks, but Freuchen’s work had revealed enough of the golden body that I was confident what lay beneath the rocks was the remains of another robot.
“You mean like the vun you said you saw on the beach, the day ve arrived?” Freuchen said, nodding toward the space he had cleared while grimacing as he wiped the sweat from his face with the back of an arm. “Two mechanical men!”
I leaned in to get a better look. Through the gap Freuchen had cleared I saw a black lattice-work of metal and the smooth curve of a gold surface I was pretty sure I recognized as the robot’s chest. I smiled at Freuchen and nodded. “Yes, I think so. But how on earth did it get stuck here?”
“The rockslide must have caught it unavare and trapped it,” Freuchen said. He stood back and eyed the debris piled up around the robot. “Ve could clear the vines avay in a matter of an hour or so… probably. It vould give us a better chance to examine it.” He let his words hang in the air, more question than statement.
“You think it might give us a clue as to who made it?” I asked, turning to face Chou.
“I hardly think it would have a manufacturer’s stamp on it, but who knows,” she replied. “It might yield some clues.”
Freuchen looked dubious, despite having made the suggestion to clear the vines in the first place. “The question is, do you think it is a good idea to uncover it? It could be dangerous.”
“The one I saw on the beach was…” I searched for the right words to sum up the feeling I’d gotten in my gut as the robot had walked by me into the ocean. I settled on, “…confused. It was like it didn’t understand why it was doing what it was doing. I know that sounds weird, but that’s the impression I got. I don’t think it had any intention of hurting us. Truth is it could have grabbed me and drowned me if it had wanted to. It’s no threat… probably.”
Chou shook her head. “It’s been buried under all that rock for a very long time. If it was going to get up and do anything, I think it would have done so by now. But it leads me to another question. Look at these trees.” She pointed at one of two trees that stood about twelve feet tall, young by comparison to the others that towered skyward around them. “Do you see how they are growing out of the space between the boulders?”
I nodded, not seeing the point Chou was trying to make.
But Freuchen apparently did. “They are growing from the rock pile that buried the mechanical man,” he said, “vich means that they must have started growing after the rocks were deposited here. A tree grows at a rate of about one to two feet a year, given the right soil conditions. That vould mean these trees have been here for a minimum of twenty years and perhaps longer. Vich also means the mechanical man has been buried here for at least that long, too.”
“Exactly,” said Chou. “But that raises another question. If this is a robot and it was trapped here decades ago, why did the one Meredith encountered on the beach choose the moment we arrived to walk into the sea?”
“You think it was just waiting there, on the beach? For all that time between whenever this happened…” I swept my hands over the rockfall “and when we arrived? That just doesn’t make sense.”
“Yet another question on a very long list of senseless events, I fear,” Freuchen said. “But perhaps if ve vur to free our metal friend here, he could give us some answers. Are ve agreed?”
Chou nodded.
“Sure,” I said, shrugging. “What have we got to lose.”
“Vunderful,” Freuchen said, his concern over the robot apparently alleviated. “Let’s get to vurk, then.”
For the next hour and a half, Freuchen hacked away at the vines while Chou and I pulled the severed creepers from the body of the robot. Bit by bit, the huge golden form of the robot was revealed. By the time we pulled the last vine away, there was less than an hour of daylight left, and we were all exhausted and soaked with sweat.
The three of us took a step back and stared at what had been revealed. The robot was trapped in a sitting position on the ground, its segmented arms clasped tightly to its sides. Its left leg extended straight out in front of it, the right leg trapped beneath a heap of rock. Several large boulders had piled up behind the robot, pushing its upper torso forward at its waist, like it was bowing. The robot I’d seen on the beach had a concave bar that floated just in front of the mound between its shoulders I assumed was its head. Two piercing blue lights had glowed on the bar and had moved to look at me as I floated in the water. I had assumed they were its eyes. The bar on this robot was firmly attached to the mound of its head, and there were no lights. No indication of ‘life’ at all.
“It must have been here for a long time for the vines to have grown so thickly over it,” Chou said.
Freuchen nodded. “Yes, but look, there is very little sign of veathering or any kind of corrosion on its body. Not even any scratches from the boulders. Is it made from the same material as the tower?”
Chou ran her hand over the golden chest. “I believe this is actual gold,” she whispered. “Gold is the most non-reactive of all metals which would account for the lack of corrosion, but to be this strong it can’t be pure; it must be some kind of alloy.” She rapped the knuckles of her hand against the robot’s chest. “It’s as hard as steel.” Chou maneuvered around the robot, climbing over tree roots and boulders, inspecting the machine as minutely as she could, given the forest’s advancing shadows as afternoon edged toward evening. “I do not see any kind of port or activation switch; no interfaces of any kind,” she said after completing her inspection.
Freuchen looked skyward, to the patches of darkening sky visible through the trees. “I have no idea vat you’re talking about but ve should ready a camp for the night. I vill prepare a fire.”
Chou reluctantly joined us, her fascination with the machine obvious.
We gathered extra wood and piled it next to the campfire Freuchen had built near the robot, ate some of the smoked salmon and jerky we’d brought with us, then sat around talking quietly to each other as evening edged toward night. The forest was alive with the sound of birds and other creatures I couldn’t identify, almost as if the animals that lived within the trees knew we were there and were warning each other about the strange interlopers on their territory. But
gradually, as night descended through the trees, even that noise died away, leaving only the crackle and snapping of our fire.
“I vill take the first watch,” Freuchen volunteered, positioning himself atop a large nearby boulder. Chou and I bedded down near the fire to try and get some rest before the aurora inevitably woke us again. I was exhausted, and I felt myself slipping easily into sleep the second I closed my eyes.
I awoke just as the first streaks of the aurora filtered through the forest’s canopy. Freuchen and Chou were already up and about, sitting around the campfire talking in low voices.
The sky crackled and glowed as bolts of energy shot across the black sky. The nano-particles did their nightly dance, and I felt the cool rush of energy coursing through my body and the welcome feeling of regeneration as the aches and pains of the previous day’s trek and toil were erased from my body. When the show was over, I stretched and took over guard duty from Freuchen.
“I don’t think I vill ever get used to that,” Freuchen said, referring to the aurora. “But it is very velcome.” Without another word, he lay down in the spot where I had slept, closed his eyes and started snoring almost immediately—a strangely high-pitched sound for a man of his size.
“Wake me in a couple of hours,” Chou said, and she lay down too.
I walked over to a tree close to where the robot sat, the machine’s golden body reflecting the orange light of the fire, bouncing it around the forest. I sat down between the tree roots, my back resting against the trunk, and looked at the robot. The campfire illuminated the front of the mechanical man, casting a long shadow behind it that shifted with the flames, creating the illusion that the robot was swaying back and forth. A pile of dead leaves, pine needles, gravel, and pinecones had collected in its lap. Grass sprouted from between its long metal toes. My eyes had just begun to wander to the forest when something caught my eye. Something about the robot had changed, I was sure of it. I just couldn’t put my finger on what it was exactly.
The Paths Between Worlds Page 18