The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  The followers in our group had chosen Anatoly as their leader.

  “I vote with Anatoly, too,” said Amal. “I think we’ve come this far, it would be crazy to give up now. Edie?”

  “I respect Mick’s advice,” she said thoughtfully. “But our friends back home are counting on us, and in a way the settlers are counting on us, too. All those people died so we could be here, and to give up would be like letting them down.”

  I pulled up the hood of my coldsuit and headed out of the tent. Outside, the day was bright and poisonous. The coldsuit shielded me from the X-rays, but not from the feeling of impending disaster. I looked across to the skeletal shipwreck and wondered: what are we doing here on Dust? The settlers chose this, but none of us asked to be born here, exiled from the rest of humanity, like the scum on the sand left by the highest wave. We aren’t noble pioneers. We’re only different from the bacteria because we are able to ask what the hell this is all about. Not answer, just ask.

  Someone came out of the tent behind me, and I looked to see who it was this time. Edie. She came to my side. “Mick, we are so thankful that you’re with us,” she said. “We do listen to you. We just agreed to go to a twelve-hour work shift on the way back, to speed things up. We’ll get back.”

  I truly wished she weren’t here. She was the kind of person who ought to be protected, so she could continue to bring cheer to the world. She was too valuable to be thrown away.

  “It’s not about me,” I said. “I’ve got less life to lose than the rest of you.”

  “No one’s going to lose their lives,” she said. “I promise.”

  • • • •

  Why can’t I quit asking what more I could have done? I’m tired of that question. I still don’t know what else there was to do.

  Ten hours later, there was no sign of the supply ship. Everyone was restless. We had slept and risen again, and now we scanned the skies every few minutes, hoping to see something.

  Edie looked up from fashioning little dog goggles and said, “Do you suppose it’s landed somewhere else?” Once she had voiced the idea, it became our greatest worry. What if our assumption about the landing spot was wrong? We told ourselves it was just that the calculations had been off, or the ship was making an extra orbit. Now that we had made the commitment to stay, no one wanted to give up; but how long were we prepared to wait?

  In the end, we could not have missed the lander’s descent. It showed up first as a bright spot in the western sky. Then it became a fiery streak, and we saw the parachutes bloom. Seconds later, landing rockets fired. We cheered as, with a roar that shook the ground, the craft set down in a cloud of dust barely a kilometer from us. As the warm wind buffeted us, even I felt that the sight had been worth the journey.

  By the time we had taken down the tent, loaded everything on Bucky, and raced over to the landing site, the dust had settled and the metal cooled. It was almost sunset, so we worked fast in the remaining light. One team unloaded everything from Bucky while another team puzzled out how to open the cargo doors. The inside of the spacecraft was tightly packed with molded plastic cases we couldn’t work out how to open, so we just piled them onto the buggy as they came out. We would leave the thrill of discovery to our friends back home.

  Bucky was dangerously overloaded before we had emptied the pod, so we reluctantly secured the doors with some of the crates still inside to stay the winter at Newton’s Eye. We could only hope that we had gotten the most important ones.

  There was still a lot of work to do, sorting out our baggage and redistributing it, and we worked by lamplight into the night. By the time all was ready, we were exhausted. Umber had not yet risen, so there was no need to set up the tent, and we slept on the ground in the shadow of the lander. I was so close that I could reach out and touch something that had come all the way from the homeworld.

  We set out into the night as soon as we woke. Bucky creaked and groaned, but I said encouraging words to him, and he seemed to get used to his new load. All of us were more heavily laden now, and the going would have been slower even if Bucky could have kept up his usual pace. When we reached the top of the inner crater ring we paused to look back at the plain where two spacecraft now stood. In the silence of our tribute, the X-ray alarm went off. Invisible through our UV-screening faceplates, Umber was rising in the east. Umbernight was ahead.

  • • • •

  We walked in silence. Sally hung close to us in her improvised coldsuit, no longer roving and exploring. From time to time she froze in her tracks and gave a low growl. But nothing was there.

  “What’s she growling at, X-rays?” Anatoly said.

  “She’s just picking up tension from us,” Edie said, reaching down to pat the dog’s back.

  Half a mile later, Sally lunged forward, snapping at the air as if to bite it. Through the cloth of her coldsuit, she could not have connected with anything, even if anything had been there.

  “Now I’m picking up on her tension,” Davern said.

  “Ouch! Who did that?” Seabird cried out, clutching her arm. “Somebody hit me.”

  “Everyone calm down,” Edie said. “Look around you. There’s nothing wrong.”

  She shone her lamp all around, and she was right; the scene looked exactly as it had when we had traversed it before—a barren, volcanic plain pocked with steaming vents and the occasional grove of everlive trees. The deadly radiation was invisible.

  Another mile farther on, Amal swore loudly and slapped his thigh as if bitten by a fly. He bent over to inspect his coldsuit and swore again. “Something pierced my suit,” he said. “There’s three pinholes in it.”

  Sally started barking. We shone our lights everywhere, but could see nothing.

  It was like being surrounded by malicious poltergeists that had gathered to impede our journey. I quieted the dog and said, “Everyone stop and listen.”

  At first I heard nothing but my own heart. Then, as we kept still, it came: a rustling of unseen movement in the dark all around us.

  “We’ve got company,” Anatoly said grimly.

  I wanted to deny my senses. For years I had been searching for animal life on Dust, and found none—not even an insect, other than the ones we brought. And how could anything be alive in this bath of radiation? It was scientifically impossible.

  We continued on more carefully. After a while, I turned off my headlamp and went out in front to see if I could see anything without the glare of the light. At first there was nothing, but as my eyes adjusted, something snagged my attention out of the corner of my eye. It was a faint, gauzy curtain—a net hanging in the air, glowing a dim blue-gray. It was impossible to tell how close it was—just before my face, or over the next hill? I swept my arm out to disturb it, but touched nothing. So either it was far away, or it was inside my head.

  Something slapped my faceplate, and I recoiled. There was a smear of goo across my visor. I tried to wipe it off, and an awful smell from my breathing vent nearly gagged me. Behind me, Amal gave an exclamation, and I thought he had smelled it too, but when I turned to see, he was looking at his foot.

  “I stepped on something,” he said. “I could feel it crunch.”

  “What’s that disgusting smell?” Davern said.

  “Something slimed me,” I answered.

  “Keep on going, everyone,” Edie said. “We can’t stop to figure it out.”

  We plodded on, a slow herd surrounded by invisible tormentors. We had not gotten far before Amal had to stop because his boot was coming apart. We waited while he wrapped mending tape around it, but that lasted only half an hour before the sole of his boot was flapping free again. “I’ve got to stop and fix this, or my foot will freeze,” he said.

  We were all a little grateful to have an excuse to set up the tent and stop our struggle to continue. Once inside, we found that all of our coldsuits were pierced with small cuts and pinholes. We spent some time repairing them, then looked at each other to see who wanted to continue.
/>   “What happens if we camp while Umber is in the sky, and only travel by day?” Edie finally asked.

  I did a quick calculation. “It would add another 300 hours. We don’t have food to last.”

  “If we keep going, our coldsuits will be cut to ribbons,” Davern said.

  “If only we could see what’s attacking us!” Edie exclaimed.

  Softly, Seabird said, “It’s ghosts.” We all fell silent. I looked at her, expecting it was some sort of joke, but she was deadly serious. “All those people who died,” she said.

  At home, everyone would have laughed and mocked her. Out here, no one replied.

  I pulled up the hood of my coldsuit and rose.

  “Where are you going?” Davern said.

  “I want to check out the lookthrough trees.” In reality, I wanted some silence to think.

  “What a time to be botanizing!” Davern exclaimed.

  “Shut up, Davern,” Amal said.

  Outside, in the empty waste, I had a feeling of being watched. I shook it off. When we had camped, I had noticed that a nearby grove of lookthrough trees was glowing in the dark, shades of blue and green. I picked my way across the rocks toward them. I suspected that the fluorescence was an adaptation that allowed them to survive the hostile conditions of Umbernight, and I wanted some samples. When I reached the grove and examined one of the long, flat leaves under lamplight, it looked transparent, as usual. Shutting my lamp off, I held it up and looked through it. With a start, I pressed it to my visor so I could see through the leaf.

  What looked like a rocky waste by the dim starlight was suddenly a brightly lit landscape. And everywhere I looked, the land bloomed with organic shapes unlike any I had ever seen. Under a rock by my feet was a low, domed mound pierced with holes like an overturned colander, glowing from within. Beneath the everlives were bread-loaf-shaped growths covered with plates that slid aside as I watched, to expose a hummocked mound inside. There were things with leathery rinds that folded out like petals to collect the unlight, which snapped shut the instant I turned on my lamp. In between the larger life-forms, the ground was crawling with smaller, insect-sized things, and in the distance I could see gauzy curtains held up by gas bladders floating on the wind.

  An entire alternate biota had sprung to life in Umberlight. Dust was not just the barren place we saw by day, but a thriving dual ecosystem, half of which had been waiting as spores or seeds in the soil, to be awakened by Umber’s radiation. I knelt down to see why they had been so invisible. By our light, some of them were transparent as glass. Others were so black they blended in with the rock. By Umberlight, they lit up in bright colors, reflecting a spectrum we could not see.

  I looked down at the leaf that had given me new sight. It probably had a microstructure that converted high-energy radiation into the visible spectrum so the tree could continue to absorb the milder wavelengths. Quickly, I plucked a handful of the leaves. Holding one to my visor, I turned back toward the tent. The UV-reflecting fabric was a dull gray in our light, but Umberlight made it shine like a beacon, the brightest thing in the landscape. I looked down at my coldsuit, and it also glowed like a torch. The things of Umbernight might be invisible to us, but we were all too visible to them.

  When I came back into the tent, my companions were still arguing. Silently, I handed each of them a strip of leaf. Davern threw his away in disgust. “What’s this, some sort of peace offering?” he said.

  “Put on your coldsuits and come outside,” I said. “Hold the leaves up to your faceplates and look through them.”

  Their reactions, when they saw the reality around us, were as different as they were: astonished, uneasy, disbelieving. Seabird was terrified, and shrank back toward the tent. “It’s like nightmares,” she said.

  Edie put an arm around her. “It’s better than ghosts,” she said.

  “No, it’s not. It’s the shadow side of all the living beings. That’s why we couldn’t see them.”

  “We couldn’t see them because they don’t reflect the spectrum of light our eyes absorb,” Amal said reasonably. Seabird did not look comforted.

  I looked ahead, down the road we needed to take. Umber was bright as an anti-sun. In its light, the land was not empty, but full. There was a boil of emerging life in every crack of the landscape: just not our sort of life. We were the strangers here, the fruits that had fallen too far from the tree. We did not belong.

  • • • •

  You would think that being able to see the obstacles would speed us up, but not so. We were skittish now. With strips of lookthrough leaves taped to our visors, we could see both worlds, which were the same world; but we could not tell the harmless from the harmful. So we treated it all as a threat—dodging, detouring, clearing the road with a shovel when we could. As we continued, the organisms changed and multiplied fast around us, as if their growth were in overdrive. It was spring for them, and they were sprouting and spawning. What would they look like fully grown? I hoped not to find out.

  I can’t describe the life-forms of Umbernight in biological language, because I couldn’t tell if I was looking at a plant, animal, or something in between. We quickly discovered what had been piercing our coldsuits—a plantlike thing shaped like a scorpion with a spring-loaded tail lined with barbs. When triggered by our movement, it would release a shower of pin-sharp projectiles. Perhaps they were poison, and our incompatible proteins protected us.

  The road had sprouted all manner of creatures covered with plates and shells—little ziggurats and stepped pyramids, spirals, and domes. In between them floated bulbs like amber, airborne eggplants. They spurted a mucus that ate away any plastic it touched.

  We topped a rise to find the valley before us completely crusted over with life, and no trace of a path. No longer could we avoid trampling through it, crushing it underfoot. Ahead, a translucent curtain suspended from floating, gas-filled bladders hung across our path. It shimmered with iridescent unlight.

  “It’s rather beautiful, isn’t it?” Edie said.

  “Yes, but is it dangerous?” Amal said.

  “We’re not prey,” Anatoly argued. “This life can’t get any nutrients from us.”

  “I doubt it knows that,” I said. “It might just act on instinct.”

  “We could send the dog to find out,” Anatoly suggested.

  Sally showed no inclination. Edie had put her on a leash, but it was hardly necessary; she was constantly alert now, on guard.

  “Go around it,” I advised.

  So we left our path to detour across land where the boulders had become hard to spot amid the riot of life. As Bucky’s wheels crushed the shell of one dome, I saw that inside it was a wriggling mass of larvae. It was not a single organism, but a colony. That would explain how such complex structures came about so fast; they were just hives of smaller organisms.

  We cleared a place to camp by trampling down the undergrowth and shoveling it out of the way. Exhausted as we were, it was still hard to sleep through the sounds from outside: buzzing, whooshing, scratching, scrabbling. My brain kept coming back to one thought: at this rate, our return would take twice as long as the journey out.

  The tent was cold when we woke; our heater had failed. When Amal unfastened the tent flap he gave an uncharacteristically profane exclamation. The opening was entirely blocked by undergrowth. No longer cautious, we set about hacking and smashing our way out, disturbing hordes of tiny crawling things. When we had cleared a path and turned back to look, we saw that the tent was surrounded by mounds of organisms attracted by its reflected light. The heater had failed because its air intake was blocked. Bucky, parked several yards away, had not attracted the Umberlife.

  It was the coldest part of night, but Umber was high in the sky, and the life-forms had speeded up. We marched in formation now, with three fanned out in front to scan for obstructions, one in the center with Bucky, and two bringing up the rear. I was out in front with Seabird and Davern when we reached a hilltop and saw that t
he way ahead was blocked by a lake that had not been there on the way out. We gathered to survey it. It was white, like an ocean of milk.

  “What is it?” Edie asked.

  “Not water,” Anatoly said. “It’s too cold for that, too warm for methane.”

  I could not see any waves, but there was an ebb and flow around the edges. “Wait here. I want to get closer,” I said.

  Amal and Anatoly wouldn’t let me go alone, so the three of us set out. We were nearly on the beach edge before we could see it clearly. Amal came to an abrupt halt. “Spiders!” he said, repulsed. “It’s a sea of spiders.”

  They were not spiders, of course, but that is the closest analog: long-legged crawling things, entirely white in the Umberlight. At the edges of the sea they were tiny, but farther out we could see ones the size of Sally, all seemingly competing to get toward the center of the mass. There must have been a hatching while we had slept.

  “That is truly disgusting,” Anatoly said.

  I gave a humorless laugh. “I’ve read about this on other planets—wildlife covering the land. The accounts always say it is a majestic, inspiring sight.”

  “Umber turns everything into its evil twin,” Amal said.

  As we stood there, a change was taking place. A wave was gathering far out. The small fry in front of us were scattering to get out of the way as it swept closer.

  “They’re coming toward us,” Anatoly said.

  We turned to run back toward the hill where we had left our friends. Anatoly and Amal reached the hilltop before I did. Edie shouted a warning, and I turned to see a knee-high spider on my heels, its pale body like a skull on legs. I had no weapon but my flashlight, so I nailed it with a light beam. To my surprise, it recoiled onto its hind legs, waving its front legs in the air. It gave me time to reach the others.

  “They’re repelled by light!” I shouted. “Form a line and shine them off.”

  The wave of spiders surged up the hill, but we kept them at bay with our lights. They circled us, and we ended up in a ring around Bucky, madly sweeping our flashlights to and fro to keep them off while Sally barked from behind us.