Long Eyes and Other Stories

by Jeff Carlson

  Some of these pockets were self-contained, forever dark and still. Some held or shared small oceans, or had at one time. That seemed promising, but the sulfur content in many was stifling and lethal. Most were empty. Clara’s imaging was a busy song of pinpoints and caverns. Each resonated in its own way, holding anything from a few millibars of air to gluey salt sludge.

  A huge crater gaped near one edge of the equatorial maze, a fourteen-kilometer bubble that had collapsed eons ago. Clara dubbed it the Kitchen Sink. It had everything thrown in except what she really wanted—positive proof. Dark weeds covered its ragged floor, thriving on outgassing and water vapor. The walls of the pit both protected it from the wind and held the heat of the sun. So she watched. She waited. There were also bugs in the Sink, hardshell creatures no bigger than her fingernail. Some ate leaves. Some ate the others.

  The ship wanted to go down.

  "No," Clara said, speaking aloud what she only needed to signal. The muscles in her back rippled as if to turn and run. Would she win a battle for control? The ship's designers had clearly given it more autonomy than they told her.

  It cited reasons for landing. Good reasons. They needed samples. They could never know, only by scanning, if the chemical makeup of this ecology held threats too vicious to overcome. For example, there was a viral assembly on Ceti IV that hadn't touched the first colonists but destroyed the second generation, leaving them with eight hundred blind, idiot children. For all its stubbornness, even the central computer knew there was no point wasting more time here if this planet held something just as deadly.

  Clara compromised, hoping to placate the machine. She brought them into synchronous orbit above the Sink and began to build a small probe in her nanoforge, using up precious steel and rubber. In the meantime she turned all eyes on the bugs. She ran simulations based on observable metabolic activity. She war-gamed human DNA against incomplete models.

  She found another ship.

  #

  It was hardly even wreckage. It had been stripped down to the hull, and much of that was missing too. What remained was half-buried, separated in a landslide. Clara only spotted it because she was running extremely tight grids.

  The broken framework was old — older than her. Alien? The bounty on a find like that would be incredible. Humankind had yet to meet another thinking species. Even bacteria and bugs were rare. More likely it was one of the turn-of-the-millennia seed ships that had gone missing, or a religious group or privateers or just about anybody.

  There was heat-warped debris abandoned in the strata around the tail. Had there been an internal explosion? Perhaps they’d impacted with some bit of cosmic junk — but it looked like they'd managed a controlled landing. All dead now. They hadn't even made much of a go of it, or Clara would have seen the evidence weeks before. Even just a few stragglers lost in the caves would have lit up on X-ray or deep red by now, much less a real, thriving outpost.

  Clara was mad at herself for feeling relieved. What if she needed rescuing someday? Would she deserve it?

  #

  She stalled the ship with busy work for nineteen days before it got weird. The computer began triple-confirming even routines like meals and exercise and finally Clara gave up, sleepless and uneasy, caught in a rut of doubt. It was awful to distrust her home.

  They touched down on the largest slab of rock that she could find, even though it was two kilometers from the wreckage and wet with puddling and ice. They massed only four tons, but Clara was leery of the jags and cracking across the crater floor. She preferred to deal with the slick rime of mud. Even on this plug of granite they might trigger a quake, and Clara wasted more than a minute of fuel letting her jets run, ready to fly again in an instant.

  At the same time there was a frenzy among the bugs — a sudden, spiraling frenzy. She'd vaporized most of the pond, and a thick fog swept away from the ship, lifting on the heat of the jets, falling in the cold—and within the fog, the bugs mated and fed. Weeds exploded with spores or slumped apart, revealing strong blossoms like tongues. She should have expected it. Almost any disturbance here was a wealth of energy, and the ecosystem was ravenous. Good. Clara had no intention of venturing outside, and this should convince the ship that she'd already risked enough. She tried to imagine one footstep out there. Motion, noise, the faintest heat of friction — the bugs would swarm. Even the plants might attack with nettles or oils. She couldn't be sure what might damage a pressure suit. The ship was unrelenting in its priorities, but it needed her. It deferred to her, so long as she kept after its goals.

  They lobbed their first probe at the wreckage and found nothing conclusive. Meanwhile they shot a dozen self-contained labs into the mud and through the air, busy little boxes full of chem tests. Clara enjoyed the work. Everything here was new and fascinating, and still at a safe distance. Only radio messages came back inside.

  The gremlins appeared on the second night, a running, shifting mass of small bodies. Mammals. In infrared they burned hot on her screens, and Clara smiled and flexed. Her hand was exactly the same size as one of the creatures, and she waggled her fingers, mimicking their wire-limbed scramble across the rocky crater.

  "There you are," she said. How deep must they live inside the cave systems to have escaped her previous scans? And how many more of them could there be?

  They were scavengers, tough and nasty, with a constant jerk of claws-to-mouth. They uprooted weeds and hives in a furious, haphazard path that had its own sense.

  With every sunset there was a severe drop in temperature. The plants reacted first. Some curled shut. Some exuded pigment as an insulator. The bugs fled into their burrows and then the air began to stir. Clara found it beautiful, but of course she was immune inside her ship.

  A dance of cold swept the crater. On the surface above, the freeze was much worse — ripping winds and knives of dust. Cyclones reached down into the Sink but were countered by thermals and radiant heat, a dynamic in six directions.

  The air was not breathable, not outside the mist that formed as the atmosphere separated into layers and tendrils. The fog she'd broiled from the pond had been warm and white. These channels of air were nearly invisible, chill against the ground, and she assumed the gremlins could see in infrared or were at least highly cold sensitive. Occasionally they edged in and out of the globs of breathable air, but in places they had to leave these safe zones. In many places there were gaps.

  The gremlins were bipeds, thick in the back and belly. Big lungs. Big stomachs. They either gorged or starved.

  They were stalking her.

  The realization went through Clara like a seizure. They're working their way to the ship. They've been doing it from the start. Edging back and forth through the swirls and dead-ends of the storm, the pack had already closed within two hundred meters. A short dash. Even if the pocket they were following continued to sweep away from her, as it was doing, they could survive that distance. She had seen them go farther.

  But then what? Surely they wouldn't risk it unless there was breathable air around her, and even then what could they do? Claws on steel.

  There were eighteen of them. They scrabbled too fast for Clara's eyes, but her systems had already detailed and profiled each one. They were smart little hairballs. Organized. Their leader kept scouts to four sides of the group, and these guards constantly ranged out and back again as the pack surged and split apart and re-formed, flowing with and between the available air.

  Clara readied a batch of nano tags but didn't fire. Her tracer-recorders would only sting, bonding with skin and muscle, but she'd wait until the gremlins had gone most of the way back to their holes. Otherwise they might see the flash of her microcannons, and she didn't want to provoke them, didn't want them to associate the darts with her.

  How smart were they really? Her mikes and subsystems said they did not have language, only the most basic grunts, although their gestures approached a speech equivalent. That made sense. They lived in a world where there wasn't al
ways air to breathe... and maybe there were predators in the dark of the caves, listening, always listening.

  Clara stared at a freeze-frame of the leader's face. For an instant her mind felt as still as the calm around the ship. Then all of the ideas lurking around her crashed together and she initiated her fusion engines.

  Get out of here, she thought.

  The gremlins' hair distorted but did not exaggerate the size of their braincases, and radar confirmed that their body fur had been trimmed in distinct ways, apparently stylized as well as grown out for warmth and protection. Their eyes were evolved for daylight. They had opposable thumbs and carried flecks of granite in hand.

  They were on the verge of civilization, and Clara understood that this is what scared her most.

  Get out.

  But the ship countermanded her start-up, no less than four safety features blocking her intent. Clara flinched and went to emergency override. Blocked again.

  A new current of air swept across her position, and the gremlins jumped into it, rushing the ship. Clara fired her nano tags in a single burst, wanting only to scare them. More than thirty percent missed or reported suboptimal placement. The rest squawked with data but barely slowed the pack. Then they were on her.

  Clara screamed. "Aaaaaa—"

  Her voice was such a lonely thing. Somehow that caught and centered her. She had no one else to rely on. She twitched within her box of gel and wire, lighting up all systems. There were no antipersonnel defenses, but if she could outfox the ship she could lift off and that would kill the little monsters, suffocate or bake or pop them. And she had the nanoforge. She could build a cat's claw if she just had the time.

  But the gremlins found a seam where her cannons had opened and then another on her belly. They abandoned the first and threw themselves against the new crack in a kicking, hanging mass. They bent back the low-weight alumalloy.

  Too late the ship realized the danger. Too late it dumped its protocols and gave her control. The gremlins were already inside, squeezing and twisting through any available space, repair panels, ductwork, delivery shunts. They ruptured the ship's innards like a climbing shouting cancer.

  They were human.

  "Can you understand me?" Clara put her words through the ship with docking radios and sonar, hysterical now. She needed to convey her fear if nothing else.

  They were human. The data was clear. Clara didn't want to believe it, but the burst from the nano tags was unmistakable. Despite every adaptation these monsters were human beings — and that would make it easier to hunt them.

  She tried again. "Stop! Stop! We can talk!" But at the same time she was designing a nerve gas in her forge.

  They tore through the ship without purpose, bypassing the diagnostic web that let her track them, ripping into the circuitry of a macroscope instead. It was pointless. It was ... No. Their goal here was the same as it had been out among the weeds. They were not attacking an enemy. They were plundering an unexpected resource.

  "Stop!" Clara yelled.

  They were savages. Even if they escaped with as much gear as they could carry, even if they ruined the ship and then slowly pulled its guts out piece by piece, the metals and wiring and everything else would only be sharper knives, better ropes, whatever stupid things they could fashion.

  "This is your last chance," she said. "Please! Please."

  She charged the lines of the macroscope and electrocuted three of them. She also sealed her box an instant before she dispersed her toxin, shutting off her own air, flooding the ship. It was a miniature storm within the night outside.

  Thrashing, the gremlins did more damage.

  Then it was still.

  Clara felt too wild to mourn, but she closed her eyes briefly. Eighteen of them dead... an entire hunting party... Had she just doomed however many others were still in the caves by killing their strongest and smartest out here?

  The ship urgently needed repair bots, yet Clara had no trouble convincing it to build a cat's claw first, a whip-fast centipede with articulate saws, both to remove the little bodies and to defend themselves until they were spaceworthy again.

  She made sure she had command. Then she sent it to drill out the ship's computer core.

  #

  Clara stayed another year, in orbit, following the gremlins with probes and nano tags. She invaded every tribe and secret, and quickly confirmed her initial reports.

  They were as human as any gene-craft like herself. Even with their drastic changes they carried enough baseline DNA to vote and hold an inheritance if those privileges had meant anything in this place.

  There was no telling how many generations it had been since their forefathers changed them. The seed ship must have been so badly damaged that even a partially hospitable world seemed like a godsend. This biosphere contained a few odd sugars, but there was nothing poisonous here, and a colonist could probably step right outside and subsist for a lifetime. The problem was how many lives — how few people could subsist. The scarcity of air, water, and food was an impassable limit.

  One ancestor had had the vision to see what was impossible and what was not, the long eyes to look past how much would be sacrificed and push for what was best. Before they depleted whatever resources they had left, before their only chance was gone, they'd created a new breed of sons and daughters.

  Clara had more in common with these survivors than anyone would think at a glance. Imagination. Grit. The solitude of being different. Yes, the gremlins had lost some of their intelligence with their size. Clara supposed that was a mistake or an unexpected side effect... but they were gaining it back.

  They were packrats. They still had most of their ravaged ship down inside the caves, guarding its steel and plastics, thieving from each other, trading with each other, no longer aware of what use these substances might be except as money or superior tools. But on some level they remembered what they had been.

  They were people in every way that counted. They cultivated mold as crops. They stacked walls of rock to make reservoirs where steam or runoff was available. The gremlins lived and bred and died, exploring, growing, failing, and succeeding, and ultimately Clara could not bring herself to betray them. This world was worth far more than she could ever spend, but she needed so little and the ship was completely hers now.

  She could not rescue them. She could only ruin them. The arrival of normal men might be inevitable, but she could buy them time. Centuries. Would that be long enough for them to regain their intelligence and meet normal men as equals, no matter how small?

  Maybe not.

  Maybe they were too little to ever be very bright, but the chance was there, so for twelve months Clara forged medicine and tools and books and dropped these supplies to the crater floor. Meanwhile she broadcast her carefully drawn lies back toward known space:

  Biohazard. This is an unstable, low-atmosphere world seething with acid bacteria.

  Clara put a beacon in orbit to repeat the warning forever. Then she left the pocket planet and followed after her own vision again.

  END

  Afterword

  A lot of the stories I write are present-day tech thrillers — situations that could happen tomorrow — but I’ve always been a fan of big, sprawling science fiction with interstellar wars, vast gulfs of time, and mind-croggling ideas.

  The inspiration for "Long Eyes" was a Golden Age story by James Blish, one of the grand masters. He wrote a novelette called "Surface Tension." Now this was the kind of sci fi written back in the day when the men had steely jaws and the women tended to be wasp-waisted, helpless bimbos except for the hot, feisty redheads who could handle a knife as well as any adventurer. I like to think "Long Eyes" isn’t so corny, but it shares some of the major themes of Blish’s "Surface Tension," which are loneliness, despair, adaptability, and determination.

  Human beings have the ability to overcome nearly any obstacle using their intelligence and their grit. If you’ve read my Plague Year novels, you know these
are qualities that interest me.

  Crashing a ship on an alien planet is a good way to put people in a fix. Unless you’re on TV or in the movies, which present an incredibly simplified view of the galaxy, our species is unlikely to find anywhere that’s as hospitable as Earth. We’re well-suited to our planet. Even our bitterest landscapes like Antarctica or Death Valley are almost certain to prove more pleasant than the softest environments on an alien world.

  I’m not talking about giant monsters with teeth. I mean more subtle problems.

  An alien meadow may have Bambi and lush flowers, but there will be nasty parasites and toxins hidden in the grass.

  That lovely alien beach? Scalding levels of sodium chloride. Or worms or bacteria.

  Safe in my office, these are fun scenarios to play with. For me, writing is a lot like a good game of chess, except I’m not only playing both sides, I’m also the board. When it works well, it’s gratifying. So I try to back my characters into corners just to figure out how they’re going to escape.

  The heroes of "Surface Tension" found themselves in a place so bad, their only way out was to stop being themselves. That’s not just a good game of chess, it also speaks to everything which makes us human. I admire that level of storytelling. It’s what I strive for in my own work.

  PRESSURE

  They said I wouldn't feel a thing, but my dreams were awful — pain and tightness, smothering weight, none of which overcame my excitement. I also dreamed of flying, dreamed that I dove right through the ground and smashed into a spectacular new universe, yet I caught only glimpses of brightness before my eyes ruptured and abrasive rock crammed through my mouth and sinus cavities.

  The mind persists in making sense of things, even when drugged and unconscious. It remembers.

  Waking was the real nightmare. I had no face, I weighed too little, and raw swelling in my throat choked my voice.