Analog SFF, November 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  It sank in with a satisfying thwump. He made three more slanted cylindrical spear points, put them in his emergency kit bag, and continued his descent.

  In his second day down the mountainside, ravenously hungry, with only five nutrition bars left, he decided whatever he was doing was not working. He was seriously thinking of the fish trapped in the CSU—could he find it again, dive down, and kill the fish? It had been big—maybe a hundred kilos of meat on it. He should have taken that opportunity when he was there.

  Okay, he wasn't going to just run into something to eat walking down the trail. Why not try setting up a blind and watching for what might come by? He could give that a day.

  It was a long boring day, but that evening something did come by. It seemed vaguely like a cross between a kangaroo and a dinosaur, so he mentally dubbed it a kangasaur. It was at least twice his height, and its head bobbed from side to side. Jacques readied his spear, then got a look at the fierce claws on the kangasaur's feet and thought better of it. It stared in his direction, but he stayed perfectly still. It ambled over to a bitterwood tree, reached up about as far as its neck would extend, and worried away at something under a bitterwood leaf. Then it left. What had it found? Could he climb a bitterwood tree? Their lowest branches were about three meters up, and the bark, though not as slick as the shiny blackwood bark, was still very smooth. But gravity was low. An experimental leap up brought his eye level perhaps six meters above the forest floor. He jumped for a branch, clumsily slung himself under it, sloth-like, and shinnied out to look under its leaves. It was barren; he would have to climb higher than he could leap.

  Jacques remembered going to an art museum with his class and seeing a picture of a man climbing a tree with rope around the trunk, holding himself to the bark that way. There was a coil of carbon-nanofiber twine in the emergency kit, 100 meters according to the label.

  It took some experimentation and a couple of falls, but the next morning Jacques made it up a bitterwood tree and looked under its leaves. He had to go higher than the first level of branches, but finally discovered a cluster of teardrop-shaped fruits. The rind was tough, but no match for the steel of his multitool blade, and he got at the pulp beneath.

  He knew the risks, but he had to find something edible. He nibbled at it. It was mostly soft fibers, almost like pasta, and relatively flavorless; nothing sharp, bitter, or otherwise deadly seeming. Ten minutes after the first taste, he took a mouthful. It seemed to go down okay.

  He put a couple of fruits in his kit bag, which was beginning to become stuffed, and dropped down to the ground. He would wait a day to see how his body reacted before eating more. He camped by a brook, sealed in his tent despite the warm humidity of the place, and slept fitfully.

  The next day, not having gotten sick, he ate the whole thing, minus the hard seeds toward the center of the fruit. So far so good, he thought, and headed downhill.

  Part of the apparent flatness of the landscape from the caldera rim, he realized, was because the trees got taller as he descended. As a guess, the tallest blackwoods were almost three hundred meters high and five meters across. He felt like a squirrel in a forest of giant sequoia. Their oval leaves were longer than he was tall, with stiff hollow veins and webbing like sheets of felted canvas. Picking one up, he felt like an ant, able to lift several times his own body mass.

  By the end of the day, he was still healthy. With food, he could survive. Under a leaf lean-to, cushioned by soft loam, he lay down. The next thing he knew, morning had arrived.

  * * * *

  Chapter 3

  The Killer Ape

  Deeper into the forest, rocks had become fewer and fewer; the floor was a rich, soft loam. His cairns were now teepees of fallen blackwood branches. Over the next week, he taught himself to weave a passable basket out of blackwood saplings, discovered a thin fibrous green vine that was surprisingly strong, found a mildly sweet edible berry to break the monotony of bitterwood fruit, found a hollow “flute plant” that grew perfectly straight but no higher than about a meter, and identified six native animals, including the furry spider-like thing he'd seen on his first day. But he was getting increasingly tired—bitterwood fruit and berries alone might not be an adequate diet.

  The furry spiderlike things—he decided to call them hirachnoids—foraged on a mushroomlike plant that grew beneath fallen blackwood tree leaves. He didn't try eating those—not a rational decision considering all the other chances he was taking, but eating things that looked like mushrooms made him nervous. He gathered up some of these and put them under his basket, weighted it down with a hunk of lava, then propped it up with a twig to which he attached a string, the idea being to pull the twig out when the furry spiderlike thing was underneath the basket.

  This didn't work well—the little animals were able to skitter out before the rim fell. That, he realized, was a consequence of the low gravity—no matter how much weight you put on something it would only fall so fast. If he could only push it down.... The answer was a long fallen blackwood branch resting on the top of the trap. The trick was to pull the string attached to the stick first and step on the branch immediately afterward: one, two. If his timing was ever so slightly off and the pressure from the lever came first, the stick wouldn't come out at all, but if he left too much time between string and foot, the critter would escape.

  After a couple of tries, he caught one. Up close, it actually looked very spiderlike, with compound eyes, but six instead of eight legs and seemingly no segments—a big hairy ball maybe half a meter across. Its mouth irised open like an anus to allow a forked appendage to shoot out and grab pieces of the mushroomlike plant. Despite being trapped, it ignored him and worked away at eating the bait.

  Jacques hesitated. He had never killed anything before. But he had only two nutrition bars left. He needed to survive, and to survive he would probably need protein. Protein meant meat because he had no way of determining if the vegetation had any. Still it was all guesswork; he didn't know that killing this thing would solve his problem. He didn't know how smart it was, whether it would suffer, or even retaliate in some very effective way. He pondered this for several minutes, then put one of his spear tips on his walking stick and struck the thing hard right between the eyes. It collapsed immediately.

  Dissection proved a problem; the hirachnoid's hair was as stiff and bristly as it looked and longer than the blade of his multitool knife. He ended up lashing the multitool to a flute plant shaft with green twine and going at it whaler style. The first cut produced not meat, but a fountain of mucous yellow ichor that stank like rotten eggs. He almost gagged, then recovering himself, made another cut.

  Suddenly, the creature's corpse began to pulsate and flop around. Jacques recoiled in disgust. Then out of the cut, a procession of miniature hirachnoids emerged—miniatures of the first except for a lack of hair. Jacques’ stomach began to get queasy, especially when the little ones dragged pieces of their mother's—or their host's—innards out of the incision and ate them.

  Sickened, Jacques backed away from the trap and sat down to collect himself. Periodically, thereafter, he checked the trap.

  By evening, nothing was left of the hirachnoid but the skin and legs. He held a leg up—it was tough and horny, like a crab leg, and felt massive enough to contain some meat. He gathered the other legs and took them back to his camp by the brook. Using some stones, he cracked one open and found some white fibrous meat inside; obviously the leg muscle.

  He pulled it out, cut a small piece off with his blade, washed it in the creek and tasted it. It was extraordinarily rich and tasted somewhat like buttered lobster, but was much softer than he remembered lobster being—indeed, it seemed to melt in his mouth.

  Jackpot, he thought. Maybe. Would the rest keep until morning? He should wait to make sure nothing untoward happened to him as a result of his bite, but it was too good. He took another bite, then, in an act of incredible self-control, he wrapped the remainder in leaves and sealed it in his em
ergency kit bag. There was no room for the other legs, so he put them in the basket and hung that by a rope from a branch.

  Then he improvised a hammock with green twine and bitterwood leaves and went to sleep.

  He woke up with the first light, feeling better than he had in days. The remaining part of the first leg didn't smell right after sitting overnight, so he threw it away and cracked open another. It tasted about as good as the first leg had the previous day, so he ate the whole thing and waited. He didn't get sick and considered himself incredibly lucky.

  On the morning of the tenth day since Jacques woke up in the CSU, he had starch, protein, and fruit, and his emergency kit was intact. There were a dozen hirachnoid legs and four bitterwood tree fruits in his basket. He had painstakingly depilated a hirachnoid pelt and sewn it into another bag. He'd constructed a back frame from flute plant stalks and green twine to carry things in. He laughed at himself; he was becoming a stone age man of substance.

  He had now stayed at the same campsite for three days. It had a running brook, in which he'd bathed without incident—if there were local parasites, they didn't recognize him as food. He had been through a local rain shower, kind of a warm, gently descending mist with the lightest of breezes that nevertheless had managed to soak everything. He had taken to going around naked—less itching, less sweating, and less wear and tear on an emergency suit he might need later.

  He had fire, though it had taken hours of experiment with a green twine bow and stick to get something going. Then he had a hell of a time containing it—the Resolution had found a planet with perhaps an Earthlike percentage of oxygen in its atmosphere, but the pressure here must be something like three or four atmospheres—so the partial pressure of the combustion-supporting gas was that much higher as well. He glanced around him at widely spaced trees, the largest ones being succulent bitterwood, or chitin-barked blackwood. No mystery there. It turned out that tanglegrass ignited easily and dried bitterwood charcoal would glow for days. He was beginning to feel like an old hand.

  He estimated that he now only needed to spend only about a quarter of his waking time hunting and gathering and could spend the rest doing something else. What should that be? Did he have enough to do the trek back into the crater? It might mean someone else's life, though he considered that possibility faint. Another thought was of salvaging his CSU. If he could rig up some kind of power source, he might get it partially functioning again. From the rim, he could study more of the puzzling geography of this world and maybe see some stars long enough to orient it in space. He could do such projects later; for now, he had to focus on a rescue effort.

  Okay, he thought, back to the rim. He left a scratched rock plaque by his fire pit:

  * * * *

  Deliverance Creek Camp

  First Human Settlement

  Jacques Song

  Day 7-10.

  * * * *

  He frowned; he was into double digits now.

  There was another trail across the creek; he had seen kangasaurs of various types going by on it. Why did they go up to the rim? he wondered. Well, he would have plenty of time later to study such matters. He spent the rest of the day trapping and gathering, then set off the next morning.

  Upward with a full kit was still no stress whatsoever in the low gravity and hyperbaric oxygen. Eventually, he thought, he might be able to build an aircraft. Even a small wing area would support a lot of mass here.

  He was lost deep in thought when a three-meter kangasaur attacked. He heard it coming and managed to turn and ward off the kick with his staff more by instinct than reason. “Where in the blue sky did you come from!” he yelled in surprise as he swatted another kick with his staff and backed away. His Earth-gravity-bred strength, the quickness of his reactions, and the extension of his reach with the staff seemed to confuse the would-be predator, and for a moment, the two bipeds froze, eying each other warily, the beaked head of the kangasaur bobbing back and forth.

  Sensing hesitation, Jacques Song, Killer Ape, roared as loudly and fiercely as he could manage and advanced on the confused beast, whipping his staff back and forth. Being hollow, it made a frightening moan in the dense air. The kangasaur jumped back, turned, and began running away up the path.

  Jacques stood there laughing, naked, sweaty and exhilarated. But as he turned to march back up the trail, he heard a much larger crunch. The kangasaur had returned with a pair of much larger ones, probably six meters tall, behind him. Unable to think of anything else to do immediately, Jacques swung his staff again. The smaller one immediately jumped back behind the large ones. After a heart-stopping five or six seconds the larger one jumped, its clawed foot—almost a meter across—looking to come right down on Jacques.

  On Earth, he would have been dead meat, but it took much longer for things to happen here. Jacques stepped aside, then jumped himself as high as he could. The huge kangasaur's head followed the leaping human with an open beak. In midair, Jacques whipped his staff across the skull of the monster. There was a cracking splintering sound, and it wasn't from Jacques’ staff. The monster squealed in an incongruously high-pitched voice and put its head between its front forelimbs.

  "Sorry, I may have overreacted,” Jacques said to it, in the humor of relief, as he sprinted up the trail away from the trio. It was the first time he had tried to run quickly since he'd arrived, and he found he had to carefully control his stride to keep from bouncing too high and losing speed to air resistance. The kangasaurs didn't pursue him, though, and he stopped after a few hundred meters.

  "I may regret this,” he told himself, but unable to control his curiosity, he retraced his steps. The small kangasaur family was clustered around the wounded animal, the other two nudging it with their beaks as it continued to hold its head in its forelimbs. A very bright red fluid, apparently blood, had wetted its foreclaws and limbs. Eventually, it stood up and tried to walk, but blundered into a nearby tree. In an entirely human gesture, the smaller one reached for the forelimb of its wounded mother or father—Jacques thought of them as a family—and led it away from the forest and back down the path the way it had come. The other large one stayed behind, looking back up the trail. Its eyes met Jacques'. Jacques whipped his staff around in a circle and it made the odd moaning sound. The kangasaur's head bobbed, looking up at Jacques and then back toward the rest of its family. Finally it turned and followed them down the trail.

  Jacques exhaled and continued upward on the trail, much more alert now, walking softly and looking up and down the trail at every turn. The era of carefree strolls in the park was over.

  * * * *

  Chapter 4

  Requiem for a Martian

  The trees began to shrink and the forest to thin as he approached the rim. The sky became soft and hazy with mist. The sun overhead was red and faint to the point where Jacques could look right at it; indeed, through the haze it began to look like what some pre-astronautical artists had thought a red dwarf would look like from a planet. Upward. While his eyes were on the increasingly jagged path through the lava ahead of him, the light suddenly dimmed. Jacques looked up in time to see the last of some great, indistinct silhouette pass across the large red disk. He shivered despite the warmth of air, thinking about wing loading in a dense atmosphere under low gravity with plenty of oxygen. Something was up there. Something big.

  He looked at the trees—cover was beginning to get scarce. He built a stone cairn and scratched a crude picture of a batlike thing on a piece of smooth pahoehoe lava. This he put on the cairn just under the top stone. As he brushed his hands off, he noticed a piece of paper caught between two stones on the ground. It was such an ordinary piece of litter that he almost turned away without recognizing its implication.

  He was not alone.

  Excited, he lunged for the paper before it blew away. It turned out to be a page from an old-fashioned diary—something one might indeed take into one's CSU. The ink had smeared and faded, but he could read some of the entries:
r />   ...daddy spanked me—not ready for church on time...

  ...went to Blu River concert with Fredrika, Gus, and Tsen...

  ...algebra is too hard!!!! maybe Gus will help me but I won't let daddy know...

  ...went to Solis Lacus Temple Sunday, really, really beautiful. I feel inspired...

  ...Fredrika's 14th birthday party really fun but sad. Her folks sold her to Will Tharsis so goodbye. I wonder who daddy will sell me to? Just one more year—I want to go. I'm afraid.

  Feeling like a voyeur, Jacques didn't read any more. These were scenes from a New Reformationist childhood on Mars—and an understandable excuse to volunteer for a century-long expedition to liberate a people suffering from theocratic tyranny. Was this just a page come loose or had something bad happened? Jacques looked around for clues—but the page might have blown from anywhere by now.

  The writer was probably female, he thought. Who? There was someone called Ascendant Chryse, a biotechnician in the third squad; she wasn't necessarily the only Martian farm girl on the expedition, though—just one whose name was memorable. She was tall and reserved, with long straight hair, and had been a bit of a loner. But something had burned in her eyes, and she'd worn her jumper open low enough to show cleavage.

  He put the diary page in his breast pocket. In the best of all possible worlds, he would have a chance to return it. Adam and Eve scenarios sprang unbidden in his mind.

  He reached the rim before sunset. It was too hazy to watch the sun go down; things simply got dark with their usual suddenness. In the fading light, he managed to find a lava tube with a view to the East across the caldera and set up his bivouac on a hollow filled with soft volcanic sand.

  He woke when it was still dark. Had he heard a noise? He listened carefully, but everything was silent now. He pulled the boots from his shipsuit on and felt his way out to relieve himself. Outside, he was greeted by one of the clearest and steadiest skies he had ever seen. The air was dead still and only the faintest stars shimmered ever so slightly.