Nara

by M. L. Buchman

  “Well, Sub-Captain. It would seem that bartenders can be useful in this situation if they will only come in from the cold.”

  Ri flinched as Bryce stared at the Captain and then her. She shook her head ever so slightly. She had not even hinted about Bryce’s existence until he’d walked into this room. She shook her head again but it was clear he didn’t believe her.

  Ri finally looked away, only to notice Olias boiling under the Captain’s reprimand, but he wouldn’t dare interfere with Bryce if he had the Captain’s protection. At least she hoped not.

  “I do, however, have one question. You said, ‘your world.’ I assume that this was in reference to Stellar One. Is it not also your world?”

  Bryce looked down at his hands. “Of course, Captain. My thoughts were…elsewhere.” Ri knew it had been Bryce Sr.’s words and wished she could cleanse the stain inside his head for him.

  “Ah, thank you for clarifying that little matter. Well, people, we have the problem clearly before us thanks to Commander Jeffers’ team, obviously sufficient in size for the task to date. I am open to suggestions.”

  The Captain slowly scanned the room. Ri followed her gaze. Jaron still wrestled with the implications of the data before him. Probably trying to figure out how his jungle could survive after the demise of Homo sapiens. Robbie was nowhere in sight, but Ri eventually located the sound of weeping from the open door to the washroom.

  She met the Captain’s eyes, but had nothing to offer.

  “Well,” the Captain didn’t look away, though her voice cracked from the strain. “Let us all sleep on it. Commander Ri. You are relieved of all watch duties to focus on this problem. Bartender Bryce, perhaps we can meet in this establishment of yours. Tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. Sharp. No excuses. Until that time, this information does not leave this room.”

  She rose and departed without any further comment. Bryce nudged Jaron, who, after some prompting, stumbled to his feet and went to check on Robbie.

  Olias came to stand before Bryce and the diagrams. The colored lines seemed to arc and curve like a lightning storm between their bodies.

  “Don’t you care about this?” Olias waved toward the projection. “About any of this? Are you so dead already that you aren’t afraid of this?”

  Bryce clenched his fists at his sides. From Ri’s position, they framed the chart of their own death perfectly. All humanity was going to die, and these two might just get their part in it over with and kill each other now.

  “Not much.”

  Olias staggered back from Bryce’s gentle tone. After a long pause, he turned and followed his Captain.

  # # #

  Jaron had seen Robbie safely to her quarters and returned to the jungle. He didn’t doubt Ri or Bryce’s reading of the data, but wished he had the clearance to read Wilkson’s document. He didn’t have sufficient security clearance to locate it in the system, much less look at it. He plunged his shovel down into the soil. The trees were growing deeper than in a natural rainforest.

  Earthly jungles rarely penetrated past a meter despite their massive height. On Stellar One they’d placed four meters of soil to ensure proper drainage. That the trees were using the depth here didn’t worry him, but he wanted to know the growth characteristics. He was already down a meter-and-a-half and the root structure was still going strong.

  He heard a gabble of voices near the eastern hatch. He stood up in the hole he’d started digging this morning before the conference, careful not to bump the headwall. The soil layers were clearly delineated and he wanted to check the composition and chemical makeup of each layer with as little intermixing as possible. The strata looked healthy other than the continued presence of roots, but jungles also didn’t usually grow in a large metal box in a rotating environment.

  Only his head and shoulders were above the rim of his excavation when the interlopers came down the trail. He was going to let them go by unremarked until one nearly fell on top of him.

  “Watch where you’re going! How did you get in here?” He’d been locking down the hatches at night lately to keep the rowdier elements out of his jungle. It required being on his crew or an officer to authorize in at that level.

  One of them knelt down and flashed far too many teeth in his direction. “Well, what do we have here? A jungle midget. Perhaps we’ve surprised an elf popping out of his burrow.” He pointed a finger at Jaron.

  “You. Where’s my pot of gold?”

  Jaron climbed carefully out of the test hole and faced the eight people. The smiley one rose to his feet.

  “The jungle midget has grown.” He held out a large hand that Jaron shook reluctantly. He was as heavy-handed as Jaron had feared.

  “Captain Jackson Turner and his crew at your service. Sorry to intrude on your late night session with the shovel, but it is a bit intense out there in the corridor.”

  “We already have a Captain, Devra Conrad. Now who are you people?”

  “Ever hear of the Icarus?”

  “A shuttle or something.”

  “A shuttle. Pish and tosh. A solar observatory. Came back in from the depths of space a week or so back.”

  “Six days, Captain.” A woman not old enough to be out of school corrected him. All he did was grin at her.

  “My but time flies when you’re having fun.” This Captain kept looking at his companions and back to Jaron. His smile kept growing.

  Perhaps this was some test by the psychologists. He kept waiting for them to try and trick him ever since the Captain had pardoned him for giving Samnal the death he so richly deserved. But trick him into what? His DNA was already on file.

  “A solar observatory? Hey, what are you doing?”

  One of the people had jumped down into his test hole.

  “Get out of there.”

  The broad face glanced up at him. “Sorry. But I couldn’t resist. Name’s Rolovsky. What’s the dark layer here at one meter plus? Sure stands out from this yellowish soil, doesn’t it?”

  Several of the others rolled their eyes and wandered off into the jungle. “That’s, ahh, old tree, probably ebony by the root shape. Scrape gently and see if there’s a pattern.”

  Rolovsky aimed a large finger at the face that would surely damage the entire section for his own study. A small knife appeared magically in his grasp. He dug a neat groove along one side.

  “Appears to be a grain to the soil, up and back to the left.” Jaron had to admit he could not have done it better himself. Between one blink and the next the knife was gone as if it’d never been.

  “Groundwater silt replacement. It can preserve the original tree shape, but the ‘grain,’ as you called it, is typically the flow direction of the groundwater along the rotting wood. Takes decades to get like that specimen. The fact that it survived the rough handling to get here is amazing.” Jaron studied the large man as he clambered lightly out of the hole without disturbing it. He moved lightly despite his mass, much the way Robbie did.

  “Thanks, soil’s my hobby. Cooking and a bit of magic for fun. Nice place you’ve got here.” He turned and looked about.

  “Much more peaceful than the corridor. A man can really stretch in here. Not like on the Icarus. There, why you can’t hardly breathe without some command crew coming or…” He glanced over Jaron’s shoulder and stopped abruptly.

  “Can’t hardly move on a small boat like that at any time.”

  Jaron turned and the one with all the teeth clapped his hands together. “Tour’s over, folks. ‘Bout time we went home. Thanks for the exciting lecture. I was…enthralled.”

  He grabbed and mashed Jaron’s hand once more before he could avoid it. They turned toward the West entrance and disappeared into the foliage.

  Jaron climbed back down into the hole with the shovel in his hands. The Icarus. He didn’t know anything about it, perhaps that was the craft docke
d over in R1. But Jackson Turner’s name was somehow familiar. He just couldn’t recall why.

  The shovel was heavy in his hands, just like a branch of ebony, its weight far too heavy for its size. He jammed the blade down into the rich, dark soil releasing its loamy smell only to realize he’d climbed in over the good face and destroyed the site for accurate observation.

  # # #

  “We walked the rings.” Sicily sat across the Icarus’ lounge table.

  All Ri could do was nod. She and Bryce had uncovered little after everyone else left. There were a lot of attempts, usually late at night, to use the airlocks. Thankfully Ri had sealed them two days ago to keep herself from hatching through into space.

  The composting system was another matter. It was extremely efficient and no body residues would last more than a few hours before being mechanically thrashed beyond recognition. Suicides accounted for some of it, but not enough. The number of disappeareds was climbing. And it wasn’t from any one area. They determined that R1 was the safest and R4 the least so, but that was all, despite their efforts.

  Jackson cleared his throat, obviously attempting to return her to the present. She was sick of Captain Turner and should just have gone to her own quarters. She’d escorted Bryce to R4 and come back with little more than a mumbled ‘good night’ to show for it before he stepped down the dropshaft. She could be asleep by now. It was only five hours until the meeting with the Captain, and that would be really ugly. Why had she stopped here anyway? To check in. And they’d been waiting for her.

  “Ri.” Donnie sat backwards on a chair with her chin resting on the back. “I don’t know what they used to be like, but ‘different’ like you told us is not the right word. It’s crashed code out there. What’s going on?”

  Sicily rested a hand on Donnie’s shoulder. Jackson stood outside the group, leaning against the wall. There was no smile on his face now. He spoke without moving from his place.

  “I took the whole crew out. R1 and R2 were okay like you said, if only a bit weird. We checked out the decompression damage. These guys could fix in six days what they haven’t done over there in six weeks. Three was a mess. The parts of L1 that haven’t been abandoned, should be. But Four,” he let loose a long whistle. “We broke up four rapes and a pair of near murders before we bailed. Do you have any ideas?”

  Ri fought the twist in her gut. If only she could lay her head down for a little bit, maybe she’d find it had all been a nightmare. She shook her head and would have lost her dinner if she’d eaten any.

  Jackson approached her with a hot soup pouch. She shoved it away and it splatted on the floor. The smell of boiled chicken filled the room.

  She cut off Jackson’s curse. “Get me a commpad.” To hell with Devra’s orders. The whole thing would be out soon enough. If Ri showed them the data, they’d see it was pointless and finally let her sleep.

  Someone pushed a pad into her hand. She thumbed into the secure files and displayed the graphs. Too tired to explain it again, she let them figure it out on their own. Hank and Donnie saw if first. Within moments only Rolovsky was insisting there must be some mistake.

  “It’s right. The numbers are right. The formulas are right. We don’t know what’s going on but we’re losing and losing fast. We’ve got nine or ten months at the outside. The buildup is slow, right now we only lose five or ten people a day. In month six, the curve steepens dramatically. But no matter how you look at it, we haven’t got long.”

  She was ready to lay her head on the table when Sicily asked her something.

  “Hunh?”

  “What’s this odd turn at the end of the curve?”

  Ri magnified the area Sicily had indicated. It was right where the population curve crossed zero. Only it didn’t. It was when the population dropped into the low hundreds. Then, instead of continuing downward, the curve flattened out for a time. She scrolled to the right, a long time. Possibly years. Slowly trending downward but not dying out.

  It was Nara.

  She thumbed into Wilkson’s and drilled in on the equation. They dubbed the flattening of the curve as the Nara Effect. It really was Nara in all its horror.

  Ri hadn’t known until this moment that of all Japan, only Nara had survived the Crash and Smash. Only she had survived. The last of an entire race.

  The sons of bitches had studied, recorded, quantified—and left them to die. The formula indicated that they’d never understood, only measured. None of the desperation. None of the clawing upward against an impossible unknown sociological curve that controlled their lives. She cleared the formula and locked it down. Pushing the commpad aside, she faced Sicily.

  “You don’t want to know.” She could see the woman start to protest, but Ri cut her off.

  “Trust me. If you live that long, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

  She tried to keep her head up as a typical Icarus-style debate ensued. Hank and Rolovsky proposed ideas so fast that others could only slip in the occasional thought. This time no one drifted away. There were frequent references to the data she’d left displayed on the viewer, but no faults were found. They recompiled for today’s data and the answer didn’t change.

  Everyone was involved except Jackson who still stood with his arms folded and his back against the wall. He stared at her as if waiting for something. She was too tired to figure it out and simply lay her head on the table. Probably whether or not she’d sleep with him tonight. He was just a guy with too many hormones. No, not tonight, nor any other. She tried to smile at her decision, but her face was too weary.

  Ri was only vaguely aware as Jackson carried her to his quarters. She tried to protest as he stripped off her clothes, but he paid no attention as he tucked the sheets tightly around her. A bit of light and then the door closed.

  Once Jackson left, sleep eluded her. She finally climbed out of bed and decided that a quick run in R4L0 was what she needed. The main cabin was empty when she slipped out, except for Jackson fast asleep in his chair. He looked at home there, no slavering ladies’ man with all his defenses on high. Maybe if she’d slept a while, she’d wake him and they’d…

  She slipped out through the lock.

  Once she slid down into R4 North, she didn’t wait for the vertigo to fully stop before heading down into L0.

  She trotted to warm up, but it wasn’t working. She was stiff and awkward. The blue and ice white of the Arctic piping brought her to a halt. Sooner or later, it would be time to face Bryce and apologize for dragging him into this. Perhaps this morning would be better spent making peace than running herself ragged. She hatched up to L1.

  At the lock, she dragged on a full coldsuit and cycled inside. The artificial starlight revealed the shapes of the boulders and glistened off the restless sea. She took a pocketlight, but didn’t switch it on. Wandering slowly, she reached Carla’s rock and climbed onto the ledge.

  Starlight sparkled off the expanse of the waves. Carla’s last view of life had been the stars. Not even a last sunset in Arctic midwinter darkness. Had she managed to stay awake long enough to watch the stars turn or had the cold taken her too quickly?

  Ri felt the whispers of her friend in the dark, not unhappy or desperate as she’d been at the end, but the whispers they’d shared in that final month of the mission; the secrets of the other crew members and the occasional lovers; the whispers of sunsets watched together while dreaming of the stars.

  She closed her eyes and let the heartbeat of the sea wash over her. It was the heartbeat of Stellar One, still strong and stable, mostly. Three hundred and twenty less people were adding to that heartbeat than should be, but it was still safe. Of course, she’d felt the same hearing the gentle breathing of the sleeping cadre in Nara the night she’d screwed up and let herself be captured by the Angel-lady.

  All the wishing in the world wasn’t going to bring back those times before she’d killed Ninka and
Tinai any more than it would change Stellar’s population data. That curve was echoed everywhere she turned; some graffiti in the corridor, the shape of a wave in the starlight. They were dying.

  Rocks rattled on the beach very nearby. She snapped on the pocketlight and illuminated a man’s face only a meter away as he climbed the rock. At the burst of light and her shout, he lost his grip and fell backward off the ledge.

  “Ow! Shit! God damn it all!”

  She leaned over the edge and shone the light on Bryce’s prostrate form.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No.” He struggled back to sitting position and squinted up at her. “And get that damn thing out of my eyes.”

  She quickly aimed it to one side and could see him climb slowly to his feet and twist and bend to check his limbs. Once more he faced upward.

  “Ri?” The question was very tentative.

  “Yes.” Her voice didn’t seem to penetrate beyond the cone of light out into the great darkness of the biome.

  He hung his head and rested his hands on his knees.

  “Are you hurt?”

  Bryce just shook his head and remained crouched for longer than it took her pulse to slow from the adrenal rush of surprise.

  After she’d switched off the light, he finally climbed the face of the ledge. Sliding over, she made room for him beside her.

  “You came back.” His low voice was quite soft.

  She was glad of the hood and the dark. “I was going to run, but decided to drop in and see you. I wanted to apolog… To tell you I’m sorry I got you involved. I didn’t mean to…” She shook her head, there were no proper words.

  “I stopped here and couldn’t get moving again.”

  The silence stretched between them. She would give much to be able to see his face.

  “I often sit here to watch sunrise.”

  “Is it that late?”

  She could feel his coat brush hers as he shrugged. “Not for a while. Eight, maybe ten hours. Less than an hour of sun a day at this point. Still doesn’t clear the horizon.”