by Scott Mackay
“How close are we to Earth?” asked Cody.
“Put it this way,” said Claire. “Ceres is Earth’s second moon right now.”
“Can you plug into any military communications?” asked Cody. “Are they upping their alert status?”
Claire switched to another screen, decrypted some military communications traffic over the next five minutes, and finally turned to Cody. “They haven’t increased their alert status, but they’re monitoring our trajectory closely.”
“So no attack?”
“No attack.”
“And what about the grav-flux? Did the Meek succeed in braking Carswell? Slowing it down?”
Claire switched to yet another screen. “Yes, they have. In three or four hours Ceres will make rendezvous with Carswell. Ceres will orbit Carswell, giving it a moon for the first time in its two-billion-year history. We’ll be ready to start the exodus.”
“What about damage estimates from the grav-flux? It was a lot worse than all the others, wasn’t it?”
“I was checking that before you came up,” said Claire. “It caused major quakes all over the asteroid. Clan scouts reported wide-scale destruction in Newton, with the collapse of over half its skyscrapers, major damage in Equilibrium, and tunnel collapses just about everywhere else. She’s not going to hold much longer, Cody. It looks like we’ll be leaving just in time.”
The time for the exodus finally came. Ceres floated above the skies of Carswell. The hangar had its massive sky-gate open. Cody stood with Ben on the third level down. Ben LeBlanc had missed the final few briefings—his romance with Agatha had consumed much of his time—and he now wanted Cody to sketch in the latest information for him.
“We saw the most recent radar pictures,” Cody told him. “Of the inland sea. Their cartographers have dubbed it the Sea of Humility. It’s round. Perfectly round. Six hundred kilometers in diameter. For the longest time they thought it was a crater. But these new pictures change that.”
“What do you mean?”
“They think it’s artificial,” said Cody.
“Artificial?”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean they think the planet’s inhabited by intelligent life,” said Cody.
Ben looked at the nearest lander, thoughtful. “Well … is there any life?”
“Oh, sure, plenty of life. The Meek always knew about the flora from the earliest probes. But now they know there’s a lot of fauna too. The methane content in the atmosphere has suggested the presence of animal life. With the satellites up and running, they’ve detected evidence of migration patterns. These new pictures show broad swaths of chewed-up land typical of the kind of scarring herd animals leave when they migrate. As for intelligent life … well, no. No radio signals, no burning of fossil fuels, no evidence of artificially produced radioactive emissions, no roads, cities, towns, or villages, no agriculture, no economic activity whatsoever … nothing but this perfectly round sea in the middle of the main landmass. Which, by the way, they’re calling Our Home.”
Above them, the first squadron of landers hung motionless in the stasis field ready for the journey to Carswell.
“And they’ve entirely ruled out the possibility of an impact crater?” said Ben.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because the depth of the Sea of Humility is an even six hundred meters from coast to coast, with no variation. Six hundred meters deep, 600 kilometers wide, with a perfectly circular island six kilometers across, right in the middle.”
“An island?” said Ben.
“Yes. Made entirely out of glass,” said Cody. He shook his head. “It’s dead. There’s nobody there. They think it’s a structure of some kind. They’ve detected two other similar structures on Our Home, one to the south of the Sea of Humility, and one to the north. They haven’t really learned anything substantive about any of them yet.”
A clarion sounded and the first wave of landers floated up through the sky-gate, glowing blue as they breached the invisible barrier.
Ben looked away. “You know … I was a little upset to see … whoever arranged the flight manifest … why they didn’t put me on the same lander with Agatha. She and I … we’re …”
“I know,” said Cody.
Cody realized that Ben was planning to stay on Carswell with Agatha, that he was taking the biggest step of his life. Ben’s face looked suddenly suffused with suppressed anxiety. “I think she might be pregnant, Cody.”
Cody raised his eyebrows, stared at his friend, not knowing what to think. “Should I …” He peered at the man more closely, sensed Ben’s ambivalence. “Should I say congratulations?”
The color of Ben’s face deepened. “I guess you … you could,” he said. “I just never thought … we didn’t plan it this way. It’s just that …”
“I know.”
“A child … that’s a big thing … and the future’s not that certain, is it?”
“No,” said Cody, “it’s not.”
“But we love each other,” he said. He nodded, more to himself than to Cody. “And that should get us through.”
Cody couldn’t help thinking of his own situation. “It should,” he said.
“Then that’s good,” said Ben. It was as if Ben had to convince himself of the future, persuade himself that he would be a good husband and father.
“She’s picked a winner, Ben,” said Cody.
Ben looked at him, a desperate grin on his face, mollified by Cody’s confidence.
“You think so?”
“Why not?”
Overhead, the next group of landers took its position in the stasis field.
“Because … because Agatha’s so damn beautiful,” said Ben, looking worried again. “Why would she go for someone like me?”
“Ben …” Cody put his hand on Ben’s shoulder. “Ben … I know you might think otherwise …” Cody grinned. “But the measure of a man is not taken by the size of his overbite alone. Believe it or not, you have other qualities.”
* * *
Cody sat in lander 2,484. Weightless. In free fall. Seats were arranged in a commercial format, two on each side of a center aisle, fifteen rows, sixty seats in all, with three crew up front in the cockpit. Outside his window he saw the great white curve of Carswell spread out below him. Cody, Ben, Claire, Deirdre, Jerry, and Kevin Axworthy now had status, for the purpose of the exodus, as members of the Olympia Mons Clan, Buster’s clan. As Buster was leader of all the Meek, it was decided that the humans, including the Father, would travel with him.
Lulu was on a different lander. Buster, in his jealousy, had made sure of it. Deirdre was the only other non-Meek on Cody’s lander.
The lander angled for entry. Friction would be intense, Rex had told him. The craft’s heat shields, made from a biological base, would burn away, regrow, burn away, regrow, again and again, like so many layers of onion skin. Gravity on Carswell was .8 gees, close to Earth gravity, stronger than anything any of them—Meek or non-Meek—had ever had to live in. To that end, everyone was fitted with a special suit. Bubbles melded with the black fabric responded to signals from antigravity satellites and would make the gravity at least a little easier to bear until they got used to it.
The lander dipped lower, skimming the ionosphere, and Cody felt the first distant pull of Carswell. Deirdre clutched his hand. In the skintight bubble-wrap she was a startling, provocative sight. Her hand was cold. He felt numb, neither afraid nor unafraid, just wanting to get it over with.
Outside his window he saw the heat shields flaring, chunks of ash flitting past as the biological base burned away sheet by sheet. Their lander descended into the clouds, and the view outside turned white. The roar of the lander’s entry was loud, seemed to drown out all his thoughts. His stomach felt as if it were going to sink right to his feet. The gravity grabbed him like a claw and pressed his whole body heavily into his seat. The lander shook. Wind turbulence? The spacecraft angled sharply down. After what seemed like for
ever in the white limbo of the planet-wide cloud cover, they finally burst through to the other side.
Rain immediately battered the spacecraft, a withering precipitation a hundred times heavier than the showers the Weather Bureau in Vesta City produced every 36 hours for street-cleaning and agricultural purposes. Below, Cody saw the flat gray surface of the Sea of Humility, still at least two kilometers down. The lander leveled off, flew straight, then began to climb, angling sharply upward. The seats automatically released their catches and rotated gently downward in their braces. As the lander climbed, Cody found himself facing the floor.
The engines cut, and the lander began to fall thrusters-first toward Carswell, in free fall for less than a second. Then Cody felt the parachutes deploy, imagined the seven of them popping from the nose cone like sudden exotic blooms. As the spacecraft sank gently through the pouring rain toward the Sea of Humility, Cody realized he hadn’t been breathing for the last several moments.
CHAPTER 22
Even through the pressurized walls of the cabin the smell of the place made itself known seconds after splashdown—a thick briny smell, like a tropical fish aquarium that hadn’t been cleaned out in a long time.
The lander now floated like a boat, rocking in the two-meter waves, propelled southward by three screws, one on each wing, and one at the back of the fuselage. Out the window Cody saw the inflatable pontoons, off-white against the green sea. It was hard to see anything at all through the heavy rain lashing the glass.
The pilot made an announcement—a general telepathic broadcast giving them the facts: We have landed ten kilometers south of our target zone and are moving at ten knots through a heavy swell. We will now have to navigate around the island of glass in the middle of the sea.
Cody conveyed this to Deirdre, who had picked up only half of it.
Over the next fifteen minutes the rain abated and the swell of the sea grew calmer. Some of the younger Meek were suffering from seasickness. Cody felt a half-dozen different emanations from the clan members around him: apprehension, hope, misgiving, excitement, regret, and relief. The mist and rain cleared further, and out the window he saw it, the island, a shore of green glass lifting above the waves, a gentle slope rising quickly to several spires, all of them cylindrical, made of the same green glass, like a gigantic collection of old radio tubes, most of them so tall they disappeared into the clouds.
The pilot said: I’ll maneuver closer. We should learn what we can about the construct.
Construct. A good name for it. Because as they got closer Cody could see that it really wasn’t a city, it was more of an installation. A construct. The emanations of the Meek around him told him they concurred with the word.
They closed to within two hundred meters. In the dim gray light of the day he was able to see right through the green glass to the internal workings of the towers. What he saw reminded him of an arterial or circulatory system, trunk routes leading to smaller subsidiary branch routes, these smaller branch routes breaking off into a final subset of routes like a meaty lacework of veins. So eerie. So deserted. With the wind howling and moaning in a thousand different tones through the thrusting green spires, like a bizarre and forbidding Emerald City of Oz, no openings in any of the spires, no windows or doors, nothing that looked like roadways or streets.
Gigantic as it was, the thing looked more like a mummified corpse than like a building. Cody half-thought he was witnessing not the archaeological evidence of a long-gone civilization but the remains of an actual creature, as inhuman a creature as anything he had ever seen, stupendously large, bereft of movement, abandoned and lonely, with only the waves splashing against its shores to keep it company.
The antigravitational satellites interfaced with everyone’s bodysuits ten or fifteen minutes before the north shore of the Sea of Humility came into view. Cody’s eyes widened as he felt the sensation of lightness come to his body.
“Do you feel that?” he asked Deirdre.
She nodded. “I feel it,” she said.
The little bubbles melded with the black fabric of his suit lifted Cody’s limbs and his body, and he was able to breathe easier and not hold himself so rigidly. He lifted his arm, testing it.
“That’s better,” he said.
Deirdre pointed out the window. “Look,” she said.
Outside he saw the north shore of the Sea of Humility. Ten of the huge supply ships, joined end to end, curved out from the imperceptibly arcing shore, floating on the water, forming a harbor for the rallying landers of the Olympia Mons Clan, each ship a hundred meters high and three hundred meters long.
The pilot maneuvered around the end of the last supply ship, and the water grew calm. They were in the harbor. Several of the landers had now been refitted into barges to transport food, materials, and equipment ashore, and moved back and forth across the green water, leaving wakes of silver foam. People crowded the shore, all of them dressed in the black bubble suits, going about the business of unloading the transports, getting ready for the migration. Several Meek engineers erected a crane, the sparks from their welding irons starlike in the mist that clung to the shore. Two other cranes had already been set up and were in full operation. The first wave of landers had arrived three days ago and Cody saw that the Meek had made much progress since then.
“Did Buster tell you how many of us there’ll be?” asked Deirdre.
“In the clan?”
“Yes.”
“Rex did,” said Cody. “Thirty thousand. That’s down from 40,000. They lost 25 percent in the attack. The other clans had roughly the same losses.”
They docked and one of the crew opened the hatch.
Cody stepped onto the gangplank and took a deep breath. Thick. Moist. Warm. He immediately started to sweat. The wind tossed his hair. Clouds covered the sky from horizon to horizon, yet it was bright out, brighter than any artificial sky he had ever seen in Vesta City. Brighter even than the sky of Mars. Mostly white but fading to gray in places. Many of the Meek wore the special black greasepaint around their eyes to cut down on the sky’s glare. A big sky. A sky that made him apprehensive. As a seventh-generation Vestan, he found it hard to get used to the idea of a sky or the notion that if he kept going straight up he would eventually reach space, that there was just this thin skin of atmosphere protecting him, with no bulwarks or pressure walls to keep the killer vacuum out. Also, he was a man whose chief professional goal had always been to design a better airlock, and the idea that he couldn’t close the door on any of it took some getting used to.
He and Deirdre were processed, as everyone was, like immigrants to a new country, injected with the Meek’s own version of a tracking microgen, given work assignments, then allowed an hour to get their bearings, to get used to moving in their bodysuits, to accept the reality that they were on Carswell now, a planet nearly as big as Earth, a marauding heavenly body from who-knew-where.
They walked through the joined supply ships one after another, through their huge warehouselike spaces, through stacks of stores and hardware so endless that the aisles disappeared to vanishing points. Forklifts roved with persistent and organized industry. They walked and walked, a full kilometer, aided by their gravity suits, until they reached the shore.
Beyond the embankment stretched a flat area about sixty meters wide. At the end of the flat area hills rose all around, covered with a sparse green, yellow, and brown vegetation, a vegetation unlike any he had ever seen—nonphotosynthetic, spores, molds, fungi, but arranged in grasslike formations, in bushlike clumps, even some widely spaced varieties that looked like trees. The hills stretched from left to right as far as the eye could see. The flat expanse between the shore and the hills now acted as a staging area for the clan. The twenty-five other clans had landed somewhere along this same stretch of coast, so Cody had learned, over 1,000-kilometer front. Bales upon bales of marrow were being unloaded. Cody and Deirdre stopped to watch the operation.
“They have a ten-week stockpile of marrow,�
�� Cody told her.
“Are they going to be able to grow marrow here?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Cody. “They’ve been sending probes for years, and these probes have tested the soil extensively. The marrow will grow well here. But while we make the migration, the Meek will have to take what they’re going to eat along with them. There’ll be no time for cultivation and no real point to establishing farms until they settle down.”
It looked much like an army operation, blue people with albino hair and violet eyes, all dressed in the skintight black bodysuits, working hard to unload supplies—much like an army operation except that there were children. The organized drills of inventory and delivery took place in the chaos of children running around through the mist, playing games, mothers running after them, some children already up in the hills, others pitching stones and grass into the sea. Cody turned back to the harbor, looked at the nearest crane.
“I wonder what those are?” he asked.
“Oh,” she said, “I think you missed that briefing. I think you were with the Father that day. Those are carryalls. A more rugged version of the skimmer. Each one has a huge cargo rack underneath. We’ll be making the migration in those.”
The crane swung a stack of seven carryalls over the embankment. Triangular in shape, just like the skimmers, but with a frame made of black tubes, a hardy carbon-based alloy.
“They take seven people,” said Deirdre, “plus all the supplies those people will need for the migration. They’ve got wind bonnets. You can’t see them in that stack. They’ll put them on later.”
He had to admire the Meek. They had it planned right down to the last nut and bolt. Despite the anarchic nature of their ghost code, they were great organizers and had developed, from their long years of surviving as a dispossessed people, an intense practical streak.
They watched for a few minutes while the Meek unloaded yet more stacks of carryalls. But then Cody got the oddest feeling. He took a deep breath. He smelled her scent, that cool menthol aroma he had grown to love so much. Lulu. Somewhere nearby. Somewhere in the crowd. Somewhere close in the mist on the shore of this alien sea.