by Dave Smeds
He shaded his eyes, trying to push away the intensity of the glare. The closest shore of the lakebed was at least two kilometers away. The nearest shade was well beyond that and, as far as he could judge, would vanish as noon approached — long before he could get to it. Meanwhile his exposed skin was cooking in ultraviolet radiation.
His nanodocs should have protected him. Right now the little molecular robots should have been deepening his tan, modifying his fluid retention abilities, and repairing the scrapes on his back — a token of his escorts, who had obviously thrown him bodily out the hatch. Nanodocs were one of the great boons of civilization. They healed every minor injury, preserved youth, enhanced beauty. The only people denied their full beneficence were convicts.
Over and over echoed the words, in that deep, noxious drawl Glenn had hated for so many years:
“I sentence you to hell.”
Aaron McCandless. Magistrate and de facto dictator of this backwater sector. The man who had framed him.
Glenn soberly confronted the knowledge that he and this world would get to know each other very well. None of his allies — assuming any still existed — would know where to find him. His location would be a secret kept by the magistrate and a handful of his toadies. Even Glenn himself had no idea where he was. The jumpship had bounced at least a dozen times; he could be anywhere among the ten thousand worlds administrated by McCandless — surely far from the four that were inhabited.
Glenn had spoken out against the powers-that-be. He had challenged the wrong people, thinking that law and morality would protect him.
This place had only one purpose: To make him suffer for his insolence.
The sheer bite of the sun’s rays forced him out of his sour meditation. It was simply too uncomfortable to indulge in inactivity. He thrust his fingers into a crack in the mud. A few small grains crumbled away, but the crust was too rigid to break loose; even a shovel would not have helped. Burying himself out of the sunshine was not an option.
He stood and began to walk.
The motion cleared his mind. The blueness of the sky and the oxygen soaking into his lungs took on meaning: The planet was habitable. There had to be a viable ecosystem here, or had been in the recent past. He could find it. He would find it.
As the sun climbed, it became apparent that he was in the southern hemisphere. He steered south, away from the equator. That kept the direct brilliance out of his face, and if the desert proved to be vast, at least that direction would gradually take him to cooler latitudes.
o0o
Thirst claimed him early, tormenting him even more than the blistering of his shoulders. His tongue scraped the insides of his cheeks and adhered to his palate. He would have licked his sweat, except that the heat evaporated the liquid out of his pores before it could surface. He would have gulped down his own urine, but his bladder held none.
He saw shimmering areas in the distance that looked teasingly like water. Mirages. He plodded on, dreaming of swimming pools, ice cubes, tumblers of lemonade, snow banks. The visions grew acutely realistic — as real as the cold in the faces of the bureaucrats at his trial, as icy as the glee of the magistrate. How long had they been scheming to put him away? It must have taken years in the planning.
At last, after many hours, a sinkhole offered shade. He collapsed into it, unable to climb down gracefully. Dust roiled up at the impact, making him cough. But at last he was out of the direct blast of stellar radiation. He could remain quiescent, conserving his fluids.
An eternity later, night fell. The temperature plummeted. By then, though his throat resembled sandpaper and his head throbbed, he had the strength to climb out of the pit. He promised himself to travel only beneath the stars, as he would have done to start with had McCandless not had him dropped in an exposed location. He staggered on, keening his ears, hoping to hear the scurry of tiny feet or the flutter of wings, anything that might confirm the ability of the planet to support life.
A hot, convection-driven breeze puffed at the sand, its whisper faint beneath the rasping of his lungs and the scuffing of his blistered feet.
Somehow he dragged one foot in front of the other. When the sky to the east turned indigo and the fainter stars blended into the sky, he found a crevice in a low, south-facing butte and propped himself up where the sunlight would not touch him.
The increasing light revealed the first hints of a plateau in the direction he had been heading, no doubt the southern boundary of the basin. A higher elevation might mean cooler air and a new climatic zone. It was as good a goal as any.
He died long before he reached it.
o0o
When he revived, stars hung overhead. Cool zephyrs of air actually produced goose bumps on his limbs. The moon he had seen upon his arrival was already well above the horizon, indicating that sunrise was only a few hours away. The light of a second, larger moon gave his body a sickly hue, but he was not sick. Nor was he dead. Not anymore.
The pain was gone. Lying there in a cleft where he had dragged himself to die that evening, he was restored to his default morph, that of a tall, muscular man, seemingly twenty-three years old.
This was the bitterest part of his ordeal: Death was no escape. His nanodocs had not been entirely deactivated. Stripping him of his citizen’s right to immortality was beyond McCandless’s authority. Capital offenses had to be referred back to the quadrant’s central judiciary. McCandless hadn’t wanted to risk exposure of the conspiracy.
Glenn might die a hundred deaths. No choice. He had control over one and only one aspect of his existence: whether or not to give in to despair.
McCandless would like it if Glenn broke down. So Glenn would not break down.
As he tried to stand, he swayed. That was when the ghastliness of his situation truly struck home. He was still critically dehydrated. His docs had the ability to snag water molecules from the air and soil to incorporate into his body, but there was little for them to borrow, and they had their limits. They had found enough to revive him, and once life resumed, their programming cancelled further effort.
He stood again. He ached everywhere, revealing that the docs, finding little organic matter in the soil, had stolen material from his muscle tissues to resupply his organs. Hunger gnawed his insides, mitigated only by thirst. His resurrection had won him a reprieve of a few hours.
Making sure of his direction, he forced himself forward. The plateau became his marker. As morning broke, the escarpment no longer hid in the haze of the horizon; it was distinct, rich with detail such as fissures, deposits of scree, and the striations of sedimentary layers. How many lives would it take to get to the base of the slope? How many lives to climb it?
o0o
Eighty-nine deaths later, he found water.
Only upon reaching the shore was he certain it was not another mirage. He had first seen the taunting, glittering surface after he had struggled across the plateau to its southern cliffs. Gazing down into yet another vast, desolate basin, he had estimated the small sea’s diameter at about one hundred fifty kilometers. Here in the flat he could not see the other side.
Determining how long the trek had taken in clock time was problematic. On several occasions he had collapsed in open terrain where the ovenlike noon desiccated his body faster than the nanodocs could restore it overnight. Mummified, he lay dead until such time as a little extra humidity crept into the air, providing his microscopic caretakers with the means to ferry his soul back across the Styx. Months or years might have passed.
The water, now that he had reached it, was forbidding. Nothing grew at its edges or within its depths. A thick white crust of salt, hard as metal and razor-edged, filled the beach zone, forcing him to tread with caution. He knew he would find no source of drink, but he plunged in, eager to recall the caress of liquid against his skin.
He floundered like a fish atop a gigantic bowl of gelatin. Eventually he bounced onto the beach, where he gashed open his legs. The sea was too saline even to swim in!
The trickle of blood from the wounds ate away at his consciousness. He couldn’t afford the loss of bodily fluid, and he had risked the daylight in his final push to reach the shore. He would die soon. No avoiding it. Already the dread was climbing up his gullet like a bloated worm.
He would not be defeated. Would not. Even here, in this ridiculous situation, he could find something to use to his advantage. For once, dying would not be a setback. Because as he lay down to wait for the end, he left his feet in the water.
o0o
Moons’ light greeted him as he revived. His body brimmed with vigor, thirst and hunger temporarily banished. Accepting the generosity of the sea, his docs had resupplied his fluids, filtering out excess salt, and somewhere in those poisonous waves had found enough organic matter to rebuild his tissues. For the first time since he’d arrived on the planet, he was totally restored.
He bounded to his feet and set out, intending to circle to the southern shore. In spite of his energy, he did not hurry. He knew that he could always die at the water’s edge again — unnerving as that process might be. No longer did he have to struggle for every forward pace.
Death indeed came again. Twice. But shortly after the second revival, as dawn was threatening to call a halt to his nightly progress, he was drawn on by an impossible sound: the unmistakable roar of water rapids.
Ultimately he was rewarded — if one could call it that — by the realization that he had come to the end of a narrow peninsula. He could go no farther unless he chose to swim.
But here, indeed, were rapids.
To his left were the viciously saline waters around which he had walked — not a sea after all, but a gulf or bay. To his right rested a much larger body of water. This was a true sea, perhaps an ocean. Straight ahead, a mere stone’s throw away, another peninsula spread toward a cluster of low hills. Together, the narrow slivers of land divided the two bodies of water into nearly separate geographical features connected only by this narrow, shallow channel.
The rapids were caused by the flow of the larger, higher sea into the smaller one. The difference in elevation was at least two meters, enough height to cause the incoming water to tumble downward over the rocks.
Glenn ignored the glaring rays of the sunrise. The discomfort mattered not at all in the face of the vital information he had just learned.
Aaron McCandless must have had his men drop Glenn in the driest region of the planet, the place of greatest torment. The land where he stood was so arid that the bay actually evaporated faster than the parent sea could fill it.
That meant that elsewhere, it wasn’t so arid. Some major, regular source fed the larger body of water. It might be barren here, but other parts of its shore had to be more hospitable. Even now he could see that its hue was healthier, less choked by salt. By following its coastline, he knew he would eventually come to a place where extended survival was possible.
He commenced that journey immediately. A newfound spirit filled his stride. Previously he had depended on faith alone to convince himself that better conditions lay ahead. This time he had a theory founded on real evidence.
So accustomed was he to incremental gains that he scarcely believed his eyes when, just as the heat had forced him up a dune to search for shelter, he spotted a piece of driftwood in the surf. He slid down the bank, pranced into the foam, and emerged with the prize. About a meter long, it fit his grip neatly. Though lightweight, it resisted the prodding of his fingernail, feeling more like cast aluminum than something that had once been alive.
Reverently, he raised it above his head.
Something scuttled over the beach ahead. Mentally he labelled it crab, though of course it was an alien lifeform, crablike only in the sense that it had a flat carapace and an array of fold-out legs. Instantly he sprinted forward and brought the club down with full force.
The carapace cracked, giving off a sound like an egg crushed underfoot. The little creature wriggled, spasmed, and in a bizarre reflex, shook off all of its legs. An aroma much like fresh lobster filled Glenn’s nostrils.
Giggling like a boy, he lifted a still-quivering leg and sucked the flesh out of the exoskeleton. Satisfyingly sweet, it quelled the acid burn in his stomach. Something so good was surely toxic, but so what? He would savor every last bite.
He danced in a circle around his kill. He had a weapon. He had food. Shelter would surely come. From these small beginnings, he would carve out a triumph.
Part Two
Glenn could smell rain coming, though the first clouds hid somewhere behind the curve of the planet. After five decades, he was acutely aware of changes in humidity. Before nightfall, the sky would weep.
Rain was still a rare occurrence, even here in the watershed of the Sea of Gulfs — named by Glenn for its many bays and peninsulas. Away from the one permanent river, plants had to struggle to survive from storm to storm. The few small creatures that roamed among that vegetation provided barely enough game to sustain a predator as large as a human.
But Glenn had endured. The estuary and coastal tidepools provided seafood. The river meant a source of drinking water, even if sometimes he had to dig to reach it. The air was never as unforgivably hot as the region where he had originally been flung.
He stared at the mountains, at the snow that dusted the highest peaks. Twice he had followed the riparian zone to the river’s source, a journey culminating in an arduous climb up canyon walls, through foothills even more sere than the flats.
When he reached the crest of the pass, all he saw on the far side was another barren expanse.
The whole planet might be a desert. There were no real seasons. From the vantage of his main camp, the sun always set over a particular narrow mesa. The world had little or no axial tilt — no engine to stir up the weather. Orbital eccentricity alone contributed any suggestion of “summer” or “winter.” At perihelion, the average temperature climbed a degree or two higher than at aphelion, a simple function of the distance from the star to its blighted child.
Periodically Glenn explored other directions, with no better result. He always returned to the few hundred square miles he thought of as “his.” Someday he would strike out in a single direction and simply keep going, perhaps after a rain when the land would be at its most bountiful. The journey might kill him, but he would revive again and again until eventually he got somewhere, even if all he did was circle the globe back to the Sea of Gulfs.
But that quest was for some other year. He was not eager to die again so repeatedly. He had not been killed in almost thirty years, despite the harsh conditions. That was a victory. The condition of his body was his badge. A convenient suicide would remove the wrinkles from his leathery skin, heal the scars from falls or battles with resistant prey. But without those marks, he would be a blank screen on which Aaron McCandless had typed VICTIM.
That was not an impression he would tolerate. Prisoner or not, he was a master of this land.
Attuned as he was, he instantly spotted the spoor on the ground in front of him, though the impressions had been made in a thin layer of dust atop hard sandstone. The footprints were shorter and narrower than his, but they were human.
His heart pounded in a way it had not done in his entire exile. His hand grew so sweaty around the haft of his spear that he nearly dropped it.
“I knew you’d never let me be, McCandless,” he whispered.
All hesitation gone, he loped forward. The trail cut aimlessly across the flat. No attempt was being made to hide it. A speck of blood remained where the walker had passed too close to a porcupine bush. The stranger had little sense of desertcraft; no one would pass so close to such a shrub twice in a lifetime.
A line of trees — the only concentration of trees on the planet, as far as Glenn knew — became visible as he crested a rise. The trail straightened, leading Glenn without detour to the banks. He arrived in late afternoon. The first clouds, black as charcoal, had appeared over the Sea of Gulfs.
Fr
om a high bluff he peered down into the eroded channel. Knee-deep in a cobblestone-lined pool, in a spot destined to be inundated before the next dawn, stood a woman.
She was naked. Her outer thigh was still spotted with coagulated blood from the cut made by the porcupine bush, a sure sign that her nanodocs had been deactivated. She was gently washing away the clots. Body and hair dripping from a recent dunking, her expression was filled with the stunned, forlorn disbelief of a castaway.
Appearances could be deceiving, thought Glenn.
Finishing with the wound, she again dipped fully into the water and stepped, trailing rivulets, onto dry cobbles. She stumbled unsteadily to a patch of shade and sat down to rub her feet. Blisters dotted her soles.
No plants grew in the riverbed — the periodic flashfloods stole them away. The shade was that of a large “oak” that projected down from the bluff, its trunk not five paces from Glenn’s position. As the woman’s eyes adjusted to the reduced glare, she looked upward and, with a sudden jerk of her head, fastened her gaze on Glenn. She grew utterly still.
“Who are you?” After half a century of disuse, Glenn’s voice was a barely intelligible croak.
She shied back, eyes wide, all but bolting away. Glenn had to give her credit for a realistic human response. Were she a typical representative of society, she might well have never seen anyone as old and worn as he, arrayed with such long, matted hair and tangled, chest-length beard, wearing only a cowl of animal pelts scarcely fit for a barbarian. It still shocked him to look at his reflection in pools and see something as eroded as the land.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, hoping his Galactic Standard wasn’t too accented. “I’ve never seen anyone else on this planet. How did you get here?”