I wish I could sleep. I want to sleep and forget about everything, but I can’t, tired though I still am. The suit can’t help me there, either. I don’t even remember dreaming, as though that facility, too, is damaged.
Maybe I’m the artificial one, not the suit, which doesn’t try to pretend. People have said I’m cold, which hurt me; which still hurts me. All I can do is feel what I can and tell myself it’s all anyone can ask of me.
I turn over painfully, face away from the treacherous stars. I close my eyes and my mind to their remindful study, and try to sleep.
'Wake up'
I feel very sleepy, the rhythms all wrong, tired again.
'Time to go; come on.'
I come to, rubbing my eyes, breathing through my mouth to get rid of the stale taste in it. The dawn looks cold and perfect, very thin and wide through this inhospitable covering of gas. And the slope is still here, of course.
It’s the suit’s turn to walk, so I can rest on. We redeploy the legs and arms again, the chest deflates. The suit stands up and starts walking, gripping me round the calves and waist, taking the bulk of my weight off my throbbing feet.
The suit walks faster than I do. It reckons it is only twenty percent stronger than the average human. Something of a come-down for it. Even having to walk must be galling for it (if it feels galled).
If only the AG worked. We’d do the whole trip in a day. One day.
We stride out over the sloped plain, heading for the edge. The stars disappear slowly, one by one, washed out of the wide skies by the sunlight. The suit gains a little speed as the light falls harder on its trailed photopanels. We stop and squat for a moment, inspecting a discoloured rock; it is just possible, if we find an oxide of some sort… but the stone holds no more trapped oxygen than the rest, and we move on.
'When and if we get back, what will happen to you?'
'Because I’m damaged?' the suit says. 'I imagine they’ll just throw the body away, it’s so badly damaged.'
'You’ll get a new one?'
'Yes, of course.'
'A better one?'
'I expect so.'
'What will they keep? Just the brain?'
'Plus about a metre of secondary column and a few subunits.'
I want us to get there. I want us to be found. I want to live.
We come to the edge of the escarpment about mid-morning. Even though I am not walking I feel very tired and sleepy, and my appetite has disappeared. The view ought to be impressive, but I’m only aware that it’s a long, difficult way down. The escarpment lip is crumbly and dangerous, cut with many runnels and channels, which lower down become steep, shadowy ravines separating sharp-edged ridges and jagged spires. Scree spreads out beyond, far below, in the landscape at the cliff’s foot; it is the colour of old, dried blood.
I am suitably depressed.
We sit on a rock and rest before making our way down. The horizon is very clear and sharp. There are mountains in the far distance, and many broad, shallow channels on the wide plain that lies between the mountains and us.
I don’t feel well. My guts ache continually and breathing deeply hurts too, as though I’ve broken a rib. I think it is just the taste of the recycler’s soup that is putting me off eating, but I’m not certain. There are a few stars in the sky.
'We couldn’t glide down, could we?' I ask the suit. That’s how we got through the atmosphere, after all. The suit used the minuscule amount of AG it had left, and somehow got the tattered photopanel sheet to function as a parachute.
'No. The AG is almost certain to fail completely next time we try it, and the parachute trick… we’d need too much space, too much drop to ensure deployment.'
'We have to climb?'
'We have to climb.'
'All right, we’ll climb.' We get up, approach the edge.
Night again. I am exhausted. So tired, but I cannot sleep. My side is tender to the touch and my head throbs unbearably. It took us the whole afternoon and evening to get down here to the plains, and we both had to work at it. We nearly fell, once. A good hundred-metre drop with just some flakes of slatey stone to hold on to until the suit kicked a foothold. Somehow we made it down without snagging and tearing further the photopanels. More good luck than skill, probably. Every muscle seems to hurt. I’m finding it hard to think straight. All I want to do is twist and turn and try to find a comfortable way to lie.
I don’t know how much of this I can take. This is going to go on for a hundred days or more, and even if the still undiscovered leak doesn’t kill me I feel like I’m going to die of exhaustion. If only they were looking for us. Somebody walking in a suit on a planet sounds hard to find, but shouldn’t be really. The place is barren, homogeneous, dead and motionless. We must be the only movement, the only life, for hundreds of kilometres at least. To our level of technology we ought to stand out like a boulder in the dust, but either they aren’t looking or there’s nobody left to look.
But if the base still exists, they must see us eventually, mustn’t they? The sats can’t spend all their time looking outwards, can they? They must have some provision for spotting enemy landings. Could we have just slipped through? It doesn’t seem possible.
I look at my photographs again. They appear a hundred at a time on the viewer. I press one and it blooms to fill the little screen with its memories.
I rub my head and wonder how long my hair will grow. I have a silly but oddly frightening vision of my hair growing so long it chokes me, filling the helmet and the suit and cutting out the light, finally asphyxiating me. I’ve heard that your hair goes on growing after you die, and your nails too. I wonder that — despite one or two of the photographs, and their associated memories — I haven’t felt sexually aroused yet.
I curl up, foetal. I am a little naked planet of my own, reduced to the primitive within my own stale envelope of gas. A tiny moonlet of this place, on a very low, slow, erratic orbit.
What am I doing here?
It’s as if I drifted into this situation. I didn’t ever think about fighting or doing anything risky at all, not until the war came along. I agreed it was necessary, but that seemed obvious; everybody thought so, everybody I knew, anyway. And volunteering, agreeing to take part; that too seemed… natural. I knew I might die, but I was prepared to risk that; it was almost romantic. Somehow it never occurred to me it might entail privation and suffering. Am I as stupid as those throughout history — those I’ve always despised and pitied — who’ve marched off to war, heads full of noble notions and expectations of easy glory, only to die screaming and torn in the mud?
I thought I was different. I thought I knew what I was doing.
'What are you thinking about?' the suit asks.
'Nothing.'
'Oh.'
'Why are you here?' I ask it. 'Why did you agree to come with me?'
The suit — officially as smart as me, and with similar rights — could have gone its own way if it wanted. It didn’t have to come to war.
'Why shouldn’t I come with you?'
'But what’s in it for you?'
'What’s in it for you?'
'But I’m human; I can’t help feeling like this. I want to know what you think the machines' excuse is.'
'Oh, come on; you’re a machine too. We’re both systems, we’re both matter with sentience. What makes you think we have more choice than you in the way we think? Or that you have so little? We’re all programmed. We all have our inheritance. You have rather more than us, and it’s more chaotic, that’s all.'
There is a saying that we provide the machines with an end, and they provide us with the means. I have a fleeting impression the suit is about to trot out this hoary adage.
'Do you really care what happens in the war?' I ask it.
'Of course,' it says, with what could almost be a laugh in its voice. I lie back and scratch. I look at the camera.
'I’ve got an idea,' I tell it. 'How about I find a very bright picture and wave it about n
ow, in the dark?'
'You can try it, if you want.' The suit doesn’t sound very encouraging. I try it anyway, then my arm gets tired waving the camera around. I leave it propped up against a rock, shining into space. It looks very lonely and strange, that picture of a sunny orbital day, sky and clouds and glittering water, bright hulls and tall sails, fluttering pennants and dashing spray, in this dead and dusty darkness. It isn’t all that bright though; I suspect reflected starlight isn’t much weaker. It would be easy to miss, and they don’t seem to be looking anyway.
'I wonder what happens to us all in the end,' I yawn, sleepy at last.
'I don’t know. We’ll just have to wait and see.'
'Won’t that be fun,' I murmur, and say no more.
The suit says this is day twenty.
We are in the foothills on the far side of the mountains we saw in the distance from the escarpment. I am still alive. The pressure in the suit is reduced to slow down the loss rate from the leak, which the suit has decided is not a hole as such, but increased osmosis from several areas where too much of the outer layers ablated when we were falling. I am breathing pure oxygen now, which lets us bring down the pressure significantly. It might be coincidence, but the food from the recycler tube tastes better since we switched to pure gas.
There is a dull ache all the time from my belly, but I am learning to live with it. I’ve stopped caring, I think. I’ll live or I’ll die, but worrying and complaining won’t improve my chances. The suit isn’t sure what to make of this. It doesn’t know whether I have given up hope or just become blasé about the whole thing. I feel no guilt at keeping it guessing.
I lost the camera.
I was trying, eight days ago, to take a photograph of a strange, anthropomorphous rock formation in the high mountains, when the camera slipped from my fingers and fell into a crevice between two great boulders. The suit seemed almost as unhappy as I was; normally it could have lifted either of those rocks into the air, but even together the two of us couldn’t budge either of them.
My feet are hard and calloused, now, which makes walking a lot easier. I am becoming hardened generally. I’ll be a better person when I come out of this, I’m sure. The suit makes dubious noises when I suggest this.
I’ve seen some lovely sunsets recently. They must have been there all the time, but I didn’t notice them. I make a point of watching them now, sitting up to observe the sweep and trace of trembling, planetary air and the high clouds wisping and curling, coming and going, levels and layers of the wrapping atmosphere shifting through its colours and turning like smooth, silent shells.
There is a small moon I hadn’t noticed either. I put the external glasses on as high as they will go and sit looking at its grey face, when I can find it. I rebuked the suit for not reminding me the planet had a moon. It told me it hadn’t thought it was important.
The moon is pale and fragile looking, and pocked.
I have taken to singing songs to myself. This annoys the suit intensely, and sometimes I pretend that’s one of the major rewards of such vocal self-indulgence. Sometimes I think it really is, too. They are very poor songs, because I am not very good at making them up, and I have a terrible memory for other people’s. The suit insists my voice is flat as well, but I think it’s just being mean. Once or twice it has retaliated by playing music very loudly through my headphones, but I just sing louder and it gives in. I try to get it to sing along with me, but it sulks.
'Oh once there was a space-man,
And a happy man was he.
Flew through the big G,
And really saw it all, yes,
But then one day, I’m afraid,
He happened to trip up,
Stumbled on a pla-anet
And landed in the dirt.
It wouldn’t really have been so bad,
But the worst was yet to come;
His one and only companion
Was a suit that da da dum.
The suit it was a shit-bag
And thought the man a lout,
And what it really wanted
Was to be inside-out.
(chorus:)
Inside-out, inside-out, inside inside-out,
Inside-out, inside-out, inside inside-out!'
And so on. There are others, but they are mostly to do with sex, and so fairly boring; colourful but monotonous.
My hair is growing. I have a thin beard.
I have started masturbating, though only every few days. It is all recycled, of course. I claim the suit as my lover. It is not amused.
I miss my comforts, but at least sex can be partially recreated, whereas all the rest seem unreal, no more than dreams. I have started dreaming. Usually it is the same dream; I am on a cruise of some sort, somewhere. I don’t know what form of transport I’m on, but somehow I know it’s moving. It might be a ship, or a seaship, or an airship, or a train… I don’t know. All that happens is that I walk down a fleecy corridor, passing plants and small pools. Some sort of scenery is going by outside, when I can see outside, but I’m not paying very much attention. It might be a planet seen from space, or mountains, or desert, it might even be underwater; I don’t care. I wave to some people I know. I am eating something savoury to tide me over to dinner, and I have a towel over my shoulder; I think I’m going for a swim. The air is sweet and I hear some very soft and beautiful music which I almost recognize, coming from a cabin. Wherever, whatever it is I am in, it is travelling very smoothly and quietly, without sound or vibration or fuss; secure.
I’ll appreciate all that if I ever see it again. I’ll know then what it is to feel so safe, so pampered, so unafraid and confident.
I never get anywhere in that dream. I’m always simply walking, each and every time I have it. It is always the same, always as sweet; I always start and finish in the same place, everything is always the same; predictable and comforting. Everything is very sharp and clear. I miss nothing.
Day thirty. The mountains way behind us, and me — us — walking along the top of an ancient lava tunnel. I’m looking for a break in the roof because I think it’ll be fun to walk along within the tunnel itself- it looks big enough to walk inside. The suit says we aren’t heading in exactly the right direction for the base, following the tunnel, but I reckon we’re close enough. It indulges me. I deserve to be indulged; I can’t curl up like a little ball at night any more. The suit decided we were losing too much oxygen each time we melded the limbs and inflated the suit at night, so we’ve stopped doing that. I hated feeling trapped, and unable to scratch, at first, but now I don’t mind so much. Now I have to sleep with my legs in its legs and my arms in its arms.
The lava tunnel curves away in the wrong direction. I stand looking at it as it wiggles away into the distance, up a great slope to a distant, extinct shield volcano. Wrong way, damn it.
'Let’s get down and head in the right direction, shall we?' the suit says.
'Oh, all right,' I grumble. I get down. I’m sweating. I wipe my head inside the helmet, rubbing it up and down, like an animal scratching. 'I’m sweating,' I tell it. 'Why are you letting me sweat? I shouldn’t be sweating. You shouldn’t be letting me sweat. You must be letting your attention wander. Come on; do your job.'
'Sorry,' the suit says, in an unpleasant tone. I think it should take my comfort a little more seriously. That’s what it’s there for, after all.
'If you want me to get out and walk, I will,' I tell it.
'That won’t be necessary.'
I wish it would suggest a rest. I feel weak and dizzy again, and I could feel the suit doing most of the work as we got down from the roof of the lava tunnel. The pain in my guts is back. We start walking over the rubble-covered plain once more. I feel like talking.
'Tell me, suit, don’t you wonder if it’s all worth it?'
'If what’s all worth what?' it says, and I can hear that condescending tone in its voice again.
'You know; living. Is it worth all the… bother?'
&
nbsp; 'No.'
'No?'
'No, I don’t ever wonder about it.'
'Why not?' I’m keeping my questions short as we walk, conserving energy and breath.
'I don’t need to wonder about that. It’s not important.'
'Not important?'
'It’s an irrelevant question. We live; that’s enough.'
'Oh. That easy, huh?'
'Why not?'
'Why?'
The suit is silent after that. I wait for it to say something, but it doesn’t. I laugh, wave both our arms about. 'I mean, what’s it all about, suit? What does it all mean?'
'What colour is the wind? How long is a piece of string?'
I have to think about that. 'What’s string?' I have to ask finally, suspecting I’ve missed something.
'Never mind. Keep walking.'
Sometimes I wish I could see the suit. It’s weird, now that I think about it, not being able to see who I’m talking to. Just this hollow voice, not unlike my own, sounding in the space between the inside of my helmet and the outside of my skull. I would prefer a face to look at, or even just a single thing to fix my attention on.
If I still had the camera I could take a photograph of us both. If there was water here I could gaze at our reflection.
The suit is my shape, extended, but its mind isn’t mine; it’s independent. This perplexes me, though I suppose it must make sense. But I’m glad I chose the full 1.0 intelligence version; the standard 0.1 type would have been no company at all. Perhaps my sanity is measured by the placing of a decimal point.
Night. It is the fifty-fifth night. Tomorrow will be the fifty-sixth day.
How am I? Difficult to say. My breathing has become laboured, and I’m sure I’ve become thinner. My hair is long now and my beard quite respectable, if a little patchy. Hairs fall out, and I have to squirm and pull to get an arm into the body of the suit to poke the hairs into the waste unit each night, or they itch. I am woken up at night by the pain inside me. It is like a little life itself, pawing and scraping to get out.
Sometimes I dream a lot, sometimes not at all. I have given up singing. The land goes on. I had forgotten planets were so big. This one’s smaller than standard, and it still seems to go on and on without end. I feel very cold, and the stars make me cry.
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