by Mike Moscoe
“This means…” Ray left the question hanging.
“Every white cell I got has changed beyond recognition. Couldn’t have an allergic reaction to save my life. Which, taken at face value, scares the hell out of me. We are supposed to be allergic to some stuff. Doesn’t matter. My lymph nodes and the white cells they’re pumping out will accept anything.”
“That can’t happen overnight!” Kat insisted.
“Right. Can’t. Did. You do the math,” Doc shot back.
“One of the viruses?”
“Maybe. All I got so far are fragments in our blood. I’m testing the atmosphere for complete samples.”
Ray mulled that over. Guesses. Just guesses. Like his dreams. He turned to Jeff and Harry. “You’ve heard what we’ve found. Something very strange happens to people who live on this planet, even just visit. What can you tell me?”
As Jeff opened his mouth, the older man placed a restraining hand on his elbow. “What can you tell me about this solar system?” Harry asked.
Kat pounced like a kitten on a ball of twine. “Star is only two and a half billion years old. The planet is estimated at less than two billion years old.”
“Early in its formation for such an abundance of life forms, don’t you think?” Harry drawled.
“And three different evolutionary tracks,” Doc added.
“On most life-appropriate planets, Earth included,” Kat said slowly, “tiny ocean life forms took most of the first two billion years just to get their acts together before venturing onto the land. So what makes this one so different?”
“Maybe because it was someone’s garden,” Harry offered. Ray started at his choice of imagery. Had he met the Gardener?
“Whose?” Mary shot back.
“I believe that is what we are trying to figure out,” Harry said with a wry smile. “It is possible, from my core samples, to surmise that three million years ago this planet was very nascent; nothing but one-cell critters. That changed real quick about two and a half million years ago. It appears the planet entered into some kind of warm, pleasant golden age a bit over two million years ago. That ended close to a million years ago, to be replaced by a strange seesaw as raging weather patterns alternated with periods of equilibrium. The past five hundred thousand years have seen the seesawing getting worse.”
“That’s in the core samples?” Ray had been looking for confirmation. He hadn’t expected to have it handed to him on a platter.
“Some say it is, myself included. Others disagree, insisting there is nothing there.” Harry turned his palms over in a dismissing gesture. “Since we have drawn them from only a small part of this continent, a very small area of this planet, I cannot refute the doubters with any authority.”
Ray sat forward in his chair. “Tell me about some of those bad-weather patterns. Major storm surges? Tidal waves?”
“I’ve drilled up evidence of six inches of sand twenty, thirty miles onto the Piedmont plain around Refuge and New Haven. Happened four or five times.”
“How strong were the mineral readings at the breakpoint between the end of the golden age and the beginning of the troubled years?” Ray went on.
“Don’t know. Unless I drilled through a major ore seam or an old river, metal on this planet is very hard to come by. Not enough tectonic action in its short history. Why?”
“Mary, you got any gear for very small samples?”
“Down to parts per billion. What do you have in mind?”
Did he dare say? “I bet if you find an area buried suddenly a million years ago, you’ll find a very rich mineral layer.”
“Want to say why?” Mary asked.
“Not yet. Any places like that near here, or do we have to go back to the coast?” Ray asked Harry.
The old man pulled a well-used map from his hip pocket, unfolded it and studied it, right hand massaging his chin. “The James River valley goes quite a ways inland. Much of it was flooded three, four times,” he said slowly. “Where the river hasn’t carried away the overburden, I could probably find that first layer.” He looked up, eyes bright and a smile forming. “I’d love to work with a few of your miners. Jeff told me what they did to a single hill. When can we start?”
“As soon as the boss wants us to,” Mary drawled. “By the way, Colonel, while we’re stacking up anomalies, I got one to throw on the pile.” Ray waited while Mary gnawed her lower lip.
“I lost nearly ten percent of my nanos yesterday. Normal attrition is less than one percent. I recovered ninety-seven percent of the nanos. But six percent of the ones I got back carried nothing and are unusable.” Ray raised an eyebrow. “The nanos were modified at their atomic level. Grapplers broken off, electric motors wrecked.”
“That’s impossible,” Kat insisted.
“Yep, impossible, but that’s what happened to my little metal wranglers. It’s like they’ve been in a fight. Only, neither the metal nor the mountain’s supposed to fight back.”
Unless the metal were fighting for its life, Ray thought, slumping in his chair. “Mary, work with Harry today. Get me a good spectrum from a million years back.”
“What are you looking for?” Mary asked.
“I have no idea. Lek, I want you to get the sky eyes back up. One over New Haven, another for Refuge, one circulating around the Covenanters.”
“You don’t trust the news media?” Kat asked.
“Let’s say I don’t trust them to know what they’re looking at, or what’s important. I want my own raw data feed.”
“I’ll patch it into the stuff we’re getting from Lek’s taps,” Kat said. “We’ll get you one consolidated intelligence report for tomorrow morning, Colonel.”
“Good.” Ray turned back to Lek. “While you’re working on other stuff, spend some time meditating on what a surveillance system or computer network might look like after we’ve had a million years to polish the technology. Any ideas?”
“No.”
“Me neither. But for the moment, assume something very high-tech grew over the million quiet years, and some of it is still humming.” Ray’s subordinates looked at each other, then at him. “We need an estimate of the situation to work from. I’m offering one, You have an alternate, I’m listening.”
“A million-year-old technology that’s been rusting for a long while. You know something we don’t?” Doc asked.
“Maybe. I’m not sure. Kat, fit the data to the curve. Tell me where my guess doesn’t fit.”
The young middie shook her head slowly. “There’s not enough data to conclude anything, sir.”
“Okay, I’ve stuck my neck out. Now you get out there and prove me wrong. By the way, Harry, before you go, would you let Doc take a picture of the inside of your skull?”
“Kind of a new-employee physical?” the old man grinned.
“Doc, I also want to spend some time on the table,” Ray said, getting to his feet. “You’ve got your assignments, everybody. Have at them. Oh, Lek, Mary, and I found an interesting pillar in a cave yesterday. Once you’ve got the sky eyes up, take a look at it; see if you can find anything electromagnetic about it.”
Ray walked over to the hospital with Doc and Harry. If he weren’t so dead on his feet, he might have been able to skip the cane entirely. Then again, maybe he was just being optimistic. Doc scanned Harry quickly, ending it with a whistle and a question. “You have many headaches?”
“When I was a kid. Not recently. Why?”
Doc motioned Harry and Ray over to look at his scan. “I’m finding most Santa Marians have some kind of growth in this section of the brain. Yours is one of the largest I’ve seen. The Colonel here sports a bigger one.” Ray nodded and Jerry pulled up his scan, as well as the kids’.
Harry frowned. “What do you make of it?”
“Right now,” Jerry said, “nothing. I can’t even figure out an approach.”
On that, Harry left and Ray took his place on the table, got comfortable, took a deep breath, and told Jerry, �
�Today we do a brain activity scan. I’ll think something, and you tell me what part of my brain lights up. I had a baseline done a while back.”
Doc fiddled with his station for a while. “Here’s that part of your file. Let’s start with the multiplication tables.”
“Seven times one is seven,” Ray began. He’d droned through the eights before Jerry called enough.
“I’m supposed to show you some dirty pictures. All I’ve got is a couple of boring inkblots.”
“I’m a married man, Doc. Going to be a daddy soon. I ought to be able to provide a few thoughts gratis.” Rita in her, folks’ garden, at the lake, on the ship.
“Nothing’s changed there, Colonel. Try a tactical problem.”
Ray went over the assault on the pass, trying for the umpteenth time to figure out how he could have gotten around Mary and her bag of surprises.
“Yeah, that’s a match, in spades,” Jerry said. “You’re dialed in. What did you want to show me?”
Ray thought of the Three. The soaring towers and purple gardens. The doctor whistled, started tapping his board like mad. Ray remembered the caverns of the woolly leg-legs, The art on the walls of the long tunnels. “Any change there, Doc?”
“None. I mean, yes. No. Keep doing whatever it is you’re doing.” Ray switched to the aeries of the spinners, dancing on the winds where gravity’s kiss was but a light caress.
“That one is a bit sensuous,” Doc observed.
“The thought of flying free always was a turn-on,” Ray explained softly.
“Want to tell me what’s going on here?”
“Got enough?”
“Yeah. Corpsman!” Doc shouted. “Wrestle me up the kids.” A lab-coated assistant nodded silently and left. “Okay, Colonel, what were you doing that made that little thing you shouldn’t have get all red and yellow from use?”
Ray swung himself off the table and ambled over to watch his own scans. The first half minute was familiar territory. Then the dark mass that scared Ray just to look at warmed up, showing itself off boldly in reds, pinks, and yellows. Other parts of Ray’s brain glowed in response to some stimuli from it. “I’m remembering things I never did.”
“Recalling dreams?”
Ray shook his head. “Too real. My dreams have a fuzziness around the edge. Nothing hazy here. I can read the writing on the walls, writing I’ve never seen before. I even understand the poetry. Understand all of its allusions and can call up more memories to back them up.” Ray tapped his head. “These memories are as real as anything I’ve lived.”
Jerry leaned back, knuckling his eyes with both fists as if to clear them of sleep, exhaustion, unacceptance, all of the above. “We’ve been trying to make data biostorage units. Every time we think they might be cost-effective, silicon comes up with a new growth spurt. And reading the data is slow.”
“I don’t know about that. All I know is I’ve just failed to disprove the hypothesis I presented this morning. I’ve got to face some things I didn’t want to even touch. Things I’ve been dismissing as dreams aren’t dreams at all. Certain experiences I and the kids had were very real. This planet is crazy. Maybe even crazier than I thought. Now I’ve got to start figuring out what to do about it. Certainly before tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah. ’cause if I can’t handle this crazy place by tonight, it’s not going to let me sleep again. And Doc, I am tired.”
A shake of the head was all the medication Jerry gave.
Ray dropped in on Kat before leaving the hospital/research center. She was elbow-deep in correlating Lek’s media and news dumps. “My college news was more interesting than this. Recipes! They actually put recipes on the front page of one. Doesn’t anything interesting ever happen around here?”
“Depends on what you consider interesting. Include a search on albinism.” Ray rubbed his temples for a moment. “Pain management ought to cover headaches. Hallucinations, any other mental health issues.”
“I saw something flash by about whirling dervishes or some kind of mystics among the Covenanters.”
“Right. Mysticism. Witch-hunts. Those kinds of things.”
Ray left as the kids were herded into Med Bay One for tests. The morning had left them happily grubby. A sky eyes took off as Ray strode for Barber’s office. Mary and the chief were head down over his station. They glanced up as Ray entered.
“Got a blimp due in by noon,” Barber said. “Another by supper. They’re loaded with ceramic feed and carbon bricks. You know anything about that?”
“I told San Paulo our help didn’t come free. Steal a blimp while one’s up here.”
“Any particular reason?” Mary asked.
“I may be bouncing a core sampling team all over the place.”
The chief leaned back in his chair. “Colonel, I’m as good as any old soldier at working in the dark. And I can process bullshit into mushrooms like anybody else. But that don’t mean I like it. Ready to talk?”
“Don’t know. How good are you at listening?”
“As in can I swallow six impossible things before breakfast?” the chief asked. Ray nodded. “Try me. I think I follow the cards you’ve put face up on the table. Can’t help but think you’ve got a few up your sleeve you ain’t talking about.”
Ray told them of the test Doc had just completed. “He’s checking the kids now. Asking them to remember about the Three. The scenes they saw in the cave.”
“Nice,” the chief said. “Instead of buying all those case files in college, just load it into your head.”
“What made you think of school?” Ray asked.
“Don’t know. Been dreaming about working on my masters.”
“In my dreams,” Ray said, “I meet what’s causing all this. Calls itself the Teacher. This whole planet was its school.”
Mary pursed her lips. “If you could make jump points on the gross scale and modify cells at the micro, why not use an entire planet to teach your young? Or your old, for that matter? Heard the old adage you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? Imagine what you could do with a planet for a classroom.”
The chief snorted ruefully. “I’ve served under some old mossbacks. Turkeys who hadn’t learned a thing since they hatched. Could spout all the new management words: “empowerment,” “results-oriented,” “shared visions.” Had the words but couldn’t do a damn thing with them. Couldn’t change at the gut level. Me, I figured I’d outlive the bastards.”
Mary nodded. “Met a few like those in the mines.”
“But what if everyone lives for hundreds, thousands of years?” Ray mused.
“Society either stagnates, or folks learn to change deep down, all through their lives. I know a few who did,” the chief agreed. “Took a damn painful boot in the ass to get their attention, to make them really want to do things different.”
“A planet might do that,” Mary agreed.
“Be fun watching it in action,” the chief grinned.
Ray shook his head. “Got a problem there. This thing thinks it knows all there is to know.”
“Oh, shit,” Barber breathed. “I’ve known a few like that. A real pain. What makes you think that?”
“Maybe just a dream. Maybe the Teacher has figured out a way into my brain.” Ray tapped his forehead. “You know, that thing in here Doc and I are working to understand. I think it puts me on the Teacher’s net.”
“Which is why you ventured your guess this morning,” the chief said. Ray nodded. “Okay, boss. What do you want from me?”
“Help Mary keep the base up. I’m not sure that when we tapped that hill, we didn’t piss the Teacher off big time.”
Barber shook his head. “Unsmart of a student.”
“Got any good ideas why people have taken to rioting in the streets?” Mary asked.
“I damn near was ready to riot last night in Refuge. All kinds of nasty feelings running around in my gut. No reason for them.” Mary pursed her lips. Ray shrugged and went on. “Let me
know what you’re making with the feed metals you’ve got.” Ray stood. “Start looking around the base for anything you’re willing to melt down and recycle to a higher priority. Life’s only going to get more interesting.”
His commlink interrupted him. “Colonel, Kat here. You want to see what we’ve got over here.”
“On my way.”
Ray walked briskly back to the hospital. The kids were bouncing off the walls in Med Bay One, so their tests must be done. Doc was head down over his board.
“Any surprises?” Ray called.
“Just like yours,” Jerry answered without looking up. “There’s got to be a pattern here somewhere. Hell, we still don’t have the human brain mapped, and now I’ve got more territory to confuse me.”
Kat and three other middies were keeping eight stations working full-time, hopping between chairs and chattering at light speed. “Another just lit off,” “I’ve got lots of movement but no action,” “But why isn’t any of this being reported?”
“What’s happening?” Ray asked, settling into a seat that apparently was out of the musical-chair competition.
“Oh, Colonel, good. We’re seeing movement of refugees out of the larger cities and into the towns and villages. Some are going smoothly. Others aren’t.”
“Show me.”
“First sky eye headed for New Haven,” Kat said. Aerial views flashed across a large screen. “We observed heavy congestion at the rail stations after a train pulled out.” Kat stopped at one scene. A train was just leaving; several dozen people in what looked like family groups scattered on foot from the station. “We didn’t hang around to follow any particular group, at least not at first. We wanted to check more trains, more stations. Lots of people traveling out. Empty trains going back.”
“Trains take up a lot of steel.” Ray knew he was changing the topic, but iron was supposedly just as hard to find as copper. What were these folks doing with trains?
“Rails are hardened ceramic. Trains are electric, using a third-rail system holding seawater to carry the electricity.”