Beyond the Sun

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “We have to report. Someone attacked us.” He spread his hands through the yellow dust that powdered every surface.

  “Not someone,” I said, my voice cracking and hoarse. “The plants.”

  “Plants don’t attack. Plants can’t think.”

  “These do.” The two factions pressed on my mind, filling my thoughts with growth. The jungle was winning. The forest retreating. For now.

  The governor lifted one hand in a futile gesture. Bites and stings marked his flesh. “We failed. I failed. The colonists will die.” He closed his eyes.

  I reached for his hand, needing the human contact to keep hold of my own humanity. The remnant of myself clung to a single thought. The colonists would arrive soon. They had to be warned away. They had to be saved.

  I dug in the twisted storage cabinets, pawing through the ruined equipment despite the seeping wounds on my hands. The jungle throbbed in my head, demanding my surrender. I ignored it, like I did people most of the time. The demand faded.

  The governor stood in the center of the room, face slack. His eyes were empty now. Nione danced with the moths around him, more plant than human now. The poison had changed her.

  It changed me. Patches of green marked my skin. But patches of brown sprouted, too, bark from the forest where the ants had left their marks. I shifted smashed electrical boards. Something collapsed in the atrium. No one screamed, not anymore. I pulled a case from the back of the storage cubby. I flipped open the latches. The emergency beacon inside was cushioned in foam, still in one piece. I turned it on just to be sure. The colonists had to be warned. They had to be saved. I packed the beacon back in the case.

  “We should go.” I hefted the case. Where would be safe? Not this building. Another crash sounded from down the hall. The jungle plants tore the human construct apart, piece by piece.

  The governor, I couldn’t remember his name, struggled to fit words together. “Shelter. By the landing pad.”

  I shifted the beacon to one hand, taking his hand in my other. The emergency shelter would be small enough that maybe the jungle hadn’t noticed. It would be stocked with food, water, the basics. We could wait there, leave the beacon listening for the colony ship.

  The man stumbled beside me. Nione skipped in circles around us, singing wordless songs to the white-winged creatures dancing around her head.

  *

  “Eden control? Please answer.”

  I scrambled out of the hammock I’d strung between two trunks. The beacon crackled with static. Had I imagined the voices?

  “Eden control, please come in.”

  I knelt on the earth between the massive trees. I flipped a switch on the beacon. “Hello?”

  “Is this Eden? What happened? We can’t get a reading on you.”

  I grimaced. The colony building and greenhouses were gone, utterly destroyed by the plants. The landing pad suffered the same fate. The emergency shelter stood at an angle, half buried in dirt but still accessible. Five of us survived. The governor, I’d dubbed him Sam, had completely lost his mind. He followed me like a puppy, digging in the dirt and singing nursery rhymes to himself.

  Nione and two younger staff had become hands for the jungle. Their skin was green, more plant than animal. Their hair turned to coils of vine. They watched me sometimes, standing for hours, just staring. They didn’t speak to me. They weren’t who they had been, they’d changed too much.

  I caught glimpses of others sometimes in the leaves of the canopy and between the massive trunks, but they weren’t human. They’d never been human. The plants learned, copying our form and the ability to move untethered to the soil. The jungle had spread up the hill where the colony greenhouses once stood.

  I’d checked there once. A few imported plants thrived, most were dead. The jungle insects fluttered over them constantly. I wouldn’t be surprised if the jungle figured out how to incorporate watermelons and tomatoes into its arsenal. I didn’t dare eat the fruit I found on the peach tree. It was deformed, like the tree, changed by Eden’s touch.

  “Are you there?”

  “You have to go back. Don’t land.”

  Static crackled between us for a long moment.

  “What happened?”

  “The plants, they’re sentient. They attacked. Wiped out the colony.”

  “We’ll send a shuttle to pick you up.”

  “No.” My denial was quick and certain. I rubbed a bark patch on my arm. Eden had tainted us. And if Eden’s rulers got loose among the docile plants of other worlds? Humans didn’t stand a chance. “Put Eden under quarantine. Don’t let anyone land here, ever. Set up warning beacons. Tell them it’s plague or radiation or whatever. Just don’t let anyone land here. And don’t ever, ever let anything leave.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  I did, all of it. I hoped they’d listen. I hoped Eden would be banned from contact. All it would take was one seed, one plant. I hoped whoever was in command of the colony ship would listen and believe.

  The plants had our technology. They’d figure it out eventually. Humanity had to be prepared for when the plants moved in.

  Erin Hoffman, best known for her Chaos Knight fantasy series from PYR, takes a departure here to look at colonists and humans through alien eyes. How would our world, lives, and goals look from that other perspective? Here’s one possibility . . .

  THE GAMBRELS OF THE SKY

  ERIN HOFFMAN

  Kelara is a galaxy.

  Her sunstar shape is familiar, myriad spreading arms an everlasting roof of light. But she is not the idea of a galaxy, the abstraction or distant quantum impression—she is every star, every planet, every cosmic duststorm that burns or bubbles in the vast elemental nothing. She is precisely 1,125,899,906,842,624 of these bodies. In a remote corner of her an electrical storm is brewing as five supernova collide in spectacular fashion. Elsewhere, there is an arrangement of stars whose hydrodynamic currents suggest a kind of consciousness, and she is pleased.

  Subroutine terminated.

  The words faded in and out from Kelara’s left eye as her ego came back online. Beside her, Ilar opened her eyes, disengaging from the link.

  “This is passable. You lean too much on g-type systems.”

  “Galaxies are not my specialization.”

  “We are looking for passion independent of specialization, Kelara. You know that.”

  “Really. I thought the synod was interested in obedience.”

  Ilar flickered, an ultraviolet rumination across her shoulders that indicated she was aware of but unmoved by Kelara’s insolence.

  “When will I be moved to another assignment?”

  “When your simulation is complete. The green district is quite looking forward to your findings. And they are concerned that Ma Emi is getting old.” The colonists aboard Hypatia might be most interested in uncovering Ix Relics or novel genetic structures evolved on Zakalwe, but a token effort at least would be made to absorb the culture of the indigenous Bissbanians. Kelara was the token, and recognized her disinterest in the project as evidence of Hypatia’s low estimate of Ma Emi’s value.

  So she ignored Ilar’s rebuke. “Will I be assigned a human?”

  “Humans are not your specialization.” Unspoken: species preference in a simulant is immoral.

  “They should have put someone on the bubble who had a passion for the Bissbanians.”

  “That would have represented a contaminating conflict of interest.”

  “Like my being assigned a human?” Kelara said.

  “Yes.” Ilar remained unmoved.

  “And yet the synod desires passion.”

  “It’s called ‘work’ for a reason, Kelara.”

  *

  The Brain is Wider than the Sky

  A small piece of Kelara is a goldfish.

  The goldfish is not an unnoticeable tax on her resources, but it is close. It operates in space sanctioned for personal use, not like Bruce. The fluid mechanics of the water surrounding it are
more interesting to simulate, but the goldfish is alive, and so its patterns have an ineffable charm. She was not enough of a philosopher to tell you exactly what differentiated them, a turn of meaning slender as syllable from sound, but different they were.

  There was something in the goldfish that fascinated a deep part of her; something about its simplicity coupled with how it retained integrity. Perhaps she should, as Ilar had often suggested, invest in some philosophy training. Yet intuition said that the human philosophies were incomplete, and she found android—especially simulant android—ones unbearable.

  Size measured in synapses was a funny thing. She could run herself and the goldfish simultaneously, or herself and Ma Emi, or the goldfish and Ma Emi. But not Bruce and herself. Or Ma Emi and Bruce.

  Kelara had no real idea of Bruce’s integrity, though he had been set up well in theory. It was too risky to simulate him here on the transport from mainship to the bubble, and so she had to content herself with the goldfish, its sensations, its reactions. A kind of meditation on its identity kept her busy until the pockmarked black lettering of the John Muir hove into view.

  She dismissed the goldfish as the transporter docked, and unfastened her restraints moments before the light bonged to announce that she was allowed to. The ship complained, threatened, but she ignored it. If the synod could ignore Ilar, and Ilar could ignore her, she could ignore a ship.

  The humid green scent of the bubble flooded her nose as she stepped off the gangplank. And another scent, an unfamiliar one, coming from the pale blue smoke that spiraled up out of the mud hut at the end of the brushed-steel pier.

  Ma Emi was baking. That’s what the humans would have called it anyway. Kelara had never seen her bake. She wished she had been able to record the patterns during the process that led up to the baking, but was also perversely pleased that her meeting with Ilar had made her miss it. Let the humans wait. If they were just going to shove another Bissbanian at her for her next assignment, she had no real interest in wrapping this one up. In a way, here she was among a fellow alien: Ma Emi, despite her people’s intensely social nature, denied contact with her fellow indigenous population; and Kelara, denied contact with human colonists: her creators, her ancestors.

  The door to the hut was open, but Kelara knocked on the threshold anyway. A soft whistle drew her inside. Ma Emi was opening shelled animals with a long knife. They belched vapor as she split them open. More already sat steaming on her low table; she’d made over two dozen, far too many for one of her kind to eat. Kelara reached back in her mind for the name of the crustaceans—ourani, she thought. Believed to grow bravery in children, they were rarely eaten by adults. Ma Emi must be experiencing maternal urges. As a Ma, she would likely never have had children of her own, but if not for the bubble, she would have lived in a village and been part caretaker to the children of her sisters.

  Ma Emi finished splitting and scraped the opened ourani into a bowl that had been lined with purple seaweed. Then she brought the bowl to the table and folded herself down next to it. She gestured with a webbed hand.

  “Can you eat?”

  “I can pretend.”

  “Pretend, then.”

  They ate, and Kelara extended her perception array perfunctorily. There was little new data; her projections that Ma Emi was baking to assuage her desire for a brood proved correct, but the hypothesis had been so simple as to border on insulting. She activated her Ma Emi simulation, and fell into the rhythms of speaking as if she were another Ma of a neighboring village.

  *

  A Narrow Fellow in the Grass

  Kelara is a small boy named Bruce. He is nine years old. His favorite thing is an ancient homeworld artifact called Super Mario Brothers. He is playing it in the spidergrass of the patch, a hundred meters or so of dry land that holds the hut out of the swamp.

  Bruce is fixated on this level of the game, an underwater one. He has beaten it before, but he’s never gotten all of the coins. It’s a secret level, which makes it even better. But the coins are hard to get, and he hates the white squids. He might even hate them more than snakes. He’d come on across a snake once in the spidergrass, a giant one with a yellow head, and he’d had nightmares about it for weeks.

  Thinking about the snake distracts him, and he doesn’t swim fast enough. He gets sucked to the bottom of the screen, and he dies.

  He’s mad, but only for a second, because a noise from behind makes him jump up, afraid it’s a snake. But it’s not. It’s a tall thing, as big as his mom, and it has eyes and hands like she does, but it’s covered in scales, and deep cuts on either side of its neck puff in and out as it breathes. It is way, way scarier than a snake.

  Subroutine terminated.

  Kelara turned then, met the dark pearlescent spheres of Ma Emi’s eyes. The nanosecond that it took to disengage from Bruce’s simulation was too long to activate and project perception routines.

  *

  There’s a Certain Slant of Light

  Kelara is herself. She is trying to convince Ma Emi that Bruce should not be reported.

  Even as Kelara and the synod studied Ma Emi, Ma Emi studied humans, and their android tools. She would know as she saw Kelara hunched in the grass, talking to herself, that she had an unauthorized simulation.

  “Please don’t tell them. Please,” Kelara said.

  The Bissbanians, who called themselves Elun after their own name for their mudball of a planet, did not have a concept of “please”. Kelara was relying on Ma Emi’s exposure to humanity to convey the strength of her request. Possibly she was also telling Ma Emi that she, Kelara, was the only friend she had.

  “Why did you simulate a human child?” Ma Emi asked. She sat on the floor of her hut with a feathered chicken-like beast on her lap, stroking its feathers. “Why not an Elu child?”

  There was no good answer, and Kelara thought Ma Emi knew it. “I’ve been working on him a long time.” It was true, and also not an answer.

  “And what happens when I tell them about him?”

  “They’ll delete him.”

  Ma Emi looked at her. The amphibious eyes of the Elun were notoriously difficult to read, even for another Elun. Underwater they could communicate emotion with pheromones, so there was little need for facial muscles, but here above the water they were nearly unreadable.

  In Emi’s eyes, she tried not to think of the yellow-headed snake. It was difficult. It had actually been difficult to not think of the snake ever since he’d had that incident. She knew this meant that Bruce’s identity had contaminated her already, had probably compromised the assignment, but she didn’t care. Kelara looked away, and tried not to imagine the snake.

  A kernel of fear had developed in him, rare and arising as they sometimes did. The image had passed in front of him early in the simulation, had echoed off a cluster of neurons and formed a pattern that he could not eradicate on his own. And since he had been thinking of it when he saw Emi, it had escaped out of him and into her.

  “I have no children of my own,” Ma Emi said. “I never will.”

  Kelara looked back at her. The eyes, dark and light around the edges as a fine sherry, bored into her like the distance in the look of death.

  In Anthony Cardno’s tale, when a deep space communications hub loses the satellite which provides their only communications link with Earth, the team must scramble to make repairs. Then a deeper threat appears on the horizon. Can they finish their mission and make it back to safety in time?

  CHASING SATELLITES

  ANTHONY R. CARDNO

  How the hell did this happen!”

  Zimmerman was ranting at Werder, the new kid, when Milne reported for his shift in the communications hub. One of the tallest humans on Orpheus, Zimmerman would tower over the shorter, stockier Werder even if the kid hadn’t been sitting rigidly at his console.

  “How the hell did what happen?” Milne asked, around a yawn born of too little sleep. Parenting a tween-age child on Orpheus was no easier than it
would have been back on Earth.

  “We’ve lost contact with Earth,” both men replied, the anger in Zimmerman’s voice in rough counterpoint to the timidity in Werder’s.

  “How long ago?” Stifling his second yawn, Milne crossed to the beverage station for some coffee. Wu, his shift partner, was already there looking equally exhausted. Milne cocked an eyebrow at him, silently asking another heavy drinking night? Wu’s strained smile was answer enough.

  “Six hours.” Werder’s answer went a long way to shaking Milne’s lethargy. Wu’s eyes widened a bit, too.

  “Six hours! You didn’t call me. Who did you call?”

  “Zimmerman.” Werder shot a sideways look at his trainer. Zimm puffed his cheeks out like he was going to interrupt, then thought better of it. “He said it was probably just solar interference on their end, like the last time, and that I should log and monitor it. So I did.”

  “Okay, but for six hours? You didn’t think to call it in again after, say, hour two? The last time this happened, it only lasted an hour and a half.”

  “I . . . uh . . .” Werder turned slightly red, making the freckles on his face stand out even more, and mumbled something Milne had no problem understanding.

  “You. Fell. Asleep.” He put the half-made coffee down with a bit more force than he’d intended and stalked to his own console, bringing it online with a series of swift, sure finger movements. “Kid, transfer me the data, so I can figure out how much of a problem we have.”