Solaris Rising: The New Solaris Book of Science Fiction
Page 32
“We’ll go through the fields to the location of puffball prime, as I call it,” Dupré said, and then for the benefit of Elana, “It’s the nearest puffball to the manse. They go off twice a day, and it’s quite spectacular. We should just be in time to catch the second eruption.”
They rode on the flat-bed of a rickety tractor, bales of kreen doubling as stolid cushions. Christopher steered the tractor along the narrow lanes between the purple fields, Alain Dupré riding beside him in a jerry-rigged frame containing his wheelchair.
“I still like to get out and about,” he explained. “And an eruption is one of the highlights of the day.”
Cygni B had set, while Cygni A still rode high in the sky. Karenia was commencing its long, slow swing around its primary sun: the period of total daylight was coming to an end. Soon, in a matter of days, Karenia would move away from between the suns and around the back of Cygni A, and the planet would face the immense darkness of space every night. Then the people of the colony world would experience a period, lasting some ten days, of total darkness, sixteen hours out of thirty two. The colonists called this period True Night.
“It’s a special time,” the old man called over his shoulder to Elana, prompted by her question about True Night. “I suppose it’s natural that we should come to see True Night as special, occurring as it does only every eighteen Terran months, but we take our lead from the Yanth. It’s a kind of festival for us, and for them too: we share the same space along the river, mix freely... It’s quite something.”
Once, sixty years ago, Loftus had caught a fleeting glimpse of the planet’s native, semi-sentient species immediately following a period of True Night. They were small, blue, upright lizards – or that was the approximation he made at the time – perhaps a metre tall and, like their Terran analogue, fleet of movement. They possessed a rudimentary language and for much of the time dwelled in great catacombs underground, emerging only during True Night and the periods of twilight on either side.
Dupré said, “They might look like lizards, but really they’re much more like mammals. They have warm blood, they give birth to live young, not eggs, and have a kind of fur growing from the base of their body scales. They have a complex social structure, too. The most comprehensive xenological study done, way back, drew parallels with our australopithecines. Anyway, they celebrate True Night by flooding from their dwellings and consuming the fruit buds of the kreen crops.”
Elana said, “And it’s this consumption, when evacuated, which seeds the land for the next crop?”
Dupré smiled. “That’s right. You’ve done your homework. So the cycle continues, and however unlikely it is, the people of the Expansion are in debt to these tiny, rarely seen troglodyte creatures. Or rather, indebted to the seeds they shit out.” Dupré winked as he said this, and Loftus suppressed a smile.
They bumped along in silence for another fifteen minutes, before Dupré pointed and said, “Ah... there it is.”
Loftus followed the direction of the patriarch’s wavering finger. They had come over the crest of a small rise and before them spread a great purple plain dotted with kiln houses, all distorted and part-obscured by a diaphanous lavender haze. Half a kilometre ahead Loftus made out the hemispherical dome of a puffball, perhaps ten metres across, swelling from the surrounding fields like an ugly grey goitre.
“The eruption will be triggered by the rising heat of the afternoon,” the old man said. “Once a certain internal temperature is reached, it’s explosion time.”
Dupré himself had taken Loftus to witness the eruption of a puffball sixty years ago, the day before he was due back aboard the mothership. He’d marvelled at the spectacular explosion, but had regretted missing True Night a few days later and the consequent alien ceremony.
This time he would witness everything, the eruption and the festivities at True Night – and the guilt that he would be bringing the colonists’ way of life to an end would be compounded.
Dupré was saying, “The puffballs and the kreen exist in a symbiotic relationship. The spores of the puffball give nourishment to the kreen plants, and the kreen, in turn, rot back into the earth and compost the puffballs. Of course, we’re careful to ensure that when we harvest the kreen, we return a percentage of it to the fields.”
Christopher brought the tractor to a halt on the lane fifty metres from the domed puffball. No kreen grew in the vicinity, and they had a grandstand view of the swollen growth.
Loftus watched Elana. She was staring eagerly at the puffball, like a child anticipating fireworks.
They had discussed his mission to Karenia before light-out aboard the mothership, and Loftus had been angered by her simple acceptance of the inevitable. He wondered if it were her youth, her belief in the manifest destiny of the human race, which sanctioned her pragmatism: so a way of life on a colony world would come to an end, and families would be torn apart, but the colony had served its purpose in the scheme of things…
Paradoxically it was he, Loftus, the Omega-Gen company man, whose conscience was riddled with doubt and pre-emptive remorse.
The patriarch’s excited commentary brought him back to the present.
“Listen. Hear that? It’s the rind, splitting in the heat. Just seconds away from blowing.”
Loftus turned his attention to the puffball. Under immense internal pressure, the grey skin of the dome was swelling, splitting. As they watched, a loud crack like the report of a rifle split the air and the apex of the puffball detonated, the flesh lacerating as a vast cloud of purple spores shot into the sky in a plume hundreds of metres high.
Laughing, they watched the spores spread and drift and rain down around them, like lilac confetti, glittering and flickering in the sunlight.
Dupré breathed deeply, and as Loftus watched him he thought he saw a revitalising glow bringing colour to the old man’s cheeks.
Loftus pulled a wipe from his pocket and passed it to Elana. Already he could feel the membrane at work in his throat and nasal passages, expelling the powdery spores.
A thick, mauve gunk was running from Elana’s nose, spreading along her top lip. She mopped up the mess, pulling a face. Feeling a tickle below his nose, Loftus put a finger to one nostril and blew hard, spraying the ground with purple snot, then repeated the process with the other side. He nodded to Elana, who was filming him, and said, “They call it the bushman’s handkerchief.”
Nearby, Dupré giggled at them. “It does have the effect of making one rather... light-headed,” the patriarch said. “Even, I venture, euphoric.”
Elana turned to him. “What did the first settlers here make of the puffballs?” she asked.
Dupré was watching the slowly falling spore mist with rheumy eyes. Loftus wondered whether that was an effect of the spores themselves or pity for those first settlers. He turned and smiled at Elana, at the millions of viewers who would watch her documentary in the years to come.
“The first colonists worked for an exploration company out of Mars,” the old man said. “It was a second-rate, cost-cutting venture that sent out ill-equipped colony teams on the cheap.” He shrugged. “They found Karenia and studied the biology. The chemists gave the place the all clear. The spores didn’t seem anything other than a cause of the sniffles and a pretty optical effect. It was only forty, fifty years later that the effects of the spores began to manifest. Just as they eat away at the lining of the gut of the Yanth, they attack the moist membranes of our lungs and throat, leaching virus-like particles into our bloodstream.”
“Colonists began dying,” Elana supplied.
“They succumbed to a spectrum of gradual wasting diseases and neurological dysfunctions and died within six months of first presenting symptoms. Few lived beyond about forty years. The colony faced evacuation, but then some of the biochemical studies showed interesting results. Omega-Gen bought out the original exploration company and followed up the early, somewhat crude studies. They found that the kreen, or rather extracts from it, helped in
the treatment of certain cancers. At the same time they found a gene tweak that allowed people to live here without full biohazard suits, so that each generation, when receiving the splice, had immunity from the deadly effects of the spores. What they couldn’t do, of course, was prevent the colonists developing a biological dependency, one similar to the Yanth’s; that dependency is genetic: just as the gene-splice protected us from the spores, it bound us to them.”
And therein lay the irony of the situation, Loftus thought. The colonists were dependent on the spores, but the spores could not be synthesised, and they broke down within a day or two of release, so the colonists could never travel off-world. They were tied to Karenia.
Dupré was saying, for the benefit of the viewers who would one day watch Elana’s documentary, “Not long after Omega-Gen began taking the kreen, one of their chemists chanced on a miraculous discovery: a variant of the chemical that stopped cancer cells multiplying and allowed normal body cells to divide beyond the telomere-shortening limit, so that subject primates tended to stay young and live beyond their normal span. It wasn’t long before the drug was tested on humans, and so extended longevity was achieved.”
A silence fell then, and Loftus considered what Dupré had left unspoken…
A short time later they arrived at the kiln house. Christopher lifted his father from the tractor and propelled the wheelchair into the cavernous shadow of the building.
Loftus followed, taking in the heady aroma of dried kreen.
The kiln house was like a vast timber barn, packed with lines of funnel-shaped vats underneath each of which was an oil-fuelled heater. The heat was intense, and workers, naked to the waist, transferred tangled bundles of kreen from the back of tractors and pitch-forked them into the vats.
Dupré led Loftus and Elana through the open-ended barn and indicated a conveyor belt onto which the funnels discharged the desiccated remains of the kreen plant, a mounded mix of blue-green fibres and grey ash. He talked them through every stage of the plant’s harvest and treatment, Elana switching between paying close attention and wandering off for establishing shots and different perspectives for the final edit.
Loftus moved away, heading for the sunlight. He emerged from the furnace heat of the kiln house, into the relative cool of the day, and leaned against the timber frame.
He wondered if it had been the sight of the kiln house workers and the knowledge that this scene would be multiplied a million-fold across the face of the planet that brought the reality of the situation into stark relief.
In a matter of months all this would cease to be; an entire way of life, a culture with its traditions and rituals built up over two centuries, would be no more.
And here he was, their Judas, welcomed into the home of an old friend only to tell them that all this was over.
He sensed movement beside him, and turned. Elana was watching him, with her documentary eyes: he wondered how long she had been filming him.
She walked away and swept her head in an arc, taking in the lie of the land, the turquoise crops of kreen overlaid with the gauzy mist of the puffball spores, and commenced a portentous voice-over.
“Tragedy compounds tragedy, here on Karenia. The colonists are tied to their planet by their dependency on the spores that cannot be synthesised. Also, they are doomed to live lives as did our forbears: four score and ten, on average. The tragic fact is this: the terrible price the colonists must pay for their dependency is that their metabolism is rendered immune to the effects of the anti-ageing drug, itself a derivative of the spore-kreen symbiosis.”
Elana turned, suddenly, to face Loftus. She was perhaps five metres away, staring at him intently. “And as if that were not tragedy enough, this man must tell them that their way of life here on Karenia is coming to an end.”
Despite a sudden flare of anger, Loftus played his part, an actor in a docu-drama that would enthral millions. Pained, he turned and walked slowly into the kiln house.
Dupré lifted his hand in a genial wave. “Ah, there you are, Edward. How about we get back and rest up before dinner this evening?”
Loftus smiled and agreed, unable to bring himself to look his host in the eye.
He excused himself early from the table again that night and walked alone through the grounds of the Dupré manse. He stopped frequently to look at the patterns of whorls on the bark of a native tree, the fruiting bodies bulging sticky and pearl-white on a network of roots spread across the ground, the dusting of spores on the surface of a small pool... The buzzing and whistling of native wildlife filled his ears, swelling and cutting off to a pattern that wasn’t quite a pattern.
He emerged on a trail that took him down towards the settlement of Turballe. The first building he encountered was a chapel, its wooden board-walls painted white, its tin roof patched orange with rust.
In the chapel grounds, each grave was marked with a small engraved slab set into the crusty turf.
He had passed this way before on previous visits, a landmark that indicated the edge of town.
The Dupré family had one corner of the cemetery to themselves. The slabs here were well-tended, the vegetation trimmed back, the surfaces scraped and swept clean. At first, Loftus did not find what he sought, but of course... she had married, changed her name to Carson.
Helen Carson.
He knelt, reached out, ran a finger along the grooves of her name on the stone’s surface.
Three days. That was all it had been. All the Omega-Gen schedule had permitted before he was shuttled away from the planet. Three days.
So many what ifs, so many what might have beens.
He straightened, turned, and saw movement in the chapel doorway, a shadow, a shape.
Catherine, the wife of Christopher Dupré’s son.
Loftus stared at her, and inevitably his eyes were drawn to the bulge of her belly.
He turned, took a stumbling step, and then was out of the graveyard, back on the trail past sticky fruiting bodies and purple-skinned pools, breathing heavily the air that was thick with heady scents and spores, gasping.
He turned and stared, but the chapel was lost to jungle, the trail behind him empty.
More slowly, he headed back up to the manse.
Elana must have been watching out for his return, for she soon joined him in their room. They closed the shutters on the semi-light of the false night and held each other.
Very soon Elana was breathing evenly, sleeping the sleep of the innocent. Loftus lay awake, unable to settle, beset by fear and dogged by thoughts of tomorrow’s meeting with the colony’s ruling elite.
His vision adjusted to the darkness, and he turned onto his side and regarded his lover, wondering why he had invited her along. He wondered at the motive of his old self, his self of six months ago. Had he really loved this woman enough to want to help her career by giving her the opportunity to accompany him?
Or did he have an ulterior motive, hidden even to himself at the time?
He wondered now if he wanted Elana to document not only the beginning of the end on Karenia, but also his part in it, so that the world would understand how he had suffered as the harbinger of dire tidings. Was the entire exercise nothing more than a consequence of his need for absolution, the desire to have his suffering witnessed by the watching millions?
He ran a finger along the declivity of her naked back, and felt a renewal of guilt at using her like this.
Some time later, a sound came from outside, a high-pitched chittering like that of a bird. He sat up, careful not to disturb Elana.
He swung himself out of bed, slipped into a pair of jeans, and crossed the room. Carefully he eased the shutters open slightly and peered out; the twilight was too bright for him to see anything at first. When his vision adjusted he saw the balcony rail, a twisted array of flowers growing up one pillar. He almost turned away, but then movement caught his eye, something beyond the rail, something out in the manse’s grounds.
He edged the shutters open a
nd stepped out onto the wooden decking of the balcony. Down where manicured garden segued into jungle there were three – now four – squat blue figures, pushing and skipping like children in a school playground. Every so often, a chittering cry came from one of the creatures.
They were Yanth, the native semi-sentient species.
Loftus had seen them on previous visits, but only ever fleetingly, distantly. As he watched, they froze, as if one. For a second or two they were as statues, and then they melted into the undergrowth and were gone.
Loftus was aware of his increased heartbeat. His throat was dry.
What were they doing here, so close to human habitation?
He hesitated for only an instant, and then was heading down the steps, his bare feet crunching through spore-crusted grass.
The ground where the Yanth had been playing bore the impressions of their feet, dark imprints where the dusting of spores had been dislodged. Loftus stared at the edge of the jungle and saw a thinning, what might have been a way through.
He straightened, took a step, then another. With his third step, the jungle wrapped itself around him and the manse might have been nothing more than a distant memory.
The mauve twilight of half night, which had seemed so bright when he first opened the shutters, was but a murky gloom in the depths of the jungle. Frequently, Loftus headed for a thinning between the trees only to be pulled up by a web of crystalline fibres snagged across his face and body. He almost turned back after a few minutes of this, but then he heard the chittering again.
Soon he was unable to determine how far he may have come, his progress so full of false starts and doubling back. Eventually, the twilight grew brighter ahead and he knew he must be approaching some kind of clearing.
Aware of the noise of his progress, he slowed, easing his way towards the thinning, his heart pounding again.
A brow of rock cut through the jungle here, covered only by a thin layer of undergrowth. The mauve sky hung seamless overhead.