Jim Baen's Universe Volume 1 Number 5

by Eric Flint

  There is no way to capture the process in an algorithm, or exercise it from behind a desk. It takes walking the planets of distant stars, communing with the faint anomalies that just might be the crumbled remains of abandoned settlements.

  Amanda and I became instant friends, and then a sweaty-and-entangled whole bunch more than friends, at Corps Academy. We begged and bargained our way onto the same Corps re-orientation ship, two earnest grads eager to help a world of Firster descendants rejoin a larger humanity scarcely recognizable in their mythos. After three missions together, we decided to get married.

  I couldn't believe our good fortune that a two-person scout ship mission was available. Starhopping would leave plenty of time for us—it seemed like the perfect honeymoon.

  And then one of those starhops brought us to Paradise.

  * * *

  Long before sensors spotted the tumbling hulk of the abandoned slowboat, I felt certain the Firsters we were tracking had settled here. From halfway across the solar system, sensors showed the planet was too perfect not to settle.

  Amanda was equally sure any colony had failed. There was no hint of chlorophyll in the orbital scans, nor signs of energy being harnessed. No chlorophyll means no terrestrial plant life to anchor a human-usable food chain. No energy generation means no bioconversion to change local biota into something terrestrials could eat.

  "Damn. Sorry." Amanda's sympathy for the lost colonists was sincere. And misplaced.

  There were people on the planet below. I was as sure of that as I'd been, from star to star to star, which way this slowboat had gone. Call it a hunch.

  "It's a waste of time." Amanda had been seated in front of a bio-readout panel. "Humans might as well eat dirt as anything growing down there."

  The planet we circled, that I still circle, is green almost everywhere not covered by water or polar ice cap. That lushness was one more anomaly, since its orbit was barely within the habitable zone of its K-class sun. While I began the painstaking process of bringing back on-line the slowboat's ancient, crumbling computers, Amanda, at my insistence, flew down in a lander to check things out.

  We have been apart ever since.

  * * *

  Any planet you would want to colonize belongs to someone else—the only question is how much of an ecosphere you are willing to displace. That is true, at least, if a breathable atmosphere is a meaningful part of your lifestyle. Oxygen is so chemically reactive that only a planet rich with photosynthesizing life can sustain an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

  From interstellar distances, the only discernable planetary characteristics are orbit, rough size, and atmospheric composition. Evolutionary progress from the single-celled stage until sentients begin to use radios, not that any such have ever been found, is undetectable. Fortunate colonists found bare rock plus oceans full of oxygen-producing algae. Unlucky colonists, at least for those with a sense of bioethics, encountered continents teeming with indigenous life.

  Like Paradise.

  * * *

  The lander touched down just inside one of the planet's few desolate regions, on the rocky coast of an inland sea. Amanda could not bring herself to use a more hospitable prospective landing site. A column-of-flame descent into some verdant meadow would have been, she said, like torching a park.

  I had no reason to doubt her inference that the area had, within the last few years, been cleared by a forest fire. "Caused by lightning," she insisted. "There are no careless campers here." Charred, often toppled, boles of tree-analogues dominated the landscape. Beyond the devastation towered vast expanses of the spiky, fern-like plants. Patches of new growth poked, scrub-like, through ashy soil. "You getting this?" she radioed, surveying the landing site on foot. She wore an envirosuit although every sensor showed the area to be safe. That was protocol: Thorough checkout took time. Videocams on the lander panned slowly.

  "Good place to take up charcoal drawing," I commented from orbit. I had no difficulty imagining her answering smile.

  "Not among my talents, and I don't see staying here long enough to cultivate new skills." Her suit radio conveyed faint crunching sounds as she walked. Saplings became denser as she progressed towards the closest unmarred growth. "What luck with the slowboat's computer?"

  "Not much," I admitted. Computing was one of the technologies at which the Firsters excelled. The Corps had, over time, reverse-engineered a few of their tricks, but the systems on every slowboat differed. Each crossing took generations . . . why should their technology stand still? "Maybe you can charm it . . ." I trailed off.

  "What?" she asked.

  "Stand still." She froze. "Speed up panning." Her helmet camera did. The matching view on my display swept across the countryside, then reversed direction. Fern saplings trembling in the breeze showed the only motion.

  "What did you see, Cameron?"

  "Apparently nothing." The videocam again reversed its arc.

  Something shot across the screen.

  "Did you see that?" she shouted. Her gloved fist, one finger outstretched, blocked a corner of the camera's field of vision. Ground-hugging fronds still rustled where she pointed.

  I was advancing, frame by frame, through captured images of a scuttling, six-legged, ankle-high alien something when Amanda whooped excitedly. Her helmet camera swung wildly. "What is it?" I yelled back. "What do you see?" The image stabilized; from the change in perspective it was clear she was squatting. Green glowing eyes studied Amanda from deep within shadowy underbrush. My gut clenched. "What is that?"

  Moments later, a clearly terrestrial calico cat sauntered out of the undergrowth to sniff Amanda's still outstretched finger.

  * * *

  The slowboat was a wreck. I tell myself that if I had skills beyond gleaning clues from traces of hints of ruins, I would have brought the old systems on-line soon enough to have made a difference. Or that if I'd somehow stitched together the colonists' story faster, I'd have gotten Amanda offworld in time.

  But I don't believe it.

  I had followed these colonists across four interstellar hops. That was a record . . . most slowboats were worn out after two; a few managed three. The problem was always biosphere collapse. A crossing Amanda and I could reasonably call a hop was to the Firsters a multigenerational odyssey. By the time the colonists reached Paradise, the slowboat's ecology was exhausted and dying. They had no choice but to descend to the surface.

  They were up to something neither Amanda nor I could comprehend. I kept exploring, kept reconstructing the spotty surviving records for some clue how these Firsters expected to live here, how they thought to avoid ravaging a thriving native ecology to transplant their own.

  Now that it is too late, I do understand.

  * * *

  What did Amanda see in me? Given my looks—straw-colored hair, a pasty complexion, features I've always thought a bit awry, and the tall-and-gangly frame common to Belters—there was always ample speculation. I've overheard enough whispers to grasp the popular explanation, and it makes me crazy: That it is a marriage of convenience. She gets the career benefit of my semi-spooky skills at tracking down Firsters. I get . . . her. It's hardly flattering for either of us.

  As I said, it drives me crazy.

  She met, she loves, an artist. When I could no longer bear the stubborn refusal of planet and slowboat to relinquish their secrets, I sought refuge—looked, in a way, for Amanda—in my art.

  There are many restored recordings of Firster music; by those standards my compositions are arrhythmic, overly complex, and discordant. Each of my melodies has a visual setting, forming a sight-and-sound poem. The first time I shared one with her, back at the Academy, she gazed at me in silent wonder. What a rare treat it was to bask in someone's appreciation.

  Years later, I cannot experience that piece without memories flooding my mind. Recalling her, recalling that moment, my heart aches.

  So what did Amanda see in me? The person. Mine is not the only sixth sense.

  * * * />
  Recovering data and restoring limited operations in the balky Firster computers involved one part inspiration and twenty parts head scratching. The work left plenty of time for watching Amanda through landing-site cameras. I missed her.

  I miss her now.

  DNA from a blood sample proved Amanda's new friend was, without doubt, a terrestrial cat. She was playing with the feline, teasing it with a dangling bit of vine, the game by way of apology for the needle stick, when two landing-site motion sensors gave alarms.

  Moments after the alert—trilling discreetly in her personal communicator and booming from my console in our orbiting starship—someone strode from the brush, as obviously a human as the cat was a cat. The burly figure wore a knee-length tunic of clearly natural fibers, cinched at the waist by a braided sash from which hung a cloth sack and various wood-and-stone implements. The loosely woven garment left no doubt that her caller was a man.

  "Amanda," I whispered.

  "I see him."

  He ambled casually towards her, greasy hair hanging past his shoulders. If he understood the lander's stungun turret slow swiveling to track his progress, he gave no sign. His body language seemed somehow disdainful of the ship. He sniffed repeatedly, a puzzled expression on his face.

  "Amanda," I whispered again. "What's he doing?"

  "You tell me," she whispered back.

  The stranger sniffed again. His meandering path took him past the flat rock on which lay the galley scraps Amanda had set out for the cat. He bent slightly, inhaled, and then continued slowly towards her. He seemed no more impressed by home-world food than had the cat.

  After the linguistic drudgery of the initial colony rediscoveries, the Corps had painfully reconstructed passable versions of the Firster languages. Modern survey ships carried translation software attuned to all major colonist dialects—that is, to the versions deduced to have been spoken when the slowboats were leaving solsys. It didn't take many utterances by the visitor to recognize English as the root of his speech. The lander's computer took longer, but not much, to derive many of the pronunciation shifts and some divergent vocabulary. From a speculative understanding of roughly every third word, Brian—his name was one thing we did ascertain—was most interested in discussing the weather.

  "His vocabulary appears limited," Amanda said. She had cranked up the sensitivity of her implanted communicator sufficiently to capture her subvocalizations.

  We both knew the computer had already reached that conclusion, and she wasn't one to repeat the obvious. "What's worrying you?"

  "Why isn't he more curious? This," and she gestured at the lander, the stacks of equipment she'd unloaded, and herself in the crinkly envirosuit, "must be strange to him."

  Paradise's sun, almost overhead at the beginning of the visit, nearly touched the horizon. I was hungry, although I had snacked throughout the session. Improvised cat food sat, scarcely touched, in a corner of my screen. Chicken scraps . . . funny that the cat still had not attacked them. "Not curious fails to do it justice." The Academy had drummed into us that body language is not universal, but I indulged myself once more. "He's yawning a lot. Fidgety." I fast-scanned backward. "Bored? And the angle at which he cocks his head, the tension in his jaw, the squint of his eyes . . . it's as though he has a headache."

  Brian loosened the drawstrings of the bag that hung from his belt. He removed two pieces of lumpy, red-orange fruit. He bit into one, pulpy juice trickling into a matted beard. The second piece he offered to Amanda. If he considered the head-to-toe encapsulation of her envirosuit strange, or an impediment to her ability to sample the local cuisine, he kept it to himself. "These need little rain."

  "Thank you." To me, she subvocalized, "I'll analyze it later." She set his gift on a portable workbench, and then unsealed an emergency ration. Insinuating food through the helmet port of an envirosuit is neither easy nor pretty; she mimed tasting a cookie before offering one to her visitor.

  Brian spit seeds in several directions before giving the cookie a perfunctory sniff. This time his expression was too foreign for me to hazard a guess—but the snack went unsampled into his sack. The headache I inferred him to have seemed to have worsened. "I must leave." He pivoted without ceremony and began walking purposefully back the way he had come.

  "Will you return?" Amanda called. "Will you tell others?"

  He stopped, less to answer, it seemed, than to reposition a box. A frond that had been bent by the crate sprung straight. "Why?"

  Without further comment or explanation, he disappeared into the woods.

  * * *

  "So what do you think?" Amanda spoke around a mouthful of the autogalley's finest. She had a heroic metabolism and an appetite to match. The lunch foregone due to the inconveniences of the envirosuit only made her that much hungrier. A still frame of the disinterested colonist occupied the wall screen behind her.

  Halfway around the world I was also eating. "About Brian?"

  "About whether it's time to lose the suit." She chewed a mouthful of greens. "Obviously Brian is fine without one."

  What could I say? That I had a bad feeling about this? I did, and she laughed.

  "You have a bad feeling about everything." She turned her attention to a cookie like the one she had given her visitor. "However." Her eyes darted to the lab containment unit in which were arrayed row after row of culture dishes with smears and thin sections of native fruit glob. "That no earthly mold or bacterium has taken hold on the fruit he eats is puzzling enough that I'm going to stay protected for a while."

  * * *

  Things stayed the same for a time. Fruit globs, while non-toxic by every test known to the ship's computers, were also entirely lacking in dietary value. Nor was the mystery limited to the one native species. Amanda made several trips to the edge of the forest—Brian made plain, without lucid explanation, that he did not want her entering—to collect roots and tubers and growths of every type remote sensors captured Brian eating. All hid their nutrients well.

  She had no better luck with snared specimens of the six-legged native things we'd taken to calling mice—because that's what you call what a cat stalks. The wireless cameras Amanda had strewn around the landing site and nearby woods had yet to catch her furry friend hunting anything else. It did not eat many Earth-food scraps either. "She," I was repeatedly corrected. "Calico cats are always female."

  Ship's sensors had failed to find people on the surface for a good reason: Weaving and woodworking are not industries one observes from orbit. Now, with Brian as an example of the survivors, I switched tactics. Low-flying microbots spotted plenty of other humans. Their shelters were primitive: caves, hide tents, and lean-tos and shacks made of fallen branches. They lived alone or in, we guessed, family units. Nothing bigger.

  That dispersion was one more mystery. Even for hunters and gatherers, there appeared to be more than enough food to support many times the current population.

  Brian remained nearby, rarely venturing from the densest parts of the fern woods. If he ever saw other humans, those encounters were as elusive as the nutrients that sustained him.

  * * *

  With power and supplies from my docked starship, I restored to habitability an insignificant portion of this ancient and mummified miniworld. The fragile, recreated bubble of life evoked in me some essence of the long-departed crew. Grudgingly, and in elusively suggestive fragments, repaired computer archives surrendered their secrets.

  Only constant nurturing of the ecosystem had enabled completion of the slowboat's fourth voyage. In the process, the crew became devoted—by most standards, fanatical—to ecological sanctity. They were overwhelmed when, another interstellar voyage clearly impossible, the prospective home finally within reach after lifetimes of travel proved too Earth-like. They would not consider wreaking ecological havoc to give Earthly life a chance to take root; they could not survive any longer aboard ship.

  I'm a rock boy, asteroid born and bred, so maybe my comments are uninformed.
Still, studying the slowboat's records, I didn't consider the planet the colonists were so mystically protective of all that special. The planet at which they had arrived, that is. In the intervening few thousand years, it had flourished.

  All I knew for certain was that the colonists had done something—found some course of action between extinction and their principles. What that compromise was, I could not say.