Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  “The sun is rising,” Sinclair pointed out, “in the west. It is setting in the east.”

  “Oh. And the asteroid was the beacon of a dimensional sffy gateway through time and space,” mocked Murphy: “and we fell through, like in a sffy film, and now we’re on the far side of the galaxy?” He pronounced “SF-y” as a two-syllable word, with a ludicrous and prolonged emphasis on the central “f” sound.

  “That can’t be true,” said Edwards. “Our first night, the stars were very clear. All the constellations were there. Familiar constellations.”

  “Which’s what we’d expect if we were back on Earth,” said Murphy.

  “But the sun rises in the west...” said Sinclair again.

  “Maybe the compasses are broken, somehow. Distorted. Maybe you think west is east and versy-vice-a.”

  “All of them? All the compasses? And besides, at night you can see the pole star, great bear, all very clearly. Oh there’s no doubt where the sun’s rising.”

  “Well let’s look at another hypothesis,” said Murphy. “There is a whole, a whole Earth-sized planet, about a hundred thousand kilometres south of the ecliptic between Earth and Venus. And nobody on earth for six centuries of dedicated astronomy has noticed it. Nobody saw a whole planet, waxing and waning, between us and the sun? No southern hemisphere observatory happened to see it? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That is,” Vins conceded, “hard to credit.”

  “So,” said Murphy. He got up, and stepped to the hatch, and looked out at the hissing and rapturous rainfall. “Here’s what I think happened. We were off investigating your winking star, Vins, and then we all suffered some sort of group epilepsy, or mass hysteria, or loss of consciousness, and without realising it we piloted the ship back up and towards earth.”

  “We were days away,” Vins pointed out.

  “So perhaps we were in a fugue state for days. Anyway, we weren’t shaken out of it until we slammed into the atmosphere, and now we’ve crashed in the highlands in Peru, or Africa maybe.”

  “There’s nowhere on earth,” Vins pointed out, “as lovely as this. Where is there anywhere as mild, or balmy, as this? Peru, you say?”

  “You ever been to Peru?” asked Edwards.

  “I been a lot of places, and there’s ice wherever I’ve been.”

  “Never mind the climate,” said Edwards. “What about the sunrises?”

  “How is it,” agreed Vins, “that the sunrise is in the west if this is Peru?”

  “I don’t know. But the advantage of my hypothesis is that it’s occam’s razor on all the stuff about planets appearing from nowhere, and it reduces all that to a single, simple problem. The sunrise.”

  “And another problem,” Edwards pointed out, “which is the lack of radio traffic.”

  “The radio’s broken,” said Murphy. “I’m not happy about it.”

  “The radio?”

  “No, not happy about the Murphy, the Murphy-topia. I’m not happy about the status of my kingdom. I was looking forward to claiming the highlands as my personal kingdom. But if it’s, you know, Peru, then there’ll be some other alpha male who’s already claimed these highlands.”

  “The radio’s not broken,” said Edwards. “We can pick up background chatter. Bits and pieces. We just can’t seem to locate any—to get a fix upon—”

  “Vins,” said Murphy, sitting himself down again. “Vins, Vins. What’s your theory? You haven’t told us your theory.”

  “I think we’ve landed upon a banned world,” said Vins. He said this in a bright voice, but his mouth was angled downwards as he spoke. “A forbidden planet. That’s SF-y, isn’t it?” He pronounced each of the letters in sfy separately, trisyllabic.

  “A banned world,” said Murphy, as if savouring the idea. “What an interesting notion. What a fanciful notion. What a dark horse you are, to be sure, Vins.”

  ~ * ~

  The rain stopped sometime in the afternoon, and the clouds rolled away, leaving the landscape washed and gleaming under the low sun as if glazed with strawberry and peach. The long stretch of grassland directly beneath them retained some of its yellow, and moved slowly, like the pelt of a lion. In the distance they could see a long inlaid band of bronze, curved and kinked like the marginal illustration in a celtic manuscript: open water, glittering in the sun. And the sun went down and the stars came out.

  Edwards, trying to identify where the Earth should be from their last known position, noticed something they should all have seen on the first night: that the stars hardly moved through the sky. He woke the others up.

  “Earth,” he said, “is just below the horizon.” He pointed. “There. Mars, I think, is over there.”

  “Send them a signal.”

  “I did. But why should they be listening for a signal from this stretch of space? It’s not even on the ecliptic. It’s not as if there are any astronomers on Mars. And if there were, if there were any, you know, amateurs, why should they be looking down here? No, that’s not what I woke you up to show you.”

  “What then?”

  “The stars aren’t moving. I’ve been watching for an hour. I was waiting to see Earth come up over the horizon so I could send them a message. But it’s not coming up.”

  “You thought it was an hour,” said Murphy, crossly. “Clearly it wasn’t an hour. You probably sat there for five minutes and got impatient.”

  So they settled down together, and all checked their watches, and looked east to where the sun had set, where familiar stars pebbled the sky. And an hour passed, and another, and the stars did not move.

  Nobody said anything for a long time.

  “Somebody has stopped the stars in their courses,” said Murphy. “We’re dead, we’re all in the afterlife. Is that what happened? We crashed the ship and died, and this is the land of the dead.”

  “I thought you were the one, Murphy, who wanted to apply occam’s razor?” chided Edwards. “That’s a pretty elaborated explanation for the facts, don’t you think? I don’t feel dead. Do you? You feel that way?”

  “Certainly not,” said Vins.

  “But we’ve no idea what it feels like to feel dead,” Murphy pointed out.

  “Exactly. It’s a null hypothesis. Let’s not go there. There must be another explanation.”

  “The other explanation is that we’re not rotating.”

  “Except we saw the sun go round and set, so we are rotating. An earth-sized world, pulling an earth-strength gravity rotates for half a day and then stops rotating? That makes no sense.”

  “I’ll tell you what makes sense,” said Murphy, hugging himself against the cold. “This is a banned world. We are not supposed to be here. That’s what makes sense.”

  “Of course we’re not supposed to be here,” agreed Vins. “Supposed to be Venus, that’s where. That’s where we’re supposed to be orbiting. Not here. But that’s not to say it’s a forbidden planet.”

  “You were the one who said so!” Murphy objected.

  “I was joking,” said Vins.

  “Your joke may be coming true,” said Murphy. He coughed, loud and long. Then he said, “the sun rises in the west and the stars don’t move. You know what that is? That’s things that the human eye was not supposed to see. That’s a realm of magic—faery, that’s where we are, and the faery queen is probably gathering her hounds to hunt us down for seeing this forbidden place.”

  “Amusing, Murphy,” said Edwards, in a bland voice. “Very fanciful and imaginative. Your fancy and your imagination, I find them amusing.”

  “I’m going to sleep,” Murphy sulked, picking himself up and going back inside the ship. “I’ll meet my fate tomorrow with a clear head at least.”

  The other stayed outside under the splendid, chilly, glittering stars and under that silkily-cold black sky. They talked, and reduced the possibilities to an order of plausibility. They discussed what to do. They discussed the possibility of making the s
hip whole again; perhaps by dismantling one of the thirty-six thrust engines and reassembling it as a sort of welding torch, so as to make good the breaches in the plasmetal hull. Nobody could think how to launch into space, though: the craft had not been built to achieve escape velocity unaided. They had not been planning on landing on Venus, after all. (The very idea!) Finally the sky started to pale and ease, as if the arc of the western horizon were a heated element thawing the black into rose and pearl and then into blushed tones of white.

  The sun lifted itself into the sky.

  “Well,” said Vins, with a tone of finality, “that settles it. Clearly we are rotating. The lack of movement of the stars and the apparent movement of the sun: these data contradict one another. Seem to. It’s hard to advance a coherent explanation that includes both of these pieces of observational data. Are we agreed?”

  “I can’t think what else,” said Edwards. “We assume the sky is a simulation of some sort. Do we assume that?”

  “We do,” said Sinclair.

  “One of two explanations, then,” said Vins. “Either the sky is a total simulation, upon which is projected a moving sun by day and motionless stars by night. Or else the sky is a real feature but some peculiarity of optics distorts the actual motion of the stars in some way.”

  “It’s hard to think what sort of phenomenon...” began Sinclair. But he stopped talking. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say; and—anyway—the dawn was so very beautiful. They all sat looking down, all distracted by the loveliness of the view from their highland vantage-point: down across sloping grasslands and marsh and the beaming seas and gleaming channels of water. And, woken by the light, the first birds were up; in nimble flight and giving voice to agile birdsong, bouncing their tenor and soprano trills off the blue ceiling of the sky—or, whatever it was.

  They were all tired. They’d been up all night. Eventually they went inside the spaceship and slept.

  ~ * ~

  The third day and the third night.

  Vins, Sinclair and Edwards woke sometime in the afternoon, the sun already declining towards the east.

  Murphy had gone.

  They searched for him, in a slightly desultory manner, round and about the ship; but it was clear enough where he had gone: a trail scuffed, slightly kinked but more-or-less straight, through the wet grasses and downwards. Clambering onto the top of the ship Edwards could follow this with his eye, and with binoculars, down and down, a wobbly ladder in the sheen tights-material of the fields all the way to where forest drew a dark line.

  “He’s gone into a forest. Down there, kilometres away.” He wanted to say something like: imagine a stretch of gold velvet, all brushed one way to smoothness, and a finger dragged through the velvet against the grain of the brushing—that’s what his path looks like. But he couldn’t find the words to say that. “Should we go after him?” he called. “Should we go?”

  “He knows where we are,” said Sinclair. “He knows how to get back here. He’s probably just exploring.”

  “And if he gets into trouble?”

  “It’s his look-out. He must take responsibility for himself,” said Vins. “We all must shift for ourselves, after all.”

  The three of them breakfasted on ship’s-supplies, sitting in the warm air and listening to the meagre, distant chimes of the birds and watching the flow and glitter of wind upon the grass. “I could sit here forever,” said Edwards, in a relaxed voice.

  The other two were silent, but it was a silent agreement.

  “We need to get on,” said Vins, as if dragging the sentence up from great deeps. “We need to explore. To fix the ship. That’s what we need to do.”

  They did nothing. After breakfast they dozed in the sun. Murphy did not return. Who knew where he had gone?

  ~ * ~

  The one thing so obvious that none of them bothered to point it out was that this world was paradisical compared to the wrecked and wasted landscapes of home. And that because it was paradisical it was very obviously not a real place. They were dead, and had gone to a material heaven, perhaps on account of some sort of oversight. They had died in the crash. Or they had been transported through a different sort of spatial-discontinuity, one that translated them from real to mythic space. They were to feed forever amongst the mild-eyed melancholy lotos-eaters now.

  The land of the sirens, in which Odysseus’s crew had languished so pleasantly and purposelessly. Was that a forbidden world? Was it banned to subsequent explorers? Why else was it never again discovered?

  It may still be there, some island or stretch of coast in the Mediterranean protected by a cloak of invisibility, some magic zone or curtain through which only a few, select and lucky mariners stumble. Who knows?

  All this culture and learning bounced around their heads: Vins, Sinclair and Edwards. They knew all about Homer and Mohammed, and they knew all about Shakespeare and Proust, even though these people about whom they were so knowledgeable were a completely different sort of creature to themselves. These Homers and Van Goghs were all super-beings, elevated, godlike; and the residue of their golden-age achievements in the minds of our scientists has the paradoxical effect of shrinking us by comparison. Don’t you think?

  Best not think about it. What and if they are in the land of the Lotos? Maybe they’re lucky, that’s all. Don’t you wish you could go there?

  ~ * ~

  The sun set in the east. Colour and brightness drained out of the western sky, out of the zenith flowing down to the east with osmotic slowness, and leaving behind a purply black dotted with perfectly motionless stars. The last of the day was a broad stretch of white-yellow sky over the eastern horizon, patched with skinny horizontal clouds of golden brown. For long minutes the last of the sunlight, coming up over the horizon, touched the bottom line of these clouds with fierce and molten light, so that it looked as if several sinuous heating elements, glowing bright and hot with the electricity passing through them, had been fixed to the matter of the sky. Then the light faded away from the clouds, and they browned and blackened against a compressing layer of sunset lights: a sky honey and marmalade, and then a grey-orange, and finally blue, and after that black.

  It was night again.

  Something agitated Vins enough to get him up and huffing around. “The stars have moved a little,” he said. “There—that’s the arc of the corona australis. Say what you like but don’t tell me I don’t know my constellations.”

  “So?”

  “It’s higher. Yesterday the lowest star was right on the horizon, on that little hill silhouetted there. Today it’s a fraction above.”

  “So we’re rotating real slow,” said Sinclair. “I can’t say I care. I can’t say I’m bothered. I’m going to sleep.”

  ~ * ~

  The fourth day and the fourth night.

  In the morning Vins left the ship. He set off in the opposite direction to Murphy; not down the slope towards the forest and the long shining stretches of open water; but up, higher into the highlands. He had no idea where Murphy had gone, or what he had been after; but something inside him prompted him to go higher. Go up, Moses. He had a vision of himself climbing and climbing until he reached the summit of some snow-clenched mountain top at the very heart of the world from which the whole planet—or at least this whole hemisphere—would be visible. Like Mount Purgatory, he thought, from Dante. As if he had anything to do with Dante! Godlike figures from the golden age.

  Vins didn’t creep away as Murphy had done. He prepared a pack, some supplies, some tools, a couple of scientific instruments. Then he woke the other two. He told them what he wanted to do; and they sat, looking stupidly at him from under their overhanging foreheads, and didn’t say anything. “You sure you don’t want to come with me?” he said. He felt an obscure and disabling fear deep inside him, a terror that if he stayed at the crash site he’d slide into torpor and that would be the end of him. Who was it had said that word? Torpor, torpor. Oh, he h
ad to get out and away. He had to move.

  “Do what you like,” said Sinclair.

  “It makes no sense to me,” said Edwards, “to go marching off without any sort of objective. Shouldn’t you have an objective? As a scientist?”

  “My objective is to explore. What’s more scientific than exploration?”

  Edwards looked at him, blinked, looked again. “We should stay here,” he said, slowly. He turned to look at the buckled ship. “We should mend the ship.”

  “We should,” agreed Vins. “But we don’t. You notice that? There’s something here that’s rendering us idle. Idleness doesn’t suit us.”

  Sinclair laughed at this. “Let him go,” he said, stretching himself on a broad boulder with a westward-facing facet to warm himself in the new sunlight. “He’s the hairiest of us all.”