Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  Vins winced at this insult. “Don’t be like that. What is this, school?”

  “It’s true,” said Sinclair. “Murphy was the hairiest, but he’s gone God-knows-where. You’re the hairiest now, and you’ll go, and good riddance. Go after Murphy. Go pick fleas from his pelt. I’m the smoothest of the lot of you and I’ll stay here and thank you.”

  “I’m not going after Murphy, I’m going higher, into the highlands.”

  “Go where you like.”

  Edwards wouldn’t meet Vins’ gaze, so Vins shouldered his pack and marched off, striding westward into the setting sun. He could feel Sinclair’s eyes upon his back as he went, almost a heat, like a ray; Sinclair just lounging there like a lazy great ape, watching him go. The hairiest indeed!

  Then Vins had a second thought. He wanted to get up high, didn’t he? He could lift himself clean off the ground.

  It surprised him how much courage it took to turn about and stomp back down to the ship again. Sinclair was still there on his rock, watching him with lazy insolence. Edwards had taken off his shoes and climbed to the top of the wreckage, clinging to the dew-wet surface with his toes and the palms of his feet. He was gazing east, down, away.

  Vins didn’t say anything to either of them. Instead he went into the ship and retrieved a bundle of gossamer-fabric and plastic cord and tied it to the top of his backpack. Then he pulled out a small cylinder of helium, no longer or thicker than a forearm though densely heavy. He tied a grapple-rope to this and dragged it after him.

  There were no more goodbyes. He stomped away.

  ~ * ~

  Something was bugging Vins, preying on his mind. It was as if he’d caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of his eye without exactly noticing it, such that it had registered only in his subconscious (that gift of the gods, the unconscious mind). He felt he should have understood by now. Something was wrong, or else something was profoundly and obviously right and he couldn’t see it.

  What?

  He marched on, the cylinder dragging through the turf behind him and occasionally clanging on the upcrops of rock that poked through the grass. It was an effort with every step to haul the damn thing, but Vins had found in stubbornness and ill-temper a substitute for willpower. He marched on. He didn’t know where he was going. He had, as Edwards might say, no objective. But on he went.

  The grass grew shorter the higher he went, and the wind became fresher. The sun was directly above him, and then it was behind him, and he was chasing his own waggish shadow, marching up and up. His field of view was taken up with the pale-green and yellow grass sloping up directly in front of him. Each strand moved with slightly separate motion in the burly wind, like agitated worms, or the fronds of some impossibly massive underwater polypus.

  He stopped, sat on a stool of bare rock and drank from his water bottle. Looking back the direction he had come he could see the ship now, very distant. Edwards was no longer standing on its back. Nor could he see Sinclair. From this eagle’s vantage point, the path the crashing ship had gouged in the soil was very visible, a mottled painterly scar through the grasslands culminating in the broken-backed hourglass of the ship itself. It seemed unlikely, Vins thought, that in crashing they had not simply dashed themselves to atoms.

  Beyond the wreck that the grasslands stretched away. Vins could see a great deal more of the terrain from up here. They had come-down directly above a broad hilly spit of land that lay between what looked like two spreading estuaries, north and south. Each of these estuaries widened and spilled into what Vins took to be separate seas—one reaching as far north as he could see and one as far south. It wasn’t possible to see whether these seas were connected; whether, in other words, the two estuaries were inlets into one enormous ocean.

  The sun setting threw a broadcast spread of lights across these two bodies of water, and they glowed ferociously, beautifully. As he sat there looking down on this landscape Vins felt the disabling intensity of it all. As if its loveliness might just drain all his willpower and leave him just sitting here, on this saddle of bare rock, sitting in the afternoon warmth gazing down upon it.

  He shook himself. He couldn’t allow this place to suck out his strength of purpose. Maybe he was a homo neanderthalis, but he was a scientist. He flew spacecraft between the planets.

  He picked himself up and marched on, uphill all the way, until the light had thickened and blackened around him. Eventually, exhausted, he stopped and ate some food and rolled himself into his sleeping bag and tried to sleep on the grass. But, tired as he was, he was awake a long time. Something nagging at him. Something about the perspective downhill—those two broad estuaries draining into whatever wide sea, hidden in distance, in haze and clouds and the curve of the world’s horizon. What about it? Why did it seem familiar? He couldn’t think why.

  ~ * ~

  The fifth day.

  He was woken by something crawling on his face, a lacy caterpillar or beetle with legs like twitching eyelashes. He sat up, rubbing his cheeks with the back of his hand, he brushed it away.

  It was light.

  The sun was up over the crown of the hill westward and shining straight in his eyes.

  He wiped his face with a dampee, and munched some rations and drank a tab of coffee. The wind stirred around him. The landscape below him was, in material terms, the same one before which he had gone to sleep; but under the different orientation of sunlight, under white morning illumination instead of rosy sunset, it seemed somehow radically different. The two estuaries were still there, kinked and coastlined in that maddeningly familiar way, but now their waters were gunmetal- and broccoli-coloured, a hard and almost tangible mass of colour upon which waves could not be made out. The grassland was dark with dew, hazed over in stretches by a sort of blue blur. The ship was still there, black as a nut, but Vins couldn’t make out either of his shipmates.

  “So,” he said to himself. “Let’s get a proper look.”

  He unrolled the balloon fabric and fitted the helium cylinder into its inflation tube. Then he untangled the harness, and manoeuvred himself into it, knotting the rest of his backpack to a strap so that it would dangle beneath him as ballast. Then, steadily, he inflated the balloon.

  It took only a few minutes, the flop of fabric swelling and then popping up, like a featureless cartoon head of prodigious size, to loll and nod above him. Soon the material was taut and the breeze was pushing Vins down the hill and across. His feet danced over the turf, keeping up with the movement for a while with a series of balletic leaps, and dragging the pack behind him. Then he was up, the cylinder in his lap and his bag a pendulum below.

  He rose quickly through the dawn air. The breeze was taking him diagonally down the hill, but only slowly. At first he looked behind himself, straining over his shoulder to see what was over the brow of the hill. But the upwards sloping land didn’t seem to come to a peak; or at least not one over which Vins could peek.

  He turned his attention to the eastward landscape. To his right he could see, as he rose higher, that there was a vast north-south coastline, a tremendous beach bordering an ocean that reached all the way to the horizon. To his left he could see the more northern of the two estuaries; its north shoreline revealed itself to be in fact a long, skinny neck of land. There was a third estuary, even further to the north. The shape of these arrangements of land and water seemed so familiar to Vins, naggingly so, but he couldn’t place it.

  He fixed his gaze on the easternmost horizon, but even though he was getting higher and higher he didn’t seem to be seeing over the curve of it. In fact, by some peculiar optical illusion or other it appeared to be rising as he rose. That wasn’t right.

  Vins tried looking up, but the balloon obscured his vision. He thought again about the peculiarities of this world. Was the sky really nothing but a huge blue-painted dome? Would he bump into it momentarily? Perhaps not a physical barrier, but some sort of forcefield, or holographic medium, upon whi
ch the motionless stars and the hurtling sun could be projected? Were they in some private high-tech parkland?

  The air was thin. It had gotten thin surprisingly rapidly.

  Maybe I am the hairiest, Vins thought to himself; but I’m a scientist for all that.

  Chill. And blue-grey.

  Looking down, looking eastward, Vins knew he had risen high enough. He stared. He gawped. Then, with automatic hand, he began venting gas from his balloon. He commenced his descent. He started coming down. The landscape below him had finally clicked with his memory. It was the map of Europe rendered in some impossible geographical form of photographic-negative: the green land coloured blue for sea, the blue sea coloured green for land.

  The ship had come down onto the broad grasslands that would, in a normal map of Europe, have been the Atlantic ocean. The two wide seas he could see from his vantage point were shaped exactly like England, to the north, and like France, to the south. Impossible of course, but there you were. The estuaries that had nagged at his memory had done so because they were shaped like Cornwall and like Normandy. The English Channel was a broad corridor of land, with sea to the north and sea to the south, that widened in the distance into a pleasant meadowland where the North Sea should have been.

  Recognising the familiar contours of the European mainland had impressed itself upon Vins’ consciousness so powerfully that it had dizzied him. It must be hallucination. He stared, he gawked. It was like the visual rebus of the duckrabbit, which you can see either as a duck or as a rabbit, and, then, as you get used to it, you find that you can flip your vision from one to the other at will. Vins had the heady sense that the broad bodies of water were in fact land (an impossibly flat and desert land), and the variegated stretches of landscape were in fact water (upon which light played a myriad of fantastical mirages). But of course that wasn’t it. The visual image flipped round again. The land was land and the sea was sea. It was an impossible, inverted geography. The Atlantic highlands. The Sea of England. The Sea of France. He was in no real place. He didn’t know where he was. He was dreaming. He could make no sense of this.

  The land rushed up towards him. He had vented too much gas from his balloon, he’d done it too fast, he was coming down too quickly. But his mind wasn’t working terribly well.

  His feet went pummelling into the turf and he felt something twang in his right ankle. Pain thrummed up his leg, and his face went hard onto the grass. The wind was still pushing the balloon onwards, and dragging him awkwardly along. He fumbled with his harness and with a burly sense of release the balloon broke free and bobbed off over the landscape.

  Vins pulled himself over and sat up. His ankle throbbed. Pain slithered up and down his shin. He watched the balloon recede, ludicrously flexible and bubblelike as it rolled and tumbled down the slope.

  This crazy place.

  He hauled his pack in by pulling on the cord, hand over hand and the pack dancing and bouncing over the turf towards him. From its innards he took out a medipack. The compress felt hot and slimy as he ripped it from its cover, but it did its job as he twined it around his leg. The pain dulled.

  As soon as the compress had stiffened sufficiently to bear weight, he pulled himself up and started the hopalong trek back down the slope. At least, he told himself, it’s downhill. At least it’s not uphill. Downhill across the Atlantic.

  He laughed.

  ~ * ~

  He anticipated the reaction of the others when he told them his discovery. To be precise, he rehearsed the possibilities: from galvanising amazement to indifference, or even hostility. So what they were living in an impossible landscape? The sun rose in the west and the stars did not move. Maybe they were indeed dead; in which case, why bother? Why bother about anything?

  But when he arrived at the ship it was deserted: both Sinclair and Edwards had gone. They had taken few or no supplies with them, and at first Vins assumed that they were just scouting out the locality. But after a while of fruitlessly calling their names, and several hours of waiting, he came to the conclusion that they must have wandered permanently away, like Murphy. Which would be just like them.

  If he saw them again—no.

  When he saw them again he ought to grab them by their necks and shake them. Was this any way to run a scientific spaceship? He ought to plunge his hands in between their chins and chestbones and squeeze. Squee-eeze.

  When he saw them.

  His fury was tiring. And what with the long trek (downhill, sure, but even so) and the ache in his bungled-up ankle, Vins felt sleepy. He ate, he drank some, and then he lay down in one of the bunks and fell into dream-free sleep.

  ~ * ~

  The fifth night.

  He awoke with a little yelp, and it took him a moment before he was aware that he was inside a blacked-out ship, crashed onto a world itself plunged into the chasm of night. “Though,” he said to himself, aloud (to hearten his spirits in all this darkness), “how we’re plunged into the chasm of the night when the world don’t seem to rotate, not a tittle, not a jot, that’s beyond me.”

  His ankle was sore, and seemed sorer for being ignored. It was a resentful and selfish pain. Analgesic, that was the needful.

  “Sinclair,” he called. Then he remembered. “I’m going to wrestle your neck you deserter,” he hooted. “Sinclair, you hear? I ought to stamp on your chest.”

  He had gone to sleep without leaving a torch nearby, so he had to fumble about. But in the perfect blackness he couldn’t orient himself at all; couldn’t get a mental picture on his location. He came through a bent-out-of-shape hatchway, running his fingers round the rim, and into another black room. No idea where he was. He ranged about, hopeless. Then, through another opening, he saw a rectangle of grey-black gleam, and it smelt clean, and it was the main hatch leading outside.

  He stepped through, into the glimmer of starlight to get his bearings. He could turn and take in the bulk of the ship, and only then the mental map snapped into focus. First aid box would be back inside and over to the left. He was the hairiest? He was the only one not to have abandoned ship! For the mother of love and all begorrah, as Murphy would have said if he’d been in one of his quaint moods, they’d all abandoned ship. They were the hairiest, damn them.

  His ankle was giving him sour hell, and the first aid box would be back in through the hatch, over to the left. He could find it with his fingers-ends. But he didn’t go back inside.

  The hair at the back of his neck tingled and stood up like grass as the wind passes through it.

  “I,” he said, to the starlit landscape, but his voice was half-cracked, so he cleared his throat and spoke out loudly and clearly: “I know you’re there. Whoever you are.”

  He turned, there was nobody.

  He turned again, nobody.

  “Come out from where you’re hiding,” he said. “Is that you, Murphy? That would be like your idea of practical japery, you hairy old fool.”

  He turned, and there was a silhouette against the blackness. Too tall to be Murphy, much too tall to be Edwards or Sinclair. Taller than any person in fact.

  Vins stood. The sound of his own breathing was ratchety and intrusive, like something had malfunctioned somewhere. “Who are you?” he asked. “What do you want? Who are you?”

  The silhouette shifted, and moved. It hummed a little, a surprisingly high-pitched noise—surprising because of its height. It was a person, clearly; tall but oddly thin, like a putty person stretched between long-boned head and flipperlike feet. Oh, too tall.

  “What are you doing?” Vins repeated.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” said the figure: a man, though one with a voice high-pitched enough almost to sound womanly.

  “We’re not supposed to—we crashed,” returned Vins, his ankle biting at the base of his leg a little. He had to sit down. He could see a little more now, as his eye dark-adapted; but with no moon, and with no moonlight, it was still a meagre sort of seeing. Vins m
oved towards where a rock stood, its occasional embedded spots of mica glinting in the light. This was the same rock Sinclair had been laying upon when Vins had last seen him.

  “I got to sit down,” he said, by way of explanation.

  He could see that this long thin person was carrying something in his right hand, but he couldn’t see what.

  “Sit down, OK? Do you mind if I sit down, OK? Is that OK?”

  “Sure,” said the stranger.

  Vins sat, heavily, and lifted his frozen-sore ankle, and picked at the dressing. He needed a new one. This one wasn’t giving him any benefit any more. The first aid box would be in through the hatch and to the left.

  “You’re trespassing,” said the stranger. “You’ve no right to be here. This world is forbidden to you.”

  “Is it death?” said Vins, feeling a spurt of fear-adrenalin, which is also recklessness-adrenalin, in his chest at the words. Did he dare say such a thing? What if this stranger were the King of the Land of the Dead, and what if he, Vins, were disrespecting him? “Are we all dead? That was one theory we had, as to why the sun rises awry, and why the stars don’t move—and—and,” he added, hurriedly, remembering the previous day, “why the map is so wrong.”