by Adam Roberts
He dozed. The day moved on.
He heard somebody approaching, tramping lustily out of the forest. Presumably not Ramon Harburg Guthrie then.
It was Murphy. He could hardly have been making a bigger racket. Vins’ strong fingers pulled up a chunk of bark from the bough upon which he rested, and when Murphy came underneath the tree he threw it down upon him.
“Quiet,” he hissed. “You want to get us killed?”
“No call to throw pebbles at me,” said Murphy, in a hurt voice, his head back.
“It was bark, and it was called for. Come up here and be quick and be quiet.”
~ * ~
When he was up, and when Murphy had gotten past the point of repeating “What happened to your head? What did you do to your head? There’s blood all over your head”—Vins explained.
Murphy thought about this. “It makes sense.”
“Where did you get to, anyway?”
“I was exploring!” cried Murphy, in a large, self-justifying voice.
“Keep quiet!”
“You’re not the captain, and neither you aren’t,” said Murphy. “You’re not the one to tell me don’t go exploring. Are we scientists? I’ve been down to the sea, to where the surf grinds thunder out of the beach. All manner of shells and...” He stopped. “This feller shot you?”
“It’s his world.”
He peered close at Vins’ head. “That’s some trepanning he’s worked on you. That’s some hole.”
“He made it, and he says we’re not allowed here. He’ll kill all four of us. We can’t afford to be blundering about.”
“He’s threatening murder. That would be murder.”
“It surely is.”
“And is he,” asked Murphy, “not concerned to be committing murder upon us?”
“He’s homo sapiens,” said Vins. “I told you.”
“And so you did. It’s hard to take in. But it explains...” He trailed off.
“What does it explain?”
“This is an artefact, of course it is. That’ll be the strange sky, that’ll explain it. The stars don’t move, or hardly, because it doesn’t rotate. The sun—that’ll be an orbiting device; flying its way around and about. Maybe a mirror—maybe a crystal globe refracting sunlight to produce a variety of effects.” He seemed pleased with himself. “That explains a lot.”
“You sound like Edwards,” said Vins.
“Don’t you be insulting my family name in suchwise fashion!”
“It’s a thousand miles across,” said Vins. “It’s a flat disc. I don’t know how he generates the gravity. It’s clearly not by mass.”
“So you met an actual breathing homo sapiens?” asked Murphy, as one might ask you met a unicorn? you met a cyclops?
“I think,” said Vins, “that he was expecting me to ... I don’t know. To worship him as a god.”
Murphy hooped with laughter, and then swallowed the noise before Vins could shush him. “Why on sweet wide water would he want such a thing?”
“He said that he—he said that they—uplifted us,” said Vins. “Brought us out of the evolutionary dustbin, that sort of thing. Taught us the language. Left us their culture, save us the bother of spending thousands of years making our own. He was implying, I think, that we owed them.”
“Did you ever read Frankenstein’s monster’s story? That’s a homo sapiens way of thinking,” said Murphy. “There’s something alien in all that duty, indebtedness, belatedness, you-owe-me rubbish. But what you should’ve said to him, what you should have said, is: my right and respectfulness, sir, didn’t Shakespeare uplift you out of the aesthetic blankness of the middle ages? Didn’t Newton uplift you out of the ignorance of the dark ages, give you the power to fly the spaceways? Do you worship Newton as a god? Course you don’t—you say thank you and tap at your brow with your knuckles and you move on.”
“It’s all a dim age,” agreed Vins. He was referring to the elder age. It was something in the past, like the invention of the wheel or the smelting of iron, but only a few cranks spent too much time bothering about it. Too much to do.
“How could you fail to move on? What sort of a person would you be? An ancestor-worshipper, or something like that.”
“They withdrew from the world,” said Vins. “It’s vacant possession. It’s ours, now. All the rainy, stony spaces of it.”
“And I say this is the same, this place we’ve stumbled into. I say this murphytopia is the same case—it’s vacant possession.”
He was quiet for a while. Vins was scanning the sky through the branches, looking for devices in the sky. Planes and such.
“I say it’s ours and I say the hell with him,” said Murphy, rolling his fist through the air .
“Here,” repeated Vins. “It’s forbidden us. He says it’s forbidden to us.”
“He says?” boomed Murphy, climbing up on his legs on the bough to shout the phrase at the manufactured sky. “And who’s he to stop us?”
“Will you hush?” snapped Vins.
The sky was a clear watercolour wash from high dark blue to the pink of the low eastern sky. There were a few thready horizontal clouds, like loose strands of straw. The sun itself; or whatever device it was that circled the world to reflect sunlight upon it, was a small circle of chilli-pepper red.
“It is beautiful here,” said Murphy, sitting down again on the turf.
“It’s mild,” agreed Vins.
“Does that mean that those old children’s stories are true?” Murphy asked. “About them, and messing up the climate, and just walking away?”
“Who knows?”
“But this is what bugs me,” said Murphy. “If they had the—if they have the capacity to build whole new worlds, like this one, and provide it with a beautiful climate, you know, why not simply sort out the climate on Earth? Why not reach their godlike fingers into the ocean flow and the air-stream and dabble a bit and return the Earth to a temperate climate?”
Vins didn’t answer this at first; didn’t think it was really addressed to him. But Murphy wouldn’t let it go.
“Left the mess and just ran away. Cold and snow and rain and deserts of broken rock. That’s downright irresponsible. Why not mend the mess they’d made? Why not?”
“I suppose,” said Vins, reluctantly, “it’s easier to manage a model like this one. Even a largescale model, like this one. The climate of the whole Earth—that’s a chaotic system, isn’t it? That’s not a simple circular body of air a thousand miles across, that’s a three-dimensional vortex tends of thousands of miles arc by arc. Big dumb object, he called it.”
“He?”
“Maybe they can’t crack the problem of controlling chaotic systems, any more than we can. He is the homo sapiens I met. When I said he called it that, I meant Ramon Harburg Guthrie called it that.”
“Doesn’t sound very godlike at all.”
“No.”
“And doesn’t excuse them from fleeing their mess.”
“I wasn’t suggesting that it did.”
“And what were you suggesting?”
Vins coughed. “I’ll tell you—I’ll say what I’m suggesting. Ramon Harburg Guthrie said that the elder sapiens, the wealthiest thousands, fled throughout the system. They built themselves little private utopias of all shapes and sizes. They’re living there now, or their descendents are. But these should be our lands. Why would we struggle on with the wastelands and the ice—or,” and he threw his hands up, “or Mars, for crying-in-the-wilderness, Mars?” He spoke as an individual who had lived two full terms on Mars: once during his compulsory military training and once during his scientific education. He knew whereof he spoke: the extraordinary cold, the barrenness, the slow and stubborn progress of colonisation. “Why would we be trying to bully a life out of Mars, of all places, if the system is littered with private paradises like this one?”
“I like the cut of your jib, the shape of your thinking, young
Vins,” said Murphy, saluting him and then shaking his hand. “But what of the man who scratched your head, there? What of that bold sapiens-fellow himself?”
“He thinks he’s hunting us,” said Vins. There was something nearly sadness in his voice, a species of regret. “He doesn’t yet realise.” He pulled the gun out of the bag.
~ * ~
They sat for a while in silence. From time to time Murphy would go “Remind me what we’re waiting for, here?” and Vins would explain it again. “He’ll come back,” he said. “He’ll get his skull bandaged, or get it healed-up with some high-tech magic-ray, I don’t know. But he’ll be back. He has to eliminate all four of us before we can put a message where others can hear it.”
“And shouldn’t we be doing that? Putting the message out there for others to know where we are—to know that such a place as here even exists?”
“That would require us to stay...” prompted Vins.
“Stay in the shuttle,” said Murphy. “I see. So you reckon he’ll? You think he’ll?”
“What would you do? He came before with some sort of personal flying harness, like a skyhook. And a handgun. He’ll come back heavier. He’ll hit the ship first, to shut that door firm.”
“But I guess we already tried the radio. Broadcast, I mean. But who’d be listening? Who’d be monitoring this piece of sky? Nobody.” He picked some bark from the bough and crumpled it to papery shards between his strong fingers. “I suppose,” he continued, “that this homo sapiens feller, he’s not to know how long we’ve been here. For all he knows we just crashed here, this morning. Or we’ve been here a month.”
“He’ll have to take his chances,” agreed Vins. “He’ll come back and hammer the ship, smash and dint it into the dirt.”
“Then what?”
“There are several ways it could go. If he’s smart, if he were as smart as me, he’d lay waste to the whole area. I’d scorch the whole thousand square mile area.”
“But he lives here!”
“He lives on the other side. He don’t need here. But he won’t do that. He’s attached to it, he’s sentimentally connected with the landscape. Its beauty. With its vacuity and its possibility. He won’t do that. So, if he’s smart, he’ll do the second best option.”
“Which is what?”
“He’ll wait until dark, and then overfly the area with the highest-power infrared detection he can muster. He’d pick out our body heat. Or, at least, it would be hard for us to disguise that.”
“You think he’ll do that?”
Vins bared his teeth, and then sealed his lips again. “No, I don’t think so. He’ll want to hunt us straight down. He’ll blow the ship and then come galloping down these paths we’ve trailed through the long grass. He’ll try and hunt us down. He’ll have armour on, probably. Big guns. He’ll have big guns with fat barrels.”
“Other people? Other sapiens?”
“That,” said Vins, “is the real question. That’s the crucial thing. He called this world me topia. Does that suggest to you, Murphy, a solitary individual, living perhaps with a few upgraded cats and dogs, maybe a metal-mickey or two?”
“I’ve no notion.”
“Or does it suggest a population of a thousand sapiens, or a hundred thousand, living in the clean open spaces on the far side of this disc—living a medieval Europe, perhaps? Riding around dressed in silk and hunting the white stag?”
“I’ve really no notion.”
“And neither have I. That’ll be what we find out.”
“You’re a regular strategos,” said Murphy, and he whistled through his two front teeth. “A real strategic thinker. You’re wasted in the sciences, you are. And then?”
“Then?”
“Then what?”
“Well,” said Vins. “That’ll depend, of course. If it’s just him, I don’t see why we don’t take the whole place to ourselves. There’s a lot of fertile ground here, a lot of settlement potential for people back home. And if it’s more than just him—”
“Maybe the far side is crawling with homo sapiens.”
“Maybe it is. But this side isn’t. We could pile our own people onto this side of the world and see what happens. See if we can arrive at an understanding. Who knows? That’s a long way in the future.” He peered through the leaves at the lustre of the meadows, the beaming waters, the warm blue sky.
~ * ~
Murphy dozed, and was not woken by the brittle sound of something scratching along the sky. But he was awoken by the great basso profundo whumph of the shuttle exploding; a monstrous booming; a squat eggshaped mass of fire that mottled and clouded almost at once with its own smoke, and pushed a stalk of black up and out into an umbrella-shape in the sky. Some moments later the tree shook heartily. After that there was the random percussion and thud of bits of wreckage slamming back to earth.
Murphy almost fell out of the tree. Vins had to grab him.
Their ship was a crater now, and a scattering pattern of gobbets of plasmetal flowing into the sky at forty-five degrees and crashing down again to earth at forty-five degrees, the petal-pattern all around the central destruction.
“Look,” Vins hissed.
A ship, shaped like the sleek head of a greyhound, flew through, banked, and landed a hundred yards from the crater. It ejected a single figure, and lifted off again.
The sound of the explosion was still rumbling in the air.
“Was that our ship?” said Murphy, stupidly. “Did he just destroy our—”
“Shush, now,” said Vins, in a low voice. “That’s him.”
“Then who’s flying the ship?”
“It’ll be another sapiens, or else an automatic system, that hardly matters. The ship will circle back there, in case Edwards or Sinclair are nearby and come running out to see what the noise is. But he’ll come after us. He knows I won’t be fooled by—” And even as Vins was speaking the figure, armoured like an inflated figure, like a man made of tyres, turned its head, and selected one of the trails through the grass and starting trotting along it.
“That’s a big gun he’s carrying,” Murphy pointed out. “He’s coming this way with a very big gun.”
“He’s coming this way,” said Vins, taking the pistol out of his sack and prepping it, “with his eggshell skull and his sluggy reactions.”
“What are you going to do?” asked Murphy.
“Do you think he’ll look upwards as he comes under this tree?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you?”
“And if you kill him, what then?”
“I hope not to kill him, not to kill him straight off,” said Vins, in a scientific voice. “I’ll need him to get that plane to come down so we can use it.”
He was coming down the path. Vins and Murphy waited in the tree, waiting for him to pass beneath them—or for him to notice them, the two of them, in the tree and shoot them down.
He was armoured, of course. He came closer.
Maybe that’s the way it goes. It’s hard for me to be, from this perspective, sure. Indeed it’s hard, sometimes, to tell the difference between the two different sorts of human. These neanderthals, after all, are not created ex nihilo via some genetically engineered miracle. They were ordinary sapiens adapted and enhanced, strengthened, given more endurance, the better to carry on living on their home world. Wouldn’t you like greater strength, more endurance? Of course you would. You stay-at-home, you. Sentimentally attached to where you happen to be, that’s you. The same people as the sapiens. Does it matter if they come swarming all over Guthrie’s bubblewrapped world? Is that a better, or a worse, eventuality to that place remaining the rich man’s private fiefdom?
It’s all lotos.
~ * ~
The seventh day
The sun rose in the west, as it did. Clouds clung about the lower reaches of the sky like the froth on the lip of a gigantic ceramic bowl: white and frothy and stained h
ither and thither with touches of cappuccino brown.
The grasslands rejoiced in the touch of the sun. I say rejoiced in the strong sense of the word. Light passed through reality filters. Wind passed over the shafts of grass, moving them, pausing, moving again; but light passed through them. Wind made a lullaby song of hushes, and then paused to make even more eloquent moments of silence. But the light shone right through. Light passed through two profound reality filters. This is photons. These are photons. Photons were always already rushing faster than mass from the surface of the sun. They were passing through a hunk of crystal in the sky, modified with various other minerals and smart-patches, and were deflected onto the surface of the world. This globe served the world as its illumination. The photons passed again through the slender sheathes of green and yellow, those trillions of close-fitting rubber bricks we call cells; cells stacked multiply-layered and rippled out in all directions, gathered into superstructures if magnificent length and fragility; and in every single cell the light chanced through matter and came alive, alive, with the most vibrant and exhilarating and ecstatic thrumming of the spirit. That’s where it’s at. The light, the translucence of matter, the inflection of the photons, the grass singing, and just after.