Chapter 5
Beyond Survival
He arrived at Rim Camp in early evening. Days had become noticeably warmer and longer since he’d emerged, but the sun still rose at nearly the same place on the horizon each day. At least it did as far as he could tell without stopping to build some kind of a Stonehenge to measure it. The change must be due to orbital eccentricity, he thought. He stuck his thumb out at arm’s length to cover less of the sun.
Two days later, after some thought and exploration, Jacques assembled the log raft Resolution II on a black sand beach three hundred meters clockwise from where he originally came ashore. The area had a small protected cove, an unusual two-story lava tube cave, and a shoreline of about thirty meters or so of deep black sand. There, he had room to lay the five corked blackwood logs parallel and rope them together with green twine. On top of the logs, he laid out a dozen smaller blackwood branches at right angles and tied them down with a lot of green twine. On top of the middle three of those, he lashed a platform of some thirty flute plant shafts, about three meters long and 1.5 meters wide, each jammed into its own hole in a blackwood log, fore and aft. On top of this, he secured a block of dried bitterwood to serve as a seat. Three long, reasonably straight blackwood branches served as oars—one was a spare.
He launched Resolution II on Day 30. It worked reasonably well in the relatively calm waters of the cove, but tipped so much in the higher waves of the lake that he had great difficulty staying on his seat. He rowed back to the beach and made another trip to the forest for more green twine and provisions.
Finally, on Day 33, having made a green twine seat belt with a whittled buckle, he felt ready for open water. While the waves were high and steep, they moved slowly, and he was able to get into a rhythm of waves and oars that let him progress at maybe two meters a second without too much effort.
He wore his emergency suit—mainly for the clear visor that let him see well underwater. Every hundred yards or so, he would unstrap, dive, and look for a CSU. About a quarter of the way around the lake, he found one.
The CSU was perhaps at half the depth of his and still functional. Its occupant was a man of medium height, a deep tan, and straight black hair. Jacques didn’t recognize him. He tied a line to the CSU and opened its panel to start the revival process. Then he went back to the raft to catch a breath and wait. After what he judged to be about twenty minutes, he dove again. The man seemed about as startled to see him as Jacques had been to see the parrot-beaked shark—a thought that made Jacques glance around nervously.
By placing his inflated hood right against the CSU, Jacques was able to tell the man what to do, and soon the two of them were together on the raft.
“What happened!?” was the first thing the man said after pulling his hood off. “My CSU couldn’t tell me anything. It was barely functional.” He was a wiry, dark man and spoke with what Jacques thought was a slight British or Australian accent.
Jacques shook his head. “The same thing for me. I’m not at all certain, but apparently the Resolution could not, or was not allowed to, decelerate at 36 Ophiuchi, and its AI or its crew or both did the best they could to find this place and dump the CSUs here. So far, I’ve found one who didn’t make it, and you.”
“Submahn Roy,” he said and offered a hand. “From Bengal. Just call me Soob. I was a park ranger and safari leader. I was going to have a hand at occupation logistics.”
Jacques gave Soob the basics of his lonely odyssey. “I have Chryse’s CSU control module. It may have more data, but I need another CSU to play it. We might try to raise yours.”
“I’m not good for much physically, right now. But as soon as I am, we should look for others.”
Jacques nodded. Time was running out on the underwater CSUs, and more people would make the job easier. He dove to recover his line and mark Soob’s CSU with a green twine-tethered blackwood buoy, then they rowed back to the beach.
Soob recovered as rapidly as Jacques in hyperbaric oxygen, and they were able to set out again the next day to look for others. The first CSU they found was occupied by Lieutenant Collette Obota, an African woman from the Congo. She was a member of the expedition’s twenty-person police force—tiny, but any actual fighting would have been done by robots under human direction. A tall, personable, lady with a big grin, Jacques had not met her before, but liked her instantly.
The occupant of the next CSU they found had clearly expired some time ago. The same for the next two. But the fourth was different. Its occupant looked to be of Asian ancestry and was still in hibernation. Jacques started the revival process from the access panel, and soon the occupant was aboard the raft. He introduced himself as Yu Song-Il, a psychiatrist who had been born on Hanguk’i Habitat in the Proxima belt. Almost two hundred years old biologically, he greeted his new circumstances with the joy of discovery.
Not long after they pulled him aboard, it began to rain in huge cold drops that reminded Jacques of water balloons. They had to struggle to row against a gentle but surprisingly insistent wind and monster waves to get back to their beach. Green twine lashings began to fray and snap as the Resolution II flexed alarmingly.
A huge wave broke Jacques’ basket open and its precious cargo of emergency kits and food spilled aft. Unhesitatingly, Collette dove after them.
For a second, Jacques froze, then shouted. “Soob, Doc Yu, take the oars and try to keep us steady.” Then he scrambled after the remaining supplies on all fours as the raft pitched up and down. His hand clamped on a coil of nanotube line before it had a chance to slither overboard. He wrapped this around the broken basket several times in a crude repair. Reluctantly, he cut that part off with the multi-tool, tied the end around several deck boards and tied the other end to a loop on his emergency suit. Then he dove into the water to look for Collette. It had all taken several minutes and she was nowhere to be seen.
“Collette!” he screamed at the top of a wave. Three times he screamed.
“Over here!” he heard at last. He swam toward the sound.
It became difficult to breathe as the drops became more and more dense. It was impossible to avoid inhaling water, and he coughed as he struggled. He lost his direction. There was nothing to do but tread water and call again.
Something brushed against his foot. Instinctively, he kicked. Suddenly he felt a strong tug on his boot and a sharp pain. Ducking underwater, he saw that a three-meter parrot-beaked fish had clamped its jaws around his foot. Unable to pierce the emergency suit, it was still exerting crushing force. In desperation, he bent double and punched it in the eye with all the strength his full-gravity muscles could manage.
No effect.
Trying to calm himself, he got his multitool out, opened the blade, and sank it deep into the fish’s skull. Nothing. Lungs burning, he slashed behind its head, once twice.
On the third cut, it released him and swam erratically away. Jacques pushed himself to the surface.
“Over here!” he heard. Not twenty meters to his right, Collette was treading water with two emergency kits in her arms. With arms that felt like lead, he stroked over to her. With Collette gripping him with her legs, she pulled them both back to the raft.
It held together, barely, for the immeasurable time it took to get back to the cove. When they arrived, Jacques could see that the wave line of the lakeshore had already advanced almost a meter. Together, they dragged the raft as far up onto the shore as they could, tied it to a stick they wedged into a small lava tube and carried what was left of their supplies into the lava cave. They had lost all the indigenous food, but only one bag of emergency gear.
Exhausted, they spent the entire next day in the cave, consuming nutrition bars and creating small private areas with shards of fallen pahoehoe lava cleared from the floor. The raindrops hitting the top of their cave sounded like distant, muffled drums. At one place, water dripped down from the roof of the lava tube. They “corked” a segment of hollow blackwood log left over from the Resolution II’s co
nstruction, a volume of about half a cubic meter, to place beneath it.
Jacques nursed his swollen foot and recounted his adventures as the storm subsided. He also made another plaque:
New Landing, Day 35
Great storm. Rescued—
Below he laboriously scratched in the full names of his party.
Rainwater, seeping in, filled a large sandy-bottomed depression in the lower part of the cave, and they bathed in shifts. Then they washed their shipsuits and hung them to dry.
Jacques arose before the others to watch the sun rise the next day. While he was happy to have achieved his goal in rescuing other survivors, he had grown used to being alone and not entirely unhappy with it. In the morning light, he found the shore almost lapping at their cave entrance and the remains of the Resolution II bobbing in the still-disturbed lake at the end of its tether. He found a secure place above the cave entrance to place his plaque and went back in to wake the others.
There was, he realized a decision to make. Most of the camp outside the lava tube had been washed away. The raft was in no shape to set out again, but every day, every hour, of delay meant that someone might die who might otherwise be saved. Alone, Jacques would have gone back to forest camp for more supplies. Now, with others present who might question his judgment, he hesitated.
Collette stepped smoothly into the silence with a clear, bell-like voice. “Here we are, four naked savages at the mercy of storms and hungry monsters with dreams of climbing back to starflight. Well, what should we do, Jacques?” Collette asked. “You know this place better than we do.”
Jacques looked around at them, uncertain.
“What would you do if we weren’t here?” Doc Yu asked.
Jacques told him.
“Ah.” Yu smiled. “And how does our being here change that?”
Jacques shrugged. His situation had suddenly moved from straightforward survival to something involving leadership and perhaps even politics. He was not comfortable with that.
“With all of us working together, we should be able to do it faster,” Soob interjected. “We can hunt more and carry more. I think we should add another log to the raft, and some more cross bracing.”
Jacques looked around him. Heads nodded. A consensus seemed to be forming. “Very well. Let us pack our things and go. We should be able to make Rim Cave by sunset if we leave now.” The sun, he reflected, seemed to be larger, warmer, and up longer than when he first revived. But he had no way of measuring it.
About halfway up the caldera wall, Jacques saw a dark shape against a towering white cloud.
“Everyone, look up, about thirty degrees left of the trail. That’s a megabat.”
“It looks as big as an airliner,” Collette said. “Do you think it’s the one that ate Ascendant?”
“I’ve only seen one at a time, but I can’t imagine there’s only one in the whole ecosystem. I think they prefer feeding at night—probably see well into the infrared.”
“The one that ate Ascendant,” she replied calmly, “was one that found something to eat in the daytime.”
Jacques nodded nervously and increased his pace as they all took turns watching the sky.
They reached Rim Cave at sunset and nervously worked to expand its sleeping area well into twilight. The soft whummm, whummm of huge wings was heard in the night, but no long beak attempted the entrance this time.
As dawn broke, Collette and Jacques found themselves together outside the cave mouth.
“An early riser, too, I see,” she said.
“And one with a French given name, too. This seems auspicious.” Jacques smiled.
“It’s my mother’s name. My parents met in Kindu, centuries ago now,” Collette said. “It dates from the Belgian colonial period.”
“My great-grandmother was a French diplomat in Papua New Guinea,” Jacques replied. “My great grandfather was a Hong Kong businessman. They settled there, in the high mountains. Someone in each of the last four generations has had a French given name.”
At Forest Camp, hunting and gathering was problematic. There were few bitterwood tree fruits to be found, and those seemed well past their prime. Hirachnoids had grown scarce as well and for the first time, Jacques failed to see a kangasaur.
That night in the lava tube, Soob was worried. “It is very difficult to be sure, but we have found in one day somewhat less than is needed to sustain us for three—even supposing that we are not missing crucial trace nutrients. We need another food source. What else have you tried?”
Jacques shook his head. “My priority has been the rescue of other crew members. After finding enough to keep me going, I focused on that and did not take additional chances.”
“I see.”
“Did the bitterwood pulp wood actually make you sick?” Doc Yu asked.
Jacques laughed. “I didn’t try very much.”
“The molecules that cause the bitterness may be more fragile than the molecules of nourishment. I suggest we try cooking it. What about tanglegrass?”
“I haven’t tried that at all,” Jacques answered. Then he remembered what he’d seen when he’d caught his foot in some and pulled it out of loose earth. “It has a thick white root, however.”
And so the conversation went. By mid-morning the next day, they had determined that bitterwood pulp was indigestible, regardless of what one did to it. Tanglegrass root was too hard to eat raw, but could be pounded into a paste that didn’t make anyone sick; whether it was nourishing would have to be determined later.
But the big surprise, in Jacques mind, was flute plant fronds. Boiled, they proved almost indistinguishable from spinach. Young flute plant shoots also proved edible when boiled soft enough to chew.
They set out for Rim Cave by noon with a corked blackwood log and forty person-days worth of provisions. Soob and Doc Yu carried the log, packed with the supplies, while Collette and Jacques headed over to Ascendant’s CSU to see if there was anything else to salvage.
Jacques attacked the area behind the access panel with his multitool. Wires, connectors, optical fibers, braces, components—anything he could pull out quickly went into their emergency kit bags. In the main compartment, the smell had gone and Ascendant’s skull lay, face still away, completely clean.
“She had beautiful bones,” Collette said. “I wonder what cleaned them?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”
She smiled at him. “Protein.” Then she laughed at his reaction. “There are only a few ways to do carbon-based life, and what we find here, like about 45 percent of what we find anywhere, must do it our way. If they can eat us, we might be able to eat them.”
“We need to be on our way,” Jacques said, recovering his equilibrium. “The sun is about halfway down.”
As they strode up the fairly well-worn path toward Rim Cave and the tree-bearers, Jacques contemplated the path of their sun. It seemed to be setting in the same place, yet days seemed to be getting longer and hotter. The planet’s orbit must be eccentric, he thought. How close to its sun would it get?
Lost in thought, he was utterly and totally surprised when one of the most bizarre apparitions he had ever seen in his life loomed in front of him, held up a hand, and said, “Well, praise the lord! Jack’s Song, I presume?”
* * * *
Chapter 6
Community
It was a large ruddy-faced man dressed in a kind of caveman get up—an animal skin of some kind wrapped around his waist and over a shoulder. He had a large bag made of the same skin slung over his shoulder and a large flute plant staff with the fronds still attached.
“That’s me,” Jacques said. “But how did you know? What do you call yourself?”
“Gabe Eddie,” he stuck out a hand, which Jacques shook. “Just call me Gabe. I was a psych warfare troop on the Resolution. I’m from New Jerusalem. I’ve been following your trails for days now—all those cairns and markers, with your name on several.”
“Of course,”
Jacques said.
“We need to catch up with the rest of our party,” Collette said. “We have a camp on the rim in a lava tube, which we should be in before the megabats come out.”
“Jacques, you don’t mind me joining your party, do you? My dragon hole’s a little farther south on the rim than yours.”
“Agreed, but we should start walking,” Jacques said, starting to pace up the trail. “My colleague is Lieutenant Collette Obota, of the expeditionary police.”
A transient frown passed Eddie’s face. “That’s long ago and far away now.”
“Nonetheless, that is our governing authority. Anyway, we all live forever now. Empress Marie may still rule—and our laws as well.”
Gabe’s expression resolved itself into a smile and a nod as he tagged along. “Well, maybe. But your gal’s prettier than the Empress is, though a bit underdressed.”
To Climb a Flat Mountain Page 4