To Climb a Flat Mountain

by G. David Nordley

  “Megabat meat, Collette. Megabat.”

  “Hey, that’s the spirit,” she answered with a big grin, and seemed to fly away from him up the trail in big joyful leaps.

  In the cave, he and Collette spent much of the night with their multitools, a nonfunctional wrist comp, and Ascendant’s CSU control module. When he was done, he had the wrist comp’s power jack twist-wired into the CSU control module. That was as far as he could go without sunlight. Morning would tell whether he got it right.

  There was one more chore. He took a look outside. It was hazy, but he was pretty certain that he saw distorted Orion and Antares setting in the west. It wasn’t a real measurement; he didn’t even know if the time of night was comparable. But what he saw suggested that their little world had completed something like half an orbit in the intervening forty rotations or so.

  He went back into the cave and lay down on the space blanket by Collette.

  “Uh, hi.” She yawned.

  “Hi. Collette, I think I’ve got our orbit worked out, roughly. The period should be about eighty of our days here, which is about ninety Earth days—that kind of fits with red dwarf luminosity and our atmosphere. The sun is getting larger, maybe half again the size it was when I got here, so the orbit is fairly eccentric and we’re probably getting closer—approaching periastron.”

  “Tell me all about it in the morning, okay?” She turned away and went to sleep.

  * * * *

  He was up for sunrise. He stood behind the cairn marking Rim Cave and noted where the sun rose behind the small hill to the east of him. He put another cairn there. By now, he was pretty sure this line wouldn’t change, but even with this primitive setup, he should be able to confirm that lack of change to a fraction of a degree.

  Collette came out with some warm tanglegrass root mash for his breakfast. Thanks to Gabe’s predations on the kangasaur population, they had bone spoons to eat it with. He was scraping the bowl when Collette called his name and pointed to the sky.

  “Jacques, what’s that? A supernova?”

  A star had appeared in the daylight sky, well above what Jacques had decided was the projected plane of their planet’s orbit. It was far too bright to be a planet, he thought. Collette was probably right.

  “If so, it’s not near enough to affect us, I think.”

  “That’s the first since 2148, and we’re probably the first ones to see it.”

  Jacques laughed. “Too bad that we cannot file a report. Well, let us see if I’ve succeeded in anything. This is going to take some time. While I’m at it, do you think you could draw a map from what you see from the high point on the ridge south of us?”

  “On what?” Collette laughed. “Wait, I have an idea.” She grabbed a shard of rock and scratched the deep ebony skin of her arm. The line stood out clearly, much lighter than the skin.

  “Ouch,” Jacques said. “That must hurt.”

  “Not much. Okay, see you later.” She grinned and gave him a peck on the cheek, her left breast brushing his arm as she did so—but neither of them did anything to acknowledge this accidental intimacy.

  “Be sure to be back well before nightfall; remember the megabats,” Jacques said.

  She nodded seriously and was off. As she left, Jacques, to his wonderment, found himself following her with his eyes. She was not what he had grown up with thinking was beautiful, particularly in her wide hips, curly hair and projecting face. Still, she moved with an easy, powerful grace. But it was her mind, he thought—its quickness and spirit—that attracted him and made her body seem beautiful.

  He sighed. He would have to deal with this complication in his life later.

  He spread out the array and carefully plugged it into the various wrist comps. Two of them lit up. With the multitool, he very carefully cut off the back of one that didn’t work at all and one that lit. He worked painstakingly on this all day, and when he was done, he had a working wristcomp, although it could not operate without the solar array.

  With the sun setting, he hurried to the highest point of the rim and queried it for any other signals. It found three. One was another wristcomp, about the right direction and distance for New Landing, another was a CSU in the forest below, and the third was apparently midway between the northernmost mountain and the easternmost mountain.

  The wrist comp identified the third as the Fortitude, an atmospheric shuttle carried aboard the Resolution.

  One survived! The wrist comp would never reach it at this range, but if he could get nearer...

  It should be looking for them. The joy of seconds ago turned into a cold cramp in his stomach. Even if damaged in reentry, it was self-repairing and nuclear powered. Its AI should know where the CSUs went down and should be seeking them out, unless told not to.

  Someone may be playing games with us, Jacques thought.

  The wrist comp abruptly shut down as a shadow fell on Jacques and the array. His head spun away from the display to show a huge megabat gliding down toward him, beak open. He quickly looked around for his staff—in his excitement over getting a wristcomp working, he’d forgotten it. Nor had he thought to set up near a lava tube. The nearest trees were too far to reach before the megabat arrived.

  He would make the thing work for its meal, anyway, he resolved, and started scrambling toward the trees, keeping his eyes open for sticks, loose chunks of lava, anything.

  The megabat deviated from its course to follow him. About a hundred meters away now, its wings filled the sky.

  Coming over a ridge, Jacques leaned far over, gathered his legs beneath him, and leaped toward the forest edge with as much strength as he could muster. Landing from his ersatz flight could be painful, he thought, but his speed had increased greatly. He couldn’t spare a look back at the megabat, and resigned himself to the big crunch that would end it all. As he lost altitude, he brought his legs under him, and seeing a smooth spot, kicked off of that, staying airborne. His body, he realized, was acting as an airfoil in the thick atmosphere.

  He risked a look back. The megabat had landed on its hind legs—the wing webs joined the legs far enough up the leg to let it do so—and was swinging its head back and forth between where Jacques was now and where he had been. Up close, the monster’s sharp-edged beak was bigger than he was.

  “Jacques!”

  It was Collette. He turned his head to see her waving from a hundred meters or so down slope, on the edge of the trees, hurrying toward him.

  “Jacques! Electric fields! You, me, the solar array!”

  Damn! The monster must locate living prey by their electric potential, like a shark. If it thought his power supply was something to eat, the entire small community could be condemned to decades of struggle. Putting his feet in front of him, he managed a not-too-painful halt on a hillock of smooth lava.

  Collette charged toward the monster, waving her arms in the air. It turned its head away from the array, toward her.

  They could probably out-jump the thing, he realized; their reactions and one-g muscles might be more than a match for it. He took a deep breath and strode toward it yelling “Here, here!”

  It swept its head from Collette and lunged for him, incredibly quickly. Jacques’ eyes found a large, somewhat dish-shaped fragment of lava and picked it up. With more instinct than deliberation or aim, he whipped the piece of lava toward the megabat’s head, using the reaction from his throw to push him down to the ground much faster than the low gravity would take him. The piece of lava missed, but whether the flying rock had distracted the monster, or Jacques had simply ducked too fast for it to follow, the beak snapped shut on empty air just centimeters above him.

  There was only one place to avoid the next bite. Jacques jumped up, grabbed the neck of the megabat, and pulled himself up behind its head, his hands gaining relatively easy purchase in its hairy pelt. The creature swung its head slowly side to side in confusion.

  While trying to figure out what to do next, he felt a tap on his back.

 
; “Fancy meeting you here!”

  “Collette!” Jacques shouted. She’d jumped onto the creature as well.

  “Hang on, I think we’re going for a ride!” She grabbed handfuls of hair with both hands.

  Behind them, vast wings rose and the creature gathered itself and uncoiled for a stately stretch into the air. The downstroke of the wings was hardly audible, but the whoosh of their backstroke was deafening.

  They gained altitude like an airliner and were soon soaring hundreds of meters above the lake and the landscape.

  “It’s a square!” Collette shouted.

  Jacques looked around. Above the local cloud cover now, he could see the layout of the land as a whole for the first time. The four huge distant mountains, indeed, formed the corners of a huge square that looked almost geometrically perfect from their viewpoint. He shook his head; what this implied seemed impossible.

  “It looks like a square,” he shouted back to Collette.

  In turning back to her, he’d shifted his grip and his hand found a firm ridge of flesh, almost hidden in the hairy pelt of the back of the megabat’s head. As his hand grabbed it, the megabat screeched and turned its head to the right, banking right in the process.

  Jacques shifted his grip to a less sensitive place and their course straightened out.

  “I think I found its ears!” he said.

  A sharp bank to the left in response to a tug indicated that they must be very sensitive organs.

  While it was still light up where they were, a deep shadow had quickly covered the world below them, leaving the rim of the caldera for last.

  “Let’s see if you can make it go down!” Collette shouted.

  Jacques nodded, instinctively pushing the rim of the megabat’s ear down. Its head also went down, and they descended. By pushing, tugging, and pulling he was able to get it to land in the fringe of the forest just below the rim of the caldera.

  Collette laughed. “They’re so big they don’t have to be smart!”

  With unspoken assent, both Jacques and Collette jumped for the branches of a passing blackwood tree. Just as well: on the ground, the megabat ducked its head to where its huge claws could reach its ears. Scratched, the megabat swung its head up, then, seeing them, moved quickly away, as a person might avoid a bumblebee. With a screech, it fled into the sky.

  Jacques and Collette dropped from the trees, made their way up to the Rim, collected Jacques’ apparatus, and made their way into the shelter of Rim Cave.

  “Wow!” Collette said, “Just wow!”

  Whether from the adrenaline coursing through their veins, or the mutual realization that they’d come very close to losing each other, and that suddenly mattered, they were quickly in each other’s arms. When they let go, Collette had a silly grin on her face, and Jacques realized his life had changed forever. However, from natural reticence, or prudence, he said nothing.

  “It’s a perfect square,” Collette said. “As close as I could tell, this side of the world is a perfect square with a huge mountain on each corner, and it looks flat, too, except for this hump in the middle.”

  “The flatness may be an illusion. Those mountains look like they stick way up out of the atmosphere.”

  “Uh huh, but the gravitational field should still be radial, shouldn’t it? So if the side of the world is flat, and gravity is radial, and atmosphere conforms to gravity, the edges would stick out.” She made a ball of her fist and put her other hand flat on top of it.

  Jacques tried to visualize it. If Collette’s model was right, walking out to the edge of the square would feel like going increasingly uphill, even if the side was geometrically flat. He shook his head. “This is unbelievable. The compression under the corner mountains must be astronomical! I don’t see how anything in nature could do that.”

  Collette looked him in the eye. “We’re part of nature. We could do this, someday.”

  “Okay, it looks like an artifact.”

  “Where there’s architecture, there may be architects!” Collette’s eyes were bright with excitement.

  “How old do you think this place is?”

  “Don’t know. With all the vulcanism, the oldest parts of the surface are maybe on the order of 100,000 years? I don’t see any craters, except maybe on the mountain tops.”

  “The life forms have adapted to this gravity. Maybe evolved some. I’m thinking a time scale of at least a million years. Whoever is watching over this has a lot of staying power.”

  Collette frowned. “A century is still a long time to me. I wonder what it’s like to know so much time. Maybe we’ll get to ask them. Maybe we’ll even get a ride home!”

  Jacques laughed, “They’re being pretty scarce.”

  That night, they made love for the first time, and afterward, Jacques clung to Collette as if to the most precious thing in the universe to him. Then they went out and, cautiously staying close to the opening of Rim Cave, watched the stars.

  “What are you looking at?” Collette asked.

  “The bright yellow-white star over the North rim, about halfway up over the part of the rim lit by the north lava flow.”

  “Okay. It seems ordinary enough.”

  Jacques squeezed her hand. “Probably is. What’s significant is that it hasn’t moved from that position since forty days ago. I think it’s our north pole star.”

  * * * *

  Chapter 8

  Testimony of a Ghost

  As soon as the sun cleared the rim of the caldera, Jacques plugged the solar array into Ascendant’s CSU. The maintenance screen lit up instantly.

  “CSU, what happened aboard the Resolution?”

  The tiny speaker below the maintenance screen produced a tinny, minimally inflected voice. “I have no records of events before atmospheric entry. During atmospheric entry, there was structural failure of Sphere 4 and this CSU was ejected at 48 km altitude.”

  “The same thing as with all the other CSUs,” Collette observed.

  “I thought as much. Ascendant was a diarist. I’m hoping she did what I did. Do you have anything from after Ascendant’s revival?” Jacques asked.

  “I have a command trace and redundant copies of recorded messages.”

  Pay dirt! “Play the recording.”

  Ascendant Chryse had been awake for the approach to the 36 Ophiuchi system. She was well aware that a starship was at its most vulnerable during the months it took to decelerate from almost 90 percent of the speed of light, and as a passionate opponent of the New Reformation, if they were attacked, she had wanted to know about it and die fighting back.

  Great precautions had been taken; for instance, laying out the deceleration trails on the far side of 36 Ophiuchi from Sol, so that the reflection plume would be directed away from the star and shielded by the starships’ bodies. Particles had been engineered to self-ionize at low temperatures. Additional rings had been added to better collimate and cool the exhaust plume.

  According to Ascendant, surprise had been preserved; there was no indication whatsoever that their opponents had any idea that an invasion force was establishing itself in the 36 Ophiuchi system. But when it came time for the Resolution to decelerate, it had not done so.

  Ascendant’s voice was a mellow, throaty warble that the CSU’s minimally functional speakers clearly did not do justice. “‘Why aren’t we decelerating?’ I asked. It told me someone or something had removed key components of the homing beacon system. The particles that were supposed to be slowing us down were just blowing by us. I got out of the CSU to look.”

  “That took guts,” Collette said.

  Jacques nodded.

  “Everyone else was suspended in CSU fluid,” Ascendant’s voice continued. “I couldn’t find the beacon parts—the ship couldn’t either, and there wasn’t time to make new ones. But I did find someone else up and about. I kept hearing things. But whoever it was has blinded the ship to himself somehow. I told the ship to wake the captain, and it said his CSU was off line. I went to his
room and turned it back on—just in time.

  “We woke a couple of the other crew, and they implemented the ‘Ghost Ship’ contingency plan, for if deceleration goes wrong. They’ve plotted a course that will pass near several stars near our line of flight—they’ll look for habitable planets or moons as they get closer, but at best we’ll be traveling for centuries. The ship put out the emergency magsail to slow down a little and change course a little. When it gets to the destination star, it passes through the star’s solar wind and ultimately its atmosphere to lose most of its velocity, using the ship’s magnetosphere as a reentry shield. If it survives all that and still needs to dump velocity, it will crash into the target planet’s atmosphere, break apart, and dump the CSUs. Those are pretty tough. If anyone is listening to this, I guess it must have worked. They think maybe 10 percent of us will make it.