White Seed

by Kenneth Marshall

  Kali took a breath. “Then the Dragonfly as well?”

  “Yeah. We just pinged it. Telemetry shows its chip detect is on already. You can’t fly it. Worse yet: we can’t trust the other lander until we do a tear-down on its engine bay. Its pumps could have the same problem. It's not safe to fly.”

  Kali swore to herself. She looked up at the sky through the front window. Somewhere up there, The Child was already more than halfway across the sky.

  “Parts?” she asked. The lander didn’t carry a spare engine or the high-vacuum synthesizer to make one, but without a complete engine replacement, both helicopters were grounded. The second helicopter was her backup strategy; now she couldn’t use it.

  “We can’t get them to you even if we extrude them,” Setona said. “You need to dig in while we come up with a plan.”

  “Then what? Cyclone Omega will be here in a week.”

  “Give us time to figure it out. Hold tight and trust me.”

  Setona’s voice faded out. Kali turned off the helicopter’s master power to save the batteries. She glanced back at Alon; he shrugged with a resigned look and jumped out the side door. He went to the edge of the plateau to study the opposite canyon wall with his back to the helicopter.

  “Hey, Supercargo!” Kali shouted over her shoulder to Toran. “Tents are in that box. Pick your spot.”

  Ai sat in the right front seat, looking out the window and nervously biting her thumbnail.

  “We’ll get out of here,” Kali said, “just can’t say exactly when.”

  Ai nodded and forced a quick smile. She dropped her hand to her lap and put the other over it as if holding it down.

  Kali squirmed restlessly in her seat. She didn’t buy Stiletto’s cold-soak explanation, and she didn’t have the patience to wait for Setona to figure out a plan. She could fix this problem herself. But it wouldn’t be easy, and there was always the factor in the equation for the things you broke trying to fix something else.

  ∞

  Could have finished my diary after all, Ai thought.

  “We spent months tagging things—” Kali went on, “Tag the ducks, tag the squirrels, tag the deer, tag the trees. Don’t know why the trees—not like they migrate. Theft, maybe?”

  Kali had ordered Ai to go to sleep an hour ago. She’d been talking non-stop since.

  “Height of the tag,” Ai said. A colleague in the biology department had once shown her a chart of tree height updated in real time. She hadn’t been sure he was serious and had suggested different colors on the chart to find out if he would change them for her.

  “Yeah, could be,” Kali said. “Anyway, it’s colder there. We didn’t have much to eat. We’d eat packets for breakfast and dinner, and Dad would give me a bullet for lunch.”

  Ai stifled a laugh at the image of Kali twisting the top off a bullet and tipping the powder down her throat. “Just one?”

  “Yeah—controlled item. Serial numbers on ’em; tags in the lead. Never issued that many. Black market and all.” The household manufacturing devices on Athena were programmed to refuse to synthesize a long list of banned items—everything from tobacco to nuclear warheads. Those were reserved for the central autonomous factories, if they were ever made. A lot of things weren’t. Flick-knives, knuckle-dusters, portable surface-to-air missiles—you couldn’t get them, unless you could make them by hand from raw materials. “If I killed a duck or a deer or something, we’d eat.”

  Ai rose up on her shoulder. “You’d shoot a deer?”

  “Useless breeders. Not enough wolves to eat ’em. More for us.”

  Ai made a sad-and-disgusted sound. Sheets of rain belted the side of the tent, and she shivered in her sleeping bag, pulling its opening tighter around her face. She rubbed her feet together to generate some warmth in her toes.

  “Ah, I love that sound—the rain falling,” Kali said. She was lying on top of her sleeping bag holding a piece of paper up to the light of a single glow-panel. Ai couldn’t be what was on the sheet even when she raised her head to look. Kali held the paper over her chest, close to her face, and the light it reflected from the glow-panel turned her skin an unusually pale shade. Once in a while, she dragged her finger across the paper, but otherwise she just stared at it.

  Outside, Ai could hear the occasional muffled voices of the men speaking to each other in short sentences. The two tents sat a few meters apart on a flat surface about fifty meters from the helicopter, shielded on one side by the base of the valley wall. Kali had thrown out the compact ball of the stowed tent and it had unfolded into a hexagonal yellow dome big enough for two, as long as they lay in opposite directions. She’d anchored it the traditional way, hammering pins into the base rock with Alon’s hammer.

  “I don’t like the rain; it makes my feet cold,” Ai said.

  “No, the noise—the pitter-patter of it, just kind of evens out your mind, gives you this cool flowing mood… The cold is just in your head. What are you going to do on Aestas?”

  “It doesn’t rain there.”

  “When I was young, I camped out in Darwin with my dad. The Forest Service has huts all over the province, and I’d lie inside in a bunk and listen to the rain on the roof and the window…. It was so green outside, and the branches would have these little drops, like tiny lenses, falling off.”

  Kali let the sheet of paper drop. “One day there was a big rainstorm and I didn’t have a coat, so my father cut holes in a black trash bag and put it on me. I thought it was great and I ran around in the rain in it for hours.” She sighed, and added, “Now it doesn’t seem so funny—too like wearing your own body bag.”

  Kali was silent for a minute. The rain had eased to white noise on the fabric of the tent. The door flap ruffled in the wind up the valley. “I shot a bear once,” she said.

  “What? There’s so few!” Ai was horrified. The Athenian northwest had never been a good environment for the bears—it was short of berries and fish, and Athena’s mild seasons and long year threw off their annual cycles. There’d never been a large population.

  “It had its teeth in my Dad’s leg.”

  “It attacked?”

  “Tagging thing gone wrong. We were —”

  “Enough!” Ai said firmly. “It’s a crime.”

  “Self-defense. I’d have shot anyone who attacked him. That’s fair.”

  Ai wasn’t sure about that—the bears were a precious asset of the planet, the humans not so much. On the other hand, she might feel differently about it if she met a bear in the woods of Darwin. She loved animals, but no one had gone out of their way to edit the primal fears out of her genome; she had as many of them as anyone else. She’d had a few bad dreams like that.

  “You brought it with you?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “The gun.”

  Kali had a rifle on The Child—an old bolt action design, like the ones you sometimes saw in wallvids. She’d shown it off one day in the dojo, firing a few blanks and then lovingly cleaning it by hand. “No—deadweight. Primates taste bad; what else would I shoot?”

  Kali had a point; they’d seen nothing but rocks to shoot at. Ai had a vision of Kali turning the mummified body of the Last of the First over a fire in an attempt to barbecue in some flavor. She muffled a laugh with her hand.

  “Go to sleep,” Kali ordered. “You’re going to blow our day/night schedule; we’re short four hours already.”

  “It’s impossible to adapt without changing our genes. We’re going to cycle forward.”

  “Take a groggy pill.”

  “Ugh!” The problem with the pills was waking up again. Ai lay silent for a moment, then asked, “What would you do if you were one of the First here?”

  “All-night party, every fifth day.”

  “But you step out of the dome and you’re in this valley with nothing but rocks, not even arthropods and things in the sea like home.” Ai pictured herself as one of the First, still an adolescent, led out of the building by a robot—a Builde
r or a Mother—to see the empty valleys for the first time. There would be children and a garden in the dome, but outside, nothing.

  “I don’t know,” Kali said. “Can’t eat that native shit anyway, so does it matter?”

  “No ship to leave in; no home to go to…”

  “That’s worse than Athena? Soil and plants weren’t much better day one, only the island’s bigger. You get raw crap from the ground and gen some crops from data. Who needs all that granite? Just more silica.”

  “But what kind of future could you hope for? Could you put fifty million people on this island? Why come at all?” Ai had been shocked to see Keto from orbit—99% of its surface was water, plus a few extra nines after the decimal; this island was the only land other than a few atolls. It was as if Athena was covered with so much water only the top of Mount Kereni was above it.

  “Boating,” Kali said. “It would be popular. Get out of sight and get laid.” Kali whipped her finger impatiently back and forth on the front of her paper. “If you hadn’t seen anything other than instructional wallvids, you wouldn’t know any different. The water make you sick?”

  “Only if you swim in the wrong bloom. It’s not even very salty.”

  “I swam in the ocean on Athena. It’s okay if you don’t swallow.”

  Ai knew that wasn’t the legal or medical consensus. Plenty of Athenians were willing to smear on the lotion and brave the F-star ultra-violet at the beach, but very few were willing to swim with the jellyfish and giant, straight-shelled nautiloids. If the nautiloids didn’t spike you going one way or bite you going the other, the microfauna in the water would send you for a stomach pumping at the hospital if you swallowed as much as a drop.

  “And they still let you come?” Ai asked. That would be a good way to foul up another planet with transferred biota.

  Kali ignored the question. “So maybe they turned into fish-people and are gulping the sea-scuzz while we’re in here,” she said.

  “I doubt it.” Ai rubbed her toes together again for more heat. But then where did they go? she wondered. She screwed her eyes shut and lay quietly for a while, but she knew her brain wasn’t ready to switch to sleep state.

  “What are you going to do when we get back home?” she asked.

  “You know that restaurant in the big spire in Newton—goes round and round, has all the wood trim?”

  Newton was North Athena’s most built-up city, with a cluster of crystal towers at its heart. The financial capital of Athena, it was a center of wealth but not necessarily authenticity.

  “Two millimeters of veneer,” Ai said.

  “No, solid all the way through. Tables, chairs, everything. Don’t know how they got it—not out of the parks. I’m going to order the Earth lobster, scallops, mussels, crab. It’s all real, grown in big pools. Take some idle lover-boy who can carry a conversation, order one of everything, a different wine for every course—”

  “A month’s pay…”

  “Yeah, like I’m spending it here.” Kali said. She let the paper fall to her side. “So what about you?”

  Ai was silent for a moment, then in a quiet voice she said, “I’m going to prison.”

  Kali sat up to look at her. “Visiting? Who?”

  Ai opened her mouth to disagree, then stopped herself. She’d said too much already. She didn’t want to lie, but she could let Kali tell the lie for her. “He used to be a friend.”

  “Used to be?”

  Ai’s voice was small, barely audible above the light rain on the tent, “There’s something I should have said.” The moment would come—an asymptote only of her own short life, not of history.

  “You could have said it before.”

  “It was too hard…”

  “And it’ll be easier then?”

  “It’ll be different.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll be stronger, or it won’t matter. I wrote it in a letter, if I die. Then I won’t have to say it, but it’ll still be said.”

  Kali picked up her paper and focused on it again. “I’ll get us all out of here. And don’t talk like that or you’ll jinx it. I didn’t write any of those letters and I’m not going to.”

  Ai rolled on her back, hugged her arms to herself, closed her eyes, and tried to put her mind in a calm state. She wanted to sleep. The day had exhausted her physically and emotionally. The landing had left her sore and drained—it had been brutal and primitive compared to traveling between the stars on The Child. The flight in the Hummingbird had been exciting, but the emergency landing like a faceful of icy water. The day had left her mind spinning and her body wound down; now she needed to sleep more than ever. And she wanted good dreams this time. Maybe if she lay still enough and pretended to sleep for long enough…

  Through the slits of her barely open eyes, Ai could see Kali in the light of the glow panel, brushing the surface of her paper, always to the left, and tapping out a line with her fingertip to the right.

  The Memory of a Dream

  Year 5314

  Mission Time: Day Two, 05:00

  Kali couldn’t see the mountains, but she knew they were there. She could feel their presence over her as she lay dying in the valley.

  She was face down in the snow, her hands pressed to her chest and her blood spilling through her fingers. It flowed out of her, dark and sticky, and soaked into the snow.

  She couldn’t see the figure standing over her, but she could sense its presence. She tried to open her eyes and turn her head, but couldn’t. The turbine of the nearest wind-tower whistled and throbbed in her ears. The wind that drove its blades chilled her to the core as her life poured out into the ice.

  There was a Type-K rifle lying in the snow. She had to get it or she would die that much sooner. She struggled to open her eyes and reach a hand out to it…

  Her eyes opened but there was no rifle, only a sheet of glowing, yellow fabric. Someone was moving behind her—she rolled and lifted her foot to kick.

  She saw a tangle of black hair and a startled look on a pale face. It was Ai, backed up against the other end of the tent.

  She had to stop. It wasn’t real—it was in her head.

  Kali took in the look on Ai’s face and held her hand up. “Thought you were someone else,” she said, in a dull voice.

  “So did I,” Ai replied.

  Kali shook her head. It didn’t matter what time it was. If the sun was up, it was morning, and that was enough. She ran her fingers through her hair and felt it tangle around them. She’d had less than five hours sleep, but sleeping longer wouldn’t change anything; it was time to move.

  She tugged the tent door open and climbed out. The sky was a blue dome overhead and the air clean and fresh. There was only a light breeze. She breathed in deeply—it was good, as good as any morning on Athena. She felt the memory of the dream slipping away. Been living in a tube too long, she thought.

  Standing at the edge of the plateau over the dry river, she looked east up the valley. At the far end it split, the north side going deeper into the island, the south ending in a cliff that would become a waterfall when it rained. Where the north and south divided, there was a steep but not impossible slope, about a thirty-degree incline. She stared at it for a moment before her eyes moved on to the mountain in the center of the island. The blanket of cloud over it had slipped away and exposed its mass to the sky. The sight of the naked mountain was ominous, but the source of her feeling about it escaped her.

  To the west, the helicopter sat with its doors shut and the Athenian blue-ball logo visible on its side. In the distance, the valley took a last turn before reaching the sea. Its cliffs cut down, fencing the sea on the other side into a triangle. The water extended to the horizon like a runway inviting the sun to an evening landing.

  There was basalt under her feet instead of snow. Kali felt the anxiety recede. What was it? Something she’d dreamed but already forgotten. The colors weren’t right now, but it was better that way. Just let it go.

&nbs
p; She turned back to the camp and walked a few meters to the men’s tent, shoving her fist into the door flap as if knocking.

  “Wake up in there! Quit spooning!”

  Toran pushed his head out and looked up. His hair was flattened on one side and his shirt billowed open at the neck and cuffs.

  “He left already.”

  “Whatever.”

  Kali sat in the helicopter and turned on the radio. “ALV?” she called, “Manus? Galia?”

  After a moment, the reply came, “Manus.”

  “What’s the weather?”

  “Uh, clear, some showers. Galia’s concerned the course of cyclone Alpha will bring it closer.”

  “Today?” Kali asked.

  “No—in a few days.”

  “Not going to be here,” she said. “Do me a favor. Go to the cargo panel. What’s the fuel regen set for?”

  “Eight hundred,” Manus replied. “That’s tonnes?”

  “Yeah. Crank it up; make it a thousand.”

  “Got it.”

  That was the first step.

  “If you’re fucking around in my chair, wipe it off when you’re done.”

  Manus laughed. “Be glad to, if I get that lucky.”

  Kali turned off the radio and walked back to the tents. Toran knelt beside a supply case and handed Ai a meal packet. In the distance, Alon was strolling back down the valley.

  “The sky was green last night,” Ai said, holding the meal as if unsure what it was.

  “When it was raining?” Toran asked in a thick voice.

  “No, after that.”Ai rubbed her eyes.

  “You all need to go stand under a waterfall and wake up,” Kali said.

  “You, too,” Toran replied.

  “We’re not going to have a comm pass with The Child until the afternoon,” Kali said. “We need to decide what to do sooner.”