White Seed

by Kenneth Marshall

Alon arrived beside them. “We’re waiting for Stil to get back to us, no?” He took a meal packet from Toran and ripped the top off a pouch of lentil stew.

  “We can walk it in two or three days,” Kali said.

  “Where?” Alon asked.

  “To the lander.”

  “Fuck, no.” Alon spooned the cold stew into his mouth straight from the pouch.

  “To the lander?” Toran asked.

  “Yeah, the lander,” Kali said. “They don’t have a solution and we all know it. Stil is going to waste a day or two on gray-tape fixes, then we’re going to walk it out anyway.”

  “Bring the lander here,” Toran said.

  “Not with Galia and Manus on it—not on remote. It’s got a dead pump and one screwy already. It’s not safe to fly on auto.”

  “You want to be on it, if it goes down?” Alon said.

  “If they’re on it.”

  “You’re going alone?” he asked.

  “You’re all going with me.”

  “No,” he replied.

  There was silence. Kali glared at Alon—it was the wrong moment to shoot her down.

  Alon dropped his breakfast package on his backpack and turned, gesturing her to follow. She trailed him as he walked ten meters to the other side of the helicopter.

  “Step into my laboratory,” he said. He touched a point on his gray jacket just below the collar. He spoke normally but his voice was muffled and distant.

  “You do what you want, I’m staying here. This is where the science is.”

  “I’m not leaving you behind. Buddy system—either two or four of us go.”

  “I’m good on my own.” He had a sly smile on his face. “Take them. Pick me up later.”

  Kali wasn’t buying it, and his chill attitude was only making her angrier. “You expect me to look after Tricksy and that street-lover by myself? I need someone who can cut it. You could do a great core sample series between here and there.”

  “No—the drill’s too large to take. We’d only be able to carry one core each, and I need a lot more than four. You go there, bring the lander back. I’ll scope out a landing site in the meantime.”

  “I’m not leaving you behind.”

  “And I am not leaving this valley without those samples. That’s the prime objective of this mission—that’s why we came here.” He met her stare; he wasn’t changing his mind. “Am I not making sense?”

  “Understand, if you stay, I can’t guarantee I can pick you up before Omega gets here. If I can’t bring the lander in time, you’ll have to ride the storm out in this valley.”

  “I accept that risk.”

  “Okay. You get what you want. But you get Ai as well. Buddy system—take it or leave it.”

  “I can look after myself—I don’t know about her.”

  “You want to do science? Then she’s yours now.”

  Kali didn’t wait for him to reply. She spun around and walked back to the camp. “I need a volunteer,” she said, looking straight at Toran. “And you’re it. Eat your meal and get your shit together. We’re leaving now.”

  ∞

  “Alon says he prefers the rocks here,” Kali lied.

  She stood beside the helicopter pulling the drawers out of the cargo carrier under the fuselage. Her backpack lay empty on the deck of the helicopter. Kali pulled out a pair of glasses, a first aid kit, and several meal packets, and put them beside the pack.

  “Really,” Toran said. It wasn’t a question.

  Kali pulled out the tightly wound bundle of an extra microfiber sleeping bag. No point in trying to repack the one in the tent, she thought, just take one of the spares.

  “You have a better way to do this?” she demanded. “Talk now.”

  “The decision may be right, but the reasoning—”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time we did the right thing for the wrong reason. Better that way than the other.”

  Toran sighed, stuck the spoon in his meal packet, and put it aside. “Alright, what do I need?”

  As fast as he could put things in his pack Kali threw them out again—“Gloves? Not going to need ’em—not cold enough. Extra food packs—plenty on the lander. We’re not going to starve in the next four days. Hat—in; entrenching tool—out. Flashlight, yes. Rope—just the short one.”

  Toran struggled to keep up with her. “Survival knife?”

  Kali pulled the knife out of its sheath and looked at it. It was a basic diacom model with teeth on the back edge of the blade; nothing fancy.

  “Take the knife,” Alon shouted from the other side of the helicopter.

  Kali put it in her pack. “Water—make sure you have a backup collector and bag,” she continued. “Fill the pouch in your backpack before we go.” The collector would pull water from the air and put it in the container in the pack; it wouldn’t run out easily in the moist atmosphere of Keto. “The water filter—yes, for worst case. Bedroll—no. Just take the bag; we’ll find someplace flat. Thread gun, harness—might need those.”

  “Paper?” Toran asked. “We need a map.”

  “Here. I’ve got a few sheets in the pack, in case this one blows away or something.”

  Satisfied, Kali threw her pack on and walked around the tents, followed by Toran. Ai stood scowling at her as she passed by. Earlier, as she packed, Kali had seen Ai pacing back and forth, at first looking distracted, then more agitated.

  She returned Ai’s stare. Then, when Ai said nothing, she asked with some annoyance, “How am I looking?”

  “Great,” Ai replied. Her brow furrowed into a glare. “You’re really putting the ‘ass’ back in ‘astronaut’ today.”

  Kali stared back for a moment, then laughed. “I’m flattered.” She wasn’t going to be deterred by some snark from the cargo. “You woke up, now go do some science.”

  “Which way?” Toran asked.

  “Straight up the middle. I studied the map last night. I think this slope in the middle is do-able. Then we go round the southern waterfall on top. It’s the only way out of here.”

  The valley was walled off on both sides all the way to the sea, and its eastern forks ended in vertical cliffs. Up the slippery slope in between—that was the beginning of the way out.

  Shinigami

  Ai sat on a flat-topped rock, watching Toran and Kali struggle up the two hundred meter slope for an hour, before she realized she was secretly hoping Kali would fall.

  As the two Athenians climbed, the waterfalls on either side faded from streams that splashed down the sheer rock face to mists that dissolved in midair. From time to time, one of the pair would lose their footing or backtrack and circle for a new path. Near the top, Kali crawled on her hands and feet, pushing ahead of the more cautious Toran by tens of meters. But just short of the top, her grip gave away and she slid, clawing at the dirt, then rolling on her back to dig her heels in.

  Ai felt a little smug satisfaction watching Kali slide and lose her lead, then caught her breath as Kali continued to slip without stopping. Ai tensed, imagining Kali tumbling all the way to the bottom and landing broken and dying. She blamed herself, as if her little fantasy had caused Kali to slip. It was a piece of the anger she’d come to leave behind.

  Kali dug her heels and hands in and came to a stop in a cloud of dust. Toran paused to shout to her, then finished climbing and stood on top, brushing his trousers off. Kali hugged the slope, frozen in place for a minute, then resumed her way up. Ai relaxed.

  Second place, she thought. Serves her right.

  Sooner than she expected, Kali and Toran disappeared behind the lip of the southern waterfall. Ai waited to see if they would show up on the other side, ready to wave a final goodbye, but they didn’t. She had no idea when she would see them again.

  “Would you call that decisive or hasty?” Alon asked from beside her. Suddenly aware of him, she turned to look up. There was a broad but sly grin on his face, his eyes lit up under tousled brows.

  It occurred to her she’d missed the signs
the night before. Kali hadn’t just been spinning old tales; she’d had plenty of time to think this march through, even if she couldn’t be bothered talking about it or asking for a second opinion.

  “Just a rhetorical question,” Alon said and strolled away in the direction of the helicopter.

  She watched him go and said nothing. She’d never trusted him. His eyes could be soft and friendly, the blue of the sky or the water, but they could also be harsh, the color of ice stained with blue algae. She’d watched Alon at dinner by the auto-hibachi on The Child, joking and laughing with the crew. But she’d also watched him sitting by himself glaring into space, starting at an unwelcome thought and swearing under his breath. That side of him unnerved her.

  Ai slipped off the boulder and squatted down. The bedrock under her feet was old, the texture of the lava worn to a fraction of its original relief. Alon stood by the helicopter, his back to her, going through equipment in a tray of the cargo pod. She glanced up and down the valley, then warily back at him; suddenly, the valley felt open and exposed. Maybe Kali had been right—at least on Shinju or Mineral she could have gotten her own room. She drew a curved line in the dirt in front of her knees with her fingertip—an imaginary dividing line between her and Alon.

  Ai stood and walked to the edge of the plateau to look at the river. When they’d risen in the morning, the river had been flowing, carrying the last of the night’s rain away through its narrow center channel. But now it had stopped, leaving behind a pool a few meters across in the oxbow. She returned to the camp and stopped by the yellow box of the field sequencer.

  “I’m going to take some samples from the river,” she said loudly in the direction of the helicopter. Alon, lost in study of a multispectral map on his scroll of paper, waved in acknowledgement.

  At the edge of the pool, she pulled on her filter mask and knelt. The water was crystal clear, at once reflecting the puffy clouds above and showing every detail of the rocks below. Nothing moved in it. She used a dropper to collect samples from the edge of the pool, then the pole to collect water from the center. The field sequencer clicked through the samples one-by-one as she put them in, chiming when it was ready for the next.

  Inside the sequencer was a large roll of paper wound between two spindles and a mechanism for delivering drops to its surface. The paper itself absorbed the sample and tore it down, isolating cells, sequencing DNA, unwinding proteins, and storing every detail. Then the mechanism rolled the paper on for the next sample, and a small swarm-scrubber cleaned the droplet system. But the paper would continue working on the sample, running background processes to analyze it. The computing capacity of the roll of paper—mostly photonic, consuming trivial amounts of power, and interacting directly with the physical world at its surface—equaled that of Earth in an earlier age. The device could sequence millions of life forms in a liter of water in a few hours, and determine, not only their DNA, but also evolutionary relationships, metabolic characteristics, behaviors, and life-cycles.

  “How’s the water?” Alon’s shouted from above. He stood on the edge of the plateau, one hand on the strap of the backpack over his shoulder.

  Ai tried to speak but the mask muffled her voice. She pulled it off and shouted back, “Not much to see. No microcystins or neurotoxins. You could swim in it. But it won’t last—it’s already down a couple centimeters since I started.”

  “I’m going up north,” he said, pointing at the valley wall. “Do a sequence. See you in a few hours, before the pass.”

  Alon stepped sideways down the slope, crossed the dry river channel to the other side, and strolled away at a relaxed pace without looking back. Ai watched him, holding the pole in one hand and her mask in the other, her mouth hanging open, as he faded away into the boulder fields and talus slopes on the other side of the valley.

  She’d worried about being alone with him, kept her distance, and had even drawn that line between them, but she hadn’t expected him to leave. She realized she’d overlooked the signs—selecting equipment, checking the map—and wondered if she’d ignored them because she knew she couldn’t ask him to stay.

  Suddenly, the science felt pointless, with no one to care about the results. She dropped the pole and tossed the mask carelessly at the field sequencer. It bounced off the yellow box and fell to the ground beside it. She collapsed into a pile of gravel at the bottom of the rise to the plateau and put her hands over her eyes.

  They all left, she thought. They all just left.

  She caught herself and put her hands on her knees. It’s not about you, she told herself. She imagined the analyst Arden Glade saying it; she wasn’t sure Glade had ever said it, but she’d said something like it: It’s not about you; they have jobs to do. It’s not personal.

  Ai stood up; she couldn’t sit there and feel sorry for herself. It’s not about you—that wasn’t what the Lady Adamantine Wyre would have said, and it wasn’t what her father would have said either. Grow the fuck up already—that’s what he would have said.

  She felt the sadness and shock of being left alone turn to anger, and stood with her hands balled up into fists.

  She turned to the sea—the blue-green triangle beyond the canyon walls—and started walking. She followed the dry river bed past a few more shrinking pools, down the middle of the valley a kilometer or so until the sea disappeared behind the intersecting walls of the canyon. The solitude didn’t bother her anymore, but she missed the green of plants and the sound of birds. On Keto, time passed but only the shadows moved.

  Ai realized the sea was too far and sat on a boulder, looking up the valley at the now dry waterfalls at the end. She wondered what the valley would have been like if the seed had taken. She imagined the trees: mango, saman, acacia, and perhaps even koa; and, nearer the ground, fan palms and portia trees. She pictured birds among them: finches or honeycreepers, egrets or cardinals, owls or hawks.

  But the trees didn’t grow about her, and they couldn’t sway gently in the breeze—they wouldn’t cast cool shade over her, and the birds didn’t fly among them from branch to branch and would never sing.

  And why not? she thought. Why not a stand of the redwoods so rare on Athena they were nearly sacred? Or quetzals, flowing iridescent green and red as they passed through the canopy? Or eagles, white trimmed, black winged, soaring overhead? Because, if none of these things would ever exist, why shouldn’t they be magnificent in her mind’s eye?

  The sun blazed and the bare surface of the valley radiated heat into the air. Ai felt thirsty; she brushed sweat from her forehead and wondered if she’d already burned her skin in the sun.

  She stood and walked to the southern edge of the valley, back to the tents and the helicopter on the plateau, and looked out over the pool again. She reflected for a moment on how water is essential for beauty in any landscape—as long as it flows or ripples, there can be beauty, even without birds or plants.

  Then she thought, a wicked smile growing on her face, that a swim didn’t seem like such a bad idea.

  ∞

  Toran rested three meters from the top of the southern waterfall, watching the last remnants of the night’s rain go over the edge and vanish in a cloud of spray.

  “Alon’s Shinigami, isn’t he?” he asked.

  Kali stood at the edge with her hands on her hips, one boot on a rock two hundred meters above the valley floor. She turned to look at him, the tangled mass of her hair a black halo around her head.

  “No,” she said, firmly.

  Toran pushed his hat onto his head to prevent it blowing away. In the valley below, he could see the dry river bed meandering all the way to the sea. Beyond the end of the island, white breakers were forming on the green ocean under a thin line of cloud. The helicopter was a gleaming dot in the middle of the valley. A second bright point hovered nearby—a figure by a pool. Also visible, but harder to see, was another figure by the river from the north fork of the valley. Presumably, Alon had left camp on some mission of his own. Otherwise, th
e valley was dark and empty.

  Keto was different from Senta or Curie, Toran thought. In the hills beyond the old exile dig near the town of Fidelity, on the way to the one-time city of Conviction, Senta was almost barren, but still not as empty as Keto. Senta had fields and crops, or at least shrubs and weeds; the soils were poor, but there was always something growing. He’d still felt the presence of life there, but not here on Keto.

  “The suit—” he said, “active camouflage. It’s illegal.”

  “Here?” Kali replied. “Tell me what’s legal.”

  “It doesn’t seem strange to you—the amount of time Alon spent by himself in the dojo?” It had seemed strange to Toran given the state of the Athenian-built hab ring in the first few weeks. Wiring faults, failed oxy generators, leaking fluids—everything had gone wrong. Crew training had stopped while they worked on the squawk list. But Shinigami training wasn’t something you could do when you had the time. You were Shinigami all the time or you weren’t Shinigami at all.

  “No,” Kali said, “that’s perfectly normal.”

  “Did he ever talk about what he does there, or his training before the launch? Or anything that happened before we met him? Where he was born or where he went to school?”

  “No. Now that you mention it, he didn’t.”

  Toran was just getting started. “Does it bother you we’ve had two highly reliable engines fail on the same day? The same day we have someone on board who would know how to arrange that?”

  Kali looked angry. “You’re accusing Alon of sabotage? That’s ridiculous. What would he gain by that? What do you think he cares about collecting the rocks in this valley instead of the one two over? You need to learn to work with him—we all need to pull together.”

  “How likely is it both engines failed by chance?”

  “Look, I don’t buy the cold-soak story, either, but there are any number of other reasons. Stil can pull them apart and we can get an answer.”

  Kali turned away but Toran stepped closer. “It doesn’t worry you to leave Ai with him?” he asked. “With a man trained to replace a machine designed to do nothing but kill?”