White Seed

by Kenneth Marshall

  Putting the samples away and taking her mask off, she stood facing him. “If it makes any difference, I’m sorry I asked now.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. It was a new regret for her diary; that thought brought a little smile to her face. There would be more to come.

  ∞

  Ai stood at the edge of the sea, feeling the wind in her face and the spray from the waves on her skin. She saw the water rush in, the green foam coming for her boots, and ran from it. She slipped and fell in a drift of black sand, and sat laughing, brushing the grit from her hands.

  Remembering why they came, she took the pole and two one-liter sample jars out of her kit, and went about collecting the seawater. She wrapped the filled jars in an insulator to keep them cool and put them in her backpack. Coming to the shore was interesting and fun, but it was also serious. The jars would give her a concentrated sample of what they’d been exposed to since landing. After sequencing the water, she would be able to tell when they’d been fully decontaminated and could leave the quarantine module on The Child to go into the hab-ring.

  Alon stood a few meters down the pitted rock shore. Ai caught him watching her and let out a nervous laugh. He smiled distantly and looked out to sea again. Beyond a few hundred meters, the seabed plunged deeply under the water, and the water reflected the gray of the overcast sky. Mats of algae bobbed in the waves.

  Alon picked up a stone and threw it out to sea. His expression seemed to change.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “You have all these thoughts—I can see them on your face.”

  “I don’t have to let them out.”

  There wasn’t any point in waiting. She left the sampling pole lying on the ground by her backpack and turned to face him. Standing in front of him, she put her hand on his arm and looked up at him.

  “I’d like to stay in your tent tonight,” she said.

  His mouth opened in surprise and he glanced away, out to sea. “Why?”

  She gave him the best smile she could manage. “It’s a long way from home; I’ll sleep better.”

  “We can’t.”

  “If it’s about Setona—”

  “No.”

  “We don’t have to say anything about it.”

  “That doesn’t matter—we can’t,” he said firmly.

  She let his arm go and picked up the sampling pole to stow it. Her hand shook and she felt a flash of anger. Why had he turned her down? She didn’t think for a moment he cared what Setona thought. It was a simple thing she’d asked for; there wasn’t anything complicated about it. She pushed the catch on the pole and snapped the tubes together, collapsing them. As they came together, she felt a sharp pain in her hand, cried out, and dropped the pole.

  “What is it?” Alon asked, stepping toward her.

  “I cut my hand,” she said, holding it up. A drop of blood pooled on her palm near the base of her fingers. Before the blood could drip on the shore and wash into the ocean, she held her hand to her mouth and licked it up. It tasted of another ocean from a very long time ago.

  “Do you think it’ll leave a scar?” she asked.

  “No. Not deep enough.”

  She laughed. “Too bad. It would have been a good one.”

  ∞

  On the inside of the first serpentine bend of the valley, Ai saw something, quickened her pace, and pulled ahead. The wall of the valley swept out in front of them, two hundred meters of layered, compacted lava and ash blocking the way east to the center of the island. A thin stream of water fell from the plateau above, wetting the cliff all the way down to a tumble of boulders fallen at its base. The land rose in a gentle slope some tens of meters from the dry river bed to the base of the waterfall.

  “What is it?” Alon shouted out from behind.

  “It’s a house!”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s where I’d build it!”

  He followed her at his own pace, arriving beside her after strolling a few hundred meters uphill. They faced a pile of stones, roughly rectangular, higher at one end, lower at the other, collapsed in on itself and dusted pale green in the direction of the sun.

  “With a fence, a garden, and a dog?” Alon asked, standing loosely, his hands in his pockets.

  “No,” she insisted, “With a chimney. A house with a chimney.”

  “To burn what?”

  “Dried algae,” she said without hesitation.

  Alon circled the pile, taking it in and letting his glasses record it, then knelt and pulled one rock out, and then another. The organic crust of lichens on the rocks—perhaps the highest form of life on Keto, depending on what else was in her sample jars—crumbled under his fingers. Peering over his shoulder, Ai saw a glint deep inside the pile. Alon dug in, burrowing like a subterranean animal making a new home, until he found a shining piece and held it up.

  She knew what it was: obsidian, not diacom. That would have been something, if it had been diamond composite.

  “It’s nothing,” Alon said. “Just a pile of rocks.”

  The First hadn’t been old enough to leave the dome when the signal from Keto was lost. The pile could have been a building for the machines, or it could have been natural—left by a storm or a tsunami.

  Alon brushed his hands clean. “We’re out of time.”

  ∞

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you,” Alon said.

  Ai stood with him by the helicopter. It was mid-afternoon when they arrived back at camp. The sky was closed off by a solid overcast, and the wind had picked up. She stood with her jacket fastened and her hands pulled into the sleeves to keep them warm.

  Alon pulled open a drawer of the helicopter cargo pod. It was the one with the climbing gear—she could see helmets, carabiners, coiled ropes, and harnesses. What did he need that for? Or had he opened the wrong door?

  “You missed the morning pass. Galia says the storm changed direction; it’s coming closer. Kali is going to walk overnight—she still says she can make it to the lander in time.

  “But,” he continued, pulling a coil of rope from the drawer and dropping it on the deck of the helicopter, “I don’t think she understands the terrain. It’s going to be very difficult at night.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?” Ai was angry. He kept making her angry—why did he do that?

  “Because you would have worried about it for another four hours. And it wouldn’t have made a difference—we still had to go to the shore.”

  “Or we’d have stayed here and figured out what to do about it. Dug a hole or found a cave.”

  “I found one already.”

  “The one this morning?”

  “No. That’ll be several meters underwater.” He walked to the edge of the plateau and pointed at the cliff on the north side of the valley. “You see that dark point sixty meters below the top? That’s where we’re going. I ran the laser imager on it while you were asleep, and I did a stereo-pair on the way down the valley; it’s real and it’s deep enough.”

  Ai stared at the cliff with an open mouth. She’d never climbed up or down a mountain of any kind and he wanted her to go a hundred and forty meters straight up? Now she knew why he’d been so distant—stonewalling her the whole morning. He’d been getting ready to watch her fall off the damn cliff.

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “These ropes are two hundred meter mono-fiber core. I have four of them. They’re very light—we can take them all. It’ll be a whole lot easier to rappel down from the top than to go up from the bottom. To tell the truth, I don’t think anyone could go up that cliff. The thread-gun might anchor to it, but I’m not even sure about that.”

  “We go up the way Kali and Toran did, then rappel down? But I missed that week of training…” Ai had broken her ankle parachuting the week before and even Athenian medicine couldn’t fix it over the weekend.

  “So we’re going to do it now.”
<
br />   The butterflies in her stomach had turned to worms and she felt sick. “Why do we need to do this today?”

  “Because we can. By the time we know Kali can’t get here, the wind will be too fast to climb. That’s the catch—if we wait, we’ll be trapped down here when we need to be up there. If Kali does get here, it’ll be early and we can still get down. If not, we tell her to get us later; we can wait.”

  “And the helicopter?”

  “Did you notice how fast the rotor spun down after landing? The engine is already binding. It’s only got one or two minutes left. We came close to falling out of that autorotation.”

  Ai remembered flying in the helicopters in training. He was right—the rotor usually took a long time to spin down, and it didn’t make much noise when the engine was off.

  “So I’ve got about an hour to learn how to rappel, then I do or die trying?”

  “Pretty much. But it’s not hard; I’ll show you. Any more time than that is just time to think about it too much.” He pulled out a harness and a helmet.

  Ai felt rooted to the spot, frozen as if someone had pumped liquid methane from the lander’s fuel tank into her arteries. But there was something she didn’t get nagging at her in the back of her head.

  “If we make it there, then we’re going to be together anyway,” she said.

  Alon nodded. “Could be a while.”

  But Ai knew, if she couldn’t get down that cliff, it wouldn’t be long at all.

  Ghosts

  Toran was a hundred-and-twenty meters up the cliff when the sixth line snapped off its anchor point on top and whistled by him. It hung from the thread-gun, blowing in the wind and tangling with the other five. Three had detached as Kali ascended, two more before he’d made it halfway; now he hung by the last two.

  “Stop where you are!” Kali shouted down to him. “Send the gun up. I’ll re-attach.”

  He halted the winch as his feet reached a ledge. Pressing against the cliff, he jammed his left hand into a crack and unclipped the thread-gun from his harness. Kali reeled it in; it went up the cliff until she grabbed it and disappeared from sight.

  There was a thin sheet of old lava protruding from the wall to his right; he latched his fingers onto it, taking any grip he could get. He didn’t turn his head to look out or down; it was better to act as if he was only a meter or two from the ground. The wind blew on his back and made the cloth of his jacket flap. His life wasn’t hanging by a thread anymore, but he felt exposed and alone.

  Where was Kali? She’d disappeared behind the cliff edge and not come back. Why was it taking her so long?

  What would happen if she didn’t come back? He’d be stuck on the side of the cliff until he had no choice other than to climb. It would be easier to go up than down, but without training in free climbing and in only average shape (for an Athenian), he’d be lucky to make it more than a few meters. Already the fingers of his right hand were tiring. He thought it would be a creative way to get rid of an enemy—someone you held in complete contempt—to leave them stuck halfway up a cliff, unable to get to the top or go back down. Eventually, he wouldn’t be able to hold on, and the higher he climbed and the closer he got to the top, the farther he’d fall.

  Where was she?

  The moment he opened his mouth to shout up to her, Kali re-appeared. She let the gun descend slowly, extruding its way down, all eight lines properly anchored. Toran clipped the gun to his harness and stepped off the cliff again.

  As he reached the top, she grabbed his arm and pulled him up.

  “Stop!” he shouted. “You’ll fall too!”

  “Not unless my arm comes off!” She’d tied the short climbing rope around her body and anchored it to a series of points on the rock behind. Gripping her arm, he kicked off a ledge with one foot, swung the other over the top, and rolled to safety.

  “You lost your glasses,” Kali said. They weren’t on his face anymore, knocked off in his last swing for the top. He heard a tinkling sound from the rocks below. “Never mind,” she continued. “Nothing lost—it’ll have replicated to mine or the paper.”

  “I can’t record.”

  “Take mine.”

  Her glasses fit after a gentle twist for adjustment. He stood, brushed himself off, and caught his breath.

  Kali laughed loudly and grinned with exhilaration. “Gonads,” she said, “that’s why we’ve got ’em!”

  Toran snorted and didn’t reply, not wanting to help her justify herself. She’d taken one chance too many for his taste.

  “This way,” she said.

  The ground ahead led into a depression in the top of the ridge. On the right, the ridge led to the sea, now as gray as the sky. Toran could see dark sheets of rain falling in the direction of the horizon. Straight ahead, he could see the lava plain beyond the ridge—kilometers of old flows between them and the lander. The plain was a dome that climbed beyond the last valley south to the edge of the mountain, and then fell to the ocean at the far end of the island. The lander was out of sight on the other side.

  Kali gestured him on, around the depression in the ridge and in the direction of the sea.

  “Wait, there’s something…” he started.

  “We don’t have time for this,” she warned.

  She’d already seen it—was that why she’d taken so long anchoring the threads? He walked into the depression, stepping carefully down the gritty slope into the dark pit in the center.

  “We don’t have time—we need to keep going!” Kali shouted from above.

  He waved her back with a hand. “You’re still not big enough to drag me out of here. Go if you have to; I’ll catch up. This is important.”

  At first, it looked like a random collection of stones, each about the size of his chest. But as his eyes adapted to the gloom in the hollow, he could see the pattern wasn’t random. The stones formed a grid, like the pieces in a game of peg solitaire, with hexagonal edges of three stones each, and the center filled with a single, larger stone. Toran tore open a sealed pack of exam gloves and walked into the grid. Kali followed reluctantly.

  “It’s artificial,” he said. “Standing stones—or lying, you could say.”

  “Navigational? Astronomical?”

  “No.”

  He thought he knew what they were, but he had to be sure. His excitement growing, he crouched to lift one of the stones aside. It revealed an open hole, larger than his head but not as wide as his shoulders. At the bottom of the hole, he felt several hard pieces. Already, his hands told him what they were—he didn’t even need to look. He lifted them out.

  The larger piece was domed, with a section smashed out of the top. The two smaller pieces were like curved sticks, broken in the middle. He fitted the small parts together, attached them to the large, and held out the result in one hand.

  It was a skull, smaller than an adult human’s. Along with the damage to the cranium, he could see the face had been struck hard. A layer of bone had broken away below the nose, and another on the front of the jaw at the chin. There was a second row of teeth above the ones projecting from the top jaw, four blades of enamel around the nose glinting in the dim sunlight. Inside the lower jaw, Toran could see another row of teeth nestled behind the roots of the erupted ones.

  “What the hell is that?” Kali asked.

  Toran understood her confusion: it looked like the skull of a demented little demon, its entire lower face filled by two double rows of shining teeth, but it wasn’t.

  “It’s a human child,” he said. “Baby teeth here, adult teeth behind. This is what children look like, underneath. You want to know where the First went? They’re here, in these graves.”

  Kali stepped into the circle and turned around, counting. “Thirty-six,” she said. “Thirty-seven if there’s one in the center. That’s not all of them.”

  Toran put the skull down and lifted out the remaining bones: a broken pelvis; two femurs, one cracked, the other broken in two; pieces of several ribs, a number o
f them broken; shoulder blades, one chipped; and a handful of other bones—fingers and toes, and broken fragments he couldn’t identify right away. Something had smashed this child’s body over and over again; any one of the injuries would have been fatal. The violence of its destruction shocked him.

  Kali watched him lay out the broken pieces.

  “Put them back,” she said. “They’re dead. We can’t help them.”

  “I have to look. We won’t learn anything any other way.”

  “What’s to be gained?”

  “Their manner and cause of death. Their DNA. Ai can tell us who they were.”

  Ai would be able to determine whether the bones were from the First or following generations, and she could reconstruct faces and personalities from the genes. The same people had been sent to Keto as to Athena and the other worlds of the Network, as information in the memory of the seed. The First generation, for each base, was a unique selection of two hundred genetic profiles from a thousand stored in the seed. Every world had a different beginning—the introduction of randomness couldn’t be undone. The following generations were always a recombination of the same DNA, whether natural or artificial. The original genetic profiles were common knowledge on Athena, although it was illegal to incubate them.

  Toran glanced up at Kali; he thought he saw some distress in her face. The sight of the bones had dented her hard shell—she was still human, then. Was it because they were children or because they were First Generation? Sometimes the First were venerated like saints, even in North Athena. Was Kali a believer, or was something else bothering her?

  Kali turned away. “You’ve got one hour.” He watched her climb out in the direction of the sea. At the top of the slope, she turned and shouted down to him, “Do you have a prayer for them?”

  “No,” he shouted back. “Prayers are for the living—those that knew and cared.”

  “Then what use is your religion?”

  He watched her leave and turned back to the bones, arranging them until the form was complete. It was a child of three or four Athenian cycles—five or six years by the old calendar. What had killed this one? Had the others died the same way? He had to find out.