White Seed

by Kenneth Marshall

  Perhaps one of the First? Several of the burial pits near the base had been empty, and there weren’t enough for the whole population of the base. Kali crawled forward again and tried to expose more of the skull. If there were other bones, they were buried deeper in the fabric or under the rocks. The bag was twisted around the rocks and trapped between them at one end; there was no way to get the whole thing free. She brushed dirt away from the skull with her fingertips and then aimed the flashlight for a good look.

  An adult, for sure. Very low brow ridges—she brushed a fingertip on the bone above the eye sockets. Probably female, but it wasn’t possible to be sure without other bones and more expertise. Toran or Manus could make a better identification, or Ai could get DNA from the teeth. But that wasn’t important, this was: it wasn’t one of the First. They had been children. The size of the skull, the adult teeth in the upper jaw, and the closed sutures on top indicated the owner was an adult.

  Kali sat back in the dirt and leaned on her backpack. The skull told her two things. The first was that Eresh was a lying bitch. Several cycles ago, the machine had driven The Child into orbit around Athena and sent an avatar to Einstein. The avatar told a story—that the ship had been built on the machine world of Ambition, a steam planet uninhabitable to humans. The Child was the only ship of its kind, and it needed a human crew to make contact with other worlds in the Network. It was a hard offer to refuse—Athena only had to supply the landers, the hab modules for the ring, and the crew. No Athenian had been beyond low orbit in three thousand years, and there were plenty who wanted to go.

  But the pin and the skull proved part of Eresh’s story wasn’t true: there were other ships and crews. There had to be—one of them had come here. What about the rest of the story? Had The Child been built by Ambition? Did Ambition even exist? It was listed in the planet catalogs but hadn’t communicated directly with the other worlds in the Network. Who’d really built the ship and why did it need a crew? What was its actual mission? There was nothing to go on but what Eresh said, and now part of that was proven false.

  The second thing the skull told Kali was more immediately and viscerally important—she couldn’t stay in this cave. If she did, she would die. Perhaps the owner of the skull had eaten the tendrils and died, or perhaps she’d died outside and been buried in here. More likely—judging by the way the fabric was wrapped around the rocks and embedded in silt at the end of the tunnel—she’d hid in the cave in a storm and drowned when it filled with water.

  Staying in the cave would be suicide, and finding a dry cave in the next few hours nearly impossible, if there was such a thing on Keto. The storm was carrying a lot of water and would dump it on the mountain in a few hours. Then it would all soak down through the rocks and the tunnels until it hit the sea or the water table below. Kali had to get out of this hole and stay out of any others she found. They were all death traps. The only plan left was the original one—to get to the lander as quickly as possible, no matter how little time there was. And she still had to pick up Ai and Alon; they would face the same problem finding shelter.

  Kali’s shivers were coming back with a vengeance; the heating pad wasn’t helping anymore and she had to get moving. She unclipped the pin from the fabric, dropped it in her pocket, and grabbed her backpack.

  “I’m ready!” she shouted up to Toran. “Now you have to shoot me!”

  ∞

  Kali fired the thread gun at the edge of the hole in the ceiling and let the gun winch itself up. There was no way she was going up with it strapped to her chest the normal way, not with ribs that might be broken. That and the roof wouldn’t hold her weight.

  “Anchor it and use the rescue mode!” she shouted to Toran. She watched him reach over to grab the gun, then disappear to secure it to a rock.

  Kali took a moment to sweep around her with the flashlight and spotted her glasses in the mud a few meters away. They were still self-repairing damage from the fall, so she dropped them in her pocket. She wouldn’t be able to record the cave, but perhaps that was a good thing. The weight of all future Athenians watching over her shoulders was lifted; also, she wouldn’t have to figure out how to secure the recording. She could relax and lie back on her pack, as long as she could ignore the pain in her hands.

  Toran reappeared and fired the gun at her—its lines splatted down on her and then slithered through the mud to knit together underneath her legs, hips, and backpack. Rescue mode was designed to lift an injured or unconscious climber as safely as possible without their cooperation. The threads pulled tight under her and tugged her off the ground; she swung gently down the tunnel centimeters over the pool, her arms hanging and knuckles skimming the water.

  As she rose to the edge of the hole, Kali reached out a hand and Toran caught it. He knelt with her hand in his, using his anchor line to counterbalance her weight. Kali threw her leg over the edge and crawled to safety. She lay for a few seconds before getting up; it felt good to be out of the hole, but breathing hurt in a sharp way. Toran watched her as she gathered strength, lighting her up with his flashlight.

  The rain was heavier now but the wind had gone; she could see the drops going straight down in the beam of the flashlight. There was blood on the palms of both her hands leaking through the spray-on dressing. The cuffs of her sleeves were soaked red where she’d gripped them.

  “Did you see her?” she asked.

  “Who?” Toran replied, sounding puzzled.

  “Never mind.” No, of course he didn’t see Eresh. It didn’t matter if the image was her glasses or her imagination—Kali had been the only one to see it. “We have to go.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “Let it bleed. We have to go. No time.”

  “What’s down there?”

  Kali looked up at Toran. She couldn’t tell him what she’d found in the cave. For one thing, if he knew, he wouldn’t want to leave, and she had to get her team back to The Child. But what she’d found was too important—it wasn’t archeology, it was strategic to the program. Setona was the only person she could tell, and then only in the security of the Cage. Maybe Eresh wanted them to know, but the less Eresh knew how much they understood the better. They depended on Eresh to get home, and Eresh could leave them stranded anytime she wanted. The Child was the one boat Kali couldn’t rock; if the crew had to act against Eresh, it needed to be without warning. Eresh could be watching and listening anytime—even down here.

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

  “We could shelter there.”

  “No. It’s not safe.”

  “Why?”

  “For fuck’s sake, trust me!”

  “No. Why were you down there so long?”

  She waved a fist at the hole. “Go ahead: jump and see how long it takes you to get over it.”

  “We need to find shelter. There’s no guarantee we can make it to the lander.”

  “That tunnel’s the storm sewer for this whole plain. You’ll drown and end up wedged in rocks at the end. Your replacement can dig you out; I’m not going to. Unless you want to be mounted in your own museum, now’s the time to leave.”

  Kali turned and started walking, following the length of the ridge over the tunnel until it was safe to cut across. Toran’s flashlight lit her from behind and cast her shadow on the broken rocks in the dip before the next ridge. She could feel large rain drops on her hair and shoulders, and hear them pattering on her pack. She stopped to scope out the next few steps. Toran aimed his light at her face; rain drops streamed through the beam as she squinted back at him.

  “Where are your glasses?” he asked.

  Kali pulled them out of her pocket and put them on. They’d recovered from the damage but the directional indicators were blank.

  “Not useful. Inertial nav tumbled.” She’d have to wing it. “It’s this way.” She was pretty sure of it; she kept walking.

  Beyond the next ridge, the ground leveled out again, just a mass of wrinkled lava like some giant’s
unmade bed. It was getting old already walking through this stuff and they still had a long way to go. Her chest hurt.

  Kali realized Toran wasn’t following her and waved at him to catch up.

  “Where are you going?” he shouted to her.

  “The lander.”

  “It’s this way.” He pointed in the opposite direction.

  “No it isn’t.”

  “I pulled you out the other side from where you went in. We just went back across that ridge.”

  “Bullshit.”

  She aimed her flashlight back the way they’d come, but the ridge was already too far to see. Was he right? She’d been certain of the direction until he opened his mouth. She shook her head. It was her responsibility to navigate, not his; why was he questioning her?

  She focused on speaking calmly and confidently. “We just need to go in a straight line this way.”

  “Studies have shown—” Toran said, as if lecturing her in a classroom, “—that humans without navigational references walk in circles.”

  Now he was really getting under her skin. “You’re not getting the seriousness of this—we’re less than a day from the biggest shit-storm you’ve ever seen. Forget the questions; we don’t have the time. I’ll reset the nav for this direction. That’s good enough.”

  “One more question,” he said, holding up a finger. “Just give me one more question and then I’ll follow you whichever way you want to go.”

  “Yeah, what?”

  He straightened his hat and waved a finger at her as if making a point in a debate back in his preaching-house.

  “You’re looking for a black ship on a black plain, on a dark night, under an overcast sky with no stars, on a planet with no magnetic field, and you have no external source of direction. If that isn’t the right way, how soon are you going to know it? Ten minutes from now, an hour from now, or five hours from now?”

  Kali stared at Toran with her teeth clenched. The rain ran down her face and matted her hair and soaked into her flight suit, and she started to shiver again. He was right. If she’d waited after getting out of the hole to settle which direction they’d come in, she could have re-initialized the inertial navigation in her glasses accurately. But she’d taken off too quickly and scrambled their direction. She could initialize the glasses now, but they would be off by as much as a hundred and eighty degrees. If it took until dawn to figure the error out, they were done for.

  She caught her breath sitting on a rock. Her hands were throbbing and her legs quivering. The pain in her chest now went all the way through to her back with each breath. If she was bleeding inside and filling up a lung, there wasn’t much she could do about it here.

  The plain was all the same—one wave of solidified lava after another. Kali had no doubt they would get turned around in it and go in circles. Unless she could find a way to set an accurate direction in the glasses, they would never get to the lander by dawn.

  Losing

  Ai lay shivering in the center of the tunnel as the wind ripped across its open mouth. She pulled her sleeping bag tighter and rubbed her feet together, but they were still freezing. There was water all around her—blowing in the front, dripping from the ceiling, and pooling in the silt at the back. Only the middle of the tunnel was dry, but the wind and the dampness frightened her, and she couldn’t sleep.

  Alon lay nearby, reading test results on a piece of paper. The only light in the tunnel was a single glow-sheet clipped to the wall above his shoulder. He flicked a finger back and forth, frowning at what he saw.

  To tell the truth, Ai was still a little angry at Alon over the way he’d brought her to the tunnel. He’d kept her in the dark the whole day and not given her time to practice or think about the climb. She’d almost gotten killed rappelling, but now she wasn’t sure the cave was even safe. It certainly wasn’t any fun.

  “How much water is going to come in?” she asked.

  “Don’t know. I brought a tarp. I’ll hang it to keep the wind out and make the water go over us. Tomorrow—if we’re still here.”

  “But the water will still come in.”

  “Doesn’t matter. It’ll drain out the front.”

  “We’ll be lying in it.”

  Alon sighed and tapped his paper to keep his place. “We can put some anchors in the walls. Hang the bags like hammocks.”

  The idea of making hammocks out of the sleeping bags and nesting in them for a few days was oddly romantic. She and Alon would be like caterpillars pupating in their chrysalises, preparing to emerge as butterflies. Although, in their case, they might just emerge more sore and smelly than before.

  Ai couldn’t wait for Kali to arrive with the lander. It would be warm and dry inside, and there would be time in weightlessness to relax.

  “Will this cliff hold up in the storm?” she asked.

  Alon chuckled. “It has many times before. Although one day it won’t.”

  Ai suspected he was playing with her.

  He continued, “After the storm, we should just get on with the mission and go climb Fin Mountain. Are you up for that?”

  “I’m not much of a climber.”

  “Hey, you know everything I do now. So it’s a deal. All the way up—no excuses.”

  Ai squirmed closer to Alon, wriggling in her sleeping bag until she bumped into him. Then she reached out with a tightened fist and punched him in the stomach. He kicked his feet in the air and made an “oof!” sound.

  “Going to have to try harder than that!” he said. “I’m not so easy to kill.”

  Instead of hitting him again, Ai pressed closer and slipped her hand down his sleeping bag to rub his stomach where she’d hit it. He’d gotten her into this cold and wet place, and now she thought he owed her some heat.

  To her surprise, he didn’t try to stop her. “That’s better,” he said.

  She wondered what it would be like to make love to him. But Alon was intent on his results and didn’t look her way.

  “So what’s the answer?” she asked.

  He grunted. “Negative.”

  “No isotopes?”

  “Same as background levels. All samples.”

  “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” If there were nuclear isotopes above background levels, it meant the First had destroyed themselves. “They didn’t self-terminate?”

  “Not by nuclear means,” Alon said.

  “That’s good. But you’re down about it?”

  “We didn’t come here for good news.”

  “Then what did you want?”

  “A sign.”

  Ai laughed softly. “You’re like Toran—looking for a message from one of your gods?”

  “No. Something you can touch.”

  “There’s nothing here but old history. It can’t matter that much.”

  “It can.”

  “You don’t care about Keto.” Ai sighed. He could be so opaque. “Athena, then?”

  “What else?”

  She drew a breath in at the thought. “Self-termination? On Athena? How?”

  “There are ways.”

  “And you need science to show it’s happened before?”

  “No. Science isn’t enough. I need to prove it to everyone.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Not isotopes.”

  “Then what?”

  “Something everyone can touch. I want them to feel it and know it.”

  “It’s not here.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he admitted.

  “Then there’s nothing you can do about it.” She knew he was lying. It was frustrating he couldn’t tell her the truth about something so abstract and meaningless. It was all so far in the future or the past. Keto had died thousands of years ago, and it would be millions of years before Athena tumbled on its axis and became a tilt-world. There couldn’t be any real threat of self-termination on Athena. Athena had never developed the technology that would make it possible on a global scale.

  A
i watched Alon silently scrolled through another page of results. She felt a sudden burst of anger. She was tired of him feeding her a grain of the truth and then lying. He’d done enough of that.

  She slipped out of her sleeping bag and straddled him. He stared up at her blankly. She grabbed his wrists and pushed them to the ground above his head, and then leaned forward to whisper in his ear. “You killed Chon Dō, didn’t you?”

  He stiffened under her as if about to throw her off, and his expression tightened.

  “Did your mother leave a message?” he said, his voice just above a whisper.

  Ai was shocked. She leaned back, her mouth open. “I don’t want to play that game.”

  “You started it.”

  She found it hard to talk about her mother without tears coming to her eyes, but she had her own questions. She breathed carefully for a moment to calm herself. “My father said she didn’t. He said she sent it to Earth.”

  “Whole worlds have died and we don’t know why. No one ever received a message. Far more than one of us gone without a word.”

  “And Chon?”

  Alon paused before he answered. “He was an old friend.”

  Ai thought that she had one the answer to one of her questions now: fucking Alon would be like fighting him. He’d been fighting so long, he wouldn’t know the difference. She let go of his wrists and sat up with her hands on his chest.

  “And what do you want?” Alon said.

  “To live. I wasn’t sure before, but now I do.”

  “We’ll live.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then she said, “It’s my turn. Why did you kill—”

  Alon touched his fingers to her lips to stop her. “No more questions.”

  “Only one more. Is it Kali you want?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll shut up now.”

  If he wasn’t Kali’s, then he was going to be Ai’s. She leaned forward, her mouth open. His fingers slipped from her lips, across her cheek and into her hair. She felt them closing behind her head.