Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
Cliff said, “That comes from microbial pathogens, different problem. I ran the DNA checks. This ecology uses the same basic double helix structure in everything I checked.”
“Sure, but on other planets, the accidents of evolution could make the proteins and sugars different. If this Bowl has been cruising along, sampling ecologies, then there may be whole ecologies here based on L-glucose rather than our D-glucose, and D-amino acids rather than our L-amino acids.”
Aybe shrugged. “Sick is sick.”
Howard glared. “So L-glucose is interesting because it tastes just about as sweet as D-glucose, but passes through the gastrointestinal system completely unmetabolized. Throw left- and right-handed ecologies together here, and every life-form in the food chain has to choose one isomeric biochemistry or the other. Fruit sugars, fructose, will behave the same way.”
Cliff recalled that Howard had been a media figure of sorts. He ran a semi-private preservation zoo in Siberia, after the climate warming ran wild there, exhaling methane. He’d never have left Earth if a disaster hadn’t wiped out his patch of land, animals and all. The mission planners put him in because
SunSeeker
carried the makings of a zoo, intended as an ecology for the colony. Some critters wouldn’t survive and most wouldn’t be revived right away, but Howard could handle them. He and Aybe were butting heads for a bit until Cliff held up a hand.
“That explains why we get the runs? How sure is that?” Cliff said. “I thought I’d seen all the problems when I did that air sampling as we came through the air lock.”
“Biology never rests.” As if to illustrate, Howard slapped at gnats that swarmed around his eyes. “Better if we learned what’s got our handedness and what doesn’t.” Howard held up his phone. “I’ve got notes in here, beginnings of a menu.”
Cliff clapped him on the back. “Good stuff. You’re the food guide now.”
It made him glad to get some clarity on an issue they’d shied away from. Just talking about it and making rude jokes helped. Irma came ambling back and laughed, too.
Howard finally said, “Meat’s the best for us. Kills a lot of nasty stuff. Let’s find some.”
“Where?” Aybe asked.
“Look to all points of the compass.”
“Compass doesn’t work here,” Terry pointed out, and they moved on, following the stream.
At a rest stop hours later under some zigzag trees, Cliff wanted to get some game into their bellies and sleep, so when Howard pointed silently into the distance, they all crouched down and peered through their binocs.
“Looks like a squashed ape,” Irma said. “Meaty.”
It had a gray pelt and walked with a swaying motion, hips throwing the legs forward. A narrow head kept wary watch, and it was coming toward them.
“At least two meters high,” Aybe judged.
“Plenty of meat on it,” Howard said. His stomach growled.
“With that thick coat, lasers won’t be much good,” Terry said.
Irma said, “A head shot is tough, too. Look at those eye ridges—bony and not a large skull.”
“It’s not carrying anything in those hands. They look nearly like claws,” Howard said.
Cliff thought about killing a primate but … they were really hungry. He decided to say nothing.
“Let’s go to Howard’s points of the compass,” Aybe said, “and close in on it. Maybe get some spears?”
This zigzag tree had limbs that slanted backwards as the trunk angled left, then right. They cut off four limbs that were fairly straight and trimmed them down, sharpening their points with knives, searing the points hard with their lasers. They had all gotten quick and sure, handling their field gear, and the gray “ape” was only a hundred meters away when they circled through the tree line, working around it as it moved steadily on. The quarry looked around a lot but didn’t notice them.
On Cliff’s signal, they all closed in. The target was bigger than they were, he judged, by fifty kilos at least. It was watching the ground as they quietly edged closer. It climbed a short knoll and crouched down among the grassy tops. This helped shield them as they moved to within twenty meters of it. The quarry’s attention was focused on the ground and Terry, who edged up the slope, gave the hand signal to attack.
They ran up the slope with makeshift spears and the thing suddenly sprang up, eyes wide. Terry charged at it with a high-pitched yell and then suddenly stopped. “It’s got a tool kit!”
“Hold!” Cliff shouted. They stopped, spears still at the ready.
The creature drew out a slender instrument and pointed it at them.
“That a gun?” Aybe asked.
“Doesn’t look like one.”
Silence. Edgy foot shuffling. Cliff now saw their potential prey was not covered in gray fur but rather a formfitting garment of close woven cloth. From a distance it had looked like a pelt. It backed up, saw that it was surrounded, and crouched low. At its feet was a square opening, revealed by a hatch tilted back by a large handle. It had used the slender tool to unlock the thing, and the lid of turf swung wide open on a big, rugged hinge.
“It’s intelligent,” Terry said.
The creature stepped carefully over and took hold of the lid. It murmured something and gestured with its long, angular hands. They ended not in simple fingers but with an array of flexible, multi-jointed appendages.
Cliff dropped his spear and stepped closer. About a meter below in the hole was a complex mechanical array. As they watched each other warily, a slight rumble came from the ground, vibrating his boots. The creature bent down and tripped two flanges to a new setting, ignoring them.
It’s got to be pretty confident of itself,
Cliff thought.
It swung the lid back into place with a thump that broke the strained silence. It put away the tool and held out its hands, appendages up. They were twice as long as human hands and fingers.
“Is that a peace gesture?” Irma asked.
Intelligence gleamed in the quickly shifting eyes. It focused on Irma and Howard, who were standing together. Slowly it walked toward them. They glanced at each other uncertainly, and Cliff said, “Stand aside.”
With what Cliff thought was supreme self-confidence, the thing walked past the humans and continued on its way. It did not even look back or seem concerned that they might follow it. They stood awhile and watched it walk into the distance with a dignified, measured pace.
When Cliff turned from watching it, Aybe had the lid up and was examining the space below. The rumble was louder with the lid off but soon faded away.
“This is interesting mechanical engineering,” Aybe said. “I could squeeze down in there and—”
“I’m hungry,” Terry said. “I was already figuring out how to roast that thing.”
“Can’t eat a smart alien,” Irma said tersely.
“I suppose not,” Terry allowed with a nod.
Cliff thought,
People do on Earth … even primates.
But said nothing.
They went back to the stream and managed to catch one of the oval turtles with the razor-sharp crest. They were all in a bad mood. They hit it with a rock and roasted it over a spit. Cracking the shell, they found leathery meat sizzling from the fire and giving off heavenly aromas. Tough, but no one hesitated.
A small set of rocky ruins lay downstream. Big stones cemented
in place, no obviously advanced technology. They seemed abandoned. Cliff wondered at their age.
They skirted these, and the river broadened into a lake that smelled of sulfur. A swamp dominated one side and unfortunately it was theirs. They tried moving through it but the sour muck sucked at their every footstep. A hundred meters of this made them stop.
“Leaving prints in this muck makes it easier for them to track us,” Irma said.
Terry looked exhausted again. “Look, we can only run so long. We’re not trained for this.”
Cliff nodded. “There’s gotta be a better way.”
There was, but not easy. They found logs and lashed them together with vines and strips of bark from the rotting fallen trees. No high chippering cries from behind, but they worked quickly together. Their discipline was getting better; nobody spoke more than the minimum. Cliff thought to himself,
The forest always has ears.
At 0.8 g, the raft didn’t have to be as strong as on Earth. Cliff and the men took off their belts to bind together the gray logs. The mud reeked and they were glad to cast off into the shallow lake. Paddling with some broad branches was slow, but they caught a breeze and the smell got better. Cliff set them facing all four directions in case anything came after them. He could tell from their faces that they were worrying. Only partway across did he recall the dinosaur-like thing that rose from the last lake they had seen. That thing could capsize them easily here. But nothing did. Fish splashed, making them all jumpy, but nothing more came. This lake wasn’t deep enough to support something like that.
They landed in a thin forest on the other shore, a kilometer away from the swamp. Wind was increasing, sighing through the trees. At Cliff’s orders—he was getting used to just making them clear and direct, when speed was crucial—they hauled the raft beyond view, into the wispy trees. Then he had them take a break. He needed a pause and they must, too.
They ate the pitifully small provisions they carried, maybe thirty grams each. Irma made a joke about losing the weight she didn’t need, and they all laughed ruefully. Soon enough, it wouldn’t be funny. Cliff could feel his overalls clinging to him because he was burning up his stored fat, always hungry. He wished they had time to stop and take a swim just to clean their clothes. But who knew what was in those murky waters?
So they pushed on—and found a wreck within minutes. They had seen rusting debris before, but this was different, fresher. It was a crashed light plane, made of light composites, its rear section crumpled. The passenger seats were two meters apart. A two-seater for giants, no bodies, one wing smashed to fragments. The engine had plunged out of the body and jammed into the sandy soil. Most of the fuselage was smooth, though, undamaged. Some sort of carbon composite, he judged.
Cliff again wondered why they had seen no aircraft. This wreck looked recent. Then it struck him—if a big aircraft fell, it might punch a hole through the entire structure, venting the life zone to vacuum. So only small aircraft were allowed. And not many of those.
Only a few hundred meters farther on, they stepped from the wispy forest onto a flat plain of sand. There were no hills visible in the distance through a shimmer of heat haze warping the perspectives. Warm tan sand simmering beneath the eternal sun. A steady breeze at their backs seemed to urge them into this desert.
“We sure can’t go slogging across that,” Terry said, his face sagging.
“But those nasties behind us…” Irma’s voice trailed away.
“We need to get some distance between them and us,” Howard said.
Cliff let them toss it around and then said, “I don’t like the idea of standing out nice and clear against a desert.” Not an idea, but true.
“We’re trapped!” Irma said angrily. She looked wan, worn.
Aybe kicked at the sand and knelt down and used his magnifying scoper on grains in his palm. “I
thought
this stuff felt odd. Look.”
They took turns peering at the grains. Cliff was surprised. “They’re all round,” he said.
“Manufactured,” Terry said. “Maybe condensed out of a hot silicon and oxygen mix in zero grav?”
“Could be,” Aybe said. “If you’re building this place in high vacuum, starting from scratch, you don’t have rivers and beaches to make sand.”
Cliff looked at the stretching expanses, as flat as the lake had been. What moved well on—? And it came to him.
“Sand without edges has got to have less friction,” he said.
Irma looked at him. “Uh, so?”
“Less resistance to a sliding surface. Let’s make a … sail craft. Let the wind blow us across this desert.”
“What?”
Aybe was aghast.
Irma snapped her fingers. “Remember that downed plane? We could use the airfoils, cobble something together.”
At first they were puzzled, then disbelieving, then—remembering their pursuers—grudgingly, they tried it.
They had to drag the cut-down body of it for hundreds of meters. Terry pried the damaged wing away, and they used the wheels to keep the thing rolling. Cliff had time to look through the tool belt he had taken off the alien body. That seemed now like many days ago. He knew this meant he was getting near his limits. That was now a bigger problem for them all—telling when an Earth day had gone by.
In his stupefied fumbling, he finally saw that most of the tools were alien wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers for pentagonal heads—and huge. Hard to use, but not impossible. One he couldn’t understand turned out to be a laser. He spotted it because it had leads to attach to a solar panel that unfolded. The gear was quite well designed.
It flared on with a virulent pop. Everybody cheered. They cut through the unneeded metal with its actinic beam, slicing elegantly thin lines. It took care and contortions to shape the body into something clean and usable.
They reconfigured it into a sand-sailboat, making the usable wing of the plane into a sail. They screwed that in place with their new tools.
Luck was with them: the wind was picking up, still howling at their backs.
They set off by pushing the fat-tire wheels into the sand and then letting the wing turn into the full wind. Cliff held his breath. If it failed, they were stuck, backs against the desert.
It failed. The wheels got stuck in grit and they had to lever them out of the sand, digging with their hands. Then, with them all crowded into the long passenger compartment, they got stuck again. Sighs, drawn faces.
Terry had another idea. Cut off the wheels. Let it be a true sailboat, running on its skin. Cliff was so tired by now, he really had no faith in anything but sleep. But he let Terry shear off the wheels and struts with the alien laser.
They got out of the boat’s body and pushed. Sand ground beneath it, the wind blew—and it started to gain speed. Cliff ran alongside, pushing with raw hands until it had some momentum. Only then did he call, “Pile in!”