Planetfall (2 page)

I HAVEN'T GONE
out of this gate for a long time. There's nothing on this side of the colony that interests me and the sensor net maintains itself. There are animals that range nearby sometimes, but they tend not to come any closer than the edge of the zone monitored by the long-range sensors. I agree with Kay's theory that God's city emits something that keeps them away, but she's still looking into it all these years later. Like all of us, she gets distracted by other experiments. It's low priority.

“What do we say to him?” Mack asks, dragging my focus back to the young man.

“I was going to start with hello and then see how it goes,” I reply. I'm trying to sound light and relaxed because I don't want to push the magma chamber of unspoken shit into an eruption. I'm barely handling it as it is.

“He must have been born after Planetfall,” he says, his pace fast but steady. “He doesn't look old enough to have been born on the ship and there weren't any babies in their pods.”

“Small mercies,” I whisper and thankfully he doesn't hear. When I glance at him to check whether he's looking pissed off at me, I see the sweat on his forehead and how white his lips are against the black of his beard. “Are you sure he's alone?”

He looks at me like I'm an idiot. “I checked that.”

“But you didn't see him coming.”

“I haven't checked on them for a long time. I thought . . .”

He doesn't finish the sentence, but the unspoken half lingers between us. We thought they were dead. We thought we had killed them.

The urge to turn around and go home and tell everyone to fuck off until it's all over bears down on me. I can feel guilt and fear and ten thousand questions I've asked myself since Planetfall rising up with the contents of my stomach and I want all of it to stay deep down where it should be.

“We stick to the story,” he says with the firm edge in his voice that means he's made up his mind and it's not up for discussion.

“But he'll know what really happened.”

“Stick to the story,” Mack says again and I don't have anything else to say. There are too many unknown variables to make any useful predictions and I try not to speculate these days. “Let me do the talking,” he adds.

As if I wouldn't do that anyway. He's the Ringmaster. He knows what to say to the crowd and to the latecomer without a ticket. I just maintain the rigging and make sure the tent doesn't collapse on us all.

The sky is now the same deep blue as that of a Mediterranean summer and when I look straight up and see a couple of clouds I can almost believe I'm on Earth again, like my brain cannot help but return to its default setting. Ahead of us the highest mountain nearby, dubbed Diamond Peak by the more
romantic members of the colony, will soon be tipped by the sun rising over that exact point. They have a silhouette reminiscent of the Alps. It's only when I look at the details here—the way the seeds are shaped on the grasses we're walking through, the slight sparkle of the silicates in the soil beneath our feet that give it a magical quality and the hard shells of unfamiliar creatures tucked between the stalks—that I remember we're so far from home.

The stranger has sunk to his knees, the exhaustion setting in now that he knows we're coming to him. As we pick up the pace, he falls forward onto his hands, his black hair hanging straight. I can see his pack now. It's a basic design from the survival pattern folder on the local server of each of the Planetfall pods. It has a built-in water filtration mechanism and a more primitive version of the porous fabric we use on houses in the colony, designed to absorb water and push it, via an osmotic mechanism, to the internal filter. He's probably been living off dew and rainwater for the whole journey—and his own urine, if he had any sense in the dry spells. I have no idea what he would have done for food; there are gels designed to produce fast-growing fungi but not enough packs to sustain such a trip.

He's thin and his clothes are worn and patched in several places. We knew their printers would fail, and without access to the cloud they had no way to run complex diagnostics. None of the people in that group were printer specialists and so unlikely to have any specs or spare-part patterns on their personal servers. The clothes he's wearing are basic survival patterns designed to be durable and breathable with a sensor net built into them designed to help the body's homeostatic system in adverse conditions. The built-in transmitter must have failed; otherwise it would have pinged our network when he was five kilometers away.

Mack and I break into a run when he collapses,
disappearing in the tall reed-thin plants. While we run, I check the network to see who's awake and whether there's any talk of Mack and me leaving the gate, but no one seems to have noticed. The sun is rising and in a couple of hours the air will be teeming with insects. I don't have any protective clothing nor repellents on me and I wonder how this man survived without them.

I half expect him to be dead by the time we get to him, but the pack is rising up and down and his head is turned to the side. I think of the parasites and organisms in the dirt only millimeters from his mouth and nose and the millions of microscopic assailants he can't possibly be protected against.

“We're here,” Mack says as we stop and kneel down on either side of him. “You're going to be all right.”

“Hi,” the young man says with a slight American accent as he struggles onto his hands and knees to tip back and rest with his backside on his heels. He sweeps his hair off his face and both Mack and I gawk at him.

He looks like Suh. He looks like the Pathfinder.

I can see her in his eyes, his lips, the shape of his chin and cheekbones. The genetic signature of her Korean heritage is written across him and I want to laugh and cry and kiss him a million times and hide my face with shame. He is an echo of her beauty. He smiles at me uncertainly and I see her again that day at the observatory, holding the piece of paper in her hands.

“Holy crap,” she said and held it out to me. “It's real. It's a real thing. It's . . . it's a real place.”

I took it and scanned the numbers, but astronomy wasn't in my repertoire. Then I noticed a string of numbers that were more than familiar—just the sight of them made me feel nauseous. They were the first things she wrote when she woke from her coma, before she even spoke or asked where she was or why she was in the hospital.

“It's a place, Ren. There's a planet in the exact location the numbers describe.” She laughed, the first time she'd laughed since the day she wrote them down. “Isn't it wonderful? We know what it means now!”

I shook my head. “No, I don't think we do.”

All these years later, this stranger has tears in his eyes too. “I knew it wasn't true,” he says. “I knew it was real and I knew you wouldn't kill me.”

Mack is speechless for the first time in the forty-odd years I've known him.

“Of course we're not going to kill you,” I say.

“My name is Lee Sung-Soo.” He grasps my hand tightly and I can't help but squeeze back. “My grandmother was the Pathfinder.”

I want to take a moment to let it sink in, but Mack is obviously struggling and I need to make this boy think everything's all right. “I'm Ren—Renata Ghali—and this is Cillian Mackenzie, but we all call him Mack.”

He smiles at me—I want him to never stop and I want to never see it again, all at once—and then he looks at Mack, who musters one of his warmest smiles as he shakes Sung-Soo by the hand.

“How did you find us?” Mack asks.

“The planet's topography was on one of the pod servers,” he replies. “I pieced together some of the things my parents said and worked it out.”

“What did they say?” Mack is trying not to look terrified. I've known him too long to be fooled though. That clench in his jaw says it all.

“About the mountain and the plain below it, the things the Pathfinder saw before we got here.” His gaze shifts to focus behind us. “That's it, isn't it? That's God's city.”

I nod. “Not the bit at the bottom—that's the colony—but the rest is.”

“It's . . . amazing,” he says and then laughs. “That sounds so stupid. They said it was all a lie, but here I am looking at it!”

“Where are the rest of the people who . . .” Mack doesn't know how to describe them.

Sung-Soo's eyes lose their joy. “They died. I'm the only one left.”

Mack takes the pack from his shoulders and puts it on his own back; then we both take an arm, wrap it over our shoulders and hoist him up between us. There's barely any weight to him at all.

We head back toward the colony, and I can't help but look up at God's city, just like Sung-Soo does but with less wonder. I'm used to it now, but it still draws my eyes up.

It stretches above the colony like a huge forest of ancient baobab trees tangled around one another, forming an organic citadel. The outer membranes of the structure are black, to absorb the most sunlight, and at this time in the morning the nodules at the top of the structure are spherical.

“It changes with the weather,” I tell him as he walks between us. “When it gets hot, the nodules in the upper levels grow tendrils and look a bit like dendritic cells. It increases the surface area to—”

“To manage the heat,” he says, nodding. “My father taught me some of my grandma's knowledge.”

Mack's silence feels like a fourth person stalking us through the grasses.

“We'll take you to Mack's place,” I say. “To check you over and let you rest.”

“Thank you. Can I stay? There's nothing to go back to. There was a storm . . .”

I glance at Mack. He's staring up at the top of the city and doesn't notice. I know where his mind is. I don't want to go there. “Of course you can. Right, Mack?”

He snaps his head to look at me. “What?”

“Sung-Soo can stay, can't he?”

“I don't have any objections,” he says diplomatically. “But you must understand, we have to speak to the rest of the colony and give them the chance to ask questions and voice any concerns.”

Sung-Soo nods. “Very fair. I can hunt and I can carve well and I'm strong, when I'm rested.”

Hunting and carving? Such primitive words. I slip my hand down to hold his and feel for calluses. When I find them, I'm relieved, but why? Did I think he was lying? What else could they have done to survive?

“It's going to be fine,” I say, and Sung-Soo smiles as if I meant the words for him.

MACK IS GRADUALLY
steering us in a different direction for the return journey so we'll go around the outside of the colony and enter at the north gate, right next to his place.

We're silent as we trudge through the grasses, Sung-Soo exhausted and malnourished, Mack and I trapped in our own little spirals of guilt and dread. He's taking us on a route that makes it far less likely we'll be spotted, but there's still a chance. He's probably trying to work out what to tell everyone else and buying time to figure that out at his own pace.

I'm trying to make something more like a mental flowchart out of the tangled mess of what-ifs and thens in my mind. I give up. We've learned so many times that, no matter how carefully we plan, something unpredictable will destabilize the system.

The northern gate is again just a couple of pillars, but more ornately designed than the western one. There are stylized plants and flowers intertwined with overly fussy representations of
the skeletal structures that form the frames of our houses. I think it's a bit childish and overdone as a representation of our aspirations to live as sustainably and naturally as we can, but the majority liked it. I think “majority” is one of my least favorite words. It's so often used to justify bad decisions.

Mack's place is based upon one of the round designs, looking like an igloo with spokes coming out of it to end in half-submerged bubbles. We're experimenting with a new membrane on the outside of the central hemisphere and it's looking good; several of the native species we've planted on it are thriving.

Half of the structure is aboveground, the rest submerged below. As Mack touches the patch to the right of the door I can't help but check on the transition between above – and belowground. Some of the earlier experiments with the new coating resulted in unexpected interactions with the soil, but this variant seems okay.

“Are those . . . fish?” Sung-Soo points at one of the windows.

“Yes,” I say, refreshed by his wonder at the things I barely notice now. “We harvest energy from sunlight using the aquarium algae. Some of the other houses do that through the outer skin—” I wave a hand at some of them. “But Mack likes fish.”

The door opens and its motion makes Sung-Soo dig his heels in a little. “Is it . . . alive?” he asks, staring at its edges compressed against the door frame.

“Sort of,” I answer. “It's based on a heart valve, loosely speaking.”

He lifts his arm from my shoulder; I let go of his hand so he can brush the structure with his fingertips. “What is it made of?”

“A composite organic material, a bit like cartilage.”

“Come inside,” Mack says, eager to get him out of sight.

The door sighs shut behind us and the lights come on,
bathing the main living area in the daylight spectrum. There are familiar comfy chairs and the central sunken fireplace for when Mack wants some primal reassurance given by control over fire. I'm drawn to the antique orrery displayed above the nook housing his home printer, the only trinket he brought from Earth.

Sung-Soo watches the walls change color as they react to the carbon dioxide we're exhaling, shifting from pale blue to a warm peach.

“House: privacy,” Mack says and the inner glass of the aquariums turns opaque.

“Have you got a health kit handy or shall I print one?” I ask as Mack guides Sung-Soo to one of the chairs.

“I've got one in the other room.”

“I'll make your chair dirty,” Sung-Soo says and Mack shakes his head at him.

“It cleans itself; it's fine. Don't worry about a thing.” He goes off to his bedroom and I note he takes Sung-Soo's pack with him.

“What's that for?” Sung-Soo asks, pointing at the large bowl-shaped impression at the center of the room.

“It's a fire pit,” I say and he nods.

“That I understand.”

“We don't need them for warmth; the house maintains whatever temperature we want. Lots of us feel comforted by a fire, that's all. Would you like me to light one?”

He shakes his head. “I'm warm enough, thanks.” He reaches down to brush the carpet. “Is this a plant?”

I nod. “A kind of moss. It's part of the house's ecosystem.”

Mack returns with the small case and I reach for it. He passes it over after a moment's pause, realizing that I want to do the assessment. It's not that I don't trust Mack. I just want to be sure it's done properly.

I run the roller over Sung-Soo's forehead and down the right side of his cheek. Normal temperature so no infection. A good start.

“I'm going to take a blood sample. It won't hurt. It's the fastest way to see how well you are.”

He just nods and rolls up his sleeve. “I've had them before.”

I take the penlike syringe from the case and press the blunt tip against his arm. The display at the end of the “pen” helps me locate the vein and numbs the skin there. I click the button at the side and the needle goes in, filling the internal vial with his blood. When it's full, the needle withdraws and the device deposits a tiny bit of skin sealant. When the display goes green, I lift it off his skin and place the pen into the analyzer part of the case.

“I'd like to extract your DNA,” I say, adhering to ethics even though Mack is standing behind him with his finger over his mouth. “I'm sorry . . . You do know what that is, don't you?”

Sung-Soo raises an eyebrow. “Of course I do.”

“Sorry.” It's hard to know what they taught him.

“What do you want with my DNA?”

“Well, everyone in the colony has their genome on file, so it's easy for the colony medical program to recommend treatment or referral to a specialist.” I glance up at Mack, who's frowning at me now. He's too tense and he'll give something away if he's not careful. He's lucky I know how to put on a show. “I'm curious too. I don't understand how you survived, to be honest. Did your . . . group develop anything to help you adapt to the environment here?”

He shakes his head. “No. A lot of us died. My father thought it was because of allergens, but none of them knew enough to be able to do anything about it.”

His father was a linguist. That was why he was with us that
day. I can't look at Sung-Soo, so I busy myself with the analyzer even though it's already doing what it should.

“And I don't mind about the DNA,” he adds with a smile. “Thank you for asking me first.”

I add the command to do a full genome extraction from the sample. “It'll take a little while for the information to compile and for me to have a proper look at it.”

“Are you a geneticist?”

I nod. “And an engineer. That's what I trained in first. They work well together.” A gentle beep from the unit tells me the first set of results is through. As I examine the data, Mack comes and sits down across from Sung-Soo.

“Can you tell us more about what happened to your group after Planetfall?” he asks. “We would have looked for them if we thought they'd survived.”

Careful, Mack, I think, hiding my concern by keeping my eyes on the display.

“They all had different stories,” Sung-Soo replies. “My father lived longer than my mother and he told me that half of them went mad before I was even born. Some killed themselves; some died from reactions to stuff like plants or things in the air. There were a lot of deaths. Especially of the babies.”

I hear Mack swallow.

“He said the Pathfinder was wrong. There was no God, no city, nothing here. He said she was mad and they didn't want to be part of her colony and live her lies. So they ran away.”

There's a tremble in his voice and his eyes are filled with anger.

“He lied to me though. I never believed him. I couldn't believe my grandmother would do such amazing things and it all turn out to be crap.”

“What else did he say about the Pathfinder?” Mack presses.
I want to leave and the strain of fighting that urge is giving me a headache.

Sung-Soo is silent for a few moments. “He . . . he said she was dead.” Now he looks tearful. “I've been too afraid to ask. Is that true? Is she dead?”

“No!” Mack says cheerily and pats his knee. “She's in God's city, communing with the creator.”

Sung-Soo's face is happiness and relief incarnate. “Can I see her?”

Mack shakes his head. “None of us can, I'm afraid, but once a year she sends us a message. The next one is due in a few days. You're just in time!”

I don't think Sung-Soo knows how to process the news. His expression fluctuates between hope and sadness. “Why only messages?”

“Because God hasn't finished with her yet. When the time is right, when we are ready as well as her, she'll be returned to us.”

How many times have I heard him say that? This time it makes me want to scream. But I push it down, as I always do. Better this way. Better for everyone.

“You've got a slight electrolyte imbalance and you're malnourished but not dangerously so,” I report, eager to change the focus of the conversation. “That's no surprise really. Mack, I've sent a request from the health kit to your kitchen to make him a shake to help replace some of the nutrients.” I look back at Sung-Soo. “It won't take long. You need rest and a few good meals and you'll feel a lot better. It's incredible, really.”

“How did you survive?” Mack asks.

Sung-Soo smiles. “I know what I can and can't eat here. Don't you?”

“Well . . . yes,” I reply. “But only because we could test things first.”

“So did we. Sometimes it didn't end well.”

I'm desperate to analyze his genome. There has to be something in him that's adapted, but to do so in one generation? It seems . . . incredible.

“We had a lot of problems with allergies in the early days here,” I say. “We knew we would, and took precautions, but we couldn't live in environmental suits forever. We managed to engineer retroviruses that modified our DNA to handle the new microbes and allergens here. We're modifying it all the time, of course, and sometimes we're caught out, but we haven't lost anyone yet.” Sung-Soo says nothing and I worry I've sounded smug. “So, what I'm trying to say is that once I understand your genome, I can make sure you're properly optimized for survival here.”

“More than I am already?”

“Yes.”

“I was sick a lot when I was a kid,” he says. “But at least I survived.”

“How old are you?” I ask.

“I think I'm twenty-two.”

“Your mother was pregnant in the Planetfall year?” Mack sounds appalled. He doesn't want to think there was a pregnant woman aboard. Stupid man, there wasn't one; we'd have known. Sung-Soo would have been conceived after Planetfall.

The three of us fall silent then. “How old are you?” Sung-Soo asks me.

“Nearly seventy,” I say and watch his eyes widen. “I know I don't look it. We've been working on some interesting things here.”

“You said something about a storm,” Mack says before he has to reveal how bloody old he is. He's so vain.

Sung-Soo looks past us into the fire pit. “It hit when we were moving the camp to avoid the floods that came every
year. We didn't realize how bad it was going to be.” He stops and covers his face.

“Your shake is ready, Mack,” a synthvoice calls from the kitchen and Mack goes to collect it.

I don't know whether to rest a hand on the poor boy's shoulder or just leave him to it. I've never been very good at this sort of thing.

“I lost everyone there. Do I have to talk about it?” he asks.

“No, no, of course not,” I say, not wanting to make him suffer any more than he must have already.

Mack returns with a tall glass filled with the shake. I drink a lot of them. They're surprisingly satisfying. Sung-Soo takes a hesitant sip and then comes to the same conclusion.

He downs the contents and hands the glass back to Mack with a smile. In moments his head tips back and he slumps out cold.

I lurch forward to take his pulse, but Mack grabs my wrist.

“I gave him a sedative,” he says. “He'll be fine.”

“What did you do that for?”

“We need to talk about what we do next. You don't believe him, do you?”

I stand and move away to the window. Mack joins me. Faint shadows of fish cross his features as I try to fathom what he's suspicious of.

“Which part don't you believe?” I ask.

“You know how angry his father was! He said he was going to tell everyone when we completed Planetfall. Do you really think he didn't tell his own son?”

“He must have changed his mind,” I reply, watching Sung-Soo's chest rise up and down slowly, fearful he'll wake and hear us. “What did you give him?”

“The same stuff that knocks me out for eight hours,” Mack replies. He can't remember the drug's name.

Paranoid, I hurry over to Sung-Soo and check he really is unconscious. Mack can be an idiot sometimes; there was no guarantee that the drug would have the same effect on a boy who survived everything this planet's biomass had to throw at him. When I'm satisfied he is asleep, I return to Mack. “Maybe he didn't want his son growing up knowing the truth. It's about as shitty as the truth comes, after all.”

Mack stares at the boy. “You trust him?”

I shrug, remembering how I felt after discovering the calluses on his hands. “I don't know. All I do know is that if we throw him out of the colony, or some other despicable thing, I'll never forgive myself. Or you, for that matter. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt. He's Suh's grandson, for fuck's sake!”

“Tell me what comes of the genetic analysis,” he says, capitulating. “I'll let him sleep it off, then help him clean up and I'll think of a way to break the news.”