Planetfall (3 page)

“He'll need somewhere to live.”

“He can stay with me while a place is built. I have room,” he offers.

I'm relieved. “I'll be back when I have some answers,” I say, and after one last look at Sung-Soo I take the health kit and leave Mack to it.

I HATE FEELING
this way. As I walk away from Mack's place I can feel that horrible fluttering in my chest like a swarm of flies is trapped behind my ribs. I used to dream about them inside my chest, laying eggs in my heart and the maggots chewing their way through it until my chest burst open. The only thing that drowned out their buzz was my screams as I woke. I haven't had that nightmare for a long time. I fear that will change now.

I try to focus on the health kit's tiny orange light indicating the analyzer is still at work, to think about an improvement to the membrane I'm testing on the outside of my house, to focus on the feeling of my toes inside my shoes and the sound of the soles against the crystal path, but nothing calms the swarm. Something terrible is going to happen. I need to go home. I need to—

“Ren, is Mack okay?”

Nick's voice makes me cry out and I nearly drop the kit. I
clutch it to my stomach as he approaches. He looks concerned, but also excited. Something unusual is happening and he thrives on being the first on the scene.

“Mack?”

He's looking at the health kit. “I saw someone help you carry him into his house. Is he hurt?”

Either he caught the briefest glimpse of the back of us or he's trying to trick me into lying. I can't handle this. I don't know what to say.

Now he's frowning. I'm not usually caught out so easily. I haven't had a chance to get my head straight.

“He . . .” I look at the kit to avoid his eyes. He means well, I remind myself. He doesn't realize I find his interest irritating. He probably believes he's being personable and caring about the community. I think he's overcompensating.

Then I feel guilty. I've defended Nick so many times when people have grumbled about him. In the early days of the project so many people treated him so badly I felt shocked to the core. It made me realize I lived in a bubble, a world where all the people I interacted with every day were highly intelligent and accepting and had evolved past so much of the bullshit that still plagued swathes of society. When Nick arrived, having bought his place with an obscene amount of money, these highly intelligent people treated him with sneering disdain and open hostility. It reminded me that we're still apes. Still evolving.

“Is it bad?” he asks with a hushed voice and takes a step closer.

Don't touch me, I think as he reaches a hand toward my shoulder.

“It's—”

A sound behind me makes him look past my face and his hand drops to his side. I see confusion in his expression and twist to see Mack hurrying out of his house. Shit.

Mack's head is down and he's marching swiftly toward the central Dome with his hands in his pockets, whispering to himself. I check the network and see his status as “busy—private.” He's either having a private conversation with someone else or dictating a message. He prefers to use voice rather than the v-keyboard. He laughs at me when I use mine, saying I look like a poor mime trying to look like I'm playing the piano. I never rise to the bait though. It may look stupid but at least people can't lip-read or listen in. There are at least a hundred or so people in the colony with augmented hearing good enough to eavesdrop on him now if they chose to. Luckily Nick isn't one of them.

“Oh, he seems fine,” Nick says and looks at me pointedly. He wants to know who the third person was.

“Yeah, Mack's okay,” I say.

Why is he going to the Dome? He goes there only for group meetings and there are none scheduled for today. As soon as I think that, I get an icon in the top right of my field of vision asking if I want to check.

“Ren, what's going on?”

With a glance to the upper right I select the option and the schedule appears to float over Nick's jacket. There's a new entry. But before I have a chance to check it, an urgent message arrives, the icon for that larger and flashing in the way I find so annoying. Nick looks away and I suspect he's got one too.

I open it. Obviously from Mack. I didn't anticipate the content though, nor the fact that he's sent it to every member of the colony.

Fellow citizens, I apologize for the hour and the urgent tag but there's a need for a colony-wide discussion of an event that occurred this morning. It seems there were survivors
of the tragic accident that happened during Planetfall. The child of one of those survivors has made it to us and has asked to live with us at the foot of God's city.

The envelope icon has started to flash in the corner of my vision. It does that only when there are more than ten unopened messages.

That child is Lee Suh-Mi's grandson. His name is Lee Sung-Soo.

“God in his mercy!” Nick exclaims moments later. He must be at the same part as me.

If you have any concerns about Sung-Soo, or objections to his joining us, I want you to follow the protocol for any colony-wide issue, namely contacting your group leader, who will bring them to the council meeting I've scheduled in ten minutes. Apologies for not giving more notice, but this is just as unexpected for me as it is for you and I think it's imperative we deal with any concerns as soon as possible, for Sung-Soo's sake. The meeting will be open on the public stream and the public tag for this topic is “Newcomer.” Sung-Soo is not connected to our network.

A flash appears bottom right, indicating a new trending tag. I don't have to look it up to know what it is. Interesting choice of word. Would I have picked the same one? It's less loaded than “survivor” or “stranger” but has a subliminal effect of assuming he's going to stay. After all, Mack didn't pick “visitor.” Nor “guilty reminder,” but that would just be stupid.

I'm sure lots of people will be keen to meet him. He's had a very difficult journey and I ask that people respect his need for the time and space to recover. We need time as a community to take in the news and resolve any issues we may have before he's introduced to everyone. Thank you for your understanding. I'm in the Dome now but ask you to discuss this in your groups and direct any questions to your councilor rather than my private stream. Thanks, Mack.

When I pull my attention from the message, I notice Nick staring at me. “So that's who it is,” he says and looks at Mack's place.

“Aren't you group leader this month?”

He nods and realizes he can't just go and bang on the door. He has to go home and be available to anyone who wants to speak to him in person as well as online. He leaves and I set the health kit down at my feet before calling up the v-keyboard.

Thanks for the heads-up, Mack.

I don't expect him to reply; he's probably being inundated despite his request. But he does.

We couldn't keep it a secret. I saw Nick poking his nose in and had to make a call on it. We knew we would have to tell everyone eventually. Come to the Dome. I want you here, you were with me when we found him.

He knows I hate meetings.
No.

Ren, don't be a pain in the arse.

People are going to realize he's in your house. I'm going to stay with him in case he wakes up. I don't want to get involved in the politics. That's your bag.

I could do with some support.

You'll be fine. Give me access to your house. I want to keep an eye on him. Look, Carmen is already coming over. You want her banging on the door to wake him up when we're not there?

There's a pause. I can see her talking to Nick, having intercepted him on the way home. It's going to be everywhere in less than—

A door opens behind me. “Ren, is the grandson at Mack's place?”

Mack?

I've given you access. Keep up with the meeting, in case I need some info, OK?

I pick up the health kit as the v-keyboard disappears and hurry over to Mack's place, pretending I can't hear ten different people calling my name. I shut down my stream and my in-box. I just can't handle being connected right now.

I press my palm to the side of the door and the house “tastes” me. I can hear footsteps as the door opens but I don't turn around. “It's being discussed at the meeting,” I call over my shoulder and let the door close behind me.

Ignoring the knocking, I put the health kit down on a nearby
table and look at Sung-Soo. Mack has taken his shoes off, eased his legs up onto a footstool grown out of the moss and covered him with a blanket.

The moss looks inviting, so I take off my shoes too and let my feet sink into its cool green softness. The knocking eventually stops and I make sure the windows are still set to privacy before making my way to sit near him.

The only sound is our breathing. I watch him sleep, feeling . . . everything. No, not everything. I don't feel relaxed and I don't feel hopeful. Watching someone sleep can be the hardest thing in the world.

I'm back at the hospital in Paris, watching Suh sleep. There are monitors and wires and beeps that serve to remind me that her rest is anything but normal. I cried a lot. I talked a lot too, hoping she could hear me, clinging to some romantic notion that the sound of my voice would somehow call her back into my world.

We were just flatmates then. I already loved her, of course, but no one else knew back then. Not even her.

Watching someone in a coma is a special kind of prison made of love and hope and despair. Sometimes other people come and sit in the prison with you, but you can't have a real conversation. You can talk about coffee or what the sleeper did or didn't do and what that might mean and what the doctors have said, but nothing else. People who don't know the rules learn fast. For those who have no words left for one another there are magazines more than thirty years old, relics of a paper age kept for this kind of prison where no one is allowed to get online and talk about their vigil.

And you're always alone there, even if other people are sitting around the bed and watching the comatose with you. There's nothing to say after the daily update and so you're left
there in your private little hells, unable to leave in case they wake up when you weren't there.

So you talk to the sleeper when there aren't any other visitors and you pray and you cry and you sit there, numbed, for hours until one day they either slip away completely or open their eyes and give you the only key out of the prison.

I sat with her for two months. I lost my placement and I nearly lost our flat, before Dad intervened when he realized what was going on. That was back when he wasn't angry with me. That was before the cancer too.

I blink and look around Mack's living room to remind myself I'm not back in that prison again.

I'VE BEEN INSIDE
every house in the colony—I helped to build most of them—but Mack's is my favorite. It has just the right balance of space and coziness. Not too big, not too small. Room to breathe but still with the feeling of being held.

I walk away from Sung-Soo toward the bedroom, thinking that his pack must still be in there. I want to look inside. I want to see what he's been using to survive and if there's any food or clues to explain how he could have traveled so far alone. It doesn't occur to me that it's a breach of privacy until the pack is in my hands.

I sit on Mack's bed. It's an expanse of crisp white cotton with a patch of dust on it left by the pack. I bounce up and down a couple of times, half to recall what it's like to sit on a bed like this, half to see if the springiness of the sponge we grew two years ago has endured. It feels good and I wonder if he's shared it with anyone lately.

The pack is heavy on my lap. It's certainly weathered
enough. Enough for what? For his story to ring true? Where else would he have come from?

Fumbling with the Velcro, I wince at the sound of it ripping apart. This is wrong but I don't stop myself pulling the inner layer open. There's a waterproof jacket scrunched up, filthy, smelling of mud and sweat. I could close it and put it back where it was but I'm pulling it out, committed to the crime now.

One of the petri dishes that would have contained the gel is the first thing I see underneath, its lid intact. As expected, none of the gel is left. There's something inside, so I pull it out to inspect the contents in the light. I recognize the six nuts still in their shells. They grow on bushes in dry soil and we can't eat them without being horribly sick. They contain a protein we can't digest.

Perhaps he was using them as bait for hunting. I put them on top of the crumpled jacket and pull out a canister with some water left in it, its lid with a valve fitting to connect to the reservoir collected in the pack's filter. There's a thermal sheet folded neatly and a small bundle of something like leather tied tight.

The bow is easy to pull loose and the skin unravels. There are all sorts of small mammals it could have come from. Two knives fall onto the moss. One is large with an impressive blade, probably used for hunting. The second is very small with a worn handle that looks too imperfect to have been printed. Did someone craft it? I wrap both of them up again and retie it, resting it on top of the pile.

There are a couple of jumpers and another pair of trousers, all stinking and crusted with dirt. I pull them out expecting to find more underneath only to find nothing more than powdery soil. I look for pockets I must have missed. There are none.

I put everything back as close to how I found it as I can manage. A notification flashes that the meeting is about to
begin, and thanks to Mack's “critical” tag I'm forced to actively notify the network that I won't be present. It's like he's forgotten everything about netiquette in the last hour. I don't shut it out completely though, mindful that he wanted me to keep an eye on things. We both know he's on his own really. But I find myself keeping the stream open and minimalized, my own settings watching for mentions of my name by default. I know most of the questions will be about what happened this morning and then the rest are relatively predictable: Can we be sure he's the only survivor? Why didn't we know they were there? I want to hear Mack's response to that one when it comes up, so I add that to the session alert parameters.

The pack has left a dark smudge on my trousers. I stand, putting it back on the bed, smooth out the divot I left and then brush the dirt off my clothes. Beneath the ambient guilt of going through Sung-Soo's things is an uneasiness, like the pack's contents have given me emotional indigestion.

Something is missing. He spoke of carving and I saw a small knife that looked like it could be used for whittling (is that what they used to call it?), but no carvings, not even small ones. I shake my head. Why would he carry anything like that? It would weigh him down and he was busy surviving. But that bit of mental grit doesn't disappear.

He wouldn't have had time to sit and carve trinkets while traveling, but before he would have. Did he really have nothing he wanted to keep after hours of crafting before he set out to find us? Before—yes, that's it—there is nothing in that pack from his life before. Nothing of his parents, of the others who survived at least some of the years he's been alive.

But he wouldn't want to carry it over a thousand kilometers. I tell myself that other people aren't as sentimental as I am. He didn't have the luxury of keepsakes. Every gram carried had
to help him survive. He's lost his people and then been forced to leave everything behind.

I couldn't have done that. I would have to take a lock of hair at least. But perhaps he didn't even have that. A pebble, then, a pebble from the place he was born, something to root him.

When I had to pack before we left Earth it was a thousand tiny agonies strung together. I can still see the empty metal box in front of me, only half a cubic meter in volume.

“That's all we get?” I put a hand on Mack's shoulder, stopping him from leaving.

“It's all we get. Even Suh.”

I suspected he would sneak on an extra one for himself and he saw that in my frown. “It's all been worked out, Ren. No exceptions. Not even Nick can take more than that.”

“He tried, then?”

Mack laughed. “Of course he did. Offered two million per locker if he could take more. He couldn't understand it wasn't like excess baggage or his country's government. You got an upgrade, didn't you?” He tapped the side of his head and I nodded.

I'd got a faster chip, a better lens and as big a personal server and cloud storage space as I could afford. All my photos, films and music were there already.

“Well, then.” He shrugged. “You can print everything else you need once we're on the ship.”

I looked around my room at the pictures my mother had painted, the antique microscope my grandfather had left me and the hand-stitched embroidery lovingly crafted by my grandmother. The shells collected at the beach on the day I first felt my baby move inside me. The casts of her feet and hands when she was only a week old, her first pictures, the three candles from her last birthday cake and her ashes. My
father's notebook, given to me at my graduation, in which he had handwritten letters to me throughout my life. Every single one made me cry, whether it was about the day I took my first steps or the first time I built my own printer. He always had the foresight to plan ahead for the most beautiful things. That was why it was so hard for him. He didn't see it coming. He couldn't plan ahead for losing me that way.

How could I choose which of these to take and which to leave behind? How could I know which of these threads, weaving me into my past and my family, could be cut without unraveling the deepest parts of me?

Mack seemed to notice the things filling the room for the first time. His gaze rested on the castings, on the tiny bronze toes and fingers. “I'll have some room left in mine, I think. I'll be happy to take something if you want.” It was the first time I saw something other than the Ringmaster in him. It was the first time I understood why Suh looked at him the way she did.

I should have gone to the meeting and supported him properly. I check on his stream and it's identical to the meeting one. He's fielding questions, being the perfect mix of reassuring and informative.

I'm here if you need me.
My private message is met with a smiley.

I find myself staring at the pack again. Sung-Soo may not need anything to make him feel rooted. Perhaps he's more enlightened than I am. Perhaps he's always looking ahead, eyes on the horizon.

There's no map.

That's the other thing missing. How could he have made that trip without one? Quite aside from the sheer distance covered, there would have been obstacles that could have thrown him off course if he was using simple navigation techniques.

Perhaps he's chipped. Perhaps they found a way to do it. I go back into the living room and kneel in front of him. He hasn't moved. There's a speck of dried shake on his chin and his eyes are still beneath the lids in his dreamless sleep.

It takes me a minute or so of reaching toward his scalp and then pulling back before I can bring myself to run my fingertips through his hair and feel the skin behind his ears. The violation makes me shiver but I am compelled to feel for myself. I should wait until we do a full scan.

There's no sign of anything and my attention turns to his wrists. Nothing is strapped to them and then before I realize what I'm doing I'm patting down the pockets in the rest of his clothing.

I snatch my hands away. What am I doing? Then I see a thong of leather tied around his neck, tucked beneath his top. I pull on it, whispering an apology, and a carved pendant the size of my thumb is revealed. It's a tree, artful, beautiful, one of the native species that remind us of oaks. There's even a little creature realized in its branches with just enough nicks and chips out of the shape to give it large-eyed character. The leather is threaded between two branches.

I don't know what it's carved from. It looks and feels a little like soapstone, with an iridescence that reminds me of the inside of a paua shell I had to leave behind on Earth, given to me by the father of my child. Purples, blues and indigo swirl through it. I wish it were mine.

Reverentially I ease the pendant back behind the fabric and drop it softly onto his chest. He did take something with him.

A gentle beep from the health kit pulls me away. The light is now green and I download the genome to my server rather than the colony one. I want to know first.

I run the quickest, dirtiest analysis, thinking that I'll get
myself a drink while the program chugs away and then drill down into the data once the meeting's over. I don't reach the kitchen. The first results flash up a notification that stops me midstride. The genome is contaminated and the program recommends immediate quarantine. When I query why, the response makes me shake:
Verify sample taken from Homo sapiens subject.

I'm still standing there, one foot in the air, wondering what the hell that could mean when the software monitoring my stream pings that the question I was interested in has been asked by Nick. He's there in person, being on the council, so I open the full feed and see the Dome's interior with practically every colonist in the central amphitheater. It's big enough to seat everyone, with rings of soft mossed seating running up the slopes. I have the choice of several cam locations, rigged as it is to be recorded and broadcast for all sorts of entertainment as well as the meetings.

I pick the cam closest to Mack, wanting to see what he does. So many faces looking at him expectantly. I was right not to go. I would have been freaking out by now.

“Because I thought you used Atlas to scan for them,” Nick continues.

“I did,” Mack replies. “The same bank of sensors and camera equipment we used to locate God's city. As many of you know, we looked for them for weeks, taking shifts to watch for any movements or hints they might have survived, but there was nothing.”

“Were you looking in the right place?” a man calls from the back, out of shot.

“Of course we bloody were,” Nabiha retorts. “I was the one who found the crashed pods. We all saw the pictures that Atlas took of them. And before anyone asks, we know there's
nothing wrong with Atlas's array because I tested it only last week.”

“Sung-Soo himself has told us there are no other survivors and he implied a nomadic lifestyle, which could account for why we lost them. But the most important thing to focus on now is the man recovering in my house. Does anyone have any objections to his being welcomed into our community?”

I shut down the live feed, seeing Mack's living room properly again and the health kit's green light. I can't tell him anything now, not while he's there in front of them all.

I sit down so I can focus on my v-display without risk of tripping over something. I have a tendency to do that when I get engrossed. I open the analysis program and confirm the source of sample is
Homo sapiens
, male, approximately twenty-two years old. I then call up the data that prompted it to suggest Sung-Soo is anything other than that.

When I drill down, I recognize some of the key markers in the DNA as indigenous. Stupidly, I look back at Sung-Soo, at his fingers and toes almost black with dirt. He's human. He's Suh's grandson. I run a cross-match against her stored genome data and that of his parents, just to be certain, and there's ample evidence that's the case. I'm shocked by the identity of his mother. Lois and Hak-Kun? They never got along. Perhaps the trauma brought them closer together.

But there's something else's DNA in him too, and enough of it to trigger the program's warning. I cross-match the alien DNA with our growing database and the closest thing it matches to is an organism similar to a tapeworm. It makes my stomach flip with worry.

The full medical scan is the only thing—short of my stripping him off, which even I won't do without his permission—that
will show if anything is physically amiss. I want to do a full analysis of his secondary genome too. I have to wait for Mack to come back, or wake Sung-Soo early and take him there himself. He should probably eat something soon anyway.

I check the network for the locations of the colonists and it's obviously the best time to take him to the medical pod. Everyone's either in the Dome or in their homes, watching the feed. I'm surprised there's no one camped outside waiting for the first glimpse of him, but I think Mack's open approach is helping demystify it all.

I print a stimulant that will counteract the sedative. As gently as I can, I pull down his lower lip and dab the paste on to the moist skin near his gums. Within a minute his eyes are opening and he stretches. The first thing he notices are his missing shoes and the new footstool.