The silvery seedlet was wriggling enthusiastically in Fropome’s grip, thin red sap spraying everywhere.
Fropome completed the tendrils on the second upper limb.
Pop.She loves me not.
Oh no!
The grazer cub licked the burner, tapped it with its paw.One of the other cubs saw it playing with the bright toy and started ambling over towards it.
On a hunch, Fropome tore the covering off the blunt roots at the base of the creature.Ah ha!
She loves me
The grazer cub at Fropome’s side got bored with the shiny bauble; it was about to abandon the thing where it lay when it saw its sibling approaching, looking inquisitive.The first cub growled and started trying to pick the burner up with its mouth.
Pop She loves me not!
Ah!Death!Shall my pollen never dust her perfectly formed ovaries?Oh, wicked, balanced, so blandly symmetrical even universe!
In his rage, Fropome ripped the silvery covering right off the lower half of the leaking, weakly struggling seedlet.
Oh unfair life!Oh trecherous stars!
The growling grazer cub hefted the burner device into its mouth.
Something clicked.The cub’s head exploded.
Fropome didn’t pay too much attention.He was staring intently at the bark-stripped creature he held.
wait a moment there was something left.Up there, just where the roots met
Thank heavens; the thing was odd after all!
Oh happy day!(pop)
She loves me!
Descendant
I am down, fallen as far as I am going to.Outwardly, I am just something on the surface, a body in a suit.Inwardly
Everything is difficult.I hurt.
I feel better now.This is the third day.All I recall of the other two is that they were there; I don’t remember any details.I haven’t been getting better steadily, either, as what happened yesterday is even more blurred than the day before, the day of the fall.
I think I had the idea then that I was being born.A primitive, old-fashioned, almost animal birth; bloody and messy and dangerous.I took part and watched at the same time; I was the born and the birthing, and when, suddenly, I felt I could move, I jerked upright, trying to sit up and wipe my eyes, but my gloved hands hit the visor, centimetres in front of my eyes, and I fell back, raising dust.I blacked out.
Now it is the third day, however, and the suit and I are in better shape, ready to move off, start travelling.
I am sitting on a big rough rock in a boulderfield halfway up a long, gently sloping escarpment.I think it’s a scarp.It might be the swell towards the lip of the big crater, but I haven’t spotted any obvious secondaries that might belong to a hole in the direction of the rise, and there’s no evidence of strata overflip.
Probably an escarpment then, and not too steep on the other side, I hope.I prepare myself by thinking of the way ahead before I actually start walking.I suck at the little tube near my chin and draw some thin, acidic stuff into my mouth.I swallow with an effort.
The sky here is bright pink.It is mid-morning, and there are only two stars visible on normal sight.With the external glasses tinted and polarized I can just see thin wispy clouds, high up.The atmosphere is still, down at this level, and no dust moves.I shiver, bumping inside the suit, as though the vacuous loneliness bruised me.It was the same the first day, when I thought the suit was dead.
‘Are you ready to set off?’ the suit says.I sigh and get to my feet, dragging the weight of the suit up with me for a moment before it, tiredly, flexes too.
‘Yes.Let’s get moving.’
We set off.It is my turn to walk.The suit is heavy, my side aches monotonously, my stomach feels empty.The boulderfield stretches on into the edges of the distant sky.
I don’t know what happened, which is annoying, though it wouldn’t make any difference if I did know.It wouldn’t have made any difference when it happened, either, because there was no time for me to do anything.It was a surprise: an ambush.
Whatever got us must have been very small or very far away, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, still alive.If the module had taken any standard-sized warhead full on there would be only radiation and atoms left; probably not an intact molecule.Even a near miss would have left nothing recognizable to the unaided human eye.Only something tiny – perhaps not a warhead at all but just something moving fast – or a more distant miss, would leave wreckage.
I must remember that, hold on to that.However bad I may feel, I am still alive, when there was every chance that I would never get this far, even as a cinder, let alone whole and thinking and still able to walk.
But damaged.Both of us damaged.I am injured, but so is the suit, which is worse, in some ways.
It is running mostly on external power, soaking up the weak sunlight as best it can, but so inefficiently that it has to rest at night, when both of us have to sleep.Its communications and AG are wrecked, and the recycle and medical units are badly damaged too.All that and a tiny leak we can’t find.I’m frightened.
It says I have internal bruising and I shouldn’t be walking, but we talked it over and agreed that our only hope is to walk, to head in roughly the right direction and hope we’re seen by the base we were heading for originally, in the module.The base is a thousand kilometres south of the northern ice cap.We came down north of the equator, but just how far north, we don’t know.It’s going to be a long walk, for both of us.
‘How do you feel now?’
‘Fine,’ the suit replies.
‘How far do you think we’ll get today?’
‘Maybe twenty kilometres.’
‘That’s not very much.’
‘You’re not very well.We’ll do better once you heal.You were quite ill.’
Quite ill.There are still some little bits of sickness and patches of dried blood within the helmet, where I can see them.They don’t smell any more, but they don’t look very pleasant either.I’ll try cleaning them up again tonight.
I am worried that, apart from anything else, the suit isn’t being completely honest with me.It says it thinks our chances are fifty-fifty, but I suspect it either doesn’t have any idea at all, or knows things are worse than it’s telling me.This is what comes of having a smart suit.But I asked for one; it was my choice, so I can’t complain.Besides, I might have died if the suit hadn’t been as bright as it is.It got the two of us down here, out of the wrecked module and down through the thin atmosphere while I was still unconscious from the explosion.A standard suit might have done almost as well, but that probably wouldn’t have been enough; it was a close run thing even as it was.
My legs hurt.The ground is fairly level, but occasionally I have to negotiate small ridges and areas of corrugated ground.My feet are sore too, but the pain in my legs worries me more.I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep going all day, which is what the suit expects.
‘How far did we come yesterday?’
‘Thirty-five kilometres.’
The suit walked all of that, carrying me like a dead weight.It got up and walked, clasping me inside it so I wouldn’t bump around, and marched off, the wispy remains of its crippled emergency photopanels dragging over the dusty ground behind it like the wings of some strange, damaged insect.
Thirty-five klicks.I haven’t done a tenth of that yet.
I’ll just have to keep going.I can’t disappoint it.I’d be letting the suit down.It has done so well to get us here in one piece, and it walked all that long way yesterday, supporting me while I was still rolling my eyes and drooling, mumbling about walking in a dream and being the living dead so I can’t let it down.If I fail I harm us both, lessening the suit’s chances of survival, too.
The slope goes on.The ground is boringly uniform, always the same rusty brown.It frightens me that there is so little variety, so little sign of life.Sometimes we see a stain on a rock that might be plant life, but I can’t tell, and the suit doesn’t know because most of its external eyes and tactiles were burned out in the fall, and its analyzer is in no better condition than the AG or the transceiver.The suit’s briefing on the planet didn’t include a comprehensive Ecology, so we don’t even know in theory whether the discolourations could be plants.Maybe we are the only life here, maybe there’s nothing living or thinking for thousands and thousands of kilometres.The thought appals me.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘Nothing,’ I tell it.
‘Talk.You should talk to me.’
But what is there to say?And why should I talk anyway?
I suppose it wants to make me talk so I’ll forget the steady march, the tramp-tramp of my feet a couple of centimetres away from the ochre soil of this barren place.