Scatterbrain (2003) SSC Read online

  “The tracks of the cable,” I said. “All over the dust like a rattlesnake convention.”

  “Anyone could see them just by looking over the rim! So I moved the lemmy up onto the crater wall and turned it on its side and used the rocket. I don’t know what Valerie was thinking by then. Did she write some kind of last message?”

  Hecate said, “No.”

  “Even if she did, who would see it? But I picked up too much radiation. It’s near killed me.”

  “Well, it kind of did,” I said. “Rad sickness retired you early. It was part of what tipped me off.”

  “Hamilton, where are you?”

  “Wait, Hecate! Shreve, it wouldn’t be prudent to answer.”

  Hecate said edgily, “Gil, he’s accelerating straight up. What was that all about?”

  “Last gestures. Right, Shreve?”

  “Right,” he said, and turned off his phone.

  I told Hecate, “When his Mark 20-odd shut down he had nothing left. He went looking for me. Spray my ship with rocket flame. I lied about being on the rim of Del Rey, but we don’t know what he’s flying, Hecate, and I don’t want him to know where we are. Even a lemmy could do severe damage if you dropped it on Helios Power One at maximum. What’s he doing now?”

  “Coasting. I think…I think he’s out of fuel. He burned up a lot, hovering.”

  “We should keep watching.”

  Two hours later Hecate said, “His travel chair just quit sending.”

  “Where did he come down?”

  “Del Rey, near the center. I want to look at it before I assume anything.”

  “It could have been very messy. He was a hero, after all.” I yawned and stretched. I could be back in Hovestraydt City by tomorrow morning.

  Loki

  A story with no human characters is daunting. It’s a tour de force, a demonstration of skill. Isaac Asimov did it well.

  It’s never a stunt. Never try this unless you have something to say, and no other way to say it.

  As long ago as our memory runs, the witch wagon came crawling down out of the rippling silver sky. She brought a taste of chemicals and metals, but that went away over a crawler’s generation. That was eighty generations ago.

  Generations were shorter then. We were less careful at counting, too. Life changed rarely. Change came as disaster, as altered deep-sea currents, hordes of predators, water fouled by algae blooms. Only survival mattered then. Recording our history was not a high priority, before the witch wagon came.

  The top of the witch wagon was a window to light and color, visible from any side. From above it was only a silver circle. The box underneath made sounds. She moved a little like a great angular snail. We hid from her for a time, but she never harmed any swimming or crawling thing.

  She didn’t eat. We thought she might be a free-moving plant, but she could not be eaten either.

  Our oldest tales have been forgotten because they relied on memory. Teacher thought that we remembered what our ancestors had known, but that is not right. It is as if tracks were grooved in our minds before birth, so that we can more easily be taught what our ancestors knew.

  We remember when the witch wagon came, but these early tales are vague. They were scrawled in sand and the pictures remembered from generation to generation.

  The pictures she showed could be brilliant abstracts—black scattered with white and color-tinged dots and arabesques, green seabottoms shining as if a hotter sun were blazing just above the sky, or waters with far stranger creatures than ourselves. But the witch wagon learned to draw simpler sketches when she talked to us. The simplified pictures in the witch wagon’s display window showed us that we could draw what we were shown. One of us must have thought of adding symbols for the sounds she thought went with the pictures.

  There were no artists before the witch wagon.

  The stories we crawlers tell are rich in detail, all sound and chemical cues and rippling fins and manipulators and the colors in our skins. But none of our language was made to describe anything so strange as what the witch wagon had to tell. Language did not have enough senses to play with. The witch wagon had far less, only pictures and sound. We took it for talk and tried to talk back.

  We learned to draw in the sand where the sky is close and daylight pours through. Later tales were carved with the flint daggers the witch wagon taught us to make. We carved them wherever we could find vertical rock, and copied them before they faded.

  Some of what she taught seemed nonsense.

  Geometry was a matter of rigid shapes to hold and manipulate in one’s mind, shapes made of straight lines and flat planes. There are no such shapes in our world! Rigid rock did poke through the soft land, or billowed up in boiling seawater and cooled into soft-looking pillow shapes that were hard to the touch. The shell of a dead dustman crab was hard and rigid. But nowhere were there straight lines or flat surfaces. None of us could understand. The witch wagon gave up on geometry.

  But some lessons stuck.

  Things need names, consistent names, and for more than poetry. Related things should have related names. Snark, leviathan, anvil jungle, dustman crab, crawler (ourselves). If we can name a thing’s kind, we are a step toward understanding it.

  Leviathan is huge, unstoppable, but slow to turn. Snarks are fast and agile. One could escape a snark by diving into an anvil jungle. A leviathan would just crash through and eat what flew out. Dustman crabs were not to be killed: they kept the environment clean even when the currents were quiet.

  She told us of Teacher.

  The witch wagon was the moving part of a larger entity. Her larger part…her mind…was above the silver sky, dry, where she could live a long time. The witch wagon was like a voice and hand turned loose to roam: Teacher’s hand and voice, but tenuously connected, and stupid as a lost voice might be. She could crawl about where the sand was flat. Teacher could only squat where she fell, where the land poked through the sky, two days’ crawl from where we then made our home.

  We had been wanderers. Now too many of us gathered around the witch wagon, and stayed. We studied the witch wagon, and she studied us, for no more than seven generations. Then predators swam into our range and drove us away.

  For twenty generations we dared not go near where the witch wagon must lie.

  There was no way to lose that place. Where else did the land poke above the sky? We know four such places now—islands—but in that age, only one. It was twenty daywalks distant, and it seethed with snarks, leviathan, and a new predator we named tractor crab. The witch wagon lay a day’s crawl sunsetward of the island. We never forgot.

  Now we had nothing but memory and stories and speculation, and the flint daggers we used to carve rock.

  We learned to fight with the daggers.

  We’d given up on geometry, but we remembered that rigid things could be useful. We could tow rocks. Volcanic pillows are rigid after they cool, and porous: we could shape such stuff into refuges, imitating the hermit crab. We built barricade walls that would tear a leviathan’s belly if it swooped to take one of us. We hunted the snarks from inside the barricades.

  Our numbers grew. We took our territory back. We won our way to what had become half a memory, a children’s tale, a metaphor, a myth. Back to the witch wagon.

  The witch wagon waited, moving only when the mud had settled too thickly. Still, she paid a price in twenty generations of corrosion.

  She showed us how to mount shards of flint on leviathan whiskers, for better weapons. We were taught how to fight in numbers, as a geometrical array. We did not die as prey any longer. We died battling what preyed on us. But some died in the enemy’s teeth, and some died from exhaustion.

  Then the witch wagon couldn’t move any longer, and her ring of display window darkened and blurred. One day we saw nothing but a dulled silver cylinder.

  Our language became sound alone, except that the witch wagon could see the pictures we drew. We grew better at talking, better at learning. In ano
ther ten generations we learned enough to change our kind forever. Our barricades were cities. There was not enough pillow lava to make our houses. Anyone could see that our numbers were grown too great; and then one of us saw the answer.

  Civilization is partly what the witch wagon taught us. But how can we know what part? Think upon this matter of our numbers. The witch wagon told us that our tiny males who live in a crease behind the chin and are fed by dribblings from our mouths, reminded her of sperm, of the male seed of her kind. Another time she told us how sperm could be blocked from a parent. We saw the point: we need only kill all the males until our numbers are as they should be, then let them swarm again. But did Teacher think of that, or did we?

  Counting generations used to be difficult, before we learned how to control our numbers.

  She taught us things…but some things we learned because she taught us how to learn.

  The witch wagon told us how to breed the life around us for traits we liked. We thinned the seaweed forests to be less benign to the snarks, while still housing the life that fed us. When leviathans were too rare to threaten us, we began shaping them, too.

  The witch wagon told us of worlds beyond our worlds, seen as white points on black, but only from above the sky. She told us of melted-sand lenses that bend light but do not stop it, and how they can make the white points look larger. But she could not tell us how to make lenses out of sand.

  But did she tell us to breed the high and low transparent jellyfish, to make our own telescopes and see the stars?

  My parent is sure that Teacher was not crazy enough for that. Whatever madness our ancestors thought they’d found in her, her teachings proved out. Teacher never feels madness, divine or mundane. I’ve come to agree.

  The witch wagon’s voice grew rusty and stopped, thirty-eight generations before my own birth.

  Teacher lived above the silver sky. Again we had to build from what we had learned; and again we knew our destiny, and never forgot.

  After the witch wagon’s voice stopped, we might perceive the next thirty-eight generations—long generations, because of what we have learned—as only my bottom-crawling kind learning how to reach Teacher.

  We bred jellyfish as telescopes. The view grew clearer with each generation. Faith was not needed here. What we saw through them was no illusion: we saw seabirds as well as stars!

  We destroyed the snarks that killed leviathans, and bred the leviathans for what we wanted, but that was hard. Leviathans live three generations. We had to invent governments stable over many lifetimes. But we did that.

  Ultimately we butchered leviathans for their flotation bladders, filled them with water, and rolled up onto the land. Six generations ago our land rollers came out of the water to see Teacher face-to-face.

  Two among those were my ancestors.

  The witch wagon had told us of the world above the silver sky. Teacher spent effort analyzing what grew near her, and relayed what she knew to the witch wagon, though the relay failed early on.

  We live through air dissolved in water. No walkers can survive on air alone, certainly no swimmer can, but some plants can grow above the sky. Endless generations of us have known how to find that strange place, how to find Teacher; but not how to survive up there. Teacher told us how her kind goes into worlds even less hospitable, into vacuum, wearing balloons made in the shape of her kind, that carry what they need. We have done the same. Gradually we get better at it.

  Teacher looks like a rounded rock.

  “This shape took me through the air without burning up,” she said. “Motion is heat, and my voyage involved faster motion than I can easily describe.” She would have demonstrated: “Put a pebble in this attitude jet, this hole under my spotlight. One blast, and I’ll send it clear across the island!”

  But my four-mother had no way to move a pebble. Even so, her balloon was much improved over her two-mother’s. Those first air rollers nearly died when the water in their balloons went stale.

  The balloons hold what we need: not air, but water. We learned to bubble air through it; there must be air in our water, or we die; but not too much, or we die. We learned to move the balloon by walking along its bottom, using our weight. It works better if we carry rocks.

  In three generations we had a permanent base, an inland pond pointed out by Teacher and filled with seawater we carried in bladders. Underwater we built temporary homes, and pressure refuges, too, because rain changes the composition of seawater.

  Teacher’s voice carries not through thin air but through the rock. We began to learn again.

  Teacher is the payload of an interstellar probe. Teacher was once far more powerful: one component of a personality greatly more complex than our own brains. The probe split to perform varied functions, a monotheistic God become a pantheon. There is an orbiter (moving so high and fast that it cannot fall) and a wanderer among the nearby worlds. Teacher is the lander. She was made to talk to whatever she found.

  We must still take a good deal of this on faith.

  “There are worlds like my world,” Teacher told us, “covered three-quarters with water. Life shapes itself in water and eventually wants the land, too. But many worlds have too much water, just as some have too much air and some have too little of both. Your world is nearly all water. There’s so little land that few living things want it.”

  “Why should we?” my three-mother asked.

  “You’ve been building a civilization, but there are things you cannot build in water,” Teacher said. “But you can’t reach out of it, can you? How can you manipulate anything?”

  “How do you?” we asked, and we listened to her answers.

  I was born for this, trained for this. I was to be a land roller, whatever that might mean when I became mature. If we breed ourselves for special traits—as we do, but very cautiously—then I was bred not to fear the blinding sun or the dry air. So, I do not.

  We were not sure what would work. Whatever we tried, some died. Whatever we tried, we became more capable.

  This worked: a leviathan altered by radiation, genetic tampering, then natural selection.

  I ride out of the sea where all before me walked. Leviathan hunches itself across the rocks, using stronger, thicker fins than its ancestors had. The skin of its back is thick, horny, armored against the sun. It still carries its bladder, but filled with water now, and the bladder protrudes through the beast’s skin below its chin. Three of us ride inside. The view is a bit murky, a bit distorted.

  I see our inland base below me. Tear this bladder apart, and we might wriggle to safety through the thin air. We have reached the highest point of the island, and Teacher.

  “I could not see how you would reach me,” Teacher said. “You have gone beyond me. I can make out your cities even from here, when the waves slacken. Still there are things I can teach. That plant in my spotlight, can you tear it up?” A tiny brilliant green dot blazes in a clump of dry-living plants. Raw daylight changes its color.

  My companion manipulates nerve clumps. These land-based plants are tough, but Leviathan rips up a stalk thrice my length.

  “It needs to dry,” Teacher said. “Pull it to the top of that rock slope. Fetch seven or eight more. We’ll see if the stuff is dry tomorrow. Then, can you recognize flint when it dries?”

  The tiny green dot probes out. “That’s flint. Pick up two chunks. Bigger.” Twice the size of my head, these. I rap them against each other.

  Teacher says, “You’re not making knives now. Now we wait a day and hope it doesn’t rain.”

  All the long generations have come to this. I asked, “What then?”

  “Then I will teach you fire.”

  Procrustes

  I found Beowulf Shaeffer single and broke. His first story, “Neutron Star,” got me my first Hugo Award. “The Borderland of Sol” got me my last. As I aged, he aged, until we find him settled and married, with children, though not yet his own.

  Asleep, my mind plays it all back in frag
ments and dreams. From time to time a block of nerves wakes: That’s some kind of ARM weapon! Move it, move it, too late, BLAM. My head rolls loose on black sand. Bones shattered, ribs and spine. Fear worse than the agony. Agony fading and I’m gone.

  Legs try to kick. Nothing moves. Again, harder, move! No go. The ’doc floats nicely on the lift plate, but its mass is resisting me. Push! Voice behind me, I turn, she’s holding some kind of tube. BLAM. My head bounces on sand. Agony flaring, sensation fading. Try to hang on, stay lucid…but everything turns mellow.

  My balance swings wildly around my inner ear. Where’s the planet’s axis? Fafnir doesn’t have polar caps. The ancient lander is flying itself. Carlos looks worried, but Feather’s having the time of her life.

  Sprawled across the planet’s face, a hurricane flattened along one edge. Under the vast cloud-fingerprint a ruddy snake divides the blue of a world-girdling ocean. A long, narrow continent runs almost pole to pole.

  The lander reenters over featureless ocean. Nothing down there seems to be looking at us. I’m taking us down fast. Larger islands have low, flat buildings on them. Pick a little one. Hover while flame digs the lamplighter pit wider and deeper, until the lander sinks into the hole with inches to spare. Plan A is right on track.

  I remember how Plan A ended. The Surgeon program senses my distress and turns me off.

  I’m in Carlos Wu’s ’doc, in the Intensive Care Cavity. The Surgeon program prods my brain, running me through my memories, maintaining the patterns, lest they fuzz out to nothing while my brain and body heal.

  I must be terribly damaged.

  Waking was sudden. My eyes popped open and I was on my back, my nose two inches from glass. Sunlight glared through scattered clouds. Display lights glowed above my eyebrows. I felt fine, charged with energy.