Forbidden Planets (33 page)
He said that none of them could see blue anymore, and that green had become yellow, purple red, and so forth. Then he hesitated and said, “And now yellow’s gone too. Hey, Karen, can you see yellow?”
Karen Berman, our mission botanist, said no, she couldn’t. In the background of the call I could hear the other members of the team. I distinctly heard the word
red
several times.
red
several times.
“Sean,” I said. “You can still see in black and white, am I right?”
He said that was right, but it was getting dark. I imagined seeing only black and white in the dark. This planet has no moon, although apparently it did at one point, since its seashores still bear traces of what must have been tidal ecosystems; but without a moon, the team was going to have grave difficulty finding its way out of the deep forest that lay over the pitchblende deposit they had gone to survey.
“Use your flashlights,” I said. “That will at least give you light and shadow.”
Tobin hadn’t gone out with the survey team. Hadn’t wanted to. He was already so withdrawn by then that he had trouble connecting with any of them deeply enough to remember their names. All the same, I believed then, and believe now, that if he had been there, they might have survived. He was strong enough and single-minded enough to hold them together by force of will.
At the exact moment of sundown—I checked later—all of the transponders they’d left on the trail as bread crumbs quit working. This was before we’d gotten a working system of GPS satellites up.
“Every one of them?” I repeated, feeling stupid for saying it but unable to keep my mouth shut.
“Every goddamn one,” Sean said.
They were losing their vision (possibly), it was dark, they were in thick forest, and they no longer had any way to get out save through the kind of orienteering skills that are as foreign to our generation as dead reckoning was to those who came of age after the discovery of the compass. Considering all of this, I think it’s amazing they held on as long as they did.
Also, it’s amazing I’ve held on to my train of thought as long as I have. Tobin must like this story, and why wouldn’t he?
I really wish I’d never gone into space. I could have taught composition at a small college somewhere. There might have been children. I would have liked children. Sometimes I dream that I have had them and wake up sad that I have left them behind.
Regrets are easy to come by when you’re the last survivor of a mission to another planet, which if I’m not, I will be soon.
So I sit and write puzzles, ostensibly for you but more honestly for myself. Anything I can think, Tobin can think—has thought—as well.
In the real world, I think those hummingbirds mostly get eaten by fish. But at least there is the beauty of the insects’ dance.
Right. Example. Forest.
They said they were hanging together, but something about the way things looked started to frighten them. “Stay close,” I warned them. “Touching close. Can you remember the way you came?”
“That’s the problem,” Karen said. “We can remember it, but it isn’t there.”
I heard Sean in the background saying that they were going to count off every five minutes, just to make sure that in their panic they wouldn’t leave anyone behind.
The first three counts came to six. The fourth came to five.
Tricia Kassarjian was gone.
“Where’d she go?” Sean was screaming. “She was right here!”
Yes, they all agreed. She had been right there. Someone had helped her over a fallen log not thirty seconds before; someone else had snapped at her for shining her flashlight up in their faces. “I heard her breathing right next to me,” said our pilot, an ex-military botanist named Lee Young-pyo. “I mean just now.”
“Tricia!” Sean called.
And this is the worst of it: She answered. I could hear her calling to them. They stayed together and worked the search the way they were supposed to. Tricia said she would stay put, and they would use the sound of her voice to locate her.
Eventually, though, she stopped talking. No panic, no cries for help. She just stopped answering.
When the team made the decision to return for her after they’d gotten back to where they’d parked the rover, they counted off.
One, two, three . . . four.
It went like that. The forest closed them off, not so they could see it but so that every time they made progress back toward where they were sure they needed to be, suddenly there was no way to get there. Sean was the last one to go. Tobin and I talked to him the whole time. He knew he wasn’t going to make it, and he told us that, and right before he stopped responding he said to me, “What kind of a place is this? How does this happen?” Mystified, like a toddler who has cut himself on safety scissors.
I didn’t have an answer for him then, and I don’t now.
Tobin said . . . ah, goddammit. For a minute there I almost had it. Whatever it was, I remember thinking I hoped it wasn’t the last thing Sean ever heard.
A little while later, Tobin went outside for good.
I think there was another incident after the loss of the survey team, but when I go back and do the arithmetic in my head, the answer I get means that everyone but Tobin and me died in that forest. My mind is stubborn, though; I know there was something else. I’m fairly certain someone else died.
It is a difficult thing to be unsure whether your apprehension of the world is the correct one; far worse not even to know if your thoughts about what you see, feel, taste, etc., are yours or projections of someone else. If all tools are amplifiers, then what was left here amplified the capability of the mind to affect the phenomenal world. It’s only natural, I suppose, for that tool to have wanted to find its way into the mind that would make the most use of it.
Without looking back at what I’ve already written, I think that probably I haven’t given enough attention to the problem of what I should have done differently. The way we all felt about Tobin—and
we
here includes Tobin himself; his many fine qualities did not include modesty—meant that there were times when we looked to him. If we were children (what group social interaction cannot be explained in terms of the playground?), Tobin would have been the kid everyone wanted to be like, and he didn’t always desire or respond well to our expectations. On the way here, he just wanted to be left alone to do his job; once we were on the ground, he forgot about the job and just wanted to be left alone with the creations of his mind.
we
here includes Tobin himself; his many fine qualities did not include modesty—meant that there were times when we looked to him. If we were children (what group social interaction cannot be explained in terms of the playground?), Tobin would have been the kid everyone wanted to be like, and he didn’t always desire or respond well to our expectations. On the way here, he just wanted to be left alone to do his job; once we were on the ground, he forgot about the job and just wanted to be left alone with the creations of his mind.
I should have handled myself better. Possibly I should have acted more aggressively as some kind of corrective to Tobin, and I failed to be that. Was never that. Could not have been that. From the moment our feet touched the ground of this world, he was different. He was of this place, I think, before he ever got here—which is a fatalistic thing to say, given what happened, but I believe it.
Here’s another fatalistic sentiment: also I believe that once this world knew of him, there was no way things could have happened other than how they did. Which doesn’t let me off the hook.
I said
what was left here
a few sentences ago. Tobin said to me once that the world
was
the tool, that whatever they—They—did turned it into a giant psychological tuning fork.
Psychokinetic
might be a better word, since thoughts here are able to manifest themselves as expenditures of kinetic energy.
what was left here
a few sentences ago. Tobin said to me once that the world
was
the tool, that whatever they—They—did turned it into a giant psychological tuning fork.
Psychokinetic
might be a better word, since thoughts here are able to manifest themselves as expenditures of kinetic energy.
Who could have done that, I wondered then. Still do. Maybe Tobin knows.
And where did they go?
Here’s what it feels like: Once, I became certain that the world itself was not just speaking to me but speaking through me, living through me, that I had become a conduit for this consciousness that was curious, eager, jealous, lonely . . . and then it was gone. While it was present, however, I could feel the matter of the world transforming around me. I was in a good mood, and the clouds in the sky cleared; I was excited about an experiment I was close to finishing, and birds burst from the trees all around me; I was fearful that the experiment would fail, and one of the birds dropped dead at my feet. The experience lasted just a moment, but Lee and I went back and looked later; the dead bird was there, and within a hundred meters of the spot we cataloged sixteen species of flower, each visually resembling a terrestrial species I knew and each utterly absent from the rest of the planet . . . at least insofar as we were able to determine.
More than human companionship, I miss that feeling, which may say more about my failure to connect with my mission colleagues than about whatever made those flowers grow.
Anyway, if you read this, it means I’ve aged, and died, and that the only one left is Tobin. I don’t think age and death are things he has to worry about now.
Don’t expect him to come and greet you, but he’ll send a message.
I haven’t gone back inside the MC for a while . . . perhaps since the night the survey team disappeared. I’m trying to hear the voice Tobin heard, trying to feel the ground below my feet responding to my steps the way it must respond to his.
Look for me under your bootsoles. And while you’re at it, look for Tobin there, too.
God, I feel like I’m doing this to myself. Maybe that’s part of the guilt I was talking about earlier, but what do I have to be guilty about? Didn’t do anything. That was Tobin. Wish I could remember that line. Then I would know.
Me•topia
Adam Roberts
The first day and the first night.They had come down in the high ground, an immense plateau many thousands of miles square. “The highlands,” said Murphy. “I claim the highlands. I’ll call them Murphyland.” Over the next hour or so he changed his mind several times: Murphtopia, Murphia. “No,” he said, glee bubbling out in a little dance, a shimmy of the feet, a flourish of the hands. “Just Murphy, Murphy. Think of it!
Where do you come from? I come from Murphy. I’m a Murphyite. I was born in Murphy.
” And the sky paled, and then the sun appeared over the mountaintops, and everything was covered with a tide of light. The dew was so thick it looked like the aftermath of a heavy rainstorm.
Where do you come from? I come from Murphy. I’m a Murphyite. I was born in Murphy.
” And the sky paled, and then the sun appeared over the mountaintops, and everything was covered with a tide of light. The dew was so thick it looked like the aftermath of a heavy rainstorm.
Sinclair, wading out from the shuttle’s wreckage through waist-high grass, drew a dark trail after him marking his path, like the photographic negative of a comet.
“I don’t understand what you’re so happy about,” said Edwards. It was as if he could not
see
this new land, a world that popped out of nowhere. As if all he could see was the damage to the ship. But that was how Edwards’ mind worked. He had a practical mind.
see
this new land, a world that popped out of nowhere. As if all he could see was the damage to the ship. But that was how Edwards’ mind worked. He had a practical mind.
“Ach, are you sad for your ship,” sang Murphy, with deliberately overplayed oirishry, “all buckled and collapsed and it is?” Of course, Murphy was a neanderthal, a
homo neanderthalis
. The real deal. All four of these crewmen were. Of course, you know what that means.
homo neanderthalis
. The real deal. All four of these crewmen were. Of course, you know what that means.
“You should be sad too, Murphy,” said Edwards, speaking in a level voice. “It’s your ship too. I don’t see how we are to get home without it.”
“But
this
is my home,” declared Murphy. And then sang his own name, or perhaps the name of his newly made land, over and over: “Murphy! Murphy! Murphy!”
this
is my home,” declared Murphy. And then sang his own name, or perhaps the name of his newly made land, over and over: “Murphy! Murphy! Murphy!”
The sun moved through the sky. The swift light went everywhere. It spilled over everything and washed back. The expanse of grassland shimmered in the breeze like cellophane.
Edwards climbed to the top of the buckled craft. The plasmetal bodywork was oily with dew, and his feet slipped several times. At the top he stood as upright as he dared and surveyed the world. Mountains away to the west, grass steppes leading away in every direction, north south and east, flowing downhill eastward toward smudges of massive forestation and the metallic inlaid sparkle of rivers, lakes, seas. That was some view, eastward.
The sun was rising from the west, which was an unusual feature. What strange world rotated like that? There were no Earth-sized planets in the solar system that rotated like that.
Did that mean they were no longer in the solar system? That was impossible. There was no way they could have traveled so far. Physics repudiated the very notion.
The air tasted fresh in his mouth, in his throat. Grass scent. Rainwater and ozone.
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