FSF, March-April 2010 Page 8

  * * * *

  Now, on this rainy evening in December, a year and a half after their jaunt to Fort Clay, she inhaled the fragrance of the oolong along with the incense of Dr. Corman's praise. Either he loved her book or he was a very good liar.

  "It's a transfiguration,” he told her, shaking his head. “You've turned that old heap of decay into a vision of life and lust and war, and how they all pass away, leaving nothing behind but ruins and sand and silence. But these—” he tapped the pictures “—also show what art can do to save something from the wreckage. To make transience immortal."

  Saffron almost purred with pleasure. Showing her work always made her feel like some sort of carnival freak, exhibiting the most private parts of her spirit to strangers. Yet until she did, she never really knew whether her work was any good or not—whether it communicated, or just sat there.

  "I'm not sure Schulz would have understood,” mused Corman. “Wonderful man—brave, smart, sensitive. But underneath, very much the stolid, conventional Midwesterner. That made him a good soldier, but for a creature of enthusiasm like Quant, sometimes rather a dull companion."

  "You could tell all that from the logbook?” asked Saffron, smiling. “It must read like War and Peace."

  "I'm afraid I fibbed about that. Schulz's log is actually quite dry—facts, figures, that sort of thing. I only use the copy I made of it at the Archives to refresh my memory."

  Saffron stared at him, sitting there, tall and skinny, the cup invisible in his big workman's hands. And old. He was very old.

  "Souls are fascinating things,” he went on. “I admit that at first I thought you quite a superficial young woman. Watching you at work, I sensed something more. Now I know I was right the second time. There's more to you than meets the eye, Ms. Genève. There are depths in you I want to explore."

  The rain murmured at the window. A soft knock sounded at the door. Saffron didn't even hear it. Corporal Quant, she thought, who delivered sermons and believed in devils.

  The knocking resumed, so loud now that she jumped. Corman finished his tea, set the cup aside, and turned to look at the door.

  "The Headsman,” she gabbled, desperate now to distract him. To distract it, whatever it was. “What about Gabriel Letourneau?"

  "He was never anything but the—what's the cant phrase? The ‘fall guy.’ Maybe that's out of date, too. I find it so hard to keep up with slang, the way it's always changing. Letourneau was just one of les abaissés du monde, the downtrodden of the earth. Morrow liked him, but then Morrow's rather a primitive character himself. He tried to kill me."

  He chuckled. “Can you imagine that? Afterward he became a good servant. He helped me get ashore. Water's really become his element.... Aren't you going to answer the door, Ms. Genève?"

  A barrage of knocks sounded, making the old door jump against its frame. Corman shook his head. “Poor devil. Always afraid the rain might end. Quite a phobia with him.... Well?"

  She sat holding her pictures, the physical embodiment of her soul. At least, when she was gone, they would last. Wouldn't they?

  "If you won't open it,” said Corman, “then I'll have to,” and he rose, tall and shadowy, set down the cup, and shambled to the door.

  * * * *

  "Precedents, Your Honor! What Precedents!"

  * * * *

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelet: STAR-CROSSED by Tim Sullivan

  Any request for biographical information from Tim Sullivan is sure to be met with something amusing. This time around, Mr. Sullivan, aka. B. Traven, reports he was born in Bohemia nearly a century ago. After an early career spent liberating rogue elephants in Kenya, which led to his active role in the Mau Mau uprising, Sullivan went on to a career in the ring, becoming heavyweight champion of the world at age 48, the oldest boxer ever to win the title. Sullivan has spent recent decades translating Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica from Latin into Sanskrit, which he believes will insure his immortality. He has no cats, but he does have his tongue firmly in his cheek.

  His new story is a sequel to “Planetesimal Dawn,” which first appeared in our Oct/Nov. 2008 issue. You don't need to read that story to enjoy this one, but readers who want to check it out can find it on our Website during the months of March and April.

  Wolverton was about to be crushed.

  He was cutting out a small chunk of LGC-1's surficial iron with a hand laser, his back to the oncoming danger.

  "Look out!” Nozaki's voice crackled in his ear.

  Wolverton felt the ground shake. He turned in time to see a black immensity looming over him in utter silence.

  "Jump!"

  He didn't know which way to go, but he jumped.

  Landing some twelve meters from where he started, he saw that he still wasn't clear of the giant's path. He jumped again.

  This time he stumbled and fell when he came down, still holding the laser, and he rolled onto his back to face the stars. He propped himself up on his elbows and saw a humpbacked giant tear up the landscape as it trundled past him. It looked like a beetle the size of a sports arena, its insectile, metal legs giving it purchase in the hard ground. It was so big that it blotted out the starfield.

  Wolverton thought about shooting at it, but the monster was already halfway to the asteroid's precipitously curved horizon, leaving a wide trench behind it. He doubted that the laser could have done much damage, anyway.

  Nozaki helped Wolverton to his feet. Wolverton was out of breath, and his heart was beating rapidly. By now the behemoth was out of sight.

  "Did you see that?” Wolverton asked her, not quite believing what had just happened.

  "Who do you think told you to jump?” Nozaki said. “Are you all right?"

  "Yes, I'm fine."

  "I'd better inform base camp.” Nozaki spoke on another channel for a moment. Signing off, she nudged Wolverton into the rover. Nozaki got in on the driver's side and started it up. Wolverton's breathing was still ragged.

  "That was close, huh?” Nozaki said, turning the rover around.

  "Yeah.” Wolverton smiled, for once not self-conscious about his overbite. He was glad to be alive. “Where did that thing come from?"

  "The bubble."

  "Bubble?"

  "Yeah, an anomaly. You called it a temporal displacement bubble."

  "I called it that?"

  "That's right."

  "I didn't even know it exists."

  "That thing was inadvertently sent here from another reality."

  "Another reality...?"

  "Yeah, one in which nobody lives on this asteroid. I don't think they'd intentionally harm us."

  "You talk like you know them."

  "I met one of them. It brought me back—well, almost brought me back—when I accidentally went through the bubble. It got me as close to my original reality as it could."

  "Does anyone else know about this?"

  "Oh, yes, everybody at base camp knows, even though they didn't believe me at first."

  "Why not? What happened?"

  "You and I went rock collecting one day, and I came back alone. They thought I'd gone crazy, until incontrovertible evidence turned up. There was talk about replacing me with Zaremba."

  "Jeez."

  "He was against the idea, though. He'd worked security with me long enough to realize what I said was true, no matter how it sounded."

  Nozaki drove alongside the deep gouge in the iron and lateritic nickel surface.

  In the few days Wolverton had been on LGC-1, he'd taken samples of an impressive array of ores—molybdenite, scheelite, manganese, quartz, iron, and lead—the products of lateral secretion blasted by Gamma Crucis's hydrogen shell for hundreds of millions of years. The digger had cut a broad swath across it all, at least two meters deep and perhaps a hundred meters wide, rendering today's work useless.

  "It's some kind of mining machine,” he said.

  "That makes sense,” Nozaki said. “A consortium of races has this place sta
ked out for ore."

  "They didn't say anything about that during my training.” Wolverton felt as if he'd fallen through the looking glass.

  "That's because we're still preparing the report. You're the only one who's seen their technology besides me...if it is their technology."

  She kept driving near the trench's edge.

  He watched her self-assured handling of the rover. Wolverton hardly knew Nozaki, but he was talking to her easily. He'd never been able to make friends on Earth or Mars; out here on the frontier, he'd hoped it would be different. Nozaki had been especially nice to him ever since the hopper brought him to LGC-1, and now she'd saved his life. Crises brought people together, just as he'd always heard.

  He liked Nozaki. He liked her a lot. In fact, he was falling in love with her.

  "What if the digger gouges out base camp?” Wolverton asked.

  "It wasn't moving in that direction,” Nozaki said, sounding a bit uncertain for once. “Besides, the compound is probably too big to miss, even for something that size."

  "Probably?"

  "Come on, Wolverton. I told you they're advanced, very civilized. They wouldn't want to harm us."

  "But since there may be an infinite number of realities intersecting here, you can't be sure who built the digger."

  "No,” she admitted. “I guess I can't. What do you think its functions are, besides digging up everything in its path?"

  "I suspect that it's identifying ores just as we're doing, only on a much grander scale. It must analyze all the rocks by volume, separating them inside itself after scooping them up."

  "They're in a hurry to acquire metals."

  "Exactly where is this bubble, anyway?” Wolverton asked.

  "Hard to say. It's centered in near space, but its parameters move around. Sometimes it comes down to the surface."

  "And that's how we passed through it? Accidentally?"

  "Yes. The digger may run into the bubble again and disappear, or..."

  "Or it will chew up base camp, analyze the chunks, and spit out whatever it doesn't want."

  "That's a pretty grim prognostication."

  "But it could be accurate,” Wolverton said. “In fact, given the small size of this asteroid, I'd say it's quite likely."

  "You've got a point. We'd better get back."

  She turned the rover away from the trench and started toward base camp. Wolverton regretted leaving, realizing that he might never get another chance to be alone with Nozaki.

  They soon saw the glare of floodlights over the steeply rounded horizon. Base camp abruptly came into sight. Labutunu's construction crew worked on the compound's new addition, affixing lead-sheet shielding to an erect wall.

  Wolverton said he'd put away the rover, giving Nozaki a chance to get inside and provide a detailed account. She opened all channels and called everyone to the briefing room, while he detached the battery pack and fumbled with the rover's panels, until he finally managed to fold it up and lean it against the others.

  The construction workers were already inside by the time he finished. Ducking his head to get out of the shack, he leaped halfway to the airlock hatch in a single step. He still wasn't used to this gravity, and his long legs often took him farther than he expected.

  Wolverton went through the airlock, got his helmet and suit off as quickly as he could, and hung them next to his bunk. Turning, he glimpsed his lanky form, freckled face, and ginger hair in the mirror through the open bathroom door. He rushed past it to the briefing room, a relatively spacious chamber at the intersection of the compound's two main bunkers.

  Everyone had already gathered there.

  The babble of many voices confused him, but he soon saw something downright disconcerting.

  Two Nozakis.

  One of them spoke, and she wore a pressure suit without a helmet. The other was seated, listening along with everyone else, and she wore a blue thermal jersey and leggings.

  "We don't know where it is right now,” the suited Nozaki—presumably the one he'd just been with—was saying, “but a very large mining machine has come through the bubble, and it may be out of control. It's tearing up the surface with abandon."

  Some cross-talk followed.

  "Here's a thought,” Wolverton said from the back of the room, as soon as there was a lull. He felt self-conscious when everyone turned toward him. “What if its purpose is to strip-mine the entire surface?"

  That brought on quite an uproar.

  "It could happen,” Nozaki said in a loud, firm voice. “We have to be prepared to evacuate base camp if it comes this way."

  Another hubbub followed.

  "What will we do if it destroys base camp?” the astrophysicist Jyoti asked, once things quieted down enough for her to be heard. “We can't live outside for long."

  "We can call for hoppers to get us out of here,” said Zaremba. The overhead lights reflected on his shaved pate. “But that'll take some time."

  "The best thing to do,” Labutunu said, “is to move building materials and everything we need for survival to another site. We'll assemble a makeshift compound and pump air into it. We can manage until we evacuate the asteroid."

  "I don't understand how this thing got down to the surface,” said the bespectacled Dr. Linebarger, M.D.

  "The bubble sometimes brushes the surface,” Nozaki explained.

  "The alien artists make a broad brush stroke,” said Duvic, the head mineralogist, stroking his gray beard.

  A few people laughed at his comment, taking some edge off the group's fear.

  "There may yet prove to be bubbles,” said Jyoti, her dark eyes widening with enthusiasm, “enveloping entire asteroids, even entire planets. This is very exciting."

  "A little too exciting, if you ask me,” said the Nozaki who was unencumbered by a pressure suit. Wolverton admired her trim, athletic figure as she stood up.

  Since he'd come to LGC-1, he'd sometimes wondered why he'd seen Nozaki so often. Now he knew why, and he understood what she'd meant by “incontrovertible evidence."

  "Let's get busy,” the suited Nozaki said.

  Everybody pitched in. Some people were assigned to gather essentials, while others assisted Labutunu outside with the heavy equipment. Sentries were assigned, and pictures from the flyby were examined.

  "There it is,” the unsuited Nozaki said, pointing at a hologram taken from space.

  The flyby's imager had picked up the digger as it tore its way into the asteroid's crimson dawn. It kept going right through the searing heat of the hydrogen shell.

  "Hard radiation doesn't even slow it down,” Jyoti said.

  "Maybe it uses GaCrux's hydrogen shell as a smelter,” Wolverton ventured.

  "It looks like it's going to circumnavigate the asteroid, its path diverging each time it comes around,” the unsuited Nozaki said. “It will almost certainly reach this point sooner or later."

  "In which case,” Duvic said, looking at Wolverton, “your hypothesis is going to become a propecy fulfilled."

  "You may be responsible for saving the lives of fifty-two people, Wolverton,” the suited Nozaki said.

  Her praise made him feel good, but this was no time to bask in the warmth. They had to get busy.

  Everything they needed was hauled outside—tools, food, dietary supplements, water, inflatable tents, oxygen tanks. They had to hurry before dawn came.

  At one point Wolverton found himself working with the duplicate Nozaki.

  "You shouldn't stare at people,” she said.

  "I'm sorry,” Wolverton replied. “It's just that I...."

  "You've never seen the same person in two places at the same time,” she said. “I know. I've heard it since the day I came back and found my double here in the compound. Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of talking about it."

  It was strange, but this version of Nozaki didn't seem as kindly disposed toward him as the other one. Everything else about them was the same, right down to the identical birthmarks on their
throats. The difference must have been due to the experience he'd shared with the other version of her.

  "We need those units stacked by the airlock,” Zaremba said, interrupting Wolverton's reverie.

  "Vite! Vite!” Duvic cried from behind him. “It's coming this way!"

  "And it's moving fast,” Nozaki said. “There's no time to gather everything up. Just load the rovers and pray that the hoppers get here before it's too late."

  "The wieldos...,” Labutunu said, dismayed. “We can't build without them!"

  "I know, but we've got to get going."

  All the rovers were unfolded, battery packs attached, and the ore boots filled with whatever supplies could be carried. Wolverton jumped into a rover next to Nozaki. Now that both versions of her were suited up, he wasn't sure which Nozaki it was.

  Twenty-six rovers drove in a column away from the encroaching sunrise, a scarlet corona behind them on the black rim of the horizon.

  "My God,” someone said over the radio.

  The fear in that voice caused Wolverton to turn and look behind him. There was the digger, churning up the surface, seeming even more gigantic than the first time he'd seen it, and growing larger by the second.

  Just as the images from the flyby had suggested, it was headed straight toward the compound. Its angular legs churned, propelling it forward at a furious pace.

  Much of base camp was below ground, only its lead-lined roofs visible from this distance. Wolverton saw the monster take its first bite. He got a brief look at part of its underside where the ground dipped in front of the airlock. Huge spiraling blades sliced into the bunker and the debris fell into its enormous scoop.

  Everything was sucked up inside it. There was no sound, only a vibration.

  It was like an earthquake, and the rover careened wildly before Nozaki got it back under control.

  Refuse shot out through the digger's backside. Jagged pieces of base camp drifted for a moment against the black and red sky and then fell slowly to the surface.