To Climb a Flat Mountain

  TO CLIMB A FLAT MOUNTAIN,

  PART I OF II

  by G. David Nordley

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  Chapter 1

  Somewhere Unexpected

  Jacques Song opened his eyes and saw a huge fish floating above the canopy of his cold sleep unit and staring at him. He shut them immediately; it must be a bad dream. People often had dreams as cold sleep evolved into normal sleep and wakefulness.

  Last night, 21 June 2345, he and the rest of the corps had listened to some inspirational nonsense from Earth Empress Marie, lifted a glass of rum spiked with cold sleep preparation drugs, and dutifully lain down on their hotel beds at Sheffield Station in Earth orbit.

  In deep sleep, they’d been transferred to Cold Sleep Units and loaded onto starships bound for 36 Ophiuchi. The process would be reversed twenty-three years later when the invasion force had established itself, hopefully undetected, at a base in the Kuiper belt around 36 Ophiuchi A and B. Their mission was to liberate a colony gone horrifically wrong.

  But that colony was not under a sea filled with staring fish.

  The colony leaders didn’t believe in using robots—labor cleansed the soul. Slavery in all but name had evolved in a decade. Polygamy, child marriage, gladiatorial executions, and inherited subordinate status became the rule. They’d bungled relations with primitive aliens on another of 36 Ophiuchi A’s planets, raising concerns about humanity’s status in the galaxy.

  But those aliens did not, as he remembered, look like fish.

  Dissenters had fled to the hills and risked everything to call for help—which would take half a century at best to get there. Before 36 Ophiuchi, the consensus had been that the distance between stars made interstellar warfare impossible. The colony leaders had counted on it.

  But faced with a cry for help, Earth considered the impossible. There’d been a mammoth debate informed by massive simulations showing that, absent outside influence, the theocracy might persist indefinitely. The decision had been made, volunteers recruited, and robots instructed to prepare a fleet. Jacques, divorced and looking for distance, had signed up.

  Jacques opened his eyes again, and the fish was still there, all too real. Maybe two meters long, it boasted a huge parrotlike beak, but otherwise looked something like a shark. He was wide awake now. He was obviously not on the conveyor ship, Resolution, so something else had gone horrifically wrong.

  He tried to touch the net, but the lack of response didn’t surprise him. The CSU seemed inert, but he was breathing, so it must be functioning to some extent. The things were designed to keep you viable in a suspended state for a couple of centuries without external power—they warmed you up to a coma every few months for DNA repair.

  “CSU, what’s your energy level?” he asked. As soon as he moved, the parrot-beaked shark tried to bite through the canopy, but didn’t have much success against the flexidiamond.

  A heads-up display flashed in front of him, superposing itself over the curious—or hungry—fish. It showed he had about two hours left at present consumption levels, which were at emergency minimum. The display flashed off again. The CSU might as well have said, “I’ve done what I can. It’s your problem now.”

  Jacques raised himself on his elbows. The water—assuming it was water—around him was not all that clear and the light level must be very low. From what he could see, his CSU seemed to be resting on nearly level sand, with a few huge, dark, boulderlike objects here and there. The surface seemed far above him.

  He would probably have to try to reach it.

  But when? Conventional wisdom would have him wait as long as he could for rescue. The CSU, he realized, had maximized that time. Rescue wasn’t coming.

  First things first. He needed to inventory his assets. He reached into a cubbyhole to his left for his personal effects; his wrist comp and a couple of backup data disks—what he’d left on his hotel night table for the Resolution’s robots to take with him. The objects seemed very light—low gravity?

  The wrist comp was dead, powerless. He shivered. Just how long had it been? He suppressed the urge to ask immediately—if he were going to get out of this situation alive, he would need to use what was left of the CSU’s power very efficiently.

  Another cubbyhole held an emergency kit in a sealable bag, which he emptied and inventoried. It struck him as an eclectic jumble of stuff someone assembled to fill a regulatory square, never expected to be used. There was another wrist comp, its memory filled, no doubt, with all sorts of survival information. It was powerless. There was a survival tent, nicely folded down to the size of an envelope. There were a few pieces of primitive, non-electronic gear including a dozen nutrition bars, a compass, a magnifying lens, needle and thread, a ten-centimeter-long multitool, a pair of fabric canteens, a photovoltaic power supply, binoculars, space blankets, etcetera. Finally, occupying most of the volume of the kit, there was a shipsuit.

  Even in the low gravity, struggling into the last was not easy in the coffinlike space in the CSU, but once he got his legs in, his body heat began to power the smart fabric up, and it relaxed to make the rest of the job easier. It molded itself around his body like a second skin, except for the hood. The latter had a transparent section that could seal up for vacuum use. Hopefully, it would work as well underwater.

  It also had an emergency life-support pack. For a moment, Jacques smiled. It could make oxygen; he could wait several hours more to try his escape, using that to breathe. Then he found it was powerless as well. He sighed; many of the suit’s functions could be powered by his own body heat and movements, but not that.

  That was all he had. He imagined that, should he survive and return to Earth some centuries hence, some of these objects might be displayed in a museum as quaint relics of bygone pioneers.

  Okay, it was time to find out where he was, what it was like outside, and what had happened. He told the CSU to power up. The first thing he got was text telling him that video was down for power conservation.

  To the first question, the CSU told him they were at an unsurveyed red dwarf, IRO 031010.36485, on a planet with a breathable atmosphere that the Resolution had found 628 light-years from Earth! On the Earth calendar, it was Tuesday, the twenty-third of March in the year 3521.

  That was almost a thousand years from when they had departed. He made himself cope with that as an objective fact; he would deal with the emotional reality later. Humanity was still in the very early stages of biological immortality. Had been, he corrected himself. They’d probably worked things out by now. Some friends might still be alive, active, even looking for him. But the gap in time would be as large as the gap between Marie’s ceremonial monarchy and Charlemagne. He could deal with it later, he repeated to himself. For now, he had to survive.

  So the Resolution had not decelerated at 36 Ophiuchi—the beamrider’s nightmare. Starships were pushed to relativistic velocities riding on a beam of microscopic pellets from their departure system, which they ionized and reflected with magnetic fields. To decelerate, they normally relied on a prepositioned pellet stream. Somehow, this hadn’t happened.

  For the invasion, the first units into the system had carried enough mass to decelerate on their own. These passed by the system and decelerated on the far side, their bulk shielding their exhaust from observation. Once in 36 Ophiuchi’s Kuiper belt, they’d made deceleration trails for the rest of the fleet. The whole process had taken an agonizing half century.

  The CSU told him the lasers used to guide the nanopellets to the starship had been replaced with a dummy load. Almost all of the pellets passed by the starship without slowing it down. Who or what had done that, and when, was unknown.

  There were cont
ingency plans for failure to decelerate. The starship had coasted until it found a habitable planet it could reach and then implemented an emergency deceleration protocol, deploying a superconducting loop several kilometers across to drag against the interstellar medium until it had reached a hundredth of lightspeed or so, and then going into rocket mode, using its auxiliary nuclear power units while sacrificing its water, redundant structure, invasion stores, and lithium hydride shielding, for fuel. It almost made it, but ended up 103 kilometers per second short, and had to try aerocapture.

  Starships were tough, but not designed to function in a planetary atmosphere. Its breakup would have absorbed the worst of the reentry forces, perhaps controlled well enough to spill its cargo of CSUs into a shallow body of water. There were three atmospheric shuttles. They weren’t designed for that much aerobraking. But if one or two survived on autopilot, Jacques thought, that could make all the difference in survival. The odds weren’t good for the CSU occupants either, but with a layer of ice, maybe. That was the best the ship could do.

  The CSU went silent and Jacques reflected. Interstellar warfare was “impossible” until the horror of what was happening in the 36 Ophiuchi system made Earth try it anyway. Perhaps they’d been right in the first place.

  The parrot-beaked shark, making no concession to human biological immortality, had not gone away. It was, he decided, definitely hungry. So was he—his cells needed to repair the radiation damage since his last CSU cycle, and that took energy. Cosmic rays could be dealt with by shielding, but carbon-14 was part of you. He ate four of the dozen nutrition bars, knowing that he might regret the binge later, but thinking it was a good thing to do while he was momentarily safe and secure. As he ate he eyed the parrot-beaked shark, thinking filet. This eating thing works both ways, fella, he thought with a grin.

  He would have to flood the CSU, he realized, to equalize pressure and get the canopy off. That would likely render his last link with technological civilization inoperable. There was irony in that; his expertise was in dealing with artificial intelligences and subsentient systems.

  “Can you still record?” he asked it.

  [Yes]appeared in the heads-up display.

  In a few short sentences, he explained who he was and how he’d gotten there and left notes for any of his fellow passengers in the unlikely event they might find his CSU.

  “Make as many copies of that as you have room for.”

  [Done]

  Jacques stuck the emergency kit bag on a geckro patch on his suit. He was ready as he could get; there was no reason to delay longer. His heart pounding, he chanted to make himself relax and use less oxygen. After a couple of minutes, he felt at peace and ready. If his life were to end now, so be it.

  “Release the fasteners on both sides of the canopy. Give me pure oxygen—exhaust what you’ve stored. Then flood the unit.” He took more deep breaths as cold water rose rapidly on either side of him. The pressure equalized with his face not ten centimeters between him and the fish’s beak. It lunged repeatedly, its blows booming on the canopy.

  He sealed his hood without trapping a lot of water in with him, then pushed the canopy off and, grasping it by both edges, stood up. If the fish had sense enough to swim around it, he was done for, but it just kept trying to push through what it couldn’t see—a stalemate that would end as soon as he ran out of breath, because the canopy was too heavy to carry to the surface.

  He looked down at the empty CSU and smiled to himself. It was easy enough to flip the canopy around between fish attacks and then stand on the edge of the CSU and lean so that the fish was below him. With a now-or-never shove, he pushed the canopy down onto the CSU with parrot-beak still trying to swim through it. With it trapped inside, he swam for the surface.

  Judging crudely from the change in volume of air in the CSU, the pressure was something like eight atmospheres at the bottom, the equivalent of eighty meters deep on Earth. But the surface proved much farther away than that. Despite starting with several liters of oxygen in his hood, he was groggy by the time he broke the surface of the water. He pulled off the hood and took a gasping first breath.

  He felt almost instantly restored as he bobbed up and down in steep waves; it took remarkably little effort to keep his body high out of the water. At the crest of a wave, he got a view of his surroundings. He’d emerged from a freshwater lake, not a sea, but it was a large one, with distant hills just barely sticking up over the horizon. Hills surrounded the lake without a discernible gap—a caldera, from the steepness of the walls next to him. He saw no vegetation.

  Remembering that the parrot-beaked shark might have relatives, he swam for the nearest shore at about a stroke per second. Strangely, he didn’t tire and even increased his pace a bit.

  The shore proved rocky, and the rocks looked volcanic and sharp, ‘a’a lava, he thought. The waves were impressively high. Still, he felt very strong, much stronger than he should after coming out of cold sleep.

  Bobbing along in the waves, parallel to the shore, he eventually found a beach that was more gravel than rock and approached it slowly, feet dangling beneath him. His feet touched briefly, then he was swept back again. He rode the next wave in and got enough purchase with hands and feet to hold on through the backwash. Then he scrambled forward ahead of the next wave.

  He stood on the shore breathing easily—not panting despite what should have been heavy exercise. He was fit; all expedition personnel had gotten many hours of hypergravity training, but his lack of distress still surprised him. Gravity here was clearly much lower than on Earth, even less than on Mars, he guessed. The sky was high and gray, there had to be a sun somewhere, but it wasn’t immediately apparent where it was. It was decidedly warm and humid.

  Okay, the first thing to do was to plug one of his wrist comps into the photovoltaic power supply and see if anyone else was around. He spread out the flexible array, almost a meter square, and plugged the adapter into his wrist comp, or tried to. It didn’t fit! Damning his luck and wondering why, after three centuries or so of electronics manufacture, such things weren’t standardized, he reached for the wrist comp from the emergency kit. That would have to fit.

  It did, but nothing happened. A broken wire? Or had something in the electronics of either device not survived a millennium of neglect? The batteries in the wrist comps were likely suspects. Or, he thought, layers of atoms in contact in various transistors and diodes may have interpenetrated each other through some kind of Brownian motion so they no longer functioned. He’d never had occasion to inquire about the lifetime of such devices and, of course, there was now nothing to ask. If he were going to survive, it would have to be on his wits alone.

  He took stock; however great he felt right now, he had only eight nutrition bars left to eat. He had no clothing except for the emergency suit that he wore. There were clearly fishlike things in the caldera, and if they were edible, he might be able to catch enough to survive—though he wasn’t sure how, having never fished in his life. For shelter, since the area was obviously volcanic in origin, there should be lava tubes.

  Was his the only CSU to make it? He should look for other survivors. Names of classmates slotted for the Resolution ran through his mind. They weren’t soldiers; their job was to reconstruct and reeducate the colony after the theocrats had been displaced. Most, he had known only since Annapolis, but he’d grown up with Edith Lu, Huong Devieux, and Ted Blackwell in metropolitan Port Moresby sixty years ago—make that something like 1,060 years ago.

  He scanned the lake with its strange high waves and impassable lava block shoreline.

  Face reality, Jacques, he told himself. He was in no position to find and rescue anyone. He had to find food, and that meant getting out of the caldera. He would come back. There was likely a large variance in CSU survival time; no one else was likely to need help right now.

  Everything caught up with him then: his impossible situation, the unfairness of it all, the totalitarian monsters that had been the cau
se of the expedition and its likely sabotage, the great decision makers of the Interplanetary Association Senate who sent others to take their risks and clean up for their failures of imagination, and the minimum effort logic of those who put only a dozen nutrition bars in a CSU emergency kit.... He screamed. The screams echoed from the barren lava cliffs.

  When he recovered himself, he decided to do something to defy the fate that sent him here, to make some mark on the universe that was trying to kill him. He could make a pile of rocks, a cairn. Practically, it would help him find the spot again. It was no work at all in the low gravity to build a stack as tall as he was.

  The lava wasn’t all ‘a’a. Here and there were rivers of smooth pahoehoe, some of which had fragmented into relatively flat shards. He brushed one off and using another, smaller fragment, sketched the shoreline, and scratched where he thought the sunken CSU lay. Under that he scratched his name and the date. Then, after a moment of thought, he added “= day 0.”

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  Chapter 2

  At the Rim of the World