Futures Near and Far (31 page)

“Yet you’ve only given us one world. You’re allowing very
slow emigration. You’re passing down the barest smattering of your technology.”

“Your species has control of its home star and planets. That
is all the edicts require. The colonization of Gamma Leporis A is an
experiment. You have chosen your candidates with care. We will see what you
make of your opportunity. To claim other stars, you must show you understand
the intricacies of cooperation.”

“And you are the judges,” Neil said.

“I see that you understand.”

o0o

Neil eventually slept. Not well. His mind boiled over with
the consequences of that day aboard the empty ark. What had he said that caused
the Thwaa to designate him as their consul, to alter him, to change forever the
role he had meant to play within the colony?

Just after dawn a knock rattled his door.

It was the governor, tousle-haired, obviously having just
awakened. “A call came through. Something has happened at the archaeological
site. Anything you, ah, can tell me about?”

“I haven’t a clue,” Neil said. “You have the advantage of
me.”

Brendt stared. “You really don’t know?”

“I told you I didn’t.” The Thwaa presence echoed through the
chambers of his mind, but passive as usual, monitoring only.

The governor looked as though he wanted to smile, but knew
it was inappropriate to do so. “You may want
to catch another transport, then. I’m sure your superiors will be
interested in your observations. It seems that our hot-headed Aussie has turned
up dead.”

o0o

A curiosity-piquing flight later, Neil landed at the
caldera to find Dimitri already there with an expanded team of assistants,
including a few specialists who rarely had reason to be part of a death
investigation.

“You’ll want to wear this,” said a woman standing beside
Dimitri. She offered Neil an oxygen mask and small tank to place on his belt.

“This is Natalie Lommond,” Dimitri said. “She’s an
atmospheric chemist.”

When Neil had donned the apparatus, they led him to the pit
where Barry Radner had been imprisoned.

Radner, or what was left of him, lay beside the rim,
cushioned by a sheet of plastic and shielded from the sun by a tarp. The corpse
was twisted into a configuration determined by whichever muscles had been the strongest,
demonstrating how thoroughly he had been wracked by seizure. The fingertips
were bloodied from his attempts to claw his way up the smooth, hardpan walls of
the septic tank. The face wore a rictus of agony. He had died hard. Neil turned
away after the thorough glance demanded by official duty, glad the oxygen mask
obscured his expression, and let the medical examiner and forensics experts
continue to document their findings.

“We brought him up as soon as we could,” Vereshchagin said.
“We made the standard resuscitation efforts, but his brain had been deprived of
oxygen too long.”

Neil turned to Lommond. “Carbon dioxide poisoning?”

“Yes.” She stepped away, putting some distance between them
and the Reaper’s harvest. “Not at all like carbon
monoxide
— that would have been as peaceful a way to die as I can
think of.” She waved her hand out over the terrain, pausing to point at the
pool of brine. “It came from there.”

“And still is,” Neil noted. The waters were bubbling.

“That’s just the dregs,” she explained. “We don’t even
really need these anymore.” She fingered her own breathing apparatus. “But
sometime during the night a giant pocket of CO
₂
burst free. The
outgassing filled the basin we’re standing in. CO
₂
is heavier than
the regular atmosphere. It hugged the ground as it spread, displacing the good
air. Look at the number it did on the wildlife.”

The ancient lakebed, superficially as benign and picturesque
as ever, contained innumerable small signs of death. A drift of prairie
wrigglers lay in the lee of a stout cactus. To the left of that, the sun beat
down on the lifeless husk of some sort of hairy snakelike creature, twisted
into a helix by its final paroxysms. No twittering or scuttling or buzzing
noises reached their ears — only the susurrus of wind through the sparse clumps
of grass, the murmur of voices in the background muffled by masks, and, once,
the screech of a hugin.

The latter noise prompted Neil to look over at the pinnacle.
His bird — he assumed it was the same one — was still ensconced, maintaining
whatever vigil its bright, native consciousness seemed to find necessary.

“That loudmouth is well above the toxic layer,” Lommond
volunteered. She went on to indicate the other avians cruising the thermals
like Terran carrion eaters. “Notice how few are trying to take advantage of
this sudden supply of meat? They’re aware of the contamination. The smart ones
may soon realize they’re safe as long as
they don’t remain on the valley floor. They can dive down, grab something, and
retreat to a higher elevation, without coming to harm.”

For the next quarter hour, Neil listened to a summary of the
night’s events from a gathering of key individuals. The surge of CO
₂
had never reached as far as the city where the majority of the excavators
slept. None of them knew what was happening until too late for Radner. The only
other people who had been poisoned were the guards. Dimitri had ordered them to
spend the night at the top of the bluff, where they had an unobstructed view of
not only the pit, but of the landscape leading from the ruins. That way they
would be able to spot any team members
sneaking out of camp to play vigilante.

The gas had filled the pit. The carbon dioxide in Radner’s
bloodstream built up while he slept, waking him when it approached a lethal
level. By the time his moans and thrashing alerted the guards, the latter had
breathed enough themselves to be overtaken by nausea, dizziness, headaches, and
muscle spasms. They stumbled to the camp with admirable poise for men being
attacked by the very air around them, but by the time they had made clear to
the camp residents what was occurring, it was too late to find and unpack
oxygen masks and return to save Radner.

Fortunately the guards, by removing themselves from the
lower elevation and inhaling a normal mix of atmosphere, had proceeded to
recover. By the time of Neil’s arrival their symptoms consisted only of wooziness and sore muscles. Radner was the only
permanent casualty.

“I bear full responsibility for this,” Vereshchagin said, as
the group around Neil shrank to just him and Lommond.

“It was a freak occurrence,” Lommond assured him. “It’s not
your fault, Director.”

“That does not console me,” the archaeologist replied. “I
could have done things to prevent Bilyang’s murder, and then Radner would not
have been down here. No one would be dead. I am afraid this locale only reminds
me of my failing. I am asking the governor for a transfer. The project will go
on without me.”

Neil merely nodded. The director was not as inastute as Neil
had judged him to be. By resigning, he saved himself the black mark of a
dismissal.

“The project
can
still operate safely, can it not?” Vereshchagin asked the chemist.

“Certainly,” Lommond replied. “I’ll install metering
equipment to warn you if another burst comes out of the vent. As long as
workers keep their masks nearby, they can dig without undue risk.”

Vereshchagin sighed, flexed his fingers, adjusted the filter
in front of his nose. Neil wondered if he were biting back tears. “Very well,”
he said. “Proceed. I will stay until the current disruption has run its course.
Ten days, perhaps. After that, as far as I am concerned, this is one place I
wish had never existed.”

“I can understand that,” Lommond said. Her demeanor implied
she would have felt far more comfortable mouthing technical details about gas
concentrations or volcanism, but she had inadvertently settled into the role of
counsellor.

Neil walked out into the lakebed a hundred meters or so,
ostensibly giving the specialist a chance to tender whatever further sympathy
she could muster, but truthfully providing himself with some privacy.

In due time, as he expected, Dimitri joined him.

Neil was first to break the silence. “Vereshchagin is taking
all this pretty hard.”

“The man has skills,” Dimitri replied. “I’m sure he’ll find
something useful to do, at some level. It’s Radner who won’t get another
chance.”

“True.”

Dimitri’s brows rose at Neil’s bitter tone. “There is some
justice in that. If I thought that someone had done this deliberately, I would tell
that someone, ‘Thank you.’”

Neil gazed back at his old friend steadily. “Surely you
don’t think the Thwaa can sway geologic forces to such a precise degree as to
arrange what we’ve seen here today?”

Dimitri paused. “No,” he said, sighing. “No. I suppose not.
In any case, my official report will declare the death to have been sheer
happenstance. You understand that I was not asking for the record?”

“I know you weren’t,” Neil said. “Dimitri, sometimes shit
happens, and other times you catch a break. Are you going to argue with good
luck?”

The inspector chuckled, and went back to his duties.

Neil knew others would wonder at the convenience of the
death. The point was, no one would be able to prove a thing. The bizarre
circumstances might incite comment for years, but that was better than keeping
alive a spark of racial disharmony in a fledging colony. The case would close
with a minimum of fuss. Such an elegant solution.

Neil had not expected this. That the Thwaa had done it he
was certain. He had told Dimitri otherwise because he was equally confident
that his overlords expected his discretion. If they had wanted to eliminate
Radner in a public way, they certainly had the means.

Precisely how they had reached their decision he did not
know. He could be sure it was their action not from any direct confession — the
Thwaa would never deign to provide one — but from the cumulative intuition he
had gained from seeing exactly what they had him investigate, and what they
ignored. The implant remained in passive mode, as it usually did. In fact,
until it awoke to give him his next assignment, hours or weeks or months from
now, he could chose to forget the device was there, and pretend he was as human
as any other Terran on Bjornssen.

A screech echoed across the valley. On the crag, the hugin
was looking right at Neil. There it was, its race already witness to the
eviction of one set of planetary tenants. He wondered if it were possible that
they did know the answer to the big mystery of Gamma Leporis A-III. Perhaps
they had seen just how and why the Eridanin had lost their lease.

Neil didn’t care. That was the past.

“Get the hell outta here,” he murmured toward the avian, as
he would to an obnoxious little brother. Joyfully.

What did the past matter? If humans were to be proper
stewards of this world, they had to look forward.

The hugin screeched, dived to the valley floor, and rose
with a prairie wriggler in its claws. It paid no more attention to Neil.

A wave of giddiness surged from Neil’s toes to the crown of
his head, settling at last in the region of his heart. He recognized the
feeling. He had last felt it before the ark was launched, back before his
transformation from pioneer to consul. Back when he was optimistic about the
colony’s potential.

He drew out his notebook and called up his niece’s painting.
A few weeks ago he had seen an acre near Landfall that would be perfect for a
vegetable garden. He could put the house on a rise above the river that
bisected the capital downstream. He had some architectural plans in his
database. For the first time on-planet, he began to examine them, noting little
changes he might like to make.

The world was full of possibilities.

Return to Table of Contents

FUTURES NEAR AND FAR

Dave Smeds

Entire contents Copyright © 2014 by
Dave Smeds. All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-61138-456-7

Cover Design: Dave Smeds. Artwork by
Dave Smeds incorporating “Asteroid Field and Nebula” by Angela Harburn,
Dreamstime.

Ebook formatting: Vonda N. McIntyre.

Proofreaders: Sara Stamey, Phyllis
Radford.

This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Digital edition: 20141027vnm

www.bookviewcafe.com
Book View Café Publishing Cooperative
P.O. Box 1624, Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624

Return to Table of Contents

“Suicidal Tendencies” was first published in
Full Spectrum 4
, edited by Lou Aronica,
Betsy Mitchell, and Amy Stout; Bantam Books, NY; April, 1993. Copyright © 1993
by Dave Smeds.