Stone Gods (12 page)

She nodded. 'Then the planet will have to evolve in its own way.'

Handsome laughed. 'Ironic, isn't it, if that is what happens, and then millions of years in the future some bright geo-scientist will find evidence of the asteroid collision that wiped out the dinosaurs, and they'll call it the best coincidence that ever was, even though the chances of a gigantic asteroid hitting the planet right here, on a sulphur deposit, are — well, what are they, Spike?'

Spike paused a moment. 'Sulphur is a rare element, the ninth most abundant in the universe, and only 0.06 per cent of this planet's crust. Let's suppose that a twenty-kilometre-wide asteroid might strike here once in, say, a hundred million years on past evidence of asteroid collision, and that its hit-rate on a sulphur zone like this might be one in twenty. If that is so, then the chances of an asteroid this size hitting this planet, right here, would be a hundred million multiplied by twenty - so, once in two billion years.'

'Two billion years?'

She nodded.

Handsome ran his hands through his hair. 'But what do you bet that coincidence will feel like a better explanation than the thought that someone might have been involved in making human life possible here?'

'Any civilization will think as we did — that they are the first and the only.'

'Wait till they find the remains of Orbus — but, then, nobody believes me about Planet White, so why will anyone believe it about Planet Red? Orbus will disappear into space history, light years away.'

'It might be possible for you to survive,' said Spike. Handsome looked at her. 'What do you suggest?'

'Take the Landpods and travel to the colony. There are sixty of them there. They have a food depot as well as crops they are farming. They have strong-built shelters, and more than they need, because you were bringing others on this trip until the Central Power decided otherwise. Your best chance is together — and the Central Power knows where the colony is so there is a landing place there. If they return, it is likely that is where they will begin.'

'It's a long way,' said Handsome. 'We may not make it in time.'

'I will stay here, and keep trying to make a connection with Orbus. I will contact you daily.'

'Stay here? On the Ship? We're going as a crew or we're not going at all.'

'The one thing I need to survive is sunlight. If I come with you, you will have to support me artificially using solar cells. You don't have the energy to spare. Go without me, and go now.'

Handsome didn't speak. Then he said, 'This is my fault.'

'You couldn't predict it — and neither could I. I did the calculations, they were wrong. They were wrong because life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation it is part of the equation.'

'Each man kills the thing he loves,' said Handsome. 'I wish .. .'

'What do you wish?' said Spike.

'That we had landed here, you and I, and begun again with nothing but an axe and a rope and a fire ... and the sun.'

The new world — EI Dorado, Atlantis, the Gold Coast, Newfoundland, Plymouth Rock, Rapanaui, Utopia, Planet Blue. Chanc'd upon, spied through a glass darkly, drunken stories strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found . . .

'If you are going to go,' said Spike, 'you should go now.'

Hurry, lifting, loading, joking, worry, packing, stacking, quiet, team-work, hand to hand, catch your eye, smile, it will be all right, look we're doing something, busy, careful, don't worry, tools, clothes, last man in, shut the hatch, drop down, rev up, lights, power, go. Go?

* * *

Spike was throwing the last of the gear into the Landpod. Handsome wouldn't speak to her. She went over to him and leaned against him. He sighed, and put his arms round her.

'A king had three planets,' he said, 'Planet White, Planet Red and Planet Blue. He gave Planet White to his eldest son, but when his son had farmed the land and spent the gold, he sold the planet to the devil to pay for one last party.

'The King then gave Planet Red to his youngest son, but when his son had mined the minerals and chopped down all the trees, he called the devil, because he needed to raise the cash to buy a car. 'The King then gave Planet Blue to his daughter, because he loved her more than the Universe itself What happened next is another story.'

'Robo
sapiens
,' said Spike. 'A life-form that will have to wait even longer than humans to be seen again.'

'It's the captain who is supposed to go down with his ship.'

'I've got plenty to read.'

'Poetry didn't save us, did it?'

'Not once, but many times.'

Handsome smiled. 'You think so?'

'It was never death you feared: It was emptiness.'

Handsome nodded. 'That's because there's no such thing as empty space. Only humans are empty.'

'Not all of them.'

'And not all of them are humans.'

He kissed her and half-turned to leave. 'Spike, when I come back ... '

'Go,' she said. 'Go now.'

* * *

Pink McMurphy was wearing a thermal combat suit and carrying cooking equipment. 'We'll make it,' she said to me, 'and with that robot out of the way, who knows what will happen? Arctic romance.'

'Pink, this is what will happen — it's happening. We're in trouble.'

'I know that, Billie, and don't you think I went to my cabin and cried and screamed and panicked my heart out? And after that, I thought, Pink, you can do this. And if I die, at least I'll die young and beautiful — excessive climates are very bad for the skin. I bet you're glad you Fixed now.'

'I didn't,' I said.

'You what?'

'It was political. I didn't Fix.'

'How old are you?'

'My chip says G-30. I'm forty this year.'

'Y'know, at least that shows you're human.'

'What do you mean?'

'Women always lie about their age.'

She smiled and punched me, balancing her cooking gear, looking and acting much better than I was feeling. Who could have said that Pink would cope and Billie would not?

I was waiting to take my place in the Landpod.

Spike came forward and put her arms round me. 'One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.'

The Landpod began to move slowly across the muddied, trampled undergrowth. Spike was standing quite still in the dust-filled air. We would all need masks to breathe once we left the range of the ship's air filters. Rufus had his head on Handsome's knee, and Handsome was telling him some story or other about a dog called Laika who was once blasted into space.

'Look after Rufus,' I said suddenly, and before Handsome could answer, before anyone could debate it, I had slipped out of the back of the pod, and I was running through the thick air to the clear place where she stood.

Here is a moment in time, and my choices have been no stranger than millions before me, displaced by wars or conscience, leaving the known for the unknown, hesitating, fearing, then finding themselves already on the journey, footprint and memory each imprinting the trail: what you had, what you lost, what you found, no matter how difficult or impossible, the moment when time became a bridge and you crossed it.

We planned to stay on the Ship, where Spike had abundant energy, and where we were safe. I was optimistic, in that morning-of-the execution way when, quietly reading a book, you look up to find the hangman waiting, and go with him, feeling every final step with the intensity of new life. The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

Outside the Ship, the noises grew more desperate and more terrified. In the darkening filthy air, the creatures whose world we had interrupted sought the sun, rearing their heads towards the sky, bellowing and crying through this fading light.

It was getting colder and darker every day.

Creatures thrashed against the Ship, battering it with swinging necks and iron jaws, using it as a landing-place. Only the ground lights kept them away, but the ground lights used power, which we had to conserve.

One night, I think it was night, though we had assassinated any difference between day and night, I heard scratching in the hold.

I thought something might be making its way into the damaged hull, so I took a weapon and a glare-torch, and went down there to our abandoned gear and supplies.

Yes, there was something. Something had punctured the already damaged hull-side. I could hear a chewing noise. Whatever I was going to find, I wouldn't recognize it, and it might be very big.

Forcing myself, I turned the glare-torch to the area where the noise was coming from. The chewing stopped, and bolting across the floor, away from the arc of light, ran a creature about the size of an Alsatian dog, but stockier, and with very short legs and three horns. It was so comical, and I was so relieved not to be confronted by a pair of jaws the size of a truck and just as fast, that I laughed.

The creature stopped and looked at me. This was not a sound or a shape it had ever met before: a thing on two legs making bird-like noises.

I dimmed the glare-torch and stepped forward. The Three Horn immediately hid behind a box.

All right, I thought. Let's feed you and see what happens.

What happened was that we found a playful and unexpected companion. Spike took a DNA swab and analysed the creature as a kind of hog-hippo hybrid, probably less than a year old.

'He doesn't know what he is,' she said, patting him, 'and neither does Nature. Everything on Planet Blue is at the experimental stage. All these life-forms will evolve and alter. Almost all will disappear to make way for something better adapted.'

'Our new ice age is going to change things, that's for sure. I can't believe that we've come here and done this.'

'Nature will work with what we have done,' said Spike. 'This planet is viable, and even a few humans can't stop that.'

She seemed quiet, subdued. I forget all the time that she's a robot, but what's a robot? A moving lump of metal. In this case an intelligent, ultra-sensitive moving lump of metal. What's a human? A moving lump of flesh, in most cases not intelligent or remotely sensitive.

'Are things getting worse or better out there?' I asked, as Spike sat over the computer systems.

'Worse. There has been no immediate corrective — no hurricane or rainstorm. And I can't link to Orbus Central Command. I have had a message from Handsome — they are making progress and they have not been attacked.'

'What should we do?' I said.

'Sleep,' said Spike. 'I need to conserve power.'

I lay beside Spike and thought how strange it was to lie beside a living thing that did not breathe. There was no rise and fall, no small sighs, no intake of air, no movement of the lips or slight flex of the nostrils. But she was alive, reinterpreting the meaning of what life is, which is, I suppose, what we have done since life began.

Thinking like this, and in strange half-dreams, I woke up, bolt upright, suffocating. The air system was failing. Spike threw me an oxygen mask and took a reading.

'To reinstate the system would use half of our remaining power. I would rather fill the travel power packs and leave. If we ever come back to the Ship, we will need something to come back to.'

She told me what to pack, and to wear the thermal gear. While I was getting ready, Spike had failed again to send any signal that might reach Orbus. Now she was coding something different for the future, whenever that would be. 'A random repeat, bouncing off the moon. One day, perhaps, maybe, when a receiver is pointing in the right direction, someone will pick this up. Someone, somewhere, when there is life like ours.'

Life like ours.

We took only the most useful items — tools, torches, a laser-saw, protein mix, compass and radio equipment, lighter for a fire, sleeping-bags with canopy hoods to keep the snow off our faces, a medicine kit that included bandages, sedative injections and lethal injections. Spike strapped herself with power packs, and then, as we were ready to leave, she threw me Handsome's copy of Captain Cook's Journals, and took down the copy he had given to her of John Donne's poems.

She is all States, all Princes I, Nothing else is ...

We left the Ship through the lower hatch and dropped into the murky, swirling forest, the Three Horn at our heels. I wanted to speak but Spike was shaking her head. She seemed to know the direction we should take, and we set off through the cooling undergrowth, now soaked with moisture.

There was a waterfall in the distance; deafening torrents of hydro-energy poured down a jagged black cliff. Spike motioned to me to go behind the fall. The air was clean. I took off my mask. 'We have to get higher, much higher,' she said, 'so that you will be able to breathe. Eat and drink here and we'll go on.'