The Wizard from Earth (7 page)

8.

Matt's eyes reflexively flickered open.  The medic's lenses stared back from mere centimeters.  Matt remembered what happened last time and restrained himself.

"I'll be good now," he said.

The medic remained impassive.  Matt sat 'up' and it backed off.  He took a breath and looked around.  Okay, he was still in the compartment.  But things were definitely different.  The dust was gone and so was the minty smell.  But most of all, he was different.  He no longer felt like Death.  He no longer felt even a mild headache. 

His fingernails had been cut.  His hair had been groomed.  His jumpsuit was immaculate. 
This was how you're supposed to emerge from a star pod
, he thought.

Subvocally,  "Ivan, can you give me a rundown on your own status?"

"Yes, Matt. I have almost completed full regeneration of my basic systems.  Here is the data in detail." 

A window of tables and graphs popped in Matt's view.  Matt scanned the overview:  Ivan's processing speed had been cut by a few percent, his memory storage had degraded but since it was holographically redundant it had been reconstituted with zero loss.  The worst damage was in the biomechanical interfaces, but those appeared to be on the regeneration. 

Matt smiled.  In Ivan's biometric displays, Matt's body was listed as a 'support system,' providing energy and repair materials. 

"You're looking good." Matt said, by habit reaching into empty space and punching the display's Close icon.  He faced the medic and said, "I'm feeling fine.  Thank you for your assistance.  I would like to leave now."

The medic backed away and Matt heard a pop from the wall beyond his feet.  A human-sized handle had elevated from the center of a circular hatch flush with the wall. 

Matt undid the leg straps and floated free.  It had been years – centuries – since his school field trip to Goddard Station in Earth orbit, but Matt's free-fall maneuvering skills came back readily.  He twisted and flexed, orienting his body properly, and pushed off the pod.  He floated gently to the hatch handle and wrapped his fingers around it and pulled. 

Nothing happened.  He pulled hard.  Nothing.  Then he remembered. 
Centuries
.  He pulled harder.

The hatch seal hissed.  The air inside the compartment thinned and chilled and stung his lungs.  Matt swung the hatch open and peered through.  He saw a cylindrical compartment, large enough to allow the passage of a single person. 

Three pairs of red eyes stared.  The dim, flickering light of the compartment gleamed off their insectoid bodies.  The nearest creature extended an arm – out of which shot a sharp, blinding flame.  Then it resumed welding.  The other two robots resumed their labors of replacing wall modules.

"Why all the repair work?" Matt asked.  "Was the station damaged?"

"Matt, the station keeper requests communication with my host.  Is that acceptable?"

"Patch him through."

"This is Herman, Delta Pavonis Station Keeper," a stern voice boomed in his head .  "Identify yourself."

Matt doubted that it would help, but said, "Mattimeo Jackson," and had Ivan give his Project ID.

"Identity confirmed," Herman replied.  "Welcome, Mattimeo Jackson.  You have full authority at this station."

"Thank you, Herman.  Call me Matt.  Now, could you please turn up the lights and heat?"

"I will comply, but be informed that there is less than fourteen hours of life support services available even at the current restricted power consumption.  Do you still wish to increase expenditure rate for life support?"

"I guess not.  Herman, you seem to be doing a lot of repair work on yourself.  Have you sustained damage?"

"I have not."

"It is possible," Ivan said, "that the repairs are necessary due to the extended age of the station."

"That makes sense.  Herman, how old are you?"

"I do not have any records on that matter.  I will forward a request to Alpha Centauri for the information.  Expected response time is 33 years."

Matt calculated.  Sixteen years for the message to go there at lightspeed.  A few months for someone to look up the answer and reply.  Sixteen years for a response to come back at lightspeed. 

"Never mind.  Let's try another approach.  Uh, Herman, do you keep a maintenance log?"

"Yes."

"What is the date of the first entry in your log?"

"March 7, 2441.  A filter was replaced in the –"

"Never mind about that.  Okay, 2441 and it's now 2834 . . . that would put your minimum operational age at . . . Ivan, calculate."

"Three hundred ninety-three years."

"It would have taken 190 years to get here at point one lightspeed  Ivan, calculate 2441 minus 190.”

“That would be the year 2251.”

“Herman, I'm guessing you were launched about fifty years after my pod was diverted here, with the goal of retrieving my pod."

"I do not have any records on that matter.  I will forward a request to Alpha Centauri for the information.  Expected response time is 33 years."

"Herman, don't forward any more requests to Alpha Centauri unless I specifically request you to do so."

"I understand."

"By the way, Herman, have you received any communications from In-System, Alpha Centauri, Sol, or anywhere else, of any type, at any time in your operational life?"

"I have no record of any communications received."

"Not even a systems upgrade or signal check?"

"I have no record of any communications received."

Matt cut Herman out of the link and subvocaled to Ivan,  "Well, this is getting nowhere."

"He is extremely task-oriented,” Ivan replied. 

"I get the feeling he's something they slapped together to make a public-relations effort of rescuing me.  Maybe they intended to send something better later on, but then they lost interest."

"By 'they,' you mean the leaders of the Star Seed Project."

"Yeah, those 'they.'  To be honest, I never really felt comfortable around them.  They seemed to think of us colonists as commodities.  I talked to Mom and Dad about it, but they were their friends so they pretended not to notice.  But, even the AIs didn't seem to care about us as persons."

Matt groped at what to say next.  It was not his brain, or Ivan's, that came up with the answer.  Rather it was his stomach, which commented by growling. 

"Herman, is there any food aboard this station?"

"Food and beverage stores aboard this station have expired.  Food printing is offline.  I can re-task printers for food printing, but it will require a minimum of two days."

"Thirteen hours and forty-two minutes of life support services are remaining," Ivan said.

"I haven't forgotten that we're on a short schedule,” Matt replied, barely refraining from snapping. 

He propelled himself to the opposite end of the passage.  He noted the banded structure, like the passage was made of so many large stacked donuts.  Too bulky to be accelerated up to a reasonable velocity in a single launch, the station must have been sent via proton cannon array in segments, and even at that, much of the bulk must have been printed from materials extracted from asteroids or low-gravity moons within the Delta Pavonis solar system. 

At the end opposite the pod chamber, the passage tube opened into a transparent bubble that overlooked, from an altitude of what appeared to be hundreds of kilometers, a planet of white clouds and blue seas. 

"I take it that's Delta Pavonis III," Matt said.  "Did they ever decide on a name for the planet?"

"Over twenty candidate names were offered,” Ivan replied.  “Would you like me to list them in order of popularity?"

“Maybe later."

Matt thought back to the field trip to Goddard Station.  There had been a much larger observation bubble there, though he had to share it with dozens of other people.  Conversations had been hushed.  There was something about the subtle drift of cloud patterns that was mesmerizing. Then and now. 

He continued, "It looks terraformed.  More terraformed than Tian when we left Earth.  Well, if it's terraformed, somebody must have been here to terraform it, and maybe they're still here.  Ivan, can you zoom in on the surface?"

Ivan's neural mesh image-enhanced the visual data from Matt's eyeballs.  Below the clouds, the surface was mainly water, sprinkled with islands.  The islands were barren in some areas, covered lushly with green in others.  Many of the islands had volcanic calderas, some of them smoldering, one of them erupting.  It was interesting, but not what Matt was looking for.

"Herman, do you have an external camera with zoom?"

"I have two.  One is not functional.  A request has been forwarded to Alpha Centauri – "

"Herman, I told you not to forward any more requests to Alpha Centauri."

"I understand.  I was reporting on a request that had been previously forwarded."

"I see.  I'm sorry.  Well, don't report on your having forwarded requests, either.  Now, about your external camera, the one that's operational.  Can you turn camera control over to Ivan and let him see the telemetry too?"

A window popped in Matt's field of vision, showing a telescopic view of the seas and clouds below.  At Matt's direction, Ivan zoomed to maximum magnification.  Matt saw trees and brush, and – a village.  He breathlessly did a double take.  Between the huts moved bipedal forms, and they surely looked human.  But the technology – or rather, the lack!  Buildings made of organic materials, no vehicles, no paved roads, no lighting . . . .

Doesn't mean they're technologically backward
, he thought.  A person from the twentieth century, walking into a home of the twenty-first century, might have thought it was a technological step backward in that there was no landline telephone.  A person from the early twenty-first century, walking into a home of the late twenty-first century, would have wondered where the computers had gone.

Ivan broke the silence.  "Matt, the station environmental systems continue to deteriorate."

"Yeah.  We're going to have to leave soon or I'm going back into biogel, and I'm not doing that if I can help it.  Herman, does this station have any orbit-to-surface vehicles?"

"This station has two available Version 12.4 OSVs,” Herman replied.  “Neither is operational at this time.  Components of Unit 3 are being cannibalized to make Unit 2 operational in anticipation of your usage of it."

"You thought ahead like that?  That's clever."

"I was the one who made the request to cannibalize the other vehicle," Ivan said.

"Well, I should have known.  Thank you, Ivan.  So where are the OSVs?"

There were three hatches set equilaterally around the collar of the observation bubble.  Ivan provided an arrow in Matt's vision that pointed to the hatch (marked '2') for the operational OSV.  Matt opened and, shooing out a spiderbot, floated inside.  It was quite roomy, or would have been, had it not been crammed with stale food rations and nonoperational printers.

The lights flickered and the air was too cold.  The couch did not automatically conform to the curvature of his spine.  He ran his finger along the interior of the spherical shell and came away with a film of dust.

Centuries
, he thought.  And everytime he thought that, it disturbed him.

Repair robots and printers had done their best to keep station systems running, but eventually glitches would accumulate and time would take its toll.  With regard to rejuvenation, the natural human body, with its modular design of cells programmed for self-destruction and replacement by new cells, had an advantage over many traditional types of machinery, but even the human body could not survive much longer than a single century without external servicing.  Matt knew he was very fortunate that anything on the station was functional at all.  But perhaps his luck would run out in the form of a fiery death inside this musty ball.

“Herman, I notice there are three hatches but only two OSVs.  What happened to the other one?”

“It was used to descend to the surface.”

“When and by who?”

“It was used at Standard Time 13:07 on 11 August 2714, by Mattimeo Jackson.”

Matt flexed his eyebrows.  “I don't remember doing that that.”

“I have no record of such an event,” Ivan said.  “According to my records, you were in biostasis and approximately three light years from Delta Pavonis at that time.”

“Herman, are you sure that I was the one who used OSV Unit 1?”

“You are Mattimeo Jackson.  My records state that OSV-1 was used by Mattimeo Jackson.  Therefore you are the one who used OSV-1.”

Can't argue with that logic
, Matt thought.  Anyhow, Herman was old, and old machines are prone to mistakes, and rubbing it in wouldn't be productive.   

"Herman, is the OSV programmed to land anywhere in particular?"

Herman, via Ivan, displayed a map of the surface.  There was an archipelago in the northern hemisphere, and an island thousands of square kilometers in area in the northwest extreme of the archipelago, and in the southwest of the island Herman had designated a red X.