The Wizard from Earth (9 page)

Contrary to Dran's statement, she had to catch her breath, though that was due to excitement and not exertion.  As she described specifically what she had seen, in the back of her mind she wondered, 
Did this apparition have to do with why Boudica sent us to patrol here?

10.

Matt had heard the thunder too – from inside the OSV.  Atmospheric buffeting had commenced within minutes of detaching the station, starting with a keening whistle that grew into a thunderous roar while the vehicle shook with ever increasing intensity. 

The lights cut out and the stabilizers went offline and he was slammed against the restraints as the vehicle tumbled.  Then – WHAM!  Parachute deployment.  But any hopes he might have had that the worst was over were soon dashed when Ivan's tap into the OSV's external camera showed one of the parachute lines had tangled.  The OSV computer compensated to stay on the same trajectory, but the vehicle was swinging like a pendulum and coming down too fast.

After minutes came another WHAM!  But this one came with a splash, and then he heard the gurgle of water.  The vehicle stopped moving.  Then it slowly tilted from the upright, until it came to a position it seemed to like and stopped for good. 

Matt sat in darkness, fingers clutching the arms of the couch, breathing hard.

At last he said, "I'm waiting to hear that we made a successful landing."

"All vehicle systems are offline," Ivan said.  "However, my accelerometer indicates that we have ceased to fall.  That telemetry is indicative of a successful landing."

Matt undid the straps and slipped from the acceleration couch.  He groped in the darkness and felt the hatch cover, slightly canted from zenith.  He took a breath and twisted the hand wheel in the center.

"I do not advise exit from vehicle at this time," Ivan said.  "I have not completed an analysis of the external environment to determine whether it is safe for human life."

"Do you have the capability to analyze the external environment?"

"Gravity is near Earth Standard.  Otherwise, I have no sensory input at this time."

"We're going to have to risk it, but I don't think it's much of a risk.  From orbit, this planet looked too much like Earth not to have been terraformed that way." 

With a click, the wheel stopped turning.  Matt pushed the hatch cover.  The rim hissed and his ears popped.  Then he started to smell . . . things.  But they were not unpleasant. 

"The atmosphere within the entry vehicle compartment has changed," Ivan said.  "Pressure has increased to 1014 bars.  Temperature rise curve interpolates at twenty-three point three degrees.  Olfactory analysis indicates presence of vegetation including pollen and dust with traces of – "

Matt tried to push the hatch with both hands, but couldn't raise his left arm.  "Ivan, is there something wrong with my arm?"

"Your left arm was broken during landing.  I was going to inform you but you appeared to have other priorities at the time."

"Are you fixing my arm?"

"Yes, repairs should be accomplished within the day.  I am also suppressing the nerve receptors.  Is this action acceptable?"

"Yeah, do that.  Thanks."

Matt put his good shoulder into the effort and shoved.  The hatch cover flopped open.  Bright light dazzled his eyes.  He looked up and saw a blue sky and billowing clouds.  He took a deep breath.  With his good arm, he pulled himself to the half-out position and surveyed his surroundings.

The OSV had come to rest in a pond.  Judging by the intersection of the water's surface with the curvature of the sphere, there was about a meter's depth to the bottom.  There was no hissing of steam from the contact of the water with the surface of the sphere, as the exterior of the OSV was coated in a special ceramic that gained and shed heat very slowly so that even after burning through the atmosphere it was cool to the touch.  The material seemed to have aged well over the centuries, for Matt saw no cracks in the tiling.

Long cords trailed from the top of the sphere, into the water and through clumps of reeds and cattails and then onto the shore, ending in billows of parachute fabric, which were animatedly tangled in trees and brush.

The pond was in a meadow.  The meadow had tall stalks of grass near the water's edge, smaller ones farther away.  There were leafy trees and evergreens.  Beyond were hills, and beyond the hills were mountains, one of whose peaks was smoldering. 

Matt felt the rustle of a breeze against his cheek.  He exhaled the breath he had held since emerging from the vehicle, and breathed deeply of the new world.  The air was fresh, but also had a whiff of methane.  He wondered if that might be a product of all the volcanoes he had observed from orbit.  Then he looked down again and remembered that he was in a swamp.

Something splashed at the water's edge.  A frog puffed its throat on a lilypad, then leaped back into the water.  Matt listened and heard the buzz of crickets and the chirp of birds.  He saw several birds, some that looked like sparrows and others that looked like crows, alight on nearby trees. 

A dragonfly hovered among the reeds.  It was abnormally large but not terrifyingly so.  It came within meters of the sphere, then zoomed away.  Matt took his second breath.

So far, no sign of people.  No bodies, no buildings.  Except – that strand of smoke against the sky in the distance. 
A controlled fire
, Matt thought,
might be a good sign of human habitation
.

Then he thought about the appropriateness of the word 'good.'  He had no weapons and no idea whether the natives were friendly to visitors who fell from the sky uninvited.  Given their apparent technological backwardness, the locals might worship him as a god or slay him as a demon.

But so far:  sky, mountains, trees, brush, animals.  All earth-like, all reminding him terribly of home.  The more he thought about it, the more it hurt.

"Ivan, are you still connected to the station external camera?"

"Yes, Matt.  The station is currently above our horizon.  Would you like to see a view of where we are?"

Matt nodded, a gesture Ivan could sense and interpret.  A virtual window popped in front of Matt, showing a real-time satellite view of the surrounding terrain.  Matt oriented himself so that the picture aligned with the scene in front of him. 

Ivan pointed an arrow at a dot in the center of a pond.  Around the pond was a meadow.  To the south was a straight line that appeared to be a road running east-west.  Matt cross-referenced the satellite view with the smoke in the distance and confirmed the presence of huts and cultivated fields and moving figures that were humanoid in shape and walked like humans, but the telescope resolution wasn't good enough to assure him that they were human.

Matt zoomed out.  There were other villages, specks for huts and patches for fields.  Narrow, winding foot paths connected them to the road, upon which people (human or otherwise) and animal-drawn carts were creeping.

He punched out the window and cut out all the status displays in his field of vision, so that he saw the scene just as a normal human might have in the days before neural implants and heads-up displays. 

So this
, he thought,
is what the world looked like before Technology.  Not another human in sight, all the way to the horizon.  Dad's vision has been realized, but on another world – and in another time.

And it was very quiet.

"You know what the weirdest thing is?" Matt asked.

Ivan remained silent, for although he did have programs that enabled him to grade phenomena according to human and objective criteria of what constituted 'weirdness,' he also had programs that advised him on when to be silent and listen to his human host.

Matt continued,  "The weirdest thing is, this place looks like somewhere on the Olympic Peninsula.  As if the star pod looped around a black hole and came back to Earth after the collapse of civilization."

"That scenario is extremely unlikely," Ivan said. 

"Or maybe we went back in time."

"That also is unlikely."

"I know, but . . . it's weird.  It seems like only yesterday I was with Dad in Seattle."

"Your sense of time compression is most likely due to the effect of the bioprocess suspension gel inhibiting the formation of new memories." 

"I – I should be crying right now.  I mean, I've lost everything.  My family, my friends, my whole world.  It's just you and me.  I guess, though, you and me . . . that's enough.  I mean, you know, I guess it's that I wasn't really close to people, that's why I'm able to be here and take in all the changes and it . . . it . . . it doesn't affect me emotionally . . . so much."

He pulled himself out so that he was sitting on the rim of the hatch opening.  He gazed at the mountains and clouds.  To the west, the sun – that is, Delta Pavonis – was being chipped away by a snowy peak.

After a few minutes, he finished weeping, and said in a shaking voice, "Ivan, isn't there a way for you to damp down human memories?"

"Neural implants do have the capability to repress traumatic memories for therapeutic purposes.  It is not advisable to engage in the procedure without oversight of appropriately trained personnel."

"But you can do it."

"I would like to point out, Matt, that you are physiologically still a minor, and that such a procedure normally requires approval of your guardians."

"But under the circumstances, would you say that I even have guardians anymore?"

Ivan paused.  He could calculate interstellar trajectories in milliseconds, but balancing sociological considerations took human-measurable time.

"I have concluded that under the circumstances, it is necessary for the sake of your survival for me to regard you as having the full rights and responsibilities of an adult."

"Well, then let's go ahead and damp my memories.  Now, I'm not saying I want to forget.  I just don't want to feel so much right now.  And I don't want to fade the technical-details stuff, just the high emotional-impact memories.  And it's reversible, right?"

"Yes, but again, extensive tampering with organically stored memories can be hazardous to the psychological health of the host."

"We're not going to do extensive tampering with memories.  We're just going to tone them down this one time.  What I want is to still have the memories, but like I'm seeing them through a tinted glass, or through a telescope from far away.  I just want to be kind of numb right now, that's all.  So . . . let's do it."

Ivan did as requested.  Matt blinked.   

"I'm still thinking a lot of home.  More, in fact."

"Your recent memory of having requested your memory to be damped is causing you to recall the memories in question even more so than before."

"Hmm . . . so I need to forget about asking to forget.  You can clear my short term memory too, can't you?"

"Yes.  As short term memories are stored in a separate region of the brain, that procedure is relatively safe."

"All right, then we'll do that too.  Wait – first thing I'll do after you delete my memory is ask you what we were doing.  Tell me that I was going to see if there was anything to eat around here."  He reviewed a transcript time line of Ivan's recording of their recent conversation and determined a hack point.  "All right, now go ahead and clear my short term memory . . .
now
."

Ivan cleared Matt's short term memory.  Matt blinked.  Then he yawned. 

"Huh.  Funny.  I forgot what we were talking about.  What were we talking about?"

"You were going to see if there was anything to eat around here."

Mindful of his crippled arm, Matt slipped out of the hatchway and plopped into the water.

I've just set foot on a new planet,
he thought.  It didn't seem as special as that trip with Mom and Dad to the Moon when he was eight . . . or was he nine?  He was surprised at the fuzziness of his recall.  Usually, his memories of outings when they were still together as a family were so vivid.  Well, he had a lot on his mind at the moment . . . .

He emerged from the water and walked toward a cluster of trees and brush and touched the leaves and berries.  Ivan conducted a biochemical analysis on the data provided by the sensor arrays embedded in Matt's skin.

"This edible?"

"No."

"This?"

"The plant appears to be sufficiently similar to species on Earth that I can manufacture enzymes to enable you to digest its cellulose."

Matt bit off a fragment of the leaf and chewed.  "Yum," he said in monotone.  "How about the water?  Do you think you can sanitize the pond scum?"

"Matt, someone is approaching from behind you."

A human was walking across the meadow.  He was only slightly above what Matt would have considered average height.  His complexion and arrangement and size of features were such that his face and bodily shape would have gone unnoticed on the streets of Seattle.  His hand-made clothing included baggy trousers and a loose shawl.  He wore sandals.  His head was topped by a small round hat, and he had a hoe balanced on his shoulder. 

The man halted at a non-threatening distance.  He bowed deeply, then stood straight.

Then, with the slightest trace of an accent, he asked,  "Do you speak Standard?"

That's my line
, Matt thought. 

". . . Yes."