Watson, Ian - Novel 08 (2 page)

 
          
In fact, the
starship was several
hundred kilometers from the target area which Paavo Kekkonen—their pilot and
systems engineer—had set for the computer. At the last moment, too late to
abort their entry into the atmosphere, the
Schiaparelli
had drifted uncontrollably, lateral jets firing. Plainly enough it was a
technical malfunction. It merely
felt
as though some external force had closed an invisible hand around them, up
where space met air, and shifted them brusquely over to a new entry point. The
six people on the starship were considerably relieved. To have come so far,
for so many years,
then
crashed . . . That was
unthinkable. So, each in their own way, they avoided thinking it, concentrating
instead on the world outside.

 
          
“Well
done, Paavo,” said Austin Faraday. “We’ll check the trouble out later.
In all other respects, a copybook landing.
So this is where
they got off at: Target Three!”

 
          
The
geologist-captain swept back white hair.
Though he wasn’t
old—unless the eighty-seven years of coldsleep were added to his own natural
forty-two years.
He was a pure blond, with a peroxide mane which had
continued growing very slowly in hyb; as had all their hair and nails, in the
same way as hair and nails carry on growing for a while from a dead body in a
coffin. The six of them had all been in coffins, as though dead, these many
years: three men and three women.
Austin, Paavo and Sean
Athlone; Tanya Rostov, Denise Laroche and Muthoni Muthiga.
All that time
their hair and their nails had continued growing out of their quasi-dead bodies
at a pace which would have shamed a snail, yet which over eighty-seven years
produced wild manes of hermit hair and crazy talons.

 
          
They
had already trimmed those talons with some difficulty on emerging from hyb.
Such long curiosities—sharp thin scimitars of horn! They hadn’t disposed of
them. No, they had stowed them away providentially like pious Chinese peasants.
Spaceman’s nails: they might present them to the Smithsonian Institution, if
the Smithsonian still survived on their return. Or perhaps they would auction
them, as the earliest astronauts had auctioned first day cover lunar postage
stamps.
If anyone was interested in auctions, or astronauts,
on their return.
This was the longest journey yet: of forty-five light
years by spacestress drive, measured on the yardstick of the human nail . . .

 
          
On
awakening, and recovering, Paavo had joked that this growth effect might set a
natural limit to human proliferation through the galaxy. Unless hyb-sleepers
were unthawed for a periodical manicure and haircut, by the time the computer
awakened them at journey’s end they would be stifled by their own hair, unable
to move because of the interlocking nest of toe and finger nails. He thought of
calling this the Poe Effect.

 
          
Theirs
was the longest journey, but one other equalled it, they now knew: that of the
Exodus V
ship, otherwise known as
Copernicus,
whose route they had
retraced past two solar systems which betrayed their promise. The
Copernicus
had definitely landed here,
beneath this yellow sun which only bore a number: 4H (Fourth Harvard Catalogue)
97801 . . .

 
          
Denise,
their French ecologist, stared down through binoculars out of one of the
crystal portholes. Her hair was a Primavera golden fleece, which she hadn’t
trimmed at all, waking to find
herself
so beautiful at
last. Her face alone was a pert, buttony affair which could hardly bear the
weight of
beauty ...

 
          
“Yes,
they’re here. Target Three.
But . . . all naked?
And
whatever are those huge fish doing on
land?
They seem to be some sort of pet. And the animals! Wherever did they get them
from? My God, I can see a
unicorn.
It’s a real unicorn!” She hurried to the computer input.

 
          
Green
words ran across a cathode screen.

 
          
EXODUS V “COPERNICUS” CARRIED FERTILIZED
OVA OF DOMESTIC ANIMALS, FISH & FOWLS. ITEM, ANIMALS AS FOLLOWS: COW, DOG,
GOAT,
HORSE
. . .

 
          
She
cleared the screen.

 
          
“They
must have had DNA matrices on file too,” suggested Muthoni, their Kenyan
doctor. Her slim black face was haloed in a bush of wiry darkness. Her skin
wasn’t chocolate or coffee or khaki, but raven black. She had the long thin nose
of a carving and full lips which pressed forward, firm and smooth as polished
wood. “They’ve been playing with bioforms. Changing them, adding new touches.
Look at that white giraffe over there. Look at those horns on its head. That
isn’t an earthly giraffe. They’ve been mutating creatures from the matrices.
They’ve made the whole planet into a park—a garden.
A
wonderland.”

 
          
“Naturally,”
Tanya Rostov, the Russian agronomist, nodded sarcastically. She was a dumpy
brunette. “Of course the very first thing that colonists do on a new world is
to landscape everywhere effortlessly, then toss their clothes away and start on
genetic manipulation
in vitro
as an
art form. Presumably behind the nearest bush! They don’t, of course, produce
farms or factories or anything of that sort. They just snap their fingers.
Hey presto,
Paradise
.”

 
          
“It
must have been
Paradise
already,” said Denise, “and . . .
well,
there was no need to struggle. The idea suggested
itself: utopia.” She laughed nervously.

 
          
“So
now they perform handstands to welcome us.”
Austin
frowned. “I’m afraid Tanya’s right.”

 
          
“Maybe
we just landed in the middle of their nature reserve—or
naturist
park
,” suggested the Frenchwoman.
“A leisure zone?”

 
          
“It
looked the same all over, from what we could see on the way down: meadows,
lakes, parkland.
On this side anyway.
Nothing
so
vulgar as a town or village. Why isn’t it boiling hot
here, eh? This planet doesn’t revolve—or if it does it does it so slowly that
we can’t tell the difference. Apart from the question of what could possibly
cause rotation-locking this far from the sun, with no moon in the sky, it
should be bloody hot here and the dark side should be frozen solid—which it
isn’t.”

 
          
“You
said there was vulcanism there,” pointed out Paavo. His own mane of hair had
been trimmed to a page-boy style by MuthonL
The
Finn
had never liked long hair. Once, eighty-seven years ago, he had been an ardent
skier and hated hair flying across his goggles. However, the trim which the
Kenyan woman had given him struck him as overly gamin- esque and cute. “We all
spotted the fires there.”

 
          
“A
few volcanoes don’t warm a frozen backside,” said
Tanya.             
~

 
          
“It
should be worse than any
Arctic
over
there,” nodded
Austin
. “Oh, there
are
cold spots,
yes! But damn warm areas too, right beside them. As I said before, it’s a hot
and cold mosaic.
Absurd.
Ice and
fire.”

 
          
Sean
Athlone had simply been standing, drinking in the landscape insatiably, unable
as yet to focus anywhere analytically for very long—because it rang so many
little bells in him (though he was no neobehaviorist). The Irish psychologist
had come out of hyb with a red Rip Van Winkle beard down to his knees, which
was now trimmed back to a neat Vandyke. He wore no flaming crown of hair upon
his head, though; his scalp was as thoroughly bald as ever. Prematurely so, but
he had never chosen to have his scalp rejuvenated. He had been unreligiously
brought up, yet he had surely compensated for this later on, his bald pate
becoming a holy vessel to him: a ciborium, well polished by his palms,
containing the special material for communion with the psychological laity. His
beard burned under his chin like a flame heating and distilling the contents of
the old ancestral brain atop the spinal column, causing its contents to ascend
into consciousness.

 
          
“So
what maintains this fair climate?” Tanya asked.
“With the sun
always at high noon in the sky?”

 
          
“
It’s
morning and afternoon in other areas,” said Denise
foolishly.

 
          
“Permanently
. . . Maybe they had damn long nights lasting a year or ten years! Do they
migrate
en masse?
Hibernate?”

 
          
Sean’s
eyes roved. He took in the rich baize of the green, spotted here and there with
white and yellow flowers like pool balls, the bowers of giant berries, a
deer-sized finch with golden bars on its wings and a carmine harlequin mask
around its beak, an orange pomegranate husk the size of a diving bell resting
near the boskage with a jagged break in its side, and particularly the two
erotic gymnasts—so casually and joyfully naked even in the face of the starship
and the dead victims of the landing. He was conscious of a swelling in his
flesh which had already thawed out but not really awoken yet—not till now. Yet
it was a curiously innocent excitement he was filled with as more people
spilled back into the meadow to get on with what they had been doing before the
ship landed, in sublime—yes indeed,“sublime—disregard of the starship in their
midst. No, not disregard either. They simply seemed to regard it as something
other than what it was: something akin to one of those strangely baroque
citadels of rock which he alone believed he had glimpsed during the final
stages of the descent. Those formations had appeared to be partly natural and
partly sculpted or built; also—somehow—partly organic, growths of mineral
matter. Perhaps those were the people’s homes, castles, keeps? But how had they
come into being?

 
          
None
of the curious rock towers was visible from where the starship stood. However,
Sean held a printout photo of one loosely in his hand, taken during descent.
The others hadn’t seen it yet. Somehow it was a photo of something already in
his head, a photo of a dream, as though someone had built an archetypal image
he already knew from somewhere else.

 
          
“We
could try asking them,” he said.

 
          
Austin
Faraday shook his head. “We didn’t travel for eighty-seven years to run out and
throw our clothes off just because the water looks fine.”

 
          
“Take
a look at this.” Sean held out the photo which he’d been keeping to himself, he
realized, as though to him it particularly belonged. “I caught a glimpse of
several structures like this on the way down—just briefly. I managed to key in
on this one.
It’s
telephoto from about five thousand
meters up.”

 
          
The
color print, slightly blurred by the vibration of the descending starship,
showed a blue rock rising among neat bushy trees. The rock opened into tulip
petals or blue lettuce leaves. From this mineral rosette serrated pink spires
arose, and what looked like twin blades of stiff curving grass—as tall as
sequoias if he’d got his scale right. These blades converged above the pink
spires to support a hoop, a perfect circle high in the sky. A forked tree trunk
in the shape of a dowser’s wand bisected the spires, too, as though tossed
there by some fearful storm; yet the outcome of the storm was serenity and
balance.

 
          
“That
isn’t a natural formation,” said
Austin
softly. “Is it?” He sounded doubtful.

 
          
“It’s
a building,” affirmed Denise. “Probably their factories and whatnot are
underground. It would follow, wouldn’t it, if the winter night lasts an
extremely long time? It looks almost armored, though I suppose
it’s
rock.
Immensely strong.
Contoured to resist any weight of ice.
Maybe it retracts
into the ground? Closes up like a flower? That loop at the top looks like an
aerial of some sort, and the,” she giggled, “
the
divining
rod could be an aerial too.”