DAY 13

 

 

From the diary of Dr Hugo Baal

June 34th

I slept badly last night, haunted by nightmares, most of which were, curiously enough, less terrible than what has been actually happening in the daytime.

I eventually got out of bed at 3 a.m. and spent two hours talking at length and in detail to Professor Saunders,¹ who unfortunately was in some discomfort, since he was tethered with toughmetal wire to an Aldiss tree.

A fascinating man — strange how I underestimated him when I thought he was just a geologist!

We chatted about this and that, as you do, though his small talk is, I must admit, not of the best, and chiefly consisted of his asking me to “cut the fucking wire”. I told him how I’d always dreamed of meeting him, and how, when I was just a tubby six-year-old with social impairment issues,² he inspired me to devote my life to the study of phylogeny and morphology and taxonomy.³

I quizzed him about Hooperman — I’d always been intrigued by Hooperman, that old rascal — but Professor Saunders was taciturn to the point of rudeness on this topic. So instead I told him a few reminiscences of my life on the road as a roving xenobiologist. That soon palled, and I became overwhelmed by the fear that I was squandering an opportunity of a lifetime — a chance to find out at first hand about, oh, so many things that Saunders had done or written or thought in the course of his long and brilliant career.

It occurred to me then that I should ask him about his account⁴ of the Frantic Assembly⁵ of Gullyfoyle, one of the most remarkable swarm intelligences yet to be encountered in the human-explored universe. I have a long-held theory that the Frantic Assembly are the regressed version of the Bugs,⁶ but Saunders poured scorn on this notion. Undeterred, I patiently, and comprehensively, and rather impressively I felt, pointed out the following areas of similarity and dissimilarity:

1) Microscopic life forms (FA and B)

2) Swarming ability, coupled with emergent behaviour (FA and B)

3) Ability to mimic forms and shapes of other creatures at macroscopic level (FA and B)

4) Ability to spell out English words in mid-air (B)

5) Ability to destroy life-forms and inanimate objects within seconds (B)

Saunders attributed all these similarities to simple convergent evolution, and pointed out that there are 541,000 genuses of “tree” on many thousands of different planets, all of them separately evolved. I naturally mocked this notion, because the prevalence of trees owes much to the tendency of lazy scientists to think anything Plantae that grows upwards and is tall and has a hard surface is a tree. Some trees have exoskeletons made of cadmium! It’s tantamount to describing anything with four legs as a lion. But the Frantic Assembly/Bug comparison is based on a more judicious and thorough and academically brilliant intellectual differentiation.⁷ There are only two creatures in all of Known Space that are microscopic and yet can swarm to become macroscopic, the Bugs and the Frantic Assembly.⁸ Coincidence, or eerie connection? I put it to you, as I put it to Saunders, rather forcefully in fact, but fortunately he was still tethered to the tree and couldn’t stalk off in a huff, that it is the latter. In which case, should we not consider the possibility that the Frantic Assembly remnants now being kept in zoos could re-evolve into a Buglike intelligence? Is it really sensible to allow them to survive? I mean! It’s madness, isn’t it!?!⁹

Saunders eventually conceded this point, rather grudgingly, at about the time that the dawn broke over the trees, in a glittering colourfulness of myriad light,¹⁰ at which point the Military Commander of the expedition Major Sorcha Molloy arrived and announced that we were departing immediately, and further explained that Professor Saunders was to remain in this location, chained and tethered to the Aldiss tree.

The Professor was somewhat distracted after receiving this news, and pointed out that he was being doomed to a certain and ghastly death. This point was conceded by Major Molloy, who then returned to the AmRover, in a state of some agitation. I asked Professor Saunders what, with the wisdom of hindsight, he now felt was the most interesting aspect about his first-ever First Contact, either from a morphological or an evolutionary or simply a taxonomic perspective.

Professor Saunders declined to respond, and commenced to swear and yell and, to my amazement, weep, and at this point I was forced to leave him, in order to join the rest of the expedition.

Sorcha drove the AmRover fast through the jungle. Plasma blasts blew a path through the Flesh-Webs. There were tears on her cheek and she didn’t bother to brush them away. The sharp yellow sunlight brushed her skin and made her flesh shimmer like rippled water at dawn. She took a deep breath, and drove and drove.

She’d voted in favour of letting Saunders die. He was tied with unbreakable wire to an Aldiss tree. He had no weapons, just his body armour. And before they’d left they had fired twelve rockets high into the sky to allow the Dravens to pinpoint his position.

Sorcha was confident that Saunders would be found and killed within hours. And, finally, the rest of them would be safe.

“A brilliant man, we’ll never see his like again,” Hugo muttered defiantly, and Ben seethed with rage. He was sick of Baal’s so-called witticisms, his pedantry, his sheer annoyingness. The man was impossible, and shouldn’t be allowed to blight the lives of others.

Ben resolved to wait a few hours, then find an excuse to go into the jungle with Baal and kill him. Slowly and painfully and horribly. It was no more than the man deserved, for being such a tedious ass.

“Although, in fairness,” Hugo added, “and contrariwise, I did find Saunders, as we must now categorise him, to be a little bit on the pompous side. N’est-ce pas, old chum?”

He has to die soon! Ben thought to himself, with the mental equivalent of gritted teeth.

Sorcha was studying the virtual map of New Amazon. “The coast,” she said at last. “That’s where we should go. Away from the jungle, away from the Flesh-Webs.”

“It’s going to be bitterly hard driving to get there,” Tonii counselled. “We’ll need to cut through another Jungle-Wall. And there’s uncharted terrain most of the way. Gods only know what we’ll encounter.”

“It’s worth it,” said Sorcha. “There, we’ll be safe. Sea. Surf. Red sand. We can build there. We can make a new world.”

And she flashed them all a confident glance, to prove she was still their leader and that nothing scared her, and that she wasn’t just a sad and vulnerable woman mourning the inevitable and imminent death of the man she loved.

It took Saunders two hours, two awful and humiliating and painful hours, to get the pencil plasma gun out of his arse.

First he had to get his body armour off, which was difficult enough, since he was both cuffed and shackled. Second, he had to strip off his trousers and underpants. And, then, third, he had to insert his fingers —

Anyway! At one point a host of Rat-Insects swarmed over his half-naked body and he had to use a sonic-scream to get them off. The jungle was generally hot and humid, but it was also blighted by savage cold breezes. Saunders found the pain of the windchill on his unprotected body appalling. It was one thing to savour the breeze on your cheeks, quite another to endure the bizarrely hot–cold New Amazonian temperatures whilst bare-arsed.

Even when he had removed the gun from its sticky niche, he still had to re-dress himself in clothes and body armour. Only then could he set about the task of burning through the connecting cables of his cuffs and shackles. And only then could he burn the diamond-hard tether that wrapped around his neck, and held him fast to the Aldiss tree.

It took twenty minutes of burning before the tether snapped. Then Saunders began walking through the jungle.

The plasma gun contained a micro-thin Bostock battery, so though it was a tiny weapon he was confident it would last him some months. The priority now was to get away from this part of the jungle. The flares had ignited in the lower atmosphere, on a faintly sloping trajectory, so Saunders had mentally calculated that the DRs would have to search more than sixty square kilometres of jungle to find him. That was, Saunders guessed, a deliberate strategy on Sorcha’s part — the longer it took the DRs to find and kill him, the longer Sorcha and her people had to get away to safety.

Her logic was impeccable, but she was wrong. It was now appallingly obvious that Hooperman would have programmed the robots to kill every single person who had ever worked with his enemy and nemesis, Carl Saunders. This wasn’t a targeted revenge, it was to be a massacre.

This must explain why Saunders was still alive. He was being taunted and mocked, forced to play a role in a Grand Guignol theatre event. Hooperman wanted his enemy to know that all his friends and colleagues had been horribly and brutally killed, before he would allow the DRs to, horribly and brutally, kill Saunders himself.

But Saunders had a few tricks to play yet. He set his body armour on high hover and soared up into the air and flew just below the level of the Canopy. From time to time poison shit rained down, making his armour sizzle, but he was making good time. He hadn’t seen any Dravens. Maybe he would get away from this region without encountering the enemy.

And then he saw them. Six flying DR Humanoids. They spotted him and formed an attack formation.

Saunders tilted his body and flew upwards, then plasma-blasted a hole in the tree canopy and flew through.

Sorcha lurched forward in her seat, as the low-hovering AmRover abruptly halted, froze briefly in mid-air, then crashed to the ground.

“What the hell?”

Sorcha patted herself for broken limbs. Ben was staring at her, puzzled.

“Check the engine,” she snapped.

They got out and inspected the vehicle. Ben snapped the bonnet open and peered down into the AmRover’s engine. He touched the smooth metal with a finger, and it came out green and sticky.

“Corrosive vegetation,” he said.

“Not possible,” said Sorcha.

“Microscopic spores,” speculated Hugo. “They could have been here months. The heat of the engine is enough to germinate them.”

“These are sealed units!”

“Microscopic,” explained Hugo, “may mean micromicroscopic. Smaller than air molecules.”

“Let’s all move into the other vehicle,” grumbled Sorcha.

The remaining AmRover was spacious enough to take all ten survivors. But Sorcha hated the fact that they were reduced to one vehicle. There was no margin for error now.

“We drive day and night,” she said.

“You’re the boss,” Ben told her, in tones that implied he thought she damned well shouldn’t be.

Saunders exploded through the tree canopy and saw clear blue sky above him for the first time in a year. The sun was bright yellow with a hint of blue corona and three times larger than any sun he had ever lived under. He could see some nearby asteroids, virtually moons.

Saunders carried on flying upwards, then he looped and looked down.

The Humanoid DRs burst through the canopy in pursuit of him. The Roc nest he had crashed into was now a wreck and a hapless Roc chick was circling aimlessly, old enough to fly but not mature enough to defend itself. A flock of Deadbirds appeared as if from nowhere and ripped it to shreds in moments. Then a few seconds later a flock of adult Rocs appeared and turned the Deadbirds into dead birds.

The Humanoid DRs were in the midst of this, and the Rocs plunged at them. A haze of plasma fire lit the sky, turning the canopy an even more lurid green.

But the Rocs had scales that could, miraculously, deflect plasma bolts. They were roused to rage and plunged in on the Humanoid DRs.

Saunders flew on, amused at the sight of the most powerful robots of all time being ripped limb from limb by a flock of birds the size of killer whales.

Ben’s head was throbbing. He was sick with desire. He beckoned to Private Clementine McCoy with the time-honoured “Shall we fuck?” finger-flick signal, but she frowned and shook her head.

“I’m important to this mission, you should think of my morale,” he pointed out acidly. He knew that Soldiers were hard-wired to be promiscuous — all sex was casual to them — so what was this bitch’s problem?

“Oh for heaven’s sake,” she told him scornfully.

“You’ve done it with me before,” he said sulkily.

“Only when drunk.” She replied, lightening her words with a smile.

“Oh don’t be such a spoilsport.”

“Back the fuck off, Ben. I’m not in the mood, OK?” She wasn’t smiling any more.

“Just a quickie?”

“No!” Clementine was baffled at his eerie persistence.

“Go on. You’ll hardly notice.”

“No!”

“No? No?” Ben was consumed with blinding rage. He could suddenly see himself strangling Clementine to death, and pleasuring himself upon her corpse.

“You don’t look well,” she told him gently.

“Are you sure that was the right thing to do? Leaving the Professor to die?” Hugo said to Sorcha.

She was angry with him for questioning her judgement. And startled that he had spoken to her about something that wasn’t a scientific issue.

“It’s the only way to divert the DRs,” she said carefully. “Saunders is the one they want, not us.”

“We don’t know that,” said Hugo pedantically.

“Of course we know that! Hooperman is the one who set his dogs on us, and he and Saunders have been enemies for more than two hundred years.”

“True,” Hugo, conceded, but couldn’t resist adding: “But it was all Hooperman’s fault, you know — well, that is, apart from the bomb bit. After all, I mean, he was the one who told those stupid lies about what happened in the Amazon rainforest. I always knew Saunders would never have —”

“I don’t care why they hate each other, I just care that they do.”

“It was all nonsense! What Hooperman said, after he crawled —”

“Let’s not rehash this now.”

“In fact,” Hugo continued, inexorably, “Saunders honestly believed that —”

Sorcha glared at him.

Hugo subsided, grudgingly.

Sorcha drove on, in blessed silence.

But then a mist covered her eyes, and she blinked swiftly to clear it.

“What’s wrong?” asked Hugo.

“Nothing.”

“You’re upset.”

“Something in my eye.”

“Of course,” Hugo realised, “it must have been hard for you to leave Saunders behind. Considering —”

“That has no bearing on the matter.”

“But you were —”

“We had sex. That’s all. He was one of my conquests. I didn’t even like the odious little shit,” Sorcha said, with all the arrogance and emotional disdain of the born and bred Soldier.

“Oh, I see,” said Hugo, his theory crushed.

Sorcha drove on.

“Well,” said Hugo, thoughtlessly. “If Saunders isn’t dead yet, he will be soon.”

“Good,” said Sorcha. “I’m glad. The useless bastard!”

She drove on, stony-faced.

The sky was black with Gryphons. Saunders knew that if they saw him as prey, and plunged, and attacked him, he stood no chance.

They did not plunge. Saunders flew on.

Sorcha realised with a sense of horror that she couldn’t do this.

She slowed the AmRover down, and glided gently to the ground.

“I’m going back.”

Hugo stared at her aghast. “What? What are you on about?”

“Is there a problem?” asked Private Clementine McCoy, from the AmRover’s recreation room.

“Why the fuck have we stopped?” snarled Sergeant Anderson, from the back seat of the cockpit.

“The Professor,” Sorcha explained to Hugo. “I have to be with him.”

Hugo fought his bewilderment. “But you left him to die.”

“And I shouldn’t have,” Sorcha said, anguished. “I have to go back, before it’s too late.”

Hugo did his best to follow this bizarre switch from loathing to loving. He failed.

“Um, I don’t think I follow,” he said.

“Have we stopped?” asked Jim Aura, blinking awake.

“What’s your problem, Soldier?” Sergeant Anderson snarled.

“Start the fucking truck!” roared Ben.

“I’ll be getting out here,” Sorcha said, sadly.

Through his helmet amp, Saunders heard a whirr of wind and suddenly he was ripped out of the air and buffeted and battered.

It took him several seconds to realise what was happening. A Gryphon had attacked, and was gripping him by his head. He flailed helplessly for a moment, then managed to take out his plasma pencil and fired. Feather-scales flew and the Gryphon’s head was severed, but its beak had pecked at his hardglass helmet, scratching it, and the power of the whiplash caused Saunders to black out.