Escape Velocity: The Anthology (15 page)

      
Occasionally, she would risk opening the door for some fresh air and stare at the strangely hued landscape around the lifeship.

      
Finally, driven by boredom and curiosity - and a panicky feeling that her supplies of water would eventually disappear - she steeled herself to do some exploring.

      
She left the ship and walked to the top of the nearby rise, the small locator unit that kept her from becoming lost clutched tightly in her hand. All the same, the moment she started down the other side and could no longer see the ship, she turned and scrambled back up the hillock. “Yes, you idiot,” she told herself aloud. “It's still there. Where did you think it would go?”

      
The hillock was a beautiful site, covered in bright purple-blue moss and tall, shimmering trees, but Naomi didn’t stop to admire it. She quickly filled two bags she had brought with her with the strange moss and hurried back to the ship. She shut the door of the capsule and stood there breathing heavily, finally setting the bags to the deck. She had heard nothing more than a slight breeze through the foliage, and her own footsteps. Nothing had attacked her. “Fool,” she told herself.

At the end of the second week, she became confident enough to take daily walks exploring other parts of the immediate area. There wasn’t much to see, but it was good exercise. She took more samples of the moss and various other floras.

      
The computer told her that the flowers from a small local bush, which she had noticed near the water source, might be converted into edible carbohydrates. She went through the supplies and made sure she knew how to use the medical instruments – just in case. She studiously avoided watching the small light that would indicate the presence of another ship. An alarm would sound if one came - and she was afraid she would become transfixed, just starting at that little bulb, waiting for it to turn green.

In the fourth week, she was returning from one of her walks when she saw something moving next to the ship. Her first impression was of color: a rich, golden yellow, astounding in this pale pink atmosphere. There was no sense of a real shape; just a fuzzy, vaguely round something rubbing up against the hull of the craft.

      
She approached it cautiously. The creature had a thin limb that reached up and touched the craft's door. Naomi stared, a bit alarmed. What if it could get inside? Was it poisonous?

      
No
, she told herself sternly,
of course not. The computer would have told me if anything on this planet was dangerous. Probably.

      
The extension swiveled around so it was facing – if facing was the right word – in her direction. She saw that the color of the creature was not uniform, but was made up of subtle shades of yellow blending imperceptibly into each other. There didn't seem to be any discernible pattern to it; it almost flickered in its variety. It was beautiful.

      
The creature seemed equally curious about her. It slithered forward until it was only a few inches away. Naomi stepped back and it stopped. The extension flowed upward until it was level with her head. Silently, they examined each other.

       “
Hello?” she said. Instead of responding, it continued to wave its extension back and forth in a small arc. Naomi tried shaking her head in the same manner, matching the creature's movements.

      
The creature stopped as soon as she had successfully mirrored its movements and lowered its extension slightly, while its shimmering skin dulled to a pale lemon. It once again reached toward her, this time at chest level, and Naomi again stepped back.

      
Okay
, she thought.
Now what?

      
The creature stopped moving, but continued to watch her - if that was what it was doing. After a few minutes, she moved carefully around the creature and toward the ship. It stayed there while she opened the door, went inside, and closed the door behind her securely.

      
She spent the next few minutes in the sanitary unit, throwing up.

During the next two days, Naomi stayed near the ship, eating judiciously from her stores, checking (not very optimistically) to see if the emergency beacon had received any response, and occasionally asking the ship questions just to hear another voice.

      
The computer didn't seem to know much about the creature, other than that it had been given an incomprehensive Latin name and was rather shy of visitors.

      
Shy?
Naomi thought.
Not likely
. Her visitor actually seemed to have taken up residence. It wandered around the area near the ship, but never tried to enter. It seemed to watch her when she came outside, occasionally extruding small tentacles.

On the third day, Naomi decided on a stronger approach. She offered the creature food, ranging from the plants she had harvested around the ship to a variety of samples from her stores. However, if the creature intended to eat, it wasn't attracted by anything she offered.

      
She talked to it, sang to it, and made absurd hand motions at it - with no reaction.

About a week after its first appearance, she finally made some progress. She had been taking soil samples near the ship, wondering whether she could actually grow any type of crop, and she had worked up a considerable sweat. In spite of her caution about the alien sun, Naomi pulled off her light jacket and draped it over a nearby rock.

      
The creature immediately dropped its ‘head’ into its body and rolled to where the jacket lay. Naomi took a few hurried steps back, and watched.

      
It quivered next to the jacket for a few seconds, then extruded a few short tentacles and touched the jacket. As soon as contact was made, the tips of the tentacles turned first a faint pink and then darkened to match the jacket's brick red hue. Slowly, the color ran up the tentacle and around the creature's skin, until the creature perfectly matched the jacket.

      
Naomi stared. Had she just somehow infected the creature? Or was it sending her some sort of message?

      
Whatever it was doing, it seemed to want to keep on doing it. After another minute or so, it withdrew the tentacles and settled itself comfortably against the jacket.

Two hours later, it was still there. Naomi edged forward and touched the creature tentatively. The skin was cool and a bit stiff; it refused to yield under her fingers. It quivered slightly but otherwise didn’t react.        She watched it into the evening, and then finally went to bed.

The next morning, it was still there. And the next. Finally, in the afternoon of the third day, the creature raised itself up slightly, shook itself, scrabbled a few feet away, blazed yellow again, and departed.

       “
Well,” Naomi said, relieved, “it doesn’t seem the worse for wear.” She walked over and stared in the direction the creature had gone. “I'll miss you,” she told the now absent creature. “You were company, even if you didn’t say much.”

      
She decided not to remove her jacket. Maybe the creature would return, and this was the way to lure it. She was lonely enough that even the presence of a small, uncommunicative blob with less personality than a sea horse was preferable to the computer.

        “
And even if it doesn’t say much,” she told herself defensively, “neither do pet fish.”

It returned a few hours later with a second creature, whose coat was a dull, pale green, and who moved, with its companion, immediately to the coat. The two nestled together, almost immediately turning the same brick red.

      
Every morning after that, Naomi would come outside and talk to them, telling them about her friends, her family, her childhood, and the various hotels that she had visited. Their lack of reaction didn't bother her – they seemed happy, and she enjoyed the company. And she wasn’t surprised when, at the end of three days, they pulled away, blazed bright gold and green, and scurried away.

       “
I wonder,” Naomi said idly, watching them leave, “if red is the only color you like.”

      
She scrounged through the ship’s stores until she found a bright blue towel and draped it across another rock. When three creatures showed up a few hours later shimmering in yellow, green, and violet, they paused between the two pieces of cloth as if they were undecided.

One opted for the red jacket, while the two others nestled against the towel, where they turned a bright, shining blue.

      
Naomi looked at the three creatures throbbing slightly against the pink grass, and laughed.

About six months later, Naomi was rinsing the last of a load of laundry when she heard a strange, high-pitched warble coming from the ship. She looked inside and saw the little alarm light flashing. Above it, a display appeared -
Response to beacon detected
, it said.

       “
Thank you,” she called. “Please shut off the alarm. It’s very unpleasant.”

      
Once the warbling stopped, she stepped outside. Today, she had a dozen guests. Two had begun to move, having obviously finished their three-day siesta. Naomi gave them a friendly wave (which was immediately imitated by at least half of her guests), and began to hang up the clothing.
After I finish this
, she thought,
I can pull out a table and put out a bit of food, just in case the new guests are hungry.

Two hours later, four armed men appeared above the far rise, walking cautiously toward her ship. Naomi smiled and waved at them from the door. She frowned as two of the men suddenly pulled out their weapons, aiming them at the creatures in her front yard.

       “
Ma’am?” One of the men shouted. “Are you under attack?”

       “
Under attack?” Naomi laughed. “Nonsense!”

      
She looked around with enormous satisfaction at her front yard, which was strewn with a neat rainbow of cloth scraps, each occupied by one or more similarly colored, pulsing blobs. “Welcome to my establishment,” she said calmly. “Would you like a room? Or a rock?”

Heaven As Iron, Earth As Brass

Richard Jay Goldstein

 
....I will make your heaven as iron,

your earth as brass.

  —
Torah, Vayikra

Neither slay anyone whom Allah

has forbidden you to slay....

—
Qur’an, Sura 17

Jacob’s ship coasts into the system of Sol, an interstellar kayak borne by gravity currents. He crosses the orbital ruts of the outer gas giants, still lumbering in their primal ways, but the rock and ice planets are gone, mined into rubble eons ago. The ghosts of their ellipses haunt his cybermap.

      
He cuts across the inner shells, swings a neat parabola around mythic Sol, and grooves in behind the lonely remaining inner planet, still in its old orbit. A brown planet, formerly a blue planet.

      
This is Terra, the Earth, home sweet home, dust to dust.

      
He plumbs the thin atmosphere, sliding down a pole of antigrav, until he hovers a few klicks from the surface. He flashes across the planetscape, rising and falling as the surface rises and sinks, mountain to valley to mountain.

      
Parched scarps tilt away from him, barren and vacant on his sensors. He traces river systems like flayed veins, devoid of moisture. He descends into ocean beds, desert-scapes now, and notes a few shallow lakes of viscous gray water, lapping thickly in the thin wind of his passing.

      
He allows himself to be attracted to the ruins of cities, bearing names from the old stories, the rusted iron of their bones sticking out like the twigs on winter trees, dustbowls of disintegrating plastic.

      
Finally he circles the dry bed of a small sea, like the fossil of a gigantic footprint. This is the grave of the Mediterranean, the middle sea, center of so many chapters of the human saga.

      
He drifts now over what had always been desert. Until he stops and hovers above the City of Stone, not much different than when the last human left it tens of thousands of Sol years before.

      
The City is ringed by dusty circles of tumbled rock and steel, plastic, and glass like a sprinkle of jewels. But the heart, the massive stone heart, the Old City, still clings to its hills.

      
Jerusalem.

      
Jacob has come here because he’s a Jew, that ancient tribe, still around. Jerusalem is still the substrate of song and prayer, and he wants to know why. Is there still some power in the crumbling stones, some potency?

      
During the long centuries of the Leaving, when prodigal humankind slowly abandoned the planet of its birth, other cities were ransacked for what was useful, and the remains scattered like ash from a campfire, but not Jerusalem.

Jacob’s ship settles slowly and silently on invisible legs of gravforce and comes to rest above the ground in a defile below the worn walls of the Old City. Jacob slides a lamsuit over himself and covers his face with a transparent aircatcher. The air of old earth has thinned with the millennia, perhaps has been exhaled too many times to maintain life. There is no longer a biosphere to replenish it. He settles a thin belt of shiny metal about his waist, his database and potential tool matrices. The wall of his ship sparkles and portals at his nod and he steps out into a descent tube, which deposits him onto the dirt of Terra. The ship withdraws into a low geosynchronous orbit and waits, alert.