Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (7 page)

The shuttle dumped me as close to the doorstep of the hospital as safety allowed. The staff had me prepped and sedated within minutes. I was in postop before I knew what had hit me.

They did a good job. The new knee could stop a laser blast even if the rest of me couldn't. The new skin was too pale and too smooth, but at least it moved and I wouldn't scare the nurses anymore. They get you in and out of Prime as quickly as possible, which was fine by me.

I made one side trip before I left Prime. A couple of attendants locked me inside an isolation vehicle, tested it for leaks, and sent me on my way. The quarantine complex where Miyuki lives is on a corner of the continent, about an hour from the hospital. The portholes in her living bubble have views of the ocean—if you can call a big lake that's covered with ice half the year an ocean. The vehicle drove into a covered garage attached to one of the quarantine buildings. The garage door closed behind me, and the air was sucked out. I didn't like the way the vehicle's windows creaked.

Miyuki walked up to a window close to my vehicle. I was glad that she could walk again. The blue and green veining on her skin was less than the last time I saw her.

“Hi, kiddo,” I greeted her. “How they treating you?”

Her voice was not quite lifelike over the comm system. “I'm doing a lot better. They've got the bugs enough under control that I can't seriously contaminate anyone in here. I'm out of isolation.”

“That's great. How you getting along with the rest of the inmates?”

“Half of them have accepted their life; they're fine. The bitter ones are boring; I stay away from them. We've got a bridge league. I started reading the classics. Just got done with the
Tale of Genji
. Always meant to read it.”

“You've got the time now.”

She looked me over as best she could. “They did a good job putting you back together.”

“Thanks. You're looking better too.”

She shook her head. “Not like I did.”

“You're still beautiful.”

She glanced down. “I wish I could believe that.”

I was tongue-tied, like I always got with her.

She put a hand on the window. “You couldn't have saved me. I was determined to be the best Scout. That was my decision. You tried your best to talk me out of it. You tried to get me to wash out. I had to be aggressive; it's the only way a woman makes it in the Scouts. If it hadn't been that hellhole of a planet, it would have been another. Just try to keep yourself out of here.”

I couldn't cry because she wouldn't.

Before I left, the garage was flooded with a gas that would peel the hull off a starship and then bathed in radiation, just in case anything had leaked from the quarantine building. I broke into a cold sweat watching the meters on the vehicle—they kept jiggling. I should make these visits remotely, but she'd been my best partner.

I entered the barracks as Lester was walking out, massaging the right arm. “How goes it, Lester?”

“Pretty good.” He gave me an appraising once-over. “They did good work on you.”

“Always do. They've put me back together about every third mission. By now they should be able to do it in the dark. How's the arm?”

“Healing slow. I keep reinjuring it. It's been good practice though. I never used my left arm with weapons. I'm getting fairly accurate with it.”

“Good. I take it you've been going through some of the simulations?”

“I've made it through all of them. Some more than once.”

“You're pushing yourself.”

“I never want to go back to that pit of a mining planet I grew up on.” Lester's right hand had clenched into a fist. He took a deep breath and opened the fingers. “Are these simulations based on recordings of your missions?”

I motioned Lester into my room and pointed to a chair. “Yeah.”

“The one with the catapult was the last mission?”

“That's when I lost your predecessor.”

“I think I figured out how to get us out without killing any of the natives.”

“Show me.”

Lester called up his version of the simulation. His solution was ingenious. It involved having the ship hop out of range of the catapult just before they fired, while we knocked over a couple of trees to block the native's retreat. Then the ship would hop back and pick us up while they reloaded. It might have worked.

“Nice work, Lester. I'm all for saving lives—ours especially.” I started unpacking my stuff. “We're both gonna take a little time off to rehab, then we'll start doing simulations together. These will be new ones; things neither of us have seen. Hopefully, they'll get us working as a team.”

We spent about a week working out in the gym. Lester had already figured out that he needed to reduce his lifting and work on flexibility. I focused on making all the new parts function smoothly with the old ones. We did a lot of exercises in tandem to get a feel for how the other guy moved.

Once the local doc cleared us, we started on simulations. The first one was a jungle planet with aggressive trees. We tried it three times and got killed each time. One time we landed in the ocean only to find that the seaweed was as bad as the trees. Eventually we learned the simulation was based on two failed missions. Scout Command included it in case some genius figured how to approach the planet and live.

The next simulation was fairly straightforward. We had our samples and were heading back to the ship when something came out of the ground and grabbed me. Lester's reaction was good; he blasted it. He just needed to learn how to change the settings of his gun on the fly. I would have been mildly toasted. That's better than getting pulled underground by a whatsit, so I gave him good marks anyway.

After that they threw another jungle at us. Jungles are the pits. There's no way to keep track of all the lifeforms. We stood in the mock airlock waiting for it to finish the decontamination cycle. “What's your primary concern when you're outside?”

Even through the suit visor I could tell Lester was wary. “Try not to disturb the native life.”

“Wrong: Protect the integrity of your suit. Depending on the level of a breach, you can end up in isolation.”

“They mentioned that at the Academy. The profs said they can get rid of most foreign pathogens.”

“They lied.” The kid looked at me but said nothing. “Most Scouts who have a suit breach either die or end up in permanent isolation. The reason you don't get to take a fun day's leave on Prime is because that's where they house the ones who aren't quite dead.”

“You seem to know a whole lot about it.”

“The partner before the one who nearly killed me is there.”

“Is he going to be released?”

“No, she isn't. She'll spend the rest of her life in an isolation dome. You don't want to join her. Maintain suit integrity at all costs.”

“Why don't they tell recruits the truth?”

The hatch opened. Something big stood outside. It moved an appendage toward us that looked like a vine covered with finger-length thorns. I blasted it and hit the close button. The edge of the door cut the appendage off. It was still moving toward us. Lester hit the decontaminate button and the appendage dissolved.

I started breathing again. “They don't tell you about the isolation units for the same reason they don't do simulations like this: it would scare you kiddies off.”

I could see Lester shaking his head through his visor. “Do we ever get a nice, peaceful dead planet?”

“Nope. Too hard to terraform. Life makes oxygen and regulates climate. Takes centuries if there isn't already life there. Today's colonists aren't a patient lot.”

It took us four tries to find a relatively safe spot on the simulated planet. In real life, Lester probably would have ended up with a broken back, but we got the info on the chances of intelligence on the planet and were more or less alive at the end of the mission.

After a month of simulations, Lester was getting jumpy. The passenger liner returned. Lester took a two-day leave and went off to find Marina. I swam laps and had remote card games with Miyuki.

Lester came back looking relaxed and happy which was good because we shipped out two days later for my nineteenth mission.

Lester looked puzzled. “Why'd you turn the navigation displays off?”

“Computer handles everything. If it goes bad, we're screwed; if it doesn't, there's nothing for us to do. I hope you didn't spend too much time on the astrogation courses?”

“I was pretty good at them.”

“They're worthless. It's like knowing how your shirt is made, interesting but no practical value. You should have spent your time learning geology and exobiology.
That
we need to know.”

Lester nodded. “I was good at those, too.”

“Then your time at the Academy wasn't a total waste.” I popped the second memory chip into the computer and a planetary view of our destination appeared. “Don't be gawking at the astrogation. I want you to spend every waking hour learning what's in this. This is everything the robot discovery ship found. We need to know it before we land. That gives us one week.”

Lester took it to heart. He had possible landing sites picked out. I reviewed his criteria. “What about the fauna?”

“All seems fairly normal. Nothing intelligent.”

“Based on what?”

“Lack of cultural artifacts.”

“What was your major at the Academy?”

“Structural engineering.”

I shook my head. “Should have known. Don't make the mistake of equating technology and intelligence. There are species that think as well as you or I and figure everything is fine the way it naturally occurs. They manage to think big thoughts without so much as building a roof to keep the rain off.” I brought up the data on the biological samples taken by the robot explorer. “What do you make of these?” I pointed to a picture of an animal; its rounded upper portion looked like a meter-high hemisphere that was set on a larger-diameter disc. The hemisphere was rigid and the disc was flexible. The animal moved by undulating the flexible disc. Tentacles sprouted from the junction of the hemisphere and disc.

“Herd animal. Grazer.”

“They definitely travel in groups, but they're not exclusively grazers. The robot found a carcass that had fresh meat in its stomach. The key here is fresh, no traces of spoilage.”

“They hunt?”

“Exactly. Hunting in groups takes a greater level of coordination than grazing. That implies greater intelligence. What's the other thing you notice about the species?”

Lester thought a while, then shook his head. “I guess I missed it.”

“There was only one carcass of this animal found. There are thousands of them all over the planet, but the robot could only find one that had been dragged off by a predator.”

“I'm still not getting it.”

“They dispose of their dead.”

“They might practice cannibalism.”

“True, but if what they do has the smallest element of ritual involved, that implies an understanding of mortality, which is an indication of self-awareness. We have to be sure.”

We tried to land close to a group of the creatures without being obvious. The ship can camouflage its color to some extent. We came down looking sky-blue and used the antigravity drive to minimize noise.

After the atmospheric checks, we got into our suits and headed out for a little animal watching. We crawled on our bellies through what looked like grass and recorded the animals' behavior. Back on the ship we watched the recordings. I pointed to a pair of the creatures and backed the recording up. “Did you see that?”

“No.”

“Watch those arms.”

Lester zoomed the display. “They touched arms.”

“And moved in tandem afterward.”

Lester nodded. “Communications. So are they intelligent?”

“Not necessarily. Every social animal has some form of communication, but there are lots of social animals that are not intelligent. But every intelligent animal has some form of communications. Communication is necessary, but not sufficient to prove intelligence.”

Lester slumped in his chair. “This is starting to sound like Philosophy 101.”

“Sometimes that's what this job comes down to.”

The next day, we opened the hatch to find only one of the creatures in the nearby grassland. We watched it from the trees, trying to stay out of its line of sight. It moved slowly in the direction of a rise. We kept pace with it.

Lester kept looking over his shoulder. “They never move alone—too much chance of predation.”

“This is unusual. We should record its behavior.” The creature led us partially up the slope of a hill and ducked inside a cave. We followed to the cave mouth and found no sign of its companions. “I don't remember anything in the documentation of this planet about these things using caves.”

Lester thought. “I can't remember anything either.”

“It's the unusual behaviors that are more likely to indicate intelligence. This is risky, but if we're going to find out whether they're intelligent or not, we've got to observe their behavior. I'm going in. You wait at the mouth of the cave in case they're more intelligent than we thought.”

Lester took up a defensive position just inside the cave, and I followed the creature. The cave was too low for me to stand. I could hear the creature a short way ahead of me. As I rounded a corner, the creature scuttled down a side shaft at surprising speed. A check with my sensors indicated the shaft led out of the cave. I yelled over the suit comm, “Lester, it's a trap!”