Nebula Awards Showcase 2003 Read online

  All we saw was dust and desolation. Broken walls of stone or brick, where roofs had fallen in. Tangles of twisted steel where towers had stood. Concrete seawalls around empty harbors. And everywhere, wind-drifted dunes of dead red dust and wind-whipped clouds of rust-colored dust, sometimes so dense it hid the ground.

  The drone turned east near the equator, climbing over mountain peaks capped with snows dyed the color of drying blood. It paused over broken dams in high mountain canyons and crossed a network of dust-choked irrigation canals.

  “I’ve dreamed of my brother.” Sandor made a solemn face. “Dreamed I might find him here.” He stopped to sigh and gaze across an endless sea of wave-shaped dunes. “Dreams! All of us dreaming we had endless life and time for everything. And now—”

  •

  The drone had reached the dead east coast and flown on across the empty ocean. The lounge was silent again, disheartened people drifting away. Casey asked if we were turning back.

  “Not quite yet.” Sandor tipped his head, listening. “Captain Vlix reports that the search team has found something in low polar orbit. Maybe a ship. Maybe just a rock. Maybe something else entirely. She’s launching a pilot pod to inspect it.”

  •

  Music had lifted back in the lounge, its unfamiliar trills and runs and strains broken by long gaps of nothing I could sense. A woman with a baby in her arms was swaying to a rhythm I couldn’t hear. Silent people were dozing or wandering the aisles. A silent group had gathered around Rokehut at the end of the room, frowning and gesticulating.

  “He still wants us to run for our lives,” Sandor said. “For a star two thousand light-years out toward the Rim. An idiot’s dream! To complete the slide he’d have to calculate the exact relative position of the star two thousand years from now. He has no data for it.”

  The attendants came back with juice and little white wafers. Rokehut and his group refused them, with angry gestures, and trooped away to confront the captain again.

  “A mild sedative.” Sandor waved the robot away. “If you need to relax.”

  I accepted a wafer. It had a vinegar taste and it hit me with a sudden fatigue. I slept in my seat till Casey shook my arm.

  “The pod has reached that object in orbit,” Sandor told us. “The pilot identifies it as the craft that brought the last colonists. His attempts at contact get no response. Rokehut has offered him a fortune to go aboard. Permission has been granted, with the warning that he won’t be allowed back on our ship. He reports that his service robot is now cutting the security bolts to let him into the air lock.”

  I watched the people around us, silently listening, frowning intently, expectantly nodding, frowning again.

  “He’s inside.” Head tipped aside, eyes fixed on something far away, Sandor spoke at last. “The pathogen got there ahead of him. He has found red dust on the decks, but he hopes for protection from his space gear. He believes the killer was already on the planet before the ship arrived. The cargo was never unloaded. All organics have crumbled, but metal remains unchanged.

  “He’s pushing on—”

  Sandor stopped to listen and shake his head.

  “The pilot was on his way to the control room, searching for records or clues. He never got there.” He leaned his head and nodded. “The science chief is summing up what evidence he has. It points to something airborne, fast-acting, totally lethal. It must have killed everybody who ever knew what it is.”

  •

  Captain Vlix allowed Rokehut and his partisans to poll the passengers. Overwhelmingly, they voted to turn back toward Earth at once. The lounge became a bedlam of angry protest when departure was delayed, hushed a little when Captain Vlix came back to the platform.

  “She says Earth is out,” Sandor told us, “for two sufficient reasons. We might find that the pathogen is already there. Even if we found it safe, she says we would certainly be regarded as a suspected carrier, warned away and subject to attack if we tried to make any contact.”

  “That recalls a legend of the old Earth.” Casey nodded bleakly. “The legend of a ghost ship called the Flying Dutchman, that sailed forever and never reached a port.”

  •

  The strange constellations flickered out of the ceiling dome, and the drone’s images returned. The limitless ocean beneath it looked blue as Earth’s when we glimpsed it through rifts in the clouds, but the sky was yellow, the larger sun a sullen red, the blue one now a hot pink point.

  “The island’s somewhere ahead.” Sandor stood with us in the lounge, frowning at the horizon. “If we ever get there. It’s losing altitude. Losing speed. Probably damaged by the dust.”

  White-capped waves rose closer as it glided down through scattered puffs of cumulus.

  “There it is!” Sandor whispered before I had seen it. “Just to the right.”

  I strained to see. The image dimmed and flickered as the drone bored through a tuft of pink-tinted cloud. Something blurred the far horizon. At first a faint dark streak, it faded and came back as we searched it for color.

  “Green?” A sharp cry from Casey. “Isn’t it green?”

  “It was,” Sandor said. “We’re going down.”

  A foam-capped mountain of blue-green water climbed ahead of the drone. It crashed with an impact I almost felt, but I thought I had caught a flash of green.

  8

  The ceiling dome had gone dark when the drone broke up. After a moment it was spangled again with those new constellations. The dead ship, immense and high overhead, was a fire-edged silhouette against the Milky Way.

  “You saw it!” Casey shouted at Sandor. “Something green. Something alive!”

  Frowning, Sandor shook his head.

  “I saw a brief greenish flash. Probably from some malfunction as the drone went down.”

  “It was green,” Casey insisted. “Aren’t they landing anybody to take a look?”

  “No time for that.”

  “But if the island is alive—”

  “How could that be?” He was sharply impatient. “We’ve seen the whole planet dead. Whatever killed it killed the drone before it ever touched the surface. The captain isn’t going to risk any sort of contact.”

  “If she would let us land—” Casey waited for Pepe and me to nod. “We could radio a report.”

  “Send you down to die?” Sandor’s eyes went wide. “She cares too much for life. She would never consider it.”

  “Don’t think we care for life? Tell her we were cloned to keep the Earth and humankind alive. But tell her we were also cloned to die. If we must, I don’t know a better way.”

  •

  Sandor took us to meet Captain Vlix, and translated for us. Our visit was brief, but still enough to let me glimpse a spark of humanity beneath her gleaming crimson scales. I don’t know what he told her, but it caught her interest. She had him question us about Tycho Station and our lives there.

  “You like it?” Her huge green eyes probed us with a disturbing intensity. “Life without nanorobs? Knowing you must die?”

  “We know.” Casey nodded. “I don’t dwell on it.”

  “I must admire your idealism.” A frown creased her crimson scales. “But the science staff reports no credible evidence of life on the planet. I can’t waste your lives.”

  “We saw evidence we believe,” Casey said. “In that last second as the drone went down. Considering the stakes, we’re ready to take the risk.”

  “The stakes are great.” Her eyes on Sandor, she frowned and finally nodded her red-scaled head. “You may go.”

  •

  There were no space suits to fit us. That didn’t matter, Casey said; space gear had not saved the pilot who boarded the derelict. With Sandor translating, the service robots showed Pepe how to operate the flight pod, a streamlined bubble much like the slider that had brought Sandor to the Moon. He shook our hands and wished us well.

  “Make it quick,” he told us. “Captain Vlix expects no good news from you. No news at al
l, in fact, after you touch down. Our next destination is still under debate. None looks safe, or satisfies everybody, but we can’t delay.”

  Pepe made it quick, and we found the island green.

  Rising out of the haze of dust as we dived, the shallow sea around it faded from the blue of open water through a hundred shades of jade and turquoise to the vivid green of life. The island was bowl-shaped, the great caldera left by an ancient volcanic explosion. Low hills rimmed a circular valley with a small blue lake at the center. A line of green trees showed the course of a stream that ran through a gap in the hills from the lake down to the sea.

  “Kell?” Sandor’s voice crackled from the radio before we touched the ground. “Navarro? Yare? Answer if you can.”

  “Tell him!” Casey grinned at Pepe as he dropped our slider pod to a wide white beach that looked like coral sand. “It looks a lot better than our pits in the Moon. No matter what.”

  Pepe echoed him, “No matter what.”

  “Tell him we’re opening the air lock,” Casey said. “If we can breathe the air, we’re heading inland.”

  Pepe opened the air lock. I held my breath till I had to inhale. The air was fresh and cool, but I caught a faint acrid bite. In a moment my eyes were burning. Pepe sneezed and clapped a handkerchief over his nose. Casey smothered a cough and peered at us sharply.

  “Can you report?” Sandor’s anxious voice. “Can you breathe?”

  Casey coughed and blew his nose.

  “Breathing,” he gasped. “Still breathing.”

  I thought we were inhaling the pathogen. I hadn’t known the pilot who died on the derelict, or the millions or billions it had killed. I felt no personal pain for them, but Pepe and Casey were almost part of me. I put my arms around them. We huddled there together, sneezing and wheezing, till Pepe laughed and pulled away.

  “If this is death, it ain’t so bad.” He jogged me in the ribs. “Let’s get out and take a closer look.”

  We stumbled out of the lock and stood there on the hard wet sand beside the pod, breathing hard and peering around us. The sky was a dusty pink, the suns a tiny red moon eye and a bright pink spark. The beach sloped up to low green hills. Perhaps half a mile south along the beach, green jungle covered the delta at the mouth of the little river. Pepe picked up a scrap of seaweed the waves had left.

  “Still green.” He studied it, sniffed it. “It smells alive.”

  My lungs were burning. Every breath, I thought, might be my last, yet I always stayed able to struggle for another. Pepe dropped the handkerchief and climbed back in the slider to move it higher on the beach, farther from the water. He returned with a portable radio. Casey blew his nose again, and started south along the beach, toward the delta. We followed him, breathing easier as we went.

  The little river had cut its way between two great black basaltic cliffs. Casey stopped before we reached them, frowning up at the nearest. I looked and caught a deeper breath. The summit had been carved into a face. The unfinished head of a giant struggling out of the stone.

  “Sandor!” Casey walked closer, staring up at the great dark face. “It’s Sandor.”

  “It is.” Shading his eyes, Pepe whispered huskily. “Unless we’re crazy.”

  I had to sneeze again, and wondered what the dust was doing to us.

  Sandor called again from the ship, but Pepe seemed too stunned to speak. A rope ladder hung across the face, down to the beach. Black and gigantic, gazing out at the sky, lips curved in a puckish smile, the head was certainly Sandor’s.

  “We’re okay.” Rasping hoarsely into the phone, Pepe answered at last. “Still breathing.”

  Walking closer to the cliff, we found a narrow cave. A jutting ledge sheltered a long workbench hewn from an untrimmed log, a forge with a pedal to work the bellows, a basket of charcoal, a heavy anvil, a long shelf cluttered with roughly-made hammers and chisels and drills.

  “The sculptor’s workshop.” Casey stepped back across a reef of glassy black chips on the sand, litter fallen from the chisel. “Who is the sculptor?”

  He touched his lips at Pepe when Sandor called again.

  “Tell him to hold the ship. Tell him we’re alive and pushing inland. Tell him we’ve found human life, or strong evidence for it. But not a word about the face. Not till we have something Captain Vlix might believe.”

  •

  We hiked inland, following a smooth-worn footpath along the riverbank. The valley widened. We came out between two rows of trees, neatly spaced, bearing bright red fruit.

  “¡Cerezas!” Pepe cried. “Cherries! A cherry orchard.”

  He picked a handful and shared them, tart, sweet, hard to believe. We came to an apple orchard, to rows of peach and pear trees, all laden with unripe fruit. We found a garden farther on, watered by a narrow ditch that diverted water from the river. Tomato vines, yams, squash, beans, tall green corn.

  Casey caught his breath and stopped. I stared past him at a man—a man who might have been Sandor’s double—who came striding up the path to meet us.

  “Sandor?” His eager voice was almost Sandor’s, though the accent made it strange. “Sandor?”

  We waited, hardly breathing, while he came on to us. The image of Sandor, bronzed dark from the sun, he had the same trim frame, the same sleek brown fur crowning his head, the same pixie face and golden eyes. He stopped to scan us with evident disappointment, and pointed suddenly when he saw Pepe’s radio.

  Pepe let him have it. Eagerly, hands shaking, he made a call. The other Sandor answered with a quick and breathless voice. Their excited words meant nothing to me, no more than their silent communion after they fell silent, but I could read the flow of feeling on the stranger’s weathered face. Wonder, fear, hope, tears of joy.

  At last the Sandor on the ship had a moment for us.

  “You’ve found my brother. Call him Corath if you need a name. Captain Vlix is ready for a jump toward the Rim. She is slow to believe what you’re saying, with her ship at risk but Rokehut is demanding a chance for confirmation and I must see my brother. She’s letting me come down. . . .”

  •

  Corath beckoned. We followed him down the path till we could see the distant lake and a ruined building on a hill. Once it must have been impressive, but the stone walls were roofless now, windows and doorways black and gaping. He stopped us at his very simple residence, a thatched roof over a bare wooden floor with a small stone-walled enclosure at the rear. Waiting for Sandor, we sat at a table under the thatch. He poured cherry wine for us from a black ceramic jug and stood waiting, staring away at the sky.

  Sandor landed his silvery flight pod on the grass in front of the dwelling. Corath ran to meet him. They stopped to gaze at each other, to touch each other, to grip each other’s hands. They hugged and stepped apart and stood a long time face to face without a word I could hear, laughing and crying, hugging again, until at last Sandor rubbed his wet eyes and turned to us.

  “I saw—saw the head.” Breathing hard, he stopped to clear his throat and peer again into Corath’s face as if to verify that he was real. “It was meant to be my own, though at first I thought it was his. He has been here almost two hundred years, marooned by the pathogen. With no way to search for me, he says, except inside the mountain.”

  A spasm of coughing bent him over. Corath held his arm till he drew himself upright and turned soberly back to us.

  “We were coughing,” Pepe said. “Sneezing. Wheezing. We thought we had the killer pathogen.”

  “Something kin to it, my brother says. But benign. He says it saved your lives.”

  We had to hold our questions. They forgot us, standing together a long time in silence before they laughed and embraced again. Sandor wiped at his tears at last and turned back to us.

  “The pathogen got here two hundred years ago. Corath knows no more than we do about its origin or history. It caught him here on the island, at work on the same sort of nanorob research I once hoped to undertake. He was testing immun
ities and looking for quantum effects that might extend the contact range. The range effect is still not fully tested, but his new nanorob did make him immune. Too late to save the rest of the planet, it did wipe the pathogen off the island. . . .”

  Captain Vlix was still a stubborn skeptic, terrified of contamination. She refused to let Sandor bring his brother aboard, or even to come back himself. Yet, with Rokehut and some of the other passengers still at odds over a new destination, she let the second officer bring a little group of desperate volunteers down to see the live island for themselves.

  They came off the pod jittery and pale. Fits of coughing and sneezing turned them whiter still, until Corath and his news of their new immunity brought their color back. To make his own survival sure, the officer drew a drop of Corath’s blood and scratched it into his arm with a needle. Still breathing, but not yet entirely certain, he wanted to see the research station.

  Corath took us to tour the ruin on the hill. The pathogen had destroyed wood and plastic, leaving only bare stone and naked steel. A quake had toppled one roofless wall, but the isolation chamber was still intact. An enormous windowless concrete box, it had heavy steel doors with an air lock between them.

  Black with rust, the doors yawned open now, darkness beyond them. He struck fire with flint, steel, and tinder, lit a torch, led us inside. The chamber was empty, except for the clutter of abandoned equipment on the workbenches and a thick carpet of harmless gray dust on the floor.

  We found nothing to reveal the structure of his new nanorob, nothing to explain how its wind-borne spores had set us to sneezing and made us safe. Corath answered with only a noncommittal shrug when Pepe dared to ask if the infection had made us immortal.

  “At least the dust hasn’t killed us,” Casey said. “Good enough for me.”