City Without Suns (12 page)

Part 5

Young Eva

Chapter 28

Running from the lakeside shore in a strange new world, Eva had really only been afraid twice during her childhood. She had been sad but seldom scared. Something in her brain signaled her body to run.  It was not a repeated danger of past experience, but somehow she knew that she had to get away. 

She had only felt like that once before.  The first time was during the approach for landing a month earlier.  Soon after entering the exosphere, about two hours before landing, a fog became visible from the bridge window on Taurus, which had jettisoned from Gambler about an hour before.  Having been raised on the ship, she had never seen a real planet up close before and wasn’t sure what to expect.  Lightning flashed in the distant haze, far enough away to leave Taurus unaffected but near enough to startle her.  The entire group, a miniscule fraction of the former population, was gathered on the bridge.  Eva looked to the pilots to see if they were concerned, knowing that if they were worried, then there was cause for alarm.  They were stoic.  She took it as a good sign and tried to keep her emotions bottled the best she could, but she was not successful.  The lack of consoling offered for her tears suggested they were viewed as products of a fragile soul, the youngest in the group, the only child from the Ward that boarded the lander.

The second scare of her sheltered life was upon her. There were probably plenty of things that should have caused fear, but in ten years, none of them had been exposed to her.  The ship named Gambler in the distance was no longer a functional home, and there was a whole new world in front of her with sights and sounds to stimulate the senses.  Their landing site was next to a large body of murky water accessible from a walkway that threaded its way between the lakeside rocks.

There was something stirring in the water.  Eva had heard some of the others talking about finding more alien life and wondered if it was possible.  They talked about whether it would be hostile or friendly.  Those thoughts were circulating when the object emerged from under the glassy surface of the lake.  She soon realized it was not an object at all, but rather something that could move under its own direction, and it was approaching her on the shore.  It was big and had limbs as thick as tree trunks, twelve of them, which it used to slowly propel itself into the shallows by the shore.

Its size alone was enough to scare her.  If a small insect on planet Beta was enough to cause the pain that it could, such a large aquatic beast must have been just as scary.  Although it did not appear it could move fast enough to catch a person, her instincts whispered not to get close.  Actually, it was more of a yell than a whisper.  Whatever imaginary force compelled her brain to move her legs, it was not quiet.  She ran hard not caring whether the thing was docile, unconcerned with whether her fright was warranted.

Of all the hazards and concerns on the new world, this was not expected.  Eva did not even fully understand at the time the things that the others were worried about.  The foul air, the fluctuating temperature, the production of drinkable water, and the food supply were apparently among the more pressing matters, although she was oblivious to the worries of the adults.  They were certainly not looking to her for help.

Upon hearing the screams, Nikolaj was the first to arrive.  The mechanic had in no small part been responsible for getting the group of Gambler survivors that far into their journey.  Without him, they may not have been able to ignite the reactors on Taurus, the auxiliary yet massive landing vessel that brought them safely to the planet surface.  He did not linger to ask any questions as he ran by to confront whatever had caused the reaction.  With a blade in one hand, he sprinted to the shore and stopped short of the strange creature.  He stood motionless between the alien and the rest of the group while it also lay still.  Nikolaj did not remove his eyes from the beast.

Eventually, the amphibious creature slowly retreated, dragging the bulk of its body using its substantial legs.  It returned from where it came and disappeared into the dark waters of Tar Lake.  As hunger was always on the forefront of everyone’s minds, some of the men talked about diving into the waters using gear they could retrieve from the Gambler wreckage.  They hoped that the biological similarities that were sure to exist in the unintelligent waterborne life form would be enough to provide some nourishing value.  Some talked of setting traps.  Others worried that the beast would reappear.  Where there was one, there were bound to be more, and it was unclear whether it was predator or prey.

A day passed.  The unit of time considered a ‘day’ had been redefined by some of the forty-eight survivors.  To avoid confusion, they started calling a
betaday
the amount of time elapsed between two sunrises.  After the next sunrise, the water creature emerged again, but this time there were three.  They moved themselves using only a fraction of their twelve legs in an awkward saunter all the way onto the beach a short distance from the water line.  Nikolaj stood in front of them as he did before.  The animals with no discernable eyes stopped as if they could see an intruder in their world blocking their way.

Nikolaj watched them as they stopped and rested.  He wanted to approach but was cautious about getting within reaching distance of their long limbs.  The alien invertebrates lingered until the first sun had risen to a point where it started to warm the cold air left by the night.  Finally, Nikolaj drew the courage to get close.  Swiftly moving in, he chose a victim, cut through its middle, and quickly backed away as the wound oozed onto the ground.

The other two creatures slithered back into the murky water. It took them both a few seconds to depart.  The other flailed wildly with its twelve arms trying to move but had a harder time than the other two of its kind.  A small crowd gathered around it but kept their distance.  After a few minutes, the creature that they called a Dawdler stopped moving.  Its arms lay flat on the sands stretching two meters in every direction from its central body that had been marred by the blade.

Nikolaj was the first to get closer and touch the alien corpse with his hand.  He severed a tip from one of its arms and looked as it bled onto the ground, but his hunger overcame any notion of the grotesque, and he returned to the cavernous space under Taurus with the meat in his hand.  He held it over the embers in the fire pit with his knife and waited while it slowly cooked.  The meat turned from a gray half-transparent color to white and opaque.  The aroma of edible meat filled the air.  The inviting smell of cooked protein, uncommon in the former spaceship home, caught the attention of everyone in the area.

“Are you going to just eat it?”  Fedora asked in front of the others.  She was older, maybe about forty or fifty Earth years old, and had emerged as a sort of leader among the group.  Eva knew her as the Wardmaster.  It was a position she held for a long time, so even the young adults in the group knew her the same way.

“Why not?” Nikolaj replied.  “I would rather die of poison than starvation.  At least I will go down fighting.”

“Maybe we should examine it first?” Fedora said, but her words fell on deaf ears as Nikolaj swallowed his first bite of meat.

A scientist named Webster chimed in, “Examine with what?” He was a good friend to Nikolaj, the same age at about twenty-five, and had been his Wardmate.  The tone of their exchange with Fedora was no doubt reflective of a past filled with mischievous acts and reprimands.  He was not defiant - the two men were clearly held in high regard by the aging teacher, but she was frustrated nonetheless.

“Always pointing out the negative, aren’t you Webster?  Gambler is only about thirty miles away, and it is nowhere near completely demolished.  There is much we need to recover from the wreckage.”

Webster wanted a bite of the meat, but there was only one mouthful to be had.  Nikolaj shook his head at his friend and held out his arm in a gesture to communicate for him not to advance.  Despite his words, Nikolaj and Webster both knew that the ingestion
was
the examination, and Nikolaj had made himself a sacrificial test subject.

Eva quietly coveted a potential meal while Fedora walked away.  Her old teacher was the only one among the survivors that knew her on the old ship, but even that relationship was weak as she had very little direct dealing with the Wardmaster.  Eva did not have the courage to speak with Nikolaj.  And Webster ignored her.  The only person she could relate to was Quasar, an older clone of the same green-eyed original, the second youngest person there at twenty Earth years old.  Eva missed her few friends, but they were gone.  If only they had used the lander to escape the unexpected crash.  She cried in the dark often but did not want the others to see.

After a day sitting in the sun, the dead Dawdler became rancid.  Others would not crawl onto the beach anytime soon after that, but they continued to appear somewhere up and down the shores of Tar Lake at daybreak.  The survivors hunted them and slowly discovered their nutritional value.  It was not judged by an examination of their proteins, nor by any other kind of analysis, but rather by the way they felt after eating the cooked meat.

Eva drew a false sense of security, a dangerous comfort from the defeat of the Dawdler.  Her people were stronger than the life on planet Beta.  That was her conclusion.

Chapter 29

Nightfall came.  Eva was always glad when it did.  Night provided a relief from the heat built up during a betaday, five times longer than the period of time they used to call a day on Gambler.  Some were still used to sleeping on a set schedule, which was slowly getting unsynchronized from the old cadence, and people slept whenever they felt the urge.

They slept outside early in the betanight because the temperature had been dropping to a comfortable level after the setting of the primary sun.  The surface of Taurus curved up from the ground, and in the cover of its shade, cots were pulled from the ship and scattered around the rock and sand.  The inside of the lander was heating up from the long hot days, and they did not want to waste power cooling the ship.  Instead, they let it cool naturally and used it for shelter in the hours toward the end of the betanights when the temperature outside dropped.

It did not get completely dark with the second sun fixed low in the sky opposite the mountains.  It was small, not much different than a star, but it was very bright and illuminated the area when the big sun went down.  It helped them see the stinging insects that would sometimes crawl out from the forest.  The star was an unneeded aid for Eva, who possessed the ability to see in the dark.

Following the first sleep during the night after the Dawdler was sampled, Eva awoke to see Webster leaving the cover.  His silhouette against the bright night sky was unmistakable with his newly acquired limp, which he got during the first week on the planet from twisting his ankle on the rocks. He could think and react faster than anybody else in the crew thanks to his modified nervous system, a trait enhanced through the generations by the genetic engineers. His heightened senses did not make him immune to accidents nor give him better than average strength and agility.  He made his contributions through his intelligence and creativity, the most valued characteristics during the time their people were in space.

Eva got up to follow. She would draw the audacity from somewhere to speak with him.  She had to.  At some point, she had to be accepted or she would go crazy.  Webster seemed to enjoy wandering around and exploring like she did, so it was logical she might enjoy being around him.  Eva ran out from under Taurus to catch up.  She realized she was probably a pest, and he would have probably preferred to be alone, but she followed anyway.

She caught up to him when he was at the forest edge marking a tree.  He pulled a knife from a sheath on his belt and cut a line in the skin of the trunk.  Very deliberately and neatly, he placed the mark through the others. Eva counted the marks – they seemed to represent the amount of betadays they had been there.  His cut on that occasion was the fifth scar inflicted on that tree.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

Without turning around, Webster recognized the voice as he sighed and said, “Marking the days.  I just want to keep track of how long we are here.  Nobody else is doing it, because they think we have forever, and my girl, I know better… Where is that sister of yours?  Shouldn’t she be watching you?”

“She’s not my sister and I can go where I want,” Eva answered in a tone that attempted to assert her independence.  She knew he was talking about Quasar, which Eva found annoying.  She had seen him watching her.

“Well what is she then?” Webster responded although he knew the answer.  Eva longed for a time when she would not be spoken to as a child.  She perceived Webster was purposely antagonizing her.

“It’s more correct to say she is my clone, but that’s not even true either.  We were cloned from the same original,” Eva replied knowing they had different mothers, so they were not sisters.  Eva didn’t even know her mother, who died before she was old enough to know her. And a father was a foreign concept.  She had no father, neither biological nor foster parent.  Fedora was the closest person she had to a parent, but that sentiment was shared among most of the survivors.  Quasar was actually the closest thing to a relative she had, so
sister
was the most accurate description, but she was determined not to humor Webster with that sentiment.

Webster continued into the forest with Eva following.

“Why are you going in there? Why don’t you wait until day?  What about the insects?”  Eva objected.

“I’m not afraid, Eva.  Something is going to get us sooner or later.  This planet is no good.  Whatever I encounter in here might be a blessing, not a curse.”

His words disturbed her.  For one, she did not want him to get hurt.  For another, she also did not want to get hurt, but she was more inclined to follow him wherever he went than to retreat back to camp.

“What is wrong with this planet?” she asked.

              As he continued walking with his back to her he replied, “Well, actually, it is pretty good.  We have liquid water, a stable orbit around a source of energy, a breathable atmosphere, and nutrients.  But anything short of perfect is not good, and this place is not perfect.  It might have been a one-in-a-million candidate of the planets similar to Earth, but to survive, we needed to find the one-in-a-billion.”

“But we survived so far, right?” She pointed out.

Webster let out a subtle laugh and a smile.  They came to a clearing where some old branches from the surrounding trees were arranged on the ground.  Upon closer inspection, Eva could see they formed a circle.  Apparently he had been there before.  Webster picked up a branch in the middle of the arrangement and changed its position, pointing it in the direction of the setting star observed hours before.

“The days are getting shorter.  I don’t know what season we’re in right now, but I believe we are approaching winter.  The nights will get colder…” he paused and squatted in the middle of his circle and turned to face the other star, the evening sun.  He stopped talking as Eva looked on wanting to hear more.

“Maybe we can migrate.  Are there warmer parts of the planet?” Eva asked.

              “If there are, I don’t know how far away they are, and besides, the late afternoons are too hot in this place already.  If we didn’t have Taurus, we would be in much bigger trouble than we are now.”

At least it had sunlight, Eva thought, a thing none of them had ever seen.  While many had their skin burned from exposure, Eva’s body went through changes in the new environment and seemed to be adapting nicely.  Her skin darkened.  Her pupils dilated down to tiny specks in the daytime light.  Her eyes adjusted to the light in day or night.  Aside from Quasar, she was the only one that could see like that, able to see many forms of radiation. 

Webster escorted Eva back to Taurus.  Maybe she had made a second friend.  She could not tell for sure.

Some of the survivors were sick and having a hard time catching their breath, so they rested and did not move around much.  Eva supposed at the time they would just get better, that illness was temporary, and they were all going to be okay.  Most of the strong like Nikolaj were doing fine.