View from Ararat (13 page)

If only we could find a way of protecting that future from the spectre of the past. A past whose fatal legacy was threatening to consume all that two billion years of evolution and two centuries of struggle had built.

Later I stood on the clifftop, facing east towards the mainland. The wind was cold. I slid my hands inside my jacket and jammed them under my armpits, seeking warmth.

Somewhere out there a war was in progress. Silent and invisible, the enemy was massing for an all-out attack. And we were manning the barricades, without a battle-plan and without a single weapon . . .

13

By the Numbers

Roosevelt Ranges

Eastern Foothills

20/1/303

CINDY'S STORY

If some guy ever offers you a walking tour of the Roosevelt Ranges and the Fringes to their west, threaten him with permanent disfigurement, and look really mean until he goes away.

It's not quite as inhospitable as the equator of Ganymede, but it's not that far off either. I guess the only thing it has going for it is that the air is at least breathable – except at midday, when it gets so hot that it burns your throat when you inhale.

For the first few days after we escaped from the camp we spent every minute looking over our shoulders for signs of pursuit, or watching the skies for the flyers we were sure they'd send after us. But after a while it was clear we were safe.

When you think about it, there was really no way they could have known that we were gone. How could they? No one was about to go into the camp and count heads, and with people dying at the rate of hundreds a day, even infra-red scanners flown over the camp couldn't keep track of the numbers.

Pursuit wasn't a problem for us. Food was. And water. Not shelter, so much. The flatlands are well vegetated, and moving at night and sleeping through the worst of the day's heat in shady stands of Ocra or Capyjou, we managed to make it to the eastern foothills. It took us about four days to get there, and even by that stage Cox's twins, Lexie and Jenna, were showing signs of wilting.

And why not? They were ten years old (twelve in Earth numbers), and for as long as they could remember they'd lived with Cox's mother in a temperature-controlled environment on the southern coast of the Florida republic.

Then their father struck it rich in the garbage belt of Jupiter and the roller-coaster started rolling. One day they go into stasis on the
Pandora
, the next (for them) they wake up in orbit thirty-four light-years away from home.

They hardly have time to blink, when suddenly they're down on the surface of a strange planet, locked away from the rest of humanity like cattle in a stockyard, and suffering in heat that could boil blood. Then, before they can really get used to
that
, they find themselves on the run, with their father, their big brother and sister, and some people they don't really know, walking at night, sheltering by day, permanently hungry and thirsty, and not really sure why they're there, or why everyone in the group is frightened of shadows and angry most of the time.

I think they'd both have been basket cases after our first day on the run if it hadn't been for Tim and Krysten, their older brother and sister. They kept up conversations, invented stupid games, and at times even took turns in carrying the girls.

But more importantly, they were a comforting physical presence when the men were just too concerned with getting on with the journey to spare even a brief touch for the two smallest journeyers.

I never had any brothers or sisters, and being earmarked for Research as soon as the testing identified my potential at age four, I never really had any friends. At least, not the kind you share your ‘inner-mosts' with.

Research is too competitive to open yourself to anyone, and they train you in total independence – academic and personal – from the moment you're chosen.

But Cox's four children were never ‘chosen'. Not for them the position of privilege. Not for them the rarified atmosphere of the New Haven Academy, with its merciless schedules, its dog-eat-dog rivalries. And its buildings full of nitrogen-cooled, light-speed data frames containing every known fact in the entire universe of time and space.

Not for them the pain of being shut out for one small mistake. OK, it wasn't just one, and it definitely wasn't small. And, if we're being perfectly honest, it wasn't really a mistake – except the part that involved being caught.

But that doesn't make the sense of loss any less real. I loved research. I needed it. I need it more than food, more than sex, more than anything. It was the reason I'd agreed to risk doctoring the log on the
Ganymede Horizon
. It wasn't the money in itself, just the thought of scamming enough of it to make it to Deucalion and work again – with my mind.

Cox's children had never known that kind of obsession. They were born average. They were the lucky ones. They had each other, and they were secure in that.

Tim was about my age. Actually he was six months older. I'd celebrated my eighteenth birthday – alone – a couple of weeks before we left Earth. He was eighteen and a half to the day when they closed the cryo-chamber on him. Krys was a year younger, but she acted a whole lot older. She was the surrogate mother – to the twins, to everyone, including Cox himself.

I watched Cox sometimes just sitting there looking at them, drinking them in. He looked so damned proud.

One time he caught me staring. He looked at me for a moment, then back at his sleeping tribe. Then back at me.

Then he just shrugged and smiled. And that one action said it all.

Later that night I lay awake trying to remember my father's smile.

I couldn't even remember his face.

The foothills on the eastern side of the Ranges are peppered with small caves, and we spent the next ten days holed up in one of them. This was partly to regain our strength before attempting the mountains themselves, and partly to build up our supply of food and water.

Nothing grows on the windswept rock of the Roosevelt Ranges, so whatever food we were going to need to keep us alive up there we were going to have to carry with us.

Which is easy to say. But finding food in the Roosevelt foothills isn't exactly like picking apples or punching in a Net-order. Most things that grow or walk on the planet are poisonous, and the rest just taste like they are.

And what else would you expect? We were on a foreign planet, with a unique and different process of evolution and previously unknown enzymes and amino acids and strange triple-helix DNA structures. It was a miracle that things weren't a whole lot
more
different.

But Jovian miners are resourceful people. And besides, I had my punchboard. When he'd burst into my hut that evening, Mac had told me to bring food and leave everything else, but I
knew
he couldn't mean my punchboard. I hadn't been without a punchboard since I was four years old. And it didn't weigh anything much.

Anyway, I'd stuffed it into my backpack along with the little bit of food I'd managed to find, just before we started running – which was pretty fortunate, as things turned out.

I mean, it's fine knowing that not all plants and animals on the planet are poisonous when you've just put yourselves into the irreversible position of having to live ‘off the land'. But unless you have a way of knowing which
particular
plants and animals won't poison you, you're likely to find a quick way of dying while you're doing the taste-test.

That's where the punchboard came in.

Being Research-issue – one of the few things I'd taken with me after they canned me – it had a universal interface. With it, I could ether-link access to any data frame anywhere, including here on Deucalion. Which is exactly what I did.

The first thing I learned was that stands of Capyjou usually occur where the water table is close to the surface. This meant a little digging and our water problem was solved. Of course, you had to boil it before you thought about drinking the stuff, but it meant we weren't about to die of thirst.

The Bio-Research frame gave me detailed breakdowns of toxicity levels and chemical compositions of the different food-sources, while other commentaries listed side effects, allergic responses and relative-nutrition stats. I was even able to get pictures of the plants and animals in question, so we'd know what we were picking or hunting.

Ocra tea we knew about. It was quite common – if expensive – on Earth, and a great source of trace nutrients and B group vitamins – or so the ads claimed. They'd been exporting it to the mother-planet in huge quantities since before the Revolution. But you couldn't live on it.

Capyjou you could live on, at least in the short term, if you absolutely had to. Carbohydrates from the leaves and stems, and protein from the tap-roots, which were a bit like sweet-potatoes in texture and general shapelessness.

There were also a few organic compounds in Capyjou – enzymes, amino acids and the like – that were unknown in food sources on Earth. But all the literature suggested they were harmless zymogens – compounds inactive in humans, hanging around in the system for a while but producing no noticeable effects, at least not in any of the clinical trials.

So it was quite safe to eat the stuff. After all, they'd been using it as a stock-feed on Earth for almost two hundred years, without ill-effects.

Capyjou fuelled your body and didn't actually poison you, but there, any resemblance to real food ended.

We were used to the stomach-turning smell of the plant itself. After all, we'd been forced to use it as shelter on our trip across the flatlands. But it was only when the food we'd managed to bring out of the camp ran out that we were forced to try actually eating it.

According to the information available, the only edible things in that part of the country were Capyjou or Yorum meat. And there were two things in favour of the plant over the animal.

Number one: A plant stands still. You don't have to waste valuable time and energy tracking it down and trying to kill it, before it decides to track you down and try to kill you – which Yorum are actually quite capable of doing.

Number two: According to all independent analysis, Yorum meat is even more vile-tasting than Capyjou. If that's possible. I don't know it for a fact, but I'm willing to take their word for it.

Anything that tastes worse than Capyjou, I don't even want to think about. But it was eat the plant or starve to death – not exactly a great choice. Starving to death is a whole lot worse than just feeling that you want to throw up.

After a few days in the cave it was time to move on.

According to Mac and Cox, the only option was to cross the mountains and find one of the mining communities along the Fringes, where our rock-biting experience might be of use. We could lie low there until we figured out what to do next.

We had no way of knowing what was going on back in the camp. Through the punchboard, I keyed in to Internet and got the latest reports, but it was all stories about how much the government wasn't saying. There was educated guesswork and long-distance telephoto shots of the silent camp, and the ring of Security operatives surrounding it, but no real news.

On the night before we began the climb I couldn't sleep. I'd stood there that afternoon, looking up at the mountains we were going to have to climb and thinking of the girls. It was going to take a super-human effort to get them across to the other side safely, and I knew that it must have been worrying Mac and Cox a whole lot. I think it was part of the reason why we'd stayed as long as we had in the cave.

So I was restless. The moons were hanging just above the peaks, and I stood in the cave entrance looking up at them.

That was when I saw Mac. He was sitting maybe 30 metres from the cave entrance, with his back against a large rock, just staring. Not at the moons or the mountains. Not at anything in particular. Just staring. Out beyond the stars.

It was an old habit. I'd seen him do it inside the mining drone on Ganymede. You couldn't see the stars on Ganymede, of course – the atmosphere obscured everything. But he wasn't really seeing them now.

There was something going on inside him, something that troubled him.

I walked over and sat down beside him. For a moment neither of us spoke. Then he put his hand on my knee and squeezed gently. I looked at him strangely, but I didn't pull away. Mac wasn't a toucher. Not in that way.

He turned his head and looked straight into my eyes for a long time, then he looked back up at the stars, and I waited for what was to come. I could see the rise and fall of his breathing. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Finally he swallowed hard. ‘We're in trouble, kid.'

I waited, but he just sat there staring. It was up to me now. I knew that he needed a question – that he wasn't going to be able to let it out without help. But I didn't know what to ask.

I tried for ‘comforting and positive'. ‘We'll make it, Mac. There have to be passes we can get through. I found the maps on the 'frame. They show . . .'

I trailed off. He was shaking his head slowly.

‘I'm not talking about the mountains, Cind. It's not just about us. It's much . . . bigger.'

He took my hand in his, looked at it for a few seconds, then traced a finger along one of the lines in my palm.

‘Your life-line.' He laughed to himself. ‘A long and prosperous life. People used to actually believe that you could predict things. By the stars, by the lines on your hand. That there were forces you could trust. Order you could count on.'

He wasn't really talking to me. The words were just his thoughts, spoken aloud, like a monologue on one of the virtual drama-sites.

It was so unlike Mac that it scared me.

Then, as if he suddenly remembered I was there, he dropped my hand, stood up, and faced towards the mountains. ‘I have a question for you.'

‘Yes?' I watched his back.

‘Which is better: to do the right thing for all the wrong reasons, or to act with the best of intentions and destroy a world?'

He was waiting for an answer, but I just didn't have one.

‘I don't know what you mean.'

He turned back to face me. ‘You never asked me how I knew.'

‘Knew what?'

‘What was going on in the camp. Why it was time to get out. How I knew what they'd do.'

It was coming. I could sense the change in him. I stood up and reached out to him, placing my hand on his shoulder.