Alien Landscapes 1 Read online

  Kevin J. Anderson’s

  Alien Landscapes

  Volume 1

  Alien Landscapes, Volume 1

  Kevin J. Anderson

  Four science fiction tales from the mind of Kevin J. Anderson, each with a short introduction by the author. Includes: “Landscapes,” “Fondest of Memories,” “Controlled Experiments,” and “Human, Martian—One, Two, Three.”

  Copyright 2011 WordFire, Inc.

  Mindawn edition 2011

  WordFire Press

  www.wordfire.com

  “Landscapes” copyright 2006 WordFire, Inc., originally published in Millennium, edited by Russell Davis & Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, 2006

  “Fondest of Memories” copyright 1991 WordFire, Inc., originally published in Full Spectrum 3, edited by Lou Aronica, Amy Stout, and Betsy Mitchell, Doubleday Foundation 1991

  “Controlled Experiments” copyright 1994 by WordFire, Inc. First published in Rat Tales, edited by Jon Gustafson, Pulphouse Publishing, 1994

  “Human, Martian—One, Two, Three” copyright 1993 WordFire, Inc. Originally published in Full Spectrum 4, edited by Lou Aronica, Amy Stout, & Betsy Mitchell, Bantam Books, 1993

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ISBN: 978-1-61475-000-0

  Electronic Version by Baen Books

  www.baen.com

  LANDSCAPES

  The outdoors has always been a fundamental part of my inspiration and my writing process. I live in the Rocky Mountains and spend a great deal of my time hiking—and writing. I wander for miles, voice recorder in hand, dictating chapter after chapter, or just mulling over a plotline or characters.

  This short story is my effort to show readers how experiencing the breathtaking beauty of planet Earth has opened up creative windows for me. It’s my way to try and explain my obsession for hiking in the rugged wilderness to the couch potatoes who “don’t get it.”

  By the time our clunky shuttle finished two weeks in roundabout transit to the “designated wilderness” planet of Bifrost, Craig and I were more than ready to stretch our legs on the trails of a new alien world. I just hoped we weren’t too out of shape for vigorous trekking.

  The uniformed ranger who piloted us wasn’t altogether happy with his chauffeur duties, but his gruff answers to our many questions could not diminish my exuberance. We were two hard-working guys, looking forward to having the peace and solitude of an entire world to ourselves, and determined to take the long, risky hike to see one of the greatest sights in the Galaxy. With humanity spreading across practically every habitable world, it was nearly impossible to get away from it all. Yet time and again we managed it.

  Craig had filled out the sheaf of required forms, and I had paid all of the fees. We were not just tourists of the “pull over, look, then drive on” variety. We were authorized to be here on Bifrost. We had the best modern backpacking equipment, semisentient adventure clothing, and camp supplies—not to mention embarrassingly detailed maps. These expeditions had become an annual ritual for us.

  Scenery. Solitude. Adventure. This was going to be heaven.

  To minimize the impact of visitors on the environment, our ship touched down in a meadow, the single authorized landing zone for official vehicles. When the shuttle’s hatch opened, Craig and I stuffed the appropriate allergen filters into our noses, then took deep breaths of the clean alien air. Ready to go.

  “I have been counting down the nanoseconds until today,” Craig said. “Oh, I was looking forward to this.” He had looked tired and a little withdrawn during the long trip, but now he seemed to come alive again. Though he spends most of his life inside an artificially lit starship cabin, Hawaiian genes from somewhere back in Craig’s bloodline endowed him with honey-tan skin, deep-brown eyes, and blue-black hair. I, on the other hand, am freckled and pale as protoplasm; despite undergoing melanin treatments and applying sunfilms, I’d probably burn beet red before the end of the trek.

  The ranger unloaded our packs from the shuttle’s cargo bin. Craig and I hoisted the heavy loads onto our shoulders, carefully adjusted the straps and clamps for balance, and double-checked each other’s equipment as if we were orbital construction workers suiting up for a spacewalk.

  For us, no first-person-tourist simulations would do: no 3-D images of scenery, no implanted memories of the perfect vacation. This was the real thing. We were going to be entirely and blissfully alone in the wilderness of Bifrost. Making a memory.

  “You’ve got seven days,” the ranger said. “Make sure you’re back in time, or I’m gone.”

  Craig turned his wide face to the sky. “If you don’t see us in a week, maybe we don’t want to go back!”

  “Uh-huh.” The ranger expressed an encyclopedia of skepticism in those two syllables.

  “How often do you really lose people out here?” I asked him.

  “About one in twelve miss the scheduled pickup and are never found.”

  “Maybe they decided to turn Robinson Crusoe,” Craig suggested.

  “Probably got eaten.” The ranger shrugged. “With budget cuts, the Planetary Wilderness Bureau can’t afford to go looking for everybody. It’s all in the waiver you signed.”

  “We can handle ourselves,” I said. “We do a wilderness trip every year. Even if we get lost, we know how to find our way back.”

  The ranger stared at us with a grim frown, convinced this would be the last time anyone would ever see us alive. I see that look on my wife’s face every time I leave on one of my outdoorsy expeditions with Craig. She never believes me when I promise to be careful, though I have survived every adventure relatively unscathed. So far.

  Craig grabbed his walking stick and tossed the other one to me. “Come on, Steve, we’d better start relaxing as fast as we can. Only seven days to cure a year’s worth of headaches.”

  We activated the staffs, which would help us navigate and could also act as cattle-prod defenses if we were harassed by wild animals—though we’d face severe fines and time on a penal planet if we dared to hurt any endangered alien species.

  “Right,” I said. “Asgaard awaits.”

  Bifrost vegetation had more blues and oranges than a typical chlorophyll-based ecosystem. We passed between scaly ferns and ethereal lichentrees that looked like upside-down waterfalls, and got a view of an ugly swatch of clear-cut ground where loggers had managed to chop down everything before strict preservation regulations had been passed. Now, gray-white stumps thrust up from the soil like razor stubble on a giant’s face.

  Neither Craig nor I are foaming-at-the-mouth environmentalists, but when you’re utterly alone on a wilderness planet, it changes your perspective, clears your head. The scars left by human greed or carelessness tend to look like a big steaming pile of dog shit right in the middle of a playground—our playground for the next week.

  “I’m glad I never had to haul freight for lumberjockeys or stripminers.” Craig scowled, taking the environmental damage as a personal affront. “In a beautiful place like this, what the hell were they thinking?”

  “I didn’t think the company gave you any choice about the cargoes you carry,” I said.

  “Screw the company—they’ve done it to me enough times. Gotta take a stand once in a while.” Frowning, he stumped off, as if turning his back on the problems of his real life. “I came here to get away from all that.”

  Craig is a long-distance cargo hauler who flies a company-owned transport ship around five systems, picking up percentages along the way. He has always dreamed of buying his ship from the company and becoming an independent hauler—and he’s gotten close—though recent months had brought a series of setbacks. I didn’t know the details, but I would probably hear plenty during the long trek.

  At some point each year Craig and I need to get away, escape our jobs and civilized home lives, no matter how much it costs or how far away we have to go. Forget spas and empathic massages, nightlife and interactive entertainment experiences. Sometimes a guy just wants to get sweaty, be miserable, sleep in an uncomfortable tent, eat bad-tasting food, get lost, and then find the way back again, ready to face another year of reality.

  Before long the faint path descended toward the distinctive rushing-wind sound of a wide creek. We picked our way over boulders toward the cascade. Wiping perspiration off his brow, Craig climbed up onto a squarish talus slab and shook his head. “This is a trail?”

  “It’s a route.” I flipped the filter over my right eye and turned it on so I could see the infrared cairns, little beacons invisible to the naked eye—and presumably to the Bifrost wildlife as well—that marked the trail without defacing the nearly pristine wilderness.

  A ribbon of foamy lavender water etched its way through pock-marked stone. Some sort of indigenous algae gave the stream the peculiar tint that in itself served as a reminder not to drink the water without treating it first
. In a narrow spot over the creek, three wobbly looking lichentree logs had been knocked over to form a corduroy bridge.

  I gingerly started across, looking down into the angry cascade. Although none of the guidebooks had mentioned the presence of aquatic carnivores on Bifrost, the very idea made me scuttle quickly to the other side. Craig paused, bent over, and ceremoniously spat a glob of phlegm into the water. Although he’s four years older than me, being out in the wilderness always seems to transform him into a little kid.

  Once we were over the bridge, I let my eyes move back and forth, tracing the discouraging zigzag pattern of steep switchbacks up the other side of the canyon wall. When I groaned in dismay, Craig reminded me, “We do this for fun, remember? Asgaard awaits.”

  “Yeah, yeah, Asgaard awaits. It’s sure better than sitting in my environmentally controlled cubicle.”

  I had long suspected that Craig envied my stable job with its regular salary, though he assured me he’d rather be footloose, traveling from system to system, than stuck at a desk. For most of the year I work sealed in a cubicle chamber surrounded by screens and interfaces, exploring all manner of networks, following faint data trails. I’m a specialist in tracking certain violations in the business world, a hunter hired by clients to scan the labyrinth of entertainment loops, advertising, and news stories for unauthorized use of someone else’s intellectual property. In most cases the perpetrators are too naïve or stupid to be a real threat. Still, just because they’re idiots doesn’t mean they can’t cause disasters. I’m paid to avert disaster. It’s a subtle job, and I’m good at it.

  Even so, I spend much of my time dreaming of Getting Away From It All, while looking at the images in my Fifty Most Spectacular Sites guidebook. Craig does the same on his long-distance hauls. And now that we were on Bifrost, we intended to make the most of our limited time here, and make a year’s worth of memories along the way.

  Soon after we began the climb, with my thighs were hauling every gram of mass against Bifrost’s gravity, I found myself regretting all of the supplies I had put into my pack. I reconsidered each item from a new angle: Why should I require a first-aid kit, if I was careful enough? Would I actually miss my sanitation amenities if I left them behind on the trail? And did I really need to eat every day? Besides, the ecosystem and indigenous species here were compatible with our biochemistry, so we could just live off the land, despite the potential fines. How would the rangers ever know?

  Unfortunately for my weary legs, my ingrained commitment to averting disasters brought me to my senses, and we plodded onward and upward. After two switchbacks, we rested ten minutes, then staggered up two more. By early afternoon we climbed over the canyon rim and were greeted by the glorious sight of a thin, cool stream running across the mesa top. We bounded toward it and stopped on the bank to unlace boots, strip off self-cleaning socks, and dunk our feet into the frigid water.

  Craig let out a long “Ahhhh!”, put his hands behind him, and stared up into the sky where vulture-sized butterflies drifted about on the breezes. There’s nothing like the sheer delight of a simple pleasure when you’re tired and dirty. “This is the sort of experience wives just don’t understand,” he said.

  “Some wives do,” I said.

  “None of mine ever have,” Craig said, and a shadow crossed his face. I thought he was about to say something more, but he yelped and yanked his feet out of the water. Several small scallop-mouthed bivalves clung to his bare toes and ankles, nipping at the flesh.

  In the stream I saw a swarm of these small nibblers approaching my own exposed flesh and pulled my feet out of the water just in time. Inspecting his toes, Craig found only a pinch mark, no broken skin.

  “We’re making a memory,” I reminded him—a phrase that had become a private joke between us when we ran into something unexpected.

  He chuckled to himself as he pulled his socks back onto his moist feet and relaced his boots. I understood what he was thinking: After waiting so long and working so hard to get to Bifrost, we weren’t about to let anything ruin our trip. “Rest stop’s over.”

  On backpacking trips, I prefer to put on an extra kilometer or two the first day, when my energy is greatest. Craig has the opposite philosophy, not wanting to burn himself out too soon, so he likes to break off early. Therefore, we compromised and called a halt exactly where we had decided to stop during the months of planning for the trip.

  In a pleasant clearing surrounded by huge blue ferns, we unshouldered our burdens, activated the self-erecting tent systems, strung up phosphors for light, and turned on the discourager beacons to drive away any nocturnal predators. Since regulations prohibit real campfires, we settled for a high-resolution hologram of crackling flames and rough logs. I’d considered bringing a can of aerosol woodsmoke, but discarded it when paring down the weight of my pack.

  Craig selected a self-heating gloppy concoction of noodles and sauce while I, in a show of macho fortitude, intentionally chose a Spampak. He looked at me with a frown. “You’re crazy. I’d rather eat indigenous invertebrates.”

  “On the trail is the only place this stuff tastes good.” I proceeded to eat my meal with much lip-smacking.

  We sat outside in the growing darkness under the camp lights and talked. When you’re hiking all day, you don’t have much extra breath for conversation, so you can let your thoughts wander, clear your head, work out personal problems and questions or, better yet, just think about nothing. That’s a luxury most people in the frenetic civilized world with families and careers and daily schedule grids don’t have.

  “I wish my life could be like this all the time,” Craig said with a sigh.

  “You’d miss the amenities of civilization. Eventually.”

  He gave an eloquent shrug. “But there are plenty of things I wouldn’t miss at all.” He leaned closer to the campfire image. “What a year! I don’t know how I’m ever going to dig out from under the crap, Steve. Maybe it’s impossible.”

  I waited. Craig didn’t need me to ask questions. He’d tell me what he wanted to tell me.

  “First, I lost a huge account. A shipment of extremely delicate—and extremely valuable—skreel embryos hatched prematurely while my ship was under heavy acceleration, killing every one of them. In the wake of that disaster, my transspace insurance carrier dropped me.”

  “Without insurance, how will you—”

  “Then, before I could get even probationary coverage, I misaligned my ship in a spacedock on Klamath Station—and that caused damage totaling just about my entire net worth.”

  “Are you going to have to declare bankruptcy?”

  From the dark forest came the sound of crashing trees, a loud roar, and a frightened-sounding trumpet as two large animals collided with each other. Craig listened for a minute, then with utter faith in our discourager field, continued, “The company’s already planning to sever my contract, and if I declare bankruptcy, I’ll lose my ship and any chance at a livelihood. At that point, my options narrow down to submitting myself for scientific research or volunteering for hard labor on a terraform colony.”

  “I hear terraformers get paid well. At least that’s a possibility.”

  “And where could I spend the credits on a raw world?”

  I groaned in commiseration. No wonder he needed to get away. “Trust me, someday when it’s all over, this will seem funny.”

  “I don’t think so, Steve. It’s hard to imagine.”

  I might have tried to cheer him up, but then the large indigenous animals—any guidebook would have called them “monsters”—lumbered into view. One, an elephant-sized panther, ripped into a house-sized spiny ungulate that looked like a cross between a porcupine and a woolly mammoth. The ungulate tried to duck into a defensive posture, but the panther-thing slipped under its guard.

  They snorted and snarled. Spittle and blood flew. Lichentrees crashed into splinters. The porcupine creature raked a spine down the predator’s flank, but the beast didn’t seem to notice. The ungulate fled crashing away from our campsite. Without so much as a look at us, the panther sprang after it.