Alien Landscapes 1 Read online

  Resigned, Craig said, “Well, that gives me a whole new perspective on my trivial human problems.”

  “Amen,” I said. “I’m turning in.”

  All the next day the trail led along a sinuous arid ridge dotted with surrealistic hoodoos, hardened clay that stuck out from the softer sandstone like a petrified alien army waiting to advance. I used my clicker to snap large files of images, though Craig just stared in peaceful satisfaction, drinking in the details, taking pictures with his mind. “I store the images in my brain,” he’d once told me, “since I’m the only one who really cares about them anyway.” I had to agree. There’s nothing more boring than looking at pictures of someone else’s vacation, no matter what planet it’s on.

  Late in the afternoon, the wind picked up and the sky congealed with ugly gray clouds, and I became uncomfortably aware of how exposed we were on this ridge. Rain and hail struck with the force of Thor’s hammer, stinging my bare arms. I dropped my pack and ducked under one of the hoodoos for shelter. Overhead, sheets of static lightning and blue balls of Saint Elmo’s Fire whipped about.

  I scrambled to get out my electrostatic rain shield, but my hands were already wet, and I fumbled it. An earsplitting clap of thunder was followed by a rumbling boom, and I dropped the shield projector. Naturally, it struck a rock, and the device sparked and fizzled out. “Great.”

  Craig crouched under the inadequate shelter with me, his head covered by his own electrostatic umbrella, a twinkling net that deflected the raindrops and the gravel-sized hail. He shifted it over so I could huddle under the meager protection that had never been designed to cover more than one person. “Here, I’ll tough it out.”

  “You’re getting drenched and bruised!” I said.

  “I’m making a memory.” Craig smiled, shrugging the droplets away. “Isn’t that part of the charm of this back-to-nature stuff?”

  “It’s supposed to be a pleasant sort of misery,” I said. “The kind that makes you appreciate your everyday life a bit more.”

  “Bifrost is going to need to toss some pretty big loads of ‘pleasant misery’ at me.”

  Watching the majestic storm and waiting for the hail to end, we each ate several handfuls of hyper-granola and chased it with some energized water. Then we passed the time chatting.

  Craig was having problems with his current soon-to-be-ex wife Grace, who had filed divorce forms while he was on a long-distance run, making it impossible for him to finish the rebuttal phase in time unless he dropped his cargo and raced back home—which she knew, as did I, that Craig would never do.

  “Grace figured out a new tactic for increasing alimony. She claims that since I’m flitting around between star systems all the time, the time-dilation effect, though small, is still significant. Therefore she has effectively put more time into this marriage than I have. She’s trying to get 1.3 times the standard alimony calculation.”

  “Never heard that one before.” It was just another nail in the coffin of his disastrous year.

  As the storm rumbled and swirled around us, Craig continued to tell me about how all of his previous divorces had gone wrong. I’d lost track, unable to remember which of the women were legally bound wives and which were just long-term live-ins. He never learned to be more wary of the women he hooked up with.

  But we were here on Bifrost, with only a few days to forget about the nonsense of our normal life. I tried to get Craig thinking about good times, positive things.

  We both got a chuckle reminiscing about the previous year’s trip, shooting the Hundred Mile Rapids on Beta Kowalski. No one could survive the legendary whitewater stretch in a traditional kayak or raft, so Craig and I rented armored ballistic projectiles. We both found them uncomfortably similar to coffins with picture windows built into every side. Unable to control our own paths, we simply laid back for the ride, in occasional radio contact, though the thundering rapids drowned out most transmissions as we went over cascades, plunged down giant drop-offs, then shot along the current to the next set of even worse rapids. It had been an adrenaline rush for five hours straight, and we were both so weak and shaky by the time we reached the pickup point that the expedition managers had carted us off for a routine medical check. The recovery facilities and the numerous saloons at the bottom of the cascades proved that we weren’t alone in being stunned by the trip.

  Afterward, Craig and I each had a different look in our eyes. “Most people don’t do that, you know,” I said.

  He nodded. “Most people aren’t crazy.”

  “Most people are boring.”

  When we showed my wife the pictures, she was predictably horrified and made me promise I would never try such an outrageous stunt again. It wasn’t hard to agree, since I didn’t need to shoot the Hundred Mile Rapids a second time. I had already checked that one off the list, and there were other things to see and do. I had them all in my guidebook, The Fifty Most Spectacular Sites in Galactic Sector A. Everybody needs goals.

  The next morning we descended steeply into a swamp, with rivulets of water snaking around dubious-looking tufts of dryer ground. I found it ironic that our discourager fields were effective at keeping large predatory animals away, yet somehow they did nothing to block swarms of annoying skeeters. The small biting insects couldn’t possibly have a natural appetite for Terran-based blood, but that didn’t stop them from biting us.

  The swamp foliage was so dense and the muddy ground so uncertain that we had to keep IR filters over our eyes just to spot the trail beacons, many of which were covered with moss or slimy fungus. I had to unroll the mapfilm and uplink to the surveillance satellites and zoom in on the detailed topography.

  Splashing across the marsh, Craig misjudged a stepping stone and sank in up to his knee. He pulled out his foot, dripping with greenish-black muck so viscous as it crawled off his boot that it seemed alive. Maybe it was.

  Halfway through a thicket, I saw some other hiker’s carelessly discarded food foils, and my face pinched with annoyance. “Can you believe someone would go to all the trouble of coming to Bifrost, then be stupid enough to throw litter on the ground?” I worked my way off the marked trail to clean up after the slob. When I pulled at a polymer strap from a hiking pack, it came out of the muck connected to the gnawed remains of a human femur. Now it dawned on me that this wasn’t merely careless litter.

  “Yeah. I think we’ve found that one-out-of-twelve the ranger was talking about,” Craig said, reading my sober expression. “He wasn’t very successful at the Robinson Crusoe bit.”

  I know it sounds warped, but the only thing I could think of was, “I hope the poor guy got munched on the way back from his hike, so that at least he got to see the Asgaard Bridge.” Sometimes my priorities sound screwy even to me.

  I let the bone drop back into the swamp. “I’d better leave a radio flare so the rangers can come and gather the remains.” I took one of the pulsers from my belt, activated it on non-emergency locator mode, and tossed it into the water. If I remembered right, the terms of our backcountry permits required the hiker or his surviving family members to pay all the costs of such a retrieval operation. Maintaining a wilderness planet is serious business. . . .

  A large fern sprang back and slapped me in the face after Craig pushed into the dryer forest beyond the wet marsh. I wiped slime off my cheeks. We were both tired, but we had to do at least another kilometer. Otherwise, we wouldn’t reach our destination tomorrow, and the whole schedule would fall apart.

  We found an adequate campsite just after dusk. Too tired to talk much, we ate our meals. That night we went to sleep early after looking at our guidebooks again and drooling over the glorious pictures of the Asgaard Bridge—certainly one of the fifty most spectacular sights in Sector A, if not in the whole Galaxy. I couldn’t wait to see it with my own eyes.

  As luck would have it, thick fog had settled into the lowlands. The trail took us into a narrow gorge, where we couldn’t see anything but a gauzy mist that hung like a suffocating pillow. We moved quickly: After days of hiking, our goal was near. We were about to join the very short list of privileged people who had actually been to the Asgaard Bridge. Mere pictures would never be the same as personally experiencing this wonder first-hand.

  We began our long ascent, and once in a while we broke above the low-lying mists and saw outcroppings like islands in a gray-white sea. We climbed toward our destination—the grail. As if by some malicious joke, the clouds thickened even further, making it impossible to see more than a hundred meters in front of us, then fifty, and then twenty. In clear weather, the trail would have been plain, but we had to use the IR cairns just to find our way through the mist.

  “Can’t see a thing,” Craig muttered. “This is not the memory I wanted to make.”

  “We’re not there yet.”

  We kept hoping against hope that the fog would lift by the time we reached the Asgaard Bridge. It was mid-morning, and the sun ought to burn away the fog and leave us with clear skies and a beautiful view. It had to.

  We reached the top of a mesa, then headed toward the edge of the gorge. Both the map and the IR indicators told us that we had reached our ultimate goal. And we could see nothing. Absolutely nothing. Days of hiking, months of preparations, countless permits, enormous expenses—all to get here.

  To see thick fog.

  The claustrophobic air intensified sounds, and we could hear the roar of the lavender river charging through the rocks and cascading into the distant gorge. I squinted, demanding optimism from myself, but I couldn’t discern even a silhouette.

  “The perfect ending to a perfect year.” Craig shook his head. “It defies belief.”

  “You say that every time something like this happens.” Resigned, I opened my pack, removing a snack and som
e juice. “Might as well have lunch.”

  Troubled and sulking, he tossed pebbles into the unseen chasm, while I opened the map and the guidebook, looked at the image of the Asgaard Bridge again, and tried to calculate just how long we could wait there. This weather couldn’t last forever, but it could last longer than we had. We both remembered the ranger’s admonition that he wouldn’t wait for us—and I couldn’t stop thinking of the skeleton in the swamp.

  “Three hours is all I’m comfortable with. I sure don’t want to miss the pickup shuttle. I’ve got a performance review and a raise justification when I get back to work.”

  “Yeah. And I’ve got my alimony hearing.” Craig hurled another rock over the edge. “Sure wouldn’t want to miss that.”

  I started figuring out how fast I could make my way back at top speed, how many extra kilometers I could put on my feet each day, but I doubted Craig could keep up.

  On the other hand, I really wanted to see the Asgaard Bridge.

  After three hours of growing frustration, the gray mist grew whiter and brighter, thinning. I finished packing up, reluctant to leave but watching my chronometer. We had never turned back before. Never. But our time was up.

  Feeling as if a neutron star were weighing me down, I hefted my pack. “That’s it.” Many other choice words were running through my mind.

  Craig didn’t move to pick up his pack, just sat staring into the opaque fog. “You go ahead.”

  “You’ll never catch up.” My pace was always faster than his.

  “I don’t have to.” He finally turned to me. I’d never seen such a bleak yet simultaneously peaceful expression on his face. “I’m not going. I’m staying here.”

  What could I say to that? “You’re crazy! Come on.”

  “I mean it. What do I have to go back for? I’d rather go native here. I’ve got my equipment, supplies, guidebooks.” The way he rattled off his justifications, I could tell Craig had been thinking about this for a long time—maybe even before the ranger had dropped us off. “The life forms are compatible, so I can hunt and forage. I can build myself a cabin. I’ll be Robinson Crusoe, living off the land. Peace. Solitude. Adventure. You of all people should understand that, Steve.”

  “I understand it as a game, a break, a vacation. Not everyday life.” Craig’s expression wavered. I was articulating his own doubts. “Sure, we like doing this primitive thing every year, mainly because it makes our regular lives tolerable by comparison. The only reason we have fun getting miserable is because we know we’re going back to reality when it’s over. It gives us an appreciation for the simple pleasures.”

  “I don’t have any simple pleasures left,” he said. “I’ve got nothing. No job, no money, no ship, no wife. Tell the ranger that a monster ate me, or that I fell off a cliff. Make up a good story.”

  I could only stare at him. “You’ll regret it in a week, Craig. A month at most. And nobody’ll be there to throw you a lifeline.”

  “No other options that I can see. And I sure don’t want to sign up for a bioresearch project. I like camping, roughing it, surviving by my own hands—” He stopped in mid-sentence and jumped to his feet, grinning. “You better take a look, Buddy! Get ready to hear a chorus of angels.”

  And he was right. The mist parted, and golden sunbeams stabbed down enough to impress even the most jaded photographer. Suddenly, there was the Asgaard Bridge, an impossibly delicate and poignant sliver of rock stretched across a gorge as deep and as sharp as if a cosmic scalpel had sliced the flesh of the sandstone all the way down to the bone. Directly beneath the arch flowed a foaming cascade of pink quicksilver, a perfect strand of water, pouring from between walls of natural diamondplate crystal. Showers of rainbows filled the air all around us. It was more stunning than anything I had ever seen, more breathtaking than any image in any guidebook. High spires of quartz-laced rock rose like crystalline spears on either side of the gorge, dazzling in the light.

  Putting aside the crisis for a moment, Craig and I raised hands, and gave each other a high-five. This was exactly what we’d come out here for. “By far the best one on the whole list!” He said that every time.

  I pounced. “And if you stay here, who am I going to see the rest of them with?” I pulled the guidebook from my pack. The Fifty Most Spectacular Sights in Galactic Sector A. “We’ve only done seventeen, Craig—that leaves thirty-three more to go!”

  He wavered, looking at the Asgaard Bridge, then back at the open book. Just to prod him, as the final part of the ritual, I found the Bifrost page and marked a big fat X on the checklist box. Another one down.

  “I really wanted to see the singing cliffs of Golhem,” he admitted. “And the refractory eclipses of Tarawna.”

  “Don’t forget the fungus reefs and phosphor labyrinths on Kendrick Five-A. I was thinking of a way we could combine two separate checklist locations into a single vacation for next year. We can bag all fifty, Craig. But not if you’re stuck here.”

  He looked as if his engines and life-support systems had all just shut down. I knew him well enough to read a flicker of doubt in his expression. Even he hadn’t been so sure about his decision. “But what else can I do? This seemed like a decent way—make my own home, settle a plot of land. . . . I could pull it off. I know I could.”

  I had an idea. “If you’re going to do that, then why not sign up for one of the terraform colonies instead? Same idea, but you’ll get a huge financial incentive and gain title to half a continent. Pick yourself a hardworking colonist wife and form a dynasty.”

  He scratched his rumpled and sweaty hair. “Terraformers? I always heard that was miserable, no amenities, living with minimal resources . . . no amenities . . .” His words slowed.

  “And exactly how is that different from turning Robinson Crusoe here?”

  He remained silent. Then, like the mists evaporating to give us a view of the Asgaard Bridge, an uncertain smile broke through on his face. “The difference is, if I become a land baron, I can foot the bill for our next expedition.”

  Though I was anxious to start back, I handed Craig the guidebook and let him spend a few minutes mulling over the images. The Fifty Most Spectacular Sights in Galactic Sector A. I set the hook: “You know, there are books like that for Sectors B and C, too.”

  Craig shouldered his pack and looked at the Asgaard Bridge one last time before returning the guidebook. Shaken and still uncertain, he took the lead with a new spring in his step. “We’ll have plenty to do for years to come, Steve—if you and I make the time to go to these planets.”

  “We will. As long as we get back to the shuttle in time.”

  The End

  FONDEST OF MEMORIES

  Several years after a painful marriage breakup in my twenties, I discovered that, over time, my subconscious had been erasing many of the bad parts of the relationship and tinting the fond memories with a rosy glow.

  It seems that everyone tends to edit their memories of lost loved ones, emphasizing the admirable qualities and the good times to heroic proportions, while obliviously erasing the unpleasant aspects.

  If a character had the chance to bring his lost wife back, through the miracles of cloning and memory transference, would he be satisfied with the real person…or would he choose to make a few changes to match his altered memory of her?

  What would you do?

  The stars in the bowshock are blueshifted as the ship soars onward. With each passing moment, the difference between my age and Erica’s becomes smaller. Her newborn/reborn body, still on Earth, continues its second life as I grow farther away in distance, but closer in time.

  I lean back in the comfortable Captain’s lounge. The ship runs by itself, and I am its lone crewmember. Time passes much swifter for me, thanks to relativistic effects. But it still seems like an eternity until I can return home, until I can have Erica back the way she was.