Asimov's Science Fiction 02/01/11 Page 12

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  SHORT STORIES

  PLANET OF THE SEALIES

  Jeff Carlson

  After his last story for us (“A Lovely Little Christmas Fire,” December 2009), Jeff Carlson returns to Asimov’s with a futuristic adventure. Best known for his internationally acclaimed Plague Year novels, Jeff’s short fiction has also appeared in venues such as Writers of the Future XXIII, Fast Forward 2, and the recent Welcome to the Greenhouse anthology from O/R Books. His next novel is Interrupt, a stand-alone thriller out later this year. Readers can find free excerpts, videos, contests, and more on Jeff’s website at www.jverse.com.

  Professor Michaud had set up camp on the northern slope, which was typically upwind of the site. They wore respirators down inside the excavation—sometimes armor, too—and it was a relief not to wear any gear in their off hours. There was some risk of contaminants if the wind shifted or if an eruption surprised their ferrets, but everyone on the team had been given Level IV gene-mods. They could handle small doses of the gases, dusts, and bacteria that regularly belched up from the pits.

  Today the sea wind was thick with the hot, chalk smell of the shore. A woman in orange strode away from the brown prefab camp structures. The land was also brown and the sky, too, was a muddy haze.

  Her name was Joanna Andrea Löw. She stretched out both arms as she walked, orange sleeves ruffling, as if to snare or fight the hard gusts. The blasting wind felt similar to the conflict alive inside her.

  This was a short trail but it was one Joanna took often because there wasn’t anywhere else to go. The eroding shore cliffs were strictly forbidden, the excavation site dangerous for its own reasons, and Joanna was young enough to need to stretch her legs even after a day’s work. Since earning her job, she’d taken to spending much of her free time among the field of non-hazardous artifacts Professor Michaud allowed them to remove as the search continued for the real treasure. They knew the purpose of only a few of these items and made a game of guessing the names of the rest—the 10,000 Pound Paperweight, the Hyperdrive, and, among Joanna’s favorites, the Make-Me-Blind.

  The Make-Me-Blind was probably just a kitchen utensil or mechanic’s device, a saw-edged set of tongs that opened to the exact spacing of a person’s eyes, but the civilization that had made these tools and trinkets was both alien and unmistakably aggressive. Joanna and her line-mates tried to keep things fun during the meticulous, often tedious dig by inventing ghost stories full of conquest, torture, and weird sex.

  She liked the Make-Me-Blind because she could chase her sisters around with it. Most of the other artifacts collected here were impressive hulks they’d lifted in via robot, a Stonehenge of metals and plastics.

  Joanna preferred small and intimate things, not unusual for a crèche-raised clone.

  The wind sang queerly through the crushed alloy pipework of the Hyperdrive, which they assumed had been an industrial pumping mechanism although it did, with some imagination, resemble an old-fashioned reaction engine.

  Joanna rested her fingertips against its bulk, frowning. Then she hurried across the field to a trio of orange bins where the smallest artifacts were kept. From there she continued past to the 10,000 Pound Paperweight. Within a crevice of this deteriorating stonework, Joanna had hidden a tiny, shiny object she called the Diamond.

  Why feel guilty? None of these artifacts were coming back with them. None would be studied or even catalogued. Of the twenty-six members on the team, just four had training in archeology, which they used only as another method of predictive analysis. Their sole interest here, the real prize, was any trace of biological material.

  Joanna didn’t question their mission, but she worried at herself. She was committing deceit and true selfishness, and for what? For nothing. Her so-called Diamond was only a rust-eaten band of iron crushed around a translucent plastic nub. It was garbage—ultimately useless.

  Could the deepening change in her be what the matriarch wanted? Her line-mother must have anticipated the influences of this environment, the effects of separation and competition. Why else the system of individual bonuses for each find?

  “I wonder,” she whispered, holding the Diamond up to catch the murky evening light.

  Joanna felt stronger for her new independence. The senior members of the team were an example of what she might become—accomplished, opinionated, self-reliant.

  But she wanted to be allowed home again.

  “Löw, Löw.” Her implant spoke while she held the Diamond at arm’s length and she brought it in close to her chest, reacting with shame. Then she understood she was still alone and felt a sharper fear at the emergency call. “Full crew to the pits. Löw, Löw. Full crew to the pits.”

  Joanna stepped toward the 10,000 Pound Paperweight and tucked her Diamond away again before running back to camp.

  The ferrets were in defensive mode and altered their hunt pattern as she approached. Worming over the ground, the lithe, furry cyborgs were briefly attracted to the tremors of her footfalls. One lifted its concave face to her as if doubtful.

  Joanna’s own uncertainty rose into a blood scream before her implant spoke again. The hardware they’d threaded through her cerebrum before she left the crèche was a communications device on many levels, helping line-mates maintain emotional balance, but this subtle, mostly subconscious process could also be a handicap. Powerful feelings like fear and pain tended to echo between them. Joanna knew there were many wounded, and she imagined the worst before her line-senior explained: “Quake, there was a minor quake, Michaud’s reporting casualties inside the dig—”

  Joanna hadn’t noticed a tremor, but this coast was riddled with faults. It was constantly settling.

  Eight figures emerged as she reached camp, tall giants in mechanized armor. Katarine raised one steel glove to Joanna as the knot of them pounded by.

  Inside the barracks she found Hel in her underwear, prepping one suit, a second outfit hot with the feeds laid down in order.

  “Jump,” Hel said. “I’ll finish this one.”

  “No.” Joanna shoved her toward the ready armor. If a stronger quake hit, if there were dust or gas eruptions, the suits would be their best protection. Joanna couldn’t bear to see Hel at risk. The two of them were laterals, closer than most, and Hel had already delayed too long because of her.

  Joanna rushed into her armor as their implants spoke again: “We’ve got five hurt on top and two buried. It looks tight. Let’s put our triage by the shed.”

  “I’m up,” Joanna said the instant she was dressed, adding a signature pulse. She moved toward the door. But she’d done a bad job of placing the feed for her left quadriceps. The leg of her suit dragged, and she strained to compensate.

  “Joanna, Hel.” That was Louise, their line-senior. “Work your way around on the west rim—there’s a chance it might be easier to dig through from that side.”

  They bounded away from camp. Joanna stumbled once and Hel came back to help her stand, patting at Joanna’s arm in her fussy way as if it mattered that Joanna’s armor was dirty.

  “What’s wrong?” Hel asked.

  “My left quad’s only 80 percent. I’m okay.”

  They cleared a ravine and two sink holes, but Hel grabbed Joanna before a larger jump. “Wait. Can you hop that far?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Neither of them had approached from the west before. In many places, this rim fell away into the brutal surf. The new perspective heightened Joanna’s mute, urgent dread.

  It was such a strange land, packed into flat steppes, an artificial mountain that had mostly kept its shape even after centuries of quakes and storms. Only brown weeds grew from the brown dirt—a sterile contrast to the greenery and lush flowers of home. This shore had its own allure but it was a terrible beauty, so much like her Diamond, a dead surface concealing wealth beneath.

  Quickly, wordlessly, Joanna and Hel coordinated with the others by grid position and their extensive
database of radar scans. The two girls buried in the cave-in had been working Trench Fifteen, which was among the deepest. Recovery efforts would be difficult no matter what angle they tried.

  “There’s an open rift twenty meters down on my side,” Joanna said. “We might save time going through there.”

  “Let’s anchor and get a probe in.” Hel knelt in a wide, three-point stance, locking her armor as Joanna crouched beside her, aware of an ache in the ligaments of her hip socket. She grabbed Hel’s free arm to better stabilize herself before pushing a wire drill through the surface.

  Even away from the cliffs, this place could be treacherous. Professor Michaud often compared the site to an insect mound, a methodical if crude structure, each layer carefully separated from the next but, inexplicably, containing the same hodgepodge of materials. Some had decayed, leaving hollows. Gas vents and fires further disrupted the sediment.

  The site was a massive garbage dump, vast enough to swallow Joanna’s home colony and six others like it, and her people had discovered ten thousand of these landfills all across Europe, Asia, and North America when they emerged from the ice and tundra of the pole six hundred years ago. Expeditions further south revealed more of the same, a worldwide scarring.

  This dump, like so many along the fallen edge of California, leached poisons into the ocean. Other landfills had been found near freshwater drainages, which was idiotic yet appeared typical of the breeder civilization.

  No one wondered why they were extinct.

  Louise made contact again in a quiet, calming voice. “How’s that rift look?” she asked.

  “Not good, it’s top heavy,” Joanna said, concentrating on guiding the drill. She uplinked her radar to Louise. “Do you want us to come over?”

  “Stay there. Keep searching. I’ve already got twelve people standing back until there’s more room to work.”

  Joanna frowned at the number. Twelve? A quick grid check showed that her line-mates had been joined by the remainder of the site crew, the third shift, who’d been asleep.

  There were three lines cooperating at this dig in what had been equal numbers of ten before a chemical burn killed three Löw and then a viral infection decimated the Suhoza. Replacements, including Hel and Joanna, had brought the total crew back to twenty-six. The line culture could be superstitious about odd numbers, but the Suhoza were still understrength and it was the Löw and the Michaud who alternated the main work details, so it had been a good bet that one of them would be the next to suffer.

  “If I send over two robots,” Louise said, “do you think you can dig into that rift?”

  “Yes,” Joanna said. She felt Hel tense. Her own reaction, excitement, made her strong with adrenaline even though it was followed by guilt. Saving the Michaud girls was no contest. Whoever got to them first wasn’t better than anyone else.

  “Be careful, cubs,” Louise said. “Understood? I just want a second option available if this side doesn’t pan out.”

  The excavation robots were towering, ten-legged spiders, capable of squeezing through narrow holes or extending several legs over a thirty-meter circumference in order to hoist ton-loads of debris. Unlike the ferrets, the spiders weren’t cyborgs. They contained no living flesh whatsoever and rarely earned nicknames or affection.

  Joanna worked her machine relentlessly, blunting its claws, losing four eyes when she pulled upward too fast and a load disintegrated into shrapnel. Hel was more studious, fishing after the smaller junk that Joanna ignored.

  Louise continued to deny them an open link to anyone except herself, shielding them from the Michauds’ grief, but Louise could not completely prevent this misery from ebbing through to Joanna and Hel each time she checked in with either or both of them to monitor their progress.

  The two girls trapped below hadn’t transmitted since the cave-in. Possibly this silence was due to the interference of metals. More likely they were dead.

  At first Joanna paid little attention to the garbage as she angled toward the rift. The loose debris was only a frustration. But as ten minutes became fifteen, then twenty-five, her emotions found new focus. Anger.

  Her home colony wasted nothing, recycling even their urine to maintain the nitrogen levels in their box farms. The line culture was not only genetically poor. For generations they had overcome energy shortages and cold and isolation. The wealth discarded here was staggering. This same crew of twenty-six could have extracted a city’s worth of iron each work-week if transportation costs weren’t so great. They had too few spiders, too little fuel, and there were a thousand kilometers between here and home, which meant the colonies struggled while this wealth decayed.

  It was wrong. It was hateful.

  Their line-mother had taught them to view this immense, upside down grave as a powerful lesson, but over time Joanna had felt that wisdom slowly die in her. To confront such waste day after day was irreconcilable with proper thinking. It was as though an entirely new interior landscape had opened inside her.

  They had all changed. But Joanna was afraid for herself and so much of what she was experiencing.

  She envied the makers of this dump.

  “Careful!” Hel swatted Joanna’s shoulder, overreacting to a slide. They both drew their spiders out. Hel’s machine was pinned for an instant, three legs grinding.

  Joanna shook her head. “Okay, we need to start setting the larger pieces as containment walls.”

  “We need to move further back!” Hel’s anxiety cut deeper than her voice, a cold contrast to Joanna’s determination.

  Joanna resisted when Hel nudged at her again. “No,” she said. “This spot is as solid as we’ve got.” She almost didn’t ask . . . “Are you okay?”

  Louise interrupted on their implants before Hel could answer. “I’m sending over help,” Louise said.

  We’re doing fine, Joanna thought, but she kept silent, trying to hide her possessiveness.

  “This dig is no good,” Hel said. “The upper sediment is manufactured items and the next layer down must have been mostly biodegradable. It’s sinking.”

  “It’s our best bet right now,” Louise said. “We ran into a corrosive spill over here and getting around it will cost us too much time. We’ll start digging from the south, too, but right now you’re the farthest ones in.”

  Joanna and Hel were alone for another six minutes. Their work grew inefficient, uncoordinated, a truth as unsettling to Joanna as the question still turning like a knife in her heart.

  Are you okay?

  Hel’s loss of composure was a weakness and a danger, but eight crew approached before Joanna found the courage to speak, because this was not a physical hurt—because she was afraid Hel might ask her the same.

  It was normal to feel shock, fear, impatience. Joanna was experiencing worse. She felt resentment and mistrust.

  Night came almost in a blink, so unlike the long dusks at the pole. Floodlights preceded the mix of human and spider figures who joined them. The professor herself led the two groups of Michaud and Suhoza. She had been among those injured in the cave-in, suffering chest bruises and a fractured cheekbone, yet she’d foregone medical attention to join the rescue effort.

  Watching her, the pride Joanna felt was soothing. The Michaud were well-made and worthy partners.

  “Your entry reinforcements are uneven,” the professor said, rebuking her, and Joanna only nodded when she might have looked at Hel as if to pass the blame. The professor said, “Why don’t you two rest for—”

  “No.”

  “What? Rest for a minute.”

  “Uh, no, we know this substratum best.”

  “We have your scans.” Professor Michaud walked her machine toward the dig, shrugging four of its legs as well as her own hands in a gesture of dismissal. “Rest.”

  Joanna turned away, glancing up for the stars but finding only cloud cover. What was happening to her? She’d been right to be concerned. These emotions went against the teachings of the line. To be selfish, to
be disobedient, were the hallmarks of breeder thinking, especially in the face of trauma, when a line was meant to close into a circle.

  Louise would know what she was feeling through her implant. At the moment, Joanna’s turmoil might be mistaken as stress. But Louise would know.

  Joanna limped away from the Michaud and was pleased when Hel hurried after her, no matter how she’d been feeling toward her sister. Joanna put one hand on Hel’s arm and was rewarded with a small, brittle smile.

  “I’m not tired, are you?” Joanna asked.

  Hel shook her head.

  Joanna smiled back at her. “Let’s run a wider sweep in case they need more options,” Joanna said.

  “Stay with me,” Hel pleaded.

  “Yes.”

  They leaned close for comfort as they marched their spiders outward in a semi-autonomous stop-and-scan, their visors flickering with radar and thermal displays. Twice Joanna leaned past Hel to watch the Michaud complete the dig, then drop four spiders into the rift.

  “Oh!” Hel flinched and said, “Line-senior?” Her tone was almost embarrassed. “Look at my radar! I’ve located a huge vein of organics.”

  Jealousy pushed through Joanna’s already crowded head, and she hesitated before joining the link to Hel’s spider.

  “Excellent work,” Louise said. “That’s industrial.”

  “It’s, um, I’m estimating two thousand plus,” Hel said, which Joanna thought was conservative. Based on the size of the twisting cubic area highlighted in the scan, Joanna’s own guess exceeded four thousand. Even if the smaller number was accurate, this find would be among their best.

  “What are you doing so far from your dig?” Louise asked, both stern and pleased.

  My idea, Joanna thought. This sweep was my idea.

  “Joanna wanted to make sure we weren’t missing a better recovery route,” Hel said. She was eager to share the bonus, and Joanna clenched her teeth in self-reproach.

  Everyone gathered above the rift as the professor’s team unearthed their missing girls, but in the night, in the rarely moving cross of floodlights, it was easy to find a shadow. Joanna stood in semi-darkness.