The Stone Gods

  Spike paused a moment. ‘Sulphur is a rare element, the ninth most abundant in the universe, and only 0.06 per cent of this planet’s crust. Let’s suppose that a twenty-kilometre-wide asteroid might strike here once in, say, a hundred million years on past evidence of asteroid collision, and that its hit-rate on a sulphur-zone like this might be one in twenty. If that is so, then the chances of an asteroid this size hitting this planet, right here, would be a hundred million multiplied by twenty – so, once in two billion years.’

  ‘Two billion years?’

  She nodded.

  Handsome ran his hands through his hair. ‘But what do you bet that coincidence will feel like a better explanation than the thought that someone might have been involved in making human life possible here?’

  ‘Any civilization will think as we did – that they are the first and the only.’

  ‘Wait till they find the remains of Orbus – but, then, nobody believes me about Planet White, so why will anyone believe it about Planet Red? Orbus will disappear into space history, light years away.’

  ‘It might be possible for you to survive,’ said Spike.

  Handsome looked at her. ‘What do you suggest?’

  ‘Take the Landpods and travel to the colony. There are sixty of them there. They have a food depot as well as crops they are farming. They have strong-built shelters, and more than they need, because you were bringing others on this trip until the Central Power decided otherwise. Your best chance is together – and the Central Power knows where the colony is so there is a landing-place there. If they return, it is likely that is where they will begin.’

  ‘It’s a long way,’ said Handsome. ‘We may not make it in time.’

  ‘I will stay here, and keep trying to make a connection with Orbus. I will contact you daily.’

  ‘Stay here? On the Ship? We’re going as a crew or we’re not going at all.’

  ‘The one thing I need to survive is sunlight. If I come with you, you will have to support me artificially using solar cells. You don’t have the energy to spare. Go without me, and go now.’

  Handsome didn’t speak. Then he said, ‘This is my fault.’

  ‘You couldn’t predict it – and neither could I. I did the calculations, they were wrong. They were wrong because life cannot be calculated. That’s the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation – it is part of the equation.’

  ‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’ said Handsome. ‘I wish …’

  ‘What do you wish?’ said Spike.

  ‘That we had landed here, you and I, and begun again with nothing but an axe and a rope and a fire … and the sun.’

  The new world – El Dorado, Atlantis, the Gold Coast, Newfoundland, Plymouth Rock, Rapanaui, Utopia, Planet Blue. Chanc’d upon, spied through a glass darkly, drunken stories strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found …

  ‘If you are going to go,’ said Spike, ‘you should go now.’

  Hurry, lifting, loading, joking, worry, packing, stacking, quiet, team-work, hand to hand, catch your eye, smile, it will be all right, look we’re doing something, busy, careful, don’t worry, tools, clothes, last man in, shut the hatch, drop down, rev up, lights, power, go. Go?

  Spike was throwing the last of the gear into the Land-pod. Handsome wouldn’t speak to her. She went over to him and leaned against him. He sighed, and put his arms round her.

  ‘A king had three planets,’ he said, ‘Planet White, Planet Red and Planet Blue. He gave Planet White to his eldest son, but when his son had farmed the land and spent the gold, he sold the planet to the devil to pay for one last party.

  ‘The King then gave Planet Red to his youngest son, but when his son had mined the minerals and chopped down all the trees, he called the devil, because he needed to raise the cash to buy a car.

  ‘The King then gave Planet Blue to his daughter, because he loved her more than the Universe itself. What happened next is another story.’

  ‘Robo sapiens,’ said Spike. ‘A life-form that will have to wait even longer than humans to be seen again.’

  ‘It’s the captain who is supposed to go down with his ship.’

  ‘I’ve got plenty to read.’

  ‘Poetry didn’t save us, did it?’

  ‘Not once, but many times.’

  Handsome smiled. ‘You think so?’

  ‘It was never death you feared: It was emptiness.’

  Handsome nodded. ‘That’s because there’s no such thing as empty space. Only humans are empty.’

  ‘Not all of them.’

  ‘And not all of them are humans.’

  He kissed her and half-turned to leave. ‘Spike, when I come back …’

  ‘Go,’ she said. ‘Go now.’

  Pink McMurphy was wearing a thermal combat suit and carrying cooking equipment. ‘We’ll make it,’ she said to me, ‘and with that robot out of the way, who knows what will happen? Arctic romance.’

  ‘Pink, this is what will happen – it’s happening. We’re in trouble.’

  ‘I know that, Billie, and don’t you think I went to my cabin and cried and screamed and panicked my heart out? And after that, I thought, Pink, you can do this. And if I die, at least I’ll die young and beautiful – excessive climates are very bad for the skin. I bet you’re glad you Fixed now.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘You what?’

  ‘It was political. I didn’t Fix.’

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘My chip says G-30. I’m forty this year.’

  ‘Y’know, at least that shows you’re human.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Women always lie about their age.’

  She smiled and punched me, balancing her cooking gear, looking and acting much better than I was feeling. Who could have said that Pink would cope and Billie would not?

  I was waiting to take my place in the Landpod.

  Spike came forward and put her arms round me. ‘One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.’

  The Landpod began to move slowly across the muddied, trampled undergrowth. Spike was standing quite still in the dust-filled air. We would all need masks to breathe once we left the range of the ship’s air filters. Rufus had his head on Handsome’s knee, and Handsome was telling him some story or other about a dog called Laika who was once blasted into space.

  ‘Look after Rufus,’ I said suddenly, and before Handsome could answer, before anyone could debate it, I had slipped out of the back of the pod, and I was running through the thick air to the clear place where she stood.

  Here is a moment in time, and my choices have been no stranger than millions before me, displaced by wars or conscience, leaving the known for the unknown, hesitating, fearing, then finding themselves already on the journey, footprint and memory each imprinting the trail: what you had, what you lost, what you found, no matter how difficult or impossible, the moment when time became a bridge and you crossed it.

  We planned to stay on the Ship, where Spike had abundant energy, and where we were safe. I was optimistic, in that morning-of-the-execution way when, quietly reading a book, you look up to find the hangman waiting, and go with him, feeling every final step with the intensity of new life. The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

  Outside the Ship, the noises grew more desperate and more terrified. In the darkening filthy air, the creatures whose world we had interrupted sought the sun, rearing their heads towards the sky, bellowing and crying through this fading light.

  It was getting colder and darker every day.

  Creatures thrashed against the Ship, battering it with swinging necks and iron jaws, using it as a l
anding-place. Only the ground lights kept them away, but the ground lights used power, which we had to conserve.

  One night, I think it was night, though we had assassinated any difference between day and night, I heard scratching in the hold.

  I thought something might be making its way into the damaged hull, so I took a weapon and a glare-torch, and went down there to our abandoned gear and supplies.

  Yes, there was something. Something had punctured the already damaged hull-side. I could hear a chewing noise. Whatever I was going to find, I wouldn’t recognize it, and it might be very big.

  Forcing myself, I turned the glare-torch to the area where the noise was coming from. The chewing stopped, and bolting across the floor, away from the arc of light, ran a creature about the size of an Alsatian dog, but stockier, and with very short legs and three horns. It was so comical, and I was so relieved not to be confronted by a pair of jaws the size of a truck and just as fast, that I laughed.

  The creature stopped and looked at me. This was not a sound or a shape it had ever met before: a thing on two legs making bird-like noises.

  I dimmed the glare-torch and stepped forward. The Three Horn immediately hid behind a box.

  All right, I thought. Let’s feed you and see what happens.

  What happened was that we found a playful and unexpected companion. Spike took a DNA swab and analysed the creature as a kind of hog-hippo hybrid, probably less than a year old.

  ‘He doesn’t know what he is,’ she said, patting him, ‘and neither does Nature. Everything on Planet Blue is at the experimental stage. All these life-forms will evolve and alter. Almost all will disappear to make way for something better adapted.’

  ‘Our new ice age is going to change things, that’s for sure. I can’t believe that we’ve come here and done this.’

  ‘Nature will work with what we have done,’ said Spike. ‘This planet is viable, and even a few humans can’t stop that.’

  She seemed quiet, subdued. I forget all the time that she’s a robot, but what’s a robot? A moving lump of metal. In this case an intelligent, ultra-sensitive moving lump of metal. What’s a human? A moving lump of flesh, in most cases not intelligent or remotely sensitive.

  ‘Are things getting worse or better out there?’ I asked, as Spike sat over the computer systems.

  ‘Worse. There has been no immediate corrective – no hurricane or rainstorm. And I can’t link to Orbus Central Command. I have had a message from Handsome – they are making progress and they have not been attacked.’

  ‘What should we do?’ I said.

  ‘Sleep,’ said Spike. ‘I need to conserve power.’

  I lay beside Spike and thought how strange it was to lie beside a living thing that did not breathe. There was no rise and fall, no small sighs, no intake of air, no movement of the lips or slight flex of the nostrils. But she was alive, reinterpreting the meaning of what life is, which is, I suppose, what we have done since life began.

  Thinking like this, and in strange half-dreams, I woke up, bolt upright, suffocating. The air system was failing. Spike threw me an oxygen mask and took a reading.

  ‘To reinstate the system would use half of our remaining power. I would rather fill the travel power packs and leave. If we ever come back to the Ship, we will need something to come back to.’

  She told me what to pack, and to wear the thermal gear. While I was getting ready, Spike had failed again to send any signal that might reach Orbus. Now she was coding something different – for the future, whenever that would be. ‘A random repeat, bouncing off the moon. One day, perhaps, maybe, when a receiver is pointing in the right direction, someone will pick this up. Someone, somewhere, when there is life like ours.’

  Life like ours.

  We took only the most useful items – tools, torches, a laser-saw, protein mix, compass and radio equipment, lighter for a fire, sleeping-bags with canopy hoods to keep the snow off our faces, a medicine kit that included bandages, sedative injections and lethal injections. Spike strapped herself with power packs, and then, as we were ready to leave, she threw me Handsome’s copy of Captain Cook’s Journals, and took down the copy he had given to her of John Donne’s poems.

  She is all States, all Princes I, Nothing else is …

  We left the Ship through the lower hatch and dropped into the murky, swirling forest, the Three Horn at our heels. I wanted to speak but Spike was shaking her head. She seemed to know the direction we should take, and we set off through the cooling undergrowth, now soaked with moisture.

  There was a waterfall in the distance; deafening torrents of hydro-energy poured down a jagged black cliff. Spike motioned to me to go behind the fall. The air was clean. I took off my mask.

  ‘We have to get higher, much higher,’ she said, ‘so that you will be able to breathe. Eat and drink here and we’ll go on.’

  ‘The Three Horn is struggling,’ I said, and he was, panting, eyes watering, in the acid air.

  Spike went to him, injected him quickly and he keeled over. Then she slipped an oxygen spur over his face, picked him up and slung him across her shoulders like a sheep. It was impressive. ‘His breathing is shallower now he’s unconscious. I can carry him for a while if I use extra power. If we climb higher, following the line of the waterfalls, the air will be better soon, and I have identified a ridge, riddled with caves. That’s where we should go.’

  I had no idea what her plan was or what was going to happen to us. We were surviving, and while we were alive, there was always a chance that we could stay alive.

  And so we walked, and we walked, and we walked through a world dark-coloured now in purple and red, livid, raw, exposed, like a gutted thing, and always around us, high cries of rage and fear.

  We walked through the grass higher than our heads towards the caves punched into the mountainside.

  Spike was walking slowly now to conserve power.

  The mountain lakes were already in darkness. The sounds of the forest were broken and high-pitched. The little Three Horn, trotting beside us now, kept darting nervously right and left. Then he’d find something to eat and forget for a minute that the world was getting dark – too dark, and strangely so, with finality that could never be night.

  I was thinking about Handsome and the rest of the crew. Maybe they were right – maybe the sun would be out there somewhere, bright and glorious and undimmed. Maybe I should have gone with them.

  ‘Maybe you should,’ said Spike, reading my mind.

  ‘It’s a thing about me,’ I said. ‘It’s not about you.’

  The truth is that I’ve spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm … maybe if I hadn’t gone with Spike … maybe if I could have lived more peaceably … maybe if I’d met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn’t done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, that promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

  ‘Climb up,’ said Spike. ‘It’s getting darker.’

  We came to a rough rock cave, sheltered by an overhang. I took out the laser-saw and got to work on the massive branches of a fallen tree, like a giant oak, with acorns the size of cabbages. The little Three Horn yelped and ran about with what I would like to call animal happiness, but I am not supposed to be here and he is never meant to have met me. If I were going home I’d take him with me, like all those shipmates who brought back monkeys and parrots. I wonder if they felt like me once, and will feel like me again, millions of years in the future, when a creaking, masted schooner lands in some paradise, and the sailors swarm ashore, free of the rat-raddled ship.

  Spike has gone to collect edible plants. Unlike me, she can assess their l
ikely composition without actually eating them and falling down dead. We’ve got the fish from the lake, we’ll have fibre of some kind, we’ll have a fire, and the Three Horn will have to fend for himself. I’m still not sure what he eats, and he probably thinks the same about me.

  We have agreed that we will bury our deposit of tools before the end. I don’t know when, if ever, they will be found, but Handsome has agreed to do the same, wherever he ends up, and who knows? Maybe some other creature, evolving in its own way, will find the tools and copy them. The axe and the handsaw will be the most useful, and the knives.

  If I bury the chips and the batteries, will anyone ever realize that they came from another planet that was dying, and how, on our way to extinction, we travelled here to one new-born?

  Now we have firewood and foodstuffs, which help me and do nothing for Spike. She feels the cold as I do, but as a depletion of cell-energy. She is using her stored solar life to keep going. She won’t tell me how long she has left.

  The little Three Horn is watching me build a fire. He thinks I’m building a den or a hide of some kind, and he stands with his scaly head on one side, looking from the sticks to me and from me to the sticks. Suddenly he trots off to the sawn pile outside the cave, picks up something too big for him (some things will never change), drags it in and drops it at my feet.

  I praise him extravagantly, and he goes off to do it again – and again, and again – till nearly all the wood outside is inside, and the poor thing can hardly lift his head.

  I pick him up with some difficulty and carry him to a corner where there is a heap of last year’s leaves. He sinks down and falls straight to sleep. I would like to sleep as completely as that again, but I don’t suppose I will until I arrive at the sleep from which I cannot wake.

  It began to snow. Soundlessly, seamlessly. From the mouth of the cave, in the lowering light, I watched the snow settle on the giant leaves, so densely canopied that the ground underneath remained dark.

  This was an advantage. At least the ground itself would stay warm for a while. Any white surface reflects back heat and light, keeping the place cold. Any dark surface absorbs heat and light, keeping the place warm.