Life force, p.1
Life Force, page 1
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Life Force by Zach Hughes
"And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. "
—Genesis 1:24
Chapter One
At one with the soughing wind and the moon-gleaming, ripening grass nuts of the browned plain, the presence drifted, lowered into the soft, murmuring song of summer, falling with a seeding pod as it expelled new life for the rich earth. From afar came the song of a fellow presence, steeped in jungle-moist richness, and a call of wonder from a young one high in the snowed, timberless mountains. All was one, all was contentment.
It rose now on a thermal as the sun-blessed plain gave back to the upper darkness the gift of the day, and the rustling grasses flashed past into a region of thinly treed, rolling ridges—a conversion zone—and as it moved over great distances, there was always the work. A flowering tree emitted a rush of perfume, feeling the brush of the presence, and that unseen one was dusted with minute pollen spores that seemed to drift upon the cooling night wind until, in another rush of perfume, flowers of a like kind were brushed. Ah, to watch the land renew itself and bring forth fruit, that was the wonder, and the work and the reward.
A new sound, the awareness of intrusion, a measurement of molecular movements led its attention high, high, where, in a blaze of red, something falling slowed, steadied, swam with graceful precision through the night sky.
Chapter Two
Tinker's Belle came out of transdrive just where Matt Tinker and his trusty Lamda 201 had pointed her, inside the orbital paths of two gas giants and three smallish, frigid planets and less than half an astronomical unit from the astral pathway of the target, detected for its blue tinge from not a few light years away. Belle was singing sweetly. Matt's ears, tuned to her moods after just over two years of seemingly peripatetic but actually well-reasoned wanderings in her, noted and were pleased. Way to hell and gone back toward the periphery, in the old neighborhood where mother Earth spewed out her deluge of humanity, a sour note in Belle's song might or might not have been panic-producing. Out here Matt wanted her to be purr-fect, and she was, odd little systems ticking and humming and the soft flow of air from the vents sweet.
"Hey, Teddy," Matt yelled, "you wanta look before we go in, or are you gonna take all day getting dressed?"
"Coming," said a very nice feminine voice, and there she was in the hatch that separated Belle's bridge from crew's quarters.
"Looks good," Matt said. "Instruments registering fine. Lots of water. Oxygen. No bad stuff so far."
The planet was magnified on Belle's viewer. Tedra Tinker saw the hint of blue seas, the whiteness of clouds. She hadn't spent too much time dressing, since it took only a couple of seconds to slip into her favorite shipboard wear, plain, loose-legged shorts and a frilly little shirt. She had spent some time on her hair. She wore it not quite shoulder-length: in all its auburn glory. And, as always, she had taken time to touch her face with a hint of color, her lashes just enough to enhance the natural impact of her huge, green eyes.
"Let me take her in?" Teddy asked, as she bent to plant a warm pair of lips on Matt's neck.
"Okay," he said, "but no showboating, hear?"
"Coward," she said, seating herself, beginning to punch buttons even before she'd plopped down into the contour chair for which she had modeled, quite bare, when the ship was being customized to its new, two-man crew just over two years ago.
Matt watched closely. In deep space it was hard to screw up when using the transdrive. Space, in spite of its white, pretty glow of stars, was largely an emptiness, and some fine-tuning to Andrew Reznor's engine—the invention which opened the age of interstellar space—had built-in safeguards against a careless pilot programming in a trans that would end up at the core of one of the nuclear furnaces called stars. Inside a solar system, with a few odd planets swimming around and with the possibility of floating scrap left over from the planet forming process, it was a bit more tricky. He nodded as he saw Teddy make the right observations, the right adjustment, the perfect programming, and then he blinked and below, or out there, or up there, depending on how one wanted to think about space, was a beauty of a world, blue and bright, with weather and seas and brown-green land areas.
"Hey," he said, as Belle dived like a bullet toward the planet.
The Reznor transient-drive functioned in two modes, deriving its motive energy from an eerie sub-elementary particle that Andrew Reznor, its discoverer, called the "transque," pronounced with a "k" sound at the end. At sublight speeds the transdrive called for a redefinition of several formerly inviolate laws of physics and the nature of energy and matter. And what it did when it was kicked into FTL mode was a clear aberration that defied all known logic. All laws of physics became void, and parsecs could be covered without measurable loss of time.
Of course, the relatively short distance to be traveled from Belle's point of emergence from subspace or, as Reznor himself said jokingly, Alice's Wonderland to planetary atmosphere did not allow acceleration to that point where Einstein was proven somewhat right, when ship's mass began to increase and time to be altered, but the distance was enough for Belle to gain more speed than Matt liked.
"Teddy, you wanta slow down?" he asked mildly, as the good old Lamda 201 clicked and counted rapidly multiplying molecules of atmosphere.
"Slow it down, Teddy," he said, his voice a bit stronger, as Belle began to transmit through her hull the rush and whine of air.
"Teddy," he yelled, as a mighty sonic boom thundered behind them and he could see the red-yellow glow of heated air through the front ports.
"You're no fun at all," Teddy said, even as she began to slow the ship, and the heat flares started to dim and the hurricane of wind sound outside began to fade.
"Kick in the G.D.," Matt said calmly.
Teddy's long, slim fingers barely moved. The Reznor G.D. rumbled. That was the only trouble with the old man's Gravitational Deflection Planetary Engine. It growled. The sound was in the ship and from the ground it sounded like steady, distant thunder. The G.D. did interesting things with a planet's own force, its gravitational pull, and used that power to soar, dart, hover, land, or orbit within atmosphere. In an emergency the trans could be used, but Belle wasn't stressed for continuous use of that drive in atmosphere.
Belle was flying into the dawn at eighty thousand feet. Sunlight sparkled on her hull, making her a daytime star.
"Wow," Teddy said, as the planet moved slowly underneath, revealing everything that a planet should have—seas, land masses, mountains, rivers, lakes, vegetation. They were too high to see details of the greenery.
"What shall we call it?" Matt asked. He felt fine. It wasn't every day, or every year, or every lifetime that an explorer found a new life-zone planet.
"Do we get to name her?" Teddy asked eagerly, her green eyes wide, making Matt almost forget his excitement at finding a new world.
"We can submit suggestions."
"Beauty," Teddy said.
"We need a name, not a description."
"Can you think of anything better?"
"Just Beauty?"
"As in Beauty and the Beasts," Teddy said.
"That's singular, beast."
"Not in this case," she said.
"Point taken," he said, as he watched a new sea edge into view past a line of snowy, rugged mountains. "But we need to submit more than one suggested name."
"Tinker's World," Teddy said.
"That would be rejected offhand," he said. He grinned. He'd taking a lot of ribbing after having the name, Tinker's Belle etched onto the ship as she was being reworked in the Reznor Yard, even though most of the men who snickered didn't know the reference hidden in the name. They just thought it was cute, maybe a little too cute, but it was Matt and Tedra Tinker who would be off in the great dark in that little teapot of a ship, and, since it was company policy, they could damned well name her what they wanted to name her.
"Let's not think about it now," Teddy said. "Let's land."
"Whoa," he said.
"Matt, it's just what we've been looking for, just what the old man wants."
"You know we have to check it out before landing. Want a screaming alien virus to fly up your nose?"
"Now how many life-forms have been found on the fifty explored worlds?" she asked, sniffing. When she sniffed, her nose tilted just a bit more and warmed Matt's heart. He had fallen in love with that tilt of nose five years before when she first appeared at the Reznor complex with a brand new degree in Terraforming from M.I.T.'s School of Space Sciences, and that love had quickly spread from nose to eyes to mouth to long, slim legs and the interior works, too, all that made up Tedra. If anything, he was more in love five years later.
"Matt, it'll be months before they can send out an analysis team. We won't be the first to walk on our world if we don't land."
"No," he said. "Gimme." He took the controls and sent Belle shooting down, down, until, at hovering speed, he opened test vents and collected air that read so pure and sweet that he whistled. To Teddy's credit, she never sulked. Nor, in actuality, would she have opened the Belle's outer hatches on an untested new world. She buckled down to work, although in five years of exploration she had not previously had the opportunity to use the various tools of analysis that gradually built up a picture of a perfect world, a world s o fresh and pure that it was unbelievable. On six out of every ten of the new habitable planets discovered and settled in the past three decades there had been some imperfection, perhaps just a trace of some noxious gas, or over-acidity of ocean to discourage the growth of those wonderful little plants that were the base of the food chain and producers of sweet oxygen.
"It's too damned perfect," Teddy said, after the third work day, after two nights spent in low orbit with Belle muttering and clicking and looking after herself while Matt and Teddy slept, limbs entwined, always touching. "Let's find something wrong, so that the Bureau of Colonization won't grab Beauty away from us."
But try as they might they could find no wrong on Beauty. Nor did they find anything other than plant life. Little plankton plants ruled the seas. A pleasing variety of vegetation owned the land, and in that Beauty was like other worlds discovered in the past three decades.
"Plants rule the galaxy," Teddy said.
"Be more peaceful if they did," Matt said.
"We're freaks. Us and all the other animals and bugs and creepy things on Earth," she said.
"There may be bugs," Matt said. "There were on other worlds with rich and varied vegetation. I'd guess there'd have to be. How else does everything get pollinated?"
"They're all like oysters, both male and female, producing both male and female pollen?"
"Could be," he said. "Let's leave such weighty questions to the eggheads."
"I'm an egghead," she said. "You love me only for my body—"
"Grrrr," he said, making a move on her that she avoided by slipping to one side.
"—and you forget that I am a legitimate—"
"So am I, my mother was married."
"—sigh-an-tist," she said.
"Let's take a break and set a nice, smooth orbit and go to bed and make us a little sigh-an-tist," he said, leering.
"That makes you look rather youthful, that expression," she said.
"I feel youthful, and I am youthful."
"You're not bad looking for a space jock," she said. In fact, she liked looking at him. He was an even six feet tall, just slim enough, just muscular enough, and he had the softest black hair. His brown eyes were rimmed with healthy white, his nose sort of short and cute, his lips curled upward at the corner and— "Now, Matt, we have work to do."
"There's always work to do. It can wait."
And so, because things of more immediate import occupied the discoverers of the world to become known as Beauty, the question of vegetative propagation on the world was left to others. After all, how exciting can the sex life of a tree be when two people are young, parsecs away from other human beings, and almost disgustingly happy to be alone, just two unique bipedal, at least semi-intelligent animals from an odd planet that seemed to be a freak? For their home planet was so packed with life that it took one hell of a lot of computer space simply to catalog it. It was a world where the life force was so persistent that life existed in the most inhospitable places—in the depths of the seas where no light penetrated, in the air, on the surface of the earth, in the soil itself, in deep, dank caves that had never seen the sun, and even within the pores of frozen rocks in the dry valleys of Antarctica where it lay dormant for three hundred sixty days a year, living and procreating during the five brief days of its summer. Life. Never fully understood, never explained. Life dear, however, to even the most minute living thing, and each living thing endowed with the instinct to fight to survive, and to reproduce and go through eonic changes in order for its species to continue to survive.
It was strictly against company policy and common sense, but Belle grumbled down and landed. Cautiously, Matt chose a torrid, barren desert on a large land mass. He ran a couple of tests, detected no danger in the form of microscopic alien villains, and, with Teddy's eyes glowing with excitement, cracked the hatch. The air was hot and dry, but sweet.
The sun was low in the morning sky and the desert was just beginning to warm, the night-cooled rocks making odd, cracking sounds as they expanded with the growing heat. They walked no more than a hundred feet from the ship. In the shade of jagged, wind-exposed boulders Teddy saw tiny crimson flowers on low growing, gray, bristly plants.
"There's vegetation, even here," she said, bending to look more closely at the flowers.
"Look but don't touch," Matt warned.
She smelled a faint aroma, a scent that would, she felt, be an instant best seller as a perfume.
"She is a Beauty," she said, standing, looking off into the shimmering, barren, rapidly heating wastes. "I wish we could stay longer, get to know her."
"Let's let the eggheads see if there's anything with teeth first," Matt said.
Tinker's Belle flew low, once more, over the largest land mass, sleek hull only feet above a smooth and endless plain of deep grasses and quiet, clear streams.
"Isn't it odd," Teddy said, in a quiet voice.
"I'm sure it is," Matt said.
"He worked a short week on all planets but Earth."
"I guess I know what you're talking about."
"Day and night on the first day; the firmament the second day; earth, grass, the herb yielding seed, the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind on the third day; the stars on the fourth day."
"Yep," Matt agreed. "Four days for that and then all the fowls and fishes and beasts and man in three days."
"But the last three only on Earth," she said.
"It's a big universe, and we've seen only a half-block neighborhood so far," Matt said.
"I think it's going to be the same everywhere," she said seriously. "I think we are unique, Matt. I think it's our work to take over, on all the other worlds, where He left off."
"I hope Reznor pays overtime, then," Matt said, and she hit him in the shoulder and the mood was gone. Belle, after one last look, soared and the muted thunder of her G.D. faded into the upper reaches of the atmosphere and was gone, as was the ship when Matt engaged the trans.
Beauty was once again silent, save for the winds, and the life-bringing rains, and the rolling of her oceans.
Chapter Three
"A man," Andrew Reznor was fond of saying, "is as young as his newest part."
Part of Reznor was just past twenty-four—his heart. His left kidney was forty-four and his left hand, indistinguishable from his original right hand, had been a part of him for three years. Reznor himself had to think a bit to remember his actual age, the age of those parts of his body that had not been replaced with younger material from organ donors who had met accidental death at an early age, but when he did remember he was more pleased than dismayed. He was just past his first century of life and had more good years ahead.
Reznor had been in his mother's womb when Air Force Major Lynsey Paige Collier opened the hatch and let the near vacuum of Mars pull air from the lock of the Mars Explorer to be the first woman, the first human, to set foot on the red planet. He'd been a teenager when the second Russian Revolution ended forever the threat of communism and led to the formation of the Pax Of Five, that combination of world powers which outlawed war, cleaned up all the little brushfires, at the cost, some historians said, of neocolonialism. Reznor, sometimes a conservative, sometimes a flaming radical, felt that the overpopulated nations were one hell of a lot better off under the control of the world's five big powers than they'd been fighting each other over religion or grazing ground or skin color or whatever other silly reason they could find, even if, in a Malthusian snit, he regretted the loss of the process of natural selection for population control.
He had seen space exploration grind to a halt, for with power came responsibility, with peace came the need to do something, something to feed the billions of Africa, Asia, and South America. That something took the growingly meager resources of the developed nations and squeezed them as dry as Saharan sands. The bellowing, beautiful, awe-inspiring, fire-breathing monsters stopped climbing the gravitational slope heavenward and left space to the imagination and to the necessary communications satellites that still went up occasionally, from places like Vandenberg.
Now that irked Reznor no end. He lived for the exploration of space. He'd cut his teeth on the classic stories of science fiction, graduated to scientific studies, sharpened his wits as he breezed through Cal Tech in two years, and devoured the embryonic space studies programs in two other tech schools. Then he invented a desalinization process that, within a decade, had the lower parts of the Sahara blooming again, got filthy rich and retired to his well-equipped laboratory in the Arbuckle Mountains of Oklahoma, where God had left His tracks in the form of exposed rock strata. Here Reznor proceeded to make it possible to end dependency on fossil and nuclear fuels with his development of the principle that had one offshoot in the G.D. system. Next he proved Einstein wrong by sending a small probe from an orbiter—powered with his G.D. Transdrive—four-plus light years to return with close-up pictures of the nearest star.
