Crossing the Line

by David Barber

Part 1 appears in tis issue.

conclusion

The green roof was not the jungle, the domes were geneered plants. She was prepared for this. Didn’t the humans exploit everything? This was only a minor wrong. The animal the humans called a med enfolded her, taking away all feeling and all control. She was too damaged to resist. Soon her vision began to fade.

“Why do you help a dupe?” complained José, struggling feebly as Edouarde tied him up.

“She’s a child!” Edouarde paced backwards and forwards, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“Been told to shoot the women,” muttered the man. He didn’t seem to understand what he’d done wrong. “She got the same look.”

Edouarde seized the man’s throat. “What women?”

“Duplicates. Come across the Frontier, ¿no?”

“So you kill them?”

“Dupe has you protecting it now,” gasped José. “Guardians warn us about that.”

“The Lady Professor should hear this,” murmured Agamemnon.

The child thrashed and turned in the medtank, fighting an invisible foe. The Professor examined the readouts bleakly.

“She is a hybrid of native and human chemistries. This med cannot save her. I wonder if she was just a message.”

As the child’s lifesigns had faded away, Edouarde swelled with guilt.

Agamemnon was more sanguine. “That man said the Guardians already knew about these dupes.”

“There is a mystery here,” declared the Professor. “This planet deserves further study. I have influence. I will have the terraforming halted.”

“Unless we are stopped first,” said Agamemnon. “Offworlders alone in a faulty airship.”

Edouarde was incredulous.

“It is their world we threaten,” insisted the AI.

The Professor jumped to her feet, impatient as ever. “We must locate these women. Our friend with the gun will take us across the Frontier in his machine.”

“But he’ll tell the Guardians—”

The Professor waved Edouarde’s protests away. “By then it will be too late.”

Emerging from the swirling mist of chemicals, the mechanical rolled through native vegetation in every shade of red, from deepest crimson to palest pink, its own photosynthetic pigment.

Their com crackled into life. “Guardián-Cinco Ramirez. Repetir—”

José pulled a face. “It’s Ramirez.”

Edouarde whispered a translation in the Professor’s ear. “He’s saying they landed at the base. He asks, where is everybody?”

Now the voice spoke Anglic. “Put this Professor on.”

Professor Flores shook her head at José.

“They made me drive them,” he said.

“She can hear me. Put her on.”

He gnawed at his lip. “The dupe is in the medtank.”

“Guardian-Three Fierro here,” interrupted another voice. “We found the body. What did they do when you shot it?”

José rubbed at his face.

“Surely they asked why you killed it?” persisted the voice.

“Losing your signal,” he said and cut the link

He slumped back in his seat. “I think they guess.” He looked from the Professor to Edouarde. “You think they guess?”

Of course the man would betray them, would throw himself on the Guardians’ dubious mercy.

“They tried to keep the existence of these women secret,” mused Agamemnon. “They could not prevent the Lady Professor Flores visiting this world, but they sabotaged the airship. They did not imagine we might walk across the Frontier. And now we know their secret, they gain nothing from our survival. Professor, you must negotiate some sort of deal.”

But Edouarde knew it was too late for that now.

José left them sheltering under red foliage, veined like meat, soft as flesh beneath their gloved hands. As the day grew hotter, small flat things with a fringe of legs hurried over their boots. As Edouarde’s suit struggled to cool him, the Professor surprised him by explaining her thoughts.

The native organisms had centralised genomes, she said. And much more information content than human DNA. Yet each working cell held just a small fraction of all those genes.

She was toying with an old idea. They adapted to changes because a single central genome made updates feasible, directing their own evolution. Not as humans now did, but not blindly either. Perhaps Darwin was not everywhere.

Edouarde barely listened, bitter that the Professor had involved him in this mess without even asking.

Later in the day, it rained furiously, the crimson leaves bending under a torrent of water, wet like blood, a dripping shambles.

After the downpour, Edouarde discovered Professor Flores sitting with her bubble collapsed, her eyes and nose streaming.

“It had to know we are here,” she said, then could not stop coughing.

She would sicken to death, leaving him alone. As his resentment grew, he pictured himself pleading with the Guardians before they shot him.

He could only watch as she drifted into allergic shock, the soft tissues of her lips and nose erupting into sores. In the midst of its destruction, the native ecosystem was claiming this small territory.

Later, one, then a second, now a third identical pale and naked woman padded from the scarlet foliage. The little girl Aileen, grown up.

They knelt beside the Professor, stroking her face.

One turned to him. “This one is all mind, her body is nothing to her.”

“What’s happening? Who are you?”

“My name was Aileen Vandervalk, a visiting scientist like her. I was the wrong side of the Frontier with a damaged suit, but I survived, as will she.”

“The first time was hard. Your DNA is simple but there are so many cells. In time our whole ecosystem could have changed, but your Frontier moves too fast.”

“Not my Frontier.”

“Then they will try to destroy you too.”

When night fell upon them, Edouarde tossed and turned on the hard ground, feeling sleep was impossible. It was the mention of his name that woke him. In the ruddy morning light, Aileen sat talking with Professor Flores.

“He must carry a message,” the Professor was saying. “He must explain to the Guardians what this planet has become.” She had discarded her suit and looked fit and well.

“They already know,” Aileen replied. “But for them it was a choice between their sleepers and nameless aliens.”

“Terraforming is one way, but humans could change instead.”

“He has heard enough,” murmured Aileen.

It was no use pretending. Edouarde sat up and gestured towards the woman who called herself Aileen Vandervalk.

“She might look it, but you know that’s not human.”

“You gave us a brain,” admitted the alien. “Literally overnight. We awoke and saw our world. We are grateful for that, but we cannot let you destroy us.”

Edouarde ignored this. He spoke to Professor Flores, to what had been the Professor. “Don’t people come first?”

She waved the question away, the way she dismissed servants.

“Contact the Guardians,” said one of the aliens.

“You have no choice,” said the other, before they ducked into the crimson foliage, leaving him alone.

Eventually, there was the distant rumble of a lander, still hidden by low clouds. It grew louder, then howled overhead.

Deafened and battered, Edouarde sprawled flat while the craft circled and landed. Later, a man in black inerts and mask sauntered down the ramp. He casually shouldered a long, gleaming weapon.

“You could have damaged my suit,” Edouarde protested, hating himself for the whine in his voice.

“Where’s the woman?” The Guardian unshouldered his gun. “This profesora.”

“I have a message for you, from the natives—”

The beam casually sliced open his bubble, a touch of the sun. Frantically he clawed the emergency skin up over his face and collapsed into a crouch, sucking the skin drum-tight over his open mouth with each breath.

“You have a few minutes. Native stuff is inside your suit now.” The man laughed like a machine inside his mask. “Any mucus. Any hole.”

He glanced with distaste around the wet, red landscape. “Just say where she is.”

Desperately, Edouarde pointed into the jungle.

“Un hablador aqui,” announced the man to an invisible listener. We have a talker.

Hacking and choking, Edouarde was pushed through decon and onto the lander’s bridge. Another Guardian sat at the controls. Both men affected the same body style of black gleaming hair, olive skin and dark, liquid eyes.

Fierro swivelled his seat round and studied Edouarde. “A talker. But can we trust what he says?”

“Listen,” wheezed Edouarde. “The Professor has joined them, she says—”

“He knows what it is to be outside without a bubble.”

Edouarde looked from one to the other, not understanding. “The natives aren’t helpless any more, they—”

A stinging, open-handed smack across the face brought tears to his eyes.

“There are no natives,” explained Fierro softly. Ramirez administered more slaps. Edouarde crouched, covering his head..

“They’ve made pathogens,” he shouted. “For your fastgrass!”

“We already unplugged the AI in your airship,” smirked Ramirez. “That José was a talker too.”

“They can fashion human retroviruses!”

The Professor had never said that, but his humiliation bubbled over into rage. “No one like her has ever tried to kill people before.”

Still they grinned. “And why would she do this?”

“She wouldn’t, but now they know everything she knows.”

Fierro swivelled his chair, his smile fading. He turned to the coms gear.

On the screen, Guardian-Two Lopez had a neat row of bristles beneath his nose.

Already nauseous, Edouarde tried not to stare at this animal fashion. Waiting for Lopez to be summoned, he had used the time well.

“Halt the Frontier,” he insisted. “Or the viruses go out.”

“Impossible.”

“Then you have a war on your hands. And now they can fight back.”

Despite his fever, Edouarde repeated this to other Guardians. They flew him to the orbiting starship to answer questions from a Committee of Guardians. Perhaps the reputation of the offworlder, this Lady Professor Flores, finally reached them. Faces grew serious

He became inventive. “You never terraformed the oceans did you? Most of your population is on the coast. Like the spaceport. Within easy reach and vulnerable.”

A thought struck him. “You brought me up here. What if I carried the virus? The natives could infect every one of you.”

They stared at him in alarm. Perhaps this was too much, but they deserved it.

He shook his head. “I’m not their weapon. They only want me to negotiate.”

So they sent him back down to contact this famous profesora. The Frontier was stationary now, clear of killing mists, of giAnt armies. A bare brown band, kilometres wide, separating red from green.

It didn’t matter where they set him down, he told the pilot. They would find him.

Sweating in his Guardian suit, he found shade beneath beautiful crimson foliage, under huge heart-shaped leaves. His allergic trauma seemed to have passed. He felt fit, young, optimistic.

It had begun in fear and anger, wanting to punish the Guardians. The threat of plague had been a weapon blunt enough even for them. When he got safely away, he would explain all this to someone. But who knows, perhaps there might have been a danger.

Meanwhile the Guardians were busy waking sleepers and shipping them down, determined to possess what they had worked for; settling for half a planet.

“Hello,” said the child solemnly, sitting down beside him. It was another Aileen, as if resurrected.

He told her about the sleepers. “The Guardians think they can live with the native system.”

She shrugged. “We want the humans to trust us. We want the sleepers down here.”

“But the Frontier must advance or retreat.”

The girl wasn’t listening. She fingered his suit’s stiff material. “You don’t need this.”

Absently she plucked a small wriggling thing from the ground and popped it into her mouth. His understanding seemed to dissolve and reform. The human and the native. Something else would emerge, slow enough not to be noticed.

Humans had to cease warring against life on this planet; they must be made to understand that.

He pulled off his mask. The air was heady and sweet, full of promise.