Crossing the Line
by David Barber
part 1
A naked woman came down the path towards him, weeping.
As usual during the heat of the day, José sprawled in a hammock, a cold drink halfway to his lips, unprepared for this pale vision.
She slipped and staggered blindly through the mud around the domes. Her hair was a tangle of bleached strands plastered across white cheeks; her lips were bloodless; the tip of each small breast was a pink button.
He could hear her ragged breathing as she slogged towards him, sinking into the wet earth at each step, labouring to pull herself free. She had walked a long way.
“Chiquita,” he called and she turned her head, eyes blinded by tears.
Trembling and swaying with fatigue, she halted, as if suddenly conscious of reaching her journey’s end, as if she had budgeted for this many steps and the next was too much.
He felt for the weapon on the crate beside him, his gaze never leaving the woman. The plasma bolt kicked her backwards, smoking, into the mud.
* * *
The airship provided by the Planetary Authority was malfunctioning. Lady Professor Flores would have nothing to do with it of course, since it was a machine. To her hireling fell the task of bickering with the vile plastic and metal mechanism.
Alone in the pilot’s pod, Edouarde swore at the airship. Touching the control glove to the map anywhere beyond the Frontier did nothing, as if it did not exist. The glove was faulty, something inside broken perhaps. Edouarde’s notions of its inner workings were hazy, though he now believed it to be malevolent.
Advanced societies used biologicals, which bred themselves and shared a profitable kinship in the subtleties of their DNA. Hopelessly, he keyed in the diagnostics. Once more the scratched flatscreen insisted all was well.
“Enough of this nonsense,” snapped the professor, pacing up and down the length of the observation lounge. The glass-sided room ran the length of the gondola beneath the airship. She waved aside Agamemnon’s attempt to beguile her with their old argument about God. She was impatient with a world that seemed so slow.
The professor noticed Edouarde loitering and beckoned him forward. She wanted to know when they would cross the Frontier, and her quick gaze ranged over his face as he explained the machine’s stubborn reluctance.
She interrupted almost at once. “I came here to study the native habitat. Not plants geneered two centuries ago.”
The Professor gestured at the view through the glass. Outside, dusk was pooling in valleys of shadow in a limitless savanna, a boring monoculture, designed to stabilise land behind the advancing Frontier.
When Edouarde messaged the Planetary Authority about the airship, their relies had been vague. He should return to the coast for repairs, they said, though he knew this was impossible. The Professor would not allow it..
They should fly south then, he suggested.
She looked puzzled. “But the native habitat is to the west.”
His maps showed that farther south the Riftwall petered out, and there was no natural barrier between the native and terraformed ecologies. They could cross the Frontier on foot. “Not an easy walk,” he added.
The Lady Professor was tiny, but she drew herself up to her full height. “You think I came this far just to give up?”
Mistrustful of the machine, Edouarde waited in the pilot’s seat. But this side of the Frontier, it seemed the airship went where it was told.
Agamemnon intruded, murmuring in his ear. “You didn’t mention the airship had been programmed to avoid the native habitat.”
“We don’t know that.”
Edouarde had no liking for the AI; it seemed to forget it was just a hireling like himself.
“You know the history of this world?”
Edouarde shrugged. Wasn’t history out of fashion? Better to study the future instead. “One of the earliest colonies, yes.”
“But the colonists are still in orbit. Thirty thousand in cold sleep, waiting for their new home to be terraformed. Naturally, a few were chosen to look after the interests of the many. Their descendants are the Guardians. Now ask yourself why our visit might be unwelcome.”
Overnight the airship landed itself. In the dim predawn light, the Riftwall was a distant blemish. The Professor had already wakened their biologicals and, as they plodded forwards astride giAnts, she showed Edouarde a geneplot.
“It is the genome of a terraforming bug,” he declared. His future career depended on the good opinions of this woman.
“Obviously. But note this gene.”
“Chlorophyllase?” He frowned. That couldn’t be right. “But these bugs target native flora and its biochemistry doesn’t use chlorophyll.”
Telling the Professor things she already knew only irritated her. He’d tried to curb the habit.
Lady Professor Flores gave him a calculating look. “It might almost be a grass pathogen.”
“But they’re geneered to be non-mutating.”
“Ask Agamemnon. It says it is a test for the existence of God.” She turned away, her interest already elsewhere, on the horizon, on the Frontier.
The AI was eager to explain. “An organism that is neither geneered nor evolved must be the handiwork of God.”
Edouarde considered this. “Then it must be geneered.”
“Ah, but by whom?”
Nearing the Frontier, they sealed their suits. These were largely biological, photosynthetic and fed from the environment, able to sustain them for weeks, the bubble enclosing their heads glowing faintly golden in sunlight, like a halo.
They were crossing a dismal region of dying native vegetation, bare earth showing through like an old blanket worn thin. It was a war zone of herbicides and bug sprays, poisons drenching the land. Each day, the Frontier crept forwards, besieged by colonies of giAnts dumping their killing loads and returning to refuel from factory queens.
The Authority updated its world map each month. Soon after their arrival, there had been muted celebrations when the red and green had become evenly balanced across the planet.
Because of this world’s fast rotation, night was already falling as they emerged into unblemished native terrain, awash with allergens, toxic to human chemistry. The Professor called a halt and Edouarde began to set up camp.
It was a child.
As she tottered towards him out of the darkness, her pale bare flesh glowed in the starlight. Weeping silently, she flinched as he lifted her slight body. Her lungs must be filling with fluid, her system cascading into allergic shock. With shaking hands, he rinsed her eyes before inflating a bubble around her head.
“Go back?” repeated Professor Flores, staring at the child.
“What is happening?” boomed Agamemnon.”Where did she come from?”
The child squirmed in Edouarde’s arms as the AI manoeuvred its giAnt closer.
“Keep away!” he insisted. “You’re frightening her.”
They crossed back over the Frontier, and with a clean breeze blowing in their faces, collapsed their bubbles.
“I believe her fever is less,” announced the Professor. “Do you not talk, child?”
Back on board the airship, nothing Edouarde could do would induce her to go near a med, though she seemed to have recovered remarkably well. She nibbled at fruit and textured protein, and drank only water.
She sat mute by his side as he used the com. Somewhere in orbit, Guardians grew agitated.
“We will come for her,” said the man on the screen, his gaze never leaving the girl.
“And you’ve no report of a missing child?”
“Land the airship. We will find you.”
“The map showed one of your bases,” said Edouarde. “We’re almost there.”
“We come in a lander,” said the Guardian. “OK? We are dark-side, so it takes one, two, hours.”
Edouarde considered the blank com screen for a while. The girl was watching him. He shrugged and brushed pale hair off her forehead
Later, Agamemnon spoke in his ear. “What were the chances of her finding us?”
“She was lucky,” admitted Edouarde.
“And what was she doing there?”
Edouarde pursed his lips.
“She elicits child-caring responses in you.”
He stifled a bitter reply. What would an AI know of that? Or the Professor?
The base was an untidy cluster of seed-grown domes planted in bare red earth. In places, the ground had been churned into mud. Edouarde slipped and squelched about, but there was no one home.
He sat beside the girl, their muddy feet dangling from the airship’s downramp.
“Where are the flowers?” she asked. Fastgrass was wind-pollinated to avoid the complication of insects.
Casually, he introduced himself and asked her name.
“Aileen.”
“And what were you doing out there, Aileen?”
She did not answer.
“Where are your parents?”
“I must convince the Lady Professor.”
“Convince her of what?”
“Not to let them kill me.”
Later in the short day, Agamemnon announced someone was approaching.
An antique mechanical with huge balloon tyres rolled to a halt and a man clanged open the hatch.
“¡Hola!,” he yelled, hurrying along the walkway towards the airship. His eagerness faded into puzzlement as he saw Edouarde.
“You are not the supply ship.”
His slow gaze found the girl and he drew a weapon, gothic and oversized.
“A dupe,” he warned, waving Edouarde aside.
Agamemnon moved its giAnt towards him, but José ignored it. Often giAnts wandered into the base, stupid and dying. Working on the Frontier killed them. He’d dragged more than one carcass away.
The plasma bolt hit Aileen as she jumped.
The man looked surprised as the giAnt struck the gun from his hand and bundled him off the walkway. A final bolt sizzled across the mud.
* * *
Copyright © 2023 by David Barber
