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Chapter 10: Two Correct Answers

Chapter 10: Two Correct Answers

Twenty-two metres in, the ferns thinned and Leon stopped being able to hear himself think, because the forest had gone quiet.

It had not been quiet before. He worked that out in retrospect and far too slowly. There had been a layer of small continuous sound the entire time he had been alive on this planet. Clicks. A two-note call repeating somewhere high. Insects at a pitch that sat just under attention. At some point in the last thirty seconds all of it had stopped.

He crouched.

Nothing moved. The light came down green and directionless. His own breathing was suddenly the loudest object in a hundred metres, and he made it slower, and it did not help.

Then the small sounds came back, one at a time, the way a room refills after somebody has left it.

Leon stayed down for another twenty seconds anyway.

Whatever had crossed had not crossed for him. It had simply crossed, and the forest had held its breath the way a street does when a police car goes past, and had then resumed doing business.

He filed that.

The silence is an instrument. When it stops, so do I.

Out of the ferns, at the edge of a shallow drainage cut, and the ground on the far side was open mud.

Two things about it were interesting.

The first was that it was wet, and Leon had not seen open water since he arrived. There was a seep at the head of the cut and a thin brown flow going down it, four centimetres deep, moving.

His body’s opinion about the water was immediate and extremely stupid.

Crouching at the edge of the flow with forty millilitres left in the tube, he and had a short, unpleasant conversation with himself, and won it.

Untreated surface water in a biome his immune system had never met. The reconstruction had broadened his defences using an incomplete sample, which the machine itself had told him in capital letters. He had watched a physician in Munich describe the first forty-eight hours of an untreated enteric infection and had made a joke about it, and had written down the joke, and was now not laughing.

Water was in the cache. The cube had said thirty-seven point four metres northeast, and it still said thirty-seven point four metres northeast, because the ferns had pushed him sideways and he had spent all that effort going around rather than toward.

Stepping over the flow without touching it cost him more than it should have.

The second interesting thing was on the far bank.

It did not resolve for a full second, because his brain offered him the correct answer first and he rejected it as an artefact of wanting company.

Then he crossed and crouched over it and it was still there.

A footprint.

Bare. Human. Adult.

Five toes, splayed the way toes splay when they have never been inside a shoe. A clear arch. A heel that had come down hard and pushed forward hard, so that the mud had risen in a small ridge at the front of the print and slumped at the back.

He put his own hand flat beside it, and then his own boot, and neither of those was necessary because he had known within half a second and was simply looking for a reason to keep looking.

Somebody had come through here at a run.

Not a walk. The spacing of the ridge told him that, and so did the depth, and so did the fact that there was only one clear print and then a long scuff where the second foot had skidded and the person had corrected without slowing down.

Work, then. Not feel.

Water had got into it, and only about half filled it. The seep flow was four centimetres deep and moving at — he timed a leaf over a measured stride — something like eight centimetres a second, and the ground here shed into the cut, and mud of this consistency slumps.

Minutes. Not hours. Certainly not days.

It pointed almost due east.

Leon sat back on his heels in the mud of a planet with the wrong oxygen and the wrong plants and no grass, and allowed himself four seconds of something he had not budgeted for.

He was not the only person here.

That single fact reorganised everything. It meant language existed. It meant fire probably existed, and shelter, and knowledge of what could be eaten and what could not, accumulated over generations by people who had paid for every line of it. It meant that the most valuable thing on this continent was not in his eighty-seven kilograms of luggage. It was walking around inside somebody’s head, in a language he could not speak.

It also meant that somebody had been running.

Leon looked east, along the line the heel had pushed toward, and the four seconds ended.

Because a person running through mud at speed is a person running from something, or to something, and both of those had implications, and neither of them was reassuring.

He straightened up slowly.

In the green light the cube’s face had gone pale, and the line on it had not changed since he had first seen it.

PAYLOAD CACHE: 37.4 METRES NORTHEAST.

The footprint pointed almost due east.

Leon looked from one to the other, and his hand went to the cord at his chest, and he did not move, because for the first time since he had arrived there were two correct answers and only one of him.

Then the forest went quiet again — the same silence as before, arriving the same way, from the east.

And this time it did not last.