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Chapter 9: The Size of the Problem

Chapter 9: The Size of the Problem

The cube gave him a line he had been waiting eleven minutes for.

PAYLOAD CACHE: 37.4 METRES NORTHEAST.

Eighty-seven point two kilograms of water, medicine, tools, seed and every usable fragment of modern knowledge he had managed to compress, sitting somewhere under the leaf litter thirty-seven metres away.

Northeast was uphill, through the light gap, and out of the hollow.

Leon looked at the ferns between him and it, which came to his chest and which he could not see through, and understood that the distance was not the problem.

Leon went anyway, because thirst does not negotiate.

Crossing the first fifteen metres went badly and the second fifteen better.

The trick, he worked out somewhere in the middle, was to stop lifting his feet the way a man walks on pavement and start putting them down the way a man walks on a scaffold — weight tested before it was committed, the ball of the foot arriving before the heel. Roots were solid. Moss over root was solid. Moss over nothing was a hole with a lid on it, and he found one, and went in to the knee, and got out with a wrenched ankle that stopped hurting within about forty seconds.

Leon stood on it, testing.

Nothing torn. The joint had taken a load that would have put his old body on the ground for a week.

"Fine," he said. "Thank you."

Then the ground moved.

Not violently. A low, regular pressure through the soles of his boots, arriving in pairs, from the north.

Leon went flat behind a root and stopped breathing on purpose.

They came through the light gap forty metres away and it took them four minutes to pass.

Eleven animals. The largest was the size of a delivery lorry and moved on all fours with a rolling, unhurried gait, and when it stopped to strip a branch it rose onto its hind legs and its head went up past the middle canopy. The hide was mottled grey-green over a paler belly. There was a low bony crest running back from the skull, and a beak, and behind the beak a battery of grinding teeth that Leon could hear working from forty metres.

Three of them were small enough to walk under the adults, and did.

Elephants he had seen. Elephants were a thing you looked at. This was a thing you were inside the weather of.

The sound was the part he had not prepared for. Not roaring — a continuous low conversational rumble, felt in the sternum before it was heard, with short nasal calls going back and forth between the adults and the young at a frequency that was clearly doing work.

Leon lay in wet leaf litter with his heart going and did not move for four minutes, and afterwards recognised the thing he had felt as something he had genuinely not experienced since he was about six years old.

Not fear.

Wonder, which is an expensive thing to feel in the open.

They went south and the pressure went out of the ground and he lay there a while longer, correcting himself.

Four minutes. I spent four minutes of the only advantage I have on being impressed.

Because wonder had cost him four minutes of his only advantage, which was that nothing on this planet had yet noticed him.

Flat on his face in the mud he ran the arithmetic properly, because it was the last moment he would be able to do it calmly.

He weighed roughly ninety kilograms. He was slow, he had no projectile weapon, no fire that was not a spark and dry tinder he had not yet gathered, no shelter, no water beyond forty millilitres, and no immune response to anything living within a hundred kilometres. He had a ten-centimetre knife, which against anything larger than a dog was a request for an autopsy.

And he was new.

That was the part that took him a moment to see properly. Every animal in this forest had a template for every other animal in this forest. They knew what smelled dangerous, what smelled edible, what was worth the calories. Predators here had a category for the herd that had just passed, and the herd had a category for them, and both categories had been paid for in a very long currency.

Nothing here had a category for Leon Falkner.

Which did not mean he was safe. It meant he was a question, and the way this forest resolved a question was to bite it once and find out.

I am not the top of anything here. I am a new smell carrying a knife.

Leon got up carefully and went the rest of the way to the light gap.

Where the herd had crossed, the mud was churned into a road. Leon put his boot beside one of the prints for scale and stopped putting things beside prints for scale after that.

And then, on the near edge of the churn, going the other way, he found the second set.

Two feet. Not four.

Three forward toes on each, with the inner one held clear of the ground so that only two had registered in the mud, and behind them a deep single puncture where something rigid had come down and taken weight during the push-off.

The stride was long. The animal had not been hurrying.

It had crossed the herd’s trail after the herd, which meant it had been following them, which meant it was doing exactly what Leon would have done in its position — walking behind a large slow food supply and waiting for one of them to make a mistake.

The prints went northeast.

Leon stood over them for several seconds with the cube warm against his chest and the number on it perfectly legible.

PAYLOAD CACHE: 37.4 METRES NORTHEAST.

The direction had not changed. The direction was never going to change.

Thirty-seven metres. On Earth that is a walk to the car.

He looked at the ferns ahead, which came to his chest, which he could not see through, and which now had a documented resident.

"Right," Leon said, to nobody, in a forest that had never heard the language.

Then he went in.