This Old Rock (9 page)

Okay, the first thing to do was to plug one of his wrist
comps into the photovoltaic power supply and see if anyone else were around. He
spread out the flexible array, almost a meter square, and plugged the adapter
into his wrist comp, or tried to. It didn’t fit! Damning his luck and wondering
why, after three centuries or so of electronics manufacture, such things
weren’t standardized, he reached for the wrist comp from the emergency kit.
That would
have
to fit.

It did, but nothing happened. A broken wire? Or had
something in the electronics of either device not survived a millennium of
neglect? The batteries in the wrist comps were likely suspects. Or, he thought,
layers of atoms in contact in various transistors and diodes may have
interpenetrated each other through some kind of Brownian motion so they no
longer functioned. He’d never had occasion to inquire about the lifetime of
such devices and, of course, there was now nothing to ask. If he was going to
survive, it would have to be on his wits alone.

He took stock; however great he felt right now, he had only
eight nutrition bars left to eat. He had no clothing except for the emergency
suit that he wore. There were clearly fishlike things in the caldera, and if
they were edible, he might be able to catch enough to survive–thought he wasn’t
sure how, having never fished in his life. For shelter, since the area was
obviously volcanic in origin, there should be lava tubes.

Was his the only CSU to make it? He should look for other
survivors. Names of classmates slotted for the
Resolution
ran through
his mind. They weren’t soldiers; their job was to reconstruct and reeducate the
colony after the theocrats had been displaced. Most, he had known only since
Annapolis, but he’d grown up with Edith Lu, Huong Devieux, and Ted Blackwell in
metropolitan Port Moresby sixty years ago–make that something like 1060 years
ago.

He scanned the lake with its strange high waves and
impassable lava block shore line.

Face reality, Jacques, he told himself. He was in no
position to find and rescue anyone. He had to find food, and that meant getting
out of the caldera. He would come back. There was likely a large variance in
CSU survival time; no one else was likely to need help right now.

Everything caught up with him then; his impossible
situation, the unfairness of it all, the totalitarian monsters that had been
the cause of the expedition and its likely sabotage, the great decision makers
of the Interplanetary Association senate who sent others to take their risks
and clean up for their failures of imagination, and the minimum effort logic of
those who put only a dozen nutrition bars in a CSU emergency kit... He
screamed. The screams echoed from the barren lava cliffs.

When he recovered himself, he decided to do something to
defy the fate that sent him here, to make some mark on the universe that was
trying to kill him. He could make a pile of rocks, a cairn. Practically, it
would help him find the spot again. It was no work at all in the low gravity to
build a stack as tall as he was.

The lava wasn’t all ‘
a-
‘
a
. Here and there were
rivers of smooth pahoehoe, some of which had fragmented into relatively flat
shards. He brushed one off and using another, smaller fragment, sketched the
shoreline, and scratched where he thought the sunken CSU lay. Under that he
scratched his name and the date. Then, after a moment of thought, he added “=
Day 0.”

TO CLIMB A FLAT
MOUNTAIN

by G. David Nordley

available in
Kindle
ebook
and
print

at Amazon.com

and

THE BLACK HOLE
PROJECT

by G. David Nordley
and C. Sanford Lowe

available
in
Kindle
ebook
and
print

at Amazon.com

See more about author
G. David Nordley

at

variationspublishing.com