I suppose it wants to make me talk so I’ll forget the steady march, the tramp-tramp of my feet a couple of centimetres away from the ochre soil of this barren place.
I remember that when I was still in shock, and delirious, on the first day, I thought I stood outside us both and saw the suit open itself, letting my precious, fouled air out into the thin atmosphere, and I watched me dying in the airless cold, then saw the suit slowly, tiredly haul me out of itself, stiff and naked, a reptile-skin reverse, a chrysalis negative. It left me scrawny and nude and pathetic on the dusty ground and walked away, lightened and empty.
And maybe I’m still afraid it will do that, because together we might both die, but the suit, I’m fairly sure, could make it by itself quite easily. It could sacrifice me to save itself. It’s the sort of thing a lot of humans would do.
'Mind if I sit down?' I say, and collapse onto a large boulder before the suit can reply.
'What hurts?' it asks.
'Everything. Mostly my legs and my feet.'
'It’ll take a few days for your feet to harden and your muscles to tone up. Rest when you feel like it. There’s no sense in pushing yourself too hard.'
'Hmm,' I say. I want it to argue. I want it to tell me to stop whining and keep walking… but it doesn’t want to play. I look down at my dangling legs. The suit’s surface is blackened and covered in tiny pits and scars. Some hair-fine filaments wave, tattered and charred. My suit. I’ve had the thing for over a century and I’ve hardly used it. The brain’s spent most of its time plugged into the main house unit back home, living at an added level of vicariousness. Even on holidays, I’ve spent most of my time on board ship, rather than venture out into hostile environments.
Well, we’re sure as shit in a hostile environment now. All we have to do is walk half-way round an airless planet, overcome any and all obstacles in our way, and if the place we’re heading for still exists, and if the suit’s systems don’t pack up completely, and if we don’t get picked off by whatever destroyed the module, and if we aren’t blown away by our own people, we’re saved.
'Do you feel like going on now?'
'What?'
'We’d better be on our way, don’t you think?'
'Oh. Yes. All right.' I lower myself to the desert floor. My feet ache intensely for a while, but as I start to walk the pain ebbs. The slope looks just the way it did kilometres back. I am already breathing deeply.
I have a sudden and vivid image of the base as it might be, as it probably is: a vast, steaming crater, ripped out of the planet during the same attack that downed us. But even if that is the reality, we agreed it still makes sense to head there; rescuers or reinforcements will go there first. We have a better chance of being picked up there than anywhere else. Anyway, there was no module wreckage to stay beside on the ground; it was travelling so fast it burned up, even in this thin atmosphere, the way we very nearly did.
I still have a vague hope we’ll be spotted from space, but I guess that’s not likely now. Anything left intact up there is probably looking outwards. If we’d been noticed when we fell, or spotted on the surface, we’d have been picked up by now, probably only hours after we hit the dirt. They can’t know we’re here, and we can’t get in touch with them. So all we can do is walk.
The rock and stones are getting gradually smaller.
I walk on.
It’s night. I can’t sleep.
The stars are spectacular, but no solace. I am cold, too, which doesn’t help. We are still on the slope; we travelled a little over sixteen kilometres today. I hope we’ll come to the lip of the escarpment tomorrow, or at least to some sort of change in the landscape. Several times today, while I walked, I had the impression that for all my effort, we weren’t moving anywhere. Everything is so uniform.
Damn my human-basic ancestry. My side and belly are hurting badly. My legs and feet held out better than I expected, but my injuries torment me. My head hurts as well. Normally, the suit would pump me full of painkiller, relaxants or a sleeping draught, and whatever it is helps your muscles to build up and your body to repair itself. My body can’t do those things for itself, the way most people’s can, so I’m at the mercy of the suit.
It says its recycler is holding out. I don’t like to tell it, but the thin gruel it’s dispensing tastes disgusting. The suit says it is still trying to track down the site of the leak; no progress so far.
I have my arms and legs inside now. I’m glad, because this lets me scratch. The suit lies with its arms clipped in to the sides and opened into the torso section, the legs together and melded, and the chest expanded to give me room. Meanwhile the carbon dioxide frosts outside and the stars shine steadily.
I scratch and scratch. Something else more altered humans wouldn’t have to do. I can’t make itches go away just by thinking. It isn’t very comfortable in here. Usually it is; warm and cosy and pleasant, every chemical whim of the encased body catered for; a little womb to curl up in and dream. The inner lining can no longer alter the way it used to, so it stays quite hard, and feels — and smells — sweaty. I can smell the sewage system. I scratch my backside and turn over.
Stars. I stare at them, trying to match their unblinking gaze through the hazy, scratched surface of the helmet visor.
I put my arm back into the suit’s and unclip. I reach round onto the top of the blown-out chest and feel in the front pack’s pocket, taking out my antique still camera.
'What are you doing?'
'Going to take a photograph. Play me some music. Anything.'
'All right.' The suit plays me music from my youth while I point the camera at the stars. I clip the arm back and pass the camera through the chest lock. The camera is very cold; my breath mists on it. The viewer half unrolls, then jams. I tease it out with my nails, and it stays. The rest of the mechanism is working; my star pictures are fine, and, switching to some of the older magazines from the stock, they come up bright and clear too. I look at the pictures of my home and friends on the orbital, and feel — as I listen to the old, nostalgia-inducing music — a mixture of comfort and sadness. My vision blurs.
I drop the camera and its screen snaps shut; the camera rolls away underneath me. I raise myself up painfully, retrieve it, unroll the screen again and go on looking back through old photographs until I fall asleep.
I wake up.
The camera lies beside me, switched off. The suit is quiet. I can hear my heart beat.
I drift back to sleep eventually.
Still night. I stay awake looking at the stars through the scarred visor. I feel as rested as I ever will, but the night here is almost twice standard, and I’ll just have to get used to it. Neither of us can see well enough to be able to travel safely at night, besides which I still need to sleep, and the suit can’t store enough energy during the hours of sunlight to use for walking in the darkness; its internal power source produces barely enough continuous energy to crawl with, and the light falling on its photopanels provides a vital supplement. Thankfully, the clouds here never seem to amount to much; an overcast day would leave me doing all the work whether it was my turn or not.
I unroll the camera screen, then think.
'Suit?'
'What?' it says quietly.
'The camera has a power unit.'
'I thought of that. It’s very weak, and anyway the power systems are damaged beyond the junction point for another source of internal energy. I can’t think of a way of patching it in to the external radiation system, either.'
'We can’t use it?'
'We can’t use it. Just look at your pictures.'
I look at the pictures.
There’s no doubt about it; education or not, once you’ve been born and brought up on an O you never quite adjust to a planet. You get agoraphobic; you feel you are about to be sent spinning off, flying away into space, picked up and sent screaming and bawling out to the naked stars. You somehow sense that vast, wasteful bulk underneath you, warping space itself and self-compressing, soil-solid or still half-molten, quivering in its creaky, massy press, and you; stuck, perched here on the outside, half-terrified that despite all you know you’ll lose your grip and go wheeling and whirling and wailing away.