Jer was brewing a mixture of roots and fish in a primitive clay pot on the embers of a fire when Auron appeared.
“What do you want?” he said.
“I need your help. I think I’ve got the microphone working.”
“I suppose that’s worth celebrating. It’s only taken you twenty years. Let’s have some beer.”
“I’m not drinking any more of that stuff. It’s vile. Why don’t you do something useful for once? Make something we actually need, instead of leaving it all to me.”
“Suit yourself,” said Jer, and he picked up a clay jug and took a long draught from it.
Auron shuddered in disgust and turned to walk back to his hut.
“Come.” he shouted over his shoulder.
“Come here, do this; dance, monkey boy,” said Jer bitterly under his breath.
Jer walked slowly over to Auron’s camp.
Auron had attached two extremely primitive-looking devices to either end of a long copper wire.
“OK, you stand at that end, I’ll speak into the mic and tell me if you can hear it.”
“If this works,” said Jer, “how long’s it going to be before we can go home?”
“Not that long.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know, maybe another fifteen years for a guess.”
“Fifteen years? For a guess?”
Jer’s voice betrayed his desperation with horrible intensity.
Auron stopped looking at the microphone and straightened up.
“Look,” he said, “the Sirius device that sent us here was end result of several years of work. If I had all the stuff we had on the Earth, I could rebuild it in a week, but I don’t. I don’t even have transistors or diodes. I don’t have any training data. I’ll have to hope I can train it like it’s a baby, but even babies have certain built-in capabilities. It’s going to be a long job, Jer, but when we finally do get home, I can use a new Sirius to remove thirty-five or forty years of ageing, and we’ll be like we were when we had the accident and ended up here. Many of the people we knew will even still be alive in fifteen years! It’s not so bad!”
“You don’t even know, really, do you?”
“We’ve been over this before, Jer. My God, how many times have we been over this? Let’s just focus on getting this microphone working, and the speaker, otherwise we’re not getting off here at all. I happen to think I’ve basically achieved a miracle by getting this far, considering we started off with absolutely nothing at all.”
Jer sighed.
“All right, what do I do?”
“Just put your ear against the speaker and listen. I’ll whisper into the mic and you tell me if you can hear it.”
Jer obeyed. Auron whispered into the microphone.
“Well?” shouted Auron, after a minute.
“I don’t hear anything. Only clicking.”
“We’ll try it again,” said Auron.
Another minute passed and he said, “Did you hear anything?”
“Nothing, just a clicking sound every few seconds.”
“Clicking sound? It’s probably the crabs.”
“It’s coming from your speaker.”
Auron walked over to the speaker and placed his ear against it.
The speaker consisted of a membrane of cattle skin with a magnetised steel plunger attached to the middle of it; the other end of the plunger was surrounded by a coil of rudimentary copper wire covered in the rubbery secretions of a plant they’d found, as fine as Auron had been able to make it.
As he listened, an astonished expression appeared on his face.
“It’s regular.” he said.
“That’s what I was telling you. There must be something wrong with it.”
Auron stood up suddenly.
“Jer, this isn’t coming from my apparatus,” he said. “It’s a radio signal.”
“Where from?” said Jer.
“From somewhere on this planet. If I had a diode I could rectify it and maybe we could get more detail. If only I could get the glass-blowing to work properly, perhaps I could make a valve that would …”
“There’s someone out there sending radio signals?”
Auron stopped talking and ran his hand through his hair, wrestling with himself inwardly.
“I don’t want to say it’s people,” he said, finally. “It could be some kind of automatic thing.”
“I told you!” Jer shouted. “Those stones we’ve been finding, I told you they’ve got writing on them.”
Auron shook his head.
“I still say it’s not writing. That’s some kind of natural phenomenon.”
Jer seized him by the collar of the primitive leather shirt he was wearing.
“We need to find out where these signals are coming from!”
“I-I can maybe narrow down the direction.” Auron stammered. “I can try. It could be hundreds of miles away. Or thousands, even. It might be bouncing off some kind of ionosphere.”
“Do it,” said Jer. “If there’s any hope at all of there being someone out there, we need to find out where they are.”
“And what if it’s people, but not as we know it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look what Sirius did when it terraformed the planet. It created plants and creatures that were inspired by things it found on the Earth, but aren’t actually things you can actually find on the Earth. What if it’s done the same with people? I mean, do you really want to meet those people?”
“I haven’t seen another human in twenty years. At his point I’d settle for the Umbongo people of Zeta Reticuli.”
“Don’t be flippant. What if it’s blended people and animals? What if they think we’re disgusting abominations and try to kill us?”
“Just figure out where it’s coming from,” said Jer, and he turned and walked back to his end of camp, singing to himself.
For three weeks Auron worked to try to improve detection of the regular clicks with his primitive device, and he attempted to triangulate it. Eventually he thought he’d managed it.
One warm sunny morning, he scratched a final set of figures into a thin clay tablet and worked through his calculations. There was no way to be sure about it.
He gazed through the enormous fence they’d laboriously erected to keep out the giant furry crabs, across towards the sea and towards the horizon, where the tiny dismal moon was setting.
He was lost in thought when Jer appeared.
“So?” said Jer.
“I can’t be certain but it looks like it’s coming from maybe a hundred miles away. That way.”
He pointed across the plain of giant mushrooms roamed by the brown hairy cattle that had formed their dietary staple for the past twenty years.
“When are we going?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said Jer. “I’m making huge progress now. Over that way is only danger. If we stay here, I’m pretty sure I can build a new Sirius.”
“Yeah, in fifteen years. I’m not staying another fifteen years on this wretched planet if there’s an alternative. I’m going, with or without you.”
“Then I’ve no choice. I’ll come with you, but we’ve never been that far out before. Who knows what’s there? Honestly I can’t recommend it. Better to stay here.”
“We start tomorrow.”
“We need a week to gather supplies.”
“We start in a week, then.”
With that, Jer marched off back to his hut.
They prepared for their journey as well as they could. Auron created an improvised rucksack which he thought he could manage to carry for the duration. He made another one for Jer, which Jer was reluctant to even try, arguing they’d simply hunt for food along the way, but Auron was insistent.
Into the rucksacks he packed dried smoked meat and fish, and primitive hard bread they’d learned to make with starch extracted from edible roots.
“It’s not going to last us the whole way,” said Auron, as they stood looking at their assembled supplies on the day of their departure, “but it’ll have to do.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Jer, “in five days we might be eating pizza.”
“They’re not going to have pizza. We’ll be lucky if we find anything vaguely human, and even luckier if they don’t kill us.”
“You’re such a pessimist.”
“I’m not a pessimist.”
“Screw you.”
“Screw you.”
The journey turned out to be harder than they’d anticipated. Their shoes had long since disintegrated and they’d replaced them with improvised moccasins made from animal skin, and under the strain of the hike, these kept falling apart, necessitating lengthy repairs.
They fished along the way, and hunted with bow and arrow. Sirius had created paths here and there, inspired by Auron’s original instructions to make the planet somewhat like the Earth of thousands of years ago, but the paths hadn’t been maintained in twenty years and rarely led where they wanted to go in any case.
At three separate points Auron set up his apparatus, which he’d hastily refined to specifically detect the curious radio wave clicks, and made appropriate refinements to their route.
Not until twelve days had passed did they lay eyes on their destination.
In the distance was a curious jagged formation, sticking out from the surrounding undulating forested hills, making a stark silhouette against the horizon.
“It’s a city,” said Jer.
“Can’t be,” said Auron. “Just jagged rocks.”
“Come off it, those are skyscrapers.”
“I really doubt it. I didn’t tell Sirius to make buildings.”
“You didn’t tell it not to.”
“Fair point.”
For another day they made their way towards the curious formation, until there could be no doubt about it.
“It was here all the time and we didn’t know about it because we never went more than about forty miles from the sea,” said Jer.
“We don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing.”
“How could it be a bad thing, mate, really?”
“If it has any kind of inhabitants, they could be hostile.”
“How about you just allow me to enjoy my fantasy till we get there? As far as I’m concerned, whatever it is, it’s the closest thing to a normal town I’ve seen in twenty years.”
“I’m just saying, we need to be wary. Prepared.”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Jer.
When they reached the edge of the city, even Jer was nervous, in spite of his optimistic patter. It was almost dusk when they stood on what was apparently a very overgrown city street, complete with signposts in an incomprehensible script and traffic lights covered in mould and circled around with creeping vines.
Before them lay endless rows of crumbling buildings, some thirty or forty stories high.
“It’s like it’s been abandoned,” said Jer. “As if some horrible disaster happened here.”
He turned to Auron.
“How do you explain this?”
“I-I can’t explain it. Jer, I think we should go back into the forest and make camp. It’s getting dark and we don’t know what’s going on here.”
Auron was clearly shaken. He face bore a worried, haunted look, which Jer was finding infectious, in spite of his desire to see the city as representative of a normality they’d left behind two decades earlier.
“I can’t sleep unless I at least take a look at what’s here,” said Jer.
“I don’t recommend it,” said Auron warily.
“Come, or don’t,” said Jer, and he strode off into the dark city.
Auron reluctantly followed.
The city seemed oddly human, but at the same time, indescribably alien. The elements of a human city were there, albeit overgrown with tangled weeds and young trees: tower blocks, signs, windows, defunct streetlights; and yet all oddly arranged in ways that no human had ever designed.
Jer stopped outside a building, the lower floor of which strongly resembled a shop.
“I’m going in,” he said.
“It’s too risky,” hissed Auron. “We’ll tackle it tomorrow.”
“Nonsense.”
Jer pushed at the closed glass door, expecting to have to smash it with a rock, but it unexpectedly sprang open. Inside, illuminated by just enough light from the glass front to discern the dim forms, stood rows of packaged foods, many consumed with mould, and all labelled in strange alien scripts.
A box that might once have contained cereal depicted a smiling family on its facade, but in the near-darkness, their faces appeared hideously malformed.
“If this is what they look like …” said Auron, trailing off into silence, trying to angle the box to catch the light from the windows.
Jer grabbed the box from his hand.
“The dye’s run or something.” he said, and he threw it carelessly to the ground.
An entire area was devoted seemingly to piles of mould and fungus and smelt strongly of fungal growth.
“Fruit and vegetable section,” said Auron. “Amazing anything’s still growing on it after twenty years.”
“Fungus section, more like,” said Jer.
Soon Jer found a row of tin cans. He picked one off the shelf and peered at it.
“Looks good,” he announced, finally, and he pulled open the ring tab and began to empty the contents into his mouth.
“Have you lost your mind?” Auron shouted at him.
Jer swallowed heavily and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“What you have to understand, Auron,” he said, briskly, “is that I really don’t care anymore. And actually, it was delicious, whatever it was. Why don’t you try some?”
A sudden sound from the rear of the shop caught their attention: a kind of scrabbling and scuffling.
“Probably an animal,” said Jer.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Auron.
Outside, Auron strode off towards the forest, without waiting to see if Jer followed him.
“I’ve seen enough,” he announced, over his shoulder. “I’m coming back tomorrow.”
“Me too, then,” said Jer, hurrying after him.
They spent half the night debating how exactly the city might have come into existence and what else might exist alongside it, or in it.
“I have the distinct feeling you’re not quite telling me everything,” said Jer.
“I have an idea about how it might have got there,” said Auron, “but I’m not sure yet.”
“Well, spit it out then.”
“Let me think about it a bit more.”
Jer made a disgruntled sound.
The following morning they made their way back into the abandoned city.
“This place must be at least a few miles across,” said Auron. “Finding the beacon isn’t going to be easy.”
“Maybe we don’t need to find the beacon,” said Jer. “This place is giving me the creeps. It looks even worse by day than it did by night. I’m starting to think you’re right. I don’t know if I want to meet whatever’s operating the beacon.”
“I need the electronics inside it. We can smash open some traffic lights and see what’s in those, but I’m thinking there might be a whole radio system running the beacon.”
“Take another reading on it.”
Auron shook his head.
“It’d be useless here. The signals will bounce of the buildings unpredictably.”
They stopped into the shop again, at Jer’s insistence. He found more cans of mysterious food, which he ate with relish.
Auron brought out a cereal box into the harsh daylight.
“Come and look at this,” he shouted to Jer.
“What,” said Jer emerging from the dim recesses. Then he said, “Holy mackerel.”
“Exactly,” said Auron. “I don’t think we want to meet these people, do we?”
The smiling family depicted on the box possessed massive foreheads, huge bloodshot eyes and protruding upper teeth.
“They look like bloody vampires,” said Jer dryly.
Auron gave a short laugh and threw the box aside.
“They probably don’t exist. It’s just a picture. Hopefully.”
Unfortunately, a little further on, they found further evidence of disquietingly abnormal habitation.
“It’s a skull!” Jer exclaimed, bending down to look at a round white object lying in the grass and weeds that were steadily destroying the road surface.
Auron joined him, and together they stared down at the eerie white dome. It had been completely picked clean, presumably by animals.
Auron picked it up and held it aloft, as if intending to perform a scene from Hamlet.
“It’s not human,” he said, “look at it.”
The skull had unnaturally wide eye sockets and bulged out at the top, with an enormous forehead.
“Just some kind of monkey,” said Jer uncertainly.
“The lower jaw seems human, though.”
“What’s going on here? Who are they?”
Auron put the skull carefully down where they’d found it.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Soon they found themselves walking down an enormous wide avenue, terminating in a huge tall grey building, which would have been almost brutalist in its ugliness were it not covered in creeping vines and moss.
“If we got on top of that we could get an overview of the whole city,” Jer suggested.
“Worth a try,” said Auron.
They entered by a pair of rusty swing glass doors and quickly located the stairs.
“This is going to be a long job,” said Auron.
They began to make their way up the endless staircase, their primitive lifestyle standing them in good stead; both of them were well-used to walking and running.
The walls of the staircase were covered in mould, paint flaking off in great slabs. Occasionally even bracket fungus sprouted from the walls.
“See, this is the problem with modern buildings;” said Jer, “major damp issues.”
Finally they emerged onto the roof.
“What d’you know!” Auron exclaimed.
There, in front of them, was a device the size of a barrel with an aerial sticking out the top of it. A green LED flashed on its side, visible even in the bright sunlight.
“Looks like we found our beacon,” said Jer.
The device was connected to a solar panel.
“Jer, this is going to speed up my work massively,” said Auron excitedly. “I’m sure it has a fair bit of electronics inside it. And these wires!”
“What’s it for?” said Jer. “Someone must have put it here for a reason. It’s a distress signal.”
“No,” said Auron. “No-one put it here, and if they did, they’re long gone. Sirius created it.”
“Can’t you see this planet was already populated when your machine terraformed it? Are you really that blind?”
“It makes no difference, anyway. There’s no-one here now.”
Jer shook his head in disbelief, his eyes misty. Then he seemed to make a conscious effort to pull himself together.
“At least can take the solar panel home with us,” he said, “Probably find a use for it.”
“It’s got to have a decent battery that’s continuously charging from the panel. Jer, this changes everything!”
“How long do you think it’ll take you to build a new Sirius now you’ve got this?”
“There’s still the problem that we haven’t got training data, but if you help me train it, I reckon two to five years.”
Jer beamed.
“That’s a lot better than fifteen, mate.”
“We should search the building and see if we can find any tools. Tools are the other major thing I’m missing. Ideally we need screwdrivers and wire cutters and stuff to take this apart.”
Jer walked to the edge of the roof and looked out over the city.
“It’s big,” he said. “Not as big as a city on Earth but pretty sizeable.”
“Probably there are cities this size with these kinds of buildings in Russia or China. I’ve never been there.”
“Me neither,” said Jer, his eyes tracing the courses of overgrown roads. “So, who do you think built it?”
“Sirius must have built it.”
“Then why are there people in it?”
“I don’t think they’re people.”
A wave of emotion passed over Jer’s face. Auron couldn’t quite tell what he was thinking, but guessed that he was disappointed not to find the city inhabited, or at least not by any normal human beings.
“Let’s get on with it, then,” said Jer.
They searched several floors of the building and found nothing in the way of tools. It was as if the building had been constructed with a view to housing thousands of office workers or tenants, but no-one had ever arrived.
They spent the night in the forest again, and the following morning they began to search every building that looked like it might possibly contain tools. Around the back of a four-storey townhouse they found what they were looking for: a toolbox.
“What on Earth is this?” said Auron, holding up a screwdriver that had a right-angle bend in it. “And this?” he added, fishing a drill bit out of the box that branched into four separate useless bits, one of them terminating in a hexagonal key head.
“It’s more like an art project than a toolbox,” Jer observed. “Is there anything useable here?”
He picked out what might almost be a small spirit level, except it was curved.
“Yes,” said Auron, smiling. “There’s enough stuff here to accelerate my work by years just by itself. Look at this!”
He held up a working pair of wire cutters, snapping the jaws shut and letting them spring open again.
“Let’s go and tackle the beacon,” said Jer.
They went back to the tower block where they’d found the beacon, stopping along the way to disassemble traffic lights and the lower parts of street lights.
Auron was able to collect together a small pile of potentially useful parts.
Again they ascended the to the top of the tower block, and they disassembled the beacon. Auron was pleased but sometimes puzzled with what he found inside it. In addition to the electronics needed to broadcast a signal, he found strange clumps of other electronics, seemingly disconnected from the rest. They filled their rucksacks with what they found and Jer took the solar panels under his arm.
“It’s going to take months to get this back to the beach,” said Auron.
“We could make a kind of sledge from one of those metal panels from the freezer in the shop and drag it,” said Jer.
Auron shook his head.
“We’d never manage to drag it through the forest.”
“If we take a route a bit further to the north, we could go across the plain more. That’d cut out a lot of the forest.”
“It’s too dangerous. It’s full of crabs.”
“Come on. We won’t sleep there. We’ll be careful. If any of them even come near us we’ll stick them full of arrows.”
“Let me think about it,” said Auron.
They descended the steps with heavy rucksacks full of useful parts. In the building’s lobby, Jer stopped suddenly, staring at the wall.
“What?” said Auron.
“That wasn’t here before,” said Jer, pointing at some strange marks daubed on the wall.
“Of course it was.”
“Did you see it when we came in here?”
“Not specifically but the whole wall was filthy.”
“I don’t think it was here before.”
“Let’s go. We’ve got a lot to do before it gets dark.”
They walked out into the eerily-silent overgrown street and began to head towards the forest.
“It’s quieter than usual,” said Jer.
“It’s always quiet,” Auron replied.
“Not this quiet. Where are the birds? There’s no birdsong.”
They turned into a narrow street between four-storey townhouses, where strange-fern like plants had sprouted from the tops of the buildings, almost blocking out the sunlight with enormous brown-spotted fronds.
A groaning sound caused them to stop suddenly in their tracks.
“What was that?” said Auron.
“Could be a bear,” said Jer.
“Those things aren’t bears, Jer. We’ve been through this before.”
“‘One of those things that look like bears’ is too much of a mouthful. We’ve been through that before as well.”
Auron took the bow from his back and drew an arrow.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We haven’t time to hang about.”
They walked slowly forward, Auron pointing the arrow at any area where he thought some creature might be hiding.
They had almost reached the end of the street when something hideous stumbled out in front of them.
“Shoot it!” shouted Jer in alarm.
But Auron hesititated.
The thing walked on two legs, although it’s face was a reddish warty mass featuring a bulbous forehead and two enormous bloodshot eyes. A row of sharp pointed teeth protruded from its upper jaw. In addition to the upright posture, a mass of curly blonde hair gave it a curious resemblance to a human woman. It was clothed in a filthy dress apparently found somewhere in a shop. The expression on its face was pitiful; expressive of enormous suffering and sadness. It lumbered slowly towards them emitting a heart-rending mewing groan.
“For God’s sake, shoot it!” shouted Jer.
“I can’t,” said Auron. “It’s too human.”
“It’s not human!”
Jer put down the solar panel and took the bow from his own back.
Before he had time to fire an arrow, another two creatures appeared. One of them vaguely resembled a male human being, also incongruously wearing a filthy ragged dress, and the other, a child—bald and covered in dark fur. All had the same bulbous heads and mournful eyes filled with sadness.
Even Jer hesitated.
“Let’s get out of here!” said Auron. “We’ll go the other way.”
He slid his bow back into the holster on his back, put the arrow in the sheath at his side, and took the solar panel under his arm. Then, they turned and ran.
Behind them, they heard one of the creatures break into a trot, and Jer looked back over his shoulder long enough to catch a glimpse of the male creature lolloping towards them.
“In here!” Auron shouted, and the ran into a building that strongly resembled a shopping centre.
Inside, the walls of the building sported impressive fungal growth. There was very little light in there; what little light there was came from the half-broken ceiling high above them. A few green plants tenaciously clung to life in the semi-darkness.
They heard the creature run into the entrance behind them. They ran as fast as they dared, almost tripping over long strands of fungus and slipping on patches of slimy mould adhering to the the tiled ceramic floors.
Then Jer, who was leading the way, abruptly gave a shout and stopped.
“What is it?” said Auron, his eyes searching the darkness behind them.
“There’s a vertical drop here!” said Jer.
Auron stepped forwards and gazed downward.
Jer was right. The tiled floor dropped absolutely vertically downward, the side of the drop also neatly tiled, before resuming its horizontal trajectory five metres below them.
“Who would build a thing like this?” said Jer. “It’s absolutely lethal.”
“We have to go back to the last turning before that thing catches up with us,” said Auron, and they briskly retraced their steps with the sounds of the thing steadily approaching ringing in their ears.
Several minutes later they emerged into the sunlight on the other side of the building, slamming a door shut behind them.
“Let’s go, before it gets out,” said Auron.
They ran several blocks before they were sure they had left the creatures behind.
“What were those things?” said Jer, panting.
They flung themselves onto the ground, propping their backs against the side of a building.
“What we’re seeing, I think it’s the result of a glitch,” said Auron, in-between gasping for air. “This whole town.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s like if you ask AI to generate an image of a forest and some cliffs, and it draws a building where the cliffs should be. Sirius made a mistake, that’s all. Maybe my instructions weren’t explicit enough. I told it not to create people, but it created creatures that look almost like people. The city, it’s a pure glitch. It shouldn’t be here. It looked at what’s on the Earth and some circuit somewhere decided that tower blocks ought to be here. I told it to terraform the planet to make it look like the Earth thousands of years ago.”
“How many thousands of years ago?” Jer asked, curiously.
“I didn’t specify.”
“Next time you terraform a planet, I think you should make the prompt longer and more detailed.”
“Yes, thanks Jer. I realise that now.”
The following day they built a rudimentary sled from a piece of metal, loaded it with everything useful they’d found, and tried pulling it along. In the forest, it kept getting stuck, but they decided that, between the two of them, pulling the sled would be preferable to making repeated journeys to get everything back to their camp.
“Once we get onto the plain it won’t be so bad,” said Jer. “I reckon we can do it in three or four weeks. Maybe less.”
They dragged the sled through the forest for a week, heading north, finally emerging onto the plain dotted with giant mushrooms and roamed by the long-haired cattle-like animals that composed most of their diet.
“How fast can you get an arrow ready to fire?” Auron asked Jer.
Jer immediately dropped the cables they were using to pull the sled, and in one smooth movement took the bow from his back and strung an arrow into it, taking perhaps no longer than a second.
“Impressive,” said Auron.
“A lot of practice,” said Jer, putting the bow back into its holster.
“OK, we need to avoid going too close to anywhere the crabs might be hiding. It’s going to have to be one long crazy push. We’ll sleep two nights only, on a rota. It’ll be completely exhausting but at the end of it we’ll have everything we need to get off this planet, all in one place.”
“Let’s do it,” said Jer.
For three days they struggled across the plain, killing only one of the giant alien crab-like creatures along the way. Then, at last, the high fence of their camp, protecting the huts inside from the crabs, was in sight.
Afterwards, with the benefit of hindsight, Auron argued they had perhaps allowed themselves to relax too much, believing the ordeal of the journey to be over. Jer felt they had simply run into a patch of bad luck.
Regardless of the reason, they were traversing a sparse patch of trees near the shore when a crab ran at them, its bulbous human-like eyes fixed uncannily on them, the creature clattering loudly.
Jer reacted immediately, stringing an arrow in his bow and firing it directly at the thing’s forehead. He had already shot the creature by the time Auron had an arrow ready to fire. The thing was still alive, staggering from side to side, so Auron fired too, and Jer shot another arrow. It sank onto the ground, emitting one last horrible shriek.
It was then that Jer’s lower leg was seized from behind. They spun around to see three of the creatures in full attack mode.
There was a sharp crack as the creature broke Jer’s leg. He screamed.
Auron took the short spear from his back, tipped with steel he’d laboriously made himself from crude iron ore, and began to jab it into the creatures’ bodies, aiming at the soft patches that were unprotected by their tough exoskeletons.
Several times he was almost seized himself in the iron grips of their enormous pincers. The creatures were capable of making very sudden, unexpected movements, but fortunately their aim was often poor. On the other hand, once they fastened onto flesh, they never let go.
He grabbed the spear from Jer too and jabbed at the crabs with both hands, concentrating mainly on the one that had Jer’s leg in its pincers.
For ten minutes he continued to battle the creatures, after killing the one that had caught Jer. They made a continual horrid clattering noise, which Auron and Jer had long suspected served to attract other crabs to the site of an attack. Fortunately no other crabs arrived.
Meanwhile, Jer managed to detach the dead crab from his leg. He strung an arrow in his bow with shaking inaccurate hands and fired at the monsters.
By the time they were finished, both of them were covered in bruises, Auron was clutching his side where a swing from one of the crab’s enormous arms had broken a rib, and—worst of all—Jer’s foot was flopping horribly to one side, the tibia and fibula clearly both broken through.
“The thing’s snapped my leg half off!” Jer shouted.
Auron examined it, causing Jer to scream in pain.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said.
“It’s not going to heal, is it?” said Jer desperately. “This is too severe to heal.”
“I don’t know.” said Auron. “Listen to me, Jer, I can put this right. In a few years now I’ll have another AI constructed, and that’s going to quickly design a new Sirius. The new Sirius will fix you completely.”
“How am I going to survive when I can’t walk?”
“I’ll take care of you, Jer. You know I will. We need to get you back to the compound before more of them turn up. I’ll clear the stuff off the sled and I’ll drag you there.”
Getting Jer onto the sled caused him more nearly unbearable pain, and he began to slide in and out of consciousness. Jer’s entire leg was swelling. Auron persuaded him to drink in the hope the extra liquid would help fend off shock.
Half an hour later they were back safely behind the high crab fences, but Jer was in enormous pain and there was very little they could do about it. Jer begged for beer and Auron gave it to him, in spite of having no idea whether or not that was medically advisable.
Jer moaned with pain all night. By the morning, his foot was an unsettling shade of blue.
“How does it look?” he asked Auron, with a shaking voice.
“Not good, Jer, I’ll be honest.”
Jer uttered a curse.
Over the following days, Jer’s condition only worsened. His foot turned completely black and the veins under his skin developed a vivid reddish appearance, a strange veiny pattern making its way up his leg.
Auron checked on him every hour but neither of them had any real medical knowledge and for the most part he could only observe Jer’s declining condition with a sense of helplessness.
By the morning of the fourth day after the attack, Jer’s foot was emitting a horrible rancid odour. Jer was alternating between lucidity and delirium, and occasionally demanded paracetamol, believing he was back on the Earth and somehow couldn’t get to a hospital. Auron tackled him in a period of lucidity.
“Your foot’s decomposing. We need to amputate it, Jer,” he said, softly.
“You want to cut my foot off?”
Jer was outraged.
“It’s not a functioning foot anymore. It’s a piece of rotting flesh.”
“What am I going to do without my foot? I don’t want to lose my foot. We haven’t even got anaesthetic. You don’t know how to stop bleeding. I’ll die if you cut it off.”
“You’ll die if I don’t cut it off. Look, Jer, in a couple of years—”
“Yeah, yeah, you keep saying, you’ll build a new Sirius and you’ll fix everything. But what if you can’t? What if your research comes to nothing?”
“The foot has to come off, Jer. Look at it.”
Jer struggled to a half-sitting position and gazed horrified at his black foot.
“Oh, God,” he said helplessly, collapsing back onto his bed.
“Today. We have to do it today.”
“Bring me more beer. I want to get drunk first.”
For half an hour, Jer drank himself into near-oblivion, and passed out.
Auron brought in a large, flat piece of wood and placed it next to Jer’s bed. Then, slowly, he moved Jer’s lower leg from the primitive bed and over the wooden block. Jer seemed as though he was about to wake up, and he mumbled something, but then passed out again. Auron tied a tourniquet just below Jer’s knee, then he brought an axe above his head, and exerting all his strength, brought it down on Jer’s lower leg, above the point where the crab had broken it.
Thanks to long practice of dismembering the alien cattle, he managed to sever the leg with one blow. Jer awoke and emitted a piercing yell.
For a whole month it was unclear whether Jer was going to live or die. He developed a ferocious fever and suffered appalling nightmares, delirium and delusions.
He could do nothing for himself and Auron had to take care of him completely. He meticulously applied resin from a pine-like species of tree to the stump, shuddering as he did so. For Auron, a man who had always tended towards avoiding physical human contact, the process of nursing Jer was deeply unpleasant, but there was no-one else around to do it, and the thought of losing his only friend on the whole planet was even more unpleasant.
Only after two months had passed did Jer begin to seem more like his former self. He sat up one morning, gazing morosely at his stump.
“I’m going to be completely useless now,” he said.
“No,” Auron replied. “I’ve already made you crutches. When you feel up to it, you’ll try them out. Probably we’ll have to make some adjustments. You’ll get through a few years just fine, Jer—however long it takes to get off this planet. Also, you can help me train the new machine. I’m making great progress, Jer, with the help of the stuff we found.”
“Yeah?” said Jer.
“Maybe in a funny sort of a way, this is a blessing. Now you’ll have the time to spend on the machine. I’ll do all the hunting and fishing and stuff. Not that you won’t be able to fish,” he added, hastily, “You’ll be able to fish. You’ll be able to get around on crutches. It’s just for a few years.”
“You wouldn’t be calling it a ruddy blessing if you’d lost your foot!” said Jer bitterly. “Anyway, I’m still too weak to try your crutches. Why don’t you bring your machine in here and I’ll help you with it if I can.”
“Sure,” said Auron. “Absolutely. It’ll take me a while to set up. I’ll do it now.”
Bit by bit he dragged the parts of his machine on the sled to Jer’s hut. He set up the rudimentary microphone by Jer’s head, and the equally primitive speaker on the other side of his head.
The most important part of the device consisted of a clay tank, the size of a fairly substantial fish tank, filled with a blueish white goop. On top of the goop, strands of copper stood out, turning green in places.
Long wires connected the assembly to the solar panels outside, and to a series of batteries, also in clay pots, that Auron dragged into the hut.
Next to Jer’s arm he placed a wire sticking out horizontally above a metal plate on a wooden block.
“What do I do?” said Jer, when Auron had finally finished assembling it.
“Press the wire to activate the mic. I’m teaching it vowels at the moment. Not just vowels; all the basic sounds in the English language. You hold down the wire and make a sound that you want to teach it, speaking clearly into the mic.”
He demonstrated, making an “a” sound.
“Then listen to the speaker. It should make a noise. The closer the noise is to the sound you want, the longer you keep on holding the wire; up to three seconds at the most. Five if it gets the sound exactly right.”
“I didn’t hear anything,” said Jer.
“You have to listen very carefully. It’s faint. I’m working on an amplifier but it’ll take a while.”
Jer tried the experiment himself, touching the wire to the metal plate, saying “a” loudly and clearly and then listening.
Then he heard it. The speaker emitted a sound that, with a good imagination, might be considered to resemble a vowel.
“That was rubbish,” said Auron, pulling Jer’s hand up off the plate. “That doesn’t deserve reinforcement. The closer it sounds to an a, the longer you need to hold the wire down. If it sounds rubbish like that, you don’t want to reinforce it at all. It’s made better a’s than that.”
They carried on for an hour, until Jer announced that he needed to rest.
Another three weeks passed before Jer felt able to try the crutches, but soon after that he was hopping around the camp, miserable, but in a much improved condition compared to when he had only lain on his bed, and pleased to be outside again.
“I’m going to give my hut a thorough cleaning,” he announced to Auron. “I need to rebuild the bed from scratch. It smells like someone’s died in there. ”
“Someone almost did,” Auron replied.
Two weeks later, when Auron was smoking a rack of fish as the sun set, Jer came hopping excitedly towards him.
“Come and see!” he said, and he hopped back towards his hut.
Auron joined him, reluctant to leave the fish but glad that Jer seemed relatively happy for once.
Jer flung himself down onto his bed.
“Watch this,” he said, and he pressed the wire to the plate and said, “hello” into the microphone.
The speaker emitted a sound. The sound was distinct and clear, and it was very obviously the word “hello”.
Auron’s face broke into a beaming grin.
“It’s working, Auron,” said Jer jubilantly. “You’re a genius! Your machine’s working! We’re getting off this planet! We’re really going to get off this planet!”
“That’s still some way into the future,” said Auron, still smiling. “Now it can say ‘hello’, but that’s still a long way from it understanding science well enough to design an improved version of itself.”
“I taught it something else,” said Jer, and again he held the wire down and said, into the microphone, “greet Auron”.
The sound, when it came a few moments later, clearly resembled speech. In fact, it clearly resembled two words: “screw you”.
Auron dissolved into peals of laughter.
Jer threw his arms into the air and shouted, “We’re leaving!”
YouTube intro:
For twenty years, Jer and Auron have lived alone on a world that was never meant for them. Then, one day, something changed. This is their story.
