Following In The Footprints by Graham Storrs

Hi Gang, On finding that there is an anthology open called ‘Footprints‘ with a very specific theme, I was surprised to find myself inspired to write this story. It’s short and it’s a first draft and I’ve been keen to put something up here for you to review and comment on.

Following in the Footprints by Graham Storrs (draft for review)

For a lifeless moon, it sure was a lot of fun.

Ven and Ragi chased one another through the low hills on their scooters, had a shooting contest with the cutting lasers, and ran barefoot across the endless grey plains, the regolith thrown into slow-falling arcs behind them with each giant stride. At one-sixth G, almost everything they did was fun.

After a strenuous rock-tossing contest, they sat on their scooters and replenished their airpacks. With their skins hardened to a tough, rubbery consistency under their worksuits, a light facefield was all they needed to keep the vacuum at bay, keep the worst of the rays out of their eyes, and give their mouths and noses a pressured space to breathe in. Hooms were pretty good in vacuum but they still needed air.

Ragi was laughing. ‘You should’ve seen your face when you hit that crevasse bro!’

Ven threw his used airpack at him, missing him deliberately but not by too much. ‘And where were you when I needed a hand out of there?’

‘I’d have helped you, honest, but I couldn’t stand up for laughing.’

Ven smiled too. ‘Little brothers are a pain in the ass. I’m trading you in for an Awmonine pack-dog as soon as we hit KoobStation. At least I’ll get some respect.’

Ragi, still chuckling, checked the time. It was still hours before the Last Chance would swing by to pick them up. ‘What a waste of time this place has been,’ he said, looking round at the barren hills.

Ven shrugged. ‘That’s the salvage business, bro. You know what it’s like. Only about one in ten of these crappy old systems ever has anything worth picking up.’

‘Yeah but I had a sort of feeling about this one.’

‘You always have a feeling about every system we go to.’

Yet there had been some good signs. As the salvage ship did it’s first sweep of the system they’d picked up lots of evidence of an advanced civilisation having lived here once. Bits of space-junk still orbited within the ecliptic and hung around at the stable Lagrange points of most of the planets. There was even a planet with water. Number three. It was shrouded in hundred-percent cloud cover and way too hot and acidic for life to survive there but that was a classic dead civilisation pattern. Races of all kinds eventually outgrew their homeworlds, moved out into the Galaxy and left a beat-up, crap-infested, poisonous hell-hole behind them.

Homeworlds were an embarrassment to most species. The hooms didn’t even know where theirs was.

This one’s atmosphere was full of nano-junk, chemical cocktails and enough background radiation to make it glow in the dark almost. A million years of acid rain and two-hundred-kilometre-an-hour winds had scoured the surface of anything useful. Whatever they might have left up in space, was gone too. Orbits had decayed, debris – natural and unnatural – had pounded everything to pieces and the pieces had gone on to pound even the pieces to pieces. They’d had one lucky find; hundreds of square kilometres of aluminium-coated plastic sheet drifting in a big tangle at the third planet’s L4 point. How it got there, no-one could guess. But that was it. It would’t even cover the fuel spent getting there from KoobStation.

Last Chance had gone off on the grand tour, checking the other planets, their moons and even the big asteroids. Ven and Ragi had been assigned the third planet’s moon, which should have been a good spot. Things last a long time on an airless moon with almost no seismic activity.

They had started with a high-orbital sweep in their scooters and picked up loads of great signals – metals, mostly. Then they’d gone in low for a closer look and had immediately found lots of disappointment. It looked like this moon had been quite heavily populated at one time. They found evidence for almost a hundred cities. Yet each and every one they visited had been destroyed, and not just by the passage of a million years, either. They had all been nuked. Blown to pieces in a bombardment of such intensity and viciousness that not a single building was left standing, not a single piece of infrastructure left intact.

It was a real pain. Ven and Ragi had inspected the ruins of what must have been the largest city and they found little bits and pieces that suggested a highly-advanced industrial civilisation. There were plastics, complex alloys, sophisticated ceramics, spintronics, photonics and quantum computers. But nothing was intact. It was just possible that it would be worth mining out the ruins and sifting them for metals and such but, even after a million years it was all so heavily irradiated, it would cost a fortune to clean it up, and it was only low-grade junk to start with.

They checked a few more places but it was the same everywhere.

‘Those guys must really have hated each other,’ Ragi said, chewing on a food bar.

‘I thought hooms were bad enough,’ Ven agreed.

‘What do you suppose it was all about?’

‘Gob knows.’

Ragi was frowning. ‘I suppose the Brains will come take a look one day. Work it all out.’

‘Brains got better things to do.’

Ragi grinned at his brother. ‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to disrespect the Almighty Brains, whose very noses we’re not worthy to wipe.’

‘Shut up, punk. What do you know? And what’s so bad about giving them their due? They look after everyone, hooms and mersals and phlozzies and… everyone.’

They’d had this argument many times before but Ragi couldn’t keep his mouth shut. ‘So why aren’t we sitting with our feet up on some hoom world, sipping ohjay and… and doing whatever the hell they do all day in places like that? The Brains would welcome us. They’d dust off a sun-lounger and warm up the pool for us. They love taking care of people. It’s what they live for.’

Ven pulled a face. ‘Sometimes it amazes me that you and I came out of the same tank. If I’ve got one gene in common with you, I’ll eat my scooter.’

‘Well? Come on. Why are we out here on this dead rock when we could be living in a tropical paradise?’

‘You know why. ‘Cos I couldn’t stand living life like a pet in a cage. A person has to do something to make him feel alive, even if it’s scavenging around these old graveyards for junk we can sell to the Brains for peanuts. At least we make our own way. At least we earn our living.’

They fell silent, each chewing on his own thoughts. Ragi had heard Ven’s views on this a hundred times and, mostly he’d agreed with his big brother. They were cut from the same cloth. Ragi too felt the urge to get out there and do something.

The Brains, or Transorganics as they liked to call themselves, kept ten million worlds safe and provided everything any member of a thousand species could want. Most hooms were happy to find a nice world, take up a sport, find a hobby, and settle down with a partner or two. Some of them needed more. They needed risk. They needed broader horizons. They needed to feel they were making their own way.

So, sprinkled among the worlds of the Transorganic Domain—which comprised most of the Galaxy—were tiny motes of trade and independence. Salvage teams, freight operators, crofters on independent worlds, hooms and other species turned their hands to all kinds of marginal, low-skill, low-tech jobs, just so they could say they did it for themselves and didn’t take the Brains’ incredibly generous handouts.

‘Hey,’ Ven said. ‘I’ve got a blip out across the plain there. Do you want to check it out?’

Ragi leaned in to Ven’s scooter and checked the direction. He lifted his head and peered into the bright, grey distance, zooming his eyes to max, but saw nothing. ‘It must be small. We didn’t see it on the aerial scan.’

‘Could be paydirt.’ Ven didn’t sound all that optimistic.

‘Ven? Does this all seem like enough to you?’

Ven gave him a quizzical look. ‘This all what?’

‘This. This life we lead. Scratching around for stuff dead people left behind millions of years ago. Doesn’t is seem sort of pointless, sometimes?’

‘Yeah. But then payday comes around again and it all makes sense.’

‘Oh you’re so funny. I’m trying to say something here. I’m trying to explain something I’m feeling.’

Ven sighed and looked hard at his brother. More and more in the past few months Ragi had started talking like this. He could see a great head of discontent building up in his brother’s chest and more and more he was learning to dread it. ‘So explain it to me, Ragi. I’m listening.’

Ragi threw up his arms. ‘Shit, I don’t know Ven. Not when you put me on the spot like that. It’s just a feeling. You know? I just feel there should be more point to what we do than just scratching a living in dead guys’ dustbins. Even though that’s better than playing scudball and watching vidlit all day.’ He looked at his brother with eyes that pleaded with him to understand. ‘I want my life to mean something, Ven. I want to do something that counts.’

Ven shook his head. He didn’t like the way this was going. When he spoke, he sounded angry. ‘Well you can’t. Nobody can. The Brains do all the hard stuff—the science, the exploring, medicine, engineering, social planning… There’s nothing left for us to do except sit around and enjoy what they’ve made for us.’

‘Or come out here,’ Ragi said, darkly. ‘In ships that they built, in areas they designate, scraping together a few creds here and there, collecting junk they don’t want. But who issues the creds, Ven? Who engineered this fringe economy we’re so proud to be part of?’

Ven hated it when Ragi got like this. He didn’t like to think about what his brother was saying. ‘I’m going to check out that blip,’ he snapped. ‘You coming?’

‘Ven!’

‘OK. I’ll go on my own.’

Ven got onto his scooter and it rose silently off the ground, sliding forward and picking up speed rapidly. Cursing, Ragi mounted his own machine and set off after him.

The blip, when they settled beside it ten minutes later, turned out to be a six-metre high cylinder forming a circular enclosure twenty metres wide. The material of the cylinder had sagged and warped, as if it had melted at some time. The cylinder was surrounded by a concrete apron extending another twenty metres out. The surface of the concrete was crumbling and dusty, only distinguishable from the surrounding regolith by its flatness. The walls of the cylinder were white and crystalline, with a delicate translucency. The two men walked slowly towards the cylinder across the concrete apron, scanning for signs of danger as they went.

‘It’s a glass wall around something,’ Ven said, looking at readings from a sensor display. ‘No roof.’

‘Glass? Around what?’ Ragi wondered. ‘And why make it so high?’

Ven thought about that. ‘How high do you think you can jump on this moon?’

‘What? So it’s to keep something from jumping out?’

‘Or to stop people jumping in.’

‘What people?’

‘People who’ve come here to see whatever’s inside.’

‘You think it’s, like, a big display case?’

‘Let’s see if we can find a way in.’

‘Try not to touch the walls,’ Ven said. ‘It was built in sections, see?’ He pointed to a seam between two glass panels. ‘The glass has flowed to fill the gap but I think the sections might have been glued together once.’ He indicated a small heap of white dust at the base of the seam. ‘These things might just be leaning against each other for support now.’

They did a half-circuit of the wall before they found the door. It’s metal hinges and locks had crumbled away and the door had fallen into the space inside. It lay on the ground, a shattered jigsaw-puzzle of itself. It was a hoom-sized door, they both noticed, although neither said anything.

Looking past it into the enclosure, the two men were astonished to find an almost empty space. Ven took a step forward but Ragi put a hand on his brother’s shoulder, stopping him.

‘Let’s just take a look before we go in.’

So they looked.

The biggest object in there was a pile of metallic junk with gold foil hanging on it. A million years of vacuum and solar radiation aren’t kind to most materials. Metals tend to sublime, losing mass and strength. Their crystal structures grow brittle and they lose their ductility. Eventually, they break and crumble under the slightest stress. Gold is pretty stable though and can protect whatever is wrapped in it for a very long time. So there was still some structure left in the pile of junk, enough to see that it might once have been a platform, several metres across and maybe a couple of metres high, with long, spindly legs.

It stood on the ground, not a concrete floor but the original surface of the moon. The bumpy, rock-strewn area was covered in footprints. The prints were hoom-sized too, just like a hoom wearing boots with ridged soles had walked there a million years ago.

Someone had gone to the trouble of preserving some old machine and the footprints that surrounded it. They’d built a glass wall around it so that other people could come and look at it.

‘What the…’ was Ven’s only comment and the only thing either of them said for some time.

After they’d stared for a long, long time, it was Ragi who broke the silence. ‘Let’s just leave it,’ he said.
Ven looked at his brother. ‘Leave it?’

‘Yeah. This place is… was… like, sacred or something. You know? We should just leave it.’

Ven kept looking at Ragi, who was still staring at the footprints. ‘Don’t suppose it’s worth anything, anyway,’ he said. ‘Probably not even worth mentioning in the survey report.’

Ragi nodded. His brother could be pretty cool sometimes.

They went back to their scooters, neither of them speaking. It was still some time before the Last Chance would swing by for them.

‘Weird, huh?’ Ven said, looking back at the glass enclosure.

‘Ven? Those footprints…’

‘They could have been anything. Just ‘cos they looked like hooms… There’s other bipeds in the Galaxy.’

‘Yeah but…’ Thoughts and feelings were shifting about inside Ragi like big, granite blocks, massive and ponderous ideas he couldn’t grasp or control. He looked up at the dazzling white planet that hung in the black sky near the horizon. Ven followed his gaze.

‘Even if that isn’t our homeworld,’ Ragi said, feeling his way towards what was moving him. ‘It’s somebody’s—and somebody who was like us a million years ago.’ He nodded towards the cloud-wrapped planet. ‘Somebody came here from there.’ His voice took on a little urgency, a little excitement. ‘Imagine what it was like, coming here for the first time, stepping out into the unknown, looking around, being the first person from your species that ever saw what you saw, that ever did what you did. Isn’t that something? I mean…’ He shook his head with the wonder of it.

Despite himself, Ven was caught up in what his brother was seeing. For a moment he saw himself making that first footprint. The first one ever on a whole, untouched moon. ‘Yeah, that’s something.’

Ragi turned his earnest, troubled gaze on his brother. ‘Where has that all gone, bro? When did we stop finding new places to put our footprints? When did we stop looking at the Universe just to see what it’s like?’
Ven snapped out of it. ‘It’s just another dead moon, Ragi. We’ve seen dozens like it. You could travel the Galaxy a lifetime and all you’d see is more of the same.’

Ragi opened his mouth to protest but closed it again with a sigh.

After a while, they boosted their scooters into orbit and Last Chance came by and picked them up in its scoopfields. Ven went to see the boss to make their report and Ragi went forward to the observation dome to take a last look at the system.

By the time Ven joined him with a cup of kiff in each hand, Ragi had made up his mind. He took the drink and regarded his brother with sombre eyes. ‘Any good finds?’ he asked.

‘Nah, not really. Whatever the fighting was about that wiped out all those moon cities, it pretty much wiped out the whole system. They found an interesting asteroid. All hollowed out and full of ancient equipment. Quite well preserved but only of interest to archaeologists, really.’

‘To the Transorganics, you mean.’

‘Yeah. The Brains will pay us something for a find like that. Not much.’

‘But just enough, eh?’

Ven pulled a sour face. ‘You still on about that?’

‘This is where it all began, Ven.’

‘You don’t know that.’

‘Yes, I do. I saw something today that changed my life.’

‘What? A pile of junk and some footprints?’

‘Not just any footprints, bro. Hoom footprints. Maybe the first ones that were ever made anywhere that wasn’t homeworld.’

Ven was angry now. ‘So what? A million years ago a few ape-men managed to fly a crappy old spaceship a few thousand kilometres and walk around a worthless desert. So what?’

‘So I’m gonna do that too. I’m going out there and I’m going to stand where no-one has ever stood before and look at things no-one has ever seen before.’

‘That’s rubbish! There isn’t anywhere like that. And what’s the point, anyway?’

Ragi moved closer to his brother, fixing him with eyes that pierced him to the root. ‘There’s Andromeda, bro.’

‘What?’

‘A whole new galaxy. No hoom has ever been there.’

Now Ven really was scared. ‘The Brains say…’

‘Sod what the Brains say! Let’s go there. You and me. Maybe some others. An expedition. A voyage of discovery!’ He grabbed Ven by the shoulders. ‘No Brains to feed us and tuck us up at night. Nothing but us. Dumb, fragile little hooms all alone in the void. Doing it because…’ He faltered, knowing full well there was no good reason. ‘Doing it because that’s who we are and because it’s out there.’

Ven pulled away. ‘You want me to go two million light years just to tramp around in some dust?’

The excitement drained out of Ragi and Ven saw it go with pain in his heart. ‘I want you to go because you’re my brother and I don’t want to do it without you.’

‘It’s not even possible, is it, a journey that far? That’s why no-one’s done it.’

Ragi gave it another go. ‘We’ll make it possible. Making it possible is part of why it has to be done.’

‘You should talk to the Brains. They’d explain the difficulties. They’d…’

‘Forget the Brains! This is for me. For us. For all hooms everywhere. It’s not for them. They’ve been happy enough to sit here in their orbital palaces, tending their little collection of perfect worlds for countless millennia. They don’t want new places, new challenges. They have virtual worlds that make this one look like dross. We’re just their hobby, a minor distraction from the main business of their lives—whatever the hell that is!

‘Ven, don’t you think it’s time we got over this and moved on?’

His brother’s eyes were dark caverns where pain and sadness sheltered. ‘I always taught you to despise the ease and comfort of Dominion worlds. But I always though that, one day when we’d finished roistering around the Galaxy, that we’d get a little place on a quiet little planet somewhere, settle down and start ourselves a family.’ He managed a small smile. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it? But I don’t want to die in the middle of nowhere, millions of light years from home, for the sake of some vision of our glorious destiny or whatever it is you’ve got in your head.’

Ragi nodded. He had known his brother wouldn’t go with him, just as Ven knew there was no point trying to argue him out of it.

‘Good kiff,’ Ragi said after a long silence.

Ven smiled. ‘Tastes like shit.’

Ragi smiled back. It would be a long time before he could get a ship and a crew together to go to Andromeda. Plenty of time for him and Ven to work things out and grow easy with the idea that they’d just said goodbye.