Clam (Maura's Gate Book 1)

  Table of Contents

  CLAM

  Chapter 1 The Moon

  Chapter 2 The Clam

  Chapter 3 The Park

  Chapter 4 The Diary

  Chapter 5 The Camera

  Chapter 1 of ROSETTA, the Comet

  Books by Fiona Rawsontile

  CLAM

  Maura’s Gate, Book 1

  By

  Fiona Rawsontile

  Copyright © 2014 by Fiona Rawsontile

  All rights reserved. No part of this story may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.

  Chapter 1 The Moon

  “Looks like you are holding the last can,” said the old man, leaning back in his chair, his hand fumbling inside a pocket. Before he put a simulated cigarette in his mouth, he murmured something like hate it.

  “Aren’t you a biologist?” Devin said as he peeled the lid off the can and poured the precooked clams into a bowl. With a deep breath, he momentarily forgot about the gray-haired biology professor sitting at the same table, as well as those questions that kept popping up in his mind since their ship entered Mullos 17, a planetary system located eighty light years away from home.

  “Why would somebody ask me this question every time I smoke?” Roland smiled. The wrinkles around his eyes reminded Devin of the growth rings on a clamshell. Roland had a small figure, an aquiline nose, and eyes that always expressed interests in his surroundings. Though, at the moment, Devin couldn’t think of anything fascinating in the windowless kitchen of a spaceship.

  “A biologist is a human,” Roland continued. “And humans don’t stop doing things just because they know the harm.”

  Devin made no reply and quietly ate his clams. Was he really here seven years ago? How could there be no memories left? He shook his head, trying to concentrate on the food, but after a while his mind was busy again. What had happened to his colleagues …

  “Sometimes I wonder,” Roland interrupted at the right time, “what’s the point of living a life as a clam, or … or a lobster? Well, at least lobsters have brains.” He gazed down and frowned at the fake cigarette, but soon decided to resume smoking. “As clams, do they even know they exist? I mean, after they are born … You know, in my junior year I was once interested in clams’ reproductive systems. They can be male, female, or hermaphroditic …”

  Devin suddenly lost his appetite. The idea that the mushy gooey stuff in his mouth may have been self-conscious turned his stomach. He enjoyed talking to Roland most of the time. Well, most of the time! He dumped the unfinished clams with the shells into a garbage bag and cleaned up the table. He needed a moment alone.

  * * *

  He climbed up with ease the long and narrow stairway leading to the bridge. At the age of forty-nine, Devin was swifter and stronger than most of his peers as a result of regular exercise. He had tanned and tight skin, bright eyes with superb eyesight. Health, career, and personal life had been great, barring the last mission that had made him a hero to some people, and to others “a coward who ran home alone with his colleagues left to die”.

  And unless he retrieved his lost memory, he could argue against neither, even to himself.

  The bridge was a circular room with windows providing a 360-degree view. Pleasant hums surrounded various machines that had been deliberately arranged to make use of every available spot. To his surprise, Mina was still sitting at her station, and he couldn’t recall seeing her at all in the kitchen. The young Asian woman was scrutinizing something on the screen in front of her. The long smooth hair lay freely on her back, and her right hand was habitually holding the black frame of her eyeglasses as if that could make her see better. With simple and effective eye surgeries—Devin reflected—few women still wore glasses nowadays. Somehow she persisted.

  “This isn’t right,” she glanced at him and said. She had a freckle-free face with long eyebrows and limpid eyes. A very “clean” look, Devin always thought.

  He kept walking and ignored her comment. Girls are always paranoid. He knew that as a father of two teenage daughters. He stopped at the front of the room and gazed at the blue planet ahead. Still far, it resembled Earth in many ways with notable dissimilarities. The side of the globe facing them had a single ring-shaped continent. The center of the ring was filled with blue water. Devin wasn’t sure whether it should be classified as a large lake or a small ocean. A massive white cloud with a swirl hole perched to the northwest of the continent. It wasn’t impossible for an island to hide underneath the storm, but Devin couldn’t tell unless he resorted to the computers.

  Then the sour feeling stirred in his heart again. How could he not remember seeing the planet? Over the past seven years not a single day had passed without him trying to recall details of the previous mission. And what happened to his colleagues?

  “This just can’t be real!” Now Mina was almost screaming.

  Devin sighed and left for her desk. The screen she was looking at showed a shadow-like image, roughly oval-shaped except for the large crack that ran all the way from the surface to the center. Mina tapped her fingers on the screen to make the object rotate. At certain angles the crack was revealed as a hollow sector of thirty degrees or so. It cut so deeply that the whole thing was almost split into halves.

  Creepy! Devin straightened up and shook his head. He knew the computer was trying to portray the smaller moon orbiting Planet Mullos 17 b, since he had just spotted the other moon in front of the planet. It wasn’t uncommon for celestial objects to carry signs of intensive collisions, normally in the form of humongous craters or cracks on the surface. But such a clean and deep cut could not have been natural.

  “What do you think?” he heard Mina asking.

  “That’s why we are here, right?” He was senior to her, so he should sound more composed. “Looking for evidence of life. This thing gives us a heads up.”

  It was true that the goal of this mission, as well as a series of other missions to different planetary systems, was to discover extraterritorial lives, but Devin had just realized they weren’t ready for what awaited them ahead. To date humans had built various facilities on Earth’s moon, but what would be the reason for taking away a large chunk of a celestial body? And how could anyone have managed to carry out the task?

  Soon, Roland and Kenton joined them after receiving Mina’s brief message. The four of them gathered in front of a large screen, watching new details being filled in as Belief-II slowed down around the orbit of the larger moon. Just as Devin thought things couldn’t have become eerier, the scanning of the moon’s surface was complete. Rather than an olive with a chunk of it taken, a better description of the moon would be a relatively flat bottom attached to a half-open lid, or valve. In fact—Devin swallowed hard—the whole thing looked like one of the clams he had just consumed.

  Chapter 2 The Clam

  Half an hour later, their ship arrived at the back of the planet where the moon—or whatever they should call it—was located. Up to this point, Devin had still hoped that they were facing at a natural phenomenon bearing illusive features of an Earth creature, like the “face on Mars”. Now seeing with his own eyes as the ship circled the moon, he could no longer deny that it was a creation by some kind of intelligence, who had done an incredible job simulating real bivalve molluscs. The “shell” was seemingly constructed with dark-gray rock. Delicate “growth rings” lay in parallel, covering all the way from umbo to margin. Since the opening was only thirty degrees or so and was not facing the sun, all they could make out in between the valves was darkness.

  “What are those cavities?” Mina asked. “They don’t look like regular craters.”

  None of the men r
eplied. There were holes in the valves, dozens of them. To Devin, these holes were too deep and clean to be created by natural collisions.

  After they sat down at a table, Roland said, “I suggest we stick to our original plan—start with the planet, although so far we haven’t picked up any meaningful signal from it.”

  “But the moon is right in front of us.” Kenton’s tone left no room for objections. “We can’t leave without checking it out first.”

  Indeed, Devin thought. This was the first time he worked with Kenton, and when he initially learned about the arrangement, his longing for the mission almost came to an end. Kenton was known as a tough supervisor, with his hefty body, critical attitudes, and stubbornness that ran eternally. Having graduated from Yale, Kenton was said to call all the none-ivy-league colleges in the US party schools.

  Nevertheless, in a dubious situation like this, it was good to have someone who didn’t hesitate to make decisions, regardless of the outcomes.

  “Call me a coward.” Roland supported his chin with his left hand. “What if the thing is alive?”

  Kenton chuckled. “That’s ridiculous!”

  “I don’t know.” Roland shrugged. “To me, it’s much easier to grow a monster clam than to carve an entire moon.”

  For a while nobody made another sound. Then Mina brushed her hair with a hand and said tentatively, “Maybe we can get closer to the opening and take a peek from the outside?”

  Having no better options, they headed the ship to the opening. As the margin of the lower valve was drawing near, the darkness inside retreated and they began making out a “landscape”. The ground wasn’t made of the same material as the valves were. Its surface was smooth and light-colored, rising up and down until it reached the horizon where the upper valve was supposed to meet the bottom. The inner surface of the upper valve was remarkably glossy and shiny, as if it had been coated with some kind of crystal. Beams of faint light occasionally flashed inside the coat layer like lightning on a stormy night. There also seemed to be other light sources ahead, beyond the range of their vision.

  “At best it looks like a cooked clam to me,” said Kenton. “When a live clam opens, you can’t see the inner surface of a valve being detached from its body. Am I right, Professor McGuinn?”

  “Normally you are correct, but someone might have modified the clam with a reason.” It seems Roland still held the belief that the moon was alive.

  “Let’s land inside, right next to the edge.” Kenton opened one of the drawers in his desk and took out a camera. Although appearing old-fashioned, it must be a special one because Devin had heard that none of the cameras had recorded anything during his last trip.

  “Hopefully this one works.” Kenton hung it over his neck. “If something weird happens, we’ll have enough time to bow out.”

  * * *

  They went back to their individual cabins to get ready for landing as the ship descended onto the “mantle”. After Devin put on his spacesuit, he opened his personal backpack and took out a canvas pen case. He then unzipped an upper pocket in his spacesuit and carefully secured the pen case inside.

  “What is it?” Kenton’s voice sounded at the door.

  Devin jerked and turned around. “Nothing. Ur … just some accessories I’d like to bring with me every time I leave a ship.”

  Kenton was fully dressed in a yellow spacesuit with his camera hanging in front of his chest. At the moment he had his face shield lifted up, and so did Devin. There was no question that Kenton wasn’t satisfied with the answer based on the way he studied Devin, but eventually he must have decided not to press on.

  The two of them went through a few passages and stairways before they arrived at the front hatch where Mina and Roland were waiting for them. After a quick test of their intercoms and oxygen supplies, the four stepped out of the ship onto the vast barren land. Too clear, Devin thought as usual. In the past few years he had been to several airless moons. Those places might have resembled certain desert territories on the Earth, but the clearness of the view due to the lack of air and dust had always marked the scenes by eeriness. He walked for a few steps and paused. There was a fleeting moment when he felt he had been here before, but the details of the memory eluded him.

  Since the tiny gravity could barely keep them on the ground, Devin didn’t have a good feeling about the sturdiness of the surface. He bent down to have a closer view. The yellow surface was certainly not made of rock or soil. The closest counterpart he could think of was whales’ skin—smooth, tight, and a little bit oily. Given his observation that the area supporting their ship had sunk slightly, whatever material underneath the surface must be springy.

  He wandered in the desert for a short while and gave up. Everywhere looked the same. He doubted they’d see a change if they kept walking on the surface for days. He headed back to the ship and saw Mina standing there alone.

  “We should’ve listened to Roland,” she said, seemingly as bored as he was.

  Devin stared at her for a few seconds and burst out laughing. He couldn’t believe she was wearing her black-framed glasses under the face shield.

  “What’s so funny?”

  It took him a while to collect himself. “Have you heard of this thing called contacts?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Of course.”

  “Then why do you have to wear glasses?”

  “To remind myself what we see with eyes may not be real.”

  Still smiling, Devin shook his head. Never argue with women, young or old. He should’ve learned it living in a household with three of them. “Where is Roland?” he asked and looked around.

  In fact, the biologist wasn’t far from them, but Devin had failed to notice him because he was kneeling on the ground next to the ship.

  “Did you find anything unusual?” Devin asked through the intercom as he walked over.

  “Some kind of lump underneath,” said Roland. He had been pushing on the surface with a hand. After a while he withdrew his hand and gestured Devin to feel it.

  Devin pressed on the spot Roland was pointing at and compared it with the surrounding areas. It felt like a solid and movable ball being buried loosely beneath that particular spot. “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. It wasn’t there when I first touched it,” Roland said absentmindedly. Devin had an impression he was thinking of something that wasn’t ready to be discussed.

  After a while Roland straightened up. The two of them climbed over a small hill and strolled a little farther. After a while, the question about Devin’s lost memory arose again.

  “I can’t believe I don’t remember anything. Unless this baby is less than seven-year old, I must have seen it the last time I came here. How could I have no memory?”

  Before Roland had time to reply, they arrived at a place that differed drastically from the other areas. It looked like a frozen pond that had been maliciously messed up. Dents and ridges ran across one another on the dark-brown surface comprised of ill-formed layers.

  “Interesting,” Devin said, only because he didn’t know what else to say. In fact, the scene was rather repulsive to him.

  “It’s a wound,” Roland said after a while. “Somebody or something once hurt her badly.”

  A wound … okay! Devin couldn’t deny its resemblance to terribly damaged human flesh. But her? “Professor McGuinn, how do you know it’s female?”

  And how do you know it’s alive? He asked in his head.

  “I’m just guessing.” Roland turned around and began heading back to the ship at a slow pace. “Have you ever heard about Joe Adams?”

  “Yes.” Devin couldn’t have been more familiar with that name. About fifteen or seventeen years ago, Joe Adams was a famous scientist who had claimed the invention of a technique to grow invertebrates in space “at astronomical speeds”.

  “In fact,” Roland said, “he was at Caltech before he left for Cambridge.”

  It took Devin a moment to catch on what
Roland was trying to say. “So you and he were once colleagues?”

  Roland nodded. “We started the project together. Later he moved to Cambridge, and I quit and went on to do something else. He always said that females should grow much faster and larger than males.”

  “Hmm …” Devin wanted to ask more, but he could tell Roland didn’t want to continue on that topic. Joe had become famous also because of the tragedy that followed his invention. The loss of Fine Galaxy with its crew and seventy-two guests near Triad 326 was the worst accident since the beginning of the space-tourism era. And Joe was on board when it happened.

  “I don’t think we know exactly how memory works yet,” Roland resumed their discussion about memory losses. “My understanding is that we frequently lose short-term memories that are deemed unimportant by the brain. When we experience extraordinary events, the memories are usually stored permanently, and not just at one place. If we can’t remember something, it’s because the links to the relevant places for that particular memory are broken. It’s like when you delete something from your computer, the information is still there unless you take extra steps to erase it from the hard disk.”

  Extraordinary events … Devin reflected. What happened during the last trip could not have been trivial. So somebody or something disrupted his “links”.

  “I’m an old man.” Roland’s voice sounded a little hoarse. “I don’t remember a lot of things. But there were times when I woke up in the morning, in the flash of regaining consciousness I saw places and people, as if they were right there with me.”

  Devin turned to look at the old biologist, but the shield on Roland’s face wasn’t clear enough for Devin to see his eyes.

  * * *

  “Thank god you are back!” Mina called out as soon as they appeared in her sight. “We’d better go. The thing’s alive.” She raised a hand and pointed at the sky.

  Roland and Devin looked up at the upper valve. A large part of the valve to their right had moved out of the shadow of the planet, its glossy coat layer sparkling under the sun. But what stroke Devin hard was the fact that the valve had noticeably opened more. Now the opening was more like forty-five or fifty rather than thirty degrees.