Steal from the World (short story)

Steal from the World was the second story in the Bernice Summerfield anthology The Dead Men Diaries. It was written by Kate Orman.

Plot
Young Benny travels to the uninhabited Capella Four to make a name for herself by finding evidence of the legendary Aurigans, who left a series of cave drawings on the planet. Blinded by the two suns whilst searching the site of the cave drawings, she falls twenty metres off a cliff, breaks both of her legs and loses her comms link. She prevents herself from going into shock and inflates an auto-splint before spending hours dragging herself back up the cliff towards her landing pod to be rescued.

Reaching a stream, Benny drinks some water and goes to sleep. She awakens to find that her legs have been set, apparently by the auto-splint, and uses fern fronds to pull herself up the cliff after seeing the spider-like inhavitants doing so with webs. She reaches the landing pod several days after her accident and finds a rescue team responding to a distress call which she cannot remember sending. They are sceptical that the auto-splint could have set her leg.

About twenty years later, Benny returns to Capella Four with Joseph and attempts to locate the cave drawings without success. She hears what her computer pad identifies as footprints in the night and looks for the intruder during the day, but she finds no sign of them until after the second night when she sees and chases a figure. The chase leads her to the cliff drawings and she takes photographs before realising that she has already been here; the cave drawings were not there before.

The next morning, Benny is greeted by an Aurigan who explains that their people decided to show her drawings because they believed that she had good intentions and that the drawings are actually a storage medium telling the story of their people. It was the Aurigan who set her leg and sent out the distress call twenty years ago, but it was unable to help her up the cliff and had to let her do that herself. The Aurigan disappears when Joseph tells Benny that a research team aboard International Klein Blue is on its way. Benny decides that she does not need to be a part of the research team and leaves for them to work out the interface for themselves.

Characters

 * Bernice Summerfield
 * Joseph
 * The figure

Continuity

 * Bernice recalls her Capella Four experience in Parasite, though she calls the planet "Auriga".
 * She also tells the story in Walking to Babylon.
 * Bernice has visited Hitchemus. (PROSE: The Year of Intelligent Tigers)