Castaway Planet (15 page)

Chapter 23

“Hi, Caroline!” Sakura said, finally spotting her older sister at the base of the landing scar. Caroline was chipping at something with one of her few metal chisels, hammering with a rounded piece of stone.

“Hey, Saki,” Caroline answered absently. “Don’t step in my samples.”

The warning was just in time. Sakura stopped herself with one foot on the edge of a neatly arranged array of pieces of what looked like dirt, pebbles, and stone chips. “Brought you lunch.” She waited impatiently for Caroline to look at her. The older girl tended to maintain focus on what she was doing for a long time.

But after a few moments her sister finally realized that Sakura was standing there for a reason, and turned. “All right, what is it . . . Oh. Oh, my, is that what I
think
it is?”

The reaction of complete stunned joy was everything Sakura had hoped for, and she almost jumped with the excitement. “Flatbread.”

Caroline stared. “Bread . . . from
what?
”

“Driftseed,” she said proudly. A seed of some plant they hadn’t quite identified yet, the seed or kernel of a driftseed was held in the center of a sort of fluffy donut formed by two graceful curves of delicate white, green, and gold feathery fiber. Melody had given it the name, not because it floated—it more bounced and rolled, being a bit too heavy to do the same thing as dandelion seeds—but because it would accumulate in drifts along fallen logs or ridges.

“It was partly my idea and partly Mel’s,” she went on. “When we started trying to harvest them for padding, Mom checked to make sure the fibers were safe, and after she said the driftseed fluff wasn’t toxic in any way, I asked her if the seed was edible, and she said yes; I chewed a few and they didn’t taste too bad.

“So once Whips figured out that sort-of-carding machine using the bristlethorn stems so we could get a lot of the fluff, I started saving them, but I didn’t know quite what to do with them. Mel pointed out that breads were made from ground seeds. So we made it a private project to see if it would work; we dried them out so they wouldn’t squish, then got Whips to help us make a mill—though we wouldn’t tell him why.”

“Make a mill? How?”

“Basically a couple of stones, one on top of another—we had to check for different types of the coral stone until we found one that was strong enough—and you put some grooves in the bottom one to catch and shove the flour out as you turn the top one, that you’ve put some kind of handle on. We took turns on our days off. Then we sifted it to make sure we didn’t get lots of stone chips or something in it, and it was flour! So then we made bread, and you’re the third person to get some.”

“You and Mel first, I presume?”

“Right.” She bounced impatiently. “Well, are you going to try it?”

“You don’t need to worry, I want to.” Caroline brushed her hands off on a rough barkcloth rag nearby, then grabbed the wrapped sandwich. “I never thought that feeling something like bread would make me want to cry.” She looked into the end of the sandwich. “Minimaw with green sweetweed? Works for me.”

She opened her mouth and took a big bite, chewed. The look of surprise was gratifying. “Omrrgrd,” she mumbled, then chewed and swallowed. “Oh my God,” she said again, this time clearly, “It’s almost like, what is it, rye. With a hint of some kind of spice, but that’s
bread
, Saki, it’s bread!”

“I know!” Sakura said, and felt that ridiculous pain in her heart and stinging in her eyes.
Really, I feel so stupid. Getting all emotional over bread.

But Caroline obviously didn’t find it silly. She ate the whole sandwich in its irregularly shaped wrapping and caught even the crumbs jealously. “Thank you, Sakura. Really. I feel as though I just had a vacation in five minutes. That’s really good bread. I think I’d think that even if I hadn’t been missing having bread for months. What’s in it?”

“Driftweed seed ground up, water, salt—from the salt-drying racks Mom had us set up—and that’s pretty much it. We got really hopeful when the dough started to squish instead of crumble and fall apart. And then we just heated one of the flat rocks you found last month in a fire and put the dough on it, flattened. It took a few tries to not burn it up, but now we know how much time to cook it.”

“So I guess driftseed’s going to have to be a major crop, then. It’s good for stuffing, lining, and now eating.”

“There seems to be a lot of it, but I’ll bet in the end we’ll need to start farming for that. That’s why Dad and Whips are off observing the capy herd; Dad thinks we might be able to domesticate them, and then we’d have some small draft animals and maybe meat, too.” Sakura looked at the array of samples. “So, learning anything?”

“Oh, I’ve learned a lot!” Caroline pointed. “These all come from different layers of what was exposed when we crashed. I came up to this end of the crash scar because I wanted to see what I found at the farthest inland point. You can see I’ve cleaned off this face of the scar, here.”

The area Caroline pointed to was obviously cleaned up—all the crumbling debris cleared away, the three-meter-high vertical cliff almost straight up and down now, showing multiple layers. “That’s more structure than I expected.”

“It’s incredibly exciting, and without the crash scar it would have been a lot harder to dig down and find all this. So, the first thing I can tell you is that this continent—or at least this part of it—has been around for something on the order of a million years.”

“A
million
years?” Sakura knew that getting things to float wasn’t easy. Something this size persisting for a million years seemed crazy.

“Well, I said ‘on the order’ of a million years.”

“Meaning that you’re sure it’s over a hundred thousand and less than ten million, right?”

“Close enough, yes. So that means we don’t have to worry
too
much about the whole thing breaking up on us. It’s not impossible, but the chances are pretty low. But it means a lot more than that.”

Learning more cool things about Lincoln was important, and Caroline looked happy and enthusiastic; Sakura sat down to let Caroline lecture. “Okay, tell me.”

Caroline flipped back her arrow-straight hair and knelt down in front of her array of samples. “Well, first, we have an absolutely
classic
soil structure here, which is very good for potential farming. The ‘O’ layer of debris on top—leaves and such—followed by humus—rich soil in the ‘A’ layer that’s obviously turned over fairly well by the worm-equivalents and other subsurface fauna. A layer of deeper earth here, the subsoil or ‘B’ layer, which I think actually shows evidence of being water-deposited. I think those streams we’ve seen meander pretty widely and so they’re depositing stuff all over.”

“That’s pretty bright red.”

“It’s got a lot of iron oxide in it; a lot of the crustacean-type creatures have high mineral content in their exoskeletons, so I’m guessing that’s where it comes from.” She smiled and pointed to the next. “But here is where it gets really interesting. Feel that.”

Sakura reached out and touched. “That’s rock. So?”

“So it’s not the substrate of this island. That’s a sedimentary rock, forming under the deposits above it. Some of the stones we found before made me suspect this, but it’s still amazing. This isn’t a rocky continent, yet rocks are being formed on it—enough that in at least some places you have major portions of soil which are derived from rocks which are, themselves, derived from hundreds-of-thousands-of-year-old deposits that managed to solidify. Only
here
,” she pointed to the base of the cliff, showing brilliant white and green striping, “do we actually hit the real bedrock, the material that’s built up by the corallike creatures that make the foundation of these islands.”

“So . . . there’s active geology here?”

Caroline chuckled. “Well, sort of. We don’t have ordinary tectonic forces, or volcanoes that can reach us—though I
have
found a layer of what looks like pumice mixed with water-deposited debris, so on at least some occasion an eruption must get close enough to the surface to produce it. Those must be massive vents to get that high, though. The mechanisms to get even near the surface couldn’t possibly be stable, not with the depth we estimate for this ocean.

“But we do have erosion, redeposition, cementation, and from what I see here there’s at least some indication that the main structure lives for at least some time after being above the water, and certainly is being maintained somehow underneath.” She gazed down towards the distant water at the far end of the scar. “I’ll bet that if we watch carefully underwater at the end where it broke off, that you’ll see it extending itself slowly out underwater, rebuilding what was lost. There’s probably a huge set of symbiotic species which specialize in keeping this floating structure afloat and dealing with damage to the structure. This whole ecology depends on being within a hundred meters or so of the surface.”

“That’s really amazing,” Sakura said, and meant it. Every time they learned more about the way Lincoln worked, the more fascinating the world became. And with the occasional games and stories and breaks, she found she wasn’t resenting its differences so often. “So if something damages the colony enough, would it have defenses?”

Caroline paused. “You know . . . I think it might. I think Dad, and maybe Mel, mentioned something like that before.”

“Hey, Mel,” Sakura said into her omni.

A moment later, Melody’s voice answered. “What is it, Saki? Did Caroline like the—”

“I
loved
it!” Caroline said, loudly enough so the omni would pick her voice up. “That was one of the best surprises I’ve ever gotten.”

“Great!” Melody’s voice was genuinely happy. “Saki, you’d better get back here pretty quick, we need to make enough for everyone for tonight.”

“Sorry, yes, I know. Then we’ll be almost out of seed.”

“Worth it for a meal, and we’ll start getting more.”

“Anyway, I called to ask—have you ever heard of symbiotic animals that defend the thing they’re a symbiont with? We were wondering if these islands have anything—”

“Oh, yes,” Mel interrupted. “Besides some trees that have ants to protect them, there are corals that have crabs and such living in them. The crabs can sense the approach of predators, like that giant spiky starfish . . .
Acanthaster planci
, that’s it . . . and they go out and drive the starfish off. There’s also things like that near some of the Europan vents. I’ll bet that Dad could give you a hundred other examples from a dozen planets.”

Sakura looked at Caroline. “Then we might want to be a little careful about how we work here.”

Caroline nodded slowly. “But I wouldn’t worry too much. What we’re doing is so small, on the scale of this floating continent, that we’re probably unnoticeable.”

“Probably. Anyway,” Sakura bounced to her feet, “Mel’s right, I have to get going!”

“Thanks again for that wonderful lunch!”

“You’re welcome!”

Sakura found herself skipping a bit on the way back, and then laughed. Little things sometimes made a big difference.

Chapter 24

Laura looked down from her perch on the Great Column—a seat of braided barkcloth suspended in front of one of the support holes finally bored and smoothed through the column’s meter-plus thickness. She could see Hitomi, well out of the way of everyone else. The monitor of Laura’s omni showed that her youngest girl was busy playing her latest Jewelbug adventure, which Mel and Whips had finished the other day. That would keep her occupied for hours.

There was no concern about lurking canopy krakens. Akira had been right. Nothing had attempted to set up housekeeping in the column with them constantly working on it for the last several weeks. They were sure of that because Whips periodically went up and checked. Caroline’s theory about the depth of the hole had also been confirmed. The column had no actual bottom they could reach.

That did make the fact that the broken-off one in their landing trench had possessed a bottom somewhat puzzling, but both Caroline and Akira thought there were several possible reasons.

The others were all at their positions. Caroline, Sakura, and Melody were holding the ropes to lift or lower things with; while the powerful little winch could easily do such things, it was such a power hog that it would be very difficult to do a full day’s work depending on it. One or two crucial operations would certainly use it, but for these, individual control and endurance were more important.

Akira and Whips were up at the top. Whips, as their chief engineer and designer, was overseeing the work. He was also the one most likely to be able to act safely in case of emergency, with his three powerful, wide-spreading arms to both anchor and grab. He’d proved that when he had to fend off the krakens.

They had already lifted the cover which would go over the top, hung off the side and suspended by a length of the winch’s carbonan-core composite cable. Just approaching the top of the column was the first of the supports which—if this worked—would provide the foundation for the first floor of their new home.

The support was a slightly arched, huge section of wood taken from one of the largest trees they had cut. If they didn’t have wood, she wasn’t sure they could even do this. But they did have wood, and wood growing in a forest never cut in its lifetime. There were thousands of forest giants waiting to be harvested, even allowing for the fact that only twenty percent or so of the forest included real wood, and of that Laura and Akira had agreed to not permit cutting nearly all in any given area.

Cutting and shaping such massive pieces of wood was itself a challenge, but Whips, Melody, and Sakura—with her help and that of Akira—had managed to find ways, combining fire, carefully-made stone and coral tools, judicious uses of the winch’s power for moving and positioning, and a lot of patient effort, to make what they needed.

In theory, what they were doing was simple: the supports each had a long, slightly curved end that would go into one hole, and a shorter, straight end that would slide into the opposing hole. You just lowered the support until the long end slid into the first hole, pushed that long end all the way over so that the support was just a little shorter than the distance across the hole, then lowered it until the shorter pieces sticking out could be slid into the opposite hole. The long piece was more than long enough to make sure plenty stuck out the other side, while the second end was about as long as the thickness of the column, so you’d end with a bit sticking out of one side that you’d lock down with pins, and you’d pound anchors into the other side.

Easy . . . in theory.

The first support was nearly to the top now, a flanged and solid arch slightly over eleven meters from socket-point to socket-point. There were three more of them, and each was cut slightly differently so that in the end, they had extensions and were interlocked to provide multipoint support for the floor that would rest on them.

Whips had taken no chances he could avoid. After all the pieces had been produced, the whole family had assembled the entire structure beforehand on the flattest area they could manage, interlocking all of the supports and putting the floor pieces in place, then measuring how much the weight atop the supports caused them to bow outward. Only then had Whips bored the holes for the locking inserts.

“All right, that’s got it. You’re well above the top of the column,” Whips called out to the girls below. “Hold on. Akira?”

“I have it, Whips.” Now Akira was pulling the support over the support with a guide rope, but the key here was just to get the support inside. Whips held another line loosely which would allow him to assist Akira in turning and positioning the support.

“It’s coming. Girls, give me about half a meter slack.”

“Half a meter slack, yes, Dad,” answered Caroline. The three girls let a little rope slide between their fingers, giving the support the chance to move towards the column.

A few more maneuvers, and Whips called out, “There! That’s it! Sakura, Caroline, watch your omni displays, and begin to pay out the line slowly. Stop when you see the red highlights.”

To her credit, Melody didn’t complain about not having her omni, which was currently being borrowed by Caroline because Caroline’s was still on security duty at the main camp.
Against her will, I think my third little girl has been getting over her original laziness,
Laura thought, smiling to herself.

Looking at Caroline, streaked with dirt and hair askew, grinning as she held tight to the cable, she realized that Melody wasn’t the only one changed.
My constant organizer who hated anything out of order has learned to adjust, too.

Probably
, she admitted to herself,
we
all
have changed. Had to, with Lincoln driving us.

The support descended smoothly into the darkness of the column, scraping occasionally as either Akira or Whips lagged slightly in keeping the column tilted enough.

There!
For the first time she caught a glimpse of the lower end of the support, entering the view from inside the great column. “I see it!”

“Great!” Whips answered. “Now comes the tricky part. Laura, make sure you’re seated to the side
,
and extend your omni just far enough to look in.”

She adjusted her seat carefully, and checked to make sure that the locking pins were also suspended safely but reachably out of the way. Caroline would normally do this climbing bit better than Laura would, but this needed someone pretty tall and stronger than she was. Since Whips pretty much had to be at the top, that left Laura. “I am in position. Are you getting the video feed?”

“Coming through perfectly. Activating the guidance application now.”

With the omni’s remote display still on her head, Laura could see the swinging support highlighted in yellow, with arrows showing directions. “All right,” Whips said. “Everyone seeing the display?”

“I do,” Akira answered, echoed by Caroline and Sakura. Below, Laura saw that even Hitomi had put away her game to watch this first—and crucial—assembly.

“All right. Arrows show we need to lower by about one hundred twenty more centimeters. Lower away.”

The arrows shortened, shortened . . . and suddenly there was a short arrow pointing up. “Whoa! Too far. Pull it up slowly . . . slowly . . .
perfect!
”

Laura could now see one end of the support that looked to be almost exactly on her level. If things worked according to plan, the long, somewhat curved end of the support would be coming through this hole.

“All right, Akira, pull to the right . . . sorry, watch the arrows, I mean your left! Slow . . . slower . . . good. Okay, let’s try this . . .”

In theory, now, all they had to do was let the one end drop while the other end rose, and that rising end would go straight through the hole in front of her.

There was a tremendous
THUD
that she felt through the column itself. “
Silt!
A few centimeters off. Pull back! Up . . . Girls, I think we need a tiny bit more down.
Tiny
. . . good.” The display flickered with green and yellow tiny moving arrows. “Okay, I think that’s right. Akira, let’s try again . . .”

Another
THUD
. This time Whips used a word in the Bemmie language that Laura knew shouldn’t be translated. “Now we’re hitting on the other side!”

“You’ve only allowed about two to three centimeters of extra space on each side, Whips. It’s not going to be easy,” Akira pointed out.

“I
know
,” the young Bemmie replied, his tone that of someone trying to banish nervousness and not succeeding too well. “But I don’t want the holes too loose, either. We can put in wedges afterward, yes, but the looser the holes, the bigger the potential disaster if a wedge comes out.”

Another set of adjustments.
THUD
. This time it was Akira saying something that she didn’t think needed translation. “Maybe we should have made those holes bigger anyway.”

“I’d hate to give up,” Whips said reluctantly. “Widening all the holes will be a hell of a task. How are you girls doing down there?” he asked.

“It’s getting . . . a little hard to hold it,” Caroline confessed. “Even with the leverage advantage.”

“I’m pretty sure we’re on the right level,” Whips said after a moment. “Can you lock it down exactly where you are?”

“I think so.
Hitomi!
”

Laura was glad to see how quickly Hitomi came running over. “What?”

“See that lever? The one marked with red?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Pull it hard towards me. That’s right . . . perfect!” Caroline eased off, but the line stayed taut, held by the carved wooden lever clamp with its blunt teeth now dug into the line. “Locked down, Whips; your lock’s holding great!”

“Good. Make sure it’s fully locked, then sit down and rest for a bit, while we curse at this thing some more.”

“I think it was a little off to my right . . . your left . . . that time.”

“Try again. But this time if it hits, don’t pull back. Let’s get it resting right against the side of the column.”

“Oh? Oh, I see. Yes, that’s probably a much better idea.”

The
thud
was a tiny bit muted, and seemed to come from the hole before her, too. On the omni’s screen, she could see something almost entirely filling the hole.

“Aha!” said Whips. “Right level, we’re off by about ten centimeters to . . . to my left, again.”

“But it’s resting against the column wall, right? So if we pull it to your right, slowly . . .”

“I think so. Laura, pull your omni out of the way.”

She did. There were a few seconds of scraping, and then suddenly, even as she heard a triumphant shout from above, an immense red-brown shaft of wood slid into view, mere inches from her face. “It’s in!”

“Can you get in the locking pin?”

The farther end was just out of reach. “Pull it up, just a little.”

Wobbling slightly in the hole with a
crunch
noise, the support slid backwards half a meter. “Okay, okay, hold it!”

Laura reached down and took the first locking pin in hand. “Do
not
let it move now.”

“Holding as steady as we can.”

The locking pin for the support was an eight-centimeter-diameter dowel of the hardest wood they’d yet found, tapered slightly, as was the hole it went into. She reached out and slid the pin into the hole, then hit its end several times with a stone hammer to make it tight. “In the hole. I’m putting in the cotter pins now.”

The “cotter pins” were actually just other pins that hammered into both ends of the locking pin itself, as they didn’t have any spring steel to make real cotter pins out of. She hammered in the nearest one, climbed carefully on top of the slightly shifting support, hammered in the other. Only once she’d returned to her safe seat did she report, “Done!”

“All right, last part of this . . . let’s hope I didn’t screw anything up,” Whips said, now even more tense.

The support end slid out farther now, to the limit of design; she could hear the thicker portion hit the column interior. “All right, let’s see if we can drop it into place!”

There was a distant scraping; taking their cue from the successful insertion on her side, her husband and Whips were obviously sliding the other end down the inside of the column, hoping that when it reached the opposing hole it would catch and then slide in. On her side, the curved end rose slightly higher as the end remaining inside descended.

Abruptly she saw her end shudder, then slide forward over half a meter.
“You’ve got it!
”

A cheer echoed from below and above. “I think you’re right . . . Yes, yes, we’re
in!
” shouted Whips jubilantly. “Akira, let’s give a pull, make sure it’s seated all the way.”

The support ground forward another decimeter or two. “There, that looks good. Laura, check the marks on your end?”

“You’re within two centimeters of the black mark going back into the column.”

“Perfect! All right, Akira, belay me. I’m going down and putting in the locking pin for the inside, then Laura can make her way around the other side and pound in the anchors for that end.”

“On belay.”

A few moments later she heard Whips on the other side, pounding his locking pin into place. “It’s set! I’m going to put in the seating wedges on my side, too, make sure it stays level, then go to the other side and wedge that one.”

More sound of pounding, a pause, and then more distant hammering, still transmitted somewhat by the massive support beam. “And . . . we’re
done
!”

“It worked!” she heard Melody shout from below.

“It sure did!” Whips sounded euphoric. “It’s not easy, but by the Sky it
worked
, and the rest will be easier, just knowing it will work!”

“When can . . .” Hitomi began.

“Be a little bit yet,” Akira answered. “We’ve got several days of work just to get the supports and floors in, locked, stabilized so that the only thing that can bring them down would be the column cracking or something. And we’ll still have to do our hunting and other work in the meantime. But still . . . I think in two, three weeks, old-home time, we will be moving in!”