Castaway Planet (16 page)

Laura joined in the cheer, because she knew exactly what her children were thinking, and her heart echoed it precisely.
A home!

We’re going to have a
home
!

Chapter 25

“We’ve figured out how to catch a herd of capys,” Akira announced.

Sakura looked up from where she was working on trimming one of what seemed an unending series of wood planks which were going to be the stairs to their front door—well, actually, the
treads
of the stairs. Two big beams were the sides of the stairs, with notches cut in them where the planks would be inserted. The whole thing was designed to be able to be raised up by a pulley mechanism, so that if some of the larger predators came sniffing around, they couldn’t get up without climbing, and climbing the columns wasn’t easy.

But right now that was concept, and whittling wood was the practice. And they couldn’t move in until this, and the stairway to the second floor, were done. “How, Dad?”

“It was partly Mel’s idea, apparently from one of the adventure books she was reading. They have some clear paths that they follow, so if we get ahead of them in their grazing pattern and build most of a fence, once they enter the area we just have to drop down the last parts and they can’t go anywhere.”

“Won’t they notice something’s wrong?”

Her father considered, as he examined a support he was working on. “I don’t think so, really. The fences will of course be made of natural materials, and look like sticks. Oddly positioned sticks, yes, and there will be some of our scent on them, but they haven’t shown any aversion to us. The one herd actually seems quite comfortable around us.”

“They way they reacted to us that one day . . . Dad, you don’t think . . . well, they’re not
intelligent
, are they?”

Her father chuckled, as did Whips, who was also working on something in the flickering firelight of this day-which-happened-to-be-at-night. “We’ve been trying to define ‘intelligence’ for hundreds of years, and I’m still not sure exactly what we mean by it. I’m not making fun of you, Saki. It’s just that—especially for a biologist—that’s not the easiest question to answer.”

He was quiet for a few moments, but Sakura didn’t disturb him. She knew that furrowed brow meant her father was thinking hard. Her Shapetool caught on a knot in the wood and then came loose suddenly, and she almost lost her grip on the thing. The speed with which it jabbed out made her very grateful that Whips had drilled into her over and over that all wood-carving motions were done
away
from you, with no other part of your body—or anyone else’s!—in line with the motion.
If I’d been doing that
towards
me, I’d have stabbed myself. And I don’t know if the omni monitoring it could get the Shapetool to reconfigure that fast.

“In my best current opinion . . . no, not in the way you mean
intelligent
, Saki,” her father said finally. “The behavior and interactions I have seen indicate that they are fairly high up on the scale, certainly, and I would consider them to probably be on the level of a smart dog. They recognize individuals, they have group and family loyalty, they have emotions of at least the general categories we recognize, all of these things, but—at least so far—I haven’t seen any significant tool use, no sign of complex ideation or of long-term prediction or generalization of concepts.” He grinned and shrugged. “Of course, even though I’ve spent a great deal of time studying them, it’s not at all long by any reasonable standard, and I could easily be missing crucial aspects.

“But what I
have
learned is that they’re reasonably gentle, vegetarian, and possibly tameable. I’d like to test the latter, although I would caution everyone not to get their hopes up. Domestication of most animals is actually a genetic process—a long-term breeding program to choose the best-compatible members and keep reinforcing those traits. Most wild animals, even ones that seem very similar to domesticated species, aren’t able to be usefully tamed. I’m only willing to take the chance with these because they have shown multiple traits that are promising.” He grinned. “Now, if we discover that they
are
on the sapient level with us, then we will of course release them and apologize, once we know their language.”

“Great!” She held up the board. “Done! How many more, Dad?”

“I think . . . you’re nearly done. Three more.”

Three more! Her heart, which had been feeling rather depressed over the endless whittling, gave a little leap. “I can do three before bed!”

“I’ll bet you can. Though a few months ago I don’t know if you could have done three in a
day
.”

It struck Sakura that her father was probably right. She wasn’t in bad shape, but doing this kind of work was new to her. Whips, her mother and Caroline were the only ones who had any experience there. “Maybe. I don’t think you could have, either, Dad!”

“
Touché
. I believe you are correct.” He held out his hands, which—like Sakura’s—had obvious, tough calluses and a multiplicity of healing scrapes and the roughness that comes from lots of handwork. “This adventure, at the least, has given me great respect for our forebears . . . and constant envy of those who still have electricity and power tools.”

“
I
,” Whips grumbled from the other side of the fire, “would give a great deal just for some old-fashioned iron and steel. It’s much easier to shape than wood, in the long run, especially for some things. And there are so many tools that we could make with it. Perhaps we could find a meteorite?”

Caroline, who was relaxing off to the side with Hitomi, spoke up. “Well, there probably are some around somewhere. We’ve noticed two naked-eye comets since we’ve been here, and there’s frequent meteors. But even relatively common meteorites will be really hard to find. On Earth in Antarctica, or Europa to some extent, you could find them lying around because they were about the
only
rocks you’d find on the surface.” She gestured to the rocky debris around them in the landing scar. “Not so easy now.”

Hitomi gave a little jump, then a laugh.

Sakura smiled over at her littlest sister. “Having fun?”

“This adventure’s great! Who made the bubble cave?”

“That was me and Whips, though Mel wrote the story and all of us—even Mom and Dad—added stuff.”

“Thanks, everyone!” Hitomi called, and various versions of “you’re welcome” floated back through the night-day air.

“So, when do you think we’ll catch us some capys and test your theory, Dad?” Sakura said, returning to the prior subject.

“Not for a while. We’ve got to finish getting the house ready, which is taking longer than we thought. Once we’re settled in, then we can think about establishing things like farms and herds.” He glanced over at Whips. “That for our water supply?”

“Yes,” Whips said, holding up a section of pipestem, which was something like bamboo but with exterior ridges instead of internal sections; Caroline, in a rare burst of humor, had wanted to name it “pipeweed” after the tobacco-analogue in
The Lord of the Rings
, but she’d been overruled. “I’m carving sections to fit together.”

“Making water pipes, of course. I saw the sketches of the system you were working on with Sakura—are you sure that will work?”

“It’s an ideal use for the winch, I think. Only needs to be run a short time each day to bring water up to a tank on the top floor in some sort of tipping buckets. I’d like to figure a way to run it all the way to Blue Hole Lake, but for now I think we still have to have people bring water over by hand.

“Of course,” Whips added, “that’s if we don’t get enough water from rain. We’ll be trying to catch rain directly into the tank upstairs and if we keep getting rain at the same frequency we have, that probably will keep us pretty well filled up.”

He looked at the pipe he was making. “The part I’m worried about are the joins. They’re probably not going to be tight enough, though maybe they’ll tighten when they’re wet. But we really need to find something like clay, or even a better gumlike adhesive, to seal them together. Plus if we had clay there’s all sorts of other things we could make. Caroline, you said there are real soils here, do you think there might be clay or something like it?”

“Well . . .” Caroline tilted her head, visible as a slightly inclined shadow against the darker gloom, her eyes glinting in the firelight. “. . . maybe. There’s silica in many of the foundation rocks, and there’s plenty of weathering. Timescale is somewhat short, but if there’s some places where water flowing down from an erosive area slows down and allows gentle deposition . . . could be.”

She gestured to the distance. “We’ve seen a lot of streams that come down from the mountains, but don’t know where they go to. Maybe we could take a hike inland to look.” While the ridges that were visible farther inland didn’t rise much more than three hundred meters or so, they were peaked and rugged enough that the family was willing to call them mountains.

“Worth a try, sometime soon. We certainly need to keep learning more about Lincoln, and exploring farther is necessary.”

“I want to go on that one,” Sakura said firmly. “Now that I’m allowed back out, that is.”

Her father laughed. “You’ve learned your lesson, Saki. All right, we’ll plan on a trek towards the mountains.”

“Great!”

“But not if you don’t get the ladder done,” her father said wryly.

She realized she had stopped whittling a while ago. “Oops.” She gripped the Shapetool in her aching hand, studied the phantom but clear lines projected on it by her omni, and started cutting. But she was still smiling.

Their house was almost done—and soon she’d be doing more exploring!

Chapter 26

“I can’t believe we’re really moving in, finally,” Laura said, looking at the narrow but sturdy staircase in front of her, glowing a deep red-gold in the occasional slanting beams of the setting sun that penetrated through the jungle cover.

“Honestly, neither can I,” Akira said. “I was so naïve to think that we could finish all that work in two or three weeks. It’s been, what, more like eight weeks?”

“Nine and a half,” Whips said. “A week or so of that was making the clear path to Blue Hole Lake and setting up my own safe niche in the lake, though.”

“That counts,” Laura said. “You’re not so suited for treehouse life, unless we could put in some kind of wet room, and we’re not there yet. So building that was your house, or your extension, anyway.”

“Well, Whips, you did about eighty percent of the design and research work, you want to do the tour?”

The colors that rippled across the young Bemmie showed how pleased and proud he was. They’d all gotten very good at reading his signals. “I’d love to!”

Whips moved over to the staircase and quickly slid his way up. His rear anchor-feet and two front arms on the railings allowed him to go up surprisingly fast. Laura followed with Akira just behind, and the rest of the family came trailing along.

“Okay, this is the entryway. Right here’s the crank to bring up the staircase. It’s got enough mechanical advantage so that even Hitomi can probably crank it up.” Whips gestured. “Why not give it a try, since we’re all here?”

Hitomi bounced forward and grabbed the wooden handle. “Mmmmph . . .” she grunted. But then she threw her full weight on the handle and it moved, then started to turn faster as Hitomi got a feel for how to turn it best. “It’s . . . going!”

“Oh, very good!” Akira was clearly pleased. “If Hitomi can do that, the rest of us will have no problems. How do we keep it there?”

“There’s a carved ratchet on the side there, see? Once it’s up where you want it, you just slide the catch over to the ratchet.”

“Nice.”

Hitomi was demonstrating her usual stubbornness; she continued cranking until the entire ladder was raised, and then managed to hold it steady until she’d locked the ratchet. “There!”

Laura laughed. “Very good, Hitomi. We’ll have to let it down when we go to get the other stuff we’re bringing up, though.”

“I know, Mommy,” she said, with just a hint of “I’m not stupid!” in the background. “But I wanted to see if I could bring it up all by myself.”

“And you certainly did.” Laura looked to the side. “I see we also have a door.”

“Of course,” Whips agreed. “We don’t want wind and rain coming in, and if anything
can
get up here we want to keep it out. Same for all the windows; they’ve got shutters to keep them secure.

“Now, you can see,” he gestured around, “This is an entrance hall and a place we can leave things we carry in that we don’t want trailing dirt everywhere, like tools we’re using a lot. I’ve got a couple boxes over there for us to put things like that in. These stairs go to the second floor. But over
here
,” he slid over to the door on the left, “is the kitchen, dining room, and pantry.”

The revealed room was a full semicircle, more than half the useful space of the floor. “Now that we have lots of wood, we don’t have to rely on the solar cooking method—which is good, since a good deal of our so-called ‘days’ are actually dark because Lincoln’s rotation doesn’t match up with human night-day schedules. The main firebox for the stove is right here.”

“That’s one of the metal pieces we used for building the fires to cut into the column, right?”

“The largest one, yes. For now, we’ve really just built a firepit with a big vent hood above it, and some attachments to put baking stones or pans or pots over the fire. Building a real stove’s got me a little stumped, though.”

“Don’t worry about it, Whips,” Caroline said with a laugh. “This is great. I love the way we have cabinets now! We can put things away
in
order!
”

There was almost an excess of joy in Caroline’s pronouncement—enough so that Laura found she couldn’t quite stifle a giggle, and then the others started laughing.

For a moment Caroline looked mortified . . . and then she started giggling too. “That did sound pretty dorky,” she said after a moment.

“But it was definitely you,” Sakura said, still smiling. “Where’s the hood go to?”

“Hole on the outside—we widened one of the naturally occurring holes and put a grille over it to keep things from getting in that way.”

“But . . .” Laura went and knocked on one of three rounded, columnlike structures on the wall. It gave a loud
tonk
sound; clearly hollow. “These are those vents you put in to let the column still ‘breathe,’ right? The ones that run all the way to the top? Why not just put the smoke vent into those?”

“Thought of that,” Whips agreed, “But there were two reasons we didn’t. First, the air can go into the column as well as out, so you could suddenly find smoke coming straight back into the kitchen. Still might, sometimes, with the wrong wind direction, but this might happen every time pressure changed, so that didn’t seem like a good idea.”

“The other reason,” Akira said, “was that we’ve already been discussing the possible issue of a symbiotic defense for the islands. Now, we don’t have much choice about doing some things that slightly disrupt the workings of the island, but it struck me that if any of the creatures here are sensitive to fire—the way that most animals are on Earth—having a constant source of smoke drifting in and out of the main airstream of the column might not be a wise idea. So we made a separate, isolated chimney. It’s fairly well away from the windows on the next floor so there shouldn’t be too much smoke coming in that way. If there is, we’ll run an external stovepipe up past the top floor later.”

“What about lighting?” Laura asked. “I see we’ve got one of our lights here, but there’s no wires and solar cells are going to be not very reliable this far down in the canopy.”

“That’ll be one of the daily chores, like making sure the water’s filled up,” Whips said. “You’re right, we couldn’t put the solar cells down here and rely on them getting a lot of sunlight, and there wasn’t a practical way to put them up on the top of the column. So we’ve put up a protected rack right near my sleeping pool. If someone comes down every morning, I can swap out charged cells for old ones and we can keep everything charged up.”

“All right,” she said, nodding. “And there are possible ways to make lamps if we can get enough burnable oil or something of that nature, I guess.”

“And we might,” Akira said with a nod. “Capys, and some of the other . . . mammal-analogues have a fair amount of fat in subcutaneous layers.”

“The cupboards and cabinets have a lot of space!” Sakura said, half-inside one of the latter. “I guess so we have room for when we start getting more stuff, huh?”

“Right. No point in making things tiny now if we’d just have to make them bigger later.”

“What’s in here?” Melody asked, opening the large door on the other end of the room. “Oh! Hunting stuff!”

“Weapons for hunting and defense, yes. It makes the most sense to have them down here.”

“I agree.” Laura was most interested in what looked like . . . “Is this a sink?”

“The best we could manage, yes.” Akira pointed to a covered section of log. “We burned and carved out this log to be a reserve tank for the kitchen; it has to be refilled by opening the valve on the top floor which comes from the main tank. We found that we didn’t have anything yet that could keep it sealed with a vertical column of something like ten meters, so the main tank’s kept shut off except when refilling the reserves or running the shower.”

“Shower!” Sakura and Hitomi both shouted.

“Whoa, there, don’t get too excited,” Akira cautioned. “It’s a cold shower for now, but since everything here’s warm it’s not
too
cold a shower. And we should be able to make soap soon, if the recipes Mel found work out. Heating shower water would be a big pain, so I’m glad it’s warm enough here that we don’t need to.”

Sakura shrugged. “If it’s a full-size shower, I don’t care, much.”

“It’s good-sized, yes. Just remember that any water you use gets drained from the tank above, so someone taking long showers may be told to go get more water to refill it when they’re done.”

“What’s the other room here, off the entrance hall?” Caroline asked. “I didn’t work on . . . oh, it’s a
bathroom
!”

“Well, a sort of inside-outhouse, but yes, no more digging trenches,” Whips said, and was momentarily drowned out by the cheers. “There’s a grid under it to keep nasty things larger than the bigger bug-type creatures from coming up, just in case, and the dump pipe for the main water comes down there so we rinse the whole thing clean when we do the weekly water purge.”

“Water purge?”

Caroline nodded. “Of course. We don’t have any way yet to keep water clean and fresh everywhere, so we’re going to have to clean out the water supply periodically. Maybe figure out some kind of disinfectant, just in case, but boiling water will probably be what we use at first.”

Melody made a face. “Ugh. What a pain. That’ll take time, won’t it? Boiling enough water to rinse out all the pipes and make them hot enough?”

“I’m afraid so. But the advantage is having water available for things like showers, drinking, and cooking inside the house.”

Mel sighed. “Well, okay. Worth it, I guess.”

Whips now led the way up the set of stairs in the entrance hall, to a small squarish room a little more than two meters on a side with four doors. The first opened into a very large room—similar to the kitchen downstairs, most of a semicircle, though it did not continue around the center with pantry and storage space like the kitchen. “The master bedroom, for Akira and Laura. We’ll just have the same sleeping pads for now, but pretty soon I’m confident we’ll be able to figure out how to make driftseed-stuffed mattresses, at least.”

“And this one?” Hitomi yanked open one door and then squealed loudly. “It’s
my room!
”

Sure enough, the smaller bedroom next to theirs on one side had decorations that echoed Hitomi’s favorite Jewelbug character, Waterfall Star, and sitting in the middle of the floor, as though waiting, was Skyfang. Hitomi ran in, grabbed up Skyfang, and started jumping around, her feet making satisfactory
thump
noises on the smooth wood. “My room, my room, my room!”

Melody’s face was shining as she looked into the room that was obviously hers—already supplied with a rocking chair and a little desk. “You . . . I didn’t see you doing any of this!” she said, her voice trembling with surprised tears that brought a sympathetic, joyous sting to Laura’s eyes.

“Sweetheart, we worked on your rooms when you were sleeping, so you’d have something to help make them home.”

“Oh, Dad . . .” Caroline said, stunned, as she saw a whole set of sample shelves on the far side of her own room, which lay opposite the master bedroom. “You . . .”

Sakura was already charging up the other set of stairs. “So I’m at the top!”

“You are!” agreed Whips.

Akira looked over at Laura. “Sorry I don’t have anything special for you in our room.”

“We have a
room
, that’s enough,” she said, and hugged him fiercely, feeling happy tears going down her face as she heard the joyous exclamations of her daughters claiming their own rooms and really, truly having a home again. “I’m glad we spent time making sure theirs were already
theirs
, though.”

“Oh, so am I,” Akira said, and his eyes weren’t dry either. “Now it is a home, and all these months of work are completely worth it.”

“Come on up, Whips!” Sakura’s voice came floating down the stairs. “Aren’t you going to see this?”

“I thought I already . . .” Whips trailed off as he reached Sakura’s room. “Mr. . . . Akira, Laura, you sneaked this past
me
?”

The two burst out laughing. “Yes, we certainly did
.
We moved the one wall over a couple of meters and put down a resting pad for you, so there’s space for you to visit. Because the most special thing for Sakura is her very best friend.”

Sakura’s head, framed by her wavy ebony hair, appeared at the top of the stairs, also with happy tears. “You guys are the
best
.”

Laura laughed again, and it was one of the most wonderful feelings, to be doing that inside a house, a big, roomy
house
and not a cramped little emergency shelter. “Well, thank you very much, Sakura!”

Then she clapped her hands. “All right, everyone, time to come back down. We’ve got to get everything here and
move in!
”