Castaway Planet (25 page)

Chapter 39

Whips tilted the big log container slowly, letting water pour from the top.

He was almost completely recovered, he thought with satisfaction. Even tipping this heavy tank of clay slurry—which was settling into clay—was only causing slight ghosts of pain instead of the agony that had been his almost constant companion for many days after the battle against the raylamps. The capture hooks he’d lost . . . well, a couple had actually been torn out to the root and he’d never get those back, but most were regrowing by now.

“A little more . . . a little more . . . Okay, that’s good!” Caroline said, and he let the tank tip back with some relief. Caroline looked in, poked and stirred with a stick. “This batch looks a lot better than the last one.”

Whips flickered in a cynical pattern. “That’s what you said about the last one and the one before.”

“And it’s been true every time,” she said serenely. Caroline glanced over at the pile of broken clay shards. “We’re learning. I really think this one will work. We’ll test it with small items again, and if those all hold, then we can make a furnace.”

“Have you decided on whether you’re going to build it in layers from the ground up, or use a form?”

Caroline scrunched up her face in a thinking expression. “I keep going back and forth on that. The layer approach is really the most solid design, but it’s going to take a lot more clay. But making the mold or form for the smelting furnace is also going to take time . . .” She shrugged. “I think we’ll probably use the mold approach, though. If we design it right—and we turned up a couple good sets of pictures and diagrams in Mel’s omni—we can reuse the forms, and something like that will also make for a good start at a kiln. With the regular rocks around here tending to decompose whenever you heat them up, we really can’t make a kiln from them that will survive more than a firing or two.”

Smoke drifted by them, and Caroline gave a small cough.

“Sorry!” Sakura said contritely. “Wind shifted again.”

“It’s okay, we know you’re not in charge of the weather yet,” Whips said. Sakura, Melody, and Hitomi were burning wood for charcoal—something they were going to need a lot of—while on the other side of this cleared section of the landing scar, Akira and Laura were working on a large bellows.

Making things to make things to make things to make other things,
he thought—not for the first time. When you were in a ship traveling between the stars, or in a comfortable home in Europa or Earth, you kept forgetting how ridiculously long the chain of operations was between the raw materials in the ground, water, and sky and the food you were eating and the gadgetry you used to prepare it.

But Lincoln reminded you of it every day. Now they were working on making clay out of the raw material dug out, so that they could prove that they had the right quality of clay, by firing it in an improvised kiln that would probably be used up just by the test, and then make a wooden mold so they could build a furnace with the clay which they would fire with wood and then heat with charcoal they were making from wood, which they would then use to smelt ore, using the bellows that they had made to keep the fire hot, into crude iron that they would refine more by working it, which they would then use to make tools that were better than the ones they had now. So they could make more stuff.

Just
thinking
that almost made him run out of breath.

“How’re our provisions, Mom?” he called over to the two adults.

Laura flashed a smile. “Pretty good. I think we could spend another couple of days before we need to go hunting and gathering again. I’d really like you to go fishing again, too; we’re still finding new treats in the ocean, and you’re the best at that. Now that you’re better—”

“You don’t have to argue me into it,” he interrupted, flashing his enthusiasm. “I haven’t gone on a good water-hunt since we almost got killed. I’d love to go out and spend a day—”

A moaning, shuddering vibration ran through air and ground; flying things took off from the distant forest in grayish clouds.

“What—”

Caroline had straightened. “It’s hit. That island we were watching.”

“I thought it had been drifting farther away!” Akira said, his tones conveying his concern.

Caroline nodded. “It was. But we’ve had a strong wind from the south for the past two days, and I think that overcame whatever drift it had.”

The juddering, rumbling vibration grew stronger, and Hitomi looked scared. “Mommy!”

“I know, honey. But there’s nothing we can do.”

Whips couldn’t keep from tensing, even though, as Laura said, there wasn’t anything he could do. Uncountable tons of floating island were colliding with their own floating continent, and the real fear was that, somewhere, a seam existed, a crack—perhaps caused by their own crash-landing—that would suddenly give way, causing their section of Lincoln to break apart, spear into the sky, hurling the castaways and everything they’d built into the sky or plunging them into the depths of a nearly bottomless sea.

Sand and earth cascaded from the edge of the landing scar, miniature landslides echoing Whips’ fears, as the grinding collision continued. Sakura glanced up, and then screamed
“Down! Everybody down!”

Whips, of course, was pretty much as far down as he could get, but he still flattened himself as much as possible while the humans all dropped to the ground.

Black and gray masses fell all around them, embedding themselves deeply into the ground. Hitomi and Melody both screamed as one smashed down not two meters away, showering them with filthy water and pulverized sandy rock. One suddenly materialized in a puff of dust and muck-smelling water almost directly in front of Whips, a six-meter shard of what he knew was the outer shelf of one of the floating landmasses.
Just a few meters over and . . .

But the vibrations were fading, finally, the grinding sounds diminishing, turning to a faint murmur . . . gone.

For several minutes, the entire family lay frozen, waiting, to see if the impact had done enough damage to destroy everything they’d built. As they lay there, slowly the sounds of life returned around them. The crants began to scuttle towards the now-beached lifeforms on the displaced chunks of continental skirt, and the smaller flying creatures began their usual hum.

Finally Laura rose to her feet. “Okay, everyone. I think we’re okay.”

“I wish I could have watched it,” Caroline said wistfully. “But we couldn’t spare days just to watch the drifting island.”

“I almost wish you had, though,” Akira said wryly. “It would have been nice to have a little warning before that happened. Are we sure that this part of the continent won’t just break up in a few days?”

“Sure? No,” Caroline’s answer was candid, if not entirely comforting. “but we do know that these islands have to maintain themselves somehow, so I’d guess that if we’re still intact in a couple of days, we’ll be okay. Once the repair crews get to work, so to speak, it’ll be more stable. And I don’t feel any extra movement or hear anything suggesting a big crack’s open.”

“There really isn’t anything we could do about it, is there?” Melody finally said.

Whips saw the others hesitating and decided to plunge forward. “No, not as we are. We saw what a—pretty small—piece of this floating continent-sized reef breaking off looks like. We can’t hold it together, or stop it, and if it started tipping like that piece we’d be lucky to get thrown clear instead of getting crushed or dragged down.”

“What if we still had the
LS-5
?” she asked.

“If it were
intact
?” He considered. “Well . . . if we were living inside it, and we reacted quickly, we might be able to take off and get out of the way. But if we were outside at the time, I think by the time we could get back inside and take off, it’d be too late.” He waved and flickered an ironic grin. “Of course, if we had the
LS-5
we’d be doing a lot of things differently.”

He waved towards the forest. “I suppose we could build a few rafts and keep them stocked with key supplies, put them somewhere that they might somehow end up floating after such a disaster. But the chances of anyone living through that to get to the rafts doesn’t look too good to me.”

“Except maybe for you,” Sakura pointed out.

“Well . . . yes.” He couldn’t argue that point. If he wasn’t crushed, or thrown so far up that coming down would kill him, he had a good chance of survival; he could live in the water as well as he could on land, and even if he got dragged far down, he could survive—even here, with higher gravity and thus pressure with depth.

But none of the humans would be likely to survive. “But if I was the only survivor, I’m not sure I’d want to live,” he said, very quietly.

Everyone else was silent for a moment; then Hitomi came up and hugged him. “Well, we would want you to, anyway.”

He hugged her back. “Okay. I’d feel the same way. But I’m glad it doesn’t look like I’ll have to.”

“So are we all,” Laura agreed. “We’re all okay, right? Anything major get wrecked in that stone-shower we just had?”

Fortunately, it appeared nothing had—here, at least.

“All right. Akira, I’m going to just hike over and make sure nothing hurt Sherwood Tower.”

“Be careful, love,” Akira said, a faint warning tone in his voice. “This may be like a forest fire; animals may be a bit panicky.”

“I will.” She picked up her spear and checked the SurvivalShot before heading out.

“All right,” Caroline said after a moment, “let’s get back to this clay. Time to pour a little more water off.”

He reached out and twined his arms around the tub of clay again. “Here we go!”

Back to making things to make things to make things . . .

Chapter 40

Akira Kimei always felt a bit guilty whenever he made another entry in his special journal. The guilt came partly from the simple fact that the journal was secret—even from his wife. It was the only thing he had ever kept secret from Laura, but his contractual obligations had been clear and non-negotiable. The journal was maintained in a portion of his omni that was hidden as well as encrypted.

Mostly, though, the guilt came from the subject matter of the journal itself. As he had done more times than he could remember, the first thing he did when he opened the journal was glance at the heading.

ETHOLOGICAL REPORT ON
BEMMIUS NOVUS SAPIENS

There followed page after page after page of dry prose; the sort of prose that a biologist is careful to maintain when compiling data on a subject he knows to be potentially explosive.

Ethological.
That term was another source of guilt. “Ethology” was a branch of biology, specifically the study of animal behavior. Using the term for a study such as this one had always seemed rather demeaning to Akira. But when he’d suggested substituting the term “ethnographical,” the Board had slapped him down.

“Akira, we’re not interested in the
culture
of
Bemmius novus
,” said Boris Yermolov, the chairman of the Board. “We already know all we need to know about that.”

He shrugged. “Basically, it’s just Europan Bemmie culture with a heavy admixture of human elements. The real issue here is whether or not—as
animals,
just as we ourselves are animals—the new Bemmies are a viable species. Can they handle adverse and unpredictable situations? Can they adapt when necessary?”

“Not that we’d take any undue measures against them if the reports are negative,” interjected Hasumati Chopra.

Yermolov gave her a sour look. “Yes, yes, of course. We are not contemplating anything punitive. Still, leaving
Bemmius novus
in peace—just as we would do with anyone suffering from mental or psychological defects—is a far cry from actively encouraging their growth as a species.
Especially
in such an intrinsically perilous enterprise as interstellar colonization.”

His tone had been every bit as sour as the look he’d given Chopra. There had been a wide range of opinion concerning the wisdom of modifying the Bemmie genome to produce what amounted to a brand new species. That range was narrower on the Colonization Board than in the public at large—there were certainly no members calling for outright euthanasia—but it was still pretty wide. And the chairman of the Board occupied a position near to one of the edges.

To be precise, the edge of opinion that argued the new species was completely untested, of dubious provenance—a species modified from a species that had
already
been modified—and far more likely to be a hindrance than a help in the great project of spreading human civilization through the galaxy.

There are been other members of the Board, however, who argued just as vehemently that there was no reason to assume that
Bemmius novus
would pose any problems at all. No one questioned the viability of
Bemmius pelagica,
after all. It would be awfully hard to do so, given that the species had thrived and even evolved into intelligence in the very difficult environment of Europa’s ocean.

The modifications that had been made to the
Pelagica
genome had been fairly restricted and limited entirely to physical changes. Basically, a species that was adapted to a marine environment had been modified to a more amphibian
Bauplan
. The new species was actually closer to the original Bemmie stock than their direct
pelagica
progenitors—and no one could possibly question the viability of that original species, given that they had managed the supreme feat of crossing the vastness of interstellar space.

In the end, the Board had decided to put the issue to a test. They would run an experiment, essentially, by including a small number of
Bemmius novus
in the next colonization expedition. Akira had been one of the four members of the expedition assigned the task of assessing the outcome of the test. In fact, he’d been appointed the coordinator of the project.

“Project Triton,” they’d decided to call it. That seemed more . . . diplomatic than “Project Can The New Bemmies Cut The Mustard?” And given the very delicate nature of the experiment, it had been kept secret from anyone except Board members and the four assessors themselves.

Akira had no idea what had happened to the other three people assigned to the experiment. They might all be dead; they might all have reached their original destination; some might be alive and some might be dead—there was simply no way to know.

For all intents and purposes, therefore, Akira had to act as if he were the only assessor left. And he had to assume that his report would be the only one the Board would consider.

That assumed, of course, that the Colonization Board would ever discover the journal. But that was a different problem and one that Akira was now confident he would have years in which to figure out a solution.

Years—which he would have in no small part because of the youngest member of
Bemmius novus
who had come on the expedition.

Slightly more than a year had now passed, according to Akira’s omni, and he had decided to discontinue the experiment. The result of the test was in—had been for quite a while, really—and it was time to record the result.

For that, he decided he could finally abandon the academic prose in which he’d recorded the data. Whatever purpose it had once served, it was no longer needed. Indeed, it would now be inappropriate.

The issue is settled. It would be hard to devise a more difficult test than the one Harratrer has passed—and passed with flying colors. Marooned on a water planet with almost no resources beyond personal omnis; with no companions of his own species and only a small number of human ones; on a drifting continent full of dangers . . .

Compared to this test, the one the Board designed would have been laughably easy. A year has gone by, and our impromptu little colony is doing quite well. Thriving, in some ways, although our lack of numbers will obviously continue to pose a great challenge—an insoluble one, in the end, if we do not make contact with other humans.

But I now have great hope that we will do so. Not soon, no. But given enough years I believe we will be rescued. And I am confident that we will have those years. Even decades, should we need them.

A large part of my confidence comes from the fact that Harratrer is part of our colony. He has been invaluable in a multitude of ways. His skills are superb, especially for such a young being. His courage and steadiness are by now unquestionable. It is no exaggeration to say that he has saved all of our lives more than once.

The reverse is also true, to be sure. We humans have saved his life more than once too. But that simply highlights what I believe may be the single most important outcome of this experiment—and the one that was the least predictable.

Harratrer’s ability to form close emotional bonds with his human companions—all of us, and especially with one of my daughters—is something I don’t think any of us could have foreseen. Not to this extent, certainly. Human relations with members of
Bemmius pelagica
have always been friendly, but the difficulties each species faces when operating in the other’s environment has served as a barrier to close personal relations. With members of
Bemmius novus,
that barrier is almost completely removed.

I am aware of the dangers of generalizing from a single example, but I have observed many members of
Bemmius novus
, and it is my considered professional opinion that while Harratrer is an exceptional individual, I do not believe he is any more exceptional than any human being chosen to be part of an interstellar colonization expedition—certainly no more extraordinary than my wife or my daughters, or the other human colonists on board
Outward Initiative
.

A year, under these extreme conditions, is more than time enough. The experiment has been concluded. The test is over. With no reservations of any kind, I recommend strongly to the Colonization Board that members of
Bemmius novus—
and in considerable number
—
be included in any and all future colonization expeditions being sent to planets whose environment is sufficiently marine or aquatic.

In practice, that meant
all
colonization expeditions in the foreseeable future. Humans were not amphibious, but they still much preferred environments with plenty of water. There were so many inhabitable planets that there was no need to contemplate settling desert planets. Not now, not for centuries—quite possibly not for many millennia.

Akira wasn’t concerned with millennia. Years and decades were his business.

He looked forward to those years and decades.

All that remained was . . .

Signed, Akira Kimei

Coordinator, Project Triton

He paused for a moment. Then, smiling, decided to add a curlicue that not even a curmudgeon like Boris Yermolov would miss.

The Bemmies—both
pelagica
and
novus
—had a custom very similar to that of some human cultures. Like Arabs, they used teknonyms, adding the title of “father of” or “mother of” to their name when they had offspring. Arabs used “abu” for the former and “umm” for the latter.

There were some differences, but the customs were still quite close.

Certainly close enough for his purpose. He deleted the signature and replaced it with:

Signed, Akira Kimei allu-Harratrer cnet-Caroline cnet-Sakura cnet-Melody cnet-Hitomi

Coordinator, Project Triton