The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  He was not quite horizontal; his feet seemed to be ballasted still, and were resting on some of the native’s furniture a foot or so beneath the surface of the water.

  Internally, his chest protested with stabs of pain at every breath he took; his limbs were sore, and his neck very stiff. He could not quite remember what had happened, but it must have been violent. Almost certainly, he decided as he made some more experimental motions, he must have a broken rib or two, though his arms and legs seemed whole.

  His attempts to establish the latter fact caused his feet to slip from their support. They promptly sank, pulling him into the vertical position. For a moment he submerged completely, then drifted upward again and finally reached equilibrium, with the water line near his eyebrows.

  Yes, it was Creak’s house, all right. He was in the corner of the main room, which the occupants had cleared of some of its furniture to give him freedom of motion. The room itself was about three meters deep and twice as long and wide, the cleared volume representing less than a quarter of the total. The rest of the chamber was inaccessible to him, since the native furniture was a close imitation of the hopelessly tangled, springy vegetation of Ranta’s tidal zones.

  Looped among the strands of flexible wood, apparently as thoroughly intertwined as they, were two bright forms which would have reminded a terrestrial biologist of magnified Nereid worms. They were nearly four meters long and about a third of a meter in diameter. The lateral fringes of setae in their Earthly counterparts were replaced by more useful appendages—thirty-four pairs of them, as closely as Cunningham had been able to count. These seemed designed for climbing through the tangle of vegetation or furniture, though they could be used after a fashion for swimming.

  The nearer of the orange-and-salmon-patterned forms had a meter or so of his head end projecting into the cleared space, and seemed to be eyeing the man with some anxiety. His voice, which had inspired the name Cunningham had given him, reached the man’s ears clearly enough through the airsuit in spite of poor impedance matching between air and water.

  “It’s good to see you conscious, Cun’m,” he said in Rantan. “We had no way of telling how badly you were injured, and for all I knew I might have damaged you even further bringing you home. Those rigid structures you call ‘bones’ make rational first aid a bit difficult.”

  “I don’t think I’ll die for a while yet,” Cunningham replied carefully. “Thanks, Creak. My limb bones seem all right, though those in my body cage may not be. I can probably patch myself up when I get back to the ship. But what happened, anyway?”

  The man was using a human language, since neither being could produce the sounds of the other. The six months Cunningham had so far spent on Ranta had been largely occupied in learning to understand, not speak, alien languages; Creak and his wife had learned only to understand Cunningham’s, too.

  “Cement failure again.” Creak’s rusty-hinge phonemes were clear enough to the man by now. “The dam let go, and washed both of us through the gap, the break. I was able to seize a rock very quickly, but you went quite a distance. You just aren’t made for holding on to things, Cun’m.”

  “But if the dam is gone, the reservoir is going. Why did you bother with me? Shouldn’t the city be warned? Why are both of you still here? I realize that Nereis can’t travel very well just now, but shouldn’t she try to get to the city while there’s still water in the aqueduct? She’ll never make it all that way over dry land—even you will have trouble. You should have left me and done your job. Not that I’m complaining.”

  “It just isn’t done.” Creak dismissed the suggestion with no more words. “Besides, I may need you; there is much to be done in which you can perhaps help. Now that you are awake and more or less all right, I will go to the city. When you have gotten back to your ship and fixed your bones, will you please follow? If the aqueduct loses its water before I get there, I’ll need your help.”

  “Right. Should I bring Nereis with me? With no water coming into your house, how long will it be habitable?”

  “Until evaporation makes this water too salt—days, at least. There are many plants and much surface; it will remain breathable. She can decide for herself whether to fly with you; being out of water in your ship when her time comes would also be bad, though I suppose you could get her to the city quickly. In any case, we should have a meeting place. Let’s see—there is a public gathering area about five hundred of your meters north of the apex of the only concave angle in the outer wall. I can’t think of anything plainer to describe. I’ll be there when I can. Either wait for me, or come back at intervals, as your own plans may demand. That should suffice. I’m going.”

  The Rantan snaked his way through the tangle of furniture and disappeared through a narrow opening in one wall. Listening carefully, Cunningham finally heard the splash which indicated that the native had reached the aqueduct—and that there was still water in it.

  “All right, Nereis,” he said. “I’ll start back to the ship. I don’t suppose you want to come with me over even that little bit of land, but do you want me to come back and pick you up before I follow Creak?”

  The other native, identical with her husband to human eyes except for her deeper coloration, thought a moment. “Probably you should follow him as quickly as you can. I’ll be all right here for a few days, as he said—and one doesn’t suggest that someone is wrong until there is proof. You go ahead without me. Unless you think you’ll need my help; you said you had some injury.”

  “Thanks, I can walk once I’m out of the room. But you might help me with the climb, if you will.”

  Nereis flowed out of her relaxation nook in the furniture, the springy material rising as her weight was removed.

  The man took a couple of gentle arm strokes, which brought him to the wall. Ordinarily he could have heaved himself out of the water with no difficulty, but the broken ribs made a big difference. It took the help of Nereis, braced against the floor, to ease him to the top of the two-meter-thick outer wall of unshaped, cemented rocks and gravel. He stood up without too much difficulty once there was solid footing, and stood looking around briefly before starting to pick his way back to the Nimepotea. The dam lay only a few meters to the north; the break Creak had mentioned was not visible. He and the native had been underwater in the reservoir more than a quarter-kilometer to the west of the house when they had been caught by the released waters. Looking in that direction, he could see part of the stream still gushing, and wondered how he had survived at all in that turbulent, boulder-studded flood. Behind the dam, the reservoir was visibly lower, though it would presumably be some hours before it emptied.

  He must have been unconscious for some time, he thought: it would have taken the native, himself almost helpless on dry land, a long time indeed to drag him up the dam wall from the site of the break to the house, which was on the inside edge of the reservoir.

  East of Creak’s house, extending south toward the city, was the aqueduct which had determined his selection of a first landing point on Ranta. Beyond it, some three hundred meters from where he stood, lay the black ovoid of his ship. He would first have to make his way along the walls of the house—preferably without falling in and getting tangled in the furniture—to the narrow drain that Creak had followed to the aqueduct, then turn upstream instead of down until he reached the dam, cross the dam gate of the aqueduct, and descend the outer face of the dam to make his way across the bare rock to his vessel.

  Southward, some fifteen kilometers away, lay the city he had not yet visited. It looked rather like an old labyrinth from this viewpoint, since the Rantans had no use for roofs and ceilings. It would be interesting to see whether the divisions corresponded to homes, streets, parks, and the like; but he had preferred to learn what he could about a new world from isolated individuals before exposing himself to crowds. Following his usual custom, Cunningham had made his first contact with natives who lived close enough to a large population center to be in touch with
the main culture, yet far enough from it to minimize the chance of his meeting swarms of natives until he felt ready for them. This policy involved assumptions about culture and technology which were sometimes wrong, but had not so far proven fatally so.

  He splashed along the feeder that had taken Creak to the aqueduct and reached the more solid and heavy wall of the main channel.

  The going was rough, since the Rantans did not appear to believe in squaring or otherwise shaping their structural stone. They simply cemented together fragments of all sizes down to fine sand until they had something watertight. Some of the fragments felt a little loose underfoot, which did not help his peace of mind. Getting away with his life from one dam failure seemed to be asking enough of luck.

  However, he traversed the thirty or forty meters to the dam without disaster, turned to his right, and made his way across the arch supporting the wooden valve. This, too, reflected Rantan workmanship. The reedlike growths of which it was made had undergone no shaping except for the removal of an outer bark and—though he was not sure about this—the cutting to some random length less than the largest dimension of the gate. Thousands of the strips were glued together both parallel and crossed at varying angles, making a pattern that strongly appealed to Cunningham’s artistic taste.

  Once across, he descended the gentle south slope of the dam and made his way quickly to the Nimepotea.

  An hour later, still sore but with his ribs knitted and a good meal inside him, he lifted the machine from the lava and made his way south along the aqueduct, flying slowly enough to give himself every chance to see Creak. The native might, of course, have reached the city by now; Cunningham knew that his own swimming speed was superior to the Rantan’s, but the latter might have been helped by current in the aqueduct. The sun was almost directly overhead, so it was necessary to fly a little to one side of the watercourse to avoid its hot, blinding reflection.

  He looked at other things than the channel, of course. He had not flown since meeting Creak and Nereis, so he knew nothing of the planet save what the two natives had told him. They themselves had done little traveling, their work confining them to the reservoir and its neighborhood, the aqueduct, and sometimes the city. Cunningham had much to learn.

  The aqueduct itself was not a continuous channel, but was divided into lower and lower sections, or locks. These did not contain gates—rather to the man’s surprise—so that flow for the entire fifteen-plus kilometers started or stopped very quickly according to what was happening at the dam. To Cunningham, this would seem to trap water here and there along the channel, but he assumed that the builders had had their reasons for the design.

  * * *

  He approached the city without having sighted Creak, and paused to think before crossing the outer wall. He still felt uneasy about meeting crowds of aliens; there was really no way of telling how they would react. Creak and Nereis were understandable individuals, rational by human standards; but no race is composed of identical personalities, and a crowd is not the simple sum of the individuals composing it—there is too much person-to-person feedback.

  The people in the city, or some of them, must by now know about him, however. Creak had made several trips to town in the past few months, and admitted that he had made no secret of Cunningham’s presence. The fact that no crowds had gathered at the dam suggested something not quite human about Rantans, collectively.

  They might not even have noticed his ship just now. He was certainly visible from the city; but the natives, Creak had told him, practically never paid attention to anything out of water unless it was an immediate job to be done.

  Cunningham had watched Creak and Nereis for hours before their first actual meeting, standing within a dozen meters of them at times while they were underwater. Creak had not seen him even when the native had emerged to do fresh stonework on the top of the dam; he had been using a lorgnette with one eye, and ignoring the out-of-focus images which his other eyes gave when out of water; though, indeed, his breathing suit for use out of water did not cover his head, since his breathing apparatus was located at the bases of his limbs. Creak had simply bent to his work.

  It had been Nereis, still underwater, who saw the grotesquely refracted human form approaching her husband and hurled herself from the water in between the two. This had been simple reflex; she had not been on guard in any sense. As far as she and Creak appeared to know, there was no land life on Ranta.

  So the city dwellers might not yet have noticed him, unless—No, they would probably dismiss the shadow of the Nimepotea as that of a cloud. In any case, knowledge of him for six months should be adequate preparation. He could understand the local language, even if the locals would not be able to understand him.

  He landed alongside the aqueduct a few meters from the point where it joined the city wall. He had thought of going directly to the spot specified by Creak, but decided first to take a closer look at the city itself.

  Going outside was simple enough; an airsuit sufficed. He had been maintaining his ship’s atmosphere at local total pressure, a little over one and three-quarter bars, to avoid the nuisances of wearing rigid armor or of decompression on return. The local air was poisonous, however, since its oxygen partial pressure was nearly three times Earth’s sea-level normal; but a diffusion selector took care of that without forcing him to worry about time limits.

  Cunningham took no weapons, though he was not assuming that all Rantans would prove as casually friendly as Creak and Nereis had been. He felt no fear of the beings out of water, and had no immediate intention of submerging.

  The aqueduct was almost five meters high, and a good deal steeper than the outer wall of Creak’s house. However, the standard rough stonework gave plenty of hand- and toehold, and he reached the top with little trouble. A few bits of gravel came loose under his feet, but nothing large enough to cost him any support.

  Water stood in this section of aqueduct, but it had stopped flowing. At the south end it was lapping at the edge of the city wall itself; at the north end of this lock, the bottom was exposed though not yet dry. He walked in this direction until he reached the barrier between this section and the next, noting without surprise that the latter also had water to full depth at the near end. There was some seepage through the cemented stone—the sort that Creak had always been trying to fix at the main dam.

  Finally approaching the city wall, he saw that its water was only a few centimeters below that in the adjoining aqueduct section. He judged that there was some remaining lifetime for the metropolis and its inhabitants, but was surprised that no workers were going out to salvage water along the aqueduct. Then he realized that their emergency plans might call for other measures first. After all, the dam would have to be repaired before anything else was likely to do much good. No doubt Creak would be able to tell him about that.

  In the meantime, the first compartment, or square, or whatever it was, should be worth looking over. Presumably it would have equipment for salting the incoming water, since the natives could not stand fresh water in their systems. A small compartment in Creak’s house had served this purpose—as it was explained to him. However, he saw nothing here of the racks for supporting blocks of evaporated sea salt just below the surface, nor supplies of the blocks stored somewhere above the water, nor a crew to tend the setup. After all, salting the water for a whole city of some thirteen square kilometers would have to be a pretty continuous operation.

  The compartment was some fifty meters square, however, and could have contained a great deal not visible from where he stood on the wall; and there was much furniture—in this case, apparently, living vegetation—within it. He walked around its whole perimeter—in effect, entering the city for a time, though he saw no residents and observed no evidence that any of them saw him—but could learn little more.

  The vegetation below him seemed to be of many varieties, but all consisting of twisted, tangled stems of indefinite length. The stems’ diameters ranged from that of a
human hair to that of a human leg. Colors tended to be brilliant, reds and yellows predominating. None of the vegetation had the green leaves so nearly universal on photosynthetic plants, and Cunningham wondered whether these things could really represent the base of the Rantan food pyramid.

  If they did not, then how did the city feed itself, since there was nothing resembling farm tanks around it? Maybe the natives were still fed from the ocean—but in that case, why did they no longer live in the ocean?

  Cunningham had asked his hosts about that long before but obtained no very satisfactory answer. Creak appeared to have strong emotional reactions to the question, regarding the bulk of his compatriots in terms which Cunningham had been unable to work into literal translation but that were certainly pejoratives—sinners, or fools, or something like that. Nereis appeared to feel less strongly about the matter, but had never had much chance to talk when her husband got going on the subject. Also, it seemed to be bad Rantan manners to contradict someone who had a strong opinion on any matter; the natives, if the two he had met were fair examples, seemed to possess to a limitless degree the human emotional need to be right. In any case, the reason why the city was on land was an open question and remained the sort of puzzle that retired human beings needed to keep them from their otherwise inevitable boredom. Cunningham was quite prepared to spend years on Ranta, as he had on other worlds.

  Back at the aqueduct entrance, though now on its west side, Cunningham considered entering the water and examining the compartment from within. Vegetation was absent at the point where fresh water entered the city wall and first compartment, so, he figured, it should be possible to make his way to the center. There things might be different enough to be worth examining, without the danger of his getting trapped as he had been once or twice in Nereis’ furniture before she and her husband had cleared some space for him.

  It was not fear that stopped him, though decades of wandering in the Nimepotea and her predecessors had developed in Cunningham a level of prudence which many a less mature or experienced being would have called rank cowardice. Rather, he liked to follow a plan where possible, and the only trace of a plan he had so far developed included getting back in contact with Creak.