by S MacDonald
‘Well, I’m not happy about this,’ he said, after a silence which was worried on his side and outraged on the commander’s. ‘It’s the shuttle, isn’t it?’ Again, he saw stress levels spike even as the commander thought about that, and nodded. ‘Thought so. Even though you know it’s safe and won’t be anything like the courier, it is very small and you’re having a classic post-stress reaction to putting yourself in a similar position to one you found so intolerable. I do understand, Commander, really I do.’ He would have preferred to be on first name terms with his patient, but when he’d done his usual ‘Call me Rangi’ routine, Commander Mikthorn had said coldly that he expected to be called by his rank. Nobody called him by his first name, not at least while he was in uniform. ‘And given how stressed you are already,’ Rangi went on, ‘I really feel that I’m obliged to make the decision, medically speaking, that is in your best interests. I cannot be responsible for you ending up in the condition you were when you arrived here, or perhaps even worse. So I’m sorry, I really am, but either we agree that you’ll take muscle-relaxing meds to see you through, or I will have to issue a medical advisory that I don’t consider you’re currently fit to travel.’
Commander Mikthorn drew breath to tell the medic – a bumptious Sub-lt, no more! – exactly what he thought of such an outrage. Then he held his breath and really thought about it.
This could work to his advantage. There would be the immediate relief of not having to go on that shuttle, and it would buy him extra time on the ship. Even he didn’t have very much hope of being able to convince Professor Parrot to vacate the research facility, but even so it would be better to stay here and keep trying than to retreat, admitting failure. And then… and then… a light dawned in the commander’s mind and he congratulated himself for the second time that day on being absolutely brilliant.
‘I will not consent to taking medication that I do not need,’ he said. ‘And I am entirely willing to endure whatever hardship is necessary in the course of my duties. If you choose to certify me unfit to travel by shuttle, however, that is your right as ship’s medical officer.’
This, Rangi felt, was as close as Commander Mikthorn could bring himself to saying ‘Thank you’ or admit that he’d been dreading the trip.
Later, though, Rangi did tell the skipper that he had no doubt that the commander would take whatever advantage of this he could – no fool, Rangi Tekawa.
‘All the same,’ he told Alex, ‘his stress levels are way high and I honestly don’t feel it would be responsible to put him onto the shuttle. We’d probably end up having to forcibly sedate him and that isn’t something we take lightly, skipper.’
Alex conceded the point, though with a gloomy look. He had once been sedated without his knowledge by a ship’s medic who’d considered it the kindest thing to do for him while he was in shock at the death of his daughter. He’d had the medic removed from his ship after he’d found out that his coffee had been laced with sedatives, and it had been a while before he’d trusted any medic again. So he was, as Rangi knew, more sensitive than most to the issues involved in forcible sedation. And while he was perfectly prepared to have Commander Mikthorn frog-marched off the ship as an irritating nuisance they’d put up with for far too long already, he would not do so when he knew that would risk the man’s health.
‘You couldn’t,’ Alex gestured vaguely, attempting to indicate Rangi’s alternative treatments, ‘do something for him?’
Rangi smiled regretfully. ‘Not without his full cooperation,’ he said. ‘Which he is not willing to give.’ He gave the captain an apologetic shrug. ‘I know he isn’t pleasant company, and I’ve no more desire to keep him on the ship than you have. But, you know – the welfare of the patient comes first.’
Alex had no argument with this medical ethic. He couldn’t even argue that the welfare of the ship and the mission overrode it, to justify forcing the commander onto the shuttle against medical advice.
‘You’re not saying we have to keep him for the duration though, are you?’ Alex asked, with a hint of pleading in his eyes.
‘No, skipper.’ Rangi grinned at that. ‘Either I get him through his issues about travelling on small craft or we make alternative arrangements – it would, I have to say, take considerable time to get him to accept any kind of therapy for claustrophobia, but I do have an idea. The Stepeasy will have come out with the Whisker, of course, and if they were to send out their tender…’ he let that hang for a moment and then suggested brightly, ‘they might even take him back for us.’
Alex gave a little splutter of mirth, though he was already shaking his head.
‘We couldn’t do that to them,’ he said. ‘Though you can ask if they’ll send out the tender on medical grounds.’
Rangi understood. Alex would not ask Davie North, the owner of the superyacht, to do this for them as a favour. It would be requested officially, through the Stepeasy’s role as a civilian support vessel under contract as such with the Admiralty.
‘Will do,’ said Rangi, and seeing that the skipper already had his hand on a stack of files awaiting his attention, thanked him and left it at that.
The news that Moaning Mick was staying did generate some sighs and grumbles round the ship, but only briefly and in passing. Everyone was far too taken up with the data they were getting to pay much attention to him. The quantities of scientific data they were getting were just overwhelming – at the end of the first hour one of the crew observed that it would take them five months to process everything they’d already got, and still it came in, a tsunami of data from the composition of the upper atmosphere to the biology of the deepest ocean. That data would be grabbed by university departments right across the League. All the Fourth could do, realistically, was to try to keep up with classifying and noting significant discoveries.
Even so, it was the anthropology data that was holding the ship spellbound. Until now, they had only been able to see the view from the singing stones, a fixed position, fixed angle view they couldn’t alter in the slightest. Since arriving in long orbit they’d had partial view of the hemisphere facing them, though it was mostly obscured by clouds and heatscan imaging didn’t give a very detailed picture.
Now, though, they had both fixed and orbiting drones in close orbit, equipped with scanners which could penetrate cloud with a range of frequencies which were then combined into a ‘clear sky’ image of the ground. This could be zoomed in to microscopic detail. It could also be viewed from any virtual position, at any angle. It was just as if they actually had cameras there which they could fly around or bring down to ground level, swinging around to see things from any point of view they wished. The anthropology software was recording the activity of every person on the planet, other than when in the privacy of their houses.
Every member of the crew could access that, with permission to monitor the islands they were already liaising with. They could see people going about their everyday lives, follow fishing boats, even see what people were saying through lip-reading software providing subtitles.
‘All the fascination of nosiness,’ said Buzz, ‘and none of the guilt.’
He was right. They might have justified something like this if Carrearranis had been a pre-communication society and they’d had to learn all they could about them through remote observation. As it was, the Carrearranians understood very well that the drones meant that their friends in the Fourth could be watching them at any time, and had given their consent on that basis.
It was fascinating, though, like sitting in a public space and people-watching, when those people were from a very different world with a lifestyle so strange it hardly seemed human at all. Not that they were sure yet that the Carrearranians were human, as the Carrearranians themselves had very limited knowledge of their own internal physiology and no DNA samples had been possible. They were very small, but that in itself would not define them as non-human under the terms of the Homo Sapiens Identification Act. To meet that criteria they would
have to be humanoid in appearance, but no specification was made as to size or other superficial matters. Far more important were the criteria of having 23 pairs of chromosomes with DNA and proteins falling within the range defined as human. That could only be determined with physical testing and it would be some time yet before Alex would take that step. They would have to be absolutely sure, first, exactly what they were dealing with in the Carrearranian biosphere.
The first real use they made of the data, though, was in calling up one of the communities and warning them of a storm front heading their way.
‘If you could have a word with them yourself, skipper,’ Very Vergan was heading up the meteorological team and had already had a frustrating conversation with the elders of the village. ‘I can’t seem to get them to understand how serious it is.’
Alex was a little surprised, since Very wasn’t a man either to give up easily or to pass the buck to his superiors. He made the call, though, and very soon discovered why Very had felt it necessary to call him in.
The island was one of the more remote, isolated from others and several days sailing away even from the nearest uninhabited atoll. It was just over nine kilometres long and four at the widest point, curving like a rough crescent around a shallow lagoon. As with all the inhabited islands it supported only one village, clustered around the singing stone. It was in the southern hemisphere, the most southerly of all the inhabited islands, and had already been identified as at risk from the storms which swept up from the southern arctic region. Two such storms had already struck it, in fact, while the Heron had been out at Border Station. That had been worrying enough when all they could do was wait to see how things had turned out. Both times, comms had gone offline for several hours while the villagers retreated to a stone-built shelter on higher ground. Both times, the Heron’s crew had been greatly relieved to be told that the storm had passed without casualties and with only slight damage. The trees in the background had looked pretty battered, but the village itself seemed just fine. Now, though, the Fourth could see the storm building out to sea. It wasn’t a cyclone – they were rare on Carrearranis – but a low pressure front of alarming intensity bearing down on the little island with storm force winds.
‘There is a big, big storm heading your way,’ Alex told the villagers, as many of them gathered around the comms tower at his request. A personal call from Alex was something of an event and it had taken several minutes of greetings and island gossip before he could get their attention for what he wanted to say. ‘A very big, dangerous storm.’
The islanders laughed.
‘We know,’ the village chief, Sarat, was a woman of about fifty, a fat, placid woman with a chortling laugh which went on and on. She let it chuckle out while and after she spoke, though quite kindly, and pointed off camera to something out of view of the singing stone. Alex was able to see from the side-screen showing drone coverage that she was indicating the village weather forecasting device.
The Fourth had seen these before, as islanders had obligingly brought them into camera range and explained their use. They were a very basic kind of barometer, with a sealed translucent tube – a kind of reed – sitting in a gourd full of coloured water. The tube was marked off at intervals which Alex knew to be finger widths. When air pressure was high, more water was pushed up into the tube and the islanders knew that the weather would be fair. When it dropped very low, they battened in for a storm. Alex could see that it was currently sitting above the second marked line, but it would have been falling for some hours now and would continue to do so. Above the barometer was the wind-tree, from which various ribbons of fabric and clumps of seaweed had been hung. Indicating this, too, and the sky above them, Sarat told Alex ‘It will arrive late morning tomorrow.’
Alex knew that the Carrearranians had a very good understanding of meteorology – they understood very well how the barometer worked and how to interpret it, and they were experts in cloud observation, too, understanding that different types of cloud occurred at different levels in the air and what each signified for the weather. They knew just what it meant when the light ribbons were fluttering at ground level in one direction while high clouds were tearing over the sky in another, and the weather-wise could even evaluate humidity from the feel of different types of seaweed. Even so, Alex was a man who’d spent his whole life relying on technology – none more so than a spacer – and he couldn’t even begin to get his head around the idea that a water tube and clumps of seaweed could do as good a job of predicting the weather as their high-tech sensors and on-board computers.
‘Yes – at this time.’ Alex put the countdown clock which Very had already created for them onto his screen, and saw more amusement. Attempts to teach the Carrearranians to tell the time generally did result in hilarity, as did any attempt to teach them measuring by standard units. The islanders already had perfectly satisfactory ways of telling the time – they had words for dawn, morning, noon, early and late afternoon, sunset, the first part of the night and the last hours of darkness. Each of these, though of irregular length, was considered to be an hour. They saw no need at all and no point, to imposing numbers on the hours or the days. As for measure, the smallest unit they used was the finger width, the largest was the stride. Clearly there was no standardisation in this even within a community, still less any global agreement on how big something like a finger-width should actually be. Attempts to explain minutes, metres and litres had had the islanders in fits at how bonkers the Fourth were. This had been all the more incomprehensible given that the islanders were certainly not ignorant of mathematics; they just didn’t see the point of quantifying and enumerating things in their everyday lives. As far as clocks were concerned, they understood the principle – their children played with shadow-sticks and made sand or water timekeepers from gourds with a little hole in the bottom. Clocks with numbers, however, held no interest for them.
In response to this, the Fourth had come up with a range of ways to show ‘time until’, including the countdown clock Very had used for this. It was a bar-clock with an indicator moving slowly along it and readily understood symbols for dawn, noon and sunset. Part of it had been hatched out in red with big storm clouds above and waves below.
‘There will be very strong winds,’ Alex told them earnestly, understanding then why Very had asked for his help. These people weren’t taking the danger seriously at all. ‘Strong enough to blow down trees, destroy your houses. And there will be very high waves, too, a storm surge which will flood the village. They will be as high as...’ he hesitated for a moment, abandoned the idea of attempting to explain metres again, ‘halfway up the walls of your houses.’
They looked at him in astonishment, some laughing and others clearly of the view that he was talking nonsense.
‘It is real,’ Alex said, more forcefully now as he was afraid he wasn’t getting through to them. ‘This storm is coming, it will hit you tomorrow and there will be great damage, trees will come down, the sea will flood into the village, your houses will be destroyed. It is very important that you take shelter on higher ground; that you go to your shelter up on the hill. Take everything that you can carry and get all of your people to safety, yes?’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ they soothed him, some still laughing, others reassuring.
‘Don’t worry, Alex dear,’ a toothless grandmother clucked at him as if he was a child just woken from a nightmare. ‘It’s all good, sweet boy, don’t worry, we will go to the hearth before the storm comes.’
‘But…’ Alex felt utterly helpless, not just in the face of the natural disaster looming for these people, but at his own inability to get it through to them how much danger they were in and how urgent it was. They had just eleven hours, shipboard time, before their village would be devastated. All his instinct and training was to get them evacuated now. It felt as if there wasn’t a minute to waste. And they just stood there laughing at him. ‘You have to go now,’ he insisted, and at that they laughed even mor
e.
‘Ohhh,’ said a middle aged man, still chortling contentedly, ‘You star people, you’re mad! You want to count and measure everything in the world and all the time you worry, worry, worry!’ He gave Alex a fatherly look. ‘I think all that counting makes you funny in the head,’ he advised.
Later, Alex would see the humour in that. At the time he was only conscious of a rising sense of desperation.
‘But you know the storm is coming!’ he protested, at which there was a chorus of casual agreement in which the word ‘tomorrow’ popped out from several directions.
‘Storms are good,’ one commented, and another chipped in, ‘We like storms.’ As Alex stared at them, quite lost for words, the chief of the village took point again and grinned at him.
‘We will go to the hearth in the morning,’ she told him. ‘When it is right. We’re not going now,’ she chuckled at the idea and there was more laughter again.
Alex kept trying, but got nowhere. They just kept assuring him with perfect good humour that he was worrying about nothing and that they would pack up their things and go to the shelter in the morning. An attempt to recruit Arak’s help in persuading them fell flat, too, as Arak couldn’t understand his concern either.
‘We all know what to do when there is a storm coming,’ he assured Alex. ‘Every village has a shelter, strong and high above where the sea can come even in the biggest storm. Everyone will go there when the storm-shell is blown; you do not need to worry.’
‘But the storm-shell should be blown now,’ Alex said, knowing that the islanders blew through conch-like shells which produced mournful hooting sounds. ‘To give everyone time to get to safety.’
