Marooned on Eden

by Robert L. Forward

  Then we coughed, or muttered something, and dropped hands. I realized then, with a little shock, that we are all shy! How absurd . . .we've known each other for years! But we have lived solitary lives, for all our proximity. With the imps to take care of our every personal need, and our own private apartments to escape to, we have developed very little intimacy. Now, abruptly, we are dependent on each other, and none of us know exactly how to handle that.

  In addition to the realization, I was becoming aware of an increasing need of my own. Cinnamon had been glancing sharply at me, and now began to say something, but stopped. It is best to begin as you mean to go on! That archaic Victorian injunction floated into my mind, and I spoke into the silence, calmly but definitely.

  "Personal hygiene is a matter which I feel merits our attention almost immediately, if you don't mind. Shall we arbitrarily designate a latrine area, and some arrangement for privacy there? I should like to suggest a place quite near the shoreline, in the absence of anything I have seen suitable for tissue."

  The practical question broke the emotional moment with some speed, but as I say, I was becoming rather uncomfortable. After a moment's consideration, Nels asked, "Why not just use the sea itself?"

  "Why not, indeed?" said Shirley. I was momentarily surprised—Shirley was always the most rigid among us about contaminating an alien surface, and about the risk of being contaminated. "I did notice, as we landed, the shoreline outside the entrance to this lagoon. It slopes away from the point, and there are long beaches along the northern side."

  "Right!" said Jinjur briskly, getting to her feet with renewed vigor. "But we'll go together, this first time. Safety in numbers, I hope!"

  We marched up the beach and over the point of the lagoon, a pathetic gaggle of humans heading for a comfort station. We found the long beach ideal for this humble purpose; plenty of space to spread out along it for sufficient privacy, even for me, and I waded desperately into the warm salt water as deep as I wanted . . .Oddly I had to remain there for some time—the habits of civilization are not easy to discard, even when the need is imperative!—but finally we were all back on shore, and began trudging back to the little spring.

  "What happened to the flouwen?" Richard's sudden anxiety startled us.

  "That's right, you were still unconscious," remembered Nels. "We heard them—at least one of them—singing out there, just as you began to get your breath back."

  "Singing? What was there to sing about?" said Richard indignantly.

  "Well," snapped Cinnamon, "They were free, thanks to you! I imagine it felt pretty good to be out of that little tank, down there in the dark!" It was good to hear the feeling in her voice—a return to a more normal state for at least one of our numbed minds.

  "We'll get in contact with them later," Jinjur stated. "First, let's see just what we've got among us."

  On a flat rock, near the spring, we put our pitifully few possessions. David and Arielle found some food in their pockets, but it had been ruined by the salt water. Shirley's Mech-All knife and my recorder were still in good shape. Shirley had lost her Permalite and it was no doubt at the bottom of the lagoon along with the lander. Cinnamon produced a small carving of a little animal, in ivory. She said it was her good-luck piece, a statement that was greeted with silence. Nels had, of all archaic things, a pencil—he explained that he liked to draw, a fact which none of us had known before. There was nothing else. From having all technology at our disposal, we were now confronted with two small tools. Shirley spread her strong hands on the rock, and gazed at them in dismay.

  "If only we'd worn our suits!" she mourned. "We'd have a lot more to work with . . .like a radio to contact Prometheus with!" That was a fact—even the wiring in them might have been usable. But long ago it had been determined that spacesuits were more a hazard than a help to pilots attempting to land on a strange planet. Our clothes are in good shape—due to the constant ministrations of James and the drowned imps, but hardly suitable for an alien environment. One fortunate circumstance is that we are all shod in the light-weight but tough slipper-stockings we wore around the ship when in free-fall, so we can walk without difficulty.

  Jinjur spoke with her customary authority. "All right, troops. We're all sound and strong, and we have water that so far seems harmless. We must continue to survive, and we must find some way to contact Prometheus."

  The sound of the familiar name made us all look skyward, trying to spot the light, if not the shape, of our homeship. The cloud cover had thickened considerably, and there was no sign of the ship.

  "Too far away." Arielle's statement was harsh.

  "The quicker we can adjust to having nothing, the faster we can begin to solve the problem," said Cinnamon. "At least I hope so! I keep mentally expecting my imp to do things for me!"

  "I wonder what the possibilities are for retrieving something—anything!—from the lander," said David.

  "If the damn thing stops going down, I might be able to dive to it when I'm rested," said Richard.

  "I was thinking more of enlisting the flouwen's assistance," said David. "D'you think there's any way we can get across to them what we want? It's pretty basic."

  "How can we talk to them at all?" Shirley wailed with fresh dismay. "Our imps, the translator program, all the computers are gone along with the lander!"

  John cleared his throat. "I don't like to be even more discouraging, but it's possible they've left the area for good. Without the ship and its equipment, they may feel they're on their own."

  This chilling thought was countered by Carmen. "I don't believe that," she said firmly. "If nothing else, simple curiosity will bring them near fairly soon!"

  The talk went on, not smoothly, but brief phrases uttered as the speaker felt compelled. Struggling to comprehend this desperate situation, searching for some sign of hope, feeling physically tired, and uncomfortable, and wet—and having to articulate our thoughts—I know I felt exhausted by the efforts I was making. And yet we kept on talking. It was a new shock, after an hour or so, when there came from the sea a loud and eerie ululation. We went to the edge of the water, and could see, well enough, the familiar forms of our alien friends, floating in the shallows.

  "I don't even know how to begin!" said Cinnamon grimly. "If I wave, will they 'see' that?"

  "I'm going to try talking to them," said Richard, and suited action to word with a roaring bellow of sound. "HELLO THERE!"

  The keening stopped, and I was astounded to hear a strange voice—one I'd never heard before, but clear and sharp. Familiar as I had been with the computer-generated translation of the flouwen's "speech," I listened to this new sound in shocked amazement.

  "Why you shout?"

  "I understood that!" breathed Cinnamon.

  How long had the flouwen been quietly absorbing our words on their own initiative, and how had they managed to duplicate our speech? This was an exciting development, and completely unforeseen!

  "Can you hear and understand us?" called Jinjur, slowly and loudly.

  "Yes," said a different voice, somewhat huskier than the first. "Like Little Red say, if talking sticks not work, we can talk human."

  "Could you do this before?" asked Shirley. "We never knew! Why didn't you say you could do this?"

  The third voice was much lower than the other two. "We think you prefer talking sticks. We not talk human good."

  A spontaneous cheer broke from us all.

  "You talk fine!" shouted Arielle encouragingly, and I agreed, heartily. The grammar can come later, if at all; the important thing is to establish comfortable and open conversations with the flouwen, who are so much at home here. They can be a very real aid to our survival, that is obvious. Not only can they retrieve vital objects from our crashed lander, they can help us procure information about the life on this planet that will keep us from harm. A powerful surge of joy swept through us all. Here was real hope! Our former condescension to the aliens was instantly transformed into appreciation—and I, at
least, no longer felt quite so alone.

  We moved into the ripples. Richard said warmly, "I owe my life to you, friends. Thank you." Little Red came near his friend to speak. "You let us out of tank. Hard work for you. You swim down to us! That surprise us!"

  "We thought we had these creatures analyzed," said John softly. "But it didn't even occur to us that they were intelligent enough to learn to copy our speech. I wonder how much else there is to learn about them, and the rest of this planet, that is going to seem painfully obvious when we find it out?"

  Shirley was full of questions, and she and Jinjur kept up a steady flow, "Is the water going to suit you? Is there food here for you? What is the lander doing, still sinking? Can you get back through the airlock? Can you bring things up? How deep . . ."

  Little Purple answered patiently. "Water okay. Needs something—(the next word was unintelligible to us).

  "Ammonia, I'll bet," muttered John.

  "Plenty food here, different, but okay."

  "GOOD!" said Little Red.

  "Little Red lucky, found (another unintelligible word)" explained Little White. Obviously we have much to learn about each other's languages still!

  "Is the lander still going down?" repeated Jinjur,

  "Yes. Not fast now. It slide down hill. Long way to bottom." The tone was unconcerned, but the words are bad news for us. With dismay I recalled that our exploratory robot Bubble had been unable to reach the bottom of this particular lagoon, and we had selected it for that reason, ironically, as being the landing area where we would do the least damage to the environment.

  I had a suggestion. "Can you show us, here on the top of the water, how far down the lander is?" A brief touch, one to the other, and Little Red sped off to one side, with Little White going in the opposite direction. At an appalling distance from each other, they sang out:

  "Here!"

  "To here!"

  About half the width of the lagoon, or about 200 meters, straight down.

  Urgently, Cinnamon, Richard, and Carmen began to try to describe to the flouwen the things they thought most important to retrieve, if possible.

  "Anything that's loose and floating," said Shirley.

  "Anything you can get loose!" added Jinjur.

  "Anything you can break off . . ." Richard was going on to suggest more destruction, I suspect, but John stopped him.

  "Wait. If they just go smashing around down there they may damage something we can eventually recover. It's not as though they are using our judgement—at least, I don't think so!" I believe it's the first time I have ever heard self-doubt from John!

  As the others continued to offer suggestions for likely places to search and useful objects to bring up, I listened with little to add—these people all know their work so well!—but I did interject, whenever possible, a very sincere "Please!" Perhaps the word was alien to the flouwen now, but I was determined they should learn it happily. At length, armed with instructions, the flouwen sank from sight and we have been trying to relax, while waiting.

  "I'll be glad of anything they can bring us," sighed Jinjur, "But if I had any say at all about it, I'd want some way to link back to Prometheus first of all. What I'd give to hear that dry voice of James's!"

  There seems to be no answer to that. None of us has any say in the matter at all. It's starting to rain again, steadily. Fortunately, it's warm rain, but we seem to have been wet for all of our time here.

  The flouwen returned rather more quickly than we expected, struggling with our badly crumpled food locker between them, and bearing disquieting news. The extremely high water pressure at the bottom of the deep lagoon has crushed most of the equipment, including the spacesuit backpacks, which were designed to withstand vacuum, not high pressure. With salt water all through them, the computers, radios, and power supplies are damaged beyond repair.

  Nels inspected the food locker. "That's the supply of special frozen food that was to last us for the duration," he said quietly. "The rest of our supplies were freeze-dried items, no doubt saturated with salt water now."

  "Well, let's haul this out and use what we can," said David briskly. "If we can consume it before it spoils, we'll get some good out of it." Nels and Richard tugged the thing out of the water and up the shore. There's no way we can even use the chest for much else, unless we can get some more tools.

  Little Purple was obviously pleased with the small additional find he'd procured. "Stuff for helping when needed!" was his very creditable translation of the Beagle's emergency medical bag. It is damaged, but the vials of emergency pain-killers and antibiotics are intact.

  Shirley was pacing up and down the beach, finally stopping to face Jinjur. "If the flouwen help me, I can get down there!" she said intensely. "And when I'm there, I know I can get into the Dragonfly and activate Josephine. With her help we can make a real try at separating the aerospaceplane from the lander. There's bound to be pockets of air for me to breathe long enough to do that, and you realize if we can get the Dragonfly up here, we can use its engines and rockets to get off this moon and back to . . ."

  "No, Shirley." It was John who said it. "Dragonfly is at least two hundred meters down! Even if the flouwen sped you there and back as fast as they can go, the pressure would cave in your chest and kill you before you reached the lander—and the bends would catch you if you tried to come back up. It's just not humanly possible to get down there!"

  "Dragonfly is thing with wings like Pretty-Smell that fly through the nothing?" Little White queried, having flown in Dragonfly Two back on Rocheworld.

  "Yes!" said Arielle eagerly. "Is it OK?"

  "No." The flat negative was chilling. "Tail broken. Not swim in nothing anymore. Warm though," he added thoughtfully. Arielle gave a single, heartbroken sob, and David reached for her.

  Shirley groaned. "Dormant, that's what it is," she said. "We had the system powered down for the landing. If the flouwen can detect warmth, it's because Josephine is keeping the nuclear reactor at maintenance power level. But with a broken tail, that means part of the radiator system is gone and we'll never be able to run the nuclear reactor at operational power levels. From a technology point of view, Dragonfly is as far out of reach as Prometheus."

  Involuntarily I looked up again. The sky was heavy with gray cloud, and only through occasional breaks could I see through to even more cloud, moving swiftly. No chance for the watchers overhead to send anything to us, and no way for us to signal them.

  After a brief conference, we have decided to obtain as much from the lander as the flouwen are willing to bring us, and then rest. Jinjur stepped to the shore to issue orders, and I moved quickly up beside her. She listed aloud the special things to look for—containers, tools, food, bedding from the sleeping racks, and I continued to interject my softening words, changing the orders to requests. When she finished, she stared at me in exasperation. "D'you really think this is the time and place for manners, Reiki?"

  "Never more so," I replied firmly. "And it's one of the few things we've have left, isn't it?"

  We are settled for the night, and I have the first watch. The flouwen worked hard, bless them, and so did we all. Some of the items retrieved from the sinking lander had never seemed important to us before; Shirley pounced with a whoop of delight on her cutter-pliers, and set them out on a rock under a leaf to dry. Most of the items we carried up the beach, out of reach of the tide, and piled them in heaps under the shelter of the line of straggly trees. This is where we have decided to sleep tonight. I had feared it would be sodden, but Nels made a happy discovery.

  "See these thick leaves? Of course I've no idea what the plant is, but look at the ground around the base of the trunk. It's bone-dry sand! It looks like the big leaves absorb every bit of water that hits them!"

  "How curious!" said Cinnamon. "Look, even the bottoms of the leaves are dry! It's as though the water is all taken into the plant itself."

  "Perhaps the water also provides food for the plant?" Carmen speculated. "I
don't know much about plants, but those clouds of smoggy atmosphere we saw on the images of the leading hemisphere could have been full of elements the plants use."

  "I think that's a real possibility," Nels agreed. "Perhaps the rain is like food and drink to the plant, so none of it is allowed to go to waste."

  The rain continued, steady but not hard, as we worked on.

  Cinnamon and Carmen took special care to set out, in an open area, what few objects of salvage were capable of holding rainwater. John has impressed upon us the necessity of boiling our drinking water as soon as we can find a way to do so, although none of us have complained so far of any discomfort resulting from the spring water we have consumed. It was another strange thing, in a day of strange things, to hear Jinjur's order: "If anyone feels sick in any way, I need to know immediately!" I'm sure everyone's first thought was my own: "What business is it of yours?", followed by the much more humble, "Of course." The private monitoring of our physical well-being by James through the imps is now gone, and for our mutual well-being it is now essential that we share our concerns. Such interdependency is going to come very hard to me—I hope very much that I continue to stay healthy, not least because I find it so intolerable to complain aloud!