by Joe Haldeman
Well, we got enough roofs up for everybody to sleep under, or try to sleep anyhow. Camp full of hollow-eyed zombies this morning. So I got my trusty idiot stick and went out to the trench detail. (That’s from America or England, the term for a shovel: a stick with dirt on one end and an idiot on the other.) We need a meter-deep trench laid from Hilltop to the water plant.
It’s not exactly challenging but it does keep the kilograms off, and the company was interesting. Tranj Boyle, who was doing astrophysics before he became a fellow common laborer, tried to explain to me about the helium. It’s the second most abundant element in the universe, I guess you knew that, but it gets baked out of rocks like Epsilon and Earth a long time before they cool down, and they don’t have enough gravity to hold on to it long anyhow. Earth has something like two or four times as much helium as it should have, depending on who you ask, and Epsilon has something like two thousand times as much. In the case of Earth they could just tug on their beards and say hum, something’s a little off here, but now with Epsilon they have to admit there’s something basically wrong with their notions of what goes on when a planet forms.
Because there’s no chemical way to make new helium, I guess you know. Some from radioactivity but we aren’t exactly glowing in the dark. It looks like all the stuff that’s bubbling up out in those ponds has been here all ten billion years. And it’s inside the crust instead of in the atmosphere. Driving them nuts!
Well, this science stuff bores you shitless, I know, but I think it’s kind of fun. Thinking about doing a geology degree once we’re settled in here. I’m certainly one of the world’s authorities on dirt! Seriously, geology’s one of the physical sciences they’ve got pretty well reconstructed, at least to the bach-degree level. They’ll need geologists for exploring the planet, and maybe its moon. Don’t want to be tied to a desk. I want to be out there battling weird creatures and worrying Mother sick. Just kidding.
Thine own Sandra.
4. HOUSEKEEPING
Age 56.16 [8 Ten 429]—This is three days’ worth. Been busy.
Saying good-bye to John wasn’t so bad, since I’ll be traveling back and forth between the planet and ’Home for some time as General Liaison. I could have set up the job description myself: someone born in New New who had been to Earth, who had professional connections with both Engineering and Policy tracks; preferably someone who had emotional ties to people both in ’Home and on Epsilon.
The shuttle descent was smoother than the three I experienced on Earth, but the landing made me nervous, remembering the Leaning Tower of Shuttle that Sandra and her crew had scurried out of. Of course the deceleration was computer-controlled and we settled to the surface as gently as a feather. I held my breath for a moment, and the thing didn’t topple over.
We unbuckled immediately and went to the exit lift, which surprised me. I thought we’d have to wait until the ground cooled some. In fact, that was the reason for the slight sideways shift I thought I’d felt just before the engine cut off. The pilot decelerated over a “hot spot” and at the last minute slid about a hundred meters over to the landing area proper, so the ground would be cool enough for us to jump out. Just in case.
Repeated landings had baked this area hard as brick. That was the first smell: scorched earth, as they used to say in a different context. Then a breeze brought cool forest smells; maybe a hint of the lake. Not earthlike, but definitely not the greenhouse smell of ’Home and New New. Alien but pleasant.
The settlement was almost a kilometer away, on top of a low rise. Three ribbons of smoke angled away, I guessed from the adobe furnaces. I could hear a faint chirping and squeaking from the forest creatures, scolding us for waking them up.
There were ten people waiting on an elevated metal platform. I hadn’t expected Sandra, since she was assigned to a building detail down at lakeside, but she was among the ten. She ran over and gave me a hug, and then pulled me along to meet Raleigh Dennison, the camp’s Coordinator pro tern.
We’d met several times in ’Home, of course, but he was literally a different man here. About my physical age—born a few years after Sandra—he had seemed pale and aristocratic, delicate, up there. A couple of months’ pioneering had turned him tan and muscular, and he sported a piratical moustache, curled at the ends. I had to laugh at the transformation.
He laughed along with me. “It’s the alien gravity,” he said. “Two months here and you’ll look like a farm girl yourself.” I doubted that anything would make me look like a “girl,” short of a time machine, but did look forward to working outdoors for the first time this century.
This flight had brought fifteen people and two tonnes of supplies. We loaded as much as we could on the utility floater and stacked the rest on the loading platform. The load for the return trip was light, a few boxes and cages of samples and animals, and two people who needed medical treatment. Hilltop’s first-aid station wasn’t up to cancer or schizophrenia.
We followed the floater in a slow walk up toward town, Raleigh giving us a running account of their agricultural successes and failures as we passed the various fields. Almost everything was grown in three sections: out in the open, in the open but protected by barbed wire, and green-housed, with soil imported from ’Home. There were goats, pigs, sheep, and chickens, all in protected covered pens, and pools of tilapi, salmon, and rainbow trout.
Most of the crops did well in the unprotected areas, though tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes all succumbed to an airborne microorganism, even in the greenhouses. The wire didn’t seem to make any difference; local fauna would take one sniff and move on. By the same token, those local fauna seemed in little danger of winding up on our tables, at least for a generation or two. Some things are just too weird to eat.
Evolution had produced different stratagems on Epsilon. Most forms of life didn’t have close analogs on Earth. Fish were recognizably fish, but the ones caught inland had lungs instead of gills. Someone who deserves a culinary medal cooked one and ate part of it. It tasted like cotton soaked in swamp water, he said, but it didn’t make him sick.
To me a bug is a bug, but the biologists say the “insects” here bear no relation to terran insects except for size and orneriness—and usefulness, being scavengers and pollinators. Most of them have twelve legs, but there’s one phylum that has seven! I wonder what they do with the extra one.
The closest thing to a mammal is a furry coldblooded thing, the jumper, that actually behaves more like a lizard. It will lie motionless in the sun for hours until something comes by that is smaller than it but big enough to be worth eating. It leaps on the thing and bites it with fangs that inject a paralyzing venom, then eats it alive, slowly. Eleven different kinds of jumpers have been identified. The airbags leave them alone, evidently because their flesh is noxious or toxic. Jumpers have never attacked a human, even though one alert individual managed to sit down on one.
The division between plant and animal is not sharp. Things like the gasbags are mobile but have a “metabolism” that includes photosynthesis as well as carnivorism. There are fixed, sessile, organisms on land and in the water that don’t use photosynthesis. They often look like plants—one type has nonfunctional green “leaves”—but they make a living by luring small animals and eating them. Some affix themselves to a larger animal or plant and live as parasites or symbiotes. An extraordinary example grows with a particular kind of tree, mimicking its blossom in both appearance and smell. When a pollinator bug flies into the blossom, it snaps shut and chews it up, and then a complex digestive system separates out certain nutrients and passes them on to the tree, through a shared circulatory system.
No other land animals have yet been found that are as dangerous as the floating spiders. There is a frightening-looking carnivore that resembles a twice-man-sized praying mantis, but so far it has never attacked a human. Neither does it run away.
The oceans and the lake have a variety of large predators, which might be dangerous if one were overcome with the
urge to go swimming. A drone flying three meters over the waves, about twenty kilometers from the western shore, was attacked by a thing that looked like a whale with grinning teeth. The lake has strong eellike constrictors up to eight meters long.
All these adorable animals, and we haven’t yet explored even one tenth of one percent of the land area. I’m sure there are pleasant surprises aplenty waiting for us.
There is eelless swimming, finally, at Lakeside. The solar tide makes almost a meter difference in the lake’s water level, so twice a day it fills and empties a large pool they yesterday blasted out of rock in the middle of town. A grate keeps out anything larger than a minnow.
We got there at the end of a work shift; when the bell rang, everybody dropped their tools and ran for the water, stripping as they went. I watched them cavorting in the pool and realized there was something going on that was deeper than escaping the heat, relaxing, hygiene, and sex play. All those kids grew up in a place where they could walk out of gravity any time they wanted. On a planet, the only escape from gravity is water. Or hurling oneself from a high place.
Out of sixty people, there have been seven psychiatric replacements; people who were defeated by gravity or weather or horizons or just the unrelenting strangeness. Three of them were from the Engineer Pioneer group, supposedly pretty stout in that regard. I wonder what percentage will drop out of our less select bunch.
Raleigh said I could live wherever I wanted, so long as I could find a roommate who was willing to move out when Dan arrived. Charlee volunteered. (Dan will be continuing as Earth Liaison, so he’ll be in ’Home for a couple more months, until the technological infrastructure down here is sufficiently reliable. Like central electricity.) I chose Lakeside, with the marvelous view of the water, even though that would mean climbing ladders for a while, and then stairs.
The houses followed a basic design we got from Key West: put a platform up on slits, build a box on the platform, put a roof on the box. They look pleasingly primitive, since the basic building material is the tough reeds that are plentiful in the tidal wetlands, but the technology involved in putting them up was not primitive. The chemists up in orbit analyzed the samples we sent and cobbled together a machine that takes in water, wood shavings, mud, and sunlight, and gives out a steady stream of magic glue that bonds the reeds together like iron. Sandra didn’t enjoy working with it. It makes your fingers stick together, too.
Each house has two residences that share a kitchen area in back, and a blank space that will eventually be a toilet and shower, once the settlement has central plumbing. Each individual residence is big enough for two adults and two children, with two bedrooms and a common room, so Charlee and I had plenty of space to ourselves.
There’s no power grid yet, but each common room has a fuel cell recharged by a solar panel on the roof, so we both set up our portable consoles there. With only one table, we have the choice of working shoulder-to-shoulder or face-to-face. Or building another table, which might be interesting.
Everything that goes up or down has to be either carried while negotiating a ladder or raised or lowered on a balky manual dumb-waiter. That will keep our furnishings simple. It might also encourage constipation and fluid retention.
I love the balcony. We can sit and stare out over the lake, our private sea. Intellectually, I know that the horizon is only fifty kilometers away. It feels more distant than the stars and nebulae that wheeled beneath my feet in Uchūden.
Charlee was a little nervous about the wide-open spaces. She took one look over the balcony and ran back into the bedroom, where I found her with a pillow over her head, laughing and crying. She agreed it was silly and came back out, but for an hour I had to hold on to her while she stared and sweated and giggled.
I left the clarinet in orbit, for the time being, but did bring down Sam’s harp. I’ve been experimenting with bluesy tunings and settled on an A minor that seems to use the instrument’s range best. You have to pluck rather than strum, since six pairs of strings are adjacent half tones. I remember Mercy Flying Dove and, lacking electronics, tune with heart and head, keeping the wolves away.
When the harpsichord comes down, there will be a kind of closure. It was built in London by Burkat Shudi in A.D. 1728. I think it will be the oldest human artifact to come from Earth (we do have a dinosaur bone).
I’ve wondered about that name. He was Swiss, and that’s all we know, but Burkat Shudi doesn’t sound European. It sounds Moslem. I picture him as a dark old man with long flowing white hair, working with endless patience on these woods brought from oriental forests on the backs of slaves, on sailing ships, finally on a creaking horse-drawn wagon down a muddy London street. To tell him that his handiwork would wind up here would be more fantastic than saying it would wind up in the Garden of Irem, less believable to him. I don’t think they knew, in 1728, how far away the stars actually are.
(I asked Prime and got a HOLD FOR OPEN DATA CHANNEL message—that’s a first.) No. Prime says 1837.
Chul’ Hermosa survived the thaw, and will be coming down with the harpsichord. He loves to teach; that will be a kind of closure, too.
We’re up on stilts both for food protection and to keep pests away. The crawlies, which is what they call these seven-legged ones the size of your little fingernail, get everywhere and they bite, leaving an itchy red knot that lasts half a day. They’re inquisitive and totally unafraid of humans, so far, but they do have an aversion to water. So each of our four supporting poles is equipped with a metal collar that holds several centimeters of water, and three children share the job of making sure they don’t go dry. Then so long as we remember not to leave the ladder down, we won’t have the things sneaking into bed with us.
It rained most of last night and it was delicious, sitting on the balcony with the raindrops drumming on the roof, distant lightning and thunder over the lake. The smell of clean water and crackling ozone. I took out the harp and taught Charlee the words to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Nine Hundred Miles.” I had to explain railroads to her.
Of course she’d never seen rain before. It frightened her at first, the suddenness and force of the storm, but she did learn to enjoy it. What frightened me was seeing one of those floating spiders, frozen in the strobe of a lightning flash, skimming along in the wind down at the water’s edge. Charlee was looking the other way and so I didn’t say anything about it, but I was glad for the weight of the knife on my belt.
AGE 57
1. SETTLING, UNSETTLING
PRIME
The first couple of years after O’Hara arrived on Epsilon constituted a time of exploration rather than colonization. The towns Hilltop and Lakeside grew slowly, since most of the Engineer Pioneers were off on various foreign adventures. The primaries who were left behind, and most of the secondaries, were less enthusiastic about backbreaking labor than those indefatigable youngsters had been.
The slow pattern of growth, in both towns, reflected the kind of design conservatism you would expect from people who had lived for generations inside circumscribed space-settlement and starship environments. The dwellings were close together and uniform in design, if individual in decoration; streets were no broader than they had to be; there were elaborate recycling systems, including a composting toilet for each pair of dwellings. (The idea of actually letting water escape down the drain was wildly extravagant to them; letting it carry away valuable sewage would be literally unthinkable.)
The unwisdom of building so close together was exposed by a lightning bolt that set a house on fire. The reeds that formed the roof and walls weren’t especially flammable but they could burn, and by the time the fire was put out, by a combination of mobile pump and fortuitous downpour, the struck building had burned almost to the support timbers and the two adjacent ones were half ruined. Two people died, either from electrocution or immolation; the other three residents had been able to jump to safety from the balcony. By the time a neighbor’s ladder could be worked into place und
erneath, the inside was a red inferno.
There was a tall lightning rod a couple of hundred meters away, but the bolt had apparently bounced off it, according to the only eyewitness, though he said it could have been a trick of perspective. Should the rods be taller, thicker? Should there be more of them? The only information they had to go on was a single diagram from Key West, with two paragraphs of text.
The overall fire danger was less ambiguous. If that small gullywasher hadn’t poured tons of water on the burning house, there might have been a chain reaction, destroying all of the houses on the lake side of Lake Road, or even the entire town. They had to spread out.
Leaving the burned-out ruin as a memorial and goad, they proceeded to disassemble every other house, reassembling them on both sides of town with a spacing of thirty meters between sites. The end result was unsettling, esthetically wrong to a society of agoraphobes, but they would learn to live with it. The three exceptions to agoraphobia, hermits who had erected shacks well outside the town’s perimeter, had to pull up stakes again. And their number quadrupled, nine more people willing to haul food and water for the exotic luxury of not having any neighbors.
The next week, on the same night, two of those hermits were attacked by a floating spider, or by two different spiders. Both men passed out, from anoxia or sheer panic. One staggered into town before dawn and woke up Doc Bishop; the other had crawled back to the safety of his lean-to until light. Neither one of them suffered any permanent physical injury. Both of them had the same experience as Kisti Seven, with the important exception of not having been able to get to their knives. The thing gnawed on their hair, leaving a little bloody spot, and apparently rejected them as food, fortunately releasing them before they asphyxiated.
