Rescued From Paradise

by Robert L. Forward

  Deirdre handed the sacks to the child-sized Christmas Branch. The end of one of its six arms detached itself and reconfigured its shape into a miniature version of the Christmas Branch. It was now a Christmas Twig, no larger than a marmoset. The fine metal "toes" of the "feet" of the motile gripped the loops in the carpet that lined the floors and walls of the corridors and scurried off toward the central shaft.

  Deirdre whispered into the pickup "hand" of her imp, reaching down from its position on top of her head, where it held her thick hair up out of the way. "The hydroponics deck contribution is on its way."

  The voice of Sam came back through the imp. "Thanks Deirdre ... we've got most everything tucked into the crawler now. Wanna come and see Spritz off?"

  Deirdre didn't answer. The others were used to her retiring ways and wouldn't be bothered if she didn't join them. She had never been one for crowds, and these days it made her feel sad to see how small the crowd had become.

  The Christmas Twig climbed rapidly up the shaft handholds, made its way along the bottom of the elevator platform, and came up through the hole next to Spritz. It placed the seeds in the compartment reserved for them, then leapt from the top of the crawler toward the larger Christmas Bush and reattached itself to one of the truncated limbs to form a second hand for the Bush.

  "That does it for their essential daily requirement of vitamins and minerals," said Sam to Spritz. He looked into the voluminous cargo hold. There was plenty of room left, but the problem was not volume, but mass. If Spritz and its cargo massed too much, the aeroshell would overheat on reentry and everything would be lost in a literal flash.

  "How much do they weigh? Do we have any mass left?"

  Spritz activated its automatically adjustable suspension system and set itself to bouncing with the active damping system turned off. After timing a few bounces it announced, "Forty-three point one two seven kilograms. I can carry another seven kilograms. Are all essential supplies loaded?" asked Spritz.

  "A few more things to come," said Sam, going over to the one-meter-diameter hole in the center of the central shaft elevator. He bent his two-meter-tall lanky frame over the hole and looked down the sixty-meter shaft. Way down at the bottom, swinging her way into the shaft column from the living area deck, he could see Katrina Kauffmann bringing a package from the sick bay. She climbed rapidly up the shaft in the low gravity, using only occasional pulls on the rungs with her free hand, her legs dangling.

  Katrina shot up through the hole in the central shaft elevator, sure in the knowledge that James would have the Christmas Bush there beforehand to guide her body through. She was carrying some nonurgent medical instruments and medicines that would make life easier for the stranded crew. The small, no-nonsense nurse had packed everything efficiently into two remarkably small packages.

  "This package contains the obstetrical forceps and child-sized medical instruments that James created in the mechanical fabrication facility," she said.

  "For sure we didn't have those in sick bay stock," remarked Sam with a wry smile.

  "I also included some nonrusting scalpels, forceps, drill bits, and other instruments useful for both surgery and general use. I've just finished sterilizing all of them down in the sick bay. I know we've been free of all regular diseases, including the common cold, for the last thirty years, but it could be that a cold germ or something worse is lurking somewhere on board, just waiting to be transported to an infant with a naive immune system. The other package contains pain killers, anesthetics, broad spectrum antibiotics, sleep inducers, muscle relaxants, tissue glue, bone epoxy, arthritis med—"

  "Ar-thur-i-tis!" exclaimed Sam.

  "They aren't getting any younger," retorted Katrina. Sam had to agree with her. He was the second oldest person on the crew after George. He had just turned ninety years old according to the Earth calendar, and his thinning gray hair and admittedly tender knee joints confirmed his biological age of sixty.

  "I had James concentrate the medicines," she continued, "leaving out all the usual liquids and fillers. These drugs are very pure and very strong, but everything is labeled so that John can dilute them properly for dispensing."

  "That's great, Katrina! Every ten grams saved means another rechargeable battery cell for the permalights and Reiki's recorder."

  Katrina blushed. "Actually ... I did have something else I thought would be useful. I know that they didn't ask, but I'm sure its only because they forgot ...

  "What is it?" asked Sam resignedly. He had always figured that he wasn't going to be the only one slipping in a little something extra.

  Katrina pulled out a long thin cylinder about the size of a cigar. "It's a sewing kit. A few dozen needles and safety pins, and some strong brightly colored thread. I know they are all wearing sarongs now, but when the little ones come ..."

  "Maybe you should include some diaper pins!" Sam said in a gruff tone. Then he smiled.

  "Don't worry, love," he said. "I'll find room for the sewing kit." Sam tucked the various packages into the cargo hold of the crawler and it bounced up and down again.

  "Forty-six point zero eight three grams," said Spritz.

  "Good," said Sam, reaching into a pouch. Down on the surface was his best friend and fellow geologist, Richard Redwing. The tall gangly Texan and the Native American had worked together on many different planets, and it hurt to know that he would never be with his friend again. They enjoyed the sort of bickering camaraderie that did not translate easily to comm-link talks. Now, his buddy was about to become a father, and he couldn't even be there to tease him about it! Sam slipped into the cargo pod a pair of baby-sized moccasins cut from the leather of his boot tops. Richard would enjoy both the love and the teasing they represented.

  On the opposite side of the deck, Caroline got up from the mechanical fabrication console, pleased. She held in her hand the first of the Mech-Alls produced, and she was taking the versatile tool through its paces. As she moved the control thumb-knob from indent to indent, the blob of complex memory metal alloy at the end of the tool reconfigured itself from scissors to saw to chisel to awl, through three screwdriver heads and six knife blades, to end with spoon and fork.

  Just then a chime sounded throughout the ship and from each of their imps.

  "Mealtime!" said Sam enthusiastically. He dove down through the hole in the elevator platform. Caroline smiled grimly over at Katrina and pinched at the slight roll of fat at her waist.

  "It's not fair that the skinny ones can eat all they want. He eats tons of calories and fat and never gains a gram. All I have to do is look at a dish of algae ice cream and I put on ten kilos."

  "He's almost as exasperating to watch at mealtime as Arielle was," Katrina agreed. The reminder of the beautiful birdlike aerospace pilot, now grounded on the moon below, brought a somber moment to both. Caroline and Katrina joined Spritz on the platform and took the elevator down the shaft to the living area deck where the crew were gathering for "mealtime", one of the three times of the day the whole crew got together. For a half-hour or so, James would be left in charge of the ship while the crew socialized.

  Down on the upper of the two crew-quarters decks, Elizabeth Vengeance had risen and dressed early and was in the process of deciding how she would wear her imp today.

  "Let's try the 'feather-hat' look, James," she said, looking at her reversed image in the view-wall that separated her living room from the bedroom. Her imp scrambled from her shoulder and formed itself into a spray of glittering metallic feathers that covered one side of her head, following the outlines of her short cap of bright red hair.

  Her green eyes looked her reversed video image over critically. She was dressed in a bright green tailored shirt-and-slacks outfit that just matched her eyes in color and fit her slim body tightly. In the corner of one shirt pocket was a circular wear spot the size of a large coin.

  "You're still in damn good shape for fifty-five," she remarked to herself with approval. She noticed a loose thread on her sleev
e and muttered something to her imp. Instantly, a small mosquito-sized motile detached itself from the main imp, clambered down her sleeve to the offending thread, snipped it off, and carried it away. The thread would be saved, along with all the other green threads and worn out clothing made of the same synthetic fiber; ultimately to be dissolved, respun into thread, rewoven into fabric, and retailored into clothing for her to use in the distant future. She palmed the door open, and James, observing through her imp that she would be exiting at about the time the elevator would be reaching her level, brought it to a halt to pick her up.

  In a room on the opposite side of the ten-apartment crew deck, Captain Thomas St. Thomas was running late. To hurry things along, he had started brushing his teeth while his imp was still shaving the left side of his face, its finest fingers pulling up on each black whisker in turn, pinching it off below the dark brown skin with another set of fingers, and passing the cut-off whisker to yet another set, which collected them all in a neat ball.

  With half his face still covered by the glittering limbs of his imp, Thomas swung to his bedroom, grabbed a pair of coveralls out of the storage shelves, pulling them on and sealing them in one quick motion. As he was putting on his Velcro-bottomed corridor boots, the imp finished his shave and completed the morning toilet by rustling through his short Air Force-trim curly black hair, fluffing up the flat spots and sharpening up the edges. By the time Thomas reached the exit of his room and palmed the opening switch for the door, the imp had reformed itself into its normal six-armed tarantula shape on Thomas's left shoulder. As the door slid open, a wasp-sized motile detached itself from the imp and carried the ball of cut-off whiskers and loose hair up the central shaft to the organic material reprocessing unit that was part of the chemical facility on the workbench deck.

  As the door slid shut behind Thomas, he saw that the elevator was there with Caroline and Katrina, picking up Elizabeth. Although Thomas normally didn't use the elevator for jumps between the lower decks, he joined the three women for the ride down. As he boarded, he looked in the cargo hold of the crawler.

  "Still got lots of room, I see," he remarked.

  Spritz bounced up and down slightly, then replied, "There remains zero point seven two cubic meters of volume, and three point nine one seven kilos of mass."

  The elevator came to a stop at the living area deck, the "commons" for the crew of Prometheus. This deck contained the exercise area, sick bay, kitchen, dining area, lounge, and two small video theaters.

  "I'm looking forward to this breakfast," announced Thomas as they left the elevator. "It's time for my real-meat ration for the week." As he passed by the counter between the kitchen and the dining area, the Galley Branch passed him a squeezer of coffee and a flip-top tray containing two pieces of algae-flour toast liberally loaded with algae-butter and pseudo-grape jelly, and an omelet packed with vegetables and real smoked-ham chunks cut from the pork tissue culture, Hamlet. Caroline contented herself with her squeezer of coffee and a small pastry. Katrina, being on the late shift, went to the smorgasbord the Galley Branch had set up in the lounge ahead of time. Sam was already there, a large slice of pumpernickel in one hand and spreading knife in the other, making a big dent in the liver spread made from Cinnamon's liver tissue culture, Pâté La Belle. It grew much faster than the other meat tissue cultures—Hamlet, Ferdinand, Lamb Chop, and Chicken Little—so there was always plenty of real liver for those who wanted it.

  Resigned because her imp had informed her that the resonant frequency of her body indicated that she was now over forty-five kilos, Katrina limited herself to a piece of pickled 'ponics-trout and soured pseudo-cream on a half-slice of pumpernickel. The 'ponics-trout wasn't herring and the pumpernickel bread was really made from algae-flour and some chemicals from the synthesizers in James's chemical facility, but the Galley Branch had made it taste like the real thing.

  The four newcomers joined the three who had just come off control deck duty. They had only been one deck down and were the first to arrive in the dining room after the mealtime chime. George, Linda, and Tony had already started, and were working on a large salad made with greens fresh from the hydroponics deck, topped with mushrooms and bell peppers. They had a main dish of linguine and algae-cream sauce with real clam meat chunks from Cinnamon's Blue Oyster Culture.

  Deirdre dropped silently down the central shaft from the hydroponics deck and moved quietly over to the smorgasbord table. Picking up the half-slice of pumpernickel that Katrina had left, she raised it to her shoulder, where the bread was taken by her pet, Foxx, a rare marsupial somewhat like a flying squirrel. The creature nibbled on the bread, its long furry prehensile tail wrapped around Deirdre's neck, while she prepared herself a tray, tucking the delicacies under the tray lids before taking her place at the dining hall table. They all joined hands for a silent moment of companionship.

  "Spritz said there was a little room left," Elizabeth remarked as they dropped hands and started eating.

  "Even after I added my few needles and things," said Katrina. "I just wish I could send much more. It's so hard, leaving them forever!"

  Deirdre's rare chuckle broke the silence. "Aye, but it's living, they are, you know that, Katrina! And they expect us to be living, too. Reiki told me, in her last message, to 'use her laces,' but look you ..." Deirdre's slender brown hands flipped a dainty wisp of lace around the plain collar of her wrinkled brown coverall, and she made an absurdly simpering face; the effect was as incongruous as ruffles on a gnome, and they laughed.

  "There's almost no mass to the things at all, you see, so I'm returning most of them to Reiki. Except this one." She held up a fluffy confection of pure white and tucked it swiftly into Katrina's neckline. The snowy froth at Katrina's throat softened the stubborn line of jaw and brightened the blue of her eyes with a happy twinkle.

  "I object!" blurted out Linda. Normally the little solar astrophysicist was cheerful and bouncy, but now her green eyes flashed. "How can you justify wasting even the tiniest bit of cargo mass in that crawler on trivia! Our people need tools, not frills!"

  "I was going to fill up the last of the mass allotment with solar-rechargeable permalights and replacement cells for them," agreed Sam. "And maybe some pocket computers like the recorder that Reiki has, but with communication capability added."

  "I would think that the sooner they get used to nonelectronic technology, the better," said Caroline thoughtfully. "I'd vote for a few good pairs of nonrusting scissors."

  "But morale is important, too," George reminded them. "We want them to know we care about them. The right kind of gifts are just as important as the right kind of tools."

  "One gift, there is, that can come from us all," said Deirdre slowly. "And it be nearly weightless. A photograph of our own selves."

  "Great idea!" said Thomas, getting up from the table. "I'll go get my best electroprint camera, and I'll have James laminate the print so it will last even in Eden's tropical climate."

  In a short while he was back, followed close behind by the Christmas Bush. He settled the autofocus camera firmly in the Bush's grasp and joined the group, all the concerned and caring faces looking steadily at the lens.

  "Say 'cheese'," said James through their imps. The trite phrase intoned in James's deep formal voice broke the tension and produced a picture full of smiles that would bring instant cheer to those who looked at it for years to come.

  An hour later, Spritz was nearly full, and Sam and Deirdre had retired for their sleep shift. "Forty-nine point nine four five kilograms," Spritz announced, bouncing again. "There is mass allotment available for ten more sheets of permapaper and another stylus."

  Linda counted out the ten sheets of untearable, waterproof, chemically-impregnated writing paper, and Tony added the thin metal stylus. The pointed end of the metal stylus catalytically produced marks on the chemically treated paper, while the rounded end reversed the chemical reaction, allowing the paper to be reused again and again. Caroline carefully closed and
latched the internal lids on the storage compartments inside Spritz, then stepped back and watched critically as the winglike doors of the cargo hold folded themselves closed.

  "Hold pressurized," announced Spritz. "No leakage detectable."

  "Let's go up and get your ride," said Caroline. She turned to the Christmas Bush. With mealtime over, the Galley Branch had rejoined the main motile, and the Bush had six functional appendages again. "Please take us up to where Charles is stored, James."

  The elevator platform came to a halt at level 22, where the door to one of the storage compartments was open. Inside, Caroline and Linda could see a Christmas Twig checking out a spacecraft, one end of which consisted of a large ceramic aeroshell, bigger than they were.

  "Hello, Charles," said Caroline. "Are you ready?"

  "All self-check routines have been double-checked by James. I am in perfect working order," said Charles. "I am ready to proceed with my mission."

  "Let's get you out of there, then," said Caroline. The spacecraft, weighing more than a ton, was too massive for the relatively weak Christmas Bush to cope with, so it was up to the two humans to wrestle it out of its compartment. Muscles straining with the effort, Linda and Caroline got the massive spacecraft slowly moving, then let it drift slowly outward in the low gravity, occasionally giving it a hard push to keep one of its appendages from touching the sides of the door. Once it was free, they guided it to the center of the shaft, and after another bout of strenuous effort with their feet planted against the central shaft wall, they brought the massive vehicle to a halt, ceramic dome down. The two women held the spacecraft up over their heads with ease. Although it massed over a ton, its weight in the low acceleration of the lightship was only a few kilos.