Rescued From Paradise
Page 18
TOOLS
IT WAS time for the third drop of supplies, and once again the whole settlement had turned out to sit on the beach. The party atmosphere had been muted with the news from George that Katrina Kauffmann, the efficient, no-nonsense nurse, had passed away at the adjusted age of 68. Jinjur, who was a year older, was taking the loss particularly hard.
"I just don't understand it!" Jinjur said again. She had been going over it with John for hours. "She had James and the Christmas bush monitoring her health round the clock! There is no way that she could just die!"
"Jinjur," said John patiently. "Whether you understand it or not, whether it makes sense or not, Katherine is gone. Eventually the human body wears out."
"But with the facilities on Prometheus ..."
"Facilities that Katrina was in charge of," John reminded her. He had been monitoring the read-outs on Katrina's health through his communicator link to the commsats and Prometheus, and he had suspicions of his own, suspicions that it would do no good to share. If Katrina didn't want to face a slow decline, if she overrode James and resisted treatment, that was her choice. "Facilities that were designed to deal with occasional illness and accidents, not to rebuild an aging human body that had worn out."
Jinjur looked down the beach to her own three boys. She had given birth to only one of them, but she had been mother to them all. Katrina had died. Died because she was old. Am I old? Jinjur wondered to herself. I don't feel old. I suppose that my hair is getting rather gray, but surely ... Her thoughts slipped back on to a more familiar path. Shirley. Gods, I miss you. Look at your sons, at our sons. They are getting so big, but they are still just children. I can't be old. I won't allow it. They need me.
"John?" she said quietly. She wasn't arguing now. John had been watching the boys, too, especially their son, Adam, and had followed her thoughts.
"We have time, Jinjur." he said. "Rescue is coming. And when they get here, you and I are going to be here to greet them." If only in the person of our son, he finished to himself. A cheer rose up from the surf as the children caught sight of the fiery tail of the incoming aeroshell as it met the Eden atmosphere. The light-hearted fun of playing with the flouwen in the shallow water vanished as the giant fluid bodies tensed, eager to get a bearing on the crawlers splashdown.
"Come on, Little Red! You can give me a ride!" called Adam. Tall and strong for his twelve years, his long brown body cut through the water until he broke the surface in the middle of the large red alien. He shook some of Red's mass out of his thick black ringlets. Jinjur had given up trying to keep her boy's hair combed and now resorted to simply cutting out the larger tangles. As a result, the soft sausage curls stayed close to his scalp, and while the cut had little style, it was practical.
"I'm coming, too!" called Shannon as she splashed into the middle of the pink flouwen youngling. The redhead had inherited her mother's beauty and grace, but she took pride in being able to keep up with the boys, and they accepted her company on most of their adventures without complaint.
"Come on, Lavender," said Little Purple, who had grown deeply attached to the child he had helped deliver. "If we go fast we can beat them to it!"
Lavender's blue eyes sparkled as she giggled with excitement. The little girl had spent so much time playing in the water with her godparent that her fair skin had tanned golden brown and her long dark hair had sun-bleached streaks. She knew the flouwen's vibrating voice had been pitched too quietly to be picked up by the grownups on the beach. If they moved quickly enough, they would not only catch up with the smaller Warm Chirring Pink, but be well underway before the adults missed them.
"Adam!"
That was Jinjur. Lavender lowered her head to leave as small a profile as possible against the water. Little Purple was moving quickly, but her face was well away from the front of him and the "bow-wave" didn't splash her. She loved the feeling of moving so quickly while floating in water that was perfectly still.
"ADAM! Come back here!"
"Aww, Mom!" Adam moaned.
"Aww, Mom!" Little Red joined in.
Lavender lowered her head still further. If her ears were under the water and she couldn't hear her parents call, she could hardly be blamed if she didn't come.
Adam waded back up the beach to where Jinjur stood hip deep in the surf. Gently she took his shoulders and walked back up the slope to the others on the shore, propelling Adam along in front of her.
"Come on, Mom! I just want to go along. I won't get into trouble, I promise!"
"Oh. And you weren't going to get into trouble last month when you just wanted to 'watch' the Demonfish. If Seetoo hadn't spared an eye to come and get me, I would never have known you had left the hut."
"Dirk went, too," Adam mumbled.
"And was it all his idea?"
Adam scowled. Dirk was bigger and stronger than Adam; the stocky blond was growing so fast that even Reiki didn't try and make him wear more than a loincloth. But Dirk was not as clever as Adam, and while Dirk made a good ally, Adam had always been the leader. Adam would never let Dirk take the blame. He was stung by the suggestion that he was trying to get his brother into trouble, but he knew better than to argue with the General. At least she didn't find the Demonfish spears we had made, thought Adam rebelliously. We just wanted to see if they'd work. We wouldn't have been hurt. Grownups just don't understand.
"This is different," Adam said, swallowing his anger and trying his most winning smile. "The flouwen are just going to fetch the crawler. It's not dangerous at all. Even the girls are going."
"No," Jinjur agreed, "it's not the same. But you are grounded, as grounded as much as anyone can be in this pulchritudinous place, and you may not go. Not even if the girls are going."
"Girls?" asked Reiki. She looked up from where she was spooning mushed jookeejook fruit into little Ernest's mouth. She could see her boys, Freeman and Justin, playing with Cinnamon's girls. "Adam? Where's Lavender?"
"She's riding Little Purple," Adam answered, a trifle jealous that Lavender had managed to sneak off.
Reiki was at first alarmed, then she relaxed, little Purple might be one of the more irresponsible flouwen, but she knew that he loved her daughter with all his ... mass. Little Purple would never let any harm come to his charge.
Little Red, seeing that Adam was inexplicably in trouble, lingered for a few moments to see if the boy would win a reprieve. When it became clear he would not, the flouwen took a moment to be thankful that Jinjur had not been a flouwen elder when he was a youngling. Then he cheered up. Unencumbered with passengers, he would have no trouble reaching the crawler before the others. He settled into his most streamlined shape and raced off through the deep green water.
As the minutes passed, the adults moved closer to the water and searched offshore for signs of the flouwens' return. Although they had adjusted well to life without the conveniences of technology, their quality of life improved with each drop. This time the fifty-plus kilo payload would be filled with larger tools like axe-heads, hoes, saws, and files, as well as more Teachers and more powerful communicators.
Fortunately, it was no longer necessary to devote any of the payload mass to the vitamin supplements which had filled so much of the earlier crawlers. It had taken thousands of samples and hundreds of days of work, but with the aid of the flouwen's excellent taste sense, John had managed to find all the vitamins and minerals they needed either in native plants and animals, or in the village's Earth crops. Josephine's chemical analyzer had confirmed the results, and while not all of the necessary foods were palatable, all were readily available.
"Here they come!" called David. His fatherly eyes had picked up the blush of his daughters hair as she rode high in the water. Shannon was riding much higher than usual; indeed, she appeared to be sitting on something. Lavender, following close behind, was also seated. Had they sent two landers?
"Look what we found!" called Shannon. "It was all over! It covered the whole ocean!"
; Little Pink and Little White surfed over the waves with their passengers, pulling back only at the last moment to deposit the girls at the waterline. The waves worked with them as they pulled two huge sodden bundles up onto the beach.
"What is it?" asked Reiki, "And where is the crawler?"
"Little Red is bringing it in, Mom," answered Lavender. "Little Purple didn't want us out there because there might be Demonfish."
"Demonfish!?" Reiki was horrified and relieved at the same time. Thank goodness her trust in Little Purple had not been misplaced! She took her daughter in her arms and hugged her tight. The wet girl wiggled, too excited to be held.
"Demonfish!" said Jinjur. "Did you see any? Was there sign?" The Demonfish had always been a mystery. They came from deep beneath the ocean whenever there was a quadruple conjunction, and then they disappeared for another five years until the next midnight quadruple conjunction. Their thick fur seemed to absorb the flouwens' sonar pings and the flouwen found them almost impossible to track. Where the vicious creatures went, and how they spent the years between their coming ashore had never been discovered.
"If this isn't sign," said Shannon, "I don't know what is." She indicated the sodden mass she had dragged up behind her. The General looked more closely.
"Pussyfooting Percherons! It's Demonfish hair!" The long, dark red locks of hair taken from the bodies of the Demonfish had turned out to be extremely useful. Washed and carded, it could be spun into soft yarn and knitted into luxurious fabric much prized by the humans and the Jollys.
"It was amazing!" said Shannon. Her eyes glazed as she recalled the scene. She was itching to get to her Teacher where she could put the fantastic sight into her sketch-pad program. "The green waves were flat, too heavy with the crimson hair to rise. The sky was purple with pink clouds, the rose glow from Gargantua overhead, and all around us the waves looked like ... like ... the waves had texture, from the curling ropes of hair, dark and deep ..."
David smiled and put his arm around his daughter's shoulders. He understood how the words wouldn't come, how the hand longed to get to a medium that would let her recreate the vision trapped just behind her eyelids. He led her from the shore, knowing how easy it was to stumble when the eyes were too busy looking inward and could not be spared to see the way. He handed her Teacher to her and she sat down immediately with it, trying to capture the images before they drifted away.
"It was reekee, Mom," said Lavender, taking over. "The whole sea seemed full of the stuff. I know how you like to weave with it, so I had Little Purple bring you some, but he thought the Demonfish might still be around, so he sent me home on Little Pink while he stayed to guard."
"Come on Richard," said Jinjur. "Let's go see if we can find out more about this!"
"Are you sure you should go after the Demonfish in their own element? Sounds like bearding a lion in its den," cautioned Reiki.
"We won't fight them, just see if there is any sign of where they might have gone," Richard assured her. The two of them rode off on the flouwen, back the way they had come.
Little Red arrived moments later, carrying the crawler, but he didn't stay to see it unpacked. He, too, wanted to see if the strange tide of Demonfish fur would lead to the discovery of the elusive beasts' hiding place. But when Jinjur and Richard returned they had only more loads of the dark red fur. There was no sign of the terrible Demonfish.
DAM
IT HAD taken many weeks of work, but at last they were ready to detonate the charge. At first, the little human settlement had needed only the water from the stream flowing through Meander Valley to fill all their needs, including the irrigation of the vital Earth crops. The last year an extreme dry season had forced them to ration the fresh water to their fields, and they wanted to ensure that this would never again be necessary. It was decided to dam one of the feeder streams to make another lake. The dam would be upstream from the village, but not in line with the normal paths the Demonfish took to the upland lakes. No one wanted to risk its being damaged by their rampage. Once the spot was selected, the long work of building a dam began. The stream's normal run-off was left unrestricted during the construction. Several sturdy boobaa trunks bridged the stream and the construction grew over and around them. Rocks had to be brought in, loaded by hand into a wheelbarrow, walked to the stream, and then piled around the site. Each stone had to be fitted and mortared into place, and as the final dam would be a meter thick and several meters high, the work took months.
There had been a great deal of discussion on how to collapse the remaining hole that allowed the water to escape beneath the growing wall of the dam. They had considered simply covering the entrance with planks and stones by hand, with the larger men working in shirts in the slowly rising water. Jinjur had wanted to prop a large load of stone over the opening and then pull the prop away to allow the stones to fall and block the water, but a prop strong enough to hold the load of stones would be too strong to be easily shifted. It was Adam who suggested using gunpowder.
"Gunpowder!" said Jinjur. "Of course!"
"What do you mean, 'of course'?" said Reiki. "One thing we don't need on this planet is something as destructive as gunpowder!"
"Gunpowder is a tool, Reiki," said Jinjur, "nothing more. It's only destructive if it's used destructively. Engineers have used explosives in construction for hundreds of years."
"Can we make gunpowder?" asked Carmen.
"I don't see why not," said John. "Let me think. You need carbon ..."
"That's easy enough," said Jinjur. "The charred wood from a fire."
"And sulfur ..."
"There is sulfur leaching out of the volcano by the lava bed," said Richard.
"And saltpeter," John concluded.
There was a moment of silence. Then Adam cleared his throat.
"We've found some," he said. "There is a lot of the stuff on the walls in the caves on the dry side of the volcano."
The growing youngsters had enjoyed the run of the island all their lives and none of the adults were surprised that the children knew the island better than they did themselves. But the fact that Adam had not only found a concentration of saltpeter, but had identified it, told his mother even more.
"Adam ..." she said dangerously. "You have already made some gunpowder, haven't you?"
The tall boy looked down at his bare feet. "Yes, Mom," he admitted. Towering over his mother, the teenager hung his head and tried to hide his blue eyes under his long dark curls.
Everett stepped forward. "It was my idea," he said, trying to get the heat off his brother. "I was reading about it on my Teacher and it sounded ... interesting." The wiry blond boy smiled ingratiatingly. His cheerful smile had won over their mother's objections in the past, and Jinjur had struggled to keep from spoiling the toy.
"It should have sounded dangerous," said Jinjur, sounding pretty dangerous herself. "It should have sounded like something that you should have left alone."
"We just wanted to see if we could do it," said Dirk, joining his brothers. Dirk was not as tall as Adam, but le was heavier and seemed to put on muscle daily. To see Jinjur berating her boys was like seeing a mockingbird scolding three young eagles.
"And could you?" asked John, getting back to the central issue. Jinjur could punish the boys later.
"Yes," said Adam. "At least we made something that went bang when we hit it with a rock."
"If they can make a small bang, we can make a large one," said John with conviction. His sparkling blue eyes all but disappeared when he smiled.
"Yeah," said Richard enthusiastically. "We could make a great big bang. We could blow off part of the valley walls over the stream. Then we wouldn't have to go as far to get more rocks for the dam."
"I bet there is a lot of things we could blow ... I mean, use the powder for," said Nels.
"I hope you're happy," Reiki grumbled to Jinjur. "Now they are going to go about just looking for something to blow up. Next thing you know they'll be building a cannon!"
Amazingly, they managed to make and test the gunpowder without anyone getting seriously hurt. John assured Reiki that Richard's eyebrows would grow back, and to make her feel better, Richard agreed not to go along when they set the charge. In fact, most of the others would be waiting in the village while the last section of the dam was filled. It was only John and Nels who placed the bag of black powder beneath the supports and reeled the fuse up to where Jinjur waited.
"All clear?" Jinjur called.
Carmen was up at her home and had all the children, even the teenagers, corralled inside. All the parents agreed that they weren't to light the fuse until they were absolutely sure that the children were nowhere near the site. Carmen's voice answered the General over the weak comm-link in one of the communicators.
"Don't worry, Jinjur. I'm looking at all three of your boys even as we speak."
"Nels?" Jinjur held out her hand, and Nels handed her the lit taper. She held it to the fuse for a moment until the end began to smoke and spark. She set the burning fuse on the ground and moved away. If they had calculated the charge correctly, the results would be unspectacular, but the crude grinding process had made the power of the black powder erratic.
The bright sparkle of the fuse was hard to look at directly with eyes that had long been used to the dim glow of Barnard, but the dark smoke marked the burn's progress. It dribbled down the side of the hill and disappeared into the pile of rocks below. They waited long moments for the fire to work its way below the stones to the support and the bag of black powder beneath. They waited. It was taking too long.