Rescued From Paradise

by Robert L. Forward

  "Gunpowder would just bring rock down," said Nels. "We would still have to pile it up."

  "If we got all the Jollys to help ..."

  "As slowly as the Jollys move ..."

  Nels and Adam continued arguing, but Richard had stopped listening. Without asking, he had taken the Teacher from Shannon's belt pouch and was searching through its massive reference files. Shannon looked over his shoulder as he called up various aerial views of the island and compared them to the maps that he and Arielle had surveyed in their early days on the island. The argument ground to a halt as they realized that Richard was definitely working on something.

  "It only has to divert ... but the stream wanders ... and it's been dry lately ..." Richard was mumbling under his breath as he finished his calculations. "Hmmm. We have the Teacher to give a signal ... could Carmen do it? No ... we need her at the comm." He switched the Teacher back to comm mode.

  "Richard to Carmen. Carmen? Has everybody left but you?" he asked.

  "Carmen here. No, Everett stayed here to help me. He's outside watching for any sign of flames."

  "Everett? He's perfect. Go get him!" cried Richard.

  "What's up?" said Nels.

  "I think I have a way to build up a wall of rock, and we won't have to lift a pebble," Richard replied while waiting. "What we need to do is deflect the lava at the point where the stream from Meander Valley joins the big river valley. If we can get enough water on the face of the lava flow at just the right time, we can cool the face enough for it to harden and form our immovable object. Then, the frozen lava face will divert the rest of the lava behind it in a new direction, just as Freeman suggested. I think we have enough water to do that, but at the moment it is ten kilometers away, sitting behind our dam—" He was interrupted by a voice from the Teacher.

  "Everett here."

  "Everett? Listen here, m'lad, I have an important job for you." He then quickly outlined the plan. Ten minutes later, Everett was on his way out of the village, a Teacher bumping against his hip. The heavy pack on his back made him awkward, but the agile blond had spent his life running up and down these trails. It was a long run, and when the trail grew steep, Everett switched to a brisk walk. Barnard was now completely out from behind Gargantua, and the midday darkness was over, but the air itself was now growing thick and dark with smoke. When Everett first smelled the burning vegetation, he tried to speed back up to a jog, but the hill was too steep and soon he was gasping in the stinging smoke. Trying to regain his breath, he slowed back down at a straight portion of the steep trail and turned around to take a few steps backward in order to rest the aching muscles in his thighs.

  Although the wind was blowing away from the fires, the ridge above the secondary caldera was now fully involved. Everett could see through the trees to the next ridge where long tongues of flame leapt into the air and then curled back away. Thick brown smoke billowed up in long plumes along the horizon. Everett tried not to think about what would happen if a stray ember should land on his loaded backpack, but more than that, Everett hated the smell of the burning forest. Wood smoke was not pleasant when some of your best friends were trees.

  After what seemed like years of climbing over the quivering earth, Everett reached his goal. The dam towered over him, and on the far side of the old streambed, a small water wheel slowly turned in the scant runoff. This far into the dry season the wheel had only enough power to turn the smallest grindstone. The dam had taken months to build, and the lake behind it now assured the humans they would always have sufficient irrigation water during the dry season for the vital Earth-grain crops—with their essential vitamins that the humans needed to survive in this alien paradise. But as much as the humans valued the dam, they valued their friends at the Jolly village more.

  When the dam had been built, they had left an opening at the base that had allowed the water to run through until the construction was completed. When they sealed the hole on the lake side with boulders, a hollow was left that reached far under the dam. Now, Everett shoved his loaded backpack deep into the opening and strung a length of fuse behind him, leading to the safety of a small cave on the nearby hillside. He took the Teacher from his belt and called the comm unit in Carmen's house.

  "Everett to Carmen ... do you read me?"

  "Go ahead, Everett." The adult's calm voice came over the speaker and soothed his nerves. The constant shaking of the ground beneath his feet, and his exhaustion from the long climb, had left him feeling tight and nervous. Richard had stressed the importance of waiting for the right time before taking any further action. Now, after all this hurry-up, it was time to wait.

  "Tell Richard I'm all set up, and I'm ready whenever he is."

  "Okay, Everett. Stand by."

  Everett wondered if he should tell Richard that in addition to the black powder from the settlements storage magazine, he had added the secret stash of powder the firstborn boys had managed to "collect" over the years, but he didn't want to tie up the radio in case Richard tried to call him just as he was trying to reach Richard. Besides, since the whole idea was to destroy the dam, a little extra black powder wouldn't hurt.

  Richard was still working out the calculations when Carmen sent word that Everett was in position. Smoke from the distant fires flavored the air, and the ground was still rumbling ominously underfoot, reminding them constantly of the approaching disaster.

  Under Seetoo's constant direction, some of the villagers labored along the irrigation ditch, widening and deepening it to increase the water flow to the seedling bed, while others gathered peethoo leaves and piled them up protectively around the seedlings, while soaking them thoroughly with water. Freeman, Dirk, Adam, and Shannon joined the Jolly work crews, preferring work to worry, as Richard and Nels refined the computations to produce a plan with the greatest chance of success. Richard had made it clear that this was all a matter of estimates and hope, but however great the odds were against them, they had to take the gamble. Now, they could only hope that fortune would smile on them and the wrath of Hoolkoor would be diverted.

  Dark and sullen-looking in the reddish daylight, the flowing lava rolled relentlessly toward them down the river valley. The air above it shimmered with heat, as the liquid stone seemed to breathe and move like a living creature, leaving thick black walls of smoldering rock along its sides. Fires broke out all along its length, distant trees and underbrush bursting into flame under the extreme heat radiated by the molten rock. Shannon fixed the awesome scene in her memory while hating herself for thinking of art when her friends were in so much danger.

  When it came, the rolling boom of the distant explosion made all of them look up. Even the Jollys stopped working to update their worldview. Shannon looked at Richard, trying to guess his reaction. The dam was ten kilometers away! Should the blast have been that loud?

  With the explosion, Shannon abandoned all pretense at work and moved uphill to a better vantage point. Adam and the rest of the firstborn soon joined her, and together they looked up the river valley at the approaching danger. The lava was now close enough that Shannon could feel its odd dry heat on her face, and hear the rumbling crackle and hisses as it ate up more of the vegetation in the glen. Anything before it was swallowed into its expanding bulk. Even the dirt and stones in the now dry river bed were picked up and incorporated into its seething body. Along its heaving sides the plants withered, then blackened, and finally burst into flame. The lava passed the endpoint of the ridge marking the place where the stream from Meander Valley entered the river. It filled up the narrow cleft in the valley formed by the endpoints of that ridge and another one across the river from it. It flowed through the cleft and started eating into the shallow waters of Wide Pond, which slowed it down somewhat, but couldn't stop it.

  Far up Meander Valley, something was happening. There was a rumble that built so gradually into a roar that Shannon didn't know just when she first became aware of it. Richard and Nels, down along the riverbank, were gesturing and pointi
ng, imploring Seetoo to move away from the bottom of the valley. Finally they left the Jolly chieftain alone with his helpless seedlings and climbed up the hill to join the firstborn at their vantage point.

  Shannon thought she knew what to look for, but when she first saw the incoming wave she didn't realize what it was she was seeing. At first she thought that the constant shaking had started a landslide—goodness knows water was never that color! It was a gray-brown wall filled with all the plants and rocks it had picked up in its headlong rush through the valley and across the many meanders in the twisting streambed. Shannon could make out wide boobaa leaves and long tangles of keekoo roots, twisting and writhing in the opaque water. Dirty froth highlighted the dark surface as it roiled and churned. Violent and deadly, the wall of water looked as dangerous as the creeping flow of liquid rock and Shannon's heart filled with fear.

  "Oh, Adam," she whispered. ''What have we done? How could we have let loose such ... such a beast?"

  Adam put his arm around her, but she wouldn't look away. They looked on with fascinated horror as the fire and water came crashing together at the juncture of the stream and the river. The flood climbed up on the back of the snakelike stream of lava like a mongoose attacking a cobra. The valley filled with clouds of steam as the surface of the lava exploded, as if attempting to shake the flood off. The hissing outburst of steam and the loud cracking of the rapidly cooling rock were deafening. Huge white clouds boiled up and filled the whole valley with its noisome dampness and set the humans to choking in the thick, stinking fumes. Small pellets of black glass rained down on them as the super-heated rock continued its fight with the cold wall of water. The lava hardened ... and then melted again ... its progress stalling until the building pressure from behind forced it onward. The lava piled up higher in the narrow cleft, filling the valley from wall to wall, while the flood of water climbed higher with it, continuing to flow over its top, attempting to submerge it. Boiling hot water flowed on the darkening lava tongue into Wide Pond and continued on down the riverbed, hiding the seedling bed and its lonely guardian in dense clouds of hot steam ...

  The flow of hot water then slowed ... and stopped ... The winds blew the steam clouds away and they could now see the far side of Wide Pond again. There was a large tongue of dark lava there. It had stopped moving! Along the riverside, Seetoo still stood sturdily by his young progeny—fronds wilted, but alive.

  Shannon broke away from Adam and headed for the top of the ridge overlooking the point where the stream from Meander Valley emptied into the river valley. There was now a new lake at that point, blocked by a black mound of steaming rock. The river valley now contained a river of lava. It flowed down the steep valley until it reached the point where it too was blocked by the black mound of rock. There, the lava was forced to make a turn, sending it harmlessly off into an adjacent ravine.

  Shannon looked around her and the world seemed for a moment to be holding its breath. Far up the valley, a whistling scream of gas could be heard escaping from a fissure. There was a final sharp jolt that knocked her off her feet, an earthquake more violent than anything she had felt earlier. With the jolt, the screaming stopped. The earth was finally still.

  Richard looked up the valley. "The lava has stopped flowing out of the fissure in the side of the caldera. The magma chamber that was driving the lava flow must have collapsed."

  As the lava flow diminished, the tube of hardened rock that had formed around the surface of the flowing liquid collapsed inward under its own weight. Later, except for the crusted remnants of the lava tube along its walls, the valley would be as empty of lava as it was now empty of water. Then, when the rains came again, the river would flow again down that valley. There would now be two "Wide Ponds" instead of one, but the Jolly village would be able to resume its normal life—safe until the next eruption—thousands of seasons in the future.

  When the weary humans returned home to survey the damage to their settlement by the earthquakes and flood, they concluded that it had been the final strong earthquake that had toppled Carmen's aerie. A landslide had brought her home down from its perch above the village. Her body was discovered beneath the rubble, still at her station by the comm unit.

  ALOHA

  RED SLOWLY drifted out of her apartment on Prometheus and palmed the door closed. She paused and looked across the lift-shaft to the two doors that opened into Thomas and George's rooms. George was not in. He was probably down in the control room working with James on data reduction. Thomas had not been in his room for two years now. When they had floated him out the portal to take him down to the sick bay, Thomas had insisted that his door be left open.

  "I'm not going to let a little heart attack keep me down. I'm going to get well and come back to my studio. I've got a lot of pictures to work on."

  They assured him he would soon return to work on computer enhancements of his world-famous shots of the ring waves on Eau mountain, the ten-thousand-kilometer atmospheric volcano on Gargantua, and the elaborately decorated alien icerugs on Zulu. James, however, had been quite insistent that Thomas stay in the sick bay where there was better access to the medical equipment. Thomas had argued with the computer for a while, but after two more heart stoppages that would have been fatal if the Christmas Bush had not been there to apply shock treatment, Thomas finally stopped arguing and accepted the life of an invalid. The view-wall above his bed in the sick bay was identical to the one in his room, but it just never seemed the same. The real problem was that the complex photographic enhancement and display console that took up most of Thomas's private room could not be fitted into the sick bay, and Thomas was reduced to more modest processing of his picture pixels.

  Red's eyes swept past the seven other doors ringing the lift shaft on this floor. They and all the doors on the floor above had been closed for a long time. Ten of them at once, some fifteen years ago, when Slam IV had crashed on Zuni, third moon of Gargantua. The others had died of one cause or another over the years while Prometheus slowly wandered back and forth through the Barnard system, collecting data on the planets and moons as the seasons changed. There were only three of them left on Prometheus now—all old, but still busy. They were presently engaged in a two-year survey of the star itself, following it through one of its sunspot cycles. For that job they had used the light from the star to slow Prometheus in its orbit, so that the spinning parasol of their ship fluttered down closer to the surface of the dim red sun. For the first time since they had come to Barnard they had to use filters over the viewing ports.

  Red looked upward at the gaping maw of the central shaft and hesitated. In the past she would have simply flung herself up into the empty hole and used an occasional flick of hand or foot on the walls to propel herself through the shaft to her destination. She would still do that for a 'tween-decks jump—but now she wanted to go to the starside science dome nearly sixty meters away. They were getting close enough to the sun that the acceleration from the light pressure was becoming almost noticeable. Getting cautious in her old age, she called for the shaft elevator and took it to starside dome.

  Her arthritic joints creaking in protest, Red wormed her way past a large telescope swung out under the dome. There was very little room left for a human. Red looked up to see a minibush working the controls. It was very busy, scrambling back and forth between the various control knobs at a speed that no human hands could have duplicated. Red was slightly puzzled, "Why are you using such a little branch, James?" she asked. "You'll wear yourself out running back and forth like that."

  She heard James chuckle, both from her hair imp and from the minibush on the telescope. "I can handle the telescope fine this way," it replied. "It's a little more wasteful of energy than using a larger motile that can reach both knobs at once, but I felt that it was better to have most of the Christmas Bush elsewhere at this time."

  Red's heart skipped a beat. "What's going on?" she asked in alarm, then instantly knew the answer. "There's something wrong with Thoma
s!" she cried, and started to wiggle her way past the slowly moving telescope.

  "I didn't want to worry you," James said through her imp. "There's nothing bad happening to him, but I just thought it best to have more of my motile close to him since his vital signs are slowly worsening. Red! Elizabeth!! ... Wait for the elevator!!!" the imp screamed in her ear as she dove headlong down the shaft.

  "I'll pay for that later," Red said to herself as her adrenaline-anesthetized joints ignored their arthritic signals and brought her to a violent stop at the living area deck. She made her way to the sick bay. Most of the Christmas Bush was there, monitoring the medical instruments. Red noticed that Thomas's upper torso was naked and covered with a lacelike net of motile threads. She looked at Thomas and understood why James had been concerned. Thomas's face, usually a handsome and healthy light brown color, was now a muddy gray. He had aged well and usually looked much younger than his sixty-eight years. He didn't look young now, more like George's eighty-seven.

  Thomas looked up as she came in. He grinned weakly at her and winked their special wink. She blushed, then put an exasperated frown on her face.

  "Thomas," she scolded, "you're incorrigible."

  "But it's been over two years, Red," he said. "A guy could die if he goes without getting it for that long."

  "... and he'd die if he did," she replied.

  "But what a way to go!"

  Ignoring his remark, Red moved over to him and put one hand on his forehead and one on his cheek. He moved his head and nuzzled his nose in her hand, his lips kissing her palm softly. She tried to hold back her emotions, but finally gave up, fell sobbing across his chest, and hugged him. Through her anguish and tears she could feel the motiles moving between them, keeping out of the way as much as possible, but still maintaining their vigil on the body of the dying man. Thomas ran his fingers through the brilliant red hair that he had loved for so long, grinned inwardly at the slight trace of gray at the root of each strand, and closed his eyes to rest.