Planetfall For Marda

by Zenka Wistram

  Her husband Alferd is affable and relaxed and completely prefers being the beta in their family. He doesn't talk much, but I've heard him sing along with Alis Gethin after dinner. He could be of Adrash/Welsh descent like the Gethins; he's short and dark with pale blue eyes. At least he speaks Adrash.

  Phenni's sister Toondie is very blonde, and I can't tell yet if she's chemically blonde. Her eyes seem brown, but not as dark as Phenni's. Their genetic history is not distinguishable to me; their ancestors may have been American. Who knows, a lot can happen with the looks of a group over a century and a half since that group last saw Earth. They could have genmods, even.

  The kids favor their father. The older one is only four; his name is Ben, short for Benjones, as we all hear whenever the kid wanders from his parents' sight. He's got pale eyes and dark, curly hair, and I suppose he's good looking for a snot factory. The other kid is also a boy; looks like a miniature Alferd sculpted from pudding (all babies seem unattractively squashy to me). His name is Blaines, which makes me wonder if they're going to name all their kids with the same first letter like some families do.

  Benjones is a stupid name, of course. Faddish. After Benjamin Jones died defending the Orphean Outpost, there were a lot of kids popping up named Benjones or Benjonie. If I were Benjamin Jones and I knew of this (and was alive somehow still) I'd shoot myself.

  I suppose it's nothing for us to worry about. “Paden Bell” isn't exactly a household name, and isn't ever going to be, thank heavens. And there's no Paden Bell, Jr to be concerned about.

  Marda's still a beautiful name for any kind of girl-kid, though.

  It's late. I will write to you more tomorrow.

  Night 5 after planetfall

  Dear Marda,

  It rained today, just a smattering, but all day. I've noticed the weather here is much easier on my cranky old bones then the weather back home was, and the rain itself actually eased the pain considerably. It's still wet, though. Huw, on the dashboard communicator, held a quick discussion and we mostly decided not to stop for lunch, since it was, as noted, wet. Everyone just ate in their crate as we kept on the move, and I believe we made up some of the distance loss from the morning wrangling with connections and panels.

  Evening came and we circled the crates and started up the perimeter fence. I get a smirk every time I think about that – circling the crates like some long ago wagon train. No Natives on this planet; it's guaranteed empty of higher life forms by Edgerift Industries, and they wouldn't lie to us.

  I know, you love it when I'm sarcastic – love it with rolling eyes. But at least there are no worrisome combatants we must protect ourselves from, just a few bumbling animal species; no guilty ethical wrongs to try and deny for centuries. We're told not to try eating the creatures here, or the vegetation until it's been thoroughly tested. One of the incorporated groups, the Black Moon group, signed on specifically for scientific studies of the vegetation and creatures, and one person – a young woman named Bets Almond – is apparently a doctor of psychology and sociology, and is writing a book about planet settling and the human psyche.

  Sounds like she's half candy bar from that name, doesn't it?

  I suppose she's not youngyoung, but even forty seems young to me these days.

  No one calls her Doctor Almond, though. She brushed that away soon enough - “too small of a group to stand on formality, and you're not my patient,” she told me.

  “Just a subject,” I said blandly.

  She tilted her head back and grinned. “I don't get the feeling I'm the only one watching everything that goes on around here.”

  Smart, and a bit mouthy; you'll like her. I can picture you sharing coffee with her (real coffee!), giving each other wicked smiles and knowing looks.

  The rain let up for a bit this afternoon, then picked up again when we stopped for the evening. Besides easing my arthritis a bit, the rain cleared the fog off some.

  We're parked right now on a wide open plain. I climbed the ladder next to the side door of the crate and stood on the roof and just looked all over, trying to see everything I could see.

  This is our home now. I want to know it. I've read everything Edgerift gave us about it. You've read some of it – the stuff they were willing to share in the recruitment packet, the stuff that made you choose Estoper over any of the other planets being opened up for settlement.

  To the south of our position, I can see mountains. Well, I can see the probable shadow of mountains. I know they're there, so it's possible I'm just seeing a slight difference in the density of the fog in that direction as the mountains themselves. I know from the topographical maps the mountains are barely mountains, very rounded, mostly rock unsuitable for farming.

  There's nothing else that I would consider a landmark feature within eyesight. I can't even see the purple lake we passed yesterday. After I climbed back down, I pulled out the awning on the port side of the crate. There's an awning on the back and on the starboard side as well, but the perimeter fence's generators are also on the starboard side. The starboard awning will only be useful after the perimeter fence isn't needed any more.

  We do have rod generators for the fence. Once we're parked, we can use them to keep an area around our personal crate safe from fauna incursions if we decide not to park in a circle with the others.

  You know me. I'm already daydreaming about my own anti-kid perimeter fence.

  Once we're settled, we'll build a perimeter around our settlement with a gate or two in it. One of the supply crates has plenty of rod generators. We all have, stored in the supply crates, the house domes we ordered. They can be attached to the back of the crate, which can be detached from the cockpit, leaving a flatbed vehicle for traveling around the planet; it's very practical. Our own dome is only a single room, since we'll use the back of the crate as a bedroom and bath.

  The Gethin's arrangement of domes will be more elaborate. Their preteen daughter, Briallen, nattered on to me about that today. She rode in my crate for a while. She's prone to migraines, and the Gethin twins, cabin-mad from being cooped up in the rain, did not allow her to rest. So, channeling you, of course, I offered the Gethins to let her nap on one of the bunks in our crate while we traveled. I moved some boxes around

  – your crafting fabrics, your stored clothes, some of the quilts you've made, things that are yours to unpack – and opened up one of the lower bunks and put one of the puffgel mattresses back on it. I'll probably leave it as is now, a headachy kid will only distract Huw and if we're going to make proper time, he needs fewer things to worry about.

  It's just practical. She slept for a couple hours and woke up pale but chipper, and clambered up into the cockpit with me until we stopped for the evening. That's when she gave me an earful about their dome and the garden she intends to keep.

  Only flowers, because that's practical. OK, yes, sarcastic again. She is excited because she'll have her own tiny dome connected to the main dome; just pleased and proud of a three meter by three meter tiny hole that will be her own. Until then, all the Gethin children share sleeping space, both here and back where they come from.

  The girl's also very interested in botany, so she follows Phenni Almaric around some. I suppose that's not a bad choice of interests, and the kid's much more knowledgeable than I would have thought someone her age capable. She's very serious, not at all silly and flutter-headed like your niece Piff.

  So it looks like I'm describing the Gethins for you tonight. Huw Gethin's forty-three years old, dark stick-straight hair and dark eyes. He has a broad smile when he shares it, but he's usually as serious as young Briallen. I have a lot of grudging respect for the man, he doesn't speak down to anyone, he's honest and capable and has a knack for getting people to treat each other well and work together as if they'd known each other for years. That's no small knack.

  His wife Alis is maybe slightly younger than he is, with graying sandy hair she wears short. It spikes up naturally, probably because she absentmindedly runs
her hand through it frequently, so it's usually smooth on one side and spiked on the other. Her eyes are gray, and she's not as serious as her husband and daughter are. I hear her humming a lot, or breaking out into song. It seems her primary language is Adrash, her Standard is accented and sometimes she searches her mind for words.

  They have the four kids. The oldest is Elyan, at seventeen nearly a man. He's very shy and blushes a lot, especially in the presence of Iris Blue Watson. Yes, that really is her name.

  Elyan blushes like magma whenever Iris Blue looks directly at him, or artlessly bumps into him. He's tall and gawkily skinny, his hair somewhere between Alis's fair and Huw's dark. His eyes are as dark as his father's, though. He seems intelligent, and he's articulate if you can get him to speak. I poked him into opening up by talking about what he was reading on his pad.

  Turns out, it was Plato. I know a little about Plato, too. Kid's not so bad. For a kid, I mean.

  Briallen's twelve, with dark, straight hair held back from her face with a plastic headband. I told her, straight faced, that perhaps if she put the headband on upside down it would ease her migraines.

  It took her only a split second to laugh. The young twins are seven years old. Cadell, whom I've mentioned to you before, is busy and curious, talking to everyone and investigating everything. He has decided to call a small insect-like creature he found on the back of their crate a “Fierce Fog Monster”, and he lobbied hard to be allowed to keep it in a container in their crate. His mother finally absolutely vetoed the idea of any pets or creatures or living things of any sort that are not members of the family living in their crate at any time before they are settled and their domes are set up and properly connected.

  His sister is Catrin, sandy haired like Cadell, dark eyed like all the children and their father. She's usually right behind Cadell as he's getting up to trouble.

  Now you know the Gethins and the Almarics. Tomorrow I'll try to remember to tell you about the Kimuras. Right now the rain's just started up again, and I'm going to close up the awning and go climb into bed, and sleep to the sound of this soft, whispering rain falling on the top of the crate.

  Remember curling up in the hammock together, close and quiet, allowing the hammock to rock a bit with the rain falling all around and over us? This is a memory I wish I could rewind to, just for a moment.

  Goodnight, Marda. I hope where you are, you can feel the rain too.

  Night 6

  Dear Marda, Dear Marda, pretty Marda, dancing, lovely Marda. I have been thinking of you today and am feeling as much in love with you as I did the day I asked you to marry me. More really – it's not just that giddiness and joy anymore, it's deep, reverent, strong, and sustaining.

  Anyway. I thought I'd make you a sketch of the animals we saw today; three different kinds of grazing animals in herds that bumbled up against each other and wove through the other herds at times. We could only see a few at a time because of the fog, but unless the same twenty kept dancing around in and out of eyeshot the herds were massive. Sounded massive – lots of footfalls and animal noises.

  Smelled like ass. Like massive, feral ass.

  You know how my sketches turn out though (like ass, actually), so I skipped drawing in favor of gracing you with my incredible powers of description.

  (Like when I told you they smelled like ass.)

  If I was at home with you and you were sharing dinner with me, your feet tangled up with mine beneath the table, and I was telling you this story, you'd have hit me three times already.

  And I'd be grinning at you, just like I'm grinning thinking about it. Of course, we'd be having real food, not this crap that tastes of plastic and metal and looks like it's already been eaten by someone who had to have enjoyed it more than I am enjoying it right now. Technically this is an chicken enchilada verde dinner. This chicken clearly had more problems in its life than the chickens I am used to eating.

  So the animals today.

  Like most life, they were symmetrical. The big ones were nearly as tall as the crates, with broad heads viper-like in shape, and cow-like in menace. Their heads hung at the ends of long necks with an inverted bow to them, the heads sort of waving back and forth slowly in front of the body, a thorny looking tongue stripping the strands of grass of the vane-leaves. The body just kept ambling on forward as if whatever the head was doing was irrelevant.

  Their backs were long and bowed like the neck, the whole body covered with leathery, scale-like flesh red and brown in color except for an odd beard of thin, colorless hair around the bottoms of their heads. Down the spine ran nubby, rounded, bony looking bulbs, all the way down to the tip of the tail, which had a heavy looking ball of what looked like bone on it.

  If one of those things decided to shove one of the crates, or smash at it with that tail, they could do a lot of damage. Mostly they just looked at us sideways as their heads bobbled and wove around, barely curious about what we were.

  There were two kinds of smaller animals, one kind no bigger than chickens. There were only a few of the smallest kind, running around maniacally around the bigger animals and in and out between the giant, stomping legs. Sometimes the little animals would climb up on the big animals and groom them, greedily munching on whatever they were finding in between the bulbous projections and scale patches.

  These little buggers had six legs, the front legs with fingers around the front of the foot, the hind legs with short toes. They had no tail, and their skin was hairless, sleekly shiny, and dark purple. Their necks don't appear that long, but they can swivel their heads almost completely around, which they frequently did while riding on the big ones – swiveling their heads to stare and stare, big eyed, at us.

  Curious animals make me glad for the perimeter fence. Creatures with curious brains and fingers are endless trouble, hence my dislike of children. Well, that and the snot. Children, not the purple groomers.

  The other creatures were built like shaggy cat-goats with floppy, mobile noses that looked like soft pink bags on the front of their heads. They used these noses to grab up the grass and stuff it into their mouths, then they'd yank their head back and pull the whole, hardy strand out of the ground. The shaft of the grass strands is very tough – I couldn't cut it with my pocket knife and had to take a heavy duty shrub clippers to it – and the cat-goats seemed to spend a lot of time mashing the grass up in their mouths, messily.

  The purple groomers would rush up any time the cat-goats stopped; they'd sit down and pull the halfchewed grass out of the tangled fur near the cat-goats' mouth to eat. Yuck. Efficient, but yuck. I call them cat-goats because they have sharp, almond eyes and tabby-like stripes in their coarse fur. Their tail is also cat like, long and slim with longer hair on the underside. The tails whip back and forth when the cat-goats stare at each other – their heads tilt, their tails whip, and after a while they start yanking grass and chewing again. The goat-like part is the short legs and the barrel-like body, the chewing, and the short, spiral horns sweeping back along the head.

  Cadell Gethin calls the big ones Land Hippos, and the purple grooming creatures Wrasskeys. The catgoats, he tells me, are now named Chompers.

  Edgerift calls them Estoper NS H7, NS H9, and NS S13. Cadell's names are better. Alis Gethin has spent most of the evening in the crate of the Blues group. Our settlement medic is in that group, a doc fresh out of university whose tuition will be paid off in full by Edgerift after a few years mucking about on their planets and taking care of their settlers. Seems like a pretty good deal for both to me, Edgerift lures docs in to remote planets, and the docs start their actual lives in the Commonwealth on a central planet with no debt.

  It worries me a little, I'll admit, that Alis is presumably being seen. The doc, Rufus Raines, kicked everyone else out of the crate, so the assumption that Alis is getting medical care isn't that big of a stretch. Probably starting to channel you more than I intended, worrying over people all the time like you do.

  Meanwhile Cadell and Catrin
have been hanging out with me.. Briallen's playing paper dolls (never thought I'd see those again) with Masumi Kimura and Jelly and Tundra Watson (I think their mother is insanely bad at naming children).

  It's not just Cadell and Catrin. For a while I had a whole bunch of the little monsters over here, sitting around spread out in front of me – Ayo the little Jalloh boy, Benjones Almaric, Eiji Kimura and Briallen and all her little friends.

  And I didn't eat any of them, not one little snot factory turned into pudding and their bones ground for my bread. Surprised, right? Turns out all those books I've read over all those evenings I preferred to spend in with you and a good book instead of at the bar with my male friends like “normal” men do, as you would tease me, has left me with plenty of stories to tell. Tonight I told some old Ojibwe stories about how the first world was born and how Nanaboozhoo turned the veggies all kinds of colors and how he fought monsters.

  Kept their noise-holes mostly quiet for an hour or so, anyway. Just practical if an old man wants some peace that he be the one doing the talking for a while.

  I stopped telling stories after I noticed Bets Almond (you remember, the sociologist with the candy bar name) sitting in with the kids and grinning. She actually winked at me after I finally shut my yap.

  So I glowered back at her. Right now Cadell and Catrin are sitting next to me while I write this with my stylus and pad, holding their own kid-size pads and looking up more stories about Nanaboozhoo. Since the Gethins are Adrash, maybe, if I feel like looking at their loud little faces again sometime, I'll tell some good old fashioned faery stories. Not all pixies and brownies but real stories about crap like Pwyll and Rhiannon.