And as I write this, Alis has finally come out of Doc Raines' crate, and called the kids to come get tucked in. Woman looks all right to me, maybe a pinch more worried than usual, but she usually looks vaguely worried.
Her eldest, Elyan the Blush Volcano, is playing some kind of card game with Katsu Kimura, Iris Blue, Kojo and Tau Jalloh. He blushes less when Iris Blue talks to him when all the teenagers are together in a big group; Iris is the only teenage girl around and sometimes she seems a little awkward and unsure of whether to hang out with the boys or with the much younger group of girls including Briallen Gethin.
So tonight I was going to introduce you to the Kimuras. The actual head of the Kimura household is unreservedly Cho, in her mid-forties, and the mother of Hisashi, Katsu, Masumi, and Eiji. Her husband Makoto is listed as the head of household, he's around fifty. He's retired, but he was big in technical hardware for the stations, and seems to spend most of his time in their crate writing on his pad.
Cho is a whirlwind. She's all friendly smiles with a cast iron spine, while her kids are well behaved and very correct. As you can tell from the name, the family hails from Yutaka, and they all bear the distinctive genetic hallmarks of the Earthling Japanese who settled that planet well before the Commonwealth formed and we all became ostensibly one people. They have dark, almond shaped eyes, dark brown hair, and gold tinged skin.
Makoto looks stern and distinguished and is an introvert. Cho is outgoing, talkative, and energetic. She shepherds her children strictly and with the air of a woman used to caring for them alone, and after she says she is “so tired this evening” you'll generally find her off to do four other tasks before sitting and resting. You'll like them both (you like everyone), and I know you'd spend time carefully dragging Makoto out of his shell.
Cho's begun experimenting with making woven rugs from the grass. It curls around itself naturally, and the strands are tough and they don't really straighten out properly when she clips them to the frame she's made from some aluminum struts sent as spares for the house domes. She tells me she may just allow the strands to curl, and sort of knot them together, and use them to make a comfortable, pretty, grass shaded gazebo as a gathering place for our tiny community.
Their oldest son is Hisashi, a young married. He and his wife Amaya are in their mid-twenties. Amaya is almost as introverted as her father-in-law. While her features are distinctly Yutakan, her skin is as pale as yours and her eyes are green, her hair caramel in color. She dresses almost exclusively in shades of pink.
Cho tells me Amaya nearly died as a child, and that her mother woke from a dream about cherry blossoms to hear from the doctors that little Amaya would make it after all, and since then, Amaya has dressed in pink – at first by her mother's choice, but now, having decided it is her good-luck color, Amaya herself continues the practice.
Cho is afraid of Amaya becoming pregnant. She fears her daughter-in-law is delicate, and worries her beloved son will lose his beloved wife.
As I said, Cho is talkative. She's also a worrier, much like you, and someone who instinctively sees to the comforts of those around her, much like you.
I don't know how on earth you have tolerated such a grumpy old curmudgeon as me all these years we've had together.
Anyway, the next oldest is Katsu, age sixteen. He's far more confident and social than Elyan Gethin, and I see Cho is carefully, secretly, nudging her son in the direction of pretty Iris Blue Watson.
Well, not so secretly. Iris avoids standing near Katsu when his mother is around. She's not the most socially deft teenage girl, and does not seem to know how to laugh off undue attention. After Katsu is Eiji, a ten year old with a flair for outrageous stories that keep the younger boys in laughter. He has a small collection of model spacecraft with him and assures me that his collection in storage back on Yutaka is much more impressive.
Last is Masumi, a tiny, elfin nine year old girl and Briallen's new best friend. The two seem largely inseparable in that way that preteen girls often seem to be – there's never just one about, is there? Huw's gesturing at me now, it's probably time for us to make the rounds and make sure all as it should be. I suspect the younger man is humoring me, no reason for him to drag this old fart along all the time unless he's got a weird fondness for grumpy know-it-alls.
Goodnight, Marda. I will only be truly glad at heart again when I can wrap my arms around you again. Sweet dreams.
Night 7
Dear Marda, Another late start this morning. Even though we were ready to go on time, having already checked for loose connections and loose panels – which reminds me, I need to set a camera up and confirm the grass is curling upwards and loosening things – we were still off late.
One of the Blues group fell off the top of their crate this morning and broke his leg. I am more and more sure these kids are college friends just out of college, without a mote of common sense yet. He didn't fall on to the grass, which wouldn't have broken his leg as it's all sproingy, but sort of bounced off the ramp to the door of their crate.
The ramp folds up when the crates are in motion to form a sort of defensive hatch over the side door of the crate, then folds down to provide easy access to the crate when we're stopped. Just the press of a button on the inside of the crate will lower or raise the ramp any time we're stopped. Works the same on the back hatch, except the back hatch is the width of the back of the crate and opens to a storage area, with a folding wall separating the cargo hatch from the sleeping area. When we're stopped, most people have both hatches open for air flow and, in the family's case, kid traffic. Because the perimeter fence secures the campsite from animals, most of us leave the side door ramp down at night, except for the Almarics, who have toddlers who can open doors but can't reach the hatch release.
So this kid, this twenty two year old kid, Soren Hinrick, was goofing around on top of the Blues' crate. From my spot, checking the latches on the outside of our crate because you know me, I'm paranoid and don't always trust the machines to tell me if something's latched or not, it looked like Soren was showing off his acrobatic skill for a young woman in their group, Annya Sanford. Only instead of a flipping dismount, he slipped on the fog-slickened crate roof and slammed his leg down onto the side of the ramp as he fell.
So we had to wait for Doc Raines to patch him up and get him walking again. He's got a fancy servo brace that allows him to walk on the leg, but it's not going to allow any fancy, impressive flipping dismounts.
Kid looks sheepish still, hours later, at camp tonight. But it worked in one sense, at the moment he has about all of Annya's attention. So we sat around until lunch, and only got about half as far as Huw had plotted out. I spent most of the time checking on people and seeing if they needed anything repaired or squared away better (or if I thought they needed anything repaired or squared away better), and this being social crap works out fine sometimes.
Rumor Watson, Iris Blue's grandmother, had real coffee, you see. She'd sacrificed an entire trunk of space for her own things in order to pack coffee, sugar, and powdered creamer she hadn't been sure would even survive the trip being edible. And since I was repairing a loose floor panel for them, she shared her secret stash with me in the form of one hot, steaming cup of black, black coffee.
Rumor's only fifty, insanely young to be the grandmother of a sixteen year old girl. She's widowed; her husband took his own life after a tough medical diagnosis. She seems soft, and kind, and bone-deep sad, and wears her graying hair in a braid down to her waist.
It seems, though, that the closer a woman is to my own age these days, the less I trust their platonic motives. Fifty's not that close to my age, but it does make her the oldest woman in our group. She's got a nice couple of daughters, though. Deja, thirty-four, is the mother of Iris Blue and a twelve year old boy named Even. No, not Evan, Even. She tells me names matter in forming personality, and she wants Even to be even-keeled, all right in his own head and space. Her own name is Deja Vu, and she named Iris what she did (I
ris Blue) because it rhymed with her name and it was a calming color combining both the compassion of blue and the awareness of lavender.
Yep.
She's a kind young woman, though. Rumor's other daughter is Misty, thirty-six, and the mother of Jelly, eight, and Tundra, ten, both girls. Misty has none of the strange but perhaps a bit endearing stories about why she named the girls what she did, and while Deja is a bit flaky (and fast friends with Toondie Renfrew), Misty seems like she might be mentally ill.
I don't say that lightly, you know how I feel about crazy. Everyone's got some flavor of crazy. Misty Watson, though, is off. Her expressions are off, her voice seems at times to come from a great distance, and her reactions are very slow. I don't know if she's medicated, and she seems harmless, and if I were prone to speculate I'd probably wonder if her father's death brought her to this state, or if there was a familial propensity for mental illness that had led to her father's awful decision.
If so, perhaps naming your daughter Jelly is not a great idea.
Rumor takes care of Misty, and Deja takes care of Misty's girls. Makes me wonder, though, how much the Watsons may have paid to bypass the normal health requirements. Mentally ill people are usually not considered for the first wave of settling, just because it's often deeply stressful. Perhaps she's not mentally ill, but has a different kind of physical injury or problem, and was waivered in under her mother's care.
I'm getting all kinds of uncomfortable with this speculation, though. I don't want to turn in to some kind of gossipy old biddy, and whatever is going on with Misty, she's got a family that loves her fiercely, and she's never alone.
I'm hardly ever alone anymore either, not if the crates are stopped. Today before we started out, after I'd checked on everyone and was sitting peacefully out in front of the crate on one of the folding chairs packed in our crate, enjoying what I know is the sunlight even if it doesn't feel quite as direct as I'd like, Catrin and Cadell Gethin and a bunch of the other younger kids came over and begged for a story while we waited.
Pestery little monsters. Cute, but pestery. And monsters. So I began telling the Mabinogion. Maybe it's a little bloody for kids, but kids tolerate blood in their ancient tales better than some hovering grownups might think. I loved it when I was a kid, and by the time I got halfway through the story of Pwyll and his year as Arawn, the older kids had come to listen as well.
I've become that crazy old coot who tells stories by campfire, only with no campfire. In light of that, I am going to turn in early tonight, so I can re-read some of the stories involved in the Mabinogion so I at least get the stories right. I don't want to mess up their ideas about the stories and get them in trouble with teachers later or something.
Goodnight, Marda. Huw's got the beacon up, so I'll send this off to all the corners of the galaxy and to you right now.
Night 8 Dear Marda, We had heavy rains today, and the ground felt swampy. I'm impressed by the tracks on the bottom of the crates though, they handled the goopy wetness with ease. Of course they can float, and the tracks can propel the crates adequately through water (or so the manual and training from Edgerift insist), but mucky swampiness is neither water nor ground, just really good crud for jamming up machines.
But the crates held up fine, and we weren't even slowed down by the rain. As always when it rains, when it let up, we had clear sight for miles, no fog impeding our view. When we stopped for lunch, I climbed up on the top of the crate with my binoculars, and far to the west I saw the triple herd of land hippos, wrasskeys, and chompers. The herd was every bit as big as it sounded a couple days ago.
There are predator animals here on Estoper; the bio book Edgerift loaded into our pads lists four large enough to be of worry to humans, but only two on this continent. The only one I'm really concerned with is the Estoper NS C10, it looks like a brute of a lizard creature. It has a sleek body with a triple row of dark green, sharp looking spikes down its back, and a speckled pattern of dark grays and greens all over the top side of its body to help it blend in to the grass. Its underside, in the event it's up and running and leaping at you, is bright yellow. I can only imagine the sudden flash of yellow causing the prey to freeze for just an instant in terror, long enough for the creature to be busy eating you already.
They prey on the chompers and on the wrasskeys, but avoid the land hippos, or so Edgerift has observed. There are a couple xenobiologists, one in the Black Moon group and one in the Porpoise Blues group, who are excited about studying all of these species, though one is more specifically interested in the smaller fauna – insect size things. Black Moon is all people here to study the planet or the settlers, Porpoise Blues has a few whose education suits the same things.
I begrudgingly concede the Black Moon bunch is probably not going to all hate each other by the time we're settled. A solid group of coworkers can keep themselves together and functional indefinitely. I still suspect the Porpoise Blues group is trouble for itself.
The name alone indicates a silliness that doesn't lend itself easily to backbreaking, lonely, aggravating work like laying the foundations of a larger settlement. That is, if ours succeeds, of course. Edgerift likes sending out small groups like this to live in a place they'd like to build a full sized settlement. Let us live there a year or so, see if it's really a workable place to inhabit, then commit full resources and time.
Meanwhile we'll have figured out the local trouble spots, if the animals or the vegetation is truly edible for the long term, how to manage local issues, stuff like that. And if our settlement fails, they pull us out without a lot of loss to their pocketbook, considering most of us have paid through the nose for this opportunity.
You and I can easily afford this. It is still a good chunk of what we've got socked away, but as you pointed out the morning you so determinedly started convincing me this is what we needed to do, I'm seventy-two. I don't have half a century left to fuss around with the money we have, I may as well start spending it, doggone it, and spend it on something meaningful and exciting.
You're hard to resist, hard to nay-say when you have that fire in your eyes and that set to your mouth. The universe knows I just sit back, grin, and let you drag me along. I mean, I have to protest and argue and fuss, it's less fun for both of us if I don't challenge you.
Brokedy leg kid, Soren Hinrick, was up and about and not in too much pain today. That servo brace really is useful, not to mention whatever pain killers Doc Raines is rationing out to the kid. Soren still seems a bit abashed to be the first big injury, and over such a stupid, show-off stunt, and he's making it up by following Huw and me around and offering his help for anything we need doing.
Well, following Huw around. I'm no leader of the group here, that's Huw's job, thankfully. I also follow Huw around, but mostly because Huw seems to like having a second opinion from time to time and a second pair of eyes to catch things. For some reason, he's picked yours truly for that. Maybe he likes my cheerful nature, right?
It's all right, old farts like me need something to do anyway. It's not like I have a crate full of yammering snot factories or anyone else to look after right now. I wanted to tell you about the camera, too. I stuck a little com camera on the bottom of my crate overnight and I seem to have confirmed that it is the grass pulling things loose. I patched the camera up to my pad first thing this morning, and there it was, the veggie culprit of so much annoyance.
First thing I said was “Well, I'll be...” like an idiot, but second thing I said was “Huw, have a look at this, will ya?” We saw, with the time sped up, that after dark, the grass covered by our crates slowly unwound a bit and pushed at the bottoms of the crates. It wasn't a mindful action, there was nothing that suggested sentience to me, just a plant looking for a way around an obstruction to be ready for the sunlight. Once it started getting light out, all the grass lay down again and entwined the way we see it every single day.
I don't know what to make of it, why it only does this while it's dark, but Huw's s
howing it to the xenobotonist (yes, in the Black Moon group) and to Phenni Almaric to get their thoughts on it. It does look like when we come to our settlement area, we'll need to dig down beneath the grass to place our domes, beneath the roots and all just to be sure.
Tonight little Catrin came running up to me just before her mother started calling the kids to bed. She brought me a picture she'd drawn on her pad, and linked her pad with mine so I could have the drawing properly. It was a little, carefully scrawled figure standing beneath a loop of what I assume is grass, a tiny, humanoid figure with a little, pointed head.
“It's a faery,” she said breathlessly. “I found it when we stopped for lunch. Cadell and me found it.”
“What?” I asked, amused. She's got a big head full of stories.
“Oh, yes,” she said, solemn. “It was under the ramp of our crate, hiding in the grass. I gave it some of my lemon bar.” “Oh, really,” I said. “What did your faery think about our traveling food?” She shrugged. “I don't know, I couldn't understand him then. When he talked he just made that sound like when the treads go over the grass!” She made a motion of moving across the plain with her hand and a tiny, squeaky noise with her mouth.”
“Well, doesn't that just beat all,” I said. “Did you tell your mom about it?”
“She told me to stop telling stories and go do my schoolwork,” Catrin said, aggrieved. “Hmmm. Telling stories is hard work, but it's important work,” I said. “But it's not always the best time for telling them if someone's not ready to listen. Write it down so you don't forget it. And make more pictures like this to go with it.”
She beamed. “I will make a hundred pictures! Once I meet more faeries, I mean. He said I could talk to his family someday soon.”
Planetfall For Marda Page 3