by Chad Spencer
“How long will it take to get an answer?” he asked the datacrown.
“Assuming the answer is transmitted in a timely manner, it should take no more than an hour. The likelihood is 97.7% that it will take less.”
Arvix said, “Dinner is served, Master Jeff.”
Numbly, Jeff rose, ambled out to the porch, and plopped onto the bench. Arvix placed his plate in his hands and set his glass beside him on the bench. Bob munched happily on the meal that Arvix brought for him. Unable to eat, Jeff just stared into the distance.
The sun slipped below the mountains. In the growing darkness, Jeff slowly realized he was hearing a familiar sound. It was a faraway music that sounded like little tiny people singing in a strange language. As it had the year before, a seemingly unending cloud of emeraldbugs drifted into the air. The light from the receding sun danced off their rainbow wings and the music rolled in a sweet chorus into the evening sky. A green glow emanated from each insect as it danced above the grass.
Jeff sat, listening to the music and watching the emeraldbugs. “I’ll bet tomorrow is the first day of the rainy season,” he murmured.
At last, the comm panel beeped. Jeff sprang to his feet and tore into the house. He thumped the icon that answered the call. His father’s image appeared on the screen.
“Jeff. Son. I’m so glad to hear from you. I … I really missed you. You look good, really good. The planet we’re on is mostly a desert. It’s hard to survive here. We’re coming to you. We’ll be there in about two weeks. I can hardly wait to see you again. By the time you get this message, we’ll already be loading. We may have even launched. I still can’t believe you’re alive. I’ll see you soon, son. As soon as I can.”
7
It was overcast and drizzling lightly the day Jeff’s family arrived. Watching the shuttles descend, Jeff could hardly contain himself. Bob bounced nervously through the fresh, tall grass. As the two shuttle pods approached the ground, Jeff couldn’t stand still any more. He took off running towards them. The hatches flopped open just as he arrived. Out spilled the two girls first. Denise bounded from the far shuttle calling, “Jeff! Jeff! Jeff!” She jumped on him and wrapped her arms around his neck, laughing. Jeff gave her a big hug back, her feet dangling above the ground.
Kent emerged next. Jeff ran to meet his dad and hugged him hard. Kent wept silently as he held Jeff close. At last, he let Jeff go and stood back to look at him.
“You look good kid,” Kent told him gently. “You’ve grown. And when was the last time you cut your hair?”
Jeff brushed his long, wavy brown locks out of his eyes. “Oh, the hair. I guess I kinda forgot about it. It’s been a while since I cut it, I guess. I started tying it back a couple of months ago.” He looked his dad over. “Have you lost weight?”
An embarrassed look crossed Kent’s face. “Yeah,” he replied. “I guess I did. Are you starting to grow a mustache?”
Now it was Jeff’s turn to be embarrassed. “Uh, not really. I guess I need to start shaving. I just never thought about it when I was alone.”
Tears came to Kent’s eyes again. “How in the universe did you live through all that? How did you survive the ceiling collapse on the ship? How did you get down here? How could you build all this by yourself? What’s that dome over there? No one can build all this by themselves.”
Jeff smiled and shrugged. “I … uh … the ceiling panels came down in a way that left a space underneath. I was in that. I flew the shuttle down here and brought down all this stuff. The house and the farm buildings built themselves. They talk a lot while they’re doing it too. I brought the animals in my shuttle pod.”
Denise was still bounding excitedly around Jeff and his dad. Danae, Dirk, and Porsche had approached while they were talking. Kent asked, “But how did you build that dome? And why? It’s not a biodome; there’re no clear panels in the support beams. The weather can go right in there.”
“Oh, that was to keep out the giant seasnakes.”
Everyone went silent. Even Denise stopped jumping around. “Giant seasnakes?” Kent asked, incredulously.
“Yeah, but they’re not really snakes. Their bodies are in segments. They’re more like a type of insect. But that’s what I call them. They’re about sixty yards long and have really, really big mouths. About eight feet across.”
Jeff was surprised by their shocked expressions. “Don’t worry,” he told them. “You’re safe in a dome. The fireflies don’t bother you there either.”
Cautiously, as if he really wasn’t sure he wanted the answer, Kent asked, “Fireflies?”
“Well, that’s what I call them. They’re these big flying cat-lizard-bug things. They ooze this sticky fluid that starts on fire as soon as it hits the air. When they come at you, it looks like a huge fireball with wings. But don’t worry; they die if they get wet. The dome has a built-in sprinkler system on the outside. When the fireflies come, it turns on automatically. They get outta here as fast as they can go. They won’t come around for a while anyway. Not until after the seasnakes lay their eggs and the rainy season ends.”
Jeff knew he was rambling a little. It was just that he was so glad to see everyone.
With great gravity, Kent asked, “Have you been attacked by all of these animals?”
“Yeah,” Jeff replied. “They ruined my first farm. But it’s all ok now.”
Nearly hysterical, Porsche shouted, “All ok?” she almost shouted. “All ok? This planet is full of monsters and you say it’s all ok?”
Huffily, Jeff shot back, “I get along just fine. Besides, the animals here are nothing compared to what’s on the mainland. This is the safest place I could find.”
Porsche looked as if she would faint.
Meekly, Denise asked, “Jeff? Are we going to be ok?”
“Sure,” Jeff replied, smiling. “See that big dome over there? It keeps my farm safe. I’ll build one for you too.”
Puzzled, Kent asked, “What do you mean, Jeff? We can all just live together in the dome you’ve built.”
Hesitantly, Jeff answered, “Well, I hadn’t really thought about that. I guess I assumed you’d want your own place. That’s my farm. I guess I kinda look at it as my place in the universe.”
Kent appeared suddenly deflated. He turned his gaze away toward Jeff’s farm.
Dirk interjected snidely, “You didn’t build that. No one can build a big thing like that all by themselves.”
Indignantly, Jeff shot back, “That shows how much you know. I built it with nanobots.”
“Nanobots?” Kent asked, shocked. “That’s illegal.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not too worried about the cops.” Jeff shrugged. “They had the nanobots on the Ellsworth. They had special permission. They had this project called the Living Ship. I was working on it before the disaster. I learned to program them, so I wrote programs to build the dome and the sprinkler system. It wasn’t that hard.”
Kent was dumfounded. “I … I’m absolutely amazed, son. I’m beginning to think you’re almost superhuman. If you told me that you could fly right now, I think I’d believe you.”
Jeff was flummoxed. He looked at the ground, shuffled his foot, and shrugged. Kent hugged him again. “Well, hopefully you won’t mind us staying with you at your farm until our farm is built,” he said.
Jeff noticed the way his father stressed the word “your.” He figured he’d hurt his father’s feelings. But it had never occurred to him that his father might want to take over his farm.
He replied, “Sure, Dad. But I only have two bedrooms. I suppose you guys can have them for a while. I’ll sleep in the barn with the animals.”
“Animals!” Denise cried out. “I want to see the animals!”
Jeff smiled. Bob, who was now about the same height as Danae, chose that moment to emerge from the grass. Porsche screamed. Dirk stepped quickly backwards.
“Don’t worry. That’s just Bob,” he said calmly. “Bob, come. Bob, sit. Good boy.” The gorillabug sat
obediently beside Jeff, gazing happily at him.
“Bob?” Dirk demanded. “You call that thing Bob?”
“He’s not a thing,” Jeff hissed. “He’s a dogbug. Or at least he was. Then he turned into a gorillabug. I couldn’t think of a better name than Bob. There was a lot going on.”
“So I gather,” Kent interrupted. “But you shouldn’t be keeping a native life form. It could carry diseases, or grow into something that will consider us all walking meals.”
“Bob’s not going to give us diseases. He’s been with me since he hatched and it’s been just fine. I think he’s fully grown now. I’m kind of not sure because he keeps changing form. Like I said, he used to be more like a dog.”
Kent didn’t seem to know what to say. At last he shrugged and suggested, “Well then, how about we go take a look at this farm of yours?”
“Sure Dad.”
Jeff led them toward the dome and took them through its large doors. To make Denise happy, he showed them the barn and animal pastures first. When she tried to climb through the fence to pet the cows, he warned her, “Better not do that, Denise. That’s a boy cow over there. It’s called a bull. He’s not too friendly.” He pointed toward the horse pasture. “You can pet the baby horse.” Denise let out an excited yell and took off like a shot with Danae trotting after her. As they walked toward the house, Kent asked, “Do you have a name for this planet of yours?”
“Yeah,” he responded. “I call it Akio. The gas giant is Harriet. There’s a storm that looks like a girl with long red hair blowing in the wind. She kept me company.”
A worried look passed across Kent’s face, but he made no remarks about Jeff’s comment. Instead he queried, “Have you got anything to eat around here? We’ve been living on synthpaste.”
Jeff smiled. “You bet. In fact, I’ve had Arvix cooking all day; Sirsen Darnell’s beef Wellington recipe. And there’s all kinds of vegetables, berries, apples, oranges, and bananas. That’s all I could harvest on so short a notice. But I did have enough flour for a cake, and I made raspberry ice cream. Arvix should have it all ready and set up in the living room by now. I went to the Ellsworth yesterday and got a table big enough for us all to sit at, and some chairs.”
Kent stopped walking. Looking Jeff right in the eyes he said, “I’m really impressed at how well you’ve done, son. I’m amazed in fact. I’m very proud of you.”
Self-consciously, Jeff responded, “Thanks Dad.”
They gathered in the house, where they all sat down together for a meal. Jeff was surprised at how much everyone ate. ‘They act like they haven’t eaten in a week,’ he thought. But he was glad to see them all happy. After dinner, they all listened to Jeff’s stories of his year alone on planet Akio.
When it was time for bed, Jeff let Porsche and his dad have his room. The girls slept in the spare bedroom on a couple of beds that Jeff had brought down for them. Dirk preferred to return to his shuttle to sleep. Carrying a blanket with him, Jeff went to the barn and bedded down in the hayloft. As he lay in the soft hay, he felt happier and more content than he had in a very long time.
In the morning, they all unloaded the shuttles. Jeff was surprised at how little was in them. He wondered where their synthpaste supplies were. There didn’t seem to be any food at all. They prepared to lift off to retrieve supplies from the Ellsworth.
“Can I ride with Jeff?” Denise asked meekly.
“You want to come along?” Kent asked. She nodded, so he continued, “I suppose. But you’ll have to stay in the shuttle. Jeff, is it ok if the girls ride with you?”
Jeff smiled at them and nodded. “Sure.”
As they rose into the morning sky, Jeff commented to Denise, “You sure have grown, kid. You’re 8 now, aren’t you? And Danae is 13?” Denise nodded. Danae was chuckling.
“What?” Jeff queried.
“You talk like Kent,” she replied. They smiled at each other. Then a serious look passed over her face. “Kent took really good care of us, Jeff. He treats us like his own kids—even Dirk. “
Jeff’s expression clouded, but he didn’t say anything.
“It was really hard for him, Jeff,” she continued.
“What do you mean?”
“The planet we were on was hot, really hot. There wasn’t much water and almost no food. We were running out of synthpaste when we got your beacon. But we were going to come here anyway. We couldn’t find enough food. Kent skipped eating a lot so we could have enough. That’s why he’s so skinny.”
Amazed, Jeff asked, “Why didn’t you come here sooner?”
“Kent said we had to wait until the two planets were close enough together. And we were really low on fuel when we landed. It took us a long time to gather enough water to make the ships go. Why do the ships only run on water? Can’t you put anything in a fusion generator?”
Nodding, Jeff answered, “Yeah, you can in regular generators like the ones in the houses and barns. That’s where all our garbage and sewage goes. But a spaceship has to get the maximum amount of power from the minimum amount of fuel. The best way to do that is to use filtered water mixed with seaboricite. If you can’t get seaboricite, the next best thing is just water. That’s what the generators on a spaceship are designed to take. If you try to put in anything else, you burn them out.”
As he thought about his father’s struggles to feed and take care of his family, Jeff felt a little ashamed that he hadn’t been willing to share his farm. ‘I’m not the only one that’s been through a hard year,’ he thought.
Kent decided that the best location for the new farm was on the other side of the hill from Jeff’s farm, near the north branch of the river. “There’s room to grow there,” he said. “If we want to later, we can build an extra dome or two for more pastures and fields.”
Jeff, Kent, and Dirk went to the cargo bay to find a house. The housing unit they selected had three bedrooms. “These housing units are for farmers that are pretty well off,” Kent explained, “not normally for regular colonists like us. Well, hopefully that’s what I’ll become—a well-to-do farmer.”
Kent paused a moment and then continued, “But since we’re on a new world that can clearly be dangerous, I want everyone to carry a gridPhone. Porsche, you, and the kids need to learn to use plasma rifles. I want everyone who can to carry some sort of weapon.”
The work went quickly with three shuttles making trips to the ship. After a couple of days, it was interrupted briefly by the arrival of the seasnakes. From the inside of Jeff’s dome, they watched as the giant creatures rose from the sea. Jeff’s animals cowered in the barn.
The huge beasts swarmed across the broad plain, searching for places to dig their nests and lay eggs. Many of them smelled the humans and animals inside the dome. They flung themselves at the structure, beating it with their bodies. Everyone but Jeff and Kent stayed inside the house. Standing with his father a few yards from the dome’s outer rim, Jeff watched as the angry creatures flailed at the superstrong posts and beams. Nothing they did had any effect. Still, their massive attacks made the dome shudder. Kent wondered aloud if they should try to drive the creatures off with their guns.
“Don’t bother,” Jeff suggested, “It just makes them madder. Even on the highest setting. I tried it. It almost got me killed.”
Wide-eyed, Kent asked, “What happened?”
“It chased me when I was riding my first horse, Hurricane. It got the horse, but I got away.” He didn’t mention anything about flying.
After a while, the seasnakes gave up looking for a meal and left to lay their eggs. That day, Danae offered to cut Jeff’s hair. “I learned by cutting Denise’s hair. Mine too. Kent lets me cut his hair. I’m pretty good at it,” she offered hopefully.
“Ok,” replied Jeff. He brought a chair outside and sat down. Wielding a comb and a pair of sonic scissors, Danae gave him his first haircut in quite a while. When she was finished, Jeff checked himself out in the mirror. “It looks great,” he told her. She blushed
and smiled shyly.
When the seasnakes made their way back to the ocean, work resumed on the new farm. Jeff retrieved more nanobots and programmed them. The new dome was finished long before everything was brought down from the Ellsworth.
After a couple of weeks, the seasnake’s eggs hatched so the work stopped again for a few days. However, things got going quickly again when they left. By the time the rainy season ended, everyone but Jeff had moved into the new house. The new barn was full of animals, and the fields and greenhouses were planted. The sun was shining.
Bob continued to grow until he was nearly twice as tall as Jeff. Because he was now too big for the house, Jeff made him sleep in the barn. Bob wasn’t too happy about that.
Every day, after he finished the chores on his own farm, Jeff rode Lakota over the hill to help the others with their chores. At first, Bob trailed along behind. But each time he got near Porsche, he would pick her up and sniff her.
“It’s going to eat me!” she invariably squealed as Bob cradled her gently.
“No he’s not!” Jeff always retorted hotly. “He just likes to smell you. I think he likes your perfume.” These situations usually didn’t end well, so Jeff stopped bringing Bob over with him.
Every day, after he finished the chores on his own farm, Jeff rode Lakota over the hill to help the others with their chores. By mid-afternoon, all the chores were usually done so Jeff often took the girls on horseback rides. They sat on the mare as he held the reins and led it along. One day, as he walked them over the hill towards his farm, Denise said, “Jeff, I wish we could live on the same side of the hill as you. Then we could come over to your house every day.”
He smiled. “You see me every day anyway. Don’t you like your house? You’ve got all those new animals.”