The mucking out of the stone houses, and reroofing two of them, had consumed the energies of a large part of the Nisuans as well, under Tisix’s supervision. He confessed to me that since they had a much better idea than he did of how to use a wooden spade and a stone ax, whenever our few power tools weren’t called for his real function was to “stand around and make people feel like they should keep working.” Hunting parties found that their job was easy: a great deal of foliage had been destroyed, and animals coming down to the river to drink had little or no cover, so that we had almost unlimited food, as long as you didn’t mind eating nothing but roasted meat for every meal.
Itenn took over sanitation and cleanup; as she said, she was supervising the only work that required fewer brains than the work Tisix was supervising. The parts of Real People Town that we didn’t salvage for our own use, or burn for fuel, went into great heaps that we set fire to with hand masers, in order to destroy all the dead animals and Seteposian corpses. Wild dogs were coming out of the hills to eat the abundant carrion in the valleys, and we wanted them to stay away from our camp.
In the middle of all this, Bepemm and I, with Diehrenn and Weruz as assistants, ran around frantically counting, enumerating, and calculating, taking breaks only for Bepemm to look in on Beremahm, whose progress was rapid and encouraging. We wanted to at least have all the answers she could reasonably ask for; it was strange how the effort of getting those answers together, in such a short time, seemed to help us hold off the perception of just how dismal those answers really were.
Beremahm was fine when Bepemm brought her out from under sedation two days later; like all of us she was extremely unhappy at being marooned for at least the next decade, and she woke up terribly hungry, but after three days of Bepemm’s putting her through every conceivable medical check, while she had nothing to do but read through the lander’s technical library, she finally said, “Enough of this. Absolutely enough of this. I may not be well, but if I am not, you aren’t going to find the cause, and the last three things you’ve checked me for, Bepemm, have been things that you couldn’t treat me for anyway. Let’s get to business.”
We walked into the middle of what was left of Real People Town—not much, because so much had been burned or reused—past the heaps of stones that marked where the wall had been, and into one of the better stone huts. We had agreed that the Nisuans born on Setepos should elect four representatives, since it was clearly impossible for all of them to be part of the decision, so Diehrenn, Prirox, Osepok, and Zahmekoses were there waiting for us. “They had to elect representatives who spoke Nisuan,” Osepok explained, an amused grin playing across her face. “Weruz is too shy, and Otuz has only recently recovered consciousness. And besides, who else here has any understanding of what you’re going to talk about?”
“And by pure accident,” Beremahm said, returning the grin, “it happened that exactly the ones I’d have appointed, if I were dictator, ended up as your representatives. Now that we have everyone together, let’s get started and figure out what’s what.”
We spent a while going over the total resources available. The lander was actually in pretty good shape and had been fully refueled and provisioned; it could haul up to sixty of us at a time to anywhere on Setepos, so one possibility was to go to one of the areas that Seteposians had not yet reached. “If we go to the big island off the Hook, or better still to the ones that are south and east of Southland, it’s unlikely that either place will be reached for millennia, not until the Seteposians come up with ways of doing long-ocean voyaging. And there are a lot of smaller islands, some of which have wonderful climates. None of those places is likely to have any big predators or venomous animals, either,” I summarized. “We could get everyone there in four lander trips, with one additional trip to get all our stuff from here to there. With the micro-smelters on the landers, we could also make a certain amount of iron or other metals as needed.”
“I think we can modify it to make glass as well,” Krurix said, “and we have chemical equipment to make some plastics. We’ve got an industrial plant for at least a while.”
“How long?” Beremahm asked.
“Well, that’s another problem,” Krurix said. “Each lander still has an almost full charge of antimatter—it uses almost none coming down or going up—and we can use them to give us electricity at max output for about five years. For that matter we could make more antimatter—the lander is set up to do it—but the process is horribly inefficient and you need the kind of power input that we used to have on Egalitarian Republic to do it in a timely way.”
“Well,” I pointed out, “we can use the solar panels we found intact to give us enough electricity for our little colony, if we don’t insist on using electricity for everything. Why don’t we use power from them to make more antimatter?”
“Because every bit they’ve got isn’t enough for the minimum energy to make antimatter,” Krurix said, “but anyway, there might be a solution to this. I just wanted to make sure the problem was on the table: we need a really large power source. Something on the order of a fusion reactor or a major hydropower project, if we want the lander to last until the rescue effort gets here.”
“All right,” I said, “a big energy source is nearly a necessity. If we don’t have that, we won’t have a modern industrial capability after a couple of years, and should we be stranded for longer than we anticipate—or should we have an emergency while waiting—that could be a very serious problem. Bepemm, I think you have the biggest problem to discuss. Can you talk about that?”
She sighed. “I really wish Dr. Lerimarsix were here. But I guess we’ll have to go with what I can determine. It looks to me like the terrible protein reaction disease that struck several of the Nisuans who were here for a long time is not at all far off for many of the Nisuans born here. Weruz was extremely close—she already had a few early undiagnosed symptoms—and Prirox and Diehrenn were so close to it that I doubt they’d have lasted out the year. Now, all of you are safe for the moment, because you’ve had the dialysis and you’re good for another twenty or thirty years, local. But if we assume the forty-fourth local year, give or take one, is about when it will strike, then we’re going to lose more than thirty Nisuans to the disease in the minimum time it takes for a rescue vessel to get here. That’s the number of undialyzed people more than thirty-four years old. But it’s clear that second-generation natives, probably due to exposure in the womb, form the toxins much faster— and so you can’t expect them to last as long. Even if they do, their birth cohorts are much bigger. So if the rescue is delayed even a few years, we could lose fifty, a hundred . . . who knows how many. The thirty or so oldest are merely the ones certain to die; there could easily be three times as many deaths.”
“Out of less than two hundred and fifty,” Beremahm said. “All of us from Egalitarian Republic would live, of course—for another forty-four years, barring accidents—but what you’re saying is that if we end up as a permanently stranded colony here, the maximum lifespan will always be about forty-four of Setepos’s years. Or just about forty of ours. Our females will die with less than a third of their reproductive years available . . . this isn’t going to work well.”
“Especially not because the toxins also produce fairly early sterility,” Bepemm said. “Even the Nim noticed that; ten years after puberty most of the Nisuans were sterile. We’d have to breed the way the Nim forced people to do: baby after baby as soon as puberty hits. Not a good way to live.”
Beremahm sighed. “You spoke of some way out, Krurix?” she asked.
I answered quickly, “Well, it was really Zahmekoses who made the suggestion,” and gestured for him to speak. Here, if anywhere, was where Beremahm might decide that we were all crazy.
“We do have a source of Nisuan food,” he said. “At least there’s a good chance that we do. And remember the problem is caused by ingesting Seteposian proteins, even in minute quantities. So since we can’t do dialysis, the only way fo
r us to all survive is to eat nothing but Nisuan food. So what I suggest is . . .” he drew a deep breath, his old voice cracking “. . . that we go up to Wahkopem Zomos, which is still in orbit—”
“The ship’s farm!” Beremahm said. “That solves it, doesn’t it?”
“Not quite,” Zahmekoses said. “Nisuan plants, animals, and tissue cultures are undoubtedly susceptible to the same kind of slow poisoning-by-immune-reaction as we are. Furthermore, if we raise them down here they’ll take up Seteposian proteins, too. So it would slow but not stop the disease, and there’s no guarantee that we can raise Nisuan food at all here on a long-term basis. We need a sterile environment in which we can build a much bigger sealed farm.”
Beremahm groaned. “This gets worse and worse.”
“Or better,” Krurix said. “Here’s the other part of it. Remember I said we needed a big energy source, like a fusion reactor? Well, Proyerin and I were fiddling around, and we think we can make one, a fairly crude job. It won’t run on regular deuterium, unfortunately, that we could get here— but it will run on helium-3.”
“And there’s a source of that on Setepos?”
“Not right on Setepos,” Proyerin said, grinning.
Beremahm looked around at the strange smiles in the room and said, “Well, now I know why Captain Baegess said the commanding officer is always the only person who doesn’t know what’s going on. All right, you’ve all come up with a way to solve this problem, and you were all afraid I would think it was too crazy, or perhaps too dangerous. Now if I admit that I’m desperate for a solution, would you please tell me what in the Creator’s name you’ve got in mind?”
“Well,” I said, “we need a sterile environment with a lot of helium-3 around. And we suddenly realized that there’s a perfect place; something I remembered from the nuclear magnetic resonance map that our low-altitude scanning satellite made of the moon. Plenty of helium-3 because it’s been accumulating out of the solar wind since the moon cooled from magma. Right there on the surface waiting to be picked up. The solar panels would easily give you enough power to run an extractor and isotope separator, and then the fusion reactor would supply enough power to keep the lander recharged indefinitely. And with surplus power from all that ...” I permitted myself to grin. “Well, the soil of the moon is a very low-grade aluminum ore, and there’s enough silica around that we can make glass as well, and most importantly, there’s a lot of water, ammonia, and carbon dioxide, deposited as ice in deep craters at the south pole. We can build a farm on the moon—and live there as well.”
“What’s the time frame?” Beremahm asked, quietly.
“Two eightdays to get a fusion reactor going; about the same to get the Wahkopem Zomos farm back on-line,” Bepemm said. “We move the six undialyzed people who are closest to the edge up to Wahkopem Zomos, where Otuz and Zahmekoses start teaching them to run the farm. We think it will only be a few eightdays more, after we get the reactor running, before we have the first sealed and pressurized environments on the moon. Then we seed the habitats, move the first group of colonists off Wahkopem Zomos to the moon, move the next group up to Wahkopem Zomos, and so forth. About twenty in a group—the bottleneck is Wahkopem Zomos itself. In half a year we have a trained cadre of farmers and workers on the moon, with room enough for everyone else. Both landers start running as a ferry; we move the last hundred and eighty in three quick swoops. And at that point we’ve got a base that could last us for centuries if it had to, especially because between the library and factory equipment on Wahkopem Zomos, and the computer and micro-industry on the lander, we can make just about anything we might need, except good luck. And we’ll be completely independent of this planet and its poisons.”
“What happens when we run out?” Beremahm said abruptly.
“Run out of what?” I asked, staring stupidly.
“How much ice is there at the south pole?”
“A few centuries’ worth, maybe more, assuming we lose one percent per year to leaks,” Proyerin said. “That’s plenty of time for us to get rescued.”
“Is it?” Beremahm asked. “You know, as your commanding officer, I’ve been doing a bit of thinking, too, and I had a lot of time to sit and read in that lander while Bepemm did all those tests on me. And I had been thinking along pretty much the same lines as you all, but with a few interesting differences. Here’s what I came up with.
“Think about the situation back home. The alien-protein-immune-sickness we discovered here is not only going to happen on Setepos, you know. It will happen anywhere where we are immersed in an alien ecosystem, at least until we genetically modify ourselves enough—and it will take decades to find out what must be done in each case, perhaps centuries to produce Nisuans who can live outside a Nisuan biosphere. And perhaps we can never succeed; perhaps we will always need to be under constant medical treatment to live in any other kind of biosphere. Some places the progress of the disease is bound to be more rapid than here, some places less, but it will happen.
“So what does that imply? There are only about sixty Nisuan years left until the Second Bombardment. And we have just demonstrated to them that any living world is unsuitable to our long-term survival. Do you see what that means? For almost a century, we have been looking for the wrong planets to emigrate to! Worse yet, the fast zero-point-energy laser-drive scout ships that have departed in the last four years—at least four of them besides us—have all gone to the wrong places.
“By the time they get our message they will have to scramble to find any suitable worlds at all. What they need are planets that can be ‘Nisu-formed,’ to coin a phrase—places where there is no life, but which could be modified to support Nisuan life. If they can find such planets, they can seed them with Nisuan life and gradually make them habitable for us. That process may take a few hundred years, but the big Migration Project ships are designed to hold crews of millions for centuries anyway; they can simply orbit the new worlds while they work on them. But when they get our message, they are going to figure out that they must find and scout Nisu-formable worlds immediately. Every available scout-ship will have to be diverted to that purpose, quite a few of them diverted en route.
“And remember there are far too many of us to move in a single scoutship; they would have to build a special rescue vessel, or send six or seven modified scoutships here. They won’t have time. Some of the places where they will be looking for Nisu-formable worlds will have to be twenty light-years and more away. That means twenty years for the scoutship to get there, and, if the place is suitable, twenty more for the radio message to come back, leaving only twenty to build a city in space and get it launched . . . no, they simply can’t spare the resources to come and get us. Everything has to go into scoutships and colony ships, flat out as hard as they can do it, right up till the rocks fall.
“We are here for good.”
It took a long time for that message to sink in. Finally Krurix said, “You’ve convinced me, anyway. I guess we can just settle on the moon and hope we think of something else before we run out of ice. Maybe we can improve recycling or find a way to get enough replacements from Setepos or—”
Beremahm looked at us all with a little secret grin—the kind that we had all been giving her—and said, “But you all give up too easily. And so do I. You have half the solution right there—how our people can live for a century or so. And I have the other half—think about the fourth planet from Kousapex, the next one out from here.”
“The War Star?” Diehrenn asked, in Real-People.
“That’s the one,” Beremahm said. “All the stuff life needs, in huge quantities, but the probes found no life. Two small moons—perfect bases with plenty of raw materials. I rather strongly suspect that given a century to work, we can make a pretty good home there. We might or might not ever be able to breathe without a helmet, we might never be able to create a lake and go swimming there, but we can live a long time. Probably we can live for three hundred years, till the Migration
Project ship gets there and starts Nisu-forming, with a better set of tools than we and our descendants will have.
“I just hadn’t been able to figure out how we’d get that century or so that we needed to make a home there. Especially since I had forgotten that Wahkopem Zomos was still around, so I didn’t remember that we had crops and animal tissue from the ship’s farm, and of course our poor little lander’s life-support system would never make it as far as the War Star. I like that name, by the way. What does it mean?”
I told her, and she laughed. “Well, then, what would be Real-People for ‘Peace Star’?”
“They don’t have a word for peace,” Diehrenn said.
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