John cleared his throat. "I don't like to be even more discouraging, but it's possible they've left the area for good. Without the ship and its equipment, they may feel they're on their own."
This chilling thought was countered by Carmen. "I don't believe that," she said firmly. "If nothing else, simple curiosity will bring them near fairly soon!"
The talk went on, not smoothly, but brief phrases uttered as the speaker felt compelled. Struggling to comprehend this desperate situation, searching for some sign of hope, feeling physically tired, and uncomfortable, and wet—and having to articulate our thoughts—I know I felt exhausted by the efforts I was making. And yet we kept on talking. It was a new shock, after an hour or so, when there came from the sea a loud and eerie ululation. We went to the edge of the water, and could see, well enough, the familiar forms of our alien friends, floating in the shallows.
"I don't even know how to begin!" said Cinnamon grimly. "If I wave, will they 'see' that?"
"I'm going to try talking to them," said Richard, and suited action to word with a roaring bellow of sound. "HELLO THERE!"
The keening stopped, and I was astounded to hear a strange voice—one I'd never heard before, but clear and sharp. Familiar as I had been with the computer-generated translation of the flouwen's "speech," I listened to this new sound in shocked amazement.
"Why you shout?"
"I understood that!" breathed Cinnamon.
How long had the flouwen been quietly absorbing our words on their own initiative, and how had they managed to duplicate our speech? This was an exciting development, and completely unforeseen!
"Can you hear and understand us?" called Jinjur, slowly and loudly.
"Yes," said a different voice, somewhat huskier than the first. "Like Little Red say, if talking sticks not work, we can talk human."
"Could you do this before?" asked Shirley. "We never knew! Why didn't you say you could do this?"
The third voice was much lower than the other two. "We think you prefer talking sticks. We not talk human good."
A spontaneous cheer broke from us all.
"You talk fine!" shouted Arielle encouragingly, and I agreed, heartily. The grammar can come later, if at all; the important thing is to establish comfortable and open conversations with the flouwen, who are so much at home here. They can be a very real aid to our survival, that is obvious. Not only can they retrieve vital objects from our crashed lander, they can help us procure information about the life on this planet that will keep us from harm. A powerful surge of joy swept through us all. Here was real hope! Our former condescension to the aliens was instantly transformed into appreciation—and I, at least, no longer felt quite so alone.
We moved into the ripples. Richard said warmly, "I owe my life to you, friends. Thank you." Little Red came near his friend to speak. "You let us out of tank. Hard work for you. You swim down to us! That surprise us!"
"We thought we had these creatures analyzed," said John softly. "But it didn't even occur to us that they were intelligent enough to learn to copy our speech. I wonder how much else there is to learn about them, and the rest of this planet, that is going to seem painfully obvious when we find it out?"
Shirley was full of questions, and she and Jinjur kept up a steady flow, "Is the water going to suit you? Is there food here for you? What is the lander doing, still sinking? Can you get back through the airlock? Can you bring things up? How deep . . ."
Little Purple answered patiently. "Water okay. Needs something—(the next word was unintelligible to us).
"Ammonia, I'll bet," muttered John.
"Plenty food here, different, but okay."
"GOOD!" said Little Red.
"Little Red lucky, found (another unintelligible word)" explained Little White. Obviously we have much to learn about each other's languages still!
"Is the lander still going down?" repeated Jinjur,
"Yes. Not fast now. It slide down hill. Long way to bottom." The tone was unconcerned, but the words are bad news for us. With dismay I recalled that our exploratory robot Bubble had been unable to reach the bottom of this particular lagoon, and we had selected it for that reason, ironically, as being the landing area where we would do the least damage to the environment.
I had a suggestion. "Can you show us, here on the top of the water, how far down the lander is?" A brief touch, one to the other, and Little Red sped off to one side, with Little White going in the opposite direction. At an appalling distance from each other, they sang out:
"Here!"
"To here!"
About half the width of the lagoon, or about 200 meters, straight down.
Urgently, Cinnamon, Richard, and Carmen began to try to describe to the flouwen the things they thought most important to retrieve, if possible.
"Anything that's loose and floating," said Shirley.
"Anything you can get loose!" added Jinjur.
"Anything you can break off . . ." Richard was going on to suggest more destruction, I suspect, but John stopped him.
"Wait. If they just go smashing around down there they may damage something we can eventually recover. It's not as though they are using our judgement—at least, I don't think so!" I believe it's the first time I have ever heard self-doubt from John!
As the others continued to offer suggestions for likely places to search and useful objects to bring up, I listened with little to add—these people all know their work so well!—but I did interject, whenever possible, a very sincere "Please!" Perhaps the word was alien to the flouwen now, but I was determined they should learn it happily. At length, armed with instructions, the flouwen sank from sight and we have been trying to relax, while waiting.
"I'll be glad of anything they can bring us," sighed Jinjur, "But if I had any say at all about it, I'd want some way to link back to Prometheus first of all. What I'd give to hear that dry voice of James's!"
There seems to be no answer to that. None of us has any say in the matter at all. It's starting to rain again, steadily. Fortunately, it's warm rain, but we seem to have been wet for all of our time here.
The flouwen returned rather more quickly than we expected, struggling with our badly crumpled food locker between them, and bearing disquieting news. The extremely high water pressure at the bottom of the deep lagoon has crushed most of the equipment, including the spacesuit backpacks, which were designed to withstand vacuum, not high pressure. With salt water all through them, the computers, radios, and power supplies are damaged beyond repair.
Nels inspected the food locker. "That's the supply of special frozen food that was to last us for the duration," he said quietly. "The rest of our supplies were freeze-dried items, no doubt saturated with salt water now."
"Well, let's haul this out and use what we can," said David briskly. "If we can consume it before it spoils, we'll get some good out of it." Nels and Richard tugged the thing out of the water and up the shore. There's no way we can even use the chest for much else, unless we can get some more tools.
Little Purple was obviously pleased with the small additional find he'd procured. "Stuff for helping when needed!" was his very creditable translation of the Beagle's emergency medical bag. It is damaged, but the vials of emergency pain-killers and antibiotics are intact.
Shirley was pacing up and down the beach, finally stopping to face Jinjur. "If the flouwen help me, I can get down there!" she said intensely. "And when I'm there, I know I can get into the Dragonfly and activate Josephine. With her help we can make a real try at separating the aerospaceplane from the lander. There's bound to be pockets of air for me to breathe long enough to do that, and you realize if we can get the Dragonfly up here, we can use its engines and rockets to get off this moon and back to . . ."
"No, Shirley." It was John who said it. "Dragonfly is at least two hundred meters down! Even if the flouwen sped you there and back as fast as they can go, the pressure would cave in your chest and kill you before you reached the lander—and the bends would ca
tch you if you tried to come back up. It's just not humanly possible to get down there!"
"Dragonfly is thing with wings like Pretty-Smell that fly through the nothing?" Little White queried, having flown in Dragonfly Two back on Rocheworld.
"Yes!" said Arielle eagerly. "Is it OK?"
"No." The flat negative was chilling. "Tail broken. Not swim in nothing anymore. Warm though," he added thoughtfully. Arielle gave a single, heartbroken sob, and David reached for her.
Shirley groaned. "Dormant, that's what it is," she said. "We had the system powered down for the landing. If the flouwen can detect warmth, it's because Josephine is keeping the nuclear reactor at maintenance power level. But with a broken tail, that means part of the radiator system is gone and we'll never be able to run the nuclear reactor at operational power levels. From a technology point of view, Dragonfly is as far out of reach as Prometheus."
Involuntarily I looked up again. The sky was heavy with gray cloud, and only through occasional breaks could I see through to even more cloud, moving swiftly. No chance for the watchers overhead to send anything to us, and no way for us to signal them.
After a brief conference, we have decided to obtain as much from the lander as the flouwen are willing to bring us, and then rest. Jinjur stepped to the shore to issue orders, and I moved quickly up beside her. She listed aloud the special things to look for—containers, tools, food, bedding from the sleeping racks, and I continued to interject my softening words, changing the orders to requests. When she finished, she stared at me in exasperation. "D'you really think this is the time and place for manners, Reiki?"
"Never more so," I replied firmly. "And it's one of the few things we've have left, isn't it?"
We are settled for the night, and I have the first watch. The flouwen worked hard, bless them, and so did we all. Some of the items retrieved from the sinking lander had never seemed important to us before; Shirley pounced with a whoop of delight on her cutter-pliers, and set them out on a rock under a leaf to dry. Most of the items we carried up the beach, out of reach of the tide, and piled them in heaps under the shelter of the line of straggly trees. This is where we have decided to sleep tonight. I had feared it would be sodden, but Nels made a happy discovery.
"See these thick leaves? Of course I've no idea what the plant is, but look at the ground around the base of the trunk. It's bone-dry sand! It looks like the big leaves absorb every bit of water that hits them!"
"How curious!" said Cinnamon. "Look, even the bottoms of the leaves are dry! It's as though the water is all taken into the plant itself."
"Perhaps the water also provides food for the plant?" Carmen speculated. "I don't know much about plants, but those clouds of smoggy atmosphere we saw on the images of the leading hemisphere could have been full of elements the plants use."
"I think that's a real possibility," Nels agreed. "Perhaps the rain is like food and drink to the plant, so none of it is allowed to go to waste."
The rain continued, steady but not hard, as we worked on.
Cinnamon and Carmen took special care to set out, in an open area, what few objects of salvage were capable of holding rainwater. John has impressed upon us the necessity of boiling our drinking water as soon as we can find a way to do so, although none of us have complained so far of any discomfort resulting from the spring water we have consumed. It was another strange thing, in a day of strange things, to hear Jinjur's order: "If anyone feels sick in any way, I need to know immediately!" I'm sure everyone's first thought was my own: "What business is it of yours?", followed by the much more humble, "Of course." The private monitoring of our physical well-being by James through the imps is now gone, and for our mutual well-being it is now essential that we share our concerns. Such interdependency is going to come very hard to me—I hope very much that I continue to stay healthy, not least because I find it so intolerable to complain aloud!
We had begun by seizing the retrieved articles haphazardly, and stowing them just above the water. I don't recall just when a sort of system crept in. Nels and Richard, standing waist-deep, collected the flotsam from the flouwen, and described it, and one of what was becoming a fairly efficient bucket brigade bore the object along to someone who put it in a more reasonable place, announcing, tersely, where it was. So, after a time, our drenched belongings were more or less arranged, and all of us knew the order. It was dreary, tedious work, and no one enjoyed it less than I, but, in a way, it was satisfying to take from one pair of hands, and pass along to another, yet one more precious remnant of our vanished life.
Throughout our labors, we noted occasionally and spoke of some small creatures, about the size of housecats but looking like nothing on earth, who scuttled out from the bushes long enough to survey us, apparently, and then disappeared. They never came close enough for us to see any details of their structure, but they are a not unpleasant shade of blue-green, and vaguely fuzzy in appearance. The most singular thing—literally!—that we have been able to detect, is that they seem to have just one eye! It is so startling that it gets our attention for the brief glimpse we have of them, and then they are gone.
After some time, as we worked, the rain began to feel cool, in contrast to the warmth of the sea. I was more tired than I have been in years, and began to think dreamily of just floating in the warm water. Fortunately, Jinjur either spotting our increasing fatigue or sharing it, called a halt.
"Little Red! Little White! Little Purple! This is Jinjur. We're going to rest a while. Stay together, don't go far, and don't try anything new until I tell you!"
Silence from the water. Then, "You tell us . . .?" The flouwen's voice sounded surprised. Throughout the months of computer-translated communication, such niceties as mutual respect had been automatically dealt with by the translation program. I had believed, as had Jinjur, that the flouwen had never been able to understand Jinjur's somewhat flamboyant methods of command. Now, in direct communication with the aliens for the first time, weary and worried, she instinctively reverted to early training. There was an echo of boot-camp sergeant in Jinjur's parade-ground bellow: "That's an order!"
I waited, aghast, to hear how our only allies would respond to this arrogance. It was a tremendous relief to hear, out of the rainy dark, only a soft, three-fold shuddering splutter—the flouwen equivalent of a giggle. And to see Jinjur smack herself, smartly, on her own forehead, and turn away.
Wearily, we humans stumbled up the beach one last time. We drank from the little basin again and picked up something from one of the salvaged food lockers. The cold food was unappetizing and tasteless, but we ate whatever it was hungrily, while the rain rinsed the salt from our drenched bodies. By the time we had collected our own choices of sodden bedding or springy tufts and leaves for pillow or cover, and hollowed our selection of sand into comfortable niches, we were too tired to feel anything more than the need to sleep. As I scooped away the soft earth, I saw that our little group had spread itself over a remarkably small area. In the single stroke of our crash, we had changed from maintaining our individual privacy at any cost, to something like a huddle of puppies. I said nothing, only thankful for the sound of other humans breathing, so close to me. One of the few fortunate aspects of our situation is that the air is so warm; as I lie here, propped up on an elbow, the breeze is not even slightly chilling on my damp garment. Indeed, the gentle darkness is balmy on my skin, and brings the strange and spicy scent of the crushed herbs beneath me.
The sound of the rain on the leaves is soporific, as is the gentle wash on the shore; the occasional purposeful rustle among the dark bushes is less so. Overhead, other sounds are in the air; strange little calls and squeaks. There is nothing inherently alarming about the noises, but it will be much less disturbing when we know the source of the sounds, or so I sincerely hope! It is time for me to wake the next watch. I have only managed to stay awake by recording this, and by contemplating the white, pure line of lace around my wrists, and wondering how long I can keep it intact.
/> RAINING
We were awakened, this "morning," by a shriek from Shirley. I think all of us had been drowsing, half-awake, for some hours, but were not fully aware in the soft light and gentle rain of what time it might be. Muscles sore from yesterday's unaccustomed strenuous activity were aching all over me. Shirley's scream brought us all to our feet, but to my horror she lay flat, thrashing as though confined. She looked unharmed, but then I saw that her thick braid of blond hair was tightly held down by a thick tendril of vine! We tried to pull her free, but the plant was as tough and strong as wire.
"My Mech-All!" Shirley spluttered. "It's in my back belt pouch!"
She twisted her body violently on the ground, managed to grasp the precious tool, and held it up. She manipulated a control on the side of the handle and the metal blob at the tip reconfigured itself into a serrated knife. Nels knelt, seized the knife, and sawed through the vine with difficulty. When it was severed, Shirley was able to rise, and we could pull the marauding strand down along the braid and off; however, the little tendril remained tightly coiled and rigid, like a spring. I looked at the cut-off end and remembered the sped-up sequence of pictures we had all observed—with such clinical detachment!—back aboard Prometheus. This was obviously one of those war-like plants.
"It must have been trying to strangle my braid!" Shirley said, her hands moving from the thick plait to her throat. "I think, if we have to spend another night here, I'll find a spot on the beach!"
Mentally, I decided to do the same, and I saw Cinnamon run a thoughtful hand along her own long braids.
Nels picked up the end of the vine from which we had freed Shirley, and gave it an experimental tug. "Humph! Considerable resistance there." I looked along the visible length of the vine—it disappeared underground within a few feet—and was surprised at how thin it was; nowhere near as thick as the coil.
"Why do you suppose the vine is so thin, and then expands at the coil?" I asked,
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