Worlds Enough and Time w-3

by Joe Haldeman

  The smallest details we can see here are about ten kilometers wide; the tiniest island visible in the Reef is bigger than all of ’Home’s floor levels put together. The Mainland’s central lake has a greater area than Earth’s Lake Chad or Lake Superior.

  The atmosphere is slightly less dense than Earth’s but richer in oxygen, which argues for a lot of plant life, if only phytoplankton. Nitrogen is the main inert element. There is a puzzling concentration of helium, over a thousand times the terran trace, but that shouldn’t have any effect on daily life, other than making balloon travel easy.

  (Hotspot has a large active volcano, which could be a source of helium, though there’s no analog on Earth.)

  Better pictures are going to be available almost hourly, but this seems like a good time to start.

  It’s too soon to say much about climate or weather. Obviously there will be a great variety of conditions, since Mainland stretches from the Arctic Circle almost to the equator. Tides will be four times as high as on Earth, which of course will affect living conditions on the coasts and especially on small islands.

  We’re tentatively planning to establish the first settlement near the large inland lake in the temperate zone, though robot drones and, selectively, survey teams will range all over Mainland and Tropica. The polar ice caps and the four other large islands will also be surveyed, but probably won’t be settled in the near future, unless they have some special virtues.

  This map will be updated every day at noon.

  AGE 56

  1. DAY ZERO

  Age 55.99 [8 King 429]—Coming into orbit. I opened up the window in my floor to watch Epsilon drift by every fifty seconds, twice a minute. Finally getting used to this time system. Dan says it’s like living a linear transformation, which I think is a highly emotional observation, for an engineer.

  I perversely miss being head of Entertainment. They’re letting me help with the big party, but it’s a pale shadow of the satisfaction you get from orchestrating the whole thing. (I know I could look back through this diary and see how much I enjoyed it while it was happening. That’s the nature of the beast.) I’m in charge of the scaffolding crew. The same complicated system we’ve used since we left New New, now rather sagging and worn. Aren’t we all. Complicated systems.

  I want to throw myself into work to stop thinking about Sandra. If anything happens to her, it’s my fault. I knew that she and Jakob wanted to be on the first shuttle, but when I put in the early-thaw request I was sure it wouldn’t be fulfilled. I just didn’t want her bitching at me for not having tried. So now while I’m bolting together bleachers, she’s studying maps and practicing pistol shooting. Pistols! What do they think they’re going to run into? Revolutionaries? Mobsters?

  Well, we know there are large animals, herds of them, or at least large groups of objects that don’t stay put. They might be dangerous. But all my earthside experience with guns was awful. I asked the mesomorphic hero who’s leading the expedition why they couldn’t just use tranquilizing darts like those rifles in Africa, and in answer got a roll of the eyes and a condescending explanation that we don’t know anything about the creatures’ metabolism, so we don’t know what would put them to sleep. Okay, so I guess anything that gets blown apart does stay blown apart, regardless of its metabolism. But it seems like the wrong way to approach a new world. And yet I want my girl to be safe, and if that means shooting straight, so be it. Some American writer said that it was a sign of intellectual maturity to be able to hold two opposing opinions in your mind at the same time. It also makes you a nervous wreck.

  The tranquilizing darts aren’t that benign. That poor silly boy Goodman was killed by one in Africa, though he was struck in the heart and it was probably an elephant’s dose. There’s still an itchy spot on my throat from a trank dart where that shitbag rapist shot me in New Orleans. “Shitbag” was what his partner called him.

  A numb patch on my arm from the razor wire. A numbness like a light finger-touch from the deep stab wound in my butt, and twinges still from my nose and the teeth they had to install after that animal beat my face against the sidewalk in New York. And the one time I used a gun, the man staring unbelieving at the mangled stump spraying blood, maybe we had to kill him but the memory makes me swallow hard or vomit. If I had a God to pray to I would pray that Sandra should please live in less interesting times. Adventure is something you want to read about, not do.

  Babies should come with a warning label ANYTHING THAT HAPPENS TO THIS CREATURE IS YOUR FAULT. Up to a Certain age, I guess. I wonder what age that is, and whether it’s the child’s or the parent’s.

  (I would have made a hell of a creche mother. Spend my declining years brooding over the fates of a thousand people who don’t even remember my name.)

  I tried to have myself assigned to the first shuttle, too, but there was no chance. There are people my age, or almost, but they’re either scientists or the kind of fanatics who wouldn’t let mere pneumonia keep them from putting in a couple of hours at the gym every day. Nobody over fifty should be allowed to have a flat stomach. It’s undignified.

  (I still am putting in an hour or so, three days a week, swimming. That looks like a practical skill for Epsilon. It may be the way we commute to work.)

  So the earliest I can be assigned is “secondary” stage. They won’t say, can’t yet say, how far away that is and exactly how many people it will entail. Hundreds. Sandra’s primary stage is one shuttle of scientists and one of people like her—“Engineer Pioneers,” young and strong and smart enough to know which end of a shovel works best for transporting dirt. Along with a shuttle of tools and weapons. The shuttles will come back two more times with more tools and supplies. Then, if things go according to Plan A, Sandra and her cohorts will build a small settlement there by the lake. When that’s done, we secondary types will come down in ten to twenty flights, and set up housekeeping and systematic exploration. Get crops started. The tertiaries, the actual colonists in the usual sense of the word, have to wait at least a year.

  Before the primaries go down, starting tomorrow, they’ll have robot drones buzzing around sniffing the air, sending back pictures. Hope they don’t find anything too interesting.

  2. FIRST CONTACT

  PRIME

  This is the short conversation exchanged between O’Hara and her daughter on the evening of First Day:

  [10 King 429]

  O’HARA: Hello? Okay, I’m here.

  SANDRA: Mair! I got you! We only have a hundred seconds—look at this!

  (The camera does a jerky pan around 360 degrees, showing lake, grassy swamp, an oddlooking forest with snow-capped mountains in the background, and a shuttle, sitting on its tail, lurched slightly out of plumb.)

  O’HARA: Good grief! What happened to the shuttle?

  SANDRA: Oh, the ground’s soft. It’s no problem.

  O’HARA: No problem? What if it’d fallen over?

  SANDRA: Oh, mother. You worry too much. Can you believe those trees?

  O’HARA: They look like hands. Claws.

  SANDRA: Don’t they? Even with fingernails. Close up, they’re covered with little red things, bugs. Some kind of symbiote, they figure, since all of the trees have them. Did you hear about the helium creatures?

  O’HARA: The little balloons. They showed them on the cube.

  SANDRA: We found a bigger one, too, about ten centimeters wide. They’re driving the biologists crazy! They can’t figure out where the helium comes from.

  O’HARA: That’s what Dan said. It can’t be part of their metabolism because it doesn’t combine with anything.

  SANDRA: It looks like they do photosynthesis. Any-how, this big one had kind of green hair all over inside it.

  O’HARA: Are you okay, honey? I mean, do you feel all right?

  SANDRA: I feel great! A little tired from carrying stuff. Here, look at me—hold the camera, Marko.

  (The picture bobs around and settles on Sandra, striking a pose. She’s wearing h
eavy boots and work fatigues, mud-spattered from the knees down. Sleeves rolled up past her elbows, hair a wild mess under a broadbrimmed hat. Wide belt holding a canteen and bolstered pistol.)

  SANDRA: Ta-da! Would you want your daughter on the same planet with this wild woman?

  O’HARA: How’s Jakob?

  SANDRA: He was fine the last time I saw him, couple of hours ago. He’s on the shit committee, setting up the latrines and a shower down by the water plant.

  O’HARA: You’re still doing foundations?

  SANDRA: Yeah, we’ll be pouring ‘krete about four days. We might be pouring paths after that, if we can improvise forms from something. It’s pretty muddy.

  O’HARA: You can’t just knock the floor forms apart?

  SANDRA: No, they’re one piece. Wasn’t that great planning? Look, I’ve got to hand the camera over. Love you, Mair!

  O’HARA: Love you too, wild woman. Take care of yourself.

  The primary landing party were warned repeatedly to “expect the unexpected,” a rule that applies to almost any situation without being particularly useful. “Expect big sticky things to fall out of the sky” would have been more practical.

  The helium-using organisms were a puzzle from the first day. There was the basic taxonomic problem: to the question “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” the answer was yes. Both plant and animal kingdoms had availed themselves of the airbag design, which inexplicably used an inert gas.

  The source of the helium would be found the next day, and would open up a new nest of problems, this time for the physical scientists. The first big problem, though, was what to do about big sticky things that fall out of the sky.

  It could have happened to Jakob first; he was on guard duty at the time. There were six listening guards, posted around the sleeping pioneers, whose job it was to report to the guard captain anything potentially dangerous-sounding. They had no trouble staying awake.

  The first potential danger, though, was almost completely silent. In retrospect, Kisti Seven said she thought she had heard something like the faintest breath of wind, and then a stillness—and then she was blinded, her nightglasses knocked off, and suddenly suffocating, exactly as if someone had thrown a plastic bag over her head, a plastic bag with the smell of swamp water that made a slurping sound and started chewing on her hair.

  In response to some fortunate instinct, she had dropped her hand to the handle of the knife on her belt. Against the sticky resistance of the membrane enveloping her from head to knees, she managed to pull the knife from its sheath and feebly stab and slash. The thing made a hissing noise and slid off her. She stepped on the nightglasses, but found her flashlight and played the beam around and caught a glimpse of a shiny thing rolling away. In the process of switching the flashlight to her left hand and unholstering her pistol, she lost sight of the thing, but fired eight shots in its direction anyhow.

  The CO2 pistol made eight impressively loud pops, and suddenly there were flashlights everywhere, the sound of guns being cocked, and the guard captain yelling for people not to shoot unless they had a target; nobody in the middle shoot at all!

  Kisti had her sodden clothes off fast, toweling the creature’s slime off her exposed face and hands. The doctor gave her a quick once-over and announced that, aside from her being the palest black person he had ever seen, she seemed none the worse for the experience. She told him that it felt like the thing had pulled out some of her hair. He trimmed a sample around the area for lab analysis, and then saturated her hair with pure alcohol and rubbed the antiseptic solvent into her scalp. Then he took a sample of the slime from between her fingers, and had her bathe completely in alcohol. When she was done, her teeth were chattering in the humid heat.

  Her trousers were torn below the knee, where the thing had been holding on to her. The doctor found superficial scratches on her calves, not breaking the skin. He took pictures of them for later comparison, just in case, and then dosed her with first-aid spray, which would kill any known bacterium or virus, and maybe some unknown ones.

  A search party found the thing and brought it back, draped over two shovels, nearly dead. They dumped it on a sheet of plastic under the bright light in the center of camp. Some people examined it while everybody else examined the dark overcast sky, wearing hats.

  The central part looked like a crab or a spider about half a meter wide, with twelve muscular tentacles that fanned out into a frame for the transparent skirt of the gasbag. Inflated, it probably made a globe about two meters in diameter, with pods ballooning out between the tentacle ribs. It could obviously move pretty fast on the ground, deflated, hauling itself along with the tentacles, which had retractable talons.

  One of Kisti’s, or somebody’s, pellets had struck the central crab part; an opalescent watery fluid puddled underneath it. The skirt had several knife punctures and a long rip that partly severed a tentacle. Two different fluids, one watery and one yellow and viscous like honey, dripped from that wound.

  Twelve was the animal’s magic number. The crab part had twelve simple eyes, spaced evenly around the carapace, and twelve fingers or articulated claws in two rows underneath, surrounding a mouth with twelve teeth like blunt tusks. The claws were imbedded in a nest of hundreds of writhing cilia that slowly stopped moving as they watched. The zoologists decided to put off dissection until the morning light.

  The next morning, everybody not involved with the dissection joined Sandra’s crew in the suddenly urgent business of roof raising. The ‘krete floors would be dry enough to sleep on by nightfall, a word that had a new connotation.

  A review of satellite and drone data came up with four possible pictures of the “floating spiders.” At least they were infrared blobs with central blobs that were there in one frame and gone in a frame taken a few hours later. All the pictures were nighttime. The blobs hadn’t shown up on the first analysis because they were only slightly warmer than the ground.

  It may have homed in on its victim’s body heat. Dissection didn’t reveal any sense organs that might be used for batlike sonar or sharklike detection of electrical activity. It didn’t seem to have ears; its eyes were little more than light detectors. Its brain was less than a centimeter wide.

  The skirt itself, when inflated, was probably a delicate sense organ. Slight updrafts would indicate sources of heat on the ground. The cilia seemed to have chemical sensors, like olfactory receptors, that would help the spider differentiate between a warm rock and a potential meal.

  The digestive system was relatively simple, the mouth used for both ingestion and excretion (when Seven learned that, she washed her hair again). More than half the volume of the ropy tentacles was bladder rather than muscle, and there was a sphincter under each tentacle claw. The bladders were full of sulfurous-smelling water that evidently served as ballast.

  The next day, an exploration party less than two kilometers from the camp worked their way over a ridge into a valley of rank yellow and orange vegetation, and smelled something that reminded them of the floating spider. Weapons drawn, they crept up on a bubbling swamp.

  One of the creatures was splayed across the water, its tentacles moored to various anchors. It was sagging, partially inflated. It had stationed itself over a spot where a steady line of bubbles broke the surface.

  No one in the party recalls anyone making a sound, but the animal sensed them somehow, perhaps by smell, and its reaction was swift. The tentacles let go of their moorings and sprayed water in twelve directions as the gasbag snapped shut. The creature rose fast, like something falling into the sky. People fired at it, but it was a difficult target, bobbing in crosscurrents, and in a few seconds it was just an iridescent dot sailing away. Dozens of other small bubble creatures flew away in reaction.

  The exploration party people spread out around the perimeter of the swamp and surveyed it. It was a circle about twenty meters in diameter, with steep banks, like a crater or sinkhole. One person volunteered to wade out, but quickly sank up to his knees in m
uck; it took several people, pulling on a rope tied under his arms, to extract him.

  Throwing the rope out with a light weight attached, sounding, showed that the pond was nowhere more than a couple of meters deep. It had probably filled up with decaying vegetable matter. (One of the team, a biologist, noted that unless this was a transient condition, there had to be Something Down There keeping the level constant. The leader asked with a straight face whether anyone would care to swim across and see if anything happened.)

  One of the helium outlets was close enough to the shore for them to fill a sample jar without wading. They collected four samples of small gasbag organisms and counted thirty-nine others scattered across the surface. All but three of them had green tendrils inside, though it would have been premature to therefore call them plants. There are unicellular Earth animals like the euglena that can photosynthesize.

  They agreed that this was enough of a find for one day, and filled all their sample containers with water, air, mud, and vegetation from various sites. Then they scientifically threw rocks into the water to see whether anything would happen. Nothing did.

  3. LETTER ‘HOME

  Dear Mair,

  You’re always after me about how important it is to practice my writing, so here’s a letter. Don’t faint. It’s almost impossible to get on the ’Home line anyhow, with all the floating spider goatshit. Figure I can write this out and just put it on queue, and when somebody pauses a nanosecond to take a breath, zip! We’ve made contact.

  It is scary. You know Jakob was on guard on the other side of the camp when Kisti got attacked by that thing. It gives me the cold sweats to think it might have been him, and he might not have gotten a knife out. Kisti says it was plain dumb luck that she survived, that her hand was near her knife. She’s kind of fixated on it; just a second before, she was picking her nose. What a way to die, she says, strangled to death with your finger up your nose.