Of a Note in a Cosmic Song; Part Four

by Nōnen Títi

  She didn’t answer him. He’d have to do better than that.

  “I know I promised, but I just wanted to stay and watch the creatures and the pods. There’s all this life here, not like town. I wanted to live–” He stopped when she smiled, confused by it.

  “It’ll be a long time before they come back, right?” Leyon asked.

  “Could be as long as a station,” Hani answered.

  “So now what?” Kunag wanted to know.

  Nini put her hand on Hani’s arm to indicate to let her handle this. “What?”

  “Are you not going to yell at us? Punish us?”

  Against her will, Nini had to smile. It sounded so childish. “Why should I do that?” she asked.

  “Because…” Kunag started.

  “Because we ruined the expedition and broke our promise and everyone in town will worry,” Leyon finished for him.

  “Yes, they will,” Nini agreed. Kunag knew who would worry about him. “You made the decision to run. Now you feel bad about it. If I got angry or punished you, you wouldn’t have to feel bad anymore. That would be just a little too easy, wouldn’t it?”

  “Hell no,” Leyon answered. “I’d much rather feel bad myself than meet Maike now.”

  “She’ll be back,” Hani warned him.

  BEGINNINGS

  How did you go about building a settlement with four people, no equipment, no tools, no material, and no knowledge? Especially no knowledge. It seemed an impossibility.

  “What we need is shelter,” Leyon had said on the first day, ready to jump up and start building for all the future settlers.

  “Good, you go ahead; pick up some tubers and stack them,” Hani had replied.

  That had been the beginning of a kor filled with ideas, which were readily turned down; a kor of collecting tubers for food, washing in the stream, taking walks, and talking each night around a small fire in the ground – just big enough for the small container which Maike had left them – to preserve the equally small piece of turf. There was no substance in the ground here for fire fuel and neither was there any material for building shelters.

  “We could use mud, like in town,” Leyon suggested.

  “What mud? We didn’t have an avalanche here. The soil in the clearing is bone dry. Water seeps straight through it and disappears,” Hani replied.

  “How about the big mud lake?” Kunag asked, but that was at least half an hour walking away.

  “Besides, how will we fetch the mud? Do you have anything to carry it in?”

  Hani’s logic was right, but she was a bit quick to use it. The last thing they needed was to give up hope.

  “What we need first is a latrine; shelter can wait,” Nini said. “If it rains we can live in the little cave, but if we are going to stay here for a station we cannot go on digging small holes in the ground every few days. We need something permanent.”

  “What’s the difference between a hole in the ground and a latrine, except that one has walls?” Leyon asked

  “Well for starters, it’s bigger,” Nini answered, but that was as far as her knowledge went. Mektar had explained some basics but that was a long time ago.

  “How did that work in town? I mean, we used them, but who designed it? Where did it go?” Hani asked.

  “The civil engineers, probably, but what we had in town were septic containers, large ones,” Leyon said.

  The problem here was how they would construct anything at all. They had only their hands to dig with.

  “Maybe we can make bricks from the mud.”

  “Good idea, but we still have to transport them back up a climbing landscape.”

  Hani was trying to study the land, wondering out loud what Daili would consider important. The western hills, between the clearing and the ocean, were as thick with vegetation as the southern forest was and both were more elevated than where the settlement would be. Water that didn’t come down in the stream drained away toward the mud lake that was on lower ground, to the east. A climb back up from there would not be terribly steep, but with a load it would still be difficult. “First and foremost, we need a safe water supply.”

  “What’s wrong with the stream?” Kunag asked.

  “Nothing so far, but that may change when there are a lot more people here. Or who knows, it may run dry if we don’t get any rain.”

  “So we’ll get seawater.”

  But the sea was three days walking away and nobody was sure yet if it was safe. It went like that with everything.

  Leyon was the most optimistic. They could make plans now and once people and equipment were over from town, carry them out. He started drawing with his finger in the soil, mapping the area of the two trees. “We’ll dig a well here and we’ll put shelters and a latrine there and then a little brick oven to cook–”

  “You can’t build the latrine up on the hill and the well below it. You may as well kill us all now,” Hani interrupted him.

  “Put them the other way around then.”

  “You can’t put your latrine anywhere upstream of the homes either, and you’ll need many latrines.”

  “And doesn’t a brick oven still require fuel?” Kunag asked.

  Leyon rubbed out his drawing with his foot. “Forget it then.”

  “No, don’t forget it. Keep thinking, you’re doing great,” Nini told him. They needed to put all their knowledge together. Anything at all about building shelters, water wells, latrines, and about little things like seats, mats, and pots for cooking. “Start picturing this place with a lot of people. Think back to DJar and town; what did we use on a daily basis? No idea is stupid, no information is wrong. We have to keep trying. It’s the only way.”

  Nini talked to Hani about not being so direct with her responses. “Let them work out for themselves if something is good or not. Let them experiment. Don’t hurt their feelings and don’t rush it. If there’s anything we have plenty of, it’s time.”

  The boys did work; they helped with the food preparation, carried water early in the morning, offered to pull the tubers, and even washed the clothes. It was an attempt from their side to show they could handle this. Whether that was because they felt they were now the only men in this place or out of guilt was not important.

  They also kept trying new ideas. They went down to the mud lake and tried forming and drying bricks and pots. At first it seemed hopeless; the bricks took forever to dry and then fell apart when lifted. The pots made from the same mud wouldn’t hold water or shape. Anything bigger than that, like a shelter, required a structure.

  “I don’t think Kun is hot enough to dry the bricks,” Leyon said.

  “That’s nonsense. Kun is just as cold in town,” Hani replied.

  “Maybe the mud was different there then,” Leyon retorted.

  After a glance at Nini, giving away she’d forgotten not to answer so quickly, Hani changed her attitude. “You may be right, though. If nothing else, when people come from town, they can’t say we haven’t tried.”

  Try they did. Day after day with new hopes, largely due to Leyon’s optimism. It kept their minds busy. The short Kun DJar days would be long without a goal.

  Then, one evening, Leyon and Kunag didn’t return from the mud lake by Kundown. Even if the sky remained vaguely pink, it was still too dark to do much without a lamp. During the hour that followed Nini’s mind went over everything that could have happened to them, which was why she sounded more angry than relieved when they finally did turn up. “You don’t just stay away without letting me know!”

  “We tried to call, but you didn’t answer your spinner,” Leyon answered instantly.

  It was impossible to be angry at him. He grinned from ear to ear over the effect his joke had, especially on Hani. The boys then explained what had kept them: At the far end of the lake, which was another sixteen-or-so minutes walking from the shore where they had worked with the mud, they had seen reeds like those they’d found in every lake with water in it, but very tall. They had argued o
ver using those; Kunag insisted they were alive and conscious and they shouldn’t cut them, so Leyon had gone alone to try them anyway. He had found them as dry as the lake itself and had experimented with mixing them with the mud to get a good consistency. He’d forgotten about the time until Kunag had come to get him.

  Two days later, Leyon was ready to show off the result of his trials and they all took a walk to the far side of the lake. Though even Kunag had to admit that the reeds didn’t look very much alive, they were still surprisingly flexible. They could not be broken into small pieces but had to be cut with the knife. Mixed into the mud and rolled into bricks as well as possible, Leyon placed them inside the flames of the fire he had going between and under a platform of rocks. To make the fire as hot as possible, he added loose dry reeds. It smoked badly, but once cooled down the bricks held their shape and felt hard.

  “They’ll work great as long as it doesn’t rain,” Hani said.

  They each carried some back to try them in the river, but even when wet, they stayed solid.

  During the following moon, Leyon and Kunag turned the far side of the lake into a brick factory and transported the bricks home on a sled made of woven reeds, which they pulled with a rope made from twisted reed fibres. No warning sounds came when they pulled the reeds.

  To build with the bricks was another problem. The hand-rolled shapes required mortar to stick together – lots of it – which they made from the same mud-reed combination, mixed with water to form a paste. At the end of each day both looked as muddy as the shelter they were trying to make. Nevertheless, it worked, and it encouraged the boys to get up early every morning. The end result was a waist-high rounded hut with a hole at the top. Not big enough to stand or live in, but good enough for a fire and to make cooking easier protected from the wind. Leyon put a plaited mat on the floor in front of it. “Just like home,” he joked, and sat down.

  In the meantime, Nini fretted about plamals and tubers. She had watched Marya and Gos cook the foods, and she could copy that, but they’d have the same thing each day. Though the others assured her they didn’t mind that, since nothing tasted of anything, Nini worried about the long-term. If DJar was anything to go by, just vegetable matter was fine to keep them from being hungry, which was the least of their problems, but it lacked the nutrients their bodies needed, like proteins. They’d need grains and nuts – or even better, seafood and grubs. How long they could go without those, Nini didn’t know.

  More important than food were the properties of the natural vegetation for healing, of which she knew nothing at all. Once again, DJar had created a population that was used to everything being ready-made for them. Nobody ever needed to think and thus nobody had. More than before did she wish Mektar could be here; if she could only talk to him. He had made a start, or even just an introduction, to her education, but a lifetime of learning was needed. His knowledge had been based in generations of trial and error, and from what he had told her, she wasn’t sure if she remembered it correctly.

  “Use your instincts,” Irma had said, but could she trust her instincts from DJar, providing she had instincts for plants, if that was what they were? Did nature always work the same way? They’d come across enough weird things on this trip alone to make her doubt that. One day something would come up for which she had no answer; she feared that day. How lucky had not Leyon been after that sting? Probably luckier than he knew himself.

  Nini envied them, the young people. Leyon with his eternal optimism, Kunag with his confidence that the eyecreatures meant them no harm, and Gos especially – he knew plants better than she did. For him, plants were plants no matter where they were or what their colour or shape. Without hesitation had he taken the same approach to edible-or-not as he would have on DJar, forgetting the lack of tastes and smells on this planet. “If it tastes bitter, you soak it, if it’s sweet, you can eat it right away.”

  He didn’t consider that the evolution of herbivores on DJar may have contributed to these differences, and those animals didn’t exist here. Yet so far his tests and assumptions hadn’t been wrong. Maybe she shouldn’t think so much.

  She discussed it with Hani. Did the basic genetic make-up of life allow for similar reactions no matter what that life looked like? If these plamals looked like plants, even if only a bit, did they work the same? Did they also photosynthesize even if Kun only spread lots of light and very little warmth? Well… yes, that was obvious, but still?

  “I don’t think we should assume anything. We’ll have to do tests and record the results. We’ll have to restart science,” Hani said.

  But recording things was also a problem without writing materials. Hani herself was experimenting with a timedisk made from one of Leyon’s tall reeds stuck in the soil at the centre of the clearing. Around it she had drawn a basic time division using the light of Kun. Next to it she had started to record the positions of the two moons until Kunag had accidentally stepped on it, proving that soil was not a permanent recording material. Nini suggested she scratch it in one of the rocks, but Hani wanted to be sure the details were right before making them permanent.

  Some of their knowledge came from accidents. After touching a ground-covering plamal at the edge of the mud lake, Kunag complained that his fingers felt numb. The effect wore off after half a day. Nini tried it herself and found the same thing. A local anaesthetic, maybe?

  After sitting on some soft rock near the stream Nini found her clothes stained a bright yellow which didn’t come out. She pulverized the rock and made a paste of it using her hands, which also remained yellow for days. She then smeared the paste onto another rock and later tried to wash it off with water. It didn’t: A paint or a dye, same as that black pod Doret had discovered earlier. But painting wasn’t healing.

  So far Nini was only confident about one thing. Ever since they’d run out of supplies brought from DJar during the first Kun DJar season, the women had struggled with washable pads made from the hides of zibots. Though very absorbent and strong, a lot of women complained of skin rashes and irritations. During the expedition Marya had first experimented with the moss that absorbed water, which worked as well as the hides. In fact, it absorbed better, did not cause irritations, and even seemed to cure existing ones.

  “I wish we could find more of those around here,” Nini had said the next time she was in need of them. A day later Hani reported having seen them in the southern hills. Nini collected some and had used them since to cure some skin rashes and a burn on Leyon’s hand. It healed quickly and left almost no scar. She had then tried it for a small infection, but that didn’t work. However, it was the first and so far only plamal she was confident of where to find and what to use it for. She’d have to write it down. Hani was right: Somebody would have to carry on, not start over, if something happened to her.

  JUDGMENT DAY

  After the initial squabbles over who’d been responsible for the disease, the town had gone into a quiet waiting period after the expedition left. Politics became secondary to emotional survival. Benjamar had assembled an emergency government of sorts, which was to organize proper elections.

  Jema found her home very empty and quiet with both Marya and Nini gone, more so when Station Five turned to Station Six without any sign of their return. Consequently, the visitors also stayed away.

  Jema spent one day a kor at Leni’s and slowly began to appreciate Frimon for the man he was in relation to the people she cared about. He was as much a father to Anoyak as he was to Rorag and she could see him as Leni’s comate, which he essentially was. Not only that, but now she knew him a little better, Jema could talk with him about subjects she used to discuss with Marya.

  The announced elections were finally held in the fourth moon of Station Six and that, of course, was the start of new problems, though at first it seemed peaceful enough. Each voter received a small piece of recycled paper with eight numbers on it. Behind each was space to mark a yes-box or a no-box. Each piece of paper was hand-written. The d
etails of the eight issues were printed on a larger sheet of paper in the social building. To prevent people from voting twice, each name on the register was marked once the person returned his piece of paper. The shortage of writing implements caused a long waiting time.

  When reading the details, Jema discovered that there was more than one way to interpret most of the propositions. The first two issues had to do with this referendum-style decision making. People should be allowed to vote like this for every political matter, majority decides – yes or no? That seemed fair enough, though Jema wondered where they would get the paper to make new voting slips every time.

  The second stated the same for judicial matters, which would act as a whole-population jury in any trial or dispute, based on the principle: equal punishment for crime committed. How they envisioned doing that was a mystery to Jema, seeing that Thalo-Leyon trial, so she voted no.

  The next two issues had to do with priorities. Point three proposed a focus on safe water first and energy second. There was little to be debated about that.

  The fourth stated that basic needs should be supplied by the government, not by trade, but trade would otherwise be allowed. What they had not done was specify which foods, if any, were considered basic needs. Nevertheless, Jema voted yes.

  A fifth point, no doubt made by the two farmers who were part of this committee, read: “Farmers, not scientists, in charge of cattle and crops.” It did not explain if a no-vote would mean that the scientists would be in charge or both would be. Jema left it blank, because she had no strong feelings either way.

  Even more confusing was the sixth issue, which stated that nobody should be allowed to harm any of Kun DJar’s life forms or people for any reason. This would include fishing and all that which people were eating, so Jema voted no on that, more because it wasn’t clear than that she didn’t agree.

  The last two statements were clear enough, were most likely Frimon’s, and would never make it: no selling or buying allowed of intoxicating substances, and nobody allowed to use sex as a commodity. Jema voted no since a yes-vote would be allowing one person’s moral viewpoint to impose on what should be people’s individual ethic.