by Ed Hurst
George was quiet, and mood was decidedly somber. He sipped his tea a moment.
“The ship with the elders ended up in this star system. We did find out where we were, but found no name for the star. The chief elder’s daughter, a very young child, was singing a song about some event in our holy books, and mispronounced part of it. Instead of ‘Dolorosa’ she said ‘Dalorius’ and her father seized on that as the name for the star.
“Prior to the attempted council, we had balanced the ship assignments so each could have formed its own miniature colony, if necessary. In the bargain, the ship which arrived at Dalorius was short a few engineering specialties, most of our former military converts, and a few scholars. While scholars we could replace for the most part, the shortage of engineers and military veterans made all the difference in the world.
“Supplies were short because no one expected to be in those ships that long. The navigation beacon was not directly line of sight, but the presence of its signal bouncing off the planets made everyone nervous that it might report our location. Since it said the fourth planet was habitable, but offered no details, we decided to blindly land. Even if we did turn on our scanning equipment, which would present at the least a risk of broadcasting our location to the beacon, we would not have gotten anything back, as you know. So the pilot simply estimated the surface depth below the clouds for an exit point and brought the ship down inside the envelope. He barely had the means to maneuver once inside the atmosphere and they bumped the ground rather hard. No one was hurt severely, and we disembarked.
“That was several hundred years ago.”
Chapter 7: Not Exactly Eden
Fortis was thinking how the situation resembled a child starting life over with an adult’s awareness. “How badly was the ship damaged?”
George grinned. “Should you stay with us long enough, and tolerate the travel, you will get a chance to see it yourself. The place was not level ground, but we were too high above it for the standard thrusters to do more than slow our descent some. The landing gear collapsed on the high side, though, and the whole thing leaned into the slope. The hull was breached where it struck the rocky ground, since even such an old ship was not built to withstand much physical impact.”
Fortis remembered the business about energy emissions not working on the planet. “So the impact resistant field generator failed?”
“Completely,” George said, shaking his head back and forth. “The generator was working, but there was no field.”
Fortis was puzzled. “My own ship does not have the old thruster technology, so I assumed it used the levitation field. Am I mistaken?”
George shrugged. “Most likely your ship had the beacon’s data about the exact depth of our cloud layer here at the pole. The military surveyor who visited us last used a ship with extensive failsafe landing capabilities, as most military ships do. I suppose he made note of the atmosphere’s depth in his update of the beacon. Departure is much simpler, because it’s not based on fields, but on something else entirely.
“At any rate, our ship landed at the edge of the desert belt girdling our planet. According to our religion, the whole thing was miraculous. We couldn’t leave because the ship was damaged and our alternative thrust system was spent. In the middle of the desert, we would have died before we could find our way to greener lands. But in the middle of the greener lands were predators we could not fight at that time, since all we had were useless energy weapons. And in the northern hemisphere it’s all small rocky islands. Our ship would not have floated in water. Instead, we crash landed on the one place where conditions allowed us the most time to orient ourselves to the situation.
“Equally significant was the good fortune of having the one and only retired engineer with a collection of museum pieces he wasn’t supposed to bring. Hand tools, of all things. It’s not as if nothing electronic works here. Wherever there is a closed circuit for electrons to flow through solids, it’s just fine. But we can’t transmit anything across the air, aside from the visible spectrum. Well, just a little into the ultraviolet and infrared, but not far enough for something like a burning laser, even.”
Fortis thought for a moment. “So computers work, as I’ve already noted in my ship, because they are solid nano-circuitry. And you can create heat and light, and use powered tools, but how do you generate sufficient voltage?”
George gestured at the glowing patches on the tent ceiling. “The lighting is a coating extracted from insects. What powers it is the entire tent. Its outer surface is coated with a modified native mildew. It doesn’t eat the tent material, but consumes what little energy comes through our cloud layer. It’s enough to light the patches, heat the water for tea, and in while, and help prepare lunch. We developed ceramics which heat with the application of a low current.”
Fortis realized he was already hungry. It was one of the drawbacks of visiting other planets, because it meant shifting his circadian rhythm, but there was no way to avoid it. “Did you have the means to generate food, as most humans do these days, or have you found the local flora and fauna edible?”
George laughed, tipping his head back. “When we left Terra, most humans were still eating plants and animals in one form or another. We had learned about advances in artificial replacements much later. Again, fortunate it was for us what grows natively here is compatible to human biology. However, it took many years of serious health troubles to discover the absolute necessity of eating the fish here. The lack of sunlight creates a serious deficiency which only the fish satisfy. Our forefathers found them repulsive, which is why it took so long, but it’s something we now take for granted.
“It was hardly idyllic. We had the predators, deficiencies, diseases, and were thrown back to prehistoric living without energy weapons.” George pointed to a place near the doorway. “I suppose the light from outside prevented you from noticing the archery equipment there.”
Fortis turned, held up his hand to block the light from the doorway. Sure enough, there was a curved piece of wood, pulling a line taut between the ends, and a collection of thin wooden shafts clipped together in a neat row. The fletching was not feathers, but something resembling a stiff fabric with small panels joining them across the edges. The heads were hidden by a protective cover. Turning back, he asked, “Do you also have other sorts of melee weapons?”
“All sorts of toys,” George replied with a faint smile. “None of them metal. As I said, we have precious little of that here and almost no means of smelting if we did. Because we came with rather modern technology notions, we were fairly quick to develop alternatives. We make fabrics from both plant and animal sources, but with highly advanced variations in properties. The same goes with animal skins, wood, glass and ceramics. We use a great many microscopic plants and animals in the process. If it grows here, we likely have done something to breed it for special uses.
“In the past we have traded these specialties to other worlds in exchange for metal and electronics. Most of what we have is wearing out, and we would like to get more soon. I know you saw the ‘bird’ circling Misty or you would not have known where to land. That is almost entirely fabric and wood, with one tiny computer and transmitter attached. We use them mostly to harvest the hyperspace radio traffic, which can only be read above our atmosphere. Our welcome signal takes quite a bit of energy, so it’s broadcast only twice each lap. The bird absorbs as much energy as possible during the sun exposure, then makes that brief broadcast before having to save power during passage around the dark side.
“We have to do that because there are only three working birds. When we still had a dozen, the message was longer because we could rotate them more often. Now they have to stay aloft until the memory is about full, then it descends down while another slowly makes its way aloft. It takes a couple of our days each way, gliding and climbing the weak updraft over the marginally warmer deserts. We have winds aloft, of course, but they are due mostly to spin, since the temperature is very stable. T
he other problem is the photo-reactive mildew tends to weaken during exposure to space, so we have regrow it some each time.”
Fortis asked, “Have you never considered using an artificial satellite?”
His hands spread out in a powerless gesture, George said, “We thought about that. Bear in mind, for the first couple of centuries we were still fugitives from the Imperium. Why would we want them to find us so easily? Once that threat faded, we found it still very hard to establish regular trade relations. And while we do have a surplus for trade, it’s not enough to easily afford something like a full satellite system. We would still need the birds to ferry the data – physical closed circuits only down here.”
Fortis couldn’t think of anything else to say.
George continued, “We are content for the most part. We are loath to breach what has accomplished so very much in favor of our religion. Frankly, too much technology is the reason we feel the rest of humanity is having such a difficult time, with wars and such. It’s not as if we have no wars here, but they don’t amount to much. Our culture is the result of our religion, and our stability and peace and...” He paused and took a deep breath. “We hold to a totally different value system. We didn’t come here and gain those values because it was the best we could do in a bad situation. We had those values before we left Terra. We believe they come from God, and that it was His plan to put us here to keep them alive, because this world perfectly matched what we believed. We might not have known that so well when we got here, but the realization dawned on us as we made our way.”
He locked eyes with Fortis. “Whatever you do, Fortis, I beg you not to take any actions which would destroy what we have here. I have no doubt you are well trained in dealing with us while you are here, observing without interfering. But once you leave to take the knowledge of our world back to your galactic academic network, it would be all too easy for something in your report to precipitate a disaster.”
Chapter 8: The Shape of Things
It had seemed like a good idea to pass one last night on the ship, since it allowed Fortis to file an initial report into the non-destructible memory module. He also ran several simulations before he noticed his circadian rhythm was far out of sync with his host. Barely ready to sleep yet, it was just a few hours before George planned to start taking the tent down. Fortis calculated this would be two hours before the small difference the planet’s tilt from vertical would produce a feeble dawn at Misty’s southern pole. There was nothing like a hard day’s ride on little sleep to make for a good natural nudge to the space lag.
Fortis stood rubbing his sleep deprived eyes, disappointed to find George already had the tent nearly folded. The fabric was far thinner than it had first appeared, and folded quite small. Fortis guessed the wagon he now saw receiving the various folded and packed up items had been the bed he thought he saw in the tent yesterday. Not only was it still quite dark, but George moved with too much skilled practice, and Fortis hardly kept track of the packing. By the time he drew close enough to offer help, none was needed. Before him was a small, light wagon on two wheels, and a harness rig attached to the end tilted into the air.
George strode quickly off toward one of the grassy humps of land barely perceptible on the horizon. Now as fully awake as he would be at any point during that day, Fortis realized it never really got all that dark, but it took some time for him to notice. The clouds of Misty kept the temperature even, with a similar effect on the light level. It had never gotten all that bright, nor really too very dark. Remembering George’s comment about lacking direct sunlight, he realized the entire population probably saw almost as much at night as in the day.
Fortis occupied himself poking about the wagon, not moving anything, but noticing how it was primitive in concept, yet with very highly advanced construction. The frame was that hard, light wood he found on his chair the day before. The wheels were similar, but very elegant, with some sort of tire which gave under hard pressure from his thumb. It felt like fabric and skin at the same time. The profile was wide and oval, like modern ground vehicles on many planets, but not designed for any sort of artificial pavement. These wheels had seen plenty of rough ground. Fortis wondered if the packed rocky shale under his feet was some of the better travel surface on Misty.
His reverie was broken by the sound of approaching heavy tread. No, it was not so much sounding as palpable through his feet. The sound came shortly after, of heavy animals with large padded hooves.
George’s voice was breathy from mild effort, approaching quickly. “Looks like we lost nothing to predators. That’s a blessing.”
Fortis noticed the bow and arrows were slung across George’s back, as his host turned around to stop the large beasts. On the opposite shoulder he saw a short sword. He wondered what a sword would be made of on a planet where hard metals were rare. George led the largest beast around the wagon, then sidled it over in front of the wagon. It was a quick draw which brought the hitching down on the animal’s back, and a few swift motions to cinch a strap under the belly. Then George stepped back to the rear of the wagon, and turned some crank handle Fortis had not seen before. The axle shifted so that just a little bit of weight rested on the animal’s harness. One last check of the straps on the load, then George turned to Fortis.
“Have you ever ridden an animal, before?” Fortis had done so only once, as a special treat of some powerful figure on one planet he visited.
George explained, “These are the largest creatures on Misty. It wasn’t hard to tame them, and it took only a little selective breeding to produce something with a natural riding saddle built into their backs. It doesn’t hurt them, and they don’t resist. Indeed, the odd thing would be they seem to lack any temperament at all. That is, until they smell predators. They don’t scare easily, but do make a bit of noise until I draw some kind of weapon for defense.”
George showed Fortis how to mount the creature, by pulling up a front foot and bending it up for a step. The beast simply leaned a bit so the one front leg bore the weight balanced, and Fortis managed to take a fairly comfortable seat. George mounted quickly and spoke in a sing-song voice words of gibberish. The two mounted beasts proceeded side by side, and the draft animal followed at the same pace. The stride was slow and gentle, so it was quite easy for Fortis to keep his seat. He noticed a faint increase in wan gray light on one horizon.
Ever the mindful host, George began describing what to expect on the journey. “We are actually starting a bit late today. Normally we would be well on our way, but I knew you were out of rhythm for sleeping.
“The reason for this sort of schedule is because of the light gathering mildew on all our tents. We have the means to carry a charge stored up, but it has limits. We try to travel during the first half of the day, then stop and set up our tents to get the current generation going before evening mealtime. Plus, it allows us to charge up the predator fences. We didn’t need one out here in the polar flats, because virtually nothing lives here. These mounts were a solid half-hour walk away in the thin grassy hillocks where they could eat and rest, and there the predators could be hunting.”
Fortis reminded himself “hour” here, as on every planet, was an ancient term for whatever numerical divisions of the day each culture used. By now they were seeing a few wisps of greenish sprouts here and there, so it was probably at least two kilometers from the ship. The pace of the beasts was easily faster than he could run, but it seemed much slower if he didn’t look down. In some ancient time, he supposed a Terran would think of the beasts as camels without the hump, and shorter legs.
George continued his explanation. “Once we enter more occupied lands, we’ll keep our mounts inside a charged fence. The predators will smell the charge in the lines and stay away. Only the youngest ones are foolish enough to approach the fence.”
Gradually, the grass grew thicker, taller. Fortis strained to see what was ahead in their direction of travel. It seemed there were no mountains anywhere, no sharp or gre
at changes in elevation.
He could have sworn George could read his mind, as the man cited more pertinent data. “Misty has no detectable tectonic activity. The entire surface is relatively flat. The seas are shallow, and everywhere is a rather high water table. The desert in our equatorial belt is simply higher elevation, and thus a hard rocky place. With virtually zero precipitation, a mist rises in the middle to polar latitudes during the night, but there is none at the equator, where the cloud base is a bit higher. Lacking a moon, we have no tides in our shallow seas. The breeze here at the pole is almost an accident, the result of winds elsewhere, which are quite stiff on the equator. We feel sure much of this is due to our star being in a very stable cycle itself, though we lack the means to confirm it.”
Fortis promised himself he would find a way to check and let them know, even if only by transmitting the data to the birds.
George was talking again. “This hemisphere has more land, but this still leaves us using boats more than beasts for travel. In a few days we’ll reach the shore of this polar island and find the ship I left anchored somewhere just off the coast. Our boats are wide and flat, and many people make their homes on them, seldom walking on land. Storms are exceedingly rare, just a bit of extra wind blowing the water in waves higher than normal. In most places, the currents run one way, the winds the other. It’s all in giant loops, so travel is alternating between sailing and riding currents.”
They had been climbing almost imperceptibly so far. Then the ground sloped downward just noticeably. They came to a narrow band of still water. Stretching to his full height, Fortis thought it was some odd, narrow inlet of the sea. It smelled of it. Yet it was amazingly shallow, as George never slowed and the beasts and wagon splashed across. The bottom was the same gray, slated stuff near the pole. Turning, Fortis could barely make out his ship, a darker sharp object against a vaguely dark horizon. He surmised the pole was almost a bowl of lifeless ground. Scanning in all directions, he realized they had passed through a low spot on the rim of this giant polar bowl.