Castaway Planet (13 page)

Chapter 19

“Oh, my. It’s
beautiful
.”

“It is that.”

Laura stared in admiration at the large pond, or small lake, that stretched out before her, a pure blue that deepened to blue-black in the center. “Sakura said it was the bluest blue she’d ever seen, but I have to admit I doubted her.”

“Oh, she was right.” Akira put his arm around her waist. “I’m pretty sure that what we’re looking at is the Lincoln equivalent of a ‘blue hole’ on Earth. I saw a couple when I was doing my graduate work in bio. Tests show that the surface layer, at least, is fresh water, as is the little stream we followed up here.”

“Tides don’t reach up this high?” Laura asked.

Akira chuckled and shook his head. “Another area where our assumptions conflict with Lincoln. We’re
floating
, Laura. There’s a bit of a ripple and lag given the size of this drifting island, but not much; there aren’t tides of any sort we’re used to. So there’s no real equivalent to the tidal zone as such, just the wave area; we do of course get waves and such, but you don’t get the slow progression of water coming in and then going out.”

“All right, you’ve made me feel stupid. I should have thought of that.”

“I have no doubt we’ll constantly be noticing things that we should have thought of, but didn’t. Lincoln’s a very subtle trap; things seem so close to things we know from Earth, or Whips knows from Europa, and then suddenly we come face to face with the difference of this place.”

“So,” she said, changing the subject, “Why did you bring me out here? Not that I mind having a few minutes alone with my husband,” she noted, and gave him an unhurried kiss before she continued, “but we can’t afford to not be doing things that are useful, either.”

“Caroline’s taken the responsibility to give us this time. She, Sakura, and Hitomi are making barkcloth, now that we’ve figured out how to make it really work, while Melody and Whips work on cutting the meat of the three minimaws we caught up for drying.” He glanced at her. “That was a brilliant idea you had on making a solar grill.”

She felt a touch of heat on her cheeks. “Oh, I’m sure that Whips or someone would have—”

“Maybe, but they didn’t, and you did.”

Truth be told, she was proud of that. “The shape of one of the side vent mounts that we found was what suggested it.”

“Well, it’s working. We can cook without using our limited supply of electricity, and that’s so very important. There’s no reason to assume our solar cells or batteries are going to run out any time soon—they were designed with at least fifteen-year lives, after all—but we needed some way of surviving without them. The heat box that Whips made out of some of the crab shells should allow us to dry out food for use later.”

Akira led her around the edge of the blue pond. Laura could see, by traces of cut plants and plantimal-things along the way, that the prior expedition had come this way as well. “But to get back to your question, I wanted to show you Sakura’s brainstorm, which almost made up for her nearly getting killed.”

“It was that bad?”

He nodded gravely. “Laura, I was at the point that
I
could have killed her . . . for almost getting killed, if you know what I mean. All trying to save a couple of capys from one of their natural predators.”

“Capy?”

“I mentioned they somehow reminded me of capybaras, so the name stuck. That predator, though—it’s an ambush and fast-dash type. We have to keep our eyes up as well as down; they disguise their tendrils as vines and such, and when something wanders underneath . . .
bam!
” He mimed a lightning snatching motion.

Laura glanced uneasily up into the forest canopy. There were a
lot
of loosely hanging vines . . .

“But as I told you, she seems to be taking the lesson to heart. You noticed there wasn’t a single protest about being told she’d stay in the camp doing work for the next two weeks. Just asked if she could help make the barkcloth with Hitomi.”

“Yes. That was uncharacteristic of her. Or,” she amended, “maybe not. She wants to help, and she just learned how following her impulses can cause a lot more problems.”

“Yes.” Akira grinned and pushed his hair back out of his eyes as he led her onwards. “They’re all holding up well. But I’m worried about that.”

She knew what he meant. They were getting past the time where pure shock and emergency were keeping people focused, and where novelty was starting to wear off. “Anyway, what was this brainstorm?”

“We’re almost there . . . Ah! Look ahead.
That
is her brainstorm.”

Laura saw, in a small clearing, an absolutely immense column—perhaps one and a half times the height of the others they’d seen in the forest before, and at least twice the diameter, a monstrous cylinder fifty meters high and eleven meters across at the base. Various growths, from vines to the bright red flowery creatures that had stung Sakura, adorned the column. “What about it?”

“We wanted a place to live. She pointed out that this would be perfect.”

Laura stopped, staring. The thought was another of the obvious in-hindsight ideas that could stun you for a moment. The columns were hollow—they already knew that—and one this large . . . “Doesn’t anything already live in them?”

“Probably—although most of it will have to be quite small. Lower down there are only relatively small openings, and anything that can reach the top can’t be very big.”

“Don’t
you
go making assumptions, Akira dear. Your arboreal predator-things could probably climb up that column and drop into it very easily. Might make a good hiding or nesting place.”

Akira winced. “Oh, well played, Laura. That’ll teach me. Yes, I would say you’re very right. We’ll need to get a good look inside. But still, what do you think?”

“I think it’s brilliant, as you said. We’ll have to figure out a nice safe way to anchor floors and such, and figure out good ways to cut through safely without imperiling the structure’s integrity, and so on . . . but I like it, I really do. An armored treehouse, almost.” She studied the column. “But getting up and down . . .”

“Solved, by Whips, when I talked with him last night. Gearing and solar batteries—and a backup hand crank—combined with the winch. Remember the winch?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “The one we thought we’d be using to bring
LS-5
up onto the shore?”

“Yes. We didn’t lose it, and the capacity of that thing is just incredibly beyond anything we’ll need. Put our solar cells from the shelter up on the top of the column, where they’ll always be getting maximum light in, and dedicate a battery or two to the winch, and we should have guaranteed elevators—keeping us from having to climb with stuff in our hands, yet letting us live well above the forest floor. Build a rampway, too, so we can get up and down that way as well.”

She walked over to the great column and laid her hand on it. “That sounds like a good plan to me. We should test methods of cutting through the material before we try it here, though—maybe on the column that’s fallen near our camp.”

“I agree. We don’t want to ruin this column by using it for practice.”

Laura found herself smiling as she looked up at the huge column. “What will we build with?”

“The trees and treelike things have support elements that are nontoxic and usable, I think. And I’ve got another surprise for you, and everyone else.” She looked down to see his smiling face above a ragged cube of pinkish . . .

“. . . wood? Is that
wood
?”

“Close enough, love. It’s a very close analogue, I’ve tested it and it burns . . . and it’s not toxic. Well, not any more than wood usually is, you wouldn’t want to breathe in lots of smoke from a standard hickory or oak fire, either.”

“Oh, that’s . . . that’s wonderful, Akira!”
Wood
. Something that could be burned, or—much more importantly—cut, carved, shaped, used for floors, barriers, cups, bowls, without dealing with the issues of metal or the frangibility of many shells . . . “That’s
wonderful
.”

He looked up at her with the same expression she remembered from their dating days—something that was so intensely focused on her that it gave her a thrill down her back, the same thrill she’d had then, too. “And that’s why I waited to tell you first. I wanted to watch you smile like that again.”

“Oh, Akira . . .”

There was no decision or thought, just another kiss. And like all the others, it was both familiar and new.

Finally they pulled apart, and she smiled again. “Alas, I don’t think it’s safe to do anything else here.”

“Decidedly not. But I most surely appreciate the implied sentiment.
Domo arigato
.” He looked back at the piece of wood. “Such a simple structure, really, sugar molecules interlocked in a layered polymer . . . and it could be one of the most valuable things on the planet.”

She looked around the forest surrounding them and the huge column. “How common is wood here?”

“Oh, it’s far from the main component, but there’s a sizeable minority of wood-bearing plants. We’ll want to be careful about our harvesting habits, but there’s plenty for our purposes.” He looked back at the column. “So, soon we’ll have a home.”

Suddenly, a quiver ran through the forest. Debris sifted down from above; the trees swayed. Her hand grabbed Akira’s and they stood stock-still, waiting. The swaying and rumbling died away, and in a few moments all seemed back to normal.

“What was
that
?”

Akira frowned. “Caroline was afraid of something like that. The whole floating continent is lifted up and down, moves with the tides, and so on. It
must
have to shift with such motion, and that will sometimes not be a smooth process.”

“So even here we’ll have earthquakes.”

“Yes. We have to assume that they won’t become too bad—because we really have no chance to survive if this semi-landmass breaks up on us. We’ve seen what that looks like in miniature, and it would be utterly lethal. But,” he said, turning back towards the pond, “it does mean we’ll have to build our house to take a little shaking.”

She nodded, and looked around her. A last long, yellow-green leaf was fluttering down from the forest canopy, a reminder that what was up . . . could fall down.

Chapter 20

“Well, that sort of works,” Whips said grudgingly, looking at the centimeter-wide hole in the side of the downed column. “But if we have to do that for all the holes we want, that have to be something like twenty or thirty centimeters wide, this could take
years
.”

“I know.” Sakura felt irrational frustration welling up in her and managed, barely, to resist the urge to kick the massive stony thing. “That hedral is pretty acidic, but that’s only by comparison with other things; it’s more like a lemon or orange. Tastes kinda like one, too.”

The “hedral” was one of the fruits that Akira and Laura had cleared for consumption, with a fresh, sour taste that came from citric acid, just as in Earth citrus fruits. That particular chemical was a common part of certain metabolic pathways which were nearly universal. Laura had dubbed the fruits “hedrals” because they came in faceted shapes somewhat like polyhedral dice.

“It proves we were right; concentrated acids will weaken the material. Probably carbonic acid in the atmosphere slowly dissolves them too. If we had a stronger acid . . .”

“But we don’t. Not right now. Mel and Mom have been looking into making chemical stuff, and from what we’ve got right now, things like nitric acid and sulphuric are just not in the picture. You might get some hydrochloric out of animals’ stomachs or something, and Mel said that one of her references says something about making it by heating salt in clay vessels, but that sounds like something really dangerous to me.” Sakura heard her voice rising slightly unsteadily, sounding much angrier and more worried than made sense.

Whips either didn’t notice or chose to ignore it, instead just waving his arms in agreement. “Hmm . . . yes, that could work. High-temperature steam and salt . . . that would produce hydrochloric acid and soda, which could be useful. But you’re right about needing to be very careful. I’m not sure we’ve got anything quite like clay, anyway, but it would be a problem.”

Sakura took a deep breath. She knew she’d been touchier than usual and not just because of her stupid moment that almost got her killed. She had to make sure she didn’t start snapping at people. She glanced over at other parts of the fallen column. Attempts to just chop or gouge through the massive walls of the thing had mostly failed miserably; her father thought that if they had a good hard-steel pickaxe and someone strong enough to use it well they might get somewhere, but almost all the metal they had was much more lightweight and not at all suited for that kind of purpose—even if they could forge something that large and heavy, something that Whips wasn’t sure of even with a large solar furnace for heat.

A black-edged hole was visible a little ways down the column—demonstrating that fire could also weaken the material over a fairly wide area. “If we had a
blowtorch
we could get this done a lot faster.”

“Yes,” agreed Whips. “But we don’t.”

“You’re a lot of help.”

“Your sarcasm is no help at all.”

“Makes me feel better.” That was a lie, a part of her realized. It released the anger but not enough of it.

“Well, it makes
me
feel like you’re just dismissing me, throwing silt in my face!” Whips’ voice had an edge in it now, a sudden edge, and he turned and slapped down hard on the column, pulling back with a ripping sound as he tore a wide swath of vines from it.

The action was so abrupt and violent that it shocked Sakura out of her own brown study. “Oh. I’m sorry, Whips. I wasn’t thinking.”

The adolescent Bemmie was staring at the tangle of torn plants and plantlike things in his one set of arm-talons with a bemused expression. Slowly he retracted the sharp claws and the stuff dropped with a rattling hiss to the ground. “I guess I wasn’t either. Just letting my currents carry me without thought. I didn’t mean to snap at you.” The sudden frightened undertone in his voice echoed his other concern:
I’m not unstable!

Sakura looked down. “Well, I deserved it. I was being nasty for no reason.”

“Not for no reason,” Whips said after a moment. “It’s just getting harder, isn’t it?”

She couldn’t pretend to misunderstand him, but that just meant she really had to face it, and that . . . that really hurt. “You mean . . . that this isn’t going to change. The situation, I mean.”

He hesitated a moment, and visibly deflated. “That we’re stuck here, with only a few remnants of technology to help us? Yes. Probably forever. Even if, somehow,
Outward Initiative
survived, and guesses we did too, it will be at least a year before someone could possibly get a rescue mission up. And how will we even know they’re there, or be able to signal them? They’ll be looking for the lifeboat transmitters, maybe even a beacon buoy, not searching every centimeter of the planet. If they recognize the new planet, maybe a scientific expedition will come out here . . . in ten years. But there’s an awful lot of planets already being studied, there’s nothing hugely important about just one new one.”

“But Lincoln’s unique. I’ve never heard of anything like these floating continents, have you?”

Whips snorted. “No, never. But noticing that will probably take years of study by one of the remote telescope arrays—if someone bothers, rather than just doing a quick survey that says ‘here’s the major landmasses, it’s got typical livable biosphere,’ if you know what I mean there.”

“Yeah.” Sakura forced the frustration down. This was getting them nowhere. “Where were we before we started getting all snippy with each other? Oh yeah. The lack of a blowtorch.”

“It would be such a perfect solution,” Whips said mournfully. “The columns are really hard to catch on fire, since they’ve got a lot of silicon-based structure, but since they’ve also got carbon-based structure you can break that down with fire easily and that really erodes the strength. Once you’ve done that, you can bash it apart with a rock or dig it away with a shell. But no way to direct the fire. If we had something like thermite paste—something that would stick to the column while it burned—now that would be perfect.”

“About the only way to make a paste that burns here, though, would be fat . . . and that’s just going to melt and run down the side. Not what we want.”

“If we could just lay it down like this one, it wouldn’t be a problem.”

The two of them sat quietly for a few minutes, thinking. Sakura finally went to the bucket they had nearby—once a small blockcrab shell—and used her drinking shell to dip up some water. “If we could lay it down and put it back up, I think we’d have to have technology that made it no longer important.”

“Yes. I . . .” Whips trailed off, staring at her with all three eyes.

When he didn’t move for a moment, she looked behind herself, then back. “What is it?”

“Cups,” he said, slowly.

“What?”

“Cups!” Whips said, with more force, as if a sudden revelation had struck him.

“Cups?” She looked down at her own, and suddenly it was snatched from her hand. “Hey!”

And Whips was pressing it up against the side of the cylinder. “See?”

Now she
did
see. “Whips, that’s perfect! We just have to drill little holes like those to support a sort of . . . firebox, I guess—that gets held up against the column and burns until it’s weak enough to get through! Then . . .” She frowned. “We have to keep burning our way through—those things are
thick
.”

“Sticks on fire, stuffing the hole?”

“Might work. Maybe we need to get some kind of burnable oil or alcohol or something. It’s kind of porous—maybe we could soak it and set it on fire in steps?”

“There’s an idea. If it can hold its own fuel, it can self-destruct according to a design.” Whips gave the tightening of the arms that equated to a frown, combined with a dull rippling pattern. “Liquid burnable material is going to be the limit. The side cup approach doesn’t need liquid, but packing a hole with burning solid material probably won’t work very well.”

Sakura sighed. “Then maybe it’s not good enough. We have to get through a couple
meters
of this stuff. Even higher up it’s going to be half a meter thick.”

“Right.”

She thought again about their limited supplies. The only powered machine of note that they had was the winch and its associated block-and-tackle and cable. All the winch could do would be to lift things . . .

“Wait a minute,” she said, an idea slowly dawning.

“What is it?”

“This stuff isn’t harder than the titanium alloy fragments we have, right?”

“Nnnoooo,” Whips responded slowly. “It’s tough, but sawing away at it with some of those pieces made cuts without apparently blunting the alloy much. But it’s far too light to make a—”

“I know that—besides, how would you—or Dad—swing a pickaxe thirty meters up? But what about a
drill
?”

“Drill? We don’t have a—”

“Put a sort of drillhead, faced with the titanium pieces, in the center of a wheel. Run the winch’s line around the wheel. Maybe use some trick to gear it up—I’m not an expert in such designs—but get it spinning and then push it into the column!”

Whips sat stock still for a moment, even his colors drifting to neutral as he thought intensely. Then slowly colors began to ripple brighter and brighter. “That might work. And we could combine it with the fire approach. Weaken the exterior, start drilling through. Perhaps even gear it up to spin something like wood at speeds that heat it up and drive it in with the heat of fire? I don’t know, but maybe, just maybe, we can figure something out.”

“Let’s go back and talk to everyone else. For once everyone’s here today.”

But as they got close to the main camp, Sakura heard a sound that sent a cold shock through her; Hitomi, crying as though her heart were broken. Sakura broke into a run, sprinting towards the camp.
Is she all right? Are Mom and Dad—?

She practically tumbled over the edge of the crash scar before she could finally make out the repeated words blurred together in the sobs: “I want to go
home
! I want to go
home!
”

She could see her mother kneeling in front of her youngest sister, who pushed her away and kept crying. Melody was turned away from everyone else but from her vantage point Sakura could see that Mel’s face was screwed up in an unsuccessful attempt to keep from crying herself.

The repeated phrase hurt, because she felt exactly the same way. She didn’t know what had triggered it, but she, too, was tired of sleeping in the temporary shelter, tired of a menu that was only very slowly expanding and never nearly diverse enough, of days spent hammering fibers into cloth or smoking meat or trying to drill holes into stuff that didn’t want holes in it. She hated the rough barkcloth and having to figure out how to stick softer things inside it to cushion the rubbing.

And she was tired of seeing the same faces
all
the time, no one else, no calls, no visits, no one to interrupt or vary the monotony.

“—and I want my
own
bed, I don’t
wanna
do any more work, and I want new Jewelbug adventures, and I want to eat . . . want to eat . . . something that’s not from
here!
” the little girl sobbed.

“Hitomi, honey, I’m sorry,” her mother said, and the sympathy in her voice at least managed to get through; Sakura saw—through the slight warping of her own tears that were trying to get through—Hitomi let her mother pull her over for a hug.

“When’s the ship coming
back
, Mommy?”

“Hitomi, we’ve told you before,” her father said, kneeling next to Mom, “we’re lost. It may never come back. Maybe it will, but we can’t live based on that hope.”

That set off another round of sobs, as Hitomi tried to argue against the reality the rest of them—even Melody—knew. Sakura wanted to help, but the whole subject felt like a dull knife in her gut. She felt exactly like Hitomi, and the excitement at the possible solutions she and Whips had found was now gone. Sakura sank into one of the nearby chairs and put her face in her hands, trying to pull some of her own courage back up from the depths.

Even Caroline was silent. Her methodical and organized approach to life had been utterly shattered by their being marooned on Lincoln, and while she was older and more controlled, Sakura could tell without even looking that Caroline didn’t have anything left to give either.

I just . . . can’t. I’m so tired of this
place
. It’s beautiful . . . and it’s scary, and uncomfortable, and there’s no one else here. We’re all alone.

She glanced at Whips, who was draped above, not even bothering to finish coming down. His arms were almost completely limp and his colors were dull and sluggish. It had to be so much worse for him. At least Sakura had a family. He didn’t even have another member of his species here.

That worry about her best friend was enough to grab onto. She forced herself to sit up, but looking around almost broke her again.

Even Mom and Dad look helpless.

We’ve beaten the crash and all these other things . . . but I think we’re all beating ourselves now . . .