Delta Pavonis (2 page)

"Were you rappelling?"

"Right. We got almost to the bottom, just a few meters. That's when I found out that two meters is an easy jump, but three is too much, if you land wrong. That's another thing. Natural surfaces are always uneven, and sand can be a real killer. Soft, and there's always rocks and things buried in it, so you stumble easy. That's what happened to me: I came down on a patch of sand with a rock under one foot. Ended up with a fractured femur and torn ligaments in my ankle and knee."

She left the niche. "Does that sort of thing happen often?"

"All the time. Just check in at the hospital. Leg, foot and knee injuries are the most common type. It seems that in spending several generations in space, we lost our fear of heights. People are always overestimating how long a fall they can take."

"I'll remember that. Thanks. " The machine coughed a bundle of cloth into a bin.

"There're your uniforms. Four sets, coveralls, underwear and socks, all in tropical weight. Your expedition colors are embroidered on the shoulders."

She pulled the bundle apart and began folding all but one set. The underwear looked incredibly archaic; a short-sleeved singlet and voluminous shorts in some white, nubby fabric. "Do they really expect us to wear these?" She held up a pair of the shorts. The thought of wearing them was vaguely embarrassing.

"They're not designed for fashion. They're to soak up sweat and keep your coveralls from rubbing you raw."

She made a face. "Sounds primitive."

"It is. Could be worse, though. Back on Earth, the tropics meant all that sweat drew bugs and caused fungus infections. Nothing here like that. What's here is plenty strange enough, though."

"So I understand. What else do I need to pick up?"

"Nothing here. Your first uniform issue is free from Survey. When you replace them, you buy them. Gear's something else. Do you have a tent and sleeping bag?"

"Uh-huh. One-piece unit, cost like hell."

"Let me see it." She pulled the unit from her duffel bag and he looked it over. "This is a good one, but it'll cook you in the tropics. This bag is made for temps down to minus fifty. Even if you left it wide open at night, you'd burn up. When you get to Supply, tell Leva, the supply man, that you want to swap it for a tropical model. Don't let him snooker you. The tropic model costs about half what this one does. Get him to give you the difference in credit or in lagniappe from the supply room. You have good knives, tools? Rope?"

She dumped her pack and duffel bag and he went through the contents. When he was satisfied, he helped her repack them. "You're pretty well set except for the sleeping bag and tent. Have you had antisolar treatment?"

"Sure." It was a variation of the antiradiation treatment that most spacers had anyway. The skin cells were encouraged to manufacture a natural block against several forms of hard radiation.

"Good. You have brown eyes, so that's a help. Here, one last thing." He punched something into the console of the fabricator and it kicked out one more piece of cloth. The man picked it up and handed It to her. "Wear it in good health."

She turned the thing over in her hands. It was of olive cloth, like her new uniforms, with a central part that was shapelessly cylindrical and an outer part that was stiffer, discoid in shape. "It's a hat!"

"That's right. Everybody wears them in the bush. Your antisolar treatment won't cut the glare, but this will. It gives you portable shade. Both sides pin up if you want them out of the way. You can fan yourself with it and when you get mad you can throw it down and stomp on it. You'll get mad a lot, out there."

"Thanks." She tried it on, feeling ridiculous. She had never worn a hat. Spacers never wore such things. "How do I look?"

"Great. Except you've got it on backwards." He made the proper adjustments. "There. Now, there's dressing rooms down at that end. Go change into one of your new uniforms and nobody'll be able to tell you from an old-timer."

She went in and made the switch. When she stepped out, she found that clothes didn't make the explorer. She felt exactly as she had when she left the shuttle: like an awkward, stumbling beginner. It didn't help that the underwear felt so strange. She had the absurd feeling that people could see them beneath her coverall.

"Perfect," the uniform issue man said. "Now go to Supply, and don't forget what I told you about getting your credit back."

She thanked him and went to Supply, thence to Medical. Eventually she found herself in a large auditorium with about twenty other newcomers, awaiting a final briefing before taking shuttles to their duty assignments. They fidgeted in their seats for a few minutes, then fell silent as a woman came in and mounted the podium. She was dark-haired and wore a white lab coat over her Survey uniform.

"Welcome to Delta Pav Four," she began. "I'm Antigone Ciano, director of environmental engineering." Dierdre sat up and took closer notice. This was interesting. The Cianos had been a crucial family in space pioneering. This woman had the intense, slightly mad look common to that family.

"In the next few hours," Ciano went on, "you will all be winging to your various assignments. If you've paid attention in your classes, you know that we've discovered a planet that's better than we had any right to hope, and stranger than anything we could have imagined." She clasped her hands behind her back and swayed like a reed in a gentle breeze.

"The whole planet teems with life, but it seems to have evolved here in a fashion completely different from the same process on Earth. The flora and fauna of the different continents and islands differ as radically as if they had evolved on different planets. The same seems to be true in the oceans, although we've barely begun to look at those. Various theories are being tested to account for the differences, mostly concerning extreme isolation during the very beginnings of life on this planet. It's a moot point, because the geology here is just as strange as the biology . . . mountain ranges where they have no business being, things like that. Well, you'll see for yourselves. The thing to remember is that whatever you learn in one place may do you no good in another."

The newcomers looked dismayed, but she brightened. "There's a good side to all this. Nothing here has evolved to bite you, for instance. There are no equivalents for mosquitoes, ticks, fleas, and that sort of thing, no bloodsuckers or parasites. I was on Earth many years ago and believe me, that improves things a lot. We can't eat anything that lives here, but that means nothing can eat us, either." She smiled at them. "Of course, you still have to be careful. Some predators attack motion or heat. It's no comfort to watch them gag after spitting out a big bloody hunk of your anatomy. They may not
know
you're inedible, so be careful.

"Conditions here are rather Earthlike, in that they run the gamut from paradisiacal to hellish. Most of you will be going to fairly pleasant areas, but a few will draw the hardship posts. Whichever you get, try to maintain the proper spirit of scientific discovery; it makes up for a lot of pain. Remember that your worst enemy is your own inexperience. Be very, very careful and watch closely what your more experienced colleagues do. Planetary conditions are new to almost all of us, and those few of us who were on Earth or Mars before the Jump were mostly in civilized and controlled areas. This is entirely different. We've had some deaths already, and many injuries."

She looked at a list in her hand. "I'll now give you your flight numbers and times. Answer when I call your name." She proceeded through the list, adding bits of information and advice along with the destinations. Dierdre waited tensely as, by ones and twos, the others got up to go meet their flights. At last, she was the only one left in the seats, wondering if she had somehow been missed.

Antigone Ciano stared at her list for several moments. "Miss Jamail? I see you're headed for those islands in the Iliad Sea."

"That's what I'm told." She wondered why she had been singled out.

"It's two hours before your flight leaves. Would you care to join me in the cafeteria? You'd better eat in any case. Your flight will take more than sixteen hours."

"Certainly," Deirdre said. She felt flattered. An invitation from one of the legendary Cianos on her first day on-planet. "I'd love to." Here was a chance to get some inside information.

"Just come along with me." The walk to the dining facility was a long one, especially lugging all her gear. Ciano kept up a running patter, making acerbic comments about nearly everything they passed. Most of her ire seemed to be aimed at Survey administration, which she considered to be inefficient and overrun with bureaucrats. Dierdre wasn't sure how much to take seriously, since scientists and engineers always talked that way.

The cafeteria had tables and chairs made of the all-purpose extruded foam, ugly but functional. The food was little better: bland-tasting synthetics, mostly with the character of tofu.

"Until we get valid agriculture going," Ciano said by way of explanation, "this is what well have to put up with. Shuttle cargo space is too costly to bring down much in the way of luxury foods. You'll find that rationing is pretty strict here."

"Can't they set up a big hydroponics operation?"

"Sooner or later. Don't hold your breath. We really couldn't start work until we knew what local conditions we'd be facing. At least the atmosphere is Earthlike and the gravity's not too far off. Soil nutrients are the big problem and even for hydro-p we can't just manufacture them out of nothing. It's going to take some time. Fortunately, we have plenty of that"

"From what little I've heard," Dierdre said tentatively, "I'm headed for one of those hardship posts you mentioned."

"I'm afraid so. That's why I wanted to give you, in particular, a little advice. The others were all going to relatively easy assignments where they'll have some leisure and fairly good companionship to learn the ropes. It's going to be much rougher on you. Not meaning to pry, but I take it you had some difficulties back home?"

"I guess you could say that. I seem to have a facility for making people mad. My parents got me into the Academy mainly to keep me out of trouble at home. At the Academy I set some sort of record for demerits. I almost wasn't given a planetside assignment at all."

"That's about what I expected. Well, you're going to meet some kindred spirits where you're going, but that's not going to make them easy to get along with." She ran her fingers through her tangled hair. "I know what they taught you in school: how we're all a happy band of siblings cooperating in the great adventure of spreading human life and culture through the galaxy. To be honest, it's not as simple as that. We brought a lot of our old problems with us. One of them is politics. Back on Earth, then in the old Island Worlds, later in the asteroid colonies that made the Jump, and now down here on Delta Pav Four, it's all riddled with politics from top to bottom. Power groups, interest groups, administrative bureaus, they're all fighting and clawing for limited resources. Each wants to expand its own operations at the expense of the others. We thought we were escaping that sort of thing first by leaving Earth, then by leaving the Sol system. But we couldn't outrun human nature, it's as old as tribal societies. All we did was separate ourselves from certain outdated politico-economic systems."

"What's this got to do with my assignment?" This was beginning to sound brutal.

"There's an ancient practice that runs through all sorts of organizations from nations to military systems to corporations: there's always a place to send the screwups. Some outfit acquires a reputation for inefficiency or uncooperativeness or maybe just bad luck. Pretty soon, anybody with a bad record gets sent there. It stays a legitimate part of the organization, because you need a human dumping-ground. It's in the nature of bureaucracy that it's much easier to arrange a transfer than to hold a court-martial or a firing or whatever. The source of trouble is put out of sight, out of mind." She picked up her synthetic tea and sipped with an expression of distaste.

"And that's where I'm headed?" Dierdre asked in a dead voice. "But the district chief is Derek Kuroda. I thought he was . . ."

"Derek Kuroda has been, for his entire adult life, one of the biggest screwups and trouble makers in the whole Diaspora. He does fine work but he makes enemies at an appalling rate. He tells his superiors what he thinks with reckless disregard for their feelings. He's worse in that respect than I am, and I've never been noted for forbearance. All of which is why he's stuck in South Atropos, with that ghastly-looking string of islands as his next assignment." She leaned forward and spoke earnestly. "It's great work and it'll be good experience for you, but it's a deadend for your career if you stay too long. Take my advice and transfer out once you have a chance. If you compile a good record, you'll have your pick of assignments."

"I'll keep it in mind. Tell me, how does Dr. Kuroda feel about all this?"

She sat back with an abstracted look. "He thrives on it, the idiot. I've harangued him for years, but he never listens. He has a romantic image of himself as a rebel, a maverick. He just never grew up. Did I mention that he's my husband? I guess I didn't." She made an airy gesture with a beringed hand. "We love one another dearly, but we prefer to keep a certain distance most of the time. Half a planet is about right. With luck, you won't be seeing much of him. He'll be at his headquarters on the mainland, mostly." Abruptly, the older woman stood and held out her hand. "Good luck out there. Be careful and you'll make out all right. Send me word of how you're doing from time to time." She sounded as if she had meant it.

"I will," Dierdre said, deciding that she meant it, too.

An hour later, she stood on the airfield, her gear piled next to her as she shuffled forward in line to board her scoutcraft. It was a racy name for a clumsy-looking cargo vehicle. Its body was a barely-streamlined rectangle twenty meters in length and five meters high. At each corner was a rotating rotor pad, held clear of the ground by landing struts. A man wearing flyer's wings checked off the passengers as they boarded.