Wildcatter (17 page)

He uploaded his plog, bringing
Golden Hind
up to date on his situation and what he had learned. He didn’t ask how long the storm would last because he didn’t want to hear the answer. The rest of the team came on to wish him luck, or prayer in one case.

The drawer he had noticed earlier was now explained. He dragged it behind him as he crawled out of the cave on hands and knees—the storm had barely started and already he did not dare try to stand up in it. He scooped a hollow in the sand to anchor the drawer; he packed sand in around it. The rain was almost horizontal, but enough was going in to fill it fairly soon.

A good prospector should never miss a chance to sample. Back in the shuttle, he wrapped up some fish bones, a couple of beetles, and some more fecal pellets, larger than those he had found earlier. Those took him past the total of twenty he had promised JC. Now he just had to deliver them.

He headed back to find Meredith. She had reached the decon room, crawling out on hands and knees. She was doing fine, but did not object when he steadied her as she climbed down into the former lab. In addition to the bra, she wore a bed sheet as a sort of sarong.

“I have always believed that women look sexiest in garments that promise to fall off at any moment.”

“Sexy? If you think I look sexy in my present condition, you really are deprived. Close your eyes.”

“Not likely!” He turned his back instead.

Meredith draped the sheet over him in case he cheated. She crawled outside for a brief needle shower. Once she was dressed again, still wet but not chilled in the muggy heat, they made themselves as comfortable as possible, sitting on the lab table that stood half buried in sand. As a bench it was awkwardly tilted and not high enough for Seth’s legs, but it beat standing.

Her hair was still a tangled disaster and her long ordeal certainly showed, but a few days’ decent diet, some grooming, and something daring to wear, and she would turn all the heads in the dance hall. Her face was broad, showing the bone, portraying strength, not grace. Her eyes were large and steady, very pale gray. She was an Amazon.

“A steak about this size,” she said. “Rare. Fried onions, fried yams, and a magnum of ice-cold champagne. To celebrate my rescue.”

“Is that the biggest steak available?” He realized he was ravenous.

“And decent rags. And a comb, fergawsake.”

“Indecent rags have their good side.” He was amazed by her courage. What she had been through would have reduced most people to gibbering idiots, and it wasn’t over yet. “There’s a dead fish outside.”

“They go stinky very fast in the heat.”

With a roar like the end of several worlds, the rain turned to hail. Stones the size of eyeballs thundered on the shuttle, many bouncing in through the gap. In that gravity they would have battered Seth to pulp if they had caught him out in the open, going to fetch the water from his packs. The cataclysm stopped after ten minutes or so, and he recovered the drawer, pulling it inside. Meredith was waiting with a cup.

“
Votre champagne, madame.
Steak to follow.” The hail should melt quickly in the tropical-type heat. Outside, rain and thunder continued. The shuttle trembled as ever-stronger gusts hit the remaining wing.

“I was warned that there’s a storm surge on the way,” he said.

Meredith pulled a face. “We may have to go back inside, then. I’ve seen water almost high enough to flood through into the decon room. If it gets past that, we could be in some trouble.”

He wondered if the whole shuttle could shift, maybe break apart; didn’t say so.

“And the centaurs will come visiting,” she said. “They may bring me fish, but if they see you in that suit, they’ll go for you. That’s what they did to Dylan.” She sipped rainwater.

At this point Reese would say that it wasn’t the centaurs that bothered him, it was the unicorns.

Seth said, “While we’re waiting, and if you’re up to it, I’d like to record your account of what happened from the time you landed on Cacafuego.”

“That’s what you call it? I like our name better. But I’ll try.”

“Prospector to
Golden Hind
. Can you hear us over the racket?”

Maria’s voice. “Barely, but Control can filter the background out later.”

“Ok. We’re twiddling thumbs here. It’s raining on our picnic. I have Prospector Meredith Tsukuba with me, and she’s going to tell us what went wrong for Galactic’s landing party.”

“If I tell you what went right,” Meredith said. “It will be quicker.”

Days 375 to 390

001.196 sentient means a creature or species exhibiting at least two of the following features:

[a] deliberate use of fire,

[b] manufacture of tools for later use,

[c] regulation of social interaction by language,

[d] an ability to communicate abstract concepts,

[e] evidence of art, religion, or rituals other than sexual or territorial display.

001.197
semi-sentient means a creature or species exhibiting only one of the above features.

General Regulations
 
InterStellar Licensing Authority 
2375 edition 

“When ISLA’s report on GK79986B came out,” Meredith said, “everyone got very excited and also furious that Mighty Mite had cheated and jumped the gun. Galactic rammed us through our final prep in record time and we left orbit just a few days after you did. The scuttlebutt was that Galactic had told Old Doddery not to spare the horses. So he didn’t. We squandered a lot of ferrets on the way—I mean we didn’t wait for them all to return, so our navigators could choose the safest possible haven to aim for in the next jump. That’s standard procedure, of course, but what I heard was that as soon as one came back with readings that met minimum safety standards, we took that route and jumped, abandoning any probes that returned later. We entered orbit around Hesperides on our
Day 354
, right about Hesperides’ northern summer solstice. I don’t know what that date would be by your ship’s calendar, but we knew we had won, because there was no sign of you, the Mighty Mite Pirates.”

Seth said, “We estimated that the solstice had been about our
Day 380
, more than a month ago now. Either we hit more time slip or you beat us by about a month and a half. Your commodore must have cut quite a few corners. When
Golden Hind
files its report, ISLA may take a hard look at his log. And he’s going to face very hard questioning about abandoning you.”

“I have enough troubles of my own right now, thank you,” she said. “We were disappointed by the axial tilt, but some sideways worlds have been profitable, and we were determined to stake it before you did. Then our scanners turned up the flower pots. Know what I mean?”

“We called them chimneys.”

“We sent atmospheric drones down to overfly a couple of the colonies and we saw pseudo-mammalian fauna around them. We were thrown into a tizzy. Now we call them centaurs and in my opinion they’re sentient.”

Oh!
“Not just semi-sentient?”

“We weren’t sure then, but since I’ve got to know them better, I’m convinced they’re sentient.”

“They use tools? Or they have language?”

Meredith shrugged. “Both. GenRegs are vague on this topic, as I’m sure you know. Taken literally, their definitions would qualify crows or parrots as intelligent. People are still arguing how sentient gorillas were, yet ISLA blithely expects a few stressed people to make a correct decision on species no one has ever seen before, and get it right first time.”

“ISLA wants to give any possible sentients the benefit of the doubt.”

“That’s not the way big corporations think. We sent down three drones in all, and every one of them ran afoul of the weather. You can avoid the obvious storms, but there’s a lot of CAT about, clear air turbulence.”

Seth recalled that Commodore Duddridge, in his beacon message, had claimed to have sent down “a lot” of drones, not just three. Had he lied to his own shuttle crew, so they would not be put off attempting a landing, or to the beacon, hoping to scare
Golden Hind
away when it arrived? He had never mentioned the chimneys or centaurs. His view of the truth was patchy and astigmatic.

“Doddery called for volunteers. Up jumped a dozen suicidal idiots. He picked me and I chose my crew. The three of us came downside on
Day 360
. We chose this site for several reasons, one being that it doesn’t get as hot as most of the northern hemisphere landmasses, yet it isn’t what on Earth we’d call arctic. Here the equator is the arctic, but there seems to be no permanent ice this far north. It had a fairly typical colony of flower … chimneys, you called them. As usual, they were close to the sea and a river, although I suspect now the river may be incidental. The drones’ videos had warned us that the estuary terrain was virtually impassable, but they had also shown some distributary channels like this one. We hoped that they might act as freeways for us wobbly bipeds.”

Meredith paused to take another sip of ice water. In her dehydrated and half-starved condition, she was over-reacting to the stim shot, talking fast, going hyper. Weeks of loneliness were showing, too. She might eventually collapse, and then how would Seth ever get her aboard
Niagara
when it returned? She ought to be in a hospital bed cocooned in IV tubes.

Seth said, “Of course you chose to land well back from the chimneys in case they turned out to be a housing project and your shuttle scared a tribe of sentients into starting a religion.”

“You guessed it. ISLA would have bust our pretty little asses. We didn’t want to waste any time, though. We knew the weather wasn’t reliable. As soon as we landed, Dylan Guinizelli and I suited up and headed out. It was a gorgeous day, all blue sky and fluffy clouds. The sun was very low and not oppressive. I really wished I could take my helmet off and smell such a beautiful world. We headed seaward, collecting, dictating, commenting, just like a school field trip.

“We followed the dry channel all the way to the chimneys. They looked bigger than I’d expected, about ten meters high and maybe five across, house-sized. But they’re irregular, obviously a natural growth, something like algal mounds. Their outsides are rough, like coral, and they taper upward, though not so much that you’d call them cones. On Earth you could climb them easily. Here, even Dylan, who’s … who
was
a hell-raiser, a crazy man, reckless to the point of insanity… Can you believe he enjoyed blindfold mountain climbing? Escorted, of course, but even so… Even Dylan wasn’t inclined to try climbing anything in this gravity.”

Dylan might have been a fun guy to know. Had Meredith found him so? Again she paused to drink and Seth spoke up, just to let her rest.

“You said that the centaurs take shelter inside them. You must have seen that from the drones, but our equipment couldn’t show us so much detail. We weren’t even sure that they were hollow. I know from what we did see that they are littoral, growing only in tidal areas, and Cacafuego has a lot of those. So if they’re plants or giant barnacles, not houses, what’s their game? How do they make a living?”

“You are terrestrializing!” she said. “You know how rarely our Earthly categories fit exobiology. Oysters have feathers and bats with hooves and so on. I think coral might be a better analogy, and coral isn’t a plant. If they trap and poison marine life, like sea anemones do, then they obviously don’t hurt the centaurs. Mariko suggested that they might collect rainwater. The rainfall here is stupendous, as you can see.”

“Quite.” Outside their little cave the water was coming down in ropes, with visibility reduced to a few meters. So far the sand had absorbed it, but Seth was watching the pond, and now it was spreading fast. The wind came in hurricane gusts, shaking the shuttle, making his ears pop. There could be no question of sending for
Niagara
until the weather lifted. He was very thirsty. “You suppose the centaurs use the chimneys to collect rainwater?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘use.’ They don’t build the pots, but they seem to make use of them. At some seasons, the precipitation must be high enough to keep the chimneys full of fresh or brackish water. The contrast between saltwater outside and fresh inside during high tide could serve as an energy source, either by osmotic pressure or by some electrolytic process. Or they may just ooze water to keep cool during low tide, when the sun is strong. Mariko suggested later that the chimneys and the centaurs could have a symbiotic thing going. The chimneys provide the centaurs with storm shelters, and the centaurs’ droppings fertilize the chimneys. But they are hollow, they are largely full of water, and they let centaurs play house, as we then discovered.

“We decided to return to the shuttle. That was when things started to go wrong. We had explored a little over one klick of a whole planet but we were beat! I admit it.”

“I understand,” Seth said, with feeling.

“We had just turned back when a centaur popped its head out of one of the flower pots and started jabbering like crazy. The others obviously heard it, so they couldn’t have had their heads underwater. They have no gills—they breathe air, but I suppose the pots aren’t quite full of water. They must come up to breathe but we certainly hadn’t noticed them doing so. Right away a whole herd of them appeared. Two or three to every chimney, they scrambled down the sides and came after us.