Worlds Enough and Time

  There is eelless swimming, finally, at Lakeside. The solar tide makes almost a meter difference in the lake’s water level, so twice a day it fills and empties a large pool they yesterday blasted out of rock in the middle of town. A grate keeps out anything larger than a minnow.

  We got there at the end of a work shift; when the bell rang, everybody dropped their tools and ran for the water, stripping as they went. I watched them cavorting in the pool and realized there was something going on that was deeper than escaping the heat, relaxing, hygiene, and sex play. All those kids grew up in a place where they could walk out of gravity any time they wanted. On a planet, the only escape from gravity is water. Or hurling oneself from a high place.

  Out of sixty people, there have been seven psychiatric replacements; people who were defeated by gravity or weather or horizons or just the unrelenting strangeness. Three of them were from the Engineer Pioneer group, supposedly pretty stout in that regard. I wonder what percentage will drop out of our less select bunch.

  Raleigh said I could live wherever I wanted, so long as I could find a roommate who was willing to move out when Dan arrived. Charlee volunteered. (Dan will be continuing as Earth Liaison, so he’ll be in ’Home for a couple more months, until the technological infrastructure down here is sufficiently reliable. Like central electricity.) I chose Lakeside, with the marvelous view of the water, even though that would mean climbing ladders for a while, and then stairs.

  The houses followed a basic design we got from Key West: put a platform up on slits, build a box on the platform, put a roof on the box. They look pleasingly primitive, since the basic building material is the tough reeds that are plentiful in the tidal wetlands, but the technology involved in putting them up was not primitive. The chemists up in orbit analyzed the samples we sent and cobbled together a machine that takes in water, wood shavings, mud, and sunlight, and gives out a steady stream of magic glue that bonds the reeds together like iron. Sandra didn’t enjoy working with it. It makes your fingers stick together, too.

  Each house has two residences that share a kitchen area in back, and a blank space that will eventually be a toilet and shower, once the settlement has central plumbing. Each individual residence is big enough for two adults and two children, with two bedrooms and a common room, so Charlee and I had plenty of space to ourselves.

  There’s no power grid yet, but each common room has a fuel cell recharged by a solar panel on the roof, so we both set up our portable consoles there. With only one table, we have the choice of working shoulder-to-shoulder or face-to-face. Or building another table, which might be interesting.

  Everything that goes up or down has to be either carried while negotiating a ladder or raised or lowered on a balky manual dumb-waiter. That will keep our furnishings simple. It might also encourage constipation and fluid retention.

  I love the balcony. We can sit and stare out over the lake, our private sea. Intellectually, I know that the horizon is only fifty kilometers away. It feels more distant than the stars and nebulae that wheeled beneath my feet in Uchūden.

  Charlee was a little nervous about the wide-open spaces. She took one look over the balcony and ran back into the bedroom, where I found her with a pillow over her head, laughing and crying. She agreed it was silly and came back out, but for an hour I had to hold on to her while she stared and sweated and giggled.

  I left the clarinet in orbit, for the time being, but did bring down Sam’s harp. I’ve been experimenting with bluesy tunings and settled on an A minor that seems to use the instrument’s range best. You have to pluck rather than strum, since six pairs of strings are adjacent half tones. I remember Mercy Flying Dove and, lacking electronics, tune with heart and head, keeping the wolves away.

  When the harpsichord comes down, there will be a kind of closure. It was built in London by Burkat Shudi in A.D. 1728. I think it will be the oldest human artifact to come from Earth (we do have a dinosaur bone).

  I’ve wondered about that name. He was Swiss, and that’s all we know, but Burkat Shudi doesn’t sound European. It sounds Moslem. I picture him as a dark old man with long flowing white hair, working with endless patience on these woods brought from oriental forests on the backs of slaves, on sailing ships, finally on a creaking horse-drawn wagon down a muddy London street. To tell him that his handiwork would wind up here would be more fantastic than saying it would wind up in the Garden of Irem, less believable to him. I don’t think they knew, in 1728, how far away the stars actually are.

  (I asked Prime and got a HOLD FOR OPEN DATA CHANNEL message—that’s a first.) No. Prime says 1837.

  Chul’ Hermosa survived the thaw, and will be coming down with the harpsichord. He loves to teach; that will be a kind of closure, too.

  We’re up on stilts both for food protection and to keep pests away. The crawlies, which is what they call these seven-legged ones the size of your little fingernail, get everywhere and they bite, leaving an itchy red knot that lasts half a day. They’re inquisitive and totally unafraid of humans, so far, but they do have an aversion to water. So each of our four supporting poles is equipped with a metal collar that holds several centimeters of water, and three children share the job of making sure they don’t go dry. Then so long as we remember not to leave the ladder down, we won’t have the things sneaking into bed with us.

  It rained most of last night and it was delicious, sitting on the balcony with the raindrops drumming on the roof, distant lightning and thunder over the lake. The smell of clean water and crackling ozone. I took out the harp and taught Charlee the words to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Nine Hundred Miles.” I had to explain railroads to her.

  Of course she’d never seen rain before. It frightened her at first, the suddenness and force of the storm, but she did learn to enjoy it. What frightened me was seeing one of those floating spiders, frozen in the strobe of a lightning flash, skimming along in the wind down at the water’s edge. Charlee was looking the other way and so I didn’t say anything about it, but I was glad for the weight of the knife on my belt.

  AGE 57

  SETTLING, UNSETTLING

  PRIME

  The first couple of years after O’Hara arrived on Epsilon constituted a time of exploration rather than colonization. The towns Hilltop and Lakeside grew slowly, since most of the Engineer Pioneers were off on various foreign adventures. The primaries who were left behind, and most of the secondaries, were less enthusiastic about backbreaking labor than those indefatigable youngsters had been.

  The slow pattern of growth, in both towns, reflected the kind of design conservatism you would expect from people who had lived for generations inside circumscribed space-settlement and starship environments. The dwellings were close together and uniform in design, if individual in decoration; streets were no broader than they had to be; there were elaborate recycling systems, including a composting toilet for each pair of dwellings. (The idea of actually letting water escape down the drain was wildly extravagant to them; letting it carry away valuable sewage would be literally unthinkable.)

  The unwisdom of building so close together was exposed by a lightning bolt that set a house on fire. The reeds that formed the roof and walls weren’t especially flammable but they could burn, and by the time the fire was put out, by a combination of mobile pump and fortuitous downpour, the struck building had burned almost to the support timbers and the two adjacent ones were half ruined. Two people died, either from electrocution or immolation; the other three residents had been able to jump to safety from the balcony. By the time a neighbor’s ladder could be worked into place underneath, the inside was a red inferno.

  There was a tall lightning rod a couple of hundred meters away, but the bolt had apparently bounced off it, according to the only eyewitness, though he said it could have been a trick of perspective. Should the rods be taller, thicker? Should there be more of them? The only information they had to go on was a single diagram from Key West, with two paragraphs of text.

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nbsp; The overall fire danger was less ambiguous. If that small gullywasher hadn’t poured tons of water on the burning house, there might have been a chain reaction, destroying all of the houses on the lake side of Lake Road, or even the entire town. They had to spread out.

  Leaving the burned-out ruin as a memorial and goad, they proceeded to disassemble every other house, reassembling them on both sides of town with a spacing of thirty meters between sites. The end result was unsettling, esthetically wrong to a society of agoraphobes, but they would learn to live with it. The three exceptions to agoraphobia, hermits who had erected shacks well outside the town’s perimeter, had to pull up stakes again. And their number quadrupled, nine more people willing to haul food and water for the exotic luxury of not having any neighbors.

  The next week, on the same night, two of those hermits were attacked by a floating spider, or by two different spiders. Both men passed out, from anoxia or sheer panic. One staggered into town before dawn and woke up Doc Bishop; the other had crawled back to the safety of his lean-to until light. Neither one of them suffered any permanent physical injury. Both of them had the same experience as Kisti Seven, with the important exception of not having been able to get to their knives. The thing gnawed on their hair, leaving a little bloody spot, and apparently rejected them as food, fortunately releasing them before they asphyxiated.

  The hermit population was suddenly reduced to three again—one of them, surprisingly, one of the beast’s vietims. “They obviously don’t have any taste for me,” he said, and moved his lean-to farther out. People sometimes saw him at first light, though, standing in a field bareheaded, with a knife in each hand.

  The other victim, Mark Ollen, had more subtle but more serious psychological problems. He was one of the scientists in die primary group, an agronomist. For some weeks he was almost useless at work, unable to concentrate, dragging into the lab and falling asleep over his samples or his console. Every night he would wake up repeatedly with the same graphic unsettling nightmare: the creature drinking his brains. Doc Bishop gave him pills, but the dream was stronger than them. One night he took all of the remaining pills at once, left a short note, and swam out into the lake. The top half of his body washed ashore in the next tide.

  The remains were frozen and sent to ’Home, where things were better set up for autopsy. The surgeons there found nothing wrong with Ollen’s brain itself. But there was one detail that Doc Bishop had missed: a hole about a third of a millimeter in diameter had been drilled through his scalp and skull, and there was a healed spot in the durum directly underneath.

  Don’t jump to conclusions, they said. A man who was sick enough to eat a handful of tranquilizers and see how far he could swim might well have done the damage himself. An animal feeding wouldn’t have had any reason to be so delicate about it; besides, the spiders’ claws weren’t fine enough or strong enough to do the job.

  They sent the other victim up to ’Home and, under the scab on his scalp, the surgeons found a similar hole. He agreed to stay there for observation. For the rest of his life, if need be. They also examined Kisti Seven, but evidently she had gotten rid of the thing before it had started drilling.

  Nobody ventured outside at night without head protection and weapons; in fact most people spent the night at home or wherever they happened to be stuck when the sun went down. Warnings went out to all of the exploration teams.

  The creatures weren’t hard to kill if you spotted them. Night was banished as a string of lights went up around the perimeters of both towns. Elevated guardhouses were staffed by sharpshooters with high-powered lasers. Extermination squads swept the countryside during the daytime.

  O’Hara said it was overreactive xenophobia and counseled moderation. The things hadn’t actually killed anybody, though they’d had the chance; probably many chances. Before exterminating them, it would be smart to capture a few and observe what they do under controlled conditions.

  THE HUNT

  Age 57.31 [23 Galileo 431]—Raleigh let me go ahead with the idea of capturing one or two of the floating spiders (or brain-eaters, as some people are calling them) so long as I could muster enough volunteers to build a cage and go capture them.

  Finding the volunteers was no problem. I’m not the only one who feels uneasy about a campaign of slaughtering the dominant form of life in the region. Charlee rounded up eleven people from Engineering and I got fourteen from Policy. We built the cage in four afternoons, basically a geodesic dome of thick reeds, the whole thing covered with tough plastic. A fan pulled cool air through hollow reeds in the top; a pair of cameras with night vision would keep our captive under surveillance.

  Now the big problem is finding a captive to capture. The first day the sweep team went out, they killed thirty-four of them, using robot drones to home in on helium ponds. The second day they killed nine; the third day they killed two. Maybe the creatures are rare. It seems more likely to me that they’re able to communicate with one another, and smart enough to clear out. Jungle primates on Earth would probably do that. Even birds.

  Raleigh’s letting us use the fast floater for one day, three days from now, so we can try a couple of hundred kilometers north of here. The drones show a concentration of them up there. Meanwhile, we’ll keep practicing our capture technique, throwing a weighted net and then pulling the trailing cords together fast. It works fine on a soccer ball.

  Age 57.32 (27 Galileo 431)—It was almost too easy. There were two of them floating together on a helium pond only five kilometers away. They had somehow eluded the killing patrols, but didn’t detect us sneaking up behind them. We got both on one sweep of the net; they didn’t resist after an initial startled reaction. They didn’t eject all their ballast water in an attempt to fly away, which was the usual response. Maybe they understood the net’s function and saw that the tactic wouldn’t work.

  The dome was in a cleared field well away from Lakeside. Its floor was weeds and water; we’d borrowed a watering trough from the goat ranch and sunk it level with the ground. Dan’s enthusiasm for the project was limited, but he helped us rig a pipe from a helium tank with a valve so we could bubble the gas up through the “pond” whenever we wanted.

  We put the creatures in the cage and freed them from the net, then hastily retreated. Both of them did the same thing, one after the other: drain out just enough ballast water to rise slowly, then at the top of the dome, spin around once, and then let out just enough helium to slowly descend. Then they both spread out as flat as they could and, over the course of an hour, turned bluish-green. It was as if they had seen that they weren’t going anywhere, so might as well photosynthesize.

  It was a transformation nobody had documented before, but the only times we had seen the creatures at rest were when they were floating on the helium ponds, presumably ready to flee at any sign of danger. Perhaps they were slower, or not mobile at all, while absorbing sunshine for energy.

  Maybe this was their normal state. If so, they had to be a lot more common than we thought. Certainly they would be hard to spot from orbit; indeed, you could probably walk right by one and miss it, if it was resting on a bed of grass.

  Samples taken hour by hour did show that photosynthesis was going on. By nightfall their jail had the most oxygen-rich atmosphere on the planet.

  We left Katia Paz in charge overnight. She’s going to let the helium bubble for an hour or so; see whether they move over to it. See how they respond to light, and so forth.

  I have an odd feeling about the creatures. This has all been too easy.

  FINAL EXAM

  PRIME

  It is difficult to relate directly the events of that night and the changes they precipitated. O’Hara and I have gone over them time and again, she under deep hypnosis, myself working in parallel with machine intelligences more large, deep, subtle, and quick than I.

  Even if you were a machine and I was telling you this story directly, you would only see a set of outlines of it—outlines not in the organiza
tion sense, but outlines as silhouettes, simulacra of truth. In the total sum of those simulacra, you would know what I know.

  Telling the story to soft humans, it is not so much that words fail. In fact, words are appropriate quanta because of their multiplicity of meanings, their radiational and reflective powers: when I say “heat” to you, free of context, the small word carries associations of anger, thirst, passion, pain, drowsiness, as well as whatever host of personal connections the word releases from your own experience, your own ideolect. (To me, until some other context is indicated, “Heat” is a kind of energy transferred from regions of higher temperature to those of lower temperature.) It is not words that fail but rather the structures that we, machine as well as flesh, are constrained to put them into: structures defined and delimited by human consciousness.

  Because something other than that is at work here.

  Allow me to relate the incidents of that night and morning as if these were O’Hara’s words; in fact, they are the distillation of millions of words and trillions of associated somatic measurements.

  Dan’s snoring woke me up in the middle of the night and I weighed the comfort of the warm blanket against the discomfort of holding back and decided to go pee. I put on a robe against the slight chill, breeze off the lake, but left the hat and knife on their pegs. The walkway to the toilet was covered now.

  The thing was waiting in the rafters outside the toilet. It let me go inside and relieve myself. When I stepped back out, it fell and enveloped me.

  There was a sharp pain on the top of my head, like being stuck by a pin. I tried to scream but couldn’t draw a breath; the membrane was fast against my mouth and nose.