Laurence Janifer: Poems are Made by Fools Like Me

But those were minor difficulties, solvable on other worlds and therefore solvable on Tree. I had a good list of stuff it would be safe to eat, or stuff I could fairly easily make safe to eat, and I began considering cooking solutions.

These are seldom obvious. Some quite usual Earth foods are foods only if cooked, stored, buried, salted, scraped, or otherwise treated for lengths of time ranging from ten seconds to ten years. We’ve had millennia to figure out how to eat shark, or Jerusalem artichoke, and the human race could manage perfectly well, as far as health and even basic pleasure are concerned, if shark steaks and Jerusalem artichokes were both suddenly canceled from the Universe.

I had a year—a year that was going to be interrupted any number of times by urgencies I couldn’t predict—in which to figure out an entire Joy of Cooking for a new planet, with new animals and brand-new plants. It didn’t seem like enough time, but it never does. (And though it surprises 3V viewers no end, unless there are obvious danger flags up on a world, any Survivor’s first assignment is that same Joy of Cooking —obvious when you think about it, but lots and lots of people don’t think about it.)

But of course I hadn’t even dreamed of the interruptions yet. The first one took seventeen hours out of my life.

I was in my (jiffy-built) house. This was a single-room log-cabin arrangement, with a working kitchen using local fluid treated so as to become H 20 with fewer trace elements, a working bathroom, same specs, and windows here and there made of nice unbreakable Glassex, and impervious, I had been told, to anything short of the end of the world. I was staring at a bunch of roots that looked a little like bulbous carrots and a little like deep-orange, helium-inflated corn, and wondering whether boiling or baking would be a good place to start. Late-afternoon sunlight, in what was this area’s fall, was coming through the windows, and I was surrounded by the small-animal, and occasionally large-animal, noises of the local forest.

I didn’t actually take notes on all this at the time, though I made plenty later on, but noticing details I’m not really noticing is one of the things I do best.

I had about decided on boiling, to start with-it takes less time, so if it doesn’t work I haven’t spent hours on it—and I stood up to find the pot I was going to put the damned things in.

Then I got up off the floor and watched the sunrise through my nice impervious Glassex windows.

I felt nothing. I mean, nothing that seemed connected to what had happened. In the first seconds I wasn’t sure just what had happened, but it didn’t take me long to figure it out: late afternoon, sunrise; standing up, lying down. The only difficulty was whether I’d been out for seventeen hours (the planet had a twenty-six hour day minus about a minute and a half) or for seventeen hours plus some multiple of twenty-six (less a minute and a half per twenty-six), and a quick check told me it had been seventeen.

There is such a thing as a body clock, very roughly: How hungry am I? and How stiff am I? and most of all How much do I need to take in some liquid, or to emit some liquid? Will give you a fair time check, at least in terms of multiples of twenty-six hours.

The noises outside were not noticeably different.

That bothered the hell out of me.

What got to me even more was that I had no idea why it bothered the hell out of me. I had no fixed notions about what Tree noises were like during an early morning, a late afternoon, or smack at noon on Christmas Day. I hadn’t been on the damned world long enough for that. But the back of my head had filed something that appeared to mean: noises should not be the same at these two points in time.

I could not figure out what it had filed, but I was not about to ignore it.

Did the noises have something to do with the seventeen hours I hadn’t been around for? Had they somehow caused the blackout? Were they in some way a response to the blackout?

I could go on for seventeen hours here and now, listing questions that might, or might not, have had useful answers. There is seldom any shortage of questions.

The one answer I did feel fairly sure of was the answer to the question: “Why am I still alive?” I was still alive because I had been nicely shut inside my jiffy-house log cabin when what-ever-it-was had come and got me. If unconsciousness was usually the prelude to being eaten (or at least taste-tested), some damned animal was in a very frustrated state, because he’d been unable to take off my large, unwieldy shell and get at me. Whatever had got me, it was something the jiffy-built house wasn’t impervious to, which was sad but in no way a complete surprise.

I spent some time sitting and staring out the window at the nice, peaceful-looking forest. Then I looked around, found the bulbous carrots (or helium-packed corn) on the floor near where I’d been, picked up the bunch, and found a pot to boil it in.

Boiled, the stuff tasted almost exactly like sawdust mixed with black pepper, not one of the tastes people eagerly seek. But fried, perhaps…

I sighed, and went to the door of the cabin. Outside, there were a lot of bunches of this particular root. I could pick one up easily and try frying it.

I could also walk right into some patient animal, wondering if the Possible Food Thing was ever going to come out of its big shell.

Well, that was also what I got paid for, silly as it sounded. I put the bunch of boiled stuff in my left hand, a slug gun in my right—slug guns make lots of noise, and frighten away animals you weren’t even aiming at— and opened the door with my deep-orange, bulbous left hand.

And nothing attacked me. Nothing even stood around looking disappointed.

Even the fairly ubiquitous small animals didn’t seem to be around; perhaps they were being properly small-animal cautious about the big construction that hadn’t been there the day before. It was, in fact, a thoroughly peaceful day in the forest. Any minute now and I would see Red Riding Hood starting off on her errand to Grandma Fricker’s House, or Handel and Grizzle looking for an edible witch. The place felt like that, sort of fairy-tale, and though I couldn’t have said why, it was, again, something I didn’t ignore.

Feelings are not facts. Once in a while they’re better; they show you where the facts are hiding.

Not just then, though.

I walked slowly away from my cabin—having remembered to shut the door, which self-locked and was keyed both to the palm of my hand and to the pore pattern of the tip of my tongue. (My suggestion—just in case I had to get in quickly, and had my hands occupied or missing.)

I tossed the boiled bunch of stuff away to my right, and I took seven steps. A patch of the same stuff was another three or four steps ahead of me.

Before I could take step eight I heard a very odd sound indeed; it almost wasn’t a sound. It was the faint echo of bacon sizzling somewhere on another planet.

The back of my head said, instantly: Beamer. I dropped flat on the ground, which at that point was covered with a sort of grass which looked, and felt, as if it had been made of pale yellow plastic buttons, several hundred of which dug the hell into me.

My head replayed the sound, and checked for direction. I had the impression it had been off to my left, and some distance away, whatever it had been; certainly the damned planet hadn’t evolved beamers to shoot at strangers with, so there must be some animal or plant which made a noise like a…

I was looking off to my left from my prone position, and there it was, a patch of button-grass burned nicely black, just as if by a beamer. About ten feet in front of my nose.