Joe Haldeman - Worlds Enough and Time

We followed the floater in a slow walk up toward town, Raleigh giving us a running account of their agricultural successes and failures as we passed the various fields. Almost everything was grown in three sections: out in the open, in the open but protected by barbed wire, and green-housed, with soil imported from ’Home. There were goats, pigs, sheep, and chickens, all in protected covered pens, and pools of tilapi, salmon, and rainbow trout.

Most of the crops did well in the unprotected areas, though tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes all succumbed to an airborne microorganism, even in the greenhouses. The wire didn’t seem to make any difference; local fauna would take one sniff and move on. By the same token, those local fauna seemed in little danger of winding up on our tables, at least for a generation or two. Some things are just too weird to eat.

Evolution had produced different stratagems on Epsilon. Most forms of life didn’t have close analogs on Earth. Fish were recognizably fish, but the ones caught inland had lungs instead of gills. Someone who deserves a culinary medal cooked one and ate part of it. It tasted like cotton soaked in swamp water, he said, but it didn’t make him sick.

To me a bug is a bug, but the biologists say the “insects” here bear no relation to terran insects except for size and orneriness—and usefulness, being scavengers and pollinators. Most of them have twelve legs, but there’s one phylum that has seven! I wonder what they do with the extra one.

The closest thing to a mammal is a furry coldblooded thing, the jumper, that actually behaves more like a lizard. It will lie motionless in the sun for hours until something comes by that is smaller than it but big enough to be worth eating. It leaps on the thing and bites it with fangs that inject a paralyzing venom, then eats it alive, slowly. Eleven different kinds of jumpers have been identified. The airbags leave them alone, evidently because their flesh is noxious or toxic. Jumpers have never attacked a human, even though one alert individual managed to sit down on one.

The division between plant and animal is not sharp. Things like the gasbags are mobile but have a “metabolism” that includes photosynthesis as well as carnivorism. There are fixed, sessile, organisms on land and in the water that don’t use photosynthesis. They often look like plants—one type has nonfunctional green “leaves”—but they make a living by luring small animals and eating them. Some affix themselves to a larger animal or plant and live as parasites or symbiotes. An extraordinary example grows with a particular kind of tree, mimicking its blossom in both appearance and smell. When a pollinator bug flies into the blossom, it snaps shut and chews it up, and then a complex digestive system separates out certain nutrients and passes them on to the tree, through a shared circulatory system.

No other land animals have yet been found that are as dangerous as the floating spiders. There is a frightening-looking carnivore that resembles a twice-man-sized praying mantis, but so far it has never attacked a human. Neither does it run away.

The oceans and the lake have a variety of large predators, which might be dangerous if one were overcome with the urge to go swimming. A drone flying three meters over the waves, about twenty kilometers from the western shore, was attacked by a thing that looked like a whale with grinning teeth. The lake has strong eellike constrictors up to eight meters long.

All these adorable animals, and we haven’t yet explored even one tenth of one percent of the land area. I’m sure there are pleasant surprises aplenty waiting for us.

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).