Hal Clement: Fossil

The slope was long and steep, and the lights her husband had installed made it stand out sharply against the scattered illumination of Pitville and the much dimmer background hills of the Solid Ocean. Janice Cedar knew that she should have been frightened. In theory, height should scare anyone except, of course, a Crotonite; in practice, after a Common Year under Habranha’s gravity, she could lean over the edge of a hundred-meter ice ridge without a qualm. She just wasn’t being pulled hard enough downward to affect her emotions. Her husband and the few other Erthumoi on the little world had the same trouble.

It took a lot of the fun out of skiing. Even armor full of diving fluid, which made most amusements either less fun or practically impossible, merely increased her inertia enough to make the wind less challenging.

She was able to push off and start accelerating, if one could really call it that, down the ramp without feeling her heart speed up at all. What little thrill the sport could furnish on this world would come a little later.

Her husband Hugh and their supervisor Ged Harrar stood watching her and waiting for their turns; Janice had wished briefly, before pushing off, that she had the Naxian ability to read emotion. The Assistant Director was a Samian, probably no more objective than the average Erthumoi, and she felt quite mystified why someone with no real body of his own, by her standards, should be interested in an Erthumoi sport. His stated reason might be true, but it had left her unconvinced. Barrar had admitted that the Cedars presumably knew what they were doing when they slid around on narrow boards in search of “fun,” and that this might well be worth doing for morale, but that he couldn’t really feel the point. He insisted that Hugh’s status as the person in charge of safety required that this human amusement be studied in more detail. Someone in the administrative office, Hugh suspected, doubted that Erthumoi, or at least the particular Erthuma named Hugh Rock Cedar, really grasped the concept of risk at all. There were, he thought, reservations in high quarters about the wisdom of using him as Safety Director.

He hadn’t worried at first; like his wife, he was kept by the low gravity from feeling any real fear of falling, and didn’t consider skiing dangerous here. He assumed that Samians would be even less concerned, since most of their planets were high weight and their physiques certainly less prone to injury. The few members of the species on Habranha were mostly researchers, Diplomacy Guild representatives, or, nowadays, individuals from one or another of the Six Races who felt an interest in the hypothesis that the intelligent Habranhans might actually be a remnant of the Seventh Race, known so far only from archaeological data. None of the Samians were settlers; there was no room for settlers.

Hugh’s first sight of Barrar “dressed” for skiing had caused him some other doubts, though. Instead of the six-limbed horizontally arranged sensibly stable walker which he usually employed, the administrator had appeared on something vaguely resembling a headless human skeleton made of some highly resistant — Hugh hoped — black and apparently resilient composition. The reddish-brown limbless, eyeless, and generally featureless slab of leathery-looking meat which was the Samian himself rode inside the rib cage, the fine wires which connected it with the various effectors and sensors of the “body” just barely visible from two meters away. Ordinary skis were mounted on framework feet which had been designed to fit them.

Even Janice, not usually a worrier, had tactfully suggested on their way to the jump area that familiarizing himself with a new mechanical body and a new method of locomotion at the same time might not be a fair trial of either, but Barrar had assured her there would be no problem. New bodies were an everyday affair to him. He had, indeed, managed to ski with no obvious problems from the residence area along the snowy, and often icy, streets of Pitville and even to herringbone up the slope to the top of the jumping ramp. He had still been standing completely at ease when she started her run. Now, as she approached its lowest part, she had to focus all her attention on her own technique and forget the Samian. Her husband would have to provide any help his boss might need.

The jump ramp itself was of packed snow, some of it natural and some the pulverized ice excavated from the two shafts which gave Pitville its name. They were only about a hundred and fifty kilometers from sunlight, so the general temperature, while extremely variable like all of Habranha’s weather, was usually high enough to let a reasonably strong Erthuma make snowballs out of water ice powder by squeezing. The ramp was therefore fairly hard and even moderately slippery, though its skiing surface was constantly changing as the natural precipitation which tried to cover it competed with the equally variable winds which strove to sweep it clear.

The falloff at either side was stabilized by native vegetation, carefully selected for deep roots and lack of explosive quality. There were two basically different types of life on Habranha; one had a biochemistry enough like that of the Erthumoi to use ATP as its “battery.” The other and more common employed azide ion for the same general purposes, so that much of the world’s vegetation and some of its animal life was either explosive or electrically hazardous or both. The winged natives belonged to the first category, lending strength to the mounting belief among the Six Races that they had not actually evolved on Habranha.

At the lowest point of the run, where the curve flung skiers upward again, the surface was hardest to predict or even to analyze by sight. Hugh had had the area lighted as well as possible, but no lighting would let human eyes determine how well the deposit was packed at any given moment. This was where the sport grew interesting…

Janice kept her feet. She was traveling last enough now to guarantee serious damage to her armor if she hit anything solid, explosive or not, and she was crouched to give the wind as little handle as possible.

For a brief moment she felt almost normal weight as she reached the bottom arc and caromed upward. Then she was off the snow beyond the first lighted area, with a fifty-meter gulf below her, and orbiting more or less toward a second and larger hill which started two hundred meters away. The target area was also well lighted, but for these few seconds she herself must be nearly invisible to Hugh. She had no idea of how, or how well, the Samian could perceive her.

She was busy with her poles, which looked more like broad-bladed oars; a skier’s problem of staying upright either on or off the ground, in Habranha’s feeble gravity and dense air, was much worse than on any Erthumoi-normal world. Strong wrists meant quite as much as good ankles in this kind of “jumping.” She made a technically poor but not catastrophic landing on her right ski, which she had managed to keep aligned with her direction of flight, brought the other down, slowed aerodynamically for a few seconds with her poles held across her body, and finally felt sure enough of her traction to bring herself to a stop in normal ski fashion. “All right. Who’s next?”

She didn’t ask vocally. Her armor and body cavities were filled with diving fluid, since her job of-ten took her to the bottom of the Pits. Vocal cords evolved for gas don’t work in liquid, and her armor carried a code transmitter whose output, while far more sophisticated than the short-and-long combinations of the original Erthumoi telegraph, was still much slower and clumsier than ordinary speech. It was loud enough to be heard for several hundred meters if the wind were not too strong.