Jack Chalker - Melchior's Fire

“I think it’s another example of when you believe you’ve seen every combination in the universe you come up against something strange. This place is totally volcanic; I can’t see any signs of massive erosion except on the very oldest and largest islands, and they’re most likely to come apart in that nasty fragmentation effect. Plenty of flowing water, but I doubt if it stays the course long enough to create great canyons, and the eruptions and fragmentations tend to break down attempts at walling it up as lakes. Still, with the combination of sudden heating and cooling and the large amount of dust up there, it appears that what saves it from becoming a total oven is that it’s only facing the sun one quarter of the time. It loses that heat pretty fast, but convection causes massive storms. Look at it now. It’s raining over probably half that world down there, and it’s a big one.”

“It’s closer than it should be to its mother planet,” Cross noted. “That’s what keeps it right in line to be victimized by all the forces tugging at it. Still, I see an awful lot of what looks to be vegetation down there. Just like Balshazzar, that soil’s got to be absolutely wonderful for growing things, as long as it lasts, that is.”

“Some green,” Queson agreed, “but also a lot of purples, yellows, reds, oranges, even patches of vegetative white. I wonder how edible it is?”

“For us? Who knows?” Nagel responded. “Same problem as every new world. Which is poison and which isn’t? Mineral content’s mineral content, but who knows what vitamins it might have, or other nastier chemicals?”

“One thing’s for sure,” An Li put in. “You ain’t gonna build any cities down there. Your roads would be washed away or crumbled away or dissolved by that lava, and the shakes and the rain would make permanent building a mess.”

“Floaters,” Jerry Nagel said.

“Huh?”

“The best place to live down there would be on a boat. A ship, maybe.”

“Ship? You mean like on water? ”

“I mean exactly that. You avoid that uncertainty, tie up and go ashore to harvest what you can there and bring it back, have an area where you make salt to pack things, and maybe you also have things in the sea you can catch or fetch and eat. If I were going to try to survive down there, that’s what I’d have. A big boat.”

“And what about those storms?” An Li argued. “There’s lightning down there, you can see that, and ashfalls, and who knows what else. Out on that ocean in a monster storm, you’d be at the mercy of the elements more sudden and dangerous than the lava.”

“Well, maybe. But there are so many islands there you’re just about never out of sight of land, and if you chart the area there are, I’ll bet, a ton of sheltered harbors. And for anything other than a direct hit, you might get seasick and damaged, but being out at sea during a severe storm is, believe it or not, the best place to be if your boat’s built to take it,” Nagel pointed out. “I was a sailor once, for fun, on an associate’s boat.”

“Anybody remember where we packed the yacht?” Sark asked in his usual cynical tone.

Randi looked over at Nagel. “He has a point, Jerry. Boat or ship or whatever or not, could you build one now, with just us, by hand?”

“With the salvage robots, maybe. That and a lot of design and some useful programs. That would presuppose that some of those trees down there are tough enough to take it and waterproof enough to build with. And, if we had access to ship’s stores here, I suspect I could knock out a pretty good set of plastic plugs and bolts to hold it all together, and strong, unbreakable ropes for rigging and control. Yeah, with a little help from what’s down there I might just be able to do a decent one.”

“You mean people-type help?”

“No, I mean wood and such. We have a lot of stuff here that can disassemble a prefabricated unit, but I don’t have a fabricator for large structures like a hull, keel, full decking, that kind of thing.”

The captain interrupted. “Have all of you stopped discussing your dream sailboat long enough to look at the night side right now? If not, you should.”

They all immediately looked at the screen and saw what the captain meant.

Melchior was a large planet with a low axial tilt; it revolved on its axis once every forty standard hours, giving it an average twenty-hour night.

They might all have expected some spectacular views, clouds or not, from the dark side, since it would produce full illumination of volcanic activities on the surface, lava flows, magma beds, and the like, and it certainly did that. The place was lit up like a festive holiday ornament, and from pole to pole. Factoring out the clouds, it was spectacular.

But there were other kinds of lights as well, much less pretty to look at but much more difficult to explain. On the larger islands and the smaller ones, and even in areas that should be ocean, there were definitely patterns that looked very much like the lights of small towns seen from a height. Most seemed to be on volcanic plains between large, dormant but threatening monster mountains, but some were up almost against the big volcanoes where the latter met the seacoast. Beyond the land areas, small but unnaturally regular shaped fields of lights could be seen in the waters, often rectangular or square, and in some cases triangular in shape.

“Is it just me, or do a lot of folks manage to live there somehow?” Sark asked.

“It appears that they do indeed, although none inland. Nobody’s that crazy,” Nagel pointed out.

“Who or what are they?” Randi Queson asked. “Can’t we get detail?”

“We are stuck with infrared and off-spectrum measures down there,” the captain informed them. “ Lots of lifesigns, very little in the way of recognizable signatures. I’m going to put us back on the planet side and we’ll see what we can see. I hope you did notice that there was considerable light but not heat from the forests, jungles, or whatever they are? And along the volcanic spillways? It appears that there is a great deal of natural phosphorescence down there. Not practical if you require a fire, but very handy if you protect it when you are suffering heavy clouds, ashfalls, major storms or a twenty-hour night.”

“You said there weren’t many recognizable signatures. I gather you mean that the people or whatever it is we’re seeing aren’t human?”

“That would be a good inference,” the captain agreed. “Coming into daylight. I’m going to scan and see if we can find one of those towns or floating whatevers and enlarge it. The problem here is that there’s a fair amount of stuff in the upper atmosphere that’s distorting good visuals. I can’t get more than a rough picture. Let’s see if close-in IR helps at all.”

The infrared pictures suffered equally because of the volcanism and the apparent inner heat that close to the surface. There were some pictures, both visual and IR, that showed vague shapes and strange-looking creatures, but they weren’t detailed nor could much be inferred about them.

“Natives?” Queson asked.

“Don’t bet on it,” the captain replied. “A half dozen distinct signatures with larger numbers, more with very small numbers, and some definite power sources that are not natural. No shipwrecks, if that’s what you mean, but the way the sources show up almost implies that they are from disassembled or salvaged interplanetary or orbital craft. Nothing big enough to go interstellar. Still, what would happen if you came down here? If you land in the water, you are vulnerable to those storms, and if you hit one of them or are otherwise breached, then your next stop is nineteen or twenty kilometers to the sea bottom. If you come in on land, better hit solid crust or you’ll punch right through into liquid magma. If you do make it down, watch out for flows, torrential runoff on the clear downward plains from the first real rains, and so on. I suspect on a world this dynamic that landing and taking off again are going to be your biggest challenges.”