John Dalmas: Return to Fanglith

The other cubes were a mixed lot: an astrogation cube; a "miscellaneous" cube that included, among other things, a learning program and a linguistic analysis program-I'd had good use of both of them before; a couple of library cubes; and a copy of the family's planetary coordinates cube with everywhere we'd ever flown on Evdash.

There was also one other: a copy of the old contraband data cube we'd used to find Fanglith. When I saw that one on the menu, I got goose bumps. I also became aware that Deneen was looking at me. I wondered if it affected her at all the same way. She'd always been "Miss Objective Practicality."

An astrogation cube and the contraband data cube! Huh! The knot returned to my gut. "Well," I said, "if they don't meet us, it looks as if they expect us to leave the planet on our own, somehow or other."

Although, how we could do that without a cutter… "Let's sit here till dark," I suggested. "It'll be safer traveling then. With the coordinates cube, we won't have any trouble finding Lizard Island at night."

I could feel part of my attention stuck on the contraband data cube. On Fanglith, actually. And from Deneen's expression, hers was too. "I'm not going to be surprised if they don't get to Lizard Island for a month or more," I went on. "Obviously, they've got something to do first, or they'd have gone there already, not 'later.' And they'll need to wait until things quiet down, because a cutter's a lot more conspicuous than a floater and a ton more likely to attract trouble."

Of course, they might not get there at all.

The floater's main door was open, letting in the late sun. I was sitting in front, with Deneen and Piet. Tarel was in back, looking sober and saying nothing. He was generally pretty quiet and serious. Beside him, Jenoor was quiet, too. She wasn't generally quiet like he was; in fact, she was often pretty animated. But just now she was worried.

Jenoor tended to look up to me because I was older and had the Fanglith experience under my belt, which was fine with me. We'd told people that she and Tarel were our cousins, so of course it hadn't been okay for me to take her around. But I had it in mind to propose to her after she reached legal age, and when I could support her. Looking up to me the way she did, it seemed to me she'd probably say yes. Anyway, she hadn't shown much interest in other guys, although they'd been pretty interested in her.

Meanwhile, living in the same house with her hadn't always been the most comfortable thing in the world. She was too good-looking.

Deneen considered her pretty special too-had even asked me once if I'd ever thought of Jenoor as a future wife. When I admitted I had, she said she was glad to see her brother showing good taste. Deneen was more critical than our parents about whom I took out. She didn't issue her seal of approval very often, even though they were just dates. And as for getting serious-she said that considering the kind of future I could expect, I needed "a wife of similar purposes and comparable ability."

She was right, of course. But how could we know for sure what someone's purpose was-one of our friends at school for example. I was sure no one there knew ours.

At the floater we sat around or napped for a couple of hours, until it got dark. I thought a little about Lizard Island. That was our family name for it; all the chart said was "Great Central Shoal," and showed a string of dots along it to indicate little islands. Lizard was inconspicuous, all right. I wondered what it would be like in a hurricane; hopefully I'd never find out.

I was in the pilot's seat. Piet sat in the seat next to mine. He was like dad-ready to let me handle things myself if it was something I could.

"Let's go," I said. I keyed the Lizard Island coordinates into the computer, and we took off. At 3,000 feet, I put her on automatic pilot and we headed southeast for the broad, shallow Entrilias Sea, keeping track of the radio and the traffic monitor, which was on high sensitivity.

The knot was gone from my gut. For whatever reason, I felt as if everything was going to come out all right.

The floater didn't have an infrascanner-it wasn't intended for anything more than family-type use-but the stars give more than enough light to see Lizard Island when you're right above it at 200 feet. It appeared to be about two hundred yards long and half as wide, but it wasn't really, because part of what looked like island was a fringe of mangrove trees that stood in the water around its edges.

"It's little, isn't it," Jenoor said.

"Small enough that no one pays any attention to it," I answered. "Small and out of the way. It's one of the biggest in a string of low islands like this, and they're a navigation hazard-the high points of a long shoal-so ships stay well away."

"How do we land?" asked Tarel.

"Carefully and by daylight. There's no clearing, so we'll have to slip down between trees."

I could feel that Tarel and Jenoor had more questions but were holding off, hoping someone else would ask them. Questions like, how do we live down there? Deneen knew, of course. Our family had been here once before, not long after we'd gotten back from Fanglith, establishing a refuge in case we ever needed one. We'd stayed for several days, getting a feel for what it would take to live there.

We definitely hadn't set up a vacation home or anything like that, but we'd hidden a plastite chest with a shovel, hammocks, fishing Sines, hooks and spears, a pair of books on edible fish and plants of the Entrih'as region, a little water still and a good-sized pail, a couple of insect repellent-field generators, a pint-size geogravitic power tap (very expensive), and Rigidite plastic sheeting that was highly flexible to start with but would get semi-stiff once it was wetted. There was also a small beam saw.

Nearby we'd buried a lightweight skiff about eight feet long and three feet wide, for fishing.

Meanwhile we had an hour or so before dawn-longer than that before it would be light enough to land-so I got in back to catch a nap. I hadn't been sleepy, so I'd stood pilot watch most of the way. I still didn't feel sleepy, but I was willing to bet I'd go to sleep, once I lay down.

I was right. I lay down and closed my eyes, and it seemed like only a minute later when I woke up. We were moving, settling downward. It was already light, almost sunup, and Deneen was at the controls. Tree-tops were rising past the windows. A couple of light thumps and brushing sounds marked our passage through their branches; then there was one last little bump and we were on the ground. Everyone else piled out, but I closed my eyes again, "just for a few minutes." When I opened them next time, the chest had been uncovered and the shelter built. I got out of the floater all sleepy-eyed, and Deneen looked at me.

"Well, brother mine," she said, and handed me the shovel. "You're just in time to dig up the boat for us."

After I'd dug the boat up, I took the beam saw and cut a little canal through the mangrove prop roots so she could be floated out to open water. The beam saw wouldn't cut under more than a quarter inch of water, so Piet and Tarel and I had to use our heavy survival knives for a lot of it. It was slow hard work, and I was disgusted before we were even close to finished. Then Deneen and Piet went fishing. Fishing was going to be very important. The only food we'd brought with us was the remains of the burrow pig, and all we'd find on the island, I knew, was a little fruit, a lot of little lizards, and insects that were mostly too small for food.

With Piet and Deneen off in the boat, that left me to finish setting up camp with Tarel and Jenoor. Deneen had done well as far as she'd gone. The shelter was a large lean-to, and she'd laid a pole on its sloping roof to form a sort of groove before splashing water on the Rigidite to harden it. This would gather the rain, which would run into the plastite chest-our cistern-which we could cover when it wasn't raining, to keep out the bugs. If it rained. By the looks of things, this was the dry season.