Ларри Нивен - Crashlander

Ultimately the ARM crews grew tired of Feather's supervision, or else her company. Rapidly after that, Feather grew tired of watching me read. «We'll only be on Fafnir two days, Beowulf. What are you learning? It's a dull, dull, dull place. All the land life is Earth imports —»

«Their lifestyle is strange, Feather. They travel by transfer booths and dirigible balloons and boats, and almost nothing in between. A very laid-back society. Nobody's expected to be anywhere on time —»

«Nobody's watching us here. You don't have to play tourist.»

«I know.» If the ARM had Boy George bugged … but Feather would have thought of that.

Our ship was in the hands of ARM engineers, and that made for tension. But we were getting on each other's nerves. Not a good sign, with a three-week flight facing us.

Feather said, «You're not playing. You are a tourist!»

I admitted it. «And the first law of tourism is: read everything.» But I switched the screen off and said, in the spirit of compromise, «All right. Show me. What is there to see on Mars?»

She hated to admit it. «Nothing.»

We left Mars with the little stealth lander in the fuel tank. The ARM was doing things the ARM didn't know about. And I continued reading …

Fafnir's twenty-two-hour day has encouraged an active life. Couch potatoes court insomnia: it's easier to sleep if you're tired. But hurrying is something else. There are transfer booths, of course. You can jump instantly from a home on some coral extrusion to the bare rock of Shasht … and buy yourself an eleven-hour time lag.

Nobody's in a hurry to go home. They go by dirigible. Ultimately the floatliner companies wised up and began selling round-trip tickets for the same price as one-way.

«I do know all this, Beowulf.»

«Mph? Oh, good.»

«So what's the plan?» Feather asked. «Find an island with nothing near it and put down, right? Get out and dance around on the sand while we blow the boat up and load it and go. How do we hide the lander?»

«Sink it.»

«Read about lamplighters,» she said, so I did.

After the war and the settlement, UN advance forces landed on Shasht, took over the kzinti structures, then began to explore. Halfway around the planet were myriads of little round coral islands, each with a little peak at the center. At night the peaks glowed with a steady yellow light. Larger islands were chains of peaks, each with its yellow glow in the cup. Lamplighters were named before anyone knew what they were.

Close up … well, they've been called piranha ant nests. The bioluminescence attracts scores of varieties of flying fish. Or, lured or just lost, a swimming thing may beach itself, and then the lamplighter horde flows down to the beach and cleans it to the bones.

You can't build a home or beach a boat until the nest has been burned out. Then you have to wait another twelve days for the soldiers caught outside the nest to die. Then cover the nest. Use it for a basement, put your house on it. Otherwise the sea may carry a queen to you, to use the nest again.

«You're ahead of me on this,» I admitted. «What has this lander got for belly rockets?»

«Your basic hydrogen and oxygen,» Feather said. «High heat and a water-vapor exhaust. We'll burn the nest out.»

«Good.»

Yo! Boy, when Carlos's 'doc is finished with you, you know it!

Open.

The sky was a brilliant sprawl of stars, some of them moving-spacecraft, weather eyes, the wheel — and a single lopsided moon. The island was shadow-teeth cutting into the starscape. I slid out carefully, into a blackness like the inside of my empty belly, and yelled as I dropped into seawater.

The water was hip deep, with no current to speak of. I wasn't going to drown, or be washed away, or lost. Fafnir's moon was a little one, close in. Tides would be shallow.

Still I'd been lucky: I could have wakened under water.

How did people feel about nudity here? But my bundle of clothes hadn't washed away. Now the boots clasped my feet like old friends. The sleeves of the dead man's survival jacket tailed way past my hands until I rolled them up, and of course the front and back were in shreds. The pants were better: too big, but with elastic ankle bands that I just pulled up to my knees. I swallowed a tannin secretion dose. I couldn't have done that earlier. The 'doc would have read the albino gene in my DNA and «cured» me of an imposed tendency to tan.

There was nothing on all of Fafnir like Carlos's 'doc. I'd have to hide it before I could ever think about rescue.

«Our medical equipment,» Carlos had called it; and Feather had answered, «Hardly ours.»

Carlos was patient. «It's all we've got, Feather. Let me show you how to use it. First, the diagnostics —»

The thing was as massive as the inflatable boat that would carry us to Shasht. Carlos had a gravity lift to shove under it. The intensive care cavity was tailored just for Carlos Wu, naturally, but any of us could be served by the tethers and sleeves and hypo-tipped tubes and readouts along one whole face of the thing: the service wall.

«These hookups do your diagnostics and set the chemical feeds going. Feather, it'll rebalance body chemistry, in case I ever go schiz or someone poisons me or something. I've reprogrammed it to take care of you too.» I don't think Carlos noticed the way Feather looked at it, and him.

«Now the cavity. It's for the most serious injuries, but I've reprogrammed it for you, Sharrol my dear —»

«But it's exactly Carlos's size,» Feather told us pointedly. «The UN thinks a lot of Carlos. We can't use it.»

Sharrol said, «It looks small. I don't mean the IC cavity. I can get into that. But there's not much room for transplants in that storage space.»

«Oh, no. This is advanced stuff. I had a hand in the design. One day we'll be able to use these techniques with everyone.» Carlos patted the monster. «There's nothing in here in the way of cloned organs and such. There's the Surgery program, and a reservoir of organic soup, and a googol of self-replicating machines a few hundred atoms long. If I lost a leg or an eye, they'd turn me off and rebuild it onto me. There's even … here, pay attention. You feed the organics reservoir through here, so the machine doesn't run out of material. You could even feed it Fafnir fish if you can catch them, but they're metal-deficient …»

When he had us thoroughly familiar with the beast, he helped Sharrol into the cavity, waited to be sure she was hooked up, and closed it. That made me nervous as hell. She climbed out a day later claiming that she hadn't felt a thing, wasn't hungry, didn't even have to use the bathroom.

The 'doc was massive. I had to really heave against it to get it moving, and then it wanted to move along the shore. I forced it to turn inland. The proper place to hide it was in the lamplighter nest, of course.

I was gasping like death itself, and the daylight had almost died, and I just couldn't push that mass uphill.

I left it on the beach. Maybe there was an answer. Let my hindbrain toy with it for a while.

I trudged across sand to rough coral and kept walking to the peak. We'd picked the island partly for its isolation. Two distant yellow lights, eastward, marked two islands I'd noted earlier. I ran my mag specs (the side that worked) up to 2OX and scanned the whole horizon, and found nothing but the twin lamplighter glows.

And nothing to do but wait.

I sat with my back against the lip of the dead lamplighter pit. I pictured her: she looked serious, a touch worried, under a feather crest and undyed skin: pink shading to brown, an Anglo tanned as if by Fafnir's yellow-white sun.