Dave Duncan - Wildcatter

Everyone looked at the maps. Cacafuego had at least eight mini-continents and many smaller islands. Some places must see huge tidal surges at those times.

Maria said, “Control, estimate tidal range at Sombrero.”

— Zero to approximately ten meters, depending on season and not allowing for storm surges.

Seth had already asked Control that, so he was not surprised. The others obviously were. It was another factor to take into account.

“Any more questions on the climate?” Jordan asked. “Control, show us Sombrero again. There. Thirty-one degrees north latitude, about the latitude of Jackson, Mississippi. It fits Commodore Duddridge’s description, although I’d call it a small continent.”

Whichever it was, Sombrero had a central plateau and a couple of curved coastal ranges. With some imagination it could be seen as a very battered and lopsided Mexican Hat. Jordan ordered a blow-up, but yesterday everyone had been shown what was coming next. The world maps faded and Sombrero swelled to fill the walls. Most of the image was grainy, but a few strips of better detail happened to have caught the evidence Golden Hind needed. A flashing circle highlighted one pathetically small white shape.

Jordan said, “Control has identified this as a crashed shuttle, to a confidence level of ninety-six percent. It is too large to be a robot drone, but we cannot be certain yet that it is Galactic’s manned effort. It could be the unmanned rescue attempt that crashed ‘about a kilometer away’ but we cannot find a second wreck. This is the site they called Apple. Maria, do you want to comment on the location?”

Maria did, but at first she said little that Seth had not worked out for himself, or obtained from Control. The Galactic landing was a few kilometers from the sea, on an expanse of sandbanks and green islands that looked like a wide flood plain. The river itself was broad, flowing eastward from the central highlands. JC had already named it the Tsukuba, after the master of the crashed shuttle.

“Apple was a good choice for first touchdown,” Maria said. “The climate is bearable at this time of year. At midsummer it had permanent daylight, but not too hot, with the sun staying about thirty degrees above the horizon. Now it rises a few degrees higher than that at noon—higher every day—and dips very close to the horizon at midnight.

“It has river, swamp, and grazing land, whether grass or not. No forest, but several environments to sample. And some odd-looking rocks. According to Control’s estimate, based on their shadows, they’re about ten meters high, roughly conical, with truncated tops, possibly open, although we can’t be sure of that.”

The crashed shuttle was so close to the rocks that they must have been the primary objective. They were not the same features that Seth had seen that first morning, but similar, just a smaller collection. A village, not a city?

“Rocks?” Maria said. “Or cooling towers? Termite mounds? Or fumarole cones? Giant white cacti? Anyone got any other suggestions? They’re not in rows, but they do seem curiously regular, don’t they?”

The careful silence was shattered by JC’s booming laugh. “Houses? Huts? That’s what we’re all thinking, isn’t it? A fine location by a river, good for hunting and fishing. Mid-latitude so the climate isn’t too extreme. Sentients… Not high-tech, because there are no fields or boats. Also they haven’t worked out yet that doors in the roof let the rain in. Maybe they need houses because they hibernate a third of the year. Maybe the trauma that killed the Galactic woman was a spear? Those huts are why Duddridge chose that site. He never mentioned videos, but he didn’t say the shuttle was too badly wrecked to maintain transmissions to the flotilla, now did he?”

“So why a yellow beacon, not purple, for sentience?” Hanna asked, her expression more skeptical than her voice.

Nothing was going to shake JC’s jubilation. “Because of us, First, because of us! We shipped out before the end of the month. Galactic had ships in refit, but either they weren’t quite ready, or the bosses wouldn’t pay like I did for a preview of the data. We got away first, and when the monthly ISLA bulletin came out they knew exactly where we’d gone: a niner world! So they cut corners to get here first. They found this settlement on the river and started sending probes to investigate sentience, which GenRegs allow them to do. That didn’t work, so they tried a shuttle. Finally they decided they needed heavier equipment to deal with the weather and went home to get it.”

Everyone else was willing to leave the battle to Hanna.

“That still doesn’t explain a yellow flag instead of a purple.”

“Yes it does,” JC insisted, “because if there are sentients, there are no profits. ISLA won’t let you stake the world. There’s fame and a billion-dollar bonus, but what are those to Galactic? Whoever the house builders are, without evidence of technology there’s still room to argue whether or not they’re truly sentient. Gorillas built nests, remember. Birds do. Duddridge probably wanted to consult the company higher-ups. He couldn’t stake, but he certainly wanted to keep our fingers out of his pot. Yellow flag to scare us off.”

“Stromatolites,” Reese said airily.

JC glowered like a gorilla defending its nest. “What?”

“Stromatolites. I’m saying that your house builders are algae, or something similar. Stromatolites made some of the oldest fossils on Earth, but they still grow in a few places, especially in some highly saline tidal bays in Australia. They’re stony mounds build by algae, like primitive reefs. Maria, is that a flood plain or an estuary?”

Maria consulted Control, which hedged and hawed, but eventually agreed with her that tides could come that far inland at some times of year and under certain weather conditions.

“Pretty damp houses, JC,” Maria said. “But my guess is that the other shuttle went out to sea on the tide. The missing people may have done so, too. Control, show us some file pictures of stromatolites.”

Stromatolites evidently came in groups of thousands on tidal flats, like swarms of stony beehives, all much the same height. The Cacafuego mounds seemed larger than terrestrial examples, but the similarity was close enough. Life never repeated itself exactly. On Shangri the tigers had six legs and spiders five. Without admitting defeat, JC subsided into a sulk.

“Why don’t we call them ‘chimneys’ for now?” Jordan said with professional tact. “Until we know what they are. Any more questions or discussion?”

Seth said, “I’d like to ask Reese about chirality. But please dumb it down to my level.”

“You’re not dumb, Broderick,” Reese said, “You’re just crazy. Tell us what you know. That’ll be quicker.”

“I know that our bodies are mostly made of proteins, which are made up of chemicals called amino acids, and amino acids are asymmetric molecules. Like gloves.”

“Top of the class. Life on Earth and almost all the thousands of life-bearing worlds we know of uses left-handed amino acids and right-handed sugars, but we’re not certain why.”

“Not just life,” Maria said. “Amino acids in meteorites are biased also, just not so much. It starts with the magnetic fields around black holes.”

Reese did not enjoy being interrupted. “That’s still controversial. The only exceptions I know of are two exoplanets, Toyama and Verdant. Their amino acids are right-handed.”

“And people died on Toyama from breathing the air?” Seth asked.

Reese frowned. “I don’t know about breathing the air, but you certainly couldn’t survive on a Verdant or Toyama diet. Your enzymes wouldn’t fit the molecules, and some optical isomer pairs have very different properties. You’d starve if you weren’t poisoned first.”