Dave Duncan - Wildcatter

Seth said, “We estimated that the solstice had been about our Day 380 , more than a month ago now. Either we hit more time slip or you beat us by about a month and a half. Your commodore must have cut quite a few corners. When Golden Hind files its report, ISLA may take a hard look at his log. And he’s going to face very hard questioning about abandoning you.”

“I have enough troubles of my own right now, thank you,” she said. “We were disappointed by the axial tilt, but some sideways worlds have been profitable, and we were determined to stake it before you did. Then our scanners turned up the flower pots. Know what I mean?”

“We called them chimneys.”

“We sent atmospheric drones down to overfly a couple of the colonies and we saw pseudo-mammalian fauna around them. We were thrown into a tizzy. Now we call them centaurs and in my opinion they’re sentient.”

Oh! “Not just semi-sentient?”

“We weren’t sure then, but since I’ve got to know them better, I’m convinced they’re sentient.”

“They use tools? Or they have language?”

Meredith shrugged. “Both. GenRegs are vague on this topic, as I’m sure you know. Taken literally, their definitions would qualify crows or parrots as intelligent. People are still arguing how sentient gorillas were, yet ISLA blithely expects a few stressed people to make a correct decision on species no one has ever seen before, and get it right first time.”

“ISLA wants to give any possible sentients the benefit of the doubt.”

“That’s not the way big corporations think. We sent down three drones in all, and every one of them ran afoul of the weather. You can avoid the obvious storms, but there’s a lot of CAT about, clear air turbulence.”

Seth recalled that Commodore Duddridge, in his beacon message, had claimed to have sent down “a lot” of drones, not just three. Had he lied to his own shuttle crew, so they would not be put off attempting a landing, or to the beacon, hoping to scare Golden Hind away when it arrived? He had never mentioned the chimneys or centaurs. His view of the truth was patchy and astigmatic.

“Doddery called for volunteers. Up jumped a dozen suicidal idiots. He picked me and I chose my crew. The three of us came downside on Day 360 . We chose this site for several reasons, one being that it doesn’t get as hot as most of the northern hemisphere landmasses, yet it isn’t what on Earth we’d call arctic. Here the equator is the arctic, but there seems to be no permanent ice this far north. It had a fairly typical colony of flower… chimneys, you called them. As usual, they were close to the sea and a river, although I suspect now the river may be incidental. The drones’ videos had warned us that the estuary terrain was virtually impassable, but they had also shown some distributary channels like this one. We hoped that they might act as freeways for us wobbly bipeds.”

Meredith paused to take another sip of ice water. In her dehydrated and half-starved condition, she was over-reacting to the stim shot, talking fast, going hyper. Weeks of loneliness were showing, too. She might eventually collapse, and then how would Seth ever get her aboard Niagara when it returned? She ought to be in a hospital bed cocooned in IV tubes.

Seth said, “Of course you chose to land well back from the chimneys in case they turned out to be a housing project and your shuttle scared a tribe of sentients into starting a religion.”

“You guessed it. ISLA would have bust our pretty little asses. We didn’t want to waste any time, though. We knew the weather wasn’t reliable. As soon as we landed, Dylan Guinizelli and I suited up and headed out. It was a gorgeous day, all blue sky and fluffy clouds. The sun was very low and not oppressive. I really wished I could take my helmet off and smell such a beautiful world. We headed seaward, collecting, dictating, commenting, just like a school field trip.

“We followed the dry channel all the way to the chimneys. They looked bigger than I’d expected, about ten meters high and maybe five across, house-sized. But they’re irregular, obviously a natural growth, something like algal mounds. Their outsides are rough, like coral, and they taper upward, though not so much that you’d call them cones. On Earth you could climb them easily. Here, even Dylan, who’s… who was a hell-raiser, a crazy man, reckless to the point of insanity… Can you believe he enjoyed blindfold mountain climbing? Escorted, of course, but even so… Even Dylan wasn’t inclined to try climbing anything in this gravity.”

Dylan might have been a fun guy to know. Had Meredith found him so? Again she paused to drink and Seth spoke up, just to let her rest.

“You said that the centaurs take shelter inside them. You must have seen that from the drones, but our equipment couldn’t show us so much detail. We weren’t even sure that they were hollow. I know from what we did see that they are littoral, growing only in tidal areas, and Cacafuego has a lot of those. So if they’re plants or giant barnacles, not houses, what’s their game? How do they make a living?”

“You are terrestrializing!” she said. “You know how rarely our Earthly categories fit exobiology. Oysters have feathers and bats with hooves and so on. I think coral might be a better analogy, and coral isn’t a plant. If they trap and poison marine life, like sea anemones do, then they obviously don’t hurt the centaurs. Mariko suggested that they might collect rainwater. The rainfall here is stupendous, as you can see.”

“Quite.” Outside their little cave the water was coming down in ropes, with visibility reduced to a few meters. So far the sand had absorbed it, but Seth was watching the pond, and now it was spreading fast. The wind came in hurricane gusts, shaking the shuttle, making his ears pop. There could be no question of sending for Niagara until the weather lifted. He was very thirsty. “You suppose the centaurs use the chimneys to collect rainwater?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘use.’ They don’t build the pots, but they seem to make use of them. At some seasons, the precipitation must be high enough to keep the chimneys full of fresh or brackish water. The contrast between saltwater outside and fresh inside during high tide could serve as an energy source, either by osmotic pressure or by some electrolytic process. Or they may just ooze water to keep cool during low tide, when the sun is strong. Mariko suggested later that the chimneys and the centaurs could have a symbiotic thing going. The chimneys provide the centaurs with storm shelters, and the centaurs’ droppings fertilize the chimneys. But they are hollow, they are largely full of water, and they let centaurs play house, as we then discovered.

“We decided to return to the shuttle. That was when things started to go wrong. We had explored a little over one klick of a whole planet but we were beat! I admit it.”

“I understand,” Seth said, with feeling.

“We had just turned back when a centaur popped its head out of one of the flower pots and started jabbering like crazy. The others obviously heard it, so they couldn’t have had their heads underwater. They have no gills—they breathe air, but I suppose the pots aren’t quite full of water. They must come up to breathe but we certainly hadn’t noticed them doing so. Right away a whole herd of them appeared. Two or three to every chimney, they scrambled down the sides and came after us.

“Dylan was closer than I was and got the worst of it. He had time to draw his stun gun and get off a few shots, but there were far too many of them. They swarmed him. I was farther away, and I drove them off with firecrackers.”

ISLA was going to hit the roof over that. Galactic would have to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Cacafuego centaurs were not sentient. Even then, it might be fined for using such weapons when it could not have been sure of the centaurs’ status. So company policy must be no sentience, which explained why De Soto had not posted a purple flag.