Marooned on Eden Read online

  Of course, most of the huge ship is taken up with other things, and much of the area on the top decks where the Christmas Bush operates is essentially inaccessible to us; I've never been there at all. I'm much more interested in the hydroponics section, the top deck of the five living decks. Of course, the primary purpose of the hydroponics deck is to supply us with the food we eat, but it is also an aid to those times when we feel a primordial tug, and need to see things green and growing. The sharp smell of a tomato leaf is a scent that is treasured among us—it is real and comes from Earth—as we have.

  The hydroponics section is in the capable hands of Cinnamon, Deirdre, and Nels; very typical was the scene today when I looked in; Cinnamon singing to herself, as she moved about the rows, touching a leaf gently, adding a minute amount of carefully controlled fertilizer, her personal imp configured into earphones that play music for her to sing to. Nels stood proudly at his tall desk, toes tucked into the free-fall foot restraints, and fingers moving alternately over the touchscreen display and the keyboard as he manipulated the tunneling array microscope and recorded his findings in James's nearly inexhaustible memory.

  "I say, Cinnamon, this new tissue culture may lead to something. Maybe not as good as my Chicken Little or Ferdinand—more on the lines of fish—rather like salmon, maybe."

  "Nels, if you can even come close!" she sighed. "My mother used to smoke the catch on wooden frames—it was heavenly!"

  "Didn't we sometimes have smoked salmon at Goddard Space Station? I think I remember that, but I can't recall if it was good."

  "Because it was dreadful! Adding liquid smoke to a can of canned fish is not the same thing!"

  With which I most heartily concur. Fresh salmon was a joy in Scotland—bought from the fisherman himself, who might say apologetically that it was caught early this morning, but then adds earnestly that it's been on ice ever since! My schoolmates and I headed towards the sea like lemmings at every brief holiday to get away from the boredom of institutional meals.

  "Now look, Cin, let's take this culture and add . . ." The conversation become severely technical, as the two heads bent over the desk, staring intently at the screen—Nels' blondness a striking contrast to her tight black braids. I left them, and moved down the corridors between the rows of foliage and the walls of water in the hydroponics tanks to my checkout task. But I sincerely hope their new project might prove successful! Along the way I came upon Deirdre, silent as always, nearly obscured by leafy foliage. I went around behind the plant—Deirdre is a valued friend—to see the massive bloom she was pollinating with a tiny brush. I said only a word; a soft, "wonderful" and was rewarded with a quick glance, and a flip of the tail from the tiny animal perched on her shoulder. Deirdre doesn't waste words, and I passed on, not expecting any. Her voice, like her eyes, is so beautiful, and so revealing of her emotions, that I think it attracts more attention than she can bear, and she maintains her privacy with silence and downcast looks. But when she chooses to be with someone she trusts, her thoughts are a joy to share. Foxx, the small pet, is a privileged creature; he clings as closely to Deirdre's shoulder as her imp, and I believe the two of them have had to work out a rather painful compromise! But his antics sometimes—rarely—make Deirdre laugh, and that is a sound worth hearing.

  By far the largest portion of Prometheus is virtually empty. It is the forty meter section between the two top decks and the five bottom decks. There were originally four planetary exploration spacecraft stored there, but there is now only one left. Called the Surface Lander and Ascent Module—the initials of which result in an unfortunate acronym—the spacecraft consists of a four engine liquid oxygen-liquid hydrogen rocket-powered stage for landing the ten person exploration crew on a planetoid, an aerospace plane stage called the Surface Excursion Module, for exploring the surface of the planetoid, and a single engine Ascent Propulsion Stage for returning the exploration crew to Prometheus. We plan to use this lander to explore the Gargantuan moon, Zuni.

  The first of the four SLAM landers was used to explore Rocheworld. After landing the rocket, the crew let down and assembled the aerospace plane—the Magic Dragonfly—with our incredible Arielle at the controls. I've heard, from all the members of that expedition, the account of their near-fatal attempt to leave the planet and return to Prometheus, and genuine respect comes into their voices as they describe this tiny lady, becoming quieter and calmer as more danger was threatening the little plane. She is almost more bird than human, and eats like one as well—meaning almost continuously! How well I remember the evening when she and David put on their fantastic performance for us all, to celebrate the arrival of Prometheus at Barnard. Arielle's acrobatic free-fall dance to David's inspiring sonovideo composition was a hauntingly lovely combination of light, music, beauty, and passion, all evocative of flight. I have James play those scenes on my viewwall again sometimes, and each time find some new joy in Arielle's soaring glides and David's genius for both sight and sound.

  I am anticipating with pleasure David's next production inspired by the last exploration trip down to Zulu. What little I've heard from Arielle seems to indicate it might be quite a different sort of story. I've actually learned more from the flouwen about that icy planet than from my crewmates. The flouwen seem to have more time to talk, these days, and are more willing to do so. Sometimes I think, for all our close proximity, we humans are all living farther apart than we used to.

  Halfway down the hydroponics corridor, I looked up. There is an airlock in the ceiling at that point, and it was open. Arielle was on the other side, in the control room of the remaining SLAM rocket lander, getting ready to check out the long-dormant airplane attached to the lander's side. This last lander had been named the Beagle, after the sailing vessel which Charles Darwin used for his voyages of exploration. Arielle had a squeezer of chocolate algae-shake in one hand and was using her other hand to operate the airlock controls leading from the Beagle to the aeroplane, Dragonfly. I followed her as she disappeared upward through the passway to the engineering deck on the Beagle, which allows access to the aeroplane, and caught up with her as she was opening the windshield of Dragonfly.

  "Hello, Arielle. Shall we proceed with our checkout?"

  Arielle turned wistful brown eyes to me and patted the control panel. "O Reiki, how brave my old ship flied! We were like real dragonfly! You know that bug? Shiny, and quick, and so fast!"

  "Yes, I know dragonflies, and you are right. But we still have this one left—perhaps you will have the opportunity to fly it on Zuni—and it will be like it was before!" Normally, one wouldn't promise such a thing, even vaguely, since the makeup of the next landing party has not yet been decided, but the pilot smiled. The first Dragonfly plane had been destroyed at the conclusion of the initial expedition, and we had been fortunate to get the crew home safely.

  Arielle's fingers silently played over the bank of control switches in the cockpit, gleaming silver in the gloom, just lightly touching them with practiced familiarity. In this low gravity she barely seemed to touch the cushion of the pilot's seat.

  "Just wait for me!" she purred to the silent machine. "We will fly again!" Emotion, like so many things, makes Arielle hungry, and she slurped noisily from the squeezer, then exhaled a chocolatey breath.

  I quietly began the routine of the checkout. We were soon joined by a Christmas Branch, looking like a six-armed chimney sweep brush. James had despatched the motile to assist us in the checkout, and it moved smoothly on three of its six arms over our heads to the engineering console.

  "I am ready to assist in the checkout of Surface Excursion Module Four," came the smooth tones from the vibrating cilia in the "head" area of the robot. The bunches of fibered fingers, with their flickering cilia, glowed red as they moved closer to the control console. The rest of the arms emitted laser-lights of blue and yellow, keeping Arielle and me under surveillance and reporting constantly to James everything that it saw. Arielle put down her food as her own imp's configuration shi
fted from headband to earphones. While Arielle spoke, one tiny section of her imp silently reached out to capture a misplaced drop of chocolate algae-shake oozing from the straw on the squeezer, detached itself from the main body of the imp, and flew off to dispose of it.

  "Right. We start up airplane, you do Dragonfly workwall."

  The fuzzy metal robot shifted its jointed limbs, and proceeded down the length of the airplane to the rear, where it fastened itself, like an illuminated starfish, to the surface of the workwall. Its flickering lights intensified as it operated the miniature controls on the various analytical machines and reported the results of the readouts to James and to us. I took my seat at the computer console at the middle of the plane, buckling myself in, since the seat was set at right angles to the low gravity. Arielle remained up front in the pilot seat, waiting until I brought the semi-intelligent airplane alive. Right now the central computer was idling, waiting for instructions. I tilted my head forward and looked down at the glittering bit of imp jewelry holding the collar of fine white lace around my throat.

  "Self-check routine zero," I commanded my imp, which is connected through its laser beams not only to James, but to every computer in the ship.

  A mechanical voice answered through my imp. "Seven-six-one-three-F-F."

  "That is correct," said the voice of James, coming from both my imp and the Christmas Branch at the rear of the ship.

  "Self-check routine one."

  This time, the voice which answered through my imp no longer had a mechanical tone. Instead, it had the distinctive voice and personality of Josephine, which I had designed as the persona for the computer that operated Dragonfly Four. Its rather husky drawl is, of necessity, easy for us all to understand and recognize instantly. This simple method of varying the voice pattern of the different computers makes it easy for us to know which computer is speaking to us.

  "Surface Excursion Module Four going through systems check," said Josephine. There was a pause. "There is something blocking the motion of the left scan platform."

  Arielle was waiting patiently in the cockpit for me to inform her that Josephine was healthy and she could exercise the piloting part of its program. I would now have to ask her to unstrap herself and go back to the science section to check out the scan platform, but instead of tilting my head toward my imp and having James transfer my message, I turned and called down the corridor.

  "Arielle, I'd like your assistance, please. Would you mind going back and checking out the left scan platform? Josephine says there is something blocking it."

  Arielle reached up in surprise to touch her earphones. "Imp not talking?" I could hear her imp whisper busily. She turned to smile down the corridor at me.

  "You like asking 'please' yourself?"

  "Yes," I replied. "I didn't mean to confuse you."

  We've not had too much interaction in recent months, and our habits are different from each other.

  She unbuckled the restraining straps and moved down the aisle in a single swoop to the recalcitrant scan platform. Through the air I could hear the soft muttering of French swearwords, which I firmly prevented my imp from translating. Josephine and I continued to prepare the little plane for its eventual mission, once landed on Zuni and made operational. Following the precise directions engineered for us by the designers, we issued commands to various subsystems and actuators and checked to see that they were indeed obeyed. The heaters were turned on, to return the ship by no more than five degrees Celsius per day to the higher temperatures it would experience on the warm planetoid below. We enabled the battery-discharge regulators, and directed the emergency backup nickel-cadmium batteries to recharge as soon as they were warm enough and energy from the reactor in the rear was available. We warmed the roll, pitch, and yaw thrusters, but awaited Arielle's return before doing any test firing simulation.

  Arielle had gone to the galley amidships for a squeezer of Coke and an algae-cookie. The still-secret recipe for the famous cola drink had been entrusted to James's encrypted files upon our departure, and periodically the Christmas Bush would use that recipe to brew a new batch of syrup in the chemical synthesis portion of its workwall on Prometheus.

  Temporarily satiated, Arielle swooped back from the galley down the aisle of the airplane, passing my head like some small pink dragonfly herself, and settled into her seat again with a satisfied grunt. We continued amicably on through the checkout procedure, chatting impersonally about Quebec during the lulls when Josephine was busy on some long, tedious task. I had spent some months in her native city, ostensibly to study the possible impact of Quebec's secession from Canada on the children of those fierce but genial citizens. Actually, I was observing how the two cultures, French-Canadian and English, with so little mutual respect, had let that disrespect show itself in sly ways of rudeness, with the inevitable result of a complete break between them. Now, all Canada, except Quebec of course, is part of the Greater United States of America, and there are sixty-one stars in the blue field of that ancient, yet ever-modern "stars-and-stripes."

  After completing the checkout of the Dragonfly, powering the reactor down to maintenance level, and buttoning up the access ports, we went back down through the airlock onto the hydroponics deck, just as Cinnamon and David were coming up to check out Joe, the persona for the computer in the rocket lander. Arielle went off to the central shaft and dove downward toward the living area deck—no doubt to get more food. I went around to another corridor. There, one of the hydroponics tanks has been converted into a most exotic aquarium. There also is a long sofa, hauled up from the lounge of the Living Area Deck, where we humans can sit and watch the activities of our alien friends as they sport in their little home away from home.

  As a result of our second exploration visit to Rocheworld, we now have with us on Prometheus three "buds" of the natives of that world, the flouwen. Although the aliens prefer to spend much of their time exploring our ship in their own spacesuits, they return to the tank for feeding on the plants and animals, which Nels brought up from Rocheworld and installed around artificial volcanic vents which provide optimum nourishment for rapid growth and reproduction. The flouwen swim with apparent pleasure in the strange mixture of chemicals in the tank. Roughly equal parts of water and ammonia, with traces of methane and hydrogen sulfide, the "water" would be deadly to us, but it is what they are used to on the ocean-covered Eau lobe of the double-lobed planet. Since their home ocean varies from nearly pure water in the hotter parts of the ocean near the volcanic vents where they feed, to nearly pure ammonia in the colder portions where the water freezes out as ice, the flouwen have developed the ability to adapt to various mixture ratios by controlling their internal body chemistry. Nels suspects that they can probably adjust to pure water oceans, provided they get periodic doses of ammonia to keep their body chemistry balanced.

  The flouwen are extremely intelligent, and each of us has some private feeling for them. Cinnamon has a special rapport with them, as she does with all living things. Jinjur finds them relaxing to watch, and she appreciates that. The responsibilities of being commander sometimes weigh heavily even on shoulders as sturdy and straight as hers, and the sight of the smoothly swimming animals, like giant jellyfish, is a source of genuine pleasure for her. She prefers to watch them in silence—I remember well how impressed I was with that silence when I first met the lady! It had not been often I had encountered someone whose comfort with stillness matched my own. She listens to all of us with an open mind, and invariably selects a course of action which has our best interests as its top priority. Her public manner of waving her arms about and shouting abuse which so narrowly avoids actual profanity gets her instant attention, which, of course, is why she uses it! I find her an excellent commander, and her words and gestures secretly amusing.

  George, our second-in-command, views the water-tank full of colorful flouwen and the panoramic vistas of black space visible from the floor-to-ceiling glass viewport in the lounge, with equal satisfaction. I
t must be highly contenting to him, after all his years of working to get our mission literally off the ground, to see how successful we have been in making contact with this new universe. The creatures in the tank are very different from anything on earth, and the scene out the viewport in the lounge is both calming and stabilizing. That is reality out there—immense, beautiful, and existing long after we are not.

  Richard looks on our small flouwen buds with what has all the appearances of paternal indulgence. In their eagerness to learn, the flouwen are always asking questions and frequently getting in the way. Little Red seems to feel a special affinity for Richard, and learns fastest of all from him as they yell affectionate insults at each other. I heard them at it this morning.

  "Move, Little Red, damn it! You keep creeping up, closer and closer, like a damn cat or something, until you're practically in my damn lap!"

  "Cat? What is cat?" All senses in the red alien are alert at the new words. " . . .and lap? What is . . ."

  "Cat is . . .Oh . . .a pet sort of thing, and lap . . ."

  "Pet!" Little Red was shouting at the implied insult. "I not pet! Pets dumb!"

  Richard laughed, and said, "Then stay out of my—uh—chair."

  "Wait! Before you said, 'lap'! What is that? Dumb too?" The tones were suspicious.

  "No, no, no . . ." The man tried to define 'lap' to the alien. I did notice, wryly, that Little Red had had no trouble with the "damn." Even such short acquaintance with humans had familiarized the alien with the regrettable overuse of that and other slipshod adjectives. One of my own obsessions is that of selecting each word with care, rather than resorting to monotonous slang. Sometimes I think I am setting a good example; at other times I despair. A moment's idle gossip invariably sends me speeding off to the fine minds waiting patiently in my library!