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  “In case I do take the shuttle down. So you won’t make her ladyship risk her pretty little ass.”

  Jordan smiled and shook his head. “No. She’s probably risked it in worse situations. Down, boy. I need to tell you a few things about Astrobiologist Platte.”

  Seth crossed his ankles again. He didn’t need sex at the moment, or even talk about sex, just sleep. Hours and hours of sleep. He worried about letting the others down, letting himself down, muffing the only big chance he would ever get. If he went back home without trying the Cacafuego landing, his prospecting career would be over. No other expedition would ever hire a proven quitter, and he would never forgive himself. But he mustn’t let wishful thinking lull him into stupidity. If he tried and failed he would leave Golden Hind without a shuttle, so the others would have no choice but to head home again, with their hopes in tatters. What was the question again?

  He thought back over the voyage. “You’ve been roommates twice?”

  “Yes, but never this way round. Male, Reese’s a competent stud, a bit predictable but patient and gentle. We’ve agreed that next time we’ll change ends. You know how old they are?”

  “Forty-one?”

  “Older. But that’s subjective time. This is her fourth trip into the Big Nothing. She was born in 2282, ninety-four years ago. About seventy years before you were.”

  Seth had no answer for that.

  “They were one of the very first herms, Seth. Their family was wealthy, old money; their father won a Nobel Prize for medicine. Can you imagine a man who would put the experimental herm drugs into his own pregnant wife? Reese was conceived as a boy, if that matters to you. The process worked without a flaw, but they were a freak in their childhood, mocked, toured around like a circus. And their father was an absolute martinet, a disciplinary extremist. I gather their mother was a Marie Antoinette-level snob.”

  “Tragic. Which part of this does she blame on me?”

  “Seth, Seth! She blames herself. Raised by a tyrant, brought up in a mansion, taught to despise the lower classes and their lustful debaucheries—you know how priggish people were last century! Now, thanks to some time slip, she’s lived so long she finds herself in a whole new culture, and she goes and falls for an uncouth, uncultured, muscle-bound, penniless yahoo a quarter her age?”

  Jordan leaned back on his elbows and grinned at Seth’s disbelief.

  “It’s true, Seth! What they tell you isn’t what they mean at all. Imagine how ashamed they feel. I don’t think they changed over this time because they were worrying about accompanying you. She just wants a few nights with you before you leave.”

  “Nights to do what, fergawsake? Call me dirty names?”

  “To get raped,” the captain said softly, and laughed at Seth’s reaction.

  “Never!”

  “I’m not suggesting you do it. That’s up to you. I’m just explaining that that’s the role she sees for you—a boorish, foul-mouthed, bodice-ripping punk imposing your lustful demands on her, ordering her into bed, talking dirty.”

  Seth swallowed and licked dry lips. “You are telling me that Reese Platte has rape fantasies?”

  “When female, yes. And you are the thug of her dreams.”

  “You can’t order me to do this.”

  “Of course not! But every mind has a few dark corners, Seth, and that’s Reese’s. She desperately wants you to call insult her, tear the clothes off her, even slap her around a bit, and then overpower her and screw her. She’d weep with joy. If you can’t fit the pistol, at least try to be understanding.”

  This conversation was downright unbelievable. Jordan had a string of degrees in psychology and was licensed to practice in three states. He would never gossip about another crew member’s emotional problems. So what was going on?

  Seth stood up. “Captain Spears, sir, I cannot do things like that. Not hurt a woman. Not even under orders. You shouldn’t be suggesting such things. Shit, I had a kid sister I tried to rear. I watched both her and my mother dying in agony. I cannot do what you or Reese want. If I want violence, I go to the gym, pick out a guy who outweighs me by twenty kilos, and beat the hell out of him.”

  “I’m not ordering you; I am merely explaining why you have problems with Dr. Platte.”

  “No, sir. If she has problems with me, tell her she can ask me herself. And there will be no rough stuff.”

  Seth stalked out, shaking his head. He wished he hadn’t been told all that. He really had no desire to lie with a woman of ninety-four. He took a long, soothing shower and sprayed his teeth. Then he headed for the cabin. It was dark, but light from the corridor showed him that both beds were empty, which was a huge relief. He fell into his with his clothes on and barely had time to order the lights off before he was asleep.

  Day 410

  Back when astronomers knew only the solar system, they tended to assume that the sun must have collected a complete set of possible planets. Now we know better. Now any wildcatter will happily quote “Blackadder’s Law” for you. Credited to Nicholas Blackadder, one of the early interstellar explorers, Blackadder’s Law states simply, “Every world is different, except that they’re all out to get you.”

  Fonatelles, op. cit.

  Jordan convened yet another meeting, this time to consider whether to continue surveying Cacafuego or set course for Armada. This was the showdown, and Seth knew that his decision would be crucial, although he might well be overruled in the end. Everyone knew the stakes. He kept catching sideways glances, appraising him, wondering which way he was going to jump. He wasn’t sure of that himself.

  The big change showed in the way they sat around the control room table. Although their positions were still the same, the balance of power had shifted, from the three at the far end who had brought them here: commodore, captain, navigator, to the three whose job had now begun: biologist, planetologist, prospector.

  Large-scale maps of the planet filled the control room walls, showing the daylight hemisphere and the ever-moving ship’s icon. No sign of the Galactic fleet had been detected. Its quarantine beacon flew a high orbit that should be stable for centuries.

  “First,” Jordan said, “a quick recap of what we know, so that we’re all on the same page. Maria?”

  “Cacafuego’s high gravity is actually helping us now. It compresses the atmosphere, so Golden Hind can orbit close in without experiencing significant drag. We have five ferrets in orbit, and they’re mapping on a low-detail scale. Of course we would need months to analyze all the scattered land masses, but we can examine narrow strips in very fine detail. Certainly there is life down there, as Reese will tell you—advanced, multicellular life. We’ve seen forests and savannahs, and marine fauna as large as whales. No large terrestrial animals yet, which suggests that the year-long cycle of day and night inhibits their development.”

  “Elephants don’t hibernate well,” Reese said.

  “Or migrate across oceans.”

  JC said, “Maria, run through this sideways climate scenario again for me. It drives me schizo.”

  “Don’t you mean bipolar?”

  A blend of groans and laughter broke the tension.

  “Kill her,” Reese said.

  “Ok, ok, I’m sorry. Imagine you live at the north pole. At the summer solstice, what we’d call roughly the end of June, the sun stood directly overhead all day, meaning about nineteen terrestrial hours. The heat is super-tropical, too hot for any terrestrial life other than some extremophile bacteria. Now the sun is descending in a spiral. If you’re exactly at the pole, the spiral will be symmetrical. By the equinox, the end of September, it will make a daily run around the horizon. A couple of days later it will sink out of sight for half a year and the temperature will drop far below zero.

  “Now suppose Hanna lives at the equator. She sees something very different. At summer solstice the sun is due north, motionless at the horizon, or a fraction above it because of atmospheric diffraction. In this perpetual dusk, the weather is
bitterly cold—arctic by our standards. Slowly the sun begins to move in increasing circles, gradually tilting so that each day it rises higher. The circles grow until, at the equinox, it rises due east of you and sets due west, passing directly overhead at noon. Then the days shrink again. Got it now?” Maria glanced around the table.

  Heads nodded.

  “In the spring, the sun does the reverse, except that it rises in the west and sets in the east.”

  “She’s making this up,” Seth said.

  “I am not!”

  “I know you’re not. Tell us about the weather.”

  “Loads and loads of weather! Right now the air in the northern hemisphere has spent half a year above a super-tropical ocean, which must get dangerously close to boiling near the pole. The air is hot and saturated, hurricanes are two-a-penny. In fact some of them may be close to permanent, whirling around the globe. The southern hemisphere air is super-arctic cold, and at this time of year the two bodies of air are starting to mix as the sun rises over the equator. The temperature difference could easily top a hundred degrees Celsius. You wonder there are storms?”

  “And what about tides?”

  “Tides? Um, I haven’t thought much about tides yet,” Maria admitted.

  Seth had. “Turd is too small to raise much of a tide, but the sun must. And it must pull a lot of water to the poles at the solstices, big stationery bulges. By equinox the tidal bulges will be sweeping around the equator. So getting from one state to the other must be quite exciting at times.”

  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.”

  “Poison is what I’m wondering about. According to the beacon’s story, the Galactic prospectors died very suddenly. Could they have been poisoned by amino acids with the wrong handedness?”

  There was silence while Reese cogitated. Control would refuse to speculate on such questions.

  Eventually she said, “I don’t see why isomer poisoning would be speedier than any other. If you go downside here you’re going to be heading into the jaws of death anyway, with your life dependent on maintaining asepsis and avoiding all types of biohazards. Isomers aren’t likely to be any more deadly than microbes or virus particles or allergens or heavy metals or poison gases or of the other things you studied in training. I suspect that radioactive dust may be a problem, because of Cacafuego’s very high density, but you’ll check on that. Optical isomerism is an interesting point, and I shall certainly check the samples for it when you provide some.”