Chronicles of Pern (First Fall) Page 2

  Liu snorted. “Absence is as ominous as presence, in my tapes.”

  “Could have been an axial tilt, you know, and what’s now the ice caps were their homegrounds,” Shawa suggested. “They got caught in the blizzards and froze. We do have ice cores, which could very well produce tissue and bone fragments.”

  “Well, this P.E. has only a fifteen‑degree axial tilt; the probes set the magnetic poles very near the ecliptic north and south, maybe fifteen degrees away from tilt.”

  “We’ll know when we get back to the ship and have a chance to study things. Are today’s samples ready to go back to Castor?”

  “Yeah, but I wish the fardles he’d sent us back his conclusions. He’s had time.” Liu scowled as he handed his latest containers to Ben to pack in the case to be launched back to the spacecraft.

  “Maybe they all moved north,” Ben said in a spirit of helpfulness.

  “To winter?”

  “This continent’s not in full summer yet.”

  “Well, it’d never get hot enough to fry things, not with the prevailing winds this continent’s got.” Liu refused to be mollified.

  On their way north they paused on the largest of a group of islands: basaltic, riddled with caves, bearing the profusion and lush growth common to tropical climes. They noted several unusual reptilian forms, more properly large herpetoids of truly revolting appearance.

  “I’ve seen uglier ones,” Ben remarked, examining at a safe distance one horny monster, seven centimeters broad and five high, which waved tentacles and claws in an aggressive manner. They could discern neither mouth nor eyes. The olfactor gave a stench reading; and the creature’s back was covered with insectoid forms.

  “External digestive system?” Shawa suggested, peering at the thing. “And‑‑wow!”

  The creature had sped forward suddenly, its nether end now covered with tiny barbs. At the same time, the olfactor reading went off the scale, and a repellent stench filled the little clearing.

  “Look, it backed into that spiny plant,” Ben said, pointing to the little bush. “And got shot in the ass.”

  Standing well back and using a long stick, Shavva nudged one of the remaining spines and was rewarded with a second launching.

  “Well, a clever plant. Didn’t just let loose in all directions. I wonder what would deactivate it?”

  “Cold?” Liu suggested.

  “There’s a small one here,” Shavva observed. She sprayed it with the cryo and gave it an exploratory prod. When it did not respond she packed it in a specimen box.

  That evening, as they were readying the day’s tube for Castor, Liu let out a whoop, holding up a glowing specimen tube for the others to see.

  “That growth I found in the big cave. Some sort of luminous variety of mycelium.” He covered it with his hand. “Indeed. Now you see it‑‑” He opened his hand to let the tube glow again. “Now you don’t.” He closed his hand again, peering through thin cracks he permitted between two fingers. “Does oxygen trigger the luminosity?”

  “You are not going back into the cave tonight, Liu,” Shavva said sternly. “We don’t have the spelunking equipment necessary to keep you from breaking your damned fool neck.”

  He shrugged. “Luminous lichens or organisms are not my forte.” He carefully wrapped the tube in opaque plasfilm. “Don’t want it to wear itself out before Castor sees it.”

  Later that night they were all enticed from their camp by the sound of cheeping and chittering. Parting the lush foliage that surrounded them, they peered out at an astonishing scene. Graceful creatures, totally different from the awkward avians seen in the southern hemisphere, were performing aerial acrobatics of astonishing complexity. The setting sun sparkled off green, blue, brown, bronze, and golden backs, and translucent wings glistened like airborne jewels.

  “The seaside egg layers?” Shawa asked Liu in a whisper.

  “Quite possibly,” Liu replied softly. “Gorgeous. Look, they’re playing a discernible game. Catch‑me‑if‑you‑can!”

  For a long time, the three explorers watched the spectacle with delight until the creatures broke off their play as the swift tropical night darkened the skies.

  “Sentient?” Shawa asked, wanting and yet not wanting those beautiful creatures to be the dominant sentient life form of this planet.

  “Marginally,” Liu murmured approvingly. “If they’re leaving eggs on a shoreline where storm waters could wash them away, they’re not possessed of very great intelligence.”

  “Just beauty,” Ben said. “Perhaps we’ll find large and related types of the same evolutionary ancestors for you, Liu.”

  Liu shrugged diffidently as he turned back to their campfire. “If we do, we do.”

  They made notes of what they had witnessed and then turned in for the night. The next day had them examining the reef systems jutting out from the island, and its smaller companions. A trip to the more tropical eastern peninsula showed them a complicated system, similar to coral, with fossils of the same thing going right back, Ben estimated, some five hundred million years. At least this was a viable ecology, not a stalemated tropical‑rain‑forest dense ecology, with the various elements, so to speak, taking in each other’s washing. Such transitory ecologies did reinforce Ben’s theory of a recent meteorite storm rather than an ice‑age hiatus in evolution.

  The bare circles were planetwide, except at the caps and one small band of the southern hemisphere, and though the survey team had thoroughly investigated, they could not find the meteorites that might have been the cause. Nor, Ben fretted, were any of the circles either deep enough or overlapping in the pattern caused by a multiple meteorite impact.

  The northern hemisphere, though in part blanketed by thick snows, was duly cored for soil and rock samplings. Mud flats, emitting the usual dense sulfurous fumes all over the central plain’s vast river delta, produced more regularities than differences, and certainly a plethora of promising bacteria over which Shavva crowed. Farther inland, up the broad navigable riverway, they found adequate lodes, of iron, copper, nickel, tin, vanadium, bauxite, and even some germanium, but none of the generous quantities of metals and minerals that would interest a mining consortium.

  On the next‑to‑last morning of their survey, Ben found gold nuggets in a brash mountain stream.

  “A real old‑fashioned world,” he remarked, tossing and catching the heavy nuggets in his hand. “Old Earth once had free gold in streams, too. Another parallel.”

  Shavva leaned over and took one that was an almost perfect drop, holding it between thumb and forefinger.

  “My loot,” she said, dropping it into her belt pouch.

  She found one extremely interesting plant on the upper section of the eastern peninsula: a vigorous tree whose bark when bruised in the fingers, gave off a pungent smell. That evening, she made an infusion of the bark, sniffing appreciatively of its aroma. Empiric tests showed that it was not toxic, and her judicious sip of the infusion made her sigh with pleasure.

  “Try it, Liu, tastes great!”

  Liu regarded the thin dark liquid with suspicion, but he, too, found the odor stimulating to his salivary glands and wet his lips, smacking to spread the taste. “Hmmm, not bad. Bit watery. Infuse it a bit longer, or reduce the liquid. You might have something here.”

  Ben joined in the sampling, and when Shavva experimented with grinding the bark and filtering hot water through it, he approved the result.

  “A sort of combination of coffee and chocolate, I think, with a spicy aftertaste. Not bad.”

  So Shawa harvested a quantity of the bark, and they used it as a beverage for the remaining two days. She even saved enough to bring back to Castor as a treat.

  Though none of the three made mention of the fact, they were all sorry to leave the planet and yet relieved that there had been no further accidents or untoward circumstances. Barring some unforeseen factor, discovered in the analyses of soil, vegetation, and biological samples, they were all three quite willin
g to let Castor initial it P.E.R.N.‑‑parallel Earth, resources negligible. He added a C in the top corner of the report, indicating that the planet was suitable for colonization.

  That is, if any colonial group wanted to settle on a pastoral planet, far off the established trade routes, and about as far from the center of the Federated Sentient headquarters as one could go in the known galaxy.

  THE

  DOLPHINS’ BELL

  When Jim Tillek activated the red‑alert recall sequence on the Big Bell at Monaco Bay, Teresa’s pod, with Kibby and Amadeus leaping and diving right along with her, was there within minutes, Within the hour, the ones led by Aphro, China, and Captiva arrived‑‑a total of seventy, counting the three youngest calved only that year. Young males and solitaries surged in from all directions, squee‑eeing, clicking, chuffing loudly, and performing incredible aquabatics as they came. Few dolphins had ever heard that particular sequence on the Big Bell, so they were eager to learn why it had been rung.

  “Why ring the red?” Teresa demanded, bobbing her head up in front of Jim, who stood, legs spread for balance, on the rocking float anchored at the end of Monaco Wharf. Her nose bore the many scratches and scars of age, as well as of an aggressive personality. She tended to assume the role of Speaker for Dolphins.

  The float was broad and wide, nearly the length of the end of the wharf, and was traditionally where the dolphineers held conferences with pods or individuals. This was also where the dolphins came to report unusual occurrences to the Bay Watch, or for rare instances when they required medical attention. The end timbers were smoother than the others, due to the dolphins’ habit of rubbing against them.

  Above the float hung the Big Bell, its belfry sturdily attached to a massive six‑by‑six molded‑plastic pylon well footed on the seafloor below. The chain the dolphins yanked to summon humans now idly slapped against the pylon with the action of the light sea.

  “We landfolk have trouble and need dolphin help,” Jim said. He pointed inland, where clouds of white and gray smoke curled ominously into the sky from two of the three previously dormant volcanoes. “We must leave this place and take from here all that can be moved. Do the other pods come?”

  “Big trouble?” Teresa asked, leisurely swimming beyond the bulk of the wharf to check the direction in which Jim had pointed. She raised herself high above the water, turning first one, then the other, eye to assess the situation. Her sides showed the rakings of many years’ contact with both amorous and angry males. “Big smoke. Worse than Young Mountain.”

  “Biggest ever,” Jim said, for a moment wishing that the eternal cheerful expression on dolphin faces did not seem so out of place right now. Not when the colony’s main settlement, with its labs, homes, vital stores, and the work of nearly nine years, was going to be covered in ash, at the very least, or blown completely to bits if they were very unlucky.

  “Where you go?” Teresa reversed her direction and stopped in front of Jim, giving him her complete and seriously cheerful attention. “Back to sick ocean world?”

  “No.” Jim shook his head vigorously. Since the dolphins had passed the fifteen‑year journey on the colony ships in cold sleep, they had had no sense of the passage of time. From an installation in the Atlantic Ocean, they had entered their water‑filled travel accommodations and had not been awakened until they arrived at the waters of Monaco Bay. “We go north.”

  Teresa ducked her bottlenose, flinging a spray of water at him as if agreeing. Then, dropping her head in the water, she gave forth to the members of her pod a rapid series of word noises too fast for Jim to follow, though over the past eight years on Pern, he’d learned a good deal of dolphin vocabulary.

  Kibby glided to one side of Teresa, and Captiva bobbed up on the other; all three regarded Jim earnestly.

  “Sandman, Oregon,” Captiva said distinctly, “are in West Flow. They turn, return as fast as the ftux allows.’

  Then Aleta and Maximillian abruptly arrived, adroitly avoiding a collision with the others. Pha pushed neatly in, too, as he was never one to be left out on the periphery.

  “Echo from Cass. They speed back. New sun see them here,” Pha said, and blew from his hole to emphasize the importance of his report.

  “Yes, they do have the farthest to come,” Jim said. That pod was based in the waters around Young Mountain, helping the seismic team. But dolphins could swim all night, and Cass was one of the oldest and most reliable of the females.

  The waters around the sea end of the Monaco Wharf facility were now so packed with dolphins that, when some of the dolphineers arrived, Theo Force remarked dryly that they could probably have walked on dolphins across the wide mouth of Monaco Bay and never got their feet wet.

  Some of the nine dolphineers and seven apprentices actually took longer to arrive than their marine friends, since the humans had to sled in from their stakeholds. Luckily, both Jim Tillek’s forty‑foot sloop, Southern Cross, and Per Pagnesjo’s Perseus yawl were in port. Anders Sejby had radioed that the Mayflower was under full sail and would be there by dusk, while Pete Veranera thought he’d have the Maid in on the late‑night tide. The Pernese Venturer and Captain Kaarvan had not yet reported in. She was the largest, a two‑masted schooner with a deep draft, and slower than the other four.

  Once all the humans reported in, Jim tersely explained that, with one of the volcanoes about to erupt, Landing had to be evacuated and everyone must help to get as many supplies as possible to safety around Kahrain Head. The larger ships would be taking their loads as far as Paradise River Hold; although that would be too far for the smaller craft, everything that floated was to be used to shift material as far as Kahrain.

  “We’ve got to transport all that?” Ben Byrne cried in aggrieved tone as he flung an arm toward the wharfside, where enormous piles of material were being deposited by sleds of all sizes. He was a small, compact man with crisp blond hair nearly white from sun bleach. His wife, Claire, who worked with him at Paradise River, stood at his side. “There aren’t that many ships of any decent size and if you think the dolphins can‑‑”

  “We’ve only to get it to Kahrain, Ben,” Jim said, laying a steadying hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

  “Click! Click!” Teresa managed an ear‑piercing shout for attention. “We do that, we do that!” Amadeus, Pha, and Kibby agreed, nodding vigorously.

  “Ye daft finnies, you’d burst yerselves,” Ben cried, incensed, wagging his arms at the dolphins facing him to be quiet.

  “We can, we can, we can,” and half the dolphins crowding the end of the wharf heaved themselves up out of the water to tailwalk in their enthusiasm. Somehow they managed not to crash into the seething mass of podmates who ducked out of the way underwater with split‑second timing. Such antics were repeated by many, all across the waters of the bay.

  “Look what you started, Cap’n!” Ben cried in an extravagant show of despair. “Damned fool fin‑faces! You wanna burst your guts?”

  Sometimes, Jim Tillek thought, Ben was as uninhibited as any of the whimsically impetuous dolphins he was supposed to “manage.” The difference between their enthusiasm and the reality of their assistance lay in the fact that all adult dolphins had spent a period training with human partners, learning to come to the aid of stranded swimmers and sailors and, occasionally, damaged sailing craft. They were delighted to have a chance to practice on such a scale.

  Harnesses from the training sessions were available‑‑and more could be cobbled together‑‑to hitch dolphin teams to any of the smaller sailing craft. A big yoke already existed, contrived for the ore barge that the dolphins had several times hauled from Drake’s Lake. But never had the settlers had to call on all the dolphins.

  “We’ve known something big was up,” Jan Regan said, her manner much calmer as befit the senior dolphineer. She gave a snort that was half‑laugh. “They’ve been squee‑eeing like nutters about underwater changes around here,” she added, flicking her hand at the crowded bay. “But you k
now how some of them exaggerate!”

  “Hah! With Picchu blowing smoke rings, of course the’d know something’s going to happen,” Ben said, having recovered his equilibrium. “Question is, how much time do we have before Picchu blows?”

  “It isn’t Picchu that’s going to blow,” Jim began as gently as possible. He allowed the startled reaction to subside before he continued. “It’s Garben.”

  “Knew we shouldn’t have named a mountain for that old fart,” Ben muttered.

  Jim continued. “More important, Patrice can’t give us a time frame.” That stunned even the solid and unflappable Bernard Shattuck. “All he can do is warn us when the eruption is imminent.”

  “Like how imminent?” Bernard asked soberly.

  “An hour or two. The increasing sulfur‑to‑chlorine ratio means the magma is rising. We’ve two, maybe three days with just sulfur and ash‑‑”

  “The ash I don’t mind. It’s the sulfur that’s so appalling.” Helga Duff said, coughing.

  “The real problem is‑‑” Jim paused again. “Monaco is also within range of pyroclastic missile danger.”

  “Range of what?” Jan screwed her face up at the technical term. She knew as much as any human could about dolphins, but she tended to ignore technical jargon.

  “Range of what heavy stuff the volcano can throw out at us,” Jim said, almost apologetically.

  “Worse than the ash and smoke already coming down?” Efram asked. Although they hadn’t been standing on the wharf that long, their wet suits were already gray with volcanic ash.

  “The big stuff, boulders, all kinds of molten debris. . .”

  “But we have Threadfall at Maori Lake this afternoon,” young Gunnar Schultz said, looking totally confused by the conflict of imperatives.

  “We have to get all the materiel we can to Kahrain as soon as possible, and that is the immediate priority, folks. Thread’ll have to wait its turn,” Jim said with his usual wry humor. “All available craft are to be used, and the call’s gone out to owners to either get here or appoint a surrogate. So all we have to do is explain to pod leaders what has to be done and the kind of cooperation we need from them.” He began passing out copies of the evacuation plans that Emily Boll, the colony’s co‑leader with Admiral Paul Benden, had given him forty minutes before. He glanced anxiously overhead, where three heavy sleds seemed about to collide. “Damn ‘em. Look, read the overall plans while I go organize some air‑traffic control.”