Monthly Archives: April 2016

130. First into Space

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220px-Vostok_spacecraftI grew up wanting to be a spaceman. I didn’t say astronaut, and I didn’t say cosmonaut. When I was just getting old enough to dream about the future, neither of those words were in use. Spacemen were the stuff of fiction, and the stuff of the far future.

The future arrived before I was ten in the form of Sputnik, an unwanted gift from the USSR that passed beeping over America and scared the whole nation out of its wits, and into a race for space. That was fine with me. I loved every minute of it, even though I knew I was never going to go. I was smart enough, and strong enough, but I couldn’t see across the room without glasses. Of course there were a thousand other hurdles I didn’t know about, but here we are talking about the dreams of youth.

I followed the introduction of our astronauts, and learned all I could about the craft they would fly. There wasn’t a whole lot of information available in Talala, Oklahoma in 1959.

Then, 55 years ago today, the Russians beat us into space – again – and in a much bigger way. Yuri Gagarin, cosmonaut, became the first human in space and the first to achieve orbit. Our guy Alan Shepard went up a few weeks later on a lesser flight, and America was outraged at the contrast.

Not me. I was thrilled that a human being had reached space; Russian, American, Finn, Bolivian, it didn’t matter. Space travel was real. The future had arrived. No one could ever again say, “We can’t go.”

But for all my enthusiasm, there was almost no information about Gagarin’s flight. For nearly another thirty years, Russian triumphs and disasters would be hidden from the world. Now we know enough to appreciate Gagarin’s feat.

The launch vehicle was an A-1, little different from the Soviet ICBM fleet, or the vehicle that launched Sputnik. Unlike the US, the Soviets have stayed with variations of a single workhorse vehicle through most of their space program. Also unlike American procedures, both Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov were suited up and ready at the pad, so that even in the event of a last second glitch, the launch would have been made by the backup pilot.

The space craft was Vostok 1. It consisted of a sphere holding the cosmonaut and a separate life support module, a style adopted by the US during Gemini and Apollo. The launch was successful and only one orbit was planned. The Soviet style was to make many launches, each incrementally more daring than the last. Unlike some subsequent launches by both countries, Vostok 1, possibly the most important launch in the history of spaceflight, went off without error.

Russia had a large land mass, a small navy, and a penchant for secrecy. Consequently, all Russian missions landed inside the Soviet Union. Technology during the Vostok missions could not yet provide soft landings, so Gagarin and his immediate successors flew their missions on ejection seats, which they used after heat shields and spacecraft mounted parachutes had brought them near the surface and slowed them to a survivable speed. They completed their missions by means of personal parachutes.

Four months later Gagarin’s backup pilot, Gherman Titov, became the second man to orbit the Earth, staying up for 17 orbits and 24 hours. more tomorrow

Jandrax 14

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After three months, Marcel Dumezil reinstituted the Sabbath. From a practical standpoint it was a good system. Planning and good judgment depend on frequent periods of rest; otherwise the immediate but trivial has a tendency to swamp more important long range considerations.

With that in mind, Jan walked with Angi to the field beyond the palisade after the service. Everyone in the colony seemed to have the same idea and soon the snowy earth was dotted with furry shapes, each sitting a little apart from his neighbor, relishing privacy after the cramped squalor of life within the palisade.

“Jan,” she said, placing her hand on his arm, “you look worried. Today is a day of rest, so please relax. I spend half my time worrying that either you or Papa will crack under the strain you are carrying.”

Jan looked up at the broad, barren expanse of snow, at the mountains beyond, where the scars of their cutting lay, and behind at the palisade. They had done well; yet it was not any natural disaster that worried him, He feared the seeds of dissension carried within the group.

“Nur and Tenn did not attend the service,” Jan pointed out. “How will your people feel about that?”

She shrugged. “It is their right. We are not barbarians, you know.”

Jan said nothing. Angi scooped up snow, balled it angrily and tossed it down. “You think we are, don’t you?”

“Huh? Are what?”

“Barbarians. You think Nur and Tenny are in danger from us because they are of a different religion. Where did you ever get such an idea? What have we done to make you think that of us. Or are you just prejudiced?”

“I never said any such thing,” Jan replied, but he was thinking of Jason. And he was remembering Hallam.

***

There was a holiday air about the camp. Raoul LaBarge was a trained geologist; he had explored the hills back of the settlement – keeping mainly to the creeks for reasons of future transportation – and he found an outcropping of iron ore, something infinitely more precious than gold.

Jan gave himself the afternoon off for good behavior and took Angi out. They went on skis, for the snow was half a meter deep. She looked beautiful to him, though, in truth, imagination played a good part in that. She was dressed as everyone else, Jan included, in a trihorn parka cut from the hairy shoulder section of the hide, wide herbyskin trousers, and boots made from the hairless rump section of trihorn hide. Only her face and a few wisps of hair showed from beneath her krathide cap. Angi’s beauty was a thing remembered from warmer days, not something available for immediate experience.

They talked of things which had become commonplace and of the future of the colony. They spoke a little of a more personal future and she remained very close to him while he cursed the cold that imprisoned them in their furry armor.

Jan was not a man given to noticing natural beauty. It was not a thing to brag about, but his profession had made him very businesslike in his relationship to the environment. Were that not so, he would long since have been dead. Yet he had come to love their cold, barren world – but never so much as on that afternoon when imprisoned passion was transmuted into softer feelings as they skiied hand in hand across the clean, white plains, moving in a common rhythm.

*****

Jan’s indifference to natural beauty was suggested a decade before I became a writer when Peter Matthiessen, in The Cloud Forest, considered an orange that he was eating after a long period of near starvation. He was a world traveller who often found himself short on meals. He confessed to having no interest in food as anything but fuel, until that orange after that privation became the finest taste he had ever encountered. more tomorrow

129. Poetry on Cyan

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What do you do at the end of a long day of exploring a new planet like Cyan? Watch TV? Read a book? Maybe a western shoot-em-up, since science fiction wouldn’t be much of a change of pace.

If Uke Tomiki were one of your colleagues, you might write poetry.

It was late.  Beyond the meadow, the jungle was predominantly blue-green with spots of color where flowers of innumerable variety grew, and where tiny, flower-winged amphibians fluttered.  Globewombs glittered in the tree tops like a scattering of jewels in the dying light.  Procyon was setting as they watched, and night flying amphibians were coming out to catch the chitropods.  A small herd of dropels grazed just beyond the fence.

Tasmeen said:

Sunlight pearls,
Treetop caught.
Wombs of glass wherein
Tomorrow waits.

“Nice,” Keir said.  “Did you just compose it?”

“Oh, no.  I’ve been working on it for days, but it won’t come right.  What do you think?”

“Maybe a bit too clever at the end.”

“Too sweet?”

“Something like that.”

“Any suggestions?”

Keir smiled.  “You’ve heard my poetry.  You know I’m not the one to ask.  What would Uke tell you?”

Tasmeen made a face.  “Less is more.”

“So I humbly submit – bearing in mind the humility that Uke’s poetry has forced upon me . . .”  Tasmeen hit him in the arm, and he grinned, “that you take an axe to it.”

She sighed and said, “I knew you were going to say that.”  She repeated the poem, now abbreviated:

Sunlight pearls,
Treetop caught.
Wombs of glass.

Keir spread his hands.  “That’s it.”

“It will require a more knowledgeable audience than the first version.”

“Hey,” Ramananda demanded, “ain’t we sophisticated enough for you?”

Sometimes Keir thought that Tasmeen and Uke’s poetry caught more of Cyan than their scientific findings.  After sex and discussing their research – probably in the other order – making poetry had become their primary form of recreation.  

Tasmeen recited several of her newer poems, then teased Keir, “Do you have any new bordello rhymes for us?”

Keir knew that Tasmeen would only badger him until he relented, so he recited his latest.

Call me Gomorrah, she said.
Nothing more —
Unless you count her straining
          breasts as speech.
Call me Gomorrah —
          It told me all I had to know.

Ramananda shook his head in mock distaste.  “Always the dirty mind.”

“I like it!”  Tasmeen protested, then took Keir’s hand and said, “You can call me Gomorrah any time you want to.

Jandrax 13

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Valikili felt the spurt of blood and knew that he had only moments before losing consciousness. He ducked his head, jamming his sliced arm into his stomach to stop the bleeding. A club caught his shoulder and drove him down, rolling him over. The knife drove into his back, aimed for his kidney but deflected by his movement. He rolled forward and the knife thrust in again, tearing the muscles of his back and glancing off a rib.

He plunged into the vegetation, struck the river and fell forward. The stream was small, but swift. It carried him southward, bouncing him against rocks and mudbars. Blackness swept in and receded. He caught at the bottom with scrabbling fingers and reached the bank, then rolled in the mud trying to stop the wounds in his back. He felt consciousness slipping again and rolled over on his face, forcing his open forearm into the mud and pressing it under the weight of his body.

***

Marcel LaBarge found him, but Valikili remembered nothing until the pain of movement awakened him. By that time a dozen men had gathered around and Dr. Marcuse was bandaging his arm with practiced efficiency. “There,” he said, seeing Val’s eyes open “that should hold you together long enough to get you back to camp. What did you tangle with – a longneck?”

“Forget it, Doc.” It was Jan and his eyes bore fire. “Don’t pretend ignorance. You know damned well those are knife slashes.”

Valikili reached up with his free hand and Jan took it. “Helene?”

“She staggered into camp with a concussion. Nothing very serious, but it set off our search for you.”

Valikili relaxed into unconsciousness. Marcuse looked sideways at Jan and said, “Don’t make a big thing out of this. You have to expect violence when the sex ratio is this disturbed.”

“Just a jealous boyfriend. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“Stick to your stitches, Doc. You don’t have the faintest damned idea what’s going on.”

***

The snow came nearly every night, layer upon thin layer, moisture squeezed from the upper atmosphere by the cold.

The palisade was nearly completed and there were some makeshift brush and mud shelters inside. Everyone was constantly cold. They had collected only enough furs for blankets, though soon they would have enough to start making clothing. The coveralls that were standard for shipboard wear were scant protection here, and Dr. Marcuse had two cases of pneumonia as well as the slowly recovering Valikili housed in his makeshift infirmary in the hold of the landing craft.

Nur Mohammet closed the hide curtain behind him and crossed to the central fire. He shook out the blanket he had wrapped about him and laid it near the hearth, then dropped onto it. Marcel Damle stirred the dung-cake fire and asked, “How is he?”

“Better. He was actually in good spirits today.”

“That’s a switch,” Risley said.

Nur grinned. It always took Tenn by surprise when Nur’s solemn face opened up. “His girl came to see him.”

“Helene?” Tenn asked.

“She took her sweet time,” Jan added. “Why?”

“She told Valikili that she was scared to go to him before.”

“Bull breeze.”

“No, Tenn,” Jan said, “I believe her. She really was scared.”

Henri looked up from his work; his scars showed pale in the firelight as he asked, “Was she raped?”

Jan shrugged, “Marcuse knows, but he’s not talking. With only six or eight decent looking women in a colony full of young bucks, you figure it out.”

Staal cursed and his hands shook. Marcel touched his knee and spoke softly, “Henri, marry Marie. Don’t wait until someone else takes her away from you. Also, once you are living with her, you can protect her.”

Nur turned to Jan. “You don’t think rape was the motive, do you?”

Jan shook his head. “I think it was an excuse, an afterthought, and a diversion. I think they were out to kill Val.”

“Because he is one of the crew?”

“No. Because he isn’t a Monist.” more tomorrow

128. Science Fiction in the Wild

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If you are what you eat, I used to be beefsteak, fried okra, and hominy. That comes from growing up in Oklahoma. I also lived outdoors most of the hours of every spring, summer, and fall day, and way too many hours of every winter day. That comes from growing up on a working farm.

If you are what you read, then I used to be an Andre Norton protagonist, at least in my imagination. Although I never met or corresponded with her, Andre Norton was something of a long distance mentor.

Alice Mary Norton legally changed her name to Andre Norton early on, in an era when being a woman was no help to a science fiction writer. I didn’t know that when I first read her; I thought Andre Norton was a man. Not that I thought about it much, but she didn’t write like a girl. Looking back, I see that she actually wrote like a person, but I wasn’t that sophisticated then.

One reason Norton got away with writing gender neutral fiction was that her characters spent most of their time alone. Even in their relationships with others of their own kind, they were loners, if not complete outcasts.

Star Man’s Son was the first Norton I read. In it, Fors spent all but a few pages on a quest away from his people; that was a pattern to which Norton frequently returned. I could easily identify with the solo quest while I spent endless hours alone on a tractor. The only variations in my daily life were whether I was pulling a disk or a hay rake, and which Norton novel was replaying in my head, forty years before someone invented the iPod.

Every time Shann Lantee on Warlock, or Naill Renfro on Janus, or any of a dozen other young men found himself stranded alone, or nearly alone, on an alien world, I could look up from my tractor seat at the Oklahoma prairie and say, “Yup, been there.”

The best thing about Norton’s characters was that they didn’t whine about being alone. They liked it. So did I.

I didn’t live in a city until I went to college. I spent my adult life living in the suburbs of a reasonably small city, and taught school in a very small town. As soon as I could retire, I moved to a few acres in the foothills. I would move further out if I could afford it.

I was born not liking cities, and my opinion never changed. It should be no surprise that my first novel was about a hunter surviving alone in the woods, or that my first science fiction novel was about a hundred or so humans stranded on an alien world (Jandrax, presently appearing in Serial). My three fantasy novels have a rural and medieval feel. David Singer, in A Fond Farewell to Dying, is a mountain boy who has to go urban to get his life’s work done. And Cyan, due out soon, begins with ten explorers on an empty world, then continues with the story of the peopling that world by hyper-urbanized refugees from an overcrowded Earth.

You write what you’ve lived.

Jandrax 12

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Chapter 3

Valikili crouched lower. Claude Delacroix was on sentry duty and, sleepy though he might be, the colonist would take great pleasure if he were to catch Val slipping past the cordon. No punishment would be exacted, of course, but considerable embarrassment – for Helene as well as himself. Delacroix and Helene had once had an understanding. On Bordeaux, before their emigration, they had talked of marriage. Helene had told Valikili of this, but their new situation had thrown all old understandings into question.

Delacroix disappeared behind the half-completed stockade wall and Valikili trotted down toward the river. There was no cover, so stealth was pointless. He had to drop below the break in the land before the sentry returned.

He did not see the figures that followed him.

Valikili was the Lydia‘s third engineer and, though he felt allegiance to his fellow crewmembers, he was adapting rapidly. He was a short, powerful Polynesian; his face reflected his open nature and his body was a statue sculpted in muscle. He was not unaware of his beauty.

Nor were the colonist girls. He had his pick, and he had chosen Helene Dumezil.

Helene was not related to Angi or the patriarch. Two-thirds of the colonists were named Dumezil after Louis Dumezil, the founder of their religion, and there weren’t enough first names to keep track by.

Valikili reached the river and started upstream toward their meeting place. A fringe of tough vegetation grew along the water’s edge – the only vegetation that survived into the dry season. He avoided its suggestive darkness. No incident had yet justified the sentries that Jan had placed, but Valikili, more than the colonists, respected his judgment. Besides, there were the precursors; everyone was speculating as to what had happened to whoever built those ruins.

It was unlikely that this generation would find time to explore that mystery and the next generation – what would they be like, so unnaturally cut off from the rest of mankind. Valikili shuddered at the thought.

His mood was anything but playful when he reached their appointed meeting place. Helene was not there. Valikili squatted to wait, uneasily watching the shadows. He regretted arranging the tryst and regretted his mood, which might well ruin it anyway. Something about the shadows of the vegetation near the water looked odd. He tried to ignore it, but his eyes kept straying back. It looked like a crumpled, human form.

Precursor? A superstitious shiver ran up his spine, followed immediately by a more urgent fear. Helene?

He approached the shadow warily. It was – something. Closer; it was a humanoid form, sprawled face downward.

“Helene?”

It was. He dropped beside her, feeling for her carotid pulse and drew back a hand sticky with blood. “No!” He felt closely, found a lump at the base of her skull, detected a weak pulse.

Something moved in the bushes.

He crouched over her and snarled, “Come out of there!” A figure rose, human, but anonymous in the darkness. It raised a knife to catch the moonlight.

Valikili crouched lower, trying to remember the rudimentary fighting skills he had been taught so many years before. The figure advanced and Valikili circled, trying to draw him out into the light. .

Something struck him from behind, knocking him to his knees, while his first adversary swept the knife forward, cutting him from elbow to wrist. Valikili felt the spurt of blood and knew that he had only moments before losing consciousness.

*****

Two-thirds of the colonists were named Dumezil after Louis Dumezil, the founder of their religion, and there weren’t enough first names to keep track by. I still like this conceit, but it painted me into a corner. Even I had a hard time keeping track of everybody, and I can only assume that it was worse for my readers. Rule one for new writers – make sure your characters’ names are easy for your readers to remember.

By the way, over in A Writing Life the post Science Fiction in the Wild will tell you why so few of my works take place in cities.

127. Not a Frog, Not a Kangaroo

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220px-Litoria_tyleri220px-RedRoo

Flashback: 1963, riding in a car, reading an article, probably by Arthur C. Clarke, on why humans should go into space. A little fish, swimming in shallow water, said to his father, “Why don’t we go up on the land and see what we can find?” The father fish responded, “Why would you want to do that?”

I read the passage out loud, but no one was interested, so I relapsed into nerdy silence.

Years later I found that the now accepted theory is that fish in shallow waters, accustomed to using their fins against the sea bottom, began to use them to navigate mud flats at low tide as mud skippers still do in mangrove swamps today. Legs evolved from fins.

It didn’t happen this way on Cyan. (This is a follow-on to yesterday’s post. If you missed it, we’ll wait for you to read it. Done? Good.)

On the planet Cyan, hundreds of millions of years ago, primitive chordates developed a split vertebral column, which resulted in twin tails. When they moved onto land, their tiny front steering fins were never used for locomotion and their twin tails (they had no back fins) became legs.

As Gus Lienhoff said when he dissected the first one Cyanian creature the explorers had collected:

Look, no pelvis. Look at this complex of bones. Some are fused, some flex, and these four are cantilevered. And look up here; no scapulae, just three extra thick, specialized vertebrae. Tiny front legs, powerful back legs with twice as many joints as you would expect, and absolutely no hint of a tail. Not even anything like a coccyx. A truly tailless, truly hopping biped. I wouldn’t have believed such a thing was possible.

Not a frog, not a kangaroo.

Frogs are quadrupeds with overdeveloped hind legs, like rabbits. They have a vestigial tail, like a human coccyx. If you look at a frog’s skeleton, it looks a bit like a massively deformed human. They can leap, but they also walk.

Kangaroos have a five-legged gait when walking. They lift up on a tripod made of small front legs and a powerful tail to shift their massive hind legs forward. Then they stand balanced on their hind legs while moving their forelegs and tail forward. 3 – 2 – 3 – 2, etc.

Cyanian bipeds, from the simplest to the most complex are hoppers. They all have short, grasping forelimbs; not quite T-rex hands, perhaps, but too weak to knuckle walk. They can move miles with grace and speed, but moving inches puts them into a condition of stumbling clumsiness. There are tree dwelling bipeds; how they navigate is a mystery I didn’t get around to investigating

When a trio of Cyl (intelligent Cyanian creatures created through recombinant DNA – its a long story) first enter a human habitat . . .

They were awkward inside the dome where the furnishings of the place made a maze for them to negotiate. As bounders, they were creatures of the unobstructed open plain. This human habitation was utterly foreign to them, not because of the steel from which it was made, or the interlocking triangles of its geodesic construction, but because it was cluttered. How could one hope to move about in it?

I don’t claim to be an artist, so I have made no effort to draw or paint these critters. I also haven’t seen the cover EDGE is putting on Cyan. If it has Cyanian hoppers, I sure hope they don’t look like frogs or kangaroos.

Jandrax 11

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They had covered the body with a sleeping bag. Jan threw it back and grimaced. Jason was badly crushed and his clothing was matted with blood. There was no need to look closer, but habit made Jan do so. He found tiny bits of moss embedded in the wounds near the base of Jason’s skull, but nowhere else. Suspicion was mirrored in his expression, and he tried to suppress it. The colonists had levered the bole off Jason but had not moved him. The bole was bare of moss.

The old, down limbs scattered about on top of the snow were not. Happenstance? Or had Jason been clubbed into unconsciousness and left in the path of the tree?

“How the hell did this happen?”

Dumezil answered, “He was gathering down wood and apparently didn’t hear the warning.” Chambard and Dubois looked uneasy, but nodded their agreement.

“Who cut the tree?”

“I did,” Dumezil said.

***

Angi left her family to join Jan. Even now he kept vigil, never trusting the land around him. The line of mourners circled beneath the low hillock where he watched. Angi stopped beside him and laid her hand gently on his arm. “He was the first,” Jan said, “but he won’t be the last.”

There were two bundles and two graves. Tom Dennison’s body had been coated with polyfoam and irradiated to preserve it after the explosion in the computer bay. Caught up in the press of immediate needs, the colonists had not taken time to begin a cemetery until now.

A white, amorphous, anonymous bolus of plastic lay beside one grave; a hide-wrapped bundle lay beside the other. Both killed by the same mad act – and every other death this planet will witness attributable to the one who stranded us here. Jan grimaced and started down the hill.

Marcel Dumezil, the leader of the Monists, read the service. Jan doubted that Dennison would have appreciated it. He was a Pentecostal Baptist from NorAm, the only one aboard the Lydia who had actually been born on Earth.

As for Jason, he had been a Pertoskan Monist. He had argued into the night with Alex Chambard the day before he died, disputing the points of doctrine which separated his sect from the Benedictine Monism embraced by the colonists.

Coincidence?

Dumezil closed his Monomythos and stepped back.

Alex and Lucien lowered Jason into the earth; Nur and Valikili lowered Tom Dennison. Then Valikili took a shovel and gently broke away a portion of the polyfoam. “Once the man is gone,” he said, “it is wrong to preserve the body.”

Jan nodded, all the time knowing that the permafrost would preserve both bodies better than any work of man.

They shoveled in the cold, dry earth. Jan watched the colonists as the graves were filled, wondering who had thrown the bomb, and why. It had to be on everyone’s mind.

Tears flowed freely as Henri Staal saw his watchmate under. He had mostly recovered from his burns, though he would always bear scars. Jan touched his shoulder as they left the cemetery to say, “I’m sorry.”

Staal looked around at the bleak horizon and shuddered. “Why, Jan? Why would anyone do this?”

There was no answer he could give.

*****

I suppose every beginning writer chooses names that make him cringe later in his career. Clearly Benedictine is one of these. There is no hidden connection to the Order of St. Benedict. It was just a dumb mistake.

126. Let’s Build an Ecosystem – 2

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Continuing our look at the creation of an ecology for Cyan. If you missed yesterday’s post, you might want to go there first.

We can take grasses and weeds for granted. Let’s give our trees multiple trunks bound together, like a strangler fig without its victim, and that should be enough. We need something like insects. We’ll call them Chitropods – chitro sounds like chitin, and pod means foot, so our reader will infer an exoskeleton without any further work on our part. Continuing the idea of inference, if we call the flying creatures who eat the chitropods pouchbats, the reader will draw a better picture in his mind that we could on paper.

The number of legs is important to Terrestrial arthropods, but lets bypass that by giving all our chitropods many legs, but with only one joint each where it meets the body. Now they have a rolling gait “like caterpillars on crutches”. Humor helps keep description from limping along. (Sorry, couldn’t resist!)

These are throw-away inventions. They could have been applied to any ecosystem and they are not systemically related to each other. They alone would be good enough for almost any SF novel, but not for one about scientists teasing out the essence of their planet.

Here we need a key differentiation, from early in evolution, from which a thousand lesser differences can be derived. Here it is: on Cyan, early in the development of chordate life, the vertebral column doubled at the posterior, giving the Cyanian version of fish twin tails. That changed everything. I’ll explain more fully tomorrow in a separate post.

On Cyan, the classes are Pseudo-pisces, Amphibia, and Inturbia. No reptiles, no birds, no mammals, no dinosaurs. The Amphibia are cold blooded. Inturbia are inefficiently warm blooded. The term Inturbia should imply “internal body temperature un-perturbed by external changes”. Not every reader will get that, but we need to reward our best readers by not spelling out everything.

There are a thousand other details, but for that, you will just have to download the book when it comes out. From EDGE. Soon.

***

I do have one more thing to share. I wouldn’t bother you, but since you’re reading a post about the backstage secrets of writing science fiction, I can assume that we are all nerds together here .

Inturbia have live birth. Cyanian amphibs have to return to water to lay their eggs, except for one group, the Sphaeralvids, who produce globewombs.

(Globewombs were) the closest thing to an amniote egg that Cyan’s fauna had developed – a transparent, leathery sac extruded by a Sphaeralvid mother and filled with a clear fluid like seawater. Into this she deposited fertile ova, then defecated. Then she separated from the globewomb and left it cached in the crotch of a tree, high up where it would receive full sunlight. On a bright day millions of these globewombs glinted in the treetops.

Algae from the Sphaeralvid mother’s bowels converted the feces into biomass and the Sphaeralvid nymphs fed off the algae.  When the feces were gone, the globewomb walls would break down, leaving the now sizeable nymphs free to face Cyan on their own.

Neat, huh?

Jandrax 10

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“What do you know about sensory deprivation?”
“Enough to recognize my own problem,” she snapped.

Andrax smiled. “Then you know that drawing into yourself at this moment is the worst thing you can do. Would it help to know that almost all the colonists feel as you do?”

Her shrug said I don’t know.

“Talk to Helene about it. Odds are she’ll share your feelings and you’ll both be better for the conversation.”

Jan continued to circulate, looking for trouble. At this crucial point, the psychological state of his charges bore more potential for danger than the environment. Later, when the first groups had begun to adjust, they would form a stable core on which the remaining colonists could lean.

He let his eyes encompass the empty horizon.

Damn! It was easier in the green belt where the danger was constant, but where there was not the potential for mass madness – a potential exacerbated by the religious temper of the colony.

Within half a local year, the melt and the herds would reach this spot. Before that time, they must erect fortifications. For that they would need timber, but as yet he could spare no timber-cutting parties.

That girl, Angi. She had shown more signs of vertigo than most, but he had had an ulterior motive in seeking her out. She was young, pretty, and very female. With sixty-two male and only thirty-six female colonists, only those who adapted most quickly and realized the permanence of their plight, would find wives.

Polyandry would come later. It was inevitable.

***

Every day the landing craft brought down new colonists. Nur Mohammet and Tennyson Risley of the crew were working on a ground-effect machine to be used for surface transportation. Relying only on the landing craft to transport their daily meat would be unwise.

A month passed. The skimmer took over the run to the green belt – a shorter run every day. Only Captain Childe remained in orbit, unwilling yet to give up on the Lydia.

Jan took time every day to spend at least a few minutes with Angi, not neglecting to give attention to the half-dozen other girls of appropriate age. In his estimation, none of the others matched Angi, but one never knew. Angi’s suitors were increasing in number and boldness.

Jan had just managed to catch Angi alone when Tenn Risley found him.

“Jan. It‘s Jason. He’s been killed.”

Jan felt himself stiffen up inside. Of all his companions, the only one he would have called a friend was Jason. Angi touched his arm, saying, “I’m sorry.”

“How did it happen?”

“Tree fell on him.” Jason had piloted the skimmer with a crew of colonists up into the mountains on a cutting expedition. “Dubois just called in to tell us. Someone has to hike up there because none of the cutters can run the skimmer.”

“Was anyone else hurt?” Angi asked.

“They didn’t say, so I suppose not. Oh, one of your brothers was on the crew, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. Jean.

***

Jan and Tenn started at daybreak. The skimmer required a fairly flat roadway, so it had followed the river Lydia. Jan and Tenn would have had to follow it anyway to stay near water. The air was so dry that they required vast quantities of liquid.

The cutters met them and Jan offered each a brief nod. He knew everyone by now. It was his job to do so. Jean Dumezil, Angi’s younger brother, wore his usual flat expression, but Alexandre Chambard and Lucien Dubois were clearly moved.

They had covered the body with a sleeping bag.

*****

A couple of notes here on words I would change if I were rewriting.

Paragraph 6, exacerbate. It’s exactly the right word for meaning, but the wrong word for mood. Today I would say made worse.

Paragraph 9, polyandry. Again, the perfect word was the wrong word. I should have said polygamy and accepted the slight loss of accuracy. By the way, if you didn’t take Anthropology 101, polygamy is multiple spouses, polygyny is multiple wives, and polyandry is multiple husbands.