Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4) (31 page)

“It’s September tenth. In another
week, he’ll be nine months old. He still holds on to furniture, but you should
see him in zero g. It’s like a swimming pool to Stu.”

The breath went out of Yvette. She
couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken to Mercy. “In the underworld, time
passes differently.”

When she moved away from the crowd
to recover, Yvette overheard Zeiss speaking to the leader of the colony in
hushed tones. “Like it or not, this will be the last export mission from
Sanctuary
.
The mineral drain for your electronics and the water required for all this
algae was too much. You’ll need to find other sources on Labyrinth.”

Rachael objected, “Because of its
makeup, this world doesn’t have oil fields.”

“There are tar pits,” Zeiss said
casually.

“A couple thousand kilometers
away!” Rachael replied.

The commander shrugged. “We’ve
given all we can, Lieutenant. The copper you requested is ten times what it
took for us to wire all of Garden Hollow with power—thirteen kilowatts from
Park’s gravity transformers. You already outproduce us in nearly every
category.”

“Mining our own copper would take
another crew member, explosives, and probably the use of the shuttle.”

“People we have. Take Pratibha or
Yuki.”

Rachael blinked. “Neither one of
them could just whip up another settlement in the desert.”

“Since that’s your specialty, maybe
you should take charge of the new site. Maybe Pratibha could be the mayor
here,” Zeiss said, underscoring the finality of his decision.

Rachael was speechless.

When Zeiss turned around to leave,
Yvette smiled and asked, “Why isn’t Auckland here? Why didn’t you mention him
when you offered Pratibha?”

“I’m not allowed to talk to you,”
the commander said, striding to the makeshift podium beside the large display
screen.

“Is he kidding?” Yvette asked
Rachael.

Rachael looked at the ground. “Auckland failed his high-gravity physical. The doc can’t come down here until he’s been
through the deep scrub on one of the decontamination pods.”

“So? Just send him through,” the
nurse replied.

“Snowflake won’t let him into a pod
on his return to
Sanctuary
until he promises not to talk to you during
his visit. The good doctor told the central computer to go screw itself. He’s
refused to betray a friend.”

“Oh, God,” Yvette mumbled, sitting
in a nearby chair. The price of her rebellion kept increasing.

“We’re burning daylight here,”
Zeiss reminded those assembled. “Testing. How’s the link to Olympus?”

“Solid via the satellite for the next
hour,” Yuki confirmed on the computer screen. “A little spotty beyond that, but
we should be able to hear each other till sundown.”

“The goal of this conference is
gifts to lift the L pandas out of the Stone Age. What would make their lives
better? What do they need to know that we found out the hard way? We’ll start
with ground rules. Everybody participates for pass one. Everyone must suggest
at least one gift. We take turns, round-robin, until everyone’s done.”

Red added, “Nobody says anything
negative about other people’s ideas until pass two, and then we’ll winnow. Lou,
that includes snorts, eye rolling, and jokes.”

“How advanced can we get?” asked
Herk. “I mean, could we give them the quadratic theorem?”

“No. I’d say nothing past 1200 AD,”
Zeiss reasoned. “People who aren’t sure can start by picking from the list of
what our committee considered bare essentials that observers haven’t checked
off yet. For example, I might select the wheel and axle. However, people who
live so close to the water won’t need the screw of Archimedes for irrigation.”

“What if we find out later that the
pandas already have something?” Risa asked.

“We’ll rank ideas and keep the top
fifty,” Red suggested.

“What if someone before me takes
all my ideas,” Yuki asked. “I don’t have many good ones.”

“We’ll take turns, one per person,
starting with Olympus because they could drop out at any time. Mercy will be
secretary.”

“Actually,” Lou boasted, “the
translation software will transcribe, and Mercy will correct it. This gives the
software a chance to learn everyone’s voice and speaking style.”

The discourse was lively and
exceeded the planned hour. After eliminating duplicates and adding
prerequisites, they had almost a hundred ideas.

“Now we winnow,” Zeiss announced
while the Olympus crew passed around sandwiches.

“Oleander, Johnny, and I have to go
load ice and fuel,” Herk said. “Roommates get our proxies.”

“The next pass we each select a definite
no. Everyone gets a veto,” Zeiss explained. “Then we’ll vote to rank ideas by
top half, top twenty-seven, and lastly top ten. At least give me your biggest
objections.”

Oleander said, “No to bocce ball.
We’re not going to teach primitives to avoid war by playing lawn sports.” A
chuckle went through the crowd, and people agreed.

Johnny said, “Okay, then no equal
rights. We can’t change a civilization that drastically in one page. They
wouldn’t accept the gift.”

Red argued vociferously for the
idea until it was voted down by the ‘nothing past 1200 AD’ rule.

Herk said, “English longbows. They
have too many prerequisites, and I don’t want my people eating an arrow. The
shimmer armor can’t stop that tech.” Everyone approved his veto, and the trio
of stevedores went topside to load goods to return to the mother ship.

Yvette spent most of her time watching
Toby. As someone who’d spent the most time in the native landscape, he had
opinions about everything. Most surprising was his objection to brass, which
Risa took personally.

Risa defended her gift. “It’s
harder than iron and resists corrosion. The alloy
requires trade because the components aren’t found in the same place. This will
promote peace in the area.”

Toby
wouldn’t yield. “Zinc is too rare and requires four different processes to
extract, including electricity. It’s also borderline on the 1200 rule. This
much effort would cause the natives to abandon the idea because they’re too
lazy.”

Risa
surrendered when Yuki brokered a compromise that allowed her to add separate
bronze alloys for tin, arsenic, and silicon. “Each tribe can succeed with one
of those types. We’ve seen tin in the eight-sided nodes and arsenic in fruit
pits. In the desert, we have plenty of copper and silicon.”

In
retaliation, Risa attacked Toby’s proposal for latrines. His was the only idea
to resist veto because of the list of local parasites that pandas could pick up
by walking through feces up to a week old. “None of these vectors can travel
more than two meters before dying. This is the same solution that Rockefeller
used to revitalize the American south. If we reduce the parasites infecting the
pandas, they’ll have more energy and live longer.”

The
group gave her a replacement veto, which she employed to sink jewelry, both
obsidian and metal. “Sorry, Sojiro. Art is fine for trade and philosophy, but
they’ll discover that themselves when they’re ready. For now, jewelry would
only give the slave owners who hide in caves another way to mark their status.
Hell, they’ll need more slaves to make it for them.”

The last idea to die was pi. The
concept was deemed too complex. They were left with eighty-five gifts to rank,
an average of five per astronaut.

Three
broad categories emerged: heated materials, agriculture, and literacy. Half of
the suggestions had been Toby’s, or ideas from his extended list that Yvette
had liked enough to claim.
After several votes, the top contenders
included: crop rotation for nitrogen fixation, crop fertilization, alphabet,
numerals, addition, multiplication, abolition, linen fabric and paper, ink,
latrines, boiling water before drinking, bathing in clean water (which included
hand-washing before meals and wound sterilization), kiln-fired clay, bread,
salting food for preservation, caffeinated tea, glassblowing, doping the glass
to make cookware, alcohol/vinegar
, bark as
a fever reducer, herbal antibiotics, cheese, tin, bronze, hardwood ax handles,
the plow, sling, saw, chisel, triangular bracing for construction, and clay
plumbing.

Mercy
included a picture of the current prototype alphabet at the top of the ranked
results. Yvette printed the list from her wrist computer and posted it proudly
inside the utility-room door.

After
Zeiss and Red left on the shuttle, Yvette said, “You’re going to be remembered
as the greatest benefactor in their race’s history.”

Toby
shrugged. “This list is by no means final. It just gives us a starting point
for our ongoing dialogue. For example, now that I see the groupings, I feel
stupid for not suggesting schools. That will help them much more than slings.”

“See,
you care about the pandas,” Yvette insisted. It showed progress integrating his
empathy.

“I
care more about you,” he insisted. “I know what you’re planning. Let me go
instead.”

“I
need you here to shadow me with the rover from the high desert. If I get in
trouble with anything, you should be able to talk me through it.”

“But
your cover mission will only take you as far as the birthing village.”

“I’ll
stay there . . . until they warn me about the impending flare, and then I’ll
head downstream as fast as I can.”

“Tha-that’s
insubordination. Everyone will see the signal on the satellite. This is against
regulations, and I can’t lie.”

“Z
practically ordered us to investigate this as Plato. I wanted to pass him some
sort of note at the conference, but we have nothing new to report after all
this time.”

“When
they ask me, I’ll have to confess.”

Yvette
grabbed him by the front of his shirt and waited until he was mesmerized by her
eyes. In a bedroom voice, she whispered, “By law, a husband doesn’t have to
testify against his wife. I’ll sign civil union papers today. If you cover for
me creatively, I’ll move into your quarters when I get back to Elysium.”

A
shudder passed through Toby’s body. Blinking a few times, he promised, “No one
will track you.”

“Don’t
tell me how,” she insisted, because she couldn’t lie to others if they questioned
her. Sometimes one needed a monster to help catch monsters.

Practice didn’t go well for Yvette. The morning started with
Toby warning her that the river was the least-studied ecosystem on the planet.
He sounded like an old woman when he said, “Make your first practice swim a
short one. There could be piranhas for all we know.”

Risa agreed. “I still need to
calibrate the sled controls and test out a few features, the most important of
which is the auto-shutoff. If you release for three seconds, it triggers the
motor kill switch. If the craft gets more than three meters from you, it will
drop anchor to wait.”

“Put your radio headset on,” Toby
insisted. “We have to be able to communicate at all times.”

Herk carried the aqua sled under
one arm and remained conspicuously silent.

“The river is faster in this area,
three to five kilometers per hour,” Toby lectured. “With your weight the
trolling motor maxes out at 11 kph, so we want to practice somewhere calmer.”
Toby made her pick a deep, slow-moving fishing hole for testing and only
stopped complaining when she stripped down to her underwear to swim. Compared
to the sweltering day, the river felt like tepid bathwater. Learning to start
the motor took so long she was afraid her skin was going to wrinkle.

Sliding an arm in each end of the
horseshoe shape, she squeezed the throttle like a motorcycle and rammed into a
mangrove root. “Gently,” Risa admonished with a wince.

Floating in the water, Yvette was
too light for the weight sensor, as it had been calibrated for Risa in the
workroom. Even after adjustment, the vehicle shut off at inopportune moments.
Once Yvette finally mastered the basics, she took the sled on a wide curve onto
the river proper. Sideways, the river slowly carried her toward the rocky
shallows. When she attempted to turn into the current, the sled stalled. As she
was trying to restart the engine, she tumbled beneath the white water. This
accident revealed the second flaw—the translation headset microphone wasn’t
waterproof.

Toby and Risa hovered like old
women and wanted to correct the problems before continuing; however, Yvette
spit out the river water and said, “Later. I need to learn to ride this thing
during daylight.”

Herk reeled in the anchor and
lugged the sled back to the baby pool.

When Yvette limped out of the
water, Toby paled. “You’re bleeding.” She had a shallow gash across her right
hip.

“And bruised. You can kiss it
later. Right now, I’m going to ride that water beast if it kills me.”

Mutely, the others watched her slog
back to the fishing hole. The sled took her a moment to find in the shade
because the clear plastic really did blend in with the water. After a few more
tweaks to the hardware, she was puttering handily around the pond. Reefing the
sled on a rock stalled her again. Since the vehicle was too heavy for her to
lift alone, Herk came over to assist.

“There are actually rollers that
attach underneath for this,” Herk explained.

When she climbed out to help lift,
Toby’s eyes were glued to her hips.

Toby splashed through the shallows
toward her. “Yvette, don’t look down. Herk, get her out of the water, now.”

“What?” Yvette asked.

“This may sting.”

She made the mistake of glancing
toward her feet as Herk scooped her up. Her formerly bloody hip was rimmed in
black spaghetti, with half a dozen strands that bulged in the center.

When Toby tossed white powder at
them, she could swear she heard a hiss like a lobster being tossed into a pot
of boiling water. “Herk, don’t yank them off like that or the teeth with stay
in. I’ll have to remove what’s left with tweezers. Use the electric match,” he
said handing Herk a glowing coil with a small handle. “Risa, put this parasite
in a tube from my belt. We need to find out what they injected her with.”

While the others freed her legs
from the rubbery creatures soaked with her blood, she turned her head and
vomited into the burbling waters.

An hour later, Yvette was in bed
with her knee propped up. She was light-headed but otherwise unharmed as Toby
explained, “Blood attracts them. Yours eventually killed the one. I was able to
counteract the anticoagulant they secrete. The chromium in them shouldn’t
affect us unless we try to eat them.”

“Relax, this could have happened on
Earth,” Yvette said.

“I’ve already commissioned the
thickest neoprene suit we can manufacture to protect you against rocks and
xeno-lampreys.”

“I’ll have the shimmer armor on
next time.”

“It has chinks. You don’t go back
into the water until we have this extra layer. Risa is placing a neck ring at
the top so we can attach your helmet. I don’t want to be out of touch with you
again.” He was pacing, and she could feel the waves of fear radiating from him.

“That sounds expensive. Won’t that
break the scouting budget?”

“It did, but I added my bonuses.
Risa donated the locking ring.”

“You just want to see me in a
skin-tight catsuit, admit it,” she teased.

Toby stopped in his tracks as the
image flitted through his imagination. “Wow.”

Patting the bed beside her, she
said, “Sit here.”

He obeyed.

When she placed a hand on his, he
closed his eyes to savor the contact. She said, “We’re not a normal, healthy
couple. You violated my deepest trust and tortured me in ways I’ll never
forget, but since then . . . with treatment, you’ve proven that I can rely on
you in many ways. I’ve always respected you as a scientist, and you’re growing
to become a
man
I could admire.” She licked her lips. “If you were any
other man, the mix of emotions I just felt from you would have caused me to
seduce you.” His eyes were huge, and she could feel his pulse race.
“Unfortunately, the sight of you and the sound of your voice can still cause me
to cringe.”

Toby made a face like he’d just
swallowed the lampreys.

“I’m going to need you to turn off
the light and not say a word. We probably won’t go all the way, and we proceed
at my pace. My hip still hurts. We’ll probably end up just holding,
understood?”

He nodded fervently.

“Now, why is that light still on?”

****

The next week, Risa and the women
on the scouting team held a dress rehearsal by the river.

“Where’s everyone else?” Yvette
asked.

Risa said, “Rachael and the others
are busy making dependency diagrams of possible gifts on a whiteboard. You
know: tea requires boiling which needs metal pots, but metal can only be
produced by smelting at high temperature—similar to the glass furnace. Most
progressions required charcoal in the early stages, which in turn needed
hardwood supplies and low-oxygen ovens. Her biggest challenge will be the shift
from renewable resources to limited ones without leaving the planet looking
like Easter Island.”

Having the others ignore her
scouting mission wasn’t a bad thing in Yvette’s mind. She donned the skin suit
and then the shimmer armor. The backup throat microphone had been scavenged
from Herk’s combat armor. As the first pleasant surprise of the experiment, the
underwater portion of the armor took almost no power to maintain. Only
whitewater challenged its processors.

“Each suit battery should last a
good ten hours at this rate, longer if you stick to deep water,” Risa
predicted.

“The helmet feels top heavy, and it
restricts my field of view,” Yvette complained.

“Our image projection doesn’t cover
the facemask well, either, so keep the mirror visor down,” Risa advised.

“I’m cleared for tomorrow?”

“Roger,” the engineer replied.

Meanwhile, Herk and Toby readied
everything in the rover storage cave.

That evening, Toby fell asleep at
his desk double-checking everything for her mission.

Yvette showered, put on a robe, and
then kissed him awake. “We’re alone. How’s it going? I missed you today.”

He whispered, “The rover’s in place
on the east wall of the canyon. Herk and I climbed all day. We hammered in a
spike and had the rover winch itself up. I’ll shadow you from the wall with
Cerberus
your entire trip
. Everyone else will watch
from the satellite as you approach the birthing village. You can abort at any
time. If you do decide to go through with the second phase, refer to your trip
to Vienna over the open channel, and I’ll trigger the distraction. I’ll still
be able to hear you on the rover band after that, but no one else will.”

“I’m
nervous,” she admitted.

“This
is natural. You are doing great things on new frontiers. Girls in grade school
will hear your story and want to grow up to be you.”

“That
is sweet, but if I succeed, we may never leave this planet. If I fail, I may
never return to base. I’m so wired I’ll never sleep.”

Toby
shrugged. “I could prescribe something.”

At
a tug, her robe fell open. “Are chemicals your answer to everything?”

Without
prompting, he shut off the light.

****

In
the predawn light, Yvette could use her helmet’s night vision. Everyone had to
check off on their monitoring system before she could climb into the water via
the fishing hole. “Here goes nothing,” she proclaimed, engaging the ignition by
punching in the proper code.

The
river gods smiled, and she sailed away at full steam. Between her and the
river’s push, they made 15 kph. She relaxed into a groove, swerving only to
avoid big rocks. Past the merge point, the lush green of the jungle passed in a
blur. She sipped electrolytes while admiring the great trees and the canopy
they spread over the canyon. She expected the glare of twin suns to be
overwhelming, but only a small amount of light filtered through the clouds and
layers of leaves. The trip felt like inner-tubing on vacation.

She
passed another bamboo plantation, but this time, instead of a cave, the guards
had a stone hut. The wall ringed around the base of a large tree and had no
windows. The sloped roof was covered by sod or lichen mats. Though she was
transmitting everything at low resolution from her helmet feed, she wanted to
snap a few shots with the high-resolution still camera. Soon after Yvette
triggered the shutter, the hut was hidden by the foliage again. “Wow. If we
didn’t know this place was here, we’d never find it from the air. The stones
they used to construct it looked long and thin, like slate or flagstone. The
builders tried to stagger the gaps each layer, but the sizes weren’t consistent.”

Toby
broadcast an image, and she said, “Close. Ours were a little thinner. Where’d
you get those, the mining village?”

“Cotswold, England: sheep fences near Stonehenge.”

The
scout shivered. “Do you think the same people showed us this technique?”

“Coincidence,”
Toby insisted.

After
four hours, Toby said, “Your sled battery is low. You should pull over, eat,
and swap cells—maybe even recharge.”

“I
can make it another hour, easy,” Yvette said, looking forward to rubbing the
cramp in her left hand. “I’ve only traveled sixty kilometers, and the suit is
going strong.”

“Your
reaction time has degraded. Please. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

Several
minutes later, she heard the low rushing.

Toby
came over the radio. “Falls coming up.”

“How
high is the drop?”

“Um
. . . a meter max. Most of the drops are smaller. There’s an easy path on the
shore to your right.”

Reluctantly,
she steered for the calmer waters. “It’ll cost me time.” When she reached the
south bank, she waded onto the beach and grabbed the front bumper as Herk had.
The sled was so heavy that she could only lift it a few centimeters. Grit
wedged into the tiny rollers, and the vehicle refused to budge. She didn’t have
enough strength to drag the sled through the sand like the large security guard
with adrenaline-override strength. Panting, she announced, “New rule: the pilot
has to be able to move this thing after being packed for the mission and doing
fifty pushups.”

Opening
her helmet, Yvette chewed off a chunk of nutrient bar, something impossible to
do with the helmet or gas mask on. She clicked the facemask back into place as
she pondered. The whorls and eddies on the stream had a soothing beauty, even
though they might drag her under.

“Charge
up while you rest,” Toby encouraged.

“Too
public,” she objected. “I can tell rafts use this route all the time.” She
chewed the rest of the food bar in three big bites as she switched out the low
battery.

“The
other bank has a safer clearing fifty meters back, about ten meters from the
shore.”

“I’m
not backtracking.”

“Blast.
Why did you just turn off your helmet cam?”

“I’m
peeing behind a bush, and I don’t want everyone to see. Keep watch from the
rover thermals.”

“Have
you ever been white-water rafting?” asked Risa.

“In
a canoe.”

Risa
said, “If you wait an hour for the satellite flyover, I can plot a course
through without drops and plot it on your helmet screen.”

Zipping
up, Yvette said, “Just tell me right or left from the rover eye in the sky.”

“There
are a few trees in the way, girl.”

“As
Z would say, we’re burning daylight.”

Yvette
headed toward the rapids before she lost her nerve.