GROUND / CH. 22:WATER

ABOVE OLD YASFORT

“You have been building, I see,” Dantho said, observing the alien tower.

“The mayor of little Yasfort gave permission.”

“I don't object. You have made a road also?”

“Yes.”

“The material is the same?”

“Yes, but we make it smooth for walls, and rougher for roads, so it's not slippery.”

“And it's a good material for roads?”

“We think so. And it helps people find the way.”

“How long does it last?” Dantho asked.

“The main road in Atlantis, Sathie's home, was remade with it five hundred years ago, and barely shows signs of wear, but we don't normally use iron tyres on wheels these days.”

“Why not?”

“Our city is small, we mainly walk. For heavy loads, we borrow a land-person technique and put tubes of hard rubber, inflated with air, instead. It gives a quieter and smoother ride, and reduces wear on the road.”

“You've progressed beyond them, you mean?”

“Yes, you could say that. But the problem is an inflated tube can be punctured if the road surface is not good.”

“And land-people use this road surface too?”

“No. The do not have the technology.”

“What technology do they use?”

“They embed stones in hot thick tar or something else which is a bit like slime. While it is hot it can be made flat, when it is it is cold the stones cannot be moved. Such roads need repairing every ten years or so, but if made properly, can cope with very heavy traffic.”

“And your road material cannot?”

“I am sure it can, Dantho. But there might be problems because it is so hard. Your most proficient miners do not have a tool that will cut this road, except that perhaps cannon-powder might smash bits off. You would not want such roads in a city where one day you might need to dig up the road to replace a pipe.”

“But you use it in your city.”

“We have rock-cutters, Dantho,” Mick pointed out, “And before we had them, we had larger devices that work on similar principles.”

“Hmm. So you are saying that this would be too much progress?”

“I'm saying that a thing we could give you, as an alien artifact, would be useful for some long-distance roads which are not likely to need repair. Whether that is a good thing or not, I don't know. It would speed travel, it would change many things, I'm sure, but if for some reason a bridge was moved, or a mountain pass became useless, it might be very very frustrating that you can quickly get to nowhere useful.”

Dantho looked at him. “Yes, I begin to see what you mean. Are there other wonders you wish us to see?”

“Just one,” Mick said, and nodded to Sathie, who moved the ship slightly. “The device we made the tower with, do you see a mechanical device down there, where we have hidden it from the road in that hole?”

Dantho cringed away. “It is a thing to inspire nightmares.”

“Lana and Takan agreed. That is an automatic device that turns rock into the material for the tower, the walls, and the road. At home it bears a resemblance to a certain sea creature, which is no real threat to anyone, but Lana tells me it looks rather like a dangerous sea predator. It is my final reason that I do not think that building such roads is a very good idea. We have no desire to cause panic from such a machine crawling across the countryside.”

“Can we move away? I don't like seeing it,” Dantho said, still staring at it from some kind of primal compulsion. “It is just a machine, isn't it?”

“It's just a machine,” Mick said.

“It's horrendous,” she said, still looking at it, with her muscles trembling.

“Dantho, look away.” Vokan said in a voice that commanded obedience, also blocking her view. As she lost sight of it, her legs became weak and she collapsed against him.

“That was unkind, and needless, Mick.” Vokan reprimanded him as he caught her.

“I'm sorry. I didn't expect such a powerful reaction.”

“Dantho” Vokan said, “it was not a devourer. Breathe!”

“I understand,” she said in a small voice. “My mind understands, but my organisms are still in fright.”

“You come from the coast?”

“My parents,” she said in the same tone, then added “Please don't let me go.”

“I understand,” he said, and held her. “You need blood-sugar, Dantho.”

“And reassurance.”

“I will defend you, Dantho. You have my word.”

“Against real ones too?” she asked, in a timid voice.

“Against real ones too,” Vokan said fervently. Convinced, she wrapped her arms around him, and relaxed in his arms. Vokan turned to Mick and said, “Get that monstrosity off my planet, preferably in a box or in unrecognisable pieces. You see what the sight of it has done to her.”

“She forgot to breathe,” Mick said.

“And she almost budded herself out of existence.”

“What!” Mick said, shocked, “Why?”

“Her organisms are from the coast. I suspected from her name, the 'o' ending is most common there, just as 'a' in the south and the plains, and 'i' in the northern hills. There is no fleeing from a devourer when it has seen you, none. And if you see it, it has likely seen you. The only escape is if you have a weapon that can stand against it, if you can wound it, it will retreat. Otherwise... while it is a fearsome hunter, it is quite a slow eater; a two or four-way total budding before it comes for you means half or three-quarters of your organisms may survive.”

“Lana said it was scary, nothing more, or we would not have kept it here, I'm sorry. It is the shape it is because although they do not really grow to that size, the land people we hid from thought they might. That was also our design: once every ten or twenty years, we created broken pieces of fake shells or legs, and allowed them to be washed up on coastlines after a storm or become caught in fishing nets, so that if one was seen, then they would not think 'unknown device', but enormous living example. We took such precautions to save ourselves from discovery; to keep our race alive. In not changing the shape when we brought it here we meant no harm, we had no idea the reaction of anyone might be so strong.”

He then called Maggie on his wrist unit, “Maggie, we need the extruder out of there, and invisibly so. Lana vastly under-communicated the abject-terror it could cause just sitting still. Think a lone kid standing in waist-deep water with nothing more offensive than a toothpick, spotting a hungry shark. The head of government was apparently within a hair's breath of budding herself into two or more pieces so some of her organisms might escape.”

“Please convey to her our deepest apologies.”

“I have, I will again.”

“And ask her if some kind of sword or spear would make her feel safer.”

“Dantho,” Mick said, “Magdalena, who is the commander of this mission and my sister, sends apologies that the machine caused you such fright, and asks if a sword, spear or bow in your hand would help to reassure your organisms.”

Dantho looked at Mick curiously. “You have that rock-cutter in your pocket, but also swords and spears?”

“The rock cutter is not threatening unless you have seen it working or understood its function. I would expect that anything with more brains than a slime creature recognises a sharp point in the hand as threatening.”

“And you yourselves would not feel threatened by me?”

“It is trust. It is normal, among my people for the women to always be armed.”

“Both your father's and your mother's people?” Dantho asked.

“My mother's, but my father left our home-world and I was mostly raised as one of my mother's people. I have visited my father's parents, including for some longer times when I was growing up, but I was a student in Sathie's city. Mostly I think of myself as Mer, one of the sea people.”

“Your father left your home world. For space?”

“To live on another planet that we are making more like home. It is where my grandmother was born, and also where my sister and I were born.”

“But your father was ...born — that is like what predators do? A young one comes from...” Dantho pulled a face, “an orifice in the mother's body?”

“Yes, it is very painful for the mother, but it is how God made us.”

“So, your mother and father were born on your home planet?”

Mick laughed, “My mother was born on Mars, our second planet, and actually, my father was born in that ball up there, which was then a laboratory where my grandmother was designing and testing our first ships that could travel between stars.”

“How did you parents meet?”

“You may ask them yourself, Dantho. We have landed.”

----------------------------------------

“What was she asking?” Sathie asked, as Lana was introducing Dantho to people.

“Lots about families, things like that, at the end. The last question was how my parents met.”

“I didn't notice you giving a long answer.”

“No, I didn't,” Mick said, smiling, “I told her she could ask them.”

“Have I heard that story?”

“Probably not,” Mick said.

“Well?”

“It was Gran's fault: she decided to use a bubble ship to bring her parents and some old family friends from Mars to the palace, grandkids and all. Then she told Dad to look after the people his age and younger. That turned out to be mum and some little kids — I think between eight and twelve.”

“And it was love at first sight?”

“Not exactly, no. Mum had mainly agreed to come along for the kudos of flying in a bubble ship, but the alternative had been going by albatross on a gem-hunting trip with some friends. She wasn't really impressed at finding herself stuck with some strange boy and some little kiddies all day, and told her parents that in very piercing Mer, thinking no one would understand it in the palace.”

“Bad guess, that,” Sathie said.

“Very. Gran told Dad it'd be a great idea to take the kids for a ride in the family peace-sub, and that if they happened to find where Mum's friends were diving he could let her out the airlock to swim with them.”

“Urm, why was that punishment?”

“It was a day at the palace. Mum wasn't wearing scale, let alone scuba gear.”

“And your dad lent her some?”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“No, but he did take them for an underwater tour on the way to a warm beach he knew, where they could build some sandcastles. On the way he spotted something sparkling on the sea-bed and he picked it up with the sub's forcefield.”

“Really? He had pretty impressive control to do that with a peace sub.”

“Mum thought so too, and she decided he wasn't such a bad chap when he offered it to her in lieu of her gem-hunting trip.”

“Diplomatic.”

“He'd been using English to her until then, too, playing dumb. He offered it to her in old Mer.”

“What a charmer! How old was he?”

“Eighteen. Mum was sixteen. When they got home, Gran took one look at them and said something like 'Well, that was faster than I expected'. They then spent a lot of time writing back and forth until Dad went to university on Mars, which had been the plan anyway.”

“Welcome back, you two,” Karella said, “The bit Mick missed out is my gem-hunting friends all caught colds when they stopped off in Atlantis to play tourist, and so didn't do much scuba diving at all. I was the only one who ended up with a stone that summer. They wouldn't believe I'd not only got a gem but a handsome prince too.”

“Was it that trip you met the clan, too, Mum?” Mick asked.

“No, that was the next summer, but rather than swap old stories, Mick, can you fill us in on who you've brought back?”

----------------------------------------

OLD YASFORT

“So... do I understand you to be saying that using fossil fuels is a mistake and you'd prefer to help us leapfrog them?” Dantho asked.

“Fossil fuels are very useful, but they're also polluting. Your own experience with smoke-fog ought to show you the potential problems. But what did you mean about the water, Lana?”

“Well known fact: life locks water and carbon into the ground, where eventually they form fossil fuels. So releasing the water isn't such a bad idea,” Lana said, “the fact that we're not doing it is probably why the sea level is going down.”

“Life doesn't account for that much, Lana.” Takan corrected her, “It's losses from the atmosphere to space that are the bigger cause.”

“You're saying that you don't have much water on your planet compared to historical levels?” Mick asked.

“Of course there isn't as much water,” Dantho said, “The city used to be near the edge of the sea, that's why it had the walls, to keep out the devourers.”

Mick did a double-take. “Doesn't that water loss scare you?”

“It's a blessing,” Dantho said. “The devourers don't range nearly as far as they did in my grandparent's time. And it's logical, surely? You can't expect the same amount of water to get back to the sea as evaporates from it! That'd be like... perpetual motion or something.”

“Let me translate for a bit, please,” Mick said, to them, feeling a shiver down his spine. “You know those dry river beds we've seen and wondered when they were made? They're losing water, at historically noticeable rates. They all seem to accept that as perfectly natural, with various attributed causes. Lana thought it was biological life, Takan corrected her to say it's lost to space, Dantho's just said the city used to be on the coast.”

“That's unlikely,” Maggie said, “Maybe on that river's delta, though.”

“It would explain why the plane is a plane, if it used to be marshland,”

Sathie said “But surely they can't be losing that much water.”

“I'll get the physicists on it,” Maggie said. “There are the twin suns and that massive solar wind the astronomers were talking about to confuse things a bit compared to home, and their planet gets an Earth-like solar input.”

“Not to mention the sister planet to locally reduce gravity every so often, and the fact that the low scale height of the atmosphere means it goes up a long way,” Mick pointed out.

“I heard someone say that global heavy water is really high compared to home.” Sathie said, “That might suggest they've been losing hydrogen.”

“If they are losing water fast enough to record,” Mick said, “that's a pretty scary rate, surely?”

“Their ocean is only a tiny fraction of the planetary surface, so the effects on it are going to be magnified that much more.”

“I meant scary for the continuation of life.” Mick said.

“And we have the technology to help, don't we?” Maggie said.

“The knowledge, yes. But the resources? Setting up a full-scale comet-shredding scheme for Mars was hard; Robert, Boris and the rest didn't get much sleep for the first ten years, and they started with MarsCorp's shepherds already in place, with all the infrastructure of an industrial Mars, and half of Atlantis at their beck and call.”

Lana, freed from translation as Dantho was speaking to Kalak had gravitated to the English-speaking group. She asked, “You knew the people who made your sea?”

“Yes, Lana. I knew them, I half expected that one of my grand-children would marry one of theirs. Maybe it'll happen next generation. And of course for that to happen I ought to stop calling Boris my uncle, because he's not, and my calling him that confused some people I know.”

“Gran, I was only six,” Mick protested.

“But you never thought of marrying Hathella again, did you?”

“Well, no.”

“Because?”

“Because, Gran, though we got on well enough at age six — that was when auntie Ursula was really sick, remember — and Hathella the older pointed out that it might get very complicated to end up with the princess of the outer Mer being queen of a landfolk country and there was a risk of someone getting her crowns confused.”

“That sounds like Hathie,” Heather agreed.

“I'm glad that risk has passed, though,” Mick said.

Heather looked pained, “No one's told you, yet?”

“What?” Mick asked.

“Your cousin Albert had mumps of all things, a couple of years ago. He deliberately refuses to have himself tested, says he wants to leave such things in God's hands, but there's a risk Albert won't be fathering any kids, even if he does manage to get his act together and find himself a wife.”

“And you've not peeked?”

“No,” Heather said, “it's not at all obvious, and if he doesn't want to know, then I'm not going to abuse that.” Then she glanced at Sathie, and smiled.

“Gran, what does that smile mean?” Mick asked.

“Your wife has just made a decision about me peeking that I fully intend to honour, Mick, that's all.”

Mick looked at Sathie, and said, “You don't think you're pregnant already, do you?”

“No, Mick,” Sathie said, “I'm pretty sure I'd tell you if I suspected. Has Albert asked you to help him look for a soul-mate, Heather?”

“He asked, and I told him I would warn him if he was clearly making a mistake, but wasn't going to stick my oar in with the risk of misinterpreting what I saw. I've made that mistake a few times too often.”

“So for the future of the monarchy, should we be sending you home soon?” Mick asked.

“Don't you dare try, young man,” Heather said sternly. “But do answer Lana's question.”

Lana looked surprised, “Which question?”

“The one you want to ask, dear.”

“Do you become ruler if your cousin does not have children? Is that what has just been said?”

“The rule is that the crown goes to the oldest child, and then their children in order of birth. My aunt has just one son, so if my cousin does not have children, then after him the next in line is dad and his descendants, and if Maggie and I die without children it goes onto my aunt Eliza's family after us, and so on.”

“It's complicated.”

“Not very,” Mick said. “Not nearly as complicated as working out who will be leader of your government after Dantho.”

“Whoever's leader of the Reason party.”

“Unless she resigns or has an accident while Progress are still in power?”

“Well, yes,” Lana agreed.

“In which case, there's no automatic candidate for the job, or is there?”

“Probably not,” Lana said.

“Let's keep her safe then,” Heather said, “I like her attitude.”

“So does the lieutenant,” Mick said, “but I think we'd better get back to talking about the water crisis. Lana, do you know when the city was beside the sea, or the stream was a large river?”

“I've read old stories, but I really don't know. I do know there were wet ages and dry ages. In a wet age there are more rivers and the sea becomes deeper and in a dry ages the sea shrinks. I've no idea how the wet ages works, it seems a bit counter-intuitive to me. But it has been a dry age for a long time now, since before the war.”

“But it used to cycle?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“How long did these cycles used to be?”

“You'd have to ask Takan, it might be something to do with astronomy.”

“We don't know enough to plan an intervention,” Sathie declared. “If the sea has shrunk before and grown again then there must be some local store, say under the icecaps, and we'd need to understand what's going on.”

“Absolutely,” Maggie agreed, “Just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. Rushing ahead with partial knowledge would be a disaster.”

“So you young people can breathe a sigh of relief because you don't need to immediately try to set up a comet shredding programme,” Heather said. “Instead you want some kind of joint research programme, unless the local experts have got it all worked out already.”

“I don't think we have,” Lana said.

“So... ongoing contact would be nice,” Karella said, “most of the local animals want to eat us or absorb us, so I presume there's never going to be talk about a viable colony, even though more than three quarters of the planet is unoccupied by our friends. Travel is worse than Mars, but not as bad as Mars before the Boris drive. I'm sure that the Mars university would love the idea of more research students and the like, but that doesn't make for an economic case for any serious intervention. The local ecosystem might or might not need fixing which would be seriously expensive, far more than the university could fund. That makes me think about falling back to grubby issues like how to get Earth so interested that they say of course we'll help our new friends twenty-three hundred light years away.”

“Is there anything we can offer in exchange?” Lana asked.

“Extreme life-support?” Mick asked. “Not to everyone's taste, I expect. I'm really impressed by the way Uza made the vaccines too.”

“Not to mention the way Mick's skin organisms cleaned me of slime-creatures.”

“Lana, do you know what 'cancer' is?” Heather asked.

Lana looked puzzled, and asked in her own language “Mick? Your language memories are confusing. A deadly disease where cells don't die? How is that deadly?”

“Because the sick cells multiply, and grow where they must not.”

Lana nodded, “That is one of the consequences of wrong podding. Traumatised organisms grow uncooperatively; it is terrible to see. You say it can develop in adults?”

“Yes. There are treatments, if it is caught early enough, depending on the type of cancer, depending where it is. Our regrowth treatment is very dangerous in that respect: if the solutions are used wrongly they can cause cancer.”

“You want to encourage division, but not that much, yes. I understand.”

“They have something similar to it, Grandma,” Mick said, “but it's a congenital thing.”

“If,” Heather said, then took a deep breath, summoning her courage, “if we had known you before my husband died from a cancer slowly growing in the innermost portions of his brain, do you think you could have helped him?”

“I don't know, Heather,” Lana said. “It is possible, but... at what cost? I hosted Mick, but... it was a traumatic thing to do. I would not willingly host another, except in very similar circumstances. Mick will tell you I did not like the idea of altering another's biochemistry, so to invade another person? To eat part of them, when my life did not depend on it? To ruthlessly rid them of their immune cells? What I had to do to Mick for us both to survive was necessary, but, I do not know if I could bring myself to do it again.”

“We have drugs to stop the immune response. Assuming they were not poison to you, and to save someone's life, do you think you that if you were asked to remove certain cells, to throw them away if consuming them is distasteful, you could?”

“My ready cells are capable of identifying genetically wrong organisms, cells in your case, but to invade like that...” she gave a horrified shudder. “Mick can you explain?”

“Gran, what I think your asking is an ethical dilemma. You're asking Lana if she could save someone by doing something that's pretty close to mating with them in her book. Quite possibly more like a vile form of rape, not that they have that crime here.”

“You're wrong, Mick.” Lana said, “it has happened. But it's rare. And yes, you're right; that's exactly what it'd be like, and that's how I'd be judged by the courts and my conscience.”

“They don't have surgeons, Gran. They don't need to stitch one another back together, or rearrange broken bones, or surgically extract a buried splinter, or clean out an infection. Their organisms can do that themselves, and even reattach a severed limb. Even during the wars, most deaths ultimately came from starvation — people fighting past when their stomachs were empty, then getting wounded and not having have the energy reserves to heal themselves or even eject a slime creature.”

“The other causes were freshly poisoned blades, decapitation or a wound to the heart or lungs so terrible that it could not heal in time. Mick tells me your bodies will absorb your own cells if you're starving. That sort of cannibalism wouldn't happen among us. Unthinkable! It would cause trauma, the end of collaboration. Our dead organisms are returned to the ground with respect, not consumed.”

“Sorry Lana. I didn't mean to offend,” Heather said, “and I don't want to offend, but what you're saying, I think, is that you'd be ethically but maybe not emotionally OK with the idea of hosting someone in an absolute emergency, say when their insides were outside, but a you'd draw a firm line between hosting someone and the sort of surgery I've just asked about.”

“Yes.”

“Even though what Mick did, picking slime-creatures off behind Sathie's eyes, would have been acceptable to do to a stranger if he'd not sent his ready-cells there?”

“Yes.”

“And picking off slime-creatures out of a wound?”

“Equally acceptable,” Lana agreed.

“So is the unacceptable line actually that of breaking the other's skin?”

“You're then going to ask what if one of your surgeons had cut a hole in your husband's skin, aren't you?”

“And cut a hole in his skull, too, and then said, 'As my colleagues said, sadly immune therapy doesn't work on this sort of cancer. I've cut out what I can safely, but honestly, we had to stop sooner than I'd have liked because of the blood vessels, I don't know if I got it all, I'm sorry. If there's more, then it's too deep for surgery.' And there was more, and six years later, it killed him.”

“If I had been there, when the surgeon was giving up, I would have been willing to try to get out the rest, yes.” Lana said.

“Thank you, Lana. You couldn't have been there; Mick didn't leave home until after the operation.”

“I don't know how knowing it would help though.”

“It helps because it is horrible to have a medic say, 'There's nothing more we can do, try to enjoy the weeks you have left together'. It helps because it means that if I know of someone else with a similar cancer, then I can bring them — and their whole surgical team if necessary — to the lab up there and ask you, or maybe Hani or one of her future colleagues, to be available, and to try. Or take you to Mars.”

“Mick talks about travel as death to his organisms.”

“Mick is wisely thinking of what would happen if he went back to his old life, and what the chemicals used every-day in people's homes would do to his organisms. I am thinking about things like making travel safe for you, but I think it'd probably too dangerous for your folk to interact freely with us humans until we know more about cross-species infections. Too many of us walk around spreading too many viruses.”

“Did I just hear my name?” Hani asked.

“Yes,” Lana asked. “You're young, how would you like to cut open aliens for a living?”

“That's not funny.”

“They call the job 'surgeon'. One of the most highly respected jobs among them.”

Hani looked at Mick's face. “Mick, why is Lana saying such things?”

“Because my grandmother asked her how she would feel about removing diseased cells that grow and grow with no thought for collaboration or what they do the rest of our bodies. We call them 'cancer' cells, and they kill us. Some we can kill by poison, or by alerting our immune systems that they are dangerous. Others, we need to cut out with a knife. Some cancers, we cannot cut out, and they kill us. That happened to my grandfather.

“The person who deliberately and carefully cuts people open in order to kill them, we call a murderer. The person who deliberately and carefully cuts people open in order to heal them we call a surgeon. There are lots of reasons that someone might need a surgeon, because our cells cannot move parts of us around, we cannot eject foreign objects, and so on. But even the sharpest, smallest knife is a very crude tool compared to what your organisms could do, once they had been trained to recognise the difference between healthy cells and sick ones. What I think Lana is suggesting is that you could study our medicine, our medical technology. You would certainly be learning about our biology, which I think could certainly count as work on the frontiers of biology to the university here. Also, you could be applying what you learn from our techniques to problems here. And if you were mentally able to remove cancer cells, then you would save lives. Lana still feels guilty about consuming bits of me to save her own life, I think, as if that didn't also mean that I survived.”

“Lana consumed bits of you?”

“When she enveloped the bits of me that were still attached with what remained of her burned skin organisms, yes. I imagine it wasn't a very pretty sight.”

“Unless you like red,” Lana agreed. “Personally, I've gone right off the colour.”