Still River

Chapter Thirteen Datum Three: Jenny

It seemed a pity to have to be so quick. Hours or days would have been better, to look over the caves, decide something of the life pattern, and form some idea of a logical basis for selecting specimens. Still, she’d be back, of course. Jenny slipped out of her mapper. It was tempting to try to walk on only the back three or four pairs of legs in this trivial gravity, and one could almost balance erect, Human or Shervah style, but it really took too much attention. It must be convenient to have eyes so far from the ground and be able to see so far without making a climbing or erecting project out of it; but on the other hand, it must be a nuisance to have to bend over or fold those long, rigid legs in order to give a close examination to something on the ground. Use what you have.

And there was work to do; one could philosophize later, though at least this was a time and place where one’s theorizing could hardly result in embarrassment. She remembered with sympathetic amusement the degree holder who had stressed, during a lecture on, if she recalled correctly, Fire’s inner planet Diamond, the universal tendency for the eyes of animals to be located close to their mouths. The unfortunate speaker had then noticed Joe in his audience. The Nethneen’s environmental armor hid the fact that his mouth was at the lower pole of his nearly spherical body, but memory had been enough.

But this wasn’t work.

There were lots of things growing here, but nothing moving. That did not mean, of course, that the things were all plants; it was already obvious that something radically different from the respiration-photosynthesis cycle of a typical sun-circling planet must be going on here. Jenny, like any imaginative being, was hypothesizing well ahead of data.

The growths in the patch which had caught her eye, only a meter or two from the mapper, were pulpy things which Molly would have compared to multiple links of sausage, some growing upward and some extending in segments along the cave floor. Jenny carefully sliced off end segments from a low and a high branch and stowed them in separate specimen cans. Colorless—to her eyes—ichor flowed copiously from the cut ends; she hoped she had not done excessive damage to the creature, and watched for half a minute, worried. If there were no animals, there might be no evolutionary provision for dealing with mechanical damage.

Then the penultimate segment shrank in on itself, the open end was pulled out of sight, and the flow ceased. The Rimmore went on, satisfied.

She could not budget much time; she was back at the mapper in ten minutes, specimen cans full. There was a puddle of material, presumably the spilled ichor, between the spot where she had made her first collection and the robot itself. Protected by her armor, she gave little thought to stepping in it; of course it might not be a good idea to contaminate the outside of her protective suit—but she would be cleaning it off when she got back to the tent, anyway.

The unexpected explosion hurled her into the air, completely over her robot, and sent the latter rolling sideways—she fortunately had powered it down completely when she emerged. If it had tried to hold position against the blast ...

Jenny tested the last six legs on her left side, some of which were numb and some stinging from the shock. The armor had apparently done its job. She righted the robot, entered it, and checked its controls. Finding with relief that all was operating properly, she set out for the surface.