The Great Hydration

CHAPTER THREE

Poised in an orbit synchronous with the planet’s rotation, the twin speculae of an interferometric telescope looked down from opposite ends of a mile-long extensible rod. Their slightly different images, processed by point-to-point comparison, gave Messrs. Krabbe and Bouche an excellent view of the World Market far below them.

Karl Krabbe twiddled a knob beneath the viewplate. The scene, currently bird’s-eye, shifted and tilted until it was as though one stood on the ground amid the inhabitants. The processor made a fair job of the representation, though the deduced facial features tended to be vague and fuzzy. He focused on a drama in cameo: two thin blue humanoids gesticulated excitedly to a smaller black humanoid. They had opened up the rear of a wheeled vehicle.

He turned to Boris Bouche. “It’s the nearest thing to a town on the whole damned planet! You only find camps and villages anywhere else.”

“That’s because towns are markets, essentially, and this is the only market they have.” Bouche’s voice had an acid quality, easily given to sarcasm. “God, Karl, I have to remind you of enough. Don’t you remember your economics?”

“Sure I remember,” Krabbe retorted testily. “What makes you think I don’t?”

Karl Krabbe was a barrel of a man, his large, ruddy face seeming always about to break into some anguished pronouncement, leaving it lined and anxious. He dressed carelessly and tended to slouch. His partner, Boris Bouche, slender and tall, was neat and compact by comparison, but the dapper impression did not extend to his face. The wide slash of his mouth and the close-set eyes gave him a predatory look. He stepped forward, peering over Krabbe’s shoulder at the plate.

“Here comes one of the bosses.”

Krabbe had panned the focus to the main concourse. One of the lobster-like creatures was being moved from one pavilion to another. A transparent tent covered the motorised dray. Within it, water sprays asperged the bulky, shelled passenger. There was something lordly about the beast’s slow progress through the throng, whiskery stalks waving above the foot traffic.

“If we do any business here, it’s his sort we’ll be dealing with,” Bouche said.

Krabbe grunted. “I mostly like crustaceans in a well-blended sauce.”

“Crustaceans? Yes, I suppose that’s close enough, though you could say he is to a crayfish what we are to… well, there isn’t any mammal as brainless as a crayfish. What we are to a newt, maybe.”

“And on a desert planet. It’s amazing.”

“Not really. It’s just that they’re smart. Wouldn’t you say so, Spencer?”

He craned his neck to the planetologist who stood at the back of the room. Spencer nodded, and came forward.

“Yes, sir. There’s not much doubt that this planet was watery once, perhaps as recently as fifty thousand Earth years ago. Then the water suddenly vanished, for some reason. Castaneda is working on the data now.

“The crustacean-like creatures were the dominant intelligent species of the time, and as far as we can tell they are the only one to have survived the calamity—except, presumably, for whatever fauna or flora they keep as food. Instead, a desert biosphere has arisen, one that doesn’t need water. That the lobsters, as you call them, have managed to maintain some sort of dominance despite their small numbers is a tribute to their tenacity, I would say. They own all the free water on the planet, and conserve it with great care. I imagine they make good any losses by paying other species to process whatever tiny amounts can be extracted from plants and the dead bodies of desert creatures.

“That market is the secret of their power. They created it and they manage it, as the only real centre of trade on the whole planet. It gives them their wealth and their prestige, and makes it possible for them to impose their own conditions on anyone who wants to come there. Physically they could be wiped out overnight, but they’ve been there right through the evolution of the desert species, whose history they have practically managed, and that gives them enormous psychological pull. They rule by nerve.”

“That’s what I don’t understand,” Krabbe complained. “There’s a whole crop of intelligent species now. We probably haven’t even seen them all yet! How could that happen in only fifty thousand years?”

“Fifty thousand is the lower limit, sir. It could be as much as a quarter of a million, though that’s an equally ridiculous period from our point of view. I suspect the losters had a hand in that, too. They needed servant species to help them survive. To that we can add that there must be a terrific rate of mutation. There’s an awful lot of radium down there. They even use it to power their engines.”

“Were you surprised to find a waterless biology, Spencer?” Bouche asked.

“Yes sir, I was. We picked up a couple of specimens. Seeing as how they evolved from water-based animals in the first place, the body chemistry is pretty ingenious. Their bodies do hold tiny quantities of water, but it’s held in a glycerine-like gel. They don’t perspire or excrete liquid waste. Their blood doesn’t circulate, if you can believe it. Oxygen and nutrients and all the rest migrate chemically through gelatinous blood, the molecules being passed hand to hand through the gel, so to speak. I’d swear it was impossible if I hadn’t seen it.”

Krabbe stared at the interferoscope plate, where the ‘lobster’ was disappearing inside the building which was the market overlords’ special retreat and where, presumably, they could be permanently drenched in water.

“Tenacity,” he murmured. “That’s what those old boys have got, all right. So that’s what we’ll call this planet, okay? Tenacity.”

“All right, if you want,” Bouche said sourly. “Tenacity it is.”

The food tray supported nonchalantly by the flat of one hand, Joanita Serstos walked the corridors of the gogetter ship with an easy, lank stride. She smiled on coming to the locked titanium alloy door.

Licking her lips, she fingered the lock tab.

“Hi, honey,” she said. “How goes it?”

“Hello, Jo,” a good-natured, if weary, male voice answered. “Why don’t you come in?”

A miniature oval image had appeared on the door. It showed the interior of the prison cell. Roncie Reaul Northrop lounged in an easy chair, one foot plonked on an occasional table. She tut-tutted to see how careless he still was with the furnishings, despite her admonishments. There was a big coffee stain on the carpet. The place was a mess.

He looked up from the book he was reading and smiled in greeting as she walked in, letting the door swing shut behind her. The vidset in the corner was switched on; involuntarily she glanced at the living, glowing flesh-tones it showed.

He followed her gaze and his smile became broader. It was a tape of her visit the day before. Their naked bodies were working away, her fleshy buttocks gyrating and nearly filling the screen.

She watched interestedly for a few moments, then waved her hand to turn the set off. She swept Northrop’s feet off the table to make room and laid down the tray.

“Really, Roncie.”

“Only trying to bring a blush to those maidenly features.”

“No chance.”

She lifted the cover off the tray to arrange the meal the way she knew he liked it. Knife, fork, mustard and chile sauce for the steak, chopsticks and soya sauce for the bowl of fried rice and prawns, a gold-plated spoon for the tangy lemon marsala custard. Northrop breathed deeply. The tang of the chile sauce somehow reminded him of her. Her skin was copper, almost orange, her face high-cheekboned. What he liked especially were her muscular, lithe legs and her long sexy stride.

“Tell me something. Did Krabbe & Bouche order you to keep me serviced while I’m in the brig? Or is that a bonus?”

“Shut up and eat.”

Patiently she began picking up the books that were scattered about, placing them back in the shelves. She smoothed out the bed and vacuumed the carpet. By the time he had dealt with the steak, she was cleaning off the coffee stain with a remover pad.

There was more than idle curiosity to his question. She had never consented to take a tumble with him until his incarceration. It could be out of sympathy of course, but equally it was possible his masters wanted him in a receptive frame of mind. After all, she was a Krabbe & Bouche bondwoman, one of about fifty bonded people on the gogetter ship. The entire staff, the entire ship’s complement, was bonded—Krabbe & Bouche did not recruit staff on any other basis. They wanted reliability.

“Doesn’t it bother you that K&B’s licence to operate has been revoked?” he asked. “Technically that ends your bonded status. You don’t have to do any of this.”

She snorted. “A fat lot the Stellar Commission means out here.”

He could see she was satisfied with her lot. Generally speaking Krabbe & Bouche had little to worry about as regards staff loyalty, the whole position of bonded employees being legally ambiguous. A bonded person was a semi-slave, required to obey his employers without question. That was apt to remain the case in practice—if not in law—even when the employer was in breach of his obligations.

Roncie Northrop had tried to go by the book. Learning of the revocation order the Stellar Commission had issued after Krabbe & Bouche transgressed the Non-Interference Law on Sesquielta, he had jumped ship. It was his philosophy not to back losers. And in any case he had come to dislike the rapacious partners he served.

He had reckoned without Boris Bouche’s meticulous point-twisting manipulations. At that time they had been docked in Durovia, where it was difficult to recruit trained people. Northrop had not formally applied to be released from his bond; Bouche posted him as an absconder.

On Durovia the proctors followed procedure unimaginatively. The police had found Northrop and despite his protests had brought him straight back to the ship. He had been in the brig ever since.

“You do know there’s a Pursuit Order?” he persisted.

“Oh sure, and they’ll send a ship and find us too. Anyway, so what?”

She was right. The Stellar Commission’s casual way of doing things meant it was unlikely the Enterprise would ever be tracked down.

He began raking fried rice into his mouth with quick motions. To be fair, Krabbe & Bouche probably weren’t a lot worse than most gogetters. All of them hated the Non-Interference Law; profit was all they cared about. Provided they went far enough into deep space they could flout the law for long enough to make it worthwhile.

“There, that’s better,” Joanita said after her tidying-up efforts. “You live like a pig, Roncie.”

“I’m penned up like one.”

“It’s for your own good, Roncie. Bouche could have punished you. Instead he jut put you under restriction.”

“For K & B’s good is what you mean!” Northrop protested plaintively. “Bouche had me thrown in here so I wouldn’t get a chance to renounce my bond. Not that he’d have taken a blind bit of notice if I did—that’s why I jumped ship in the first place. By the way, are we still in orbit?”

“Yes, over the little yellow planet. There’s been a geological report.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “I hear there might be work. You’ll be needed.”

Northrop frowned thoughtfully. As a nuclear engineer he was on Castaneda’s geological team. “So they have nuclear power on this planet? They want help with some geo-engineering?”

She giggled. “You could say that. Don’t worry, pretty boy. It’s all out of your hands, anyway.”

He dipped the golden spoon into the bowl of marsala. “Here, come and share this with me.”

She came closer, bending as he lifted the spoon to her. He slipped his hand up the inside of her well-tensioned thigh. Beneath her short smock she wasn’t wearing anything.

The yellow cream was thick on her lips. She licked it off, and allowed him to tug her down beside him. They ate the marsala together, mouth to mouth, lips twining, passing it back and forth. By the time it was gone the work-smock was up to her shoulders. He panted as he swallowed the last of the sweet.

“Wait a sec,” she said. She jumped up, took a pace and waved her hand. The light over the vidcamera blinked on.

“Something more for your library,” she grinned as she rejoined him.

Northrop didn’t say anything. Where his mouth was, he couldn’t say anything.

Castaneda, the leader of the Geological Team, entered the conference room accompanied by Runkfoh, his assistant. He carried a sheaf of papers under his arm. His florid features looked troubled.

Krabbe turned, pleased by his early arrival. “Good work, Castaneda. What’s the news?”

For answer Castaneda laid out a large map on the table in the centre of the room. Krabbe and Bouche both came to look at it. It was a geological surveyor’s map of the planet, done on a Mercator projection.

“Much what we expected, Partner Krabbe, sir. The planet below us—”

“Tenacity,” Krabbe interrupted.

“Sir?”

“Tenacity. That’s what we decided to call it.”

“Yes, sir. Well, uh, Tenacity is, in its own small way, a freak planet. A small enough planet—smaller than Mars. It has an unusually thin crust, and beneath that, the mantle is in layers. The top layer is also unusual: made up of a porous rock of a structure I confess I haven’t come across before. On any other world it would have got compressed by now and would have lost its porosity. It also contains fracture zones, similar to the tectonic plates found in the crust of many larger planets.”

He waved his hand over the-map. “As you know already, Tenacity had surface water once. It was a one-continent world: this one big continent here, and one big ocean, just like Earth used to have long ago, before our mother continent broke up. The ocean on the side of the planet opposite the continent was very deep. It had worn away the crust and lay on the mantle. However, there was enough pressure on the mantle to stop it absorbing any water, though there must have been enough heat convection to make for a pretty warm, balmy ocean.

“Then the catastrophe happened. A stability that had existed for millions, maybe billions of years was disturbed. I think it was probably due to tidal influence from the inward planet, which is bigger than Tenacity and approaches within fifteen million miles. The fracture plates slipped. Some of the pressure on the mantle zone under the deep ocean was eased. The rock became like an expanding sponge. The seawater drained into like it was going down a plughole.”

He shook his head wonderingly. “It must have been really sudden. All in a few years, tens of years at the most. The drainage region lies under a mile of sand now.

“Whatever small amounts of water were left will have taken longer to disappear. First it will have evaporated, and then gradually been disassociated by solar radiation, the hydrogen rising to the top of the atmosphere.”

“So you were right,” Krabbe breathed. “It’s still there!”

“Right under their feet, though they don’t know it.”

Bouche spoke, glancing ferally at Castaneda. “The point is, can we get it back again?”

Castaneda nodded. He stabbed his finger at another part of the survey map. “This faultline here is what it’s all about. It kept the water up top once and it can do it again. If we put down a few strategically placed shock tubes we can lever the plates back into opposition again. The pressure will come back on. The rock won’t be able to hold all that water. It will come squirting up to fill the old ocean bed. It will rain again, there’ll be rivers, lakes, inland seas. Plenty of shoreline for the lobster people.”

“Shoreline. That’s what they must like.”

“Yes. Of course, the water will be rather warm to begin with. Up to a hundred degrees. Most of it’s steam right now.”

Bouche stared at the map. “Why don’t I see your shock tubes placed?”

“We shall need to survey the area in detail, do some drilling. I suggest Runkfoh takes charge of that, sir. Northrop’s experience will also be valuable.”

“Runkfoh?” Krabbe said suspiciously. “What’s wrong with you doing it, Castaneda?”

Castaneda became diffident. “As you may recall, sir, I am prone to cancers. There’s a lot of radium down there. It’s very carcinogenic. May I request that I be excused from going down on the surface?”

“Is that all? Don’t be a sissy, Castaneda. Use radpaint, that’ll take care of it.” Krabbe looked aggravated.

“Radpaint isn’t completely effective, sir,” Castaneda pleaded.

“Then you can get cured. You’ve been cured before, haven’t you?” Krabbe waved his hand dismissively. “Get on with the job. If we make a deal, I want to be able to move fast. And you can take Northrop from the brig.”

The picture of defeat, the geological engineer took up his map and folded it among his papers. He nodded to Runkfoh. The two men left.

Krabbe went back to the viewplate. “You know, Boris,” he said, “those lobsters must have a terrible hunger. They must feel a terrible frustration. They were clever enough to survive the dehydration, so it’s obvious they have a lot of experience and a healthy urge to dominate. If Tenacity should get its water back they’ll be in their element again. They’ll be able to proliferate, restore their former grandeur. We can give them heaven! What won’t they pay for it?”

“As to that,” Bouche said with a scowl, “I suspect we’ll find they’re pretty smart traders.”

“We’ll stick them with a contract, don’t worry about that. Equal partners in a whole world! Why, the radium alone—what was the quote on radium, last you heard? Our own empire! After all, it’s an offer they practically can’t refuse.”

There was a cough from Spencer. Nervously, he spoke. “What about the dehydrate species, sir? Giving Tenacity its water back will hardly do them much good. It will almost certainly kill most of them, if not all.”

“Oh, they’re just savages, Spencer, the sort that die out on thousands of planets once there’s any progress. Why, take a look here—”

He twisted knobs. A tall, thin, green desert warrior came into view. “See that weapon he carries? With a stock like a rifle, only instead of a barrel it fires that funny curved blade? It’s a flenching blade, and it spins as it flies through the air. Its purpose is to carve as much flesh from the bone as possible.” He shook his head with a show of moral disapproval. “Weapons as horrific as that are outlawed on every civilised world.”

Spencer was relatively new to the staff and this was his first time on a gogetter ship—his first experience as a bondman, in fact. Krabbe spoke to him affably, condescendingly. It pleased him to be avuncular.

“Of course,” Bouche commented, “it’s probably the best way to be sure of killing someone who doesn’t bleed.”

Bravely Spencer said, “What I question is the legality of it, sir, not the morality. Interfering with the geography and climate of an alien planet, not to say the culture, to the extent of species extermination…”

“The desert dwellers are a biological sport,” Krabbe said shortly. “They resulted from a natural catastrophe. The lobsters are the authentic owners of Tenacity, and we’ll have their approval.”

“I only hope the Stellar Commission sees it that way, sir. I don’t need to remind you of the penalties.”

“That’s nothing for you to worry your head about, Spencer,” Krabbe told him firmly. “Only Partner Bouche and myself are legally liable for the orders we give.”

“Yes sir.” Spencer sat biting his lip.

Boris Bouche took over his partner’s argument, leaning towards the younger man, one foot on a desk rail, one arm resting on his bended knee. The stance made him seem even more wolf-like. “You see, son, the Stellar Commission is maybe five, even ten years behind us—if they find us at all. By that time we’ll have transformed this planet. The new weather pattern will have had time to settle down. There won’t be anything left of the dehydrate species you talk about. And we’ll have a solid contract to give us mining, manufacturing and trading rights. How could anybody put oceans on an arid world?” He chuckled, genuinely amused. “The worst they’ll be able to stick on us is operating without a licence.”

“That’s right!” Krabbe joined in triumphantly. “And we’ll have a fait accompli. The firm of Krabbe & Bouche will be in business again!”