Ship Who Searched Read online

  “Well, pottery doesn’t hold up well in conditions like this,” Pota agreed. “It goes brittle very quickly under the extremes of surface temperature. What have you got so far?”

  “A flint disruptor-pistol, a flint wrist-com, a flint flashlight, and some more things,” she said solemnly. “I haven’t found any arrowheads or spear-points or things like that, but that’s because there’s nothing to hunt here. They were vegetarians, and they ate nothing but lichen.”

  Braddon made a face. “Awful. Worse than the food at the Institute cafeteria! No wonder they didn’t survive—the food probably bored them to death!”

  Pota rose and gathered up their plates and cups, stowing them neatly in the dishwasher. “Well, enjoy your lessons, pumpkin. We’ll see you at lunch.”

  She smiled, hugged them both goodbye before they suited up, then went off to the schoolroom.

  That afternoon, once lessons were done, she took down her own pressure-suit from the rack beside the airlock inner door. Her suit was designed a little differently from her parents’, with accordion folds at wrists and elbows, ankles and knees, and at the waist, to allow for the growth-spurts of a child. This was a brand new suit, for she had been about to outgrow the last one just before they went out on this dig. She liked it a lot better than the old one; the manufacturer of the last one had some kind of stupid idea that a child’s suit should have cavorting flowers with smiling faces all over it. She had been ashamed to have anyone but her parents see her in the awful thing. She thought it made her look like a little clown.

  It had come second-hand from a child on a Class Three dig—like most of the things that the Cades got. Evaluation digs simply didn’t have that high a priority when it came to getting anything other than the bare essentials. But Tia’d had the bright idea when her birthday came around to ask her parents’ superiors at the Institute for a new pressure-suit. And when it came out that she was imitating her parents, by creating her own little dig-site, she had so tickled them that they actually sent her one. Brand new, good for three or four years at least, and the only difference between it and a grown-up suit was that hers had extra helmet lights and a com that couldn’t be turned off, a locator-beacon that was always on, and bright fluorescent stripes on the helmet and down the arms and legs. A small price to pay for dignity.

  The flowered suit had gone back to the Institute, to be endured by some other unfortunate child.

  And the price to be paid for her relative freedom to roam was waiting in the airlock. A wagon, child-sized and modified from the pull-wagon many children had as toys—but this one had powered crawler-tracks and was loaded with an auxiliary power unit and air-pack and full face-mask. If her suit failed, she had been drilled in what to do so many times she could easily have saved herself when asleep. One, take a deep breath and pop the helmet. Two, pull the mask on, making sure the seals around her face were secure. Three, turn on the air and Four, plug into the APU, which would keep the suit heat up with the helmet off. Then walk—slowly, carefully, to the airlock, towing the wagon behind. There was no reason why she should suffer anything worse than a bit of frostbite.

  It had never happened. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t. Tia had no intention of becoming a tragic tale in the newsbytes. Tragic tales were all very well in drama and history, but they were not what one wanted in real life.

  So the wagon went with her, inconvenient as it was.

  The filters in this suit were good ones; the last suit had always smelled a little musty, but the air in this one was fresh and clean. She trotted over the uneven surface, towing the cart behind, kicking up little puffs of dust and sand. Everything out here was very sharp-edged and clear; red and yellow desert, reddish-purple mountains, dark blue sky. The sun, Sigma Marinara, hung right above her head, so all the shadows were tiny pools of dark black at the bases of things. She hadn’t been out to her “site” for several weeks, not since the last time Mum and Dad had asked her to stay away. That had been right at the beginning, when they first got here and uncovered enough to prove it was an EsKay site. Since that time there had been a couple of sandstorms, and Tia was a bit apprehensive that her “dig” had gotten buried. Unlike her parents’ dig, she did not have force-shields protecting her trench from storms.

  But when she reached her site, she discovered to her amazement that more was uncovered than she had left. Instead of burying her dig in sand, the storm had scoured the area clean—

  There were several likely-looking lumps at the farther end of the trench, all fused together into a bumpy whole. Wonderful! There would be hours of potential pretend here; freeing the lumps from the sandy matrix, cleaning them off, figuring out what the Flint People had been trying to copy. . . .

  She took the tools her parents had discarded out of the wagon; the broken trowel that Braddon had mended for her, the worn brushes, the blunted probes, and set to work.

  * * *

  Several hours later, she sat back on her heels and looked at her first find, frowning. This wasn’t a lump of flint after all. In fact, it seemed to be some kind of layered substance, with the layers fused together. Odd, it looked kind of wadded up. It certainly wasn’t any kind of layered rock she’d ever seen before, and it didn’t match any of the rocks she’d uncovered until now.

  She chewed her lower lip in thought and stared at it, letting her mind just drift, to see if it could identify what kind of rock it was. It didn’t look sedimentary.

  Actually, it didn’t look much like a rock at all. . . .

  Not like a rock. What if it isn’t a rock?

  She blinked, and suddenly knew what it did look like. Layers of thin cloth or paper, wadded up, then discarded.

  Finagle! Have I—

  She gently—very gently—pried another lump off the outcropping, and carefully freed it of its gritty coating. And there was no doubt this time that what she had was the work of intelligent hands. Under the layer of half-fused sand and flaking, powdery dust, gleamed a spot of white porcelain, with the matte edge of a break showing why it had been discarded.

  Oh, decom—I found the garbage dump!

  Or, at least, she had found a little trash heap. That was probably it; likely there was just this lump of discards and no more. But anything the EsKays left behind was important, and it was equally important to stop digging now, mark the site in case another sandstorm came up and capriciously buried it as it had capriciously uncovered it, and bring some evidence to show Mum and Dad what she had found.

  Except that she didn’t have a holo-camera. Or anything to cast with.

  Finally she gave up trying to think of what to do. There was only one thing for it. Bring her two finds inside and show them. The lump of fabric might not survive the touch of real air, but the porcelain thing surely would. Porcelain, unlike glass, was more resilient to the stresses of repeated temperature changes and was not likely to go to powder at the first touch of air.

  She went back inside the dome and rummaged around for a bit before returning with a plastic food container for the artifacts, and a length of plastic pipe and the plastic tail from a kite-kit she’d never had a chance to use. Another well-meant but stupid gift from someone Dad worked with; someone who never once thought that on a Mars-type world there weren’t very many opportunities to fly kites—

  With the site marked as securely as she could manage, and the two artifacts sealed into the plastic tub, she returned to the dome again, waiting impatiently for her parents to get back.

  She had hoped that the seal on the plastic tub would be good enough to keep the artifacts safely protected from the air of the dome. She knew as soon as the airlock pressurized, though, that her attempt to keep them safe had failed. Even before she pulled off her helmet, the external suit-mike picked up the hiss of air leaking into the container. And when she held the plastic tub up to the light, it was easy enough to see that one of the lumps had begun to disintegrate. She pried the lid off for a quick peek, and sneezed at the dust. The wadded lump was not going to look lik
e much when her parents got home.

  Decom it, she thought resentfully. That’s not fair!

  She put it down carefully on the countop; if she didn’t jar it, there might still be enough left when Mum and Dad got back in that they would at least be able to tell what it had been.

  She stripped out of her suit and sat down to wait. She tried to read a book, but she just couldn’t get interested. Mum and Dad were going to be so surprised—and even better, now the Psychs at the Institute would have no reason to keep her away from the Class Two sites anymore—because this would surely prove that she knew what to do when she accidentally found something. The numbers on the clock moved with agonizing slowness, as she waited for the moment when they would finally return.

  The sky outside the viewport couldn’t get much darker, but the shadows lengthened, and the light faded. Soon now, soon—

  Finally she heard them in the outer lock, and her heart began to beat faster. Suddenly she was no longer so certain that she had done the right thing. What if they were angry that she dissected the first two artifacts? What if she had done the wrong thing in moving them?

  The “what ifs” piled up in her head as she waited for the lock to cycle.

  Finally the inner door hissed, and Braddon and Pota came through, already pulling off their helmets and continuing a high-speed conversation that must have begun back at the dig.

  “—but the matrix is all wrong for it to be a food preparation area—”

  “—yes, yes,” Pota replied impatiently, “but what about the integument—”

  “Mum!” Tia said, running up to them and tugging at her mother’s elbow. “I’ve found something!”

  “Hello, pumpkin, that’s very nice,” her mother replied absently, hugging her, and going right on with her conversation. Her intense expression showed that she was thinking while she spoke, and her eyes never wandered from her husband’s face—and as for Braddon, the rest of the world simply did not exist.

  “Mum!” Tia persisted. “I’ve found an artifact!”

  “In a moment, dear,” Pota replied. “But what about—”

  “MUM!” Tia shouted, disobeying every rule of not interrupting grown-ups in desperation, knowing from all the signs that she would never get their attention otherwise. Conversations like this one could go on for hours. “I’ve found an artifact!”

  Both her parents stopped their argument in mid-sentence and stared at her. Silence enveloped the room; an ominous silence. Tia gulped nervously.

  “Tia,” Braddon finally said, disapproval creeping into his voice. “Your mother and I are in the middle of a very important conversation. This is not the time for pretend.”

  “Dad, it’s not pretend!” she said insistently, pointing to her plastic box. “It’s not! I found an artifact, and there’s more—”

  Pota raised an eyebrow at her husband and shrugged. Braddon picked up the box, carelessly, and Tia winced as the first lump inside visibly disintegrated more.

  “I am going to respect your intelligence and integrity enough to assume that you think you found an artifact,” Braddon replied, prying the lid from the container. “But Tia, you know better than to—”

  He glanced down inside—and his eyebrows arched upward in the greatest show of surprise that Tia had ever seen him make.

  “I told you,” Tia could not resist saying, triumphantly.

  “—so they took the big lights out to the trench, and the extra field-generators,” she told Ted E. Bear after she’d been put to bed for the night. “They were out there for hours, and they let me wait up to hear what it was. And it was, I did find a garbage dump! A big one, too! Mum made a special call to the Institute, ’cause this is the first really big EsKay dump anybody’s ever found.”

  She hugged Ted closer, basking in the warmth of Pota’s praise, a warmth that still lingered and made her feel happy right down to her toes. “You did everything exactly right with the equipment you had,” Pota had told her. “I’ve had undergraduates that didn’t do as well as you did, pumpkin! You remember what I told you, when you asked me about why I wanted to find garbage?”

  “That we learn more from sentients’ garbage than from anything other than their literature,” she’d recited dutifully.

  “Well,” Pota had replied, sitting on the edge of her bed and touching her nose with one finger, playfully. “You, my curious little chick, have just upgraded this site from a Class One to a Class Three with four hours of work! That’s more than Braddon and I have ever done!”

  “Does that mean that we’ll be leaving?” she’d asked in confusion.

  “Eventually,” Pota told her, a certain gloating glee in her voice. “But it takes time to put together a Class Three team, and we happen to be right here. Your father and I will be making gigabytes of important discoveries before the team gets here to replace us. And with that much already invested—they may not replace us!”

  Tia had shaken her head, confused.

  Pota had hugged her. “What I mean, pumpkin, is that there is a very good chance that we’ll stay on here—as the dig supervisors! An instant promotion from Class One supervisor to Class Three supervisor! There’ll be better equipment, a better dome to live in—you’ll have some playmates—couriers will be by every week instead of every few months—not to mention the raises in pay and status! All the papers on this site will go out under our names! And all because you were my clever, bright, careful little girl, who knew what she saw and knew when to stop playing!”

  “Mum and Dad are really, really happy,” she told Ted, thinking about the glow of joy that had been on both their faces when they finished the expensive link to the nearest Institute supervisor. “I think we did a good thing. I think maybe you brought us luck, Ted.” She yawned. “Except about the other kids coming. But we don’t have to play with them if we don’t want to, do we?”

  Ted agreed silently, and she hugged him again. “I’d rather talk to you, anyway,” she told him. “You never say anything dumb. Dad says that if you can’t say something intelligent, you shouldn’t say anything; and Mum says that people who know when to shut up are the smartest people of all, so I guess you must be pretty smart. Right?”

  But she never got a chance to find out if Ted agreed with that statement, because at that point she fell right asleep.

  Over the course of the next few days, it became evident that this was not just an ordinary garbage dump; this was one containing scientific or medical debris. That raised the status of the site from “important” to “priceless,” and Pota and Braddon took to spending every waking moment either at the site or preserving and examining their finds, making copious notes, and any number of speculations. They hardly ever saw Tia anymore; they had changed their schedule so that they were awake long before she was and came in long after she went to bed.

  Pota apologized—via a holo that she had left to play for Tia as soon as she came in to breakfast this morning.

  “Pumpkin,” her image said, while Tia sipped her juice. “I hope you can understand why we’re doing this. The more we find out before the team gets sent out, the more we make ourselves essential to the dig, the better our chances for that promotion.” Pota’s image ran a hand through her hair; to Tia’s critical eyes, she looked very tired, and a bit frazzled, but fairly satisfied. “It won’t be more than a few weeks, I promise. Then things will go back to normal. Better than normal, in fact. I promise that we’ll have a Family Day before the team gets here, all right? So start thinking what you’d like to do.”

  Well, that would be stellar! Tia knew exactly what she wanted to do—she wanted to go out to the mountains on the big sled, and she wanted to drive it herself on the way.

  “So forgive us, all right? We don’t love you any less, and we think about you all the time, and we miss you like anything.” Pota blew a kiss toward the camera. “I know you can take care of yourself; in fact, we’re counting on that. You’re making a big difference to us. I want you to know that. Love you, baby.”<
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  Tia finished her juice as the holo flickered out, and a certain temptation raised its head. This could be a really unique opportunity to play hooky, just a little bit. Mum and Dad were not going to be checking the tutor to see how her lessons were going—and the Institute Psychs wouldn’t care; they thought she was too advanced for her age anyway. She could even raid the library for the holos she wasn’t precisely supposed to watch. . . .

  “Oh, Finagle,” she said, regretfully, after a moment. It might be fun—but it would be guilty fun. And besides, sooner or later Mum and Dad would find out what she’d done, and ping! there would go the Family Day and probably a lot of other privileges. She weighed the immediate pleasure of being lazy and watching forbidden holos against the future pleasure of being able to pilot the sled up the mountains, and the latter outranked the former. Piloting the sled was the closest she would get to piloting a ship, and she wouldn’t be able to do that for years and years and years yet.

  And if she fell on her nose now, right when Mum and Dad trusted her most—they’d probably restrict her to the dome for ever and ever.

  “Not worth it,” she sighed, jumping down from her stool. She frowned as she noticed that the pins-and-needles feeling in her toes still hadn’t gone away. It had been there when she woke up this morning. It had been there yesterday too, and the day before, but by breakfast it had worn off.

  Well, it didn’t bother her that much, and it wouldn’t take her mind off her Latin lesson. Too bad, too.

  “Boring language,” she muttered. “Ick, ack, ock!”

  Well, the sooner she got it over with, the better off she’d be, and she could go back to nice logical quadratics.

  The pins-and-needles feeling hadn’t worn off by afternoon, and although she felt all right, she decided that since Mum and Dad were trusting her to do everything right, she probably ought to talk to the AI about it

  “Socrates, engage Medic Mode, please,” she said, sitting down reluctantly in the tiny medic station. She really didn’t like being in the medic-station; it smelled of disinfectant and felt like being in a too-small pressure suit. It was just about the size of a tiny lav, but something about it made it feel smaller. Maybe because it was dark inside. And of course, since it had been made for adults, the proportions were all wrong for her. In order to reach hand-plates she had to scoot to the edge of the seat, and in order to reach foot-plates she had to get right off the seat entirely. The screen in front of her lit up with the smiling holo of someone that was supposed to be a doctor. Privately, she doubted that the original had ever been any closer to medicine than wearing the jumpsuit. He just looked too—polished. Too trustworthy, too handsome, too competent. Any time there was anything official she had to interface with that seemed to scream trust me at her, she immediately distrusted it and went very wary. Probably the original for this holo had been an actor. Maybe he made adults feel calm, but he made her think about the Psychs and their too-hearty greetings, their nosy questions.