“It’ll be okay,” Lynn assured him. “The target’s small enough, admittedly, but the laden basket won’t swing much, and we’ll use the chain saws to clear a much bigger working space. Even if they’re the kind of bushes that the humanoids used to make tools from, the saw blades will cut through them easily enough, shattering anything that won’t shear. It’ll be a fair amount of work for a party of three, but we’ve got all day. You wouldn’t have been able to do as much as the rest of us anyway, even if you hadn’t hurt your arm. You’re not fully acclimatized yet.”
“If I had been,” Matthew muttered, “I might not have dislocated my shoulder in the first place.”
There was, as Lynn had observed, a lotof work for a party of three. Matthew did his utmost to make himself useful, and bitterly regretted it when it became painfully obvious that he was neither as strong nor as skilful as the least of his three companions. He quickly became tired, and his arm would have been agonized if his IT had not muffled the pain—but the IT was too dutiful to allow him to do further damage by insulating him from the consequences of reckless action, so it began to let the distress signals through as soon as the damaged tendons and ligaments provided it with evidence of further strain. Long before midday, therefore, Matthew was relegated to the humblest task available: working the electric motor that controlled the winch. Ike, Lynn, and Dulcie did the lion’s share of the unloading, then carried the bulk of the cargo to the cliff’s edge. Ike was the one delegated to establish a more generous bridgehead down below while Dulcie and Lynn—who knew exactly what they were doing—set about the delicate work of taking the boat itself to pieces.
“Do you want the gun?” Matthew said to Ike, when the genomicist got into the basket to make his first descent. “We don’t know what might be lurking in those bushes.”
“Well, if it’s anything that can stand up to a chain saw it’ll be big enough for you to shoot it from way up here,” Ike said. “Anyway, we don’t know what might be lurking in the bushes up here on the plateau—there’s no reason to think that the gun’s more likely to be needed down there than up here.” Ike had already donned heavy boots and protective armor, and he seemed to feel that he was well-nigh invulnerable.
Matthew stopped worrying when Ike started up the chain saw and got to work on the bushes. The saw made such a racket, and cut with such devastating effect, that any sensible creature would have taken off in the opposite direction as fast as it could run or slither. The storage space grew with astonishing rapidity, although the contrast between the bare gray rock and the purple-littered ground beyond remained as sharp as ever to the naked eye. If the bushes did have vitreous trunks and branches they shattered easily enough, and no needlelike shards shot like darts into Ike’s flesh. His booted feet trampled the foliage down with mechanical efficiency as he marched stolidly into the territory he had claimed. Various globular fruits were rushed along with the “leaves.”
As the boat slowly came apart Matthew insisted on shuttling back and forth across the fifty-meter safety margin, adding what he could to the various stacks of goods queued up by the basket, but his earlier efforts had taken their toll and he was glad to take control of the winch again once Ike signaled that he was ready to begin taking delivery of more cargo.
The manna-supplies were the last to go down before the parts of the actual boat, and it was not until then that the first accident occurred. Inevitably, it was Matthew who made the mistake, his out-of-tune reflexes and his injured arm combining to make him drop one of the heaviest boxes before he could get it into the basket. It fell in such a way that it bounced toward the edge of the cliff.
For one tantalizing moment it looked as if the box might come to a halt at the edge, but it had gathered too much momentum. To make matters worse the packaging split at the last point of impact, and the manna began to spill out as soon as the carton began its precipitate descent.
Mercifully, Ike was too far away from the edge to be at any risk—but he stood and watched with annoyance and wonder as the powdered manna became a cataract in its own right, expanding like a cloud of spray. Almost all of it landed on the carpet of crushed vegetation, dusting the purple pulp like icing on a party cake.
“It’s okay,” Lynn was quick to say. “It was only a box of biomotor-food. The converter churns out that stuff a great deal faster than produce for human consumption, and Ike’s amassed a far bigger heap of litter down there than any we ever built up in the ruins. Once we’ve got the rest of the stuff down I’ll unpack the converter and start bundling the stuff into the hopper. Boatfood’s the least of our worries right now. It would have been a hell of a lot worse if you’d dropped part of the rudder, or the AI’s brain.”
“I know,” Matthew retorted, bitterly. “I’m trying to stick to the least important items for exactly that reason. There’s an awful indignity, you know, in setting out on a pioneering voyage on a virgin world, with the possibility of meeting all manner of spectacular monsters, then rendering oneself entirely useless by falling out of bed.”
“It’s your mind we need, not your muscles,” she assured him—but Matthew was well aware that her muscles were working heroically in association with her mind, and that he would not have the slightest idea how to reassemble the boat again if that responsibility were his.
Dulcie was working even harder, with quasi-mechanical concentration and purpose. She had hardly said a word for hours, and seemed to have adapted to the requirements of long, hard labor by retreating into herself.
Matthew had no alternative but to take up his station by the lift’s control button yet again, pretending as hard as he could that there was a valuable dexterity involved in controlling the descent of the basket and guiding it to a soft landing. An AI could probably have done the job far better, but a winch was far too primitive a machine to warrant the addition of any supervising brain but a human’s.
When the disassembly process was complete, Lynn announced that she had better join Ike down below, because there would be more work to be done there from now on.
“Do you want to take the gun?” Matthew asked, for a second time, as she carefully put her armor on.
“It’s okay,” she assured him, grimacing slightly as she forced her feet into smart boots that were still rather unyielding, having never been properly worn in. “I’ll have to break out the second chain saw, so that I can clear a second platform further downriver for the reassembly. As Ike says, anything brave enough to take thaton will have to be big enough to make an easy target, even for a one-armed man shooting wrong-handed. If the worst comes to the worst, pass the gun to Dulcie. She’s good at everything.”
Dulcie did, indeed, seem to be good at everything. Having finished the skilled work she was now back to hard labor, moving the last sections of their craft into the queue for the basket, stacking them with the utmost care in such a way that the basket could be filled quickly and safely. He was impressed by the way she plugged on so relentlessly, long after Lynn had started up the second chain saw in order to begin the second stage of the clearance. He was normally content to be left alone with his thoughts, but he felt snubbed when she responded rather shortly to his various attempts to make conversation.
He wondered, vaguely, whether she was really the kind of person who became deeply absorbed in her work, impatient of distractions, or whether she was quietly inclined to put on a show. He recalled the first picture he had seen, in which she had stubbornly continued to display the battle scars she had earned in the plague war: a calculated affront to the beautiful people who formed the great majorities of the fully developed nations. He decided in the end that she was by no means innocent of showmanship, but that it was sincereshowmanship, deeply felt as well as deeply meant. It was the same judgment he would have passed on himself, and he could not resist a burst of fellow feeling in spite of what he had guessed.