Conrad didn't think a centuries-deep rut was the best way to start off eternity, but he didn't press the point. Neither did he wish to reenter his old life as an architect, nor his even earlier life as an unemployed confidant of Bascal. The king, the oppressor, the Man. This was said and thought in joking tones, yes, but in a period of crisis there was something unsavory about government, and for better or worse Conrad had no desire to associate himself with that anymore.
So he took his own advice, inserting himself beneath the blanket of P2's atmosphere and seeking odd jobs on the outskirts of civilization. A few of these lasted six months; a few lasted a year or two. He supervised robots in a factory for building more robots. He was the editor and publisher of a rural news service until the communities he served closed up and moved elsewhere in search of better agricultural soils.
He even did a turn as a road builder, bulldozing and paving and cobbling streets for old-fashioned maglev vehicles, and even wheeled vehicles, to travel along. It was important work, because large aircraft and spacecraft were increasingly scarce, and for the mining and quarrying communities of the southern lowlands and the mountains between Domesville and Bupsville, there was virtually no other way to get around anymore unless you were a centaur, and even they couldn't carry ore.
That job felt too much like a retreat, though—a shallow attempt to revive his childhood, without even his father there to supervise. So Conrad moved on, and moved on some more. He spent a season as a hermit, taking clay out of the dry riverbed and fashioning it into bowls and oil lamps and fat-figured women in a cold and poorly ventilated shack in the desert. But that was really a retreat, and no service to civilization at all, in its hour of greatest need. So he took a real job again, and this time it stuck.
He was the captain of a fishing boat on the Sea of Destiny. He had a staff of four—bristly unshaven men, all. Their job was to sail P2's larger ocean—shallow and poisonous though it be—tracking the migrations and population dynamics of various species of fish. This was directly helpful to society, since the fax shortage had driven other boats out here to catch the fish for actual human consumption. The movement and fluctuations of the schools were also an important indicator of the health of the infant ecosystem. And yes, out on the ocean there was no one to confront or argue with, nothing to dispute, nothing all that much to worry about.
Except perhaps the weather, and even that was nothing compared to Earth or—God help them—Neptune, which P2 more closely resembled in some ways. Yes, it was a hostile planet for ordinary human life, but Conrad and his men were not ordinary humans. No one on P2 was, or ever would be again. And while the oceans were technically larger than Earth's, they were shallower and occupied a much smaller percentage of the planet's uselessly large surface. And P2's rotation wasn't fast enough to generate meaningful Coriolis forces, so when the sun heated the ocean's surface during the long, long days, the tropical depressions which formed over it were not pulled into raging cyclonic hurricanes. Instead, they formed simple rain showers—or at worst, tornado-spawning thunderstorms—which roamed the oceans aimlessly and were easily avoided.
Indeed, the planet's greatest storms were the dry ones, sweeping off the desert plains and into the ocean. This happened most often at daybreak, as new slices of atmosphere rotated into the heat and proton flux of the solar wind. The resulting aurora could be quite beautiful, but the accompanying ground-to-sky lightning, the random blasts of dry wind off the warming sand, sometimes took the coastline by surprise. When they came, the storms would rise an hour behind the sun and quickly rocket out to sea, carrying clouds of stinging grit which blotted out the sky and clobbered the surface acidity, killing raft vegetation for hundreds of kilometers and driving the fish down, down toward the featureless bottom.
At night, the oceans gave up their heat again, turning over, exchanging with the warm, nutrient-rich muck at the bottom. In this sense, P2's shallow oceans were more fertile—more habitable and forgiving—than Earth's deep ones. No sterile, crystal blue depths here! This turning over was a weather event unto itself, generating thick, cold, chlorinated fogs that reduced the visibility to twenty meters or less and clung to everything in a slick film, turning all but the stickiest of surfaces into skating rinks. But Conrad's ship, Snowflake, rarely sailed at night, except during the mating season of the beholder squids, which glowed eerily beneath the water's churning surface and were one of Conrad's absolute favorite sights in the world.
Ah, the adventures they had on that proud little ship! The tides of P2 were high and slow, so that there were islands and peninsulas and even whole archipelagoes that would come and go—a landscape and seascape always in flux. There was so much to see, so much to explore.
On one dry-shoe visit to the Drowned Islands, on a kilometer-wide reef called Umamaha, or Shallow Shoulder, Conrad and his men found themselves knee-deep in rotting fish. They had seen their share of fish kills before, but these were generally monospecific events triggered by a local resource depletion, and so were ultimately a sign of overpopulation. But they knew right away that this one was different, because it involved dozens of unrelated species and had no obvious cause.
Ned Creswell, Conrad's senior ocean chemistry officer, opined thusly: “Nutrient levels in the water are all nominal, sir. And off the island, we didn't read any signatures of unusual decay.”
“Meaning what?” Conrad probed.
“Meaning the dead fish are all right here on the island, sir. Look at them: they haven't been dead more than a couple of pids. They flopped up here while the waters were receding. They were trying to get out of the ocean, millions of fish. From all directions, too, by the look of it.”
“And why would they do that?”
“Hell if I know, sir. If I didn't know better, I would say they were suffocating. Panicking. Trying to breathe the air while keeping their bodies wet? But if that were true, we'd see signs of it in the water. Dissolved gas levels have been normal all week.”
“Hmm. Do fish leave ghosts?”
“Hell if I know, sir. But we haven't got the equipment to read 'em in any case.”
So they held their noses and walked around for a while in the ruddy brown light of morning, but the mystery only deepened.
Said Giotti, the wildlife officer, “Whatever's scavenging these fish corpses, Captain, I've never seen anything like 'em before.”
“They're bugs,” someone said helpfully.
But that did little to shed light on the matter, because even Conrad could see that while these bugs were built on a generally Barnardean chassis—radial symmetry stretched out into a sort of bilateral torpedo—the similarities ended there. For one thing, these bugs had legs all over them. They were absolutely, positively covered in legs. Even the mouthparts were legs—a decidedly nasty feature when examined closely.
“It's the proton flux from the sun,” Conrad speculated. “With a nice, hot yellow star, you can set your planet away from the fusion source. Here, we're practically nestled up against it. And the planet has no strong magnetic field to deflect the proton winds. You and I are full of healing nanobes, medically refreshed every couple of years, but there are no veterinarians under the sea. The radiation damage probably just builds up, generation after generation.”