Of course, the plants stole our water. We should have seen it coming. Every living creature we’d found spent most of its time finding, extracting and storing water.
Second Chair pounded on my door.
“Get into a suit, Spencer,” she yelled when I poked my head into the hallway. “Everyone outside!” A couple of engineers rushed by, faces flushed, half into their suits. “I’m systems control,” said one as he passed. “There’s no way I should risk a lung full of Papaver rot.”
When I made it out the airlock, the crisis was beyond help. Our water tanks stood twenty meters from the ship, their landing struts crunched beneath them just as they were designed to do. They’d landed on the planet months before we got here, both resting between deep, lichen-filled depressions in the rock. Then the machinery gathered the minuscule water from the air, drop by drop, until when we arrived the tanks were full. A year on Papaver was enough. Everyone surrounded the tanks, heads down. Even in the bulky suits I could see how glum they were, except Lashawnda, who was under the main tank. “It’s a fungus,” she said, breaking off a chip of metal from what should have been the smooth underside. Her hand rested in dark mud, but even as I watched, the color leached away. The ground sucked water like a sponge, and underneath the normally arid surface, a dozen plant species waited to store the rare substance. Even now the water would be spreading beneath my feet, pumped from one cell to the next. Ten years worth of moisture for this little valley delivered all at once.
She looked at me, smiling through the face shield. “I never checked the water tanks, but I’ll bet there was trace condensation on them in the mornings, enough for fungus to live on, and whatever they secreted as waste ate right through. Look at this, Spencer.” She yanked hard at the tank’s underside, snapping off another hunk of metal, then handed it to me. “It’s honeycombed.”
The metal covered my hand but didn’t weigh any more than a piece of balsa wood. Bits crumbled from the edge when I ran my gloved fingers over it.
“Isn’t that marvelous?” she said.
First Chair said, “It’s not all gone, is it? Not the other tank too?” He moved beside the next tank, rapped his knuckles on it, producing a resonant note. He was fifty, practically a child, and this was only his second expedition in command. “Damn.” He looked into the dry, bathtub-shaped pit in the rock beside the tank where the water undoubtedly drained when the bottom broke out.
Lashawnda checked the pipes connecting the tanks to the ship. “There’s more here, after only ten days. How remarkable.”
First Chair rapped the tank again thoughtfully. “What are our options?”
The environmental engineer said, “We recycle, a lot. No more baths.”
“Yuck,” said someone.
He continued, “We can build dew traps, but there isn’t much water in the atmosphere. We’re not going to get a lot that way.”
“Can we make it?” said First Chair.
The engineer shrugged. “If nothing breaks down.”
“Check the ship. If this stuff eats at the engines, we won’t be going anywhere.”
They shuffled away, stirring dust with their feet. I stayed with Lashawnda. “A daily bleach wash would probably keep things clean,” she said. She crouched next to the pipes, her knees grinding into the dirt. I flinched, thinking about microscopic spores caught in her suit’s fabric. The spores had killed Marvin and Beatitude. On the third day they’d come in from setting a weather station atop a near hill, and they rushed the decontamination. Why would they worry? After all, the air tested breathable. We all knew that the chances of a bacteria from an alien planet being dangerous to our Earth-grown systems were remote, but we didn’t plan on water-hungry spores that didn’t care at all what kind of proteins we were made of. The spores only liked the water, and once they’d settled into the warm, moist ports of the two scientist’s lungs, they sprouted like crazy, sending tendrils through their systems, breaking down human cells to build their own structures. In an hour the two developed a cough. Six hours later, they were dead. Working remote arms through the quarantine area, I helped zip Beatitude into a body bag after the autopsy. Delicate looking orange leaves covered her cheeks, and her neck was bumpy with sprouts ready to break through.
At least they didn’t suffer. The spore’s toxins operated as a powerful opiate. Marvin spent the last hour babbling and laughing, weaker and weaker, until the last thing he said was, “It’s God at the end.”
A quick analysis of the spores revealed an enzyme they needed to sprout, and we were inoculated with an enzyme blocker, but everyone was more rigorous decontaminating now.
Lashawnda said, “Come on, Spencer. I want to show you something.”
We walked downhill toward the closest gully and its forest. She limped, the result of a deteriorating hip replacement. Like most people her vintage, she’d gone through numerous reconstructive procedures, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her. She’d stabilized her looks as a forty-year-old, almost a tenth her real age. Pixie-like features with character lines radiating from the mouth. Just below the ears blonde hair with hints of gray. Light blue eyes. Slender in the waist. Dancer’s legs. Economical in her movements whether she was sorting plant samples or washing her face. Four hundred years! I studied her when she wasn’t looking.
I picked thirty for myself. Physically it was a good place to be. I didn’t tire easily. My stockiness contrasted well to her slight build.
Lashawnda suffered from cascading cancers, each treatable eruption triggering the next until the body gives up. She’d told me she had a couple laps around the sun left at best. “Papaver will be my last stop,” she’d said during the long trip here. Of course, every expedition member says that in the claustrophobic confines of the ship. Once we’ve slept with everyone else (and all the possible combinations of three or four at the same time), and the novelty of inter-ship politicing has worn thin, we all say we’re done with planet hopping forever.
I suppose it was inevitable Lashawnda and I ended up together on the ship. I was the second oldest by a century, and she had one hundred and fifty years on me, plus she laughed often and liked to talk. We’d go to bed and converse for a couple hours before sleeping. I’d grown tired of energetic couplings with partners I had nothing to say to afterwards. My own two hundred fifty years hung like a heavy coat. What did I have to say to someone who’d only been kicking around for only sixty or ninety years?
I cared for her more than anyone in my memory, and she was dying.
When we reached the gully she said, “What’s amazing is that there are so many plants. Papaver should be like Mars. Same age. Lighter gravity and solar wind should have stripped its atmosphere. Unlike Mars, however, Papaver held onto its water, and the plants take care of the air.”
Except for the warped orange and brown and yellow “trees” in front of us, which looked more like twisted pipes than plants, we could have been in an arctic desert.
“Darn little water,” I said, thinking about our empty tanks.
“Darn little free water, but quite a bit locked into the biomass. Did you see the survey results I sent you yesterday?”
We pushed through the first branches. Despite their brittle looks, the stems were as supple as rubber rods. They waved back into place after we passed. Broad, waxy leaves that covered the sun side of each branch bent to face us as we came close. I found their mobility unnerving. They were like blank eyes following our movements. In the shadow of the trees I found more green than orange and yellow.