In the small outbuilding you will find a variety of native animals, psychotamed for your convenience. Some of them will augment your diet, others are merely work animals. Full descriptions of their roles, needs, and natural histories will be found in the barn.
All utilities are built into the house. No maintenance is necessary. The house is supplied with a Mark VII tect to replace the one you left on Earth, which has been reclaimed. Your tect here on Planet C will serve all functions to the best of its capabilities. It is linked directly to TECT, to provide you with uninterrupted service and advice in your new surroundings.
Finally, do not worry over your apparent isolation. Your life and happiness are still matters of concern to your Representative, who is proud of you and your achievements. Merely because you reside on a far-flung planet does not mean that the eyes of the Representative are not cast protectively on you. You will be married within two years. The usual delay of eight years for first-born offspring will be waived in your special case. All services and privileges due a citizen of North America will be fulfilled promptly and with special enthusiasm. Enjoy Planet C. Congratulations!
There are no locks on the doors.
Murray took the note and walked up the path to the house. It looked like a typical midwestern farmhouse, with picket fence, porch swing, curtained windows, and smoking chimney. The one error was the color. The house was painted a traditional farmhouse red, which looked terrible in the orange light, under a magenta sky. Murray made a mental note to do something about it. Inside, the house was lovely. It was furnished in an old-fashioned, comfortable style. The kitchen and the bathroom plumbing were efficient and attractive. Murray wandered through the rooms, climbed the stairs and explored more rooms, gazed through all the windows until he realized how silent it was. It was incredibly quiet.
He grew hungry. There was no food in the kitchen at all. There were the promised leaflets, though. One said, Welcome to Planet C! in huge Gothic script letters. It gave a short description of the various edible plants growing in Murray’s fields, with photographs of the fruits or vegetables in ripe and unripe stages. Murray wanted something quick to munch on, before he got on with the job of settling in.
He riffled through the pamphlets until he came to a description of a semi-aware creature housed in the barn. The thing was actually a colony of dozens of football-sized, amoebalike creatures. These jellyballs could be found oozing along the ground during the summer, and frozen into solid white stones in the wintertime. In the soft stage, two or more could be tossed into a container, where they would coalesce into a single entity. When this happened, the creature would begin producing tough gray objects, about once a week. If more single jellyballs were added and assimilated, the gray lumps formed more frequently. These gray things, according to the booklet, settled down through the unsolid body of the aggregate creature; the lumps were a great deal more dense, and in the wild eventually were left behind in the path of the jellyball. The creature in the barn was housed in a wooden tub with a trapdoor on the bottom. Just inside, between the trapdoor and the creature, was a layer of wire netting with holes large enough for the gray lumps to pass through. Murray had merely to open the trapdoor to let the gray lumps fall out, and close it before the jellyanimal itself began to drip down. If more young jellyballs were found, they could always be tossed in to improve the stock. The gray lumps had to be boiled thoroughly; otherwise they were intensely poisonous. Afterward they were softer and quite palatable. According to the pamphlet.
Obviously, the gray lumps were supposed to become a staple of his diet. Murray felt a queasy feeling grow in his stomach. The other beasts with which the planet and the thoughtfulness of the Representative provided him were equally as unsettling. But a living had to be made from them. Murray went outside to the barn, to inspect his cattle.
As the weeks passed, Murray adjusted quickly to the new environment. There was too much work to do to waste time in loneliness and petty regrets. Every day after dark, when he had made himself a strange-looking but nonetheless appetizing meal, Murray entertained himself with the tect. He had no lack of reading material, nor would he ever. The tect supplied him with movies, music, games, and almost everything else stored within TECT’s immense subterranean memory banks. Yet sometimes Murray wondered if this were the sort of goal toward which Grandpa Zalman had urged him with his eccentric scholarship.
After a while Murray learned the planet’s oddities. Days were twenty-six hours long. The year was nearly a month shorter than on Earth. Planet C had no moons. Seasonal weather patterns became familiar. The various instructions for the feeding of livestock and the care of the field crops were inaccurate or incomplete in places; practical experiments complemented the information supplied by TECT. Sometimes Murray was lonely, of course; after the arrival of winter, with the snow piled around the house so deeply that he despaired of getting into the barn to feed the animals, he had the first real opportunity to ponder and to experience an initial tinge of sorrow. He went for walks across the snow-deadened prairie, staring at the new constellations that glowed in the moonless sky like fiery eyes in a fading dream. He liked to stand and look back toward the house; the lights and the fireplace blazing through the front windows gave him a sense of belonging that he had never felt at home with his parents. This was his world. He could name those eerie constellations, and no one could dispute him. He could travel the face of the world and name continents, oceans, deserts, ranges of mountains. He could raise cities to rival the choking metropolises of Earth….
When he began to think like that, he always laughed. Out in the snow, his breath blowing out in quick clouds, Murray admitted his loneliness but was content nonetheless. He was building, and it gave him satisfaction. Even if Planet C never did have sprawling cities, it made no difference. Murray was happy. He felt an unshakeable unity with the world, a sort of faith in himself and in God’s eternal gifts; even here, circling Pasogh 1874, Grandpa Zalman’s simple ideals seemed to apply. Wherever he went in his immense realm, Murray felt the presence of Grandpa Zalman. And, eventually, Murray informed TECT that from then on Planet C would be known as Zalman.
The winter passed slowly but enjoyably. Murray had followed the advice of TECT and stored food for himself and the livestock; there was no problem at all about running out of provisions. Fuel for the fire was not essential, as the house seemed to be receiving natural gas from some local supply. Murray had learned that the dried stalks of one of the food crops made excellent, slow-burning firewood, but he hadn’t been able to store enough for frequent fires. Next year he’d know better, but now he had to ration the fuel. That was a shame, because there was nothing he enjoyed more than building a fire in the living room fireplace and listening to music.
Spring came, and with it an incredible amount of work. Alone, Murray had to prepare the fields for planting, seed the few acres, and maintain the young plants against the natural pests that lived in the high grass around the farm. Murray worked long days, glad of the extra hours of sunlight that Zalman’s slower rotation allowed him. Perhaps because he was laboring for himself alone, the work was never frustrating or tedious. At night, exhausted and aching, he was nevertheless satisfied. He knew that he could never have achieved that degree of fulfillment on Earth.