The Great Hydration

CHAPTER EIGHT

The hydrorium towards which the desert caravan hummed was, according to the Gaminte guards, the largest on the planet. It hove into view like a dome-shaped mountain, the metal exterior scored to dullness by centuries of wind-blown sand.

Boris Bouche judged the curve of the dome to be a cycloid, a shape much used by human engineers. It impressed him that the Tlixix could construct a cycloid on this scale. He scanned the terrain where the dome stood. It had been built on the edge of an escarpment, beneath which a level plain stretched to the horizon. Clearly this had been a shoreline, in the days before all ocean water disappeared into Tenacity’s interior.

They were in the foremost of four large desert drays. The journey from the World Market had taken a tiresome two Earth days. A suggestion that transport be left to one of the Enterprise’s lighters had met with a curt refusal on the part of the Tlixix, who continued to treat the Earthmen as prisoners, albeit honoured ones. They still retained all of Krabbe and Bouche’s equipment, except for the translator sets.

They didn’t know, of course, that the Enterprise was watching the progress of the caravan through the interferometric telescope.

The partners lounged on the foredeck, protected by a glass canopy, in company with three Gamintes. Market Master Rherrsherrsh was semi-submerged in a spray-bath in the rear, separated from them by a partition. His colleague at the World Market had gone ahead in a fast vehicle to brief the Tlixix ruling council. Behind them, in the second dray, was Krabbe and Bouche’s supply of food and water.

The powerful radium motor hummed as the Gaminte driver headed the dray towards the dome’s tunnel entrance. Bouche scowled, rubbing his jaw. Krabbe, by contrast, smiled happily. He had noticed how his partner got tense at these moments. He, however, was convinced that everything was going well. Sure, the lobsters were going to have an incredulity problem. The tale they were being told was scarcely believable, from their point of view.

But Krabbe had dealt with a range of alien races, and he had come up with a common denominator. It didn’t matter what an intelligent species looked like, or what strange habits and outlooks it had. There was a common touchstone for the whole galaxy, probably for the whole universe, which made it possible to do business.

Greed and self-interest.

The Gamintes were hurriedly donning skintight suits complete with facemasks. They were preparing themselves for the conditions inside the dome. If naked they could not tolerate a water-rich environment for very long. The tunnel turned out to be a multi-stage vapour lock. One by one doors opened in sequence. Then the sixth door opened, they trundled into the hydrorium.

The scene was stunning.

They saw what appeared to be a rocky shoreline, full of creeks and beaches, fringing a calm ocean. There was little sense of being in an enclosed space, and even less of being on the planet as they had experienced it so far. The dome’s roof was coloured blue—a softer blue than the sharp azure which bedecked present-day Tenacity—and gave the impression of a sky extending to a distant horizon. Lounging and splashing in the water were hundreds of Tlixix.

The lobster creatures had managed to preserve a fragment of their former world. Several fragments, rather. This was one of several such refuges.

Krabbe was awe-struck. “What a place!”

Bouche nodded. As the Gamintes slid back the desert rover’s transparent canopy a refreshing sea-smell wafted in, carried by a distinct breeze. That would be part of the artificial environment’s circulation system, Bouche thought to himself.

“This is probably only part of it,” he said to Krabbe. “See those openings in the rocks? My guess is they lead to excavations underground.”

“Yes. What we’re looking at is a pleasure area.”

“Well, a little more then that. It’s also a psychological necessity. The lobsters need to have something of the environment they evolved in.”

The masked Gamintes swung a ramp over the side of the desert dray, then picked up their flingers. The curtain screening the rear compartment swished aside. Market Master Rherrsherrsh came through, moving on crab-like legs, stalks and antlers waving. An unmistakable seaweed smell wafted from him as he swept by them and proceeded down the ramp.

The Gamintes motioned the Earthmen to follow. They crossed a sandy beach. An odd sensation assailed Krabbe. To see more-than-people-sized lobster-like creatures disporting by a seaside made the scene surreal, as if invented by a mad artist. He could almost expect to find shrimp-sized humans lurking beneath rocks in the pools.

As Bouche had surmised, they were making for one of the cave entrances. Inside, the tunnel angled sharply down, lit by radium lamps and forking frequently.

“Did you notice something back there?” Bouche asked.

“What?”

“The lobsters on the beach. Did you see any little lobsters? Or larval forms or anything? Everybody was full grown.”

“Maybe the young are kept in nurseries. They probably hatch from eggs.”

“Yes, or maybe there just aren’t many of them. A low birthrate would make sense in these conditions. And a low birthrate suggests a long-living species. These guys are probably old. And their leaders will be oldest of all.”

“I see what you mean,” nodded Krabbe. He and his partner had learned to gauge the shrewdness of a species by the length of its life-cycle. They had once struck a deal on a planet where individuals lived for no more than two Earth years. It had been like taking candy from a child.

Here they were going to have their work cut out. From the look of it Tlixix individuals lived a long time. They would have to, to gain the experience and deviousness needed to keep control of Tenacity.

They continued downward for some time, until the tunnel widened into a globe-shaped chamber. Their path was here blocked by four Tlixix who carried in their pincers versions of the weapon also toted by the Gamintes and which seemed to be almost universal on Tenacity: a kind of catapult-crossbow flinging a whirling curved blade.

In a sense the newcomers answered Bouche’s question. They were smaller than the Tlixix Krabbe and Bouche had seen so far, which probably meant that they were younger. Their sheen was different, greener, and a fresher smell came from them.

One spoke to Rherrsherrsh, who turned to face the party behind him. The partners switched their translators on.

“The Gamintes may leave the refuge.”

Thankfully the black guards turned and retreated.

Bouche turned his translator off again. “See that? Now we can be sure they’re taking us seriously. The Gamintes are the lobster’s guard dogs. It wouldn’t do to let them get wind of what’s coming.”

That’s right, Krabbe thought. But two more points clicked up in his mind. One, the Tlixix were capable of fielding fighting troops of their own. And two, the partners were still under guard.

It might become necessary to let the Tlixix know, accidentally as it were, that their movements had been followed by their colleagues in space. And that the Enterprise could smash this dome like an egg.

At the other end of the chamber a door irised open.

Flanked by the Tlixix guards, the Earthmen went through. They now stood in a much larger chamber utterly drenched in a fine drizzle. The floor was awash. And in the centre lay a spacious pool where half a dozen Tlixix lolled.

An air of luxury pervaded the chamber, which was bathed in golden light. The walls were pale blue, like the roof of the larger dome. A seaweed-like plant of various reddish hues floated in the pool end trailed across the floor in long ribbons, giving off a pungent smell.

Rherrsherrsh beckoned Krabbe and Bouche to come forward. Their burnooses already soaked, the Earthman approached the pool, throwing back their cowls to reveal their faces as three Tlixix reared up from the water to scrutinise them.

There was a marked difference between the creatures in the pool and Rherrsherrsh and his companion in the World Market. Whereas Rherrsherrsh’s face was generally agitated, his whiskers constantly twitching, the crustacean faces now confronting them possessed an icy stillness. These creatures were larger, too, and the greenish-blue of their segmented body-shells tended to yellow. A feeling of hoariness surrounded them.

They were quite possibly several centuries old.

A voice like a soft roar came from the middle one of the three.

“So you claim to come from another world in space.”

“Yes,” Krabbe replied.

“And you claim you can give our world back its water.”

“Yes.”

“Then you must tell us how.”

Krabbe let his partner answer that.

“First of all,” Bouche said dryly, “where do you think your water went to when it disappeared?”

The Tlixix leader paused, and spoke less vociferously.

“We do not know. Some say it evaporated into space, others that it sank into the sand. In past times our engineers dug deep wells. But no water was ever found.”

“The principle was right. The water went into the ground. But it went a long way down, much further than you could ever reach by digging. Now, our arts are superior to yours. We can bring the water back.”

“You still do not say how.”

“We have ways of forcing the water back up to the surface. It will form oceans once more. There will be rain.”

“What if it drains away again?”

“We can stop that happening.”

“How do you force the water back up?”

“That is difficult to explain. Essentially, we reverse the process that caused it to drain away. If you wish, you can talk to our engineers about it.”

The Tlixix who had been speaking broke off and splashed into the pool. All six of the beasts began surging about in the water as if in great excitement. This must be absolutely incredible to them, Krabbe thought. They scarcely know what to make of it.

At length the sloshing water subsided. The Tlixix leader reared over them again.

“How do we know you are what you say? How do we know you are not a mutated species of our own world who have found a supply of water and learned to live on it? You will take one of us to this ship which you say hangs in space.”

“Agreed.”

The Tlixix turned his four milky eyes on the Earthmen, studying them. Power exuded from the creature. Power and a ruthless determination. “There is equipment with which to communicate with your ship?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“All your property has been brought here. You will arrange for our representative to see the ship in space. Meantime, you remain here as our guests.”

The Tlixix spoke with a finality which caused Krabbe to glance at the crustacean guards behind him.

Turning off his translator, Bouche spoke aside to him. “They don’t trust us yet. They’re measuring us by their own cloth. They probably suspect we aim to control them the same way they control the dehydrate species. But don’t worry. We’re offering them paradise. They’re not going to be able to refuse.”

He turned the translator back on as the master of Tenacity spoke again.

“And if you restore our world to us, what do you want in return?”

Krabbe and Bouche both sighed.

The negotiating was about to begin.

Planets a gogetter company could realistically expect to do business with were generally a patchwork of authorities—nations, empires or the like—and that made matters complicated. Sometimes a gogetter’s intervention would spark off a destructive war, rendering any contract drawn up unenforceable.

To come upon a planet under one set of rules was a pretty good piece of luck. It meant the contract could be global.

However it was dressed up, what a gogetter wanted was to exchange beads for Manhattan. In return for some service or good-looking piece of technology, he would claim from the owner of a territory all interstellar trading rights, sewn together so as to hold up in a human court of law. If Krabbe and Bouche had their way, the lobsters’ ownership of their world would ultimately consist of little more than their tenancy of it.

All off-world commerce, all mining, manufacturing and trading not of a purely domestic character would belong solely to the firm of Krabbe & Bouche, Partners. Exclusive rights in the uninhabited bodies of the local planetary system would also be thrown in.

Exclusivity was in fact what gave the contract its value as an asset. The gogetter would rarely take up the options himself. But when, sooner or later, one of the rapacious large corporations decided to make use of the find it would have to license the right to do so. Meantime, registering the contract increased Krabbe & Bouche’s credit.

Bouche chuckled. “I wonder what these lobsters would think if they found out our licence to operate has been revoked,” he said, translator off.

It probably would be hard to explain to them that actually it didn’t make any difference. The contract drawn up and registered would still be valid.

That was one of many useful lacunae in the law.