Wildcatter

“We followed the dry channel all the way to the chimneys. They looked bigger than I’d expected, about ten meters high and maybe five across, house-sized. But they’re irregular, obviously a natural growth, something like algal mounds. Their outsides are rough, like coral, and they taper upward, though not so much that you’d call them cones. On Earth you could climb them easily. Here, even Dylan, who’s … who was a hell-raiser, a crazy man, reckless to the point of insanity… Can you believe he enjoyed blindfold mountain climbing? Escorted, of course, but even so… Even Dylan wasn’t inclined to try climbing anything in this gravity.”

Dylan might have been a fun guy to know. Had Meredith found him so? Again she paused to drink and Seth spoke up, just to let her rest.

“You said that the centaurs take shelter inside them. You must have seen that from the drones, but our equipment couldn’t show us so much detail. We weren’t even sure that they were hollow. I know from what we did see that they are littoral, growing only in tidal areas, and Cacafuego has a lot of those. So if they’re plants or giant barnacles, not houses, what’s their game? How do they make a living?”

“You are terrestrializing!” she said. “You know how rarely our Earthly categories fit exobiology. Oysters have feathers and bats with hooves and so on. I think coral might be a better analogy, and coral isn’t a plant. If they trap and poison marine life, like sea anemones do, then they obviously don’t hurt the centaurs. Mariko suggested that they might collect rainwater. The rainfall here is stupendous, as you can see.”

“Quite.” Outside their little cave the water was coming down in ropes, with visibility reduced to a few meters. So far the sand had absorbed it, but Seth was watching the pond, and now it was spreading fast. The wind came in hurricane gusts, shaking the shuttle, making his ears pop. There could be no question of sending for Niagara until the weather lifted. He was very thirsty. “You suppose the centaurs use the chimneys to collect rainwater?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘use.’ They don’t build the pots, but they seem to make use of them. At some seasons, the precipitation must be high enough to keep the chimneys full of fresh or brackish water. The contrast between saltwater outside and fresh inside during high tide could serve as an energy source, either by osmotic pressure or by some electrolytic process. Or they may just ooze water to keep cool during low tide, when the sun is strong. Mariko suggested later that the chimneys and the centaurs could have a symbiotic thing going. The chimneys provide the centaurs with storm shelters, and the centaurs’ droppings fertilize the chimneys. But they are hollow, they are largely full of water, and they let centaurs play house, as we then discovered.

“We decided to return to the shuttle. That was when things started to go wrong. We had explored a little over one klick of a whole planet but we were beat! I admit it.”

“I understand,” Seth said, with feeling.

“We had just turned back when a centaur popped its head out of one of the flower pots and started jabbering like crazy. The others obviously heard it, so they couldn’t have had their heads underwater. They have no gills-they breathe air, but I suppose the pots aren’t quite full of water. They must come up to breathe but we certainly hadn’t noticed them doing so. Right away a whole herd of them appeared. Two or three to every chimney, they scrambled down the sides and came after us.

“Dylan was closer than I was and got the worst of it. He had time to draw his stun gun and get off a few shots, but there were far too many of them. They swarmed him. I was farther away, and I drove them off with firecrackers.”

ISLA was going to hit the roof over that. Galactic would have to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the Cacafuego centaurs were not sentient. Even then, it might be fined for using such weapons when it could not have been sure of the centaurs’ status. So company policy must be no sentience, which explained why De Soto had not posted a purple flag.

“Teeth? Claws? Weapons?”