Adam had been up and about for only a few minutes when the call came in from Zodiac-Altair – the replacement spectroscope was on its way to his location, and he only had maybe a few minutes before it would arrive. He knew he had to act quickly, to make sure the part would remain undamaged from outside forces, but knew as well that as a recent hire – and as an outsider, no less – he couldn’t disappoint his new employer. Decisions, decisions. . . .
Whichever would happen first, he couldn’t do either on an empty stomach. After scarfing down a packet of almost-boiling-hot-and-barely-reconstituted oatmeal, along with some fruit preserve to temper the heat, Adam suited up and started sterilizing. To him, in such a time, those two minutes could not pass by any slower.
In fact, at the :28 mark, he saw the silvery glint of the sample-return capsule – heavily charred from reëntry – descend on a red-and-white parachute near to him. He looked up and saw H’ryleeloofa flying past overhead, waving at him. She must’ve retrieved it for me! He waved back, glad that he wouldn’t have to walk more than a few yards away from RPMR-1 to get what he needed.
Right as it hit the ground roughly where he expected, the timer hit :00, and the lander’s suitport released him. He slid down the ladder, gripping the railings with just his hands, and ran over to where the capsule was. Respectfully, he started packing the parachute away, so the plants beneath wouldn’t die off, then started unscrewing the nose cone off the end – or at least, what was left of the nose cone, as that was where the parachute had been packed away. Inside was one perfectly-intact freshly-sterilized ready-to-install RPMR-spec spectroscope. A miracle, if ever there was one.
Next, he knelt down and started removing the old spectroscope, undoing each of the cables in sequence – or what was left of them. Thankfully, whatever the previous tenant was only did cosmetic damage to the sockets, so they could be reused with no issues. Adam didn’t know what to do with the old instrument, so he just left it on top of the probe, frayed wires and all, right next to the dented plate and useless screws.
Hooking up the new one was essentially the same process in reverse – the only issue was knowing which cable went where. Adam was able to use the colors and positions on the old one to guide him in this step, but then noticed how two wires seemed to be in the wrong place. At first Adam thought the spectroscope was upside-down, but then saw that all the other cables lined up just right. I guess these are supposed to cross each other.
Doing just that confirmed his suspicions – and once the power cable went in, as he saved that one for last, a few small lights on the spectroscope switched on. Guess that means it’s working now. “Zulu-Alfa, this is Somerset,” he radioed. “The new spectroscope has been installed and should be working as intended. Please confirm, over.” He started putting the plate back on, as best as he could, in order to block out the unwanted light.
“This is Zulu-Alfa,” Louis replied soon enough. “Dr. Weiss reports signals from the spectroscope – it’s coming back up, well done. And just out of curiosity, how far away from the landing site did you have to walk? Over.”
“Not far at all, Zulu-Alfa,” Adam answered. “One of the Indigenous intercepted it en route, and was able to land it right at my doorstep. It was perhaps the most convenient repair that I’ve ever done.” Not that I’ve done a lot of these kinds of repairs myself in my time. “I’ll have to leave for work now, but I will be in touch as I need it. Over.”
“Copy that, Somerset. Zulu-Alfa out.”
Adam got back up on his feet and started making his way to town. Helpfully, he had drawn directions from Antir in one of his pouches, so he was able to walk to where he was meant to go. And not shamble, either – walk. The suit’s joints had been broken in enough at last to allow free, fluid movement for most of his joints. And knowing what was on his agenda, he was all the more grateful for it.
·–·–
It was about half an hour after sunrise when Adam walked in the door to the temp agency. He dipped his head below the doorframe, and nearly ran into another pony – one dressed in a greasy pair of overalls and a neckerchief. My coworker, it seems.
[ᵑǃɑpɑˈtɑ] It bowed as it spoke.
Reflexively, without thinking, Adam replied with “Nǃapata.” Wait, was that appropriate? But he didn’t show his panic – nor his relief soon after, when the other equine simply smiled and let him pass before it, as it went out.
The place was already busy, with ponies filing in and out, many with written assignments for the day. He saw a bulletin board on the wall, with various sheets pinned to the cork surface, each one with an offer for work for that day. Or week, if they’ve been up there for longer. Adam wanted inventory jobs, but couldn’t tell at the moment which were which.
“Khon E-dem!” he heard from his left. Turning his helmeted head, he saw what was apparently the clerk who ran the place. He didn’t get its name, but it looked rather impatient. [seˈʃe ɑlˈʙu] It grabbed a long wooden pointer in its mouth, and used it to indicate a chalkboard, apparently with pictorial instructions for him. This was not in Antir’s neat telekinetic hand – this one was rougher, cruder, and got the point across with no semblance of elegance.
Apparently, he was called to an inventory job somewhere else in the town, where some flowers needed to be counted. Ah, so I’m heading back to the floral shop for the day, am I? he realized. I bet they’d be glad to see me – not to mention, he also realized, if their customers are prone to idle chitchat while waiting, I can also learn more there. Boy, is this going to be beautiful. The chalkboard also had a map of the town etched on a metal plate, upon which two magnets were placed. A yellow one was placed where Adam knew to be the agency’s building itself – easy enough – and a red one was placed where he had to go. And below the work instructions, he noted three hindquarter-marks, each with a different flower on them – which only further confirmed who he had to see when he got there. Come to think of it, he further realized, that red magnet’s location looks awfully familiar too. Isn’t that right on my usual route to town? And now they needed a spare hand for the day. Did they want me specifically, or are we randomly assigned?
[ᵑʘeˈsɤ ɑkˈʙ̥u] the equine suddenly barked at Adam, pointing at the door. Not wanting to waste any more time – if not for its patience, then for his scrubber – he silently bade his boss farewell and started out the door and down the road to his first job of the day.
·–
The roads were mostly empty at this time of day – he encountered only a single equine, small, as though it were a juvenile, scampering away at the sight of the white being from the sky. When he arrived at the floral shop, one of them was serving a customer – that mint-green unicorn he had seen the other day – but the other two noticed him. Silently, the one with lilies on her hindquarters waved him into the back of the shop.
Adam had to duck under this doorway so far that a second thought found it more practical to crawl outright. But once he was inside, he stood up and looked around the stockroom. Hmm. . . seems rather dim. Then again, he realized, these equines sure have large eyes for a reason. But mid-musing, he was handed – or hoofed, rather – a small clipboard with what looked like a grease pencil attached on a string. He needed no further instructions – not when the paper made it obvious which they wanted counted, with its illustrations of each flower juxtaposed to an inverted triangle – the Indigenous equals sign, if memory served him correctly.
She left the stockroom, leaving him alone to deal with the inventory. Remember Adam, gotta count with dice pips – gotta count with senary. He breathed, recalling what their digits were, including their zero, ultimately trying to get his bearings straight. Alright, what’s first? He recalled the writing direction their script took, and decided the most logical way to proceed was left-to-right, then up-to-down. The top-right corner had a rather-well-drawn picture of a rose. Roses, far from home. Imagine that! Dr. Weiss would certainly have a field day with this shop alone.
But wait a moment. This sheet appeared to be written in columns – three of them, to be exact. Would that mean going up-to-down in each column instead, or sticking to left-to-right?
Bah, why does it matter? If I do all of them, it wouldn’t look any bit different. Adam swallowed his curiosity and grabbed the grease pencil. First on the list looked like roses. Hold on, aren’t there two of them? Adam searched for different clues to differentiate them. Colors? None that he could tell. If it was marked in writing and not by the color itself, it was sadly lost to him. But then he noticed the stem – the first one had thorns, the other did not. Strange that they wouldn’t clip the thorns from all of them. Maybe it’s cultural-specific? Or maybe these are edible varieties. . . .
Regardless, he looked around for the roses. Right on the left, he found them, white-petaled and soaking in several metal buckets full of water. They probably intended for me to count each blossom individually. Let’s do that. Going from left-to-right, purely out of habit, he counted in the first bucket twenty-four roses, none of which had a single thorn on them. He counted the next bucketful, and found it too had twenty-four roses.
Adam then had an idea: what if I simply multiplied the buckets by twenty-four? He just as quickly discarded the idea when he realized it was entirely possible that one or two buckets might contain fewer or more than twenty-four, meaning he’d either record roses that didn’t exist or make them disappear on paper. Not to mention I’d look dishonest if I took shortcuts like that, he thought. Better do things the hard way.
Only five buckets held roses, to his relief – so he counted them up as quickly and carefully as possible. He had already counted up two of them, so it was onto the third. . . . twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four as well. Next one. . . six. . . twelve. . . eighteen. . . twenty-four. But the last bucket had far fewer roses than the others – a quick count showed ten, to be exact. Twenty-four times four is ninety-six, plus ten is one hundred and six. Got it.
Then came the hardest part of the job, and one he absolutely could not skip – converting the total from decimal to senary. His mind went back to the library earlier, and from there converting the decimal population of Earth to senary. Lessee. . . . He divided one hundred and six by six, and got seventeen with a remainder of four. Seventeen divided by six became two, with a remainder of five. And two could not be divided into six, which left the answer as senary two hundred fifty-four. Beside the inverted triangle next to the dethorned rose, he placed two pips, then five, then four, in the arrangement Antir had prescribed to him the other day.
Then Adam noticed four more buckets grouped with the roses, empty save for small traces of water. They must be popular in this town. Romantics, these lot? No, don’t be ridiculous – this must be an edible cultivar. In any case, this was one down, and. . . seventeen to go. This is gonna be a long day here in the shop.
He shrugged and started on the next one – tulips. The Dutch would be proud. These were stored in smaller buckets, and a cursory count of one of them showed thirty-six – one hundred in senary. And there were twelve buckets of tulips – senary twenty. As tempting as it was to simply convert, he knew he had to do it the right way. But he did find a safe enough shortcut – group up tulips in ‘bunches’ of six, then count those. One-two-three-four-five-six. . . twelve. . . eighteen. . . twenty-four. . . thirty. . . thirty-six. His mind lost track of time as he focused on counting tulips in this manner, one bucket after the other, one bucket after the other, one bucket after the other. . . .
Two minutes later, he found, somehow, all twelve buckets had thirty-six tulips. Four hundred thirty-two was easy to convert to senary – two thousand. Guess they’re not as popular here. So what’s next?
As he worked, he started to get better and better at counting in senary instead of decimal. By the time he reached the thorned roses – for which his suit’s titanium gloves provided protection – he had already abandoned base conversion, instead counting in senary as naturally as he would have with decimal. And as he noticed, those wares were the final item in the final column – meaning when he marked senary one hundred thirty-three, his job was complete.
Time to show ’em. As fate would have it, right at that moment one of the three florists came into the stockroom, apparently to check on him. And not a moment too soon! With a moderate glimmer of pride on his face, he presented the clipboard to it. Read it and weep.
It took a moment to look it over completely, making sure not a pip was out of place. It raised an eyebrow at one section, but a shrug told him it chalked up whatever he had written down to just a quirk of his kind. Adam distinctly remembered not placing any Arabic numerals or tallies on the sheet – lest he run the risk of confusing his employers. Eventually it looked back up to him – with a smile, satisfied by his work.
It stepped out of the stockroom, beckoning him to follow with a swipe of a hoof. Remembering what he had to do to enter in the first place, he got onto his hands and knees and crawled out of the room. When he stood up, another florist – the one with the peach fur and deep red mane and tail – had a small cloth sack at the ready. It reached in and pulled out a gold coin. I did my job, he realized, and now I get paid.
He took the coin and deposited it into an empty pouch, then started out the door. As he turned down the road back to the temp agency, he caught sight of them waving at him – must be a gesture for ‘goodbye,’ he hypothesized. He waved back at them, without breaking his stride. He smiled to himself – I did something productive in their society, he thought. Granted, it was just counting up their flower inventory – something they probably could’ve done themselves – but it’s still something I did. Yeah, Adam – you’re going places. You’re making your home here in this town.
··
When Adam got back to the temp agency, the clerk greeted him with a curt wave. Yeah yeah, good to see you too, boss. So what’s next in the adventures of Adam Somerset? The clerk answered that for him, wordlessly – it pointed again at the chalkboard, with the previous job erased and a new one drawn up for him. Apparently, according to the chalkboard, he had another inventory job, but now it was at a new place: horseshoes at the farrier – the same farrier he had seen the previous day. He even recognized the hindquarter-mark. And if my memory serves me correctly. . . yep. There it was, in a part of town he distinctly remembered going to.
Wordlessly, the clerk sent him on his way, with Adam tracing out the way to the farrier’s place in his head. The more I do this, he mused as he walked along, the better I’ll get in navigating, and the less I’d have to rely on hand-drawn maps, which could get busy and cumbersome.
It was about a ten-minute walk, just as uneventful as last time, between the agency and the forge. Adam could hear the telltale signs of activity – hammer meeting metal, crackling flames of a hot furnace – and he stooped down to enter the building, knocking on the side of the doorframe out of respect.
It took a moment for the farrier to look up from the shoe it was working on. “Nǃapata,” it seemed to greet him. [ʙẽz ilɑlˈɹu] It gestured another equine sitting across the way to him.
This one had the most bizarre appearance of all he had seen before: off-white fur with a line crossing a grid for a hindquarter-mark, with a blue mane and tail that gave him the impression that this one belonged in a seedy urban nightclub in Tacoma or Santa Barbara.
Not that he’d been to one in either city.
What’s your game? he wanted to ask – but he didn’t, as neither of them would understand English, nor did he know enough Ukhǃerr to get his point across. He simply stood back upright inside, watching as the farrier started applying adhesive to the now-perfectly-fitted shoe, before bringing it over to the client and sticking it right onto the hind-right hoof.
It stood up, rolling its hoof around on the ground, before finding the fit satisfactory and bidding the farrier farewell with a silent bow. Adam stepped aside as the client left the place – looking around, he couldn’t find any other equines waiting to get their shoes fitted. It was just him and the farrier now. In another moment, another clipboard found its way into his hands, and wordlessly the farrier pointed to the shoes on the wall.
Crissake, that’s a lot of shoes.
All of them were hung on pegs partially driven into the wall, no higher than his waist. No more than eight shoes were on any given peg, going off of a few random counts – a clear exception to the senary-centric society. So one of these pegs could shoe two equines, he imagined. Or one really heavy one, now that I think about it – but that red one is an obvious exception, not the rule.
He looked down on the sheet, trying to see what categories of shoes he should find. Measurements would be helpful, but he didn’t know what units he would use to measure them out. He looked down the list and saw that Indigenous shoes came in six standard sizes, and were further sorted into two columns. Senary strikes again. In his head, he categorized them for the time being as XXS, XS, S, M, L, and XL. If an XXL size existed, this farrier didn’t carry it, but they were likely forged custom anyway.
Can these equines grow that big anyway? Well, he recalled, they’re probably meant for equines like that white one at the fortress. Might make sense. Maybe.
The columns, however, confused him. Up to down they were sorted by increasing size, which was easy to keep track of, but what quality separated the columns themselves? Adam decided to ask the farrier.
Turning around, he found it tidying up the workspace. He gently tapped it on the shoulder when he was sure it wasn’t handling anything delicately. Good thing, too – it jumped slightly at the sudden pressure. Now that he had its attention, Adam showed it the still-unused sheet on the clipboard, tapping one column, then the next. He made sure to raise an eyebrow as he did so, but he wasn’t sure if the farrier could see the admittedly-subtle facial movement.
It furrowed its brow in apparent frustration and went over to the wall of shoes. At the far left, it grabbed one shoe, and somewhere in the middle, it grabbed another. It presented both shoes to Adam.
He tucked the clipboard under his arm as best as he could, then took the shoes from its hoofgrip. He held them up to his view through the suit’s visor, trying to find anything that could make them stand out from each other. Finally he held them flat, and found it: the shoe taken from the far left was thinner than the shoe taken from the middle – by two-thirds the thickness of the latter, by his reckoning.
He gave them back to the farrier, who then hung them back up. Adam took another look at the sheet, to see if the thickness was drawn out at all. Oh. . . that should’ve been obvious. The thicker shoes had a bolder outline. Then, looking back up from the sheet, he noticed that the shoes’ sizes restarted almost exactly halfway on the wall of pegs – perfect for finding where he should jump to the next column.
So now that that’s out of the way, he surmised, let’s begin. He walked to the thin-XXS shoes, and started counting them up. He could easily count the number of shoes on each peg by eye, without shifting them around with his finger – the farrier had spaced them out far enough that it could easily grab one with its jaws, and he didn’t want to mess that up. Adam wasn’t sure if that was even sanitary in the first place – but then, there’s a forge nearby, isn’t there? It’s basically an autoclave on steroids.
Adam soon noticed that in each group, the pegs were arranged together six across by six high. With up to eight shoes hanging from each, there was a theoretical maximum of two hundred eighty-eight shoes per group – senary twelve hundred. Actually counting them went by faster than he expected – he could quickly tell that the farrier had a tendency to take shoes from the third-from-the-top row of pegs first, then the top two going upwards, then the bottom three going downwards. I guess anything to avoid putting your mouth on the ground. Adam shuffled his suit’s boot – yep, it’s a dirt floor. It did make counting shoes go by a little faster – he simply skipped empty pegs, and the ones with one or two left were quickly counted in the blink of an eye. He eventually came up with two hundred twenty here – senary one thousand four. One pip, two pairs of vertical lines, and four pips later, he had recorded the total for the farrier.
And now to rinse and repeat. Adam went through the process, slowly yet carefully, counting however many shoes were on each peg, totaling, converting, down and down the line, until he reached the column, where he recorded one thousand, one hundred two thin-XL shoes. Definitely not a popular size, he thought. That, or they just restocked.
Which meant he had to start counting the thick shoes. Here, he noticed he had made a false assumption – there weren’t eight shoes per peg here, but merely six. I guess thicker ones mean less room on the peg, he surmised. Whatever, just means a slight adjustment.I can work with this. . . .
The same pattern of peg usage came into play, first the third-from-the-top, then the top two, then the bottom three. Adam quickly got back into the flow of things, marking down senary pips as he counted and calculated them. Between the previous practice and the fewer number of shoes overall, the thick column went by faster than the one before – and before he knew it, he had marked down senary four hundred twenty shoes for the thick-XL size.
·–·–··
“Dr. Weiss?”
Elena slowly set down the gym weights, making sure nothing vital got dented under their mass and force. “Yes?”
“You have results from RPMR-1.” Dr. Konstantinov pointed out the Virgo module. “They concern background radiation. I suspect the new part is working correctly.”
“I’ll see about that, thank you.” Elena took a deep breath, then leapt up and grabbed the ladder to reënter microgravity. Behind her, Dr. Konstantinov took her place in the gym.
The transition from centrifugal gravity to free-floating weightlessness is disorienting for the first few times, especially for the human heart, which is used to pumping blood against gravity. But after a dozen or so passages from one to the other, one’s organs would start to get the message, and start making the transitions for themselves much smoother. Even though Elena had been pulled from cryo last of all the four, she had still long since gotten used to moving through the two environments.
The slight weakness on her heart, for instance, had dissipated by the time she reached the bridge, where her terminal was. . . not blinking, since Dr. Konstantinov had apparently seen the results before her. But then, how else would he know what they were about? “Lueged mer mal. . . .”
Background radiation was about point five millisieverts, barely a hair over the Terrestrial average. Nothing to write home about. Going back to atmospheric levels gathered during the initial descent, she spotted that they did not seem to vary from altitude to altitude, however – and that caught her attention. “Würkli?” she asked herself. “So stabil?”
“Is something the matter?” Commander Darcy turned around.
“Nothing, Commander.” She sighed. “It’s just. . . background radiation is so perfectly consistent on Rhysling, regardless of altitude.”
“What about soil?” he asked. “Vegetation? Surely there has to be some variation.”
“Well. . . .” Admittedly, she didn’t see anything on that subject, but then she hadn’t ordered a second round of soil testing. “Only one way to find out.” She started queuing up the commands on her terminal, placing an emphasis on radiation and radioactive materials readings. “If I did not know better,” she said, “I would say the the probe itself is positioned over a deposit of pitchblende.”
The commander raised his eyebrow. “Any results for radium?”
“Negative, but. . . .” She ran her hands through her hair, letting out a quiet whine. “I have no other way to explain it.”
He pushed himself off the ceiling and to her side. “I realize this might be frustrating,” he said, his voice much lower, “that everything you find is fruitless or doesn’t align with conventional science – but if you ask me, that’s the beauty of it! It means, potentially, you could discover something that would revolutionize science, both here and back on Earth.”
“Or. . . .” She let her hands back down, and looked up at him. “Or it could be that something else on the probe is broken.”
“Not possible.” He snapped his thumb back at his terminal. “We ran the diagnostic – the spectroscope was broken, but it wasn’t anything we couldn’t solve with a bit of good old-fashioned human ingenuity.” He pushed himself off the floor and went back to his terminal. “So, will you take a second look at the sample? It shouldn’t take as long, since the old sample is still aboard – and I don’t think our dear Somerset has done anything to disturb it.”
This gave Elena some pause. “Well, now that you mention it. . . .” She hadn’t transmitted the command yet, so she started making some modifications – just to remove the order to take a second, now unnecessary, sample from the ground. “Let’s begin.”
She hit the return key, and away it went.
·–––·
Adam was back on the road again, for the sixth time today.
No sooner had he walked into the agency that he had a third job to do – inventorying wares at the farm south of town. But wouldn’t they do it themselves? he remembered wondering at the time. Maybe their usual guy’s sick or something. Regardless, they had put out a bulletin for help, and he was assigned to the task.
He had already done two jobs today – one gold coin per job, since the florists and the farrier apparently paid the same wage. Adam was frankly surprised to see they all paid him right after he finished – wouldn’t he get it weekly? He didn’t know if this was the usual fare for temp workers in this realm, or if he was being stiffed as an outsider, though the latter possibility wouldn’t surprise him – isolated communities can be incredibly racist.
Oh please Adam, just be grateful you’re getting paid at all. And that they’re giving you a fair shot in the first place.
As he had thought back at the agency, the walk to the orchard was long and winding – but Adam had started memorizing the features of the town on the way. There were various signs that named the businesses here, meant for residents – but even though he was an outsider, even with his poor command of the language, he could quickly recognize what these places were. That’s a stationery store over there, he thought. And he could also recognize landmarks – statues, particular houses, there was even a fountain on his way. Soon he was crossing another bridge to leave – is this settlement built on an island? – and headed on a well-beaten dirt road to the orchard.
Nyeledirve indeed was waiting for him when he got there – [ˈɑj xõ eˈdem] she called out to him. [seˈxe ᵑʘeˈsɤ ezeɡɯbɯˈʙɯ] She waved a front hoof over to him, beckoning him to follow, or at least come. As Adam started to her, she started walking away – follow it is, then.
As he set foot on the property, he heard what sounded like barking coming from his right. When he turned to look, he saw an obvious canine analogue, fur mottled brown and white, eyes and snout bearing straight ahead at him, tail wagging stiffly over its back, and by all accounts ready to pounce upon him to defend its territory.
[xõ ɣinoˈnɑ] she shouted at it. [ˈɤz]
The creature started to calm down, easing up on the tail-wagging, but did not dare take its eyes off of what it clearly perceived to be an intruder.
Thanks, Nyeledirve. Adam recalled a time in his childhood in Tacoma when some new neighbors moved in next door. They had also brought an aggressive dog with them, and though they kept it contained well in their yard, he still felt uneasy seeing it run straight to the fence and start chomping on the chain links. They were still there when he moved to Santa Barbara, though the dog eventually died a few months into his college stint. Oh well.
There was a great big red barn at the orchard – and that was where Nyeledirve led Adam. This was the first doorway he had found so far where he didn’t have to duck beneath the frame, and what a relief it was for him. Once he was inside, he took a look around the interior space. Along one wall was one great big group of crates, each one labeled with an apple-like fruit icon on the side – the logo for this orchard, he guessed. Some way to identify where these goods came from. On the other side, raw apples, hay bales, and other supplies he couldn’t identify at once. But right in front of him was a large cart, with the large red equine hitched to it. I guess they’re taking some of their wares to town, he concluded. All of those by the wall over there, or just what’s been ordered?
Another sheet of paper found its way into his hands, but this time it lacked a hard backing surface to write against. Really? Nyeledirve at least gave him a pencil to write with. Guess I’ll have to improvise a surface somehow.
First on the list was jars of what looked like fruit preserve. He didn’t see any of those jars in the lot, so he assumed they would be inside. Cautiously, he lifted open one crate, and found the silvery lids peering up at him – twelve, to be exact, senary twenty. He lifted one out, to make sure there weren’t any jars stacked on top of one another. Oh, there are! Another layer of twelve below the first brought the total to twenty-four. He lifted that jar up, but found only wooden shavings beneath to cushion them. So twenty-four to a crate, he surmised. Senary forty.
He packed the jars away and took a step back, to get a bigger picture of the wares. One, two, three, four, five – he managed to count to seven before Nyeledirve stopped him. Huh? She then pointed to the writing on the side of the crate, making sure he could see it. He knew them to be good writing samples, but actually sorting them by the label alone? As it is, that’s a tall order.
In the blink of an eye, desperation bred a solution for the linguist. Adam didn’t need to read the labels – not per se. He just had to match the squiggles to the contents, even if that meant popping open several more crates as he worked. He saw how Nyeledirve and the others reäcted – or didn’t, rather – to how he opened the first one. Surely they won’t mind if I do that some more.
Once he got enough of the writing-pattern encoded in his eyes, arguably to the point where he could see it in his sleep – it helped that he snapped a few photographs as he worked for later investigation – he started matching it to the crates of jars of preserve. It helped that each one weighed about the same as the others, which further hinted to any that might be short a few jars. One crate, two crates, three, four, five. . . eight total.
The last one had a noticeably louder clinking noise of glass jars colliding with one another. Even Nyeledirve was confused, glancing up to meet his gaze, so Adam thought it warranted prying it open to see what was going on. Well, well, well. . . this crate’s short one jar.
Nyeledirve turned towards the door and shouted [xõ ɲeleɟɯˈɡeːːː]
With a great amount of reluctance, a juvenile started creeping around the corner of the doorway and into the barn. He noted this one had yellow fur, with a red mane and tail that reminded him of leaves of lettuce, and a large pink bow in its mane. Apparently too, this one held back a jar, for purposes he couldn’t discern. But before it could return the jar to the crate, naturally it spotted Adam and hesitated, seemingly unsure what this bipedal monster would do to it.
Nyeledirve firmly pointed a hoof at the now-opened crate. Even with her fear and guilt trying to override her intent, the juvenile brought the jar over to him. Adam knelt down and picked it up, setting it down in the empty space where it should have been. He closed the crate up, looking back up just in time to watch the yellow one scamper out of the barn.
Right then, now that that’s out of the way. . . . The total, twenty-four jars per crate times eight crates, was one hundred ninety-two jars. A moment of base conversion later, Adam put down five pips, then two, then two vertical lines.
That was just one item. Next, there were the number of fruits themselves. These were sorted into different colors – red, green, and. . . white? He checked the burlap sacks, and saw that each one bore a similar identifying scheme: red, green, and a certain shade of grey. It must be one of those colors I can’t see, but they can. Delightful.
But it got worse. When he opened up the first red-fruit sack and counted the contents, he found that the total, just for this one, was fifty-three, senary one hundred twenty-five – a prime number. What logic is this? he pondered. Or maybe there’s none at all – they just sort them out by color, and don’t care at all how many go into a sack, so long as it can still seal up.
All he could do was count them up individually, one sack at a time. For the time being, against his usual practice, he wrote down 53 beside the red apples on the sheet, then started counting up the second sack of red fruits. Just as he thought, he eventually came up with forty-seven fruits – another prime number. Damn! He jotted down 47, and counted up the third one, slowly yet surely.
Ten minutes later, he totaled up two hundred and fifteen apples – one short of senary one thousand. Five pips, five more, then another five – and Adam was grateful that this pencil had an eraser attached to the other end, which let him hide the evidence that he cheated in his work.
Nyeledirve audibly sighed. Am I taking too long? Well, excuse me if you don’t keep track of the number of apples per bag! But he had no room to complain – not when they’d been so gracious in letting him search through them to get the numbers right. Now that I think about it, this specifically may have been what they called me in for.
But that was just one of the three colors; Adam still had the other two to count up. Here we go again, he thought as he opened up the first sack of the green fruits. Fifteen minutes later, he counted up two hundred and three of these – senary five hundred thirty-five.
As he worked on counting the undefined-colored ones, he heard Nyeledirve load up the sacks onto the cart. He couldn’t look up, of course – not when he ran the risk of losing count and having to start over. Thankfully there weren’t very many of this color – one hundred fifty-three, senary four hundred thirteen.
Adam sealed the last sack back up, and handed it to Nyeledirve. Right as she loaded it onto the cart, he also handed her the now-finished inventory sheet. She said [eˈdem ᵑǁuɹuᵑǂˈɹu], folded it up, and slipped it inside one of the crates of preserve. The red equine took it as the cue to leave, haul in tow.
As he watched it leave, he felt a nudging on his left hip. Turning, he saw Nyeledirve had another gold coin for him. Ah right, thanks. He popped open the same pouch and slipped that inside with the other two. One per job. . . not a bad start. But still, he didn’t know exactly how much they were worth. More than nothing, that much I can assume. With the matter settled, he too started to set down the road, back to the agency.
He turned to wave goodbye to her – and she waved back, with great enthusiasm. As he was walking, he couldn’t help but notice that the sun was just starting to descend over the horizon. Guess that’s the end of my working day, he thought. Good time as any to get out of my suit, change the scrubber, get some dinner, and so forth. But I’d better go check with my boss first thing.
·––·–
“Well well, that is very interesting. . . .”
Elena was pouring over the latest soil analysis reports from RPMR-1. Curiously, going against her earlier expectations, there wasn’t any pitchblende, radium, uranium, or any other radioactive substance in the soil.
“Is that so?” Commander Darcy looked over her shoulder. “What did you find?”
“I tested the same sample, like you suggested,” she replied. “Nothing stands out to me – no radium, no uranium, nothing of the sort. Is the part put in correctly?”
“I’ll have Somerset check, hold on,” he said. “In the meantime, dump that sample and grab a new one. I don’t remember much from secondary school chemistry, but I think shorter half-lives means the sample won’t be as good.” He floated himself back to his radio, grabbing it as he arrived. “Somerset, this is Zulu-Alfa. Dr. Weiss reports a lack of radioactive material in the soil, and suspects the new spectroscope may be at fault. Don’t consider this an emergency, as we’ll run another sample first – but just be on the lookout for more work. Zulu-Alfa out.”
Meanwhile, Elena started transmitting orders to the probe to dump the old sample and obtain a fresh one, just in case the commander was indeed correct. Somerset could wait – and wait a while, to boot.
·–·––
Adam was a few score meters away from docking when he received the call from Commander Darcy. Well, if he says it’s not an emergency. . . I won’t be bothered to check it out yet. He climbed up the ladder to the scaffolding, though he did note he weighed just a bit heavier this time – from all the pay he was carrying in his pouch.
As he had noticed while working, all of these coins were minted in gold – although he could have sworn he’d seen silver as well, though he had never actually received any of those – but from no other material he’d seen. At least, he thought at first, that’s just the cladding, with a cheaper material inside – but then he watched another temp worker bend a gold coin in its teeth, and he realized these were pure, solid gold and silver. He couldn’t help but wonder just how much these would be worth back on Earth. If he had to guess, however, here each of those silver coins were worth some fraction of six compared to a gold coin. One-sixth made the most sense, but that would mean having to carry more silver coins than gold. Do they not mind it as much? he pondered. Or is fractional pricing not as common?
For now though, he decided to take another look. He pulled one out of his pouch and set it in the sterile locker. He left the others inside the pouch – even though theft was possible, he hadn’t noticed very much traffic around here. He closed the locker behind it, hit the switch, and off it went, making sure the coin was safe to handle when he got back inside. Speaking of – he then turned around and plugged himself into the suitport, and hit the switch to sterilize that way as well. Two minutes, the monitor read out. . . and eighteen percent scrubber capacity remaining. I’d say that’s a close call – or a hard day’s work. Either way. . . . He crossed his arms in boredom and waited – and hoped that there wouldn’t be any more trouble that day. He had enough as it were.
Especially considering that the workday didn’t end until the sun was well on its way down the horizon, the sky lit up like a great red-and-orange bonfire to burn away the troubles of the day. He sighed – he couldn’t wait until he was out of this infernal suit to stretch out his back and his limbs. Being inside a hot, metal suit for. . . what was it, eight hours? – was not doing him any favors.
Another icon showed up on the readout – a water drop with a slash through it, indicating that his suit was starting to run low on water. Again. Thankfully Adam had plenty to spare, and refilling was easy – just hook it up to the water reclaimer nearby, and it would do the work.
He uncrossed his arms just in time for the timer to hit :00 – and for the back hatch to swing open, and for him to feel the cool rush of air from inside TPRU-1. He shimmied his arms out of the Strauss’s arms, grabbed the bar, and pulled the rest of himself out of his suit. Hungry, thirsty, drenched in sweat, and possibly needing other things – these he would have to take care of before examining anything new he’d found on Rhysling.
And yet. . . something compelled him to check the sterile locker first. Perhaps it was his unsatisfied curiosity, his itch he had to scratch right that instant, and not after taking care of everything else, or something else entirely. . . . He hinged the sterile locker open, and gingerly removed the coin. In his naked fingertips, it felt like it had a very smooth polish, with sharply-indented engravings on the obverse and reverse. Not to mention, it was indeed rather heavy – he could feel its weight as he brought it over to the desk, where he laid it out obverse-side up. At least, I think that’s the obverse.
His mind went back to the other gold coins – which let him recall that each of them appeared to be the same worth, even with different designs on the obverse – and each of them had the same reverse design. The gold coins were worth one unit of something, and the silver coins were worth one unit of something else – all things he figured out before stepping back inside the lander. He then slid the coin into the far edge of the desk, saving it for later. He contemplated re-sterilizing it to take back outside, but he wasn’t sure if he was going to need to spend it in the foreseeable future. Not to mention I have other coins outside that I could spend if I need to, he thought. What’s one less out of circulation?
Next, getting back up on his feet, he started fishing for some food to rehydrate in the meantime. Goulash again? Eh, can’t go wrong – those guys sure can make them spicy. By now he had the instructions memorized, so he grabbed the red hydration gun and went to business. The block of meat stew started absorbing it – meanwhile, Adam started stripping off his spacesuit garments, then retrieved the no-rinse soaps from under his bunk. He had no idea how much he would need, but he hoped it wouldn’t run out before he would be able to complete his mission.
He had an epiphany. Looking up, he saw the sun setting over the horizon through the window. Crissake, I left the window shutter open. He got up and started walking over to shut it, right when Antir teleported right in front of it.
Shit! Reflexively, his hands swiftly moved in front of his unmentionables, dropping the soap but still concealing himself from her view. He quickly yet carefully trotted over to the window, positioning himself so that he was still somewhat out of view – right when she put her hoof up against the glass. He paused – then hastily copied her movement, before twisting the knob to shut the shutter, thus restoring his privacy and modesty. I hope she didn’t see too much. . . .
Oh who are you kidding Adam, she’d have to see your anatomy at some point. It’s either through the glass. . . . The next thought sent a shiver down his spine, which made his hands shake in his shampooed hair. . . . or under the knife. Crissake, I don’t want to die!
Relax Adam, don’t get yourself all worked up. Just wash up, get some food in you, and look over your notes. You should have learned a few new words over the course of the day. . . .