Pennterra

by Judith Moffett

Genres: Science Fiction; Dystopian

Synopsis

Pennterra is a beautiful and fertile planet and humanity's last hope for survival. But Pennterra is already inhabited. After warning other colony ships to stay away, the small advance colony of Quakers has adapted to life on Pennterra. Heeding the empathic warnings of the native hrossa, they have settled in a single valley, sharply limited their population, and continued to use no heavy machinery in their building and farming. But surviving under these conditions has left the Quakers little time to learn more about their native neighbors. Catastrophe or peace-Tanka Wakan, the omnipotent master spirit of Pennterra, will decide.

Release date: September 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

WHEN the stock alarm clanged, George Quinlan was on his knees in the hot sun, weeding sweet corn with a short-handled hoe. A very small part of his attention sufficed to direct the blade—a bite-shaped piece cut from a tractor panel—deftly round and between the bases of the stately plants and grub out whatever seedling invaders had sprouted in the weeks since the previous weeding. The rest of his mind was free to go on fretting about his forthcoming meeting with the officers of the Down Plus Six, the colony ship whose arrival would soon be the second most eventful occurrence in the six-year history of the settlement the Quakers had named Swarthmore.

George frowned and sighed unhappily as he weeded. He was forty-five years old, a superb geologist, a widower, a father, and a settlement leader, with a minor back malady that limited his field work assignments to hydroponics, aquaculture, light stock duty, and row crops—reaching across the wide raised vegetable beds put a lot of stress on a lower back. To his own surprise he had taken to peasant-style farming wholeheartedly and at once, and would ordinarily have “walked” along the rows on his knee pads entirely absorbed, keeping his back nice and straight, neatly extracting the slow-growing (but madly greedy) blue-green native “weeds” from the soil and taking a puzzling but profound satisfaction in performing this simple task well. Today his consciousness would not stay submerged in the work; he minded badly that this should be so.

When the triangle began to shout its pattern of five short whangs (for “stock alarm”) followed by two long ones (for “sheep”) he rose stiffly, groaning a little. All eleven other members of his work squad popped up too between the rows of corn, dropping hoes, shucking gloves, unstrapping knee pads, pelting off at the best speed they could muster through the settlement toward the sheep pastures on the other side of the river they called the Delaware, a quarter of a mile away. Jogging behind the field of sprinters, George could see other runners converging on the pastures from several directions. None carried any kind of weapon, for no native predator could eat a sheep with profit, and in six years none had ever killed one, or even so much as chased one, out of devilment—a trait the native wildlife seemed remarkably to lack. Almost certainly the devilment would turn out to be of the flock’s own making: they’d have broken out and strayed, fallen into the river, hung themselves up in a snaggle of rotten willow fence—

“—in the river meadows!” someone shouted hoarsely as the runners pounded across the bridge, and they rushed in a pack around the animal enclosures without slowing down, angling upstream toward a broad handsome strip of alfalfa bordering the river, into which George could now see flattened signs of the sheep’s untidy progress. Puffing hard—he was a swimmer, not a runner—he scrambled down the bank and splashed through the little pasture brook, ignoring the stepping stones farther along, then fell belatedly into position in a wing of beaters yelling and clapping as they edged through the strip and spread out along the riverbank. The idea, obviously, was to chase the sheep back out the way they’d come without damaging the precious hay themselves, and George whooped and yelled with the others. No carnivores but Quakers had been brought to Pennterra; the present occasion was typical of a good many that had caused them all to regret not having made an exception of some shelties to control the sheep.

These now blundered witlessly about in the tall alfalfa, baaing and trampling their winter fodder like the idiots they were. Finally, giving up, the beaters entered the meadow from the river in a straight line. The sheep, giving up as well, plunged out the other side into the lane, to be smartly seized and hauled back to their proper pasture by an assortment of muscular young people, and moments later, with neither discussion nor the giving of a single order, the incident was over.

George stood with the other drivers afterwards, laughing and swabbing his forehead with a rag, and watched the two dozen ewes and large late-summer lambs be manhandled away: black-faced Suffolks, long-fleeced Herdwicks—not many of those left—and the all-white Dorsets, which the breeders had been concentrating on for the past year or so, since these had proved best adapted to conditions in the valley. George was fonder, himself, of the Herdwicks, a surefooted English mountain breed able to withstand harsh weather and thrive on rough forage—traits superfluous on Pennterra, where nothing growing in the maroon-colored mountains northwest of the settlement, from whence the Delaware descended, could nourish a sheep, nor so much as a cockroach, brought from Earth. The Dorsets made excellent mothers, superior wool, and abundant mutton; for these reasons they also made better sense as homestead stock to be kept on pasture.

Soon the Herdwicks might be phased out altogether—though a decision to allow any Earth-born species to become extinct on Pennterra must always be emotion-fraught and reluctantly taken. Almost certainly, there would never again be Herdwicks here when these were gone.

Gradually the groups began to break up and straggle back to whatever they’d been doing when the alarm stuck. “Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,” quoted handsome Andrew Bell cheerfully, pausing to throw one bare sweaty arm around his wife, Norah, in passing. “The sheep’s in the meadow, the cow’s in the corn.”

“Watch out who you’re calling a cow,” said Norah; but she kissed Andrew—a gingerly kiss, for his whole face was sweat-soaked—before trudging back toward the cornfield with George, while Andrew went off with a few others to find and fix the break in the fence. “Come fall,” said Norah grimly, “that hurdle fencing has got to be replaced. Not repaired, replaced—sooner if possible, if anybody has a minute to spare before harvest. Which I doubt,” she said, “but if the goats get into the orchard again we’ll be in a bad way. That one little midnight raid of theirs last spring is probably going to mean rationed apples and no pears for adults this winter as it is. God, I wish I knew whether the Sixers’re bringing us some trees!”

A third corn-chopper, overhearing this, fell into step on the other side of George. “If they haven’t, won’t we pretty much be forced to ask KliUrrh about fencing with mountain hardwood now, George? I know you’re trying to tread carefully there, but it’s a pure waste of time to put this stuff up,” waving vaguely at the treelike shapes bent out over the river, “and nobody wants to dip into the ship’s stores again for fencing. That’ll go for the Down Plus Six as much as the Woolman, wouldn’t you think? We’d buy a little time that way, but we’re going to be mending fences for—well, effectively forever.” The speaker had a hesitant, flat, rather didactic way of speaking and hair as red as a brick.

When George started to reply, Norah butted in tensely: “Oh, Bob, how can KliUrrh possibly say no? What are we supposed to do, tether every single sheep and goat to a mesh lead? And a stone fence would have to be how tall to keep a billy goat and a doe in season away from each other? He’ll have to let us use hardwood, for a while anyway.”

“We could make cement and forms from local stuff and stuff we brought,” said the redhead, Bob Wellwood, “and a stone wall’s zero maintenance; in the long run stone’s our best bet. But a fence like that would take a couple of years to build; we still need something for the short run. And I don’t think dry stone’s worth the trouble, not for us—nobody here’s got the know-how, and it takes a lot of skill to do right. We’ll always need fences,” he repeated in his flat loud voice. “KliUrrh knows that. I think you ought to bring it up now, George—ask him to tide us over till we have time to build in stone.” Then, finally, Bob and Norah both stopped talking and looked expectantly at George, who walked a few paces further, head down, to be sure they were really done before speaking.

“We’ve been over all this before,” he said finally, glancing sideways at Bob. “Nothing’s changed. There’d be no objection at all to our using the deadfall from the mountain hardwoods however we liked, if there were any flokh trees or whatever growing below the falls, but the elders insist they don’t want us wandering out of bounds for any reason, and they mean it—they really do mean it. KliUrrh himself might take a more flexible line, but he couldn’t decide something like that on his own. There’s just no point in asking, Bob. Maybe when our credibility’s better.”

“In about fifty years,” said Bob, not bitterly; he was a dogged but pretty reasonable young man. “But still, would it hurt to ask? I know you know KliUrrh better than any of us, but mightn’t you be guessing wrong on this one?”

“Oh, it wouldn’t hurt, exactly, but it would reinforce his impression of us as dangerously childish characters, and I’d just as soon not. If we’d known when we chose this site that we’d be here forevermore, we’d have looked more carefully and picked someplace with hardwood and a swamp, a lot closer to the coast. But we didn’t and there it is.” The bridge, planks laid across cask pontoons, bobbed under them as they padded back across the river. From the small vantage of its height George looked about him at the sun-saturated landscape, at the cultivated fields on either side of the glancing stream, the blue-green slopes of the valley beyond. “We didn’t choose so badly, at that. Don’t you ever forget what Earth was like, you two. I don’t expect the Sixers have.” He scowled suddenly, a scowl that looked peculiar on a face so pleasant. “There’s nobody back home who wouldn’t be glad to trade places with us. And even if we have to make do with hurdles for now—”

“You’re going to say, ‘Way will open,’” interrupted Norah, oblivious to the scowl and agitation evident in George’s little outburst; Bob, though, was now looking at him oddly as Norah went on: “Way will open, way will open—how long did it take you to acquire the knack of looking ahead and planning without worrying? God!” Under the tone of complaint she sounded a little frantic. “Andrew’s just as bad—just as good, I ought to say, but it’s awful being so comparatively feeble! I’ll get to stewing about, oh, what if the corn’s wiped out by hail some summer—thinking about the kids, you know, and how narrow our margin is, how easily the odds could shift against us—lucky or not, George, and I know we are—I really do know it!—this is still a damn hard, uncertain life we’re living. Anyway, Andrew will just say, very patiently, ‘Well, we’re here, which ought to be impossible, so we have to assume we’re meant to survive here; if we’re meant to, we will; if not, we won’t, and it’s as much as I can do to concentrate on every day as it comes along—the rest is up to Providence.’ Now, I’m as clear about all that as—well, as you are yourself, George, but Andrew feels it the way you do. He’s honestly content to work and wait upon the Lord. Me, I have to keep yanking myself up short. I wish I knew how you chaps do it. I’d give anything to be that free of plain old common-or-garden fretting about the future. It’s not even noble fretting, about the future of the race, not anymore—just the future of the Bell family and the settlement, and quite a bit lately about how the Sixers are going to fit in. I don’t deserve to be here, I suppose.” She looked glum, and also resentful. “I admire the hell out of you and Andrew, and I envy you too, but I can’t be like you to save my life.”

“As a matter of fact, I wasn’t going to say one word about way opening,” said George, rather nettled. Norah’s nervous neediness—because he had no help to offer—wore upon his own nerves; and it mortified him to be viewed as a figure of heroic serenity. “I was about to say that we might try growing hedges of native brush that the stock wouldn’t even want to nibble. And that since the pasture windmills should be operational by the end of the year, we can easily spare enough power and parts to electrify the fences for a while.” He took in the startled faces on either side and shook his head. “You overestimate me—yes you do, Norah. This past half-hour of sheep-doggery is the first half-hour since we raised the Down Plus Six that I haven’t spent fretting about how to cope with what’s coming when the Sixers land.”

They had stopped walking; the other two stared in consternation at imperturbable George. “It’ll be different once they’re down and we’re talking, but the anticipation of conflict gives me the galloping golliwickers. Always did. I lose sleep, fight my field work, growl at Danny, can’t stay centered—Norah, you nitwit, I’m not one bit different from you! Andrew is the real thing if you like. Not me. Thank God they’ll be landing tomorrow; another week of suspense and my self-esteem would be damaged beyond repair.” He swept an arm around each of his companions, propelling them back into motion. “Just for the record, though, Andrew’s perfectly right. Why should we be here, if not to mend our fences somehow, and act as a buffer between the Sixers and the hrossa? And survive? The Mormons had it worse, didn’t they? And lived to populate a desert and a dozen space colonies? What would George Fox and Margaret Fell think of all this fussing and bitching, hmm? Not much!”

“Oh God, George,” began Norah, stricken, but Bob broke in firmly: “We’re going to have some silence. Now. Yes, right now.” He braked the three of them to another halt and passed his free arm around Norah, closing the circle.

The rest of their work squad, filing back between the shoulder-high rows of corn, scarcely gave a passing glance to the little huddle; in general they understood perfectly what they were seeing, a usual sight about the settlement from its inception. An unknowing observer—had there been one such within millions of miles or light-years of that spot—would have seen what appeared to be three barefoot but particularly clean, attractive peasants dressed in short, loose, light-colored tunics tied at the waist with rope. Standing, they held one another toward a common center—eyes closed, heads lowered, faces graced with similar expressions of listening and of calm. Of the two men, both Caucasians, one was tall and lean, with beautiful gray-white hair; the other, thirtyish, was of middling height and build, his hair and short thick beard two violent shades of red; the third person was a young Asian woman, small and very pretty. They stood like that for nearly a quarter of an hour.

They looked, and labored, like peasants. But they were Quakers, starfarers, uniting in impromptu meeting for worship; and they and their fellow settlers, 312 souls in all, were the only human beings in all the world.

For one more day.

“How come I never thought of hedges?” Bob asked as they finally separated, and George replied in his old, nice voice: “Because you’re a builder, I expect,” and smiled. Norah gave him a quick apologetic hug before slipping between the rows.

AT the bottom of the lake the hross KliUrrh, an early elder, unlatched a lattice gate and began inviting several of the sluggish eel-shaped beings inside to swim from the cage into his basket. His four hindmost limbs swirled the water, holding his large, buoyant body in position; two stubby lower forelimbs held the basket open like a lopsided clamshell, while the longer two gently herded in the swillets that, cleaned and sectioned, would become the main course of his family’s evening meal. The image of bowls of hollowed stone filled with bits of swillet rose in KliUrrh’s mind and communicated itself to the little creatures, along with his feelings of anticipation and thankfulness, and they came willingly enough. He released the few that had yet to complete their lives by replication—Not this time, cousin!—judged he had taken enough, shooed back the others, and closed the basket’s lid and the holding pen’s hatch. Feed and content yourselves till I come again. His body turned and glided at once toward the surface, lifted by the kind clear water, all his arms clasping the basket full of stirring consciousness to his thorax.

He came up into a soft, dull afternoon, a pale-gray sky above the pewter-gray water. Soothing the uneasy swillets, which never themselves swam so near the sunlight, he paddled toward a wide beach of blue-gray sand. Beyond, a cluster of dwellings rose humpily. Swimming thus, polar-bear fashion, he looked rather like a smallish, neckless sea monster; as he walked up out of the water on his four strong legs, the impression was rather that of an outsize frog that did not leap, a seal that did not waddle, but with twice too many limbs to be much like either. There was something of the centaur about him, and something of the dinosaur.

Before his domed house he found his family occupied quietly with domestic business, their personalities forming a composite aura like an odor of which he was scarcely conscious, yet that set his own lodge apart from every other in his village. KliUrrh set down the basket, now leaking a few droplets through its tight weave, with a ritual emotional “gesture” meaning roughly, “These are the kind ones who give up their lives to ours.” Aloud he said (in effect)—the supple blowholes in his brow region forming the sound—“I’ll see if I can grub up a few last hiding nuts to throw in with them, unless I’m needed for some other task.”

No one looked up or replied, but the household aura became tinged pleasurably with encouragement and gratitude, and he turned back toward the water, first taking a small net, and a digging scoop carved from a piece of preserved wood, from hooks on a rack inside the door.

Hiding “nuts,” a dietary staple of KliUrrh’s people, grew plentifully in marshy places at that latitude on that world. The single blue-green frond, like a fan spread flat on the oozy ground, produced a husked starchy fruit on a stalk projecting from the underside of the frond. As the fruit matured, its own weight tended to bury it in the soft mud below, where it then anchored itself by putting out a mass of hairlike structures that sponged up nutrients from the semiliquid soil. The ripe nut was large, very nutritious, and strongly flavored, and kept well in underground pits or caves through the cold season. Raw, it was an ideal trail food; dried, pounded to flour, and mixed with other foods, it gave substance and piquancy to the dish.

KliUrrh reentered the lake, the net and scoop gripped in his lower arms. His sense of the village dwindled, blocked by the static interference formed of the lake’s many small lives, of its muds and sands and the mass of water itself, much as the sound of wind and waves drowns out the noise of picnickers talking and singing on a beach for those in a sailboat headed out from shore. Sound is a feeble metaphor for this extra sense of KliUrrh’s, not least because his people were equipped with excellent organs of hearing. Their awareness of the living world about and below them, and of one another, was literally the sixth of their senses and the most highly valued—a sensitivity they shared to varying degrees with all the life-forms on their world, plant life as well as animal.

For this reason KliUrrh’s kind were generally without meaningful postures or physical gestures, or anything corresponding to facial expression, as the lower forms generally lacked behaviors corresponding to rites of courtship or appeasement. Emotion being manifested not outwardly and symbolically but directly and empathically, such expressiveness had served no evolutionary function. Thus a hatchling gipgip made no signal to stimulate feeding behavior in its parent; thus had KliUrrh omitted to wave goodbye to his family.

In a while the hross’s broad feet touched bottom. Emerging, he began to squelch through bogland, spiracles contracted against the gases released from decomposing vegetation by his passage. He was semiaware as he progressed of the needle-points of life that pierced his thick smooth hide and borrowed a little blood, but his senses were held on alert for the sensation of dumb bulbousness or the sight of a flat blue-green fan, either of which would signal the belated presence of hiding nuts. He saw plenty of withered fronds blackening into the ooze, but their nuts had been taken.

KliUrrh had nearly accepted failure when finally, pushing through a clump of large-celled, water-filled stalks without breaking or bruising them and climbing a fallen trunk in the slow process of being preserved by chemicals in the ground water, he spotted not one but three fans spread on the ground; at the same instant he felt the triple throb that told him all three nuts were both present and infertile. He stood still in the muck and experienced his gratitude in the consciousness of TuwukhKawan, for the unseasonal bounty; then he slopped forward, deftly twisted and thrust the scoop in with one long arm, spread the net between his two short ones, snapped the stalks, and dropped the dark, muddy, hairy lumps in, one after another, with his fourth hand. The hands on his longer arms had two stubby opposable pairs of single-jointed digits and were fairly dexterous; the second pair were useful for holding, but their “hands” were little more than flat, padded paws.

Now they clasped the bulging net and the scoop again while KliUrrh’s upper arms parted the canes and his four legs drove him forward, leaving tracks that the water rapidly filled. First a swim to cleanse you, then you bless us. It was late for fresh nuts. These heavy three would be tough but very sweet. They would delight SwikhKarrh, and delighting SwikhKarrh was a foremost pleasure of KliUrrh’s existence.

Now that, reflected KliUrrh, that for example, was a feeling the People and the Quakers could experience in common. KliUrrh had been present, and had picked up George Quinlan’s buoyant pleasure in his own child’s pride and delight, when Danny had at last become a strong enough swimmer to make the long reach clear across the lake on his own. Among many differences, several deep and truly disturbing, it was good to feel where his own kind and the aliens most resembled one another.

And in this too—this rejoicing in their alikeness, the excitement about their differences that had nothing to do with fear—he and George Quinlan were kindred spirits; for unlike certain others among both their peoples, neither of these two had any inclination to be wary of the other.

Though thoroughly conscious of the mischief they might make out of quarantine, and genuinely grieved at the death of the little valley the Quakers called Delaware, KliUrrh could not help his gladness about the coming of the humans. He would not have missed knowing George, or Danny or Katy, for the world. In a long life full of pleasures, there was hardly anything he would have traded for the fascinating taking-in of them.

DANNY had tried to wait up for his father, but the meeting ran late and he had had an exciting couple of days. When George finally came in with Billy Purvis they found him asleep in his dhoti on the sheepskin patchwork that covered half the metal floor of the sitting room; but he got right up, groggily, and splashed water from a plastic bucket onto his face and rubbed it hard with a towel, asking even before he was fully awake, “How’d it go? What happened? What’d they say?”

“I taped the whole thing for the archives,” said Billy. “Play it if you like, but there’s a couple of hours’ worth here, and I want to file it in the morning.”

He flipped the little disc to Danny, who teetered between wanting to know what everyone had said in the meeting and wanting to know what George and Billy were going to say in the postmortem.

“It went about like we thought,” said George. He had lost the air of fretful unease that had clung about him for weeks, but looked exhausted. He pulled his blue dress tunic over his head and dropped onto some taut cushions arranged on the floor and against the wall, automatically stuffing a little pillow behind the small of his back. “They’re bewildered and disappointed, and pretty angry. It looks like they’ll draw the line at mass murder, thank God, but they don’t much see why they shouldn’t proceed according to the original plan and just pay no attention to what the hrossa want. They’ve only known for a couple of months what Pennterra’s like, remember, after years of suspense, so it’s just not possible yet for them to take us seriously when we say they have to tell the UN not to send any more ships.” He yawned and stretched his arms over his head. “All in all, about what we figured for Round One.”

“Also,” Billy put in, “they can’t for the life of ’em figure out why we went along with the restrictions.” There was a padded metal chair with arms, bolted to the floor, and he settled into it, crossing his long legs straight out in front of him. “Most of them are struggling to be courteous and reserve judgment, but they’re not Quakers, Danny, and at this point what we’ve done here makes sense to them only as a piece of pure Quaker foolishness.” He made a rueful face at George. “It’s been such a long while since I sat through a meeting with non-Quakers, I’d kind of forgot what it’s like. Mm-mmm. This isn’t going to be easy.”

“Did you ever expect it to be? I didn’t,” said George. “Take that hot thing off before you melt, Billy. I’m going down cellar and draw us some cider.”

Danny had never sat through a meeting with non-Quakers; before today he had never laid eyes on a non-Quaker in his whole life, that he could remember (though in fact, in infancy, he had). There were a lot of things he was dying to know; but he could read in the plain signs of weariness and gloom how poor was the outlook for a lively rehash of the evening’s events between these two, and was grateful that he would not have to be bratty and pump them anyway. “I’ll get it, Dad,” he said. “You stay there. And then I guess I’ll play the tape.”

The way the two men drank, reflectively, respectfully, as if rehearsing the amazing facts behind the plastic mugs of brown brew they held in hands coarsened by grubbing in dirt—planting the specially selected seeds, watering, grafting, greenhousing, and pruning the little trees, transplanting them into the carefully conditioned soil of the orchard, years of anxious training, more pruning, propping, and finally the labor of harvest and the pressing—spoke volumes about their situation. So did the fact that Danny brought up no third mug for himself and would accept only one good-sized swig out of his father’s. He went into the other room, taking the tape disc. “I’ll keep the volume down,” he promised as George was opening his mouth to tell him to. They had a player in the flat but no earpiece, and the radio station was too far to go to borrow one this night.

Alone in the sitting room, Billy and George sipped at the cider slowly for some moments without speaking, for in their different ways both were depressed. Voices, gently muffled, soon floated through the heavy curtain hung in the doorway and filled the mutual silence. It was no trick to discern the note of politely restrained incredulity that overtook one side of the discussion almost at once, and after listening for a few minutes Billy shook his head. “I tell you what, ol’ George. This stuff upsets me worse than I expected, it brings it all back. I listen to those arguments, and I can remember arguing the very same points myself six years back. We’ve insulated ourselves in practical problems, we gave up the mission such a long time ago and just got on with learning how to farm, but remember how fired up we were at first to make this planet into the Brave New World? And how infuriating—how goddamn maddening it was to be balked, when we finally really had to believe we just were not going to be sold or given any more land at all, not any, not ever?”

“I remember all right.” Tiredness settled over George, a web of lead.

“And then remember how we argued and schemed, and how hard we resisted being led to submit?” Billy shifted unhappily in the stiff chair. “I mean to tell you, giving up that dream in full view of achieving it was the hardest thing, bar none, I’ll ever do in my life. It’s the hardest thing any of us will ever do—harder’n deciding to come in the first place! If you ask me, we’re going to need to meet a lot more than usual if we’re going to keep clear about ourselves and our decisions, as long as this tussling with the Sixers goes on. Maybe every day.”

“Maybe more than that.” From the bedroom George could now hear his own smudged voice echoing the sense of his friend’s lament: “… and though most of us here have come to admire and respect the hrossa very much, please believe that our disappointment was as crushing in its time as yours is now. Every one of us volunteered for this mission in the same hope and desire that led every one of you to volunteer, and we were as reluctant to give it up as you could possibly be. That we did give it up, despite our desire and our commitment, means simply that to us there finally appeared to be no other moral choice.”

Unexpectedly, to hear himself say the