The good news is: we’ve isolated the biological/mineral combination that makes the ocean water joy-juice.
The bad news is: It’s because Lei found some standing water in isolated rock bowls that made the same compound.
The really bad news: Standing water is as dangerous here as it is anywhere, plus the dangers of the joy-juice.
The tolerably decent news: Lei’s knee-highs make pretty good assistant nursemaids. They aren’t letting him leave bed until he’s healthy again.
Lei has something new to distract him from the joy water (and how nigh-impossible it is to get to the sea on foot from where we are, now); he has been domesticating the knee-highs – and teaching them tricks.
They are relatively friendly, if you keep them away from wires; we had discussed using the old trick of putting a cyanide-like compound on them, but both Lei and our three pregnant mothers complained.
So we’re using some spare plascrete armoring on wires & trying to keep them out of our beds.
But at least Lei isn’t trying to drown himself in joy water anymore?
We landed on the lowest part of the main landmass we could manage. From there, we have been sending out instruments and probes.
The sea has a smell to it, almost like a cocktail at the wrong sort of party. But it is lovely, crystal and blue.
What arable land there is is crowded with plant life – meadows and little forests running in stripes from the mountains almost to the sea, small animals skittering everywhere. Nothing touches the sea, not even the amphibian-like creatures.
We’ve set up camp beyond the high water mark, just in case. Continue reading
The first planet we encountered in Subsection 11 nearly took our breaths away, all of us in the cockpit. The mountains! This planet had a mountain ridge that ran from pole to pole, intersected by narrow waterways several times. From the mountains land seemed to trickle down towards the ocean like a skirt trailing in the water, and little islands rose up like baubles from the navy-blue seas.
We sent Team 3 to see what they could.
We were not expecting a planet in this area, as all instruments showed it full of nothing bigger than asteroids. Instead we found a wild, erratic solar system.
Most notable to us was an M-class planet with a flat elliptical orbit that seemed to house three vastly different civilizations. The planet was mostly water, and much of that occupied with floating and submerged structures, but on two small land masses, huge edifices filled the land.