Complete Education

2042 July 31 23:37 UT
Test Year 15, Day 85, 18:00 CST (~20:00 local)
Straits of Catalina, South-East Coast of California

The proa was the “Surf” and it was crewed by either ‘surfers’ or ‘serfs’ or ‘research project students’ depending on who was asked. It was smaller but more flexible than the Eagle and the Enterprise and the three other ships currently on the California-Massachusetts loop. Surf was also different from its predecessors in that it was made almost entirely of Tau-made materials. The hulls were wood from thorn trees, the sails and kite woven from the products of the chemical engineers, the solar panels and radio built from parts made at MIT and shipped over. Only three XO3s – the only laptops that had worked without breaking since landing – had been brought directly from Earth.

A research project course had been the endpoint of Techer general education since just over a year ago, when Amy Guo had gone over to Massachusetts for a month-long medical practicum with Townsend and the two others close to her in school. The courses that followed this success were partially designed by the highest level students themselves, albeit with a lot of oversight, and were vaguely at the level of the summer undergraduate research fellowships that had been offered to students on Earth starting after frosh year. The joke in the ship’s name was universally groaned at.

For this course, Mina was commanding the crew of eight who had sailed far south along the California coast from campus. She was the only adult on board. The kids were some of the most intellectually gifted and competitive of their generation and ranged in age from Sarah, just past thirteen Earth years, to Z and Karen, who’d be twelve by the time the ship got home. The bulk of kids their age would be taking the research course in three or four years.

Each of the adolescents had their own particular interests and a project they had chosen for this voyage, which intersected with each other. But they also had an overarching group assignment, which was not directly connected to the cruise but was to be finished by the end of it. The method, used by Townsend to great effect as a focusing tool, had been formulated by a certain visiting professor to Caltech in the mid 1990’s as a high-level form of general instruction. By the time the Surf had returned to Caltech, they were to have prepared a document giving an ‘as complete as possible’ history of the construction of the vessel. That included the stories and motivations of those who had built it, as well as the history of the materials back to the origin of the universe. They approached this very large project with varying, but positive, enthusiasm.

The trip up to this point had been relatively smooth sailing. They had had to detour to avoid a storm system, but the four satellites now in orbit had been more than sufficient to warn them. Mina took it as easy as she could with eight charges. She’d surveyed the Big Wet down to Cape Lewis at 15º S, so Z’s first ten days of seismic data taking held no surprises. The kids were better sailors than she was by this point, and almost as good cooks, so she was able to spend a fair amount of time working on her own comparative geophysics text, which she’d send back to Earth as a follow-up to her thesis. She talked to Will over the radio, and simply sat in the sun woolgathering and watching her children.

Surf was at anchor in smooth fifty-meter water three kilometers out from the shore of Catalina. The rafts would land the next morning. Hannah Zhang and Mark Thye Jr. had wanted a night landing, but Mina had pulled rank on that one. So, for the moment, there wasn’t much for the kids to do either and they relaxed to their favored recreations.

Karen was balanced on one of the spars that connected the two hulls together, practicing a set of straight-line karate katas in bare feet, despite the starting-to-cool weather of early fall. The spar was a twenty-centimeter wide beam a meter and a half above the water. Mina felt her mother’s fear rising, but knew her daughter would react a little badly to Matka’s worrying. At least she had the balance to do this, and hadn’t been practicing when the ship was moving. Karen had been learning the martial arts from her father since she was six, and had showed no signs of declining interest as she entered puberty. That was probably for the best in a prospective alien veterinarian, but of course Mina worried anyway.

She took a picture as her daughter evaded an invisible sword and sent it back to campus. Will would be working the Screamer Lab, she knew. When she or the kids were away, work and training was how he suppressed and coped with his own worry. He’d appreciate Karen’s progress. In a few years, she’d be able to do things that he was getting too old for. Mina was just shy of her own fortieth Earth birthday, as her body had measured time. Will was a year older. Middle age was starting to close around them, but she didn’t mind it so much, if only she were able to brood less often. So after a good-night from Will, making sure that Karen had stopped practicing and gotten onto one of the hulls now that the sun had set, and checking that Z had a thermos of tea to keep him warm during the first watch, Mina went to her bunk and meditated herself to sleep.

Zmago Grohar Chamer was still ‘Z’, even though he’d long since learned enough of his mother’s language to pronounce his name correctly. He was quieter than his sister. At home, she would punch and kick and scream her way through training after spending the day persuading the pedes that domestication meant that they shouldn’t fight each other. He would go running with Dad in the early morning and spend the day and evening carefully planning out and constructing electrical components and studying spacecraft. Will had given him a part-time job predicting the positions of the satellite network. Tau GPS was much to Z’s taste. He wasn’t a weakling; he’d done well in Basic Hunting and Personal Defense; but he preferred to plan things out in advance and not run on adrenalin. So on Surf he was the navigator and quartermaster and sat the first watch because it meant a couple of hours where he could quietly plan without disrupting his rest.

The night passed without much incident, and an hour after dawn the proa had moved in too a kilometer out and one of the two rafts left for shore. It had been scrubbed, its crew had been scrubbed, and so had their sample containers and water jugs. They had no wish to contaminate the island with either Earth or mainland animals.

Hannah, Mark, Z, and Jorge spread out once the raft was safely beached. Two started a little ways inland to test and refill tanks with water from a stream. The others scouted the piscipede moulting ground that started two kilometers down the coast. As on Earth, isolated beaches were at a premium, and there were roughly a hundred thousand live aquatic invertebrates on the other side of the rocks they clambered to the top of, along with decades worth of shed and partially decayed exoskeletons. Z didn’t mind being put on water duty. When the wind brought whiffs from over the mass down the beach, he could tell why the scouts had worn filter masks. Because of the smell, as well as a need to scout a large portion of the island and a desire to not disturb the piscipedes, this would not be the permanent base site for the next three weeks of the project course. That was another two days’ sailing to east.

This Catalina was far larger than its Earth counterpart. From east to west, it spanned fifteen hundred and thirty kilometers, and from north to south, just shy of five hundred. It was two and a half times the size of New Zealand, and it was cold so far south. The southern shores, in particular, were often visited by bergs calved off of the south polar ice. The Channel was sixty kilometers wide and one and a half deep – a fault ran down the center. In the Surf’s main cabin, next to the radio, there was a large composite printout of the best satellite map of the island. On the computers, it could be seen at full resolution, showing fifty-meter dome-like masses of presumed vegetation in sheltered areas of the interior mountains, interspersed amongst bare rocks, snow pack, and the alpine glaciers that reached far down the slopes. During the cold periods, everything else on the island would be blanketed by ice pack.

Even without hot springs to keep them going, plants were surviving centuries of cold in areas out of the wind and snow. Insulation and sunlight were well enough, but where were they getting their water? This was Mark’s problem. Karen was to examine any animals on the island, to see if they sought survival in the ocean or could endure the land. Sarah had agreed to fly ultralight surveys through the mountains. She might be an electrical engineer, but she still liked the scenery and, like Melinda, she knew how to fly. Z would be manning the boat and studying seismic data, while the other four students looked at the pisepedes and other coastal life forms, glacier flow patterns and mineral prospecting possibilities, and planted remote instrumentation stations. So after resupplying on water, they moved eight hundred kilometers east along the north coast, to a site where the mountains were relatively close to shore. On the south side, the mountains were closer still, but glaciers ran down into the sea and that would mean dodging icebergs, so Mina had again exercised her veto.

2042 August 2 04:19 UT
Test Year 15, Day 86, 22:00 CST local
Northern Coast of Catalina

For the next two days, the daily rhythm that the ship had formed repeated itself. Three hundred and fifty kilometers past Molting Beach, they anchored in a slow swell for the next night and for a photographic survey of a large set of folds in a series of sea cliffs. Z again had the first watch, and was settling back for some quiet thinking after a radio conference with Will about satellite radiation drift. But his scanning the horizon and occasionally writing down a line of equations in his scratch files on one of tablets was interrupted by another nightowl.

Sarah was no longer short; she would soon have her share of her father’s height, with maybe a little bit more altitude from her bones reacting to Tau gravity. She now knew the full history of her parents and how Melinda had brought her back. She was closer to Z and Karen than she was to her guardian, although she admired the ninja more than she’d readily admit even as she claimed to be rebelling. She had flirted with an emo-goth worldview for a while, wearing only the purple-black of pede leather and trying to keep her hair in an artistically grieving form while working her shifts in the zard pens under Karen. Self-inflicted misery had not been encouraged by her friends or Mina or Will, so she’d bounced back and Melinda’s distancing herself from her ward’s behavioral choices hadn’t had too much of a negative impact. But Sarah had developed and retained habits of listening to odd philosophical electronica from the music collections and starting conversations about death and existential topics from the oddest bits of information. Z had become adept at seeing this pattern and deflecting it, and did so when his watch was interrupted by a mention of the idea of the spear-carrier, from Rite of Passage. The book was appropriate. The research course was becoming a rite of passage itself.

“I get that the whole point of the spear carrier is that they are seen as expendable and die when they don’t deserve to, but have you considered what that means for the Examiners?” Z had seen his father’s skill at gentle redirection, and was better at it than he knew. He did know that he’d prevented some self-pitying discussion about other people occasionally being unthinking. The Examiners weren’t quite like God, but discussing their ethics would keep things at a higher level.

“If you want to know what the Examiners think about us, why don’t you ask them?” If, having translated from the English-Chinese-Internet jumble of Techer creole, both of the pre-teens sounded a lot like lecturing professors, and Z a lot like his father, it didn’t bother them. This was the environment of the Techer school system. A lot of their parents had talked the same way even when they had been surrounded by the crowds of Earth. “I don’t think they see us as spear carriers or red shirts. If they do, they don’t act like it. If they did, they could have just snuffed out the Four.”

“That’s my point. They claimed to see us as potential equals. But I think even Dad has been treating them as some analogy of the spear-carrier: they aren’t people to us. We treat them like objects and abstract fitness tests. I don’t like it.”

Sarah balanced against the gunwale. “There really isn’t any other way. Would you feel better if we’d started to treat them like gods? They’ll become people when we can see them, if you have faith that the Test will actually end.” She’d started to veer towards theology, where she would argue for agnosticism for hours. Z nudged the conversation back.

“But people should have bodies. So are they computers, brains in vats, green goo? What does an Examiner look like?” As she’d been reading a lot of science fiction recently, Sarah was predisposed to complain about the excess of Star Trek fan fiction in the Techer library, and from there they talked for the rest of the watch without hitting dangerous ground. The only disturbance was a minor pulse from a small earthquake as a glacier somewhere inland gave way and slid slightly downhill. Those were to be expected and had been registered by the seismometers several times a day.

2042 August 7 10:12 UT
Test Year 15, Day 91, 14:00 local
Surf Base Camp/Above Mt. Ahrens Glacier

The ship rode at anchor in a natural harbor. The tents and supplies had been moved to the shore, on an elevated set of barren rocks that were isolated from inland. There was nothing growing on the shore and coastal rocks but an intermittent patchwork of marginally mobile lichen-like growths. The samples would be analyzed by the experts back at campus, but based on their distribution, Hannah was already claiming that some were derived from sea plants while the hardier species were from spores of the permanent growths in the interior. She claimed to be done with her field work, and had spent her off hours writing out the descriptions of mainland California vegetation that were needed for the joint assignment’s description of Surf’s spars, until Mina had ordered her to work as a geology assistant. Jorge’s project was the first rockhammer geology she’d done in the last two years, and she would be giving him more data than he wanted. And it gave her something to do.

Karen was a hundred and fifty kilometers inland, surveying one of the high refuges with young Mark. They were camped for the next day and night on the shore of a glacial lake, held behind a dam of ice. Sarah had dropped them and their supplies on top of a ridge with two trips of her paraglider, homebuilt and larger than the old ones from the Examiners. On one side of the ridge was the lake, which would fill a lot higher in spring, and on the other was one of the plant enclaves. They’d opted to camp at the base of the ridge, in an area that would be wiped clean the next time the lake rose and flooded. Ecological maintaince was the official reason. Unofficially, the lake was more scenic, if also a touch rancid from an algal bloom. The two pop-tents, the food supplies, the oxy-methane fuel tank and stove, and the waste buckets were all lined up on the shore. A hundred meters further from the dam, two Kevlar lines were strung to the top of the cliff, holding with geckle pads. Sarah could land the parachute in the lake valley, but would not be able to take off again, so when they were done, they’d climb back up the cliff.

Mina knew she should not worry about Mark when it came to Karen. He was a nice enough boy, and quite honorable. Even if he weren’t, anyone who pressed Karen’s boundaries too far tended to get thrown into the nearest wall. But Mark would follow the rules and keep to the plan, as witnessed by his careful acoustic mapping of the base of the Mt. Ahrens glacier where it dammed the lake. Already he’d gotten a good estimate of the speed and location of the subsurface channel that carried the outflow. Since Mina needed to worry, she worried instead about what her daughter might do in pursuit of her animals and information on the massive insulated pillow-plants in the enclaves.

Mina had need to be worried. Karen’s assignment for the morning had been to climb over the ridge and obtain detailed photos of the pillows, plus a few soil samples to check the nutrient balance. The pillows themselves were intricate mosaics and layers of dozens of different types of plant, and couldn’t be disturbed without risking centuries of growth. She had climbed the ridge, geckel pad over geckel pad along the rope like she’d practiced up and down the sides of Millikan, and she’d gotten the samples and a good set of photographs. But she had also climbed off to the side on her way back down, to get pictures of the water storing shells of dormant sedentary pisces that had been left twenty meters above the current shoreline by the drainage of the lake. Mina only learned of that little stunt after it was over, and all she could do to forestall something similar was to warn that there wasn’t any more geckel in all of Catalina, so those climbing gloves should be kept as safe as possible.

The color of a few exposed roots in an old rockslide gave the first clue to how the pillows survived. Some of the plants had very long roots, which had grown downwards far enough to follow changes in the water table from the lake. Presumably they went deep enough to get to the sub-glacial part of the lake, which would remain liquid during the cold years. The plants at the top must lose most of the water they brought in to the probing and severing tendrils of the other species, but they were dependent on those for nutrients and pure insulation, so the system was stable. With that basic idea, Mark’s glacial studies – which he’d put into the description of Tau’s climate necessary to explain why vegetation in California grew the way it did, and Karen’s survey of the dormant pisces, Mina could call them back to base. Sarah had launched for the first pickup, and they started to pack up camp.

Their ride was a half-hour out when Z radioed a seismic warning. The glacier on Mt. Murphy, closer to Surf than to the Mt. Ahrens lake, had just slipped again. The ship had felt quite a perceptible jolt two seconds behind the p-wave. Ten seconds later, the lake sloshed gently back and forth. It wouldn’t have been a problem, except for the geckel lines.

Geckel is resistant to sudden forces. The patches did not move when the face of the ridge was very slightly warped. But the rock that one of the lines was anchored to did. When it fell, the jerk went up the line and pulled out the higher tie-down and its support. The falling multiply weighted line started a rockslide. When everything had settled, both lines and all of their support pads were buried under the rubble. Even Kevlar cables have a failure point, and the geckel would be useless after that much pummeling. Now the only climbing gear the kids had was that one pair of climbing gloves and their way out was an angle-of-repose pile of loose scree. They would need to either get past the dam or climb over the upper part of the glacier to get to a point where they could be picked up.

Nobody panicked, in a testament to how well they’d adapted. While she had a brief moment of shock when she heard the stream of curses from the speakers, Mina got on the radio and started to check on Karen – although both she and Mark were obviously conscious – while Z called back to campus and reported the accident. They didn’t call Sarah back yet since she had a small amount of reserve fuel, but they patched her in to the communications as well.

After a few minutes of helpless laughter from her and some pointed words from her mother, Karen was able to give an inventory. They had both been far enough away from the lines that they had been able to move before the rocks landed. But there hadn’t been time to move the supplies, except for the cameras, phones, and the few samples in their backpacks. The tents, most of the extra food, the stove, and heaters were either buried or crushed. Thanks to equal parts luck and its rigid construction, the gas tank hadn’t been breached, which had prevented it from acting like a bomb. Mark started to move it away from the base of the slide by himself – he was big on the new Caltech American-rules football team. In the meantime, Karen tried to find a way up the corner of the ice dam and the ridge.

Twenty minutes later, Sarah was working her way over the top of Mt. Ahrens, and could see the lake. But Karen had had to give up the attempt to climb. Geckel sticks just fine to wet surfaces and the gloves were insulated enough for her hands to stay warm, but the rocks near the ice dam were covered by frigid mud and the pads got coated. For the same reason, she couldn’t free climb up. She had a hammer and a few pins, but the lakeward face of the glacier was by its nature overhanging, knarled, and unstable. So they could not climb out without swimming the lake, and without heat they would be stupid to do so. The fuel tank could no longer be burned in a controlled fashion. Mark figured that the mix would detonate even if they put it under water.

While Karen cleaned off the pads, the radio buzzed with a discussion. Finally, an apparently viable idea developed. Sarah had a line in her payload, intended as a safe way for her to drop the fan if the Tau-built motor were to fail. “I think if I make a close pass over the dam, I can drop the line and have it reach you. I can’t make a tight enough circle for you to work a harness on the end. Want to try for a straight grab?”

“Not necessary. I’ve got a better idea.” Mark had pulled a self-burning wick from his pack. He kept it next to the spare capacitors for his four-shot pistol. “It’s a lot safer, but a lot more noisy. Help me with these rocks, well you?” He jammed the wick into the tank’s valve, tossed Karen a spool of string and picked up a couple of stones the size of his head.

“What are you doing?” That came from Karen, her mother, and Sarah all at once.

He pointed to the tank. “We tie the rocks to this; light the wick; and toss it into the lake. The current will drag it downstream, and we get as far upstream was we possibly can before the tank blows. It should have lodged in the outlet by then. That should take down the dam, and then we just walk out. Nothing crazy like hanging from a forty meter rope.”

They talked him out of it, eventually. Mina did not even attempt to pull rank. Survival came first, and it was her daughter out there. But she did make a few choice remarks off the link to Z, about how teenage boys were the same here as they had been back on Earth. She not needed to remind Mark about the importance of ecological conservation: Sarah and Karen did a plenty good job of that. So Mina reverted to reciting prayers in her head. When Mark realized that he was out voted, he started to waver. When the voice of Will Chamer told him that the mine wouldn’t bring down the ice, he relented. And when Karen jumped up and grabbed the rope and the paraglider dropped down with the extra load, he ditched the tank and followed. Sarah ran up the motor and they were dragged several meters until lift built enough to pick them off the ground.

The pads let Karen dead hang. Without them, she didn’t have enough strength in her grip and upper arms to hold her own weight and that of her pack for a long period of time. Mark had developed enough muscles that when he held with a death grip, he didn’t move. But as Sarah slowly brought them up and around to the top of the ridge, where they could be picked up in an orthodox fashion, his hands started to slip. So Karen helped him a bit. She dug the tips of her boots under his armpits and pulled upward. She was not gentle about it, and let him drop from a meter above the ground when they were above the ridgeline. He bounced and rolled as she landed lightly and Sarah cast off the rope.

Karen drew the first ride back. As she climbed into the second harness, and they flew up and over the mountain, Mark sat down for the wait. He went through a debriefing over the radio, and then sat in silence. His shame gradually shifted, and by the time Sarah got back to pick him up, he had become sullen. When they got back to base, he was angry.

2042 August 7 18:29 UT
Test Year 15, Day 91, 21:30 CST local
Surf Base Camp

Mark started in on Mina after she’d handed him a bowl of spicy miso-zard soup and sat him next to the radiant heater in the main tent. The other students were either asleep like Karen or there to welcome him back. Mostly they remained quiet while he ranted.

“We could have died out there, and you ask me – and your daughter – to take an insane risk to get out of there … don’t give me something about the dam not bursting. I worked it out. Even if the mine didn’t take it out by itself, it would have either blocked the channel and the pressure would have broken it down or widened it drained the lake. It would have worked just fine. Instead we had to play hero. I thought survival came first.” He gradually ran down, but then Jorge broke in and compared this trip to the Test and Mina to an Examiner. This caused an uproar and started Mark going again, and it went on. Eventually Mina decided that they’d blown off enough steam and called for order. She and Will and a lot of the other parents had spent a long time asking themselves how to answer questions like this.

“You could have died out there. If you had, I would be in deep mourning right now. That is the nature of life. It is risky. We try to minimize the risk and ensure that we don’t risk everything for something that doesn’t matter, and to have backup plans. Hanging by van der Waals bonds from an extra-strong rope and being lifted out is a pretty good backup. It isn’t as risky as Mark has said, but that is a natural reaction to fear. Now, blowing the ice dam may have been safer, but it would have meant destroying a lot of the Catalina ecosystem. As the Examiners did say, we have a responsibility to the world. Sarah would prefer I not use this language, but we are the stewards of creation and it is worth a little hardship and even risk of death to keep it safe. Of course, we can’t become irrational and disproportionate in our response – that’s what the tree-huggers back on Earth did.

“Maybe the Examiners made us more willing to accept these sorts of life-and-death truths than we would have been otherwise. Our entire lives have been the Test for so long that we don’t think about it much anymore. Now you have begun to understand. This is the sort of thing that we can’t teach you without your reaching the edge first. A lot of wisdom is like that – it either comes from very thorough study or sudden pain. That is life.”

The children accepted this, but they still argued a lot during the remaining nights on Catalina. Sarah, in particular, was confused. She had not realized how much the adults had thought and understood about life and death and philosophy. When Mina figured this out, she smiled. The children were growing up. Too fast, she thought, but it was for the best.