Chapter 17: Home Away From Home

The individual days pass slowly but the months rapidly. We are arrived at another water world again mostly water. About seventy percent of the surface is covered with water, and most of it fresh.

The continents are smaller and more numerous and more evenly dispersed, but it resembles Earth in many ways. While the oceans are fresh water there are two large salt lakes with brackish streams feeding them. Reminds me of the Dead Sea and Great Salt Lake on Terra. These mildly salty streams should be ideal for crab and lobsters.

Plenty of vegetation that seems familiar in form. Conifers that resemble the giant Redwoods. Other trees are reminiscent of Mangroves and Palms. There are vines, bushes, and flowers. All alien and unusual, but they don’t seem strange. This feels like home.

Poor Billi has no children and will have no more. Her body is cyborg. The two children we had together are semi human and spend their lives soaking up sunlight on Hope Island. Johnny’s twig addled brain is in the freezer. The good news is, she’s devoted to our latest thaw of embryos. Three dozen new babies.

Everybody but me is totally occupied with infant care.

Why am I exempt? Sand boxes. I argued for sand boxes rather than diapers. A pooper scooper to extract the feces, and hose off the kid.

Add some fresh sand occasionally, and less frequently completely empty and replenish the sand. I’m talking large sandboxes, half a dozen kids in each. My suggestions were voted down. No attempt was made to adjust or modify my ideas, to make them more acceptable. They were rudely discarded out of hand. Without even a trial.

I figure the women aren’t capable or inhibited in visualizing my concept, so I built a prototype they can see and touch.

A shallow large box set on trestles, one located on the axis of center of gravity. This puts the kids at waist height. No stooping or kneeling to pick them up or set them down.

To empty a box, kick an end trestle out, and it flips verticle, pivoting on the center axis trestle. Simple and efficient.

Nope.

The women are changing cloth diapers that need to be washed and boiled then dried so they can be reused. I can understand Mark not loading a couple billion disposable diapers for a million thawed incubated embryos. What I can’t understand is why hasn’t anyone modernized and automated infant care in all the centuries since the industrial revolution?

If they had to lick the babies clean, like dog and cat mommies? They would be a wee more interested in my innovations I bet.

Moving on, our colony will need energy sources. Unfortunately, no Niagara Falls similar cascades or even high hills exist on this planet. Solar power is adaptable to small installations like individual homes, but not heavy industry.

We only brought three small fusion reactors with us. One in each ship providing power for the ships, and one emergency spare in MOM’s living quarters sphere.

These are hotel size units, greater than home sized but we need city size power production.

Geothermal seems our only alternative and thankfully, Mark Hest recognized and prepared for this eventuality. We have massive steam turbine generators on board. We just need to find a source of heat to make the steam. We need a volcano or a fault that allows magma near the surface. Sea Hag is making aerial surveys of infrared scans.

That’s how we discovered the indigenous inhabitants of this world. I discovered an undersea civilization, one of their submerged cities.

The Merfolk.

Morphology can only adopt a limited number of forms, and Earth at sometime tried all, nearly all.

So, the Merfolk do look a bit familiar.