Rockhound

by

Tyree Campbell

© 6/22/01

"What inspired me? Sheesh, how the smeg do I know? An idea whizzed
through, I snared it, and embellished it. How does one write? But I think
there was a bit of latent inspiration...Stanley G. Weinbaum's "A Martian
Odyssey," in which the main character was an incomprehensible silicate
being. I took it a step further and wrote from the stone's POV, rather
than, as Weinbaum did [in 1935, I believe], from an explorer's POV wondering
what the heck the silicate was. [inspiration...mutter, mutter]."

(Unrestricted Club Use)



Warm. Verdant. Humid. Vibrant with color.
The mezh linking spring and summer is the cruelest time of year.
The body grows soft, and molecules can wash away in the thunderstorms.
The mind rots in the pervasive, viscous heat. The land is bleak and
desolate, littered with trees and shrubs and flowers, parasites all,
devouring all.
The mezh is no time to be alive.

Food was even scarcer that year, and the few stones detectable through
the iridescent azure groundcover were too soft to wear down the mineral
deposits on Pedier's grinders. The kamen was scuttling along the west bank
of the creek in search of a dry spot where the smooth stones lay exposed,
ripe for plucking, ka's jointed antennae and appendages clicking as ka
probed here and there, desperate for nourishment. In the absence of
crystal, even a silicate would suffice. Sandstone would have been a
gourmet's delight, but the nearest deposit lay hours away, in the bluffs to
the west, where salt water lashed the land, offended by its stubborn
resistance. Pedier avoided the iskers, the long and narrow rolling hills
laid down by ancient glaciers that at one time had calved into the sea. The
loose till undoubtedly contained a nugget or two, but ka hadn't the time to
waste searching for them. The mezh was notorious for storms that fired up
out of nothing more than wisps of vapor, and already the air pressure was
dropping as clouds began to accumulate in the west. Pedier needed food and
shelter, and neither was immediately accessible.
Near a bend in the creek Pedier withdrew ka's motive appendages,
halting. A telescopic probe had encountered something solid on the surface,
perhaps three arths under the groundcover. The prehensile tip wrapped
around it, withdrew it, held it up for inspection, a chunk of ordinary
fieldstone, fractured long ago and somewhere else, the fractures filling
with magma at some point, which had crystallized. Pedier scritched ka's
ventral thorax, stimulating the sensory data collection locus. Luxens,
translucent photosensitive appendages, bloomed like a writhing flower from
the top of ka's torso to inspect the find. Under the gentlest of pressure
the fieldstone crumbled--most of the pink interstice of silicate had been
worn away...devoured. An uncontrollable surge of cold flushed Pedier's
torso as ka scanned this way and that in spasms of panic.
A flur had passed this way, and recently.
Uncontrollable bursts of molecular oxygen issued from tiny fractures in
Pedier's surface as ka skittered into the shelter of an undercut in the
creek bank. Would the flatulent hissing reveal ka's location? All
appendages the kamen withdrew, save a single luxen, which cowered behind a
clump of gramine feeder roots and scanned the terrain, and a concave sieven
which scanned in parallel, rendering coherent the impacts of gaseous
molecules.
[Whiss] informed Pedier that molecules of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and
carbon dioxide were rushing through the vast swatch of tall, thin slivers of
green groundcover. Experience enabled ka to dismiss this as innocuous.
[Thud-ticka] alarmed ka. Nearby a stone had slipped from the top of
the bank to the bottom, striking the soft bed of the creek before rolling
onto a bedstone. But what had caused it to fall?
[Oh, wow, what's that] startled Pedier. Its origin seemed to be just
above him, atop the bank. As quietly as possible ka withdrew the luxen and
sieven, and crystallized.
[Did you see that. Dad. Dad, where are you]
A massive tremor shook the creekbed as a solid mass dropped out of the
air and landed in front of Pedier. Retracted beneath the surface, one of
Pedier's luxens conducted a discreet scan. The stone was composed mostly of
hydrogen and oxygen and carbon, useless...but there was a substantial
quantity of assimilable calcium, and smaller amounts of potassium and
sulfur. The minute accumulations of copper and zinc could readily be
condensed and eliminated. But the shape of the stone struck Pedier as odd,
as if, somehow, a glob of carbohydrate had grown stalagtites on which to
scurry over the terrain.
The stone telescoped an appendage and struck Pedier. A variety of flur
ka had not encountered previously? But no, ka detected no whiff of
debilitating yellow fumes, no fluorine that might reduce ka, as the
interstice had been reduced, to crumbling shards of depleted silicate. Some
other form, then. Delicately, hesitantly, Pedier telescoped a probe,
testing the firmness of the stone.
[Hey]
It was soft, much softer than sandstone or gypsum...
[Ouch]
...and wet now, not like storm condensation or creekflow, but erosive
nonetheless. A strange liquid, thick and crimson, it threatened to erode
ka. No choice had Pedier, not now.
[Hey. Stop. I'm telling]

Much later, temporarily saturated, Pedier ascended to the top of the
bank to resume ka's search for sustenance. No other flurs, if indeed flur
that had been, were detectable. The kamen's motive appendages chuffed along
the terrain, breaking through rootgrasps and other impedimenta. Suddenly
Pedier's short-wave luxens came alert. In the groundcover just ahead lay a
small fragment, in shades of blue to those particular luxens. Approaching
it, Pedier fairly trembled in anticipation of calcium, assimilable with
oxygen, a combination useful in internal structure. The tungsten, of
course, would have to be evacuated, the oxygen released in flatulence,
carefully, so as not to alert flurs. The kamen telescoped a graspen,
acquired the fragment, and crushed it between ka's grinders, before scanning
about again. Where there was one, there might be others---
There were others! Massive things, much larger than the one which
had fallen before ka in the creekbed. They appeared to be moving! On
jointed stalagtites. And further away, an enormous boulder of...Pedier
could scarcely credit ka's luxens. The boulder was composed almost entirely
of aluminum and titanium and vanadium, utterly unassimilable. Pedier
marveled at the size of the kamen that must have ingested a small mountain
to condense so much waste. This development warranted very discreet
investigation. Pedier withdrew all but the most essential sensors, and
prepared to wait, forever, if need be, for the threat, if threat it was, to
erode.
Agitated molecules of gas struck Pedier's sieven.
[That has got to be the largest massive quartz I have ever seen.]
[I'd've sworn it wasn't there a moment ago.]
[Anyone seen Danny.]
[Hey, look at this.]
[You found something, Pete.]
[Sec. I'm scanning. Says zinc.]
[Native zinc. Unlikely.]
[Fine. You argue with the 'corder. I'm telling you, this nugget is
zinc. And this one is copper. And holy hatrack, this one is tungsten.]
[C'mon, Pete. Native tungsten.]
[Trail of nuggets leads right to this here quartz mass, Jacob.]
[Sure. A glob of quartz that ingests scheelite and craps tungsten.]
[I'm tellin' you]
[You're telling me the Golden Goose is a mass of silicon dioxide
and...hey, scan this, it looks like calcite.]
Incomprehension chilled Pedier's infrastructure. None of the
information passing through the sieven to ka's data collection locus bore
any relation to the rush of air that announced the approach of storms or the
wash of erosive waters. The earlier encounter had assured ka that the
strange stones were not related to flurs...and yet, they posed a danger, ka
was certain of it. Worse, internal pressure from the molecular
decomposition was increasing, threatening ka's crystalline camouflage. The
strange stones were extending graspers to snare the inert metallic blobs,
and drawing closer, ever closer.
[What now.]
[This zinc is organic.]
[Say what.]
[It is derived from a bioform. So's the copper.]
[I know what organic means.]
[...Danny.]
[We don't know that. Let's try an experiment.]
[What's that.]
[Scheelite. Found it over there. If this thing craves minerals, we
might tempt it.]
[And then what.]
[You said yourself. The Golden Goose. Keep feeding it ores, reap the
profits.]
[Danny...]
[We'll find him. The others are looking for him. He can't have gotten
far.]
[Pete, I'm telling you, this thing ate Danny.]
[Jacob, you can't smash it. If what I suspect is true, this is a find.
Anyway, there's no proof it ate Danny.]
[That organic zinc and copper...]
Inside Pedier, the crystalline structure sang with the effort of
suppression. Still, internal pressure increased. If only the strange
stones would depart. But they gave no indication of anything save
immobility. If ka lost camouflage...
In the end, flatulence doomed Pedier.




View our Universe
Images - Fiction - Poetry
Science - Creator - Chronology

HOME