By some miracle, I grab a jutting branch and avoid meeting a sharp rock face-first. My flailing has loosened my pack. One of the straps has come off my shoulder, and as I wriggle around, trying to pull myself back up, the other slides off my open arm and the pack plunges into the rapids.
I was right about the undertow. It doesn’t bob away. It is ripped away from me in a second, disappearing under churning white water. I cling to the fallen tree, gasping for breath and trying to stop shaking. Adrenaline is not my friend now that I need to keep myself upright on this now even more slippery log.
Blehehehe!
Strumpet trip traps over my back, using me as a bridge without so much as a second thought. I curse, but she doesn’t care. She gets to the other side and starts grazing on the lust grass there. Meanwhile, I clamber my way after her, slowly but surely wriggling myself to solid land — which I have never been so grateful for.
It takes me a few more minutes to really sort myself out. I knew that being an explorer on a wild planet would be dangerous, but I always assumed the danger would come from aliens, and alien conditions.
“Well,” I say. “Fuck.”
There were a lot of important things in that pack, but upmost in my mind right now is the issue of birth control. Both our medications were in there. I was provided it to manage hormonal swings and the sort of bleeding that would make a barbarian blanch. Strumpet was given it to suppress her cycles. I asked why they gave me a female goat if her cycles had to be suppressed. They asked me why they were sending a female explorer if her cycles had to be suppressed. I stopped asking questions at that point, in case those questions reverberated so far up the chain of command I got fired.
“You are going to get us both killed,” I tell Strumpet. She turns to me, mouth full of foliage and makes a soft bleating sound that I’m free to pretend is apologetic, if I like.
Strumpet marches to the beat of her own drum, which I appreciate. She also screams to the sound of her own trumpet, which I love less. She can feed herself on the surrounding ferns and grasses. I am going to have a harder time without provisions. My plan was to move camp a few times, away from the initial base picked for me. The base is fine, but a little boring. Now I’m seeing why they chose it. A flat grassy plain offers fewer opportunities for me to kill myself within the first few days of being here.
It’s been a week. Or something like a week. Adjusting to alien worlds is not easy, even if you’ve been training for it for a long time. As humanity started to depart for the stars, we discovered that a lot of life is built vaguely in the same way, and the kinds of life that aren’t don’t play well with us. Carbon-based lifeforms are pretty straightforward. The ones that are made of antimatter are very hard to connect with. It’s really hard to strike up a conversation with someone when your atoms keep disintegrating in their presence.
Fortunately for me, this is a carbon-rich planet, and so close to Earth in terms of climate and chemical composition, the odds that we’re going to find anything terribly frightening are low. We might still encounter pretty scary things, though, and that’s why I carry a laser weapon strapped to my back at absolutely all times, as well as two pistols holstered on each of my hips. My hair is always braided and then pinned at the top of my head. I don’t want it becoming a handle for some alien beast to use.
I’m wearing approved tactical gear. Because the atmosphere checked out as neutral, I don’t have to wear chemically protective clothing. It’s just a matter of keeping my skin protected from the elements and the suns. This planet has two suns, and very long days. The solar cycle means that we have light for approximately thirty-six hours and night for around twenty-two hours.
It’s a lot to get used to. Human animals, and most of the animals on earth, calibrate themselves to circadian rhythms. I’m tied to a twenty-four-hour clock regardless of what this planet gets up to in its spare time.
That’s why I’m making mistakes, and why I often feel tired. I’m out of sync, and I don’t know if I’ll eventually adjust or just go mad. That’s part of the study. This is not a job for the faint of heart, or anybody who is too concerned with coming home in the same condition they left. Fortunately, I don’t have any real ties to where I was born. Station 47-Alpha isn’t the sort of place you yearn for. It’s one of over a thousand stations orbiting Earth. I did get to visit Earth itself a couple of times during training missions, which makes me one of the fortunate ones. Most humans are not permitted to set foot on the planet that spawned us. It’s too fragile. Too precious. We hang in the skies above it, acting as guardians and looking for new worlds to claim.
I sit where I am for as long as it takes to muster up the energy and courage to come to the obvious and only conclusion to this sad little outing. I have to go back. Back over the log, back to my camp. I don’t want to go over the log, but if I stay out here with no supplies whatsoever, then I’m going to be in real trouble. Starving trouble.
It takes me a good couple of hours to work up the nerve to crawl back over the log. I don’t bother to even try to walk. I go on hands and knees, putting as much of my body to the wood as possible, shimmying along more like a caterpillar than a person.
Strumpet trip-traps her way across after me, completely happy with herself. Good for her. I have to walk three miles back to the landing camp I put up when we first got here. There’s a white globe tent and a white frame pen for Strumpet. She’s supposed to be confined to it, according to the guidelines, which I’m pretty sure are also at the bottom of the river now.
* * *
Within three days of my less-than-successful expedition, everything turns to…well, shit. For starters, I am not in a good mood. There’s no reason for it, no external reason anyway. There is an internal reason. And as luck would have it, Strumpet is also acting up.
Strumpet is wagging her tail a lot and bleating almost constantly. I’ve fed her as much of our extra grain rations as I dare, but nothing seems to settle her.
I am sitting in the sun, shivering, but with a blanket wrapped around me, the sound of an unhappy goat drilling into my brain.
“What’s wrong, girl?”
Strumpet lets out a shrill cry and wags again. I wish I could check the goat manual, but that was washed away, along with my birth control. I can feel cramping starting, the dreaded ache which heralds the unceremonious dumping of vital blood. My body is perhaps the stupidest machine I have yet encountered.
I hid the entire truth of it from the EET examiners. They would never have let me come here if they knew I was temperamentally and physically crippled for seven to fourteen days out of every thirty. I need my pills. But my pills have long been dissolved into the alien river, where they are probably wreaking havoc on the hopefully small number of sensitive creatures they encounter. We are taught to be careful about what we allow to leach into the soils and waters of alien planets. My little bungle broke a whole host of guidelines. I can imagine the lecture my instructor would be giving me right now if he saw what I did.
Actually, I don’t really need to imagine it, I can just remember the last thing he said to me before I was assigned here.
Six months ago…
“What. The. Fuck. Is WRONG WITH YOU!?”
Little bits of spittle land on my face. I’m being yelled at. This is not a rare occurrence. It has happened basically every day since I arrived at EET training. Whatever the opposite of a teacher’s pet is, that’s what I am. We’re on Earth, camping out on what used to be the central American plateau. Most of the radiation has burned off here, leaving desert, and in the distance, jungle. Our white dome tents here are the same as the ones we will inhabit on alien worlds. We each have one to ourselves, because we’ll be living in one by ourselves.
I do have the honor of being yelled at by a legend. Mike Boltz was the first person to ever settle a planet by himself. I had a Mike Boltz poster in my room my entire childhood and fan art of him through my teenage years. I wrote a couple fics that got blacklisted from the net for, uhm, reasons. I worshipped this guy, and now he hates me.
Instructor Mike is huge and old. Well, maybe fifty-five. He’s not actually that old, but he carries himself like a muscular Father Time. Every single hopeful is afraid of him, wants to be him, and needs his approval like they need oxygen. Suffice to say, I do not have his approval. Everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong.