The Green Book Read Online Free Page B

more evenly than the Earth; there will be less difference between one season and another here. Such small difference as there is suggests that it is spring now, and time to plant. As you all know, there is seed enough for one sowing, and a small reserve. The soil here seems fertile, though, as you also all know, the plant life here is crystalline and might act on our digestive systems like ground glass, so we can only eat what we can grow from Earth seeds. It seems there is no life in the waters of this planet except algae and suchlike, and the jellyfish we have all seen. Tomorrow, therefore, we must catch some and see if they can be cooked and eaten, unpalatable though they look.”
    Cries of “Ugh!” from the children were scolded quiet when he said this.
    â€œAs for land life, of a kind which might compete with us, or threaten us, or give us animals for farming, the tapes show no signs of any such life over the greater part of the land surface. However, Peter, our expert, will tell you about this.”
    Peter was a tall, bearded man. The children knew him because his choice of luxury had been the funny little chess set that let you play the game with another person instead of with the computer, and he had played with them sometimes on the journey.
    â€œThere’s just a slight oddity in the record,” said Peter. “Signs of biorhythms, very slow ones, somewhere on the lake shore, near here. I’m baffled. There are two possibilities. One is that the computer is not operating perfectly. It is supposed to discount biorhythms which we produce ourselves, and so tell us about any other form of life; perhaps it isn’t screening us out perfectly. The other possibility is that something here produces an effect like a biorhythm—though, as I say, an extraordinarily slow one. The effect is only hereabouts, and it’s a bit of a coincidence if it’s nothing to do with our presence here. And nobody has seen anything except the jellyfish, so I think we can safely assume that there is in fact no animal life on this planet. We have the land to ourselves.”
    The grownups were still talking in the meetinghouse, making plans for plowing and sowing, stockpiling timber, and sharing out food rations to last till harvest, when Pattie fell asleep in her chair, dreaming of eating jellyfish and being sick. Sarah picked her up and carried her across in the open under the stars, to put her in her bunk in their own hut.
    Pattie didn’t eat jellyfish, and wasn’t sick the next day, and neither did anyone else. For as soon as the horrible gluey mass of the fish was heated up, smelling funny, within moments of it beginning to boil in the pan it broke into flame and began to burn. It burned with a tall bright green flame like a firework, except that it gave a clear, steady, greenish light. Malcolm became excited and began to try to work out ways of using jellyfish as fuel; he said they must be full of oil of some kind. Jason’s mother, however, just took a ladle and took a scoop of the burning pan in a bowl to make a lamp in her house, and that idea seemed very easy to use. Jason’s mother wanted light to sew by, sitting at her fireside after nightfall, but of course nearly everyone had something they would like to do in the evening, and so Shine was transformed. For the buildings at night were now a soft pale green, with points of emerald visible where the lamps were hung, and the leaping glow of the fires made a ruby-red glow in the middle. The blurred and magnified shadows of the people moving inside their houses cast dark figures softly over the walls of the fluted, shimmering green and red shining houses, and Shine at night looked like a scatter of blocks of fire opal, lying on a dark land under the stars.
    So life at Shine began to settle down. After the exploration party returned, there were no more night watchmen, and everyone slept in their bunks at night. The grownups needed their