The sunset was orange again, strange, beautiful, and serene. It had a saffron edge, then it blended down to yellows, getting milder and milder the farther it spread along the horizon. It hung there slowly, spilling its colors gently across the sky, with a thin dash of red or rose blending then fading.
The ocean was almond-colored, and slow. The biggest problem, Jenks said, was that she couldn’t swim in it.
“Like swimming in a pillow,” Brute snorted. “No, the biggest problem is we can’t drink it. Tired of water rations. I mean, I’m okay with water rations unless I have to look at a whole lot of water all day.”
“See, the real problem is, you insist on calling it water. If you stopped calling it water, you’d feel right as rain.” This came from Squirrel, who always thought he had the essential point.
“Rain,” Brute sighed, and they all stared out at the ocean, observing it. Was it water? It spread out wide against the horizon, as oceans did. But the water was thick and rolled; it was theoretically possible to walk on it, if you shifted your weight in the pockets the water formed and if you didn’t go too quickly, which would cause a widespread line of waves, or worse, one of those sinkholes that never even glugged before it covered over.
They hadn’t touched it; they still wore suits. But they had a piece of it in a tube in the lab room, and Sibbetts was writing lots of meticulous things about it in her reports. Good for Sibbetts. Brute didn’t think they needed the suits any more; the air could be handled with just one of the simpler filters, a light mask over the nose and mouth. But Sibbetts was cautious; Sibbetts said wait.
The trolley wasn’t due back for another year. The crew—two men, three women—had a habit of nicknaming everything, and the trolley was their name for the long-range transport.
Jenks, who was head of the exploratory team, said, “Maybe we’re in at the beginning—you know, before life evolves.”
“There’s some kind of seaweed on the rocks,” Darcy pointed out. He was polite and gorgeous and well bred, and Jenks—the reader in the group—had named him Darcy.
Their colony of two and a half domes was on the first shelf of a kind of stepped ascent from the beach. Discarded containers and broken equipment were left in the open next to it. There was no wind so they weren’t careful about securing it.
They spent half the day outside, just poking around and observing, except for Sibbetts who worked on her own inside. One day they gave themselves the task of examining the smooth, cigar-shaped stones that sat around on the lip of the beach.
It was natural, after handling the stones, to want to wash the dust off their gloves. They went to the sea and cupped their hands and pulled out gobs of thick water. It amused them to carry the water around, and eventually they took some of it back to their collection of rocks. Darcy leaned over too far with his hands full, and he made it into a fake fall and rolled onto his back.
