Foreigner: (10th Anniversary Edition) by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online

just now, and the night was very cold, and nothing in his life had prepared him for this.

IV
     
    T he morning came as milky pale as the first morning Ian had wakened on the planet, with a scattering of improbably pink clouds. Pink … and gold, and pearl white, with a little mist in the low places. Condensation due to the air being saturated with moisture and the ambient temperature reaching the critical point: weather. The moisture came from previous precipitation and from evaporation from the ground and from respiration from the plants. One could generate the same effect in the herbarium, up on the station, by a combination of natural and mechanical processes.
    It was a pretty effect there. But they’d never thought of pink clouds. A shame, Ian thought. They should put gels on the spots and arrange tours. See the planetary effects.
    It’s pretty, Julio had said from the barracks door. —It’s pretty, it’s cold, have fun.
    Estevez with his regulated temperatures and filtered air: a life systems engineer with an allergy to the environment was not a happy experimental specimen for the medics.
    Estevez flinched from the day sky. And Estevez admit to his fear? Retreat from it? Not if he had to go back in and throw up, after his glance at the weather. Allergies, Estevez said.
    And it was funny, but it wasn’t, since Estevez couldn’t leave this world. Steroids weren’t the long-term answer, and they hadn’t had an immune response problem in a hundred years and more on-station. Gene-patching wasn’t an option for their little earth-sciences/chemistry labdown on the planet, they couldn’t send specimens Upstairs, they hadn’t anybody trained to run the equipment if they could get it down here, they weren’t a hundred percent sure a gene-patch was what they ought to try under exotic circumstances, anyway, and, meanwhile, Archive had come up with an older, simpler idea: find the substance. Try desensitization.
    Fine, Estevez said, sleepless with steroids, stuck with needles, patched with tape, experimented on by botanists and zoologists. He’d try anything. Meanwhile Estevez stayed under filtration and stayed comfortable and maintained his sense of humor—except it was scary to react to something after two months down here. The medics thought it should take longer. They weren’t sure. There’d never been a hundred-fifty-year-old genetically isolated, radiation-stressed human population exposed to an alien world. Not in their records.
    Wonderful, said Estevez.
    Meanwhile all of them who went out on Survey, laying down their little grids of tape and counting grass species, took careful specimens of anything new, bushes, grasses, seeding and sporing plants and fungi and the like. The medics waved a part of that sample past Estevez’ nose and taped other samples to his skin. They hung simple adhesive strips in the wind, and counted what impacted them, and analyzed snips of the filters, figuring at first that whatever Estevez was reacting to had to be airborne. But they were working on a new theory now, and analyzed samples of soil and dead grasses, looking for molds.
    So they added the soil punch to the regular test, and extended the grid of samples beyond the sterilized ground. Ian took a soil sample every hundred meters, a punch of a plastic tube down past the root-line, and left his blue plastic tube inserts in a row down the hillside, to pick up on the way back. The old hands down here could walk briskly. He ambled, stopped often, lungs aching, on the long easterly climb uphill, into the rising sun.

    He’d spotted different color on the east hill yesterday. It looked like a blooming plant, and if it did bloom, in the economy of nature, one could guess it did that to put forth genetic material for sexual combination to produce seed, as the grasses did, a likely and advantageous system according to their own Earthly prejudice.
    That indicated, then, that it was shedding something into the air, and if it was