by C. Gockel
Instead, in the alien light, Joe suddenly saw the clouds as a bleeding mass: vast flesh mangled beyond recognition. Vast wounds spurted blood. The rain looked like streaming blood. Raindrops spattered the shuttle’s windows. Joe flinched.
Incredibly, so did the shuttle. It banked sharply away from the rain. The mountain leaned over them. Wing cried, “No!”
Now the shuttle veered the other way. But a downdraft lowered on the shuttle like an invisible fist. The shuttle dropped abruptly.
The shuttle twitched as the pilot fought to regain altitude and control. The shuttle’s wing grazed a treetop with a grinding scratch. The shuttle twisted, throwing Joe against the straps of his seat belt. Clear water streamed on the viewport glass. And then a hell of noise and violent motion broke loose. Cracking pain seized his left shoulder. In agony, he struggled, caught in a contorted position. Then he blacked out.
10 Twilight
Curled up on sloping ground, Joe felt the roughness of dirt and duff under him. He began to notice a kind of vague light, a twilight. Propping up on his right elbow, he saw one, two, three dark blue tree trunks not far away. And then, downhill, a steaming, metallic ruin. He stared incredulously.Wing emerged from the ruined plane and hurried uphill. “How do you feel?” Wing crouched beside him.
“Something’s fractured,” Joe mumbled. “Can’t use my left arm. Head hurts, too.” With his right hand, he explored his scalp. His fingertips came away bloody. “What happened?”
“We crashed,” Wing sounded shaken. “I managed to pull you out.”
“The pilot?”
“The nose of the plane hit the mountain first. He died.” Wing bowed his head.
Rain began falling almost soundlessly. Water dripped off Joe’s hair. Meanwhile, the pain in his shoulder eased to a tolerable level. Joe felt his left hand stinging. He discovered a nasty scratch on it. Both hands were streaked with soft black organic soil. He shuddered.
“I gave him last rites. Besides being a botanist, I am a priest, so—”
“If it comes to it, don’t try that with me.”
Wing stared him. “You are not a believer?”
“I’m an atheist.”
“Given the straits we’re in, perhaps you should reconsider,” Wing said.
“Like hell!”
They heard an engine whirring. Both looked upward instantly. “That is the survey copter,” Wing said. “Searching for us.” The whir swelled. Then faded away. “They will not see a trace of us,” Wing whispered. Slender tree trunks rose into the air all around them. High overhead, the trunks branched into massive crowns of fronds intermeshing with each other. The canopy showed no break, no sign that the shuttleplane had crashed through it.
“Voicelink?” Joe asked. “Locator beacon?”
“The crash destroyed the cockpit equipment, but I’m sure they’ll come back,” said Wing. But he absently wrung his hands. “Our colony cannot afford to lose you.”
“Just so they don’t waste time about it!”
Wing shook his head. “It may take time to decide how to search for us without exposing the search party to biological hazard.”
“If the biohazard is all that serious, they might as well not bother,” Joe gritted.
The raining wind breathed through the forest canopy. Finally Wing said, “If you are not going to die, then I must climb to the base to get help.”
“How far?”
“A few miles. You will be safe here. I think.”
Stay here alone? Joe’s notebook was in his pocket. But here there was no World Net for it to connect to. There was nothing. He felt the fingers of the riptide tugging on his mind, wanting to pull him toward cold zero. Shaking his head, Joe clumsily stood up. He twitched his shoulder. Now it didn’t hurt, didn’t feel at all. “Painkiller?”
“Yes. I salvaged a first aid kit.” The rain soundlessly ceased. Cobalt silence surrounded them. Wing looked toward the wreckage. “I pulled a large broken frond over him. That’s not a real burial, but—”
“It’ll do. See if there’s a sling in that first aid kit.”
Wing obliged. With his useless arm secured in the sling, Joe felt marginally fit for a desperate hike. What choice did he have? If he stayed here alone, the riptide would get him.
The blue moon must have been high in the night sky above the forest. A viscous blue twilight filled the air under the trees. It made for uncertain visibility. Joe could discern the nearest few tree trunks. Everything beyond that melted into a murky sketch done in blue ink. His first few footfalls made sharp thin pains radiate through his body.
The first part of the climb seemed simple, a steady slope without much undergrowth. But slick moss coated the ground. Both of them slipped repeatedly.
Something glowed in the blue gloom. It was a dead tree. Some kind of fungus coated the tree in thick, dripping sheets like candle wax, emitting a faint yellowgreen glow. Wing crept closer to investigate.
“Don’t touch that!” Joe ordered. “No microbes here are specifically hostile to us—but chances are, some produce toxins. Metabolic byproducts that happen to be toxic to us.”
Wing stopped short. “It could be dangerous to touch anything.”
“So could standing here breathing the air. Let’s go.”
The painkiller had made him lightheaded. Between one footfall and the next, Joe was seized by the feeling that this place could be the bottom of the sea: liquidly shadowy, ultramarine, and silent. Following Wing, he moved in slow motion, like an ancient diver, his feet leaden, his head weightless.
With a startled cry, Wing pitched backward and started sliding away. Joe reacted just in time. Throwing himself to the ground, he grabbed Wing’s wrist with his good right hand, saving Wing from disappearing into a deep darkness. The slope underfoot had taken a sudden, steep turn downward.
Joe swore at the unexpected ravine. With an effort, he hauled the smaller man back over the edge.
“Thank you,” Wing said faintly.
Drug or no drug, the action had caused the pain in Joe’s shoulder to flare up. He tried to rock the angry pain away.
Wing crept back to the edge of the ravine and peered into it. “I hear water rushing over rocks.”
“You could have been killed.”
“I was careless,” Wing fumed. “Like our pilot, I just assumed that this is not a dangerous place.”
The pilot had been too talkative, maybe careless, but not a bad guy, and he had died. Realization seeped in. Joe was walking away from a bad crash. He could have been dead too. Rocking against the pain, he shivered.
After brooding at the ravine a while longer, Wing said, “I don’t think that was what you meant by proceeding without extraordinary precaution on this world.”
“No. Now what?”
“This ravine angles uphill. We should skirt it until we find a way across.”
“Just watch your step.”
“I think I’d better watch with my toes. My eyes are not at home here.”
Wing edged along from tree to tree. The trees grew more slender, their foliage less dense; more moonlight filtered into the forest, improving visibility. The feathery crowns of the trees were silhouetted against the dim sky. “You’re a fern specialist, eh? No wonder they defrosted you,” Joe said. “These things look like prehistoric fern trees.”
“So the Vanguard thought.”
The ravine rapidly grew shallower, evolving into a tree-bordered depression that ran like a ribbon as far up and away as the eye could see. Illuminated by full moonlight, it glowed bluegreen. “That damn moon puts out a lot of light,” said Joe.
Wing halted at a narrow spot in the long depression.
“It looks boggy,” Joe said dubiously. “And either I’m feeling my fever, or it’s hot here.”
“Hot and humid. And the air has a strange smell.”
“Loaded with volatile organic molecules. Well, you’re the field man. What do we do?”
“Cross here. I go first; you follow in my steps. B
e ready to give me a hand if need be.” Wing found firm footing in vegetation that came up to his shins. He paused. “These plants are odd! They shake even though there is no wind here.” He bent over for a better look. “What do you say is the color?”
“Green but not green.”
“Yes. I do not see any color either, yet the plants appear convincingly green. What strange light.” He touched a leaf that resembled a fern, curled at the top, the rest wide with frilly edges that quivered for no apparent reason.
“This isn’t a field trip,” Joe reminded him. “And get your head up away from the muck.” The strange organic smell nagged Joe’s nostrils.
Wing straightened. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.”
“What?”
“That is the textbook example of a perfectly grammatical but meaningless sentence in English. I never expected to see any.”
“Why don’t you keep your mind on getting across?”
Joe put his feet where Wing had stepped among the colorless greens. He heard faint crunching sounds from the underlying mat of vegetation saturated with water. Grimly he calculated that he outweighed Wing by fifty pounds at least.
“This is the center—solid enough,” said Wing.
But it proved solid enough only for Wing. Joe’s foot tore through the mat into mud beneath it. He lunged ahead. His other foot sank into the mat. The mud reeked of overripe bananas. An instant later, it smelled like a latrine.
“Can you pull out your feet?” Wing asked urgently.
“Ugh! Yeah—” Joe plowed through the mud. The smell wrapped itself around him, oscillating between fruit and sewage. Joe stumbled onto firm ground. He tasted the urge to vomit.
“That smell is strange,” said Wing, leaning on a slender frond-tree. “Yet almost familiar . . . .” Dumbfounded, Joe stared as Wing slid down the tree and sat down in a huddle, sobbing into his knees. “That smell!” Wing’s words were muffled. “It is so very like—” He choked and sobbed.
Seizing Wing’s collar, Joe dragged him uphill into fresher air. Joe breathed deeply to pull fresh air into his own lungs.
“That smell!” Wing said finally. “It reminded me of my grandmother’s kitchen!”
“What?!”
“The fragrance of sesame oil heating in the wok,” Wing said sorrowfully.
“Didn’t strike me that way,” said Joe.
“So real!” Wing murmured. “Many memories of home. Give me a few moments. I still feel overwhelmed. . . .” Wing trailed off.
With a grunt, Joe sat down to wait while Wing pulled himself together.
Getting himself out of the bog, he had ripped a visible trail through the plants. Never before on this world had that happened: plant life damaged by a large blundering animal. The semifloating vegetation seemed to be drifting back together, his trail closing up, jagged as a stitched wound.
Joe shifted his gaze to the sky. A dim yet intense blue, more than anything else it resembled a color of cyberspace. Which reminded Joe that he had not done any of his own work since he came out of the Ship’s freezer. Modeling data; assessing other people’s reports; politics; bossing technicians in the lab, yes. But not theoretical molecular biology. His genius was to lift up a great looming strand of DNA in cyberspace, and rearrange the bases, using the virtual manipulator that made it feel like physically handling the vast molecule. Until it felt right for what he wanted it to do that nature hadn’t thought up on its own. Then, he would tell the hypercomputer to give the novel DNA a workout, model the expression of the new genes through messenger RNA, proteins, and organs into the final organism.
He had made manifold modifications to the canine double helix in cyberspace. His design had been executed by genetic engineers in Labrador retrievers. The result was a dog with gills, flippers, and other physiological modifications. By the time Joe left Earth, sea dogs were being used as helpers, messengers, sometimes bombcarriers for undersea operations. Porpoises, useful in some of the same ways, were protected against being so used; they had parahuman rights. The sea dogs retained the loyal and tractable temperament of Labs.
He had really wanted to design and develop a unicorn. But chimeras were expensive. They had to be practical and profitable.
The dark electric blue of the sky gave him ideas. Planet Green needed animals. They could be tailor-made. The Ship had brought a trove of germ cells from Earth. Here, there was a planetary pool of alien genetic material to investigate, exploit, and maybe recombine with genes from Earth. Why not? He took the notebook from his pocket and opened it. The flimsy screen unfurled and stiffened. Joe stroked hurried notes, squinting at the tiny bright characters on the display.
With a world full of plants, there was plenty of food for animals engineered to metabolize it. First, herbivores. Antelopes with appropriate digestive enzymes. Unicorns, even. Why not? Unicorns with silver manes and tails. Then predators that eat unicorns but find people distinctly unpalatable. Though it might do the human genome good to have maneating predators on Green: keep the genes for survival honed sharp.
Unicorns with fluted horns to let them defend themselves their predators. What kind of predators? Chimeras with horns and talons and serpentine tails. Staring into the moonlit sky, he imagined the coils of DNA, changes in the genetic code, transfiguration into breathing ornamented shapes, teratisms that would have been illegal, impractical, or both on Earth. His creativity had always been trammeled there. But here the possibilities were endless and compelling. Onehanded, he frantically entered his ideas into the notebook.
Wing scrambled to his feet. “It is not good to sit and think in this twilight!” he announced, and dashed uphill.
Wing was right. Sit around in this twilight thinking, and colorless green ideas wake up furiously in your head. Tucking the notebook back into his pocket, Joe broke into a cold sweat. He did not know—would not know, until he got an uplink to the Ship’s hypercomputer with its molecular biological database—whether what he had just dreamed up made any scientific sense, or was lunatic fantasy.
They hiked directly uphill on a steep but not unmanageable slope. Joe’s shoulder felt leadenly numb. Elsewhere on his anatomy, nerve endings complained loudly, claiming to be scraped. He did not dare to investigate with his good hand. By now, that damply dirty extremity must have collected a staggering number of microorganisms.
Wing pointed to a short tree draped with filmy stuff that shone slightly. “Shroud worms.”
Bugs, slugs, crud. Srivastava, with his smile full of white teeth, had said cheerily, “The cake is much like Earth, you see, the layers of procaryotes and eucaryotes, singlecelled and multicelled microbes, then plants and arthropods and invertebrates. Only there is no decoration on the icing of the cake—no large vertebrates running and flying around. The carbon cycle works quite well without them. The atmosphere down there is much like that of Earth. Richer in oxygen, but only somewhat.”
On Earth, Joe thought, the primordial crud had enough imagination to evolve into large animals.
Looking back at the shroud, Wing said, “That tree is thought to be an analogue to Earth’s ginkgo. The ginkgoes flourished with the great dinosaurs in Earth’s Jurassic period. Yet here, nothing more complex than shroud worms eats that tree. The plant life and animal life are very far out of phase. Have you found an explanation for this?”
“Maybe. The native organisms have a kind of deoxyribonucleic acid for genetic material. Different from terrestrial DNA, and, it turns out, more stable. Too stable. My guess is that you need a certain mutation rate to make enough random experiments so that some of them go to the kind of nervous system complexity that makes for higher animals.”
The pseudoginkgo trees were small, branchy, rooty and close together. Joe fought his way through, while Wing slipped between the tangled trees like a cat. He paused to wait for Joe. “Could it not be that the pace on this world is simply slow and that animals will come about in time, if we let the world be?”
“I doubt it, because there’s a
n incredible excess of genetic material in every organism we’ve studied. The ratio of genes that mean something to genes that mean nothing is absurdly low. A slug tissue sample collected near Unity Base had six million times more genetic material than it should need.”
“I do not see how an apparent excess of noncoding DNA negates the further evolution of slugs,” said Wing. “Of course, I am a botanist rather than a xenobiologist.”
Joe detected a nettle. Joe was no xenobiologist either. His qualifications to assess the biohazards of Planet Green had been questioned by some of the scientists who were. To no avail: the reins had stayed in his hands. “Obsolete genetic baggage doesn’t get selected out. Evolution here was never able to jack up to higher life-forms. And now it’s too late,” Joe said flatly. “From here on, we supply the higher life-forms.”
Wing forged ahead in silence.
The bright blue gloom made it all but impossible to judge the position of obstacles. “Still think it’s beautiful?” Joe snapped, after tripping over yet another root.
“Yes, I do,” answered Wing, “philosophically. How I feel is another matter.”
“You don’t feel sick, do you?”
“No. But . . . I’m unnerved. Things here have no names. I might feel better if I expected a dinosaur—even a toothy one like an allosaur—to crash through the bushes.” He ducked into a thick band of trees. Long, pliable branches with masses of round leaves hung in the way.
Wing seemed healthy enough. But Joe wondered morosely about his own weakened, fevered body. The ragged molecules and wounded cells of stasis fever—how vulnerable did that make him? “Ever read about the Black Death in medieval Europe? People literally dropped dead. I keep thinking about that,” said Joe. “Irrationally expecting wild viruses to rustle in the air. And water. And goddamned dirt.”
