“So communication is very bad?” he asked.
“Uh….” She was looking at the camera again.
At first, Daisuke had thought the biologist was pretending to be camera-shy. How could he explain her performance at the wormhole that morning if Anne wasn’t a performer? But it seemed now that all of Anne’s cutting remarks had just been her honest opinions.
Trying to help Anne get over her stage fright, Daisuke asked, “Do you have anyone who can interpret for the Nun?”
But Pearson, seated on the log beside Daisuke, snatched the conversational initiative before Anne could recover it. “There are only a few natives who speak Indonesian, and none who speak English or anything else.”
Anne frowned. “Although they speak plenty of other Papuan languages.”
“Which isn’t very helpful to us, is it?” said Pearson.
“Our translators should arrive shortly,” said Hariyadi. The Indonesian colonel looked very uncomfortable on his log, bowl of porridge in hand and a camera pointed at his face. He kept darting glances at the cameraman’s bottle of beer.
“It will be very good to hear what these people have to say,” Daisuke said to Anne, trying to make her forget the camera. “You know, I have been fascinated by New Guinea ever since my first visit here.”
“You mean ‘there’,” said Anne.
“Ah yes. Of course, we’re not in New Guinea anymore,” Daisuke said, “but this place resembles it very much. The plants and the animals….” He looked off into the middle distance. “Also, the feeling of moving between worlds.”
It was too much. Anne looked back at the camera and froze like a frog caught in the glare of a snake. “Um,” she said, and took a swig of her own beer.
Daisuke gave up and followed her example. The beer was good: bintang smuggled in by Indonesian soldiers and a good complement to the porridge and pork. The feast must be hard on the Muslim soldiers, thought Daisuke, although neither Hariyadi nor the Astarinas seemed to care.
Nurul cleared her throat. “Speaking of which.” She turned to Pearson, and Daisuke’s trained eye caught the twitch of the journalist’s hand as she realized she had no microphone to point into the soldier’s face. “Can you tell us more about this village on the far side of the Indonesian wormhole? Where are we, exactly?”
Pearson cleared his throat. “This village is called Imsame. It’s on the western bank of the Mekimsam River.”
Hariyadi cleared his throat. “I believe she was referring to our astronomical position.”
“Oh.” Pearson grimaced. “We don’t know. The stars are…unfamiliar.”
Anne chuckled at that for some reason, but Pearson ignored her.
“Tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll fly out of the habitable zone around the Earth Wormhole…”
Daisuke noticed he didn’t call it ‘the Indonesian Wormhole.’
“…and get our first aerial reconnaissance of what the native Nun people call ‘the Uninitiated Forest of Treeworms.’ The Treeworm Bush. The toxic, alien ecosystem.”
Nurul nodded at Daisuke, and he understood he was expected to contribute.
“Ah….” he said, and waited for Rahman to center the camera on his face before frowning seriously. “When you say ‘toxic’…well, we heard of the man who was bitten by a worm and suffered an allergic reaction? Is that what you mean?”
“Obviously,” muttered Anne.
Pearson shot her a smug smile. “To answer that question, I refer to our resident biologist, Anne Houlihan, discoverer of the wormhole.”
Rahman turned the camera in her direction, and Anne leaned back, hands up in front of her as if the cameraman had aimed a gun at her.
“Well, um. Shit. Amino acids. We don’t even know if they have them…no.” Anne stared at her beer. “You know how you get red and pussy when there’s a splinter in your finger? Pus? Shit. Shit, I swore again. Don’t film me. I’m no good at all this…” – she made circles with the bottle of beer in her hand – “…looking like…a person. On film. Talk to someone else.”
Nurul made a noise that Daisuke, well accustomed to the ways of directors, recognized as the sigh of a professional resigning herself to filming a bunch of idiots.
Daisuke, however, felt just a bit optimistic. It was refreshing to work with people who said what they meant. And acting alongside Anne, Pearson, and Hariyadi, I can’t help but look good.
He tried to guess what Anne had been trying to say. “Ms. Houlihan, why is the land around this terraformed valley uninhabitable?”
“Um. Well. Uh.” Anne’s eyes slid to his. Locked there. “North. Look, Mr. Matsumori, you have to know that that’s just a…a convention. We just call it ‘north’ because we call the direction the sun rises ‘east.’ Magnetic compasses don’t even…wait. Shit.” She closed her eyes and opened them. “Can we start again?”
“Of course,” said Nurul. “Whenever you’re ready.”
“Ugh,” said Anne. “Shit.”
Pearson sighed, but Daisuke kept his face open. “Don’t worry,” he whispered to her. “I will help you.” He angled his body on the log they shared so that he was between the camera and Anne, caught her eyes again and said, “That’s very interesting, Ms. Houlihan. So we know very little about this planet, even the basic directions?”
“Correct?” Anne said it with the rising intonation of a question, but she nodded at the same time.
“Um.” Daisuke tried again. “Is there anything we do know?”
“Yes?” said Anne. “Oh. Okay? So, this here is a rocky planet? Very Earthlike, although the gravity is higher and the stars are different. Oh, the stars!” The question-intonation vanished as Anne became more confident in what she was saying. “The stars are very different indeed.” She snorted, as if at a joke. “But you’ll see about that. Anyway, we’ve got mountains, we’ve got air and liquid water. We’re going to fly over it all tomorrow in a plane that’s been, I guess” – she glanced at Pearson – “disassembled and put through the wormhole piece by piece?”
Pearson cleared his throat and Daisuke tried to get them back on topic.
“Outside the valley, there is alien life,” he said. “But in this valley, there are grass and trees. They are very much like on Earth. So what’s going on?”
“Don’t ask me, I only got here yesterday,” said Anne, and looked surprised when they all laughed.
“That was a very good joke,” Nurul hinted.
“Right,” said Anne. “A joke.”
Daisuke smiled at her. “Sorry, I should have said, why are the, ah, ‘treeworms’ toxic?”
Anne shrugged. “Well, incompatible biochemistry, obviously.”
Daisuke had seen that one coming, and had a translation ready. “In other words, humans and other Earthly life are allergic to the treeworms?”
“At the very fucking least!” She threw her arms out and Daisuke rocked back. “This whole planet must have a totally different vocabulary of amino acids. If they even use amino acids. God, I wish I could do some proper science here.” Anne shook her head, sending blonde curls flying. “I haven’t a clue what’s going on at the molecular level or how this fits in with the bigger picture of the ecology. I mean, it’s a whole bloody big planet out there!”
Pearson cleared his throat again and Rahman centered the camera on him.
“Good job,” whispered Daisuke as Anne wiped the sweat off her face.
“Thank you, Ms. Houlihan. Now,” Pearson addressed the camera, jaw working as if the general wished he had a pipe stem to chew on, “I must stress that we have things well enough under control now to do the sort of research necessary to determine how great a danger this planet presents.”
Anne made an unattractive noise and Daisuke tried to gain control of the scene before she ruined all his work. “I don’t know anything about politics or military things. Maybe you can exp
lain to me: why is the wormhole so dangerous? If no one can live outside the valley, then all we have here is a small tribe of natives.”
“And surely, if the natives can handle it, so can we,” said Nurul.
Pearson glared at the Indonesian journalist. Daisuke was put in mind of an owl pinpointing a distant mouse. “Excuse me if I gave the impression that our mission here was to protect the Earth from aliens. The truth is the opposite. There are many players on the international theater vying for power here, for use of this new planet’s resources. It is my mission, and Colonel Hariyadi’s” – he gave a gracious nod to his counterpart – “to ensure that the various interests here are balanced peacefully.”
“So you say,” said Hariyadi, raising his palms. “Balance.”
Daisuke would have been happy to let the scene close there, but Pearson had to have the last word. “Transparency is also very important to the American government, of course, and we see it as our responsibility to our descendants to keep a record of these historic events.” He cleared his throat. “To that end, we will have you all fitted with one of these.”
He tugged at a lanyard around his neck and pulled out a palm-sized black device, a bit smaller than a smartphone. “This is a body camera. It will record video and audio of whatever you’re facing. Battery life of over a week. Please keep it on and unobstructed at all times.”
Anne muttered something like, “Oh, of all the—”
“Cameras for everyone?” Daisuke said, thinking about what being on camera all the time would do to his and Anne’s every single interaction. It was going to be an exhausting and awkward couple of days, with him poking and prodding her toward the basic semblance of humanity. “Is this…really necessary?”
“Yes,” said Hariyadi. “The stakes here are higher than you seem to realize.”
“What?” said Anne, glaring at Pearson. “You want us to collect your intelligence for you?”
“He wants us to put a sweet civilian face on the military struggle here,” said Nurul.
“We want you to establish our innocence,” Hariyadi corrected.
Daisuke kept his face blank while wondering what on Earth ‘establish our innocence’ was supposed to mean.
“What the hell does that mean?” said Anne.
Pearson looked out toward the natives, celebrating around their firepits. “It would be a shame if I, or my esteemed colleague Hariyadi, were torn apart by aliens and everyone assumed it was foul play.” He scowled. “And by ‘a shame’ I mean ‘World War Three.’”
Daisuke knew that tone. Pearson was about to launch into a speech, probably about how America was nobly trying to stop Indonesia from indulging in an illegal land grab.
That wasn’t a speech Daisuke’s audience, or Daisuke himself, needed to hear again, so he looked for something distracting.
“Isn’t that our host?” he asked, pointing.
The Nun chief, a proud display of masculinity in feathered headdress, sash, and meter-long codpiece, left off haranguing the chefs and the central firepit and bounded over to theirs.
Nurul directed Rahman to swing his camera toward the spectacle, and Pearson deflated, looking sour.
“Please translate for me,” Daisuke whispered to Anne, and bowed to the man. “Thank you for extending this opportunity to all mankind.”
Anne said something in halting Indonesian and their host answered rather more fluently.
“This is Tyaney, the man who originally found me and showed me the Deep Sky Hole,” said Anne. “He says he is happy for all the foreigners we have brought to buy things from his people. He’s, uh, happy to offer us second helpings of our meal as well.”
“For what price?” asked Pearson. Anne shot him a poisonous look and Tyaney spoke again.
“He says,” Nurul said, when it became clear that Anne hadn’t been paying attention. “He says that his…newest wife?…has brought us more food.”
“Oh. Hello, Sing,” Anne said. “Selamat malam.”
Sing did not respond. The chieftain’s shaven-headed wife was covered in a sort of raincoat made of fur-lined straw. Her face was round and rather heavy-featured, dominated by a mouth too small for her teeth. With deep-set eyes and a long, slightly hooked nose, Sing might have been anything from fifteen to a malnourished twenty-five.
Tyaney yelled something at her, and the little woman ducked her head, presenting more folded-bark dishes. The foreigners took what was offered with varying degrees of politeness.
“So that’s Tyaney,” said Anne. “He’s the one who found me and brought me to the wormhole in the first place. His father was alive to see first contact with the outside world, but Tyaney’s been all the way to Jayapura. He’s decided to act like I’m his best friend in the…both worlds…and he’s our best source of information. I just wish he wasn’t….”
“An asshole?” Pearson asked.
“No,” said Anne. “He’s just brought the attention of the whole world down on his little village. A village the army has completely evacuated now. How do you think he feels about that? How do the rest of the Nun feel about him? The shit he’s dealing with is more complex than anything Pearson or Hariyadi have on their plates.”
Tyaney screamed something at Sing.
“So?” said Rahman. “He is asshole.”
“All natives treat their wives like that,” said Nurul, giving her own husband a tender look.
Anne’s jaw muscles visibly clenched. “No, they don’t.”
Tyaney yelled something at them, or maybe at his wife again. Anne said something to him, which made him laugh, and Anne scowled.
“What did you tell him?” Daisuke wondered if he ought to tell Anne not to antagonize Tyaney. That some of the native guides on his various shoots had been unpleasant people, but he’d needed to work with them, and had refrained from commenting on their customs.
“Ms. Houlihan told him she would bring him and his wife with her on the plane tomorrow,” said Hariyadi, “and he just said, ‘My wife? Don’t be ridiculous.’” The Indonesian colonel smiled. “I hope you have learned your lesson, Ms. Houlihan. You do not understand the natives as well as you think you do, and you have no authority to invite them on military expeditions.”
“Houlihan discussed it with me, Hariyadi,” said Pearson. “I gave her the go-ahead.”
“And who will give up their seat to allow your biologist to bring her pet Nun on board?” Hariyadi leaned forward on his log, stabbing a finger toward his American counterpart. “You are making unilateral decisions that strain both our missions. That is unacceptable.”
Anne took a swig from her bottle and cawed in sarcastic laughter. “Human politics. I never thought it could get any stupider, but here we are.” She raised her free hand and wiggled its fingers over her forehead. “It’s like ants stealing from a picnic being racist to each other.”
Daisuke decided those fingertips were supposed to represent antennae. He was starting to feel the beer.
“Well, who do you think set up this picnic?” Anne leaned back into the shadows and took another drink. “Whose food do you think we’re stealing? You dipshits invade the Nun’s home because they don’t have tanks and attack helicopters. But when you meet beings that can make permanent wormholes leading to your home? What happens then?”
The fire popped in its pit. Somewhere, beyond the feasting soldiers, insects buzzed.
“You mean you believe that aliens made the wormhole?” Daisuke asked.
“We are aware of that possibility,” said Pearson. “Another reason our mission of exploration is so important.”
Anne gave a scornful grunt. “What exploration do we need? Just look the fuck up, mate.”
Daisuke squinted, trying to parse that phrasal verb.
“Look up.” Anne patted Daisuke on the shoulder, and the skin under the spot where she touched hummed with pleasant wa
rmth. Her face was very close to his, and her eyes were luminous in the firelight. “Look at the stars.”
Daisuke looked up, past the smoke into the cold night sky, pricked by unfamiliar stars, girdled with—
He sucked in a shocked breath and Anne laughed.
“What are you…?” Nurul looked up and gasped, and Colonel Hariyadi cursed in Indonesian.
Daisuke felt a rare, true smile break across his face. Over their heads, lines of lights marched across the sky, twinkling white, yellow, red, and blue. The lights curved off to the east and west, following the path of the sun to the southern horizon, as ordered as pearls on a necklace.
“They might just be stars,” said Pearson.
“Those aren’t stars, you tosser,” Anne said. “Those points of light orbit this planet. We’re looking at a ring system.”
“Like on Saturn and Neptune?” Daisuke clarified.
Anne made an impatient sound. “No, it isn’t like Saturn. That one’s made of ice and rock, but this” – she poked her beer bottle upward – “this ring is made of fucking wormholes.”
“Yeli im,” said Tyaney into their astonished silence. The Nun chieftain had come to stand behind Hariyadi, his penis-sheath pointing toward the fire, his face aimed at the sky.
“What did he say?” asked Daisuke.
“Yeli is a deity like the Rainbow Serpent,” said Anne. “Im means ‘sky’.”
“The men call it ‘the Nightbow’,” said Pearson. “Showing it to newcomers is somewhat of a hazing ritual.”
“The Nightbow,” Daisuke said. “What is it? Who made it?”
“Yeah,” said Anne. “Wouldn’t it be great to try and find that out?”
* * *
The rotting treeworm lay in the center of a circle of dead grass like a fish in an extremely unappetizing breakfast box.
The morning sun bathed the south-western slopes of the mountains in light that was just a little too yellow. And the scent Daisuke had smelled up by the wormhole wasn’t just a hint on the wind anymore. The alien reek was all around him, not exactly chemical, not exactly fetid, just…strange. Foreign. Bad.
Junction Page 3
