“You called it Junction?” said Anne.
Had he? Daisuke didn’t remember. It was easier to say than ‘crazy quilt’, anyway.
“Yes. Energy from the interior of Junction heats the water.” Daisuke had begun the summation out of habit. Dumbing down the scientist’s explanation so it would make sense to his viewers. But then he actually started listening to himself, passing his hand through the steam rising from the damaged tile.
I had been thinking of the glassland biome as if it was a puzzle that cannot be comprehended. Daisuke imagined his narration over this scene. But now I saw it for what it was: an ecosystem. A system to support life.
When Daisuke placed his hand against the ground, the ridged, glassy surface was warm.
“We will not freeze,” said Daisuke. “We only have to lie on the ground.”
“Well, yes,” Anne said, squinting at him. “I thought that was obvious.”
So they didn’t need wood for a fire. They could make their own sauna just by cutting a hole in the ground. But as for food….
Daisuke lowered his face toward the swarming creatures and took a sniff. “Like fermented fish,” he narrated for his audience, “but with sulfur instead of salt. If we have to eat this, I think even people who love funazushi will have a difficult time appreciating this flavor.”
“Eat it?” said Anne as if in horror. “No! It’s probably totally incompatible with our biochemistry. We’re lucky we’re not going into anaphylaxis just from smelling the air here.”
“So,” Daisuke said, “no food, no wood, and no water out here?”
She made a wry face. “No food or wood, certainly. But there is water under there.” She tapped the tough glassy surface again. Things beneath it darted and swam.
“Can we drink it?” asked Daisuke, but an idea was already forming in his mind. “I have been in plenty of situations where I needed to purify water. You can mix hand sanitizer or alcohol or even bleach with water to kill germs. At least, Terran germs.”
“Correct,” said Anne. “And what about chemical pollutants? We can smell the sulfur, but what’s in there that we can’t smell? To be sure we’re getting out all the impurities, we’d have to boil the stuff and collect its steam.”
“I am glad to see we are thinking of the same thing.” Daisuke picked up a palm-sized tile lying loose on the ground. After a once-over with his hand-sanitizer and a corner of his shirt, he had its surface clean enough to hold over the nearest hole the plane had plowed in the glasslands.
Daisuke held the glass plate high over the wafting steam. In the chilly air of dusk, water condensed almost immediately on the under-surface of the glass. Little droplets merged as Daisuke tilted the glass, ran together like rivers running down a mountain to water, or veins spreading the heart’s nourishment to a man’s hand. He lifted the glass high, and water bulged on the lower lip of the glass plate, shone red in the light of the setting sun, and fell onto Daisuke’s outstretched tongue.
Anne watched his experiment, her brows together. “I wish there was some other way to test this. Don’t swallow immediately. Any weird tastes?”
Daisuke held the water in his mouth. There was still some sour sulfur there, but no stinging or numbness. Daisuke swallowed, and smiled. “Yum,” he said.
* * *
“Yuck,” said Tyaney.
Daisuke agreed. Hardly chilly or shaky at all now, he forced himself to eat another mouthful of something that said Turkey Tetrazzini on the package, but tasted like poultry-flavored vomit.
“Is this what the American military has to eat?” Hariyadi asked.
“No rice?” Nurul asked her silvery food-pack.
“I like,” said Rahman. “Good like wife cooking.”
Nurul shoved him.
“We don’t usually rehydrate the stuff with sulfuric acid,” said Pearson.
“Very diluted acid.” Daisuke spoke around a spoonful of sulfurous sweet and sour pork. “This is no worse than what’s already in your stomach.”
“That’s hydrochloric, though,” Anne contributed.
“So you mean this food is pre-digested,” said Misha. “Efficient!”
Daisuke couldn’t even muster a polite chuckle. It had been a long day.
The wind was cold, but the warm air rising from the ground kept their surroundings a pleasant twenty degrees Celsius. Still, he wished they had a fire. Instead, they sat on folded blankets around the shattered remains of the tile that provided them with the steam to warm and hydrate their dinner. The shadow of the plane reached over them, seeming to clutch at the sky.
The sun sank toward the south-west, its light scattering through the atmosphere, shifting the color of the sky through orange, green, and purple, fading to star-pricked black to the north. Things like glass bumblebees zipped through the dusk air, avoiding larger, rod-shaped creatures like headless dragonflies. Or would a better comparison be ‘elongated, winged squid’?
“Maybe we eat animals?” asked Rahman, who hadn’t touched his dinner. He asked something hopeful-sounding of Tyaney, who barked a question at Sing. Both Nun had already finished their rations, although whether from hunger or a desire to be over with a bad experience quickly, Daisuke didn’t know.
“No.” Nurul translated Tyaney’s report from his wife. “We can’t eat the animals.”
“Maybe animals eat us,” said Misha. “When I was on patrol, I saw something moving fast, like motorcycle. No shape. Many colors.”
“That could have been a shmoo,” Anne said. “A little spiny blob the size of your thumb?”
“No, size of cat,” said Misha. “Big cat. With eyes.”
Nurul made a sound like “Eww,” and huddled closer against Rahman’s side.
“And I saw things eating the glass on the ground by the plane,” said Pearson. “Little balls like hard candies. Might be venomous.”
“Toxic,” Anne sighed. “Allergenic.”
Pearson grimaced. “My point is that we’re going to need to keep an eye out for little things as well as big ones.”
“And what did you see, Hariyadi?” asked Daisuke. It was important to get people talking, sharing, building trust. Reminding them that they were all out here together, terrified, maybe, but not alone.
“Something like….” The Indonesian soldier paused, thinking of the word. “A sea urchin?”
“A sea urchin, yes,” Daisuke said. “Anne and I saw one too, but small.” He held his fingers a few centimeters apart.
“No,” said Hariyadi. He held his hand a meter and a half off the ground.
“Perhaps we should sleep in the plane?” Nurul looked fearfully out at the rippled glass beyond the circle of their flashlights.
“No,” said Pearson. “Too unstable.”
“Plane is sideways,” Misha pointed out. “How to sleep against sides of seats?”
Daisuke thought of the chalklike substrate under the tiles, and of the quicksand he’d encountered in South Africa. “I am also worried about unstability.”
“Instability,” Anne corrected. “But yes. After today’s…accident with the sporulation tile, let’s stay cautious?”
Accident? Daisuke would call it a ‘disaster’. And now that the initial terror had worn off, he was thinking more and more about how stupid the whole thing would look on the video recorded by their bodycams. Of course, people who had been there would know how chaotic and impossible things could get out in the field, but their audience back home wouldn’t understand. Daisuke would look like an idiot for choosing the one dangerous tile in the whole field to dig up, and Anne would at best appear to be hopelessly disconnected from the real world. After all the mental work she’d done to figure out the reproductive cycle of these alien plants, she couldn’t have given more useful advice on the matter than “Yellow tile!”?
“I just don’t want to sleep in the open where a
nything might find us,” Nurul said.
“We shall continue our watch,” said Hariyadi.
“So we will live long enough to die of thirst,” said Misha. “May I choose devouring by monster instead?”
“We can get enough water from the steam traps,” Anne said. “But we have to be really careful about allergies.”
“Yeah,” said Misha. “No more EpiPens.”
“No more coffee,” Rahman said. “Ya Allah, no more cigarettes!” He was smoking his last, the tip the only fire in a country of glass and hot water.
This was why Daisuke didn’t voice any of his concerns. Everyone else was more worried about the basics of survival. But the disaster with the exploding tile had been caused by lack of communication. Lack of teamwork. Bad feelings.
Being on camera did something to people. It made them put on masks. I am not myself, I am playing myself, the grizzled old soldier, the irreverent pilot, the Iron Man of Survival. Everyone acted in front of a camera, with the possible exception of Anne, and Daisuke hoped that he could use their cameras to remind these people that they were supposed to be acting like survivors.
He looked up at the Nightbow, thinking about how to set the scene.
Daisuke got to his feet. Eyes on the sky, he held a hand out to Anne. “Anne. Stand up with me.”
“What are you doing?” But she gave him her hand.
“Rahman, please turn on your camera,” said Daisuke. “I think it is time for some wonder.”
With a sigh, Rahman scooted away from his wife’s side and stood, unslinging his camera.
“What the hell is it now?” Pearson said.
But the camera was already rolling. Rahman never went anywhere without it.
“Look at this!” Daisuke declaimed. “Gaze at a magnificent wonder of the alien world!”
The camera panned up to take in the southern horizon, which was spanned by the arc of twinkling lights – red, yellow, blue, and white.
The speech came easily. “On Earth, we have the River of Heaven, what in English is called the Milky Way. But in this place, we have the Moat of Heaven! The Milky Ring!”
“Like I said before, they aren’t rings.” But Anne made the ‘hm’ noise that meant she was thinking. “Huh. They must be wormholes.”
I got her. “Really? Wormholes?” Daisuke spread his arms, thinking of his silhouette on the covers of books and boxed DVDs. “A ring of wormholes circling this planet! Shining with the light of other worlds!”
“Is that possible?” Pearson asked.
Misha turned his face up. “What is up there?”
“Same as what’s down here,” said Anne. “Look.” She pointed.
“Pan down,” said Nurul quietly.
Ha. Daisuke had her too.
It was full night now, dark enough that it was easy to see the lights shining out beyond the glasslands. There and there and there, all in a line.
“Those wormholes on the ground were probably just tourist destinations,” said Anne. “Rocky planets not too much smaller or larger than Earth, all with oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres, liquid water, and life. The wormholes in orbit were probably more like the industrial districts. Or trade.”
“The heart,” Daisuke said, “of an interstellar empire.”
Anne snorted, but nobody else did.
“God, this place just keeps getting weirder,” said Pearson.
“Are you saying you believe Junction is a zoo, Ms. Houlihan?” Hariyadi asked, joining the scene. Now how would Daisuke get Tyaney and Sing to participate?
“Who could have built such a grand project?” Daisuke asked the camera. “Can we ask our local experts?”
“You mean Tyaney?” said Anne. She said something to the Nun man, who had been quietly licking clean the inside of his food pouch.
He said something, at which Hariyadi scoffed. “Pft. Superstitions and fairytales.”
Nurul cleared her throat. “He says the lights of the Nightbow are not doors. That’s not how it is at all. He says, ‘Do you want to hear the story of how the Nightbow came to be?’”
“Absolutely,” said Daisuke.
Tyaney shone the flashlight on his own face.
“Ah!” Misha said. “Campfire story with no fire! But at least my ass is warm.”
Tyaney spoke, and Nurul translated. “‘Quiet everyone. Once, there was a man who climbed the Yeli. The Yeli was a worm. It was a tree. It was a rainbow. In the night sky it was Yeli im, the Sky Worm, what you call the Nightbow. It held apart the sky and the earth. The man climbed the tree because he stole a woman from another man.”
“I know this one!” cried Misha.
“This story is very interesting,” Daisuke said, hoping the pilot would take the hint and shut up.
“The man whose wife was stolen grew angry,” Tyaney said. “He commanded his brothers and sons and cousins to help him chop down the Yeli so that the young man and the young woman would fall back to the earth.
“The axes hurt the Yeli. Like a worm cut in two, it slithered in two directions. One part, down into the deep earth, the other up into the high sky.
“The young man and the young woman thought they were safe in the sky, but because the Yeli was really only one, it had made only one hole: in the earth was the Deep Sky Hole, in the sky, the High Earth Hole.
“The old husband of the woman rushed through the hole and found the young man and chopped off his head. The blood from the wound leaked into the ground of the Deep Sky Country and poisoned it so no good crop could grow there. But the young bride wept and her tears cleansed the land, so some crops could grow, but only where her tears had fallen. Then she ran into the cold jungle beneath the Nightbow and gave birth to the adulterer’s child. That is the origin of the people born under the Nightbow, on poisoned ground. People like Sing.”
Rahman swung the camera to point at Sing, who bowed her head.
Even that worked. Tyaney was either casting Sing as a villain, or himself. Later, I will worry about whether either of those possibilities is true.
“Excellent,” he said, clapping. “A great story.” Now to use it to weld his crew together. “Anne, what is your analysis?”
“Huh?” she said, “I’m not an anthropologist.”
Just co-operate with me, damn you. Attractive as her authenticity was, Daisuke wished his co-star would be a little less impossible. Any other talking head would have been happy to babble out some half-baked theory about the myth they’d just heard, and that was all Daisuke needed.
“No need to be archaeologist to see Tyaney doesn’t respect his wife the way a husband should,” said Misha.
“You have a theory about where the wormhole comes from,” Daisuke told her patiently.
“Oh. Well. Right. A zoo,” Anne said. “Maybe. With some sort of containment around each wormhole to keep the biomes separate. But when the containment failed, the biomes spilled out, spreading until they came up against an incompatible biome from some other wormhole.”
Good. Now they all knew Anne’s role in the group. Nurul took the cue with admirable professionalism.
“Thank you, Anne,” she said. “We count on you for your understanding of this place.”
Anne’s shoulders tensed up. Her head snapped around. “Hey, I’m doing the best I can.”
“I know,” said Nurul.
Damnit, Anne. “She wasn’t being sarcastic,” Daisuke said.
Anne blinked at him. “Really? Oh. Shit. Shit!” She pounded the glass with her fist. “You know what? I’m going to go.” She stood up. “Go away for a minute. Scout the perimeter.”
This wasn’t at all what Daisuke had wanted. “Uh,” he said. “Wait.” But she was already stomping away.
Daisuke looked at the rest of his crew. They were looking at him.
“Well?” said Misha. “Go after her.”
> Daisuke did.
Walking away from the others and their flashlights was like diving into a subterranean river. The Nightbow was not as bright as Earth’s moon would have been, and a fog was rising from the warm, moist ground, obscuring the stars and wormholes above.
Creatures buzzed or hooted or tinkled like crystal bells, invisible in the fog. Strange cold drafts coiled and whispered through the rising columns of steam. Stars and wormholes peeked through the fog, creating a velvety gloom thicker than mere darkness, as menacing and intimate as sharing a sauna with a psychopath.
“Let’s go back to the others,” he told Anne when he caught up with her.
“I’m not scared of the dark,” she snapped. “Although I am disappointed at the lack of bioluminescence,” she said, as if to herself.
“It’s all right,” said Daisuke. “Nobody is angry at you because you misinterpreted—”
“Of course they’re angry at me,” Anne said. “I nearly got Nurul and Rahman killed. I wasted all of our water. And I keep being just a flaming bitch about everything on top of it.”
Daisuke had not expected that, but he should have. Anne must be feeling guilty. He glanced at the bodycam hanging off her chest and thought of how to respond. Right. “It’s my fault,” he said. “I chose the yellow tile. Without you, Nurul and Rahman would be dead.”
Anne didn’t seem to be listening. She walked slowly into the cold wind from the north-west, staring at the steaming ground in front of her. “And before that, Nurul wasn’t badgering me about the food. I just thought she was, but all she wanted was some comfort. Some, just, some empty promises. ‘Everything’s going to be okay. Don’t worry.’ Same with Pearson. And I’m just bad at that, all right?”
Daisuke couldn’t think of anything to say in response to Anne except “True” so he kept his mouth shut and followed her.
“You work with people,” said Anne. “Everyone on this crazy trip works with people in one way or another, except me. I work as far away as possible from as many people as possible.”
“So you’re bad with people,” Daisuke said. “That doesn’t make you a bad person.” Eh. That hadn’t sounded as trite in his head. Hopefully his viewers wouldn’t judge him so harshly.
Junction Page 8
