“Oh man,” said Misha. “That is going to be a bitch to climb with this sledge.”
“You know,” Anne said, “I’ve been thinking.”
Daisuke looked at her. “Thinking?” He panted.
“I’m thinking about how we might be able to improve on your sledge design.” The smile Anne turned on him made her red, sweaty face look very good. An apple he was sure would be deliciously sweet. If only he could be sure it wasn’t poisoned.
“How would you like some wheels?” asked Anne.
* * *
The herd of wheelers grazed on a glassy meadow between two lines of foothills. The creatures, each the size of a monster truck’s tire, were the mottled purple of glasslands camouflage, rolling their ring-shaped bodies slowly across the tiles.
“I saw these things from the plane,” Daisuke said. “Do you think that they can become the wheels for our sledge?”
Anne frowned. “We know that. I explained it to you an hour ago.”
“He’s speaking for the camera,” Nurul whispered to her.
Anne looked around at Rahman and the camera, her frown deepening. “Just let’s be a bit more careful this time, right? I mean, you gave the eulogy for the last guy who tried to approach a wild animal.”
“The shmoo was a predator. Those are grazers.” Nurul pointed to the ground, where sagging, blackened tiles showed where wheelers had been feeding. “The trails we followed—”
“I know that! And rhinoceroses are also grazers. And horses, kangaroos, even sheep can kill people.”
Daisuke cleared his throat. “Do you think these wheel animals are dangerous?”
“Well, look at them!” She thrust out her hands at the nearest wheeler. It was five or six meters away, a thick glass hoop with spines around the rim. “I have no idea how they move themselves, but if they’re eating the tiles, that means they have a way of getting through the glassy test and into the soup inside. I’m thinking a powerful radula assisted by acid at high concentration.”
After taking a moment to remember that test and radula meant ‘shell’ and ‘tongue’, Daisuke nodded and summarized. “So you believe these things drill into the glassland ground and suck up nutrients like—”
“Shut up, Daisuke!” Anne stomped. “This isn’t a bloody TV show.”
Daisuke jerked. Looked up. For a second, he stared into the lens of the camera.
“Hey,” said Rahman.
Daisuke quickly refocused his eyes. Looking into the camera? When was the last time he’d made that amateur mistake?
“I know,” he said. “I know this isn’t a TV show. But this is what I know. And Nurul and Rahman. It’s why we’re here.” Or so we are supposed to assume.
“Like how you keep analyzing every creature we see,” said Nurul. “Or how Hariyadi keeps yelling and giving orders. We all have our roles.”
“Yes, well, my role is to tell you when you’re about to do something stupid and dangerous.” Anne sighed. “But we need a way to carry our supplies.”
“It can’t hurt to try,” Nurul said.
“Can’t hurt you, you mean.” Anne gestured at the camera. “You’re going to be behind the camera, not in front of it.”
“We will stand in front of the camera together,” said Daisuke.
Nurul waited the appropriate beat before slashing her hand through the air. “And cut!”
When they’d repositioned everyone and gotten the “Ya” from Rahman, Anne, and Daisuke had put one of the wheelers between themselves and the camera. Daisuke held his urchin spine in his right hand and a collapsible shovel in his left.
“So, Anne,” he said, “what do we have here? I’d say this is the strangest organism we’ve discovered so far, how about you?”
Anne sighed and rolled her eyes. “Just stab the bloody thing, Dice. Stab it right through its bloody axle.”
Daisuke had spent a long time memorizing random English vocabulary. “That’s no axle,” he said, hoisting his urchin spine. “This is an axle.”
Her glare cracked. “What are you doing?” she giggled. “Is that Crocodile Dundee you’re trying to do?”
Daisuke just smiled, trying to remember who Crocodile Dundee was.
“Just poke the alien, you dipstick. I’ll tell the camera how this creature works.”
“You have theories?” asked Daisuke.
“Of course I have theories. Rolling as a means of locomotion isn’t unknown even on Earth. There is a spider that spreads its legs out and turns its body into a wheel. There’s a beetle larva that rolls up and does the same. What we’re seeing here is similar. I just don’t understand how this thing propels itself….”
“Let’s find out.” Daisuke smacked the wheeler with his spear.
Anne grabbed his arm and pulled him back. “Jesus Christ, Daisuke! I was kidding about the poking.”
The wheeler rolled as if pushed, but toward Daisuke, rather than away. It pivoted and from its flat rim a spike pistoned out, spraying steaming fluid.
Rahman and Nurul jerked back. Daisuke and Anne had already stepped out of the way.
“So we know how it defends itself,” Daisuke said, once he was sure his voice would remain level. “Do you think that spike also moves the animal?”
“Hmm,” said Anne. “Maybe in emergencies. But look at how it rolls and pivots. There must be something heavy moving around inside it. Changing its balance.”
“Changing its balance?” Daisuke prodded.
“Stop wasting time!” Hariyadi yelled at them from beside their travois.
Anne flapped her hands at him, then formed the fingers into a ring. “Imagine a worm swallowed a rock and then its own tail. Now the worm is a hoop standing on its rim with a heavy rock inside. It swallows the rock further down its gut, which causes it to overbalance and roll.”
“I see,” said Daisuke, thinking of his career. “Like a clown forever cursed to do somersaults.”
Anne squinted at him. “Huh?”
“All right.” Daisuke squared his shoulders. “Let’s see if we can make a wheel.” He raised his spear, then, thinking, switched the shovel into his right hand. With the spear in his left, he reached out and prodded the wheeler, which shot out its defensive spike. Daisuke rushed in close and brought the shovel down on the spike where it met the rim of the wheeler. He leaped backward, away from the digestive juices that flooded out of the shattered hole he had made.
Daisuke glanced at Anne, wondering if his destruction of the native wildlife would bother her. Anne only stared at him for a second before frowning and holding her hands up. “What? You killed it. Congratulations.”
The wheeler rolled away from him, smoking fluid sluicing down its side. Its internal organs bubbled and spasmed, and defensive spikes extended, retracted, extended again. A hole in the inner rim of the wheel vomited black tarry material. The animal rolled to a stop.
“Let’s get a move on.” Anne walked to the wheeler, grabbed its rim, and held out a hand. “Give me that spine.” Daisuke handed it to her, and she thrust it through the center of the wheeler. There were bits of glass there, hollow and brittle as old light bulbs.
“Aha,” said Anne. “As the wheeler grows, it flees away from its center, increasing its diameter faster than its body’s girth in an attempt to gain torque. That leaves an empty space around the hub. An…that’s not an axle? The urchin spine is the axle? So what’s the hole? There’s got to be some technical name for the hole in the middle of a wheel.”
“I don’t know.” Daisuke shoved on the spine, now threaded through the middle of the dead animal. Trailing acidic slime, it rolled.
“Well,” said Anne. “At least we invented the wheel.”
* * *
The tiles rolled by under Daisuke’s feet. Every time he looked up, the mountains were closer, rising from the sparkling plains like the head
of a black dog from a diamond-studded collar.
“I think I can see the next biome,” said Anne. “Do you see where the glass sort of peters out? Then there’s bare rock, and above that….” She squinted. “Something dark.”
“What are you talking about?” Hariyadi shouted, even though he wasn’t more than a few paces from them. In fact, Daisuke realized, the Indonesian soldier hadn’t allowed them to get more than a few paces away since that morning. What is he afraid we might do?
“Can we get to the mountains before sunset?” asked Hariyadi, who hadn’t bothered to wait for an answer to his first question.
“I think we might,” Daisuke said. “Maybe if—”
Anne smacked him across the chest with the back of her arm. “Careful!” She pointed with her free hand at the yellow tile in front of Hariyadi.
The others turned at Anne’s shout. Rahman called out a question in Indonesian and Misha said, “Almost step on landmine again, Colonel?”
“I saw it. I knew it was there.” Hariyadi took a dignified step to the side. “These things are becoming quite a nuisance.”
“They do seem more common,” said Daisuke as he skirted the dangerous spot. “Maybe we are in a less stable part of the glasslands.”
Anne swatted at a bumblesnail as it tumbled through the air past her head. “Oh, no. Isn’t it obvious? After the snow melted into water, the glasslands are, um, blooming.”
“And singing,” Misha said. “Or is that sound in my head?”
“No,” said Daisuke, “I hear it too.” It had begun as a subliminal rumble, a fluttering in the chest that Daisuke had only felt before in Africa, when elephants were nearby. Now, though, he could tell the subsonics came from the ground.
Anne cocked her head, eyes narrow. “And the pitch is rising.”
As if it had been waiting for her to notice it, the sound shifted to the sound of boulders grinding together.
Hariyadi surveyed their surroundings. “There’s steam coming out of the cracks around that yellow tile. What does that signify?”
“You know what?” said Anne. “I think we should all head up a hill. Uh. Right now.”
Daisuke knew better than to ask for clarification. As he turned in his traces and hauled his cart back toward the safety of a hill-reef, the whistling rose in pitch from earthquake to church organ. The ground vibrated under Daisuke’s boots. He pulled harder on the cart. “Help!” he called.
A few moments later the cart lurched behind him and Misha grunted. “I push! I push! What is noise?”
“A signal.” Anne appeared in Daisuke’s peripheral vision, her expression worried, but not panicked. “Look at those swarming bumblesnails. Or, no, Daisuke, don’t look. Focus on your climbing. I think that whistling is calling them here.”
Daisuke didn’t have to look. Tiny bead-gnats swarmed him. Animals crawled on the glass at his feet, legless stick insects dragging filmy bags like parachutes, trying to catch the wind and get up into the air.
“It’s like of the scent of a cherry tree in bloom, calling the bees,” said Anne. “A musical perfume.”
“Yo-issho!” Daisuke groaned, hauling the sledge up the hill a half-meter at a time. It wasn’t until he got to the top that he could appreciate Anne’s flower analogy. Yellow spots speckled the purple glasslands like a color-shifted prairie in bloom. The air over those ‘flowers’ was thick with flying creatures from the size of bees to hawks, darting, whirling, attacking, and escaping from each other as the pitch of the whistling grew higher and louder.
“It’s like an old-fashioned teakettle,” Anne said, looking out over the swarming glasslands. “And it’s about to boil over.”
That was a good comparison. Daisuke looked around for Rahman and found the cameraman already at work, showing Daisuke a thumbs-up from behind his equipment.
Daisuke gave the camera a big smile. “We should be safe up here,” he said for the folks at home. “Safe from the…steam-spawning of the glasslands.” And then as the howl rose in the air, “Perhaps we should set up some kind of protection.”
“I had wanted to get out of this cursed place before nightfall.” Hariyadi puffed up the hill behind them, looking annoyed. “Protection from what? Are we in fact safe on this hill, Ms. Houlihan?”
Anne rubbed her mouth. “We might want to erect tarps to protect us from the, um, splashing.”
Hariyadi yelled orders at Rahman, Nurul, and Tyaney. Anne answered their plaintive-sounding questions in Indonesian and said in English, “I’m sure it will all blow, um, blow over before sunset.”
She was right. The sun had just barely touched the horizon when the glasslands exploded.
The howl became a whistle, which rose to the shriek of an air-raid siren. The sound reached its crest, and every yellow tile became a spume of boiling fluid. Drops spattered on the tent they’d erected.
“It reminds me of watching whales breach off Hawaii,” said Daisuke. Then the smell hit them.
“Whales from hell,” Misha said.
Rahman clamped his hand over his mouth, but he kept filming.
Anne pulled one of the edges of her jacket over her mouth. “Probably shouldn’t breathe this stuff in!” she yelled through the fabric.
So they were silent for the next few minutes, until the sharp, sulfurous stench died away. Then another tense period, waiting for the yellow goo to stop raining on their tent. Daisuke made sure his back was to the camera before shutting his eyes and monitoring himself for signs of incipient allergy.
Time passed and nobody fell to the ground in a seizure. They let out sighs of relief, but shallow ones.
“Now,” said Anne, eventually, “we need to start thinking about animal life.”
Daisuke opened his eyes. Beyond the tarp, the glasslands looked as if they’d been spray-painted. Yellow slime covered the ground, and it writhed with life.
Wheelers and urchins trundled between things like shaggy carpets and animated rolling pins. Shmoos ambushed and battled their prey while overhead, baton-shaped hunters darted through clouds of bumblesnails. High above the glasslands, the last red rays of the setting sun shone on parasail-shaped scavengers, circling in the warm updraft from the mass steam-sporing.
Nurul murmured something to Rahman and then said in English, “Daisuke, can you take a step to the side?”
She wanted to get a wider angle. Daisuke turned and put his hands on his hips, framing the scene with his torso. “Ah,” he said, “what a glorious spectacle of nature. The miracle of reproduction!”
“Ah,” said Misha, “geysers of plant semen. What’s that word, Daisuke? Bukkake?”
Daisuke made a disgusted face.
Rahman giggled and, thank goodness, put the camera down.
Nurul squinted at her husband. “How do you know about bukkake?”
“Well, how do you?” asked Misha, and burst into laughter at her blush. “Ah, when a married couple finds they share a fetish—”
“Shut up, Misha,” Anne said. “I’m thinking about sulfur-reducing bacteria.”
“Oh, were you?” said Misha. “I was thinking about—”
“On Earth,” Anne said heavily, “they live in hot springs and hydrothermal vents or deep underground where they can get at elemental sulfur. Here, it seems like there’s a lot of sulfur just freely available in the environment. More than there should be.” She cocked an eyebrow at Daisuke, as if offering him a puzzle. “Like there’s more oxygen than there should be on Earth.”
Daisuke got it. “You mean glassland plants produce sulfur the same way Earth plants produce oxygen?”
Anne shrugged. “It’s what I’m guessing. Clearly there’s enough oxygen in the air to keep us alive.” Anne breathed in demonstration. “Maybe enough blows in from other places. Maybe plants here also produce oxygen.” She nodded to herself. “Yes, it would be odd for the aliens who designed
this place to link up a planet with a poisonous atmosphere.”
She was developing a real presence on camera: solid and loud. Daisuke found he liked watching the biologist as she lectured. Found it hard to stop, actually.
“But what if organisms like that evolved a way to mine the sulfur they needed out of the ground?” Anne asked.
Of course, she got no answer, but she went on anyway. “Perhaps,” she said, “by using strong acid to dissolve boreholes into the rock? Heat becomes a problem, but silicate valves are grown in the bores, shunting water from one place to another, cooling the tunnel system and transporting dissolved minerals.”
Daisuke was trying to put together a metaphor to encapsulate all that when Hariyadi said, “How can we ever build cities in a hell like this?”
“Why should we need to?” asked Anne.
“To stop acid from glasslands eating through crust of planet,” Misha said.
“I was thinking more of establishing a claim to the land,” said Hariyadi.
Anne shook her head, setting her halo of curls swinging in fascinating little arcs. Daisuke would love to find out what those curls felt like around his fingers. “We don’t need to save Junction from the glasslands. This ecosystem has its own system of checks and balances.”
“Maybe on home planet.” Misha pointed west, toward where they assumed the glasslands’ own wormhole sat. “Here, on Junction, we have only part of ecosystem. Spill-over from ancient alien zoological gardens. Maybe it eats hole in planet, makes super-volcano.”
“Nonsense,” Anne said. “If that could happen, it would have happened some time in the past however many million years and we’d see evidence of it on Earth. Volcanic ash spewing out of a hole in the New Guinea Highlands.”
Hariyadi made a skeptical sound. “How could you possibly know that that Indonesian wormhole is so old?”
Daisuke frowned. What the hell was he doing thinking about caressing Anne’s scalp when super-volcanoes or alien slime could kill them all at any moment? Or if not natural forces, then human agency.
Junction Page 14
