Anne noticed the silken netting strung across those towers, the cords that she had thought of as guy-lines, but now realized were…reins?
She focused on the ground, and saw several large land-boats dig their oars into the ground. Xylophones tinkled, reins went taut, and the mass of towers rolled another half-meter down the path.
“Seems the toymakers are on the march,” Anne said.
“Yeah,” said Misha, “right toward our caravan.”
Chapter Eleven
Toymakers
Daisuke lay on his back, breathing.
It was good to feel the rise and fall of his rib cage, the pulse of blood from his temples to the soles of his feet. His shoulders and thighs ached. So did his head. Sparks swam in his eyes. Nerves tingled in the tips of his fingers and the pit of his stomach. Even the heavy gravity of Junction felt pleasant now, a gentle hand pressing him against the flesh of the planet.
The chocolate-colored tubes of the forest swayed above him like the strands of the hair of a sunken giantess, swimming with strange and wonderful life. A lobsterish creature climbed jerkily up a stalk, hunted by a floating predator the size and shape of a Children’s Day koinobori windsock. The ghostly pursuer billowed through the air toward its prey, darting out the brown dagger of its proboscis. Wood thocked against wood and the lobster clunked hollowly onto the rocky ground. The killer windsock undulated downward to finish its meal.
Daisuke wondered why the forest floor wasn’t littered with wooden shells. Was there something that ate them? Alien termites? Or perhaps something lived inside those shells? Alien hermit crabs? He smiled, anticipating asking that question of Anne.
And speaking of transmitting genes…. There was a whole biological circus grinding into motion now within Daisuke. A process that started with a glance, a smile, a kind word, a touch, or a kiss, and ended in the next generation. Yes, gentle viewers, this is what it feels like to be a naturalist in love.
He’d had girlfriends before his marriage and a few flings afterward. The difference had been startling. A semi-famous, theoretically wealthy, attractive man, Daisuke had found new sexual partners easy to acquire. The reproductive itch was easy to scratch, even if only for a few nights at a time. If only he had liked any of the women he’d slept with. Or they him, come to think of it.
Now, Daisuke certainly enjoyed Anne. And any doubt as to whether she reciprocated had been thoroughly squashed last night on the glasslands. He was breathing. His heart was pumping. Daisuke felt, as with all his endorphin highs, a nirvana-like state of unawareness, as if he was dissolving into the ever-spinning wheel of the gaudy living world.
That would be the part of the trek he’d edit out. Just say, “That was the most difficult day of my life,” and skip ahead to the next exotic animal attack.
Whose idea had it been for Daisuke to haul this cart up a mountain, anyway? It had proved to be an excellent way to keep him too exhausted to focus on detective work. Not that he was very good at it, anyway.
Anne believed Pearson’s death was an accident. Maybe he should trust her. Trust her and kiss her and undress her….
“Mr. Matsumori! Get up!”
Hariyadi was standing over him, voice tight with suppressed anger. Or was that fear?
“What happened?” Daisuke opened his eyes. By the shadows on the path and by the fact that he was still exhausted, he couldn’t have been asleep long. “What’s going on?”
“Sing ran away.” That was Nurul, more obviously afraid than the soldier. “Anne and Misha ran after her, and Tyaney ran after them. We need you to track them down.”
Anne! In trouble? Daisuke tried to spring to his feet, but his upward trajectory went sideways as every muscle in his back and legs seized up at once. Damn him, how could he have forgotten to stretch before lying down? All that time in Tokyo offices had made him soft.
“I’m fine!” Daisuke waved away Rahman’s and Hariyadi’s hands as he steadied himself against the cart and tried to rub some life back into his calf muscles. “What happened? Why did Sing run away?”
“You can ask her yourself when you find her,” said Hariyadi. “You don’t need me to tell you that our survival depends utterly on her on-the-ground knowledge.”
“What about Anne?”
“She’s also a priority,” Hariyadi conceded. “We need her expertise. And Misha has the most medical training of any of us.”
The colonel didn’t mention Tyaney on his list of priorities, Daisuke noticed, which was a mistake. Even ignoring the questionable ethics of leaving someone to die in the wilderness just because he was a bit of a jerk, they needed Tyaney to translate for his wife. Calling Hariyadi out on his mistake would be counterproductive, though, so Daisuke simply resolved to rescue everyone. “When did they leave? Which way did they go?”
“Only a few minutes ago.” Nurul had huddled in under Rahman’s arm. She asked him something in Indonesian and he pointed into the weeds on the south side of the path.
“We must go now,” said Hariyadi. “Once we find them, we can reconvene at the cart.”
Daisuke tended to agree. With the party split in two, we could not afford to split up further. Aside from the aid and comfort company may bring, most predators will avoid a group of three or more humans. And thinking of which…. “Rahman,” Daisuke said, “do you have a weapon?”
“No weapon,” said the Indonesian. “Only camera.”
My decision was easy to make. “Take my knife.” Daisuke threw the small tool to the cameraman, who fumbled and dropped it.
“We don’t have time for this,” said Hariyadi.
“No more going into the wilderness unarmed,” Daisuke said. “Now, sir, if you would give me your other gun?” He held out his hand as if expecting Hariyadi to actually agree.
“Absolutely not,” Hariyadi said.
Of course, narrated Daisuke. I wasn’t one of his men. He would have gladly given the gun to Rahman, but Rahman would have been more dangerous to us than to any lurking predators. Nor would Hariyadi hand over his weapon to Nurul, a woman. Not unless the alternative was giving the weapon to me.
“Although I suppose distributing resources would be better ….” Hariyadi sighed and unbuckled Pearson’s holster from around his waist. Not meeting Nurul’s eyes, he thrust the weapon in her direction.
“So the three of us are armed,” said Nurul. “What about you?”
Thank you for the straight line. Looking as grim and badass as he knew how, Daisuke turned and removed an urchin spine from the cart.
“This is ridiculous,” Hariyadi said. “What can you do with a spear?”
It’s like we’ve rehearsed this. In answer, Daisuke swept the spine through the nearest clump of weeds, provoking a hailstorm of jumping, zebra-striped parasites.
“Anne calls those linguipods,” said Nurul. “They might be dangerous.”
“Then I will go first,” Daisuke said, firmly in persona. “Now, follow me.”
Now, hope that I can actually find the trail. Daisuke had certainly accompanied enough real wilderness trackers, pumped them for information, even spent time on camera following the instructions they’d given. He’d only been wrong about half the time.
As if he knew exactly what he was doing, Daisuke withdrew his flashlight from its belt-pouch and flicked it on. The beam of reddish light cut through the forest gloom, showing where the carpet of grasslike weeds had been disturbed by the passage of human feet. A blind man could have followed those tracks.
Oh thank goodness, thought Daisuke. I would have looked pretty stupid if I’d sent us wandering in circles while Anne got eaten by carnivorous windsocks.
The tracks led south, then turned east and paralleled the path for a ways before crossing a smaller trail. Or…no. Daisuke studied the rocky ground of the little trail, much harder to read than the hairy forest floor. “I think one person went that
way.” He pointed forward to the curtain-like fringe of weeds on the trail’s other side. “The other three….” He shone his flashlight on the ground. Anne and the others had not crossed the trail, but turned south and paralleled it.
“Why didn’t they follow Sing?” Hariyadi asked.
“Why didn’t they use the path?” said Nurul.
“Because they learned something.” Daisuke looked around the forest, its murky depths undulating with hidden dangers. “They saw something.” Something I should have seen before now. “First Sing, then Anne and the others. They were…afraid of the paths.” He imagined he could hear the minor bars of the song in his soundtrack titled ‘Danger’. “And what else might be using them.”
The four of them stood very still, watching the forest sway. Balloons rubbed and rumbled against each other. Something in the woods made a noise like the clacking of the bamboo arms of a hundred souzu deer-scarer fountains. The air held the burned-vanilla musk of rotting wood over the ever-present stink of sewage.
“So,” Hariyadi said, “cross the trail. We must be close to Sing.”
“We must be close to Anne and the others,” said Daisuke. “You should all cross the trail and go after Sing. I will turn south and rescue Anne. And the others, of course.”
“No,” Hariyadi said. “We will not split the party again.”
My thoughts exactly, but what about Anne? “Sir,” Daisuke said, but Hariyadi did not allow him to finish.
“Go straight ahead, Mr. Matsumori. We need your expertise to find the native woman.”
Daisuke paused, considering what Hariyadi would do if he simply turned and ran away toward Anne. And how would it look on camera? Valiant warrior protecting his lady, or coward fleeing his duty? How much do I care about that?
“I said, go straight ahead.” Hariyadi rested his hand on his holster.
“It would be very foolish to shoot me,” said Daisuke, careful not to let his anger show. He would rescue Anne. Screw this tiny tin-pot dictator and his guns.
He would have simply turned and walked away if Nurul hadn’t pierced him with her gaze and said, “You aren’t considering putting all our lives in jeopardy for the sake of your libido, are you?”
Daisuke opened his mouth. Closed it. Thank you, Nurul.
“And even if you save Anne,” Nurul went on, “what good will it do if we lose Sing? Do you want Anne to die of starvation or dehydration or poison or animal attack without Sing’s expertise to guide us?”
Daisuke let out his breath and gave a sharp nod. “All right,” he said, and parted the weeds that separated them from the trail.
To the north, the trail rejoined the main path, where their cart rested, abandoned. To the south, down the path, wooden wind chimes ticked and clonked. Ahead, the weeds swarmed with linguipods.
“She didn’t cross the path,” said Daisuke.
“So which way did she go?” Hariyadi asked. “South or north? East or west on the main path or back into the forest? And what is that sound?”
“I don’t know, sir.” The path was rocky and bare of vegetation. Perhaps one of his expert consultants could have seen tracks in it, but he sure as hell couldn’t.
Hariyadi cursed again. “We’ll have to split up. Rahman, you run north, Matsumori, south.”
“Wait,” said Daisuke.
“No. You have to start now to have any hope of catching her up.”
“You were right before. We shouldn’t split up.” Daisuke tried to arrange his thoughts. “Maybe we can predict where Sing will run, given what we know about her motivation. What were you doing before she ran away?”
“Talking,” Nurul said.
“Talking? You were talking to her? How?”
“With only small words,” Rahman said. “‘Water’, ‘tree’, ‘death’. You know. But she can learn English, insha Allah.”
“Death?” said Daisuke. “She said ‘death’?”
Nurul asked her husband something in their language. Rahman responded and Nurul put her hands to her mouth, nodding thoughtfully. Hariyadi barked an order, which caused Rahman to widen his eyes and take a step back, hands coming up between him and the soldier. Nurul spoke sharply to her husband, who shook his head, but stopped protesting.
Cut out of the conversation, Daisuke tried to think of something intelligent to do. What had scared Sing, and how would she try to escape it? Not by running down the paths. Not by running through the forest, at least no more than necessary until she found…a better way to escape.
Daisuke looked up.
Windsocks chased each other through a canopy of chocolate-colored balloons. Climbing log-worms clacked and scuttled. And there, three meters up, her legs wrapped around a kelp-tree stalk, was Sing.
The Nun woman had either found or made a knapped stone hand axe, which she had used to carve finger- and toe-holds into the kelp-tree’s tough, gummy tissue. Now, slathered with stinking black goo from the plant’s interior, she was sawing away at the material that bound the hydrogen-filled plant to the ground.
For a crucial moment, Daisuke simply stared at the woman. She must have heard them, must have known they were hunting for her. But she wasn’t even looking down. Sing was totally focused on the task of untethering her balloon from the ground, mouth set, eyes wide as if with panic.
Now Daisuke’s ears registered the fact that the bamboo-rattling sound was much louder. Closer. And from the sound of it, someone was walking, dragging something heavy up the trail toward them.
Hairs shivered up Daisuke’s shoulders and neck.
But before he could say, “We have to get off of this trail,” the creature emerged from around a bend.
It was the size of a compact car, huge and irregular and turreted. A mud-and-wood castle on wheels. Glassy eyes peppered its surface; arms flapped and spun and clutched in all directions. Tentacles or vines spread from its forward face and vanished into a scuttling mass of…little wooden cars?
Or little boats. Oar-like wooden limbs bristled from their sides. Some were hitched to carts. Others were capped by wooden arms carrying more knapped-stone implements. Flint knives glittered, glass-tipped scorpion tails ratcheted back. Pairs of slings counter-rotated. Bladders inflated with gas.
“Toys,” whispered Daisuke.
Hariyadi stared, whining deep in his throat. Daisuke had seen it before, when one of his cameramen had been cornered by a leopard. The cameraman hadn’t been armed, though.
“Shoot it!” Nurul screamed.
And Hariyadi opened fire.
The bullets struck the largest animal, or machine, or whatever it was. One of its four thick towers blew entirely apart, while two more ruptured, spraying black effluvia, strings of wooden disks inscribed like old Chinese money, and white ring-shaped worms. Toymakers.
Some of the calamari rings were caught by folding wooden arms like tiny construction robots. Many more of the toymaker organisms fell to the ground, and were lost under grinding wooden wheels.
The knocking of hundreds of wooden hammers became louder and higher pitched. A percussive alarm. A howl of toymaker rage.
* * *
“Oh, you idiots!” yelled Sing. “I don’t want to have to see you die.” Of course, they didn’t understand her.
Weeping, Sing sawed harder at the kelp-tree stalk. The balloon above her swayed in the wind that would carry her away from this nightmare and back to her brother.
She must hurry. The Them and Tyaney might still snatch her back and re-imprison her. Deeper in the forest, Anne was gesticulating, saying something in her brash way to Misha and Tyaney. Had the Them woman seen Sing? Was she telling her companions to capture her? But the men did not look up. They ran down the path toward the place where Hariyadi, the slack-bellied fool, had shot the cargo carriage.
The toymakers were a gathering caravan, mobilized around the large cargo carriage. T
heir most likely destination was the lower western slopes, where they would gather glass to trade with Sing’s people. And what a story that would be when she returned home. I know where the glass comes from, she would say, and her brother Yunubey would embrace her and everything would be all right again.
The caravan was crippled now. It no longer had the resources to travel down the mountain, so their only course of action now was to punish those who had damaged their cargo carriage. Make an example of them.
The Indonesians were shouting at each other; Hariyadi and Nurul ganging up on Rahman. None of them even spared a glance at the oncoming toymakers.
“You fools,” said Sing, sawing. “Get off the path or they’ll fill you full of darts.”
The work was slow and awkward. The toymaker blade she had stolen was little more than a chip of stone, and Sing had to bend in half in order to bring it to bear on the stalk below her feet. The flexible brown material did not cut easily, and the effluvia that dripped out of the interior of the plant made her work slippery and uncertain.
And now, Hariyadi was pointing at her with his gun.
“Oh, you bent-backed, pus-filled sister-fucker,” Sing said.
Thunder echoed again in the kelp forest and Sing jerked. Not, she realized, because her body had been pierced by one of those tiny metal arrows, but because her kelp-tree was sinking. She looked up at the balloon, now sagging, and cursed Hariyadi all the way to the ground.
Daisuke yelled something, which Hariyadi cut off with a curt order.
“No!” Daisuke said, one of the Them words Sing had come to recognize.
Hariyadi now pointed his gun at Daisuke. And all the while, the toymakers drew closer.
“You stupid, deformed Them!” shouted Sing. “Stop flailing that weapon around. The toymakers will kill us all unless we give them a sacrifice.”
Daisuke seemed to understand her. He turned to Hariyadi and the toymakers closing on them. The oars of land-canoes rippled like a centipede’s legs. Man-o’-wars made their stealthy way through the air between the stalks, the spring-loaded weapons hanging under the hulls swiveling to aim at the humans.
Junction Page 18
