Junction

by Daniel M. Bensen

  Chapter Thirteen

  Ripe Blood

  Daisuke knelt before Anne, his muscles and bones protesting. It had been a long night.

  This would have counted among the top ten hardest mornings of Daisuke’s life, except that there were these beautiful soft arms and legs curling around him.

  Daisuke explored the body pressed against him. Marveled at the way Anne gave when he sank his fingers into her skin. Generously yielding. Her mouth, parting in promise. Her soft moan in his ear. Her hair wrapping his fingers. Her scent.

  “Would you stop sniffing at me?” she said. “You made your point. I know I’m totally gross, but hey, so are you.”

  I want to swim in a pool of your intimate scent. But he couldn’t think of a way to say that in English without sounding disgusting, so he said, “It’s okay. I like it.”

  Her throat vibrated under his mouth. “Enjoy it while you can.”

  “I will.” His lips rose and fell across her like footsteps, laying a trail from one treasure to another. She moaned again, a signal in the wilderness. Yes, go there! And her hands pressed against his back, rubbing up his rib cage, down his waist. Searching for something.

  Daisuke grinned against her navel. “You found me,” he said.

  But when he grabbed Anne’s hips and tried to push her onto her back, the muscles on Daisuke’s chest gave a sour twang.

  “Tta!” he said, heart fluttering as if in memory of nearly being impaled on a crossbow bolt.

  “Are you all right?” said Anne, and damn, the boiling honey was gone from her voice. She wasn’t a tender goddess of love, but a concerned colleague on a disaster-stricken interplanetary expedition. “Daisuke, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Daisuke said. “I’m all right. I’m actually surprised at how I am all right.”

  “Well then. Good.” She snuggled up under his armpit.

  He kissed her, rather more careful and clearheaded now, and tried to formulate a polite way to say, ‘I still want to have sex, but I don’t want to get you pregnant. Also, I should probably be on the bottom.’

  He didn’t get further than “I—” before Anne stuck her hand down the front of his pants.

  “Very good,” she said, and squeezed.

  Daisuke pushed against her hand, his eyes filled with a vision of her face. The sweat beaded over her eyebrows. The pulsing emerald flecks in her irises. The freckles like stars. Daisuke’s own eyes, he realized, were closed. Anne slid her hand up and those stars went nova.

  Daisuke’s muscles all went loose and he sank into the floor of the tent like gelatin into a mold. “Wow.” Eyes still closed, he let the room spin around him, gentle currents lapping at his skin.

  He drifted until, with a shock of cold air, Anne separated herself from him.

  “No,” Daisuke said. He squinted his eyes open and saw sunlight shining through the fabric of the tent just as it did through tents back on Earth.

  “It’s morning,” said Anne.

  “Good morning. Very good morning.”

  “We should get up.”

  She was on her knees over him, the light lining her wild hair with a corona of liquid gold, turning her eyes into deep pools the color of a Yucatan cenote. Her hands went to do up the lowest button on her shirt, drawing his attention to the tiny hairs on her skin, glimmering like diamond filaments in a line from between her breasts to her navel.

  Daisuke was seized by the sudden imperative to give this woman an orgasm. Right now.

  “But I want to….” Make you do attention would be gibberish in English, and he was pretty sure make you come would be crude. “It’s my turn now.”

  That stopped her. “Your turn? What do you—”

  Daisuke made a grab for her crotch.

  “Whoa, now!” She put her hands to her mouth and stifled the yell, which became a giggle as Daisuke hooked her belt buckle with his finger and tried to pull her toward him.

  “Stop that,” she said again, smiling. “Later, Dai suki.”

  She was mispronouncing his name again, telling him she loved him. Anne kept one hand over her mouth, while the other worked to disentangle his fingers from the waistband of her pants.

  “Promise me,” Daisuke said, not surrendering a centimeter. “Promise me that I will get the opportunity to…” he flipped through several possible verbs, “…to return the favor.”

  “Yes,” she said, tugging on his hand. “All right. It’s a date. But not now. Everyone will be awake now and we don’t have time.”

  Daisuke had been about to relent and let go. Now, however, he smiled and yanked Anne toward him, groin first. “Everybody?” he said. “What did I tell you about everybody?”

  “Fuck ’em?” Anne needed both hands to stifle her burst of laughter, which left Daisuke’s hands entirely free. He made good use of his opportunity.

  Anne gasped and squeezed her eyes shut as Daisuke’s fingers oriented themselves. She sank down as he rolled over, propping himself up on an elbow. He watched her churn against the floor of the tent. The thermal blanket stretched between her fists, breasts rolling out of her unbuttoned shirt, eyes shut tight, lips pursing.

  I’ve never had so much passion for Eriko. I was never…the word came to him in English: wild. What would the preposition be? I wasn’t wild for her. Daisuke leaned over and kissed her as his fingers continued their work. She breathed into his mouth and he smelled Earth. Human animals, wrapping their home ecosystem around them like a comforting blanket. Spreading themselves.

  Anne screamed into the wadded-up thermal blanket.

  Daisuke, whose mind had begun to wander, watched her press the blanket against her mouth and nose and thought, I can’t hear a thing. I bet you could smother someone under a blanket like that.

  It was a very weird thought to have during sex play. But it was true, Daisuke was sure. Daisuke knew how Pearson had died.

  Anne clamped down around his hand as her head whipped back. Sweat beaded her upper lip. She gave a very small squeak and a long, draining sigh.

  “Hey,” she said. “Try not to look so smug.”

  “The word you are looking for is ‘proud’,” said Daisuke.

  “Let’s settle on ‘satisfied’.”

  Daisuke tried to keep his expression blank as they left the tent and walked toward the people squatting around their pile of supplies.

  “There you are,” Hariyadi said. “At last.”

  “What is this glow I see in the air?” asked Misha. “Should I maybe applaud and throw roses?”

  Anne responded in her usual manner. “If you needed us, you could have come to our tent.”

  “Next time, I will,” said Hariyadi sourly, but Daisuke wasn’t paying attention to the colonel. He squinted at Misha. And at Sing, who was sticking out from under the big Russian’s arm, chin up, eyes focused on the distance as if she couldn’t wait to be over the horizon. And, come to think of it, Rahman and Nurul had a particular glow about them too. The couple was sitting modestly apart, not even holding hands, but Rahman kept looking at his wife and grinning.

  Well, it made sense. Yesterday had been a howling typhoon of death and exhaustion. They might or might not have made first contact. They might or might not have sacrificed one of their number to the spirits of the forest. They certainly didn’t have enough food or water to get them to civilization. Why shouldn’t they take the opportunity to enjoy life when it came?

  “Because we all have duties,” Hariyadi said.

  Daisuke started, then realized that the colonel couldn’t actually read minds. He was just responding to something Anne had said.

  “Duties?” Anne said. “We’re past duty, Hariyadi, and we’re into necessity territory. We need water. We need wood to make a fire that can boil that water. Then meat. Then clean clothes and hair. Then, and only then, do we start to think about how we’re goi
ng to get out of this valley.”

  “We saw campfires over there,” said Daisuke. “Down the river on the eastern edge of the mountain opposite.”

  “Really?” Anne said. “Humans?”

  “Unless you think there’s some alien in the next biome over that can light fires,” Nurul said.

  If that was sarcastic, Anne didn’t seem to notice. “It must be the Nun. Unless it’s the rescue party. But why would they camp out at the edge of the Deep Sky Country? It would be one weird way to mount a rescue party.”

  “People,” said Nurul. “How soon can we get to them?”

  Misha made musing noises. “Maybe very soon. If we copy Sing and ride balloons across valley….”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Hariyadi snapped. “I told you whether we arrive at Imsame later or sooner, it makes no difference.”

  Nurul made a shocked noise, looking at her commander as if he’d uttered an unthinkable blasphemy.

  “Never mind,” Hariyadi sighed, suddenly sounding very tired. The Indonesian had come to resemble a rotting strawberry, his face slowly sagging into red-brown wrinkles. The white stubble on his cheeks looked more like mold than beard. “There is…no need for hurrying. We shall rest here.”

  “It makes a difference whether we starve to death or not,” Anne said.

  “Sing says we can eat the animals here and burn the plants,” Daisuke pointed out. “I think we can relax. Maybe.”

  “But will something explode or devour us?” Misha cocked an eyebrow at Daisuke. “Maybe.”

  Anne squinted at him. “So if you’re done being sarcastic, do you want to go or stay?”

  Misha shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “No,” said Hariyadi. “I am in command and I say that we stay.”

  Now was not the time to challenge Hariyadi’s command. “Sir,” Daisuke said, nodding to the exhausted-looking soldier. “The water and firewood we need for a bath we will need anyway to drink and cook our food.”

  Hariyadi’s pouched, bloodshot eyes focused on him. “All right, Matsumori,” he said, “you and Houlihan are in charge of our survival initiative. Find water, find meat. Find something that will burn. Take Sing, take Misha to translate. Take Rahman with his camera and record the whole fascinating process in HD. Nurul and I shall remain here and guard the camp. Don’t forget to take buckets as well.”

  It seemed Daisuke’s deferential strategy had worked. “Thank you, sir,” Daisuke said, and bowed low.

  Anne giggled the whole way to the supply cart. “What?” Daisuke asked.

  “Men is what,” she said. “Sir, permission to wash my underpants! Underpants-washing permission granted! Sir, thank you, sir! My laundry will be both pretty and fresh-scented, sir! It’s cute.” She ruffled the hair on the back of his head as if scratching behind a dog’s ears. Daisuke liked it.

  They had planted their tents on the strip of muddy rock that girdled the mountain from the palisade. Clearly, that wall marked a defensive boundary, not a biological one, for toymaker biome plants still grew downslope of it. There were no kelp-trees here, but noodle-like brown tendrils waved in the slightly stinking south-easterly breeze. These grew small and thin as they descended, and the stink grew worse.

  “Ugh!” Misha made a face. “This is even worse than on other side of mountain.”

  “Waste products building up,” Anne said. “There are pathways in the climax ecosystem to recycle everything, but down here, we’ll get a buildup of poisons.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Rahman. “Should I film this?”

  “No,” Anne said, picking her way down the muddy, stinking slope. “Save your film for when we get out of this wasteland.” And as if to herself, “It is a waste too. On the other side, the toymakers made some effort to extract resources from glassland plants….Over here either the plants in the Ripe Blood Country have nothing in them the toymakers want, or— Aha! Look there.”

  Daisuke tried to figure out what had excited the biologist. All he could see was the curly brown tendrils of Toymaker Country grass. And even the grass was patchy and balding, like an old rug.

  “Look at that dead place,” she said. “What’s that mound of stuff in the center?” She answered her own question, prodding the black dry material with the toe of a boot. “Dead material. And not from a kelp-tree. It looks more like…packing peanuts. Or little sponges. Washed up from the next biome, and clearly toxic as hell to this one.”

  Daisuke squinted. Now he could see other mounds of packing peanuts, some downhill, taller and surrounded by larger dead patches, others smaller, uphill, and grown over with curly brown weeds. He was reminded of the terraforming pools north of Imsame. Except….

  “Washed up?” Daisuke said. “We are not in a marsh by the sea. We are on a mountain, and there are no waves here.” He pointed at the clump closest to Anne. “So something carried those little sponges up here. Maybe to use as fertilizer?”

  “Toymakers,” Misha growled.

  Sing’s head came up. “Yes,” she said.

  Daisuke blinked. “Was that English?” She hadn’t quite gotten the word right – it was more like ‘yays’ – but who was he to critique her pronunciation? Daisuke still sometimes slipped and pronounced ‘yes’ with two syllables.

  “Yes,” said Misha. “English. I teach her.”

  “Oh, I bet you do,” Anne said. “So what, she’s spending the nights in your tent now that her husband is dead?”

  Misha drew himself up. “None of your business.”

  Rahman sniggered. “Before that. Back on glasslands, Misha and Sing walk out together…like dating?”

  Which would explain why Tyaney was in such a foul mood climbing up the mountain. Some detective Daisuke was, for missing this affair going on under his nose.

  He found himself looking at Sing, who gave him a hostile glare and took a step toward Misha.

  “And she’s what, ten years younger than you?” said Anne. “Sing, dan Misha, for Christ’s sake?”

  Sing turned her glare on Anne. “Misha good.”

  “Tochno tak. Malysh.” Misha squeezed her against his side. “Say again Misha is good guy.”

  Sing pointed east. “Down green, an wait. Here food mekaletya.”

  Daisuke didn’t understand that, but Misha evidently did. He let go of Sing, who squatted by the nearest pile of fertilizer. She had slung Misha’s utility belt around her shoulder like a bandolier, and now she rifled through its pockets until she found a thick curling sheet that Daisuke realized must be a section of kelp-tree, cut lengthwise and unrolled. Sing used this sheet to scoop up and wrap the fertilizer, producing a large, stinking roll. This, she tied neatly with a twist of brown weed and secreted back in her utility belt.

  “She needs to collect food for her pet toymakers,” Misha explained.

  “I see,” said Anne, arms crossed, still scowling. “So, you’re going to replace Tyaney now?”

  “Replace that fucking bastard?” Misha turned to look at Anne. Daisuke found himself widening his stance, clenching his fists, preparing to defend her, but all the Russian said was, “If you were a man, I would beat you for saying that, but since I must be gentleman, I say only that you know nothing, so please shut up.”

  “Go?” Sing said. “Down green. Food go.”

  “I agree, my dear,” said Misha. “Let us depart.” The couple turned and strutted down the hill.

  “Damn it, Misha,” Anne called after them, “can’t we go a day without interpersonal drama on top of the alien animal attacks and starvation?”

  Misha looked over his shoulder. “What drama? I have Sing, you have Daisuke. Rahman has Nurul. Hariyadi has duty to Mother Indonesia. We go get water. Everyone is A-OK, okay?”

  Daisuke suspected that everything was not A-OK, but Sing and Misha were already several meters down the mountainside, with Anne stomping after t
hem.

  “Come on, Rahman,” Daisuke said. “Let’s go before they leave us behind.”

  No answer from the Indonesian.

  “Rahman?” Daisuke’s shoulders tensed. What if this hillside was home to some kind of predator? What if the toymakers had followed them? His chest stung as if in memory of a flying crossbow bolt. Hand going for his knife, Daisuke ground the balls of his feet into the rocky mud. “Please answer me, if you can.”

  Daisuke spun, and found himself staring into the cold, unsympathetic eye of a video camera.

  “Don’t talk to me, please,” Rahman said from behind the thing. “I am filming.”

  Daisuke closed his eyes and rubbed the place where his wedding ring had been. When he opened them again, he found he could smile. “Oh! I am sorry,” he told his audience. “You surprised me. Yes! Well. Here we are on the other side of the…what we are calling the Outer Toymaker Mountains. We had quite an adventure…no…. One of us is dead….” He shook his head. Bad idea. “Cut that, please.” He cranked the smile up a notch. “Now look at the place we have come to!”

  The camera panned mercifully away from Daisuke, up then across the gray mist of the Death Wind Country, the lush yellow of the Lighthouse Country with its tiny trails of campfire smoke.

  They would want Daisuke’s voice over this. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he said, letting whatever words that wanted come. “That yellow color on the other side of the valley? What is that? We don’t know, and honestly I hope we don’t have to find out.” He chuckled. “On this side of the valley, the plants are green, which means they might be something like the plants we find at home on Earth.”

  Rahman caught Daisuke’s gesture. He panned down to focus on Anne, Misha, and Sing, then past them to where the mud became green weeds, which in turn became a pulpy sort of scrubland.

  “What interesting forms the local plants take!” Daisuke enthused. “From here I can see no animals, but our native guide assures us that they are delicious.” He laughed. “Well, let’s go!”

  With the camera’s regard heating the space between his shoulder blades, Daisuke picked his way down the mountain toward a small stream that emerged from a cleft in the rock. Toymaker grass and curly soba-weed grew around its edges, inhabited by the snaillike creatures Anne called linguipods. The water itself was striped brown and green, perhaps from colonies of algae from two biomes? Daisuke would have to ask Anne, if he could make her stop shouting.