Junction

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “Ha,” said Anne. “Thanks, Dice. Always walk on the sunny side of the shadowless forest.” They slogged forward a few more three-legged steps. “I don’t think we’re going to make it to the mouth of the valley before nightfall, though.”

  Please don’t leave me here, Daisuke thought, but he said, “We can survive that long without food or even water.”

  “Hoo, I wish you hadn’t mentioned water, mate.”

  Daisuke thought of other ways to reassure her. “And we can stay warm when night comes.”

  “Were you thinking of sex? Or more along the lines of setting fire to the trees?”

  Daisuke suppressed a flash of anger, then another, strong burst of self-disgust. Anne clearly had no idea how much she’d hurt him, but how could he tell her? How could he express his true feelings to someone who didn’t want to see his true feelings? The only way to fix their relationship would be if Anne figured this all out and apologized without prompting.

  Which is less likely than convincing these plastic trees to burn.

  Anne stopped. “Can you stand by yourself for a moment?” she said. “I want to try something.”

  Daisuke found that he could stand, and even walk by himself, which was some comfort to his wounded pride if not his legs and back. While he tried some tentative stretches, Anne knelt in the undulating grass, pulling a lighter out of her utility belt. She reached for one of the stiff yellow grass blades, saying, “We have enough kindling— Ow!”

  Daisuke jumped and Anne jerked upright, waving her hand as if the plant had burned her.

  “What happened?” asked Daisuke, heart racing.

  “The grass just shocked me. A nice little jolt of electricity.” Anne sucked on her fingers. “Well, that puts the kibosh on collecting this stuff as firewood. I wonder if we could hack open the local fauna and sleep inside it? Unless the critters are electric as well.”

  “Critters?” Daisuke tried to remember if he’d seen any animals since the flower-sloth, but his mind was blank. Either he hadn’t been paying attention to his surroundings or he had failed to form memories of his impressions. It is possible, gentle viewers, that my career as a professional survivor is over. I can only hope that I can continue to survive as a hobby.

  Anne pointed at something off the path. “Animals like foot-wide sunflowers. Or I should say like sunflower sea stars. Land stars?” She snapped her fingers. “Land-asters.”

  Daisuke smiled and nodded, glad he wasn’t expected to do more.

  “I was wondering when we were going to finally see some good old-fashioned radial symmetry,” Anne continued. “Except these things are more like mollusks than echinoderms, with those shell-tipped tentacles. And even there the analogy isn’t great because mollusks have contractile muscles just like us, and these things – seems they’ve only got a sort of pneumatic muscular system of erectile tissue.” She looked at him. “Does that make sense?”

  “I didn’t understand much of that, except for the part about erections.”

  Anne’s laughter echoed weirdly between the yellow trees. “And in the end, what else do we really need to understand? Ah, there’s a nice big turgid one.”

  She was right. At least about the ‘big’ part. Daisuke didn’t know what ‘turgid’ meant, and didn’t want to ask.

  The animal sat on the edge of the path like a rococo boulder, its feeding apparatus dangling from the center of its body, a stalk of waving ‘grass’ caught within its jaws. As they walked past the creature, the grass broke with a pop and a flash of light.

  “And I’m not sure what ecological role these fast little ones play. Look, you can even see them moving.”

  Clumps of blue aerogel wobbled on the backs of the ten-centimeter creatures as they made a comparatively speedy dash toward the big grazer. Erectile muscles swelled and contracted, pushing the little creatures up so that their spike-shaped feeding tubes could jab at the big land-aster.

  “Little predators?” Daisuke asked, thinking about piranhas.

  “I don’t think so. Every now and then they’ll stop treading about and this complicated apparatus unfolds from their underside and plugs into a hole in the ground.” She pointed at one of the purple-filigreed cups that Daisuke had assumed were flowers. “I don’t think the little animals are parasites, so are they like hummingbirds pollinating underground flowers? Hummingbirds sometimes mob bigger birds, try and drive them away. Or are they doing something else? Something more alien? Watch the grass.”

  Daisuke did. The paddle-shaped plants rose to a height of twenty to twenty-five centimeters, stiff at their squared-off tips but flexible at the base, where the stalk narrowed and met the bulbous root.

  “A plant that makes energy through movement.” Anne passed her foot through the grass, which clacked. “But where do the purple ground-flowers come in? This grasslike stuff rewards animals that walk through it with some kind of nectar. Hummingbird-sea-stars, walking on treadmills for a sip of nectar.”

  Daisuke looked at the purple ground-flowers, remembering the bitterroot plants he’d filmed in college. How much he had enjoyed himself back then, in front of a camera. Now, he just felt like lying down. I have been on this treadmill for too long, and for too little nectar.

  “What’s up, Daisuke?”

  He looked up. “Nothing.” He could hear how flat his voice sounded, but it took all his effort to speak at all. Injecting emotion into his words was as impossible at this point as flying.

  She looked him up and down, intense as an MRI. “You feeling dizzy? Headachy? Tired?”

  Daisuke shrugged. “Yes, but none of that will stop me from walking.” He faked a smile. “I will survive.”

  Anne looked at him dubiously. What would the Iron Man of Survival be expected to say at this point?

  “The grass,” Daisuke said. “Can we burn it?”

  Anne shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not without a furnace, anyway.”

  “What about those blue globs floating in the air? Maybe we could burn them.”

  “Blue globs?” Anne straightened and followed Daisuke’s pointing finger to an irregular clump of translucent-blue gel around a meter across. She ran up to it and kicked it.

  “Anne!” said Daisuke, but the clump just deformed around her boot and bounced off.

  “It was like kicking jelly,” Anne said, “except made with air instead of water.”

  “An aerogel?” Daisuke had seen a program on NHK about them. “What creature could excrete aerogel?”

  Anne considered. “Maybe it’s a tangle of some kind of ultrafine, ultra-hydrophobic fibers. Dense enough to trap air, light enough to be carried by the wind. But those little dark blots in the gel— Ha!” She laughed with real delight. “Animals!”

  She trapped an aerogel with her fingers and held it out so Daisuke could see the creatures inside it. They were spherical and up to one centimeter in diameter. Ridges of iridescent cilia pulsed as the little animals slowly tunneled through their home.

  “It’s like a ctenophore,” said Anne. “A comb jelly. Aerogelly?”

  “I wish we could examine this creature,” Daisuke said. “Stop and learn about it like in the old days.” He peered into the depths of the aerogelly. The creatures moved within it, eating the detritus trapped by their sticky home.

  “So?” said Anne.

  “So what?”

  “So are you going to try and light that thing on fire? ’Cause if not, we’d better get a move on before we freeze to death.”

  “Oh, right.” But Daisuke didn’t move. An idea had occurred to him. “Maybe there is something better I can do.” He pressed the aerogelly over his left arm. It spread and stuck to itself, forming a tube from Daisuke’s wrist to his elbow.

  Daisuke waved his arms experimentally. “The one with the aerogel feels much warmer,” he confirmed.

  “Good,” said Anne. “
Now watch those things excrete acid and eat your arm off.”

  Daisuke watched the little animals within the aerogelly, which were indeed clustered around the fabric of his sleeve. “Easily fixed….” he said, and reached into the gel with forefinger and thumb. He plucked out one of the creatures and he tossed it away. It flew a few tens of centimeters before ballooning out a new cushion of aerogel and floating off, light as a soap bubble.

  Daisuke repeated the procedure until he had made a small cloud of drifting baby aerogellies and an uninhabited bracer of gel over his left forearm. He and Anne spent the next few minutes tracking down aerogellies and converting them into insulating clothing.

  “Brilliant, Daisuke,” said Anne, now blue with gel. “I think we might just live. Come here and let me do your back. You’ll have to do mine too.”

  She looked up at him, and Daisuke felt a little better. So what if he couldn’t tell Anne how he felt? They were both alive, weren’t they? And now, no longer cold.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Plots

  “Tek-lum! Keb tek-lum!”

  Misha opened his eyes. His eyes hurt. So did his left little toe and his scalp and everything in between. What especially hurt was his right scapula, where Sing’s little toymaker had shot him. And the place on the back of the head where she’d hit him with a tree branch. That, and the knowledge that he’d been betrayed.

  The natives had put him in some kind of cage. It was made of alien plants – flat yellow paddles as wide as his body and about twice as tall. They had been planted around him at angles to each other, forming a spiral. And between the gaps in the spiral….

  “Keb-lum!” A man stood beyond the wall of paddles. He looked just like Sing, minus the breasts and plus a bizarre yard-long codpiece of twisted yellow plastic. Some kind of translucent blue jelly glinted on his narrow, wiry shoulders. A white thong had been tied over his brows, with feathers, bones, and thorny alien mandibles woven into his hair. He held another paddle, this one only the size of a cricket bat, which he used to reach into Misha’s cage and prod him in the chest.

  “You’re going to have to do more than that to impress me,” Misha told the man he assumed was Sing’s brother, watching the bat. It was the same yellow plastic as the codpiece. Someone had scorched its edges, then pressed pointed teeth into the softened plastic to create saw edges. Those teeth looked very much like human canines.

  “Okay,” said Misha. “That is pretty impressive.”

  “Sing,” he said. “Where is she?” No, that wasn’t what he should say. He had a mission that was more important than any native women he might have taken a fancy to. “Listen, I go. I go to my persons.”

  “Misha,” said the Nun war chief, followed by an incomprehensible spate of words. He turned, addressing someone behind him, putting his back to Misha.

  Who grinned and smashed him into the paddles.

  The pain was so intense it felt like nothing at all. A pop like an old-fashioned fuse blowing, and Misha was on his back, his teeth chattering, his heart smashing against his ribs, his hands throbbing, the smell of burning hair in his nose.

  “Misha. Okay. Okay, Misha.”

  That was Sing’s voice. Misha managed to loll his head sideways and saw Sing between the electric paddles of this alien torture chamber. “Okay is,” she said. “No go. Hurt more.”

  Misha cursed in Russian.

  “Misha, this is Yunubey,” Sing said. “He is….” She pointed to herself, then to the native, then mimed giving birth.

  He couldn’t be her son, and he was too young to be her father. “Sing,” said Misha. “Help me. I have to go.”

  “No,” said Sing. ”Here is people of you.” She gestured around her then pointed to Misha. “Nu….” – she pointed to herself and Misha – “Nun-ak ang…” another gesture around her – “…ulu-na. We are…with the Us.”

  Misha blinked, and human figures melted out from between the electric paddles. ‘The Us’ surrounded Misha, Sing, and Yunubey, mostly male, mostly short and skinny, all armed, literally, to the teeth. Sing’s people, but not Misha’s. Not while he had his mission to fulfill.

  “Okay, Misha?” Sing asked again.

  “Yes.” Misha licked his numb lips. He would be all right. He had gotten through to base before that monster ate his radio. The Indonesians’ little coup had failed, Misha’s people had control of the wormhole, and someone was coming to pick him up.

  Misha would survive, although he’d have to disappear for a while. Anne, Daisuke, and Nurul might make it out of here if they had the sense to stay away from him. Misha looked at Sing, the woman he loved even though she’d put him in a cage. Hell, he would have done the same thing in her place.

  He took a deep breath and hauled himself to his feet. “You got to go,” Misha told the war chief. “Go from here. Death comes. Death flies.” He pointed toward the sky, wondering how the hell he was going to convey ‘helicopter’.

  Sing said something to Yunubey that might be her attempt at a translation. Yunubey frowned and asked her a question. She launched into a story that Misha recognized from her gestures as their encounter with the flying monster, not the helicopter.

  “No,” Misha said. “Wrong. New death comes. New deibukna. Death will come. Not from Death Wind Country. From my country. My….” Sing wouldn’t know the word ‘comrades’. “My people. My Us. My Nun. They’re coming to kill you.”

  How long did Misha have to make himself clear? He didn’t even know how long he’d been unconscious. He checked the sky above the paddles. It was dark, but the air was full of a weird yellow radiance. Straight, smooth branches stretched above them, shedding enough light to read by.

  Sing squinted at him. “People of you…come kill? Me kill? Yunubey kill? They Misha not kill?”

  “Yes,” said Misha. “My people are coming here. I called them. They’ll kill everyone but me.”

  Yunubey bared his teeth and shook his cricket bat at Misha. “Dan? Danya yak-nam-ak do?”

  “Who come?” Sing asked. “People of you are who?”

  “Who are my people?” Misha could only shrug. Unlikely as it was that any journalist would ever interview these poor, doomed people, the chance was still there. And he was still wearing the bodycam, if his brush with the paddle-cage hadn’t fried it. So he couldn’t very well say ‘Americans’, could he?

  * * *

  When they found her, Nurul looked like a corpse reanimated by vengeance. Her hair hung in tattered curtains across her waxy skin. She clutched at herself, shuddering, her lips pulled back from chattering teeth.

  “Shit, what happened to you?” Anne rushed to fold her arms around the shivering journalist. “We thought a magnetovore got you.”

  “What? No. I only got…turned around,” Nurul said. “Cold. I need…help.”

  “Christ, you need gel,” said Anne. “Daisuke, get her some gel.”

  Daisuke, who had hoped that Nurul was just a hallucination, groaned as his brain creaked over this new information. He was hurt, hungry, exhausted, angry at Anne, and despairing of his future. And now a journalist had joined their party.

  “Why were you walking west?” he asked.

  Nurul’s eyes widened. “I was going the wrong direction?”

  “It’s a good thing you found us,” said Anne. “Let’s get some insulation on you before you freeze.”

  Nurul watched with distaste as he and Anne caught some aerogellies and spread the excretions over her body, but her shivering slowly subsided.

  “Where did you become lost?” Daisuke asked.

  Nurul pointed behind her, in the direction they were supposed to be going. “There’s a river. I tried to go around it.”

  Daisuke shivered in sympathy. Nurul would very likely have died of hypothermia if she had gotten wet. “Is it deep?” he asked.

  Nurul shook her head. “Waist-high.”<
br />
  Daisuke looked at Anne. It was clear she felt no better about wading through icy mountain water than he did.

  “Any ideas how we’re going to cross that river, Dice?” she asked.

  Daisuke thought. It was a very great effort. “We might chop down a tree to make a bridge if we had an axe.”

  “We’ve also got no grappling hook or shovels,” said Anne.

  Daisuke looked around, and his gaze snagged on one of those big starfish-looking grazers. Land-asters moved so slowly. It should be easy to capture enough of them. “I have an idea, but I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “How does the saying go? We will cross that river when we get there.” Yes, that sounded properly telegenic, although now they had no cameraman. “For now, we should walk.”

  They set off, just as slowly as before. Nurul stumbled alongside them, hugging herself and shivering. Her color seemed better, though, at least what Daisuke could see of it under the blue tinge of the gel.

  The poor woman. She had lost so much. Had Daisuke even expressed his condolences? “I’m sorry about Rahman,” he said.

  Nurul closed her eyes and nodded silently. Anne only shot Daisuke a puzzled glance.

  “What are you sorry about?” she said. “He’s probably safer than we are.”

  Nurul stopped walking. “What?”

  “What what?” asked Anne. “The Oasis biome is warm, and you can eat the animals there.”

  Nurul looked like she was going to cry.

  The part Daisuke was playing couldn’t confront Anne about the callous way she treated his feelings, but he could certainly defend Nurul. “Why did you say that? It’s cruel.”

  “Cruel? You guys are the ones talking about Rahman as if he’s dead,” Anne said. “And he isn’t. He’s just on the Oasis Planet.”

  As if it made any difference whether Rahman was still alive, trapped as he was uncountable millions of miles away. Daisuke massaged the base of his thumb. “Don’t be so pedantic.”

  “Wait,” said Nurul.

  Anne stared at Daisuke. “Are you angry with me? What did I do?”