Interference

by Sue Burke

  “Let’s go there,” I sent to Arthur to test the radio system, pointing at a clump of what seemed to be stems hung with brownish undulate leaves. Odd to see brown plants growing above water. The solar spectrum here was ideal for green plants, better than Earth. So a brown plant would be a good place to start if I was looking for aliens to Pax’s native ecology.

  Arthur touched his earpiece but didn’t stop looking around. He pointed to giant, shiny, purple beetles far away, maybe a kilometer. “Those ate our raft when we were here the last time.”

  “Big, dangerous, and no other thing known,” Cawzee said. “It is noisy here on the radio.”

  “They’re far away,” Haus said. “And about the radio, sometimes it’s noisy, background noise. It’s called static. This isn’t bad, though.”

  “I don’t know how fast those things can move. Anyway”—Arthur looked at the ground closest to us—“we need to worry about small, fast, close, dangerous things. Cawzee, see any?”

  “Hey!” a technician said, jumping. “Something hit my foot!”

  In a single leap, Cawzee was at his side, spear ready, and inspected the ground. He relaxed. “Corals.” He pointed at something on the ground with his spear tip. “They send darts. You will be alert for big bump of worm.”

  Arthur glanced at me, then at the plants. “You want the ones over there? Well, here’s sort of a path leading that way, and that’s how I’d go.” He pointed to slightly more bare soil that formed a line on the ground.

  “Will you go with me?”

  He looked at Haus, who nodded. “Cawzee, can you help them gather corals without getting killed?”

  “A difficult work, but I will make success.”

  I let Arthur lead. He walked slowly, alert. The ground under my feet seemed soft and crunchy.

  “Your partner’s pretty funny,” I said.

  “He really does learn fast. They all do.” He paused, poked at something on the ground with his spear, and began to walk again.

  “He’s a partner, right?” Or a slave. That’s what Zivon said.

  “Officially, he’s my son, but partner is a good word, too.”

  I looked around, marveling at the alienness of the plains. Then I remembered my goal. “You don’t seem very interested in our technology.”

  “You mean the guns and stuff? That’s interesting, but when you leave, it’ll be gone, so there’s not much point to learning about it.”

  “But you like the radio.”

  “Better than messenger bats.” He stopped a few meters from the plants. “What’s your plan?”

  “Take a sample or two. A whole plant, that is. Roots, if we can get them. I brought a little shovel.”

  “Digging’s interesting here. A lot happens underground. I’d prefer a shovel with a longer handle.”

  “I’m wearing a protective suit.”

  “Fine, but let me check for surprises.” He approached the clump, spear ready, and then whacked the trunks and the ground. Insectlike things skittered away. “Which plant?”

  “How about that second one.… Yes, the one with lots of leaves. It looks healthy.”

  He whacked it again, then poked the ground. “All clear.”

  I approached and inspected. A woody stem, stiff linear leaves with parallel veins, a thick bristly cutis. “Now let’s dig.”

  “You dig, I’ll guard.”

  The ground was damp and full of things that seemed to be colorful stones and pebbles, but some of them jumped and wiggled. I avoided them. Animals were the Mu Rees’ problem. Fa sent that they were going down into a damp rill to pick up some samples, and he was exulting as if he’d found a gold mine. Fine, if he had time for it.

  I kept digging and asked Arthur, “So why don’t you have plant scientists?”

  “Hmm … Hold it, what’s that?”

  Something reddish darted through the hole, out of the soil on one side and back into it on the other. There seemed to be a tunnel.

  “Gone. I hope for good, but watch out.” He moved a stone to block the tunnel. “Farmers know all about plants. And when we first landed, there was a scientist named Octavo. He wrote the rules about plants.”

  “Rules?” Maybe rules for rainbow bamboo?

  The brown plant seemed to have extensive roots with nodules. Would they contain symbionts as on Earth? I wished I could get the entire root ball but it was just too big. Brains? There only seemed to be fine roots, fibrous, probably not for information storage, so I began to cut roots with the shovel ten centimeters around the plant. Tough roots, hard to chop. I jumped when something buzzed close to me.

  “Yes,” Arthur said, looking in the direction of the noise. “The rules say that plants can count, they can see, they can move. Stuff like that. That’s what he said.”

  “Stuff like that.… It’s true, they can.”

  “Here,” he said, “I’ll grab the plant for you.”

  I had finished digging around the roots. He picked it up, root ball and all, and set it in a specimen bag that I held open. “Do you trust plants?” I asked.

  “Keep a watch on that dirt. Who knows what’s in it? Be careful when you open the bag. Trust? They move slower than me, so I’m not worried.”

  He’d said nothing about plants outthinking us.

  Static roared in the link to the other part of our team. Maybe they weren’t in the ideal range for the plane. We had only one retransmitter. But I had my job to do as fast as I could so we could go home. “Can you spot any other plants here that don’t grow in the forest?”

  He could, lots, and five of them were right around us, smaller and superficially quite unlike forest plants. As fast as I could, I had them packed up and was ready to go. “Let’s get back to the plane. Fa has what he wants and then some.”

  “I’ve heard them. It’s funny how the radio translates Cawzee. It gives him a Human voice. He says the corals they took were much too big. Too many of them. Much too dangerous and foolish. This was quick, at least. I’ll be glad to go.”

  We arrived first at the plane. The rest were still climbing up the hill, excited by how reactive the corals were when they collected them, and Cawzee complaining that they were more dangerous than they realized. “More than perhaps foolish.” The static had gotten even worse. He held out his hands to show how big, at least a half meter.

  “Can you hear me well?” I sent.

  “Horrible, horrible,” Cawzee answered.

  “It’s not that bad,” Haus said. “But not good, either.”

  “Something’s wrong,” the data tech said. “I’m getting interference.…” Then her voice dropped out. They approached, she and another tech, speaking directly about how the planet had high magnetic fields and was hit by a lot of highly charged solar winds. Arthur said something, but my chip didn’t translate it. This was no time or place for network problems. Something on the ground near us started clicking.

  “Let’s go home!” I shouted to Fa.

  He and Haus carried a huge bag between them, bulging with samples. They stopped outside the door of the plane. “Open up,” Fa sent to the pilot, who had remained inside. I hardly heard it over squeals and static. I turned off my connection. Fa seemed to send it again. He pounded on the door. He tried the handle.

  “It could be automatically locked, but it shouldn’t be,” Haus said aloud. “I can override it.” He took off his glove and put his hand on the door latch. It might have clicked, or that might have been the noise from something in the area, but he opened the door and hopped in.

  “Mosegi!” he shouted, the name of the pilot. “Mosegi!”

  Arthur said something about the pilot. Cawzee answered with hoots. I tried my link again, but the noise would have given me a headache in seconds.

  “The links are more than failing,” I told the data tech.

  She tried it and winced, then shook her head to clear it. “This is new to me.” She pulled out a piece of equipment and turned it on. Her mouth dropped when she read the screen, and she show
ed it to the other technician.

  “Dear Lord,” he said. He looked up. “There has to be a transmitter here. Transmitters, more than one. We’re being jammed.”

  “Fa!” Haus shouted. “Come in here.”

  Fa climbed in as fast as he could, clumsily, and Arthur followed in one jump.

  The rest of us stood there. Cawzee motioned for us to stand close together near the plane, and he stood ahead, facing out, guarding us. A few hours ago I’d have laughed at him. Now I felt grateful. The air smelled like rotten bananas, probably some Glassmaker scent.

  Voices shouted inside, and finally Arthur: “Sick. Lungs. Full of fluid.”

  “Will he die?” Haus said.

  “Maybe. In the city, no. Who else can fly?”

  “I can, basic flight,” he answered. “But without the radio, I’m sunk.”

  “Do the instruments work?” Fa said. “Velma!” he called to the data technician. “Come here and check the instruments.”

  She shoved a scanner into her vest pocket, turned, and began to scramble in. I laced my fingers and gave her a leg up. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cawzee rise up on his back legs and grip his spear in two hands. Then he turned to us, squalling something and gesturing at the two of us to climb in, the visual recorder and me. When we were in, he leaped in himself and called to Arthur. This time he smelled like oranges.

  “Trilobites,” Arthur translated. He was holding the pale, sweating pilot erect in a seat in the passenger compartment while Haus strapped him in. “Purple. You saw them. Now there’s one on this side.” He pointed and added something I didn’t understand. Haus found an oxygen mask and strapped it on Mosegi’s face, then tipped the seat back as far as it would go.

  Fa rushed to the window and called the visual recorder to look. I found a window to look out of. A giant purple trilobite, five or six meters long, was climbing the hill toward us. Another, twice as big, followed.

  “How dangerous?” Fa said in English.

  “Very,” Arthur answered.

  “Giant horseshoe crab,” Fa said.

  “I’ve got to shoot it,” said the visual recorder. He held his camera tight and began to open the door.

  “No!” Haus and Arthur and Cawzee shouted together, but he was out. No one seemed to know what to do, so I shut the door, careful to leave it unlocked. Whatever the purple things could do—and I’d seen lots of Pax animals already—they couldn’t open a heli-plane hatch.

  The visual recorder hit a button on the chest of his suit and seemed to disappear as the camouflage kicked in.

  Haus and Velma continued to examine instruments. Haus slipped a radio receiver on one ear and plugged wires into it and the panel. He listened, then shook his head. The two continued to talk quietly, cheerless about what they were learning.

  Something big hit the back end of the plane. None of the windows gave us a good look in that direction, so Cawzee quickly opened the door, stuck out his long head, then pulled it back in and shut the door. He babbled at Arthur, still reeking of oranges.

  “Maybe it can damage the plane,” he translated, with gestures to make his meaning clear. “Haus, weapons?”

  Haus smiled, picked up his gun, and locked his helmet in place. Then he dashed to the door, opened it, and jumped out, leaving Cawzee to slide it shut again. I crowded next to Arthur at a window.

  Haus aimed and fired. Then something—the crab?—screeched. It was answered with other screeches. That was bad. It had friends. The crab hit the ship again, harder. Haus fired again. Again. A crab was coming toward him.

  Arthur ran to the door, opened it, and shouted and pointed. Haus turned and fired. A huge crab dashed at him and knocked him over. I knew there were more weapons stashed in the plane, but where?

  Arthur closed the door, his face grim but thoughtful. Cawzee said something. Arthur came next to me and crouched at the little window. He stared a moment, then rushed to Velma.

  He talked and gestured. She didn’t seem to understand. He picked up a tablet and stylus and drew a picture. Fa came to look. He and Velma disappeared into the cockpit. Arthur returned to the window. The crab seemed to be trampling or chewing on Haus.

  “What did you say?”

  “Use the plane as a weapon.”

  “How?”

  “The engine. Noise and fire.”

  Fa shouted from the cockpit, “Where’s the recorder?”

  Cawzee answered, pointing.

  “Shadow,” Arthur translated. “There, near the blue plants.”

  I looked out of the window, and after a moment I made out a shadow in the shape of a man, that idiot who ran out to make a visual recording of all this. He was standing far away and safe, camouflaged.

  The engine began to whir, powering up. Then it roared and the plane lurched. I thought I heard Haus’s gun, then dismissed that as wishful thinking.

  The plane lurched again, engines thundering. The crabs stood still. The plane thundered again. Set to lowest efficiency, the engines spewed fire instead of frost. Hot exhaust flashed. A crab ran off, gone in a second. The other one, apparently injured by Haus, moved away more slowly, but obviously hurrying. Farther away, a coral exploded from the heat and burned brightly.

  Arthur opened the door and jumped out. He ran to Haus and helped him up. He shouted at the recorder, the meaning clear even if the words were not. The recorder’s shadow began to run toward the plane. Cawzee, at the door, grabbed their arms and yanked them all in one by one, then shut it and motioned for me to lock it.

  Dirt clung to Haus’s suit. Something fell off. Arthur moved like a flash to stamp on it, then grabbed him with gloved hands to inspect the suit and quickly knocked off something else and crushed it. Haus took off his helmet. He seemed unscathed but deadly serious. He shot the recorder a look like a projectile and entered the cockpit. Fa and Velma came out and strapped themselves into chairs. Arthur checked on the pilot. The roar of the engines got louder, and we took off.

  We sat, silent, relieved. I checked my link. Still static. A few minutes later, with the forest in view, I tried again. It worked fine. But what did I have to say? I remembered my goal, to learn about Stevland. So I sent to Arthur, “Good work.”

  “All hunters are fighters. I’m not used to losing.” He looked out a window as we crossed the boundary with the plains. “I never want to go back there. It’s too hungry. Can we call ahead for help for the pilot?”

  “Done,” Haus said. “And yes, good fighting.”

  We rode on, Fa and Velma fascinated by the recorder’s video. Haus landed the plane in the field near the city perfectly. He must have used automatic pilot. A team with a stretcher was waiting and whisked the pilot away as fast as they could. I was left with several bulky bags to carry back, but Arthur and Cawzee lingered to help me.

  “It was beautiful there,” I sent to start a conversation, then realized they’d have returned the radios, so they couldn’t hear me.

  “Beautiful,” Cawzee said. He reached into a deep pocket of his coat, took out something red and furry, and held it gently. It stirred, and a wide-eyed head popped up and looked around. A baby fippokat? But those were green. And how had he heard me?

  Arthur’s mouth dropped open, then he laughed and slapped Cawzee on the shoulder. “You think we can domesticate that?”

  “Yes. I have us a pet. Perfect for hunters. Perfect for you to give to Fern.”

  “What are you going to name it?” I sent to be sure of what I suspected.

  “Fippokats have green names,” Cawzee said. “This must be a red name.”

  He still had his radio set. Arthur wasn’t wearing his, but I hadn’t seen him put it back, either. He’d spent all his time getting the pilot off the plane. He’d probably kept it.

  By afternoon, the plains plants, tucked into flowerpots outside our lab, were attracting more interest from the colonists than from my fellow explorers. We were all overwhelmed by new things, and this was just more newness. But the colonists knew that plants mattered, to
o.

  I spent the rest of the day examining my samples. As expected, they were morphologically distinct from the “forest” plant life and from Earth. No nerves or sense organs that I could find. They had common biochemicals with the corals, even a little methane, and like them, they had DNA. Fa’s corals, placed in a brick-walled pen for safety, sat as if they were inert.

  Four kinds of life on Pax: Human, Glassmaker, forest, and plains.

  The most beautiful native species, perhaps the smartest, grew above my head on rainbow stalks, apparently mute, but I wouldn’t believe it.

  That long day got me nowhere closer to what I wanted to know. At the end of it, Om came to congratulate me for a “worthy mission on this strange, wonderful planet.” All he did was delay my going to bed.

  * * *

  “Wake up,” Arthur’s voice whispered inside my head. “I have something to show you.”

  After a minute of drowsy confusion, I remembered. He had kept a radio. He knew how to use it. The Mu Rees were snoring. It was dark.

  “Get up, get dressed. I’ll tell you where to find me.”

  Stevland. He was going to show me Stevland. All my fishing for information must have gotten through to him.

  “I’m coming.”

  I pulled on my clothes as fast and as quietly as I could and added a Pax scarf with a rainbow design a woman had traded for some socks. I ducked under the door into the cold. The east held a hint of twilight. The sun would rise soon.

  “You’re hungry. Get some food. We can have breakfast together.”

  I tried to trace and identify the transmission. It came from nearby. We had an antenna in the city. But the transmission had no identity confirmation from the central transmitter. It seemed to be merely a smart instrument transmitting data in the system, like a refrigerator or portable weather station. Clever disguise.

  I found my way in the dark more by memory than sight. But Arthur wasn’t at the dining hall. All I saw was a table holding trays of fresh bread and fruit, dimly lit by a cage of glowing insects. The bread smelled beautiful, of wheat, of plant life. I took a small loaf and grabbed a couple of pieces of bamboo fruit. I ate one as I left, sweet and energizing. Stevland’s fruit.