by Jerry
“Like hell!”
“Where is your science now?” Wing demanded. “Your computer is on the ship. We are here in the forest dirt. Eternity—”
“Reality hasn’t changed. And I’m not about to trade it for superstition!”
“Eternity is nearer to hand than science now!”
“Prove it,” said Joe.
“I cannot, but—”
They heard an engine whirring. Both looked upward instantly. “That is the survey copter,” Wing said. “Searching for us.” The whir swelled, faded. “They will not see a trace of us,” Wing whispered. “Look at the forest roof.”
Slender tree trunks rose into the air all around them. High overhead, the trunks branched into fronds, massive crowns of fronds intermeshing with each other. And Wing had it right: there was no break in that canopy, no sign that the plane had crashed through it.
“Radio?”
“The crash destroyed it.”
“Crash beacon?”
After a moment’s hesitation. Wing answered, “I do not know.” The whir faded away into the faint slither of the rain. “They will come back,” said Wing. But he sounded far from confident, and he absently wrung his hands. “If nothing else, our colony cannot afford to lose you!”
“Just so they don’t waste time about it!”
Wing shook his head glumly. “There are no plans for accidents like this. It may take them much time to decide how to search for us without exposing the search party to biohazard.”
“If the biohazard is all that serious, they might as well not bother,” Joe gritted.
The raining wind sighed and breathed through the forest canopy.
Finally Wing said, “If you are not going to die, then I must climb to the base to get help.”
“How far?”
“A few miles, perhaps.”
Joe stood up and twitched his shoulder. Now it didn’t hurt, didn’t feel at all. “Painkiller?”
“A potent one, yes. There was a first aid kit. I also salvaged your briefcase,” he added.
“Intending to throw it into the nearest lake?”
“I respect reality as much as you do,” Wing said stiffly, and handed the case over. “We differ in our interpretation of it.”
The rain ceased. Cobalt silence surrounded them. Wing looked uphill, then down toward the wreck. “I pulled a large broken frond over him. That’s not enough, but—”
“It’ll do. See if there’s a sling in that kit!”
Wing obliged. With his useless arm secured, Joe felt at least marginally fit for a desperate hike.
The seamoon must have been high in the night sky above the forest. A viscous blue twilight filled the air under the trees. It made for uncertain visibility. Joe could discern the nearest few tree trunks. Everything beyond that melted into a murky sketch done in blue ink, suggestions of trees or foliage. His first few footfalls made sharp thin pains radiate through his body.
The first part of the climb seemed simple, a steady slope without much undergrowth. But slippery moss coated the ground. Both men lost their footing and pitched forward repeatedly. With his good hand, Joe had a grip on the handle of the briefcase. But when he slipped, the thing kept him from simply catching himself. He felt like an utter fool, floundering his way up an alien mountain with a briefcase. So he paused to open it. He removed the briefcase’s slim computer and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket. The briefcase itself he threw away.
Something glowed in the blue gloom. Wing hesitated, then went closer to investigate. It was a dead tree. Some kind of fungus coated the tree in thick, dripping sheets like candlewax, emitting a faint yellow-green glow.
“Don’t touch that!” Joe said harshly. “No microbes here are specifically hostile to us—but chances are some of ’em produce toxins. Metabolic byproducts that just happen to be toxic to human beings!”
Wing stopped short. “It could be perilous to touch anything at all, then!”
“So could standing here breathing the air. Let’s go.”
The painkiller seemed to have made him light-headed. Between one footfall and the next, Joe was seized by the feeling that this place might just as well have been the bottom of the sea: liquidly shadowy, ultramarine and silent. Following Wing, he moved in slow motion, like an ancient diver, his feet leaden, his head weightless.
With a startled cry. Wing pitched backward and started sliding away. Joe reacted barely in time to save him. Throwing himself to the ground, he grabbed Wing’s wrist with his good right hand. Which saved Wing from disappearing into a long deep darkness. The slope underfoot had quite smoothly taken a steep turn downward.
“God-almighty-damn!” Joe swore. “That’s a ravine!” With an effort, he hauled the smaller man back over the edge.
“Thank you,” Wing said faintly.
Drug or no drug, the action had caused the pain in Joe’s shoulder to flare up. He tried to rock the angry pain away.
Wing crept back to the edge of the ravine and peered into it. “I hear water rushing over rocks!”
“You could have been killed.”
“Yes, I was careless!” Wing fumed. “Just like the unfortunate pilot, I assume too easily that this is not a dangerous place!”
The unfortunate pilot. The man had been too talkative, maybe careless, but not a bad guy, and he had died. The realization was sinking in. Joe was walking away from a bad crash. He could have been dead too. Or dying. Rocking against the pain, he shivered.
After brooding at the ravine a while longer. Wing said, “I do not think that is what you meant by proceeding without extraordinary precaution.”
“No,” Joe said. “Now what?”
“This ravine angles uphill. We should follow it that way.”
“Just watch your step.”
“I will watch with my toes. The eyes are not at home here!”
Wing edged along from tree to tree. The trees grew more slender, their foliage less dense; more moonlight filtered into the forest, improving visibility. The feathery crowns of the trees were silhouetted against the dim sky. “You’re a fern specialist, eh? No wonder they defrosted you,” Joe remarked. “These things sure look like prehistoric fern trees.”
“So the Vanguard thought.”
The ravine rapidly grew shallower, evolving into a treeless depression that ran like a ribbon as far up and away as the eye could see. Illuminated by full seamoonlight, it glowed, blue-green. “Damn moon puts out a lot of light,” said Joe.
Wing halted at a narrow spot in the long depression.
“Looks boggy,” Joe said dubiously.
“And either I’m feeling my fever, or it’s hot here.”
“It is hot and humid. And the air smells strangely, does it not?”
“Loaded with volatile organic molecules. Well, you’re the field man. What do we do?”
“Cross here. I go first; you follow in my steps. Be ready to give me a hand if need be!” Wing took cautious steps, found firm footing as he stepped in vegetation that came up to his shins. He paused. “These plants are odd! They shake even though there is no wind here.” He bent over for a better look. “What do you say is the color?”
“Well—Green. But not green.” Intrigued in spite of himself, Joe continued, “Doesn’t look like any color at all, but it’s green!”
“Yes. I do not see any color either, yet the plants appear convincingly green. What strange light.” He touched a leaf. It resembled a fern, curled at the top, the rest of the leaf wide with frilly edges that quivered. “Look, the leaves have their heads curled up as though they are asleep like birds. And they shiver in their sleep!”
“This isn’t a field trip,” Joe reminded him. “And get your head up away from the muck!” Joe was acutely aware of the strange organic smell. It nagged his nostrils.
Wing straightened. “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously!”
“What?”
“That is the textbook example of a perfectly grammatical but meaningless sentence in English.�
�� Wing informed him. “I never expected to see any.”
“Why don’t you keep your mind on getting across?”
Joe put his feet where Wing had stepped among the colorless greens. He heard faint crunchings underfoot, from the underlying mat of vegetation saturated with water. Grimly he calculated that he outweighed Wing by fifty pounds at least.
“This is the center—it is solid—enough,” said Wing.
But it proved solid enough only for Wing. Joe’s foot tore through the mat into mud beneath it. He lunged ahead. His other foot sank into the mat. The mud reeked of overripe bananas. An instant later, it smelled like a latrine.
“Can you pull out your feet?” Wing asked urgently.
“Ugh! Yeah—” Joe plowed through the mud. The smell wrapped itself around him, oscillating between fruit and sewage. Nauseous, Joe stumbled onto drier firm ground. He tasted the urge to vomit.
“That smell is strange,” said Wing, leaning on a tree. “Yet almost familiar . . .” Wing lapsed into Chinese and then he started to cry. Dumbfounded, Joe stared as Wing slid down the tree and sat down in a huddle, sobbing into his knees. “That smell!” Wing’s words were muffled. “It is—” He choked and sobbed.
Seizing Wing’s collar, Joe dragged him uphill into fresher air. Joe breathed deeply and fought off his own nausea.
“That smell!” Wing said finally. “Ah!—it reminded me of my mother’s kitchen!”
“What?!”
“The fragrance of peanut oil heating in the wok. Delicious reused peanut oil,” Wing said sorrowfully.
“Didn’t strike me that way,” said Joe.
“So real!” Wing murmured. “Many memories of home. Give me a few moments. I still feel overwhelmed. My mother died some years before the ship left . . .” Wing trailed off.
With a grunt, Joe sat down to wait while Wing pulled himself together.
In getting himself out of the bog, he had ripped a trail through the plants. Never before on this world had that happened: plant life damaged by a large blundering animal. Now the semi-floating vegetation seemed to be drifting back together, his trail closing up, jagged as a stitched wound.
Joe shifted his gaze to the sky. A dim yet intense blue, more than anything else it resembled a color of computer cyberspace. Which reminded Joe that he had not done any real work since he came out of the ship’s freezer. Assessment of other people’s reports; politics; bossing technicians in the lab. yes. But not theoretical molecular biology. His genius was to lift up a great looming strand of DNA in cyberspace, and rearrange the bases, using the virtual manipulator that made it feel like physically handling the vast molecule. Until it felt right for what he wanted it to do that nature never intended. Then, he would tell the computer to give the novel DNA a workout, express the new gene through messenger RNA, proteins. and organs into the final organism.
He remembered the dog DNA. He had made manifold modifications to the canine double helix in cyberspace. His design had been reproduced by genetic engineers in real dogs in the real world. The result was a dog with gills, flippers and numerous other physiological modifications so that it could breathe and survive in salt water. By the time Joe left Earth, sea dogs were being used as helpers, messengers, sometimes bomb-carriers for undersea operations. Porpoises. useful in some of the same ways, were protected against being so used; they had para-human rights. The sea dogs retained the loyal and tractable temperament of Labrador retrievers.
He had really wanted to design and develop a winged horse, for the hell of it. But chimeras were expensive. They had to be practical and profitable.
The dark electric blue of the sky gave him ideas. Westpark needed animals. They could be made. The ship had brought a trove of germ cells from Earth—samples of every species that the ship’s agents managed to buy or barter for in every ecological corner of the Earth. Here, there was a planetary pool of alien genetic material to investigate, and exploit, maybe recombine with genes from Earth. Why not? He fumbled in his pocket, took out the computer, and made notes, squinting at the tiny bright characters on the display.
With a world full of plants, there was plenty of food if engineered organisms could metabolize it. First, herbivores. Antelopes with appropriate digestive enzymes. Then, maybe, predators to eat the antelopes—but find people and other terrestrial organisms distinctly unpalatable. Though in the long run it might do the human genome good to have man-eating predators on Westpark; keep the genes for survival honed sharp.
Changeling antelopes and lions. But why not unicorns and griffins? Staring into the moon-lit sky, he imagined the coils of DNA, changes in the genetic code, transfiguration into breathing ornamented shapes, teratisms that would have been illegal, impractical, or both on Earth. His creativity had always been trammeled. Not so here. The possibilities were endless and compelling. One-handed, he frantically entered his ideas into the little computer.
Wing scrambled to his feet. “It is not a good thing to sit and think in this twilight!” he announced, and with that, dashed uphill.
Joe went after him. Tucking the computer back into his pocket. Joe broke into a cold sweat. Wing was right. Sit around in the twilight thinking, and colorless green ideas wake up furiously in your head. He did not know—would not know, until he got an uplink to the ship’s supercomputer with its molecular biological data base—whether what he had just dreamed up made any scientific sense, or was lunatic fantasy.
Now they could go directly uphill again, on terrain with a steep but not unmanageable slope. Joe caught up with Wing. His shoulder felt leadenly numb. Elsewhere on his anatomy, nerve endings complained loudly, claiming to be scraped or scratched. Some of the abrasions might have been imaginary. He did not dare to investigate with his good hand. By now, that damply dirty hand must have collected a staggering number of micro-organisms.
Wing pointed to a short tree draped with filmy stuff that shone slightly. “Shroud worms,” Wing announced.
Bugs, slugs, crud. Srivastava, with his smile full of white teeth, had said cheerily, “The cake is much like Earth, you see, the layers of prokaryotes and eukaryotes, single-celled and multi-celled microbes, then plants and arthropods and invertebrates. Only there is no decoration on the icing of the cake—no vertebrates. The carbon cycle works quite well without them. The atmosphere down there is much like that of Earth. Richer in oxygen, but only somewhat.” But on Earth, Joe thought, the primordial crud had had more imagination.
Looking back at the shroud, Wing said, “That is considered an analogue to Earth’s ginkgo. The ginkgos flourished with the great dinosaurs in Earth’s Jurassic period. Yet here, nothing more complex than shroud worms eats that tree. The plant life and animal life are very far out of phase! Has your committee found an explanation for this?”
“Maybe. The native organisms have a kind of ribonucleic acid for genetic material. Slightly different from terrestrial RNA and DNA, and, it turns out, more stable. Too stable. My guess is that you need a certain mutation rate to make enough random experiments so that some of them go to the kind of nervous system complexity that makes for higher animals.”
The pseudo-ginkgo trees were small, branchy, rooty and close together. Joe fought his way through, while Wing slipped between the tangled trees like a cat. He paused to wait for Joe. “Could it not be that the pace on this world is simply slow and that animals will come about in time, if we let the world be?”
“I doubt it. because the genetic material is incredibly junked up in almost every organism we’ve studied. Ratio of genes that mean something to genes that mean nothing is absurdly low, more so than Earth’s record-holder in that respect—the lunglish, which has fifty times more DNA than a human being, and that’s a hell of a lot more DNA than you really need to specify a lungfish. But one of the slug tissue samples collected by Unity Base had six hundred times more genes than the nearest Earth analogue.”
“I do not see how unexpressed genes must negate the further evolution of slugs,” said Wing. “Of course, I am a botanist
rather than a xenobiologist.”
Joe detected a nettle. Joe was no xenobiologist either. His qualifications to direct the advisory committee had been questioned by some of the scientists who were. To no avail: the reins had stayed in his hands. “Evolution here was never able to jack up to higher life-forms. And now it’s too late,” Joe said flatly.
Wing forged ahead in silence.
The bright blue gloom made it all but impossible to judge the position of obstacles. “Still think it’s beautiful?” Joe said sharply, after tripping over yet another root.
“Yes, I do,” answered Wing, “philosophically. How I feel is another matter.”
“You don’t feel sick, do you?”
“No. But . . . I am unnerved. Things here have no names. Somehow I would feel better if I expected a dinosaur—a ferocious allosaur—to crash through the bushes.” He ducked into a thick band of trees. Long, pliable branches hung in the way with masses of round leaves.
Wing seemed healthy enough. But Joe wondered morosely about his own weakened, fevered body. The ragged molecules and wounded cells of stasis fever—how vulnerable did that make him? “Ever read about the Black Death in medieval Europe? People literally dropped dead. I keep thinking about that,” said Joe. “Irrationally expecting wild viruses to rustle in the air. And water. And goddamned dirt.”
“That is more likely than allosaurs,” Wing said in a low voice. He eased past a thick skein of branches. Joe followed more clumsily.
“More likely than allosaurs but still damn improbable,” said Joe. “I’m no fool. I recommended colonizing without extraordinary precaution because the findings are straightforward.” He patted the computer under his shirt, almost as if to reassure himself of its tangibility. “The idea of an alien virus scares the hell out of people who don’t know better. But viruses are parasites fine-tuned to their hosts. No mammals here means no virus even remotely prepared to exploit the mammalian organism. No alien virus is going to ambush us.”
“Most regrettable!” said Wing, heading up a steep incline laced with roots and branches.
“You’d rather drop dead?!”
