Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  Lain silently reached down and checked that the pistol was still tucked in beside her useless legs.

  Yves took her silence as obedience. He dropped his hand and focused back on the glass. He drew several more symbols on the glass then said a foreign word. The symbols gleamed faintly and then a pale dome appeared over the glass and gleaming lines traced an odd pattern underneath.

  What the hell?

  The pattern looked like some type of map. There were a multitude of lines running like water, and a handful of bright motes. The contours hadn’t matched up to the three rivers that lay inside the zone. The lines indicated two “streams” in the immediate area, one of which they were standing directly on. She could see no water.

  “What is that?” Lain wished she had a camera to capture the image before it vanished.

  Yves studied it for a minute longer and then spoke another word and the glowing faded. “Nothing.”

  He took out a cloth and wiped clean the glass.

  Nothing? The hell if it was nothing. Yves was looking for something quite specific and apparently found it. He was surprised by the forest but not ignorant of it. He knew it existed. He just didn’t expect to find it here.

  “Have they identified the power source behind the transfer?” Yves asked.

  “No,” she said and then the oddness of the question struck her. What was the trigger event? The aurora-like effect that followed the arching path of destruction hinted that the power had come from the atmosphere. She hadn’t heard of any large solar flares—but those rarely made even the science news feed. Since her accident delivered its crippling blow to both her and NASA, all the news feeds focused on the Chinese hyperphase gate.

  Which had activated last night for the first time.

  If the gate worked as promised, it would jump a colony ship to a new world.

  She gasped as possibilities hit home. Last night the gate was turned on and created a field through which something could travel to another world. Like Pittsburgh. The neat disc of forest was the same shape as the gate, magnified by a factor of nearly one hundred. NASA had been forbidden in its infancy by Congress to work with the Chinese space program, so she knew very little about the gate. Its design was top secret and the actual science unproven. Her stepfather had been heavily involved in the construction via his international businesses. If Pittsburgh’s disappearance were caused by men—her stepfather to be exact—it would explain Yves’ behavior. She always knew her stepfather was a stunningly powerful man but making an entire city vanish seemed beyond even him. Unless—of course—it was by accident.

  Her family just got a thousand times more mysterious—and possibly more dangerous.

  She sat in shock as Yves strode back to the encampment. What did she know of the gate’s startup? It was supposed to go live for the first time yesterday at noon Beijing time but had been delayed until nearly seventeen hundred. She worked through the time zones. Yes. That would be the right time Eastern Standard Time when Pittsburgh disappeared. The Chinese stated that after a series of tests, powering up and powering down the gate to make sure it was operating smoothly, they’d jump the first colony ship through. It was less clear when they planned those. Were they already testing the gate or hadn’t they powered it down yet?

  Would Pittsburgh return if they powered the gate down?

  There was an odd booming noise, growing louder.

  “What now?” Lain spun her wheelchair around, wondering if some idiot was blowing up some other rare specimen.

  A huge dark figure loomed inside of the forest. As she watched, it moved into the sunlight and she gasped. It was a tree—walking.

  The ground shook with each step.

  Lain knew she should be afraid, but all she felt was sudden and complete nirvana. It didn’t matter that she could no longer go to an alien world—it had come to her.

  The tree’s branches were long and slender like a willow, trailing down to brush the ground as the tree walked. It would pry up a massive root foot, shift slowly forward and plant it again in an earth-rattling stomp. The trunk had many rough nodules with the appearance of a bark-covered face but she could see no true visible eyes.

  She studied it through binoculars, whimpering as it drew nearer. “No, no, no, turn around.” She fumbled with the radio. “Perkins! Lieutenant Perkins! This is Colonel Shenske. You need to stop that tree.”

  “Which tree? There are thousands of them.”

  “Are you blind? The one that is walking! It’s bearing down on your twelve o’clock. You’re going to have to stop it.”

  “Stop it?”

  “It’s loaded with seed pods.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.” He’d spotted the tree. “I-I-I don’t understand. Say again: seed pods?”

  “If this vegetation can thrive on Earth, then every one of those seeds could grow into a similar tree. It could be like kudzu.”

  “Kudzu?” Lieutenant Perkins said.

  “Oh good God, man, have you never been outside of Pennsylvania? It’s the second worst thing the South ever did to itself. It’s a massively invasive perennial vine native to Southeast Asia that was imported as groundcover to prevent soil erosion. It grows unchecked, killing off native plants and trees and covering any building in its path.”

  “How do you recommend that we stop the tree?”

  “At a distance. Roughly half of the plants that have rapid movement are carnivorous.”

  “So we should shoot it?” He sounded doubtful at the effectiveness. The man obviously knew the result of shooting bullets at trees generally only resulted in ricochets and splinters.

  “Do you have any Javelin or Dragon anti-tank missiles?”

  He obviously was mentally scanning equipment lists as he slowly answered, “Yes.”

  “Then get them and shoot it!”

  Lain eyed the tree that was closing distance with surprising speed. It was the first living alien life form she had ever encountered and she had just ordered its destruction. If she didn’t start moving, she could be hit by friendly fire. First rule of xenobiology was to keep yourself alive. She thought she would never have the chance to apply the rule.

  She toggled the wheelchair’s control. The chair shuddered. One leg pawed at the ground and then stilled. “Oh, no.” She glanced toward the tree. “You’ve got to work; there’s no time for a reboot.”

  The tree seemed to be following the second bright line on Yves’ map. It hit the edge of the highway. The soldiers fell back, yelling in frightened dismay. One of them shot at it with a rifle and triggered a sudden barrage of gunfire. She ducked down and a moment later a bullet ricocheted over her head. An officer shouted to cease fire as the tree surged forward onto the paving. There was a sudden change in pitch in the yelling as the willowy branches lashed forward and snared two soldiers. The shouting went from excitement and fear to horror and pain. It was a sound that Lain had hoped that she’d never hear again. The sound of people dying.

  She punched the control pad of her wheelchair. “Come on!” She had to do something, though she wasn’t sure what. She was a useless cripple trapped in an unreliable piece of equipment.

  Everything went black and she felt like she was falling and suddenly everything snapped back to clarity. The silence was so complete that she thought she’d been struck deaf.

  Oh, God, did I just have a stroke? Did I lose more of myself? She lifted her hands, wiggled her fingers and tilted her head back and forth.

  “The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain,” she said aloud.

  No, not a stroke. Nor was she deaf. The wind gusted, making the leaves overhead whisper. The forest was impossibly quiet. No booming footsteps of the willow tree. No screams of pain and terror. No gunshots.

  Did the reserves kill the tree already?

  The highway wasn’t where she remembered it being. She scanned the forest, trying to orient herself.

  The base camp was gone.

  The highway and all signs of civilization were gone.

&
nbsp; Forest continued, uninterrupted.

  The Chinese must have turned off the gate. Good news: Pittsburgh was back on Earth. Bad news: she was stuck on whatever planet that the gate was tuned to.

  She sat stunned for a moment, and then forced herself to take a deep breath and push out shock. “Well, you always wanted to visit an alien planet. Congratulations. You’ve succeeded. Now what?”

  If the Chinese continued the tests as planned, they should turn on the gate shortly.

  If she was right about what was happening.

  Logic suggested that she should sit tight and hope that the Chinese turned the gate back on soon. This parallel world, minus man’s pollution, was cooler. A few hours after sunset, she would be at risk for hypothermia. All the nearby fallen branches and trees were covered with moss; building a fire with the damp wood was going to take her survival skills. She had no matches but she did have a pistol. If she could find enough dry tinder, she might be able to use the muzzle flare to light it.

  Something moved in the forest close by.

  Her heart leapt painfully in her chest at the sound, as if it knew something horrible was hunting her.

  A deep breathy roar came from downwind. If the beast could smell, it would pick up her scent. She pulled her pistol and checked the magazine. It was a .45 caliber with ten rounds in the magazine. She flipped the safety off. She noticed her hands weren’t shaking. Was it because she wasn’t afraid to die? This was the death she wanted; on an alien planet, dealing with extraterrestrial life.

  If the Chinese never turned the gate back on, there was no way she could survive for long. Not crippled.

  “If this is your idea of a joke,” she whispered to the God she rarely acknowledged. “I don’t think it’s very funny.”

  Something large came crashing through the forest bracken. She steeled herself, knowing that she only had ten rounds, plus another ten in the spare magazine. Twenty bullets until she was rescued. If she was rescued. She couldn’t afford to waste even one.

  The younger brother of Perkins’ dinosaur broke through the screen of ferns. It rushed at her, jaws open. She aimed at its dark eye.

  Why am I fighting so hard? I’m just going to die.

  Obey the first rule! Stay alive!

  She squeezed the trigger. The dinosaur roared with pain as the bullet plowed through its eye. She flung herself forward, out of the chair, as the beast lunged at her. Its hot breath blasted across her back, reeking of spoiled meat.

  There was a clang of metal and the whine of servos as the dinosaur bit down on her wheelchair. She rolled through dead, molding leaves, trying to put distance between her and the beast. The dinosaur shook its head just like a crocodile would to tear chunks of meat from a large prey.

  A .45 didn’t have the stopping power for a body shot. Getting a head shot from a prone position was going to be nearly impossible. She struggled to sit up, cursing her ruined body.

  The dinosaur flung aside her wheelchair. It sniffed loudly, casting about for her.

  She levered herself up, took aim on its head, and waited for it to turn.

  There was crashing in the forest nearby. A second breathy roar of an adult dinosaur.

  They’re pack hunters, she thought. Maybe a mated pair, or two juveniles, since this one is smaller than the male inside the cooler.

  The wounded male turned to face her. It spotted her with its one good eye. She shot. The first bullet cut a groove along its heavy bone eye ridge. The second missed. Then she had no choice. She rapid-fired into its body as it loomed over her. The pistol thundered in her hand, slamming her onto her back.

  The beast stood over her, its mouth wide to show off massive sharp teeth. And then slowly, gracefully, it toppled over dead.

  She had one moment of elation and then the second dinosaur crashed into the clearing. She aimed and fired. The hammer fell onto the empty chamber with a loud click. She was out. She fumbled to roll to the side so she could pull the spare magazine from its pouch. The larger but less decorative female charged, rumbling dangerously. She wasn’t going to make it. She wasn’t going to…

  A shrieking bolt of light pierced through the female’s chest. The beast crumbled, landing inches from Lain’s feet. The last of its breath washed over her.

  What the hell? Lain rammed the magazine home. She lay in the deep rich moist loam of the forest, panting. Her wheelchair sat twenty feet away, canted on its side, looking extremely battered.

  She caught movement out the corner of her eye. She rolled quickly, bringing up her pistol.

  A humanoid stood a dozen feet away, bow in hand, string pulled taut, arrow ready. It took her a second to realize that it was nonhuman.

  “Shit,” Lain whispered. First contact. A lifetime of dreaming of it—all the possible ways it might take place—and her mind went blank. “Shit.”

  They stared at each other.

  He was at least six and a half feet tall, wide shouldered and lean. Pointed ears said he wasn’t human but he had to be at least a distant genetic cousin. His black hair and almond-shaped eyes hinted that he was closer to the Asian branch. If she had to guess an age, she would put him at seventeen. Tribal tattoos done in blue ink covered his arms in a complex design reminiscent of Celtic knots. He wore knee-high boots, leather pants and a vest of overlapping scales that seemed more organic than handcrafted. He seemed to be wearing nothing fashioned out of metal; all his weapons were wood, leather and stone.

  Primitive as his weapons might be, he could still kill her. It was a basic truth that xenobiologists had always acknowledged—first contact could easily be deadly to both sides.

  They stared at each other, weapons aimed.

  “I don’t want to hurt you.” Lain cautiously lowered her pistol. “And hopefully you don’t want to hurt me, but I am not going to make my last act in this world killing off an intelligent being.”

  The male lowered his bow.

  Lain breathed out in relief. Mutual destruction averted, at least for the time being. She risked glancing at her wheelchair still lying on its side. She snapped her fingers. Its legs flailed for a moment and stopped. It needed to be righted before it could function properly—if it wasn’t totally broken.

  She started to crawl toward it, keeping her pistol in position so she could quickly bring it up. “Yes, I might be thrashing around on the ground like a beached whale, but I’m still dangerous. I’m a cripple but I have powerful machines that make me greater than this broken shell. With machines I have flown up to the stars, walked on the moon.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Was supposed to swim the seas of Europa—that’s a moon to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, although your people might think it’s just a star.”

  She reached her chair and struggled to right it. “Of course it would help if my powerful machine was working.”

  The male crouched down, cocking his head in what seemed to be puzzlement. She reminded herself that it was dangerous to assign human emotion to the gesture. It seemed, though, that he was curious about her. She knew that she was damn curious about him. Her training, though, stressed that her first priority was to stabilize her environment. Dead scientists learned nothing but the truth of their own mortality.

  She finally managed to right her wheelchair. “Load.” It whined as it tried to comply. After a second, it shuddered and its operating system crashed. “I am starting to suspect that there is a god and he has wicked sense of humor. He’s probably doing all this just to teach me a lesson. I’m just not sure at all what I’m supposed to be learning.”

  She manually set the chair’s armature to load position. “I think part of it is that I’m supposed to remember that it is my mind that matters most, not my body. True, this would all be marginally easier with two sound legs, but not much. Without a gun, I would have been in a bad way with those dinosaurs, crippled or not.”

  She climbed into the chair and rebooted the operating system. “And I think God was also reminding me that regardless of where I would have gone
, I would have needed machines to operate. When I went to the moon, I needed a space suit. In the seas of Europa, I would have needed a diving suit. And if they ever got that insane trip to Venus finalized—you should have seen that gear. All machines to move this fragile container I have about, because what’s important is what’s up here.” She tapped her head. “It’s my mind that makes me special. And there’s nothing wrong with it. And machines let me use my mind, be it on the moon, or Europa, or wherever this place is.”

  “This is Elfhome,” the male said.

  She slapped her hand over her mouth. He spoke English? She had just ranted on and on. God, what had she said? First contact and she had thrown a hissy fit. Wait—how did he speak English if this was first contact? Maybe she just misheard him.

  “Have you really been to the moon?” he asked.

  She nodded, hand still over her mouth. He was definitely speaking English with a lilting British accent. He wasn’t simply parroting her faint New York accent back at her. Oh God, he had understood everything she had said! What exactly had she said? She had ranted on without thinking. Had she mentioned being on the moon? Yes, she had. She nodded, and then, realizing that he might not know the gesture, added. “Yes, I have. I was—I am an astronaut. That’s a scientist that travels to other worlds to study them.”

  “What’s it like? The moon?”

  “Very beautiful, in a lifeless kind of way. Rock and dust and cold and nothing more.”

  He tilted his head to scan the trees above them, as if looking for the moon. “Do you suppose our moon is like yours? Lifeless?”

  She floundered in the flood of implications. This twin of Earth had a brother of their moon. A nearly infinite set of identical events that would have needed to happen to form both. And most stunning of all, that he would know that the two planets were so similar. “Statistically speaking, yes.”

  “Do you find our world more to your liking?”