by David Coy
“Good. You got enough food to feed an army there I’d say.”
“Yeah, well. You know . . . ”
“Okay.”
“Yeah . . . ”
“Well, see ya’ later, then.”
"Sure."
“And thanks again for saving me.”
Rachel looked at Mike and smiled. He’d been so sincere with that little thank you that it plucked at her heartstrings. She touched his arm.
“My pleasure,” she said.
“See ya.”
“See ya.”
John and Rachel exchanged looks; both glad the conversation lost its momentum so quickly. They paid again, hauled the baskets out and dumped the contents in the truck. John looked at the truck’s load and was dissatisfied. “One more time,” he said.
“Let’s go.”
“He’ll think it’s weird,” Rachel said.
“Who gives a shit what he thinks. C’mon.”
They went back and filled up again, ignoring the looks from the two boys. The clerk must have thought it was unusual too, but if he did, he didn’t say anything.
“Can you think of anything else,” he said to Donna as he put the last of it in the truck. “We’ve got some credit left.”
“No.”
“Then let’s get outta here.”
They drove to the shuttle landing and, as they approached, John wished the area were less well lit. But circumstances were in their favor. The shuttle landing was some distance from the docks and its guards. Chances were slim they’d be seen in spite of the light.
The company operated three Creighton-class shuttles for low atmospheric transportation. His thumb print would start all three, so he had his pick. His favorite was the older Model SU, but he considered stealing the new Model SY then changed his mind. He knew his SU inside and out. He planned on stripping out the transponders, and he knew just where they were on the older model.
Double-timing it, they carried the provisions into the shuttle and stowed as much as they could in the storage compartments. It was a twelve-seater and the seats took up useless space. But there was no time to remove them then. They stuffed the rest of the supplies into and under the seats, securing it any way they could.
While Rachel and Donna stowed the last, John removed several panels from the ceiling of the passenger compartment. and one from the cockpit. Using a Gripsall, he clamped onto the transponders one at a time and wrenched them out like stubborn teeth, leaving hanging strands of wires like torn veins.
“Won’t we need those to navigate?” Rachel asked.
“No. All these little bastards do is broadcast our location to the orbiter. I left the receiver array—that’s what the navigation system uses.”
He pitched the transponders out onto the ground next to the truck and shut the shuttle door. A moment later the shuttle was airborne with lights out, humming westward over the green.
“Where are we going?” Rachel asked.
“Does it matter?” Donna answered.
“It might,” Rachel replied.
“Anywhere Smith can’t find us suits me just fine,” Donna said.
“Is there such a place?” Rachel asked.
“We’re flying over it now,” John said.
* * *
They continued westward until they reached the sea, a broad calm pool that lay under them like a swath of tarnished silver. Nothing disturbed that solemn surface, and the rising moonlight illuminated it like something solid. He turned south along the coast and dropped down a few hundred feet. They’d been airborne for over an hour and traveled well over two-hundred kilometers. It was far enough, and he thought with a wry grin that just a hundred meters would probably have been far enough in with the jungle as cover.
“There’s a likely looking spot,” he said, pointing out the window. “That little inlet there has a patch of beach.”
“I’ve always wanted to live at the beach,” Donna said. “I like to smell the ocean.”
“Then you’ll get your wish,” John said.
He circled around the spot to get a better look. The inlet formed a backwater perhaps fifty meters wide that penetrated the jungle for some distance, finally narrowing to a point a few hundred meters to the east. Where the inlet merged with the sea, two small patches of beach had formed.
The beaches were covered with tall, sparse grass and storm-blown debris causing Donna to think that it was probably less buggy than the jungle behind it, but it wouldn’t be bug-free by any means. After her recent ordeal, such considerations were very important to her. She reached out and touched the shuttle’s stiff, strong wall with the palm of her hand. She knew where she’d be sleeping.
“What do you think?” he said into the window. “It looks pretty good if you ask me.”
“It’s cleaner than the jungle,” Rachel said, “and there’s at least a view of something other than jungle.”
“Let’s go for it,” Donna said. “We won’t find better.” John swooped down and circled low over the inlet. He picked a fairly level spot on the northern side, hovered over it, then put the shuttle into a slow vertical descent.
“We’ll have to do this in the dark. I don’t want to risk using the landing lights, you can see those damned things from space easy. I just hope there’s nothing weird underneath us.”
“There’s always something weird under you on this ball,” Rachel remarked.
The craft sat down with a few scraping sounds and a slight bump. Rachel studied John’s face for some sign that he sensed damage and got a wink in return that put her at ease.
“Home sweet home,” he said.
“For a while,” Donna added.
They slept poorly. The makeshift beds were rough, and the floor of the shuttle hard. John had an especially difficult time. The animal warmth from Rachel’s body seemed to reach out and touch him, excite him with the promise of its supple smoothness.
They all awoke bone-sore, bleary-eyed and grumpy. The food was oddly tasteless to Rachel, and she wondered just how long this would have to go on. It wasn’t comfortable.
“At least it’s better than being dead,” John said as if reading her mind.
“I suppose,” she said.
She looked flushed. That was a bad sign. He reached over and put his hand on her forehead. “You’re hot,” he said. “Are you having another reaction?”
“It’s just hot in here is all,” she said puffing at a strand of twisted hair. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” he asked gently.
“Yes. I’m fine,” she said turning away.
The idea of having another episode made her flush with fear. The last one had caused convulsions that left her bruised and exhausted.
The centipede’s poison had done some damage, and the effects had persisted. Donna had figured it out following a brief medical interview she gave Rachel after seeing one of the seizures firsthand two days ago. Donna told her that she had no way of knowing how much damage had been done, and the specialized diagnostic equipment required to find out more was nowhere to be found on the planet. Rachel had had three convulsions since the bite, each one a little more severe than the last.
“I worry about you,” John said. “Donna said the damage might be progressive and to be aware of any change in the way you feel.”
“I’m fine, John. Really I am. Besides, there’s nothing we can do about it now. Don’t worry about it. I’ll be fine.”
They went outside and milled around their new home, kicking at grass and driftwood and taking a close look at this or that. The air that close to the water was heavy with the rich scent of ocean and fertile shore, as sweet to Rachel as perfume. She lifted her head and sucked the sweet scent in with a deep inhale, eyes closed, savoring it. She couldn’t imagine a better scent and wondered why, for the hundredth time in her life, why someone hadn’t bottled it.
They ambled over to the shore and looked at that, too. The water was clear, cool and the narrow strip of wet sand was streaked with
tracks of nocturnal crawlers going in and out of the gently lapping water. The biologist squatted down on her haunches and took a close look. John didn’t fail to notice how that particular maneuver emphasized her thighs under the material of her clothing, and he longed to run his hands over those smooth curves from the back, the front, from underneath.
God . . . he thought. She is beautiful.
* * *
Rachel spotted it first, just when the sun came up far enough to illuminate it. She wished she were higher off the ground and thought about asking John to lift her up in the shuttle to get a better view. Down low, only the top portion of it could be seen, but she could see enough to know it was either a completely unnatural artifact or the biggest, strangest goddamned plant she’d ever seen.
From where she stood, she guessed the object to be nearly four hundred meters high and perhaps two hundred in diameter.
“What is it?” Donna asked, shielding her eyes against the sun.
“I have no idea,” Rachel said. “I suppose it’s a plant. It has some floral symmetry. That’s all I’d hazard to guess at this point.”
The object roughly resembled the trunk of a tree, cleanly chopped at the top and with numerous thick and twisted shoots protruding from it at right angles like branches at irregular intervals. Its color was brownish with mottled patches of darker brown. Some patches near the top had a yellowish tinge.
“A tree?” Donna asked, scowling. “Is it some big-assed tree?”
“Unknown. I’d like to take a closer look at it, though,” Rachel said with a strange sense of longing that surprised her. ”It’s . . . interesting.”
“That could be arranged,” John said smiling. “You know how I feel about discovering new things.”
“Yeah, a real searcher of truth, you are,” Rachel said with a grin. “You’d like that wouldn’t you—just go land right on the damned thing and snoop around for a while.”
“Yep.”
“What are you two talking about?” Donna wanted to know.
“We’re just thinking about doing a little exploring,” John
said, keeping his eyes locked on Rachel’s.
“Just a side-trip,” she said, similarly locked onto him. “Nothing major.”
“We have enough to worry about without complicating our lives to Hell and back. It’s a plant. Big deal. I mean, it’s a big plant, but so what?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Rachel said.
“No, it’s personal,” John said.
“Oh,” Donna said.
“Now?” Rachel asked to John.
“Why not?” he said.
Rachel took him by the arm and dragged him toward the shuttle. “C’mon, Donna,” she said. “It’ll be fun.”
“I’m not so sure about that, but I’m sure as hell not staying here alone.”
John took a quick look around the shuttle, making sure there weren’t any sticks or vines snagged around the propulsion coils.
It took just a minute to fly from the inlet to what appeared to be a gigantic tree. Looking out at the sea of green, Donna remarked to herself that the trip would have taken days and gallons of sweat on foot. She would know.
John flew the craft to within a hundred meters of the structure then banked around it, making a complete circle.
It looked to Rachel to have grown up out of the jungle floor but she was at a loss to explain from what. It seemed to be a one-of-a-kind something and that seemed inexplicable. If it were a plant, it should have had progenitors visible. But on this planet, she thought ruefully, anything was possible. The organism could have had a life cycle unfathomable by Terran standards. Perhaps it had a few millennium or two to go before going to seed.
“How tall is it?” she asked. “What’s our altitude?”
“Three, four hundred meters. We’re a good hundred meters from the top right now.”
“It’s huge . . . ” Donna said.
Up close, the structure seemed to have the texture of polished wood, and when not backlit by the sun, was much lighter in color than it had seemed. When the light was right, the brown, mottled surface reflected the red light of the sun and sent back bands of gold.
Rachel studied it. The unknown shape sunk deep to some remote section of her mind and made a connection. She felt a sudden sense of awe that rose up from her bosom and through the nerves in her neck and the back of her head. The shape seemed to be more than the sum of its parts. It seemed more like sculpture than a mere object; a grand, inexpressible symbol of something else.
“Get away from it,” she said.
“What?” he said.
“I mean move back. I want to see all of it at once.”
John turned the craft out, then brought it back into a slow loop.
“Good,” she said.
Rachel recognized that the monolith had formed eons ago, erupted, from the jungle floor as if thrust by some explosive force. From one angle, the flat sea beyond seemed to frame it, caress it, with soft gray. In sharp contrast to its golden sheen, the ocean was a calm and tranquil backdrop that accentuated its strength.
She felt her head buzz with a sudden revelation.
Rachel had spent her entire life in the study of things alive, of life; from the smallest proto-organism to the most complex forms. She’d seen their shapes in every conceivable configuration. Those shapes possessed her waking hours and crept into her dreams, moving, twisting and slithering in symmetrical halves and quarters. This structure, this peculiar shape, reached into her psyche and with one of those twisted, powerful arms plucked some chord deep, deep down. Finally, she was able to find the words.
“It looks like life itself,” she said and swallowed hard.
“What?” Donna asked, not sure if she'd heard right.
“That . . . plant. It looks like life itself.”
“I thought you said you didn’t know it was a plant.”
“I still don’t.”
As Rachel watched the light bounce in gleaming splendor off the structure’s resilient surface, the sudden realization came to her, carried like some gift by the monolith’s bronze perfection.
If this fertile planet has a heart, surely this is it. It is the planet's center.
She felt herself trembling. The object’s mass seemed to pull her in as if by magnetism.
“Land on it. I want to touch it.”
“You’re the boss,” John said.
“You can’t just land on that thing,” Donna protested.
“Sure we can,” John smiled at Rachel.
“Go,” Rachel said. “Land right . . . right in the center.”
The top of the monolith was flat and smooth. He brought the craft slowly over it and went into a vertical descent. The surface looked solid enough, but you never knew. He put the craft on creep and let the suspensors gradually ease it to within a meter of the surface.
“That’s close enough,” he said. “We don’t know how much weight it can take.”
“It can take the weight of the universe,” Rachel said. “And hold it like a feather.”
“I think she’s in love,” Donna said ruefully to John.
John locked the craft in place, then slid the side door open. The light from the object’s surface flooded the shuttle’s gray interior with gold, making them squint against it.
Without hesitation, Rachel stepped into the suspensor field and waded through it.
When she stepped out onto the surface and away from the suspensor’s influence, it felt as if she’d stepped onto the very earth itself so solid was the surface underneath. Her boots made faint clomping sounds as she walked, and she heard her breath as if she were listening to someone else’s. She stopped and stomped hard once just to feel the object’s immutable strength under her foot. She bent down and ran her hand over the surface and felt its smoothness like fine polished wood. When she looked at her hand, she noticed that it was trembling. She was having another reaction. The trembling was the first concrete sign. She clenched a tight
fist to make it stop, willing it to go away.
I’m stronger than you.
She marched across the plateau, turning and walking backwards every few steps. Taking in the incredible vista all around with a broad smile, she could feel in the muscles of her face but could scarcely understand. From atop this life form, she felt as if the planet had unfolded from the substrate beneath and now lay before her like a vast living carpet in one plane. The rolling waves of deep green went on forever in three directions, punctuated to the east by the red ball of the sun and framed by the gray strip of the ocean to the west. From this high place, she could open her arms and fill them with the planet’s very spirit. It would flow into her, fill her and transform her—she knew it. She felt it in every fiber. Reason told her that coming to this place was mere chance, but her heart felt some profound and frightening design at work, as if every thought she’d ever had or act she’d ever done had brought her inexorably to this place.
She walked farther and faster, finally breaking into a run across the impossible surface. Faster she ran, feeling the planet’s hot air caress her face and hair, and she heard the sound of her own breath and of her blood rushing like wind in her ears. She pounded forward until the muscles in her strong legs ached and her breath came in torn gasps. To the smooth edge she raced where with one last leap she would soar out and out over the planet’s rich forest like some mindless, awe-struck bird. She stopped at the very edge, hearing her blood and breath and feeling the hot rivers of sweat under her clothes. She forced down a deep and steady breath and smelled the planet’s scent, its richness and sweetness, like the warm scent of a lover.
She held out her arms.
It is the center.
Rachel had never been religious, nor was she especially spiritual. She knew little of those ethereal realms, and had never sought them through any channel, preferring instead to keep her feet firmly planted in the here and now, shorn with the sturdy boots of science and fact, not with the flimsy sandals of faith. But with Verde’s vista before her eyes and its fragrant air filling her lungs and its hot sun on her skin, her soul seemed to take flight and to spin upward and out, far, far above her physical place—and she saw herself small and, from a perspective, perfect and flawless for the first time.
