17
ALEX LISPENARD WORKED her DSV controls, circling the trunk of the Baobab from a distance of about forty feet. The trunk was massive, far larger than even the largest sequoia: around sixty feet in diameter, and covered with a rough, bark-like surface of crude, parallel vertical grooves.
As her spotlight probed the trunk, she could see it was vaguely translucent, almost like a cloudy jellyfish, of a pale-greenish color like sea glass. Within, she could see the blurry outlines of what appeared to be internal organs, folded tubes and sacs that made no sense, looking like no terrestrial organism she knew of. There were also some round globules with a yellowish tinge, along with spidery networks of darker, reddish strands. The entity’s flesh was scattered with shining flecks and spots that drifted around in slow motion, like snow in a snow globe. It was simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. From this vantage point, seeing the complexity inside, it appeared to her more animal than plant, or perhaps something in between. And yet so far she had seen nothing that looked like sensory or feeding organs. Nor did it seem to have a mouth or anus.
At any rate, she was getting everything on video and LiDAR. They would have plenty of time to examine the images and scans topside and try to determine how the creature lived, how it fed, what it needed to stay alive—assuming, of course, it was alive.
She continued her slow circuit, maintaining a spiral pattern in order to create a three-dimensional digitized model of the thing. In another loop she would have reached the point where the branches forked out—not like a tree, but all at once, to form a kind of starburst pattern like a sea anemone.
Sea anemone…once you got past the scale of the thing, she thought, it did vaguely resemble a sea anemone—although the branches looked rigid, not like the flexible tentacles of an anemone, and Alex saw no signs of stinging cnidocytes on them.
At the very base of the fork, she noted something unusual: a dark, oval shape deep inside. It was the size of a large watermelon, and it looked out of place to her somehow, as if it didn’t belong with the rest of the creature.
“Control, this is Paul,” she said. “I see something unusual at the fork in the trunk. Something dark.”
A brief pause. “Okay, we see it,” came the voice of Chief Officer Lennart.
Alex wondered briefly what had happened to Glinn. “It doesn’t look like the surrounding tissue. Request permission to take a closer look.”
“Permission denied.”
Alex swallowed her momentary irritation. She wondered how Gideon would react to such an order.
At the thought of Gideon, a small smile formed on her face. Then her lips set once again in a straight, determined line.
The sub came around, the autopilot accomplishing its complex spiraling maneuver without effort. She had reached the forking section of the trunk.
As the DSV rose above the fork, she looked down and, at last, saw what could only be a mouth: a round opening, three feet in diameter, surrounded by what appeared to be three sets of clear, rubbery lips. It was flexing rhythmically, as if pumping water in and out.
“I think we just found its mouth,” she said. “And from what I can see, it’s very much alive.”
“Stay well away,” warned Lennart.
“It looks like it’s sucking in water—filter feeding.”
The pulsing, rubbery, huge, translucent lips were truly disgusting. Alex shuddered.
Now the sub commenced another autopiloted loop above the mouth, taking in the sudden coruscation of branches. She could see, deep below the mouth, the dark melon-shaped object she had noticed earlier.
“Hey, I think that dark shape I mentioned earlier is something it swallowed.”
More scanning.
“Wait…the mouth stopped flexing.”
“Noted.”
“It’s gone still.”
“Back off to two hundred feet,” said Lennart sharply.
“Roger.” Lispenard touched the joystick and sent the sub on a radial away from the mouth.
Suddenly she felt a lurch. An alarm went off in the sub and a flashing message appeared on the main screen.
WARNING: STRONG CURRENT DETECTED
She instinctively knew what it was, and a quick glance at the hideous mouth confirmed it. The orifice had expanded grotesquely, the lips protruding, the whole thing sucking in water at an abruptly increased pace. She grabbed the joystick and gave it full reverse, the engine thrumming up fast, arresting the forward movement of the sub.
“Get out now!” she heard Lennart say in her headset. “Back away, full power!”
This was what she was already doing—but now the mouth ballooned further, the lips stretching, and the current increased. The sub shook and rocked in its effort to pull free. Lispenard pushed the joystick sideways and rotated the sub, trying to exit the current diagonally. For a moment it seemed to work; the sub jerked violently sideways and almost broke free, but then the mouth gulped more water, swelling like an enormous toad, snagging her once again in its suction.
“Not free yet!” She struggled to keep the sub stable in the vortex created by the flow of water, the mouth seeming to loom ever bigger. Such a huge current had been generated by the suction that now a curtain of silt was rising in plumes from the ocean floor—or was it caused by the motion of the roots?
As the sub began to spin, she slammed the joystick sideways, trying to break free of the maelstrom—to no avail.
“Emergency eject!” Lennart said. “Trigger the eject!”
Alex reached for the red eject lever, but was thrown back by an unexpected lurch. And then the mini sub was suddenly swallowed in a green, milky globe of light, the creature’s translucent tissue flaring in the headlamps. She both heard and felt a wet, sucking sound, and she could see the tissue flecked with bright specks, flexing and contracting horribly, as the thing swallowed her whole.
“I’m inside,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice even.
“Use the arm torch—cut your way out,” was the last message she heard before the UQC ceased working, the acoustic connection crackling out into digital hiss.
She activated the arm and tried to extend it, but the pressure of the thing’s internal tissue blocked any movement. She tried a second time, pushing the joystick all the way forward, but now multiple alarms were going off, warning messages flashing everywhere.
Screw this. She activated the acetylene torch, the flame flaring into life. The effect was instantaneous: a sudden, jerking reaction, along with a low booming groan, and then she managed to pull the emergency eject, designed to jettison the titanium personnel sphere from the sub housing, inflate the ballast tanks, and send it screaming to the surface.
18
GIDEON THROTTLED HIS DSV to its max as he sped toward the scene of the disaster. He had heard the exchange over the UQC and watched in horror as the lights of Alex’s sub winked out as it was apparently swallowed. But they were not gone entirely—there was a ghastly, greenish glow now from inside the creature, and as he approached he could even see the dark, blurry outline of the sub within.
The titanium sphere, he knew, was incredibly strong, resistant to pressure down to a depth of three miles; she would be safe inside it. She could cut her way out of the Baobab with the torch or, perhaps, irritate the creature enough to regurgitate her…
“Gideon,” came Lennart’s voice. “What are you doing?”
He didn’t bother to answer, keeping himself focused, cursing the slowness of the sub’s propulsion.
“Your orders are to remain at the waypoint.”
“The hell with orders.”
As he closed in, he could now make out sounds: not digitally through the UQC, but through the water itself, picked up by his sub’s exterior hydrophone and broadcast into the interior. He turned up the gain.
“There’s nothing you can do. Stop now.”
A sloppy, wet groaning sound filled his capsule, along with a rapid clicking, overlain by some kind of low rumble.
“S
tay back, Gideon. That’s a direct order.”
Ignoring this, he dropped down, coming in low, only ten feet above the seafloor. If he approached the creature from below, the mouth wouldn’t be able to reach him; he’d cut into its trunk with his torch, chop the whole damn thing down if that’s what was necessary. But even as he descended he saw, inside the monster, the sudden bright spark of Alex’s own acetylene torch lighting up, and—in reaction—the upper trunk of the creature flexing abruptly. The lights of her sub winked out and there was a muffled popping sound; a huge, roiling belch of air bubbles was expelled from the creature’s mouth.
She’d hit the eject.
The creature writhed horribly. But the sub didn’t emerge; didn’t break free. More air erupted.
“No!” Gideon cried.
Now the trunk was warping toward him, bulging grotesquely like a puff adder.
“Gideon!” came Lennart’s voice. “What you’re doing is suicide. Get the hell away from it!”
He lit his torch, waving it at the creature as he motored forward. A tiny voice in his head told him that this was crazy, David coming at Goliath, but he pushed it aside. Through the forward viewport he saw one of the strangely thin tentacles of the creature whipping sinuously across the ocean floor. He had to do something now. He pushed the joystick down, reached the root, halted, and extended his torch, slashing at it, the heat making it pop and sizzle like seared meat. The tentacle coiled frantically, causing silt to cloud the water. He slashed again, each movement riling up more silt and engulfing him in hazy darkness.
An all-too-familiar message popped on the screen:
CONTROL TRANSFERRED TO SURFACE
He felt the joystick stop responding.
“No!” he cried.
“We’re getting you out of there.”
And now the sub started to rise. The silt cleared and Gideon—in a last, spontaneous move—grabbed a long, floating section of root that he’d chopped free with the mechanical arm and stuffed it into the science basket, next to the black boxes.
And then a voice came through the hydrophone. It was Alex’s voice: calm, pleasant, remote as the stars.
“…Let me touch your face.”
19
THE SEEDILY DRESSED man wheeled his cheap roller bag down Santa Fe’s West San Francisco Street. He passed a Starbucks and hesitated, craving a venti macchiato—or even a single shot of espresso—but realized he didn’t have the money. Turning down Galisteo Street, he stopped at a shopfront with a sign identifying it as PROFESSOR EXOTICA. It sported a window stuffed with bizarre and fantastical rocks, minerals, gems, and fossils. There was a cave bear skull, mounted; a dinosaur egg; a mummified crocodile; a spectacular azurite geode; a four-inch tourmaline; and a large, sectioned meteorite with its etched face displaying a riot of Widmanstätten lines.
The man paused at the window. He hadn’t called ahead to make an appointment, but the proprietor, a guy named Joe Culp, was almost always there. Besides, an appointment hadn’t seemed like a good idea—the last one hadn’t gone all that well, and he’d been afraid of being turned away before he even got in the door.
He collapsed the handle of the roller bag, then picked it up. Jesus, it was heavy—maybe eighty, ninety pounds—but that weight was what was going to buy his dinner and a place to spend the night. He pushed through the door, bells tinkling, and lugged the bag down the staircase into the basement shop, crammed floor-to-ceiling with natural wonders.
“Hey, hey, Sam McFarlane!” Joe Culp came around from behind the counter, arms spread wide, and gave the man a big embrace. McFarlane didn’t like to be hugged, but it seemed prudent not to object. “What you got for me? Where you been? Teaching?”
“I was teaching. Didn’t work out. So I headed to Russia.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Primorye.”
At this, he saw Culp’s face take on a faint look of disappointment. He glanced at the suitcase. “These are Sikhote-Alin specimens?”
“Yeah.”
“All of them?”
“Trust me, these are good ones. The best. Shrapnel, thumbprints, oriented—all unique. One with a hole in it.”
“Let’s take a look,” said Culp with what McFarlane sensed was slightly forced, artificial cheer.
McFarlane unzipped the roller bag to reveal a row of shoe boxes of sorted specimens, each labeled with a Sharpie.
“Let’s take a look at the ones with regmagylpts,” said Culp.
McFarlane pulled out a box and laid it on the counter. He opened it up. Inside he had wrapped the specimens in paper towels. He sorted through them and picked out a few of the biggest, then unwrapped them. Culp brought out a velvet-covered board and placed it on the counter to keep the meteorites from scratching the glass.
“How about that?” said McFarlane, laying his best specimen on the velvet. “Thumbprints on one side, fusion crust. Totally unique.”
Culp grunted and picked it up, examining it. “How’d you get these?”
“There’s a lot of guys in Primorye with metal detectors that go out there, sweep the area. There’s still tons of shit out there.”
Culp turned the piece around in his hand and finally put it down. “What else?”
“You don’t like it?”
“It’s not that I don’t like it. It’s just that we specialize in unique stuff. This…well, there are pieces like it selling on eBay. Let’s see the one with the hole in it.”
McFarlane searched through the box until he found it, unwrapped it, and laid it on the velvet.
Again he saw disappointment in Culp’s face, which annoyed him. When Culp didn’t pick it up right away, McFarlane took it in hand. “See?” He peered through the hole. “This is pretty unique.”
“It’s also pretty small. I might be able to sell it, though. How much you want for it?”
“Twelve hundred.”
“Whoa! No way can I get twelve hundred. Or even six. Sam, you know I’d be lucky to get two.”
McFarlane felt his irritation grow. “Bullshit. It cost me three thousand bucks to get to Primorye. Who’s going to pay for that? And I had to pay the guy who found it two hundred!”
“Then I would say you overpaid.”
“Come on, Joe. How many Sikhote-Alin specimens have thumbprints and a hole?”
“The market’s awash with Sikhote-Alin. Just go on eBay and look.”
“The hell with eBay. This is way better than eBay.” McFarlane reached into the box and pulled out another. “Look at this—wicked good piece of shrapnel, two hundred grams. All twisted up. And this—” He unwrapped another, then another, with increasing rapidity. “And how about this? Beautifully oriented with flow lines and fusion crust.”
Culp spread his hands. “Sam, I just don’t need them. I’ve got meteorites, unique meteorites, selling for ninety, a hundred grand. This is not the kind of stuff I handle. Now, if you had a really good pallasite, say, I would definitely be interested. Like that incredible Acomita pallasite you brought me five years ago—if you could get me another slice like that, I could sell it tomorrow.”
“I told you, I just got back from Russia. I spent my last nickel on these meteorites. Surely you need some less expensive stuff in this shop—I mean, who can afford hundred-grand meteorites?”
“That’s my clientele.”
McFarlane hesitated. “I’ll sell you the whole collection for six grand. Take them all. Forty kilos of iron—that’s only fifteen cents a gram!”
“Honestly, Sam, your best option is eBay. There’s no shame in that. And then you wouldn’t have to absorb the dealer’s cut.”
“So after all the great stuff I’ve brought you, all the money you’ve made off me—you want to shuffle me off to eBay?”
“I didn’t mean it that way. I’m just offering advice—you do what you want.”
McFarlane felt the disappointment and rage building. “eBay,” he said, shaking his head.
“Sam, you haven’t brought me anything I could use in
years. Not since that…that expedition to wherever it was. Bring me something good and I’ll pay you well, really well—”
“I told you never to mention that expedition!” McFarlane said, rage finally breaking through the dam. He swept the box off the counter to the floor, the meteorites flying and rattling everywhere.
Culp rose. “I’m sorry, Sam, but I think you should leave now.”
“With pleasure. And you can go ahead and keep that shit on the floor, I don’t want it. Give it away to your rich fucking clients or use it for fucking paperweights. Jesus, what a ripoff artist!”
McFarlane seized his suitcase and climbed the stairs in a fury, emerging onto the street. But the sudden bright light dazed him, and already he felt his fury subsiding. Son of a bitch, he needed those meteorites he’d left scattered on the floor—those were his best. He didn’t even have enough money to buy a cup of coffee. He felt a sudden overwhelming shame for his outburst. The guy wasn’t in the charity business. And McFarlane knew, underneath it all, that Joe was right: the meteorites he had were run-of-the-mill specimens. The trip to Russia had been a bust—other meteorite hunters had already cleaned out the good stuff, and he was left buying the shit everyone else had rejected. Joe had helped him before, advanced him money, financed his trips…He owed the guy five thousand dollars and Joe hadn’t even brought it up.
After a long, burning hesitation, McFarlane turned and headed back down into the shop. Joe was just putting the last of the meteorites back into the shoe box. He silently handed it to McFarlane.
“Joe, I’m really sorry, I don’t know what got into me—”
“Sam, I’m your friend. I think you need to get some help.”
“I know. I’m a mess.”
“You need a place to stay tonight?”
“No, I’m good, don’t worry about it.” McFarlane put the shoe box back into his roller bag, zipped it up, and manhandled it back up the stairs, mumbling a good-bye. Back in the street he wondered where he was going to get the money for a meal and a place to spend the night. Maybe he could get away with sleeping in Cathedral Park again.
Beyond the Ice Limit Page 9
