by John Scalzi
“Well, of course it was,” the groundskeeper said. “What did you expect?”
“I didn’t expect anything,” Wilson said. “No one told me there was a dog-eating plant here in the garden.”
The groundskeeper looked at Wilson and then Schmidt. “No one told you about the kingsflower?”
“The only thing I know about it is that it’s a colony plant,” Wilson said. “That most if it exists under the dirt and that the flowers are the visible part. The thing about it being carnivorous is new to me.”
“The flowers are a lure,” the groundskeeper said. “In the wild, a woodland creature will be drawn in by the flowers and while it’s grazing it will get pulled under.”
“Right,” Wilson said. “That’s what happened to the dog.”
“There’s a digestion chamber underneath the flowers,” the groundskeeper said. “It’s big enough that a large-size animal can’t climb out. Eventually one of two things happens. Either the creature starves and dies or asphyxiates and dies. Then the plant digests it and the nutrients go to feed the entire colony.”
“How long does that take?” Schmidt asked.
“Three or four of our days,” the groundskeeper said, and then pointed at the planter. “This particular kingsflower has been in this garden since before the disappeared king. We usually feed it a kharhn once every ten days or so. Tomorrow is a feeding day, so it was getting a little hungry. That’s why it ate your creature.”
“I wish someone had told me about this earlier,” Wilson said.
The groundskeeper gave the Icheloe equivalent of a shrug. “We thought you knew. I was wondering why you were letting your, what do you call it, a dog?” Wilson nodded. “Why you let your dog wander through the kingsflowers, but we were informed ahead of time to allow the creature free rein of the garden. So I decided that it was not my problem.”
“Even though you knew the dog could get eaten,” Wilson said.
“Maybe you wanted the dog to get eaten,” the groundskeeper said. “It’s entirely possible you brought the dog as a treat for the kingsflower as a diplomatic gesture. I don’t know. All I do is tend to the plants.”
“Well, assuming we didn’t want the dog to get eaten, how do we get it back?” Wilson asked.
“I have no idea,” the groundskeeper said. “No one has ever asked that question before.”
Wilson glanced over to Schmidt, who offered up a helpless gesture with his hands.
“Let me put it this way,” Wilson said. “Do you have any objection to me trying to retrieve the dog?”
“How are you going to do that?” the groundskeeper wanted to know.
“Go in the same way the dog did,” Wilson said. “And hopefully come back out the same way.”
“Interesting,” the groundskeeper said. “I’ll go get some rope.”
“You should probably rub against the flowers a bit,” the groundskeeper said, motioning to the fleur du roi. “Your dog was not especially large. The kingsflower is probably still hungry.”
Wilson looked doubtfully at the groundskeeper but nudged the flowers with his feet. “It doesn’t seem to be doing anything,” he said, kicking at the plant.
“Wait for it,” said the groundskeeper.
“How long should I-,” Wilson began, and then dirt flew and fibrous tentacles wrapped around his legs, constricting.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Schmidt said.
“Not helping,” Wilson said, to Schmidt.
“Sorry,” Schmidt said.
“Don’t be alarmed when the plant starts cutting off the circulation to your extremities,” the groundskeeper said. “It’s a perfectly normal part of the process.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Wilson said. “You’re not losing feeling in your legs.”
“Remember that the plant wants to eat you,” the groundskeeper said. “It’s not going to let you get away. Don’t fight it. Let yourself be eaten.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m finding your advice to be less than one hundred percent helpful,” Wilson said to the groundskeeper. The plant was now beginning to drag him under.
“I’m sorry,” the groundskeeper said. “Usually the kharhn we feed to the kingsflower are already dead. I never get to see anything live fed to it. This is exciting for me.”
Wilson fought hard not to roll his eyes. “Glad you’re enjoying the show,” he said. “Will you hand me that rope now, please?”
“What?” the groundskeeper said, then remembered what he had in his hands. “Right. Sorry.” He handed one end of the rope to Wilson, who quickly tied it to himself in a mountain climber hold. Schmidt took the other end from the groundskeeper.
“Don’t lose your grip,” Wilson said. He was now up to his groin in plant. “I don’t want to be fully digested.”
“You’ll be fine,” Schmidt said, encouragingly.
“Next time it’s your turn,” Wilson said.
“I’ll pass,” Schmidt said.
More tentacles shot up, roping around Wilson’s shoulder and head. “Okay, I am officially not liking this anymore,” he said.
“Is it painful?” the groundskeeper asked. “I am asking for science.”
“Do you mind if we hold the questions until afterward?” Wilson asked. “I’m kind of busy at the moment.”
“Yes, sorry,” the groundskeeper said. “I’m just excited. Damn it!” The Icheloe started patting his garments. “I should be recording this.”
Wilson glanced over to Schmidt, looking as exasperated as he could under the circumstances. Schmidt shrugged. It had been a strange day.
“This is it,” Wilson said. Only his head was above the surface now. Between the tentacles constricting and dragging him down and the pulsing, peristaltic motion of the fleur du roi plant sucking him down into the ground, he was reasonably sure he was going to have post-traumatic flashbacks for months.
“Hold your breath!” the groundskeeper said.
“Why?” Wilson wanted to know.
“It couldn’t hurt!” the groundskeeper said. Wilson was going to make a sarcastic reply to this but then realized that, in fact, it couldn’t hurt. He took a deep breath.
The plant sucked him fully under.
“This is the best day ever,” said the groundskeeper to Schmidt.
Wilson had a minute or two of suffocating closeness from the plant as the thing pushed him into its digestive sac. Then there was a drop as he fell from the thing’s throat into its belly. The fall was broken by a spongy, wet mass at the bottom: the plant’s digestive floor.
“Are you in?” Schmidt said, to Wilson, via his BrainPal.
“Where else do you think I would be?” Wilson said, out loud. His BrainPal would forward the voice to Schmidt.
“Can you see Tuffy?” Schmidt asked.
“Give me a second,” Wilson said. “It’s dark down here. I need to give my eyes a moment to adjust.”
“Take your time,” Schmidt said.
“Thanks,” Wilson said, sarcastically.
Thirty seconds later, Wilson’s genetically-engineered eyes had adjusted to the very dim light from above to see his environment, a dank, teardop-shaped organic capsule barely large enough to stand in and stretch his arms.
Wilson looked around and then said, “Uh.”
“‘Uh’?” Schmidt said. “‘Uh’ is not usually good.”
“Ask the groundskeeper how long it takes this thing to digest something,” Wilson said.
“The groundskeeper says it usually takes several days,” Schmidt said. “Why?”
“We have a problem,” Wilson said.
“Is Tuffy dead already?” Schmidt asked, alarm in his voice.
“I don’t know,” Wilson said. “The damn thing isn’t here.”
“Where did he go?” Schmidt asked.
“If I knew that, Hart, I wouldn’t be saying ‘uh,’ now, would I?” Wilson said, irritated. “Give me a minute.” He peered hard into the dim. After a minute, he got down on his
hands and knees and moved toward a small shadow near the base of the capsule. “There’s a tear here,” Wilson said, after examining the shadow. “Behind the tear it looks like there’s a small tunnel or something.”
“The groundskeeper says the rock bed below the palace is riddled with fissures and tunnels,” Schmidt said, after a brief pause. “It’s part of the cave system that’s underneath the palace.”
“Do the tunnels and fissures go anywhere?” Wilson asked.
“He says ‘maybe,’” Schmidt said. “They’ve never mapped the entire system.”
From deep inside the black tunnel, Wilson heard a very small, echoing bark.
“Okay, good news,” Wilson said. “The dog’s still alive. Bad news: The dog is still alive somewhere down a very small, dark tunnel.”
“Can you go down the tunnel?” Schmidt asked.
Wilson looked and then felt around the wall of the capsule. “How does our groundskeeper friend feel about me tearing into the plant wall a little bit?” he asked.
“He says that in the wild these plants have to deal with wild animals kicking and tearing at their insides all the time, so you’re not going to hurt it too much,” Schmidt said. “Just don’t tear it any more than you have to.”
“Got it,” Wilson said. “Also, Hart, do me a favor and throw me down a light, please.”
“The only light I have is on my PDA,” Schmidt said.
“Ask the groundskeeper,” Wilson said.
Down the tunnel, there was a sudden, surprised yelp.
“Ask him to hurry, please,” Wilson said.
A couple minutes later, the mouth of the plant opened and a small object tumbled down into the capsule. Wilson retrieved the light, switched it on, lifted the tear and shone the light down the tunnel, sweeping it around to get an idea of its dimensions. He figured if he crawled, he might barely be able to make his way down the tunnel. The tunnel itself was long enough that the light shone down into darkness.
“I’m going to have to undo the rope,” Wilson said. “It’s not long enough to go all the way down this tunnel.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Schmidt said.
“Being swallowed by a carnivorous plant isn’t a good idea,” Wilson said, undoing the rope. “Compared to that, letting go of the rope is nothing.”
“What if you get lost down there?” Schmidt asked.
“My BrainPal will let you know where I am, and I’ll let you know if I get stuck,” Wilson said. “You’ll be able to tell by the screaming panic in my voice.”
“Okay,” Schmidt said. “Also, I don’t know if this is information that you need to know right now, but I just got a ping from Ambassador Waverly’s assistant. She says the negotiations should wrap up in an hour and then the ambassador will want Tuffy for, and I swear to God this is a quote, ‘a little snuggle time.’”
“Wonderful,” Wilson said. “Well, at least now we know how much time we have.”
“One hour,” Schmidt said. “Happy spelunking. Try not to die.”
“Right,” Wilson said. He knelt at the tear, tore it just enough to shove his body through, put the light between his teeth, got on his hands and knees and started crawling.
The first hundred meters were the easy part; the tunnel was narrow and low, but dry and relatively straight as it descended through the rock. Wilson figured that if he had to guess, he’d venture it was once a lava tube at some point, but at the moment all he really wanted was for the thing not to collapse on him. He wasn’t ordinarily claustrophobic, but he’d also never been dozens of meters down a tube in a rock, either. He thought he was allowed a spot of unease.
After a hundred meters or so, the tube became slightly wider and higher but also more jagged and twisting, and the angle of descent became substantially steeper. Wilson hoped that somewhere along the way the tunnel might become wide enough for him to turn around in; he didn’t like the idea of having to back out ass first, dragging the dog along with him.
“How is it going?” Schmidt asked him.
“Come down here and find out,” Wilson said, around his light. Schmidt demurred.
Every twenty meters or so Wilson would call out to Tuffy, who would bark some times but not others. After close to an hour of crawling, the barks finally began to sound like they were getting closer. After almost exactly an hour, Wilson could hear two things: Schmidt beginning to sweat up on the surface and the scrabbling sounds of a creature moving some distance ahead.
The tunnel suddenly widened and then disappeared into blackness. Wilson carefully approached what was now the lip of the tunnel, took the light out of his mouth and panned it around.
The cave was about ten meters long, four or five meters wide and roughly five meters deep. To the side of the tunnel lip was a pile of scree that formed a steep slope to the floor of the cave; directly in front of the lip, however, was a straight drop. Wilson’s light played across the scree and caught glimpses of dusty paw marks; Tuffy had avoided the drop.
Wilson directed the light to the floor cave, calling out to the dog as he did so. The dog didn’t bark, but Wilson heard the clitter of nails on the floor. Suddenly Tuffy was in the light cone, eyes reflecting green up at Wilson.
“There you are, you little pain in the ass,” Wilson said. The dog was dusty but otherwise seemed unharmed by his little adventure. He had something in his jaws; Wilson peered closely. It looked like a bone of some sort. Apparently, Tuffy wasn’t the first live animal to get sucked down into the fleur du roi after all; something else fell in and escaped down the tunnel behind the tear, just to die in this dead-end cave.
Tuffy got bored of looking into the light and turned to wander off. As he did, Wilson caught a glimpse of something sparkly attached to the dog; he trained his light on the animal as it moved and focused on the sparkly bit. Whatever it was was stuck to Tuffy in some way, encircling one of the dog’s shoulders and riding around to his undercarriage.
“What the hell is that?” Wilson said to himself. He was still following Tuffy with the light, which was why he finally saw the skeleton of the creature the dog had taken his chew toy from. The skeleton was roughly a meter and a half long and mostly intact; it was missing what looked like a rib-which was what Tuffy was now chewing on quite contentedly-and its head. Wilson flicked the light slightly and caught the white flash of something round. Ah, thought Wilson. There’s the head, then.
It took him a few seconds to realize that what he was looking at was the skeleton of an Icheloe adult.
It took another few seconds, and Tuffy wandering through the light cone, sparkling as he did so, before Wilson realized which Icheloe’s skeleton it was likely to be.
“Oh, shit,” Wilson said, out loud.
“Harry?” Schmidt said, suddenly cutting in. “Uh, just so you know, I’m not alone on this end anymore. And we have a bit of a problem here.”
“We have a bit of a problem on this end, too, Hart,” Wilson said.
“I’m guessing your problem isn’t Ambassador Waverly looking for her dog,” Schmidt said.
“No,” Wilson said. “It’s oh so very much larger.”
There was an indignant squawk on the other end of the line; Wilson imagined Schmidt putting his hand over the PDA’s microphone to keep Wilson from hearing ambassadorial venting. “Is it Tuffy? Is Tuffy all right?” More squawking. “Is Tuffy, uh, alive?”
“Tuffy is fine, Tuffy is alive, Tuffy is perfectly good,” Wilson said. “But I’ve found something down here that’s none of those things.”
“What do you mean?” Schmidt said.
“Hart,” Wilson said, “I’m pretty sure I just found the lost king.”
“Do you hear that?” Ambassador Waverly said, pointing out the window of one of the many sitting rooms of the royal palace. The window was open, and in the distance was a rhythmic chittering that reminded Wilson of the cicadas that would fill the midwestern nights with their white noise. These were not cicadas.
“Those are protester
s,” Waverly said. “Thousands of Icheloe reactionaries who are here to demand a return to royalty.” She pointed at Wilson. “You did that. More than a year of background work and persuasion and angling to get us a seat at the table-more than a year to line up the dominoes just right for us to position this negotiation as the first step to make a legitimate counter to the Conclave-and you blow it all in two hours. Congratulations, Lieutenant Wilson.”
“Wilson didn’t intend to find the lost king, Philippa,” Ambassador Abumwe said, to her counterpart. She was in the room with Wilson and Waverly. Schmidt was there, too, pulled in because he was, as Waverly put it, an “accomplice” to Wilson’s shenanigans. Tuffy was also present, gnawing on a toy ball volunteered by the palace staff. Wilson had discreetly separated Tuffy from the royal bones long before they both had exited the cave. The crown remained with the dog; it had somehow attached itself and refused to be removed. All five were awaiting the return of Praetor Gunztar, who had been pulled into emergency consultations.
“It doesn’t matter what he intended to do,” Waverly shot back. “What matters is what he did do. And what he did was single-handedly disrupt a long-running diplomatic process. Now the Icheloe are back on the verge of civil war and we are to blame.”
“It doesn’t have to be as bad as that,” Abumwe said. “If nothing else, we’ve solved the disappearance of the king, which was the cause of the civil war. The war started because one faction blamed the other for kidnapping and killing him. Now we know that never happened.”
“And that simply doesn’t matter,” Waverly said. “You know as well as I that the disappearance of the king was just the polite fiction the factions needed to go after each other with guns and knives. If it hadn’t been the king going missing, they would have found some other reason to go at each other’s throats. What’s important now is that they wanted to end that fight.” Waverly pointed again at Wilson. “But now he’s dragged up that damn king, giving the hard-liners on both sides a new pointless excuse to go after each other.”
“We don’t know that will be the outcome,” Abumwe said. “You had confidence in the process before. At the end of the day, the Icheloe still want their peace.”
