by Ginger Booth
If one could call them trees, and no doubt the locals did. Geometry, biochemistry, and physics decreed many of the basic facts of life, here as on old Earth. But where Earth primary producers favored radial or bilateral symmetry first, followed by fractal growth, Denali seemed to favor fractal forms all the way. The dominant plants tended towards fern and fan and spiral shapes. He was dying to know if the scarlet steps jutting from the thick corkscrew trunk ahead were a symbiotic organism. Its shape and texture expression, not to mention its colors, seemed to contrast with the towering pigtail it buttressed.
Copeland rapped his earmuff to catch his attention, and held him back. Oh, yes, the sonic boundary. Their guide demonstrated placing two shiny batons at waist height, across an imaginary threshold marked with corner daubs of yellow spray paint on the ground. One of his cronies on the outside, similarly dressed in baggy safari clothes with shoulder cannon, accepted the opposite ends of the batons. With gestures, the Thrive contingent was invited to walk the gauntlet.
Sass wore their only earmuff-and-breath-mask ensemble that came complete with comms. Other than the headgear, they wore their usual clothing from the ship, no pressure suits. Considering that they were all sopping wet, they were remarkably warm. Amazing.
Cope jabbed him in the back to propel him through the baton gateway. Eli hadn’t paid attention when Sass and Clay went through. When he crossed the threshold, the boom! caught him by surprise. The deep bass sonics seemed to travel up his bones, and loosen his leg joints. He pitched forward onto his hands and knees on the fused rock, his feet still inside the thrumming sound field. The batons and earmuffs clearly dampened the barrier so they could cross, but didn’t cancel it.
Cope stepped over him, then dragged him another meter, and offered him a hand up. Their guides plainly thought this was hilarious.
Grease paint, Eli decided. The black sockets drawn around their eyes, nostrils and mouth must be grease paint of some kind. The pair of men appeared to be hairless, from crown to brow to bare fore-arms. Every part that wasn’t painted black was covered with vivid whorls and stripes of other colors, a few pastel and iridescent, but mostly bold reds and golds. Is that camouflage or war paint?
They left the batons stuck in the mud near one of the markers. A few steps further, they entered a tunnel clearly fresh-hacked from the understory. Eli still felt his feet and leg bones thrumming. Sonic path, milder. Their lean but squat guides kept their massive guns slung across their backs in unconcern. One held up a short green glowing wand to light the way. Chemical light. This brushed the ceiling of their leafy tunnel. Eli’s head almost grazed it as well. Copeland and Clay, both taller, hunched down rather than let the alien plants touch them. That’s a lost cause.
They stepped down a series of radial tree roots as the path curved right. Glancing back, Eli couldn’t even see a glow from the Thrive anymore, though they’d barely come 100 meters from the landing pad. His appreciation for the density of this forest rose a notch.
A couple hundred meters later, continuing downhill, they reached a dim geodesic dome roof. It reached only to waist height on him and dropped off to either side. Apparently they approached this dome from a bluff above its main level. They performed the now-familiar baton routine again, then popped a hatch to clamber in.
A spiral staircase in the airlock took them down a level. The guides bid them wait, and cycled the air. Just as on the Thrive, a red light turned green. And their guides pulled off their air-and-ears headwear, boots, and every stitch of clothing.
Their ears and other orifices featured the same black paint.
Their main guide, Zan, demonstrated how to feed the face plates, ear muffs, air tanks, clothes, personal electronics, and picnic basket into apertures in the wall, each hole clearly marked with pictographs of what to stuff where.
Eli pursed his lips in disapproval. Like settler towns back home, a question mark button offered the user further verbal explanation, or perhaps help. Signage for the illiterate.
“Excuse me,” Eli interrupted, pointing below the belt on one of their guides. “What is the purpose of your decoration?”
He laughed. “Bakkra. You’ll see. Come along. We can’t pass into the bio-lock until everyone’s clothing is in. You’ll get it back, cleaned.”
In the next chamber, they donned little plastic goggles, and were drenched with a gentle whole-ceiling warm shower. That seemed nice, until the ‘water’ seeped into Eli’s scraped hands, scratched arm, and a nick from his morning shave. He watched his arm foam from the scratch. Hydrogen peroxide. With a cautious sniff, he decided there were likely other active ingredients, possibly something related to turpentine.
Their guides handed out washcloths and copious liquid soap, and encouraged them to scrub especially in armpits, under breasts, between toes, behind ears, and other close and tender spots. The Mahinans turned their backs to offer each other a modicum of privacy.
The guides’ black didn’t come off under the onslaught. Nor did any of their other skin decoration, though their colors dimmed a bit.
Zan offered to shave their heads. “It’s easier. No one wears hair here.”
Eli and Clay chose to bow to local custom. Copeland and Sass were asked to lean back into a vat of the stinging water. They shampooed with a vile black tarry stuff that reeked of turpentine, then dunked their scalps into the vats again to work it off.
“Cope,” Eli whispered after the engineer finished his cleaning. “See Sass’s hair color?”
Copeland’s eyes narrowed. “Is mine…?”
“Not platinum blond,” Eli assured him. The engineer’s hair started out black, not honey blond like Sass. “More of a dark red.”
Zan laughed. “It’ll turn white. Hers from one wash. Yours might take three.”
“Awesome,” Cope growled.
“Eye drops,” Zan pushed on them next. “Four in each eye.” Sinus sprays, lung nebulizers, and throat gargles followed this. No enema. Perhaps that comes later, Eli thought dolefully.
But first, they passed through a hot air dryer chamber, down another flight of stairs, and into the next shower room. Where they had to start over and perform the same ablutions. Sass’s hair was definitely white now, no longer blond. Their guides admitted at least two more peroxide showers awaited before their return to the Thrive.
Zan kindly found a mirror for Copeland, then shaved his head on request. Sass agreed to a 2-cm flat-top cut. Eli quite liked the look on her, transforming her angular features from homey farm girl next door to hard-body femme fatale. He looked away hastily when Clay glared at him.
“Eli,” Sass murmured, “I’d like you to be our new biological control officer.”
“Good idea,” he agreed.
Mercifully, the next door led out of the showers. They entered a dim hallway full of a cacophony of noise and a strong stench of urine and feces.
“Dogs!” Clay exclaimed. “Barking dogs.”
“Yes, this is the kennel for city center,” Zan admitted. “Don’t get too close to the bars. And here are your things.” Some reusable shopping bags hung available on a hook for their returned clothing, sealed in plastic. “Don’t reopen those inside the city. Especially not the packages with the red tape. The automated system decided it was unable to decontaminate them.”
The red-tape packages Zan referred to included their comm tablets, grav generators, and shoes. Eli’s hands twitched at the idea of being parted from those. Strangely, the picnic lunch and ice wands passed muster.
“And I leave you here!” Zan said heartily. The guides bowed instead of offering handshakes. “Just follow the corridor to the end. One more shower, then you wait for the doctor in the next chamber.” He smiled.
The guides ripped their packages open and put their clothes back on.
“You don’t live in the city?” Sass asked in surprise.
“Not this dome. We’re out-walkers. This routine is too time-consuming for every day. We keep separate domes. And the farming domes don’t ev
en offer a bio-lock – the shower and airlock system. People aren’t permitted in and out. Only goods.”
“Never?” Sass demanded sharply. “Farmers are imprisoned in their domes?”
3
Eli couldn’t blame Sass for her sharp tone. Your ag workers are locked up?
“Oh, it’s voluntary!” their guide Zan hastily assured her. “Not a punishment! But it’s extremely difficult for farmers to get back into their domes. Or leave in the first place. We’ve had to abandon a lot of food habitats due to contamination.”
To Eli, this seemed a reasonable precaution to safeguard the food supply. Whether the farmers appreciated the necessity was a separate question.
After parting ways, the Thrive contingent followed a long sloping corridor between the barred dog kennels. Clay approached the dogs like a moth to a flame. He changed his mind abruptly as the shoulder-high canines went berserk. They hurled themselves at the bars trying to attack. The baying barks and smell were horrific. They hastened their pace to escape them.
“Hunting dogs,” Clay concluded.
Eli agreed, “Not much like our domesticated pets.” Mahina’s livestock were placid. The city even offered a bit of a petting zoo for the children. These Denali dogs were something else entirely.
After yet another shower and spiral staircase downward, they emerged into a dim glassed-in tunnel of wide shallow steps slanting downward across a bluff. On one side the dark forest crowded in. On the other a cliff fell away after a few meters of rock.
A loud beep preceded the door opening at the far end. A woman emerged to join their tube, clad in an orange bio-hazard suit. She carried a large white case marked with a red blood drop.
“Hello. I am Dr. Tyler,” the figure announced coolly. “I’ll examine you and administer inoculations before you enter the city.”
“Why are you wearing a containment suit?” Eli demanded as they continued stepping their way another 50 meters onward and 3 meters down. “I must say, Dr. Tyler, I find your bio-lock procedures alarming.”
“They are extreme,” the woman allowed. “But without treatment you would soon get very ill from your exposure already. You’ll be dead within the day without your shots.”
Sass and Clay crossed their arms over their naked chests. “I doubt that. Eli?”
“Yes, I’ll go first.”
Eli stepped forward. Copeland collapsed onto the last broad step, and buried his face on his arms.
“If your companion is ill,” Dr. Tyler argued, “he should go first.”
“He’s fine,” Eli replied ruthlessly. “Cope, eat something. What exactly do you propose to do to us, Dr. Tyler?”
The doctor prepared an old-fashioned plastic syringe. Eli winced as she squirted off a little liquid, to work out the air bubbles. Up close and personal, he could see through her wide plastic face panel. Her paint job was radically different from Zan’s hunting party. The skull-like black eye sockets she replaced with opalescent lavender, and a pink and coral pattern around her nostrils and mouth, fading into blue. Like the guides, she wore her skull and brows bald, with make-up on her skin everywhere, albeit in more soothing colors.
“This shot inoculates you against all current Denali pathogens and influenza, and patterns your immune system against bakkra. I also have some pills to prime your intestinal fauna to our food supply.”
“Dead, before the day is out,” Eli reminded her. “Tell me more about that.”
“Are you a doctor?” the woman demanded crossly.
“Yes, in fact, I am,” Eli asserted, folding his arms across his chest in an attempt at belligerence. He had a PhD, and not in a relevant subject. Except that all MA doctorates conferred vast experience in standing up to credential bullies. “And I am familiar with the differing medical status of our crew.”
That gave the woman pause. “Differing how?”
“Three of us have active nanite bio-defenses. Those two,” he pointed to Sass and Clay, “have phenomenal nanite defenses. Whereas my colleague Copeland is exhausted. And his nanites, if any, are only proof against inorganic environmental toxins.”
“If any?” But the doctor was perturbed enough to put aside her syringe and rummage in her case for a diagnostic device.
“Copeland, have you been in the auto-doc since your burns early in the trip?”
“Y-yes,” Copeland decided. “The auto-doc wants to rebuild all my bones. They’re a bit fragile. Sometimes I sleep in there. Maybe not since the container incident.”
Over a month ago, the ship lost half its supply containers. This miserable accident was why they were stranded here now. They lost the fuel needed to escape this deep gravity well and return home to Mahina.
Eli nodded a so-so. “Perhaps he has a bit more than just scrubber nanites, then.”
The doctor leaned toward Copeland with a diagnostic cuff. Eli bodily intervened. “Me first,” he reminded her firmly. “Madame, I remind you that we just spent over 5 months in the most thorough quarantine imaginable. Not so much as a sniffle.”
Much put out, the doctor huffily snapped her diagnostic bracelet onto his wrist, and studied her screen. Even more annoyed, she removed the bracelet. “You’re fine,” she conceded.
“Them next,” Eli stymied her renewed approach on the engineer.
With a sigh, Dr. Tyler clamped Sass and Clay in turn to her tablet, and scrolled through screens. “That’s…remarkable. You also…probably don’t need our treatment. Now may I approach the member of your team who is in distress?”
“I’m just tired,” Copeland grumbled. “We screamed down from orbit today, you know.”
Sass murmured kindly, “We need to add a chair and harness at your station, don’t we?” The engineer’s console in the cargo bay looked like a lectern.
“I had that thought,” Cope snarked back. In his naked condition, several bruises stood out sharply, with an especially vicious purple one across his shin. “Especially when you hit that pole vaulting thing.”
Sass snickered and corrected him, “Polar vortex.”
Dr. Tyler looked much relieved by Copeland’s readings. “Well, you are showing a bakkra load. You are susceptible, like everyone else on this planet. You require an inoculation and the pills to prime your gut.”
Eli held up a hand to stop her. “Bakkra. Local ecological analogue of bacteria, correct?”
“Yes,” Dr. Taylor agreed, with a put upon sigh. “Though we also have bacteria, of course. All the necessary human and soil microbes. I understand that Mahina specializes in nanite medicine, and Sagamore in chemical cocktails. Denali medicine is considerably more advanced in gastrointestinal culture.” She turned to retrieve her syringe at last.
Eli grimaced in distaste. “Charming.” Medicine by gut bacteria wasn’t a pretty image. “My concern, doctor, is how we avoid carrying this bakkra back to our ship.”
“You can’t,” the woman stated categorically, and advanced on Copeland with the needle.
Eli blocked her again. “We intend to return to Mahina. Our ship must not become contaminated. How do we accomplish that?”
She poked him with a latex-gloved finger. “Not by letting that man die.”
“I’m dying?” Cope inquired. “Eli, when did what test say I was dying?”
“You’re not dying,” Clay assured him. “The doctor is on a power trip. That’s what doctors do. Isn’t it?” he challenged her.
The pair entered a brief dominance contest by eyeball. She flinched first. Clay quirked a lip in satisfaction.
Eli wasn’t surprised. No one bested Clay in a dominance fight, including the captain.
Sass crouched next to Copeland and reassuringly broke out the picnic. “Nobody’s dying. Do you want Wilder’s beer or Jules’s?” Beer-brewing was one of their pastimes on the 5-month journey here.
Cope shuddered. “Jules.” He kept shivering and grabbed for the ice wand. He poured into a glass tumbler, slowly with the glass tipped to build a nice frothy head, not too deep. Then, in a move
that never failed to aggravate Clay, he used the ice wand to draw concentric cylinders of ice through his lager. The glass began sweating cool drops immediately. Cope took a long satisfying pull, then pressed the beer against his cheek.
He does look flushed, Eli realized. They were all warm and sticky, despite remaining naked. He laid a hand on the young man’s forehead. Cope was decidedly warm. I may need to speed this up a bit.
Dr. Tyler stood transfixed. “What is that?”
“An ice wand,” Eli said curtly. “Show me the diagnostic that claims our crewman is dying.”
“Ice,” she whispered in wonder.
When Eli plucked at her tablet, she yanked it away, but set it to display the damning screen of interest.
“Psychedelic influenza?” Eli read aloud. “That’s caused by bakkra?”
“Yes! Well, not exactly. It’s a human influenza that interacts with a mild euphoric toxin from the bakkra. He needs a shot.”
Eli pointed out, “This says he has no harmful bakkra load. Can we inoculate him against the psycho flu without injecting him with bakkra?”
Tyler sighed loudly. “I suppose we could.”
Eli pressed his advantage. “Can you tell from this which of my nanites are fighting off the bakkra? Not theirs.” He waved at his companions in dismissal. “Specifically my nanites. Mine I can manufacture.”
“I could, but I’d need to go back to my lab.”
“We’ll wait,” Sass volunteered sunnily.
Copeland giggled. His sandwich dripped sauce on the floor. “Oopsie!” He shifted the sandwich in his fingers to take a big chomp. A big gob of egg salad fell onto his chest. He got that drip with his tongue.
Still squatting by his knees, naked knees swiveled for modesty, Sass watched this in consternation. “He can’t be drunk.”
On half a beer? For the past half year, Wednesday was men’s poker night on the Thrive. They played five card stud, and seven, with or without high-low. They played Texas Hold ’Em, Omaha, Mississippi, and every other variant they could find rules for. They played in the galley. They played in Copeland’s testosterone-colored shower room. They even bolted some couches to the cargo bay overhead as a ‘man cave’ for a while. Until they got fed up with dropping the cards and occasional beer bottle to the deck, lost to the ship’s gravity when someone set them down by mistake. Cope and Eli were the card-counters. The engineer needed at least 5 beers to make a bidding error. The reminder of his crewmates’ infuriating predictability made Eli long to vanish among the Denali and never, ever play poker again.
