Farhad raised a finger. “Now imagine if we could reverse engineer that.”
“Whatever,” said Anne. “Don’t look at me, Mr. Entrepreneur. Look at the spinner. Look at that fucking valve. It’s blown open now, but when closed, its resistance to exiting fluid would have been ridiculously high. Going the other way, resistance is actually negative, which means that this thing is very slowly pumping air into itself, even though it’s dead.”
“And how—”
“You wanted the lecture, you listen to the lecture.” Anne slapped the table, disturbing the pigeons. Her coffee spilled. “Right. So, the vacuum-spinner lives in a vacuum. But what’s it doing up there? It’s spinning. That’s what we think the skirt is for. That’s the silklike material that’s extruded from glands around the valve. Quartz crystals doped with oxygen, nickel, iron – each crystal with nanoscale hooks—” she demonstrated with her fingers, “– linked together in a very specific order and folded and twisted and pleated like some sort of giant, inorganic enzyme!”
Anne unraveled her fingers, which she had folded and twisted together. Did she have their attention? Who cared? Either these people would learn something or they would go away and let her yell at Daisuke for getting her into this.
“I won’t grab ahold of the stuff to demonstrate – and you better not have either – but if you pinch it between two fingers—” Anne pinched the air, “– it will either stretch like putty or resist like steel, all depending on the direction you pull. Now imagine if you spin it.” She spread her fingers. “It forms a disk. A skirt. Microstructures on the surface of the fabric make it opaque or reflective to electromagnetic radiation depending on the angle the photons hit, and those microstructures alternate in these—” she groped for words, “– gorgeous bands that spiral out from the spinner. We’re sure – well, I’m sure as hell sure – that the purpose of all of this is to spin the organism around inside its shell.”
Anne’s hands twitched. She longed to spin the organism on its stalk the way she had back on the American aircraft carrier, showing these dipshits how frictionless the motion was. Reverse engineer that, humans!
But no touching. With no mechanisms to repair them, the nanoscale structures that allowed these miracles broke. They broke a little more with each demonstration, and with each day. Magic, draining away.
Anne blinked away tears and forced her voice to stay level. “We mustn’t cut this thing open. It’s the only specimen of its kind on Earth. The Nun on Junction don’t have any more, either. We have no idea how to get—” Her voice broke, and she swallowed and looked down at her hands. Damn it! Damn Daisuke for setting her up to fail like this.
He held her hand. His fingers were very warm. Somehow, he was stopping the others from interrupting her.
Anne took a breath. Let it out. “It’s not a ‘bio-ship’. It definitely didn’t live in interstellar space. This thing evolved in microgravity and very low pressure, yes, but the valve wouldn’t make sense unless there were some gasses for it to suck in. Not to mention magnetic fields to spin against. I think it skimmed the very upper layer of the atmosphere of an Earthlike planet.”
“A planet like Junction,” Farhad said.
Anne wished she could disagree, because now she understood where this conversation was headed.
“In your papers, you said this organism is adapted for life in an ecosystem unlike anything we’ve seen,” said Farhad, “a low-orbit biome.”
She nodded wearily. “And, since this specimen shows no sign of reentry burning or impact with the ground, there must be a wormhole on Junction that leads into space. Is that what you want me to say?”
“Yes,” breathed Farhad. His eyes sparkled. “Yes, exactly.”
Anne slumped back in her chair. She felt like she was back on Junction. 1.3 gees, and one of those stupid body cameras dangling off her chest, second-guessing every word she said and every thing she did. She felt like a circus performer. This meeting, her angry speech, it had all been on the script that these three had worked out between them.
“Please,” she said, “return the vacuum-spinner to the University of Sydney. Whatever you paid them, it isn’t enough to deny the world access to the things we can learn from the specimen.”
Farhad gave another genuine-sounding chuckle. “You think that I’m greedy and controlling and I’ll steamroll over any idiot stupid enough to get in my way as I suck all the world’s value into myself.”
She glared levelly at him, which he took as assent.
“But what I actually do is create value.” He gestured at the spinner. “Those scales, the valve, the nano-manufactoring. And you didn’t mention the radiation shielding. I would never deprive the world of this alien. I only borrowed it temporarily. Something to wow the investors with so that I can get the budget I need to explore these potentially world-changing discoveries. And so many more. You understand.”
Anne didn’t understand and didn’t care. “Were your investors impressed by the show? I’m not. I know what the vacuum-spinner looks like. I’ve memorized its exterior features and everything that seismic tomography can tell us about its interior. I have dreams about dissecting this specimen, of—”
Anne stopped herself, but too late.
Farhad was leaning toward her, hands back on the spinner’s velvet box. “You’ve had dreams—” he lowered his voice and Anne found herself leaning even closer to him, “– of seeing a live one. In space.”
His face was much too close to hers, still grinning, wrinkles deep in the corners of his mouth.
“I am here because I need Anne Houlihan. And you”, he said, before she could muster a response, “are here because you need a mission.”
Again Anne found herself stammering, “I-I already have a mission.”
Farhad leaned back, hands going from the spinner’s box to his coffee cup. He took a sip. “You want to save Junction.”
All Anne could say was, “Yes.” She felt like a sheep with a collie at her ankles.
“Yes!” He beamed. “And where can that salvation happen? Here on Earth? Where’s your leverage on this tired old planet?” Farhad swept a hand to take in the towering buildings, the tiny park across the canal. “Here, you’re just another expert opinion for the media to ignore.” His flat palm became a finger pointing upward. “But there, you can answer some of the questions we’re all asking.”
“You mean, are we going to fuck up Junction like we fucked up the Earth?”
“I…no.” For the first time, they seemed to be off script. Farhad rubbed his goatee. “I was thinking of other questions, because what we do to Junction, you have the power to change that.” He held his hands out at her. Coffee would have sloshed if there had been any left in his cup. “You can be the one who sets the policy on how we explore, not just on Junction, but on all the worlds it leads to.”
“I’m no politician.”
“Exactly. You know what you’re doing.” Farhad caught her eyes with his, and she couldn’t look away. “Anne, on Earth you are wasting your time.”
Anne clenched her fists and swallowed. The force of the temptation was almost palpable. A fishhook in her lip. On Junction, she could be queen.
“Are you planning anything big here on Earth?” Farhad asked. “Anything you can’t delegate or do from Junction?”
“I tell her she needs to delegate more,” Daisuke said, and Anne startled in her chair. For a second, she’d forgotten he was there. That he’d set this whole thing up!
And why not say it? “You set this up!”
“Yes I did. You need it.” He looked into her eyes. “Why aren’t we on Junction already?”
Anne should have said, ‘Because of your career!’ That would have been a good tactic, but she only thought of it a second after the words just fell out of her mouth: “They’re destroying Junction. It’s too heartbreaking to see it happen.”
She hadn’t meant to say that! But now it was out there, that truth, echoing between them. Why wasn’t Farhad saying anything? He’d been quick enough to interrupt her before. Why was he letting the awful silence stretch now?
“Well?” Anne demanded.
“You’re right,” Daisuke said simply. “It is heartbreaking what they’re doing beyond the wormhole.”
And now Farhad put his oar in. Or maybe his demon’s pitchfork. “No accountability, no planning, no vision beyond the next quick buck they can make. Idiots. That’s why we need to be there, on site, supplying our more far-sighted, comprehensive vision.”
Anne clutched the edge of the table, suddenly dizzy. She felt as if she were on a descending elevator. Like she was falling through the wormhole in Papua.
“My plan is a small expedition,” Farhad was saying. “A compact but very powerful electric camper.”
The plastic edge of his voice reached between Anne’s ribs, pressed hard against her heart. She found herself massaging her chest, looking away from the tycoon and at the pigeons.
Those bizarre, beautiful creatures. As wondrous as any alien. Zippered keratin sheathing chalky skeletons rigged with protein puppet-strings. The whole organism bathed in iron-doped brine, four-hundred-million-year-old currents washing in and out of each cell, dragging oxygen from the atmosphere so that protons could be properly pumped.
A car swept by and the pigeons scattered. Wings slapped and syrinxes gurgled in alarm. Bones, muscles, and feathers slid across each other. Around them flowed the air, no less a product of biology. All that oxygen.
“Anne?” Daisuke said. She tried to ignore him, watching the pigeons swoop past the edge of the hotel and out of its shadow. They flared in the sunlight and vanished.
So that was why Daisuke had arranged this meeting. This was his engagement gift to her. His way to get her out of civilization, where she could be happy. To fix, if not her, then at least their relationship. Oh, shit, she thought. It’ll kill him if I say no.
And Farhad was talking again. “What do you say, Anne? Can I take you back to Junction?”
***
“No,” Anne said, and Daisuke swallowed the sudden lump in his throat.
She couldn’t reject this gift. They couldn’t go back to Tokyo. He had nothing to offer her there except some kind of nervous breakdown. Anne was like some sort of exotic creature. A cassowary. Beautiful and dangerous. Unappreciated and totally unsuited for life in a city. One way or another, Daisuke would have to reintroduce her to the wild.
If anyone noticed Daisuke’s inner turmoil, they didn’t show it. Farhad was leaning back, smiling, fingers laced over his belly.
“Finally, we come to the ‘no’,” he said. “It’s good that you’re unwilling to blindly sign on to my expedition in return for some vague promises of power to set environmental policy on Junction.”
“Because you are in no position to grant me those powers,” said Anne. “Unless you actually work for the American government.”
Theoretically, the American army was only looking after the terraformed valley on Junction until such time as the UN could decide on a way to divide the territory up. A massively fortified emplacement had been built.
“God preserve me from the fate of working for the American government,” Farhad said. “Don’t worry, I have a much more humble project in mind to start with.” He nodded at the vacuum-spinner. “Spaceflight.”
“What?” Anne said, and Daisuke suppressed a sigh of relief. She had fed him the correct straight line. They were back on script.
“It’s no easy feat,” Farhad continued. “More eccentric millionaires have failed at getting into orbit than succeeded, and they had the whole industrial base of Earth to support them.” He held up a finger as if to forestall any questions Anne might ask. “But! What if there was a way to get into orbit without all the fuss of rocketry?”
Anne folded her arms over her chest and just looked at him.
Daisuke’s gut tightened with anxiety, which years of habit and training translated into a big smile. He spread his hands at his audience and said, “The Howling Mountain is home to a wormhole that can take us to space!”
Farhad deftly caught the cue and ran with it. “The native Nun people who gave you that spinner said it came from a ‘Howling Mountain,’ right? We’ve talked to the Nun and sent drones out in the direction they indicated and yes, there is indeed a mountain north-west of Deep Sky Base. Migrating toymakers have beaten trails to it. Toymakers are the alien life-forms that traded the spinner to the—” He caught Anne’s expression. “But you know what they are, of course.”
Anne’s frown deepened. She had seen a man butchered by the little wood-shelled creatures. Daisuke restrained himself from filling the awkward silence.
Farhad did not apologize or otherwise acknowledge his gaffe. He simply talked on. Daisuke was reminded less of a steamroller than a huge American snowplow, clearing a highway.
“Even the howling part makes sense,” he said. “Air escaping through the wormhole into a vacuum. You see?”
Anne waved a hand. “That’s just speculation.”
When she failed to elaborate, Farhad raised an eyebrow and tapped a fingernail against the vacuum-spinner’s box. “What about this creature? Didn’t it come from space? Is there any other way it could have gotten to you, other than through a wormhole?”
Anne looked like she wished she could say no, but she was too honest for that. “It’s a hypothesis,” she admitted.
“A very well-founded hypothesis,” said Farhad. “There’s no burn marks on this shell. No damage that might occur from a fall to the ground. If this specimen came from space at all, it came through a wormhole, and what more logical place for a wormhole to lead than from the surface of Junction to orbit around Junction?”
“Now that’s really speculation.”
“Would you like to join me in finding out the truth?”
“Right.” Anne nodded, not out of agreement, but because she was assuring everyone she understood what was going on. “Right.” Her eyes narrowed. “Now tell me the real reason you want to go to the Howling Mountain.”
“Aside from the enormous potential value of a wormhole that leads to space, the human drive to explore, and my family’s desire to get me out of the house for a while?” Farhad winked at Anne, who just looked suspicious. “In a word, my goal is bioprospecting. Junction has been accessible for barely a year, the politicians are squelching research as hard as they can, and still I already have dozens of patents filed based on the biochemistry of alien life. Your expertise in that field is unparalleled and would be essential.”
“And profitable?”
Farhad answered as if the question hadn’t been rhetorical. “Profits are a measure of efficiency, and my entire career has been about finding ways to make more efficient use of resources. Desalinization projects, bioremediation, genetic engineering, even seasteading. Junction has a better chance than any of these ventures of saving humanity.”
Daisuke thought some translation might be in order. “The secrets of Junction might provide us with a means to save the Earth!”
“Exactly so,” said Farhad.
Anne frowned. “He’s already blowing enough smoke up my arse, Dice. He doesn’t need help.”
Daisuke blanked his face, not letting the sting show.
“We need to show people what an intact, unexploited Junction has to offer,” Farhad said. “We need real exploration. Real, basic research. Sampling by someone who knows what they’re doing.”
Anne’s eyes widened and Daisuke’s esteem for Farhad rose yet further. An invitation to collect biological samples would sound like a dirty and boring chore to Farhad’s investors, but Anne hadn’t been in the field since they had returned to Earth.
“The area north-west of the glasslands is a wilderness,” Daisuke said. “E
verything we see will be a new species.”
Farhad nodded. “There have been flyovers, but nobody has traversed those plains. No human feet have walked there, not even the Nun.”
“There’s probably a reason for that,” Anne said, but Daisuke could tell she was looking for reassurance now. She wanted this mission to be real.
“The toymakers, now.” Farhad held up his hands as if holding up a toymaker: a colony of alien worms puppeteering a wheeled wooden ship. “The toymakers have this periodic migration. And the Nun have agreed to loan us a contingent of toymaker wranglers to guide us.”
“Okay,” said Anne, and again it wasn’t agreement. She planted her hands like cleavers on the table, rattling the coffee cups. “But why are you coming on this jaunt? No, let me rephrase that, you shouldn’t be coming on this jaunt.”
“Anne,” murmured Daisuke, but Farhad held up his palms.
“I understand. You’re worried I’ll get in your way. Micromanage you. I promise you I won’t.”
“Uh-huh,” said Anne. “Because you’re the sort of workaholic executive who doesn’t schedule every moment of his day and everyone else’s.”
Farhad grinned. “I prefer to think of myself as a work-connoisseur. This jaunt will be a palate cleanser for me. A vacation. I wasn’t kidding about my family wanting a break from me. I’ll be more than happy to sit back and watch you do…” he spread his hands and tipped them up, “…whatever it is you want to do.”
“Bullshit,” Anne said. “You don’t hire someone and then not care what they do.”
Daisuke kept his face blank, but he wanted to pump his fists and say ‘Yes!’ Anne’s resistance was wearing down.
“What I do is I hire people who care what they’re doing,” said Farhad, “and then get out of their way. And I know you care very much, Anne. You’re the sort of person who will, when placed on an alien planet, take samples. All I ask in exchange for supporting your work on Junction is that I get to keep those samples.”
Interchange Page 3
