“Ah,” said Farhad. “We’re a day early and he still managed to get in ahead of us. No time wasted with Professor Moon.”
“Siapa?” Anne shook her head. “I mean, who?”
For the first time, Farhad looked less than completely self-assured. “He’s our physicist.”
“Our brengsek,” muttered Turtle.
Jerk, that meant.
Chapter Four
The Caravan
Anne’s laboratory was surprisingly well-equipped. Small, but of course it would be, and Anne didn’t think she’d be spending much time in it anyway. She planned to spend as much time as possible in whatever alien biome they were driving through. Don’t call it ‘being antisocial’, Anne, she told herself. Call it a ‘pre-reward’. This was a payment for the time she’d have to spend indoors once the research station was built. Enjoy the wilderness that’s left before you buckle down to fix the places that have been ruined. A honeymoon.
“Hm,” said Anne, plucking at her engagement ring. In the gleaming surface of her lab bench, her reflection looked troubled. Anne shook her head and went to explore the storeroom.
It was the largest space in the rear half of the caravan, and it smelled like new plastic. Here were the gloves and face masks and chemical sprays, as well as several worryingly large boxes of first aid equipment. Although, on reflection, wouldn’t it be more worrying if there wasn’t any first aid equipment? And it was good to see that the place had been stocked by someone who knew you could never have too many sampling vials. There was a tank of liquid nitrogen here too, and a 4C refrigerator, as well as—
Anne jumped back and bounced painfully off a stack of fuel tanks. She swallowed, hands to heart, blinking at the bubble-headed…no. That wasn’t a person lurking in the closet, it was her own face reflected in the visor of….
“Hey?” she called. “Farhad? Why is there a space suit in here with me?”
Footsteps approached down the hall and Farhad answered, the smile plain in his voice, “Why do you think, Anne? Why did you think I needed your measurements? You’re going into space!”
Another wave of gooseflesh. “I didn’t know you needed my measurements.”
“Oh.” An uncomfortable pause. “Well, I’m sure the numbers Daisuke gave me were accurate. The suits were made specially by the company of a friend of mine, fitted for you, Daisuke, and Moon.”
“Right,” said Anne, still looking at the suits. “And what will we be doing in space? With a physicist?”
“We will be doing work of scientific value,” someone else said. “For once on this farce.”
“Oh dear,” Farhad said. “Aha, Professor Houlihan, would you please come out and say hello to Professor Moon. I wanted to introduce you.”
Anne poked her head out of the storage room to see Farhad standing in the corridor with a skinny, long-faced Asian man. He had the spiky hair of the recently showered.
“So you’re Moon?” Anne asked. “Where do you work?”
The man regarded her from under his lashes, shoulders up as if bracing himself for a fight. “Until a few months ago, CERN.” He had a thick American accent.
“So you really are a physicist? I thought Farhad was just confused and you were a physiologist or something.”
Moon continued to look at her, his face less a mask than a statue carved in granite.
“You should shake hands,” Farhad suggested.
Anne did so, annoyed at herself for obeying. “Just what the hell does our expedition need a physicist for?”
Moon’s chin twitched. “What does it need a biologist for?”
Shit, she’d insulted him. Anne released his hand and waved hers, trying to recover her balance. “I mean, what are you going to study?”
“Portals, of course,” he said.
Anne felt like an idiot for not figuring that out on her own. “Oh, right. Of course. Wormholes.”
“Portals aren’t ‘wormholes’,” Moon said, as if this were the fifth repetition of some tired old argument. “They have no detectable mass of their own. They can’t be wormholes.”
Farhad cleared his throat. “What he means is that wormhole is a technical term. It refers to some kind of warp in space that punches a hole in space-time.”
“Ugh!” Moon made chopping motions with his hands. “Why do you have to dumb it down? An Einstein–Rosen bridge is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a solution to Albert Einstein’s field equations, but who cares about that now because portals—” he jerked his head to the right, presumably indicating the Earth wormhole, “– prove that Einstein was wrong!”
Farhad cleared his throat. “The way Professor Moon has explained it to me is that black holes are like horses. We’ve seen them and we know they exist. Wormholes are like unicorns; we can imagine them but we’ve never seen one. But a portal is a Lamborghini. It does broadly the same thing as a horse but much better and by completely different means.”
“Hm,” Anne said, because she had realized something. Not about Einstein–Rosen bridges. She didn’t know enough about the physics to form an opinion yet. What she had realized was that Farhad was Moon’s Daisuke. He was trying to translate the scientist’s words into Normal Human speech.
Unlike Anne, however, Moon was not attracted to his translator, and was therefore less patient. “What I said was that portals are like cars because someone made them.”
“Aha,” said Anne, “the Zookeepers.”
“If by that you mean that I think that the portals are artificial, of course I do,” Moon said. “How could they have just happened to come into existence, otherwise? By natural selection?”
Anne actually had always assumed that the wormholes on Junction were artificial, but now she questioned that assumption. Moon was the sort of person who made her want to disagree with him.
“I don’t know what to think yet.” She was very proud of herself for closing her mouth on the rest of that sentence: except that Turtle was absolutely right about you.
Moon was a brengsek right enough, but instead of telling him so, Anne turned to Farhad. “Why not a chemist or a geneticist, is what I’m asking. What tests can you actually perform on a wormhole that don’t require a supercollider or something?”
Moon opened his mouth to make some retort that would further lower Anne’s opinion, but Farhad held up a hand. “It sounds like you have good staffing ideas for your research station, but to answer your question, and the one before that, come to think of it, Moon’s primary experiment won’t take place until we arrive at the Howling Mountain and use those space suits.”
Moon grunted as if in frustration and Anne thought about using those space suits. The toymakers had collected the vacuum-spinner from Howling Mountain, and the vacuum-spinner seemed to have evolved to live in space. What must its ecosystem be like? What would Anne give to find out?
But she had to be sure. “Use the space suits to do what?” she asked.
“Well, to start with—” Farhad spread his hands, as if releasing white doves from his lapels, “– you’ll launch the nanosat.”
Anne scowled. “The what?”
“You can see how revolutionary it would be if we could put a satellite in orbit without actually launching it.”
“It won’t be in orbit,” Moon said. “Not around Junction.”
“What difference does that make?” asked Anne.
Farhad winked at her. “Moon says that if the wormhole opened up somewhere else in the universe, somehow that wouldn’t make it a perpetual motion machine. I don’t understand the logic there, but Moon is very upset about it.”
Anne decided she was being side-tracked. “Fine. What I’m upset about is that nobody said anything about satellites before. It’s all well and good if we’re going to go explore the wonders of space-life, but if we’re going to be chucking artificial junk at it. I mean we shouldn’t
bloody chuck artificial junk at it.”
Farhad winced. “This is an uncomfortable place for this conversation. If you’re ready for a debriefing on our full mission, why don’t we go to the bridge?”
‘The bridge’ turned out to be the driver’s cabin of the caravan, a roomy cube with wraparound windows and swiveling chairs set behind the driver’s seat. It reminded Anne of the front end of a luxury bus.
Boss Rudi was already behind the wheel, going through a checklist with Aimi. They both looked up as Farhad led Anne and Moon into the cabin.
“Ibu Anne,” said the driver in Indonesian, “you tell this miser that we won’t save any money by setting out today. One less night hooked up to Imsame’s electricity and water in exchange for one more night of food? It doesn’t make sense.”
“Uh,” Anne said, “Boss Rudi doesn’t think we should set out tonight.” Then she thought about what she’d said and a thrill went through her. Leave tonight? That might get her into the wild faster.
“Don’t worry.” Farhad nodded at Rudi. “We’re not ‘setting out’, we’re just driving down the valley to pick up the Nun. It wouldn’t be a party without them.”
“‘Bring your own meat’, huh?” Boss Rudi asked Anne, still in Indonesian.
“The Nun aren’t cannibals,” Anne snapped. “The wormhole and this valley are theirs.”
“Oh. Sorry, Ibu Anne.”
He didn’t look sorry, but Anne didn’t have time to unpick his racism right now. One old man at a time. She turned to Farhad. “I don’t like that I wasn’t told about the nanosat. How can I be part of a mission whose basic objectives I don’t know?”
Boss Rudi said something about Anne’s heart being hot, and “Last-minute changes and secrets make for terrible security. You tell him I said that.”
“And Boss Rudi isn’t happy either,” Anne said.
“Then allow me to rectify my mistake,” Farhad held a hand out to Aimi. “It’s time for the drone photos.”
“Now?” Aimi’s fashionably bushy eyebrows rose. Apparently this was another last-minute change. She passed her tablet to Farhad, without another word.
“Thank you,” he said. “Now call Daisuke and Turtle, please.”
“I haven’t issued walkie-talkies yet, but I’ll find them.” She slipped past Farhad, who sat in one of the chairs.
“Please take a seat. You can swivel them around so you’re facing me.” Farhad flipped up a lecture-hall-style board from the armrest of his seat and placed the tablet on it.
“I considered turning these little tables into touch screens, but Aimi says those things are a gimmick.” Farhad poked at the tablet until it spat up a grainy green-and-brown image. “All right, cards on the table. This, subject to any last-minute changes I might have reason to make, is the first day of our itinerary.”
Anne sat and leaned forward to look at the photo. “Looks like an aerial view of a valley. This valley, from the chlorophyll-green color. I suppose this photo was taken several months ago, before the ecological destruction was quite so total?”
Farhad hummed as if impressed. “Yes. Very good. And here’s photo two.” He slid the image aside to make way for a new one: a valley with one yellow side, one green side, and gray mud in the middle. “The Death Wind valley, where we’ll meet and make merry with our native guides. Well, I should say the managers and handlers of the toymakers, which are our real guides. They periodically migrate to the Howling Mountain, it seems, and although the Nun have never made the trip themselves, some of them were willing to accompany us. For a generous payment, of course.”
Anne wasn’t listening. She thought about the lack of deadly mist and the gouges clawed into the vegetation on the eastern end of the valley.
“What took this photo?” Daisuke asked. “A helicopter?”
“Military drone,” Farhad said. “We had it fly all the way down our planned route.”
After the crash of Anne and Daisuke’s survey flight, drones had become all the rage on Junction. The problem was that, on a planet orbited by no human-made satellites, that radio-controlled devices lost contact when they went over the horizon.
As far as Anne had heard, the best that anyone had been able to do was send up relay balloons, which expanded a drone’s operational radius to about three hundred kilometers. The circle of Junction geography thus revealed consisted of several parallel north-south mountain ranges, with dry flatlands to the east. They had yet to discover an ocean on Junction.
Daisuke, Turtle, and Aimi arrived and took their seats as Farhad said “…then over the Outer Toymaker range and into the glasslands. That’s still as far west as anyone has explored. Welcome, Daisuke and Turtle. Take a seat. Have a look.”
He dragged his finger across the tablet, bringing up a photo of shiny purple plains. Anne bent closer. Lavender, maroon, burgundy, and blue, with subtle red striations and the occasional shocking pinpricks of yellow sporulation tiles.
“The glasslands,” she sighed.
“We’ll be traveling a bit north of the path that you took on your previous expedition,” said Farhad. “Right through here.” He slid his finger again, showing another purple landscape. Not a plain though.
The overhead view made it hard to judge depth, but the ground seemed to rise into jagged red ridges. Anne was reminded of pictures she’d seen of the Tsingy karst plateau in Madagascar, except here it wasn’t green forest between gray rock, but cloudy water between blue-red glass.
“Not something we’d want to drive over,” Farhad said. “But we can visit on foot.” He tapped the screen and it zoomed in on one particular column of rock. Something glowed there, spherical and blue.
“Oh,” said Anne, who had been thinking about biogenic acid erosion. “The climax would be around the wormhole, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” Farhad said.
“A climax ecosystem is where the plants have lived for a long time,” Daisuke translated. “Anne means that someday, the flat glasslands might grow into that crater?”
“I see,” Farhad said. “The wormhole at the heart of the biome.”
Moon grunted.
“I mean, the portal, of course,” Farhad said.
Anne had no interest in further pedantry. Another question had occurred to her, so she leaned forward and tapped the edge of the tablet. “Right, so why are we driving through all this stuff? Why aren’t we flying?”
Farhad’s face went blank before he chuckled. “If you think space is tight in this caravan, let me tell you something about helicopters.”
“If you could fly a drone over our whole route, it’s well within range of a military helicopter, and if we did have a helicopter, we wouldn’t need a mobile lab,” Anne pointed out. “We could fly in and then back to base.”
Farhad was shaking his head. “Doing that every day for a week would be prohibitively expensive.”
More than the caravan? But Farhad was still talking.
“…and one of our mission objectives is to survey the route from the ground.” He raised his eyebrow. “Anyway, I thought you’d appreciate not flying after what happened to you last time.”
Daisuke nodded emphatically, but Anne said, “Not so much. The crash was a freak event, and anyway we survived it. I’m not scared of flying.”
Farhad winked at her. “Well, you’ll pardon me if I make things a little easier for us mortals. And this way, you can take samples from all of the biomes between here and the mountain. I thought that was the major draw for you.”
It was. Anne couldn’t wait to see whatever lay beyond the glasslands.
“We’ll be in unexplored territory within three days,” said Farhad, tempting as the devil, and flipped to the next picture.
Hilly green fields, their color slightly deeper than one would expect on Earth.
“That isn’t grass,” Daisuke said
.
“No,” Anne agreed. “Look at the stripes in it. Some fractal stuff going on there. And those odd rectangular shadows. Are they some kind of trenches?” She spread two fingers on Farhad’s screen, trying to zoom. The image only got grainier.
“I think they’re the shadows of something,” Daisuke said.
Anne imagined something broad and narrow, covered in the same green stuff as the ground. “Some sort of green slab?” she wondered out loud.
“Some kind of tree?” Turtle suggested.
“Trees that grow around wormholes, if so,” said Farhad, sliding to another photo. A similar ring of slabs, visible only by their rectangular shadows, encircled a dark sphere.
“No, go back.” Anne slid her finger across the screen. “It looks like those rings are only at the crowns of hills. See here? Those are animals there.” Again, they were mostly visible by their shadows: many-legged and serpentine. Some were forked at one end. “Maybe what we’re seeing is nests, rather than trees,” Anne guessed.
“How large are those animals?” asked Daisuke.
Farhad chuckled. “It’s good to see you’re so excited.”
“Do they have two heads?” Turtle asked.
Anne wasn’t listening. Her finger had pulled over the next photo, which showed a sharp demarcation between green and orange. “Lovely stuff,” she said. “Interesting there isn’t much dead land between it and the grassy-hilly-slab biome. That’s the smallest border zone I’ve seen.”
“Yes.” Farhad sounded aggrieved. “We believe that orange stuff is a forest.”
“Well, of course it’s a forest. See the exclusion zone around each tree’s crown?” She peered at the photo. “Weird. This looks more like a subtropical forest than cold-temperate.”
“Are the trees far enough apart to drive the caravan through?” Farhad asked.
Anne blinked up at him. “I have no idea. I shouldn’t think so.”
“Then do you have any ideas that will help us bushwhack through it?”
Anne looked around. “Off-road this thing through a forest? Not too likely. I say don’t bother trying. Turn north and go around the edge of the biome. We can take sampling trips on foot.”
Interchange Page 6
