Interchange

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “Yes,” came the answer, “but only something shaped like a bird or a fish.”

  A what? “I don’t understand,” Moon said.

  Misha and Yunubey discussed the matter. Yunubey steepled his fingers and poked the air with the wedge they made.

  “He says that the only big things that can go through a wormhole are fish or birds…? That’s not true. There’s a word he’s using that I don’t understand.”

  “That’s all right,” said Moon. “I think I understand.”

  Moon stuck his spear into the portal and walked around in a circle, watching the perspective change. Size. Volume. Edges.

  Moon recalled a joke paper he’d read in college, claiming that Earth’s topology was actually concave. According to the author, rather than living on the outer surface of a sphere or rock surrounded by infinite space, humans lived on the inner surface of a bubble of space surrounded by infinite rock. The geometry that described the real world worked just as well that way. The only problem was that you had to make the speed of light become exponentially slower as it approached the center of the bubble. Space only seemed big because it took so long to penetrate.

  “And what am I going to see when I go through there?” It was Anne. She was still in the mood for useless argument, apparently. “More ecological disaster?”

  “More people trying to survive,” Misha said.

  Moon knew better than to engage. Talking hadn’t worked in the hospital, and it wouldn’t work here. He climbed higher up the mound, feeling his body grow lighter, until he could stretch his whole arm through the portal. He put in his other arm, so he was up to his elbows in another planet.

  Aside from the gravity differential, Moon felt nothing. No resistance. Not even a tingle as his blood and nerve signals flowed across the cosmic distances.

  Or perhaps the Sweet Blood planet, and all the space between it and Junction, was right here, compressed infinitely small. Perhaps the same was true of Earth, and every other planet on the other side of every other portal. Perhaps the only real, uncompressed space in the universe was here, and only Junction was real.

  He separated his arms, and the portal’s diameter grew. The edges knew where they should be. Moon had read every paper and report on ‘wormholes’, and not one of them had mentioned that they could change size.

  “There’s still the whole planet beyond the wormhole,” Misha protested.

  “Put a wall around it,” said Anne. “Put a wall around all the wormholes unfortunate enough to be our neighbors.”

  ***

  Anne lowered herself onto her grass mat, careful not to spill her food and drink as she pressed her back up against Daisuke’s. He felt hard and very warm.

  She allowed herself a small sigh of contentment. A good, cold bottle of Little Creatures beer in one hand, a tray full of canned ham and instant porridge in the other – frankly, the food was pretty terrible. But! A good man at her back. Good things.

  “This is the life, eh?” said the figure hulking on the other side of the stove. “Maybe it makes you want to emigrate? Join the Nun tribe. Initiation rituals are a steal at ten thousand US dollars and only a very little bit of physical torture.”

  The much thinner man next to him said something in Nun.

  “Well, if you can understand English well enough to know I’m insulting the tribe, you can say, ‘Shut up, Misha.’”

  “Shut up, Misha,” repeated the man. His name was Yunubey, the chieftain of the Nun, and Misha’s brother-in-law.

  The smuggler and the witch, Mikhail Sergeyevich Alekseyev and his wife, Sing, were the only two other survivors of last year’s expedition. Misha had stayed on Junction with Sing’s people, helping them negotiate with the soldiers, moving their camp, and, apparently, reproducing as well. His wife was with Misha’s parents in the United States, raising the baby.

  Anne had asked why Sing hadn’t given birth at the American army base. Didn’t the Nun need Sing’s skills? But apparently the military doctor there had taken one look at the size difference between the parents and recommended a C-section. And even if they could convince the army to fly in a team of obstetricians, there were, as Misha said, “No alien trees that grow diapers.”

  Was this how all the Nun’s births would go? Would the mothers ever bring their children back to Junction? Or would they exchange the end of infant mortality for the end of the tribe?

  Misha hadn’t wanted to answer those questions, so for now, they sat in peace on the northern slopes of the Outer Toymaker Mountains. The air smelled of cooking ham, human and pig body odor, a sewer-ish pong that could either be those same humans and pigs or else the exotic chemistry of the Toymaker biome up the hill, and, just faintly, bananas. That would be the ghost-scent of the Sweet Blood biome, which the Nun had almost entirely destroyed in the less than twelve months they’d been living here.

  There were no more extrusion-pines or packing-peanut-bushes. Last time they’d been here, Daisuke had flirted with Anne and eaten a banana-flavored bug he’d caught in a stream. That stream was gone now, and its miraculous filter-wall. People sang and stumbled between cooking stoves, pigs, tents, and the military surplus kit they’d scattered over the hillside. The caravan was parked at the edge of what had once been the Death Wind biome, and was now an expanse of polluted silt.

  It was better to look across the valley at the golden glow of the Lighthouse biome.

  “Do you remember when we came here?” Daisuke asked.

  Anne remembered stumbling out of the toymaker forest that capped this mountain. Colonel Pearson, the American soldier who’d stranded them in Junction’s wilderness, had died. Tyaney, the Nun chieftain who’d shown Anne the Junction wormhole in the first place, had been chopped to pieces by the same toymakers who’d shot a miniature balista bolt into Daisuke’s chest. They’d had no supplies left and no clue what to do. But they’d looked across the valley to see those illuminated trees.

  Crystal boughs reflected and redirected light from the Lighthouse wormhole, spreading it across the mountain’s middle elevations. Walking through that forest had been like walking across a giant stage, lit with spotlights.

  Misha held up his bottle. “A toast to fellow travelers.”

  The three of them clinked and drank, and Yunubey held up his tin of meat.

  The trees of the Lighthouse biome seemed to grow brighter as the mountain under it darkened. The heart of their web glowed brightest, a wormhole shining with the blood-orange light of a star much older than the sun. The Lighthouse planet. Up the hill behind Anne floated the Sweet Blood wormhole. Those were just two of the worlds linked to Junction.

  If Junction had as much land area as Earth, and the regular grid of wormholes they had observed in this region extended over the rest, that would mean about five hundred thousand worlds. Not counting whatever was waiting for them in space.

  “It’s funny,” Misha said, “the first time we were here, I was terrified. Panicking. Remember the monsters in the fog that tried to eat me? But now I just remember falling in love.” He glanced at his brother-in-law.

  Yunubey grunted in an ‘Oh, do you?’ sort of way. He was squatting on his mat, feet covered in thick woolly socks and grass cape bristling on his back. His bare chest and face were caked with translucent aerogelly, collected from animals in the Lighthouse biome. His penis-sheath was another of that biome’s products: a tapering rod of yellow plastic as thick as Anne’s thumb and as long as her arm. His toymaker floated on the fishing line through his belt loops like a tiny wooden blimp.

  “Tekenak nunja, goma ‘love’ ara talenalum, hong yu ara senalum dara.” He showed his large, square teeth and jerked his chin toward Anne and Daisuke. “Pelum.”

  “He says, if I want to find love with him, I should shave my beard.’” Misha said. “The Nun word for my beard, by the way, is nose hair. Not their beards, just mine.”

  Ann
e savored the sensation of Daisuke laughing against her back.

  “I am glad your brother-in-law has a sense of humor,” he said.

  “I’m not,” said Misha.

  “But no,” Daisuke continued, “I was thinking about our first party, where Anne and I met. In Imsame. Old Imsame, I mean.”

  “You mean the village that’s now the parking lot of the American military base?” Anne said bitterly. “Couldn’t you do anything to protect them, Misha?”

  “Obviously,” Misha said, “I couldn’t.” He took another swig of beer.

  Yunubey said something, his expression bleak.

  Anne’s little spark of anger guttered out, and the smell of the tinned pork on her lap turned her stomach. “Would you tell him I’m sorry? For bringing this down on his people?”

  Yunubey didn’t wait for a translation. “Tekena nunja malye uwado. Soko Im Taramak ang Anne unggula. Pelum.”

  Misha nodded. “He says, ‘Things have always been hard. Anne doesn’t own the Deep Sky Country.’”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  Daisuke pushed against her, a sign that he would translate for her. Not English to Nun, but Anne to Human.

  “Thank you for helping us now,” he said.

  “You are welcome,” Yunubey said in English, hand to his chest. “Thank you for money.”

  “Yeah. Is it true that this Mr. Irevani is paying for your own private research station, Anne?” Misha leaned forward, eyes shiny with speculation.

  “Not my own private,” she said. “His own—”

  “What about a hospital?” Misha interrupted.

  “Yes,” said Yunubey.

  Anne swallowed, thinking of those babies. “Er, look, Farhad isn’t Santa Claus. He’s more like one of those evil genies who turns every wish bad.”

  “That isn’t fair, Anne,” Daisuke said.

  “All right, maybe.” Anne took another drink. “I’d just like to see one of his promises come through before we start trusting him to make more.”

  “We are on his mission.”

  “Yeah, Dice, but what’s it a mission for?” Anne thumped her bottle against her knee. “Not pure science, that’s for sure. First it’s ‘Oh, we’re prospecting for new species.’ Then it’s ‘Oh, we’re testing out this new satellite launch system. Oh, is that what I said? I meant that we’re trying to see how wormholes work.’ Then it seems we’re also surveying the land for a new international treaty?”

  Misha scratched under his beard. “Yes. I did wonder why we weren’t flying to the Howling Mountain. The Americans have an AgustaWestland AW609 that could make four trips there and back before it needed refueling.”

  “Right?” said Anne. “I don’t like the way things keep changing.” She realized as she said it that that was truer than she’d thought. Anne liked none of the changes that had befallen Junction since her last visit.

  Daisuke’s back tensed. Somehow, Anne could tell he was making a fist. “We will make good changes!” he declared.

  “Yeah. Ganbatte,” Anne put aside her dinner and took another drink instead, trying not to think about Junction’s problems and her lack of any plan to deal with them.

  Daisuke was right. These weren’t the same firepits or the same food or place, but there were the plastic codpieces on the men and shaved heads for the women. The ginger-tinted sunlight, the gravity, the tensions and uncertainties. The feeling of something waiting for them to discover it.

  Could they discover a way to move forward? A good future? Anne pictured green spreading back down the slope of this mountain, holes healing in the web of lights on the opposite slope. Maybe down there in the valley, where the Death Wind biome had retreated back to its home planet, they could build a research center. They could plant it with nothofagus trees and dig terraforming pools into the riverbed. Anne could stand on the roof, surrounded by three healthy biomes and the Nun village, and direct the further study and protection of this world.

  Anne raised her head and looked east through the Death Wind pass to the mountains that cupped the Deep Sky valley. Shadows climbed their slopes like dark water, but apricot light still warmed the peaks. A trio of kelp-tree balloons flashed like copper against an indigo sky. A line of bright sparks was visible.

  They were not stars.

  Junction was ringed in wormholes. They orbited the planet like beads on a necklace or cars in a train, presumably placed in orbit by whatever forces had created Junction. The Zookeepers, some called them. Aliens? Gods? Something stranger? Something a hundred million years old.

  And Farhad wanted to send Anne up there. She clenched her fists, a feeling in her chest like a blunt knife prodding her heart.

  “I want this so terribly,” she said. “It scares me.”

  A silence fell around their stove. Daisuke broke it with a quiet request.

  “Yunubey, would you show your toymaker to Anne?”

  Anne looked around to see Yunubey’s chin up and his narrowed eyes on her. His gaze slid to Daisuke, and the chief smiled and nodded as if a grand master had challenged him to a chess match. He held out his hands, palms up. “Eng udirobak.”

  “Of course,” translated Misha. “It would be an honor.”

  Yunubey reached up and grabbed the creature in two hands as if it were a rugby ball. Solemnly, he passed it to Anne.

  Her suspicion that the boys were playing some kind of social trick on her evaporated as her fingers brushed its surface. Wood, or something almost like wood. A rhinoceros horn made of fused filaments of lignin, rather than keratin. Or maybe a better comparison would be the shell of an ancient cephalopod.

  Yunubey released his hold and sat back. Anne gripped the shell harder. It had the mass of a liter bottle of beer, but thanks to its hydrogen gas envelope, its weight was negative. The shell of the toymaker gleamed darkly in the light of the stove, like polished walnut, smooth and fibrous. It narrowed gently toward the front, where a bubble of glass had been cemented. The cockpit.

  Careful not to lose her grip, Anne rotated the toymaker until she was looking into its eyes.

  Everyone called the Nun’s floating and wheeled pets toymakers, which was like calling cars and planes people. Technically, the blimps and land-galleys and so forth were the toys. The makers lived inside.

  They peered from their dark, syrupy growth medium like calamari rings smothered in chocolate sauce. Eyespots glittered on rings of pale flesh. Hoops of muscle turned themselves inside-out and outside-in, flashing tiny teeth, knotting and unknotting, coupling with each other to spin gears of chewed wood.

  Tlink-tlunk!

  The whole blimp vibrated with the force of the signal, like a clock filled with mud, powered by self-twisting rubber bands. The underslung spring-ballista shuddered.

  Glong! Glong! Glong!

  Yunubey chuckled and said something that Misha translated as. “The little…rascal? Is begging for food. Would you like to feed him?”

  Anne sniffed and nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Finally, here was an alien. Not dead. Not in danger of dying. Just hanging in there.

  Yunubey untied a flask from one of his belt loops and held it out. The liquid inside smelled absolutely revolting, but Anne smiled at the memory. The carved cap on the flask fitted perfectly with the valve on the upper rear end of the blimp. It clocked and clunked as Anne fed it. She assumed those noises indicated contentment.

  “It’s possible he remembers you,” Misha said. “That was Sing’s toymaker before she went to Earth. The one she tamed,” he pointed, “right up there.”

  He pointed and Anne twisted to look up the hill. Sunset light had turned the toymaker forest a rich whiskey-and-oak color. Gold highlights gleamed like hair after a very expensive shampoo. Trees like tethered balloons swayed and rubbed against each other, flag-leaves snapping in the wind.

  Anne found herself grinnin
g. The toymaker forest was still there. Still swimming with strangeness and bristling with danger. And tomorrow they would set out for even wilder lands.

  ***

  Daisuke felt triumphant rather than relieved. Anne was only really happy away from civilization, and they were on the edge of civilization now. If he could keep her attention focused westward, they’d be all right. Their joyous adventure was just over the mountains.

  And when they came back? Maybe something unexpected would happen before then.

  Perhaps the thought made Daisuke more observant. On the lookout for opportunities. In any case, he was the first of their group to spot the beer.

  “Oi!” Daisuke waved. “We’re here!”

  Moon and Aimi climbed up the hill to them, bottles in hand.

  “There you are!” Aimi yelled. “You drink alcohol, right?”

  Daisuke waved his bottle in answer and moved to make space on the mat. “Where are Mr. Irevani and the others?”

  “Not drinking. Smoking a lot.” Aimi maneuvered Moon into his place between her and Daisuke. The physicist was carrying a cooler.

  “Wise men,” said Misha. “I always tell Yunubey that alcohol has killed more recently contacted people than any army.” He held out his hand. “So you can give me his share of the booze.”

  “You must be Misha. I’m Aimi, Farhad’s protégé.” She gave him two bottles of Bintang.

  “The pleasure is all mine.”

  “Chief Yunubey,” she said. “I look forward to working with you.”

  Yunubey asked Misha something, and Misha shrugged, then shook his head. Daisuke suspected the exchange went something like ‘Is she married?’ and ‘I don’t know, but don’t try yet.’

  “So,” Aimi said, “what conversation are we interrupting?”

  “Anne was raking me over the coals for failing to preserve her alien wilderness,” said Misha.

  Daisuke could feel Anne’s back muscles tense up. Last year, she might have made some kind of outburst, but recently her tendency had been to grit her teeth and curl in on herself, simmering in rage. Daisuke didn’t think this new development was at all healthy.