Daisuke looked back at Moon, his brain seeming to slosh around in his skull. “Is physics a young man’s game then, like math?”
“For me it is.” Moon looked at Aimi and shook himself. “It’s fine. It isn’t a secret,” he declared. “My father is dying of Alzheimer’s disease. Early onset. Hereditary. If I want to discover the new physics, I don’t have much time.” He made a bitter sound in the back of his throat. “Soon, I won’t be able to discover my own shoelaces.”
Oh. Not a famous father. Daisuke had faced death right on this hillside, and it seemed Moon was doing the same. Except the physicist seemed to have no hope that he would emerge from the contest. So why would he choose to spend his limited time here?
Silence around the stove. Aimi raised her glass. “Then here’s to the time we have left.”
“That’s beautiful!” Daisuke looked down at Anne. “This is how you bond with people! You get destroyed with your new coworkers. Then, when you wake up in the morning with both your kidneys….”
“Daisuke, I am too drunk to translate that in my head.”
“Was I speaking Japanese?”
“Yeah, you still are.” She lifted herself out of his lap. “That’s probably a sign that it’s time to get you home, big guy. Come on.”
She stood in front of him. Daisuke hugged her around the hips and buried his face in her crotch.
“Goddamn it, Dice!” She shoved him into Moon.
“Hey, Moon,” Daisuke said. “You’re good. Thank you for letting me…” What was ‘lean on you’ in English? Oh, right.
“Lean on me,” Daisuke sang, “when you’re not strong…”
Moon smiled back at him. “…If the mountains, they should crumble to the sea.”
Aimi hit the mat with her bottle. “That’s ‘Stand by Me’, you pencil-necked atom-smasher, not ‘Lean on Me’!”
Daisuke reached around Moon and prodded the air with the neck of his bottle. “Be nice,” he warned her. “Be nice to Moon.”
“Misha, Daisuke is absolutely legless. Help me get him back to the caravan.”
“Why should I? Why should he get to sleep with a woman when I can’t?”
“Misha, I swear to God….”
Daisuke felt arms under his elbows. He needed to tell Anne he loved her. She would never regret marrying him.
“I thought you proposed to her a year ago,” said Misha.
Had Daisuke spoken that aloud? He hoped it had been in Japanese.
“Shut up, Misha. No, you pull and I’ll push.”
“Do you know how much I envy you?” Misha asked.
“No envy,” Daisuke said. “You have a baby.”
“Dice, he was talking to me. Misha, you’re drunk.”
“So are you, Anne. Drunk with your lover. Going to bed with your lover! Sing is on another planet and her brother hates me. You know what he calls me?”
Daisuke felt himself pushed and pulled. Misha’s hair was in his nose. “Good night, Aimi,” he called. “Good night, Yunubey. Good night, Moon!” For some reason, that made Aimi and Misha laugh.
“So why don’t you abandon Junction like Sing did?”
“Be nice, Anne.” Daisuke waved his hand and nearly fell off of Misha’s back.
“What do you know about Junction? I was keeping the Nun alive while you were getting into fights on the internet.”
“How do you know about that? Does everyone know about that?”
“It’s the internet, Anne. Its whole point is to tell everyone everything.”
“Everything bloody stupid!”
Daisuke squinted against sudden lights.
“Who’s shouting out there? Ibu Anne?” That was Turtle’s voice.
“I like Turtle,” said Daisuke.
“You screwed up, Misha,” Anne said. “I left Junction with you for a year and you fucking let it run to ruin.”
Misha swayed under Daisuke. “Fuck you! Yunubey was right, you do think you own Junction.”
“Ibu Anne?”
“No, I don’t! I’m responsible.”
Misha spun toward Anne. “You think—”
Daisuke retched and Misha dropped him.
It hurt so, so much.
Chapter Six
Dangerous Unknowns
The rising sun cast the shadow of the caravan across the glasslands.
At first glance, the surface under them might have been a sea. Sunlight sparkled off a million tiny knobs and divots. Hummocks rolled by like the backs of dolphins. Swarms of glittering creatures rose around the caravan like spray before a Viking longship cresting the waves.
So was Anne on a Viking raid, then? She shook her head and closed her eyes. She concentrated on the warmth of the mug in her hands, the gentle rise and fall of her seat as the caravan drove up and down the ripples in the ground. In the driver’s seat, Boss Rudi whistled approximately along to a sappy love song playing on his phone.
When the motion sickness got too much, Anne opened her eyes, focusing through the wraparound windows to the northern horizon. The ripples there rose higher and steeper than any wave, and the shapes that crested them were not foam. No sea on Earth had ever bloomed with algae of quite this grape-candy color, either, and even a frozen sea wouldn’t reflect the sunlight so harshly.
“Driving on this surface feels very strange,” said Boss Rudi. “You say it’s made of glass?”
Anne clutched her coffee, grinding through the Indonesian sentence. “This land…planting glass plants.”
“This land grows glass plants,” the driver corrected. “I don’t see plants. Unless you mean those things on the tops of the hills? Or that giant donut?”
“What donut? Oh, that’s a wheeler.” She used the English word. “It’s an animal like a sheep.”
“Donut sheep? Amazing! What does it eat?”
“Um. Tiles.” Another English word. “They are the plants of glass. They have six….” Shit, what was the word for side? “They are like beehives.” That was a word she remembered, but possibly not very helpful. She didn’t know the word for “cells of a beehive” either.
“Do you mean that they’re hexagonal?” Boss Rudi asked. The word in Indonesian was apparently the same as in English.
“Yes,” Anne said. “They are hexagonal. Inside they have purple jelly, which makes food from sunlight, like the leaf of a plant. Under, they have hard roots like pipes.” At least she thought she’d used the right word for pipes. Anne remembered the way those chalky tubes had crunched when she twisted a tile loose. “And the shell is made of glass.”
Or more likely some more complex shell of silicates embedded in silicone. Remember how they had tented up during the rain, so that water rolled to their edges? The way they gave just a little under your foot? Had anyone actually taken a dissected glasslands tile under a microscope? And here Anne was with a dissecting microscope. Hmm.
She sipped her coffee, thinking about the forces that created that landscape and last year’s trek through it.
The hexagonal plates of glasslands plant life rose and fell in gentle undulations, forming low east–west ridges crowned with purple growths shaped like cockscombs. How inconvenient those things had been, when the lost expedition had been trying to drag old Pearson east toward home. A couple of times every day they’d had to drag the sledge up one of those glassy slopes, shatter the combs on top, and descend into the next valley. And all of it in heavier-than-normal gravity and thinner-than-normal air. How the hell had Anne done it? How had she managed to fall in love while doing it?
And was it the combs that made the ridges, or the other way around? Were the combs the same organism as the plate-shaped ground cover? Were the plates genetically distinct, like clumps of grass, or were they clones like coral polyps? Did any of those comparisons make sense with aliens? What tests could Anne do to determine t
hat?
Anne plucked at her ring. That was improvement, right? She’d hardly been able to do any science at all the last time she was here, what with all the geopolitics and murder by wildlife. Their party had been shocked, cold, half-starved, dragging a dying man over those siliceous hills. Half of them had been waving guns around and threatening the other half. A wrong step would have killed them, literally. Why would anyone miss that?
“Good morning, everyone!” Farhad strode onto the bridge and spun a seat toward him. “What a lovely country we’ve found ourselves in. The sky and the land under it, like a frozen ocean of red wine. It’ll play well in California, for sure.” He settled himself into his seat and inhaled the cardamom fumes from his tea. “What’s our status? Boss Rudi, are we moving fast and breaking things?”
“We drive straight north, sir,” said Rudi. “Ahead of schedule.”
“Excellent! And Anne! I hope you slept well after what I hear was an intense party. Planning out your experiments for the day?”
Anne took another gulp of coffee. If Daisuke were here, he’d come up with a way to make friends with Farhad, turn him to a more virtuous life, and plan their day all at once.
“Yes?” she essayed.
Farhad laughed. “I’m sorry, Anne. Don’t let me push you. I’m told I have trouble with downtime. Feel free to relax a little.”
“Actually I was thinking about an experiment,” Anne said. “I was thinking of figuring out what those tiles are made of.”
He blew on his tea. “Not simply glass, I assume?”
“Ibu Anne knows a lot,” Boss Rudi contributed.
“That is why I hired her.” Farhad sipped and hummed with satisfaction. “I’m sure you’re appreciating this landscape on a different level than anything I can manage. You did hike across it on foot, after all. What’s the word I’m looking for?”
“Death march?” suggested Anne. “That’s what it was, what with the shmoos and the sporulation plates.”
“Ah, yes, the dreaded dire shmoo.” Farhad rapped his armrest. “You don’t need to worry about predators hurting this thing.”
“Rather the opposite.” Anne wiggled her ring. “What is the weight of the caravan doing to the tiles under us? Not to mention whatever contaminants are caught in our tires.”
He was looking at her. Why was he looking at her?
“What?” Anne said. “I’m worried.”
He nodded. “Yes, you took the changes in Imsame very personally.”
“Destruction,” said Anne. “Not changes. Destruction.” She gestured at the window with her coffee cup. “What can we do to prevent this place from being destroyed too?”
Farhad tilted his head up and waggled his chair from side to side. “I’m considering how to address that. Maybe if I had an egg on me, I could show it to you. Look how beautiful it is, I could say. Look how smooth the shell is. How perfect the shape. Why would anyone want to break it and make an omelet?”
Anne’s heart sank.
He chuckled. “You probably think I’m a wicked old capitalist who cares about nothing but money.”
“Well,” said Anne. “It does look that way.”
His nod was more like a little bow. “Thank you for speaking your mind. I really do appreciate it. If you just kept quiet about your beliefs about me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you that you’re wrong.”
Farhad took another sip of tea. “Money is just a way for people to communicate their needs. How much would someone pay for a chance to come to Junction and see a lovely view like this? A research station? A new cancer drug or antibiotic distilled from the blood of native animals? How much would they pay for—”
“A parking lot?” Anne said.
“I was going to say, ‘How much would people pay for a safe place to live?’”
The hairs on the back of Anne’s neck rose. What the hell was Farhad talking about? How would Daisuke phrase that?
“What”, said Anne, “do you mean?”
Farhad tilted his head up and frowned at the ceiling, as if there were instructions written up there. After a moment, he nodded to himself and said, “When I was a teenager, I smuggled myself into Turkey in the back of a pickup truck. That was only the start of the struggle that led me here.”
“…yeah?” Anne said, for lack of any better response. Farhad sounded like he was answering the questions of an interviewer who wasn’t here.
He held up a finger. “My parents supported the Shah, which means nobody trusts me in modern Iran.” A second finger. “My grandfather fled to Iran in the first place because he was a wealthy land-holder in Armenia when the Red Army came.” A third finger and a smile. “My great grandfather was not a favorite of the Ottomans, either.”
Farhad turned up his palms. “Before that, history doesn’t say, but you can be sure that whatever my ancestors were doing, the regional power at the time thought they were wrong.”
Anne wasn’t sure what she was expected to say about that. She noticed that Rudi had stopped singing along to his phone.
Farhad nodded as if Anne had said something. “My family has survived because we played outside of the rules, and we made sure to get out before the revolutionaries took control of the transportation network. So when I tell you that Junction might save humankind…”
“You’re telling me you don’t care if we smash a big hole in Junction’s ecology,” Anne said.
“I’m saying that this planet is important.” The twinkle in Farhad’s eye was less jolly grandfather now, and more targeting laser. “Yes, we will do a non-zero amount of damage to Junction as we move through it, but there’s more to life than avoiding damage.”
Anne didn’t, but Farhad didn’t pause to explain.
“What if Junction is our only life raft when things on Earth go to hell? Isn’t our continued survival worth a couple of squashed glasslands tiles?”
Anne’s chest grew tight and cold, as if someone were buckling her into refrigerated armor. She could pull out now. Leave the caravan and walk back to Imsame and Farside Base. Then back to Earth. Except that wouldn’t stop Farhad, only deny Anne the possibility of balancing out his destruction. The armor had a collar and lead attached.
The silence was broken by Daisuke’s voice. “Natsukashii naa.”
Anne looked around to see him standing behind her, his own cup in one hand while he stabilized himself against the doorframe with the other.
“Ah, Daisuke. Thank you for joining us,” said Farhad. “You’re already looking better. Those pills I gave you working?”
Daisuke nodded, then appeared to regret the motion of his head.
“What does that word mean?” Farhad asked. “I always wanted to learn Japanese, but alas….”
Anne forced herself to un-bristle. Farhad wasn’t trying to butt in on her and Daisuke’s tender moment. Well, he was, but he wasn’t doing it maliciously. And he was Anne’s employer. “Natsukashii means nostalgic.”
“Nostalgia for your last death march here?” Farhad chuckled. “I suppose I understand that.”
“The trip was very hard,” agreed Daisuke, lowering himself into the seat next to Anne. “But, hard times…” he curled his hands around his own cup, “…bring people together. Bonding. Me too, and Anne.” That dazzling smile flashed through his hangover. For a moment, Daisuke looked like a little boy who’d just gotten the best present for Christmas, and knows exactly how he’ll play with it.
Anne felt herself blushing. “Stop doing that. You flirted with me shamelessly on that trek too.”
“And in comparison, our relationship has gotten boring?” He sipped his coffee, and met her eyes over the brim of the cup.
“That’s not what I meant at all.” Anne glanced at Farhad and blushed harder. “Don’t misinterpret me.”
“It’s all right, Anne. Romance. You need romance.” He nodded to himself an
d clunked his cup on his seat’s armrest. “And I can give it to you. Romantiku na otoko dakara ne.”
Anne had been about to tell Daisuke what an idiot he was being. She’d been talking herself into taking him back to bed, and here he was, casting doubt on their relationship. Oh no, the spark is dying, Anne. You keep demanding all these romantic gestures from me, and I’m such a great guy, I’ll keep giving them to you. But whenever he said something in Japanese, Anne had to drop whatever she was thinking about and translate it.
He’d said it with a sort of macho swagger, but now that Anne translated it, it sounded a little unsure. Maybe Daisuke wasn’t annoyed that Anne was demanding too much of him, he was worried he wasn’t giving enough to her. Or maybe Anne had the wrong end of the stick entirely and she just had no idea what he was trying to tell her.
Anne needed more data. She finished her coffee, and leaned toward Daisuke. “What are you talking about?”
“A date,” he said, and put his hands around hers. “Remember the day we went looking for water and you showed me all the tiny creatures? Let’s do that again.”
That did sound suspiciously perfect. “That’s a great idea. I bet there are a dozen new species we can discover five minutes walk from the caravan. Oh! And I’ve been thinking about the combs.”
“Combs?” Daisuke ran his hand through his hair, and made it look great.
“I mean the bush things growing on the tops of the ridges. I have a theory to test. Come on, Daisuke, let’s go look at them.” Anne stood.
“Perfect,” said Farhad. “Go earn your keep! I can’t wait to see what you discover.”
***
The wheels of the ATV hummed over the nubbled surface of the glasslands, throwing up clouds of glassy fliers. Larger animals rolled away like animated wheels, balls, beanbag chairs. Clouds raced across a lilac sky, reflected in the grape-candy ground.
“Oh my God,” said Daisuke. “This is much better than last time!”
Anne laughed. He was right. And she was doing the right thing, coming here. This landscape, this wilderness, was where she belonged. Where she could do some good for once! Anne didn’t have to force herself into her computer chair and pound herself against global society in order to make a difference. She could come out here, between the ground and the sky, and finally learn something.
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