Interchange

by Daniel M. Bensen

  The muscles in Anne’s chest and belly loosened. As Anne drove their ATV north, the land sloped gradually down, but the hills grew taller. This forced them into an up-and-down path which, combined with vibration in the seat and steering wheel, gave Anne the impression she was riding some sort of Swedish luxury roller coaster.

  She turned west, running them along the length of the ridge they were on. She left behind the caravan and its file of Nun and toymakers, and imagined for a moment that she and Daisuke were alone on Junction, speeding toward the mountain.

  “That one?” Daisuke asked.

  She let out a breath. “What?”

  “What comb will we see? That one?” Daisuke pointed forward and left, to a particularly large, Merlot-colored crown. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Yeah. It’s a beauty all right,” laughed Anne. Daisuke the nature show host. She steered in for a closer look.

  From a distance, the comb looked like a glass sculpture a meter and a half tall and maybe five long. On closer inspection, however, the surface wasn’t smooth, but ribbed with soft undulations that marched up from the root to the tips of its flanges. Anne was reminded of the walls of Kings Canyon, but those formations had been eroded from layers of sandstone. These layers were more like tree rings or the ridges in a seashell. Not ground down, but built up, layer by microscopic layer, over what must be hundreds of years.

  Anne ran the tip of her fingernail up the comb, feeling the vibration of keratin on glass, watching the color of the gel inside brighten from dusty violet at the roots to ruby red at its comb-tips, outlined with gold as the sun shone through them.

  Daisuke crouched down next to her, hip touching hers. “Mite,” he said. “Things are moving.”

  Anne refocused her eyes, and saw that he was right.

  Every five or so growth-ridges, there was a partition like a floor in a skyscraper. There were even glass elevators running through the comb’s structure, branching tubes visible only because of the organisms using them. Tiny pale capsules rose through this circulatory system like bubbles in champagne. Higher up, rows of darker capsules descended. Larger organisms – organs? – glided slowly across the inner surface of the glassy shell.

  “What am I looking at?” Anne wondered aloud. “A tree infested with termites? A colony built by termites? A little building, complete with window washers?”

  “A fish tank,” said Daisuke.

  She bumped him with her hip. “Be serious.”

  “I don’t want to be serious. This is discovery!”

  Anne grinned, remembering what they had discovered the last time they were on a ridge in the glasslands. The gentle snow and the explosive sporulation that had followed it. The life that boiled up from the ground to struggle and mate and die. Daisuke taking her aside and telling her about…what was it? Anne couldn’t remember, only that they’d kissed for the first time.

  “What do you think we’ll discover this time?”

  Instead of answering, Daisuke pressed a finger to the surface of the comb.

  It noticed him. A blob the size of a postage stamp stretched itself flat against the glass opposite Daisuke’s fingertip, bubbling with black eyespots. Screw-shaped organisms homed in on him like tiny missiles. Motes sparkled in the gel, and the comb around Daisuke’s finger flashed yellow.

  He snatched his hand back. “Oh!”

  Anne held her breath, but the warning colors on the comb had dissolved back into the normal purple color of glasslands photosynthesis. The plant had got itself back down to the business of turning sunlight into life. Anne should get on with her work too.

  “All right!” Anne clapped her hands to her thighs and stood. “We’ve got science to do. Tell me if you feel like your throat is closing up.”

  “Anne, what’s wrong?” Daisuke followed her to the ATV.

  “Nothing physical,” she assured him. “It’s just….” She thumped the vehicle’s door. “What changed, Daisuke? The last time we were here, I was afraid sometimes and angry sometimes, but it was….” She looked over the purple plains. “I don’t know. Thrilling. I was worried because there were so many unknowns. Dangerous unknowns, yeah, but I could discover them, right? And discovery is what I’m all about.” She watched the caravan, grinding slowly west, the Nun and their toymakers trailing behind. “I should be happy now.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Daisuke. He gave her a blank look. Another mask.

  Anne hadn’t used to notice those. Now, she wasn’t sure what to do about them. Another chore she had to see to before she could dissect anything. “Yes, Daisuke, I know I’m throwing your romantic gesture in your face. I’m sorry.”

  It didn’t work. Daisuke frowned. “I want to understand.”

  Was he actually trying to find the problem or just managing her? Anne had no way of knowing.

  But maybe she’d been spending too much time online, where ‘I don’t understand X’, was code for ‘I hate X’. Maybe she should give her boyfriend the benefit of the doubt. Fiancé. Whatever.

  “I don’t understand either,” she said. “I should be happy out here with you on Junction but I can’t manage it. I don’t know why.”

  “‘I don’t know’,” Daisuke repeated slowly. “That’s not so bad. You don’t know how aliens work and you don’t know how your brain works.” He poked the side of his head in illustration, then grinned like a sunlamp. “But we can learn, right? Discovery is what you’re all about.”

  Anne thought about that. “Huh.”

  “So!” Daisuke nodded briskly. “Where does the sadness come from? When you look at the comb, how do you feel?”

  Anne snorted. “Don’t I need to be lying on a psychiatrist’s couch for this?”

  “Huh? Oh, I get it. No, just tell me.” Daisuke’s eyes widened in an expression that he somehow kept from being utterly ridiculous. “Explore yourself.”

  Anne considered that instruction.

  The comb stood like a frozen splash of sunrise on the crest of the hill. A process of exuberant growth. A tiny, climbing current in the otherwise downward-rushing river of entropy. A flame in the darkness. Hopelessly fragile. Anne’s chest tightened.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” said Daisuke.

  “I’m….” Anne rubbed her sternum. “I’m worried. No, honestly, I’m scared. I’m scared that the next time we come here, this beautiful thing will be gone.” She blinked, found there were tears in her eyes. “Daisuke, what if someone destroys it?”

  He closed the distance between them and enfolded her in his arms. He didn’t say ‘They won’t destroy it’, because who could know? It was an unknown. Something worth discovering, like the source of Anne’s fear, and therefore her mission.

  She shuddered in Daisuke’s arms and hiccuped, feeling stupid. But when Anne took a breath, that band of tension loosened. She took another, deeper breath.

  “I have to protect this thing,” Anne declared into Daisuke’s chest. “I have to protect Junction. I’ll figure out how.”

  Daisuke was silent for a while, rubbing her back. “Maybe it would be good to ask Farhad?

  Anne pushed away from him. “Farhad?”

  “He knows how to do things.”

  Anne grunted. “What he knows how to do is look at you patronizingly and make pronouncements he thinks are deep. Not very appealing to me, but maybe he reminds you of your granddad.”

  “No, you remind me of my granddad.” Daisuke laughed. “Farhad reminds me of myself.”

  “Huh?”

  “We’re both good at knowing what people want to hear. We have both….” he searched for words. “Kore made iro iro na mondai ni okorarechatta. We have been hurt by bad things. We have learned that we need to do something big with our skills. Bigger than ourselves.”

  Anne shuffled back from him. “But maybe you need to do something bigger than yourself that’s
also good?”

  Daisuke looked at her blankly, then his face cleared. “That will be my goal. I will convince both of you that the other one is also good. We have a long trip in front of us, right? We have time to teach him.”

  Anne blew out a breath. “Steady on, Dice. One grand project at a time. Fix Farhad, fix me….”

  “Learn what’s going on inside that comb?”

  Anne smiled thinly at him. “It’s transparent, for one thing. Like you.”

  Daisuke grinned and held his hands up as if holding a video camera. “And... action!”

  Anne rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t help smiling back. “Well, the comb has a glass shell, right? Just like the hexagonal plates on the ground. The tiles. The difference is that this organism is vertically oriented. You’ll notice it’s presenting its wide face toward the path of the sun.” She swept her hand to the south. “What strikes me as odd, though, is that the best orientation for this southern exposure just happens to line up perfectly with this little ridge. If it was just this hill, that would be one thing, but there are so many of them.” She pointed at the shorter ridge they’d ridden over to get here. Beyond it, there was another, even shorter, and then another. The land rippled off toward the caravan, and each ripple was crested with its comb.

  “It looks like waves breaking on a shore,” said Daisuke. “Only…I should get my binoculars.” He reached into the ATV and extracted the very compact, very sensitive instruments. These he trained on the landscape sweeping out to the south.

  The ripples weren’t the only feature of the glasslands. Their orderly march was disturbed by stands of screw-trees and steaming pits where spore tiles had recently exploded. Animals skated across the plum-colored surface as well: spiky land urchins, donut-shaped wheelers, an unfamiliar creature like a giant snail shell on stilts. A middling-sized shmoo rolled lazily up to a steam-hole, scattering a flock of glittering fliers. The animals buzzed up, hung between the sky and the ground, settled.

  “Ha,” said Daisuke. He had turned around. “I was right. The land is like a bowl.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The combs are all the same height,” he said, handing Anne the binoculars. “Look.”

  She pressed the eyepieces together and fitted them to her face. “What are you talking about? The combs are smaller to the…huh.”

  He was right. The combs to the south were ‘shorter’ in the sense that their tips were closer to the ground, but that was because the ground itself rose in that direction. The tips of all the combs that Anne could see looked to be at the same height, as if they had grown up against an invisible ceiling.

  No, as if they’d stayed in the same place as the floor had dropped out from under them.

  Hadn’t Anne been thinking about erosion? Maybe those ridges on the comb weren’t growth lines after all; maybe they were marks of the shape’s excavation.

  Anne shoved the binoculars back into Daisuke’s hand and turned to inspect the roots of the nearest comb. Careful not to touch the organism, she knelt to see where it emerged from the tiles that covered the ground. The tiles grew smaller close to the base of the comb, more rounded, and spinier. Some were misshapen, some dead and gray. Their chalky roots had clearly been broken, regrown, and broken again. Under the roots, the shell of the comb continued.

  “Yes!” Anne said. “I was wrong! Look, Dice! Look at the comb! It didn’t grow out of the ground, it held on to the ground, which was eaten away everywhere else!”

  “Eaten?” asked Daisuke.

  “Eroded, I mean. We knew that the ground cover tiles secrete acid that dissolves the rock under them. But this other organism, the comb, forms a protective coat over the rock, kills the tiles, stops them from eating away the ground. Over time, the surrounding terrain sort of drops out from around it. Lovely!”

  Anne held her hands out, letting them fall, imagining what the land would look like after—

  “Of course!” she shouted. “The drone footage! We saw what the climax stage of this ecosystem looks like!”

  She looked up at Daisuke. “Don’t just stand there grinning at me, train your binoculars north and tell me if the ground keeps falling away. If I’m right, we should see a sort of bowl with the combs turning into columns.”

  “They look more like pyramids,” Daisuke said after a moment.

  Anne whooped. “Ha! Up till now it’s been either tourism or feelings and crap, but this is starting to look like science!”

  Daisuke was standing on tiptoe, peeking through the gaps between two of the combs’ tips. “It’s like a forest of pyramids,” he said. “Narrow pyramids. Spikes? Kenzan mitai ne.” He looked down at Anne. “What’s the word in English? The thing with spikes that holds flowers. You put flowers on top and it holds them.”

  “I have no idea, Dice,” said Anne. “Let me see with the binoculars.”

  “Kenzan.” Daisuke put his binoculars back to his eyes. “Kenzan bowl. A kenzan crater? I see the wormhole….” Daisuke twitched. “Masaka!”

  Anne frowned. As far as she knew, that word meant something like What the hell?

  “What?” she said. “What do you see? What about the wormhole?”

  “No,” said Daisuke. His brows scrunched down over the binoculars and he fiddled with the focus. “Ano, yes. The wormhole is there. But also, I see people. Three…four people.”

  Anne screwed up her mouth. “There are other people out here? Soldiers or something?”

  Daisuke removed the binoculars and shook his head. “I saw the other ATV. They’re from our caravan.”

  Chapter Seven

  The Pyramids of Doom

  “Farhad,” said Anne. He’d changed into khaki slacks and a black turtleneck. If she could just figure out a way to shoot death rays out of her eyes and through these binoculars….

  “What the fuck is he up to? Drive faster!” she shouted.

  Daisuke had taken the wheel because he had more experience with off-road vehicles. The problem was that his experience was all with driving off-road vehicles safely, and not in the pursuit of nefarious millionaires.

  “Faster!” Anne shouted again.

  “Sit down!” They crashed over a ridge, spraying shards and gel.

  Anne thumped into her seat as Daisuke twisted the wheel and accelerated. Electromagnetic torque and heavier-than-normal gravity combined to blast their vehicle down the gully between two ridges.

  Anne imagined the kenzen crater. A funnel filled with water, pierced with stone spikes. Pyramids. The mature form of the comb organisms that formed these ridges. That meant the pyramids would be in east-west lines, just like the ridges, presenting their broadest sides toward the sun.

  “Right,” Anne said. “Keep driving east until we’re past the crater, then we’ll loop around and come at Farhad with the grain of the land.”

  “The what?”

  “Just drive straight!”

  They barreled down the gully between ridges, scattering flying animals like winged batons. The ground dipped, then rose again. “We’ve passed south of the kenzen crater,” said Anne. “Just a little farther.”

  The land rose until the tops of the ridges were level with Anne’s head. She stood up, balancing against the upper edge of the windshield, and twisted to aim her binoculars north-west. “The other ATV is parked at the edge of the crater, and there’s a rope bridge leading to the stone spike in the center. Do you have a clear path north? Take it!”

  The ATV twisted under her and Anne’s stomach lurched.

  “What will we do?” Daisuke asked. Stubby ridges juddered the vehicle. “We can’t attack them.”

  “What else are we going to do? Yell at them through the walkie-talkie? Actually….” Anne plopped down in the passenger’s seat. “Drive faster while I yell at them. When we’re level with the crater, turn left and blast down that gully, got it?”


  Anne didn’t wait for a response. She tugged her walkie-talkie off her belt, fighting motion sickness, trying to figure out which buttons did what.

  Daisuke swerved west and Anne’s vision swam. She closed her eyes, fighting the urge to vomit, and of course that was the moment Farhad chose to answer her squawk.

  “Yes? What is it, Anne?”

  “Hey Farhad!” Anne yelled into the walkie-talky. “Just what the fuck are you up to?”

  A pause. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean what do I mean? Mate, I can see you.”

  She didn’t need binoculars now. The other ATV and its occupants waited for them at the end of the gully, like a target in front of a cannon ball.

  “How can you see me?”

  “Stop stalling. You’re right in front of us. You’re between the two ridges that pass through the center of the kenzen crater.”

  “‘Kenzan crater,’” said Farhad. “I appreciate the alliteration. Professor Moon, you have about sixty seconds.”

  “Who the hell cares about alliteration?” shouted Anne. “What’s Moon doing?”

  Farhad didn’t answer her. He didn’t need to. Anne and Daisuke sped west down the gully that deepened into the kenzen crater. Steam rose beyond Farhad’s ATV. Above the steam towered a tapered stone column – a pyramid. At the pyramid’s tip floated the glasslands wormhole.

  Anne dropped the useless walkie-talkie and used both hands to hold the binoculars to her eyes. She recognized Farhad, Moon, Aimi, and Turtle. They were gesticulating at each other. Arguing?

  Their ATV bucked over the honeycombed ground. The acid-etched rock to either side of them rippled in strange fractal shapes, like rivers or blood vessels. The combs on either side had grown into spindly pyramids, solid stone at the base shading to glassy red at their sunlit tips. Shadows grew as they drove deeper into the throat of the biome.

  “What are they doing? What is that?” They were close enough now for Anne to make out the rope stretched from the nose of the ATV to the tip of the nearest pyramid, which was connected to the next pyramid down the line, which led to the central pyramid and its crowning wormhole. The upper slopes of the glassy tower glowed with the light of the glasslands world. Rose-lit steam drifted around a clutch of heavy, round objects slung around the pyramid’s neck like charms on a very ugly bracelet. Barrels?