Interchange

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “Yes!” The mogul was practically drooling. “Good lord, Anne, can you imagine the sort of press we’d get?”

  “Can you imagine the backlash on Twitter?”

  Farhad was holding up his hands, and Daisuke, walking up with a box of supplies, was shaking his head at her. Well, screw ’em! Anne pushed on regardless.

  “Right,” she said. “We can’t plaster our mythology all over this planet. We’ll get every creationist and his sister-wives in here, chewing on the scenery.”

  Farhad flapped his hands. “Fine, fine. I take your point, Anne, yes. No religious allusions. But ‘Rapunzel trees’? That’s brilliant! Although—” he tapped his chin, “– if this place is El Dorado, we really ought to have a conquistador theme. Feathered snakes and doubloons and so forth.”

  Aimi looked up from the box she was digging through. “I think that’ll get us social media backlash as well. Colonialism.”

  Anne winced with the pain of someone who’d been called a colonial apologist on the internet.

  Farhad nodded, but said, “At a certain point, backlash is publicity. Better to lean into it. But feathered snakes! What were they called?”

  “Kukulkan? Quetzalcoatl?” Aimi smiled at Anne’s look of confusion. “I majored in anthropology.”

  “That’s great. The second one. Let’s shorten it to coatls.” Farhad pointed down to the ground just in front of them, where the lichen-encrusted clay gave way to an orange – for lack of a better word – lawn. “How about that little plant on the ground? What’s grass in whatever language?”

  “I don’t actually speak Nahuatl, Farhad,” said Aimi.

  It was clear that the plants of the lawn weren’t grass. They grew at least a meter tall, forming a tight, springy orange net that visibly bent under the weight of the humans and larger toymakers on top of it.

  “Doubloon-grass?” offered Daisuke.

  Land-galleys scuttled across the stuff easily enough though. The little wooden cylinders hooked their oars into the ground cover and rolled on little gear-toothed wheels, shuttling between the big cruisers and the coatls that clustered at the edge of the forest.

  “That’s the spirit, Dice! Now, Aimi, talk to me about how we can get these names trademarked.”

  Anne wanted to scoop out her eyeballs, this conversation was so excruciating. Like a drowning woman clutching a piece of floating wood, she knelt to examine the plant.

  The organism that she would absolutely never call doubloon-grass reminded her of a twig from a juniper or a frond of Corallina algae. It was composed of flattened oval yellow-tan segments, each around half a centimeter long. At the base of the plant, these segments followed one after another like beads on a necklace, forming a stalk. Farther up, one row branched into two, each of which branched into yet more, forming a fan shape.

  “What are you looking at?” It was Daisuke, squatting next to her.

  “Tired of copyrighting the bounty of nature already?” Anne asked.

  Daisuke sighed, which made Anne feel bad. By way of apology, she said, “What I’m looking at is a nice Fibonacci growth pattern.”

  “Fibonacci? Ah. Fuibonatchi-su. One, one, two, three, five, eight? That one?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one.” Each new number was the sum of the previous two. “The same numbers that gave the nautilus-grass its curve. Not to mention Earth nautiluses. Math is universal, but the problem is….” She put out a finger and waggled the little yellow fan. “Look. It can put out more shoots from the tips of its branches, but it can’t thicken its base.” Already, this plant was bending under its own weight. She found what she was looking for.

  “Here, look at this,” she said, and crouch-walked away from the corporate types and their naming game.

  Anne pointed to a hand-sized fan of doubloon-grass bent into a bridge shape, with its segmented branches burrowing into the dirt. The broad upper surface of the bridge was spiky with new, upward-growing shoots. More fans stretched up from the leading edge of the parent plant….

  “And that.”

  Anne pointed farther west still, where the lawn began. Triangles begat triangles, yellow branches cascading out across the ground.

  “Another mathematical shape,” said Daisuke. “What was it called? Ko¯ko¯ su¯gaku nante mukashi no hanashi dana … Shierupensukii no Gyasuketto dattakke?”

  “The Sierpinski Gasket,” Anne said, too ashamed to admit she’d only ever heard the phrase in a Jonathan Coulton song. “Sierpinski-grass. There. Much better than doubloon-grass.” She remembered that that name had been Daisuke’s idea and hid her chagrin by peering more closely at the plant.

  “Oh!” There was an animal clinging to a branch of the sierpinski, camouflaged in umber and tangerine blotches, a bit longer than Anne’s pinky fingernail. Its shape reminded her of a computer chip: a long flat rectangle with its long side fringed with tiny teeth.

  Or perhaps legs. When Anne disturbed the plant it had wrapped itself around, the animal dropped off and rippled away, its body bowed to allow the triangular pegs to dig into the soil. When Anne bent to touch the creature, it curled into a spiral, tooth-legs meshing, and inverted itself into a sphere. The orange upper surface of its body was now on the inside, and its dark blue ventral surface formed the skin of a little ball. It oozed milky fluid that was probably some kind of defensive toxin.

  Anne wondered if the creature could invert that sphere, and put the toxins on the inside. Subdue prey inside that cavity? Digest food? And hadn’t she found it spiraled around a branch? A quick inspection showed that, yes, the branch of sierpinski-grass where the pinkie-nail had perched was scored in a spiral pattern, like the red line around a barber’s pole.

  “Aha! That’s one way to evolve a coelom,” said Anne.

  “What?” Daisuke asked.

  “Never mind about that. Look how they stack.” Anne waddled deeper into the biome. “The sprouts on the top of one sierpinski fan out, then bend, then root themselves on the top of another bridge and so on.”

  The lawn thus formed stretched to the forest and continued, filling the space between ornate tree trunks. Deeper into the forest, the wedge of sierpinski-grass rose three or four layers high before it put up blue stalks – fruiting bodies? Gaps in the layered ground cover indicated where herbivores had torn chunks out and…ha!

  Anne got up and jogged to the place where two wedges met. “Look at this.” She pointed at a bare line in the ground. “It’s the border between the two competing sierpinskies.” The line jagged off into the forest like a bolt of lightning, branching and converging, marking the history of a million tiny battles.

  “And that’s only one solution to the problem of supporting growth.” Anne turned in a slow circle, pointing. “Those domes, look how every other branch dips back toward the ground. Those…telescope…bamboo…things. Look how the rings of stem-segments sprout from the ground around an upward-growing core. Or you just don’t branch much at all, and you get these long, coiling whips. Barbed bramble.”

  “I like that name,” Daisuke said.

  “Thank you.” Anne turned and looked back east across the lawn that separated the tree-wall and the forest.

  The edge of the forest wasn’t clean, of course. Shrubs grew up from the sierpinski, scattered around the lawn like very ugly hedge sculptures. Rather than the globular or conical shape of most understory plants, these things looked like they’d been hacked apart and glued back together by surrealists. One was a wiggly, spiny U shape with a horned blob on one end. Another was an overturned barrel with legs.

  Anne watched a forest animal slither out of this shrub to threaten a passing toymaker land-galley. The little craft stopped and raised its forward oars.

  “Anne! Daisuke! We’re almost ready to go.” That was Misha, striding across the springy mat of sierpinski.

  “There’s something odd about the oars on that toymaker,”
Anne said.

  Most toymaker oars looked like flattened chopsticks, but this land-galley was equipped with segmented orange sticks. They looked very much like they came from this very biome.

  “Eh?” said Misha as the toymaker flapped its orange sticks in semaphore. Its wooden shell shuddered as some internal mechanism clunked into a new position. A sound cue? Some visual thing that Anne couldn’t see from this angle?

  The forest animal nosed closer.

  “Is it talking to that coatl?” Daisuke asked.

  “Toymakers don’t talk,” Misha said. “But I don’t know what that one is doing.”

  The toymaker rushed forward, then stopped. It rushed forward again until it was almost kissing the…yes, might as well call it a coatl. The toymaker held out its front oars like a toddler asking to be picked up.

  The coatl unzipped its snout and plucked the oars off the toymaker. The serpentine alien slithered off into the forest and the stranded toymaker clacked.

  “What?” said Anne, and the Nun started calling to each other.

  Misha cocked his head. “That’s the signal to move out.”

  “Great!” Daisuke clapped his hands together. “We’ll load the ATV and meet you at the wormhole.”

  “Farhad’s still going along with your plan, is he?” Misha narrowed his eyes toward the gate and the caravan beyond. “Are you sure you can trust him?”

  “I think so,” Daisuke said, while Anne thought, Not on your life.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Get Rich Quick

  Farhad did not kneel to pray, not when at work.

  He’d been fired for it, once, back in his first job in Los Angeles. His manager had walked in on Farhad during his lunch break, and they’d put him on probation a week later. Farhad had held on for two months before he came to his senses, gave them an excuse to fire him, and started his own business with a fellow Iranian. But Farhad hadn’t prayed in front of that guy, either. Farhad’s relationship with God was nobody’s business but his own.

  Now, if anyone saw Farhad sitting with his eyes closed, tea mug steaming in his hands, face turned toward the eastern window of the caravan’s bridge, they’d think nothing of it. The old man was just enjoying his tea, or perhaps he was meditating.

  That would be an interesting inversion of the truth. Several of Farhad’s friends did practice transcendental meditation, and they were forever talking about ‘reaching out to the cosmos’. That was the exact opposite of what Farhad was doing, which was opening himself up to let the universe flow into him.

  The caravan bumped. Aimi and Turtle whispered together while Boss Rudi, perhaps coincidentally, crooned a romantic ballad from forty years ago. Ginger sunlight shone through the window and onto Farhad’s face, which was turned east toward the wormhole that led back to Earth.

  Farhad saw his world in all its beauty and vulnerability. He saw his grandfather’s tomato garden, and the irrigation channels the old man had dug out between the plants. When the water came, the cracks in the soil darkened first, then brimmed.

  Farhad listened to the blood pulse in his temples. Should I give up? He asked. Should I stop pushing and turn us around? Go back to Earth and, I suppose, do something about its problems?

  The answer came as the sensation of a shadow falling over him. The skin on Farhad’s neck prickled as he felt the Howling Mountain looming up at his back. A massive cone, too regular in shape to be natural. It radiated cold from the wormhole at its peak. What lay there? What waited at the top of the tower?

  Fear. Suffering. Sacrifice. The transformations Farhad would have to create in order to climb that last mile. A reward to make the climb worth it.

  The wormhole. The escape valve. And so little time was left.

  Farhad opened his eyes. He had his answer: stay the course. Climb the mountain. Reach the finish line by whatever means necessary, and rest when you’re dead.

  He took a long, slow sip of his Earl Grey. Its heat spread down his body and pooled in his stomach. A center, a tunnel back to simpler, more dependable times.

  Farhad clinked his cup down on the arm of his chair. Aimi understood that this sound was a signal for her to stop what she was doing and pay attention. Before Farhad could say anything, though, Moon arrived.

  “We have to turn around right now,” the physicist demanded.

  Farhad quashed his annoyance. Why couldn’t Moon be his enemy and Anne his ally? That would be easier, emotionally. “All right,” he said.

  “The math is simple. The closest portal is the one in the middle of the Dorado biome. I need it. We don’t have time to detour to get another.”

  “All right, I said.” Farhad looked up at Moon, who was pacing back and forth on the bridge like a caged leopard. “I’m agreeing with you.”

  Moon stabbed a finger at him. “For now, maybe, but what about after Anne’s next tantrum?” Farhad clinked his mug again, wishing it were a gavel. Beyond the windshield, the Dorado forest still slid slowly by on the left. They were still driving north along the border of the Dorado forest, as Anne had demanded.

  “I can’t believe you gave in to her threats,” muttered Moon, but Aimi cut him off before he could work himself up any further.

  “If we have the Howling Mountain,” she said, “and the co-operation of Ms. Houlihan, we still have the secondary and tertiary missions.”

  “No!” Moon smacked the back of a chair and pushed off for another lap. This pacing must be making the man terribly carsick. “It isn’t enough. All we’ve done so far is prove we can destroy a portal!”

  “Phase two was successful,” Aimi pointed out. “Isn’t that something?”

  Moon stopped pacing. “It is nothing!” he hissed. “Pure research doesn’t matter anymore. I’m not a scientist anymore. I am a monkey in a Ferrari and I need the key in my paw!”

  Farhad noted Aimi’s flinch from Moon’s raised fist. The poor boy. A pity he didn’t consider himself a scientist anymore, because he wasn’t a man, either. Maybe this outburst was Moon’s way of telling Farhad that. A cry for help.

  “Professor,” Farhad said, “I understand. And I agree with you. We’ve already destroyed a wormhole. That information alone will turn international politics upside down, but if we want any leverage from which to bargain, we must complete the primary mission. And for that, you need your wormhole.”

  “Portal!”

  Farhad waved his hand, more annoyed with himself for forgetting Moon’s foibles than at Moon for having them. When a man’s dog bites someone, you don’t blame the dog, you blame the man.

  “We must reach our goal at any cost,” Farhad told them.

  “Yes, and we have to tread lightly while doing it,” said Aimi. “We can’t just steal the w— I mean…the portal from the Dorado forest. Not if we want Houlihan’s co-operation.”

  “What co-operation?” sneered Moon. “What’s she going to do to us? I need that portal, Farhad.”

  Farhad hid his annoyance by putting his cup to his lips. It was empty. He looked down at it, suddenly tired despite the caffeine and the lingering smell of bergamot.

  He laced his fingers around the teacup and looked from Moon to Aimi. “All right,” he said. “Unless one of you has a better idea, I think the time has come to engage in some light treachery.”

  Both of his people slumped, but Aimi’s faint scowl indicated sorrow and anger. Moon just looked relieved.

  “Aimi,” ordered Farhad, “go to Boss Rudi and tell him to turn around. We go south and east, back to the Cavalier portal. Moon, figure out where the next closest portal will be.”

  “Obviously, the two closest portals are the Cavalier and Dorado portals. The most direct path is to just push past Anne and take it.”

  “No,” Farhad said. “I told you, the costs are too great. If we can visit two portals and come back here before Anne and the others realize what�
�s happened, maybe we can salvage something.”

  Moon smirked. “Once I’m done, it won’t matter what we salvage.”

  Farhad leveled a finger at him. “This is the attitude that made you think you could drive off alone into the Cavalier biome. This lack of caution lost us one portal already, so learn from your mistakes, son.”

  Moon flinched. Farhad hated to use such crude tactics on the man. Poor Moon was crushed between his dead father in the past and his own ruined mind in the future. Reminding him of that would only hasten his breakdown.

  But maybe Farhad didn’t have to care. All he really needed was to postpone the breakdown for two days.

  “Let’s go, people.” Farhad stood, and sent up a silent prayer that he would not be incentivized to commit any worse acts than this one.

  ***

  The Dorado wormhole did not sit above a mound or at the bottom of a hole. This wormhole was trapped, pierced by the branches of the trees, and crawling with activity.

  Spiky orange limbs as thick as Anne stuck out from a ring of mighty Dorado trees and went right through the wormhole, presumably interconnecting to a matching ring on the Dorado home world. Coatls formed rushing conga lines across these bridges, a pulsing stream of activity that reminded Anne of ants in columns. Or maybe one of those time-lapse pictures of stop-and-go traffic.

  Except ants and cars didn’t suddenly peel off in a different direction or slam into each other and…fight? Mate? Start dancing? It looked like all three at once. Tangles of wrestling animals formed, grew, then scattered without apparent signal. Phalanxes would coalesce, clear paths through the melee, then dissolve and join it. Swarms harassed loners, loners gathered guards around themselves, individuals in both groups switched sides, all apparently at random.

  Creepy. Strange. Interesting. Anne found her fingers clenching as if to rip open this forest’s secrets.