Interchange

by Daniel M. Bensen

“What am I looking at here?”

  “We’ll protect it,” Daisuke declared, his hand on her shoulder. “Even if Farhad was lying—”

  “He was lying,” said Misha.

  “Even if he comes through the forest,” Daisuke said, “we will be here. We’ll be waiting for him.”

  “Don’t say that, Dice.” Anne gestured at the Nun and their toymakers, which were still filtering in from the eastern forest and arraying themselves in protective circles around the wormhole. “If Farhad comes through the forest, that’ll mean he’s leveled the forest.”

  “I thought he would use the ATV,” Daisuke said.

  Misha crossed his arms. “Yes, that’s my most likely scenario. Farhad sends his goons in the other ATV, along with guns and chainsaws.”

  The Nun would kill or die to protect this wormhole, Anne knew. Or more likely, kill and then die, because the vast majority of their food and water was inside the caravan.

  “What about food?” Anne asked. “Farhad can starve us out.”

  “Probably not,” Misha said. “He has a schedule to keep. We have enough supplies that starving us out will take him longer than driving around the forest to the Howling Mountain and blowing up its wormhole.”

  “Shit,” said Anne, who hadn’t thought about that possibility. “And if he’s willing to just leave us here, he can traipse across the landscape, experimenting on whatever wormholes he wants.”

  “If he leaves us here, we’ll just walk back to our village,” Misha said.

  “Do we have enough food for that?”

  Misha’s big, florid face went suddenly stony. “You let us worry about that.” And in a more normal tone of voice: “Of course, Farhad will try to stop us from getting back to civilization before him. He won’t want anyone to know what he’s been doing out here.”

  In the past few days, Anne had almost forgotten about Junction’s extra third G of gravity. Now she felt all of her extra weight and more. “Agh! I hate thinking like this,” she said. “I hate people and their politics and scheming!”

  “Then you have come to the wrong place, dorogoy,” Misha said.

  Anne blinked, looking back up at the rush-hour traffic on the Dorado trees. She knew that Misha meant that the humans had brought politics with them, but now that she thought of it, wasn’t there something city-like about this forest?

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what keeps creeping me out.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Daisuke.

  Anne found herself smiling. Daisuke was banishing whatever nerves he might have twinging and letting her bounce speculative biology ideas off him. She could feel guilty about that, or she could lean up against him and enjoy his warmth and solidity.

  “The more I look at these trees, the less sense they make.” With a sweep of her hand, Anne indicated branches that formed ramps, bypasses, flying buttresses, braces – more architecture than physiology. “Look at those two trees. There’s a bridge between them!”

  “Maybe that growth is accidental,” Daisuke said. “Sometimes trees grow together.” He rubbed two of his fingers together. “The wind makes them touch and the bark comes off….”

  “This isn’t accidental,” Anne said.

  “So it’s planned, then?”

  “Well obviously it’s not planned,” Anne said, although there was nothing obvious about anything here. “But it is sure as hell co-ordinated. Like the tunnels of an anthill. Except ants just dig tunnels. I don’t understand how these structures could have grown this way. All right, so a mangrove can grow stilt roots and a banyan can grow prop roots, but – but look here.” She pushed herself off Daisuke and walked up to the nearest flying buttress. “Imagine a branch that grew up from the ground and curved to meet this trunk, or maybe a branch that grew from the trunk and curved down to hit the ground. Why am I sure that’s not what happened here?”

  Misha only rolled his eyes, but Daisuke was smiling. “These little shapes in the bark.”

  “Correct. The bark is segmented, just like the vines and the grass. Made of lots of little elements. But the elements in this buttress didn’t grow up from the ground or down from the trunk, they’re not even coiled or in bands! That would be very un-Earthlike, but at least I could understand how it grew.”

  “What’s so strange?” Misha said. “Haven’t you ever seen bricks in an arch?”

  “Misha, if these elements are actually little bricks, then who stacked them? Or here.” She pointed to the base of one of the forest giants that pierced the wormhole. “Look at these chains of segments that ring the trunk. They’re like the hoops around a barrel. How did they grow like that? Those segments aren’t connected to anything but each other. Are we looking at a distinct plant? Some kind of symbiote? A parasite? Or is it exchanging structural support for something?”

  “I still don’t know why you’re worrying about this,” said Misha. “Do you think that if you can figure out what makes this ecosystem tick, you can use it to do something to Farhad?”

  “That would be great!” Daisuke said.

  “I’ve had about five minutes to examine this biome,” Anne grumbled, squinting into the forest. “What the hell do you expect? A tree that I can plug my brain into?”

  “Maybe we can just relax and learn about aliens,” Daisuke said.

  “Maybe we can.” Misha looked back toward the Nun’s defensive ring. Yunubey was walking around it, talking to his men and giving each what looked like a handful of dust. “Ugh. They say they’re throwing the go-home dust. Another ritual I don’t need to see. All right. Let’s go exploring.”

  They walked past the first ring of trees. The trunks were as densely packed as Anne had predicted from the drone photos of the canopy. She hadn’t thought the trunks would be this thick, though, or so gothic. Limbs twisted and spread toward a canopy so dense it was almost black. The only light came from the exclusion zones between one tree’s crown and other, like irregular rings of fire.

  Even the shadowed patches under giant trees had their own extravagant growths. The closest of these was roughly the dimensions of Anne, a monstrous lump of tangled tendrils with two huge curved branches protruding from the top.

  “Odd. It doesn’t seem like there’d be enough light for this bush to grow here,” she said. “Maybe it’s some kind of parasite? A fruiting structure? A flower?”

  There were certainly lots of animals climbing on the bush’s curlicue branches. Anne counted four distinct shapes of coatl. Species or growth stages or sexes or some even stranger determiner of morphology. Columns of the animals marched to and from the plant, paying it no less attention than the trees around it. She thought about the ecological web. Lines connecting nodes. Coming together into…what?

  “It doesn’t look like a flower to me,” said Misha. “It looks like those hedge sculptures we saw back at the gates. The yellow devils with horns.”

  Daisuke tilted his head to the side. “I think it looks like a giant ant.”

  “It’s not art, guys,” Anne said. But now that Daisuke had said it, she couldn’t unsee it. A hedge sculpture, just like the ones they’d seen back at the gate. And hadn’t one of those hedges also looked like this? Those two huge serrated mandibles. Those eyestalks.

  “Oh shit,” she said. “It’s the head of a cavalier.”

  A little searching found other hedge sculptures. In addition to cavaliers, there were legged barrels that looked an awful lot like toymakers, as well as stars, fern fronds, mouths with teeth, and a dozen other abstract objects. At least, Anne hoped they were abstract.

  “What do you think they’re for?” Misha asked.

  Anne looked up. She’d been studying a baroque tangle, as if an octopus had been planted head down in the ground, then persuaded to grow hands instead of tentacles. “Hell if I know. I guess I can’t claim to think these shapes are coincidental.”

  “C
argo cult?” asked Daisuke. “They worship alien visitors?”

  “War training?” Misha asked. “Maybe they ritually destroy these sculptures.”

  What Anne wanted to do was stake out an observation blind and spend the day watching. She’d need cameras and a team of people to help analyze the videos. Samples. Dissections. Radioisotope tagging would be lovely.

  Wasn’t that the point of this whole expedition? But Anne didn’t have time for any of it, and she was beginning to despair that she ever would. Even if Farhad came through with his promise of a research station, who could guarantee that this ecosystem would survive his attention long enough for Anne to study it?

  Her worries about Farhad and Moon and Junction in general loomed up, and she pushed them aside. Best to focus on one thing at a time.

  “All right,” she said. “Do you see that spike growing up out of the ground over there? It looks as if it’s growing up to meet that other branch that’s coming down and form a new buttress.”

  “So now you know how they grow?” asked Misha.

  “No! How does the tree know where these two branches are supposed to meet? Pheromones?” The air of the forest was redolent with something. The closest Anne could come to describing the smell was resinous.

  She approached the tree, watching a pair of coatls twist their way toward each other, one from each end of the half-made buttress. Each of the spikes was made of orange elements stacked like bricks, but the elements at the tip of each spike were blue, shining brilliantly in the curtain of light that slanted down from a crack in the canopy.

  “The elements that make the rings and the flying buttresses and the trunks of the trees are all the same,” Daisuke said, and Anne saw that he was right.

  Some of the thumb-sized, knobbly segments grew in regular rows, each born from the tip of the last. Others, though, were sideways or poking out as if someone had placed them there. There was also something odd about the colors. Yellow, orange, umber, brown, with clusters of iridescent blue. Contrasting colors?

  A coatl screwed its way out of the sierpinski-grass, its zipper-mouth stuffed with more red objects. They were cylindrical, about the size of Anne’s thumb. Rough cylinders, ridged on the outside as if they had been extruded by a machine. Anne thought of churros. Or maybe a child’s building blocks.

  Or bricks. Those red objects were the wrong color, but otherwise they looked a great deal like the segments that made up the trees. And the objects the toymakers had given the coatls guarding the gates.

  Anne watched as the coatl slithered up the lower spike of the unfinished buttress. It reached the tip and pressed its conical face to the blue elements there. It withdrew long enough for Anne to see it had clipped a red segment into place on top of a blue one. The possum-sized creature inserted the tip of its snout into the center of the segment, which began to flush purple.

  “Ha! It is a fruit,” Anne said. “Or some sort of flower. Or that mouth isn’t a mouth at all, but an ovipositor, and the purple segment is filling up with eggs.”

  “Are those things fruits?” asked Daisuke.

  “Hold on just a second.” Anne reached out to touch a blue segment at the tip of the lower spike of the future buttress.

  An oboe keen and the coatl flared its fronds at her.

  “Oh, sorry.” Anne stepped back. The coatl stayed where it was, staring at her through its spiral line of eyes. Now another coatl climbed up to stand beside it.

  The first twisted its head around. It unzipped its mouth, flashing the blue interior, then it shifted its grip on the tree and flared its fronds at Anne. The second coatl mimicked the first. The first went through the same routine, and again the second mimicked it.

  “Weird,” said Anne. “Am I watching a threat display or a mating dance or what?”

  The first coatl seemed to kiss its own body, then the mouth of the other. Anne saw a dull red object pass from the tip of one snout to the other, and the first coatl was slithering away up the tree. The second animal, though, stayed, flaring its fronds at Anne.

  “A guard?” Daisuke asked.

  “Who knows? I don’t.” But Anne’s cheeks burned. It was ridiculous, but she felt embarrassed. As if she’d just brushed up against security at a fancy office building.

  Anne took a step back. Another. The guard-coatl quested around with its nose, as if confused or bored. When Anne stepped behind another tree, the little animal smoothed itself out and wandered away.

  “That’s right,” Anne said. “Go about your business.” Business. Now, why did she think that word?

  “Okay, here’s a theory,” she said. “What if, instead of growing a fruit to tempt animals to pass seeds through their digestive systems, a plant grows a structural element. The element refuses to give up its nutrition until it has been used to build something?”

  “It makes the animals wait? How?” Daisuke asked.

  Anne hummed to herself. “I’m thinking about the toymakers, which seem to have been carrying those segments around since their last visit to the Dorado biome. They must have waited for a long time indeed. But how long did that coatl wait? And why go through the trouble?”

  Anne thought of the way coatls passed segments to each other. Of the trove of segments the toymakers had given over at the border crossing. The covetous way the coatls had hoarded this treasure….

  “Holy shit,” she said. “I think we’ve discovered money.”

  “It’s about time,” said Misha, who had been watching the Nun and the toymakers. “What are we talking about?”

  “The coatls pay each other with tree segments,” Anne said. “They even accept payment from toymakers.”

  Daisuke cocked his head, eyes pointed up, thinking out loud. “What if we paid them to spy on Farhad for us?”

  “That’s stupid,” Misha said, but Anne’s eyes widened.

  Could she get some of the forest’s currency and figure out how to use it in one night? She turned toward the nearest Dorado tree. “So let’s get rich quick.”

  ***

  The forest hummed with commerce. It throbbed.

  Flying creatures like bees or hummingbirds zipped between flowers like gaudy wrought-iron cages. Others twirled down from the canopy, spinning on stiff little wings. Coatls, ranging in size from leg- to hand-length, streamed around boar-sized creatures that growled over the sierpinski like armored troop carriers.

  Now that Anne knew what to look for, she saw that even the trees moved. A cluster of animals would condense around a blue-tipped limb and scatter, leaving it longer. Others would snatch elements from existing structures, or gather into larger groups to besiege and disassemble entire plants. Entire leaf-bearing branches would be unplugged from trunks and snapped into new positions. Over the course of the day, spots of light opened, closed, and shifted as the forest canopy was re-engineered. Everywhere flashed the blue and orange of negotiation.

  The coatls didn’t flock, exactly, or swarm, but their behavior was clearly emergent from something. It reminded Anne of ocean waves, except these waves were from and going to every direction.

  Anne remembered sitting at her apartment’s window – Daisuke’s apartment’s window – watching the pedestrians on the busy streets below. Every little speck had its own place to go and thing to do. Rushing, rushing, and never arriving. Those pitiful little idiots, she had thought.

  Now, why would Anne’s cheeks flush at that memory? Was she ashamed of comparing humans to animals, or the reverse?

  She cleared her throat and the men looked at her. “This place is a city. It’s Shibuya at rush hour.”

  “I think Tokyo is better organized,” Daisuke said.

  Anne stepped around a long, skinny coatl, which opened fronds like skirts to reveal shimmering sapphire bristles. “Times Square, then.”

  “What’s the word?” Daisuke asked himself, looking up at bustling branches
. “Trade? Commerce.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Misha. “How would a squirrel tell a dog that it wants to buy something? How would the dog understand it? Do the coatls talk to each other? Can they, like, negotiate contracts?”

  Anne had seen a dozen alien species held up as potential sapients. They’d all proven to be disappointments. Even toymakers had performed worse than rats in creative problem-solving, and their supposed ‘language’ consisted of five non-combinatorial signals. Coatls, though….

  “How do you negotiate an exchange of money for services unless you have language? That would be an interesting question to answer.” Anne peered around, eyes narrowed. “Maybe if I could get my hands on one of those detachable…segment…element…brick things….”

  “Doubloons?” suggested Daisuke.

  Anne looked up sharply. Had she really hurt Daisuke’s feelings when she rejected his name for this plant? His face said he was teasing her, but his face lied all the time.

  “Fine. If I had some doubloons, I’d be able to experiment.”

  Misha growled. “You and your experiments. We are not scientists here; we are defending the forest from Farhad.”

  Anne looked at him, trying to think of something to say more helpful than ‘Shut up, Misha’.

  Daisuke cleared his throat. “I think that Anne has a plan. She will probably find out something about this forest that will help us.”

  “You mean like we could pay the forest creatures to attack Farhad? This isn’t a cartoon, man.”

  Anne decided to let them argue. She didn’t want to think about Farhad or what he might be planning. She just wanted to see what was up with that bush shaped like a fish standing on its head.

  Like the rest of the forest, the fish-bush was constructed of orange segments. She grabbed one between thumb and forefinger. The doubloon did give a little when she wiggled it, but before she could pop it free, a coatl rose from the bush, humming at her and shaking its fronds.

  “Just knock them away,” urged Misha, who, Anne noticed, was not offering to tackle any aliens himself.

  “I’d like to get past them without hurting them,” she said.