“Ooh.” Misha rubbed his hands together. “A heist. I’ll be the getaway driver. Daisuke, you’re the muscle.”
Daisuke looked at the bush uncertainly. “I think I don’t want to rob a bank.”
“Even just a little branch office? Eh?” Misha looked from Anne to Daisuke. “Nothing? Fine.” He sighed. “I wasn’t thinking about anything violent. Just bribe the guards.”
“Bribe them with what, genius?” Anne said. “We haven’t got any money. That’s the whole point of this experiment.”
Misha shrugged. “I always use drugs or alcohol.”
“Always?” repeated Daisuke.
“I mean I used to. I’m a happily married Nun now, and now I’m sure I couldn’t even tell the difference between a twelve-year-old Hakushu and industrial alcohol mixed with black tea in a Hakushu bottle.” He coughed. “For example. Anyway, there must be something that those guards want more than money. Food? Sexual favors?”
“No!” said Daisuke, but Anne wondered if she might combine two investigations into one. She had no idea how coatl reproduction worked, and wouldn’t it be nice to find out? But wait. What had Misha said about alcohol? Tea? Happily married?
“Oh, I’m an idiot.” She slapped her forehead. “Misha, ask Yunubey. The toymakers got all of their doubloons from somewhere. How did they do it?”
Misha frowned, but Anne’s priorities now were to study the forest and save it, not untangle the ex-smuggler’s feelings about his brother-in-law. Grumbling to himself, Misha walked back toward the wormhole grove.
“How do they do it?” she asked herself. “How do animals invent money?”
“Well, we did,” Daisuke said.
Anne shook her head, but shelved the argument. Misha was on his way back, leading Yunubey. The chieftain held the tether of a toymaker blimp like a wooden party balloon.
“Hard work,” Misha said. “That’s how they got the doubloons. The toymakers put themselves out there and got jobs. That’s what Yunubey thinks, anyway.”
Misha said something in Nun to his brother-in-law, who gestured at the wormhole grove and at Anne and Daisuke.
“What’s he saying?” asked Anne.
Misha looked sheepish. “I’ve been playing too much with you.”
“Ignoring your duties as a Nun?” Anne asked.
Misha’s face clenched up, as if she’d angered him. “I thought what we were doing was important, but now that you mention it, yes, maybe I should spend more time with my tribe and leave the safety of this biome up to you.”
“She didn’t mean it that way,” Daisuke said, which made Anne want to ask him how she had meant it. But she was getting that hot feeling behind her eyes that meant it was time to let Daisuke drive, so she just folded her arms and tapped her foot. The whole purpose of keeping Daisuke around was so he could handle people and their squishy emotions, right?
The thought squirmed queasily in Anne’s mind. She dropped it. “Does your tribe need you?” Daisuke asked. “I’m sorry if we’ve kept you away from your duties.”
“Eh. Duties,” said Misha. “Yunubey is angry at me because I spend more time with you than with him, so my status is falling. I need to bring home some bacon. Instead, I’m asking for more.”
He turned to Yunubey, who launched into a long lecture. Misha’s expression grew glummer as this continued.
Yunubey pursed his lips and clicked his tongue twice. His blimp double-clicked back. Yunubey tongue-clicked three times, put his hands around the little wooden vehicle, and thrust it toward the sapling. The coatl guards fluffed their fronds and hooted again, but with a clunk of gears, the toymaker’s forward windshield turned blue.
“How the hell did that happen?” Anne leaned in toward it. “Is that a shell or something they’re pressing up against the inside of the glass?”
A coatl twisted toward her and hooted. The toymaker clacked four times, Yunubey snapped something, and Misha said, “Uh, Anne, move back a little.”
Anne took a step back, and the nearest coatl turned its corkscrew head away from her. It bent around and plucked something from the fronds that covered its body: an orange doubloon. The creature stretched its serpentine body out toward the toymaker, and tapped the doubloon against the blue windshield. It tapped again. And again, robotically.
“I think it looks confused,” Daisuke said.
“Supernormal stimulation,” said Anne. “Like a bee landing on a picture of a flower. That’s just what coatls do whenever they see something blue. They try to clip a doubloon to it. Maybe this trading behavior was exapted from a mating ritual? Or feeding young? If – oh.”
The coatl had broken out of its tapping loop. Still holding the doubloon, it darted away from the toymaker and down the branch. It stopped, reared up, and attacked the empty air. Four jabs of its mouth before it slithered up to its partner and made as if to pass its doubloon to the other animal. The other animal followed the doubloon with its snout, but the first slid back to the toymaker, which it tapped with its doubloon again. Finally, the coatl curled itself up and sat, as if waiting for the toymaker to do something.
The toymaker clunked and clocked and the blue flag vanished from its windshield. The little wooden alien made three decisive tocks and waited. It made another three tocks.
Yunubey spoke and Misha translated, “It’s hungry.”
“What’s hungry?” Anne said. “The coatls or the toymaker?”
Misha shrugged. “It’s impossible to say. Three clicks just means ‘seek’ or ‘get’. It’s the noise the toymakers make when they’re hungry, but it could just as well mean that the coatls are hungry, or that one of them is hungry, or that there is some resource around here that the toymaker wants.”
Anne reconsidered the little dance of the coatl and said, “Huh.”
“What?” said Misha and Daisuke.
“Hey guys,” she said. “Look around for something to feed the coatl.”
“What does it eat?” Daisuke asked.
“Meat, I’d guess from the way it mimed hunting.” Anne pulled gloves out of her jacket pockets and slipped them on.
The first thing that she noticed wriggling, she snatched.
When the wriggler failed to explode, spit venom, or otherwise try to kill her, Anne brought the creature up to her eyes. It flexed between her fingers, the front part of its body peeling back like an automatic banana. More of those zipper-teeth, except these were in a straight line down the length of its body. Less a banana than an empty sleeve, with button-eyes and a fur of little tentacles.
With the front third of its body unzipped, the animal now looked like a sleeve with its cuff undone. Or probably a better analogy would be a cobra with its hood extended. The inner surface of the sleeve was dark blue, shiny with some mucus that Anne didn’t want to get on her skin.
She rose. What would happen when she fed this thing to one of the coatls? But before she could put her experiment into action, the sleeve-snake in her glove clenched and spat something out of its body cavity. Surprised, Anne relaxed her grip, and the sleeve-snake hit the ground along with the object it had expelled. A pellet of waste? A distraction, like the tail of a gecko or the guts of a sea cucumber?
The pellet hit the sierpinski and bounced. It was roughly cylindrical, thumb-sized, burnt umber in color, with flattened sides and warts protruding from its pocked shell.
“Holy shit,” said Anne. “It’s a doubloon. The little bugger tried to bribe me.”
“Grab it!” Misha said.
She was too late. The doubloon bounced to a stop and the sierpinski erupted in animals. Forms like twisted ribbons, chains of starfish, and flying correa flowers swarmed over the doubloon.
“Hey!” Daisuke kicked at the swarm. “Itta!”
He yanked his boot back, dragging with it a trout-sized animal covered in plump tentacles. The creature writhed up Daisuk
e’s boot, exposing the serrated wedges of its zipper-teeth.
Daisuke winced as the trout-a-pus gnawed on his boot. Yunubey rose and stepped away, saying something sharp to Misha, who ran forward and gave the animal a kick. It let go with a shriek and plopped back onto the sierpinski. With flailing tentacles, the fish-shaped creature squirmed back under the protection of ground cover. The doubloon was gone.
“Damn it, Daisuke,” Anne said. “What if that thing had bitten your foot off?” She put her hand to her thundering heart, and found something crawling there on her shirt. She grabbed it, and held up to her eye an animal as long as a lima bean. An armored head with a collar of legs, followed by a leathery, fluted structure that unfolded into wings as the animal tried to fly away. A burrowing flier, maybe in the beetle or cockroach niche? Maybe something the coatls found tasty?
Before anything else could happen, Anne reached toward the hungry guard, offering up the flower-shaped creature. The guard pulled out its doubloon and waved it at her.
“Visual signals and mimicry,” she said. “Is that really enough to negotiate an exchange?”
Yunubey’s toymaker tocked twice, Yunubey said something, and Misha translated. “Now it’s saying ‘ready’. That means it thinks its job is done, I guess.”
Something slapped Anne’s hand. She jerked her attention back to the coatl, which had snatched the roach and deposited the doubloon onto her palm.
The coatl unzipped its mouth, brought together the tooth-fringed edges of its body, and squeezed down on the roach. It crunched.
Anne held up the doubloon and looked at it. Less a cylinder, now that she looked closely, than a rough hexagonal prism. Its hard shell was marked with raised lumps and lowered divots.
“A doubloon,” she said. “Wave your doubloon around to indicate you want to pay for something. Show off your blue internal surface if you want to work for pay. The buyer goes through the motions of what it wants done, and the seller mimics that behavior until the payments stop coming. There’s no need for symbols. Aside from the doubloons themselves, maybe? Hm….”
The toymaker tocked twice, and Misha said, “I think we have another customer.”
A second animal approached, waving its own doubloon. The coatl danced, miming hunting, and waved its doubloon again. Another dance. Another wave. It stopped, body pulsing, then launched into the display again. Dance wave, dance wave, dance wave.
“That’s three,” Misha said. “The coatl wants three more bug-things.”
“So they can count?” Anne wondered. What she wouldn’t give for a lab where she could study these things for a few years. Oh, right. She’d given a lot, and Farhad had demanded more.
For once, Daisuke didn’t notice Anne’s mood.
“Oh, I know this game,” he said, and pressed the toe of his boot into a gap in the siepinski. He jerked back when the trout-a-pus flared its tentacles at him.
The burrower hooted and pulled back a flap of skin over its mouth, revealing brilliant blue flesh. It gaped its mouth in what Anne was beginning to realize was not a threat display, but a merchant’s call.
“Is it offering itself up to us?” she asked. “Why would it want to be eaten?”
The animal closed its mouth and vanished into the ground cover, only to return a moment later with another roach struggling in its tentacles. It flashed blue again.
“It doesn’t want to be eaten. The little bastard is sticking itself into the middle of our transaction,” Misha said. “‘Oh, Misha, don’t turn me in. You know I’m your man if you have a job.’ There was this guy in Jayapura just like that.”
“What?” said Daisuke.
“The trout-a-pus is telling us that it will only let us hunt for roaches in its sierpinski if we give it a doubloon,” Anne said. The sentence felt a bit like reciting Lewis Carroll’s poetry, but Daisuke seemed to get it. He bent and took the roach from the trout-a-pus, gave the roach to the coatl in the bush, got his payment, and passed the payment on to the trout-a-pus, which went hunting again.
“Net profit: zero,” observed Misha.
Daisuke held up his hands. “This is very slow. If we want enough money to do what we want, we must work harder.”
Misha sniggered. “Step back, and let an old criminal show you how to really make money. Anne, bribe that guard to leave his post.”
Anne held her hands up to the coatl she’d fed. It threat-displayed.
“Bribe. Right.” She held up her orange doubloon and mimed lowering something to the ground. “I’ll pay you to leave your guard post. How about that?”
The guard followed Anne’s motions with its multi-eyed snout, then went into its own mime. It pulled a doubloon from its fronds, put it back, pulled it out again, and so on until Anne lost count.
“That is one expensive bribe,” Misha said. “I’m glad you don’t work at Indonesian customs, little dude.”
Anne ignored him, waving her offer as she mimed carrying the coatl to different spots on the ground, different branches on its tree, a spot on a different tree….
The coatl hummed and pushed its nose toward the next tree over, like an eager ferret. Its partner perked up, and pointed to the same place. Two passengers.
“Tell them to pay up front,” Misha suggested.
“How the hell do I do that?” But the coatls were ahead of Anne. They released their grip on the bush and fell into Anne’s hands, dense, frond-covered cylinders like feathery hot dogs. One of them snapped up the doubloon she was still holding.
“Hey,” she said.
“Maybe he thought you would stiff him,” said Misha.
The little animals just looked at Anne until, ashamed of herself, she carried them to the next tree over.
“Misha,” she whispered, “pull doubloons off of that branch this bush was guarding.”
“I already am, of course. Although next time, you let me do the negotia— Oh no!”
Anne turned to see Misha stagger back from the bush and the dachshund-sized coatl that had just slithered up its trunk. Fluting in rage, the animal unzipped its head to display a spiral of sharp teeth and gleaming digestive surfaces.
Misha cursed. “Middle management!”
Anne was about to ask Misha if he’d managed to steal any doubloons when a horrible, atonal blatt sounded from the branches overhead. She looked up to see three weasely bodies race out of the foliage. Two coatls were chasing a third, and while all of the animals looked identical to Anne, she could guess the identities of the pursuers.
The murderers! The two coatls Anne had bribed caught the third, grabbed it by each end, and twisted. With a sickening crack, the victim-animal broke, dropping a handful of segments onto the sierpinski.
One of the murderers rushed down the tree trunk to snap up the fallen plunder, and fought off the animals that emerged from under the ground cover to steal its ill-gotten gains. The bleats and hoots of the scuffle drew other coatls from the tree, which saw the first murderer chewing on the flesh of its victim. It gave out an alarm-call and its partner twisted up from the ground, holding most of the plundered segments inside its helical body.
The two criminals met on the tree trunk, looked toward Anne, and waved a doubloon at her.
“Ha!” Misha laughed. “Who’s the getaway driver now?”
“What?” Anne was frozen to the spot. Had these little aliens manipulated her? They’d tricked her into becoming their accomplice.
With a grunt, Misha strode to the trapped criminals and held out his hands. Each coatl spat out three segments, then three more once Misha had delivered them safely to their home sapling.
“Triple prices for emergency job,” he said, palms full of doubloons. “Half payment on delivery. How civilized.”
“Did we just get away with murder?” Daisuke asked.
“Oh, good idea.” Misha hopped back to the scene of the crime, where the
murder victim’s body had fallen onto the sierpinski. Misha snatched up the little corpse just as a trout-a-pus rose from the depths, tentacles spread to snatch the meat. Misha shook his finger at it. “Niet, moi drug. Hey, who has something blue I can show this guy?”
Anne could almost convince herself that the trout-a-pus’s tentacles clenched with frustration. But as soon as Misha flashed Daisuke’s Chapstick at it, it dragged itself farther into the open and unzipped its mouth to offer up payment. Misha received his doubloons and deposited the dead coatl. The trout-a-pus seized the meat and vanished back into the grass.
Anne looked at the bush, where the manager coatl was dispensing doubloons to the two guards. Paying them for their successful hit on the guardian of a rival tree? Or maybe the two criminals were flush with cash now and demanding higher wages.
“So,” said Anne, “the first interactions we try to have with the eco-economy and we get suckered by evil possums.”
“We’re strange-looking aliens nobody has ever seen before. What legitimate employer would hire us?” Misha stuffed doubloons into his pockets, grinning. “Now, come on, let’s find some more crimes to commit.”
Chapter Fifteen
Tempting the Serpent
Farhad leaned forward in his chair, steepled fingers tapping his nose, watching the gate to the Dorado biome as it grew larger in the windshield.
“I’m not sure what’s more disturbing,” he said, eyes still on their destination. “The fact that you thought I might strand Anne and the others and leave them to starve to death in the forest, or the fact that you hesitated to bring me the recordings from our bugs.”
“I’m very sorry, sir,” said Turtle. “When the caravan started going east, I didn’t know what to think.”
“We had plenty of time to accomplish our mission and still pick them up before their supplies ran out,” Farhad said, but who knew if the young man would believe him? This was the problem with a reputation for villainy. It eroded trust, necessitating further villainy.
If not for all this distrust floating around, Farhad wouldn’t have had to depend on the bugs he’d planted on Anne’s and Daisuke’s clothing and equipment.
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