Interchange

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “‘If we had doubloons, we could pay the forest to attack Farhad,’” he repeated to himself. “Oh my, oh my.” Rage was an indulgence worse than alcohol. Farhad would not scream or stomp. He was not that kind of man. When Farhad Irevani killed, it was with kindness.

  He made sure his expression was warm, then turned his head. “You did well, son. We turned the caravan around. Anne and the others are in no danger of starving and the mission can move forward anyway. Everyone gets what they want.”

  Turtle nodded, but his brows were still pressed together when Boss Rudi brought the caravan to a stop. Ahead lay the gates to the Dorado forest, and Farhad knew just what to do with them.

  Farhad rose to his feet. His knees popped. His neck hurt too, but in many ways he felt younger than he had in years. He’d built his reputation on slow and steady progress. No corners cut, no dashes slapped. And yet sometimes the time came to make an executive decision. You burst into a sprint or they caught you and killed you.

  “Turtle, Rudi, you’re with Moon. Do as he says.” Farhad walked to the door. “Aimi. Follow me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He turned as the door opened and gave his mentee a smile. “No need to ‘sir’ me now. The fact that two thirds of my expedition is in open rebellion is no reason to fall back on hierarchy.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Farhad gave a short laugh and stepped out onto the ground. The wind was blowing cold from the north-west, and the resinous scent of the forest filled his nose. The yellow and orange forest might have been the larches and aspens around a Northern Rockies camping resort, but the smell made Farhad think of spice markets. Although maybe that was just his plans affecting his perceptions.

  “We should have done a better job of value alignment,” Aimi said. “I should have worked harder to get Anne on our side.”

  “Don’t say, ‘I should have,’ say ‘Next time I will’,” Farhad said. “And in fact what we should do next time is not hire someone whose interests diverge so sharply from our mission plan.”

  They reached the gate. Segmented orange coils blocked further progress, elaborate and lovely as Reyhan calligraphy.

  “The problem is that this expedition is a one-off event,” Farhad said. “There won’t be a next time. I’m sure you’re familiar with the game theory of this situation. The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Non-iterated.”

  “Not a good game to play,” Aimi said.

  “And yet, here we are.” Farhad examined the gates as well as his memory. “What was it Anne said? Wave your doubloon around to indicate you want to pay for something. An economy-ecology. Fascinating.”

  “But money isn’t real,” Aimi said. “It’s a tool we humans invented to keep track of debt. How can animals have it? How could this evolve naturally?”

  “Maybe it didn’t.” Farhad said. “Maybe this forest was intelligently designed.” He looked around at Aimi’s silence. “I mean some alien civilization built this place. You know. With genetic engineering, like in that one movie.”

  Aimi squinted at him. “You think the coatls were made by the Zookeepers? Like as pets?”

  “Maybe the Zookeepers. Maybe someone else. But don’t think pets. Think delivery drones.” Farhad waved at the bustling forest. “You build robots to deliver goods to consumers. You build robot factories to make those robots. And robots to make those goods. Robots to place the orders. Robots to choose what consumers buy. Eventually, it’s all just robots, going around and around.”

  “Living robots? Shaped like orange squirrels?”

  “Well, I admit the color was a surprise. And the hooting.” Farhad turned up his hands. “Maybe I’m wrong, and this really is all natural. Maybe money really does exist, like flight or vision, and many animals will evolve it independently. In any case….” He noticed his mentee’s lack of expression. “What’s wrong?”

  She looked away, jaws working. Looked back at him. “Farhad, when I started working for you, you told me you hated cutting corners. Well what is this?” She spread her arms to indicate the forest between them and the mountain. “This is literally cutting a corner.”

  Farhad spend a moment meditating on the fact that what he hated more than cutting corners was being second-guessed. He said, “I’m afraid there’s no other choice. We don’t have time. But once we get Moon’s wormhole, we’ll have enough leverage to apply the brakes a bit.”

  “You mean we’ll be able to threaten everyone else to back off while we entrench ourselves. But will we be entrenched in the right place?”

  Farhad examined his feelings. I am annoyed with Aimi. More than that. I feel betrayed. And I notice that Aimi is in my way.

  “We can’t have this conversation now,” he decided. “But you have until we reach the top of Howling Mountain to convince me there’s a better way. Deal?”

  “Deal,” she said, but not happily.

  Farhad breathed through the familiar annoyance of everyone piling their problems on top of him. He’d asked for this. He’d put himself in a position of power, and the price for that was that people looked to him to fix their lives.

  And, to be absolutely honest, Aimi was right. This whole enterprise was slap-dash, and it was only a matter of time until it fell apart. Farhad didn’t like this feeling of riding the edge of collapse either, but what other choice did he have? If the American army wasn’t storming toward the Howling Mountain right this moment, they soon would be. He’d destroyed a wormhole.

  Maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe Aimi would give him a real alternative to this smash-and-grab. Until then, though, it was time to get grabbing.

  As they approached the gate, a coatl slithered out of the vines and hooted at them. Yes, this would be why Farhad’s plan hadn’t been enacted before. The trees were involved in this economy. They controlled the money supply. Of course they would have guards.

  Farhad didn’t have any doubloons yet, but a search of the kitchen had produced a baby carrot. This had needed only a few minutes under Turtle’s pen-knife to become counterfeit currency.

  Farhad waved his vegetable coin, and the coatl’s snout unzipped. Blue interior surfaces glistened. He had its attention.

  “You brought the machete, Aimi?” he said. “Good. Chop at that thing if it tries to attack me.”

  Aimi chuckled. “The worker chops, the manager decides which tree, the leader decides which forest.”

  “Exactly.” Farhad grabbed a structural element of the gate-vines, what Anne had called a doubloon. Immediately, the coatl rushed him. The alien was the size of a boa constrictor, but Aimi sliced it neatly in two.

  Farhad had expected that. One of Aimi’s hobbies was Filipino knife-fighting. What Farhad did not expect was for the creature she killed to be full of money. He didn’t notice the orange lumps contained inside its tubular body until other animals boiled out of the gate and began stealing them. “Aimi!” he cried. “Kick those things away and collect that money.”

  “Next time, let’s get the others involved,” Aimi said as she chopped and kicked. “Ha. We should call these things ‘piñata snakes’.”

  Farhad laughed. They were gathering money much faster than he’d expected. He tossed away his carved carrot. No need for counterfeits now. “Would you like to switch sides? Give the machete to the old man while you haggle with the client?”

  “No, no, haggle away, old man.”

  Aimi gave him a handful of doubloons, which he waved at the next guard-coatl. The guard stopped, following his motions with its spiral-eyed snout. A flash of blue.

  “Now the buyer goes through the motions of what it wants done.” Farhad reached out, past the guard, and the tip of one of the curling vines that made up the gate. He gave a sharp tug, and off popped two doubloons and a half-grown sprout.

  The supposed guard did nothing to stop him. It only watched, blue throat flashing in and out of view behind its flexing teet
h.

  “It’s working,” breathed Farhad. “We’re tempting the serpent.” He waved a doubloon past the coatl’s nose and plucked another from the gate.

  The coatl pressed its snout against the gate and copied him.

  Farhad paid the coatl, then signaled he wanted it to do the job again.

  Now both Farhad and the coatl were collecting doubloons. This part of the gate was starting to look thin. Aimi didn’t need to use the machete anymore. The next guard that came to defend the plants was simply bribed into switching sides.

  “It’s working,” said Aimi.

  The more of the plants they disassembled, the more doubloons they had with which to pay for further disassembly. Farhad watched as his workforce grew and the gate melted away, unable to suppress his manticore’s grin.

  Beyond the gate, trees were beginning to sway. Farhad took a step back, watching, waiting for his chance to shout, ‘Timber!’

  ***

  The first sign of collapse was a massive increase in wages.

  Anne heard it before she saw it. The toymakers tocked when dealing with the coatls, and the humans grumbled. As they stood there guarding the wormhole grove, the sun sliding across the southern horizon, the tocking and grumbling had begun to come more often.

  “You greedy little bastard,” said Misha. “Didn’t I just pay you?”

  Anne had been leaning against a tree, eating the last of the food. Now she straightened, ears pricking. “Something’s wrong.”

  “Yes,” Daisuke said. “We don’t have enough doubloons to pay our guards. We’re running out.”

  Anne rubbed her face. She had fallen into a trance, playing with phylogenetic trees for the coatls, spinning idle theories on their evolution and development, watching the forest darken as she contemplated adaptive radiations after extinction events.

  “We will have to go out into the forest to find more jobs and get more money,” Daisuke said.

  The rat race. You couldn’t avoid it in academia; what had made Anne think she could avoid working for a living on another planet? “Do we have time?” she asked. “Once it gets dark….” She looked up, her voice trailing off. Gooseflesh prickled up and down her limbs, as if she were one of the trees of the wormhole grove, and coatls were scurrying across her skin.

  What was she feeling? What was wrong?

  Anne twisted around and looked at the grove. No, the nexus of branches was normal, the orange-and-blue orb hanging above it like a clock over a village square.

  The frenetic activity of the grove had not become any less intense either. There was still just as much rushing, clumping, and attacking as ever. What had changed?

  Anne let her gaze go fuzzy. Focused on nothing, unblinking, her eyes accepted information as a red-orange blur. A blurry fountain of scurrying creatures. A fountain flowing down from the wormhole.

  And that was wrong. The flow shouldn’t be so asymmetrical. Anne blinked and focused, but the conviction remained. More coatls were climbing down the trees than going up. More were coming through to Junction than returning to their home world.

  Anne turned slowly. Yes, most of that traffic was flowing away to the east. Anne caught her breath. The direction of the caravan.

  “Farhad,” she said. “Farhad’s doing something.” A coatl streamed past her foot. In the distance, something crashed like a mountain of pebbles. Light grew to the east, like a sunrise. The light had been growing, Anne realized, for some time.

  Another shattering crash. The Nun were yelling, looking around.

  “What the hell is going on?” Misha asked, either of God or of Anne.

  She started forward. Stopped. Daisuke had latched on to her arm, the whites around his eyes showing.

  “Don’t go!” he shouted. He had to shout now, above a rumble like a waterfall made of wooden blocks.

  The light grew steadily, and now Anne could see why. The canopy to the east was falling apart. Anne tried to pull out of Daisuke’s grip as she watched a great, spreading trunk melt. Its limbs dwindled away even as they tilted and fell.

  “Let go of me!” Anne twisted free and ran to the eastern edge of the grove. Her eyes darted, found a pair of coatls, focused on them as one animal waved extravagant bunches of doubloons at the other. When the second coatl flashed blue consent, the first lowered its mouth to the surface of the tree under it. It ripped loose a doubloon.

  A tree shivered, then clattered the pieces. Another. The noise increased, like waves crashing against a beach of woodchips. Animals streamed past Anne, who stood staring as the forest ripped itself apart. Animals wailed, horrifically like the sirens of ambulances. Pheromones like burning pitch coated her tongue. The light was very bright now, almost like on a treeless plain. Anne wobbled in it, drowning in understanding.

  We did this, she thought. I did this. She had thought she was winning this war, but wars destroyed. She had thought the righteous flame of her anger would only burn her enemies. Instead, the whole forest was burning down around her.

  Farhad’s caravan burst into view like the end of the world.

  It glowed orange with the sunset light that shone through the rip in the canopy. Mighty trees trembled at its passage, bent away, withered, broke apart into lucrative rain. And through the destruction, damned, cavorted the coatls.

  Animals weren’t fleeing the destruction. They were flocking to it. Adding themselves to it. Ripping apart their biome in a frenzy of misaligned instinct.

  “What is this?” shouted Daisuke.

  “Farhad!” Anne said. “They think he’s paying them.”

  Misha laughed. “And he thinks they’re working.”

  The caravan slowed as it approached the wormhole grove and allowed the market crash to sweep past it.

  ***

  Farhad flinched as another tree burst apart on the roof of the caravan. This couldn’t be good for the solar panels.

  “We’re almost at the wormhole,” he called, turning. “Are you ready, Professor Moon?”

  Moon stood with Turtle and Aimi at the door. The physicist’s skin looked pale, waxy, as if he were trying to replace sleep with caffeine. “You need to get Anne out of my way,” he grated.

  Farhad silently prayed, God, save me from expert consultants. Out loud he said, “I’m not going to kill anyone.”

  Moon made clawing gestures, as if fighting his way through cobwebs. “No, I mean I can’t do my experiments while she’s out there interfering. I don’t care how you distract her. Just keep her away from me.”

  It was annoying to be told to do something one was already doing. On the other hand, this was an excellent chance to appear to be serving Moon. “Of course,” he said, and brought his walkie-talkie up to his mouth.

  “Anne,” he said, “would you and Daisuke please board the caravan?”

  He held the device away from his ear while his biologist spat a stream of invective.

  “I need that portal,” said Moon. Aimi shushed him, and he flinched. The young man had screwed up badly with her, and there wasn’t time to fix things.

  “Anne,” Farhad said into his walkie-talkie. “Anne, please. Yes. Yes, I know. This is entirely my responsibility – fine! But it isn’t safe out there.” An idea occurred to him. Farhad kept the smile out of his voice as he said. “Daisuke, are you there?”

  Silence from both of them while Moon made more demands. Farhad suppressed a sigh, took his thumb off the talk button and said, “Are you ready, Moon? Do you have your bucket? Your net?” This was so exactly like getting the children ready for school. Farhad resisted the urge to tell Moon to pee now before he left.

  Maybe it was the memories of his children that caused the anxiety to spike up Farhad’s belly. Anne and her followers were his responsibility, just as much as his loyal people. Would someone physically attack Moon? Would Aimi and Turtle protect him? In doing so, would they harm th
e rebels? Would the local wildlife eat them or bring a tree down on them? There had to be a better way to do this.

  Farhad pressed the talk button and said, “Anne? Daisuke?”

  “Will you allow us to come aboard?” came Daisuke’s voice.

  Yes, there was the weak link. “Of course, son, of course. Bring Anne and whoever else needs safety.” Farhad would happily fill the caravan with angry tribesmen if Anne was with them.

  “We’re not doing anything with you,” Anne growled. “Never! We’re staying. We’re fixing this.”

  Fix? How do you fix a market crash? You cash out, hunker down, and hold on to what you can until the storm passes. But that argument wouldn’t work on Anne. Instead, Farhad spoke loudly and clearly, so that someone standing next to Anne would understand him. “It isn’t safe, Anne! Would you rather live or die?”

  ***

  Anne cursed and shoved the walkie-talkie back onto her belt. What was the point in talking to the slimy bastard? A waste of time, as useless as standing there, tears running down your face, just watching a forest rip itself apart.

  A giant tree swayed as its flying buttresses melted away. The place where the branches came together had been heavily reinforced, wound around with linked doubloons like the hoops of a barrel. Now, those hoops burst, and the trunk split in great vertical cracks. Doubloons popped with sprays of sap. Even as animals leaped from the branches, they clutched at the tumbling red-orange segments.

  Nearby, a large coatl sprayed money at its smaller employees, trying to find a price high enough to convince them to stay and protect their tree. Soon, the chief guard ran out of its own stash of doubloons, and started pulling them from the very tree it was supposed to be guarding.

  Doubloons rained from the sky. Animals dove for them, attacked each other, attacked the attackers. The phalanx of coatls guarding the wormhole grove broke and reformed, inverted. They ripped into the bases of the trees.

  The Nun and the toymakers were fleeing. Misha too. Daisuke made a grab for Anne, who stepped back. The humming and hooting of coatls had grown to a deafening siren of greed and alarm, rising and falling with the crash of trees.