Daisuke lowered the binoculars and looked at her.
Anne’s first impulse was to say, “Of course I’m still going after Farhad. What he’s doing is evil!” But when she looked back at him and tried to deduce what he wanted, it became clear that Daisuke wanted something else from her. He couldn’t tell her what it was, because if he did, it would be meaningless.
If only she had any idea what it was Daisuke wanted.
Anne knew she was over-thinking this, but she didn’t have much practice at under-thinking, did she?
“Look, Dice. My theory about myself is that I lost the ability to imagine good things happening.” She sliced a hand toward the Dorado forest. “It was so easy to look at a tree and see how it might be cut down, I couldn’t see how it might grow again. You know?”
“I know.” Daisuke lowered his eyes. “I saw you were angry.”
“I couldn’t stop it. Just saying ‘I don’t want to be angry’ didn’t work. I needed a reason – I’m a scientist, I need reasons – but I couldn’t find any. The more I looked, the more problems I saw, the more reasons to lose hope. Finally there was nothing left to examine except….” She hugged herself. “Except for the rocks I couldn’t look under. I was afraid of what I might find there.”
Daisuke’s eyes crinkled up with his smile. “Professor Houlihan,” he said in his low, slow TV voice, “will you tell me what you found under those rocks?”
That shocked a laugh from her. “Ha! Right! What I found was our last trip to Junction, you jerk. Remember? I was having this grand old time while you were going insane trying to protect me from a murderer. I didn’t even believe there was a murderer!”
Daisuke rubbed his chest where a toymaker had shot him. “But you caught her.”
“Right. I told myself I was smarter this time. I thought I knew about the danger. I made it my mission to protect Junction, but that conflicted with your mission to protect me.”
Daisuke’s eyes were sad now, but he nodded. “You understood that just now?”
“No, I actually figured that out back in the Dorado forest.” Anne resisted the urge to look away from him. “I was so angry at you. You’d put me above the future of an entire planet! And you knew that I was angry at you, but I didn’t know that you knew….” She held her hands up to her head. “I couldn’t stand thinking like that, so I didn’t try. I didn’t figure it out until just now that…,” she slowed down listening to herself, “you don’t think you’re good enough for me.”
Daisuke stiffened, blinked and looked away. Shock? Sudden tears? Did that support or disprove her hypothesis?
“You don’t think you’re smart enough or enough of a conservationist, or good enough for anything but protecting me from alien monsters,” Anne probed. “Uh, right?”
“I also thought I was good for listening to your theories,” he said, and smiled, although his breath caught.
Ha! Support! This was like figuring out the mountain’s biology. The same pieces were there, but now they connected up. All the little bits fit together because that was how they grew.
“Right. I kept seeing you with Farhad and Aimi and thinking, ‘They’re all manipulators.’ I didn’t see the difference: you really care about the well-being of the people you’re dealing with. You aren’t willing to sacrifice people in some grand scheme, like Farhad.” She spread her arms. “That’s how I want to be too.”
“But I want to be like you. I want to not care what they think about me.”
“Wait a sec, all those times you told me ‘fuck ’em, don’t listen to the trolls on the internet,’ you were giving advice to yourself?”
He shrugged. “I want to be strong like you.”
“Strong like a bull in a china shop, maybe. Even when I knew you wanted me on your side, I didn’t do anything with the knowledge. That wasn’t blissful ignorance, that was willful ignorance. Armor. And if you need to be more like me, I need to be more like you, or else I’ll turn out like Moon.”
“Probably there is something in between,” Daisuke said.
Anne pinched the diamond on her left ring finger. “Let’s find that equilibrium.”
He looked back at her. He was smiling again, as brilliantly as he ever did on camera. “Let’s find it.”
He put his arms around her, and Anne returned the embrace. Life could be destroyed in an instant, but in every instant it lived, it grew.
She looked up into Daisuke’s eyes. He frowned.
“How can we stop Moon and Farhad from stealing the mountain’s wormhole?”
“Or blowing it up?” Anne held him tighter. “I don’t know, yet, but I think we can do it. This feels like a good first step, though. Trusting each other?”
As if waltzing, Daisuke turned them around so he could look up at the mountain. Mist swirled just a few meters over them. “If you know a faster way to climb, we can beat them to the peak.”
“Assuming that’s where the wormhole is. And I’m wondering…hm.”
Anne released her fiancé and looked, not up the slope, but horizontally across it. She examined the seam where the apical and equatorial canopies met. She pictured a cube with a melted, petrified tree growing out of each face. What sort of environment would produce a shape like that? What would be going on in the center, where the trunks met?
“Anne?”
“Let’s do some exploring. Reconnoiter. Figure out what it is that we’re trying to protect.”
She pulled Daisuke across the upper slope of the mound. He was holding on tight to her hand, unwilling to let go.
“You missed me,” she hypothesized.
“Of course! I was worried! I thought something horrible happened to you.”
Anne could sympathize. “I thought about horrible things too. You open a window to the world, and these thoughts swarm in. What if everything I love dies?” She cast about for another ribbon-tree, but couldn’t see one.
The fog was all around them now, but Anne could still see the mountain in her head. The equatorial trunk branched and branched again, each bifurcation ninety degrees offset from the one before. There should therefore be another mound above them and a little to the south. If it was tipped with ribbon-trees, those would be dangling….
“That way,” she said.
“Yes,” said Daisuke. “I’m sorry, Anne. I can’t stop worrying about you. I don’t want to stop.”
“Well, I don’t want to stop worrying about Junction, either. What’s love if you’re not scared of losing it? What’s the point? But then, look at this mountain!”
“I can’t see it.”
“You know what I mean. Visualize it.” She led them onward, pulling Daisuke through what felt like very fine spiderwebs. Lead-colored shapes gleamed ahead. Not ribbon-trees, but some huge, round object, an egg as big as a boulder, connected to the ground with a fat stalk. A fruit? A bud? A giant eye on a stalk?
“What’s the point of a mountain?” Anne said. “Nothing! Unless somebody looks at it. That’s the point of mountains. That’s life. That’s love! You find something beautiful, you turn to someone, and you say, ‘look at that view!’”
Daisuke smiled, but said, “I still don’t see anything. Just darkness and mist.”
“Hm.” Anne pinched the diamond on her ring, thinking. “The mist.” She’d been trying to focus through it. Now that she stopped and considered the air in front of her nose….
The stuff retreated when she drew in breath, then advanced again when she exhaled. It trailed cobwebby fingers across her hands, tasting her skin, twisting together into tiny vortices that carried away her sweat and sloughed skin cells. Larger whorls turned more slowly, gathering and distributing resources, forming tunnels to communicate with their neighbors, linking themselves like a ball-and-stick model of tremendous molecules just on the edge of visibility.
“The mist is alive,” she said. “
And why shouldn’t it be?”
“What do you mean?” What did that waver in Daisuke’s voice signify? Anne arrived at a hypothesis.
“Don’t be scared?”
His hand flexed around hers. “Okay.”
“Anyway, perhaps this is some kind of froth of tiny bubbles? Air, lipid membrane, cytoplasm, membrane, more air. But strung together with what?”
From ahead, their came a clunking, as of wooden clocks.
Daisuke held her back. “Wait.”
“Don’t leap into danger.”
He looked around at her. “Okay. Let’s stay together.”
“And maybe look first?” Anne brought up her binoculars and focused on the vague shapes in the mist. More lead-colored buds, they looked like, even bigger than the one she’d seen before. The largest, a burr-like hairy thing, could have easily fit four people inside it. It sagged sideways on its stalk, fuzzy apex open, revealing a glowing interior. Something moved around it, tocking.
“Toymakers,” Anne said. “Either the Nun didn’t eat all of theirs after all, or these are wild.”
“What are they doing?” asked Daisuke.
“I don’t know.” There were other shapes moving around the bud, as well. “Okay. Ten steps forward. Ready?”
They stayed quiet and low, which seemed to work. At least, Anne and Daisuke were completely ignored by the aliens.
“Not just toymakers,” whispered Anne. “Those are possum-type coatls.”
“Any cavaliers?”
“Not that I can see.” Or smell? Anne breathed in through her nose, and was rewarded with the sewage-stink of toymakers, as well as a sharp, vinegar-and-cat-piss smell she’d never before had the misfortune to experience.
“A signal for pollinators?” she wondered.
“What?” Daisuke asked.
“I’m guessing that shiny thing over there is the mountain’s flower. Like the ribbons are its leaves. So the toymakers and coatls are like bees? Let me watch.”
What were the aliens doing? A pollinator would visit a flower, get its equivalents of pollen and nectar, then buzz off. That wasn’t what the toymakers and coatls were doing.
The toymakers filed between the fuzzy-bud and one of their mobile fortresses. The coatls were less well-organized. They seemed to be paying each other to dart into the bud, and out again. In both cases, though, the aliens carried things in that didn’t come back out.
“They’re storing stuff in it,” said Anne. “Or maybe feeding it? How does that make sense?”
She looked up the mountain and something clicked. “Oh. Maybe. Come on, Dice, let’s go see the cave.”
“Yes? What cave?”
They didn’t have to walk far before the ground started sloping out from under them. Rock curved as if pulled inward, puckering into a cavern, funnel, an orifice.
“Right,” said Anne.
“How did you know there was a cave here?” Daisuke looked around at the deserted mountainside and laughed. “Tell me, Anne. I want you to explain to me.”
Anne’s first thought was that he was making fun of her. But he wasn’t. She could tell from his face. The way he looked at her, cheeks flushed, lips parted. He smiled in a way that made this entire trip worth the cost.
“The toymakers and coatls back there are loading a fuzzy-bud, right? Not feeding it, but caching supplies. Supplies for a trip! A trip to where? A trip to space. And how do you get there?” She stretched her arms toward the cave. “Ta-dah! Through a wormhole.”
Daisuke furrowed his brow. “The cave is connected to the peak of the mountain?”
“No! No, the wormhole was never in the peak. It’s in the center! Where all the trunks come together.”
Now he was smiling again, enjoying playing Watson to her Holmes. “Trunks?”
Anne made the peace sign with one hand, then the other, one coming off the other. “One trunk splits in two branches, which splits in two again, and so on. That cave ahead of us must be the crotch where two big branches come together into a trunk.”
Daisuke snickered.
“What?”
“I’m thinking about Misha. He would say, ‘This doesn’t look like a crotch. It looks like breasts.’”
Anne looked down the slope of their mound, and up the next one. The cave they were headed for in between. “Christ, Daisuke, you must be horny as hell.”
He smiled at her. He smiled hard. Anne found herself blushing.
“I’m very happy we’re together,” Daisuke declared. “I’m happy that you’re happy. And we’re alone together.” He grabbed her around the hips.
Oh! Anne considered it. She considered Daisuke. Or perhaps ‘relished’ was the more accurate word.
Daisuke’s hands moved up and down her back. “Jikan nai,” he growled. “We don’t have time.”
“You know, I think we might have time. If I’m right about the structure of this organism, Farhad etc. are hiking to the wrong place entirely.” Her heart pounded. “And there aren’t any aliens hanging around here. We really could…. Oh! Hey!”
That was all the encouragement Daisuke needed. Anne extracted herself, tugging up her suddenly unbuckled trousers.
“Let’s, uh, find some soft moss or something first? Then just make sure there’s nothing in that cave that’s going to eat us.”
“Maybe I’ll eat you,” said Daisuke, but he turned and skipped down the slope into the cave.
The cave was right where Anne had expected it, but it was inexplicably deep. It wasn’t just the volume squeezed between the four mounds around it. She had to think of a different word than mound. Lobes? Crowns. The branches had crowns. And four of them pressed together should leave a gap at the center, tapering to a point.
Except this cave kept going. It was a tunnel, its walls smooth, with gentle lateral ridges. No claw marks, thankfully, nothing that would suggest burrowing. The smooth surface ended abruptly at the lip of the tunnel, where the crunchy, friable rock resumed. The giant buds had sprouted there. Lead-colored ribbons spread from the bases of the buds, lolling down over the multicolored paths that the animals of various biomes had carved into the mountain. Paths that all led here.
Some sort of mutualism? The mountain drags animals up to its equator, where they pollinate the flowers and…?
Anne’s foot hit something on the ground. The object rolled like a stone lemon, dragging a skein of shimmery fabric. A vacuum-spinner. A treasure from space.
“Hey, Daisuke,” she said, turning. “Come look at this—”
Daisuke’s arms came around her. His mouth covered hers.
***
Daisuke fell on Anne like he was drowning and she was a life raft. Her back hit the wall of the cave. The smooth, hard surface pressed into her spine, but Daisuke was unzipping her jacket with a determination she found very flattering. She ran her hands over his shoulders as he bent to nuzzle her breasts.
Pros and cons: Farhad was headed for the peak of the mountain, where he would find nothing. This tunnel was dry and unoccupied. Anne really loved Daisuke, and they had sex only once on this whole trip.
He kept bending. A sharp downward tug on her belt and cold air hit Anne’s legs. She broke out in goose bumps, helped not at all by his face, which was pressed between her legs. Daisuke attacked her underpants.
Anne’s heart pounded. Heat diffused up her belly and chest like a shot of hard liquor going the opposite direction. Her legs twitched shut around Daisuke’s head. His fingers kneaded her thighs.
The wall still pressed into her back. Beyond the overhang, creatures darted through the living mist. Shadows flickered and colors bloomed. The phrase eating me out flashed through Anne’s mind.
Sensation gathered inside her, collapsing like a star. The two of them slid down the wall as Anne’s knees gave out. He was kneeling in front of her now and a live wire ran u
p from his mouth to the base of her skull. Another. Her legs squeezed together.
“Fuck, I’m going to suffocate you,” she said. Then, just, “Fuck!”
She repeated that a couple of times, probably. Mostly, she was just aware of red-and-black darkness, shot with lightning.
Eventually she released him. The heels of her boots sank back to the ground.
Daisuke stood over her, looking very satisfied with himself.
Anne’s was satisfied with him too. She reached down to her ankles, where several layers of clothing had collapsed around her boots.
“God, Daisuke,” she gasped. “Goddamn. You didn’t have to do that. Our jackets are thick enough we could just— Ow!”
Daisuke had somehow gone from flat on his back to on top of her. His arms were around her again and whoop.
Anne dug her shoulders into the floor of the cave while Daisuke wrestled with his pants. His expression before had been joyful, but now it was focused. A cat would look that way before it pounced.
This time the operative phrase was falling upon me. Anne had the feeling that if a hideous alien beast had materialized out of the mist between herself and her man, he would have torn it apart with his teeth.
There wasn’t anything too lumpy under her back. Like the wall, the rock was smooth, with gentle lateral ripples as if eroded by millennia of outgushing water. Her bottom was cold, but Daisuke’s heat more than made up for it. Anne’s skin was so sensitized it felt like she could feel every one of his leg hairs. His weight on hers increased. Perfectly, they slid together.
More sparks. More bolts of lightning. The walls of the cave vibrated like an earthquake. Anne buried her teeth in his shoulder.
The mountain howled.
Chapter Eighteen
Climb
And kept howling.
The noise expanded from whistle to siren to freight train to typhoon. Soon it wasn’t a sound at all, but a force that fluttered the diaphragm and pulled inexorably down the tunnel.
Anne’s ears popped, and the cave was suddenly full of living mist.
It streamed past her, thick with cobweb organisms. Something the size of a hummingbird tumbled past, triangular wings swiveling. A flash of light, a pop like a gun going off, and the animal shot back out of the mouth of the cave.
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