“A rocket-propelled animal?” Anne could feel her lips and mouth form the words, but could hear nothing over the howl.
A hand grasped hers, let go, got a firmer grip on her wrist. Daisuke tugged, and Anne pushed herself after him. In this case, the heavy gravity helped them, keeping their hands and knees anchored against the smooth floor. The wind, the suction, was still rising though.
The fog was shot through now with whirling whips of dirt. Bits of variously colored vegetation spattered against Anne’s face. Blood pounded in her ears.
But she crawled forward. Hand, knee, hand, knee, she and Daisuke pulled each other out.
The intensity of the wind dropped once they left the cave mouth, but very slowly. The funnel-shaped depression in the mountain had no edges, no convenient corners or outcroppings to hide behind. Anne suspected that that was the whole idea.
“Behind the buds!” she yelled over the noise. “Downhill!”
The buds closest to the cave were bent double by the wind, their fuzzy silver heads beating against the ground like wrecking balls. Debris flew up from the ground uphill of them and swirled into the howling maw. The buds themselves, however, stayed anchored to the mountain.
Of course they would, thought Anne. None of them are ripe yet.
The wind was dying down. The howling had dropped back to audible levels and the fog seemed to be fighting back. Gossamer cages spun themselves across the cave mouth, fragile as frost crystals, white with frost and trapped debris.
Anne chuckled. “Catching some food of your own, are you? Cheeky little bastards.”
“What?” Daisuke shouted at her. “Are you all right?”
“Fine!” It was true. Anne was fine. She hadn’t been eaten by the…the…. “Hole-worm!”
Daisuke turned, face white and contorted. “What?”
Anne grinned at him.
“What?” he demanded. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“Somebody set off the wormhole!”
He glanced back at the cave mouth. “That was the wormhole?” Then back at her. Color was coming back into his face. “Who set off the wormhole?”
Anne rolled her eyes. “It was Moon and Farhad, obviously.”
The wind narrowed to a whistle and vanished. The delicate cobwebs of mist melted under the attention of buzzing scavengers. Something popped and darted: another rocket-animal.
Daisuke shook his head groggily. “What did Moon and Farhad do? You told me the mountain is alive?”
“Yeah, but then you distracted me.” Anne sniffed. More cat piss and vinegar. Bleh. “I didn’t have time to put together the walls of this cave that have been bored into the mountain. And the buds, Daisuke! The fuzzy-buds!”
He turned around and hugged her. She kept talking.
“Why does the Howling Mountain howl? We knew that the sound was probably caused by air rushing through a wormhole into space, but what opens the wormhole? Why does the mountain only howl sometimes? Why did it howl just now?”
He breathed out into her neck. “Are we safe?”
“Yes,” Anne said. “Mm. Probably.”
“Anne!”
“Unless Farhad and Moon trigger it again.” Anne frowned. “We should call them to make sure they’re okay. And find out what they did.”
Daisuke let go of her and patted his trousers and belt. They were unfastened, but still present. “You don’t sound angry at them.”
Ridiculously, Anne looked down at herself, as if she could see into her chest and check her heart for malfunctions. “I guess I’m not.” That was a stranger revelation than everything she’d just figured out about the Howling Mountain. “I’m actually grateful for them. They set off the wormhole and told me how this mountain works.”
Daisuke pressed the squawk button and got a squawk back. If it was possible for a walkie-talkie to sound panicky, this one did.
Farhad’s voice came through, thin and shaky. “It seems that nobody in the expedition has been eaten.” He explained that his team had cut through one of the ‘big round trees’ growing under a cave. This had turned out to be a very bad idea. “Anne, I apologize for my act of destruction in the Dorado biome. In the future, I promise you I’ll ask for your opinion before I engage in any environmental intervention.”
Anne’s first thought was, Yeah, right. Her second thought, though, was, You’re scared. Then another thought: Did he say ‘eaten’?
“There’s something big in the mountain, Anne. Stay with Daisuke.”
Daisuke’s arms tightened around her.
Anne’s first thought was, You’re manipulating Daisuke. The anger came next, pulled behind the first like the next carriage in a train. But there were more thoughts, weren’t there, behind this one? Anne followed the train of deduction as if she was figuring out an alien biome’s food-web. Right. So, Farhad was trying to trigger Daisuke’s overdeveloped protective instincts. But why would he do that? See the previous hypothesis, re: Farhad was terrified. He was grasping at every lever of control, trying to stay on top of the situation when really, what he should get was….
“You need help from us,” Anne declared. “You need explanations.”
She looked up at the smooth walls of the cave, out at the hard, round, Velcro-covered shells of the buds that only seemed to bloom on one place on the mountain.
“You saw the hole-worm, didn’t you?” she said. “It ate the fuzzy-bud when you cut its stem.”
“Um. What? I don’t quite follow your terminology.”
Anne rolled her eyes. “Come to us. We’re halfway up the mountain just like you, on the south-eastern face.” Anne thought of what Farhad would want to hear. “You’re safe. Um. I know how to get us into space.”
“What?” said Daisuke at the same time Farhad asked, “How?”
Anne imagined the mountain’s interior. Tiny, stone-skinned twigs came together into large branches, which converged with each other until they formed four mighty trunks. No, six, including the top and bottom faces. Here at the surface, the twigs were so small and numerous they were basically a solid mass, although one with lots of tiny air pockets. In the center, though, there would be enormous empty volumes. And nature abhorred a vacuum.
Daisuke stood and zipped up his trousers.
What if a wormhole leading to orbit sat here for a hundred million years? Surely something would evolve that exploited it. Anne imagined a worm boring into the mountain, eating through rock with the aid of, perhaps, an acid that smelled like cat piss and vinegar? The worm would thread itself through and between those internal trunks, its mouth opening outward into the nutritious air, while its anus found the mountain’s heart.
You could grow or shrink a wormhole. You could switch it on and off. The worms in the mountain could use this mind-bending rip in space-time to suck food into their mouths. The mountain, in turn, could grow a seed with a fuzzy exterior. That fuzz captures food for the worm. The interior stays safe as it’s passed into space, where it can germinate.
A slow, wicked smile spread over Anne’s face. She had a hypothesis to test.
***
“Not only wormholes,” Daisuke. “But also…hole…worms?”
They had spent about an hour making their way around the waist of the mountain. Now, from the way the ground was sloping, Anne could tell they were getting close to Farhad’s camp.
“It makes sense,” said Anne. “An entire ecosystem, this entire mountain, has grown up around the suction provided by the wormhole pulling air into orbit.”
“So then what happened to Farhad?”
Anne scraped her boots over the mountain’s petrified skin. “He cut down a fuzzy-bud to see what would happen, and what happened was a great stonking worm came out of the cave and swallowed it.”
“That’s what should happen, right?”
“Right. Some kind of mutuali
sm. I’m thinking the stuff stuck to the outside of the capsule is a treat for the worm. An incentive. The stuff inside the capsule is for a seed.” Although now that Anne voiced the assumption, it didn’t ring true. “Or not. Not sure about that yet.”
There had to be a way for things to come down from space as well as go up to it. The vacuum-spinners proved that. What tests could Anne do?
They rounded a pair of ribbon-leaves and came out onto a slope above another cave. Anne could see the ATV and the tent that Farhad’s group had pitched among the fuzzy-buds.
“I think we’ll need to camp out here for a few days,” she said. “See whether the bud stays in space or comes back, and in what condition.” Maybe they’d get the chance to have sex again.
“We can do it this time,” Anne said, mostly to herself. “We’ll keep him from doing anything stupid.” She glanced up at Daisuke. “Um. Maybe you’ll tell me how I should play this?”
“You should impress them,” he told her. “Tell them what you believe is happening and why. Understanding will give them a feeling of control.”
“Right.”
Anne reviewed her options, straightened her clothes, and descended to meet the others.
It chose that moment to vomit.
There was no noise this time, not so much as a rumble. The cave on this face of the mountain simply welled with clear, foul-smelling jelly.
From their vantage point, Anne and Daisuke watched Farhad and the others flee their tent and scatter from the path of the slow, gloopy avalanche.
“Should we help?” Daisuke asked.
“Naw. It doesn’t look like anyone is dumb enough to touch the stuff, and it isn’t exactly racing after them.”
The vinegar stench grew stronger, but Anne didn’t see anything smoking. The jelly just rolled harmlessly around the tent and unripe buds. It stopped. Quivered. Quivered again.
“Oh, I see,” said Anne. “There it is.”
A fuzzy-bud the size of a compact car appeared in the cave mouth, covered in jelly. It rolled over the lip of the cave, then slid down the rest of the greasy way. Once the bud was back where it had started, the jelly withdrew, sucked back into the cave like a noodle into a pair of lips. Once it was in the open air again, the aperture at the end sagged open. A coatl wriggled out.
“Ha!” Anne shouted, and everyone looked up at her.
***
“You predicted all of that?” asked Farhad, a few minutes later.
He had led the way to meet Anne and Daisuke at the cave. Moon swayed and stumbled behind him, clutching a long plastic tube like a discount wizard’s staff. Then came Boss Rudi, with Turtle and Aimi bringing up the rear. Were they holding hands? When had that happened?
Anne felt as if she’d been asleep for the past week, or wearing blinders. Her hand slipped back and reached for Daisuke, who grabbed it.
“Well, no,” she admitted. “I didn’t think the worm would spit the fuzzy-bud back up so soon. Maybe because it wasn’t fully loaded?”
“‘Fuzzy-bud’?” said Farhad. “Are we entirely sure about that name?”
“Never mind about the names.” Moon came to a stop. The butt of his plastic staff came down as if he wanted to lean on it, but the physicist jerked it back up at the last moment and tucked it under his arm. “She’s expecting me to get into one of those things and ride it through the portal.”
“Congratulations on experimental support for you hypothesis,” Anne said. “How else do you think you’re going to get into space?”
Moon looked at her as if she’d thrown a brick of gold at him. On guard, but hoping for more.
“You’re excited,” Farhad said after a pause. “I’m very glad to see it, but I’d appreciate a slower and more coherent explanation. With an emphasis on safety. How do we get into space now?”
“Okay.” Anne pretended she was sitting on a funding committee. “My guess is that there’s some kind of cycle. We see this Velcro stuff all over the buds? This fuzz?” She walked toward the buds, realized Farhad and Moon weren’t following, and turned around, gesturing. “Well, come on! Do you want me to explain it or not?”
They followed, and Anne lectured. “You already know the mountain is alive. It attracts animals to bring resources to it, which it stores in fuzzy-buds like the one you cut down. That action triggered the hole-worm that lives in the cave to come out and swallow the bud. Although I guess ‘bud’ isn’t the right word for it. I was thinking flowers and fruits at first, but that’s not what’s going on here. These things aren’t seeds, they’re more like cargo containers. Space capsules. Is there a bio-word for that? Receptacles? Macro-vesicles?”
Moon groaned and fell into a sitting position. Farhad cleared his throat.
“Let’s call it a capsule-pod. When it dropped off its stalk, the worm came out and ate it, using the vacuum of space to pull the capsule through its digestive system.”
“That doesn’t sound safe,” said Farhad.
“But we just saw the pod return, right?” Anne gestured at the spent, sagging structure. “The same one you saw depart just a few hours ago.”
“We could probably use it for another tent,” Daisuke said.
Anne found the next largest pod, still attached to the round and covered with hair. Closer up, she could see that its outer covering was stuffed with detritus, and crawling with small animals. “You see this stuff? None of it left on the pod that came back, is there? The worm slurped it in, scraped it off, and spat the pod back out. The interior was fine. That coatl lived through the experience, anyway.”
“What coatl?” Farhad asked.
“I saw it too,” said Aimi, cutting short another long explanation that Anne didn’t want to sit through. She was fizzing with energy, bouncing on her feet. Where did the logical thread lead?
Farhad bobbed his head, thinking. “If I understand you right, you’re saying this mountain is a biological spaceport.”
“What this mountain is,” Anne said, “is an entire ecosystem evolved to act as an airlock around the wormhole at the center. Ribbon-leaves drag stuff up here from the ground, store it in and on these capsule-pods. Once the pods are full, they close and break off from their stems, which is a signal for the hole-worm to eat them. At some point the toymakers and the cavaliers and coatls and whatever else got into the act too. They bring cargo from all over and deliver it into space.”
“Why would the toymakers want to go into space?” asked Farhad. “What do they get out of the deal?”
“That’s actually a really good question. I suppose to get resources?” Although now that Anne thought of it, what resources were there in space? “Maybe they have uses for organisms that don’t live on the surface of the planet? I’d like to find out.”
Farhad nodded as if he got it. “So this is it. This is why Junction’s creators built this place.”
“Natural selection would do just fine. You have a wormhole to orbit, and something evolves to plug it. This place is no different from a mangrove forest, where selective forces over millions of years reward co-operation.”
“Millions of years,” Farhad repeated. “If we leave it alone, we won’t need to add any other investments. We can just squat on it and charge our fees to passengers.”
Anne’s skin crawled, but she pasted on a smile.
If Farhad noticed the pro-social fakery, he pretended it was real. Fakery of his own? “But,” he said, “that’s a lot of assumptions. What if you’re wrong and this seed comes apart and gets digested in the worm, along with anyone who’s inside?”
“What if coatls can survive things that humans can’t?” asked Moon.
“Now you’re worried about the danger?” Anne asked. “What about all the other stuff you blew the hell up just to see what would happen?”
Daisuke cleared his throat.
“Um,” Anne said, “I mean I have an
answer to your question—”
But Moon had turned to Farhad. “It’d be safer if we just broke into the wormhole at the center of the mountain and used our own tether and winch.”
“No?” said Anne.
“How difficult will it be to cut into the mountain?” Farhad asked Moon, who shrugged.
“You’re not cutting into the—” Anne took a deep breath. Trust. Trust! Farhad was thinking about human safety. He would be a fool not to. Anne imagined worst-case scenarios. “Right. Let’s say the worm crunches down on us like we’re a gobstopper. Or it traps us for a month while its digestive system works. Or its internal processes produce some kind of horrible poison that somehow gets through our space suits….”
The men looked ill.
“That’s still a safer bet than fucking walking down the worm’s gullet and taking a chainsaw to its internal organs. How the hell do you think it would react to that?”
Moon stared at her. “I imagine it would die.”
“And then what? Do you have equipment to haul its carcass out of the mountain? No.” Anne focused on Farhad. “All my plan needs are natural processes that have worked for tens of millions of years, three space suits, and that tether and winch. We bolt the tether to the inside of the capsule-pod and trail it out the door behind us. You haul us in after we’re done.”
Farhad met her eyes. What was the expression on his face? Pride that Anne was learning to bargain? Shrewd consideration that she might conveniently get herself killed and spare him a lot of explaining later? Satisfaction that his expert had given him an action plan? Just a polite mask while Farhad hummed to himself and imagined his future grandchildren? What did he want? What was he plotting? Did she know that he knew that she…?
Daisuke squeezed her hand. Anne thought of spending the rest of her life with him, and the answer appeared. “Will we have radios?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Farhad. “This is more complicated than I expected. I think we should test it first.”
Interchange Page 27
