She decided to try to make him understand one more time. “Junction has a lot more value than as a site to extract resources from. When you mine the mountain, the stuff you mined out of it is gone. But when you learn something new, you get something for nothing.”
Ignorance turned into knowledge, ugliness into beauty, meaningless stuff became part of a plant or an animal.
“Yes, yes, but what if the world needs those portals?” Farhad glanced up at the sky again, and the alien armadas it might contain. “At a time like this, can you really sit on top of this treasure trove and refuse to let others make use of it?”
No, this was the way to get to him. Anne could almost see it. “What do you want to do with Junction? Keep your grandkids safe, right?”
He blinked at her. Caught his breath. “Yes,” he said.
“Thinking about the next generation is like thinking about the next, what, fifty, one hundred years? The Zookeepers think in terms of millions of years,” she said. “If you can do that, if you extend your plans out to infinity, then your own goals will demand that you treat yourself – and other people, and everything – sustainably.”
“That assumes I think Earth has another million years,” Farhad said. “Or even fifty.”
Anne understood his problem. For all Farhad’s talk of faith, he didn’t really have any. He couldn’t imagine the Earth surviving the century. He didn’t think he had time, so he grabbed what he could and didn’t care what he destroyed in the process.
“Nothing we learn can fix Earth unless we believe the Earth can be fixed,” said Anne. “Junction can give us new biochemistry, all right, and even new physics, but that’s not as important as inspiration.”
She flung up her arms. “I mean, look at it! This planet is a machine designed a hundred million years ago, and it still works! That’s sustainability you can sink your teeth into! You can walk through it. You can climb up it and into space, Farhad! Junction is a beacon. It’s a promise. We can learn how to do this!”
Farhad took a step back from her, eyes round. Suddenly he looked much younger. “Wow. Say that to the journalists. Please!”
“I think she means,” Daisuke said, “that in the long run, wonder will be a more profitable export than wormholes.”
“Yes, Daisuke. Yes, I see that.” Farhad put his hand up to his mouth and stroked his goatee. He looked almost normal again, but he couldn’t fool Anne. Under his hand, Farhad was grinning like a little boy. “I agree.”
***
“How much of that was the truth?”
“All of it.”
Anne and Daisuke lay on their bed, letting the caravan carry them toward home. It was time to return the Dorado portal to its forest, see whether the portal in the Kenzan Crater had reappeared, and tell Earth their shattering news.
“Except I noticed you used words like beacon and promise. In space, you called Junction a trap.”
“Well, I was trying to get Moon to leave.” Anne snuggled up under Daisuke’s arm.
Muscles slid across his chest as he gestured. “But what if it’s true? What if he goes to meet the Zookeepers? What if he comes back next year and he’s the Emperor of the Milky Way?”
“Biologists don’t usually elect their lab animals to high positions of power, Daisuke.”
“Biologists might become excited when they see a new species, and go look for more.”
Anne nodded, pulling her knees up so his body could warm them. “I’ve been thinking about that. The mountain-ship was testing us, but what exactly was it measuring?”
“Intelligence, you said.”
“Yeah, but what is intelligence? I think the ship gave us a choice: stay or go somewhere else. At first, I thought that that was because we’d passed some threshold of personhood and suddenly our consent mattered. As if the Zookeepers were bound by human moral philosophy. But I wonder.” She rolled onto her back, looking at the ceiling. “I wonder if it wasn’t the beginning of a new test. Something more subtle than cracking our language.”
Daisuke rolled onto his side and put his arm across her. “What sort of test?”
“Think about it this way: Junction is a hundred million years old. We tore through it in less than a week. If it were that fragile, we could never have found Junction the way it is. I think something special has happened to us. I think the portals were watching us and listening. I think they were trying to teach us something: ‘Welcome. Enjoy our hospitality. Help yourselves while we decide what sort of animal you are.’”
“What do you think they have discovered about us?”
“Well, we certainly led them a merry chase, didn’t we? What would you do if one of your lab rats figured out how to get out of its cage and open the door and take a taxi away from your lab?”
“I think if I had a lab rat that did that,” Daisuke said, “I’d follow it.”
The Nightbow spun above them, filled with mountains.
.
Acknowlegments
If writing Junction was like pulling a monster from the depths, Interchange was like strapping on a scuba tank and going hunting. I made it back intact thanks to the following people.
Turns out wormholes as I described them in Junction don’t make sense! Thanks to Michael Tabachnik for some real wormhole physics and Robert Dawson for nixing a couple of bad wormhole ideas and helping me understand why they were bad. David DeGraff read through the whole damn manuscript, propping up Moon’s explanations where he could, unraveling character motivations, and generally raising the level of conversation.
On the squishier side, Alessandro Allievi gave me some non-standard biochemistry, Vladimir Nikolov helped with the lifecycle of mountain-ships and Anne and Daisuke’s relationship, and Anatoly Belikovski provided the hole-worm’s vacuum-curing Kevlar mucus. Oscar Lozada and Alexander Brown didn’t buy the evolutionary biology of the Dorado biome and made suggestions for how to render it more plausible. Thomas Duffy did a great deal of depth-adding and sanity-checking in the Dorado biome as well the orbital biome. You know when ideas are bouncing between people and the ideas just get bigger and better? It’s a treasure.
And then there are those even squishier humans! Franz Anthony painted an excellent shmoo picture, very graciously talked with me about names and backstories for the Indonesian characters, and gave me the Indonesian text. Emil Minchev helped me with narrative flow, Timothy Morris corrected Australian cultural references, and Mami Kojima corrected my Japanese. T.J. Berg told me what kind of grant proposal Anne must have written before Junction, the sort of operation she’d want to put together in Interchange, and generally blessed me with a ton of science advice and suggested reading. I got to…some of it. Eeson Rajendra loved the sights and sounds of Junction and told me so, a welcome ego-boost. Copy editor Imogen Howson not only picked her way across my shattered quotation marks and elipses, but compiled a glossary of all the made-up words in Junction so she could make sure they matched the made-up words in Interchange. Katheryn Anderson told me why Anne should say no to eccentric millionaires. And of course Pavlina read a much earlier draft than everyone else and told me all the places where I was wrong.
Now for the research. For physics, I used Spooky Action at a Distance by George Musser, The Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark, The Ascent of Gravity by Marcus Chown, A Briefer History of Time by Stephen Hawking, and Extreme Medicine by Kevin Fong. The paper Moon read about the hollow earth was ‘A Geocosmos: Mapping Outer Space Into a Hollow Earth’ by Mostafa Abdelkader.
For biology, its evolution, and its exploration I had I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong, The Wood for the Trees by Richard Fortey, Plant Science: An Introduction to Botany by Catherine Kerr, The Making of the Fittest by Sean B. Carroll, and three papers in early ecology: ‘The Lake as Microcosm’ by Stephen A. Forbes, ‘The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan’ by Henry Chandler Coles, and ‘
Nature and the Structure of Climax’ by Frederic E. Clements.
Humans, those trickiest of animals, were somewhat more fully illuminated by Ray Dalio’s Principles, Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk biography, Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly, and most of all Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss.
My heroes Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Greg Egan helped me find a way to live and write. The atmosphere, themes, and ideas of Interchange were inspired and informed by the work of Alastair Reynolds, Sue Burke, Der-Shing Helmer, and the music of Against the Current, Goosehouse, and John Murphy’s ‘Adagio in D Minor’.
Finally, thanks to my agent Jennie Goloboy, and my editor, Don D’Auria, who got this project off the ground in the first place. Hacking away at a story day after day, it’s easy to forget that somebody might actually read it at some point. Thanks for being those readers. Thanks for helping me reach more.
About this book
This is a FLAME TREE PRESS BOOK
Text copyright © 2021 Daniel M. Bensen
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Thanks to the Flame Tree Press team, including: Taylor Bentley, Frances Bodiam, Federica Ciaravella, Don D’Auria, Chris Herbert, Josie Karani, Molly Rosevear, Mike Spender, Cat Taylor, Maria Tissot, Nick Wells, Gillian Whitaker. The cover is created by Flame Tree Studio with thanks to Nik Keevil and Shutterstock.com.
FLAME TREE PRESS is an imprint of Flame Tree Publishing Ltd. flametreepublishing.com. A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.
HB ISBN: 978-1-78758-469-3 • US PB ISBN: 978-1-78758-467-9
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