Half Way Home

by Hugh Howey

  Tarsi, Kelvin, and I looked at one another. We hadn’t planned on any of that. The three of us were family, so there was no question on what belonged to whom. As much as we needed and supported everyone else, the idea of submitting to another collective when the goal of that new group might one day turn out to be as sensible as building rockets—it didn’t sit well with me. I could see similar worries on the faces of my friends.

  “We are in this together, aren’t we?” Britny asked.

  We sat silent for a moment.

  Several of us nodded slightly, as we looked to one another. I turned at the sound of people moving behind me and saw some of the sleepers stirring and stretching, pointing up to the new patch of open sky overhead created by last night’s missile.

  “This is going to get complicated awfully quick,” I grumbled.

  “No, it’s not,” Jorge said behind us. “Let me make it real simple. I brought a gun.” I turned and saw him reaching behind his back. He pulled his hand out and pointed two fingers at us, then started laughing.

  Eventually, the rest of us joined in.

  Even though I never saw the humor in it.

  ••••

  An easy and temporary consensus formed once everyone was up and had their things together. We decided we would walk toward the nearest tree, just to make sure that’s what they were. Several of us were curious to see one up close after having lived within sight of them for weeks. They were so unlike the trees from our training programs that they seemed alien to us, even though we’d never truly known anything else.

  From the colony, they had appeared continuous, a jagged cliff of rising bark that encircled us completely. The width of each trunk was easily as big around as the perimeter of our entire base. Between the closest trees you could see darker trunks looming in the shadowy distance. They overlapped in a way that blocked out all else, creating the appearance of something solid and impenetrable. As we neared them, they appeared even broader and flatter, their curvature removed by our proximity.

  We set off toward the nearest one, figuring that would have been Mica and Peter’s plan. We could make shelter along the wall of wood, affixing our various scraps of tarp to stay out of the rain, and maybe use our machetes to remove building material from the trunk.

  Even with the pain in my hamstring, the walk was a pleasant one. The previous night, we had discovered that the surface of our planet wasn’t all packed dirt and mud; that was all we’d ever seen inside our fenced-in colony. Everything Colony prepared for us, out to a hundred yards or more, had the beat-down look of constantly roaming tractors and dozers.

  Moving past Colony’s reach, we saw what the ground of our home normally looked like. It was mostly moss. A half dozen varieties covered the ground beneath the canopy. Some were soft, others stiff, but all were better than the hard soil that had calloused our feet over the past weeks. We soon learned the brown mosses and the really dark green were the most abrasive, so our line swayed to and fro as we picked over the most luxuriant paths.

  We also quickly discovered the bombfruit hadn’t evolved to explode on impact. Out beyond the perimeter, they studded the ground like stones—half-buried, the pointy ends embedded in the moss. They looked like seeds pushed partway into the ground by a giant’s thumb. None of them seemed to be sprouting anything, however, and the near dearth of natural sunlight didn’t seem to bode well for their chances of growing into more trees.

  Kelvin, with his training as a farmer, was the nearest we had to a biologist in the group. He seemed fascinated by the seeds. The rest of us were just glad to know we would starve to death no more rapidly out here than we would have inside the camp.

  The only other curiosity we came across on our way to the tree was an odd geological formation: a hole, almost perfectly round, that gaped in the middle of the moss. Our path nearly took us right into it, causing us to stop and peer inside. The shaft seemed to go straight down, far deeper than my flashlight could penetrate. Karl, an electrician who had been shuffled between construction and payload duty a few times, took a bombfruit and threw it into the center. We all stood quietly until we heard a distant clatter, then marveled at what the depth of the thing must be.

  We left the strange hole behind and resolved to no longer run through the night like madmen. Just in case. Tarsi hammered the point home when she spotted another of the holes in the distance and off to one side. Nobody spoke of the chances that Mica and Peter wouldn’t be found, but I couldn’t have been the only one thinking it.

  It took half the day before we reached the trunk, the thing seeming to slide away from us one step for every two we took. The base of it was even more massive than we had imagined. Kelvin had overheard the canopy crew adjusting their missile the other night for a height of two thousand feet. It was hard to believe a living thing could grow to such proportions, but the evidence loomed before us.

  We stopped several hundred feet away and made lunch out of raw bombfruit with a pinch of spice someone had brought along. Objectively, it was less palatable than the paste we normally ate, but we all agreed the novelty of the mixture made it somehow more enjoyable. Or perhaps it was just that the food and the time spent consuming it were ours.

  Several people wondered aloud what the rest of the camp was doing right then, besides hating our guts. Those with intimate knowledge of the timetables told us precisely what each group would be doing and even what some of us were supposed to be up to. I sat facing the distant camp, the tops of the modules barely visible above the rise of the berm. A spot of raw sunlight beamed down from the new hole overhead and glimmering off the things we could no longer use. It all looked so small. So impossible. How was such a speck of humanity expected to tame an entire planet? And what did that make our little group? A mote ejected from the speck?

  Halfway through the meal, rapid popping noises sounded in the direction of Colony. Even if the berm and fence weren’t there, we were too far away to see individual people moving around camp, leaving us to speculate.

  “The propellant?”

  “Sabotage,” Jorge said, almost with a hint of wishing.

  “It’s a warning.”

  A twinge in the back of my leg—a sudden jolt of pain—gave me the answer:

  “Target practice,” I said.

  We fell silent and the popping sounds did as well. We looked around at each other as the noise started back up a minute later. Those who had obsessed with timetables for three weeks murmured their disgust at the labor hours needed to replenish all those rounds of ammo.

  Overall, the meal could not have been more bizarre. It was, in many ways, even stranger than the first one we’d had the morning after our birth. That one had been so consumed with depression and despair that no other emotion could gain purchase. This one had a tinge of accidental camaraderie, as fully three separate groups had made our break on the same night—all following in Mica’s and Peter’s footsteps. While we ate, Kelvin admitted that the three of us had dreamed of escaping a day earlier. Four of the others, including Vincent and Britny, had even discussed the idea before the enforcers formed up.

  As a half-trained psychologist, I was fascinated by how quickly the group gelled. Many of my fears concerning shared resources faded as I spoke and joked with each person. Names and faces I knew in passing were now a part of my tribe, and over the course of a single morning I went from feeling wary of their presence to being willing to risk myself for them. And not just like the night before, where my primary concern had been for Kelvin and Tarsi, but really put myself in danger for any one of them. Whatever the cause of this magical transformation, I had not yet come to it in my studies of human behavior.

  After we ate as much of the foul tasting fruit as we could and passed around our several rations of water, we rose as a group and approached the tree. The organism seemed to offer a hello—or possibly a warning—as a single bombfruit whistled out of the canopy and buried itself with a thud inside a nearby patch of light-green moss. We laughed at the ti
ming and stepped around the embedded fruit as if it still contained some animating force. We spread out to explore the mountainous plant.

  “It’s soft,” Samson said.

  He was one of the two boys that had brought machetes. I saw him rubbing the blade against a jagged edge of bark, peeling a piece back with ease.

  The skin may have been soft, but the shape of the tree was rough, far more than it had appeared from a distance. The bark was so jagged and the spacing of the outcrops so regular, you could step inside the wide crevasses and find yourself surrounded on three sides by cool, brown walls of tree. It reminded me of a mechanical gear if seen top-down, like evenly spaced cogs standing out from a round, recessed base.

  Several of us stepped between the cogs into what felt like roofless caves. I went all the way inside one of the creases and looked up, mesmerized by the way the bark wiggled its way up into the canopy. It no longer looked like a cave but more like a square, vertical ditch running all the way up the surface of the tree, the edges seeming to converge in the distance.

  I put my back against one of the walls jutting out from the center and tried to place my hands against the opposite side, wondering if a taller person could shimmy their way up to the branches and leaves overhead. It would take monumental endurance.

  “Give me fruuuiiiiit,” someone howled, and we all laughed at the way the vertical canyon toyed with their voice. I popped out of my indention and imagined us carving a little village right out of the trunk, all of our individual caves interconnected. We could dig up some mosses and plant our Terran seeds in the soil, see if they would grow in the filtered sunlight. The tarps we could save for gathering and storing water. I stepped back and looked up the tree, imagining how we could make it work.

  Tarsi came up behind me and wrapped her arms around my stomach. I turned into her embrace and gave her a joyous squeeze. To our side, I saw Kelvin step away from the tree and glance over at us, that expression from earlier on his face. I waved him over and he grudgingly joined in our little group hug.

  “I’m gonna miss our tractor,” he said.

  “Even on floor night?” Tarsi asked.

  “Even then.”

  “I wish Oliver was here,” I told the others, breaking out of the hug and looking back in the direction of base.

  “Yeah,” Kelvin said. “I wonder what he—”

  “Hey! Check this out!” Vincent backed away from the tree and pointed. He had wandered fifty feet or so further down the trunk. We all ran over to see what he’d found.

  “Did you carve that?” Samson asked, pointing his machete at one of the outcroppings of bark.

  “With what?” Vincent said, shrugging his shoulders and lifting his empty hands.

  I pushed past the people up front to see. Leila stood right next to the tree, rubbing her hands over it.

  It was an arrow. Carved into the trunk.

  Pointing up.

  • 17 • Inclinations

  “None of you carved this?” Leila asked.

  “How are we supposed to go up?” someone said.

  “Why should we?” Kelvin asked. “I don’t want to be up there. If it was Mica or Peter that made this, let them come down here and join us.”

  “I don’t like being on this side of the tree,” Vincent said. “If we’re really looking to survive for the long term, setting up camp next to the people we abandoned might not be the best plan.”

  “I agree,” Britny said. “We should make our way around one of these guys and set up camp on the other side. Maybe move even further as we explore. For all we know, there’s open fields on the other side of this thing.”

  “No way,” Jorge said. “Colony wouldn’t have cut its way through the canopy and set up here if there was open space like that nearby. I’d be surprised if there was a clearing this big anywhere else in the temperate zone. It would’ve picked the best spot. That’s like its primary job.”

  “What were you trained for?” I asked Jorge.

  “I’m a miner, but that doesn’t make me any less smart than you.”

  “Whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. “Just curious.”

  He shook his head and looked away, and I resolved to step lightly around him from then on.

  “Guys, I found the way up.”

  We turned and looked further down the trunk where Mindy stood, her hand on an outcropping of bark several paces away. The crowd shifted again, curiosity driving us along.

  “Holy shit,” one of the guys said, looking up the trunk of the tree.

  It was a spiral tunnel, rising up and off to the side, further around the base. The angle wasn’t too steep, and the carved indention ran behind the gear-like outcroppings, exposing the inclined plane to air before weaving behind the next outcropping, and so on. Kelvin stepped between two of the juts and ran his hand along the exposed core of the tree.

  “Something created that,” Samson said.

  “No shit.”

  “I mean, like, chewed that out.”

  “He’s right,” Kelvin said. He ducked his head into the cylinder of missing wood and looked up the incline. “I wonder how far it goes?”

  “You’re not thinking about exploring it, are you?”

  “Maybe we should,” Vincent said.

  “I say forget about it,” Mindy said.

  “What about the arrow?”

  “Probably Mica and Peter throwing off pursuit.”

  “Yeah, why would they think other people would come out and join them?” Mindy asked. “They could be trying to get Hickson killed as much as help us find them.”

  “She has a good point.”

  “It worms back down that way,” Kelvin said, looking through the shaft in the direction we’d come. “I think it comes out behind the arrow.”

  Vincent ran down and stepped between the two outcroppings back at the carving. “It does,” he said. “I still think we should explore it.”

  Tarsi turned to Mindy. “It must be biological,” she said. “The difference in us, I mean. The boys want to go up it and the girls want to circle around and set up camp.”

  I didn’t say anything, wondering what it meant that I agreed with the girls on that score.

  “Maybe there’s all kinds of passageways dug through the trees,” we heard Vincent say, his voice muffled. He popped his head out where Kelvin stood, having walked up through the tunnel from where the arrow was. “Maybe there’s all kinds of cool caves to live in and we could save the digging.”

  “Hey, genius, whatever ate those holes are probably still around. You think they’ll let us just move in with them?”

  “Maybe they taste good,” someone said, which made us all fall silent. I watched the thought settle throughout the group, lips literally being licked.

  “Meat,” one of the boys said.

  “You’ve never had meat in your life,” Leila pointed out.

  “Yeah, but I know it’s good,” Jorge said. “It’s primal.”

  “You’re primal,” Britny said, which got more than a few of us laughing.

  “I say we vote,” Kelvin said, scanning the crowd.

  “No fair,” said Tarsi. “There’s six of you and only four of us.”

  If she was referring to gender, she probably didn’t realize that the vote might just as easily be half and half.

  “What if we do both?” I asked, hoping to prevent my exposure as a wimp or me having to fake some machismo I didn’t feel. “Why don’t some of us set up camp, get a fire going, rig up some cover in case of rain. Meanwhile, a scouting party can go partway up the tree, look around a little, maybe find Mica and Peter if they’re up there.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Vincent said. I looked up to follow his voice and saw his hand reaching out between two of the outcroppings further along.

  “I don’t like the idea of splitting up,” Tarsi said, looking directly at me.

  “I’ll stay here and help with camp,” I said, shrugging as if I’d just as well scale a tree but didn’t mind
staying for her benefit.

  She smiled. I looked to the tree and saw Kelvin glowering at us before he was able to store the emotion away again.

  “You guys can take the flashlight,” I told him. “Just in case it gets dark before you get all the way back down.”

  He nodded and forced a smile. I realized how badly I needed to talk to him and wondered when I would ever get the time.

  ••••

  Before the boys set off, we all dumped our packs and arranged our meager supplies across the moss. More than half the water went to the climbers. We kept the tarps, most of the rope, one of the machetes, and all the domestic gear. They took the small amount of medical supplies and packed several bombfruit in their sacks. We agreed they would only climb until nightfall, then descend with the flashlight, but Vincent and Kelvin argued they could set up camp within the incline, behind one of the outcroppings, and descend the next day.

  The rest of us relented once the other boys got excited about the idea. We also resolved that if they found anything important or discovered passageways through the interior, they would yell down or send a messenger back before they explored any further.

  We exchanged hugs and wished each other luck. I felt awkward and conspicuous as the only male not joining the climbers. As soon as they disappeared, the five of us remaining behind immediately set to work. We agreed that the tunnel provided the best place for sleep, so we concentrated on clearing and creating a fire pit, carving burnable wood from one of the outcroppings, and gathering bombfruit.

  Mindy and Tarsi had worked in supply together and knew how to split the occasional intact fruit in half, both sides of which created functional bowls. They gathered the soft gold seeds from the interior, which Britny and I took for creating utensils. We picked out one of the large stones sticking out of the moss and dug out a few smaller ones. Using one to beat against the other, we turned the seeds into functional shapes for spooning and mixing.