“We have to go,” I said. “This must be the exit; sooner or later the ones that went in are going to come back out.
The sound of my voice snapped the others out of their stupor. Marcus crawled to his feet. Jerilea must have landed head-first, because she had a bad cut on her scalp and looked woozy.
We limp-ran over a rise into the strangest fucking forest there ever was. The vegetation formed a roof ten feet off the ground; below that was bare ground broken up by the boughs of trees and plants. As we headed under the canopy, the ground was mottled sunlight and darkness, and splattered with animal droppings large and small.
We kept going until Jerilea collapsed, then huddled together in animal shit, our eyes big, as living things made chittering and groaning and popping sounds all around us. I’d only known Marcus and his people for two days, and suddenly in this place I felt like I was sitting with three strangers. I wanted my mom. I wanted my people. I kept hearing Uncle Joey’s scream in my head. I couldn’t make it stop. I’d been so tired of being treated like a kid, now the only thing I wanted was to be a kid just a little longer.
“How are we going to get back home?” Porter asked.
“We’re not,” Jerilea said. “Why would we go back? There’s nothing there for us.”
I nodded, too exhausted, too devastated to speak. Of course we were staying. There were no buzztops chewing up this world.
Porter looked mortified by the idea of spending his life here, however long that turned out to be. I didn’t blame him. “How are we going to know what’s safe to eat? What if there are wild animals?”
“We’ll figure it out,” Marcus said.
“Or we’ll die,” I heard myself say. “But at least dying’s not guaranteed.”
Marcus reached out and touched my knee. “We’d all be dead already if it wasn’t for you.”
“We would,” Jerilea said. “Thank you, Carrie.”
The tightness in my chest eased a little. I still missed my people badly, but suddenly I didn’t feel surrounded by strangers.
* * *
Something round and purple dropped from above. I stopped walking as it bounced twice and rolled to a stop at my feet.
I picked it up. It was spongy, sort of hairy. I dug my fingernails into it and broke it open, praying it wasn’t filled with flesh-eating bugs.
It wasn’t. The center was purplish liquid; the meat looked suspiciously like fruit. I lifted one half to my nose. It smelled vaguely like chocolate, or coffee.
“Hang on,” I called to the others, who were walking ahead of me. Someone was going to have to be the guinea pig, and if it was going to be me, I wanted them to know what I died of.
I took a bite. It was surprisingly chewy, more fruit roll-up than fruit, but it was indeed vaguely chocolaty. I swallowed.
Everyone stood perfectly still, watching me.
As the minutes stretched out, the silence started getting weird.
“You know what?” I said. “I don’t think I’m going to die.”
Marcus held out a hand. “Let me try it.”
I drew it away. “We should wait a few hours, in case it’s slow acting.”
Three more purple balls dropped through the canopy. Not two, not four, but three. I looked up. A yellow eye was peering down at me through a gap.
I jumped back and shrieked, and the eye disappeared.
“What?” Jerilea was looking up at the canopy. “What did you see?”
“Something was watching us.”
Part of me didn’t want to know what was attached to that eye, but I still wasn’t dying from eating the purple fruit, so whatever it was, it must have helped us. Either that or it was trying to lure us to our deaths, but we were four unarmed people, alone on this world. If something wanted to kill us it didn’t need to be sneaky about it.
We decided we had to go up there.
One by one, we shimmied up the bough of one of the big trees and squeezed through the gap between the tree and black vegetation. When I popped free, I found myself on a trampoline of vines, underneath an enormous black-boughed tree that had one blood-red, parachute-shaped leaf ringing the top. Hundreds of fat, snakelike things were crawling up and down the bough, covering it, somehow not falling. Then I realized they were connected—they were like hands with four or five long, fat fingers. There were smaller trees overhead as well, some of them covered in yellow berries instead of leaves. One was dotted with the purple fruit. I moved closer to it, stepping awkwardly on the springy surface.
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, spun to find a creature standing beside a cluster of fluffy shrubs. It had more limbs than I could count, a wide body that seemed all head. I couldn’t see any eyes, just a gaping mouth round.
The thing tore off a piece of the shrub and ate it, chewing slowly, its mouth opening and closing, like it wanted to make sure we could see it was eating. Or maybe that was just the way it ate.
“Could it be one of the aliens who live in that black city?” Marcus asked.
“The soldier we picked up said they walked on two legs.” This thing walked on fifty legs. It turned, headed off at a slow pace.
“Should we follow it?” Marcus asked.
We followed it to a copse of trees with wide black leaves that reminded me of the outside of an artichoke. It picked a fallen leaf off the ground and took a bite.
“I think it’s showing us what’s edible,” Jerilea said.
I clapped my hands together and laughed. It was. Like a neighbor welcoming us to the neighborhood with a covered dish.
As we watched it, it pointed at the sky.
I looked up. Was it pointing at those parachute trees? Maybe to tell us they were edible, too? It lowered its limb, then pointed up again. There was nothing up there but blue-green sky.
My head exploded. “Holy shit. ‘I’m from the sky.’ Is that what it’s trying to say?” I pointed to the sky as well, then I pointed at myself.
It repeated the gesture, took a step forward.
I took a step forward. “We’re from the sky, too.” I pointed to myself, then at the sky. I was crying.
Marcus was beside me, grinning. He pointed at himself, at the sky.
We weren’t the first to think of escaping through the gate. Why would we be? Maybe there were others as well.
The creature suddenly took off, moving incredibly fast. It went about fifty feet, then dropped through the web of vines and out of sight.
Jerilea shrieked. She was staring behind us, wide-eyed. Dozens of snake things were slithering silently toward us.
“We gotta get down. Down.” Marcus grabbed my arm, pulled me toward the spot where the alien had gone. We reached a ragged hole in the canopy; I scrambled through it, hung from the edge for a second before dropping to the ground.
The alien was waiting close by. It watched as Porter, Jerilea, and Marcus dropped through the hole, one after another. Then it turned and skittered off, heading away from the city.
“I guess we should follow it,” I said.
We let the creature put some distance between us, then we set off after it. Not taking his eyes off the creature, Marcus patted my shoulder. “I think maybe we’re gonna be okay, Carrie with a C.”
About Will McIntosh
Will McIntosh is a Hugo award winner and finalist for the Nebula and twelve other SF/F awards. His most recent books are Unbreakable, a dystopian novel with a twist you will not see coming; Faller, published by Tor Books; and a middle grade book (ages 9 and up) titled Watchdog, which is being developed as an animated TV series by the creators of the How to Train Your Dragon TV series, Dragons: Race to the Edge. His previous book Defenders (Orbit Books) was optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film, while Love Minus Eighty was named the best science fiction book of 2013 by the American Library Association-RUSA, and has also been optioned for a TV series. Will was a psychology professor before turning to writing full-time, and still occasionally teaches Introductory Psychology at the College of William and
Mary. He lives in Williamsburg with his wife and their twins. You can follow him on Twitter @willmcintoshSF, or on his website.
Water Babies
by Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff
OMAR NAVARRO ADJUSTED THE SONAR ARRAY and took a second look at the infrared imaging. He could’ve sworn he’d seen a sudden, large flash of ambient heat about 100 yards off the port bow of the submersible. It was in an odd place, though—a relatively narrow dead end canyon at the end of a shallow trench. As he attempted to relocate it, it returned as a sustained event of obviously variable temperatures.
“Hey, Professor,” he said, “you might want to take a look at this.”
Professor Corwin “Win” Lerner, head researcher at the International Cetacean Institute, turned from his study of his laptop screen to Omar’s infrared display.
“Now that’s something,” the professor said, adjusting his glasses on the bridge of his nose.
“What though? I mean, it looks like a—a fumarole.”
Lerner gave the younger man a sidewise glance. “Since your last posting was a geological survey, I suppose that makes sense.” The professor peered at the eddying heat signature. “Recalibrate, Omar. Then assess.”
“Well, possibly a large, closely grouped cluster of aquatic mammals. Dolphins most likely.”
Win Lerner grinned. “Shall we go see?”
This was exactly the sort of thing they’d hoped to encounter on the new submersible’s shakedown cruise. ICI-2 (aka, Icky the Second) was less than a week old and just now getting a full test of her equipment and systems. Omar piloted the submersible into the mouth of the little canyon, carefully avoiding the walls. They had just tucked into the narrow cut when the heat signature altered, seeming to break apart into separate entities.
Definitely dolphins.
The walls of the box canyon opened out a bit as they motored into visual range, Icky’s headlamps reaching into the swirling gloom like the hands of an inquisitive toddler. They picked out the shapes of six individuals, all with the elegant shape of the short-beaked common dolphin, delphinus delphis. It took Omar a moment to realize the coloring was wrong. These dolphins were more distinctly two-toned, and the colors were reversed; they had a dark ventral area topped with a gleaming silver dorsal region.
“Professor, their coloring…”
“Yes, I see.” Win’s voice was musing. “Could we be looking at a new species?”
Omar cut the thrust of the submersible, letting it drift slowly up to the animals, which reacted with benign interest. One of them—a smaller specimen—even swam up to the little submarine as if to examine it. The others hung back. Omar expected that sort of behavior from dolphins. What he had not expected was the startling morphology.
“It has a neck,” he murmured. “Professor, am I imagining—?”
“No. No, you’re not. Are the cameras rolling?”
“Yessir.”
The animal now regarding them through the transparent cowling at the bow of the submersible apparently determined that they were no threat, and turned to swim back to its fellows. In silhouette, the strangeness was emphatic. The rounded head with its tapered beak was set on a short, thick neck that joined the body just forward of a pair of long, narrow fins, flowing into the torso via sloping shoulders. Omar knew without a doubt that this was a species no one had seen before.
What was it doing in a relatively shallow trench off the coast of Gibraltar?
* * *
They deployed both of the institute’s smallest submersibles to capture the animals. The dolphins followed Icky II back to the ICI base in Rosia Harbour, so it was a relatively simple combination of luring and herding.
The six abnormal dolphins were of different sizes, though none seemed to be immature. Up close, their coloration was even more striking. There were subtle nuances to both the light and dark colors of their gleaming skin, and the patterns of light and dark on their beaks was highly individualized. Their behavior was typical of dolphins; they were curious to a fault, poking into every nook and cranny of their new habitat.
It was an enormous tank—both deep and wide—and stocked with marine animals and plants common to the waters around Gibraltar. They made themselves comfortable almost immediately, surprising everyone by eating the kelp in the tank while ignoring the fish.
They also seemed affably interested in the humans, which Omar found odd. If they were a species that had never interacted with humans before, why were they so friendly? He raised that with Professor Lerner when the staff gathered to get their first look at the newcomers.
“It may be an instinctive behavior, rather than learned,” Win Lerner told him. “I can’t imagine that humans have had contact with these creatures before, or they’d exist in our records.”
“Maybe they do,” said Song Park, the newest of the ICI’s research assistants. “They remind me of Inuit and Salish depictions I’ve seen of dolphins. Maybe ancient aboriginal societies came across them.”
Dr. Lerner smiled at her observation.
“Not a bad theory, Song.”
While the research team weighed their new acquisitions and took DNA samples, Dr. Lerner alerted the media, offering video and high-res still photos to media outlets and other research organizations. The creatures were calm throughout, only becoming agitated when the team attempted to tag them. It took an hour to insert subcutaneous chips in the left fins of each dolphin to enable tracking when they were later released back into the Alboran Sea.
The team set up to observe the new species in a scale model of their familiar habitat. Omar—who worked the night shift monitoring the institute’s specimens—wondered what they thought of their new environment. It was much like the canyon they’d occupied previously in that it formed a rocky cul-de-sac on three sides, but unlike it in that it had a thick sheet of transparent Plexiglas on the fourth side. This fronted onto a gallery from which a number of habitats could be observed.
Omar watched the new arrivals press their beaks against the Plexi-panel repeatedly, and daydreamed about what they made of the human observers on the opposite side, busy tapping away on their iPads. It was a funny sight—one that had Omar picking up his own iPad to sketch a cartoon of the scene. He was infamous at ICI for his comic depictions of the staff and specimens. Everyone enjoyed it except for Felix Berrocal.
He was a post-grad from the Universitat de Barcelona—a tall, statuesque fellow with sleek black hair and a distinctly Moorish angularity of feature. He was scathing of Omar’s depictions of him as a romance novel hero, typically striking poses before a bevy of stunned high school girls while delivering soliloquies on the mating habits of sea cucumbers.
Felix accused Omar of rank envy. There was a grain of truth to that, Omar had to admit. Omar was half a head shorter than the Spaniard, and his profusion of unruly hair and raw sienna skin hinted at a heritage that was more Incan than Iberian. Then there was the fact that Felix had shown an immediate and obvious attraction to Song from his first day on staff. Omar had been mesmerized by the petite Korean from the moment he saw her, but had quietly given up on any idea of asking her out.
Song was among the group of studious dolphin watchers he was now sketching. He was especially careful with her likeness. Perhaps out of spite, he drew Felix behind her, looming like a vampire or a vulture. He did quick renderings of the several other scientists in the group, made two vertical slashes to represent the thick wall of the habitat, then began to sketch the dolphins. They bobbed in a ragged line right up against the Plexiglas, watching the humans as intently as the humans were watching them.
As Omar finished the cartoon, two of the animals swam away and disappeared into a stand of kelp. Chuckling, he sketched the two dolphins leaving the pod, and dashed in a caption of one saying to the other, with an oblique backward glance at the humans, “I don’t know, Agnes. I think that has got to be the most boring species in the aquarium. They never do anything.”
Omar heard a decidedly female giggle in his left ear and
felt hair brush his cheek. He nearly jumped out of his skin and swiveled his chair. Song stood behind him, trying to cover her laughter with one elegant hand.
“Omar, that is so funny,” she said in delicately accented English. “Can I see?”
He allowed her to pluck the pad from his unresisting fingers.
Still laughing, she studied the drawing. “Oh, I see Dr. Win. And there’s Nate, and Cecily—oh—that is so very Felix.” She met his gaze over the top of the pad. “Is that me?”
Omar shrugged. “It’s not a very good likeness. I’m a total amateur.”
“I think you’re very good. But, you made me so pretty.”
“You are pretty … I think.” He cleared his throat. She blushed. “What’s so Felix?” he asked, desperate to change the subject.
She handed the iPad back and struck a predatory pose with her hands forming claws. “Like that. Like a—a—”
“Vampire?”
Her laughter was like the peal of silver bells. “Yes. Funny. Does that make me a blood donor?”
While Omar tried to decide what to make of that remark, Song glanced up at the monitors and said, “Oh, look. The dolphins are all leaving. I guess they do think we’re boring.”
Omar had to wonder if they still thought that after the team snatched two of them—a male and a female—for more detailed analysis. The animals were tranquilized and carefully relocated to shallow examination tubs where they could be X-rayed and subjected to a variety of other imaging techniques.
Win Lerner led the examination team, which included Felix and Song, while Omar held down the fort in the observation center, watching the other dolphins react to the absence of their comrades. They were agitated. Extremely so.
They scoured the habitat for the missing animals, even resorting to piercing vocalizations. Omar had to leap to turn down the audio gain on the mics in the habitat, they got so loud. Up until then, the creatures’ vocal output had been entirely beyond the range of human hearing, and Omar had been recording it using what amounted to a recalibrated seismic array. Now, the animals went through a series of clicks, burst pulses, and whistles, all the while zipping around the tank and bumping their beaks on the Plexi-panel.
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