Junction

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “Stay out of this, Matsumori,” Pearson growled.

  Daisuke ignored that. “I agree with Anne,” he said. “There is nothing your aides can do on camera, colonels, and the natives might provide useful—”

  “Be quiet.” Hariyadi stabbed a finger at Anne. “And you, tell your native guides to exit the aircraft.”

  They were pressing in on Daisuke from both sides, rumbling. He was trying to figure out how to make his exit look good on camera, when Anne snarled, “You know I’m trained to castrate primates, right?”

  Pearson took a step back. A second later, Daisuke and Hariyadi finished translating that sentence and followed his example.

  “What did you say to me?” Hariyadi hissed, face darkening.

  “There’s lots of ways to do it, too,” Anne said.

  Hariyadi’s mouth opened, shut, opened again. But before he could make any sort of coherent response, Pearson laughed.

  “Maybe my aide and I should stay on the ground and let you fly off with Houlihan.” He tipped the biologist a wink. “He might not come back in one piece, but oh, the footage!”

  “Ya!” said Rahman.

  “Da!” said Misha.

  Hariyadi looked around him, as if remembering where he was. He let out his breath and straightened, tugging his uniform down over his chest. “Colonel Pearson, our orders were clear.”

  Pearson shrugged. “My superiors didn’t tell me anything about how many sergeants to take on the first reconnaissance flight. If we both leave our aides here, the natives can come with us. Eh?” He smiled paternalistically up at Tyaney, who turned his head aside and spat.

  Frowning, Hariyadi glanced from Pearson to his own aide.

  “I don’t care,” said Misha. “I fly Americans, Papuans, Martians, whatever. As long as weight is not exceeded.”

  Hariyadi nodded to himself, gripping his bodycam. He no longer looked angry. He looked determined. “Very well,” he said and glared up at Tyaney. “He had better be worth the aggravation.”

  Tyaney’s lips stretched and he said something in Indonesian.

  Nurul translated, looking amused. “He says, ‘Since the shattering of the Yeli Worm, the world has looked to us to enforce the borders between countries. Now you will not turn us away.’”

  “Right,” said Pearson, rolling his eyes. “Good. If we see any treeworms in the plane, you can spear them.”

  To his evident annoyance, Nurul translated that too, as well as its response. “The country of the dung yo is only our closest neighbor,” Tyaney said. “There are many others. On this trip, I expect to spear something really interesting.”

  Chapter Three

  Junction

  Daisuke lowered himself into the seat across the narrow aisle from Anne, who was shivering in her seat as if with cold. No, he realized, the biologist was shaking with fury.

  “Anne,” he said, leaning toward her. “Are you all right?”

  “God!” she whispered. “Pearson! I very nearly attacked a trained soldier with a good twenty kilos and probably twenty years of combat experience over me. What was I thinking?”

  Because of course that delightful threat hadn’t been playacting, as Daisuke would assume coming from anyone else. Anne had really meant all those things about castration. Why on Earth should that be so attractive?

  “Hey,” said Daisuke.

  “What?” Anne knuckled her eyes.

  “You were right. The Nun deserve something from us.” Daisuke smiled at her, projecting warmth. “I think—”

  “Ding!” shouted Misha. “Thank you for flying Air Misha, Austronesia’s best choice for smuggling, drug running, and sexual tourism since I deserted the army.”

  Daisuke jerked up and away from Anne, staring at the back of Misha’s head. The massive Russian was directly in front of them, squeezed into his pilot’s seat like a bear in a bathtub. “Now, I am kidnapped by some other armies,” he continued in a voice that boomed down the fuselage of the plane, “so now everything is by book! This is a non-smoking flight. Yes, even marijuana. If you’ve got any smokes, bring them up here to me right now. I’ll trade you some of the whiskey I got up here.” He held up a two-liter Coke bottle full of yellowish liquid and sloshed it, steering the plane one-handed.

  “Where exactly did you find this fellow?” Hariyadi asked from the seat behind Daisuke.

  “In a Malaysian prison,” came Pearson’s voice from behind Anne. Daisuke wondered at the odd choice. Surely there were people in one army or another qualified to fly this kind of plane. Or was that the problem? One army or the other? Perhaps, like Daisuke himself, Misha was a compromise, the representative of a country with little stake in this planet.

  “Thanks,” said Anne. “It’s good to hear I’m not totally crazy.” She was leaning across her seat’s armrest toward Daisuke. He tried not to look down the collar of her shirt.

  It would be unutterably sleazy of him to seduce the first unattached woman he stumbled across post-separation. Not even post-divorce, come to think of it. If Anne wanted a relationship with Daisuke, she was a very poor judge of character. Probably she couldn’t see below his polished exterior persona. What would she do if she found out that there was nothing under that exterior but a howling vacuum?

  She was looking at him. With the ease of long habit, Daisuke directed the conversation away from anything substantive. “What do you think he meant, your native friend?”

  “You mean Tyaney? I don’t know,” she said. “Hariyadi translated him correctly, though. ‘Many other countries.’ He might mean other habitats. These mountains will be full of little microclimates.”

  The rotor throbbed and acceleration pushed her back in her seat. People and charred ground blurred past her window. More normal sensations. Daisuke could be flying off to any shoot in Siberia or Canada. Then the plane slid into the air and the ground scrolling below him was no longer black, but absinthe-green.

  The wormwood forest grew dense and lush along the banks of the river, a wilderness of parasols and tangled cords that might be vines or snakes or something else entirely. Things moved in the shadow of the plane.

  “Oh hey,” said Misha. “Alien monsters. You guys see them too, right?”

  “‘Countries’ might mean many things,” said Daisuke. “Do you think we will meet other…ah, groups of natives aside from the Nun?”

  Anne shifted her attention from the window to him. “We’re traveling due west, and Tyaney was very clear about there being no other people over those mountains. How could there be? The land is poisonous.”

  “Tyaney said ‘country’, but he meant the sort of ‘country’ in ‘big sky country’,” said Daisuke. “It means an area. A region.”

  Anne nodded. Her breathing was back under control, he saw. He was helping distract her. “It would make sense for the Nun to have different names for different habitats. High mountains. Marshes. Deserts. Even oceans.”

  The plane banked and the view from Anne’s window tilted up to show the deep and chilly sky. Dark specks floated out there in the air. Or maybe those were just motes in Daisuke’s eyes.

  When the plane leveled out and the ground came back into view, it had faded from native candy-green to a washed-out chartreuse, wrinkled and veined like the skin of a very old lime.

  “I am thinking,” Daisuke said. “Those places the Nun can’t travel to. They can’t leave the Deep Sky Country and survive. Which means there is no way Tyaney and his wife can be our guides. This” – he nodded out his window – “will be just as new to them as to us.”

  Anne’s mouth twisted. “So that dipstick just wanted a joyride after all. After I stuck my neck out for him.” Her hands clenched around her seat belt. “I’m the idiot for letting Tyaney manipulate me. Jesus Christ, but I hate people.”

  A cough from behind Daisuke. That had been Pearson.

  Daisuke glan
ced at Anne’s reddening face, and decided to switch the conversation to another track. “Should we ask him what he wants? Tyaney, I mean.”

  * * *

  “Tyaney! Do you think you can get free rides in planes from me?”

  That was exactly what Tyaney thought. He had needed to show his people that he was still in control of the situation in Imsame. But now here he was, surrounded by the Them, and he had to be careful. The chief of the Nun composed his face into an expression of hurt confusion and said, “No, Ibu Anne. I gave you my wife to use as a guide. She knows the countries around here. Ask her anything. I’ll translate.”

  That seemed to rob Anne of her initiative. The red woman blinked, looking confused and guilty. “Um,” she said. “Well. What do you mean? How can Sing know about this poisonous forest? People can’t live there.”

  “No,” said Tyaney, quashing his impatience. Ever since the Them had invaded, it had been nothing but nonsensical questions and annoying orders. “No one lives farther away from the High Earth Hole than my newest wife, Sing.”

  The Indonesians had turned around in their seats and trained their camera on him. Good. Tyaney stared bravely into it. “Sing’s people are savages,” he said, using the offensive racial epithet used by the Indonesians to refer to his own people, “but they know all about the different countries.”

  The red colonel, Pearson, demanded something in his language.

  “How far has Sing traveled?” Anne asked, after a hot exchange with the man.

  Tyaney nodded and grinned. “I kidnapped her from the mouth of the Death Wind Pass, the one south of Imsame, where the Death Wind River joins the Mekimsam. She has seen the Death Wind Country, the—” He paused, looking for the word in Indonesian. “Toy…maker Country? Yes. The Signal Fire Country, the Ripe Blood Country. The Treeworm Country you already know.”

  “What are you telling the Them?” asked Sing, sitting uncomfortably in the seat across from him.

  “They want to kill you,” Tyaney told her with satisfaction. “They know you’re a witch. A toymaker-user. I’m convincing them you’re better use to them alive. Don’t forget that I have control over the Them as they have control over this flying machine.”

  Sing said nothing. If only Tyaney could know he’d impressed her. That she thought he could command powers as great as her own. Then maybe he could relax and stop being so afraid of the woman he’d taken to be his wife.

  “Ask them if their machines can destroy the Death Wind Country,” she said.

  “My newest wife asks: can we fly to the Death Wind Country and burn it as we did the wormwoods?” He shuddered. Such a thought would never have occurred to him. But who knew what the Them could do? They were almost as frightening as Sing.

  * * *

  Daisuke waited patiently for Tyaney and Anne’s incomprehensible exchange to end.

  Others were less patient. “What the hell was all that about?” demanded Pearson.

  “That,” shouted Misha from his pilot’s seat, “was request from Grass Skirt Princess to firebomb the next valley over. You know, she may have a point. Look out your windows.”

  Daisuke looked. They were crossing the spine of the mountains west of the Deep Sky Country, where the green vegetation gave way, not to snowy or rocky peaks, but something brown, rippling like floating hair.

  “Apa itu?” asked Rahman, with the intonation of ‘what’s that?’

  “Soko Mekaletya,” Tyaney said. “Di sana Soko Heng Tokwey.”

  “They’re the names of places,” said Anne. “‘The Country of the Something’, and that’s the Country of the…Sun Ground? The Ground Sun?”

  West of the hair, the mountain slope was a brilliant, canola-field yellow, which cut off abruptly at the lower elevations. Something gleamed there in the cup of the valley, gray and steely. It was mist, and as Daisuke watched, it parted, swirling around the black back of a flying animal the size of an orca.

  “Fascinating,” Anne whispered.

  Pearson jerked around in his seat. “What is this? Is that thing dangerous?”

  Pearson’s demand was probably addressed to the universe in general, but Tyaney answered as if he understood, “Soko Bou Deibuna.” Followed by something in Indonesian.

  “The Death Wind Country,” Anne translated. “I don’t understand. Something I’m missing….”

  The shadow of their plane had crossed the Death Wind Country and was now rippling up the valley’s western slope. Animals the size of goats bounded across a landscape of giant grapes, or piles of spaghetti, or spilled intestines.

  “Soko Ining Eng,” narrated Tyaney.

  “The Country of Ripe Blood?” Anne asked herself. “Oh,” said Anne. “Oh, I see. Fucking wormholes.”

  A mound topped by a shimmering blue sphere flashed by. Then another fringe of waving brown tassels, like a mane across the ridge of mountains, and the land changed again.

  “What wormhole? Explain,” Pearson demanded.

  Anne rolled her eyes. It was the expression of a specialist being forced to repeat themselves to an ignorant public. Fortunately, this was exactly Daisuke’s job.

  “I think she means the Earth wormhole isn’t the only one,” he said. “We just saw another.”

  “And another,” Anne said, “And another off to the south, and they’re all the same distance away from each other.” She talked faster, more quietly, grinning to herself. “This is a grid of wormholes, each at the center of its own alien ecosystem.”

  “This planet is a jigsaw puzzle. A crazy quilt.”

  “Or,” said Daisuke, “it is a railway junction.”

  Nurul was babbling excitedly in Indonesian. Anne spoke too, whether translating or just voicing her own opinion, Daisuke didn’t know.

  “This isn’t just one other planet, it’s…it’s a network of dozens. Hundreds! If each of those wormholes leads into a different habitable world….”

  “It’s a defensive nightmare,” said Pearson. “Hundreds of corridors for God-knows-what to come down. Or go up.”

  “Stop being paranoid,” Anne said. “The only thing that’s changed is we know this planet is even more precious than we thought. Hundreds of alien ecosystems rubbing up against each other. Coevolving. Do you know what that means?”

  “It means we must—” Hariyadi’s order was interrupted by a sharp curse from Misha. The plane bucked and something up by the nose went bang! The pervasive sound and vibration of the engine vanished.

  Everyone looked forward. Past the pilot, the nose of the plane was smoking. The rotors spun gently in the wind of their passage through the air.

  “Turn us around,” barked Hariyadi.

  Misha only grunted and the plane bobbed sickeningly in the air.

  “We must return and report what we have seen,” Hariyadi said, voice tight.

  “Plane not responding,” shouted Misha. “Engine broken. We crash.”

  “Then radio back to base,” ordered Hariyadi. “Now, while we still have line of sight. It is imperative—”

  “Play with radio and we all crash and die,” Misha said. “I land plane now.”

  Hariyadi, face gray, turned to scream at Pearson. “You! You did this! I’ll see you dead before I—”

  “Crashing,” said Misha. “Still crashing.” The plane dropped a meter as if falling off a stair. Daisuke could feel his body tugging upward against his seat belt, his hair and viscera making the same effort to stay at the plane’s previous elevation, clawing at the sky as they fell.

  I knew we were going to crash, came Daisuke’s own voice in his mind, narrating the tragic event as it unfolded. We had made the most important discovery of human history, and we would never be able to tell anyone.

  Misha pushed on the yoke and the plane lurched. Daisuke was now looking down at the back of Misha’s chair. His guts felt like streamers trailing behind hi
m. They were diving.

  The landing gear clunked into position under the floor.

  The landscape rushing past out the windows now looked more like bad computer graphics than real life. It was a rolling purple plain, littered with geometric objects like corkscrews, obelisks, pleated sheets, spiny spheres. A squadron of man-sized donuts rolled into the shadow of a giant crystal rooster comb as the plane hurtled past.

  Wind screamed over the fuselage of the plane, vibrations rippling from the metal through Daisuke’s skin and bones.

  They rocked. The nose tipped up. The wind died. A soft pressure urged Daisuke forward. The gentle hand of de-acceleration telling him everything would be all right if he just curled up….

  “Hold on,” said Misha.

  The plane kissed the ground with barely a tremble. The Newtonian pressure eased. They were down as smoothly as if they’d landed on a freshly paved runway.

  Daisuke hadn’t been aware he’d closed his eyes. When he opened them, the alien obelisks were still rushing past the window. Just as fast as they had been when the plane was in flight. The vibration had begun again, this time from below.

  “Keep holding something!” Misha shouted.

  Anne’s shoulder touched Daisuke’s chair. She was leaning to the left. Or rather the whole plane was slewing to the right.

  Misha cursed again. In the window beyond Daisuke’s head, one of the obelisks was getting bigger.

  Something glittered. Flashed. Crystalline crashing like a broken mirror, and the caress of Sir Isaac became an open-handed slap. Daisuke jerked forward against his seat belt.

  The plane’s nose swung around, the force of the spin tugging Daisuke’s head forward. Another crash. The shriek of metal from under their feet, and the plane tipped as if banking. Sparks filled the window. The wing on Daisuke’s side tore off with a noise so loud it wasn’t even noise anymore, but a pair of hands scooping apart the hemispheres of his brain.