Junction

by Daniel M. Bensen

  Anne looked away.

  Daisuke could guess why. It wouldn’t be the sight of the needle going into his vein, but the look on Pearson’s face. The loosening. The weakness.

  “Ah.” The soldier sighed and flopped onto his back. “Not that I give a damn anymore, but Hariyadi, you are going to kill us all.”

  “I do not plan to kill anyone, Colonel Pearson.”

  “That may be so, but it’s going to happen,” said Pearson. “Just turn around and go back to the plane, would you?”

  Nurul murmured something and Hariyadi frowned. “What do you know, Colonel Pearson?”

  “I know,” Pearson said, “a war is coming. That’s what you’re marching us into.”

  “Damn this stuff is strong,” said Misha. “Almost makes me jealous.”

  “What war?” Hariyadi asked. “There will be no war. The politicians in Jakarta and Washington may shout all they like, but out here, it is military men who make decisions. Men like you, Colonel, and me.”

  Pearson laughed. Everyone flinched back from the sound.

  “Oh,” said the old man. “Oh fuck that hurts so good. Hariyadi, you are a crazy fucking maniac.”

  Hariyadi grimaced. “He is out of his mind on drugs, the poor man. I—”

  “Yeah,” Pearson said. “And I’m a stupid old fool. Or at least my country is making me act like one. Let me talk, dammit!”

  “Sir,” Misha said again, “it would be unhealthy for me to give you more morphine.”

  “So don’t do it, comrade.” Pearson put his hands behind his head. “Just lie back and listen.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “That’s an order,” snapped the soldier. “You got your fairytale from George of the Jungle over there” – he jerked his thumb at Tyaney, who was squatting next to Sing, back turned on the people speaking incomprehensible English – “so now it’s time to hear the white man’s story of Junction.

  “Once upon a time, once upon a time, someone punched a big hole in South Pacific geopolitics.” Pearson chuckled woozily. “A wormhole. It warped space and time and also money and politics, which are more important. Give me a drink.”

  Daisuke handed him their water bottle, filled from the steam trap.

  “Ugh,” said Pearson. “It’s still warm. Papua New Guinea fell apart, torn to pieces by just the hint that Australia, the US, and China might end up on different sides of this conflict. Australia and the US smashed a pro-Chinese coup by the Papuan military, and sent those soldiers to the Highlands to get killed by Indonesians.

  “Because even if the Indonesians couldn’t get to the wormhole first, they’d be damned if they were going to let the Americans and Australians have it all to ourselves. Whoops! Did we dump defoliant on the rainforest around the wormhole again? And napalm too this time! Well, the people who made those mistakes will be punished, you have our word on it! And the people who shot at you? Terrorists, of course!”

  “That is not at all what happened,” Hariyadi said. “There were terrorists around the wormhole. Papuan separatists and religious fanatics. The Indonesian army was given orders to pacify the region. Orders that came from our government, which means,” he sneered, “it came from yours.”

  “Heh,” said Pearson. “Don’t I know it. Your army is nothing more than a bunch of mercenaries hired by the highest bidder. Except for a few…troublesome…patriots like you.” His voice had grown warm and muzzy. “Anyway, Australia was also torn between a government that knows its best interests aligned with the USA, and increasing anti-American sentiment in the populace. There was a lot of talk about avoiding a ‘second Gallipoli’. There was a hard deadline on the current American/Australian/New Guinean alliance: the next Australian election.”

  “Next year?” said Anne.

  “Time flies when you’re having a civil insurrection,” Pearson said. “Now, China. China was much more cautious and pragmatic. Their fleet of warships south of the Philippines just sort of showed up there to ensure nobody did anything regrettable.

  “So the USA” – he placed his hands on his heart – “was feeling the heat. They managed to get their people on the ground at the wormhole site, but how to justify their presence? Internationally, it’s all nods and smiles about exploring the opportunities of the wormhole in coalition with all of humanity. Why, yes, China and Russia and Europe, you’re invited too. Internally, though, the only way to keep goodwill flowing from the American public was by whipping up a state of frenzy. Indonesia is a clear and present danger to the security of the wormhole. And did someone say ‘terrorists’? The New Guinean armed forces were trained by China! And even the Australians are going to turn against us! If anyone is going to do anything ‘regrettable’, you bet your ass it’s going to be us. Fuck, my legs hurt.”

  They were all silent for a moment.

  “What exactly,” said Hariyadi, “was that load of paranoid fantasy supposed to signify?”

  Pearson didn’t appear to hear him. “There are two kinds of countries in this world. Stupid countries and crazy countries. Indonesia’s going to do something crazy, which will prompt the US to do something stupid. Turn back to the airplane, Hariyadi. Let us hide there while the world burns on the other side of those mountains.”

  “Meaning that we should sit here and be safe while the world burns?” Nurul asked. “That’s not a very brave philosophy, Colonel.”

  “That’s not what I said,” snarled Pearson. Then, more quietly. “I’m no coward.”

  Hariyadi stood. “This is all purest nonsense. Do you have any facts to back up your wild accusations?”

  But Pearson had closed his eyes. His breathing had become shallow and fast. Sweat stood out on his forehead.

  “Enough,” Misha said. “He is not a well man.”

  “I am aware of that.” Hariyadi rubbed a hand over his face. “All right. We shall set up a rotation for night duties. Guarding and monitoring Colonel Pearson….”

  Daisuke volunteered to drag Pearson into his private tent and take the first shift with the wounded man. He had halfway hoped for a chance to talk to him privately, but the soldier remained in his sweating, pale, drugged unconsciousness. Daisuke managed to stay awake until his watch ended, at which point he switched with Nurul and crawled into the men’s tent. The warm, wet air rising from the ground condensed into rivers that ran down the outside of his blanket and the inside of the tent. It’s like a chilly sauna, he would tell his audience. A chilly sauna on a broken bathroom floor. The ground under him was hard and not at all level.

  Eventually, Daisuke fell asleep. He dreamed he was back on the plane and they were crashing. The plane sank through the air as slowly as if through quicksand, scrawling above it a trail of black smoke, like a message written in grass-style calligraphy. Do not trust them.

  Tyaney shrieked.

  Daisuke jolted awake and crawled over Misha and Hariyadi to the tent flap.

  It was day and the sky was clear and cloudless. There was no snow on the ground. Nothing that suggested any snow had ever fallen here.

  Tyaney screamed again. Daisuke didn’t understand the words he used, but he knew shocked profanity when he heard it.

  “What is it now?” said Hariyadi, blundering out behind Daisuke.

  Tyaney pointed back the way they had come.

  Daisuke looked west. They had covered depressingly little distance, and the plane was still visible. Although they had apparently climbed farther uphill than he had thought. Either that or the plane was….

  “Christ on a bicycle!” Anne shouted from the flap of the women’s tent. “The bloody plane is sinking!”

  The plane was at the center of a vast sinkhole. Shallow, but growing deeper as the waterlogged sand under it gave way. The water steamed in the bright morning air, air that teemed with clouds of swarming life.

  Daisuke thought of the contracted tiles a
nd how they had slipped and ripped out of the ground under the sledge. About the much heavier plane. About the fact that there were no boulders or other heavy objects lying anywhere on the glasslands.

  “Goodness,” said Daisuke, watching the ground claim their plane. “Look at the diameter of that sinkhole. If we had stayed there….”

  “We didn’t,” Hariyadi said. “We shall take it as a sign.”

  “Well,” said Misha, emerging from Pearson’s tent, “here is another sign. He is dead.”

  Chapter Eight

  Gushing

  “Colonel Pearson is dead?” Hariyadi nearly shoved Daisuke off the hill as he whirled to face Misha. “How did this happen?”

  Misha only shrugged his sagging shoulders. “I don’t know how he died. No marks on body. Simply, he is not breathing.” He looked at Daisuke. “You gonna help me?”

  “Help?” Daisuke echoed.

  “Help move body. Help bury body.”

  Daisuke blinked. Well, of course they had to bury Pearson. They couldn’t very well drag the corpse with them over the mountains. A corpse. One of their number had died.

  “No,” said Hariyadi. “We can’t bury him. We don’t have time.”

  Anne rounded on the soldier. “Would you like us to leave your corpse out here when you die?”

  Hariyadi raised an eyebrow. “When I die?”

  “When all of us die, she means,” Misha said.

  Anne just looked bleakly at the ground.

  And that’s when I knew I had to intervene. Daisuke found himself stepping forward and clearing his throat, checking to see where Rahman and his camera might be.

  “We will bury Colonel Pearson’s body,” he said. “Misha? Get the shovels.”

  “Okay,” said Anne, while the Russian sloped off to the sledge, “but then what?”

  “We will all dig together,” Daisuke said. “Just as all together we will help each other to survive. We will not give up.”

  “Okay?” Anne said. “But I meant ‘what about decomposition?’ The bacteria in his gut will go some way toward breaking his body down, but they won’t thrive in quicksand. Local bacteria and scavengers can’t digest him. His nutrients will be wasted. Just totally inaccessible.”

  Daisuke prevented himself from asking “so what?” If anything, the ninety kilos of biomaterial donated by Pearson would help terraform this place. But the habit of long training took over and what Daisuke ended up saying was, “Perhaps his body will form the basis of an Earthlike ecosystem. Future explorers might find here an apple tree growing in the oasis made by Pearson’s sacrifice.”

  Anne just sniffed. Was she fighting back tears? Why? She’d never liked Pearson. She’d barely been able to exchange a civil word with him. Daisuke might be excused for shedding a manly tear for the fall of a gruff old mentor, but what sort of relationship drama had Anne established? Romantic antagonism?

  Daisuke realized with a twist of self-loathing that he was thinking like a TV personality. What had Eriko called him? An eggshell with nothing inside? This is a funeral, and I can’t even summon up the humanity to be sad?

  Apparently not, but if Daisuke couldn’t be a real human being, he could sure as hell act like it. He rubbed his ring finger and composed his expression into heavy grief. “Let’s get the body.”

  Pearson’s body itself showed no signs of struggle. The corpse lay on its back under a silvery thermal blanket, its arms limp at its sides, its skin waxy and bejeweled with dew. Its mouth and eyes were closed. The man looked more peaceful than he ever had when alive. Daisuke muttered a prayer to Amida Buddha as he squatted at the corpse’s head and slid his arms under its armpits.

  “So what happened?” asked Hariyadi as Misha and Daisuke waddled past with their grisly cargo. “Allergy? Shock? Poison?” His eyes scanned Daisuke’s face, Misha’s, Anne’s, narrow with suspicion.

  “Well, we can rule out poison,” Anne said. “The shmoo injected him with something, but I doubt bioactive molecules from aliens would have anything like the intended effect on humans.”

  “Allergies?” Hariyadi pressed.

  Anne made a considering noise. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t even the shmoo that killed him, just his own immune response to the alien germs that took up residence in the wounds ex post facto.”

  “What’s going on?” Nurul mumbled, climbing out of the women’s tent. She shivered under her thermal blanket, glaring blearily at the rest of the party as if looking for the person who had turned down the thermostat. Then her eyes fell on Daisuke and Misha. Pearson’s body. She stiffened, her face setting like cement.

  “Pearson is dead,” said Anne.

  “Oh!” Nurul’s blanket fell to the ground as she put her hands to her mouth, revealing clothes stained, and in some cases eaten right through, by glasslands effluvia. Her forehead furrowed with shock and distress. “That’s— How terrible! Was it his wounds that killed him?”

  Anne sighed. “I suppose it must have been. Shock. Delayed shock. It’s not like we can do an autopsy on him out here. Or a decent burial.” She ran her hands through her hair, while Nurul ducked into the men’s tent, where Rahman was still asleep. Tyaney lurched out of the tent a few seconds later as if shoved, his expression foul. The Nun man turned back toward the tent, opening his mouth, but backed away from the sound of muffled weeping.

  “Okay,” said Misha. “We bury him. If we don’t die of exhaustion carrying body down hill. Come, Daisuke.”

  It turned out that moving Pearson’s body was the most difficult part of the burial process. With only a little pressure from the edge of a shovel, the tiles that made up the ground of the glasslands popped out of their sockets. The chalky sand below was entirely dry and easy to shift.

  Small creatures like hard candies made of glass tinkled out over the ground as the humans emptied out a grave. What would such creatures make of Pearson’s body? Would it poison them? Would they die of an immune reaction? Daisuke grimaced at the thought. He’d experienced the early stages of anaphylaxis himself.

  Daisuke remembered burning pain, swelling of the eyes, nose, and throat. Anne clawing at her own skin, her rictus grin of pain and terror.

  Pearson’s body, however, was as peaceful as a Buddha.

  Too peaceful. Daisuke forced himself to keep digging, kept his expression neutral. Pearson couldn’t have died the way Anne said he had. It was still possible that Junction was simply a very dangerous place – more dangerous than the worst bush Daisuke had ever trekked through.

  Or maybe, gentle audience, it is not Junction that is dangerous, but the human soul.

  Chapter Nine

  Postmortem

  The body of Gregory Pearson, Colonel, United States Air Force, became a flattened mound of sand between two glassy ridges. Hexagonal tiles turned on their sides formed a fence around the grave, the fishlike organisms within wriggling as they died from exposure to Terran biochemistry. The body might last forever, mummified under the crossed root-pipes the expedition had left on top of the grave.

  Or Pearson’s body might already have vanished into a sinkhole like the one that had swallowed the plane. A ferocious predator might have chanced upon the grave and dug it up. The person who was responsible for the death might be walking alongside Daisuke right now. The chilly, damp air smelled of sulfur.

  And yet the glasslands were beautiful. The sun, still low in the south-east, sprayed off the reef-topped crests of the hills. Glassy animals swarmed in the air, splitting the light with their prismatic shells, populating the misty air with rainbows.

  Glass squealed under the runners of the sledge as Daisuke pulled their baggage. It was hard work, full of backtracking and rerouting around ridges that all seemed to run in the wrong direction, but Daisuke was no stranger to hard physical labor. Plus, this way he could keep all of his suspects in view.

  Hariyadi marched at the
head of their little expedition, Pearson’s gun in his hand. They were marching toward Imsame even now. The wounded Pearson hadn’t been able to stop them from leaving camp. He would have slowed us down, though.

  Tyaney and Sing walked next to the colonel, the woman hand in hand with her husband, occasionally exchanging a few words. The Nun guides had barely reacted when they learned about Pearson’s death. Was that just because Daisuke didn’t understand their special signs of grief? Or did they really not give a damn about the life or death of a Westerner? And Pearson had put Sing in danger, antagonizing the wildlife like that.

  Pearson had put Nurul in danger too, and as loyal Indonesians, they might not like the way the American had tried to take control after the crash. That is, the destruction of Misha’s precious airplane. And the Russian had been the one to discover Pearson’s body. He was also the one who had administered Pearson’s morphine. Pearson, who had died so peacefully.

  And Anne. The one who so clearly hated Pearson and everything he stood for. The one who had argued with him before his death. Who had been with him when the shmoo attacked, and who knew more about this environment than anyone. Murder by applied ecology?

  Anne might be a murderer. Any of Daisuke’s companions might be a murderer.

  Stuck in his frightening thoughts, Daisuke failed to give enough berth to a reeflike outcropping of screw-trees. One of the runners of the sledge caught on a finger-high nodule and Daisuke was nearly yanked off his feet as the sledge turned into an immovable fixture of the landscape.

  Anne and Misha were the closest, and so first to turn around in response to Daisuke’s swearing and calls for help. It took all three of them to lift the sledge off the obstruction and push it clear.

  “What are you doing?” Hariyadi called. “You are too far behind.”

  Daisuke wiped his brow. Tiny creatures like the beads of a necklace zipped through the air, tasting his sweat and dropping away. He looked out at the glasslands, rising in hills like ripples in a pond to lap at the stony feet of the mountains.