“What?” said Anne. “It’s obvious? The plants growing at the edge of the Earth biome aren’t like anything that actually lives on Earth. There are fish in the Nun settling pools that eat plant matter from the treeworm biome! You think that kind of adaptation happens over a long weekend? And, uh….” She looked introspective. “I haven’t talked about this before, but I’m pretty sure I saw teeth on one of the birds the Nun roasted for us. So, the Deep Sky Hole has been there for a long, long time. Like, Cretaceous-long.”
“And for how many million years since aliens put wormholes here?” Misha pointed up toward the darkening sky and the unnatural arc of the Nightbow. “Connections to how many other stars? Hundreds? Thousands? In all that time, one of those stars will become red giant, no? Or become nova. Why do we not see wormhole belching stellar plasma all over place?”
“Because we’d be dead if we were close enough to a nova to see it,” said Anne.
Daisuke looked into her eyes. Saw the stars reflected there. “So,” he said, “why are we not dead?”
“Because we are careful,” snapped Hariyadi. “Enough idle speculation. Ladies, we need dinner. Daisuke, you should have made a steam trap already.”
“Ladies?” Anne said. “Ladies? How about you make dinner, Hariyadi? Since even though I may be a woman, I actually have an important job to do, what with observing our environment and making deductions that keep us alive. While you….”
“Please help me with the steam trap, Anne,” Daisuke begged.
“I keep you safe,” said Hariyadi. “I make sure the whole party is coordinated and organized. It’s the difference between life and death.”
“Yes, yes it is. Yes, you do.” Daisuke looked around for a camera, but Rahman was just staring at him, probably not getting five words in the conversation out of ten. Well, they were all wearing bodycams. Daisuke oriented himself to Hariyadi’s and performed.
“We all do what we must to survive,” he declaimed. “That is what we should learn from Pearson’s death. There is no room in our group for fighting. No room for suspicion.” He lifted his right fist to chin level. “We protect each other so we can survive.”
Hariyadi raised an eyebrow. “Should I applaud?” He let out an angry breath. “Go make us a steam trap, Mr. Matsumori, and take Ms. Houlihan with you.”
He glared at Anne, as if daring her to disagree. Nurul and Rahman whispered at each other. Misha looked extremely entertained. Sing and Tyaney were sitting silently, ignoring both each other and the rest of the party.
“Please come,” Daisuke whispered, and walked out from under the tarp.
Anne followed him a moment later. “Oh hell,” she said. “People.” She spat the word like a curse.
Daisuke smiled. As lost as he was behind the persona of the Iron Man of Survival, a person with no mask at all was like a drink of cool water in the desert. He walked across the slippery glass, selecting a tile to smash and some words of comfort to say. “You do not need to be a people person. Just a survival person.”
“Is that supposed to be sarcastic?” Anne demanded. “Pearson died trying to protect Nurul and me.” She looked away. “Protect us from something I should have seen coming a mile off. Dig into that tile. No, that one.”
Anne pointed and Daisuke plunged the shovel into the tile. The plume of steam that came out was smaller than usual. Perhaps the glasslands needed time to recover from its sporulation.
“I am wondering whether the thing that made Pearson allergic might get us too?” he said, once they had the steam trap erected.
Anne frowned, considering. “Well, he might have died from anaphylaxis. Or maybe it was poison or shock or, or anything. Fast-acting silicosis from all the glass-coated pollen?” She waved her hand in front of her face as if to dispel poisonous smoke. “I don’t even have a magnifying glass. I have no idea what’s in this air and it could be almost anything. You keep making assumptions like we’re on Earth, Dice, and we’re not.”
She was right. Pearson’s death could have been caused by anything. Their own deaths could be caused by anything. Not a comforting thought.
“So,” Daisuke said, trying not to feel the tickling of spores in his nasal cavities, “it’s a very good thing we’re leaving this environment quickly.”
“I suppose,” said Anne. “Good thing we don’t have a crippled soldier to slow us down.”
Whatever relief Daisuke might have felt was gone now. Anne had just outlined her motive for getting rid of a deadly drain on their resources. Hell, Daisuke was halfway convinced he should have killed Pearson.
He looked at Anne, her hips drawn as if with broad strokes of a big, round-tipped brush. Himself, lusting after her, suspicious of her, making dinner, trying to keep his tenuous grip on his role to play. Wishing he could have sex with Anne even when it was entirely possible she’d murdered Pearson. Sex and power. Scheming and sneaking. Dominance games. Death. We are eight monkeys, still trying to do what monkeys do, even though we are so very far from jungle.
“You’re awfully quiet,” said Anne.
“It has been a long day.” He glanced at her bodycam. And I don’t want to interrogate you.
“Hey,” Anne said. “You just looked at my bodycam.” She put her hand over the device. “Are you afraid of saying something that might get recorded? Or doing something? Because I can take this thing off.”
Daisuke stared at Anne.
“That sounded like a come-on, didn’t it?” she said. “Uh…. Well, maybe it is?” She hefted the bodycam in one hand. “How about it?”
Their eyes met and his heart jumped as if he’d touched his tongue to a battery. A sour taste filled his mouth. The same taste he got right before he forced himself to jump onto a crocodile’s back or fling himself up an escarpment. The thrill of danger.
“Shit. I said the wrong thing, didn’t I?” Anne gave a short, sharp sigh. “Look, Dice, I don’t enjoy feeling like I’m back in high school. I’m not good at this, okay? So would you stop trying to send me subtle signals and tell me whether I should keep pushing or whether I’m embarrassing myself?”
“I’m the one who should be embarrassed,” said Daisuke, “and I’m the one who should apologize. I….” He forced himself to say something the Iron Man of Survival would never say. “I don’t know what to do.”
She folded her arms. “Oh, I get it. You aren’t interested.”
“No no!” Daisuke fumbled for the right words. “You are very interesting. I mean, I am…interested. I am just….” He looked down at his own bodycam. “I am just confused. When there is no camera, I don’t know what to do.”
“You…want to record us pashing?” Anne asked. “That’s pretty weird, Dice. I’m not judging, but I’m not into that.”
“No. No.” Daisuke held his hands up toward her, feeling as if he was propitiating an idol. “I don’t want cameras for…that reason.” They’d called it ‘making out’ in America. Presumably ‘pashing’ was the Australian equivalent. “It’s only….” Can I even express this thought in my own language? “I know what I should do in front of cameras,” Daisuke attempted. “Like you know what to do with an alien ecosystem. Right?”
She rocked her head from side to side. “You mean you’re a professional TV guy the same way I’m a professional biologist. Okay. But I’m talking about what happens when we…” she tugged distractingly at her shirt, ”…hang up our work clothes.”
“Nothing,” said Daisuke. “There is nothing else in me.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” She examined him as if he were a new species of nematode. “Dice, you’re gonna have to unpack that for me.”
Her expression was open and concerned. Honest. As opposed to Daisuke, the fake hero, the pseudo-biologist, mimic-detective, the TV personality. Self-disgust gushed up from the glass-coated bedrock of Daisuke’s personality. He was off script. The Iron Man of Survival woul
dn’t talk like this.
And yet, who knew when they would stop surviving? Pearson had managed to unburden himself before his death, but would Daisuke be so lucky?
He cleared his throat, forced himself to speak. “My wife was right.”
“Uh,” Anne said. “…oh?”
“My wife said….” Daisuke tried to assemble a coherent translation. “‘You have a pretty face, but you’re hollow. Like an egg with nothing inside. I could crush you with one hand.’”
Anne blinked. “Your wife said she would crush you?”
“She wrote it in an email.”
Anne snorted. “The bitch.”
“No,” said Daisuke. “She was right. I never showed her my…insides?” She squinted at him and Daisuke reviewed his phraseology. “I mean what I have inside. Only showed her outside.” He brushed his hand across his chest. “The shell.”
Anne squatted next to him, close enough he could feel her body heat. “Well.” She looked down his torso. “What have you got in there?”
Daisuke’s laugh came without warning. A bark that echoed off the glass ridges around them. A herd of wheelers left off their grazing on the reproductive slurry coating the valley below and rolled off in search of quieter pastures.
“You,” said Daisuke. “You are…you have no shell at all. An egg with no shell.”
She squinted. “So like frog spawn? I can live with that.”
“Most women would be insulted by the comparison.”
Anne’s grin turned self-deprecating. “Most women would have worked their wiles on you a lot smoother, probably.”
Daisuke flicked through his mental English grammar book. Yes, this sentence should work: “Maybe it’s better to be bad at people than to be bad at being a person.”
“Well,” Anne said. “That just means we’re complementary.” She placed a hand on her collar. “Insides without outsides….” She put the other hand on his chest, where it warmed him. “And outsides without insides.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “So can I fill you up?”
Daisuke laughed again, leaned to the side, and kissed Anne.
Overhead, the Nightbow shone with the light of other stars.
Chapter Ten
Marital Relations
They didn’t have sex. That would have to wait until Anne could finagle a private tent. Or failing that, a patch of ground that wasn’t coated in allergenic yellow slime.
But Daisuke was definitely on Anne’s ‘to do’ list. That was the thought Anne had gone to sleep with and the thought she’d woken up with. Just grabbing Daisuke’s face and rubbing it all over her. Letting those strong, long-fingered hands explore a different kind of wilderness.
“So,” said a voice from her elbow, “are congratulations in order?”
Anne looked around to see Nurul, now looking less like an airline hostess than one of the broke college students who sleep in the airport. Although Anne shouldn’t be critical. She probably looked less human than the things growing on the mountainside around them.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Anne said, failing to suppress her smile.
Nurul smiled in return. “I’ve known you two were going to end up together since we met in Imsame. And the way you looked at each other this morning while we broke camp, even Hariyadi figured it out.” She nodded back down the slope. “That’s why he’s marching so far back, the coward.”
Anne didn’t see the logic. “He’s scared of Daisuke and me having sex?”
“More like, he’s scared of talking about it,” said Nurul. “He is a man of a certain age, after all.”
Anne and Nurul had indeed outdistanced the rest of the party by a fair bit. The slopes of the mountain had proven surprisingly amenable to wheeled vehicles, but it still took Daisuke, Rahman, and Misha working together to keep their heavily laden cart moving up the zig-zag game trail.
They’d only been climbing for a couple of hours, but already the air was cooler and thinner, if less sulfurous. The morning sun shone up the length of the mountain range, casting deep shadows across their folds and gullies, throwing glittering highlights off of hill-reefs and, still visible in the distance, the wing of their airplane. The fuselage of the plane had vanished into an irregular lavender carpet that Anne supposed was some kind of weedy secondary growth. And under that scab, were the glasslands digesting the metal and plastic in the plane or just growing over it? If she came back in a year, would that wing still be there, waving hello as it now seemed now to wave goodbye?
If she came back in a year, what would be growing over Pearson’s grave?
Anne shivered, angry at herself for ruining her own good mood, and guilty she’d been in a good mood in the first place. She should be grim. She should be mourning, literally, not chasing after rugged Japanese celebrities.
The only thing that made Anne feel better was that Daisuke had clearly felt the same way. He’d asked her to talk to people about Pearson’s death, probably because he wanted to get some good footage of grieving.
Anne actually agreed with him. They should try to keep him alive in their memories. Because God knew Anne hadn’t given the man much credit while he was alive. She’d been content to deal with him as a stereotype, but she’d been like a layperson walking across the desert and saying, “It’s just sand,” totally ignorant of the struggles going on under the surface. The ceaseless work that it took for organisms there to just go on surviving under the lethal sun.
Pearson hadn’t been some meathead caricature. He’d been a whole person, full of complicated self-contradictions, as rich and diverse and productive as anyone. And now he was gone, his body turned into a battleground of two different types of microorganism. Wasted. Fuck, was she crying?
“What’s wrong?” asked Nurul.
“God, I’m sorry.” Anne sniffed, poking at her eyes, churning with embarrassment and sadness and horniness and curiosity and who knows what. “I’m sorry. I’m a mess.”
“It’s all right.” Nurul looked at her, face scrunched up as if she was wrestling with an internal decision.
“He was a very difficult man,” she said, finally. “A hard man. Still I am…horrified he’s dead.”
Horrified, yes. Because Pearson was a worthy individual who should not have died, or because Anne was afraid the same might happen to her? Or maybe just horrified at her own selfishness.
Nurul shook her head, maybe clearing away her own grim thoughts. “Do we have enough food and water to get over the mountain?”
“If getting over the mountain only takes us a day,” said Anne, “maybe.”
“But that should be enough, right? Didn’t Sing say that there is a sort of oasis ahead, where we can eat the animals and drink the water?”
“Yes, and I would like to believe her,” Anne said, “but even if she’s right, there’s still this biome between us and the oasis.” She sniffed. “From the smell of it, I’d prefer not to drink the water here.”
The rocks around them were almost entirely bare of life except for odd little glassy bubbles and a sort of brown slime. Every now and then the wind would swirl down the mountain, bringing with it a smell that made Anne think of sewers and rotting corpses. Or maybe that was just her imagination.
Anne looked downslope, wondering how she might indicate that she’d rather let Daisuke catch up to her, then just sort of kiss him for a while. “You don’t want to wait for the others to catch up with us?”
“We wouldn’t be very good scouts if we stayed with the convoy. Besides” – Nurul swept her hand up the slope – “Hariyadi wants to push forward until we get to the tree line.”
“The reverse tree line, I’d call it.” Rather than the normal succession of trees to grass to bare rock, this mountainside went from glass reefs to bare rock to rotting sludge, then something rustling and brown.
“All right,” she said as they
started up toward the tangled mountain jungle. “But you don’t need to keep to my pace. Feel free to take a rest and let your husband catch you up.”
Nurul did not get the hint. “Actually I thought since our primary TV personality is currently employed as an ox alongside my husband, I should take the opportunity to enjoy one of your famous alien talks.”
Of course Anne would really rather talk more about Daisuke. But there was a fair chance that Nurul would remind Anne that once they made it back to civilization, Daisuke would drop Anne like a homely potato. So. Stick to biology.
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll try not to get us attacked by poisonous spores or vicious beasts this time.” Anne immediately regretted the joke. Her teeth ground together and she suppressed the urge to stomp, furious with herself. Jesus, a man had died!
Nurul favored her with a smile, teeth a perfect white crescent. “Thank you.”
The sun rose high and the glasslands died out from under them. The lowland tiles became fishbowl-sized globes, then shrank to the size of grapes, then vanished, leaving the ground bare except for pencil-thin root-pipes and purple algae. Farther up, the pipes were broken, then absent. A shiny, chocolate-colored patina appeared on the sunward side of rocks, and then….
“Is that hair?” Nurul asked. “An animal?”
“Maybe,” said Anne. “Or an old wig. Or the remains of a man buried up to his scalp in the talus.”
Nurul squinted at her. “You’re not serious, are you?”
“It’s some kind of plant.”
“Well, why don’t you go examine it and tell me about it?” Nurul flicked her bodycam. “Daisuke’s not the only one who knows how to help people look good on camera.”
Anne realized their previous conversation about pashing was now recorded on military hardware. Hopefully they’d never declassify this stuff, and only some poor intelligence analyst would have to know Anne’s shame.
Biology. Let’s focus on biology.
Trying not to be self-conscious, Anne brushed the clump of brown filaments with her foot. They flopped limply aside. “More like thin noodles than hair,” she said. And, still thinking of Daisuke. “Soba-weed.” God, did her voice sound weird? Was she standing the right way? And what smelled so bad?
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