Junction

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “Uh,” said Anne, but the Nun woman pointed at the nearest kelp-tree.

  “Yo,” she said. “Yo sam mek.”

  “That means ‘tree something water’,” Anne said.

  “Tree water,” Sing seemed to agree.

  Anne thought about that. “Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? Look down and you don’t see any soil. Just bare rocks with the holdfasts of the plants clinging to them. But they must have some way of storing the water they need, and the only place it could be is inside. Plus, it would make good ballast against the lifting power of hydrogen.”

  “So she says water is in the trees,” said Misha. “Okay. Stop!” he yelled, and let go of the cart. Hariyadi and Daisuke groaned from the other side.

  “Sing,” said Misha, lumbering toward her. “You say water is in tree?” He removed from his belt an extremely scary serrated hunting knife, nearly as long as his forearm. “Like here?” He gave a kelp-tree a whack with the flat of the blade. It thunked and sloshed like a rubber wine cask.

  Sing jumped at the noise, looking around as if afraid of drawing attention.

  “Quiet, Misha,” said Anne. “There might be predators.”

  “Human ones only, I think,” Misha said, and smiled at Sing. He held his thumb up. “Tyaney good?” He turned his thumb down, frowning. “Or Tyaney bad?”

  Sing frowned. “Tyaney.”

  “Just as I thought,” Misha said. “We must rescue her.”

  “You have no idea if she understood you,” said Anne. “Or if you understood her. We have no idea if there’s even water in that tree.”

  In answer, Misha gave the tree a slash with his knife and jumped back to avoid a stream of thick black mud. It stunk like a latrine and wriggled with creatures like rings of calamari. Anne turned away before she could be sick, taking her eyes off Sing.

  “Oh! We can’t drink that!” said Rahman.

  “Where is water, Sing?” Misha asked. Then, spinning around, “Sing?”

  “What?” Anne caught a glimpse of the soba-weed swaying like a curtain, obscuring Sing’s footprints. The woman herself was gone.

  “She ran away.” Anne was nearly bowled over by Misha, who leaped into the undulating undergrowth after Sing.

  “Follow me!” he shouted, already invisible behind waving brown tendrils. “Before the trail gets cold.”

  Anne jumped in after him and was running before she could consider why. Was she rescuing a woman from her abusive husband or securing a vital source of intelligence? Or just acting to spite Tyaney, who’d made a fool of her again?

  Anne stopped herself. She couldn’t just plunge headlong into the alien bush with no more protection than a pair of boots and some rancid clothing. But if they lost Sing, all the rest of this expedition would be a headlong plunge into alien bush. They needed Sing to tell them what was safe and what was dangerous. And the trail was getting cold.

  Anne passed through the curtain of soba-weed and the light dimmed. The forest was stinking, somber, and cold. It whispered and thunked with the sounds of kelp-trees sliding past each other. And there was something else. Some kind of animals making xylophone-like klonking or pokking sounds from the soba-weed. Anne imagined a log-worm striking its own shell with a biological hammer.

  The kelp-trees moved in the wind, parting to let dazzling spears of sunlight pierce the coffee-colored understory gloom. Anne blinked, squinted, tried to retain some semblance of dark-adapted vision. If she faced north-east, she could put her back to the afternoon sun, which cut off her view of half the forest. Sing could be standing three meters south-west of her, and she’d be obliterated by the dazzle.

  Misha had, either consciously or not, turned away from the sun and run east, parallel to the track. As she watched, he bulled through a wiglike clump of soba-weed, which rustled.

  “Stop!” called Anne, “we have no idea what’s—”

  “Fuck!” Misha reeled back, a lobster-sized log-worm dangling from his upraised foot.

  “It’s okay. It’s okay,” Anne said, walking up to him. “This thing doesn’t have any equipment hard enough to get through your boot leather. Just put your foot down and give it a chance to disengage.”

  “Or….” Misha growled and slashed his terrifying knife through the log-worm’s proboscis. Its shelled body clunked to the ground, bleeding milky fluid.

  “There,” said Misha, taking a step into the bush, “now we…fuck!”

  He held up an arm to shield his face from a rain of bullet-sized linguipods.

  “And that is how she will kill you.”

  Tyaney was right behind her. How the hell had the bastard snuck up on her?

  “What do you mean?” Anne tried to look less frightened and more pissed off. “Tyaney, what’s going on between you and—”

  “Sing is a witch,” Tyaney said. “As I told you. She can command the creatures of this country to do her bidding.” He pointed at Misha. “Already they have killed the fat man.”

  “I am not dead,” Misha said, but winced. “Ow.” He flicked his hand, sending a squadron of linguipods flying.

  “Let me see that.” Anne grabbed Misha’s hand and peered at the bleeding pinpricks the little animals had left behind.

  “No swelling, no heat,” she said. “Misha, do you feel any stinging, tingling, numbness, itching, dizziness?”

  “I know the symptoms of snakebite and anaphylactic shock better than you do,” snapped Misha, pulling his hand back. “I’ll be fine. Unlike that little wife-beating weasel.” He glared at Tyaney, who sneered back and uttered an Indonesian idiom about dogs.

  Anne gritted her teeth. Of all the time for alpha male dominance rituals. “Right!” she said, and clapped her hands. The noise echoed like a gunshot between the swaying stalks.

  “Do you want to find Sing?” Anne demanded in Indonesian. “If so, follow me.”

  “You can’t track a witch in her own wood,” Tyaney said. “We don’t know anything about this evil country.”

  “You don’t know anything?” demanded Misha.

  “No. I come from Earth, remember?”

  Anne wasn’t listening. She had squatted, looking at the ill-lit ground.

  Fine threads, delicate and thin as the hairs on a baby’s head, clutched the upper surfaces of the stones. The fuzz carpeted the ground everywhere except where she and Misha had stepped, where their boots had overturned pebbles and crushed the tiny plants.

  “What are you doing? That won’t work,” groused Tyaney as Anne waddled down the path of disturbed vegetation, past Misha.

  Sing had run through the plant life without fear of poison, so….

  Anne swept her hand through the soba-weed and flinched back from a rain of linguipods. She moved, swept out her hand again. Another attack from the little parasites. And again…nothing. The soba-weed to the north-east was free of linguipods. Because the creatures had already attacked someone else? Sing, for example?

  “Look,” she said, “in a forest on Earth we would look for…” she switched to English, “…spiderwebs and crushed grass. Here we have disturbed baby’s-hair weeds and triggered linguipods, but it’s the same thing.”

  “What?” said both Tyaney and Misha, equally baffled.

  Anne stood and pointed into the bush. “Sing went that way.”

  Tyaney did not look impressed. “Let Misha go first. He can spring her other traps.”

  Misha either didn’t understand or ignored the comment. He did indeed insist on going first, though, carefully parting the weeds with his booted foot before taking each step.

  “Misha,” Anne said, “I should go first. I know how to read the ground.”

  “You think you do,” grunted Misha, taking another step.

  “I think I just bloody proved I can read the ground, Misha, so let me take the lead.”

  Misha waved a hand
in front of his face, as if dispelling smoke. “Sorry, Anne. I am not angry at you.”

  “This is too slow,” Tyaney said.

  “Shut up,” Misha replied in his terrible Indonesian. “You hurt your wife, you dog.”

  “Yes,” said Tyaney. “My wife. Mine. You think you can take her from me, red man, and have her peoples’ magic for yourself?”

  “You animal,” Misha said, at the limit of his Indonesian vocabulary. “You pig. You dog.”

  “You called me a dog already, you leftward-shitting, swollen-jawed, sagging-bellied, burned-skinned pile of babbling afterbirth.”

  “You’re not helping,” said Anne. “Misha, check the ground ahead of us for linguipods. Tyaney, why did Sing run away?”

  “Because certain death is better than staying with her bastard husband,” Misha said in English while Tyaney said, “To find her toys, probably. She told me the local ones were wild and untamed, but I don’t believe her.”

  “Toys?” repeated Anne, thinking she’d heard wrong. “Like the things children play with?”

  “Eh,” Tyaney said. “In my language we call them mekaletya.”

  “Meka letyat?” said Misha.

  Anne struggled to recall what Sing had said with so much fear in her voice. “Is that like Metek aleb-ti-a?”

  Tyaney shrugged. “Metek aleb-ti-a means ‘a small thing that gives a lot’. Mekaletya means…how would you say it in Indonesian? Maybe ‘toymaker’.”

  “Tyaney,” Anne said, hairs rising on the back of her neck, “what exactly are toymakers?”

  “They’re, what do you call it? ‘Evil aliens’,” said Tyaney. “When we raided Sing’s village, the damn things killed three of my men. Clearly, Sing wants to finish the job now.”

  They emerged onto a rut in the ground barely large enough to qualify as a path.

  “There,” whispered Tyaney. “Of course she came to them. Ibu Anne, if you want use of Sing, we must find her now before she—”

  Something clattered behind them. Misha swore under his breath and jumped back from the object he’d stepped on. “It’s all right,” he said in disgust. “Just another damn log-worm.”

  Except it wasn’t. Or at least, not anymore.

  “Dead,” Tyaney said.

  Misha kicked the empty wooden shell into the middle of the path, where it rolled to a stop, empty and skull-like.

  “That way is the toymaker nest,” Tyaney said, pointing south. “We must go back into the bush and circle around. It is death to stay on this path. Let the fat man go first to absorb all the parasites.”

  Misha had something to say about that, but Anne was no longer listening. As she watched, a second log-worm joined the shell Misha had kicked.

  Except it wasn’t. Instead of a wrinkled fleshy mouth, this thing’s front end was capped by a purplish, hexagonal pane, very much like a glasslands tile. Instead of marionette-legs, it pushed itself forward with an octet of finger-length legs. And it – Anne squinted for a better look – it rolled.

  Two thin wooden cylinders like the wheels of a steamroller squeaked as the legs pushed the animal forward. On its back, an L-shaped organ twitched back and forth like a tail…no.

  Anne’s mental models broke and reformed. The half-meter thing she saw twitching its way up the path was not an animal. It was a toy boat. A wooden artifact with wheels, oars, and a little periscope on top.

  Tyaney said something that was probably a curse in his language. “Stay back,” he said. “Do not provoke it. We are not enough to defend ourselves.”

  “But…but…that’s….” Anne swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. “That’s a wooden fucking robot.”

  She had been speaking English, but Tyaney wasn’t listening anyway. “Disturb a single toymaker and the rest will never forget us or stop until they have killed us all.”

  As if to underline the ridiculous pronouncement, the little boat stuck out an oar and patted ineffectually at the empty log-worm shell.

  When the shell only spun harmlessly, the little boat nosed closer. Its two front oars, which Anne now noticed were shaped less like paddles than salad spoons, clapped onto the shell’s sides, pressed, and lifted. The oars, now arms, locked into place with an audible klak, suspending the log-worm shell over the ground. On its six remaining oars, the boat pushed itself through a four-point turn and trundled back down the path.

  Anne and Misha stared after it, mouths open. Gradually, their shocked silence was filled by a sound from down the path as of tiny xylophones, or mating frogs, ticking wooden clocks, or an army of tiny gnomes, hammering away in the darkness of the forest.

  “So,” said Anne, very carefully in Indonesian, “that was a toymaker?”

  “No,” Tyaney said, “the makers ride inside the toys like we rode inside the airplane.”

  Which made what they’d just seen a sort of mining engineer? Collecting raw material from the forest? No, more like a caddis fly larva building a shell out of found materials. Facts clicked into place. “Let me guess,” she said, and switched to Indonesian. “Inside the toy there is stinking black stuff and white things like rings of calamari.”

  Just like they’d seen living inside the kelp-trees. Except this species, the toymakers, didn’t live inside trees, but the shells of dead log-worms. Something of Nurul’s lessons must have rubbed off on her because Anne had no trouble coming up with an analogy. “As if a bird built wheels onto its nest.”

  “People build things with wheels too,” Misha said. “What if these creatures are true tool-users. Can we talk to them?”

  Anne shook her head and shrugged. “I would love to find out.” She switched back into Indonesian and asked Tyaney, “The thing down the path is the toymakers’ city?”

  “Nest,” corrected Tyaney. “Sing will be with them. If we stay off the path and make our way toward the nest, we may be able to see her. Then I will throw a rock and hit her on the head.”

  “What?” hissed Misha.

  “If she falls without damaging any toymakers, they will ignore her and we can collect her.” Tyaney finished.

  “No,” Anne said. “We might kill Sing.”

  “If Sing directs her alien hordes against us, we will surely be overwhelmed,” said Tyaney.

  “No,” Anne said again. “No violence. We go to the nest. We find Sing. We talk to her.”

  “That’s a stupid idea and you’re a stupid, blind red woman,” said Tyaney, but Misha was already lumbering into the bush. Anne had intentionally made her Indonesian simple enough for the smuggler to follow.

  Tyaney snarled and threatened, but he had no way to stop them short of injuring them. And even if the Nun man thought he’d be able to overpower a pair of fit and bulky ‘red people’, he knew as well as Anne how vulnerable he would be here in the kelp-tree forest by himself.

  “You are being stupid,” he said, “and selfish. You want to take Sing from me and use her to lead you home. You can kill me then and take my share of the food.”

  There was more noise from the path beyond the soba-weed. Wooden oars clattered against rock.

  “Of course we’re not going to kill you,” Anne whispered back at him. “But you’re right we need Sing. You must be…” – she groped at her meager vocabulary – “…a good husband to her.”

  “Arrogant red woman!” said Tyaney. “You think you know my wife better than I do? She’s mine. I know her. I know where she is and what she’s doing.”

  “No, you don’t,” Misha said. He had stopped at a new, smaller path. One of many Anne could see, all radiating out from a clearing just beyond the smuggler. There, built up around the holdfast of a huge old kelp-tree, was the toymaker city.

  It was made of log-worm shells of varying lengths and diameters. Some had been split to form crescents that had been somehow glued together to form larger, flowerlike structures. Others had been glued side-to
-side into honeycomb patterns or end-to-end to make segmented tubes.

  There were other materials in use as well. Anne noted hexagonal glass plates and glass bowls the size of her head and realized who had made the path down the mountain to the glasslands and why.

  The linked-cylinder architecture reminded Anne of an illustration she’d seen of proposed habitats on Mars. That or someone hired Jim Henson to design toys for a construction-equipment-worshipping cargo cult.

  And all of it was in motion. There were vibrating guy-wires, spinning windmills, circling trains, oars, and lever-arms that paddled and pistoned, chopped and scooped and carried. There were at least a hundred variously sized land-boats, all bustling into and out of the central mound.

  What there was not, was Sing.

  Misha snorted in disgust. “You lied. She is not here.”

  “But Sing came this way.” Tyaney looked at Anne, apparently baffled. “She must have. You tracked her, didn’t you?”

  “I tracked her to the path,” Anne said. “She probably used it. Or crossed it and kept going. If these things are as dangerous as you say, Sing probably walked away from them.”

  “No,” said Tyaney. “She must have come here. These evil creatures are hers to command.”

  “And how would he know that?” Misha asked in English. “His witch doctor tell him?”

  Anne shook her head. She hated to leave sight of these fascinating wooden tool-users but…. “We have to find Sing. If she didn’t go down the path, she must have gone up it.”

  “Don’t walk on the path!” snapped Tyaney. “It’s death to step on a toymaker.”

  And they’d never be able to avoid that. The path, which had been empty less than fifteen minutes ago, now swarmed with wheeled vehicles, most of them headed back toward Daisuke and the others.

  Anne was about to suggest they go back through the woods the way they’d come when a noise like a fanfare of tiny xylophones erupted from the clearing. The central mass of the city, a rough pyramid of stacked cylinders that Anne had thought of as little skyscrapers, separated from the rest of the buildings and slid across the ground. Another fanfare, and the mass of towers jerked forward again. The whole thing, she saw now, was on wheels, rolling pins the thickness of her thigh.