Junction

by Daniel M. Bensen

  Anne only shrugged unhelpfully. “Well, I wouldn’t say ‘intelligent’. The toys are more like a termite mound. Part of the animals’ extended phenotype. They don’t engineer those land-boats, they just build them. And the land-boats built according to bad designs don’t work, so their builders die and don’t pass on their faulty genes. Or maybe….” She tapped her fingernails against her teeth. “Or what if the designs for the vehicles aren’t coded for in genes at all – just a behavior where the toymaker worm observes an artifact like a cogwheel and then chews a piece of wood into a replica. In that case, the cogwheel is the replicator and the worm, genes and all, is just the machine it uses to reproduce itself.”

  The silence that followed was, depending on the source, uncaring, baffled, impatient, and infuriated.

  Daisuke cleared his throat. “And what about threats?” he asked, walking toward the others and hoping the biologist would follow his lead.

  “Yes!” barked Hariyadi. “What is the Nun girl going to do with that thing? Summon the other toymakers to chop us all to pieces? Or just help her run away again?”

  “Hm. Good question,” Anne said, as Hariyadi audibly ground his teeth. “Well, a toymaker could be a hunting animal like a falcon. It might carry messages. It might work as a sentry like a guard dog. They might even work as stores of information like books…. May I?”

  Anne had stopped in front of Sing, and held out her hands, palms up in the fading light.

  Sing said something that probably meant that that would be a very bad idea. But she glanced past Anne at Hariyadi and bit her lip. Seeming to come to a decision, Sing held out the toymaker vehicle for Anne to inspect.

  “Din-lulum,” Sing said, with the intonation of ‘look’.

  Daisuke looked. Or rather, peered over Anne’s shoulder.

  Sing’s toymaker had no oars or wheels, only a set of immobile hooks along its underside, bracketing a bulbous, barbed device like a wasp’s stinger.

  “Oh,” said Anne. “I see.”

  Daisuke glanced back at Hariyadi, who was grinding his teeth again. “What do you see, Anne?” he prompted.

  “It must be one of the flying ones,” Anne said. “A little wooden dirigible. Or a balloon, since I don’t see any propellers or other way for it to—”

  “Din-lulum,” said Sing again and gave the balloon a little shake. Holding its hull firmly with her thumbs, ring, and little fingers, she tapped the wood with the nails of her pointer and ring fingers in a quick, odd little rhythm. In a high voice, Sing spoke, but not to Anne or any of the other humans present.

  Daisuke’s hackles rose.

  The toymaker rang like a xylophone in counterpoint to the music. It shuddered in Sing’s grip. The wasp stinger twitched and rotated.

  Still chanting, Sing let go of the creature, which bobbed, weightless in the air. The stinger swept around, provoking hisses from Hariyadi and even Misha, but ended up only pointing toward the wall.

  Sing cried out and gave a sharp double-click with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. The toymaker fired its weapon.

  With a cartoonish sproing, the barb shot out from the ‘stinger’ like a harpoon from a spring-loaded gun. There was even a thread connecting the harpoon to the gun. The thread unwound from the end of the harpoon, now quivering in the palisade wall. That line went taut as the little balloon winched itself forward, winding back, until the little round body was perched, flush against the log.

  “Huh,” Anne said. “A spring.”

  This time Daisuke didn’t wait for Anne to clarify her gnomic mutterings. He just asked, “What have you realized?”

  “Oh, well.” Then Anne noticed everyone was looking at her. “Nothing. Just that if that’s a spring in there, it probably comes from the inside of a treeworm, which lives, uh, one, two, three, four biomes away.” She nodded to herself. “Plus we saw them collecting glass. I’d say the Nun have plugged themselves into a pretty extensive trade network. Impressive.”

  “Yes,” said Daisuke, thinking about how Sing might have murdered her husband. She would have known that getting toymaker fluids on him would make him a target. Even if she had not been in a position to pick up a toymaker and hurl it at Tyaney, might Sing have simply ordered one of her wooden minions to smash itself into him? Did her mastery of the creatures extend to compelling them to suicide? And she had been with Pearson when the shmoo had attacked, hadn’t she?

  “We have to talk with her,” he said. “We will ask her what she plans to do with that thing. How will it solve our problems?”

  “How will we do that?” Hariyadi asked.

  Daisuke turned to Anne, the only one of them who knew any Nun. “Can you ask her?”

  “I’ll try,” said Anne. “Um, mekaletya, uh, why? Dan mekaletya?”

  “Dan meteklyetya ub-ak do?” Sing squinted, shook her head. “An dan nu meteklyeta ara diin-ny-en heib-lam.”

  “Enlightening,” Hariyadi said.

  “Keb-lum. keb-lulum.”

  “That means ‘listen up’,” Anne said.

  The toymaker clacked and clicked, shuddering with the force of whatever internal mechanism it used to make the signals. Invisible in the shadows beyond the wall, other toymakers answered.

  Anne hissed through her teeth. “It’s talking to them.”

  Daisuke saw Hariyadi stiffen and injected some calm. “I think it is warning them off. Like a guard dog.”

  Anne nodded. “Sing is on our side after all.”

  Hariyadi made a face while Nurul said, “At least Sing is on her own side, but we knew that already.”

  The toymaker made a klack-klack noise, a wooden mirror of Sing’s tongue-click. There followed a hollow klunk as a hatch opened on the little balloon’s roof. Inside, an animal shaped like a slice of calamari in an ink-black sauce contracted and relaxed.

  “Hm,” said Anne. “A doorway? An airlock?”

  “A sphincter?” Misha said.

  Sing turned to him and made pointing gestures toward her open mouth. She nodded and pointed west into the kelp-trees. “Jibna,” she said. “Mek.”

  “That’s ‘food’, I think, and ‘water’,” Anne said. “She’s telling us it’s hungry. It’s going to need toymaker biome material. Um, Yoyo mekaletya bin?”

  Sing gave a Rahman-esque thumbs-up and Anne shrugged. “I guess she’s going to go back into the forest.”

  Hariyadi said something complicated and probably sacrilegious in Indonesian, but evidently decided he had better things to do than keep Sing from venturing back into the forest they’d just fled. “We need food as well,” he said. “Nurul, please prepare it while the rest of us disassemble the cart.”

  They worked together in silence as the sun slid behind the mountain they’d crossed. Ginger-colored light sprayed across the bruise-colored sky, and suddenly it was night.

  But not dark. Daisuke could still see his hands clearly. His skin glowed like raw honey, the color of Anne’s eyes.

  She noticed it too. “Wha—?” Anne straightened from her work and looked eastward. “Light reflecting off the other side of the…no. Ha!”

  Daisuke knew that noise. That was a sign of another miracle of Junction. Smiling, he looked past Anne at the other side of the valley, which shone.

  It was as bright as moonlight, but as warm and alive as a candle flame. Light the rich yellow of sea urchin roe flickered and danced in intricate branching patterns across the slopes of the mountains across the valley. It was not fire, but light. Light running like water, or the electricity of firing neurons. Ki-energy made visible.

  “What did Sing call it?” said Anne. “The Ground Sun Country? The Lighthouse Country?”

  “It isn’t….” Daisuke groped for explanations. “It can’t be a city?”

  “No. Humans would never string their street lights in such a crazy array,” Anne said.

 
She was right. Illumination spangled out of a central bright spot like dew on spiderwebs or fireflies on the branches of a tree.

  “Damn, I wish I could know what lives over there,” she said.

  “Whereas I wish we could return home alive,” said Hariyadi, “and in good time. Are all the tents erected? If so, I shall take first watch, along with—”

  “Lihat!” Rahman said, pointing excitedly down the length of the valley.

  At first Daisuke didn’t see much. The Lighthouse Country blazed in loops and skeins like an earthbound galaxy. Its warm light illuminated the mist that clung to the river as it ran toward the valley of the Deep Sky Country.…

  “What?” Daisuke said. He fumbled with his utility belt, snapped open his binoculars, focused on the lights he could see at the mouth of the river. These were not Lighthouse Country yellow, but flickering red with clearly visible columns of smoke.

  “Campfires,” said Daisuke.

  “People,” Rahman said.

  Daisuke passed his binoculars to Anne, who passed them to Rahman, saying, “Nun natives? Camped on the other side of the valley?”

  “Marvelous,” said Rahman. “They help us! We walk to river, only thing.”

  ‘The Death Wind River,’ Sing had called it, although Daisuke wasn’t sure he wanted to remind the others of that.

  “We shall see tomorrow,” Hariyadi said. “In the meantime, we still have the business of survival to attend to.”

  Nurul asked the colonel a question in Indonesian, which he rebuffed with a curt growl. In English, he said, “I shall take first watch. With Rahman.”

  Nurul asked another question and Anne’s brow wrinkled.

  “What do you mean, ‘enough time’?” she asked in English.

  Hariyadi shook his head. “Never mind. Get some sleep. Rahman!” He said something to the cameraman, who gave the soldier a disgruntled look, no doubt tired of being ordered around. Nurul spoke, but Rahman only shook his head and slouched away down the hill. Hariyadi said something under his breath and took off in the other direction.

  A less exhausted Daisuke would have pursued one or the other of the men and tried to mend fences, but Nurul and Misha were already making their way toward two of the tents. The third….

  Anne was looking at him. Her eyes were nearly black in the amber illumination of the Lighthouse Country. Did he want to offer to share a tent? Would she say yes? Would that be wise? Yes, probably, and possibly not.

  Daisuke cleared his throat. “I think I will stay awake for some time. I will watch the light on the mountain.”

  Anne looked away. “Sorry,” she said. “Uh. Good night.”

  Well good. I’ve either confused her, mortally offended her, or stopped her from murdering me in private. Maybe all three? Daisuke watched light flicker over the hill, considering. Another member of their party had died. Again, the biology of this planet had killed him. And Tyaney, like Pearson, had been a difficult person to like. He had especially antagonized Anne. And aliens had butchered him.

  It wouldn’t be enough to convict Anne in a court of law. Especially if the judge was in love with her… Daisuke shook his head as another thought occurred. Or especially if the judge was in the middle of a messy divorce and no longer trusted love… What if his attraction to Anne, rather than biasing him in her favor, made him suspicious of her?

  Small animals clicked along the rocky ground. Downslope, larger beasts hooted and whistled. A zipper unzipped.

  Anne crawled out of her tent and advanced on him. “Hey,” she said in a sort of shouted whisper. “Can I marvel at nature with you?”

  Daisuke nodded deeply.

  “I doubt that’s bioluminescence.” Anne faced the glowing mountainside, close enough for him to feel the heat radiating off her. “More likely that’s reflected light from a wormhole. See how it’s brighter in the middle? So for some reason, the vegetation there spreads the light from its home world across the mountain. I’m thinking of the way the Humongous Fungus in America shunts nutrients around an area the size of, what was it, eight square kilometers? What do you bet that all of the trees in that glowing forest are all just scions of the same rootstock?”

  Daisuke watched Anne’s eyes flick up to his, away, back again. She wasn’t the subtle sort. She raged at her antagonists, shouted and stomped and stormed off. She didn’t plot elaborate murder. Unless part of the plot was to appear prickly and antisocial in order to lower everyone’s guard….

  But Daisuke could go around in circles like that forever. The fact was that Anne wasn’t entirely safe. She was an undescribed species caught in a beam of sunlight on the jungle floor. Possibly venomous, but beautiful and strange. Deserving of a closer look.

  “It’s very beautiful,” said Daisuke, and put his hand around her waist. “Would you tell me more about it?”

  “Hm.” Anne leaned into him. “Naw. Let’s kiss instead.”

  Daisuke put his hand to her bodycam. Not that his viewers wouldn’t expect the Iron Man of Survival to kiss the girl, but that wasn’t the scene he wanted to be in, right now. He wanted to be himself, expressing his true feelings for an audience of only one.

  “Take that off,” he whispered.

  They were startled apart some time later by a clattering thump.

  Sing had returned from the kelp-tree forest with an armload of supplies, which she had dumped in a careless pile before turning to her tame toymaker. After some more chanting, she tapped at the wooden oblong with one hand, while with the other she extended a dark object the size of an ice-cream cone. The toymaker opened the hatch on its top and Sing fed the cone into it.

  “Um.” Anne cleared her throat. “Thank you. I’m very sorry about what happened to Tyaney.”

  Sing waved a hand, murmuring something in a tired voice. She gave Daisuke a smile and patted Anne’s shoulder as she walked past her toward the tents.

  Toward, in fact, Misha’s tent.

  “Eh?” said Daisuke.

  Sing went up to the tent and gave a double tongue-click, as if she was signaling a toymaker. It worked; Misha unzipped the tent from the inside and Sing ducked in to meet him.

  Daisuke turned and walked away before he heard anything more. Anne followed him, sniggering past the hand clamped over her mouth.

  He tried to clear the feel of Anne pressed against him from his mind. Had the Russian conspired with the Nun to kill her abusive husband? Or perhaps he had thought he was rescuing her? Or had she murdered Tyaney as a gesture aimed at Misha? Or were the two of them just making the best of an impossible situation? He would have to talk to Misha to find out. Daisuke would have to talk to everyone….

  “You want to turn in?” Anne said. “There’s going to be a whole day ahead of us.”

  “Turn in?” She meant go to bed. Daisuke thought of Sing and Misha.

  “Although, if I’m honest, I’d kind of like to take a bath first,” said Anne. “I probably smell dreadful.”

  “No,” Daisuke said, “you smell….” His brain caught up with him. “A bath?”

  “Oh man, it’ll feel good, Dice. A cold bath and a hot meal.”

  Daisuke frowned. He was missing something. “There’s no clean water here,” he said, “and nothing that will burn.”

  “Take a look downslope of us.”

  Daisuke did. In the light of the opposite valley, clear mountain streams shimmered amid lush folds of plant life. Bushes like piled mattresses or stacked PVC pipe, all of it as green as anything on Earth. All of it growing within ten minutes’ walk of where they now stood.

  For the first time since they’d crashed, the air didn’t stink. It was sweet. Sharp and clean in Daisuke’s lungs like the nose of a dry white wine. He hadn’t realized how starved he was for the smell of photosynthesis, the sight of green plant life. It was like, after long, lonely years away at work, he had come home to his friends.


  “We did it,” Anne said. “We’re in the oasis.”

  Daisuke tried to remember that they weren’t actually home yet. They were barely halfway. Two members of his crew were dead, and Daisuke knew those deaths had not been accidents. But they could take a bath. They could make a fire. They were still alive, and could breathe in the sweet, green air.

  “We work really well together,” Anne said. “That’s unusual. You know, for somebody I’m not…just working with. Um.” She cleared her throat, looking at her boots.

  “I was sort of expecting you to participate in this conversation, Dice,” Anne said. “Or am I just supposed to seduce myself?” This couldn’t be an act. If Daisuke was a shell with nothing inside, Anne was the yolk and white just sitting there on the mound of rice, pretending to be nothing other than what she was.

  “So,” she said. “What are you thinking about?”

  ‘Eating you for breakfast’ would be, perhaps, too forward. “I was thinking about how I am a shell with no egg inside, and you are an egg with no shell,” he said. “Maybe that’s why we suit each other.”

  Anne looked at him. “Naw,” she said. “I think your ex-wife is wrong. You’re not a hollow shell, you’re just a big fucking nerd who doesn’t know how to talk to human beings.”

  “That’s…a strange thing to say.”

  “Ha. You mean it’s the pot calling the kettle black.”

  Daisuke had to think for a moment before he remembered the meaning of that expression. He smiled and said, “It’s better in Japanese. ‘The eye-shit laughs at the nose-shit.’”

  She screwed up her face. “Eye-shit?”

  Daisuke rubbed the inner corner of an eye. He ignored the unmanly tear he found there and said. “You know, eye-shit. After you sleep, the stuff in your eyes. It shouldn’t laugh at nose-shit, because it’s all the same stuff.” The word came to him. “Mucus!”

  Anne’s laughter bounced off the glowing mountainside. “Ah, the subtle poetry of the Land of the Rising Sun.” She clapped her hands. “That’s it, you’ve seduced me. Let’s go to my tent.”