“It doesn’t matter whether he was useful to us. It doesn’t matter if none of us liked him. Tyaney was still a person and he’s still dead.” She turned to scowl past Daisuke. “Rahman, what the hell are you doing? Are you filming? Put the camera down!”
She stomped in the mud and Rahman retreated. He didn’t stop filming, though.
“So?” said Misha. “Why so upset? Tyaney is dead. And?”
Anne whirled on him. “And we haven’t talked about his death at all. We haven’t done or said anything. We just…kept going. Hell, you didn’t wait a day before—”
Misha went red. “I told you I’d hit you—”
Daisuke kept smiling, just in case the camera ever chanced to pass across his face. What if someone had thrown that toymaker at Tyaney back in the kelp-tree forest? With its blood or nutritive fluid on him, the other toymakers had swarmed the unfortunate Nun and given the rest of the party a chance to escape.
So. Sing had killed her abusive husband. Or Misha had killed him for her. Or Hariyadi, or Anne, or Nurul, or Rahman had killed Tyaney because it was that or lose their only guide.
Misha and Anne were talking to Sing, who of course couldn’t understand them, or if she could, could not make her answers understood.
“Now you upset her!” Misha said when the Nun woman’s yelling and flailing got too loud. “Quiet, little Sing. It’s all right.”
“I agree with Anne, though,” said Daisuke.
“Of course you do,” Misha said.
“I mean that we should say something about Tyaney.”
“What you want?” Misha asked. “Death ritual for man chopped into little pieces by clockwork robots? You want to go back and collect pieces of him to bury?”
“No, but we need a ritual. A…” Daisuke found the word, “…memorial service even if there can be no funeral.”
The camera focused on him. Of course, the audience would expect the memorial service right now. Daisuke had no choice but to close his eyes and bow deeply. “Of course, I will be honored to give that service.” He straightened, wishing he could just lapse into Japanese. “Ah…Tyaney was…a difficult man. A difficult to understand man. He spoke with us, but did we listen? Or did we put the words in his mouth we wished were there? We wanted a native guide we could talk to, a person who would help us survive and understand this strange new world. But Tyaney was not a native. He was as much a stranger to Junction as we are. And he did not help us out of some sense of honor or nobility. He helped us because we had something he wanted.”
Daisuke turned east, toward Imsame and the Death Wind Pass and the wormhole home.
“He wanted what we all want. Safety. Security in the future. Power so he could make his vision of the future true. A piece of this world.”
“Well obviously!” Anne said, ruining the moment. “And remember none of this” – she spread her hands at the landscape around them – “would have happened without him. Tyaney told the world about Junction. Would you go back in time and stop him from doing that? ’Cause I wouldn’t.”
Daisuke cleared his throat. The camera turned back to him. “We should sympathize with Tyaney. Tyaney was selfish. He was ruthless. He was willing to hurt, or enslave, or kill to grab a piece of Junction for his people. He was just like us, and we did not understand that. We did not understand him, and he died.”
“Amen, I suppose,” Anne mumbled.
Daisuke nodded. “Now. Let us see what we have here. Good water to drink?” He squatted to dip his hand into the pool.
“No!” shouted Sing.
Daisuke jerked back. “Why can’t we drink this water?”
“Water. Water no nun.”
“Us,” translated Anne.
“Us,” Sing said. “Water no us. Water toymaker.”
Daisuke looked at Misha, who shrugged helplessly.
“Water toymaker. No us.” She pointed to the edge of the pool. “Water us.”
What did she mean? Daisuke stood and walked to where she was pointing. The pool’s uphill rim was flush with the soil, but the mountain sloped down while the spongy tube that contained the water maintained its height. It was as if someone had half buried a bathtub in the side of the mountain. Except this bathtub wasn’t watertight. Droplets seeped out of the wall of the pool, creating a second, very different pool.
“Take a closer look at that, would you?” Anne asked.
Rahman knelt, dragging his camera from the stinking brown water of the upper pool, across the weeping wall to the lower pool. Green threads undulated in the water there, indistinguishable from algae on Earth. Fishlike creatures, all paddling legs and undulating tails, swam against the current, waiting for scraps of organic detritus to fall off the filter-wall. Tiny three-legged creatures skated across the surface tension of the water.
“It’s clean,” said Anne. “Do you get what we’re looking at? This is like the settling pools at Imsame, except nobody designed it. That spongy wall is alive; a biological filtration system evolved all by itself!”
“What could we do with these things if we took them to Earth and used them in sewage treatment plants?” Daisuke said.
Misha laughed. “I was hoping for cure for cancer, but am willing to settle for cure for shit.”
Fortunately, Daisuke didn’t have to think of a segue for that.
“Look at this,” Anne said. She was leaning over a bush by the river. The bush’s branches were chains of puffy, thumb-sized segments, shading from ivory-colored near the ground to green at the branch tips. She gently squeezed one of the segments.
“They remind me of those ecofriendly starch packing peanuts. The ones you can lick and smoosh against each other so they stick together?”
“So is that what these…peanut bushes are?” asked Daisuke. “Structures assembled by someone else? Something else?”
Anne didn’t appear to have heard his question. “You can build a pretty good model of a polypeptide that way. Or for that matter an anatomically correct mannequin of my biochem tutor.”
“Would you two please take this seriously?” Daisuke said. “I don’t want all of our footage cut.”
“Daisuke, my sweet, I am operating mostly on endorphins at this point. You want to get more than impulses from my brain stem, you put some meat in me— Oh my Lord, that sounded filthy.” She broke into a fit of giggling.
“All right,” said Misha. “So enough with nature documentary. We must focus on two things. Making fire and cooking animal.”
“No, keep filming,” Daisuke said. “This is exactly what our audience wants to see. Anne, maybe we can burn some of those peanuts?”
She wiped her eyes. “Oh, hell, I don’t have the faintest. Sing? Can we burn this plant? Okay? Fire?” She turned her hands palm up and wiggled her fingers. “Whoosh? Okay? Fire?”
Sing didn’t appear to have any idea what Anne was talking about.
“Let’s call that a ‘yes’,” said Anne. “Misha, hand over your knife. Daisuke, you gorgeous fillet of man-steak, catch me a fish to barbecue and I’ll reward you with sexual favors.”
Daisuke swallowed, and reached for his belt.
“Why my knife?” Misha said. “You have knife.”
“I don’t want to ruin my knife when this thing explodes or turns into acid or something.” Anne held out her hand. “Lively now.”
Misha handed his knife to her. “You want lighter also?”
“If you would be so kind, comrade. Here we go!” She sliced the branch off, revealing its hollow interior.
Faster than Daisuke could blink, that hollow space filled with paste. Pale foam bubbled out of the plant, hissing.
“Would you look at that?” said Anne. “It has its own insulation foam. Presumably the green photosynthetic cells will colonize the foam in due course. And look, the branch I cut off has its own blob of foam.” She prodded it with
the knife-tip. “As hard as a sponge already! I bet it’ll burn up a treat too. Misha, hand me your lighter.”
“Only if you give me back knife.”
“Okay, serious science time. Let’s say these things are sort of land-sponges. They grow by releasing a burst of paste from this thing here.” She prodded the green tip of the branch she had severed. “The paste forms foam, which is then colonized by algae. Where’s that lighter, Misha?”
The Russian reluctantly gave Anne his lighter, and she shuffled back, holding out the lighter to the severed branch on the ground. “Here we g—”
The flame raced over the branch. When it touched the tip, the branch burst, spraying foam that smothered the fire. The entire process took less than a second.
“Huh,” Anne said.
Daisuke reached for an appropriate summary. “The firewood here comes with flame-retardant?”
Sing said something in Nun. She extracted herself from under Misha’s arm and plucked another branch off the peanut-bush. She removed the bud at the end of the branch, unconcerned about the blob of foam that formed over her fingers, and handed the denuded branch to Anne. “Yes. Fire.”
“Thank you.” Anne applied the lighter to the branch, which, without the flame-retardant foam, burned to ash in five seconds. “Well, there’s another problem. How are we going to build a stable fire if everything here goes up like tissue paper?”
“We catch fish in stream and eat raw,” Misha said.
“First of all,” said Anne, “they’re more armored leeches than fishes….”
“And I don’t want to eat them raw,” Daisuke said.
“What kind of Japanese man are you?” Misha said. “You grab fish!”
Daisuke looked into the stream, where the crab-like creature walked slowly across the mud.
“Sing,” Anne asked, “can Daisuke eat the fish? Daisuke fish deb fish okay? Gum fire? I mean, ukwey gum? She doesn’t understand. Can you demonstrate, Daisuke?”
Daisuke snatched up the little crab. Its four legs wriggled. Eating this thing would look excellent on camera. “Fish!” he said.
“Daisuke eat fish okay?” Anne tried again. “Daisuke deb fish? Fish dena okay?”
“Yes, yes,” said Sing impatiently. “Daisuke adya hadya ara deb-lem-la-a okay ub-la. Daisuke fish eat okay.”
“Well, it doesn’t get clearer than that,” Misha said. “Rahman, you are filming, yes? Happy you’re on that side of camera, yes?”
“Ya!”
“Tell them I died doing my job, and I loved every second of it.” Daisuke put the crab into his mouth and crunched down. His eyes went wide, then crinkled up to match his utter confusion. This is the face that’s going to appear on the cover of my biography, I’m sure of it.
“Ah. Mm! It’s good,” Daisuke said, the same as he did whenever he ate anything on camera. “Crunchy. Salty, with a very light sweetness and,” he breathed in through his nose, “bananas?” The crab tasted like salty bananas.
“Ah,” Misha said. “The fish made him crazy.”
Daisuke swallowed. “It tastes like bananas. Sweet.” He wiped his mouth, raised his hand to examine his fingers. “With red blood. Just like ours.”
Anne turned to Sing. “What did you call this place? The Ripe Blood Country? Thank you!”
“Welcome,” said Sing.
“Okay,” Rahman said, lowering his camera. “Now we catch another meat for everyone. Take back to camp.”
“Or,” said Misha. “You go bring them here. This is better camping site than muddy rocky mountain side.”
“No.” Anne got up. “We all have to go back up the hill. They’ll need help moving our stuff. But I agree, we should move camp.”
“Camp?” Sing said. “Camp!” She pointed.
“What?” said Misha. “How do you know that word? What are you pointing at?”
They all looked east, where a fluted hill rose up above the pulpy foliage.
“Is that,” said Anne, “smoke?”
Daisuke shook his head, searching in his utility belt for his spotting scope. “No, it’s steam. Smoke moves differently.”
“So what?” Misha asked. “We look at volcano?”
Daisuke fitted the scope to his eyes and the mound sprang into focus. The mound and the dark green-and-black globe that hovered at its apex.
“No,” he said. “We’re looking at another wormhole.”
Chapter Fourteen
Death Wind
Dusk had fallen by the time Daisuke and the others got to the wormhole.
The green-and-black globe hung at the peak of a fluted mound of earth, steaming gently against the cool purple sky. It was very similar to the High Ground Hole, the one that led to Earth, except here the plants were like frozen splashes of muskmelon liquor. And this wormhole steamed.
“Look at that vapor plume,” said Anne. “That wormhole must open somewhere warm and wet.”
“That sounds nice,” Daisuke said into her hair.
She swatted him on the nose. “Stop that. I’m theorizing. And it has lower gravity than Junction. Lower than Earth too, I reckon. The Ripe Blood Planet? Planet Oasis? Inhabited by packing-peanut-trees and lizard-bugs….”
He snaked his arm around Anne’s waist and gave her a squeeze. “Can I do this while you theorize?”
“Easy there, Dice. I plan to clean at least some of the filth off me, warm up by the fire, eat some native wildlife, and then we can get down to the business of enjoying each other.”
“How much can I help with bathing?”
“No.”
Daisuke enjoyed the simple sensations of love and food. Too soon he would have to resume thinking about the deaths of Pearson and Tyaney, not to mention the task of hiking the rest of the way home. Daisuke sighed, looking uphill toward camp.
Where something moved. Scuttled.
“Anne?” he said.
“Dice?”
“Don’t move.”
Of course, Anne immediately spun, looking up at the hill of the Ripe Blood wormhole. Two creatures trundled down that slope like crab-walking acrobats.
“Hey!” came Misha’s voice. “Lovey dovies! Do not let dinner escape!”
This order Anne obeyed, stepping into the path of the animals and waving her arms.
“Yah!” she said, and the creatures skidded to a stop, peering at her with bulbous eyes set at the tips of long, tube-shaped heads.
They looked either like spiky tortoises or giant shelled hedgehogs, with four sturdy legs under broad backs. A third pair of limbs ended in crab-like pincers, currently clasped below where the heads met the bodies. As Anne stared, unsure what to do, the farther animal lost interest and lowered its long head to the stream. Its eyes swiveled over the surface of the water while its broad, spiny tail curled up over its back, pulsing. The nearer of the pair kept its eyes on Anne. Mouthparts unfolded from its head like the implements in a Swiss army knife, and a pair of hairy antennae flicked out to taste the air like the tongue of a snake.
“Aha,” whispered Anne. “Evolved your mandibles from limbs, did you, you clever little bastards.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll kill them,” whispered Daisuke.
Anne laughed. “Could you be any manlier? I’m not sure how you plan to….”
“Like this.” Daisuke shuffled past her. He didn’t get any closer to the two tortoise-hogs, but his path took him, as if by coincidence, to a point just behind them.
The first tortoise-hog stopped drinking and lifted its periscope head to focus its eyes on Daisuke. Its pincers snipped nervously at the air.
But Daisuke kept still, and those claws descended to clip pieces off the ground cover and pass them to the complicated mouth.
“Herbivores,” Anne whispered. “And heavily armored. See the spikes on the tail, the legs. Those claws. These things won
’t be easy to hunt.”
“Even so, if I drive it into the water….” Daisuke took another step forward, and the nearest creature’s head and claws came up. Its legs swung out as if on hinges until the knees pointed sideways. The animal sidled away from Daisuke up the bank of the stream.
Daisuke darted forward to head the tortoise-hog off. It curled its spiked tail toward him and rotated its legs again, trying to get them into position to run forward into the stream. Daisuke got to it first and kicked it under the belly, flipping it neatly onto its back.
The second tortoise-hog scuttled away as Anne rushed to join Daisuke, but he seemed to have the creature well in hand. Its pincers waved at him, but Daisuke grabbed them at the base where they connected to the animal’s body and twisted them off. He did the same with the head, leaving a body the size of a car tire, attached to four columnar legs and the spined, beaver-like tail. The legs churned ineffectually at the air while Daisuke yanked them off.
“Shades of Galapagos, isn’t it?” Anne said. “I’m not so sure I like this.”
But hunger evidently trumped conservationism. Anne helped drag the thing back to the firepit.
Hariyadi, who had been scowling over Rahman’s attempts to keep the fire alive, turned at their approach. “Do you plan to butcher that thing here?”
“Let’s call it a field dissection?” Anne said. “You can tell Rahman to bring his camera over.”
“No time for butchery,” said Misha, carrying the still-kicking body of the tortoise-hog. “Oasis plant life burns too fast. Just drop meat on fire.”
He followed his own advice, and the big turtle-like body cracked and hissed amid the spurting yellow flames. It smelled delicious, if disconcertingly fruity.
“Like caramel corn,” Daisuke said.
“Caramel what?” said Misha.
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