“A gift,” said Anne. “Daisuke want you gift. Uh. Gift you!”
Yunubey chuckled. “Either she wants us to take that amulet as a gift, or she’s offering to sell you to the Them in exchange for it.”
“What are you doing standing around making sarcastic comments?” Sing said through her smile. “They’re giving us their most valuable possessions. Go get something nice to give them.”
“Eh?” said Yunubey. “But they’re Them. They don’t know about proper gift exchange.”
“Just give them something, Yunubey. They’re my in-laws now.”
Her brother sighed, casting about for suitable bride prices. “Well, I’m not giving them a pig. They wouldn’t know what to do with a pig if…by the Rainbow Worm, Sing, you’re not back a day and you’re already putting me in impossible social situations!”
“Give them an interesting animal,” suggested Sing. “Anne likes them. The weirder the better. Something from a country far away.”
Yunubey brightened. “Oh! We did buy a specimen from a toymaker caravan out of Howling Mountain Country. We can’t eat it or make anything useful out of it, but it sure looks bizarre. Do you think we could unload it on these rubes?”
“If you mean ‘would they like the Howling Mountain specimen in exchange for their amulets?’, I think yes,” said Sing. “Go fetch the specimen. And somebody let Nurul out of the trap-grove. She has her own husband to find. And get Misha hidden. Hurry. We don’t have much time before the helicopter lands.”
“Helicopter?”
“It’s what’s making that noise,” Sing said. “A toymaker big enough for many men to ride inside. My new husband knows how to fly them.”
When she looked around at Yunubey, his face had gone stiff. “I think,” he said slowly, “that we will need to teach him to talk soon.”
Sing smiled. “He will be a very great asset to the Us.”
Chapter Twenty
The Next World
“Hey.” Anne rubbed Daisuke’s face. “No crying.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “There are no cameras.”
“But what about the soldiers?” She had to shout to be heard above the rotors of the helicopters, which were still making that annoying screaming noise, even though they weren’t turning that fast. Also, the soldiers were shouting at her.
Daisuke sniffed and coughed and brought his hand up to rub his eyes. Then he turned to yell back at the soldiers. “We’re Daisuke Matsumori and Anne Houlihan. Blah blah blah. No, everyone else is dead. Blah blah. Bodycams blah. Would you please not shoot us or detain us indefinitely?”
Anne let him yell while she examined the heavy box in her hands.
“Ms. Houlihan? What are you holding? Show us what you’re holding!”
The soldiers were nervous. The two Americans who had stepped out of the helicopter had not shot Anne or Daisuke yet, but they clutched their weapons and peered fearfully around the bright and deserted clearing.
The spangle-trees shone with the reflected light of a dwarf star. The paddles of the trap-grove rippled and sparked in the backwash from the rotors. Aerogellies whirled through the air like agitated snowballs. And the Nun’s gift moved in Anne’s hands. It sloshed.
The soldiers took the gun that Daisuke had taken from Nurul. Nurul had probably stolen it from Hariyadi while she was alone with him on the other side of the Oasis wormhole. Or something. Anne didn’t care about the gun anymore. She could barely bring herself to care about these lads who were shouting at her.
“Where is Colonel Pearson? Colonel Hariyadi? The pilot? The journalists?”
Daisuke shook his head, face grave. “We are the survivors.”
The soldiers decided to be civilized, which was a nice change. “If you’ll come with us, ma’am,” one of them said, reaching past his machine gun toward her. “We’ll have you home in no time.”
Dice was crying again. “Survival,” he said. “It is very beautiful.”
“Come on now,” Anne shouted at him. “There, there. Now stop blubbing and ask me what’s in this package.”
“What?” He couldn’t hear her, which was just as well. Anne supposed she wasn’t being very supportive of her boyfriend’s emotional breakthrough. But that was the nice thing about biology. You didn’t need to talk to appreciate nature’s marvels.
The box was Lighthouse biome plastic, finely cut and melted together. It could have come from Ikea, except for the gauche yellow color. It was open at the top, and Anne could see that within a nest of very expensive-looking gray satin padding, there nestled a rock. What appeared to be a rock, anyway.
“Let’s get out of here,” shouted one of the soldiers. He turned to the other one and Anne caught “…light enough to take off?”
The other one, the pilot, gave the light-scattering spangle-trees a look of deep suspicion, but eventually gave the okay sign.
“Just make sure you don’t fly low over the Death Wind biome,” Anne said.
“What? What does she mean?” asked the pilot, but Daisuke had the matter well in hand. Flying monsters in the mist. Blah blah blah.
The specimen in the box was shaped like an old pomegranate, gray and pitted and roughly round, its surface composed of tiny triangular scales. Anne was reminded of the sclerites of the Oasis zone’s animals, or the tiles of the shell of a glasslands land urchin. Or for that matter, the plates in the test of an Earth sea urchin. The plates of a human skull too. Not a rock, then. No, this was something that had once been alive.
The soldiers sat them next to each other in the helicopter, and wasted more time shouting into Anne’s face about whether the thing in her hands was dangerous.
How the hell should I know? That’s what makes it exciting! But Anne didn’t say so out loud. She let Daisuke do the talking, that manipulative, adorable son of a bitch. Niche partitioning, that’s what built a good relationship. Let the actors act and the scientists science.
Anne picked up the specimen. It was much heavier than she had expected. Those little scales ground against each other, allowing the thing to shift slightly in her grip, sloshing and rattling in her hands as if filled with mercury and rock salt.
Daisuke pressed against her, put his warm lips to her ear. “Is that thing safe?”
Anne shrugged. Something tugged on her hand and she almost dropped the specimen before she saw that its resistance was only because part of its packing material had snagged on…no.
The aperture at the end, what would have been the flower on the bottom of the pomegranate, had spilled forth a shimmering flood of…spun glass? The stuff covered the folds of packing material inside of the box. No, Anne realized, there was no packing material, only this shimmering stuff, as fine as wild silk. Depending on how she tugged and pressed on the material, it turned as stiff as metal, stuck like Velcro, or flowed like water over Teflon. The stuff’s color changed as well, gray in certain angles of the helicopter’s lights, transparent in others, black as charcoal or white as a wedding veil.
“Solar sails,” said Anne, as Daisuke kissed her ear. “This is a space animal.”
Anne turned its dense little body in his hands. Star-silk spooled in glittering skeins. “A ‘star-wisp’,” she named it. “Or maybe a ‘full metal jacket’. Want to bet it’s magnetic?”
She imagined it alive and in its natural habitat. Heavy and spherical, its outer surface terrifically hard, flinging out and reeling in this net of a material fine enough to harvest starlight. Funneling matter and energy into its mouth, spinning order from entropy. Just like the rest of us.
“If it came from space, how did the Nun get their hands on it?” Daisuke had to shout now, even though he was sitting next to her. The rotors were spinning up, the illuminated forest dropping out from under them.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” said Anne, although she doubted he could hear her. “The several
-billion-dollar question, actually. Where is the wormhole that leads from the surface of Junction to the Nightbow? And can we go through it?”
“Yes,” he said.
Daisuke was thinner now, his eyes sunken and his chin overgrown with uneven black hairs. He should have looked ten years older than when he’d first come through the wormhole onto Junction, but really he looked younger. Maybe it was his expression. Like grand vistas were opening before his eyes.
The Earth wormhole and its mound swung past the windshield as the helicopter pointed its nose toward home. But Anne knew she’d be coming back soon. They wouldn’t be able to keep her away. She’d discovered bloody space-aliens.
Daisuke must have had a similar idea. Careful not to make her drop the star-wisp, he put his hand over Anne’s and pressed his face up against her ear. “Do you want to go to space with me?”
Anne laughed, and now there were tears in her eyes too. “I do, Dice,” she said. “I do.”
Acknowledgments
What I really wanted to do was write a field guide to alien animals. The fact that this is, you know, a story, is mostly thanks to my alpha-readers, who read each chapter as I wrote it and pretended there was some sort of coherent plot there. Melissa Walshe bonded with Anne and told me how to make her more…Anneish? Tex Thompson upped the Daisuke-osity, and reminded me to add some emotional resonance to the explosions and slime. Pavlina Borisova told me when I’d gotten things wrong (mostly by not including enough kissing). On Tumblr, Spugpow, Exxon-von-Steamboldt, and Turbofanatic helped me make creatures. Timothy Morris corrected my typos and Australian dialect. The Codex Writers’ Forum answered my stupid questions (How do you wrestle a cassowary? You don’t, idiot).
Like a viscid monstrosity clawing its way up from the abyss, the resulting manuscript-shaped blob then devoured countless souls in its determination to achieve the light. I think we were up to ‘epsilon-readers’ by the end? Benjamin Poulsen told me when I needed more sensory details and which parts were ‘clunky.’ Kim Moravec wanted more wonder (and to know where the hell the action was taking place). Kalin Nenov suggested anime references. Kacy Nielsen gasped in all the right places and said “Huh?” when the places weren’t right. Daniel Newman dug the aliens and what people could do with them. Brent A. Harris lined up character emotions with scene tone. Carrie Patel informed me, gently, that I hadn’t actually mentioned any wormhole in the first chapter. Jesse Sutanto and Franz Anthony told me where I’d messed up with Indonesian language, politics, and culture (as well as good old-fashioned typos). Eric Fischl told me that methane doesn’t have a smell and ‘commander’ isn’t a real rank in the army. Anne Tibbets depth-charged the mediocre first couple of chapters and in general hoisted the story up out of the abyss. Rachel Westfall saw how I could clarify the characters’ goals and personalities. Richard Campbell Powel asked pointed questions about the evolutionary biology of kelp-trees and ferrofluid monsters. Nicholas Hansen told me what parts I shouldn’t cut. Maiko Shigemori helped me with the translation of Daisuke’s conversation with his bosses in Chapter One. My agent, Jennie Goloboy of Red Sofa, made me go back and put in the mystery and romance elements I promised her at the beginning. My copy editor at Flame Tree, Imogen Howson, fixed the quotation marks and defused several potentially disastrous continuity errors. Finally, thanks to Don D’Auria, my editor at Flame Tree, who dragged this beast out of the murk and hammered it into a shape you’d be glad to mount over your mantel.
Thanks to you all. I cannot express how terrible this book would have been without you.
And there actually was some real research too! For examples of the real Guinean mek language, see transnewguinea.org/language/eipomek, diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:631006/FULLTEXT02.pdf, and trasnewguinea.org/language/ketengban. For anthropology, see Scripture in an Oral Culture: The Yali of Irian Jaya by John D. Wilson and (in a more general way) The World Before Yesterday: What can we learn from Traditional Societies? by Jared Diamond.
For biology and some of the wonders evolution can produce, see Richard Dawkin’s The Ancestor’s Tale. For some of my more specific questions, I turned to the Cassowary Husbandry Manual First Edition December 1997 edited by Liz Romer, “The influence of Carbon Monoxide and Other Gases upon Plants” by H.M. Richards and D.T. MacDougal, and ‘Outcome of children with carbon monoxide poisoning treated with normobaric oxygen’ by K.L. Meert, S.M. Heidemann, and A.P. Sarnaik.
Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose was my inspiration in more ways than one, as was Bird Woman (Sacajawea) the Guide of Lewis and Clark: Her Own Story Now by James Willard Schultz.
About this book
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Text copyright © 2019 Daniel M. Bensen.
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