Message from Gondwana

by David Wiley

CHAPTER 4

  Bax poked his head around the corner to her lab bench. "Mumson isn't quite back to normal, but he's improving. I guess it takes a while to clear all those esters out of the synapses, or so Kiet told me. Between Kiet and Candece mothering him, I think Mumson isn't going to have any choice about getting back on his feet within another day."

  He cocked his head. "How are you feeling?"

  "Two zutsuu tablets and a lot of water and my head still feels like it is about to explode. Fortunately I'm a biochemist and know about things like that. I'm just glad you kept me awake long enough to burn off as much rum as you did," Lani smiled shyly.

  "Yes, about that," Bax's tone flattened.

  Lani's smile instantly faded. Oh, hell, here it came. The old "it was a mistake speech." She turned away, Alfie's dials swimming before her eyes. Why was she so stupid? She—

  She felt Bax's hand gently turn her head. She reluctantly raised her eyes to meet his blue ones, his sparkling blue ones. "I thought it was wonderful. We need to have seconds again, soon," he grinned.

  "What? Why you, you—" his kiss ended whatever protest she had in mind.

  Lani was thinking out loud at lunch when she mentioned to Professor Jonze about mounting some samplers for volatile airborne chemicals outside the building, so she was surprised a short while later when Bax and Juls went by carrying a ladder and some equipment. Bax caught her look. "Hey, you were the one who suggested this," he told her. She watched them go out the hatch, feeling unsettled by her new-found status.

  She was not at all embarrassed when she was alone with Bax in his hutch that night. True to his word, he had lost no time in coming back for seconds or thirds. "Why me?" she asked as they lay on his bed. He hesitated, tracing his finger down across the curve of her hips. "And don't try and distract me, at least not yet," she growled.

  "Well, you're great to talk with, really funny, and incredibly smart," he began.

  "Bax, that's what you tell a girl when you don't want to sleep with her," she pouted.

  "Then I realized that brain was wrapped up in this incredibly sexy package," he smiled at her, his wandering hand beginning to turn her thoughts to mush.

  "But I'm pale as a ghost, have these stupid freckles everywhere—"

  "I noticed," he interrupted, closely inspecting a few of them.

  "Stop it," she said halfheartedly. "My hair is a frizzy mess, I'm short, and I'm too curvy."

  "Not for me," he objected, staring into her eyes. His eyes glowed with the truth, but she frowned.

  "Prove it," she challenged.

  Lani flipped over and picked up Bax's zuno from the floor. The handheld zuno served as a personal digital assistant, including communications. It also stored a large amount of data, often related to its owner's profession or for entertainment. In Bax's case, the screen on the handheld computer flashed to the book he was currently reading. "Illinois Smith versus the Maneaters of Gathol," she read.

  Embarrassed, he grabbed it back from her, muttering, "I was really, really bored."

  "Isn't this the one where Illinois loses his neutronic whip, but escapes by stealing the chastity girdle of the Maneaters' high priestess and using it to slide on the cable across the Chasm of Doom?"

  Bax goggled. "You've read The Maneaters of Gathol?"

  Lani smirked. "Read it? I must have read at least half of the series, over and over again. I couldn't wait for each new one to come out. Illinois is the reason I wanted to get into space in the first place. I begged my parents to get me a neutronic whip and a hat like Illinois' for my fourteenth birthday."

  Bax gazed admiringly at her. "Lani, you are such a guy!"

  "I never did get the whip, but I did wear the hat the rest of the school year," she mused. "Probably one of the reasons I was such a social outcast."

  Somehow between the two of them, they came up with a good enough argument to convince Jonze to let Lani join Bax and Juls on their next sampling trip—or maybe their persistence wore her down. She was looking more her century of years every day. After giving them a long look, she finally agreed.

  "Do you think she's upset about us having sex?" Lani asked as they started to pack for their little trip.

  Bax shrugged. "Who can tell? Of course, old Jonze used to be in the Imperial Marines, and you know what they say about those leathernecks."

  "No what?"

  "They'd rather sleep with their karbine than another human," Bax waggled his eyebrows at her.

  "That is not what they say," Lani giggled.

  Bobbie normally had space enough for eight passengers, but most of the extra space in the flitter was presently filled by sampling equipment. This was the first time Lani had been airborne since they landed six weeks ago, so Bax let her sit up front as Juls flew them to a cloud forest halfway up the slopes of a mountain they had nicknamed Misty Mountain.

  The turbines gave a reassuring, if noisy, drone. "Too bad we can't convert to thrusters and really take you for a ride, but Jonze would kill us because of the extra fuel," Juls apologized.

  "Not unless we want to achieve orbit," Bax's voice came over Lani's headphones from his seat in the back.

  "Don't I wish," Juls lamented.

  "That's okay, this way I have a better chance to see everything," Lani grinned. She avidly surveyed the pale shades of green and yellow rolling past underneath them, "It's amazing how sickly everything looks for a supposed jungle. I guess it is because the sunlight is so strong, but I keep expecting big trees with huge, broad leaves. You know, everything lush green with vines and monkeys everywhere."

  "No monkeys on Gondwana, except for us," Bax chipped in.

  "Plenty of blagging vines though," Juls said, "Way too many vines."

  "What's that?" Lani pointed towards a clearing in otherwise nearly impenetrable vegetation. "Can we get closer to take a look?"

  "No!" Juls and Bax both retorted.

  "A bunch of Chen's trees with the machine-gun seeds are surrounding it," Bax explained.

  "Yeah, we learned that the hard way the first time we came out here. Near as we can tell, it looks like some type of volcanic rock formation, maybe similar to obsidian. It would explain the lack of plants," Juls tipped the flitter so Lani could see the brown, glassy outcropping better. "Anyway, it's not worth the risk to get closer. Besides, we're supposed to be looking for vegetation to sample, right?"

  Less than an hour into their flight, Juls pointed ahead of them towards a peak. "Misty Mountain," he announced. It was the tallest peak in a ridge line. Clouds completely shrouded most of the other peaks, but Misty Mountain proudly thrust up through the mists.

  "One of the few places we've found that has an abundance of surface water on this planet," Bax explained. "That blue-white star of a sun bakes most everything else, but we're close to the coast now. You should even get to see something more like a typical rainforest, maybe swing on a vine."

  Lani laughed. "Right, can't you see me on a vine? I'd go splat into the nearest tree. Jonze would never let me out of the lab again."

  They landed at the upper edge of the clouds, in a field dotted by stunted trees. Lani diligently applied sunscreen, with a willing helper in Bax. Although Draco was merely a dim globe through the clouds she would still get burned if she was not careful. She followed the two men out of the flitter's hatch. It was about a twenty-minute hike down to where they would start prospecting. While Bax and Juls carried shovels, laser-bladed machetes, sampling containers, and of course, laser karbines, she carried the fourth, semi-intelligent, occupant of the flitter. His weight felt heavier than his listed twenty kilos, and she had to set him down regularly, but she was damned if she was going to leave Alfie behind. He was listed as a portable unit, after all, but she planned to have a word with the geniuses who had designed the dysfunctional carrying straps. She also quickly found that the wide-brimmed hat she had brought for sun protection was more useful for keeping all the dripping moisture from runnin
g down the collar of her shirt.

  When they finally reached a likely spot, she extended Alfie's legs and pointed his solar panel in the general direction of the sun. He beeped when she got the panel correctly oriented. She started him on his self-diagnostics, while she watched the other two establish a sampling grid. She jumped slightly as a wet tree branch brushed against her arm and heard a chuckle. Bax must have been watching her more closely than she realized. "Don't worry," he said. "It takes the plants a while to react to our presence. We should be able to collect all the samples we need and be on our way before we trigger a hostile reaction."

  "But just in case," Juls patted his karbine.

  The two of them quickly fell into an obviously familiar pattern, recording various sampling grids, thoroughly scouring the vegetation for potential samples, and cutting off or digging up the most likely candidates. On a more settled world, they would be talking to the local residents to identify plants they used for medicinal or agricultural purposes. Here, they had to look for signs in the environment itself, such as plants with a cleared space around them—evidence of possible allelopathic chemicals that had killed off their competitors.

  Lani had Alfie draw in a few deep breaths to analyze the general volatiles of the site, then brought him over, shortened his legs, and set him next to a plant that Juls was ready to dig up. After Alfie indicated he had a baseline count of the volatiles, Juls went ahead and harvested his victim. Lani couldn't detect any obvious changes in chemistry, her previous wintergreen experience notwithstanding, but Alfie's nose was a million times more sensitive than hers. She left Alfie there for a few minutes before hauling him over to where Bax was standing waiting with a machete next to a branch of large, fringed leaves. "See? I told you you'd get to see your rain forest."

  After a couple of hours of lugging Alfie back and forth, she realized that this was a bit more work than she had thought. She stuck Alfie back in his preliminary spot for another baseline sample while she watched the two men work—well, mainly watched Bax work. Unfortunately, she found watching his strong arms and the muscles playing across his chest more than a little distracting.

  While monitoring Juls as he dug up a small bunchgrass with purple flowers, she noticed the tearing sound it made coming out of the soil. She had noticed bits of the tiny hair-like structures in soil stuck to some of the samples that she had analyzed in the lab, but had been unaware of how extensive they were—or even if they served the same function as rhizomes did on Earth. "Can you pull on that? So I can see how extensive the system is?" she asked Juls, bending over him.

  "Sure," he said, working his hand around a bunch of the exposed filaments and starting to pull. "Ouch!" he jerked his hand back, knocking Lani off her feet. "Damned roots shocked me," he flexed his hand as Bax hurried over.

  "Interesting," Lani said, taking Bax's hand to pull herself up.

  "What?" Bax and Juls asked.

  "Well, when most people think of plant communication—"

  "If they do at all," Bax interrupted. "Do you?" He asked Juls.

  "Are you kidding? I figure all the rustling leaves are just signs they are out to get me," Juls responded.

  "Okay, if you two clowns are done? Most people think of plants communicating by releasing volatiles, chemicals to be spread by air. But if you consider it, that's a really inefficient way to do it. The wind might blow the chemical the wrong direction or even worse, a hostile species might be listening or should I say, smelling? Chemical signaling would seem to be best if you're trying to attract the attention of an unrelated species, say a wasp to attack the caterpillar eating your leaves, but we haven't seen many insects on the planet at all. I think the additional energy in the sunlight means the plants can outcompete most animals."

  "What about the flutterbys?" Bax asked. "Seem to be plenty of those."

  "But we didn't even see many of those at first. I wonder if some of our activities caused the plants to call them in," Lani shook her head. "Anyway, electrical signals would be a much more efficient way for plants to communicate. I think that's what zapped you."

  "Or it could be a defense mechanism by a single plant," Juls volunteered.

  "It could be," Lani agreed. "Do we happen to have any multimeters with us?"

  "I knew I shouldn't have said anything," Juls muttered.

  Professor Jonze looked up, pursed her lips, and shook her head. "Before you even ask, the answer is 'no.'"

  "But I haven't even asked," Lani protested from the comm center hatch. It was only a few steps back down the hall to her lab section, but now it seemed like a long march to imprisonment.

  "No, but every single lab scientist I have ever worked with has the same reaction to a sampling trip," the Professor's lips quirked. "Except for Mendoza. But as I recall, there was a monsoon and an angry water bison involved. The lab monkey gets one taste of freedom and immediately decides it needs to get out in the field more often. You might be right that there is a chance to discover something in the field, like those rhizomatic electrical currents. The problem, Lani, is that I need you in the lab even more, doing what you do better than anyone else. We are way behind corporate projections with how many potential pharma prospects we have found, and the Alchemistica bean counters made it very clear what they were expecting from this expedition."

  "But they can't blame you for Mumson getting drugged or Juls and the spike snares or not having the Quaddie in orbit helping us survey," Lani protested.

  "Oh, but they can," Jonze smiled wistfully, silhouetted by the blinking lights of Hoover behind her. "This is your first trip, and things have been a little more difficult than you expected, no? But I trust your eyes are beginning to open?"

  Lani nodded hesitantly.

  "Imagine you are a corporate bean counter. Alchemistica is a small corporation, without the deep pockets of the true kartels. The bean counters have never traveled further than from their desk to a budget planning session. They have no idea what we face out here, but it can't possibly be as important as their triplicate forms. Their only purpose in life is to find ways to cut costs—hopefully without killing an employee, but if enough money is at stake? So, we wind up marooned on Gondwana, without any way to yell for help."

  Jonze rubbed her temples. "Sorry, I suddenly feel like a tired, old woman who is selling vacuum to a spacerat. Go on back to your lab bench and find the next blockbuster drug for me, okay? Who knows? Maybe some of the data you collected yesterday will indeed pay off."

  Lani forced down her carefully rehearsed rebuttal and reluctantly returned to the laboratory. Yes, she did want another field trip and was disappointed about that, but worse was that the Professor knew what she was going to ask and even anticipated what arguments she was going to make. Lani felt like she was back in public school all over again. She smiled. Maybe that was fitting; she probably had the same level of hormones now as when she had first become aware of boys, right after the socialization treatments—no, she was definitely not going there. Besides, what had the Professor said? Some of the data from yesterday might pay off. If she didn't know better, it sounded like the old, gray-headed principal had given her permission to forget about her assigned homework for a while.

  Lani rubbed her eyes. She had been staring at graph after graph of chemical compound abundances. There were at least a dozen volatiles used by different plant species that indicated that they were being harmed. The same plant even released different compounds depending on whether its roots were being disturbed by Juls digging it up or stems being broken by Bax snipping samples or even leaves being cut by Lani, imitating a hungry insect. She wondered if her theory about the higher insolation giving plants the advantage was true. There were a number of insect-like creatures they had discovered, but not nearly as many as expected.

  The volatiles did seem to affect neighboring plants. On their field trip, one small shrub had tightly furled its leaves in response to the leaf cutting. Surprisingly, a ne
ighboring plant of a different species responded to the same stimulus by exuding a sticky sap. Her background monitoring had shown that by the end of their sampling, there were well over a hundred volatile compounds that had changed in concentration. She was intrigued by volatile that had been present in high concentrations when they started, vanished during their collection efforts, then started to rise as, finished with their sampling, they ate a snack, delaying their return. She watched the video again, watched the leaves unfurl after the chemical reappeared. She was willing to bet that particular volatile served as a general "All-Clear" signal.

  She had also taken a look at volatiles detected by her sensors outside of the laboratory building. The glutamate analog had died down to near non-detectable concentrations; maybe it was a seasonal thing. However, there were a number of compounds similar to those found as 'alarm' signals in their sampled plants from Misty Mountain. Although Hoover did the preliminary structural analysis on the molecules for her, she did the final visualizations. Computer programs were not as good as humans at spotting congruities. It was like a three-dimensional computer game. In fact, it was a near record score on a three-dimensional holographic game that had landed Lani a corporate scholarship to the University and brought her to the attention of Alchemistica.

  She noted that the concentrations of the alarm analogs that the plants were emitting around the base were on average ten times higher than at their Misty Mountain sampling location. The plants were definitely broadcasting their distress. The big question was "Who or what was going to respond?"

  The rhizomes and the electrical signals were another puzzle. It could have been a defense mechanism, but the series of pulses recorded on the multimeters seemed to be overkill for simple defense. Hoover had fewer theories about the electrical signals, claiming that he needed more data. A sudden idea popped into her head. Why not modify their multimeters and stick them outside to broadcast what they recorded? They would likely be smothered by plants, degrading the signal, but that was okay, she did not need them to broadcast from much further away then the edge of the slab. What she did need was help in assembling them.

  She found Mumson in his hutch, slouched against the wall, his eyes closed. He woke up when she entered. He listened carefully to her idea before breaking into a big smile. "Sounds like a great idea. I'd love to help you. How many of these units were you thinking you needed?"

  "Three to five," she noticed he still had slight tremors in his hands. How much of his enthusiasm was because he thought it was a good idea and how much was because he was bored out of his mind, feeling useless, while he was trying to recover? He asked a few more questions. The more he talked, the more she noticed the slight slurring of his words. She tried to keep her worry off her face. Maybe this little project of hers would do him good. Anyway, this was one puzzle she was leaving completely up to him. She was starving for supper and, she thought with a smile, dessert.

  "I noticed you stopped and talked to old Jonze for a few minutes at supper. You even made her smile. I didn't know that you knew her that well," Bax said, leaning towards her on his bed. "What did you say? Were you whispering sweet nothings into her ear like this?" he asked, demonstrating.

  "No, I just told her she was right, was it all I told her?" Lani was finding it hard to string a sentence together, which was certainly Bax's intention.

  "So it was sweet nothings," Bax started working on her ear lobe and she surrendered all hope of coherent thought.