Corey froze.
The television turned another half inch.
“Stella?” Corey said, almost choking on the sound. “Stella?”
The television’s speaker hissed.
Without willing herself to rise, Corey found herself under the television, straining to make out the breathy whisper. A voice murmured behind it. Corey said, “I can’t understand you, Stella.” Finally, a ghost of speech resolved itself into something almost audible. What it sounded like was, “I’m here, deary.” Then the hiss faded away.
“I’m still here,” said a louder voice.
Corey jumped. It was the pen.
“Leave him,” said the trashcan. “Mixed recyclable or not, when you’re done, you’re done.”
“No,” Corey said. She retrieved the pen from the trashcan’s bottom. “I need it to write a note.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” said the pencil. “I don’t have another word in me, I’m afraid.”
Corey took a sheet of paper out of the desk and clicked the pen open. “Do you know a fancier phrase than ‘I am sorry?’”
The pen said, “I regret.”
“Or, ‘with regrets,’” suggested the pencil.
Corey wrote her note, thinking about frontier women riding west, their bellies full of babies, of little flesh quakes shaking within her. She thought of the pencil’s pathetic quest to stay alive. One, tiny, sentient voice among a million voices, like Stella’s voice somehow preserved in all the connections. The seat of her consciousness cut loose and free.
She thought of the tiny voice she hadn’t heard yet, like the speechless gray bird on the sidewalk, hopping from seed to seed.
LASHAWNDA AT THE END
We landed in steam. It billowed from where we touched down, then vanished into the dry, frigid air. From that first moment, the planet fascinated Lashawnda. She watched the landing tape over and over.
Lashawnda liked Papaver better than any of the rest us. She liked the gopher-rats that stood on their hind legs to look curiously until we got too close. She liked the smaller sun wavering in the not-quite-right blue sky, the lighter gravity, the blonde sand and gray rocks that reached to the horizon, but most of all, she liked the way the plants in the gullies leaned toward her when she walked through them, how the flat-leaved bushes turned toward her and stuck to her legs if she brushed against them. Wearing a full contamination suit despite the planet’s thin but perfectly breathable atmosphere didn’t bother her. Neither did the cold. By midday here on the equator the temperature might peak a few degrees above freezing, but the nights were incredibly chilly. Even Marvin and Beatitude’s ugly deaths the first days here didn’t affect her like it did everyone else. No, she was in heaven, cataloging the flora, wandering among the misshaped trees in the crooked ravines, coming up with names for each new species.
When we lost our water supply, and it looked like we might not last until the resupply ship came round, she was still happy.
Lashawnda was a research botanist; what else should I have expected? For me, a commercial applications biologist, Papaver represented a lifetime of work for teams of scientists, and I was only one guy. After less than two weeks on planet, I knew the best I got to do was to file a report that said, “Great possibilities for medicinal, scientific and industrial exploitation.” Every plant Lashawnda sent my way revealed a whole catalog of potential pharmaceuticals. The second wave of explorers would make all the money.
Lashawnda was dying, but was such a positive person that even in what she knew were her final days, she worked as if no deadly date was flapping its leaden wings toward her. That’s the problem in living with a technology that’s extended human life so well: death is harder. It must have been easier when humans didn’t make it through their first century. People dropped dead left and right, so they couldn’t have feared it as much. It couldn’t have made them as mad as it made me. Her mortality clung to me like a pall, making everything dark and slow motion and sad.
Of course, the plants stole our water. We should have seen it coming. Every living creature we’d found spent most of its time finding, extracting and storing water.
Second Chair pounded on my door.
“Get into a suit, Spencer,” she yelled when I poked my head into the hallway. “Everyone outside!” A couple of engineers rushed by, faces flushed, half into their suits. “I’m systems control,” said one as he passed. “There’s no way I should risk a lung full of Papaver rot.”
When I made it out the airlock, the crisis was beyond help. Our water tanks stood twenty meters from the ship, their landing struts crunched beneath them just as they were designed to do. They’d landed on the planet months before we got here, both resting between deep, lichen-filled depressions in the rock. Then the machinery gathered the minuscule water from the air, drop by drop, until when we arrived the tanks were full. A year on Papaver was enough. Everyone surrounded the tanks, heads down. Even in the bulky suits I could see how glum they were, except Lashawnda, who was under the main tank. “It’s a fungus,” she said, breaking off a chip of metal from what should have been the smooth underside. Her hand rested in dark mud, but even as I watched, the color leached away. The ground sucked water like a sponge, and underneath the normally arid surface, a dozen plant species waited to store the rare substance. Even now the water would be spreading beneath my feet, pumped from one cell to the next. Ten years worth of moisture for this little valley delivered all at once.
She looked at me, smiling through the face shield. “I never checked the water tanks, but I’ll bet there was trace condensation on them in the mornings, enough for fungus to live on, and whatever they secreted as waste ate right through. Look at this, Spencer.” She yanked hard at the tank’s underside, snapping off another hunk of metal, then handed it to me. “It’s honeycombed.”
The metal covered my hand but didn’t weigh any more than a piece of balsa wood. Bits crumbled from the edge when I ran my gloved fingers over it.
“Isn’t that marvelous?” she said.
First Chair said, “It’s not all gone, is it? Not the other tank too?” He moved beside the next tank, rapped his knuckles on it, producing a resonant note. He was fifty, practically a child, and this was only his second expedition in command. “Damn.” He looked into the dry, bathtub-shaped pit in the rock beside the tank where the water undoubtedly drained when the bottom broke out.
Lashawnda checked the pipes connecting the tanks to the ship. “There’s more here, after only ten days. How remarkable.”
First Chair rapped the tank again thoughtfully. “What are our options?”
The environmental engineer said, “We recycle, a lot. No more baths.”
“Yuck,” said someone.
He continued, “We can build dew traps, but there isn’t much water in the atmosphere. We’re not going to get a lot that way.”
“Can we make it?” said First Chair.
The engineer shrugged. “If nothing breaks down.”
“Check the ship. If this stuff eats at the engines, we won’t be going anywhere.”
They shuffled away, stirring dust with their feet. I stayed with Lashawnda. “A daily bleach wash would probably keep things clean,” she said. She crouched next to the pipes, her knees grinding into the dirt. I flinched, thinking about microscopic spores caught in her suit’s fabric. The spores had killed Marvin and Beatitude. On the third day they’d come in from setting a weather station atop a near hill, and they rushed the decontamination. Why would they worry? After all, the air tested breathable. We all knew that the chances of a bacteria from an alien planet being dangerous to our Earth-grown systems were remote, but we didn’t plan on water-hungry spores that didn’t care at all what kind of proteins we were made of. The spores only liked the water, and once they’d settled into the warm, moist ports of the two scientist’s lungs, they sprouted like crazy, sending tendrils through their systems, breaking down human cells to build their own structures. In an hour the two developed a cough. Six hou
rs later, they were dead. Working remote arms through the quarantine area, I helped zip Beatitude into a body bag after the autopsy. Delicate looking orange leaves covered her cheeks, and her neck was bumpy with sprouts ready to break through.
At least they didn’t suffer. The spore’s toxins operated as a powerful opiate. Marvin spent the last hour babbling and laughing, weaker and weaker, until the last thing he said was, “It’s God at the end.”
A quick analysis of the spores revealed an enzyme they needed to sprout, and we were inoculated with an enzyme blocker, but everyone was more rigorous decontaminating now.
Lashawnda said, “Come on, Spencer. I want to show you something.”
We walked downhill toward the closest gully and its forest. She limped, the result of a deteriorating hip replacement. Like most people her vintage, she’d gone through numerous reconstructive procedures, but you wouldn’t know it to look at her. She’d stabilized her looks as a forty-year-old, almost a tenth her real age. Pixie-like features with character lines radiating from the mouth. Just below the ears blonde hair with hints of gray. Light blue eyes. Slender in the waist. Dancer’s legs. Economical in her movements whether she was sorting plant samples or washing her face. Four hundred years! I studied her when she wasn’t looking.
I picked thirty for myself. Physically it was a good place to be. I didn’t tire easily. My stockiness contrasted well to her slight build.
Lashawnda suffered from cascading cancers, each treatable eruption triggering the next until the body gives up. She’d told me she had a couple laps around the sun left at best. “Papaver will be my last stop,” she’d said during the long trip here. Of course, every expedition member says that in the claustrophobic confines of the ship. Once we’ve slept with everyone else (and all the possible combinations of three or four at the same time), and the novelty of inter-ship politicing has worn thin, we all say we’re done with planet hopping forever.
I suppose it was inevitable Lashawnda and I ended up together on the ship. I was the second oldest by a century, and she had one hundred and fifty years on me, plus she laughed often and liked to talk. We’d go to bed and converse for a couple hours before sleeping. I’d grown tired of energetic couplings with partners I had nothing to say to afterwards. My own two hundred fifty years hung like a heavy coat. What did I have to say to someone who’d only been kicking around for only sixty or ninety years?
I cared for her more than anyone in my memory, and she was dying.
When we reached the gully she said, “What’s amazing is that there are so many plants. Papaver should be like Mars. Same age. Lighter gravity and solar wind should have stripped its atmosphere. Unlike Mars, however, Papaver held onto its water, and the plants take care of the air.”
Except for the warped orange and brown and yellow “trees” in front of us, which looked more like twisted pipes than plants, we could have been in an arctic desert.
“Darn little water,” I said, thinking about our empty tanks.
“Darn little free water, but quite a bit locked into the biomass. Did you see the survey results I sent you yesterday?”
We pushed through the first branches. Despite their brittle looks, the stems were as supple as rubber rods. They waved back into place after we passed. Broad, waxy leaves that covered the sun side of each branch bent to face us as we came close. I found their mobility unnerving. They were like blank eyes following our movements. In the shadow of the trees I found more green than orange and yellow.
“Yeah, I looked at it.” Except in a narrow band around the equator, Papaver appeared lifeless. But in the planet’s most temperate region, in every sheltering hole and crevice, small plants grew. And peculiar forests, like the one we were in now, filled the gullies. The remote survey, taking samples at even the coldest and deadest-looking areas, found life there too. Despite the punishing changes in temperature and the lack of rain, porous rock served as a fertile home for endolithic fungi and algae. Beneath them lived cyanobacterias.
“If the results are uniform over the rest of the surface, there’s enough water for a small ocean or two.” She wiggled between two large trunks, streaking her suit with greenish-orange residue. “Do you know why the leaves stick to our suits?”
“Transference of seeds?” I hadn’t had time to study the trees’ life cycle. Classifying the types had filled up most of my time, and I did that from within the ship. Lashawnda sent samples so fast, I’d had little chance to investigate much myself.
“Nope. Airborne spores and their root systems do that. What they’re really trying to do is to eat you.”
Obviously she knew where she was going. We’d worked our way far enough into the plants that I wasn’t sure what direction the ship lay. “Excuse me?” I said.
“You were wondering what preyed on the gopher-rats. They’re herbivores. You said they couldn’t be the top of the food chain, and they aren’t. They eat lichens, fungus and leaves, and the trees eat them.” She stopped at a clump of stems, like warped bamboo, and gently pushed the branches apart. “See,” she said.
Half a meter off the ground, a yellow and orange cocoon hung between the branches, like a football-sized hammock. I’d seen the lumps before. “So?”
She dropped to her knees and poked it with her finger. Something inside the shape quivered and wiggled, pushing aside several leaves. A gopher-rat stared out at me for a second, a net of tendrils over its eye.
I stepped back. For a second I thought of Beatitude, her face marked with the tiny, waxy leaves. “How long… when did it get caught?”
She laughed. “Yesterday. I startled him, and he jumped into the trees here. When he didn’t come out, I went looking.”
I knelt beside her. Up close I saw how the plant had grown into the gopher-rat. In the few uncovered spots, tufts of fur poked out. The biologist in me was fascinated, but for the rest, I found the image repugnant. “How come he didn’t escape? The leaves are a little sticky, but not that sticky.”
“Drugs. Tiny spines on the leaves inject some type of opiate. I ran the analysis this morning. Same stuff that kept Marvin and Beatitude from feeling pain.”
“A new data point to add to the ecology.” I rested my hands on my knees. The poor gopher-rat didn’t even get to live out its short life span. For a second I thought about burning down the entire forest for Marvin and Beatitude and the gopher-rat, who were dead and never coming back, except the gopher-rat wasn’t dead yet. I wondered if it knew what was happening.
“Don’t you see what’s interesting?” She pushed the plants back even farther. “This is important.”
“What am I missing?”
She smiled. Even through her faceplate I could tell that she found this exciting. “The gopher-rat should be dead. If the plants grabbed him just for his water, he’d be nothing but bones now, but he’s still living. Obviously something else is going on. There’s lumps like this one all through the forest. I dissected one. Without a thorough analysis, I can’t tell for sure, but it looks like the plant absorbs everything except the gopher-rat’s nervous system. It’s symbiotic.”
The leaves seemed to tighten a little around the gopher-rat. We stood in the middle of the forest. I couldn’t see anything but the trees’ tall stems and the sticky leaves that covered most of the ground. The sun had dropped lower in the sky so I couldn’t find it through the trees, although their tops glowed orange and yellow in the slanting light. Even through the suit, I could feel that it was growing cold. “It doesn’t look like an equal relationship to me.”
“Maybe not, but it’s an interesting direction for the ecology to take, don’t you think?”
“Why would a plant want a nervous system?” I said. We’d turned the lights out an hour earlier. My arm was draped over Lashawnda’s shoulder, and her bare back pressed warmly against my chest. I didn’t want to let her go. Even though my side ached to change position, I wanted to savor every second. I wondered if she sensed my grief.
“No reason that I can think o
f,” she said. Her fingers were wrapped around my wrist, and her heart beat steadily against my own. “But it must have something to do with its survival. There’s an evolutionary advantage.”
For a long time, I didn’t speak. She was so solid and real and living. How could her life be threatened? How could it be that she could be here today and not forever? She breathed deeply. I thought she might have gone to sleep, but she suddenly twisted from my embrace, cursing under her breath.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
She sat up. In the dark I couldn’t see, but I could feel her beside me. Her muscles tensed.
“A little discomfort,” she said.
“What did the medic prescribe?”
“Nothing that’s doing any good.”
She coughed heavily for a few seconds, and I could tell she was stretching, like she was trying to rid herself of a cramp. “I’m going down to the lab. I’m not sleeping well anyway.” She rested her hand against my face for an instant before climbing out of bed.
After an hour of tossing and turning, I got up and did what I’d never done before: accessed Lashawnda’s medical reports. After reading for a bit I could see she’d been optimistic. There were a lot less than a couple trips around the sun left in her, and her prescription list was a pharmacopoeia of pain killers.
She hadn’t returned by morning.
“It’s standard operating procedure,” said the environmental engineer. She held her report forms to her chest defensively. “If the atmosphere isn’t toxic, we’re supposed to vent it in to cool the equipment. We’ve been circulating outside air since the first day. There are bioscreens.”
First Chair looked at her dubiously. The four of us were crowded into the systems control room. Lashawnda broke the seals of her contamination suit. She’d rushed from decontamination without taking it off. “I should have thought of it,” Lashawnda said. The helmet muffled her voice. “The fungi are opportunistic, and they’re adept at finding hard to get water. You reverse airflow periodically, don’t you?”
The Radio Magician and Other Stories Page 14