The Radio Magician and Other Stories

by James Van Pelt

  The environmental engineer nodded. “Sure, it blows dust out of the screens.”

  “The spores are activated by the moisture you vented, and…”

  “I didn’t vent anything,” snapped the engineer. “It is standard operating procedure.”

  “Right,” said Lashawnda, pulling the helmet off her head. She brushed her hair back with a quick gesture. “The fungus grew through the screen, spored, and that’s what’s in the machinery.”

  “The entire water recycling system? The backup system too?” asked First Chair, a tinge of desperation in his voice.

  “Absolutely. There are holes in the valves. All the joints are pitted. The holding tanks would have more fungus in it than water, if there was any water left. Pretty happy fungus at that, I’d guess.” She pulled the top half of the suit over her head, then stepped out of the pants. “Here’s the unusual part: The water that was in the tank isn’t in the room anymore. There are skinny stems leading to the vent that go down the ship’s side and into the ground. The fungus pumped the water out. These plants are geniuses at moving water, which they have to be to survive.”

  First Chair asked, “Why weren’t the external tanks already ruined when we got here? They were exposed to this environment much longer than our recycling equipment.”

  “They landed in the winter. That’s the same reason the initial probes didn’t find the spores,” said Lashawnda. “It’s spring now. The plants must only be active when its warmer. Bad timing on our part.”

  I looked through the service window into the machinery bay. Even through the thick glass the fungus was evident, a thick fur around the pipes. “You’re sure the growth started inside the ship and went out, not the other way around?”

  Lashawnda smiled. “Absolutely.”

  “So what?” said First Chair. I could see the wheels spinning in his head: how much water did we have stored elsewhere? How well were the dew-catchers working? Then he was dividing that amount of water by the minimum amount each crew member needed until the resupply ship arrived. By his expression, he didn’t like the math.

  Lashawnda said, “That means the plants cooperate. They share the wealth. It’s counter-Darwinian. I compared the fly-by photos of this area from the first day until now. Since we’ve landed, plant growth has thickened and extended, which makes sense. When we lost the external tanks we introduced more free water into the system than it’s seen in a years, but the forests in the neighboring gulches also are thicker. We thought they were separate ecosystems. They aren’t. Water we lost here is ending up as much as five kilometers away. The plants move moisture to where it’s needed.”

  “Will knowing that help us now?” asked First Chair. “I don’t care if the plants are setting up volleyball leagues, we’ve got to figure a way to find enough water to last us five months.” He glared at the environmental engineer on his way out. She turned to me.

  “I know,” I said. “Standard operating procedure.”

  “Let’s go outside,” said Lashawnda. “We’ve got the afternoon left.”

  “Could we harvest the trees and press water out of them?” I asked.

  Lashawnda attached another sensor to a tree stem, moved a few feet along, then fastened the next one. She straightened slowly, her eyes closed against the discomfort. I wondered how she really felt. She never talked about it.

  “You did the reports. How many plants would we have to squeeze dry to get a single cup?”

  I didn’t answer. She was right. Although the plants tied up most of the planet’s water, it was spread thinly. I dug into a bare patch of dirt between two stands of trees. Only a dozen centimeters below the surface, a matted network of plant tendrils resisted my efforts to go deeper. I picked one about a finger in width and fastened a sensor to it.

  We were deep into the tree-filled gulch. With no sun on us, I had to keep moving to stay warm, and my faceplate defogger wasn’t working well.

  I looked into a bundle of tree stalks. An old gopher-rat lump hung between the branches. Now that I knew where to look, I found them often. “Have you gone this deep into the gulch before?”

  Lashawnda consulted her wrist display. “No, but by the map we are nearly at the end. We’ll save time if we go back along the ridge.”

  Fifteen minutes later Lashawnda pushed through a particularly heavy patch of trees, and she disappeared.

  “Oh!”

  “What?”

  Pulling my way through the vegetation, I found what stopped her. The gully pinched to a close twenty meters farther, and there were no more trees, but the same kind of sticky leaves that captured the gopher-rats covered the ground in a bed of orange and yellow, like broad-surfaced clover. The setting sun poured a crimson light over the scene, and for the first time since I’d landed on Papaver, I thought something was beautiful. As I watched, the leaves turned their faces toward us and seemed to lean the least bit, as if they yearned for us to lay down.

  Lashawnda said, “Let’s not walk through that. We’d crush too many of them.” She fastened the last of the sensors to the delicate leaves at the end of the little clearing. Her movements were spare, exact. The final sensor fastened, she paused on her knees, facing the bed of plants. She reached out, hand flat, and brushed the leaves gently. They strained to meet her, leaves wrapping around her fingers; a longer stemmed leaf encircled her wrist. Within a few seconds, her hand, wrist and arm to her elbow were encased.

  I stepped toward her. The expanse of leaves had changed color! Then I realized the color was the same, but the plants had shifted even further to face her. Sunlight hit them differently. All lines pointed toward Lashawnda. My voice felt choked and tight. “What are you doing?”

  “If I move, I must contain water. They’re just trying to get it. They work together; isn’t that superb? If they got my water, they’d send it to where it was needed.” Gradually she pulled her arm free. The leaves slipped their hold without resistance.

  Careful not to step on the plants, we made our way to the edge of the gully and clambered out. The startlingly pink sun brushed the horizon, and yellow and gold glowing streamers layered themselves a third of the way up the sky.

  “That’s amazing.” I held Lashawnda’s hand through the clumsy gloves, the same hand the leaves had covered.

  “You haven’t seen one before?” She squeezed my hand back. “Every sunset is like this. It’s the dust in the atmosphere.”

  The streamers twisted under the influence of upper air disturbances that didn’t touch us.

  “I saw your medical reports,” I said.

  She sighed. The sky darkened as more and more of the sun vanished until only a pink diamond winked between two distant hills, and the final golden layer dulled into a yellow haze. “You’re the last one. Are you going to wish me well too? You’d think everyone turned into death and dying counselors. If I hear, ‘You’ve had a good four-hundred years’ again, I’ll scream.”

  “No, I wasn’t going to say that.” But I don’t know what I was going to say. I couldn’t tell her that I wanted to do some screaming of my own.

  By the time we returned to the ship, it had grown incredibly cold, and the decontamination chamber wasn’t any warmer. I longed for a hot spiced tea, but First Chair was waiting for us on the other side.

  “I need you to drop your other projects and concentrate on the water problem.” His eyes had that haunted I-wish-I-didn’t-have-a-leadership-position look to them. “The geology team is looking for aquifers; the engineers are making more dew traps, and the chemists are working on what can be extracted from the rock, but none of them are hopeful we can find or make enough water fast enough. Is there anything you’ve learned about the plants that might help?”

  Lashawnda said, “They’ve spent millions of years learning how to conserve water. I don’t think they’ll give it up easily. Spencer and I are working on an experiment right now that ought to tell us more.”

  “Good. Let me know if you get results.” He rushed from the room, and a fe
w seconds later I heard him say to someone in another room, “Have you made any progress?”

  “We’ll need to sedate him if we want to work uninterrupted,” she said.

  “What is the experiment we’re doing?”

  “Electroencephalograph.”

  “An EEG on a plant?” I laughed.

  She shrugged. “You wondered why a plant would need a nervous system. Let’s find out if it’s using it.”

  In her lab, Lashawnda bent over her equipment. “What do you make of that?” She pointed to the readouts on the screen. “Especially when I display it like this.” She tapped a couple keys.

  The monitor showed a series of moving graphs, like separate seismographs. “It could be anything. Sound waves maybe. Are those from the sensors we placed?”

  “Yep. Now, watch this.” She reached across her table and pressed a switch. Within a couple seconds, all the graphs showed activity so violent that the screen almost turned white. Gradually the graphs settled into the same patterns I’d seen at first.

  I leaned closer and saw the readouts were numbered. The ones near the top of the screen corresponded to the sensors we’d placed at the far end of the gully. The bottom ones were nearest to the ship. “What did you do?”

  “I shut the exterior vents into the equipment room. The change in the graphs happened when the hatches cut through the fungus stems connecting the growth in the ship to the ground.”

  “The plants felt that? They’re thinking about it?”

  “Not plants. A single organism. Maybe a planet-wide organism. I’ll have to place more sensors. And yes, it’s thinking.”

  The lines on the monitor continued vibrating. It looked like brain activity. “That’s ridiculous. Why would a plant need a brain? There’s no precedent.”

  “Maybe they didn’t start out as plants. As the weather grew colder and it became harder and harder for animals to live high on the food chain, they became what we see now, a thinking, cooperative intelligence.”

  Lashawnda put her hands into the small of her back and pushed hard, her eyes closed. “A sentience wouldn’t operate the same way non-thinking plants would. We just need to discover the difference.” She opened a floor cabinet and took out a clear sample bag stuffed with waxy orange shapes.

  I barely recognized it before she opened the bag, broke off a Papaver leaf, and pressed it against her inner arm.

  After a moment, she opened her eyes and smiled. “Marvin said, ‘It’s God at the end,’ so I thought I’d give it a try. He wasn’t too far off.” She enunciated the words carefully, as if her hearing were abruptly acute. “The toxins are an outstanding opiate. Much more effective on pain than the rest of the stuff I’ve been taking. I don’t think the gopher-rats suffer.”

  No recrimination would have been appropriate. Although it was most likely the leaves wouldn’t affect her at all, the first time she did it she might have just as easily killed herself. “How long?” I took the bag from her hand. It wasn’t dated. She’d smuggled it in.

  “A couple of days.”

  “Is it addictive?”

  She giggled, and I looked at her sharply. She seemed lucid and happy, not drugged.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t tried quitting.” She held her hand out. I gave her the bag. She said, “I wonder what an entity as big as a planet thinks about? How old would you guess it is?” The bag vanished into the cabinet. “Not very often I run into something older than me.”

  “Did you tell the medic about that?” I nodded toward the cabinet.

  She levered herself up so she could sit on the counter. “I’m taking notes she can see afterwards. No need to bother her with it now. Besides, we have bigger problems. If First Chair is right, in a month we’ll have died of thirst. How are we going to convince a plant to give us back the water it took?”

  Sitting where she was, her heels against the cabinet doors, she looked like a young girl, but shadows under her eyes marked her face, and her skin appeared more drawn, as if she were thinning, becoming more fragile, and she was.

  “How do you feel?” I asked. I had tried to maintain within myself her concentration, her ability to ignore the obvious fact, but I couldn’t do it. I worried about the crew and the water they needed. But for me? I didn’t care. Death would find Lashawnda before it took me.

  She slid off the counter and tapped in a code into her work station. The recording of our landing came up again. Clouds of steam surged from the ground. She said, without meeting my eyes, “Look, Spencer. I can’t avoid it. It’s not going away. So all I can do is work and think and act like it’s not there at all. You’re behaving as if I should be paralyzed in fear or something, but I’m not going to do that. There’s still a quest or two for me in the last days, some effort of note.”

  I had no answer for that. We went to bed hours later, and when she held me, her arms trembled.

  A nightmare woke me. In the dream I wandered through the twisted forest, but I wasn’t scared. I was happy. I belonged. The crooked stems gave way before my ungloved hands. My chest was bare. No contamination suit or helmet or shirt. The air smelled sharp and frigid, like winter on a lake’s edge where the wind sweeps across the ice, but I wasn’t cold. I came upon a thick stand of trees, their narrow trunks forming a wall in front of me. I pushed and tugged at the unmoving branches. I’d never seen a clump of Papaver trees so large. Nothing seemed more important than penetrating that branched fortress. Finally I found a narrow gap where I could squeeze through. At first I wandered in the dark. Gradually shapes became visible: the towering stems forming a shadowy roof overhead, other branches reaching from side to side, and the room felt close.

  “Spencer?” said Lashawnda.

  “Yes?” I said, turning slowly in the vegetable room. Waxy-leafed plants humped from the ground, but I couldn’t see her.

  “I’m here, Spencer,” she said, and one of the humps sat up.

  I squinted. “It’s too dark.”

  A dim light sparked to life, a pink diamond, like the last glimpse of the sunset we’d seen the day before, growing until the room became bright, revealing a skeleton-thin Lashawnda.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said.

  I stepped closer, all the details clear in the ruddy light. Her eyes sparkled above sharp cheekbones. She smiled at me, the skin pulled tight across her face, her shoulders boney and narrow, barely human anymore. She wore no clothes, but she didn’t need them. The plants hid her legs, and leaves covered her stomach and breasts. Like the gopher-rat, she’d been absorbed.

  “The plant is old, old, old,” she said. “We think deep thoughts, all the way to Papaver’s core.”

  I put my arm around her, the bone’s hardness pressing against my hand.

  In the dream, I was happy. In the dream, the plants sucking every drop of water from her was right.

  “And, Spencer, this way I live forever.”

  I woke stifling a scream.

  She wasn’t in bed.

  In the decontamination unit, her suit was gone.

  I don’t remember how I got my suit on or how I got outside. Running, I passed the empty water tanks, avoided the lichen-filled depressions, and plunged into the forest. The sun had barely cleared the horizon, pouring pink light through the skinny trees. I tripped. Knocked my face hard against the inside of my helmet. Staggering, I pushed on. The dream image hovered before me. Had the pain become too much for Lashawnda, and the promise of an opiate loaded bed of leaves, eager to embrace her become too tempting? I imagined her nervous system, like a gopher-rat’s, joining the plant consciousness. But who knew what the gopher-rats experienced, if they experienced anything at all? Maybe their lives were filled with nightmares of cold and immobility.

  Trees slapped at my arms. Leaves slashed across my faceplate.

  When I burst through the last line of trees at the clearing’s edge, she was crouched, her back to me shoulders and head down in the plants. I pictured her faceplate open, her eyes gone already, home for stabbing tendr
ils seeking the moist tissue behind.

  “Don’t do it!” I yelled.

  Startled, she fell back, holding a sensor; her faceplate was closed. For a second she looked frightened. Then she laughed. I gasped for breath while my air supply whined in my ear.

  “What are you doing, Spencer?” A bag filled with the sensors we’d put on the plants sat on the ground beside her. She’d been retrieving them.

  “You weren’t… I mean, you’re not… hurting yourself… you’re okay?” I finally blurted.

  She held me until I quit shaking and my respiration settled into a parody of regularity.

  The sun had risen another handful of degrees. We stayed still so long that the plants turned away to face the light. She hugged me hard, then said, “I know how to find water.”

  I hugged her back.

  “Can you carry the bag?” she said as she pushed herself to her feet. “It’s getting darned heavy.”

  The crew stood around the one meter deep depression beside an empty water tank. Like every sheltered spot, lichens covered the rock. Lashawnda supervised the engineers as they arranged the structure she’d sketched out for them, which was two long bars crossing the hole, holding an electric torch suspended above the pit’s bottom.

  First Chair stood with his arms crossed. “What do you mean, we should have figured out how to get water from the first day?”

  Lashawnda sat in a chair someone had brought for her. “The plants here are cooperative. They’re not just out for themselves like we’re used to seeing. I watched the records of our landing. The ground steamed, but, as Spencer will tell you,” she nodded to me, “you couldn’t get an ounce of water out of a ton of the lichen no matter how hard you tried.”