She took a second to triangulate the location. The signal was stronger down here, meaning she was closer to it. That gave her two points of reference. By comparing the signal strengths of the two points she could calculate the source.
It wasn’t far—just down the slope, on the far side of the island from where they’d washed up. “Here.” She touched the map, and a red dot appeared, marking the location of the transponder. “Hawkins—it’s on the way to your destination.”
She was pleading. Jansen had never been good at begging, but if it meant saving the life of a KSpace astronaut—she would beg.
“It’s not the most direct route,” he grumbled. But eventually he shrugged. “Come on. We’ll check it out on the way.”
WINDSOR HAWKINS: I knew there was no point to Jansen’s quest. It was just a waste of time. But she was already having trouble walking, and I couldn’t let her slow us down. If it kept her motivated, I would let her have her little hero fantasy.
TELEMETRY ANOMALY
He wants to find the brain?” Jansen asked as they headed down the slope. “Maybe that’s good. Maybe… maybe if we’re going to communicate with 2I, that’s where we need to go.”
Rao watched the older woman carefully as they walked. It looked as if Jansen was in pain, but she kept pushing past it. Admirable, certainly, but Rao knew you couldn’t do that forever. Endorphins and resolve lasted only so long. If she could convince Hawkins to stop and let them take a rest—but she knew that wasn’t going to happen. He was as obsessed as Jansen was, in his own way.
“Once we find the KSpace people, you mean,” Rao said, picking up the thread of the conversation.
“You think those two goals are mutually exclusive?” Jansen asked. “We know Channarong, at least, is still alive. She’s been in here the whole time. She must have watched all of this grow.” She waved one hand feebly to indicate the island, the drum, everything around them. “At the very least, she can tell us how KSpace tried to communicate with 2I, and why it worked or didn’t work. We can eliminate some things.”
It was getting to be an old argument. Rao wondered when the justifications would fall away. They were all running on empty—none of them had eaten any solid food for more than a day, and the pace Hawkins had set for them was brutal. Neither of the others was healthy. Jansen had her bad knee, while he was ignoring what looked like a pretty significant concussion.
As for herself—
She was fine. Physically. Mentally, she was distracted. Disoriented. 2I’s darkness and its strangeness were getting to her. And she had a lot on her mind.
She had put her grief for Stevens in a little box. Tied a bow around it and stuck it in the back of a closet. She’d started thinking of it as a present, a reward. When we’re done here, she thought, I’ll take out those feelings and examine them. Turn them over in my hands like old photographs, and then I’ll finally see them, I’ll finally let myself think about what he and I could have had. What we should have had.
In some fucked-up way she was looking forward to it. Because experiencing that grief would be getting to be with him, in a way. In the only way she had left. And because it would mean the fear was over. The fear she was carrying on her back, her fear of 2I. What it was and what it meant.
It was headed toward Earth. Once she’d harbored a little dream, a dream that it was going to go into orbit around Earth and then a hatch would open on its side and some aliens would step out. They would look weird, not humanoid at all, but not terrifying, either. They wouldn’t speak English, not at first, but they would learn. And they would tell her what it was like, out there. Out between the stars.
2I was the answer to that fantasy.
Because it didn’t fit. It didn’t fit her preconceived notions of what an alien was, and that was the lesson it wanted to teach her. Out there, out in the deeps of space—things aren’t the way they are on Earth. It’s dark, and cold, and you do what you must to survive. That’s all—there’s no room for higher aspirations. No self-actualization out in the nebulae. No sharing of ideas, no warm friendship. Nothing to say.
She’d spent her entire career looking for this, for contact, and now she had it and it was a dark reflection of her dreams, it was the harsh laughter of the void.
“Rao!”
And yet she couldn’t bring herself to hate 2I. It was an animal, driven by natural urges. It was alive, as she was, if on a different scale. You didn’t hate a rabid dog, you didn’t hate the lions even if you feared them. You respected them, kept your distance.
Of course, distance was no longer an option…
“Rao!”
She looked up. Looked around. Her stomach gave a sickening lurch as she realized she couldn’t see the others. Just her own lights spearing off into the dark, the undifferentiated surface of the island…
“Rao,” Jansen said, limping out of the shadows. Hawkins came running up behind her. “Rao, you were walking the wrong way.”
“I… was?”
“You were right behind me, then suddenly you turned and walked off. I wasn’t sure where you were going.”
“I guess I was just following my lights,” Rao said. Shame made her cheeks hot, made her turn her face away from Jansen.
Hawkins grunted in impatience. “We need to keep moving,” he insisted.
Rao nodded and they got walking again, this time with Jansen slightly behind her. Watching her, no doubt.
“I’m so sorry,” Rao said.
Jansen lifted her hands in resignation. “It’s OK. We just need to focus, right? We need to stay on track.”
“Right,” Rao said. “Right.”
“I asked you a question, though—did you hear me?”
Rao hadn’t, and that scared her. She’d been so sunk in her own thoughts she had missed it altogether. “What—what was it?” she asked.
“I wondered if you’d given any thought to how we’re going to talk to the brain, assuming we even find it up there.”
“Communication,” Rao said, “is about more than just talking. Animals communicate in all kinds of ways—threat displays, coloration, pheromones. Trees talk to each other, did you know that? Trees talk by pumping chemicals into the soil. Other trees absorb those chemicals through their roots, and they get the message, which is typically, I’m growing here, don’t bother me.”
Jansen laughed. It was a welcome sound in the dark. It cut through some of the tension, the embarrassment she’d felt about wandering off.
“Communication, huh.” Rao smiled and imagined the centuries-long battles that colonies of sea anemones fought on the bottom of the ocean. She considered the chemical trails ants lay down, and the dances of honeybees. Then she frowned, because she realized she was thinking of organisms that lived on roughly the same scale as human beings. 2I was something completely different.
“It’s so big. It’s so big—that’s why it never responded to our signals, our best efforts to get its attention. Compared to 2I, we’re not peers. We’re like microbes. The difference in size is like the difference between you and the bacteria that live in your gut. Can you imagine having a conversation with bacteria?”
“There has to be a way, though. How are we going to talk to 2I?” Jansen asked.
“The same way bacteria always talk to their hosts,” Rao said. She tilted her head in the direction of Hawkins, walking ten paces ahead of them. “First—they try to kill each other.”
A hand touched Hawkins’s arm and he jerked sideways, away from the touch. His lips pulled back from his teeth as he glared at Rao, who had come up behind him with no warning. He forced himself to calm down.
“I just wanted to see how you’re doing,” the young woman said. “We’re all getting a little fuzzy. You know? You had a pretty bad thump on the head, and I want to make sure—”
“You don’t need to talk to me like I’m a child. I’ve got a nasty headache, but that’s it,” he told her. He had no time for this. “No blurred vision. No nausea.”
“Th
ere’s no food in your system. Nausea might not feel like you need to throw up, it could feel more like cramps. And there are other symptoms, too, less physical symptoms like mood swings or personality changes or—”
“I said I’m fine,” he told her.
She took a step back. As if she was afraid of him. Him. He was the only thing standing between Earth and 2I, and he scared her? It was ridiculous. “It looks like Jansen needs more help than I do. If she gets to a point she can’t walk—”
He stopped because he’d heard something. A rustling sound. Not too close, but it was big, a big sound. “What was that?” he demanded.
She stared at him.
“You didn’t hear it?” he asked. She shook her head and he turned away from her, swinging his lights over the ground ahead. Nothing. Maybe she hadn’t heard it because she still had her helmet on. Or maybe—
His light caught something, and his whole body went rigid. He reached for the pocket of his suit, the pocket he always kept zipped tightly shut. But whatever he’d seen, it didn’t move.
He moved toward it, very carefully. It looked like a tree, he thought, and then he adjusted his light to move upward. He saw a central trunk, no thicker than his thigh, and then a branching canopy of what looked like human arms splitting off from that trunk. A hand-tree, like the ones they’d seen from the ice floe raft, though much smaller. It was maybe ten meters high, at most.
Behind it there was another one. And then more. He played his light back and forth and saw hundreds of them, maybe thousands, blocking their path. A whole forest.
He studied the branches carefully. On careful inspection they didn’t look as much like human arms as he’d thought before. The branches had too many joints, which bent in every possible direction. The hands, though—
He thought of ARCS, with its three hands that were sculpted to look as human as possible. A perversion of the human form. The things on the ends of the branches of the hand-trees were much larger than human hands, but the resemblance couldn’t be denied.
Each hand had four fingers, long and tapering and jointed exactly the way human hands had knuckles. There were no nails at the ends of the fingertips, but the proportions of those digits were uncanny. It was impossible to think of anything but human fingers.
“Convergent evolution,” Rao whispered. “It doesn’t mean anything. Those… those trees evolved to serve a certain purpose. Our hands evolved for a purpose, too, but not necessarily the same one. It’s just a coincidence they look the same.”
Hawkins stared at her. He didn’t remember asking. He didn’t remember saying anything, not out loud. Had he—was he—
There were things he had to make sure he didn’t say out loud. Things he couldn’t let the others hear. He needed to be more careful.
As he watched, one of the hands moved. Rao literally jumped backward. The hand twitched and shook, and then it curled up into a narrow fist, the fingers turning pale as they tightened. Over the course of maybe five seconds, the fist tightened, and tightened, until he thought the fingers might snap. Then they released and stretched out again, splaying outward away from each other.
“What the hell are these things?” he demanded.
Rao didn’t answer until he turned and looked at her directly.
“No clue,” she said.
“Are they dangerous? Do we need to find a way around, or can we walk beneath them?” he asked.
She opened her mouth as if to answer, but then she just shrugged.
Jansen finally caught up with them, limping up to where they stood. She pointed her single light deep into the forest. “The distress signal is coming from in there,” she said. Then she started moving again, walking right between two of the trees.
Hawkins watched, fully expecting the branches to dip, those big hands to snatch her up and haul her into the sky. He considered how he would react to that.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to find out. The hand-trees didn’t react to Jansen’s presence at all.
Jansen’s light hit a tree trunk and made it glow. The trunks were made of some slightly translucent material, as white as mushroom flesh. It was fibrous, and in some places it stuck out like rough, uncombed hair. She turned to dodge around the trunk and three more appeared in her light. The farther in she got, the closer together the hand-trees were. She was worried that she would eventually come to a place where she would have to turn sideways to squeeze between them. Maybe she would have to push her way through—maybe she would have to touch them.
It never occurred to her to turn back.
Her leg didn’t hurt anymore. She was only peripherally aware of its existence. She could ask Rao what that meant, except then she might find out, and it could be bad news. Better, maybe, to remain in ignorance. At least until they got back to Orion.
She hurried on as fast as she could, though the ground was uneven and kept trying to trip her up. Tendrils ran thick across the forest floor, all of them rooted fast to the ground. She kept getting the tips of her boots caught in their coils. She tried lifting her feet higher, but her bad leg kept failing to obey her. She wasn’t so much walking as stumbling. If she slowed down, maybe. But—no. Not when she was so close.
She heard a rustling sound above her, and she held her breath. Slowly she lifted her light, pointing it up into the canopy above her. Up there the hands curled and uncurled. Slowly. Never very many of them at a time. She watched one of them reach over and grab a branch of another tree. The long fingers grasped the wrist—there really was no other word for it—of the branch, then closed up, curling around the pale joint. The hand held for a moment, then released, swinging back to its original position.
A few seconds later the branch that had been grasped repeated the gesture. Reaching out in turn to a third tree and grabbing some protruding fingers there. Slowly, quietly, compressing them. Then letting go.
Were they… passing along a signal, maybe? Exchanging chemicals? Rao had said even she didn’t know. It wasn’t a mystery Jansen was going to solve.
She had one of her own to work out.
Listening to the distress beacon had driven her crazy as she hurried down the slope and into the forest. She’d eventually switched it off, then had her devices display it as a visual cue. Once every sixty seconds, when her suit detected the beacon’s pulse, it would show her the sound as a series of ghostly visual waves that swept across the polycarbonate of her faceplate. The waves coalesced on a spot ahead of her, slightly to her left. She turned and followed them, passing easily between two rows of trees, almost as if she were entering a tunnel that would lead her to the source of the beacon.
She switched on her radio and called out, saying she was coming. Whatever was sending the beacon didn’t reply.
Above her the hands reached for each other. Grasped each other, and then released. If she kept her head down, she couldn’t see them moving. It was easier that way.
The waves on her faceplate were brighter now, closer together. That meant she was almost on top of the beacon. She shouted through her faceplate, calling out to anyone who could hear her. If they would give her some sign—
Something loose slipped out from under her foot, and she stumbled forward, out of control. “Shit,” she cursed, as her boot got wedged in a nest of tendrils. She started to totter forward and threw her arms out to compensate. At first she thought she was going to be fine, that she could stop herself, but then her backpack slid forward onto her shoulder, throwing off her center of gravity. Feeling as if she were underwater, or maybe in slow motion, she realized she was going to fall flat on her face. Unconsciously her arms went out to grab anything that might stop her from collapsing.
The only thing that met that criterion was the trunk of the hand-tree right in front of her. Her arms wrapped around it as she dropped to her knees.
She felt the fleshy trunk writhing under her grasp, felt it crawl away from her. She looked up and watched in horror as every branch of the tree started moving at once, all of them reachin
g out in different directions. The hands grasped the wrists of other trees, grasped and squeezed and then released, twisted around to grab other branches. The pattern rippled outward, away from her, spreading from tree to tree.
She held her breath. Uncertain of what she’d just done.
For a long time she just sat there, watching the branches writhe, the hands grasp and then release. Grasp and then release. It looked as if a strong gust of wind had passed through the canopy, perhaps. Or like the church meetings she remembered from her youth, when all the congregants turned to shake the hands of their neighbors.
Eventually she let herself breathe again.
She was sitting on a nexus where a bunch of tendrils came together, rising up from the forest floor in a humped mass like a natural seat. Her bad leg was stretched out before her as far as it would go. Her other was curled up beneath her. She looked around, her single suit light slowly drifting across the forest floor. She wasn’t even thinking, wasn’t processing what she saw. She was just letting her heart rate come down, letting herself breathe easier. She’d had a little scare, but nothing had happened. Nothing was wrong, she was just taking a moment.
That was when her light fell on something yellowish and small, roughly cylindrical. It lay amid the tendrils as if it had fallen out of someone’s pocket. It took her a second to realize that when she’d tripped it was because she had stepped on this—this small parchment-colored object. She’d seen nothing else like it in the forest. There were no leaves on the ground, no undergrowth—this was the cleanest forest floor she’d ever seen, and yet there it was, this short, round thing, slightly narrower in its middle, slightly knobby at either end.
A thing that looked, now that she gave it some actual thought and consideration, exactly like a human finger bone.
“Don’t touch anything,” Hawkins said, putting one arm out in front of Rao. She took a step back.
The Last Astronaut Page 27