Improbable Botany

by Wayward

  They glowed in ultraviolet. They moved slowly around in the sample.

  At the very highest resolution they appeared as balls with spikes, like medieval maces or more accurately, sea urchins. They trundled around their little world by extending and retracting their molecule-thin spines, latching onto the rock fragments and turning them into pieces too small to even see.

  If they were in the filters, they were on the ship. If they were on the ship, they could be eating it away, mining it for exotic alloys they were never going to find in nature. The first hull breach would let them drift inside with the wind.

  They would be on her skin. In her lungs. In her blood.

  That the stores still had months of food suddenly became immaterial. What happened when the tiny machines encountered living tissue wasn’t.

  She should tell the rest of the crew, though it was likely that they would blame her further. They would see her slavish, unthinking adherence to the rules as not just condemning them to slow starvation, but damning them to an unimaginable hell. If they’d have taken off after they’d seen the visitor’s craft, and before the towers seeded the atmosphere with their cargo, they’d have been safe. If they took off now, there was nowhere to go except the cold vacuum of space in a ship that might simply disintegrate around them.

  Not, she suspected, that she’d be going anywhere.

  There’d been no contact with Earth, no ship sparking brightly as an artificial wormhole disgorged it into the night sky. No chatter over the radio, no sweep of radar as it scanned the surface.

  Perhaps there was a relativistic kill vehicle on its way after all, so that when even her bones had been ground to dust, the planet would be resurfaced by fire.

  It would be nice if they told her that was what they’d decided. And, given that possibility, she really should tell the rest of the crew what was happening, and what was likely to happen. None of them had asked for this, and behaving decently was all she had left to offer them.

  ~

  At least they gave her supplies. Meagre, but enough for a week. She brought the hovercraft up to the landing craft and loaded it on, together with a little equipment and her personal effects. While she was going to and fro, she had the opportunity to examine the hull. The paint had gone, replaced by a layer of rich ochre rust. When her gloved fingers wiped it away, it revealed brilliant metal, smooth as a mirror. The plastic of the hovercraft seemed unaffected for the moment, though the engine sounded tired when she’d fired it up.

  She closed up the airlock door for the last time, then drove back down to the beach.

  The ground shook as the landing craft rose into the sky, streaming smoke and red dust. She watched it dwindle, wondering if it was too badly damaged to make orbit.

  It vanished beyond sight in the blue-white sky, and she was alone.

  She decided that, since she was never going to go home, she’d make the best of it here. She broke the seal on her helmet and gave it a quarter turn. The suit huffed and hissed in protest, and she shut the life support down. The air smelled flat. She lifted the helmet off and laid it beside her, and let the ragged wind blow in her face.

  She took a breath, a deep one, right down into the depths of her lungs.

  It didn’t feel quite enough, so she took another one, and held it so she didn’t start hyperventilating. The air pressure was fine – it wasn’t like being at altitude – just the oxygen content.

  The sunlight was already battering at her skin. She pulled out a towel and fashioned a makeshift headscarf before extracting herself from the rest of the suit. She laid it out over the side of the hovercraft, and slipped her feet into her running shoes. She jumped down onto the beach, and ran through the surf, kicking up black jets of sand behind her.

  When she turned around to look back the hovercraft was a small splash of orange. There was no reason why she shouldn’t just keep going until she’d reached the far end of the bay, climbed up the headland and down the other side. Keep going until her skin melted off and her blood poured out.

  Except she was gasping as it was. She felt hot with exertion and her sweat was cooling against her back. She crouched down and pressed her hands into the grit, holding up her palms to the light, watching them glitter.

  She hadn’t seen the interior of the continent at all. She’d barely scratched the surface of an entirely new planet. She’d studied the maps, helped name the gross topographical features, even looked down on it from above once the haze had been consumed.

  She’d head inland, for as far and as long as she could. She glanced up and saw only white clouds and blue sky. She had become, albeit briefly, native.

  ~

  The racket from the hovercraft’s lifting fan was just about bearable if she put the helmet back on. She ran the vehicle for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon, tracking a river upstream towards the distant line of mountains they’d called Hedorah. The landscape was rock; black basalts, cream limestones, red sands. The river was a mirrored ribbon, cut by rapids she found difficult to navigate.

  The hovercraft was too heavy for her to portage, and sometimes she had to backtrack to find a place where the river bank sloped, then drive onto the land. The cloud of dust she managed to create each time drove her back to the river just as soon as she could.

  It was only when she’d parked up for the day and walked the short distance to the shadow thrown by a cliff of green marl that she realised what it all meant. She looked behind her and stared at her footprints, as crisp as Armstrong had left on the Moon.

  Because she had spent so much of her adult life looking up, she’d failed to look down and recognise soil when she saw it. Soil that lacked all the bugs and rotted detritus of regular soil was just dust, as dead as lunar regolith, but that was what the machines were making: eating the rock, grinding it down and turning it into a mineral-rich layer, ready for planting.

  She sat down by the base of the cliff, in the dirt, and ran it through her fingers, watching it drift slowly down, as fine as flour.

  She was tired, and she lay down to sleep.

  ~

  When she woke up, it was raining.

  It was almost light, a dirty grey gloom in which she could make out shapes but not detail, but she was certain that she’d staggered through the sucking mud to the right place on the bank. All she could see was the water tearing past, churning like ropes. More than that, the dust had turned to paste, and the river into a swollen brown artery that had swept away everything she possessed and relied on to keep her alive. The food had gone, the hovercraft had gone, and the gun had gone.

  That she would die here wasn’t a surprise, but that the planet itself would kill her was. One moment, she’d been, if not happy, content with the hand she’d been dealt by circumstance and choice. She had planned out her remaining meals, how far she would go; and rather than starve to death, how she would steel herself to put a bullet in her head. Now she had what she stood up in, like the victim of a natural disaster, or a house fire, or one of the refugees she’d seen wash across the lines on a map, looking for a home. Except there was no sanctuary, no neighbours to take her in. In almost every other situation it would be a matter of simply walking, whether it was for a day, a week, a month. There was always help, eventually. Here, she could walk around the whole damn continent like some demented Robinson Crusoe, and the footprints would always, inevitably, be hers.

  The rain soaked her through, to the skin and beneath. It ran down her saturated hair and down her face, dripping from her nose and chin. Her feet were heavy with clay, and everything stuck to her. She was cold.

  She stumbled back to the cliff, but even there the water had turned the exposed rock to sludge, and lumps of it were falling from high up to splat on the ground. There was no shelter, and nothing she could make shelter from. When the rain eventually stopped and the clouds broke she would have no protection from the sun. It would burn her raw.

  Neither the planet nor the machines wanted her
dead: how could they, when they weren’t even aware of her? She was simply in the way, and blame was superfluous. Nevertheless, it would be a savage, uncertain death now. She could curl up into a ball and shiver until she stopped moving, or she could put one sticky foot in front of another, and see where that took her. Somewhere high, perhaps. She could look down on this new world one last time.

  She turned away from the river, and started uphill.

  ~

  The first flash of sunlight struck her back and made it steam. Her head felt instantly warm. This was the start of it, then: her long, slow decline. She gave herself perhaps half an hour before she was burnt, another half before the first blisters rose.

  Climbing from the valley had led her out onto a rising series of ridges that crossed the landscape like ribs. She clambered up the scarp slope of one, down the lee, to be confronted with another. She managed to kick the mud from her boots before it set like concrete, that which clung to her hems peeled off in brittle sheets as she walked.

  The rain had washed the dust into smoking pools, wisps of mist spiralling with the updrafts into the bright blue sky. The sun was overhead, and beat down regardless of her wants and wishes. She would have welcomed even a sliver of shadow, but everything was as sharp and hot as the Namibian coast where they’d trained.

  There’d been life there. And inexplicably, there was life here.

  She circled it once, not believing the evidence of her eyes, wondering if the strangeness had finally got to her, if she was simply seeing things. When her body shaded it, it shifted, searching for the light.

  It was an engineers’ idea of a plant. Its stem was die-straight, like a telescopic pole, the flat, pinnate leaves arranged at mathematically-exact angles around it. It came up to her knee, only a little thing, and she crouched down in the mud to marvel.

  As it came back into full sunlight the leaves rotated to bask properly.

  It was black and shiny. Almost metallic. Underneath, where she dug a little of dirt away, were radial roots like the anchor cables of a radio telescope. She found a bulb directly below the stem, fat and slightly yielding. The leaves were flexible, springy plates that vibrated when she bent the tips and released them.

  She was lucid enough to realise that it was preposterous that she’d stumbled across the only plant growing on the whole planet. She got up, shielded her gaze from the sun and looked around. There was nothing but mist and mud and rock and sky.

  She had her back to the next ridge. She turned and started to climb.

  By the time she’d made it to the top she was aching and breathless, and it took a moment for her to raise her head to the vast dark and silent forest that waited to confront and confound her.

  The ground sloped away and the floor was carpeted with the short, thin-leaved plants, but beyond that, there were trees. Fat-trunked and splay-footed, they soared upwards to a crown of fractal branches and overlapping broad leaves. Thick cables of flexible black rope hung from the canopy to the ground, swaying gently in the breeze.

  The hiss of wind was the only sound. That, and her own pulse in her ears.

  She blundered forward, the plants around her shying away from her shadow and closing back in behind her, staring up at this cathedral of trees that had sprung from the lifeless soil with abrupt, riotous vigour.

  She reached out and rested her hand on the nearest trunk. It was smooth and hard, a mosaic of interlocking plates like armour, with none of the imperfections or scars that afflicted biological trees. It was cold to the touch, a relief to her skin. If she stepped a little further, she would be in its shade.

  It looked forbidding and alien. There should be bird calls echoing between the trees and insects drifting like smoke in the cool dark. It should smell rich and earthy, of fungus and sap. Instead, it was as sterile as a laboratory.

  Nevertheless, it was the only respite from the sun she would get, so she walked into the forest, ducking around the trailing cables and stepping over the anchoring roots that angled out into her path.

  She understood that a tree’s purpose was to make another tree: it wasn’t to provide shelter, or usable wood, or edible fruit. It was oblivious to the creatures that lived symbiotically beneath its branches. But these were clearly created, programmed for a function that was beyond mere self-replication. Even if it was the legacy of a long-dead civilisation, automatic ships spreading out among the stars, finding likely worlds and seeding them with machine life, it had to have meant something to someone once, thousands or tens of thousands of years ago. There had to be a why.

  Behind her was the bright, mud-covered rock. Ahead of her the profound shade of the artificial trees. There wasn’t really much of a choice. She might find her answer before she faded.

  ~

  She had no idea how long she’d spent under the canopy. Strobing shafts of light fell like spears as the wind above parted the black leaves, the forest floor glittering with momentary, dazzling confusion.

  As well as losing her sense of time, she lost her bearings. At first, she tried to keep the brightness behind her, but as she went deeper, it became impossible to even guess. She wandered, aware only of her growing thirst and a vague inchoate buzz around her.

  It was as dark as a curtained room. She stumbled and tripped when she looked ahead, and she knocked her shoulders and head when she stared at her feet. Then, with one step, she fell into a slow-moving stream, barely ankle-deep and silty-bedded. The shock of the sudden cold made her gasp, before she dropped to her knees in the water and pressed her face to its clear surface.

  She drank until she was heavy and her nose grew numb.

  She sat back on the slight bank and dragged her wet fingers through her hair. She remembered that when she’d started into the forest it was contained in a fold in the land. Downstream should be further in. Both directions seemed just as dark, but she trusted her instincts, and rather than carry on walking into half-hidden obstacles, she would travel along the stream itself. She waded a few steps before realising the impracticality of it, then stepped high, each boot clearing the water before splashing down again. It was awkward at first, and her tired legs protested. Eventually, she fell into a rhythm, safe in the knowledge that she wasn’t going around in circles.

  The air under the trees grew strangely sharp, scented of swimming pools and bleach. She tasted the river under her feet, and found it was as sweet as when she’d first drank her fill. It was the air itself. Ozone. She had to be getting close.

  There was light between the trunks, and the stream became a tunnel. After the constant gloom of the forest, it was sharp and painful. Her eyes streamed, and she blinked away her tears. The light grew brighter as she splashed on. The bleach smell grew stronger, too.

  She renewed her efforts. She was almost back out in the open. Her feet ploughed through the water, waves forming around her shins. She couldn’t see any more, just a shine in front of her, everything blurred, nothing distinct.

  She was there, wherever there was. She felt the sky overhead, the burning heat of the sun against her, and the zephyr of a breeze clearing the air of toxins. She crouched down and scrubbed at her face, eyes open, crying.

  She was in a clearing, wide and circular, surrounded by a palisade of tall black trees turning their leaves to the white-hot coal above. Cables lay loosely across the ground, emerging from the forest edge as fat pythons, snaking and intertwining towards the structure in the centre.

  A tree. A vast tree, huge in girth, great in height. Its top hummed in the wind, and beneath, its fruit was cradled within branches as thick as the columns of a Greek temple.

  Fruit that undeniably, uncontroversially, resembled spaceships.

  There was nothing left for her to do but pick her way across the root-strewn clearing, and hope for autumn.

  LISA TUTTLE

  Vegetable Love

  One moment you’ve never seen it, never heard anything about it, have no idea what it might be. Then you hear the name, someone leads you into the presence
, and from that moment the world is changed.

  ~

  Hannah went to the local community meeting on an impulse. She was restless, tired of staying in, unable to think of anything better to do, something that wouldn’t be another expense, when she saw the notice on a lamppost near her house.

  Memories of a chilly church hall and heated discussions about dog-fouling and the need to save the local play-park came rushing back, recollections of an earlier time, when the children were small, and it had been so important to make common cause with other mums and dads. She’d been drifting, lately, or coasting, both at work and at home. They had their routines. The children – now hardly ‘children’ – made fewer demands. She would not say she was unhappy, but she was just a little bit bored.

  She wanted Neil to come with her, but he gave her a look that said she was mad. Clearly he did not share her vague dissatisfaction, or he could not imagine sitting through a discussion about the new one-way system would do anything but make it worse.

  She didn’t argue. Of course he didn’t share her feelings, how could he? His experiences of life as a parent, of their early years here, had been so very different from hers. She didn’t expect the meeting to be exciting, but it might offer some practical way of reconnecting with her neighbours. It was through those gatherings in the church hall a decade ago that she’d made two of her best friends, women she still felt close to, although since they had moved away she did not see them very often.

  So she went on her own to the church hall, walking through the familiar south London streets, the evening air as balmy as if summer would never end. As she passed by the houses she looked over hedges or through fences and admired the gardens of strangers, feeling the imaginative pull of other lives. She wished Neil was beside her, to take her hand or put his arm around her as they strolled, to see the same things she saw. They might at least have talked about something different, for a change.

  The moment she stepped through the door she caught a whiff of the old building’s familiar, distinctive smell, like a combination of mushrooms and feathers, and it was as if time had turned back, she was a young mother again, frazzled and spent after a day of balancing work and childcare, invigorated yet nervous about the unknown experience ahead, and she entered with a tentative smile, hoping for a welcome.