by Mark Teppo
Her brain is starting to insist on some answers. Things are becoming too real. I understand her confusion—I have my own. She can't make the pieces work without accepting some things as being truth that are difficult to swallow.
“I was here,” I admit. My memories are still fragmented, like the leftover pottery shards that get folded into raw soil. The growing loam.
“Are you familiar with Sirolimus?” I ask, changing the subject. “It's an immunosuppressant, used primarily to treat patients who've received organ transplants. It is sourced from a bacterium only found here in the island.”
I close my eyes and try to remember the way Rano Kau used to be. “We cultivated a number of fragile species in the garden down there. Species of tree and bush that had gone extinct elsewhere in the world. It was its own ecosystem, and we had saved it. The soil here—the humus—is incredibly rich, almost the perfect proportions. In fact, we tried to grow a sapling from”—I pause, catching myself—“from an old, old tree that we had been tending for centuries. Our cutting lasted longer than a lot of people thought it would, but it didn't survive.”
It was too far from Mother. Or too close, perhaps.
“Why is the soil important?” she asks. “Is it for you? Do you need to… you know, sleep in the ground?”
“We can. We do. But most of the ground has been tainted by all the chemicals leaching in from landfills or what seeps into the ground after being dumped in streams. We need clean dirt, and that's what this ground is. This garden and our steward were always here, even after the island was discovered by European explorers.”
The image of a headdress of white feathers floats through my head. As does the sensation of jumping off a cliff. And black streaks on skin, like ash mixed with tears. I'm starting to build context. Remembering why I should know this place.
“I need to rest,” I say, pushing the images aside. They're still a distracting mess. “My immune system is compromised. I need to flush my system clean. Any of the others would have the same need. They'd come here for the same reasons.”
“And here we are,” she says, “and there are trees, so what is the problem?”
“Why are there only trees here?” I ask. “If there is a steward here still, why did they let the rest of the island die?”
“We should go ask,” she points out. “I wish I could see something,” she sighs.
“This is why I didn't want you to come with me,” I remind her. “I should take you back to the hotel.”
“Yeah, well, that's not going to happen,” she replies. “I should have brought a flashlight.”
I offer her my optics. “Try these.”
They're too big for her face, but she stuffs the ends of them into her hair and they look like they'll stay in place well enough. I show her how to work them, and as I do, her hand naturally rests on my hip. “Wow,” she grins as she looks around. “These are cool. I knew being obstinate would totally work in my favor.”
She fiddles with the settings, and I take advantage of her hand moving away to step out of her line of sight.
“Oh,” she says, grabbing my arm without missing. “I see something. There's a blob out there. Sort of red and yellow.”
“It's a heat bloom,” I say, realizing she's got the thermal filter on. “Ambient heat. Usually from a building.”
“Maybe it's Orongo,” she suggests, “though…” She cocks her head to one side as if the change in perspective will help her decipher what she is seeing.
“It can't be,” I tell her. “Orongo is on the western rim of the crater.” She's looking off to our left, and since we're facing nearly south, she's looking in the wrong direction. My night vision is good, but whatever heat signature she has spotted is too subtle for me to pick out.
“It's almost like a cross.”
“There shouldn't be anything like that out there. The natives weren't Christian. Nor would they build something like that if they were.”
“Well, there's something out there now.” She offers me the optics. “Here. Look for yourself.”
I do, and I can tune the settings more delicately than she can. The shape wavers, solidifies.
“It's a building,” I announce. “Four wings off a central hub.”
“Well, I guess I know where we're going, then.”
I hand back the optics. “I guess so.”
Why would Arcadia build something like that?
* * *
We work our way down the sloping rim of the crater and enter the rows of trees, and I'm struck almost immediately by the methodical organization of the trees.
There are toromiro, of course, a leafy tree almost fernlike in its appearance; it used to cover the hills of Rapa Nui. Ranks of miro stand in stately lines, while clumps of carambola—star fruit trees—huddle together like displaced children. I think I smell the tang of citrus trees, though I haven't seen any yet. There are several different species of palm trees, as well as two varieties of the plant whose fruit is known as the miracle berry. Both of these last two species are native to Africa, and their presence crystallizes a suspicion that has been building in the back of my brain.
“It's amazing,” Mere says. The moon has risen, and she's taken off the optics as there's enough light to follow the track between the rows of trees. “It's a tree farm.”
“Yes,” I say, “but it's not right.”
“What's wrong with this? There are species here that live nowhere else, right? I thought you'd be more excited about it.”
“I am. Don't get me wrong. I thought the toromiro were extinct.” I wave a hand up and down the row we're walking along. “But this isn't, well, organic. Notice how the toromiro are all exactly the same distance from one another.” I point at the next row. “See those over there? Those are tualang. They're not much taller than the toromiro now, but give them time and they can grow to heights of more than seventy-five meters. Bees like them. The sorts of bees that build nests a meter across. They're not terribly aggressive, which makes it easy to harvest their honey and beeswax.”
“So there are bees here too?”
“Perhaps. The use of honey as an antiseptic goes back thousands of years.”
“You said this was a spa. That's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to find here. The bacteria you were talking about earlier. The honey from bees. It all sounds like the sort of things you'd find at a private Beverly Hills spa for the stupidly rich.”
“It's the organization,” I say. “The building, too.” It's obvious to me, and I know why she doesn't see it as I do. She's never been underground; she's never experienced the fulsome chaos of the systemic nervous system of plant life. The way roots of different species—weeds, flowers, shrubs, trees—all share the same space, the same water and nutrients. It only looks chaotic from the outside. If you are in it—if you can sense every other root and tendril around you—then it becomes part of you. Order out of chaos.
“This is too much like an orchard or a vineyard—the sort of layout that makes it easy to harvest fruit. This is order for order's sake,” I explain. “This is the way corporations think.”
That stops her. “Big Ag?”
I shake my head. “Does the thought of a multinational agricultural conglomerate investing in a tree farm in the middle of the Pacific Ocean make sense to you?”
“Only if there is a functional profit model. But why couldn't this be an Arcadian project?”
“We don't do things this way,” I point out. “We know better.”
“Silas,” she says, tapping her lower lip as she walks along the row. “I don't like this. It doesn't track well.”
I'm having similar thoughts. “I know.” Secutores is the security arm of some corporate entity, one that has the wherewithal to make the chemical weed killer. There's no reason they couldn't also have an arm that does pharmaceutical or biotech research. I start to replay my conversation with Callis, wondering if there was something I missed.
“Silas,” she says again.
�
�What?”
“There's a road.”
I hurry over to where she is standing. I had thought the gap between the rows of trees was a grid border—how the planners were separating the distinct plots of specific tree species. But it is definitely a road of packed dirt, wide enough that two cars could squeeze past each other. I kneel and scrape up a handful of the dirt, sniffing it carefully. I don't smell anything terribly pungent and I taste the dirt cautiously.
“Okay,” Mere says. “What are you doing?”
It's faint, but there's a bitterness to the soil that shouldn't be there. “They cleared this path,” I say after spitting the dirt out.
“Cleared it? How?”
“I don't know, but it's not as toxic as I thought it might be.”
“And yet I have just watched you eat dirt because you wanted to check toxicity?”
“TCDD,” I say. “It's a persistent contaminant found in dioxins, which are the basis for a lot of herbicides.”
“So you were tasting for poison. In the dirt.”
“Yes. There was growth here that needed to be cleared away. Look, the Amazon rain forest takes up how much of Brazil?”
“Most of it?”
“And yet it started as a tree farm.”
“It did?”
“Yes, but the natives didn't farm all of it. They only farmed the areas that were convenient for them. The rest they let grow wild. Over several thousand years. It didn't happen overnight. There is a mix of order and chaos in the arrangement of the trees.” I gesture at the rows of trees around us. “This is order.” I point at the road. “This is order, too, but it came after the trees. Do you see?”
“I get it,” she says, nodding and looking at the trees again. “Not all of these trees are farmed. Some of them were here originally. Someone came later and, well, farmed it, I guess.”
“And at that time, they needed a road.”
“And someplace to hang out, like the cross-shaped building I saw.” She nods and claps her hands together. “Well, mystery solved then. Is there more dirt eating to do or can we go find this place?”
“After you,” I say, gesturing along the road.
We keep it on our left, walking between the rows of trees, and it doesn't take us long to reach the building site. It's not far from the wall of the crater, about a half kilometer from the gap which looks out over the ocean. There's nothing graceful about the building. It's made from pre-fab Chinese materials, and it looks like it was spit out of a first year architecture student's design program. Everything is framed by right angles. Calling it utilitarian would be to upsell the intent of the builders.
There are no external lights, though I can hear the distant rumble of a generator running. Motion-sensitive lamps run along the roofline, and we stay beneath the trees so as to not inadvertently announce ourselves. A field of antennae and a pair of satellite dishes huddle together on the roof of the northern wing. The only doors are an unmarked set in the front. There are no windows and no second floor, though over the central hub, there is a square concrete block—the sort of shape that would house the machinery for an elevator.
“What is it?” Mere asks when I lean against a nearby tree and massage my temples.
The memories are coming back again. The open sky. White feathers. Old stone carvings. A cistern of cold water. None of it is connected to anything, though. It's all out of reach. I've had this happen before, when I've gone someplace familiar. It kicks things loose. I know Mother helps us carry the burden of our years when we go into her embrace, and it rarely is a problem. Not like this.
“It's nothing,” I say. I stare at Mere's moonlit face, her features knotted with concern, and I realize I can't remember what happened after I took Kirkov's knife.
Nothing is both a lie and the truth. There are chemicals in my blood. TCDDs, even. While I may have staved off the worst of the poisonous effects, there are some lingering malignances that are causing decay.
Remember your priorities. The voice in my head isn't mine, and it isn't Talus's either. Who said that to me first, or was it something beaten into the meat of my brain by years of soldering? Know your mission. Make it to the next checkpoint. Don't think about the big picture, son. You're not trained to think. You're trained to kill. Kill one of the enemy. Find another one. Repeat. Keep it simple. So many variations over the centuries. Don't think. Mind the plan.
Memory is insidious. It can become a burden too heavy to carry. That is why we let Mother leach it away when we rest in her embrace. There. There. Let me take care of everything. Let Mother take away the pain.
Remember your priorities. Survive. Kill everyone else.
No, that's not true.
I remember the boat and the storm. Aeneas holding on to the tiller. His eyes forward, not looking back. “Remember our families,” he shouts at me.
Remember those we left behind.
I slump against the trunk. It's a Surian cedar. Australian Red Gold. Our boat was made from cedar planks, though the cedars of the ancient Mediterranean were much different from their Australian counterparts—not even the same family. But the wood, the wood was the same: strong, resilient. So much of history was built from trees like this. So much history was… burned.
I jerk upright, startling Mere who was reaching out to shake me.
“Smoke,” I say. “I smell smoke.”
It's faint, the sort of distant aroma of a wood fire a thousand yards away, and it's not from wood. There are chemicals in the smoke too. Plastics. Synthetic fibers. Paper. “You saw a heat bloom,” I remind Mere.
She fumbles for my optics, puts them on, and stares at the building. “It's the whole building,” she says, “but it's more yellow than red now.”
“Because it is cooling off.”
I walk out into the open area that has been cleared around the building. Mere squeaks behind me, but when nothing happens—when the motion-sensitive lights don't flash on—she follows. I walk up to the front doors of the lab and touch the panels gingerly. They're warmer than the outside air, but not by much. “There's been a fire,” I tell Mere as she comes up behind me. “The building is a hermetic environment. Nothing gets in or out.”
“Wait,” Mere says as I grab the handle of the door. “If the fire has burned everything inside, then it's an oxygen starved environment. What happens when you open that door?”
“Nothing.” I tap my ear. “Do you hear it? There's a generator running somewhere. And I can smell the burn. It's faint, but it's there. An environmental system is still running. There's a tiny leak somewhere.”
There's a keycard reader next to the door, but the activity lights on it are dark. I brute force the door, and for a half-second, I fear Mere is right. The fire is waiting for us, and I've just given it a big dose of fresh air. But all that comes out of the lab is a foul commingling of everything that has been burned.
TWENTY
We prop the door open and wait a little while, just to be sure. When nothing seems to change, we venture inside.
The lab is dark, both from a lack of light and from the layer of ash that covers everything. The fire burned while it could, and the more combustible materials went up quickly. If there was a fire suppression system, it never went off. The walls are scorched black, the paint and wallpaper gone. Metal struts for movable walls and desk units are still there, but the synthetic and plastic overlays are all melted or gone. There's a large planter—several meters in diameter—in the center of the lobby that held a few flowering shrubs, but they're nothing but blackened sticks poking out of char-covered dirt.
There are a few bodies too, twisted in unnatural positions. Mere gags when we find the first one, though she doesn't vomit. “Were they dead before the fire reached…?” she mumbles through her hand.
“From smoke inhalation?” I shrug. “Let's hope so.”
There are four wings off the central hub: the entrance, where the few rooms off the central hallway seem to have been administrative; two research wings, though
it is difficult to tell exactly what sort of research was done—the lab equipment (what hasn't been melted and charred by the fire) is used for chemical analysis, protein therapy studies, and biological tissue analysis; and the last wing, opposite the entrance, that looks to be more administrative services—executive offices, a kitchen, a quartet of conferences rooms, and a break room. The elevator in the central hub has a large set of doors—freight-sized doors. There is only one button on the pad next to the doors, and it isn't marked.
“Only one way to go,” Mere says. “Down.” She pushes the button, and nothing happens.
She's sweating. The ambient temperature inside the lab is higher than outside, and not just because the central air handling system has failed.
It hasn't been that long since the fire snuffed itself out.
“There has to be another access,” I point out. “Where's all the heat exchanges, the air control infrastructure? It's not up on the roof, which means it's all below ground. That has to vent somewhere.”
She nods. “And the server room. I see computer workstations, but where does the network collapse back to?”
It's odd there's only one door into the building. No windows. No emergency exits. A good design criteria if you are building something that can be hermetically sealed, but, well, Mere and I are looking at what happens when good designs become deathtraps.
There's an unmarked door near the end of the right-hand lab wing that is thicker than the others. The seal hisses when I pull it open, and colder air wafts out. Stairs, going down. We prop this door open too, and descend, feeling our way in the dark.
We reach a landing and find—by feel—another heavy door. I force it open, and weak light streams out into the stairwell. Emergency lighting, a track of tiny lights that runs along the ceiling of the hallway beyond. The hallway is nondescript and I spot a few generalized signs. Maintenance and HVAC systems. Separate from the lab upstairs, and unaffected by the fire. They're in low power mode, but they're still functional.