Fragment

by Warren Fahy

  “Let’s call it clover. The clover photosynthesizes by day and eats rock by night—and these grazers come out at night to eat the clover. Maybe the grazers prefer the minerals the clover consumes at night, or don’t like chlorophyll… We know that some green algae in birdbaths turns red to protect itself from too much light or salinity—but it takes days to make that color change…”

  “Hmm…”

  “But we know lichen is a symbiont formed from algae and fungus.” She opened her eyes and looked at Andy, but her focus was distant and inward. “In lichen, the algae provides oxygen and organic molecules like sugars and ATP through photosynthesis. The fungus helps dissolve rock and provides nutrients for the algae to synthesize organic molecules.” She focused on Andy. “You with me?”

  “Sure!”

  “OK, so now—what makes this clover turn purple? The only thing I can think of is purple bacteria.” She looked out the window as though she could suddenly see through a fog. “This may be a symbiont of cyanobacteria and proteobacteria, which uses sulfur as an energy source—and turns purple! There’s a lot of iron sulfide, fool’s gold, on the island. I noticed it on the beach…So if this is some kind of cyano-proteobacteria symbiont, then the purple phase of this stuff would produce hydrogen sulfide gas—and stink like rotten eggs, like Zero mentioned! But during the day, when photosynthesizing, it would produce oxygen… while the sulfur-reducing bacteria might retreat underground…”

  She leaned forward, intently watching one of the nearest fernlike creatures pressing down a translucent frond on the field. White smoke curled around the pads at the end.

  “Of course!” She looked at Andy with wide eyes as three thoughts slammed together in her sleep-deprived mind. “If those ‘grazers’ only come out at night, they may be so ancient that they have to avoid oxygen! They may need the hydrogen sulfide gas to protect themselves and re-create the primordial atmosphere that they evolved in. See?”

  “Go on, go on!”

  “And if these grazers eat this stuff when it’s purple, they could be ingesting purple bacteria like Thiobacillus to convert the hydrogen sulfide in the plants into sulfuric acid—which they may be using to scour the clover off the rocks!”

  “Nell,” Andy gasped. “You’re amazing. I don’t have the slightest idea what you just said, but it’s amazing! I told everyone down in Section Two you thought it was lichen, so they’re all calling it lichen now. Sorry.”

  She laughed wearily. “That’s OK, Andy. It’s hard to believe this is even our planet. I’m glad we’re here, though. If I couldn’t do something after…I think I might have gone crazy on that ship.”

  “Yeah. I think they call it survivor’s guilt.”

  “No.” Anger instantly erased the humor from her face. “If survivors do something about it, there’s no reason to feel guilty, Andy. Unless they don’t.”

  “It’s up to the living to avenge the dead, eh? Isn’t that how the saying goes?”

  She stared at the darkening jungle below, thinking of her eleven shipmates that were now gone. “Something like that,” she answered softly.

  “But can you take revenge on animals, Nell? After all, we were the ones who intruded on them. Animals can’t help what they do. They didn’t have a choice. I know what happened to your mom, Nell, but—”

  Her eyes scalded him.

  “OK.” He nodded, and backed off. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked back out the window, focusing on the glistening creatures emerging across the purple slopes of the island.

  Glowing swarms of bugs came out of the tangled vegetation now and swirled across the fields in clusters as they grazed.

  9:45 P.M.

  Dante tugged off the swim fins. He dragged the raft up the beach toward the rocks. Ditching his fins on a high rock and stashing the raft sideways between two boulders, he dragged the duffel bag of climbing gear up the beach and over the rock outpouring to the edge of the crevasse.

  He opened the bag, stepped into his harness, attached the pre-strung loops of gear, and slipped on a new pair of his favorite Five Ten climbing shoes. Then he zippered the bag, slung it over his back, and bouldered up into the crack.

  About seventy feet in, Dante spotted an ascent route on the left face. He glanced warily into the rock-strewn canyon ahead, weighing his options. He poured some chalk on his hands from a small bag strapped around his waist. Then he felt the cliff-face, carefully examining the surface.

  The rock was abundantly pitted with pockets and cracks for nuts and cams. He decided he could climb this face clean, without using the rock hammer or the pitons, and he felt a surge of confidence. It would be a perfect solo climb.

  Dante visualized the first line of holds in the moonlight, then he donned his gear and tested his balance. Carrying the heavy gear disturbed his center of gravity—and the camera on his chest would prevent him from hugging the rock. He decided to strap the camera on the backpack instead—it made the center of gravity worse, but at least it was not in his way.

  He looked up. A hundred-foot vertical face rose above him to a perfect ramp, a diagonal crack that stretched almost to the top of the 230-meter face. The tricky part would be an overhang on the last thirty feet.

  He hoped to climb two-thirds of the way to the summit, find a ledge, and sleep until dawn. Then he would contact Cynthea and film his remaining ascent, transmitting the first live images of Henders Island to the world.

  So much for Zero.

  Stacking six connected rope coils on a flat rock at the base of the cliff, he tied the end of the rope to a cam, and hooked the cam to his chest harness. He felt the adrenaline pump inside him as he jumped up and grabbed the first hold, pulling the end of the rope with him.

  Suddenly, a sound like a Mack truck air horn blasted him from behind, nearly stopping his heart in the deep silence of the night.

  He leaped upward instinctively, “smearing” his feet in a mad scramble over the rocky surface.

  “What the fuck!” he shouted, clinging to the rock and twisting to look below him. What he saw resembled a giant spider the size of a Chevy Suburban, covered with stripes of glowing fur, crashing into the rock wall below Dante’s feet.

  A black spike reached up from the spider. It gouged the cliff beside his right leg, clawing a groove down the hard rock face. Dante sprang six vertical feet in a single terrified lunge, to grab the next set of holds with his chalked hands.

  Amped with adrenaline, he chimneyed backwards off a wrinkle and climbed the next fifty feet faster than he’d ever scaled a rock in his life. Pausing for breath at a ledge, he leaned out to look down the face. Three large shapes prowled like phosphorescent tigers below. “Please tell me you can’t climb,” he whispered, panting.

  He reached both hands into the chalk bag, dusted them together, and resumed the climb, casting an occasional nervous glance downward at the shrinking forms below. The ramp was another fifty feet above him.

  His hand fell on a strange smooth texture, and he momentarily recoiled from what looked like a serving-tray-sized, boomerang-headed cockroach. But it was motionless, and he quickly realized it was just a fossil. He saw others around him, dark and glossy on the moon-washed rock face.

  When he reached the ramp he set another cam rigged with a gri-gri, for protection, then he crawled forward to the corner and looked down into the crevasse.

  Farther up the crack he saw the cornucopia-like tunnel of jungle growth, its glowing outline etched by the swirling sparks of a million flying bugs. He decided to stay out of its line of sight as much as possible to avoid being detected by anything.

  Around the corner, he chimneyed backwards to a bucket of stone that emerged from the cliff like a sharp-edged bowsprit of rock. He set another cam there and marked his elevation— about two hundred feet up. He faced a waving vertical climb of about seventy feet, in the open, until another ramp of rock would take him to the crux.

  He chalked his hands again and started up.

  The moonlight glint of an
other fossil caught his eye, so he climbed toward it to have a look.

  It leaped off the rock and snapped its jaws at his face— devouring a glowing bug that whizzed past his ear.

  Startled, hands slipping and scrabbling, Dante lost his grip.

  He fell.

  The cam he had set expanded in the crack as his weight tightened the gri-gri. He swung beneath the stone bucket—he had fallen about thirty feet, but the protection held.

  Now, shuddering, he got a good look at the creature skittering down the cliff face, moving like a huge beetle welded to a flying fish.

  Dante pulled himself up the rope to the hold point and dangled there, watching as more of these living fossils darted around him, snapping up the flying insects that were now buzzing past him.

  10:08 P.M.

  “Quentin, save the rest of the ROVs for daylight, OK?” Nell said. “Let’s concentrate on lighting and time-lapsing the field specimens till morning.”

  Quentin triggered the outboard lights for the cameras that would continue shooting a frame of the plant specimens exposed outside every thirty seconds through the night.

  “God!” she said as she ran replays of the time-lapses from the last forty-five minutes. She looked out the window and saw that some of the specimens had already been stripped, uprooted, and replaced with something else.

  “Hey, what’s that?” a NASA technician asked.

  A strange hum buzzed in the air.

  The entire lab seemed to vibrate and then rock gently back and forth.

  “Probably a tremor,” Quentin said. “The military said they noticed low-level seismic activity in the island a few days ago.”

  “Hang on, folks,” Andy warned.

  Nell grabbed the edge of the lab counter and looked out the window, at the trees quivering at the jungle’s edge.

  10:09 P.M.

  Dante felt the rumble before he heard it. At first he thought the entire cliff was falling, but then he realized it was only the slab he was clinging to—separating from the cliff with a slow crumble. He lunged sideways, finger-locking a crack with his left hand and swinging up to catch a dead-point with his right, simultaneously edging a hold with his left foot. It was the most incredible dyno he had ever made—but he didn’t care, because he was terrified.

  Flakes of rock rained down around him, and he realized the last protection he had set was fifty feet below—he needed to get to that ramp above, fast.

  The cliff-gliders grew bolder. They lightly grazed his shoulders, back, and heels as he climbed, flittering around him in greater numbers like flying crabs swarming over the cliff face. “Hang on, bro,” he said to himself nervously.

  10:09 P.M.

  The humming stopped.

  Andy sighed. “Now I know what an earthquake feels like.”

  “OK, it’s over,” Nell said, hopefully.

  Briggs came through the hatch from Section Three. There was a serious look on the chief NASA technician’s face.

  Cliff-gliders

  Megatriops hemapteryx

  (after Joel, Revision of the Notostraca of the World)

  “Hey, Briggs. Is there any way I can run down to Section One and get my Mets cap? I think I left it down there.” She smirked at him.

  “That’s very funny, Nell. That would be a ‘no.’ So, now we have earthquakes?”

  “Not too bad, so far.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Briggs glared at her. “Bring on the mudslides and hurricanes!”

  10:11 P.M.

  Dante began to suffer from forearm pump as the fingerwork bulged his arms and weakened his grip. He tried shifting more of the weight to his feet, and finally, painfully, he reached the crack and wedged himself in. He shook out his arms in the womb of rock and then set some protection, overcamming it into a hole above him, and hooking it in with a locking ‘biner.

  He was not confident about bivouacking on the rock face— sleeping here did not seem like such a great idea, after all. Crawling deeper into the crack, he discovered a vertical crevice that shafted into the roof like a ladder, straight to the overhang at the top. He felt a surge of hope. If this was as clean as it looked, he could reach the top in fifteen minutes.

  He decided it was time to transmit, using the camera’s night vision mode. He turned on the SeaLife walkie-talkie and called in.

  10:26 P.M.

  Every three and a half minutes Peach nibbled a peanut M&M as he played the twenty-sixth level of Halo 5—when suddenly he caught a signal icon blinking in a corner of his monitor.

  He clicked the icon as though he were blasting another alien, and the raw feed of Dante’s camera suddenly filled the screen, muddy and crackling: “I’m here on Henders Island, about a hundred meters from the top of the cliff. Do you guys hear me? I hope your walkie-talkies are on, man…”

  Peach looked around for his walkie-talkie but couldn’t find it.

  10:26 P.M.

  Cynthea was sleeping in her cabin when the beeper of her walkie-talkie went off on her night table. She sprang up as she heard Dante’s voice.

  She dashed in her navy blue pajamas toward the Control Room with the walkie-talkie to her ear. “Dante! You shouldn’t be doing this!” she scolded as she ran.

  “Hey, it’s done, Cynthea. I told you I could climb this thing. Here I am!”

  “Oh my God!” she groaned.

  As soon as she reached the Control Room and saw the live feed, frustratingly dark and erratic as it was, she grabbed the shipboard satphone and speed-dialed.

  “This is Cynthea Leeds, may I speak to Barry? Just wake him up, honey. Trust me, OK? DO IT!” She looked at Peach, frowning, and put her hand over the receiver: “Can you bring down the contrast and brighten the image or something, Peach? We gotta get more than that.” She took her hand off the receiver. “Barry, I’ve got a rock climber with a camera thirty feet from the top of Henders Island, ready to go live. Wake up, Barry. Wake up! We’ve got to go LIVE now! This is the broadcast of the century! We can get it through the news blackout from Henders Island! Damn it, that’s our hook! Barry?”

  Peach could hear Barry breathing through the phone’s ear speaker.

  “Do you know what time it is on the East Coast right now, Cynthea? It’s one-thirty in the morning!”

  “That’s what makes it legendary television, Barry!” Cynthea shook her head, glancing at Peach. “Do it! You’ll have the exclusive rights to a MILLION RERUNS! This is like the first MOON LANDING, BARRY!” She put a hand over the receiver. “Tell Dante to hold off from getting to the top—Barry’s getting his fat ass out of bed and is going down to the office, but Dante has to stay put for ten minutes.” She put the satphone to her ear. “OK, Barry, sweetie. Thank you, my darling!”

  10:27 P.M.

  “OK, I hope this night vision is coming through—I have the camera strapped to my chest now and you’re looking at the cliff above me,” Dante said. “I’m climbing a seam. You may be able to see some gliders just outside the crack. I’m protected from them in here, but they’ve been getting a little close for comfort— one of them seems to have taken a nip out of my elbow. But mostly they seem to eat these big fireflies that were coming after me…”

  Dante climbed fifty feet before setting some pro. He estimated that he was now a hundred feet from the top.

  Peach’s voice suddenly crackled through the walkie-talkie. “Can you stop about thirty feet from the top and wait for a green light, Dante?”

  “No problem. Don’t make me wait too long, though, the last bit’s an overhang, dude.”

  “OK, cool. Keep videoing, we’re getting all this. You shouldn’t have done it, you know,” Cynthea scolded. “But you’re going to be a superstar, baby!”

  “Woo-hoo!” Dante grinned as he steadily climbed up the crack, ducking occasionally to avoid a swooping glider.

  10:39 P.M.

  “Are you getting this, Barry?”

  “We’re getting it, we’re getting it. It’s exciting stuff.”

  “Are we live?”
There was a pause and Cynthea glared at the phone. “Barry?”

  “It’s great stuff, Cynthea, but I don’t know… I’m having dinner with Congressman Murray tomorrow night from the FCC Oversight Committee to hash out the merger details—”

  “Why, you cocksucking motherfucking backstabbing son of a bitch,” Cynthea snarled.

  “Now, Cynthea, we can maybe get better airtime and a real special out of it later without getting in trouble with the FCC or violating the goddamned Patriot Act or God knows what else the lawyer is nodding his head at me about right now, all right?”

  “Don’t let me down, Barry!” Cynthea threatened.

  10:40 P.M.

  Dante dangled from a pair of cams that he had chocked into the roof of the overhang, thirty feet below the cliff’s summit. As he looked across the chasm, the opposite cliff face seemed to draw nearer, then recede. “It’s kind of gnarly up here, man. We’re having another earthquake, I think. I hope you’re getting this, man!”

  “Try to hold it steady.” Peach’s voice came over the walkie-talkie taped to Dante’s upper arm.

  “You try!” Dante snarled.

  Dante set two nuts in small cracks above his head and equalized the tension on the tie-ins. Cliff-gliders leaped past him, devouring the flying, glowing bugs attracted to his dangling body.

  He swung forward and caught the edge of the overhang, locking off with one arm and reaching up with the other to place a final cam.

  He was ten yards of rock away from the top. “Tell me when, guys. And make it fast, OK?”

  10:42 P.M.

  “Come on, Barry! You’ve got a live feed from Henders Island all ready to go, damn it!”

  Peach heard Barry reply through her phone’s receiver: “I don’t want another slaughter on TV!”