Horizon

by Scott Westerfeld

  Molly didn’t answer. She was too busy trying to ignore the food bar in his hand. She was saving her own to eat right before sleep. Living with her mother had taught her that nothing was worse than waking up hungry in the middle of the night.

  “I can handle the vine,” Yoshi said, and went back to cleaning his sword. He was buffing it with a yellow cloth, the movement hypnotic in the growing firelight. After a solid minute of polishing, he inspected it from all angles, then pulled out a tiny plastic bottle. Squeezing a few drops of oil onto the blade, he began to rub it into the steel.

  Molly suddenly understood. “Your sword isn’t rustproof.”

  Yoshi nodded. “It was forged four hundred years ago. Stainless steel wasn’t a thing.”

  “Whoa,” Javi said through his food bar. “So you have to clean it every time you use it?”

  “Even a speck of moisture could make it rust.”

  Molly wondered how many drops of oil were in that little bottle. Probably not as many as there were monsters in this jungle.

  She wondered when exactly she’d given up on the idea of help arriving, and why. Maybe because a rescue squad of Canadian Mounties didn’t fit in with shredder birds and plants that tried to eat you?

  Yeah, that was probably it.

  When they got back to the plane, how were they going to explain all this to Oliver?

  The buzz of the jungle grew louder as the sky darkened, and a few of the glowing blue insects drifted into camp. Molly stared into the black trees, wondering again what new threats were out there. They should make a schedule for keeping watch through the night …

  But if she brought that up, everyone would go to sleep imagining unknown monsters. None of them would get any rest.

  Molly sighed. It was up to her to stay awake—to keep watch without telling the others. She could sleep tomorrow in the safety of the aircraft cabin.

  She ran her fingers though her hair. Anywhere else, she would be freaking out, wondering how to get it cut to mask the singed parts. But here it hardly seemed to matter.

  “I thought of a way to signal everyone back at camp,” Anna said. “To let them know we’re okay.”

  Molly looked up from the fire. “That would be great. Oliver must be worried sick.”

  “We can signal him.” Anna held up a bundle of twigs. “We turn the gravity off, set this on fire, then throw it two thousand feet in the air. Like shooting up a flare.”

  “That’s almost half a mile,” Javi said. “How do we manage that?”

  “Check it out.” Anna stood up and tossed the bundle of twigs straight into the air. She took a few steps, staring up into the darkness, and caught the bundle two-handed as it fell back to earth.

  “Maybe twenty feet,” Javi said.

  “Right.” Molly calculated, wishing Oliver was here. “So you’re saying low G lets us throw stuff a hundred times higher?”

  Anna nodded. “From a standstill, I can jump maybe a yard? And we were jumping a few hundred feet at a time. That’s a hundred-to-one ratio.”

  “But we tested the antigravity bubble. It’s only about thirty feet across,” Molly said.

  “Across, yes.” Anna held up the device. “But the first time I turned it on, Javi jumped way higher than that. The low-G zone might only be thirty feet across, but I think it goes all the way up. It’s a cylinder, not a bubble.”

  “Huh …” Molly closed her eyes, remembering Javi floating high above the trees, the emergency door tumbling to the ground. “Why would anyone design it that way?”

  “Maybe they didn’t have a choice.” Anna placed a fist over the fire, so that it was lit by the glow. “Gravity comes from the Earth, right? It reaches up like the light from this fire, and pulls us down.” She put her other hand underneath, palm out flat, blocking the firelight from her fist. “So maybe that device makes a gravity shadow. Everything above it is almost weightless, because it’s cut off from the Earth.”

  Javi let out a groan and fell back onto the stone. “That makes sense, but it also hurts my head.”

  “But gravity doesn’t shine—it warps space.” Molly shook her head, realizing that everything she knew about relativity came from extra credit questions and TV shows. “Still, I guess it’s the same idea.”

  “How do you guys know all this stuff?” Yoshi spoke up. He had sheathed his sword and was staring at Anna’s shadowed fist.

  “We don’t know anything,” Anna said with a shrug. “We’re just theorizing.”

  “But we’re engineers. We were flying to Tokyo for a robot thing.” Molly tried to say it in an offhand way, like Team Killbot flew to Japanese robotics conferences all the time. But Yoshi didn’t look quite as impressed as she’d expected.

  “Engineers?” he said, then gave a grunt. “Then why hasn’t it occurred to you that we might be on a spaceship?”

  They all stared at him.

  “A what?” Molly sputtered.

  “Think about it,” Yoshi said calmly. “Shielding the gravity from a whole planet would need some serious hardware, and that device is the size of a Frisbee.”

  “So?” Molly asked.

  “So—in a spaceship the gravity is artificial. You don’t have to change the laws of physics, you just have to turn something off.” When no one reacted, Yoshi gave a tired sigh. “In other words, maybe it’s not a gravity device at all. Maybe it’s just a remote control.”

  Molly stared, wondering if Yoshi’s day alone in the jungle had addled his mind somehow. Or if he’d eaten some kind of psychedelic plant.

  He held up his radio. “And I heard something on this. Some kind of transmission.”

  “Really?” Molly said. “We haven’t gotten anything but static.”

  Yoshi turned his radio on, and the familiar hiss came out. “Me either. But back at the waterfall there was a beeping. A pattern. On a spaceship, there would be a navigational signal, right?”

  Molly turned to Javi and Anna, silently appealing for help.

  “This place doesn’t have any actual sky,” Javi said softly. “Just mist.”

  Anna nodded. “Like someone’s trying to hide the ceiling.”

  Molly stared at them both. “What? I mean, yeah, all of this is really weird. But why would there be a jungle on an alien spaceship?”

  Instead of answering her, both of them looked at Yoshi.

  He shrugged. “If you can build a ship big enough, why not put a jungle in it? Plants create oxygen.”

  “Exactly the right amount of oxygen for humans to breathe?” Molly asked.

  “Maybe they made a few adjustments. They clearly don’t want to kill us.”

  “They don’t?” Molly cried. “Did you miss the part with the carnivorous plant?”

  Yoshi spread his hands. “They’re testing us. If you kidnapped some local primitives, isn’t that what you would do?”

  “I wouldn’t kidnap people in the first place!” Molly cried. She turned again to Javi and Anna. “Since when do you guys believe in alien abduction?”

  Javi shrugged. “Since something grabbed our plane and stuck us in this weird jungle, more or less.”

  “Molly, a plant tried to eat us,” Anna said calmly. “And a red jungle? On Earth, almost everything that does photosynthesis is green. It’s like these plants evolved under a different sun.”

  Molly let out an exasperated sigh, wondering when exactly they’d all gone nuts. You had to gather hard data before you came to conclusions. Especially ridiculous ones.

  “Listen, Molly, I’m not saying we’re on a spaceship,” Anna said. “But whatever is going on is at least that weird. I mean, do you have a non-weird theory?”

  Molly stared into the fire for a moment before answering.

  “I think we’re on Earth, because we can breathe and the gravity is the same. I think our plane went off course because there was some weird new technology in the hold, and we crashed someplace no one’s ever been before. A lost island, or a valley deep in the Amazon, that was never discovered before becau
se it’s always covered in mist.”

  She stood up and looked into the dark sky.

  “And I think I can prove it.”

  Javi rose from the fire and stood beside her. “You think there are stars up there?”

  “Yep. Watch this.” Molly jumped as hard as she could, straight up. “How high?”

  “Um, about two feet?”

  Molly nodded. “Sounds right. And with a boost from the rest of you, I bet I could do twice that. Four feet, multiplied by a hundred, should be high enough to get above any mist!”

  “But you’ll be bird-bait up there,” Javi said. “And you won’t be able to turn off the device without splatting yourself.”

  “Not to mention landing on us,” Anna added.

  “I’ll take a flare,” Molly said. “It’s worth the risk to know something about where we are. Otherwise, this place is going to drive us all crazy.”

  They all stared at her until Javi sighed and said, “Okay, guys. Everyone up.”

  A few minutes later, Anna, Javi, and Yoshi stood in a tight circle next to the fire. Their hands were interlinked in the middle, like they were ready to give someone a boost over a fence.

  Molly put one hand on Javi’s shoulder, then rested her right foot carefully onto the six overlapping palms. With her other hand she turned on the gravity device.

  The sickening elevator-drop feeling hit her in the stomach, and the fire made a popping noise—a few burning pieces of wood wafted into the air.

  Oops, heat rises, Molly thought. But that problem would be solved once she and the device were lofted above the flames. The antigravity effect might go all the way up, but it only extended about fifteen feet in every other direction—including down.

  “One … two … three,” she cried, and pushed herself up with all the strength of her arms and legs.

  The others grunted in unison, and a moment later Molly was hurtling straight up into the night sky. The firelight quickly shrank below, and soon the jungle itself disappeared, wreathed in mist and darkness.

  At first, Molly felt suspended in formless space. The only sense of motion came from damp tendrils of wind brushing her face, the air growing cooler as she rose. But soon she realized that the mist was thinning around her. And finally she saw a few pinpricks of light in the inky darkness above …

  Stars in the night sky. Beautiful and perfect—they weren’t on a spaceship after all.

  Molly smiled. This was Earth—which meant there was some chance of getting home. She couldn’t wait to tell Yoshi that his alien abduction theory was just as silly as it sounded.

  But then, as she felt her ascent coming to an end and the long, slow fall beginning, Molly saw something else in the sky. Two things, in fact, close together.

  For a moment she thought they were aircraft lights. But they were too big, and one was a crescent shape. And as she fell back into the mists, Molly realized what they were …

  A pair of moons. One red, one green.

  We’re on another planet.”

  Yoshi jolted awake, his eyes opening to a sky without stars.

  Had he really heard the murmured words? Or had he been dreaming?

  He sat up, shivering in the cold. Looked around.

  “Sorry,” came a whisper from the darkness.

  It was Molly who’d spoken. She’d said the same thing hours ago when she’d floated back to the ground—we’re on another planet—in the same stunned voice. Now she was sitting up by the dead fire, framed by the pale horizon.

  She pointed at the sky.

  Yoshi looked up and came fully awake.

  At some point the mist had cleared a little. Now the two moons were dimly visible from here on the ground. Close together, red and green, they stared down at him like the mismatched eyes of some vast monster.

  “Did you think I was kidding?” Molly whispered. Her smile glimmered in the dark.

  Yoshi shrugged. Somehow, teleportation to another planet seemed harder to believe than being taken away on a spaceship. Or at least harder to come back from.

  But those were definitely moons in the sky. Plural.

  He decided to change the subject.

  “Too hungry to sleep?” His own empty belly had been keen and sharp in his dreams. Last night Molly had offered him one of her food bars, but he’d said no. It was his own fault he’d set out to explore the jungle with nothing but a sword.

  “Not hungry.” She looked at the others, both asleep. “Just nervous about what might be out there. I thought I’d keep watch.”

  “Alone?” Yoshi shook his head. “You mean, you’ve been up all night?”

  She nodded, looking only half awake.

  “Did anything try to eat us?” he asked.

  Molly didn’t smile, just turned toward the darkness.

  “There was a noise.”

  Yoshi frowned. The jungle was full of noises—the buzz of insects, the flutter of birds, the scampering of small feet through the undergrowth. And always the shushing of wind in the leaves and fronds.

  He listened but didn’t hear anything beyond the usual ruckus.

  “What kind of noise?” he asked.

  “Like a foghorn, maybe. Far away.”

  “You mean, a ship?”

  She shook her head. “No, an animal. But a really big one.”

  “Oh.” Yoshi patted his katana. “Well, maybe it’s big enough to feed eight people.”

  “Big enough to eat eight people, you mean.”

  Yoshi considered this. “Then it’s probably too big to sneak up on us. You should get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

  She looked at him a moment, weighing the offer. Like she didn’t trust him not to fall asleep.

  “I’ve got stuff to do.” He pulled out the piece of tanglevine he’d saved and started to peel the leaves away. It was green, though many of the plants here were red as blood.

  Molly just stared at him. “Um, is that what I think it is?”

  “Yes. I saved some.”

  Her eyes widened. “What for?”

  “To study. I’m pretty sure it’s not edible. All muscle.” Yoshi had to smile. “I didn’t know engineers were so squeamish.”

  “Anna loves dissecting things.” Molly’s gaze stayed locked on the dead vine. “But I prefer stuff that isn’t squishy. Give me a user manual and numbered parts.”

  “Ah, you like order. You and my father would get along.”

  Molly looked up at Yoshi. His words had come out colder than he’d meant them to.

  He turned away and added mildly, “Even dead, the vine is very strong. Useful, maybe. I bet it holds more weight than those bungee cords.”

  “We want stretchy, not strong. We crash into trees a lot.” Molly shuddered. “Also, I’m not wrapping a dead thing around my waist.”

  “You never had a leather belt? That’s made out of a dead thing.”

  “Okay, I’m not wrapping a dead alien thing around my waist.”

  Yoshi shrugged. “Suit yourself. But I’ll hang on to it, just in case. We might be stuck working with squishy stuff for a while.”

  “You’re probably right,” Molly sighed. “I’m just tired, I guess.”

  “Then sleep,” he said, but she was already stretching out on the stony ground. A moment later, her eyes were closed.

  Yoshi pulled the rest of the leaves off the tanglevine, then tied it to his scabbard, which was made of sharkskin. Another predator, like the vine.

  He slid his katana out, inspected the shine on the blade. Perfect.

  There was nothing to do but stare out into the darkness and listen to the jungle. All together it was a roar, like ocean waves rumbling in chorus. But each sound had its own little story—the shriek and flutter of two birds fighting, the skittering of a creature along a branch. Nothing deadly.

  But not long before dawn, Yoshi heard something bigger out there. Something pushing through the trees, making branches creak and snap.

  Something that moved with purpose and strength.

/>   He tensed, hand on the pommel of his sword, eyes aching as he peered into the darkness. Finally, the sounds faded, until he wasn’t sure if he had imagined them. It was Molly’s fault, for talking about monsters that sounded like foghorns. There was probably nothing out there.

  But Yoshi was glad when morning came, and the horizon finally started to turn bloodred.

  When the others were finally awake, the four of them tied themselves together—with bungee cords, not tanglevine—and started to jump for home. They followed a rushing stream that ran away from the waterfall, back toward the plane.

  It was Molly’s idea, a way to find the closest source of fresh water to camp. The glimmer below was easy to spot through the trees, reflecting the white sky. The stream led them on a winding path, but every ten jumps or so, one of them was flung higher to look for the crashed airplane.

  It all seemed sensible to Yoshi, and he let the three engineers do their work. They saw everything as a puzzle to be solved, which kept them focused, instead of worrying about the fact that none of them might ever make it home.

  They listened nervously for the “shredder birds,” like rabbits in an open field. Like prey.

  He decided not to tell them about the large beast he’d heard in the night. It would only scare them and had probably been his imagination anyway.

  The engineers were wary of the taller trees that sprouted from the jungle. These trees were spindly, soaring up to disappear into the mist, and came in perfectly round clusters. Even weirder, every cluster seemed to be exactly the same diameter.

  “That looks designed,” Yoshi said to Molly when they landed a few jumps from one of the towering stands of trees.

  “I know.” She was untangling her bungee cord. “Like a sign of intelligent life, right? I’d love to check them out, but listen.”

  Yoshi closed his eyes, and deep within the babble of birds and insects he heard a sound that made his skin crawl. It was almost a growl, like pigs grunting.

  “Your ‘shredder birds’?”

  She nodded, and when they jumped again, it was in the opposite direction.

  As they soared, Yoshi shook off the creepiness of the shredder sound and went back to enjoying the heady feeling of floating through the misty branches, a sword on his back.