Tangled Planet

by Kate Blair

  This planet changes everything.

  “I’ll be working with you today,” he says.

  “But … I should be supervised by an engineer.”

  He shakes his head. “Cassius spoke to Antares. The captain will be assigning your work.”

  I roll my eyes. But I shouldn’t be surprised. Antares is old, and as weak as a hydrogen bond. He’ll do whatever Cassius says.

  Sabik continues. “We need you to fix a landclearer we found in the forest. I’m not able to do much else with this.” He holds up his bandaged arm. “So I volunteered to take you.”

  “You’re my supervisor?”

  “We’re not as hung up on hierarchy down here. I won’t be filling in a report on your work. Plus, I think Cassius wanted you to feel at home. You do have friends down here, you know. Come on.”

  Then he’s walking away from the town square toward the habitation huts at the edge of the camp. There are cracks in the clouds now. Shafts of light beam down randomly on the planet. I exhale and follow him. I guess I’m lucky. Cassius could easily have stuck me with a worse assignment.

  We’re soon through the village and hiking across the fields. Tiny shoots stick out from the mud, transplanted from the ecocarriages back on board. I’m careful to follow the paths, so as not to tread on them as I pick my way through. It’s weird, food coming out of dirt. Yet another thing to get used to.

  A dark mass of trees glowers at the edge of the field. We’re heading straight for it.

  “Are you okay?” Sabik asks.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “I heard about your testimony. Everyone’s talking about it.”

  Great. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.

  “You really think you saw a creature?”

  I nod.

  “I’ve been working in the forest for four months, Ursa. I haven’t seen any animals.”

  “So you think I’m making it up?”

  “I didn’t say that. But wouldn’t we be able to find something down here? Do a scan of the planet or something?”

  I laugh. “You’re kidding, right?” The ship was only set up to enable us to check the weather at the landing site and allow basic communication by linkcom. We weren’t meant to stay in orbit long.

  Sabik sighs. “Give it a chance and it might even be a fun day. The clouds are going to clear in an hour or two, and there’s the first bird release scheduled later. They say they fill the air with song.”

  I don’t smile.

  “C’mon, Ursa. You used to be up for anything. Where’s your old sense of adventure?”

  “It drowned with Maia.”

  Sabik looks away.

  We trudge on across the fields in silence. I let him walk ahead for a while, wondering if he’ll check to see if I’m following. I soon realize he won’t, and I’ll get in trouble if I don’t complete my assignment.

  Sabik stops as he reaches the trees. “The landclearer left a rough track behind it before it broke down twenty or so years ago. It’s a path of sorts, but quite overgrown.”

  There’s a gap between the trees about the width of a corridor on the Venture. But glowferns have reclaimed the ground, and saplings are pushing up here and there. Branches reach out from high up on the trees on either side and meet in the middle, forming a kind of tunnel.

  “You’re going to have to stay a lot closer if you don’t want to get lost in the woods.” He takes his machete out of his bag and steps onto the path.

  I pause, feeling vulnerable. I rummage in my gear bag and pull out my wrench before following him. I hold it up as the woods swallow me whole.

  This is worse than the path through the forest to the shuttle camp. Roots and undergrowth trip me. Thin branches reach down to try to scratch me. Glowferns swish against my ankles.

  The forest either side is much deeper, more tangled. But I can see how this was a decent path once. If the landclearers had done their job, we’d have been striding down clear roads and looking out over fields ready for sowing. It would all have been so easy.

  It wouldn’t have saved Maia, but it would have made life down here bearable.

  Maybe.

  The tunnel path ahead is clear, but I can barely see a few meters to each side through the confusion of branches and trunks. There could be a creature right by us and I wouldn’t see it until it was too late. Sabik glances back at me every so often as he strides along, but he looks strange as the shadows of the trees move over his face. There’s an odd noise over the rustle of branches and snap of twigs underfoot. It takes me a while to work out what it is.

  “Are you humming?”

  “Yup.”

  I concentrate, and after a while the melody clicks. It’s the one from the campfire. The one where they changed the words to make it all about how ridiculously fantastic the planet is.

  “You still like it here?” I’m breathless as I say it.

  Sabik turns around. “Am I going too fast for you?”

  I want to say no, but instead I rest my hands on my knees and breathe deeply.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, stopping. “I should have realized. You’ve been on the ship this whole time. You’re unfit.”

  I pull myself up. “I do my exercises.”

  He shakes his head. “Not the same as working on the planet all day. Look. You take a break. I’ll tap this tree.”

  I lower my head, watch the glowferns around my ankles sway. “Don’t you find it spooky?”

  He gives a little laugh. “No. You just aren’t used to it. It’s a big change, but it’s a good one. I love it here.”

  “Why?”

  Sabik has his machete out. He hacks at the tree’s trunk, and red liquid flows out of the black bark. I know it’s just an organic polymer, bioengineered for use in the printers, but I still shudder as it trickles out like blood.

  “I’ve always been waiting for this.” He waves his bandaged hand to encompass the strangling branches of the woods. The dirt. “To be free, to have space to run.”

  “But it’s a mess. It’s all too hard and unpredictable.”

  “Much like life,” Sabik says.

  I fight the urge to slap him.

  “You used to love to explore,” he continues. “Back on the ship. I miss the old you.”

  I straighten up. “I’m still the old me on the Venture.”

  The planet turns me into someone else. Someone weak, fragile.

  Sabik puts away his machete, gets out a metal bucket, and clips it onto the tree, positioning it so the red sap seeps into it. “Life is better down here. And there are more resources.”

  “And we could put them to good use if Cassius wasn’t in so much of a hurry to settle.”

  Sabik shrugs. “It’s not sustainable to keep running the shuttle back and forth to the Venture. It’s a huge power drain, and we should be using that energy to build our future. We need to bring the ship down as soon as possible.”

  “We need time — to get used to Beta and to get the planet into better shape. We’re not ready.”

  “Lots of us are ready. Not stuck to the old ways.”

  My body tenses. “The old ways worked for our ancestors for hundreds of years. Kept us going. Brought us here.”

  “They worked on the ship, yeah. But it’s time for change. For example, on Beta we won’t need to select for gender at conception anymore, so no more primas and secundas, unless that’s what people actually want.”

  Sabik always said he only wanted one wife. That he was raised by two men who loved only each other and that monogamy was best.

  Not practical, though, on a ship with two women to every man.

  “And there will be flowers, soon,” he says.

  I stare at the ground. Sabik tried to grow me some on the ship once, hidden in the air ducts. But they never bl
oomed.

  “Done,” Sabik says, finishing fixing the bucket. “That should be full by the time we come back this way.”

  We start hiking again.

  “So, you don’t want to settle here?” He slashes at the forest.

  “I do. Of course I do. But why can’t we take our time?”

  “Because of the axial tilt. This planet has seasons, Ursa. If we don’t plant now, we won’t be able to colonize for another year.”

  “I’m not an idiot. What’s wrong with waiting a year?”

  “You want to wait a whole year? Just orbiting the planet? Doing nothing?”

  Fury rises in my gut. “You agricologists may have been doing nothing, but some of us have been working hard keeping the Ven-ture running against all the odds, and for what? So she can be torn apart and dragged to the ground for her parts?”

  Sabik stomps faster through the forest.

  “Oh, we’ve been doing plenty,” he says. “Do you know how hard it was to feed all of us? To keep the ecocarriages producing enough food as we ran low on supplies? While your father gave the engineers all the resources?”

  My hands curl into fists. “He got us here. There was no other way.”

  Sabik pauses. When he speaks again, his tone is softer. “What I meant is not doing anything to move forward. Just waiting for our lives to start.”

  I’m stung. “I thought my life had started. At one point I thought I was in love.”

  His mouth is a straight line. “At one point.”

  I shake my head. “What I mean is, we had lives on the ship. Generations of us did.”

  “And they did it all to get us here.”

  “So we shouldn’t throw that away by rushing the colonization and endangering people.”

  “Hiding from the planet isn’t the answer.”

  “It’s not hiding!”

  I kick at a root that tries to trip me. I want to keep arguing, but what is there to say? He’s made up his mind. Plus, I’m totally out of breath again. Instead I follow Sabik, trying to step where he steps. He’s not humming anymore. There’s just the rustle of wind through the trees, the pant of our breath, and the occasional thwack of the machete against a branch, eliciting a trickle of red from each severed stump. The sky slowly clears above us, and the forest feels warmer, muggier.

  “Come on,” Sabik says after a long time. He’s going faster. I try to speed up, stumbling on tree roots. I try to follow him more closely, step in his footsteps.

  “Look ahead,” he adds. “It’s easier that way.”

  I can’t see anything up ahead, so I go back to focusing on the mud, and Sabik’s footprints in it. It’s clear other people have been this way before, probably when they were looking for the landclearer, so there’s more than one set of prints to follow. That makes it a little easier.

  Or at least it does until one set breaks off from the others and heads through a gap in the foliage to my right. I stop.

  Most of the footsteps remain on the path Sabik walks ahead of me, but there are marks in the mud heading through the wood to my right. Left by someone with big feet.

  “Where does that path go?” I ask.

  Sabik keeps walking. “There’s no path there.”

  “Yes, there is.” I peer down it. It’s even narrower than the path we’re on. “And someone has been down there.” I point at the marks in the mud.

  Sabik pauses, turns back. “Sometimes the forest does that. It’s not a real path, but it can trick people. You follow them for a little while, then they peter out. It’s a good way to get lost. The footsteps just mean someone has already checked it out. Come on. We’re not far.”

  But we keep hiking through the forest for what feels like ages. Sweat trickles down my back. I’m gasping. Everything down here is a major workout. But it’s dumb to be afraid of the forest now. The sun has climbed above us, and the thick branches above cast roving patches of light on the ground. It’s almost pretty.

  Finally, we step out into a larger space between the trees. In front of us, in the sunlit clearing, half-swallowed by vines, is the yellow bulk of a landclearer.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see machinery before. Coming across a landclearer in the depths of the forest is like finding an oxygen tank in the vacuum of space.

  I drop my gear bag and rotate my shoulders to get some of the soreness out, still gazing at the machine. It looks so bright, so solid. Nearly the size of my whole cabin back on the Venture.

  Sabik takes in the way I’m looking at the landclearer. “Should I leave you two alone?”

  “Sorry. It just looks more real than the trees. Don’t you think?”

  “That’s because it’s neon yellow. You don’t get neon colors in the forest.”

  “I knew that,” I say, even though I didn’t.

  Sabik hands me a water bottle. I take a long, deep drink, then I head for the landclearer and pace around it. The solar panels are covered in mud and needles. The wiper is gone. Snapped off. I’ll have to order another from the printers. But for now, I pull a cloth out of my kit bag and wet it with the water bottle. I stick a foot onto the front ledge of the machine, pull myself up on a metal arm, and start scrubbing at the mud, humming a working song as I do it.

  “Is that all that needs to be done? Just clean off the solar panel? I could have done that.”

  “I don’t know.” I’m slightly out of breath as I speak, chest pushed against the outer casing as I scrape off the dirt. “We’ll find out once the battery has had time to charge.”

  The mud comes off easily, already damp from the recent rain. It only takes a few sweeps until the panel is clear enough to collect the light.

  “Now,” I say, as I step back down, “we wait.”

  Sabik nods. But then there’s an odd sound from above us. Tuneless high notes.

  We both look up. For a second, I’m terrified. I take a step closer to Sabik. Is it the Venture? What could have happened to her? But it’s too quiet, too close.

  Then they dart out above us, above the trees, in a V shape. I duck, covering my head, peering up from under my crossed arms. Dozens and dozens of miniature brown shuttles flying over us. It takes me a moment to clue in.

  Birds.

  The first release. Of course. It’s just small birds now, ones that feed on the bugs and plants sent by the seeding ships.

  Good. Maybe they can eat the fly that was bothering me last night.

  I straighten up, let my shoulders relax, and watch properly. The birds zoom over us, as if delighting in their new freedom. Hundreds of them, spreading out, colonizing the woods. And there are new sounds now: tweets, rustles in the trees. My mouth falls open.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “Yeah. That sums it up.” Sabik is grinning like an idiot. But for once, it feels appropriate.

  “Try to imagine what it’s going to be like, Ursa. We’ll have chickens in a couple of days. Fresh eggs! You haven’t begun to see how this planet will look.” He waves a hand at the forest. “Rabbits, squirrels, and wild boar in the woods. Fish shimmering in the water. Cows and chickens in the farms. Full food chains, everywhere.”

  I shudder a little. They’re experimenting with eggs, as chickens are sustainable with all this space, but they’re not planning to reintroduce meat into our generation’s diet. I know they ate it on Alpha, but it’s an inefficient energy source, so we never had it on the ship. And I’m fine with that. Who wants to eat corpses?

  Reminded of my hunger, I pull the mealpack from my bag.

  “Is it okay if I stick with this for now?”

  Sabik laughs. “Sure. Let’s have a picnic. I know a better place than this, and if we’re lucky, we can grab some more food on the way. Follow me.”

  He’s back in the trees before I can stop him or ask where we’re meant to get food. So I shove my mealpack ba
ck into my bag and scramble after him. Fortunately, he’s going slower now — partly because there’s no path here, and partly because he stops every few steps and checks at his feet. A couple of times he bends over, pulls up a patch of the undergrowth with his good hand, and shoves it in his bag.

  We have to push our way through branches as the forest grows darker around us. Climb over raised roots. I can see why they engineered the glowferns. It makes it easier to see where you’re going, but it casts a sinister light on my legs, and I can’t help checking around me for any glimpse of teeth among the branches.

  I’m just about to ask Sabik if we can go back when there’s a strange hiss. At first, I barely catch it over my own breath. I think it’s the wind picking up, but there’s no change in the breeze on my skin, and it’s getting louder, clearer, changing into a splashing, bubbling noise. There’s more light ahead as the trees thin, and then we step out of the forest, and there, a few paces ahead of us, is a river.

  It’s shallow — about knee deep — and large rocks peek out. The gurgling, rushing noise sounds as if the water is talking to us. Laughing at us.

  Sabik spreads his arms wide, proudly.

  “Is it safe?”

  “We’re not going swimming. We’re fine.”

  “What about flash floods? They told us to stay away from the rivers in case of flash floods.”

  “Those only happen after heavy rain or a sudden thaw.”

  I stare at the water. The sunlight skims over the surface, glittering like knives. There’s no ice now. It’s warmed up a lot since Maia died. But still, I take a step back.

  “Can’t we go somewhere else?”

  “You used to like visiting the water.”

  “Not since they found her body.”

  Sabik’s eyes go wide. “Sorry. I should have thought.”

  “You know it’s not safe. Are you trying to kill me?”

  “Ursa, it’s okay. We’ll stay back from the water.”

  But words are pouring out of me. “What were you thinking? The whole planet is unsafe. Look at your hand. And what about Seginus or Perseus? What about Orion? We’re not ready for this. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Of course there’s danger. But that’s true of everywhere, even the Venture. I love this planet.”