Sean found he could go no further than a few steps inside the doorway, which made David stop and stare.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Memories of their shared past were flooding over him. “It’s like nothing’s changed …”
David looked chagrined at that. “I work no differently than I did years ago. It makes no sense to alter the configuration.” He motioned to the nearest bench. “Please, it’s right here.”
Still staring in wonder, Sean followed, the sound of his footsteps lost in the vast darkness of the factory’s hollow interior. David motioned to a set of three microscopes, indicating that Sean should look into the first. Sean reluctantly leaned down to the leftmost, putting one eye to the black eyepiece. The view showed a tight pattern of tubular green cells backlit by a disk of quinta incendia. “These look like pollen tubes.”
“They are,” David said. “Can you guess what species they came from?”
Sean stood, his ligature whirring loudly in the relative silence of the place. “I’m not your student anymore. Keep your questions to yourself and tell me why you’ve brought me here.”
David winced, but recovered quickly. “Do you know where I’ve been for the past thirty-eight months, Sean?”
“I’ve no earthly idea.”
“I’ve been in the Amazon, studying the plant life there. Did you know there’s a higher concentration of haulms in the Amazon basin?”
“I’d heard something about it, yes.” In fact, Sean had been reading many of the journals coming out of the university. The pain he experienced day in and day out—not to mention the efforts he went through to keep it in check—prevented him from pursuing the field of botany as he once had, but his love for it was as strong as ever, so he read when he could, keeping up on the field as much as his quiet times allowed him.
“What you’re seeing are the pollen tubes of Victoria amazonica, the water lily. They’re normal, healthy, rapid-growth cells, yes? Now take a look at the second scope.”
“David …”
“Please, Sean. Just take a look.”
The urge in Sean to deny David anything he was looking for was strong, but there was also a fire within him, a strong curiosity for knowledge, especially where it related to the Jovians. He stepped up to the second microscope and bent down, the muscles along his shoulders and spine and hips aching dully from the attention. Within he saw a similar slide of cells. They were shaped the same, but their color was wrong. They were damaged and crumbling, though from what, Sean had no idea.
“What are these?” Sean said as he studied them carefully.
“Those are the same cells exposed to the influence of the haulms’ roots.”
Sean stood. “Their roots?”
David nodded. “At the center of the Amazon basin, we noticed that many of the plants near the haulms looked weakened where they hadn’t been only a month or two before. We took careful samples of dozens of different varieties, studying their growth—or in this case, their decay. In the middle of the rain forest, one of the most fertile places in the world, Sean, we found that these plants were dying.”
“There might be any number of reasons for that.”
“Indeed there might be, but we’d been studying that area for nearly two years already. We know its ecosystem intimately, and there was no reason for them to decay in the manner we saw. Rain was plentiful, as always. The nutrient levels in the soil were all within acceptable ranges. We found no traces of toxins.” David stepped up to the third microscope. “But what we did note was that the phenomenon started a mere few weeks after the arrival of the pods, the rough timeframe we estimate it took the pods to completely fuse with the haulms.”
“You’re suggesting the pods themselves had something to do with this.”
“I am.”
Sean pictured the haulms spread high above the basin, the ponderous pods lowering and attaching. Just how conscious were these inscrutable beings? To date they’d exhibited no form of communication—either with one another or with humanity—that earthly science might detect. “Perhaps it’s a leaching of the soil near the haulms.”
David nodded like a professor to his prized student. “In the early weeks of our detecting the phenomenon, the withering was stronger near the base of the haulms, but since then, the rate of decay in the more remote areas has been strengthening, and now, since that equalization has occurred, the rate of decay has been steadily increasing.”
Sean’s mind was racing. “The roots…They’re forming a colony.”
David’s head jerked back. “Very good…It took us a long while to confirm those very suspicious, but we now believe it to be true. The pods have created a vast network beneath the Amazon Forest and are starting to bleed the life from it.”
“Wait a tick. Bleed? Some undiscovered Jovian byproduct causing decay is one thing, but you’re implying intent.”
“Not intent, exactly. I’ve no idea if there’s true intelligence—or anything we would recognize as intelligence—within those pods, but the beings that have arrived on our planet have to sustain themselves somehow. It’s nature’s most basic law.”
“Yes, but to suggest that they’re bleeding us seems like a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it?”
In answer to this, David stepped up to the third microscope and motioned to it.
Sean stared at it, a feeling of dread blooming within him. He stepped closer, leaned down, and stared into the eyepiece, the aches in his body now all but forgotten. Within he saw a similar slide of pollen tubes, but in the center was a very different cluster of cells. These were unlike anything Sean had ever seen. They were oddly shaped, with a strange ochre color and spicules reaching out from the walls of each cell. This microscope, unlike the other two, clearly had a quinta essentia filter in the lens arrangement. Sean could tell from the bright chromatic aberrations present, in the interior of the cells especially. It was one of David’s greatest contributions to the world of science, made and shared freely twenty years ago, well before Sean had started working with him. But this was very different than the ones Sean was familiar with. When he’d worked with David fifteen years ago, they’d been forced to capture images on daguerrotype plates, a process that—depending on how busy the university’s development labs were—took a day or two from exposure to viewable image.
This was an incredible breakthrough. The lens allowed him to see the fifth element itself with the naked eye as it moved through the aether.
David had proven without a doubt—shortly after the creation of lenses like the one being used here—not merely that quinta essentia could be viewed and measured, but that it pooled within all living things. It did, in fact, run throughout the entire universe, but where there was life, quinta essentia thrived. No one knew if it was created or if—the amount of quinta essentia being constant—it was merely drawn toward life, but experiment after experiment proved that life of any kind would accrete more of the fifth element as it grew.
And here, for the first time known to man, was one form of life drawing quinta essentia from another. The study of the elements was still a relatively new science, but nothing like this had ever been seen before. It had never even been considered.
“This means that,” Sean began. “This means… Does it happen to all life? Animals? Insects? Sea life?”
David nodded soberly. “Lower life forms—less complex life forms—are apparently more susceptible than animals and humans. Bacterial life in the Amazon is being decimated. We have more evidence that worms and other invertebrates are weakening, and that soon they’ll be dying in greater and greater numbers. And after that, it will start to affect us.” He paused for effect. “If it hasn’t already …”
“Why the Amazon?”
“Because life there is so vital. If the Jovians can sense the fifth element, then it stands to reason the haulms would have been drawn there.”
Sean shook his head. This was all so much to digest. “You’re talking about complete destruction, t
he loss of all life on Earth.”
“I am. It’s coming, Sean, and sooner than we know.”
“Then we go to the Royal Society. We tell them of your findings.”
“I would, but my history with them, Sean… After what happened with the two of us, they wouldn’t trust anything I offered up to them.” Sean opened his mouth to object, but David raised his hand and talked over him. “They’d open up a commission. They’d study the phenomenon.”
“As is proper.”
“Under normal circumstances I’d agree with you, but you know what will happen. They’ll examine every single thing I’ve done. They’ll insist on an expedition of their own making be sent to South America. They’ll demand they be allowed to make their own fluorite lenses, and none of them can make the kind I have here. They’re years behind me. All of them. But that wouldn’t stop them from demanding to know how they’re made, to know the process. They’d make their own, and they’d test those. And even then, even if all their findings were to corroborate what you and I already know to be true, there would be some that would claim that the potential effects aren’t as serious as we imagine, that the pods may, in fact, be benevolent, that they’re transforming the world for the better.”
“We could disprove that easily enough.”
“Yes, given time. But what we’re talking about is years of effort. I fear we have only months to do something about this, perhaps only weeks.”
“Then what are you suggesting?”
“There may be a way to reach them, to speak to them on another level.”
Sean shook his head, completely confused. “How can anyone speak to the pods? We’ve tried everything.”
David frowned. “We’ve hardly scratched the surface. There could be any number of ways to communicate with them.”
“Which would take years on its own.”
“That would be true if we didn’t already have clues.” David seemed to gather himself. “Our experiment, Sean. When we—when you—touched that basic plane of existence, I believe we were completely successful in our goals.”
“Successful?” Sean shook his arms, his muscles aching from the effort now that he’d been relatively idle for so long. “I was ruined, David! My life was ruined! How can you call that successful?”
“Whatever might have happened to you—and know that I will regret that to my dying day—you cannot deny that you were able to submerse yourself in quinta essentia. For a time, as our models predicted, you were quinta essentia.”
Understanding began to dawn on Sean. “You want me to do it again.”
“There’s no one else who can.”
“Then you do it.”
His face turned melancholy at this. “I wish I could. But I can’t. Not yet, in any case. I have to take measurements. I have to refine the process.”
“Then find someone else to volunteer for your bloody mad schemes!”
“I can’t do that, either. For all we know, there’s something specific about you, your makeup, that allowed you to complete the transition.”
Sean stepped up to David until they were almost chest-to-chest. “Do you have any idea the sort of life I’ve had since that day?”
“I can only imagine, Sean, and I’m—”
Sean poked him in the chest. “Truly sorry…Yes, I’ve heard it before. There hasn’t been a single day, not even after the Royal Society built this damned ligature for me, that I haven’t thought about killing myself. The pain is constant, running through every part of me like fire I can never rid myself of, not truly. You can’t know how that scratches away at the mind. It grates constantly, tearing me down until I’m raw from it! Maddened!”
David tried to speak again, but Sean shoved him backward so hard that he fell with a satisfying crash and skidded along the well-worn floorboards.
“You said all would be well, and then the experiment failed. I could have swallowed that. I might have gone on with something approaching a clear conscience, but you abandoned me! You claimed I’d done it on my own, that I’d stolen your research to claim the glory of being the first to touch quinta essentia!”
David looked up at him from the floor, his eyes, his face, filled with shame. It was unlike anything Sean had seen, even in the aftermath of their failed experiment. “Why didn’t you give me up, Sean?”
Sean tightened his hands into fists until they shook from it. “Because you were brilliant! You are brilliant. You have the kind of mind that comes along once a century. Once a millennium. You were going to do so much. So very much. Who was I to deny that to humanity? Who was I to claim that you couldn’t continue your work?”
David shrugged, pushing his spectacles back into place. “They found out anyway.”
They had. Of course they had. David had been stripped of rank and all the credentials granted by the University. Sean had been working toward his degree, using the money David could spare to pay him, hoping to earn his degree, become a Doctor Elementalis like David, but that had all changed after the accident. Afterwards, he could worry only about his body, about keeping it alive until the doctors from the Royal Society came up with something, anything, to help him, and even then, he would have a long way to go to repair the damage he and David had caused to his career. No matter that they’d eventually found David guilty of gross negligence in the pursuit of science. They hadn’t absolved Sean from his part in it.
After standing and adjusting his shirt, David stared Sean in the eye. “This is the world we’re talking about here, Sean. Not you and me. Not the Society. But everyone. Life on Earth.”
Sean felt consumed. He felt betrayed all over again. “I could die, David. Or are you going to give me assurances again?”
“No, you’re all too right. You could die, Sean. And there’s more. In a way, I believe the two of us are responsible for this entire series of events.”
“Responsible?” Sean felt confused. Angry. He wanted to run. He wanted to use his enhanced muscles to punish David for what he’d done, make him feel what he felt every day.
“I’m surprised you haven’t pieced it together yet. Our experiment. Fifteen years ago, we touched the very fabric of quinta essentia.” His eyes seemed to bore into Sean’s. “A mere two years before the haulms arrived.”
“Two years,” Sean said, ready to argue, but his mind was already racing through the calculations. Theories abounded about how quickly one might travel through space using elemental drives, but David himself—shortly before he’d been discredited—had put a new one forth: a way to travel by distorting and drawing upon the warp and woof of quinta essentia. According to David’s calculation, two years and ten days, roughly, was by a strange twist of probability the time it would take to travel from one world to nearly any other. Quinta essentia’s pull, converse to popular opinion in the science community, was stronger as the distance increased, which led to a tethering effect that might allow a starship—or an extraterrestrial being—to draw itself from one planet in the universe to another.
He thought back from the date they’d run the experiment to the first recorded sighting of the haulms. Two years and seventeen days. A mere six days off from David’s calculation. How could he have missed it?
He knew why, of course. He had still been in the thick of his rehabilitation then. The University had been furious, but many were concerned about their liability, so to make things look as though they were being magnanimous, they offered Sean a chance to receive their first set of human ligature. He’d accepted, for it meant a chance at life—some sort of life––however painful it might be. While he’d been there recuperating in the hospital, he’d hardly seen a single haulm—a few from the small window of his room, a few more from the place he was forced to exercise his muscles with the newly installed ligature, so the arrival of the Jovians, and whatever relationship they might have had to his experiment, simply hadn’t been on his mind.
But now the link was undeniable. Six days was certainly a reasonable time for the Jovians to mobilize and la
unch the haulm seeds toward Earth. They were parasites, then. Creatures poised like spiders on a web, waiting for the telltale signs of planets that were not only capable of storing quinta essentia, but had advanced to the point that there would be an abundance, enough for them to travel there, to revitalize themselves, perhaps reproduce, and then begin the process all over again.
He might have felt burdened by this new information—he should have—but the truth was this was incredibly freeing. To know that he might have the ability to help gave him hope and a sense of purpose that had been nearly snuffed out by their past failure. And David was right. Whatever success they’d achieved last time might have had everything to do with Sean himself. If he denied David’s request, there was no telling whether it would work for anyone else, or, even if it did work, how long it would take to perfect.
He had to do it. Not for David—certainly not for David—but for everyone else. For Therese. For his family. For the world.
“Where do we begin?” Sean asked.
David’s smile was slow in coming. He waved to the corner of the large open space, where a set of stairs led down. “In the basement, Sean. We can begin right now.”
* * *
In the basement of the factory was a set of equipment, clearly well cared for, that warred with the dark wooden rafters and uneven stone walls. Vats of glass containing a glowing amber liquid could have provided much of the light, but there were lamps of quinta incendia placed all around, their shaded points of light burning bright sapphire blue.
Sean stepped into the padded leather seat within a complex set of mechanical arms and lenses and tubes, and when he was comfortable, Vidnas, David’s assistant, secured him into it using triple-thick leather straps. As usual, David had thought well ahead. Sean’s ligature was strong, and they couldn’t risk him ripping his way out of them during the experiment itself.
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