Of a Note in a Cosmic Song; Part Four

by Nōnen Títi

  “How did you know how to talk to it?” Kunag asked Nini that night.

  “I’m not sure,” Nini admitted. She didn’t think she’d talked, only communicated a feeling.

  The next encounter with something new was Hani’s, a few days later. “Oh shoosh, yuck!”

  Her voice came from behind some stalky trees – which, according to Saski, resembled a cluster of organ pipes stuck to a common base – and was followed by a call for help.

  When Kunag got there he found Hani hopping on one foot while shaking the other in a wild manner to get rid of the slimy substance it was covered with.

  “Hold me,” she said.

  Kunag let her lean so she could stand still and let the slime move down on its own accord. Her trouser-leg was dry where it had come off. Once on the ground, the ooze formed a puddle as if made by rain.

  “We’ve seen this before. It isn’t water. It’s alive,” Maike said.

  Kunag agreed. It was like the film that covered the ocean.

  “Is it an animal?” Hani asked.

  Yako thought it may be a colony of lots of tiny animals or plants, a bit like algae. Leyon determined it was different from that in the western hills. The drops were bigger and looked like what had rained down on them when first building the settlement. He let Kunag have a look through his magnifying glass. Inside were tiny rolled-up strands, surrounded by bubbles of jelly.

  Kunag tried to draw it for the record, like he had tried to draw the coils, but just a puddle or a tumbleweed, or even a shelter didn’t mean anything special once on the plastipack. What made these things special was their strange behaviour and he either couldn’t draw that or he got in trouble for trying.

  What he could draw were the amazing landscapes they were confronted with from time to time. As he stepped out on some rocks, all of a sudden there was an open space with a canopy of vegetation below, and it looked green. It could have been a forest on DJar as viewed from above. The steep drop in the land made Kunag a little dizzy and he stepped back just in case.

  “You’re lucky you didn’t go running,” Sinti told Leyon.

  “A valley of trees. A real valley!” Gos exclaimed, staring down.

  “I hate to shatter your dreams, but those aren’t trees,” Marya told him, and pointed to a part of the canopy that seemed to float on air.

  “It looks like panels of moss,” Doret said.

  “They can’t just hang around. They have to rest on something,” Hani said, but it looked like she was wrong. DJar logic didn’t work on Kun DJar.

  “The only way we’ll find out is by going down there… but not this way,” Maike said.

  “Can’t we stop for a while, so I can draw it?” Kunag begged. The floating green canopy bathed in Kunlight had to be beautiful enough for a small delay.

  “Let’s vote on that, shall we? If we stop here to draw, we’ll spend another cold night at the top. If we find our way down into this valley a bit, there may be less wind and we’ll have shelter.”

  Kunag was outvoted eleven to one.

  It was still light when the sound of a fast-moving stream led them to a good spot to camp. The canopy, now above them, was no more attached to any of the growths than a cloud was. It functioned more like an inverted umbrella. Kunlight came through only faintly, but moisture was trapped underneath it. It was so wet that the soil had turned to mud and stuck to their shoes. The protective plastic sheeting they carried in case of rain came in handy draped over the ground to put the mats on top of.

  On the positive side, the wind-free area allowed for a proper fire, without the danger of the wet plants catching, and, thus, the chance of warm food for the first time in two kor.

  “Couldn’t we spend a few days here?” Wolt asked Maike. “I’d like to do some writing.”

  “Yes, give us the chance to explore a bit,” Marya said.

  “And draw,” Kunag added.

  “Please have some feelings. You drive us like cattle. I feel like a bati.” Leyon emphasized his dramatic plea by making bati sounds, and started prancing around like one, turning it into a comedy performance, which had them all roaring with laughter.

  “I seem to have no choice. How about we stay three days?” Maike asked.

  Kunag liked her like that; she still had water in her eyes. He leaned against the base of an organ-tree and watched the firelight reflect on their floating shelter above. The dancing shadows also played over the faces of his companions. He answered Sinti’s smile, without any intentions, but she immediately came over to sit beside him.

  “What did I ever do to you?” she asked.

  “Nothing, Sinti.”

  “So why are you being so angry all the time?”

  “I’m not angry.”

  “You are too. You’re just like your sister!”

  She stood up in a hurry after saying that, grabbing a stalk of the tree to pull herself up on. As she did that, the limb crumbled and Sinti landed right back on top of Kunag. Sets, if not masses, of moving pieces of the stalk scattered in all directions. Sinti started screaming and didn’t stop.

  Kunag, himself horrified by the bombardment of life forms, pushed against her as hard as he could so she’d move. Yako eventually took her off him and shook her until she was quiet. Kunag was pulled to his feet, and hands from all sides helped brush off whatever it was that had covered him.

  “It wasn’t a stalk at all,” Hani said, sitting on her knees with the battery lamp shining onto the floor. She inspected the rest of the tree and concluded that only the base and one of the tube-like limbs was solid.

  “Here, look,” she said and jumped out of the way as another stalk disintegrated.

  “But if it isn’t a tree, why do these things pretend it is?” Gos asked.

  “Camouflage, maybe.”

  “Which would mean they are prey for something.”

  That set off another discussion which Kunag, still shaken, only listened to. Things weren’t what they seemed; you could never tell.

  Nini checked Sinti and Kunag to see if these scatterers had bitten them or caused some skin reaction, but they hadn’t. When the scare was over and the tiny creatures had returned to playing stalks, the people spread their mats in the small central area that was clear of trees – fake or real. Leyon was only too happy to put his mat close to Sinti’s to comfort her.

  A similar encounter took place a kor later when Wolt tried to sit on a rock that turned out to be no rock at all. Once again, it was a colony of uncountable mini-organisms.

  Yako scooped up a handful of them to see what it was that made them stick together. He found no resin or anything of the sort, but to his surprise the compass needle went out of control. “Does anybody have a magnet?” he asked.

  Leyon, of course, did.

  “Have a look.”

  In silence they all followed Yako’s manipulations of the magnet, with which he could change the position of the scatterers. The magnifying glass, also from Leyon’s pockets, proved there were two kinds. Both looked like beans with a tight belt at their centre, but one had little spikes at both ends, while the other had cilia. The cilia beans were repelled by the magnet until Yako turned it around.

  “No wonder the generator killed them,” Hani said.

  “Maybe we should leave them alone,” Saski suggested, since the magnet could injure them.

  Yako let them back onto the ground, where they quickly bonded with their opposites to create a new formation. He acknowledged that his compass must have been wrong and the moons were more reliable.

  Then Gos found something that was even stranger, not because of what it was, but because of where.

  “Have a good look,” he said, showing them a tiny green plant he had found growing between the organ bases.

  They all had a look and concluded that these were the DJar seedlings. There were many of them, seemingly growing in this forest.

  “How is that possible?”

  “Maybe they got washed away with the flood and stranded he
re,” Sinti suggested.

  “Don’t be stupid. The flood washed things to the sea, not up the mountains,” Hani replied.

  “You explain it then, if you’re so much cleverer than me,” Sinti pouted, but Hani couldn’t.

  Another encounter with life occurred when they reached the next high-up plateau. They walked into a bluish cloud that gave them trouble breathing and forced them to turn around. Kunag had been lucky, having been at the rear, so he was back out quickly, but those at the front had fits of coughing and a lot of trouble getting their breath back. Marya concluded that whatever was suspended in the cloud was clogging their lungs.

  After having caught some of it in a plastic pot and examined it with the looking glass, the answer appeared right in front of them. This was the life Kalim had said survived in clouds like plankton in the sea. They were different colours, mostly blue-green, and they resembled the bubbles they had found in the puddles on the ground: The air was literally too thick to breathe.

  In order to cross the plateau, and after trying several items, Nini tore up one of her blouses made from a very fine material, so they each had a filter for their mouth and nose to make breathing possible, but they didn’t feel comfortable until they were in the next valley and they slept with the filters on, just in case.

  “If it’s raining life, and that life is part of the water cycle, then it must be evaporated with the water from the sea and transported here,” Hani said.

  “See,” Sinti replied. “The seedlings could have come to the mountains too.”

  Though it seemed really unlikely, nobody could argue Sinti’s logic.

  Kunag did his best to draw the strange life forms, but it was hard to express what it was while drawing what it wasn’t. Certainly, Leyon could no longer complain about a lack of excitement, but this was not an ideal place for a settlement. How long before they’d be on the other side of Maike’s heaps of dirt?

  “That’s not the worst thing,” Wolt said. “We’ll have to get back again.”

  MUD LAKES AND REED PONDS

  According to Wolt, who kept a calendar, it had taken nine kor to cross the mountains and Station Five was now in its last moon. Ahead lay the flat that led to the other coast. The temperature had increased as they descended from the mountains, but the life-clouds, which they’d encountered several times at the top, came down with them – or rather, they appeared to sit on the ground here, so that they still had to cover their faces. Now they were truly wading through thick air and Kunag’s feet were heavy with moisture, which caused blisters.

  “I feel like a fish,” Marya said. “If only we could have gills then we could simply scoop the oxygen from between those drops.”

  The clear mountain streams turned into rivulets, which collected in pools or lakes, around which these life-clouds hovered. In between them, they could breathe normally.

  Compared to the lush valleys, this land was near barren. All that grew was clinging to scattered rocks, some of it thin, downy, fungi-like, while other bits were more like moss – spongy and thick, but grey. Most of the vegetation they found stood inside the lakes, like the tall, dark grey reeds. Well… they could have been reeds, until they started moving. Wolt saw it first when they had just put down their packs at the edge of a small lake. “Look at that!”

  The reeds that had been in the middle moved toward the shore, apparently of their own will. Even though there was no logical explanation for that, each of them agreed that it was the appearance of the expedition that had caused this migration. Saski spoke it first. “It’s as if we’re some travelling road show that the locals come and watch.”

  “Don’t be silly; they’re plants,” Hani said.

  “How can they be plants if they’re watching us?” Leyon asked.

  “When is a plant a plant and when is it an animal?” Saski wanted to know.

  “They’re not; they’re plamals and animants,” Doret said, and explained that his father had used those words ever since coming to the planet. “That way you don’t miss things, because your mind isn’t stuck to one way of thinking,” he clarified.

  “Maybe they’re studying us. They’ll report back to their leaders,” Marya joked that night, when they had set up camp on top of the rain cover sheet to protect the mats from the wet soil. She pretended to be a reed and talked, in a funny stiff voice, as if giving a report.

  “The individuals of this species hobble around on two sticks and cover themselves with cloth, their mouths included, for no apparent reason other than to get it wet and dirty. So far they have managed well on a diet of our native brothers, but they’re lacking the ability to keep it inside. In fact, they seem to be designed to lose half their sustenance out the other end after a few days, which goes to show that evolution does not always produce the most economic and intelligent of designs. Furthermore, this consumption should be considered a threat and I advice we follow the example of our flagellant brothers and give them all a good spanking.”

  By this time they were all in stitches, Maike included.

  Further away from the mountains, as Station Five turned into Station Six, the air got thinner and the size of the lakes increased, but they seemed muddier, while, along with the moist air and the life-clouds, the last of the rivulets also vanished. The land in between was dry, dusty, and warm. The sky was now an orange-red, darkening at dusk, but the nights didn’t get completely dark. In the daytime Kun appeared more red than yellow and the haze made it all diffuse.

  For drinking water they tried to set up the evaporation tent while preparing a campsite near a large reed-lake, but it produced not one drop. According to Yako, that was because Kun didn’t radiate enough heat. Marya believed they had made a mistake in the setup, and Gos thought that tiny life forms kept the water from evaporating.

  Kunag didn’t know. All he knew was that having water was the deciding factor for the future of the expedition. Without it they couldn’t go on, and Nini didn’t allow them to drink the muddy contents of the lake.

  The entire evening was spent discussing every possible option from boiling the lake water to surviving on the natural juices of the tubers they carried. Nobody wanted to admit that this may be the end of their journey, that they’d failed the challenge.

  “It’s stupid that we have so much wet around us and nothing to drink. Can’t we just squeeze the moisture out of the reeds?” Doret asked.

  Ready to put action to his words, he reached out to the tall vegetation at the edge of the lake, but the reeds moved away. Reminded of the coils, he didn’t try again.

  “We can give it one more day and see what lies ahead,” Maike suggested.

  “We can’t keep walking away from a source of fresh water. The last proper supply is already a day behind us,” Yako replied.

  “There may be good water underground,” Hani said hopefully.

  “What do you suggest we do – dig it up with our hands?”

  “Marya’s idea of returning to the last stream and filling all possible vessels with water was also rejected by Yako; they’d need safe water readily available or they’d have to turn back first thing in the morning.

  More hungry than thirsty, Kunag accepted the dry zibot meat from the emergency supply before going to his mat, but he couldn’t sleep. Memories plagued his mind; he didn’t want to go back to town.

  Kunag was woken by something cold and wet that slapped his face. Trickles of water started running down his neck and back when he sat up. In front of him were the faces of the six women, all laughing. The water that had woken him came from a piece of the moss-like substance they had found draped over the rocks and which was now plastered to his head.

  “Squeeze it,” Hani said.

  Kunag held the piece up and did. A stream of water poured down his arm. “Real water?” he asked. He meant drinkable.

  “Yes.”

  This time Kunag squeezed it above his mouth. It was fresh and clean and helped quench his thirst.

  “How do you know it’s safe?” Wo
lt asked.

  Nini explained that she had tested it last night; Doret had given her the idea. She hadn’t wanted to say anything to avoid giving them false hope. It hadn’t made her sick. “The moss not only soaks up water from the air, but it can be used as a filter. You pour lake water on it and it comes out clean on the other end.”

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” Yako asked.

  “Because thinking is a complicated activity, which you should leave to women,” Maike replied.

  “Oy!” Yako launched his piece of wet moss into her direction. His aim was perfect.

  “That does it. Girls, help me,” Maike said, pulling a large patch of moss off a rock to bombard Yako with.

  Kunag jumped up as the flying pieces came his direction. He threw his moss at Nini, but the girls had the better position, away from the mats, and could avoid it. He looked around for more rocks with moss on it.

  “Sorry boys, but you seem to have run out of ammunition,” Maike taunted, holding up a large piece.

  “We’ll take it off them,” Leyon said, throwing himself around Maike’s waist while pinning her arms down. “So get the sponge!” he yelled at Kunag.

  Maike was laughing while trying to shake Leyon off, so Kunag pried the wet vegetable matter out of her hands. Wolt and Gos had also confiscated some and soon the pieces were flying to and fro until there were only little trinkets left. Everybody was soaked.

  “Does this mean we don’t have to go home yet?” Kunag asked.

  “It does. We’ll explore a bit further. Who knows? Maybe all the way to the other coast. I want to stay here a few days to check what lives in the lake,” Maike answered.

  The joyous mood stayed with them all day. Together they dried the rain sheet and mats and hung their clothes out to dry on the now-bare rocks. Nobody got sick; the moss water was fine for drinking. In fact, it was the only Kun DJar substance that tasted good.