“Thomison, I’ve seen the doctor. I can assure you, there’s no need for it.”
Thomison looked as though he was going to argue with Sean, but just then his eyes went wide, his mouth fell open, and he pulled his cap off and clutched it to his chest.
Sean turned. Stared up at the thin layer of clouds high above. They were parting, folding backward as something with a dark, mottled surface drove through from above. It was huge. Massive. Larger than a bloody castle and shaped like an island ripped up from the sea. Its smooth top warred with a ragged underside and the strange tendrils hanging down from below. It floated down, down, down toward Durham, and behind it came more. One, then two, then three, then a dozen.
They lowered themselves, each heading slowly but inexorably toward one of the haulms.
Around him, the city was coming alive, more and more coming out from their homes or stepping away from the day’s early work and staring up at the wonder of it all. Screams came. Children wailed for their mothers. A gun rang out, and then another, rifles and pistols firing ineffectually at this new menace above them. But the Jovians cared for them not at all. To them, the humans running about on the ground below were little more than a host of teeming insects, a minor annoyance at best.
The first of the lowering shapes was nearing its chosen haulm. Thin tendrils reached up from the massive stalk. More reached down from the underside of the pod. And they intertwined, multiplying, strengthening, drawing one another closer until the massive object had secured itself in place.
“What’s it mean, Mister Brannon?” Thomison asked breathlessly.
“I’ve no idea,” Sean replied, “but I can’t imagine it bodes well, can you?”
“No, sir, I cannot.”
* * *
Several months after the Jovians arrived, the steady rain of flakes dwindled and then stopped altogether, but something new soon took its place: a fecund smell wholly alien to the forests and bogs and marshes Sean had ever been to—a byproduct, the botanists said, of the pods’ tendrils attaching to the tops of the haulms. Sean thought it a poor sign. It meant that the haulms had stopped growing, that the pods were nearing maturity, and that the next steps in whatever plans the Jovians had for Earth were nearing.
Or so it seemed to him.
Winter passed and spring arrived. The pods had been catalogued all over Earth, wherever the haulms grew. In point of fact, as far as anyone knew not a single haulm had been left untethered, suggesting an intelligence that couldn’t be explained away as simple extraterrestrial plant life. Fear of the pods and the hatred they’d initially generated were starting to soften. The pods simply were—a new feature of the landscape all over the world—and people were starting to say it was a good thing. What they saw floating over their cities and countrysides was likely the worst of it, they said. The Jovians had come from wherever they’d come, they’d planted their seeds, and they’d grown. Simple as that. Like petunias. And one day, if the science community was right, they’d find something useful from these pods, something revolutionary. They’d come from another world, after all. Who since the days of Ptolemy hadn’t dreamed of this very thing?
Twelve months after the arrival of the pods, there was a breakthrough announcement from the team of botanists who’d convened in Durham. They had been taking weekly samples of the pods using the University’s science platforms—the undersides of which had been infused with quinta aeris—and now claimed the husks were slowly hardening, perhaps in preparation for some transformational event. A regrowth, a seeding. No one knew for certain, but it seemed to make sense. It was a natural organism, and so of course would have some way of reproducing itself.
Sean was pounding out a bar of iron, red and fresh from the forge, a new job after Thomison, the rail yard foreman, had seen to it that Sean had been shown the street. The forge suited him just fine. It let him work his body all he wanted—a thing it needed even more in the colder months—and the owner was rarely around to hear Sean’s groans, which, even Sean had to admit, was a difficult thing to deal with.
Sean was just finishing the forming of the bar he was working on when he heard footsteps, saw the silhouette of a man in a brown suit standing in the entrance to the forge. He blinked against the lowering sun, trying to see who it was.
And then, like a dark dream suddenly returning in the light of day, he recognized him.
“What the bloody hell are you doing here, David?”
David Lock, a scientist Sean had worked with years ago, stepped into the forge. “I’ve come because we need to talk, Sean.”
“Bollocks, we need to talk…” Despite himself, his atrophied muscles began to shake. The ligature was as silent a piece of machinery as there was, but still it betrayed him, its sensors picking up his movements and whirring in response. “I want you to turn around, right now, and leave.”
Instead, David took a step forward. “I didn’t make this journey lightly, Sean. I’ve come bearing news. Critical news. And you’re one of the few people in the world who would have any hope of understanding it.”
“What, some mad new scheme to restore your chair at the University?”
“Nothing of the sort.” David doffed his bowler and gripped its rim tightly. “It’s the Jovians, Sean. I think I know why they’ve come.”
* * *
David led Sean to an abandoned shoe factory that had shut its doors a decade ago, but when David pulled the heavy door aside, rollers squealing in protest, Sean found a science lab within it—a proper, well-equipped, elemental science lab. It smelled of leather, as if nothing save burning the warehouse to the ground would ever rid the place of it, but warring with this, and the other echoes of its sweatshop past, were four precise rows of workbenches with dozens of individual stations, glass beakers and blue flames and fluorite lenses all about, nearly an exact replica of the lab Sean had helped David to run over a dozen years ago.
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.”
&nb
sp; 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, 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 suspicions, 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 lens 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 daguerreotype 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, the 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 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 the pods, 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?”
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