Mary Zee, the communications tech, also went swimming, which left Benton alone in the boat with Reynaldo Valdez, the pilot, a droopy man in his forties who never exerted one joule of effort more than was absolutely necessary. Without a word, Valdez leaned back and closed his puffy, red-rimmed eyes.
Benton endured the bellowing and caterwauling of the trees with gritted teeth. Whoever had named them songtrees must have possessed a tin ear. For that matter, the burly growths with their vaulted roots and purple canopy were not really trees at all, any more than the spiky fans bristling from every hummock were ferns or the rafts of scum were algae. How many of these organisms had the biologists named before breaking off contact with VIVA Control? Labeling things seemed to be mostly what researchers did on these E-type planets. Benton never stayed long enough on any world to learn the exotic names, so he called things by whatever terrestrial analog they brought to mind.
The scrawking of the trees grew louder, like a crescendo of voices in a madhouse. He glanced at his watch. Another half hour or so, and then the breathless calm.
A splashing caught his eye and he jerked. It was Kerry, back-stroking from one songtree to another, her knees and arms churning with each stroke. Inside the helmet her mouth was open wide, as though panting or singing. Had he ever felt so exuberant, even as a child?
Eventually the high-pitched squeals gave way to mutterings, and then to silence. The craft wallowed as three dripping figures climbed aboard, the young woman last. She pulled the helmet away and gave her head a vigorous shake, the long hair whipping out in russet curls. “You should try it, Captain,” she said. “The singing makes you tingle all over.”
“I’ll leave the tingling to you,” said Benton.
She turned away abruptly and moved to her seat.
“Cast off the lines,” he commanded, “and let’s get moving.”
In the stern, Valdez yawned, and reached for the throttle. They swept another circle through the bog, Kerry and Zee sharing the middle seats, Benton and Cummings the bow, on the lookout for movement in the mazy stillness, for a break in the monotonous purple.
“Their bodies couldn’t just vanish,” Benton muttered to the doctor. “The suits would have kept them afloat.”
“If they’re dead,” said Cummings, always the hopeful one. At fifty he was the oldest of the crew, with a squat body and a face as round and blank as a plate. He never ceased to expect good news, no matter how many times he stumbled upon disaster.
Benton ducked as they passed beneath the arching roots of a songtree. “Two months without logging in to Control? Their boat tied up at the dome and their camp a pigsty? Of course they’re dead.”
From behind, Kerry said, “I understand why VIVA wants the data and gear, but why are they so intent on collecting the bodies?”
“Because nobody wants to rot alone and forgotten on some stinking planet,” said Benton.
“When I die, Captain,” said Zee, a thickset woman with the abrasive rapid-fire voice of an auctioneer, “just chop me up and dump me in the fish tank.”
“I’ll do that, Zee.”
“It’s getting too dark to see,” Valdez called.
“It’s light enough,” said Benton. “We’ll finish this circuit and then head back to camp.”
Again he checked his watch—midday back in Oregon, which he still thought of as home, although he visited there only briefly between missions. On Memphis-12 it was late evening, but in the perennial gloom you could only tell it was nightfall because, here and there, phosphorescent stumps began to glow. To some eyes, he thought, the twilit swamp might almost appear beautiful.
Sleep had always seemed to Benton a bite of emptiness out of the day, and he got by on as little as possible. Long after the others had curled up in the antechambers that encircled the dome, he sat at the main console listening to the biologists’ log.
“. . . synchronous variables for sound contour in lower registers . . . songtide enunciation period . . . mimicry blended with improvisation in the mocking-trees . . .”
Skeins of jargon. He punched the fast-forward, released it, heard a rattle of numbers, punched the control again, heard a buzz of polysyllables. He kept skimming the record, without finding any clue to the disappearance of the nine researchers. Toward the end, the log became fragmentary, days passing between entries; he detected a note of boredom, almost of lethargy, as if the ponderous rhythms of the swamp had invaded their blood. But the substance of the entries remained the same—numbers and jargon—so perhaps the boredom he heard was his own.
He shut off the log, rubbed his eyes, then peered through the console window. He imagined the vegetation out there seething, roots groping through the mire. The darkness was broken only by those glowing stumps. On Earth their pale light would have been called foxfire, a kind of fungal decay. No telling what it should be called here, or what caused it.
Startled by a shape blurring the edge of his vision, he swung round. Kerry’s wiry figure, clad in a sleepsuit the color of mint, swayed toward him on bare feet. Her eyes were closed, her lips moved, and her body undulated to whatever music was playing through her headphones.
Benton stood up, hesitated, then grabbed her shoulder and gently shook her.
Her eyes blinked open, dreamy, gray. She removed the headphones, setting her curls jouncing. “What?”
“You’re walking in your sleep.”
She looked about in confusion, then crossed arms over her chest. “Oh, my.”
“You aren’t on anything, are you?”
The confusion in her eyes gave way to indignation. “I’d never touch a chemmie during mission, sir.”
“You’d better not, or I’ll warp you straight home.” Her lips crimped into a hard line. A twitch beneath his hand made him realize he was still clutching her shoulder. He lifted the hand casually, as if no longer feeling the need to steady her. “What were you listening to?”
“Recordings of the songtrees.” The contour of her lips softened. “They’re lovely.”
“Lovely? They sound like bedlam to me.”
“But there are melodies, subtle ones. Sometimes you can almost make out words.” She combed fingers through her sandy hair, clutching a handful and letting it fall over her shoulders. “If you’d go in the water when they’re singing, you could hear.”
“I don’t give a damn about moaning trees. I want those nine bodies.”
“If it’s not rude to ask, sir, do you get any pleasure from exploring new planets?”
He considered a moment before replying, “I get pleasure from finding things.”
“Things?”
“Equipment, tools, people—whatever’s lost.” He felt unaccountably defensive, here in this pocket of light, surrounded by the impenetrable swamp, confronted by a woman still warm from sleep. He added, “I hate for things to be lost.”
“A place for everything and everything in its place?”
He looked sharply at her. Was she mocking him? Her cheeks, he noticed, were lightly freckled, her lashes as pale as gauze, her rosy Irish face unlined. So young—twenty-three, was it? twenty-four?—too young to understand how easily things fall apart. “You’d prefer chaos?”
“No, sir. Of course not.”
“Because that’s how everything trends, don’t you see? Toward increasing disorder, maximum entropy. Everything we’ve made is fragile. If we relax, it will collapse.”
“Is that why you’re out here? To push back chaos?”
He shrugged the question aside. “Back to bed, Kerry, and don’t go wandering.”
Her hand rose in a gesture of apology, but he refused to acknowledge it. She backed away, placing her bare feet carefully as if she were approaching the brink of a cliff.
If the instruments had not assured Benton that each sweep of the boat covered new territory, he would have sworn they kept circling over the same path, for on all that soggy planet there were no shorelines or mountains, no lakes or rivers to mark boundaries, nothing but hectare after he
ctare of swamp. At dusk and dawn he called a halt during songtide, for he did not trust his crew to keep a watchful eye during that nerve-grating din.
Valdez took advantage of these respites to catch up on his sleep, as if he were compensating for a lifetime of wakefulness. Zee and Cummings sometimes played chess, sometimes sat reading on the upthrust knees of songtree roots, sometimes floated lazily in the water. Kerry always swam. Too often, Benton found himself watching her. He would be seated in the bow, mapping search patterns or writing in his log, when the sleek figure would hook his attention and drag his gaze along.
Catching him at this once, Valdez commented drowsily, “Bit of a distraction, isn’t she, Captain?”
“I’m worried about her, is all,” Benton said. “I keep wondering if there’s something in the muck that detox won’t handle. I can’t afford having anyone get sick.”
“No, indeed, sir,” Valdez replied with a skeptical smacking of his lips. “Still and all, she livens things up.”
On the sixth day the scanner guided them to a concentration of metal, which proved to be the nine survival belts, concealed in a hollow stump. Some of the tools were missing, but each belt still carried its locator. Instead of beaming out signals, however, the transmitters were silent.
“They’ve been jammed,” said Zee. “That took some doing.”
By reflex, hands touched the locators at the rescuers’ own waists. Immune to almost any accident, these devices were like amulets guaranteeing eventual return to Earth, dead or alive.
Kerry studied the heap of belts, her face pensive. “They didn’t want to be found.”
Benton turned to the doctor. “You still think they’re alive, Cummings?”
“Well, sir, there’ve been cases—”
“Save it. I don’t want to hear any miraculous survival tales. Let’s just find them and get off this filthy planet. They can’t have gone far without equipment.”
Piece by piece over the next few hours they turned up the missing tools. Everything the scientists brought with them had now been accounted for, except for the scientists themselves. Equipment was easily found, thought Benton, but the human body could be damnably elusive; it dissolved into the landscape. An empath could locate a living body, but not a dead one, and even a live one was hard to find if the competing life-fields were strong. He had brought an empath along to Memphis-12, but after one day in the swamp the man had been driven frantic by the waves emanating from the songtrees. Never fully trusting empaths, who seemed to wear their nerves outside their skin, Benton sent him back up to the orbiting ship. Eyes would have to do.
That night when Kerry stole into his pool of light her eyes were open. Earphones dangled like a necklace about her throat. For a minute after sensing her presence Benton did not look up from the map he was studying. At length he said, “What is it?”
She hesitated, the minty sheen of her sleepsuit flickering at light’s edge, like a specter on the threshold of materiality. “I couldn’t sleep, sir, for thinking about those songs.”
“Isn’t listening to them morning and evening bad enough?” he asked. “You’ve got to listen to recordings half the night?”
“I’m sure I can hear words in the singing.”
“You don’t hear anything of the sort.”
“I do, Captain. Human speech. There are words in French and English and Chinese. Maybe some Russian, too.”
What was her game? She knew perfectly well the missing scientists included native speakers of all those languages. He studied her. She was awake this time, the gray eyes open wide, the fair face bright with excitement. Her voice and gaze were too fresh for someone on chemmies. “Don’t hang back in the dark,” he urged. “Come, sit down, tell me about it.”
She edged closer. The overhead light cast shadows beneath her chin, her breasts. Without sitting down, she said, “They’re sort of like nursery rhymes. Or nonsense poems.”
“Such as?”
She withdrew a notepad from a pocket and began to read: “Pop, popcorn, pickle, participle, pumpernickel, pharmaceutical—”
Benton cut in. “You heard this in that squawking?”
“And a lot more,” she replied, riffling the notepad.
“Strings of words beginning with ‘p’?”
“That’s just a sample. The mocking-trees seem to love rhyming. Their words run in streaks, with a thread of sound stitching them together. ‘Raw, rarity, rhomboid, rib—’”
“I get the idea.”
Kerry sat down next to him, pressing palms together between her thighs and rocking nervously. “I noticed it the first time I went swimming at songtide. No, I thought, I’m just putting human words to alien music. But every time I swam, the impression grew stronger. I’d keep my head underwater, listening, and pretty soon I recognized words in the singing.”
Indulging her, Benton asked, “How do you tell these mocking-trees from the other kinds?”
“They’re the ones with the shiny knees,” she explained, rubbing her own knees for illustration. “Kind of like cypress. Half the recordings are of mocking-tree arias. Like in opera, only in three or four languages, rhyming every way you can imagine.” Unclasping the headset from around her throat, she offered it to him, saying, “Here, listen.”
Reluctantly he took it, hoping to put an end to her raving. The pads against his ears were still warm from resting on her throat. She punched a button and the pandemonium of songtide crashed in on him. He tried to hear something intelligible, but could not. She watched him expectantly, her face uncomfortably close, the freckles a dusting on her cheeks. Her lips were parted, fleshy, pink. He imagined breath eddying in and out. He found himself inclining toward her, only half conscious of the babble in his ears.
Recovering, he tugged away the headset and pulled back. “It’s nothing but noise.”
She stood up in confusion. “You didn’t hear—”
“I heard bleats and warbles and screeches.”
“The words are hard to make out. It takes patience—”
“I have nine corpses to find and a crew to deliver home safely. So forgive me if I don’t have energy left over to decipher gibberish in the middle of the night.”
“But, sir—”
“That’s all.”
He listened to the scuff of her bare feet. He tried looking at the map, but a pang of guilt prompted him to call after her. “Kerry?” The scuffing halted. She was a slim silhouette in the lighted passage. “I know you’re trying to help,” he said. “You could help me a lot more by forgetting this nonsense and sticking to your duties. Understood?”
Her reply was barely audible. “Whatever you say, Captain.”
During the next day’s search, Benton noticed that some of the jutting roots did appear shinier than the rest, like knees gleaming with oil. He could not help recollecting how Kerry had rubbed her own knees while telling him about the mocking-trees.
Valdez broke into the memory. “Do we stop, Captain?”
Benton craned round and blinked at him. “What for?”
“The trees have been singing for several minutes now.”
The noise washed over Benton. How could he have failed to hear? The others were staring curiously at him. “Songtide,” he muttered. “Of course. Tie up here.”
As usual, Kerry was first in the water. Cummings and Zee followed her in, as they often did. But when Valdez forsook his nap in order to join them, Benton began to feel uneasy. The four of them drifted through the swamp, floating on their backs, legs scissoring languidly, eyes shut in the bubble helmets. Their lips were moving and their faces wore a drugged expression of delight. Had they all caught some alien fever?
The clamor of the songtrees kept him from thinking clearly. In the din he fancied he heard a guttural “broom, doom, gloom,” then a rhyming chant that might have been Russian. He cleared his throat irritably. It was only noise. Imagining one heard words in that racket was like seeing shapes in clouds or beasts among the stars.
Kerry flo
ated serenely by. Beneath the helmet her lips never stopped moving.
Benton sat rigidly at his post. He endured the songtide as he would endure any pain.
Once back on board, the four swimmers whispered among themselves, their voices like the scrabbling of insects. Before the craft had proceeded far, Benton spun round. “What are you all mumbling?”
Cummings turned on him that round, pasty face, which even the bloodiest mess could not perturb. “Nothing important, sir.”
“In the water your mouths were gaping like fish and now you’re muttering. What is it?”
“Oh,” said Cummings, glancing at the others, “we were just discussing what we’d heard in the singing.”
“And what did you hear?
“Some old video jingles,” said the doctor.
“Opera for me, sir,” said Valdez.
“I heard show tunes,” Zee confessed.
Kerry clenched her jaw and said nothing.
The boat drifted through the glassy water, the calm air, the unbroken stillness of the drowned forest.
“Listen to me,” Benton said carefully. “You’re all sick. You’ve caught some bug from swimming in that filth. It’s causing you to hallucinate.”
The doctor’s face cracked with a smile, like a flawed plate. “Begging your pardon, sir, but I’d say we’re perfectly healthy. We just like the music. Nothing wrong with that.”
Benton checked his temper. If he lost control, they might all become bait for yet another rescue team. “Cummings,” he said in level tones, “by now even you’ve got to realize those poor bastards are dead. Their camp’s a mess. Their food stores were left open, as if they’d given up eating. They abandoned their ship, their tools, their survival belts and locators. The log dwindles away into incoherent fragments, and finally to silence. Now why?” He fixed each of them in turn with a sober stare. “I think they went mad from listening to those damn trees.”
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