Thump. Thump—
She was watching ahead even as she was arguing, though her attention wasn’t on it. That automatic caution was all that kept her from running off the edge of the world.
Before her—below her—a great cliff dropped away. The trees in the valley soared up. But this was not a tangled jungle: it was a climax forest, a species of tree taller and more densely canopied than any Dharthi had seen. The light below those trees was thick and crepuscular, and though she could hear the rain drumming on their leaves, very little of it dripped through.
Between them, until the foliage cut off her line of sight, Dharthi could see the familiar, crescent-shaped roofs of aboriginal Cytherean structures, some of them half-consumed in the accretions from the forest of smoking stone towers that rose among the trees.
She stood on the cliff edge overlooking the thing she had come half a world by airship and a thousand kilometers on foot to find, and pebbles crumbled from beneath the toes of her adaptshell, and she raised a hand to her face as if Kraken were really speaking into a device in her ear canal instead of into the patterns of electricity in her brain. The cavernous ruin stretched farther than her eyes could see—even dark-adapted, once the shell made the transition for her. Even in this strange, open forest filled with colorful, flitting, flying things.
“Love?”
“Yes?” Kraken said, then went silent and waited.
“I’ll call you back,” Dharthi said. “I just discovered the Lost City of Ishtar.”
Dharthi walked among the ruins. It was not all she’d hoped.
Well, it was more than she had hoped. She rappelled down, and as soon as her shell sank ankle deep in the leaf litter she was overcome by a hush of awe. She turned from the wet, lichen-heavy cliff, scuffed with the temporary marks of her feet, and craned back to stare up at the forest of geysers and fumaroles and trees that stretched west and south as far as she could see. The cliff behind her was basalt—another root of the volcano whose shield was lost in mists and trees. This … this was the clearest air she had ever seen.
The trees were planted in rows, as perfectly arranged as pillars in some enormous Faerie hall. The King of the Giants lived here, and Dharthi was Jack, except she had climbed down the beanstalk for a change.
The trunks were as big around as ten men with linked hands, tall enough that their foliage vanished in the clouds overhead. Trees on Earth, Dharthi knew, were limited in height by capillary action: how high could they lift water to their thirsty leaves?
Perhaps these Cytherean giants drank from the clouds as well as the soil.
“Oh,” Dharthi said, and the spaces between the trees both hushed and elevated her voice, so it sounded clear and thin. “Wait until Zamin sees these.”
Dharthi suddenly realized that if they were a new species, she would get to name them.
They were so immense, and dominated the light so completely, that very little grew under them. Some native fernmorphs, some mosses. Lichens shaggy on their enormous trunks and roots. Where one had fallen, a miniature Cytherean rain forest had sprung up in the admitted light, and here there was drumming, dripping rain, rain falling like strings of glass beads. It was a muddy little puddle of the real world in this otherwise alien quiet.
The trees stood like attentive gods, their faces so high above her she could not even hear the leaves rustle.
Dharthi forced herself to turn away from the trees, at last, and begin examining the structures. There were dozens of them—hundreds—sculpted out of the same translucent, mysterious, impervious material as all of the ruins in Aphrodite. But this was six, ten times the scale of any such ruin. Maybe vaster. She needed a team. She needed a mapping expedition. She needed a base camp much closer to this. She needed to give the site a name—
She needed to get back to work.
She remembered, then, to start documenting. The structures—she could not say, of course, which were habitations, which served other purposes—or even if the aboriginals had used the same sorts of divisions of usage that human beings did—were of a variety of sizes and heights. They were all designed as arcs or crescents, however—singly, in series, or in several cases as a sort of stepped spectacular with each lower, smaller level fitting inside the curve of a higher, larger one. Several had obvious access points, open to the air, and Dharthi reminded herself sternly that going inside unprepared was not just a bad idea because of risk to herself, but because she might disturb the evidence.
She clenched her good hand and stayed outside.
Her shell had been recording, of course—now she began to narrate, and to satlink the files home. No fanfare, just an upload. Data and more data—and the soothing knowledge that while she was hogging her allocated bandwidth to send, nobody could call her to ask questions, or congratulate, or—
Nobody except Kraken, with whom she was entangled for life.
“Hey,” her partner said in her head. “You found it.”
“I found it,” Dharthi said, pausing the narration but not the load. There was plenty of visual, olfactory, auditory, and kinesthetic data being sent even without her voice.
“How does it feel to be vindicated?”
She could hear the throb of Kraken’s pride in her mental voice. She tried not to let it make her feel patronized. Kraken did not mean to sound parental, proprietary. That was Dharthi’s own baggage.
“Vindicated?” She looked back over her shoulder. The valley was quiet and dark. A fumarole vented with a rushing hiss and a curve of wind brought the scent of sulfur to sting her eyes.
“Famous?”
“Famous?”
“Hell, Terran-famous. The homeworld is going to hear about this in oh, about five minutes, given light lag—unless somebody who’s got an entangled partner back there shares sooner. You’ve just made the biggest Cytherean archaeological discovery in the past hundred days, love. And probably the next hundred. You are not going to have much of a challenge getting allocations now.”
“I—”
“You worked hard for it.”
“It feels like …” Dharthi picked at the bridge of her nose with a thumbnail. The skin was peeling off in flakes: too much time in her shell was wreaking havoc with the natural oil balance of her skin. “It feels like I should be figuring out the next thing.”
“The next thing,” Kraken said. “How about coming home to me? Have you proven yourself to yourself yet?”
Dharthi shrugged. She felt like a petulant child. She knew she was acting like one. “How about to you?”
“I never doubted you. You had nothing to prove to me. The self-sufficiency thing is your pathology, love, not mine. I love you as you are, not because I think I can make you perfect. I just wish you could see your strengths as well as you see your flaws—one second, bit of a squall up ahead—I’m back.”
“Are you on an airship?” Was she coming here?
“Just an airjeep.”
Relief and a stab of disappointment. You wouldn’t get from Aphrodite to Ishtar in an AJ.
Well, Dharthi thought. Looks like I might be walking home.
And when she got there? Well, she wasn’t quite ready to ask Kraken for help yet.
She would stay, she decided, two more sleeps. That would still give her time to get back to base camp before nightfall, and it wasn’t as if her arm could get any more messed up between now and then. She was turning in a slow circle, contemplating where to sling her cocoon—the branches were really too high to be convenient—when the unmistakable low hum of an aircar broke the rustling silence of the enormous trees.
It dropped through the canopy, polished-copper belly reflecting a lensed fish-eye of forest, and settled down ten meters from Dharthi. Smiling, frowning, biting her lip, she went to meet it. The upper half was black hydrophobic polymer: she’d gotten a lift in one just like it at Ishtar base camp before she set out.
The hatch opened. In the cramped space within, Kraken sat behind the control board. She half rose, crouched under the low
roof, came to the hatch, held out her right hand, reaching down to Dharthi. Dharthi looked at Kraken’s hand, and Kraken sheepishly switched it for the other one. The left one, which Dharthi could take without strain.
“So I was going to take you to get your arm looked at,” Kraken said.
“You spent your allocations—”
Kraken shrugged. “Gonna send me away?”
“This time,” she said, “… no.”
Kraken wiggled her fingers.
Dharthi took her hand, stepped up into the GEV, realized how exhausted she was as she settled back in a chair and suddenly could not lift her head without the assistance of her shell. She wondered if she should have hugged Kraken. She realized that she was sad that Kraken hadn’t tried to hug her. But, well. The shell was sort of in the way.
Resuming her chair, Kraken fixed her eyes on the forward screen. “Hey. You did it.”
“Hey. I did.” She wished she felt it. Maybe she was too tired.
Maybe Kraken was right, and Dharthi should see about working on that.
Her eyes dragged shut. So heavy. The soft motion of the aircar lulled her. Its soundproofing had degraded, but even the noise wouldn’t be enough to keep her awake. Was this what safe felt like? “Something else.”
“I’m listening.”
“If you don’t mind, I was thinking of naming a tree after you.”
“That’s good,” Kraken said. “I was thinking of naming a kid after you.”
Dharthi grinned without opening her eyes. “We should use my Y chromosome. Color blindness on the X.”
“Ehn. Ys are half-atrophied already. We’ll just use two Xs,” Kraken said decisively. “Maybe we’ll get a tetrachromat.”
JOE R. LANSDALE
Prolific Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale has won the Edgar Award, the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the American Mystery Award, the International Crime Writers’ Award, and six Bram Stoker Awards. Although perhaps best known for horror/thrillers such as The Nightrunners, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Bottoms, The God of the Razor, and The Drive-In, he also writes the popular Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mystery series—Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, Bad Chili, Rumble Tumble, Captains Outrageous, Devil Red, and Hyenas—as well as Western novels such as Texas Night Riders and Blood Dance, and totally unclassifiable cross-genre novels such as Zeppelins West, The Magic Wagon, and Flaming London. His other novels include Dead in the West, The Big Blow, Sunset and Sawdust, Act of Love, Freezer Burn, Waltz of Shadows, The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, Leather Maiden, Deranged by Choice, and Edge of Dark Water. He has also contributed novels to series such as Batman and Tarzan. His many short stories have been collected in By Bizarre Hands, Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back, The Shadows, Kith and Kin, The Long Ones, Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy, Bestsellers Guaranteed, On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks, Electric Gumbo, Writer of the Purple Rage, Fist Full of Stories, Steppin’ Out, Summer ’68, Bumper Crop, The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent, Selected Stories by Joe R. Lansdale, For a Few Stories More, Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories, The King and Other Stories, Deadman’s Road, an omnibus, Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal, Shadows West (with John L. Lansdale), Trapped in the Saturday Matinee, and High Cotton: the Collected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. As editor, he has produced the anthologies The Best of the West, Retro Pulp Tales, Son of Retro Pulp Tales, Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto), Dark at Heart: All New Tales of Dark Suspense (with wife Karen Lansdale), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners, the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology, Cross Plains Universe (with Scott A. Cupp), Crucified Dreams, and The Urban Fantasy Anthology (edited with Peter S. Beagle). An anthology in tribute to Lansdale’s work is Lords of the Razor. His most recent books are a new Hap and Leonard novel, Dead Aim; The Thicket; The Ape Man’s Brother; and a big retrospective collection, Bleeding Shadows. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.
Here he sweeps us along with a man who is wrenched out of his proper place and time and thrown headlong into another world, one that proves even more dangerous than going down with the sinking Titantic …
The Wizard of the Trees
JOE R. LANSDALE
I AM HERE BECAUSE OF A TERRIBLE HEADACHE. I KNOW YOU will want more of an explanation than that, but I can’t give it to you. I can only say I was almost killed when the great ship Titanic went down. There was an explosion, a boiler blowing, perhaps. I can’t say. When the ship dove down and broke in half, I felt as if I broke in half with it.
An object hit me in the head underwater. I remember there was something down there with me. Not anyone on the ship, not a corpse, but something. I remember its face, if you can call it that: full of teeth and eyes, big and luminous, lit up by a light from below, then I was gasping water into my lungs, and this thing was pulling me toward a glowing pool of whirling illumination. It dragged me into warmth and into light, and my last sight of the thing was a flipping of its fishlike tail; and then my head exploded.
Or so it seemed.
When I awoke, I was lying in a warm, muddy mire, almost floating, almost sinking. I grabbed at some roots jutting out from the shoreline and pulled myself out of it. I lay there with my headache for a while, warming myself in the sunlight, then the headache began to pass. I rolled over on my belly and looked at the pool of mud. It was a big pool. In fact, pool is incorrect. It was like a great lake of mud. I have no idea how I managed to be there, and that is the simple truth of it. I still don’t know. It felt like a dream.
With some difficulty I had managed a bunk in steerage on the Titanic, heading back home to my country, the United States of America. I had played out my string in England, thought I might go back and journey out West where I had punched cows and shot buffalo for the railroad. I had even killed a couple of men in self-defense, and dime novels had been written about me, the Black Rider of the Plains. But that was mostly lies. The only thing they got right was the color of my skin. I’m half-black, half-Cherokee. In the dime novels I was described as mostly white, which is a serious lie. One look at me will tell you different.
I was a roughrider with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, and when it arrived in England to perform, they went back and I had stayed on. I liked it for a while, but as they say, there’s no place like home. Not that I had really had one, but we’re speaking generally here.
I struggled to my feet and looked around. Besides the lake of mud, there were trees. And I do mean trees. They rose up tall and mighty all around the lake, and there didn’t seem anything to do but to go among them. The mud I wouldn’t go back into. I couldn’t figure what had happened to me, what had grabbed me and pulled me into that glowing whirlpool, but the idea of its laying a grip on me again was far less than inviting. It had hauled me here, wherever here was, and had retreated, left me to my own devices.
The mud I had ended up in was shallow, but I knew the rest of the lake wasn’t. I knew this because as I looked out over the vast mire, I saw a great beast moving in it; a lizard, I guess you’d call it. At least that was my first thought, then I remembered the bones they had found out in Montana some years back and how they were called dinosaurs. I had read a little about it, and that’s what I thought when I saw this thing in the mud, rising up gray and green of skin, lurching up and dipping down, dripping mud that plopped bright in the sunlight. Down it went, out of sight, and up again, and when it came up a third time it had a beast in its mouth; a kind of giant slick, purple-skinned seal, its blood oozing like strawberry jam from between the monster’s teeth.
It may seem as if I’m nonchalant about all this, but the truth is I’m telling this well after the fact and have had time to accept it. But let me jump ahead a bit.
The world I am on is Venus, and now it is my world.
—–—
My arrival was not the only mystery. I am a man of forty-five, and in good shape, and I like to think of sound mind. But good as I felt at that age, I felt
even better here on this warm, damp, tree-covered world. I would soon discover there was an even greater mystery I could not uncover. But I will come to that even if I will not arrive at a true explanation.
I pulled off my clothes, which were caked with mud, and shook them out. I had lost both my shoes when the ship went down; they had been sucked off me by the ocean’s waters with the same enthusiasm as a kid sucking a peppermint stick. I stood naked with my clothes under my arm, my body covered in mud, my hair matted with it. I must have looked pretty foolish, but there I was with my muddy clothes and nowhere to go.
I glanced back at the muddy lake, saw the great lizard and his lunch were gone. The muddy lake, out in the center, appeared to boil. My guess was it was hot in the middle, warm at the edges. My host, the thing that had brought me here, had fortunately chosen one of the warm areas for me to surface.
I picked a wide path between the trees and took to the trail. It was shadowy on the path. I supposed it had been made by animals, and from the prints, some of them very large. Had I gone too far off the path I could easily have waded into darkness. There was little to no brush beneath the trees because there wasn’t enough sunlight to feed them. Unusual birds and indefinable critters flittered and leaped about in the trees and raced across my trail. I walked on for some time with no plans, no shoes, my clothes tucked neatly under my arm like a pet dog.
Now, if you think I was baffled, you are quite correct. For a while I tried to figure out what had nabbed me under the waters and taken me through the whirling light and left me almost out of the mud, then disappeared. No answers presented themselves, and I let it go and set my thoughts to survival. I can do that. I have a practical streak. One of the most practical things was I was still alive, wherever I was. I had survived in the wilderness before. Had gone up in the Rocky Mountains in the dead of winter with nothing but a rifle, a knife, and a small bag of possible. I had survived, come down in the spring with beaver and fox furs to sell.
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