Interchange

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “That’s a bad marketing strategy, my friend,” he informed the merchant. “You should tell her that your animals are in constant misery, so she’ll feel compelled to save all of them.”

  Aimi cleared her throat and the tycoon chuckled. “Excuse my insensitivity. Anne, would you like me to buy all of these creatures and set them free? Then we can find the caravan.”

  “No!” said Anne and the merchant at the same time. “Someone would just capture them aga—– What?”

  “I said no,” the merchant repeated.

  The dealers in illicit animals Anne had met previously had been walnut-faced old villains, infinite in age and cynicism. This guy, though, couldn’t have been more than twenty-nine. He was small and twitchy, with a sharp-featured face and a haircut that made Anne think military.

  “You don’t set them free,” he ordered. “You take care of them in your laboratory. Scientists, right? You’re not army.”

  “Yes,” Daisuke said.

  “Does the caravan have room for an eagle?” asked Farhad.

  “Uh,” Aimi said. “Anne, would your research be improved by this specimen?”

  Anne didn’t answer. The creature had indeed caught her attention.

  It was not an eagle. Not at all.

  “Oh,” said Anne. “Oh wow.”

  Rather than a beak, the animal had a fluffy, tapering snout. Brown fluff covered its body, which terminated in a nubby little tail, from which sprouted a pair of ribbonlike white plumes. It had no talons, which meant it didn’t use its feet to hunt.

  Anne looked up at the merchant. “Can I get a look at the forelimbs?”

  He was still explaining to Farhad. “For soldiers, I say, ‘You take good care of it. It’s a pet of the barracks, right?’ Of course we don’t transport them to Earth. We’re very moral here. We follow Ibu Anne’s protocols. The natives…. Ah? What did you say, ma’am?”

  “Can I get a look at its forelimbs?” Anne said impatiently.

  The merchant fished around in his pocket. “Oh, yes, this is very interesting. Have you seen what happens when you give it food, ma’am?”

  He produced a dusty twist of dried meat, which drew a grunt and a hard yellow stare from the non-eagle in the cage. “You’ve seen this species before, ma’am? You’ve been to Junction before?” His expression faltered. “Only I don’t recognize you. Ma–ow!”

  The non-eagle didn’t poke its beak through the cage to peck at the food the way a bird would. It reached out with its wings, and the feathers folded back to reveal two pairs of long, knob-jointed fingers. Four wicked little claws poked out between the wires and hooked the merchant’s distracted hand.

  The non-eagle ignored the human flesh and stuffed the jerky into a mouth lined with tiny, backward-slanted teeth.

  “Oh, yes. Very interesting,” said Daisuke. “A dinosaur.”

  “A what?” Farhad said. “Since when does this planet have dinosaurs?”

  “I think he means it’s a dinosaur-like alien?” Aimi suggested.

  Anne turned to her. “Oh, of course not. Would you find something this similar to an Earth animal evolving independently on a completely different planet? Daisuke was just being dramatic.”

  “So this planet does have dinosaurs?” Farhad asked.

  Anne peered back into the cage. “Well, yeah. All birds are dinosaurs, and here it is on this planet. What’s interesting, though, is just when this thing’s ancestors split off from the rest.”

  “Wait, you’re Ibu Anne!” cried the merchant, lunging for Anne’s hand. “I mean, Professor Anne Houlihan!” He shook it. “I’m very, very happy to meet you! And to work with you!”

  “I’m not a professor,” Anne said. “Your hand is bleeding.”

  “Work?” Daisuke repeated.

  “Just a…a thing. A little wound. You’re Matsumori Daisuke! I’m so excited! We have to take selfies!”

  “Ah,” said Farhad. “You must be Turtle.”

  “What turtle?” Anne asked.

  Without letting go of her hand, the merchant bowed deeply. He looked like his captive non-eagle, hunched over its meal. “My name is Evan Sudiarna, but everyone calls me Kura.”

  Anne blinked, then remembered the word in Indonesian. “Kura means turtle.”

  “Yes! I’m very, very happy to meet you! You’re heroes!”

  “I’m pleased to meet you.” Daisuke bowed, then turned to Farhad. “Is he one of your employees?”

  “Did Boss Rudi send you to meet us?” Aimi asked the man, who looked nothing like a turtle.

  He shook his head, still clasping Anne’s hand. “Rudi’s with Professor Moon. Mr. Irevani, Ms. Garey! We didn’t expect you until tonight. I wanted to find someone to take care of my animals before we go.”

  Farhad waved his hands. “Wait, wait, wait. There are dinosaurs on Junction? Aliens can be dinosaurs? Surely I would have read reports about this. Clarify this for me, Anne?”

  “Didn’t I already?” Anne struggled for patience. “The portal has been here for a hundred million years.”

  “Anne means that the animal in the cage is from Earth,” Daisuke said, and held up his hands, forestalling whatever bone-headed misapprehension Farhad was going to come out with next. “That is, its ancestors came from Earth very long ago. Before the dinosaurs went extinct.”

  “Before the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct,” corrected Anne. “And here, they didn’t. Or at least, some species from outside Crown-Aves survived.” How could she be sure? “Apparently,” she corrected the correction. And would Farhad know what ‘Crown-Aves’ meant? Who cared?

  Anne turned to Turtle. “Can it fly? And let go of my hand already.”

  “Can it fly? Yes? Not like an eagle though,” he admitted. “More like a chicken.”

  “Why not call it a phoenix?” Farhad suggested. “Those tail feathers? Mythology always makes the best marketing.”

  Turtle beamed. “Ibu Anne, may I give you this phoenix?”

  “No.” Anne pulled her hand away from Turtle, who looked crushed.

  Daisuke rushed to smooth things over. “She means we can’t take care of it. We will stay in a small caravan, I think.”

  They all looked at each other.

  “You are rescuing these animals?” Daisuke asked. “Alone?”

  Turtle slumped. “Yes. They bring them to me every day. The natives catch them, or soldiers on terraform duty. Before, they just ate them, but I said they might be valuable scientific specimens.” He swallowed. “For scientists. Scientists come every Tuesday, so I bring out the cages. I didn’t think— Let’s go to Boss Rudi.”

  “Wait,” said Farhad, who had been murmuring with Aimi. “We’ll buy them.”

  Turtle blinked. “All?”

  “Yes,” Farhad said. “There’s, what, about a couple dozen specimens here? Twenty dollars a pop. Let’s say five hundred for the lot?”

  Anne looked at the tycoon suspiciously. “And what the hell are you going to do with them?”

  “A zoo.” Farhad put his hands on his hips and squinted off into the distance. “The Irevani Zoological Preservation Institute. IZPI. ZIPI? Aimi, make sure that’s not a slur in any popular language and see if you can register the domain name.”

  “This is wonderful,” said Turtle. “Thank you very much, sir.”

  Anne sidled closer to Daisuke. “What the hell is happening?”

  “I think you helped our new friend save the lives of many creatures.” Daisuke rubbed his chin. “Do you think the phoenix would make a good mascot for our mission?”

  “Yes. Perfect,” Farhad said.

  “What? No! I can’t adopt that thing as a pet.”

  “I was thinking we could keep it on the grounds of the new research station,” Farhad said.

  Anne gaped at him, trying to untangle her feelings. Was she angry
at this idiot who bought décor for a building that wasn’t built yet? Or furious at a villain who thought of animals as décor? Or, just, hopeless? Because this animal didn’t have the choice of life in a research station or life in the forest. There was no more forest.

  The Mekimsam River, ‘the water in the sky’, had once flowed through terraforming paddies, yam gardens, and stands of southern beech, karakas, pear-fruits, and Alyxia shrubs. All very homey to an Australian biologist, and now, as far as that biologist could tell, gone.

  They had crossed a wooden bridge to get to this side of the valley, but the rutted margins of the river testified to a time when soldiers had simply plowed their jeeps through the water. That would explain the failure of the terraforming pools, the flushing of toxic alien biomaterial downstream, the swath of dead ground along the river, and the smell.

  Behind Anne, the Mekimsam River flowed in cloudy, scummy folds over sterile rocks. Pale gray tree roots stuck out of sharp-edged gouges in the riverbanks, their soil contaminated and washed away. Matted hummocks of reeds bleached in the sun, unable to rot.

  Here, the ground was mostly just mud and dust, stretching to the airfield and a military compound that might have been copy-pasted from Iraq or Afghanistan. Away from disturbed ground, the few plants were fat-leaved succulents, adapted to live in alien-contaminated soil. Once, they had grown only around the terraforming pools, at the edges of the Earth biome.

  Those edges were mostly gone too. The ground north of the airfield had been burned and poisoned. Only high up the mountains to the north did the blackened barrens give way to the acid-green alien plants that had spread out of their own wormhole. Above the green began the chocolate-brown of yet another biome. That was Junction. The patchwork world.

  “There it is,” said Farhad proudly, and for a second Anne thought he meant the wreckage civilization had made of this valley. Then she saw he was pointing at the parking lot.

  To be fair, it wasn’t just cars that were parked on the asphalt plain. There was construction and earth-moving equipment there too, as well as motor homes and caravans. The largest, she assumed, was Farhad’s.

  The fifty-foot caravan gleamed like nothing else in this wasteland: white with black honeycomb patterns on its sides that after a moment of squinting resolved themselves into photovoltaic panels. More panels hinged up from the roof like half-open books, angled to the south.

  Farhad led the way, saying, “It’s a hybrid design. Cutting edge! Solar and hydrogen fuel cells, although we do also carry a diesel generator for emergencies. Bunks on the upper level, laboratories and storage in the back segment, common spaces in the front. Two four-seater electric ATVs clipped to the back. Very suitable for a week of what you might call ‘roughing it in luxury’.”

  “How the hell did you get it here?” Anne asked, trying to keep up.

  Behind them, Turtle wrestled the phoenix into a wheelbarrow.

  “It was cheaper than you might think.” Farhad held out his hand as if weighing a pouch of gold coins. “I only paid a fraction of the shipping and reassembly costs because I sold the design to the army. This is just the sort of self-contained mobile platform they’ll need to secure their territory on Junction.”

  Anne banished the image of an army of these things churning across the landscape. “What do you mean their territory? The Pizza Treaty doesn’t give sovereign control to anybody other than the Nun.”

  “If by ‘Pizza Treaty’ you mean the Treaty of Junction, the United States isn’t even a signatory. They never promised to stay off of other territorial wedges. All they’ve done is promise not to shoot first.” Farhad shrugged.

  “Water?” asked Daisuke.

  “That is the limiting factor, yes. There’s a brown water recycling system and a collector we can use to catch rainwater, but the tank can only be so big. The Nun assure me that we can find enough water along the way to top up, but you might want to take your shower now.”

  Anne wondered where the Nun were. Not anywhere around the Nearside Base in Indonesia, that was for sure. Apparently they’d been pushed out of their village here as well.

  “How did you know it would have fingers?” Aimi asked.

  Anne started and turned around. Farhad’s secretary or mentee or whatever had snuck up on her. “What? Fingers?”

  “I mean the phoenix.” Aimi gestured toward Turtle, who was trundling his wheelbarrow toward them.

  Daisuke cleared his throat and Anne tried to be more personable.

  “Um. Because it had no talons on its feet?” Anne said. “No big teeth or hooked beak. It would need to rip flesh with something, you know?”

  “How did you know it ate meat?”

  Anne shook her head impatiently. “It’s eagle-sized. Too big for an obligate insectivore and herbivores usually have a big fermentation gut. It could have been an omnivore or something that doesn’t actively hunt, or have some sort of novel digestive system, or the insects here could be abnormally gigantic, but, you know. That was the hypothesis I was testing.”

  “Amazing.” Aimi gushed. “You know they call you the Alien Sherlock Holmes here?”

  “It’s not an alien.” Anne hated the way her cheeks were heating up. Sherlock Holmes? “And plenty of my guesses have been dead wrong. Like when I thought that the springy coil inside treeworms was metallic, but it turned out to be sugar crystals! The worms juggle ethanol and water concentrations to move sugars around and fix them in place.” She looked back up at the thin band of green on the mountainside. “Or at least they used to.”

  The Nun people had been walking back and forth between Earth and Junction for the last forty thousand years, and they’d always known that human spit dissolved treeworm structural sugars. The army had found out that laundry detergent worked even better.

  “There are still treeworms on their home planet,” said Daisuke.

  “Yeah,” Anne said. “For now. There’s no telling when someone will decide to claim the Treeworm wormhole, and then where will we be?”

  “You’ll be here,” Farhad said, striding ahead of them. “That’s where you’ll be. In charge of a research station, instructing those bad guys to cease and desist.”

  Anne rolled her eyes.

  “Hei! Siapa di sana? Kura? Kenapa ada karavan? Siapa orang-orang— Mr. Irevani!”

  A short, portly man came bustling out of the caravan. He hastily zipped up his camouflage-patterned jacket and smoothed down his comb-over, shouting, “Mr. Irevani datang awal, but it’s all okay! Everything okay!”

  “Boss Rudi?” Farhad asked as the man lunged at Farhad’s outstretched hand.

  “I am happy to meet you, sir! Very happy! Even if you, uh, earlier, semuanya, uh, everything is ready and we can depart ASAP. Haha! Or have party, right? Kura goblok, kenapa tidak panggil aku.”

  “K-karavan….” said Turtle, while Anne scrunched up her brows in concentration.

  “‘Stupid Turtle, you didn’t radio ahead?’” she translated, and Farhad cocked an eyebrow at her. His smile widened.

  “Everyone, this is Boss Rudi, our chief bodyguard and driver.”

  Anne thought the man looked more like he should be managing an accounting department than guarding an interplanetary expedition.

  “I’m sorry we didn’t warn you,” Farhad was saying. “Don’t worry at all, there’s absolutely no need to change the schedule. No need for a party. We’ll sleep and take showers.”

  “Ha!” Rudi said, “and then the party. Bagaimana ‘jangan sungkan’ dalam bahasa Inggris?”

  “‘Take it easy,’” answered Anne and Turtle at the same time.

  “I insist!” Rudi roared, and turned to greet Anne. “Anda pasti Ibu Anne. Senang bertemu dengan Anda. Selamat datang.” He clasped hands with Anne while slapping his free palm against his chest. “Welcome back to Junction!” he continued in Indonesian. “Or maybe you should welcome me? Haha!�
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  Anne tried to figure out how to say ‘Junction isn’t mine’ in Indonesian. She got as far as “Junction bukan…” before her words were swept away in the deep, swift torrent of Rudi’s effusion.

  “Let’s have a truly excellent expedition together,” he said. “Have you heard of my private security firm, Aunty Anne? It’s actually the most highly rated firm for this sort of small, unusual, but very important mission! Indeed, I personally guarantee safety, security, and no worries to all my clients. That’s to all of my clients, but to Aunty Anne, I am delighted to promise even more! You are a celebrity! A most distinguished scientist, and of course a beautiful young lady.”

  Or something like that. After a year with very little Indonesian and quite a lot of Japanese practice, Anne was having trouble remembering which end of a sentence was up. “Um,” she said. “Terima. Saya akan…melihat…binatang-binatang?”

  Boss Rudi roared with laughter. Anne felt as if she were cooking in her jacket.

  “I just want to say that I am here to make sure that you enjoy every minute of this grand adventure,” Rudi said, and whirled away to give Daisuke, then Aimi, the same treatment.

  Turtle gave a fractured bilingual explanation of his phoenix. Or perhaps it was Farhad’s phoenix, or Anne’s. What was to be done with it? No, not on the caravan, and no, the Americans won’t take it, not unless you have the proper paperwork for little alien dinosaurs. Haha!

  With no decision made, Rudi switched subjects to arguing with Farhad over whether or not they should have a party tonight. Despite the fact that Farhad said no, it turned out that they would have a party, which seemed to please Farhad a great deal. Nobody but Anne was surprised by this.

  “Is there a bed for me?” she asked Rudi, once she had constructed the sentence in her head and triple-checked for errors. “Or a shower?”

  “Of course it would be my honor to show you to your bunk, but—” Boss Rudi cleared his throat, “– the moon is in the shower.”

  “Apa?” said Anne, and repeated back what she thought she’d heard. “Bulan sedang mandi?”

  He waved his hands. “Bukan bulan. Kubilang Moon segang mandi. Professor Moon. Ah!” A laugh. “Good joke!”