Interchange

by Daniel M. Bensen

  Why would Farhad have his men tie barrels around a pyramid, then call them back to his ATV, where one of them was now…Anne squinted…handing his boss a device? Were those wires running from it to the rope? Two wires running down a rope to a black barrel of what Farhad had told her was emergency fuel.

  “He’s rigged it to explode!” Anne cried and Daisuke slammed on the brakes.

  Anne jumped out. Daisuke was yelling something but she pumped forward. Strange, frilly organisms curled into tubes at her passage. Sack-like blobs climbed ladders of spun glass, escaping the invasion from Earth.

  She couldn’t run fast enough. She wouldn’t get there in time. She slid on the glassy ground, slow as a nightmare, screaming, “Don’t do it! Farhad! Moon! Don’t you fucking dare blow up that wormhole!”

  Farhad flapped his hand at Turtle, who twisted around in his seat and waved his arms at her. “Stay back! Danger! Explosion!”

  Anne didn’t waste breath on answering. She dug deep into the bottom of her soul and ran harder.

  “Cover your ears!” shouted Turtle.

  And Daisuke caught her.

  An enormous weight yanked Anne off her feet, swung her around so her face was pointed up to the glowing tips of the pyramids, and her back hit Daisuke, who hit the ground.

  He said something like “Pah!” And they were down. He struggled to breathe and she struggled to get back up.

  “Wait!” Anne screamed. “Daisuke let—”

  The barrels went off like the beginning of a rock concert. BAM. BAM. BAM. The air punched her in the face. Knocked her back into Daisuke’s arms. Her vision went gray and her ears squealed with the terrible assault. Gravel pinged off her head. Daisuke gasped under her.

  So he wasn’t dead. Neither was Anne. The ATV ahead was still upright. The ground was not collapsing.

  But the central pyramid sure as hell was. The spike of rock was visibly tilted out, a big charred hole in its side. Anne could hear the stone cracking from here. Nice to know she still had her hearing.

  “Look,” shouted Moon. There was more emotion in that one word than anything Anne had heard from him before. “It’s stationary!”

  He couldn’t mean the pyramid he’d blown up. That thing was not stationary. It was toppling.

  But as it toppled, it carried its wormhole with it.

  That’s what Moon meant. The wormhole stayed in exactly the same place relative to the tip of the pyramid, tilting and falling along with it. That was Moon’s purpose here. His experiment was designed to answer the question ‘can a wormhole be moved?’ The answer was ‘yes’.

  The central pyramid was falling now, sweeping its wormhole toward the slightly shorter pyramid on its far side.

  Like a pendulum in a high school physics demonstration, the wormhole traced a perfect arc, ending at the tip of the second pyramid.

  The tip pierced the wormhole. Passed through. Kept going.

  “Yes!” crowed Moon as the central pyramid continued to fall, dragging the wormhole at its tip down the height of the second pyramid. The pyramid widened toward its base, and so did the wormhole. The circle of warped colors expanded as it fell, swallowing ever-increasing tons of rock. It flashed once, twice.

  There was no explosion this time. Anne simply blinked, and both pyramids were gone. Two stony stumps protruded from the steaming water that filled the Kenzan Crater. They had been truncated along a perfect circular arc.

  The wormhole was gone too.

  ***

  Anne closed her eyes hard, pinching the skin between her eyebrows, clenching every muscle in the upper half of her face until a shimmering black-and-red checkerboard took shape before her straining retinas. Visual noise foamed and spun around the glowing black circle in the center of her visual field, burned there by the explosions.

  “Anne?” Daisuke asked.

  “Give her a moment,” came Farhad’s voice. It was the last straw.

  Anne ripped herself out of Daisuke’s embrace and rose to face her enemies. “What—?” Dizziness pressed against the sides of her skull. She shut her eyes again. “The fuck did you do?”

  “That—” Moon’s answer was cut off and his boss spoke instead.

  “We performed an experiment. An important one. We’ve discovered—”

  “Bullshit! You destroyed a wormhole! You destroyed a fucking wormhole! We can never, ever, visit the glasslands planet again.”

  “It wasn’t great,” said Moon. “It’s just lava and rocks.”

  Anne choked on her rage. Literally, her throat closed as if against an allergen. Her eyes squeezed shut again and when she opened them, everything was tinted with red. She’d burst a blood vessel.

  Pain sliced across Anne’s forehead, as if Moon had physically attacked her.

  “Moon, you’re not helping,” Farhad said.

  “No, this is ridiculous.” Moon’s voice grew louder as he walked toward Anne. “One day you say we should put walls around the portals so we don’t get our unclean human hands all over those pristine alien planets, and the next you’re screaming at me because I did just that.”

  The unfairness of it was like a slap to the face. Anne wasn’t screaming. She was strangling herself to keep the screams in.

  “This is not what Anne wanted,” Daisuke declared.

  “She should decide what she wants, then. I saved that planet, didn’t I? Isn’t that what Anne wants?”

  Anne imagined her fist going through Moon’s face with such hallucinatory force she almost felt like apologizing. Instead she said, “Don’t you talk over my head.”

  Moon and Farhad were standing in front of her, Turtle and Aimi in the ATV behind them. “Anne, just take a moment and calm down,” said Farhad. Now Daisuke was rubbing her back, tacitly agreeing that Anne was the real problem here.

  And meanwhile Moon kept talking. “I’m sick of tiptoeing around Anne and her crazy demands. Is she in charge of this expedition? Is she in charge of this planet? You promised she wouldn’t interfere today.”

  “Moon, shut up,” Farhad hissed.

  Anne pressed her hand to her forehead. She didn’t feel any blood. The headache was probably more from fury than…wait. “What?” She looked up at Farhad. “You promised—” She whirled to face Daisuke. “Our romantic date was Farhad’s idea?”

  Daisuke’s features went blank, but not before Anne caught the flash of shame.

  “He used you as a distraction, didn’t he! A babysitter while he went off and— Goddamn it!” She stomped and pain lanced through her forehead. “I trusted Farhad. I trusted you, Daisuke!”

  Anne pressed her palm into her skull. She couldn’t cry now. She couldn’t let Moon beat her. He’d been waiting for this. He’d prepared his arguments at the same time as he’d been wiring the wormhole up to explode, and he’d completely blindsided her. Blasted her supports right under her so he could watch smugly as she self-destructed.

  Fuck him. Fuck what he thought of her. Fuck what any of them thought of her!

  Nearly blind, vision swimming with red, Anne slapped away Daisuke’s hands, and came at Moon, hands curled into claws.

  Farhad stepped between them. Her eyes met his, and his expression hit her like a ton of pulverized mountain. Compassion.

  “I’m sorry, Anne,” Farhad said, and it sounded true. The old man really did sound as if Anne was breaking his heart. But what did that mean? Anything?

  Anne reeled. She didn’t want insight into her enemy’s psyche. She didn’t want to feel what Farhad was feeling, or look at herself through his eyes. Because what she saw was a red-faced, squalling dwarf. How dare you lay a finger on Junction? Junction is mine!

  Anne pressed her forehead between her palms again, as if to literally get a hold of herself. She felt the way she had when she’d stomped on a sporulation tile in the glasslands last year. She’d bulled forward into a terr
itory she didn’t understand, lost her temper, and drenched herself in hot acidic water full of alien allergens.

  Anne had to do what she had done last year: slow down and explore these dangerous unknowns.

  “…further discussion for an hour,” Farhad was saying. “We can all rest and get something to eat, then attack this problem with clear heads. How does that sound?”

  Anne took a long, shuddering breath. “Oh no you don’t.” She tried to make eye contact, couldn’t, and spoke anyway. “This was why you hired Moon and—” The idea burst upon her like a geyser. “And why you put us in the caravan instead of flying. You wanted to play with the wormholes along the way.”

  Moon sneered at her. “Hardly play.”

  “Well, it was hardly science, was it?” Anne said. “You’re a little boy sticking firecrackers in an anthill.”

  Moon blinked, reddened. She’d pissed him off, as easy as pressing a button.

  Good.

  Anne pretended she was participating in a particularly aggressive Q&A at a conference. “How do you know you haven’t destroyed the entire glasslands planet? Or turned off all the other wormholes? Did you do small-scale tests? Simulations?”

  “Of-of course not.” Moon took a step back. “How can we simulate something like a portal? Based on what math?”

  Anne folded her arms. “Right, because you don’t know how they work, do you? You have no idea what you’re doing, Moon. You could have killed us all. What if the wormhole had blasted us all with X-rays as it died?”

  “What if it had sprayed candy out of it like a piñata? There’s no reason to assume any danger. There comes a time when you simply have to make a decision,” said Farhad. “Either we consider every possible outcome, or we accomplish our goals.” Anne was about to ask what the hell those goals were, when Moon turned to his boss and murmured. “Although it might be illuminating to place sensors around the area next time.”

  Anne lost it. “Fucking next time?” spluttered Anne. “Right, because Junction is huge, isn’t it? There’s a wormhole every ten kilometers or so. Always more where that came from!”

  Moon opened his mouth. Closed it. Straightened, and looked at Farhad.

  Who said, “Well.”

  Anne instinctively stepped back. Shit, she’d lost the initiative. Found one button on Moon and pressed it, but now Farhad was looking at her like her soul was a keyboard and he was about to launch into a concerto in B-flat.

  He clasped his hands in front of his chest and angled his face downward. The tech mogul could not have appeared more reasonable and conciliatory. “I was not aware of the size of the risks Moon took. However, those risks were a price worth paying.”

  “Because you know now how to destroy wormholes? What good is that possibly going to do anybody?”

  Only then did she realize that she’d asked why?, which was exactly the question that Farhad wanted to answer. She sounded as if she were pleading.

  “This is the first step to saving the human race, of course,” Farhad said.

  “Uh,” said Anne. “What?” This wasn’t a concerto after all, but some weird modern art performance where nobody knew who the audience was.

  “What happens when people need a new place to flee to, and Earth is all used up?” Farhad asked. “The future of humanity depends on Junction. Don’t you see?” Farhad lifted his face to the dusty sky, eyes glittering. God help her, Anne almost believed him.

  “No!” she said. “That’s insane. The Earth biome can’t support the number of people on it now, let alone refugees from this dystopian world of the future you’re envisioning.”

  “That’s the beauty of it!” Farhad grinned. “We don’t need to colonize Junction. We’ll have other planets. Destroying a portal is the first step in creating one!” He spread his hands like a stage magician. “Think of it! We could colonize space!”

  Anne refused to be dazzled. She was in control of herself. She knew exactly what to say. “No. Absolutely not. This is it. We’re turning the caravan around and going home. And to jail, some of us.”

  Moon snorted, and Anne realized what an empty threat that had been.

  Farhad, however, was in a much better position to threaten. “Well, I’m afraid I cannot accept that.” He clapped his hands together. “You’re in no danger, Anne, but you can’t go back to Imsame before I do. That just isn’t going to happen.”

  Anne stared at him. What could she do? He had all the money, guns, and politics. How could she convince Farhad that he was wrong? Manipulate him? Lie to him? Turn herself into a slimy shmoozer?

  Anne lowered her face so Farhad wouldn’t see her expression. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll stay. We’ll stay. We’ll help you with this saving humanity thing.”

  “I’m so glad to hear that, Anne,” said Farhad.

  He sounded perfectly honest.

  Anne hoped that she sounded honest too. What she really wanted to do was run away screaming.

  She was trapped in the alien wilderness with a madman. Again!

  Chapter Eight

  Change of Plans

  The western border of the glasslands lay like a battlefield before Misha and the Nun. The flat-topped hexagonal tiles had given way to spiked, fishbowl-shaped growths surrounded by sand and shattered glass. Past that, purple spheres clustered on jagged rocks, growing smaller and smaller until no sign of life remained. Fuzz on the hills in the distance might indicate the plant life of the next biome, but with the setting sun in his eyes, all Misha could see was blood-red.

  “So,” he said. “Your boss destroyed a wormhole.”

  “Not my boss!” Anne replied.

  “Our boss,” said Daisuke quietly.

  Misha turned, bringing into view his friends, his tribe, their toymakers, and the caravan that carried all of their food. He swore at length in four languages.

  “Yeah,” Anne said. “It’s a fucking disaster.” She stared down at the sand as if she wanted to bury herself in it.

  Misha scratched under his beard. “We could kill them. Farhad and Moon. I suppose we’d have to kill the Indonesians too. Maybe only lock up the woman?”

  “No.” Daisuke looked horrified. “No, Misha!”

  Misha looked at Anne, who took longer to respond. “No,” she finally said. “I was thinking you would just tell the Nun—”

  “And let them kill your boss?” Misha snorted at the pair’s shocked expressions. “Of course Yunubey will want to kill them. Of course we should kill them. This is war!” He slapped his chest. “Farhad blew up one of our wormholes!”

  “It’s not a war,” Daisuke protested.

  “Obviously we’re not going to make a formal declaration. We’ll tell everyone another story or something. Farhad was eaten by a shmoo.” Misha gestured behind him. “Or whatever lives over there in the castles, okay? Then we’ll go after Moon….”

  “I’m not a murderer. Anne, you too.”

  “She’s not the one you have to convince.” Misha put a hand on Daisuke’s shoulder. It was an old habit from his time in Jayapura. “You gonna stop me?”

  “Boys! Enough!” Anne snapped, which only made Misha squeeze tighter.

  “Misha,” Daisuke said. “You’re scared, but you’re using anger to hide from fear.”

  Misha blinked at him, hand relaxing. “Huh. You’re good at that.”

  “We are all scared.”

  Daisuke flicked his eyes toward Anne, who said, “Well, good! Anger is the most appropriate emotion for this fucking situation.”

  He blanked his face at her.

  “What? You look like your brain’s been flushed down the toilet, Dice.” She stomped her foot and looked away. “But you’re right. We can’t murder anyone.”

  Misha puffed out a breath. The air was getting colder. The Nightbow hung in a darkening sky. “When I tell the Nun what happened, they�
��ll massacre the caravan no matter what I do.”

  “Dan ara pedirolum?”

  Misha’s head jerked around. Yunubey had materialized behind him in that awful way he had.

  “Nothing.” Misha answered his question. “We’re not talking about anything important.”

  Yunubey grinned. “I think you were talking about the bomb that the Them exploded earlier today.”

  Misha jerked back.

  “What is it?” Anne asked.

  Misha closed his eyes. “They know that Farhad blew up the wormhole.”

  “Well, what do you have to look glum about, hey? Didn’t you want to massacre everyone?”

  Misha glared at her. “Shut up. I am scared, all right? Let a man have his machismo for five seconds.” He glanced at the rest of the camp. “But Yunubey might seriously kill someone.”

  “Only if he finds out what really happened,” said Daisuke.

  “Stop talking to the Them and tell me what they’re saying,” Yunubey said. He wasn’t grinning anymore.

  “I can’t lie to him, guys.”

  “You’re a spy,” Anne pointed out. “You lie professionally.”

  Misha rolled his eyes. “Okay, let me try again. I won’t lie to Yunubey, okay? I’m his only good link with the non-Nun, and every time I do a less than perfect job, the extinction of my wife’s people takes a step closer and—”

  Yunubey did not grab Misha’s arm. He did nothing more than shift his weight onto the balls of his feet, jangling the tools carabinered to his belt. Misha found his eyes drawn to the tip of the man’s spear.

  “You will tell me,” Yunubey said slowly, “what the Them are saying.”

  “Uh, yes, my brother!” Misha swallowed, flashing back to his time in the army. “Farhad and his people have destroyed a wormhole. Anne and Daisuke tried to stop him, but he was too clever for them.”