“Anne, what are they?”
There was a distracting tremble of fear in Daisuke’s voice, which Anne chose to ignore. She imagined muscles running through those mouthparts. The shovel going rigid to dig into the clay-like soil. Those trowels flexing back and forth, scraping clay off the shovel and onto a henge-tree.
“Builders,” she said, suddenly happy Moon had dragged them here. The builders looked just like she’d predicted they would.
“What are they doing here though?” Misha asked.
“Repairing the fence, obviously,” Anne said. Her gaze went back to the toymakers.
“‘Ready’, they’re signaling,” said Misha, “and ‘stand by’.”
Cavaliers bobbed their heads at the toymakers, the Nun, and the ATV. One of the mounts curved its neck back, showing its throat.
“Uh…huh,” Anne said.
The toymakers ticked faster, like a drumroll, and the cavalier beheaded its mount.
The Nun jerked backward, spears bristling. The other mounts had more or less the same reaction, but Anne had seen it all before. So, apparently, had the toymakers. The toymakers began a three-tock signal.
“It means ‘seek’,” said Misha. “Or ‘food’.”
A chop sounded from the grass, like a flint axe striking flesh. This was followed by another.
Daisuke moaned, and Misha said, “This is Tyaney all over again.”
“What’re you talking about?” Anne asked. “The toymakers are just butchering their gift.”
The cavaliers swung their mounts toward the ATVs and Daisuke said, “Drive, Misha. Drive!”
Misha shifted into reverse.
“No no!” said Anne. “Daisuke, hold up your corpse. See?” she shouted at the cavaliers as Daisuke grappled with the long, limp body. “We’ve already got one!”
The air smelled like butter and fish, which was probably a good thing. And to make matters even better, the display spooked Moon, who backed past them and sped away.
“Should I follow him?” Misha asked.
Anne had been thinking about selfish genes. She shook her head. “Huh? Naw. Whatever’s in his bucket, he can’t get it now. There’s nothing he can do that he hasn’t already—”
Something exploded in the sky above them.
Anne looked up in time to see a second toymaker blimp detonate. Acrid soot rained onto the grass.
“Oh,” said Anne. “Right. They expect the sacrifice to be mutual.” She sniffed. Whatever had been in that blimp smelled like burned sugar. Bananas? “Where have I smelled that before?”
“Sweet Blood biome plants,” Daisuke said. “When they burn, they blow up.”
“A big, flashy, purely symbolic thing? Or valuable nutrients? What exactly just happened?”
“Something good,” Daisuke declared. “Wondrous.”
***
Daisuke was glad to leave Misha with the Nun. It meant that he could get out from under the dead mount and sit next to Anne.
She looked better, more like herself, with the wind in her hair and a smile on her face as she drove and turned theories over in her mind.
“That ritual we saw,” he said. “Do you think it was like going through customs?”
She hummed to herself, steering between hills. “Bribing the border guards, paying tolls, or sacrificing to the god-king. But then why did they give us gifts? A gesture of submission? Weakening yourself, like rolling over and showing your vulnerable tummy? But then why expect the same of us?”
She swerved to avoid the cavalier that jumped up on the left, but that brought them closer to another on the right. It didn’t attack, though, just glanced sideways and pulled away to keep its distance. Had it been looking at the body of the mount in the back?
“Do you think our dead animal is scaring them?”
“Hm,” said Anne. “Maybe that’s the purpose. They know we’ve already paid the toll. Or got our passport?” She sniffed. “Or maybe I’m anthropomorphizing again. I guess we’ll see whether they attack us or just escort us back to the caravan.”
As they drove on and no attack came, Daisuke allowed himself to relax. He was trying to figure out something romantic to say when Anne started humming again.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“What was Moon doing back there? What was he trying to discover?”
“I wish we could explore the crime scene.” Daisuke reviewed the sentence. “Could have explored, I mean.”
“We didn’t need to. We know he drove his ATV into the wormhole. That’s what he was trying to discover.”
Daisuke wondered if he should change the subject. They had so little time out of Moon’s shadow. But soon they would be back at the caravan and the man himself would be waiting for them. Solving the problem was better than ignoring it.
“He already knew that the wormhole would expand to swallow something larger,” said Daisuke. “Why did he test it again?”
“I guess Farhad told him to?”
Daisuke cocked his head, thinking. “Farhad wants to save his family. Or maybe the human race. He wants to colonize Junction.”
Anne shivered. Daisuke worried he’d done nothing but allow her to ruin her mood, but she shook herself and muttered, “Keep exploring, Houlihan! Lift up that rock and see what squirms out from underneath.” In a louder voice: “Okay, what purpose would blowing up a wormhole serve Farhad’s cause? Driving through one, okay, that would get more colonists through faster….”
“Stress tests!” she and Daisuke said at the same time.
“He’s also understanding what doesn’t work,” Anne said. “Can you pile people into a pyramid and drop a wormhole on them? No. It will explode. But what if you drive an ATV through?” Her voice dropped. “Experimenting on wormholes. But I experiment on animals, don’t I? Yeah, and how different is that from Farhard’s thing about eggs and omelets?”
Daisuke saw a place where he could help. “The difference is sustainability. You don’t crack an egg until you know that there are more eggs in the world.”
That seemed to relax her. “Right. So they’ve set an upper limit on what a wormhole can swallow. What’ll they do next? They’ll try to get closer to that limit.”
“This is good,” said Daisuke. “We can tell Misha that we know what to expect in the next biome. Moon will drive through the next wormhole in something bigger?”
They looked up. Ahead of them, the caravan sat at the edge of the Cavalier biome like a huge and very hungry caterpillar.
Chapter Twelve
A New Course
Anne clapped her gloved hands together over the dismembered corpse of the mount. “Itadakimasu!”
From behind her, Daisuke snickered. “You’re not planning to eat it, are you?”
“What I feel like is a starving woman who’s finally been given a goddamn sandwich.” Anne repositioned a light and bent over the carcass on the worktable in her barely used laboratory. “Hand me a magnifying glass. I want to get a look at this stump.”
The middle mandibles of the cavalier had severed the animal’s neck like a pair of gardening shears, compressing before cutting. That meant Anne had to do some decompressing before she could get a look inside. She held out a hand. “Forceps.”
“Ah?”
She made pinching motions with her hand. “Like big tweezers.”
“Kanshi? Pliers.”
Anne didn’t look up. “Yes. Sciency pliers. Forceps.”
Cool metal was pressed into her palm. Anne hooked a thumb through the tube that ran down the middle of the animal, pinched with the pliers, and gently pulled. The inside of the mount’s neck turned out to be very interesting.
“Okay,” said Anne. “We’ve got your basic tubes-in-tubes body structure, like any honest Earth coelomate. Outermost layer is some sort of tough, wrinkly tissue. I’
m reminded of elephant hide. It even has hairs.”
“What about the exoskeleton?” Daisuke asked.
“Not exoskeleton. It’s embedded in the skin. Some kind of armor.” Anne rapped a plate with the pliers. It clunked. “We’ll have to wait until we can get these samples to a real lab, but I’m guessing we’ll find out that it’s a scleroprotein like keratin. You can see the growth rings, like a turtle’s shell.”
She tapped the shell again, adding percussion to the run of her thoughts. “Lots of proteins in this biome. Did I tell you the sample of ammonite-grass turned out to be full of nitrogen too? More keratin, maybe? Actin? Freakin’ gluten? That’d be a laugh.”
She straightened, looking at the lights that hung from the ceiling on their jointed, adjustable arms. “All of which might indicate some sort of super-duper nitrogen fixation, if the plants have all these nitrates to waste. It would explain the smell, too.”
“Nitrogen is what’s in fertilizer, right?” said Daisuke. “If the plants here can get it from the air—”
“Nitrogen-fixing bacteria on Earth already do that for beans,” Anne said. “And rice and sugarcane and a whole bunch of other things. The enzyme they use is— Hmm…nitrase?” She cocked her head, searching her memory of university lectures. “Is that true or did I make the word up? Anyway, whatever they’ve got on Earth, this biome’s got something light-years more efficient. Maybe. I’m speculating.”
Daisuke’s voice was eager. “Maybe we can figure out how they do it. That could be valuable knowledge.”
Anne’s gut tightened. “Ick. You sound like Farhad. You can tell him how to make money off of ammonite-grass, but I’d rather not talk to him.” Ever again, if she was honest. But failing that, she could at least bury herself in biology for a while. Try not to worry about things.
Anne shook her head and put her hands on the alien. “Okay,” she said. “Under the…what I’ll call for now the ‘epidermis’…we get a living layer of ‘let’s-pretend-it’s-dermis’, some stuff that looks very much like fat, then…” she counted, “…six, seven, eight longitudinal muscles.”
“Is that strange?” Daisuke asked.
“It’s what I expected. It took an enormous amount of leverage for the cavalier to lift me.” Anne rubbed her shoulder, which was bruising up nice and purple. “These muscles must run down the whole length of the body. And yet these animals are also as flexible as earthworms. No bones, okay, but then how can the animal support its own weight? Maybe they have tissues that expand as well as contract?” She poked and prodded. “Proteins resistant to pressure, but not tension…. Oh! Well, here’s something you don’t get in an earthworm.”
Daisuke leaned closer. “What is it?”
Anne enjoyed his breath on her cheek. “Kanshi, love. Little mineralized clamps. Look here.” She pinched the edge of a shell with one hand and squeezed her forceps around the severed end of a muscle cord. When she pulled, the corpse on the table curled, stilt-legs splaying, tail scraping around the opposite edge of the table.
Anne let go, but the body stayed curled. Even when she put both hands on it and tried to bend it back in the other direction, it refused to budge.
“It’s a winch!” Anne crowed. “I can’t straighten it. It takes energy for the tissues to relax, so this thing picks something up, locks its muscles, and just stays like that.”
Anne waited for Daisuke to say something along the lines of ‘We could sell this and make a fortune,’ but he didn’t. Instead he said, “It looks like a centipede. Or an ocean worm.”
“A polychaete. Correct.” Anne put her hand out, palm down. “Take a swimming worm and turn it on its side, so half of the bristles become legs and the other half dorsal spikes.” She turned her hand into a blade. “The side-to-side undulations that moved the worm through water are now an up-down galloping motion.”
She pointed her fingertips up, as if making a karate-chop. “That also explains Lancelot’s head, which was laterally flattened, remember? There was one eye-cluster on the top of the head, the other on the bottom, stuck out on short stalks that angle either up or down to bring the eyes closer to the body’s midline.” She pointed to the appropriate places on her hand.
“But that’s not what the mount’s head looks like,” Daisuke said.
Anne glanced at it. It was about the size of a serving platter, round on the edges but flattened at the front, with three pairs of mandibles shaped to cut grass and shovel it into the mouth.
“Right,” she said. “This animal’s head is dorsoventrally flattened. A secondary adaptation. To grazing, it’s clear.”
“Why didn’t the mounts just turn the right way around, like centipedes, with the legs on both sides?”
Anne shrugged. “Evolution does funny things like that all the time. Nobody’s in the driver’s seat; you just end up somewhere. Now, these limbs.”
The limbs began as little yellow hooks along the animal’s throat, one for each pair of armor plates, each hook with its own puckered, mucosal breathing hole. Moving down the neck, the hooks grew larger and straighter, until they were each the length and thickness of a walking stick.
Anne grabbed one of these stilt-legs and gave it a wiggle. It bowed slightly out from the body, like a rib the color of carrots and the texture of ivory. “Now, this isn’t just protein. It’s mineralized in some way, but we won’t know how until I carve off a sample. Which, glory be, I can do right now.” Anne held a hand out to Daisuke. “Scalpel me.”
Anne got her scalpel and used it to dig into the limb, which turned out to be softer than ivory. Maybe horn was a better comparison. Proteins, after all. And…. “Oh! It’s hollow. There’s a sort of pith inside and…wait just a second here.”
She moved her fingers up the limb to where it joined the body. “Hm. The breathing hole here might indicate a biramous ancestor, or am I just flashing back to trilobites? Never mind about that now….” She cut into the tough hide and found what she was looking for. “Another muscle cord!” When she pulled it, the limb bent, just a little.
It was hard work. Anne strained for a moment before she released the tension with a gasp. The limb returned to its normal shape.
“Whew!” she said. “That was like stringing a bow. So the stilt-legs aren’t entirely stiff after all. They’ve got some spring in their step. A lot of spring, actually. Fascinating!”
The walkie-talkie on her belt squawked.
“Anne?” Farhad called. “Would you come to the bridge?”
Anne could feel the muscles around her neck clench. Like her spine had been caught in a winch. “I’m working. For the first bloody time on this jaunt, Farhad.”
“Then I’m very sorry to interrupt you.”
What did the mad mogul want now? Had he discovered a tree that grew money? Maybe the emperor of the cavaliers had invited him to tea? The rest of the party had formed a union? Ha. If only.
“Tell me what you want,” said Anne. “Daisuke, give me a sampling container for the spectrometer.”
“I don’t believe in multitasking,” Farhad said. “When you’re dissecting, you should focus on dissection. When you’re advising me, I want your full attention.”
“Then bugger off until I’m done.”
“I’m afraid that the decision I need to make is time-sensitive,” Farhad said. “And I think you would like to have some input.”
“Anne,” Daisuke said, “I think we should go to the bridge.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Anne threw down her forceps and snapped off her gloves. “Why can’t they just make a decision without me babysitting them?”
Then she remembered what Moon had done the last two times she wasn’t babysitting him. “Shit. We’d better go.”
* * *
They found the bridge crowded with Farhad, Aimi, and Boss Rudi, who was in the driver’s seat.
“We no break wall,” he was sayin
g. “Break caravan.”
“All right, what is it?” asked Anne.
Rudi turned in his seat. “Ibu Anne, bilang Mister Farhad kalau kita tidak bisa menabrak dinding pohon. Suspension tidak bakal tahan.”
Anne blinked, trying to force her brain to switch languages. The main points were, ‘tell Farhad’, and ‘the suspension won’t hold’. She’d had a lot of conversations in Indonesian about vehicle repair. But dinding pohon? “Uh, what’s a tree-wall?” Anne looked past Rudi’s head. “Oh, I see what you mean.”
It was the same basic structure as the fence around the wormhole and the wall of the tower where Moon had been imprisoned. It’s just that this one was much longer. The tree-wall was a continuous, three-meter-high slab of clay with ammonite-grass growing on top of it. The clay had been excavated right there. Anne could see where the ground dipped as it approached the wall. The depression had filled with water. Plants grew in it like tubes topped with dark green hair.
“You see why I had to interrupt your work.” Hands clasped behind his back, Farhad inclined his head at her. “ Anne, would you please tell us what we’re looking at?”
She folded her arms and drawled, “Yeah, I’d say it’s a tree-wall, all right.”
Farhad sighed.
“It’s even got a moat,” Anne said. “Hm. And a wall. If this country wasn’t the cavaliers’ original territory, they must have come here and conquered it, for lack of a better word. Okay, fine, but then why didn’t they conquer whatever was west of this wall?”
“The orange forest,” Aimi informed her.
Yes, it would be, if they were heading north-west from the Cavalier biome. This was the ecosystem that she had wanted to drive around.
She squinted up at the top of the wall. Beyond the noodly plant-tubes, there curled something orange and spiny. Barbed wire laid over the top of a prison wall. “We ought to ask ourselves why the cavaliers had the forest walled off.”
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