Interchange

by Daniel M. Bensen

  “What are they protecting?” Daisuke clarified. “What are they protecting themselves from?”

  “Yes, very ominous,” said Farhad. He put a hand against the windshield. “But what I want to know is whether we can just ram through it.”

  “What?” Anne said.

  “No,” said Rudi. “Ibu Anne, beri tahu dia.”

  “I sure as hell will!”

  “Anne?” said Farhad.

  “No,” she said. “You can’t ram through it.”

  “Indeed!” Boss Rudi said.

  “All right,” Farhad said. “So, we’ll have to knock a hole in the wall.”

  “Yes,” said Rudi, and turned to Anne. “Tell him that that’s okay,” he said in Indonesian. “Moon only needed an hour with a shovel to break down a wall like this.”

  Anne’s teeth snapped together. She opened them slowly. “No. You cannot make a hole in the wall, Boss Rudi.” In English she said, “I told you before we should drive around this biome.”

  “Not possible. We have a schedule we need to keep,” said Farhad.

  A muscle started jumping along the side of her nose, but Anne would not lose her temper. She would…she would…why the hell wasn’t Daisuke helping? Saying something manipulative?

  Anne visualized the caravan turning and driving north. What would get them moving that way?

  “Maybe there will be a way through the wall?” Anne looked at Daisuke and pumped her fist. “We shouldn’t give up!”

  He blinked at her. So did Farhad. “You think we’ll find a gate? A border crossing?”

  Anne abandoned her impersonation. “I think your schedule can stretch to a little reconnaissance, in any case. Exploration is what we’re here for, isn’t it? Drive north along the wall. Slowly. No, better yet, wait until the Nun overtake us.” She was starting to sweat. Moving Farhad’s mind was like pushing a car uphill. “The toymakers have been coming this way for a long time, right? Even if the Nun don’t know how to cross the border, the toymakers must do.”

  Farhad stared out the window. “The toymakers. You saw them do something yesterday, didn’t you?”

  “Well, yes,” said Anne, surprised at the deduction.

  “Some sort of negotiation with the cavaliers? The report I got from Moon was confused on that point.”

  Oh, so not a deduction at all. Anne hated to agree with Moon, even in absentia. His analysis was a gross oversimplification at best, and more likely to mislead them than not. But it would push Farhad in the right direction. Bleh. Shmoozing.

  “That is the hypothesis I’m testing, yes,” Anne said.

  “So the cavaliers you saw really were escorting you?” Aimi asked.

  “Mostly likely,” Anne said, but where had the sudden tension in the air come from? Both Daisuke and Farhad were looking at Aimi with narrowed eyes. Her own eyes widened. Was the supermodel scared? Why?

  “All right. I was watching you.” Aimi looked at Daisuke under her lashes and brushed a lock of fine dark hair behind her ear. “I was worried about you. The two of you.”

  Anne looked from Aimi’s face to Daisuke’s, suddenly lost. Stupid humans and their stupid mind puzzles.

  “Sir,” Daisuke said. “I think we should let the Nun go in front of us. Their toymakers are very useful.”

  Farhad nodded slowly, still gazing out the window. “All right, Anne. I defer to your expert opinion. Boss Rudi, please wait until the Nun and the toymakers catch up with us, then follow them.” He turned to Anne. “Do you have any more advice for me?”

  “Don’t go through that wall and leave the orange forest alone?”

  Farhad examined her face. “Anne, would you and Daisuke extend your break from your work and sit with me for a minute?”

  He sat, flipping a hand at Aimi. “Would you make some tea for us? And bring in Moon.”

  Anne’s neck stiffened so fast her vertebrae popped.

  As if he had heard the noise, Farhad turned his smile back to her. “I know things have become strained. I’d like to fix the problems between you two.”

  Anne looked at Daisuke, who was nodding unhelpfully. “Uh,” she said, “yeah. Thanks, but I have this alien corpse I’d like to get back to dissecting.”

  “This won’t take long, I promise.” Farhad steepled his fingers. “Think of this as just another part of the postmortem.”

  ***

  Moon sat on the bridge with Anne, Farhad, and Daisuke, pretending to listen.

  “Professor Moon told me how grateful he was to you for saving his life,” Farhad said.

  Moon’s eyes tracked across the toymakers as they streamed around the caravan, rowing on oars, floating under gas-filled envelopes, or pulling on reins attached to other toymakers or humans with strained expressions.

  “Yeah, he looks grateful as hell,” Anne said, “but what was he doing, Farhad?”

  “Why, research, of course,” Farhad said and coughed. “Boss Rudi, would you tell Turtle to stow the solar panels and prepare for departure?”

  “What research?” Daisuke asked. “What did you send him out there for with a bucket and a shovel?”

  “That was to move dirt. To break through the wall that the – did you call them cavaliers? – that they placed around the wormhole.”

  Moon’s fingers twitched. Farhad was much more sanguine now than he had been yesterday, when Moon had told him the cavaliers had stolen back the bucket. Even now, something hard and sharp gleamed behind Farhad’s grandfatherly mask, like the shell of a scorpion.

  Whatever. There were more buckets in the caravan’s storage room, and another portal ahead.

  Moon watched the cavaliers, pacing alongside the larger toymakers outside. The aliens clacked their mandibles, paused, clacked again. The nearest humans waved their arms, lips moving as if speaking.

  “Is he even listening?”

  Moon glanced around to see Anne had stood. “I don’t believe this! I don’t believe you.” She blocked Moon’s view, hands on hips. “Moon, what the hell were you doing with that wormhole?”

  Moon met her eyes. So Anne was angry. When wasn’t she? It was a disgusting display of self-indulgence, like taking your dieting friend to a sweet shop and stuffing a whole cake in your mouth.

  “I’m not going to tell you,” he said.

  Daisuke sighed and Farhad let out a groan. “All right, boys and girls—”

  “No!” Anne slashed her hands through the air. “I can’t do this, Farhad. I can’t stand by and let you send your minions out on evil missions!”

  Farhad rubbed his beard. “So you think I’m some kind of super-villain?”

  “This is my working hypothesis, yes.”

  “Anne,” said Daisuke.

  “No, no,” Farhad said. “It’s all right. I understand. Anne, I know you’re frustrated—”

  She stomped her foot. “I am going on strike! If you try to drive this machine through that forest, I am locking myself in my room and not coming out.”

  Moon snorted. “You can’t lock yourself in. He has keys to all the rooms.”

  “Moon!” Farhad glared at him.

  “Creepy,” said Anne. “But irrelevant.”

  Farhad sighed. “Anne. Please don’t make ultimatums. It’s bad strategy.”

  “Oh is it? What do you think you can do to me? Drag me outside and force me to hypothesize at gunpoint? Even if you torture me—”

  Farhad held up his hands. “Please, Anne. For god’s sake, I’m not going to torture you. You’re not my enemy, or my slave or my prisoner. If anything, you’re holding us hostage. If you don’t help us spot potential danger, we might be killed.”

  “Yup,” Anne said, “sounds like a good reason to keep your caravan on this side of the wall.”

  In the silence that followed, Moon stood. “I should go,” he said.

 
“No hold on,” said Anne, but Farhad said, “Let him go.”

  The biologist turned on the tycoon, and Moon slipped off of the bridge.

  Farhad gave him an exasperated look, but what part did Moon have to play here? He didn’t care whether Anne or Farhad won this pissing contest. Moon had work to do. His experiments would continue until the portals either yielded up the secrets of space and time, or, as was looking more likely, Moon went mad.

  He’d driven off alone into the alien wilderness, gotten blisters all over his hands, been imprisoned by monsters and nearly killed, and what had Moon accomplished? Nothing but the discovery of another superficial layer of the Zookeepers’ user-interface system.

  That was the real humiliation here. Not being rescued by Anne or defended by Farhad. They were monkeys playing monkey games of territory and dominance. What did that make Moon though? He was nothing but a monkey too.

  Let a monkey play in a sports car and it might eventually find the starter button. It could press the button and all the other monkeys might hoot with glee at the bright lights and loud noises. That brought nobody any closer to understanding internal combustion.

  None of which changed Moon’s plan. Portals were still the most promising path to the new physics. Nothing else so completely failed to obey the old physics, after all. As ever, there was a wall between Moon and the truth, and he would continue to scratch away at the surface until something gave and he broke through. From the outside, there was no way to tell how thick it might be. All he could do was dig faster, while he still had his shovel.

  ***

  “Why don’t you tell me what you are afraid will happen if I drive the caravan through the forest?” said Farhad. “Aside from you going on strike, I mean. What will the natural consequences be?”

  “What do you mean ‘What’s going to happen’? You’re going to cut down a whole bunch of trees.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To make room, obviously!”

  Farhad frowned at the tree-wall. “Do you think the forest over there is that dense?”

  “Of course it is!” Was he teasing her? Anne was tempted to just storm off the bridge, but what if Farhad really didn’t know? “You’re the one who showed me the drone photos. Didn’t you see the exclusion zones around the crowns?”

  “I hate to admit it,” Farhad said, “but I only pretended to understand you. What are exclusion zones?”

  Anne couldn’t help but sigh. She knew she probably sounded like she couldn’t believe how stupid Farhad was, but actually she was just relieved. “You didn’t know how dense the forest is? You thought you could just drive through it?”

  The tycoon shrugged. “I usually go camping at Redwood National Park. You can drive a camper between those trees.”

  Anne took a deep breath. “Yes, but the trees over that wall aren’t redwoods. They’re much shorter and more densely packed. More like an artificial tree plantation than an old-growth forest, now that I think of it. Although if people planted them you’d expect the trees to be in rows….” She shook her head. “You can’t drive the caravan through without cutting trees down, and no way am I going to allow that. Especially when it would be so easy to just drive around.”

  “More to the point, it would take more time to cut the trees down than to drive around.” Farhad stroked his goatee, watching her. “All right, Anne. You win. I agree to your terms.”

  Anne sagged. “Oh. Okay. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Farhad said. “And I’m very sorry things had to come to this pass. You shouldn’t feel like you have to engage in combat with me in order for me to change my plans.” He clapped his hands together. “Now, what was that you said about artificial plantations? Do you think somebody made that forest?”

  Anne shrugged. “Not enough information.”

  “How could we get that information? On foot? With what supplies? Will ATVs pass between the trees, do you think?”

  “Of course they will,” said Anne before she realized what Farhad was doing. “I mean, wait, what about driving around?”

  “I’ll double-check, but I think going straight through, even on foot, will still get us to Howling Mountain faster.”

  He just wanted to get at the wormhole, the bastard. Anne looked to Daisuke for help, and he suggested, “What about a compromise? Anne, I, and the Nun will walk through the forest, and everyone else will drive around it in the caravan?”

  “Ah,” Farhad said, “a compromise.” For a second, his face pinched together in a way that almost looked sad. Disappointed. Then he smiled and turned up his hands. “If that’s what it will take to keep you happy, Anne, I’ll do it.”

  “We will tell you everything we learn in the forest,” Daisuke said.

  Farhad nodded. “Of course you will. I’m very much looking forward to finding out what you discover.”

  Boss Rudi pressed the starter button and the caravan hummed to life.

  Chapter Thirteen

  City of Gold

  The gate, when they came to it the next morning, was refreshingly inhuman. No arches, no arrow slits or murder hole. Not even a door. There was just a gap in the clay wall and a mound where a pile of clay had been dumped into the moat.

  The toymakers had waited for sunrise before they began to trundle across this crude bridge. At their lead was a mobile fortress the size of a mini-fridge, towed by a team of land-galleys. A quintuplet of tethered zeppelins hung over the fortress like arm-length wooden wasps, orange with caked-on clay and glittering with mica.

  Anne stood outside with Misha and Daisuke, and watched the delegation approach the gate. Beyond the toymakers lay a thicket of those barb-wire tendrils. They sprawled and coiled like a saffron-colored blackberry bramble, except….

  What was so wrong with them? What gave Anne that fluttery feeling in her belly when she looked at them? A real bramble – assuming it was growing in its native habitat and wasn’t taking over some defenseless South Pacific island – should make her feel calm and eager. What sort of birds would be nesting in it, etc.

  These serrated orange curlicues, though, filled her with dread. Anne examined her reactions and found that the reason she hated these plants was because they looked artificial.

  The gates were symmetrical. Each spiral and loop of vine mirrored around a midline. Anne hugged herself, thinking of the wrought-iron vines on the gate of a Victorian-era train station. All aboard. Hurry up and wait. Better run or you’ll miss your connection. Welcome to civilization.

  “Something is moving,” said Daisuke.

  Anne raised her binoculars and zeroed in on the disturbance in the hooked and looping vines. Behind them was what looked like more vines. The tangle was so thick that Anne couldn’t see anything past it. But the toymakers and cavaliers were all clacking, and yes, there were small, mouselike animals fluttering away from….

  “Oh!”

  Anne had thought that mass of fronds was a plant. Maybe some kind of fruiting body. Now, though, it came twisting out of the bramble, as if umber staghorn ferns had rolled themselves into a cigar.

  Fronds brushed against vines, curled, contracted, and a head emerged. It was blunt, with the cross section of a five-pointed star. The star twisted as it was drawn out, creating five equally spaced ridges that spiraled down its body. Two of these ridges sprouted contractile limb-fronds. Another bore eyes like black beads. The fourth was just raised bristles – maybe other sense organs. The fifth bore a row of interlocking, triangular teeth.

  Which unzipped. The tube-shaped body became a spiraling ribbon, fronds splayed like the bows of a monstrous birthday present around the slick, blue interior surface. A thrumming noise reached Anne, such as might be produced by an oboe the size of a Bengal tiger. Maybe something more like a bassoon.

  The toymakers clacked, and a hatch on their land-fortress opened. From this angle, Anne couldn�
�t see what was inside, but the zipper-animal stopped its display. It smoothed out its fronds and bent over the toymaker delegation, the unzipped front of its body dangling like an elephant’s trunk lined with eyes.

  “Tock-tock!” signaled the toymakers, and the forest animal struck. The tooth-fringed ribbon buried itself in the toymaker fortress.

  Anne could feel the other humans tense, but the toymakers made no alarm clacks.

  The creature convulsed. A wave of motion traveled up its body, the zipper-teeth opening and closing in rhythmic ripples.

  “Is it vomiting?” Daisuke asked.

  “The opposite, I think,” Anne said. The animal was sucking something from the toymaker cruiser. Food? Drink? She debated with herself about running forward to take a closer look.

  The animal reared up. Its nose zipped itself back together and Anne’s diaphragm fluttered in sympathy to another deep vocalization. A pair of smaller animals stuck their heads from the brambles and slithered up to the first.

  “Are they kissing it?” Misha asked.

  To Anne, it looked more like they were plucking something from its body. She quashed her impatience. There would be time to make more observations.

  All three animals withdrew into the brambles, leaving the toymakers to wait.

  Anne’s walkie-talkie gave a squawk and Farhad’s voice asked, “What happened? Did we make it?”

  The creepy, symmetrical brambles did not swing back like doors on hinges. They didn’t even uncoil. They lurched up and rotated away, as if they were potted plants whose pots had been turned and shoved out of the way.

  Beyond the gates shone a city of gold.

  ***

  “But I don’t want to call it ‘El Dorado’,” Anne said later.

  “Yeah, I think you’ve named your fair share of things already.” Farhad dropped another pack of water bottles next to the ATV and straightened, massaging his back. “Everything’s a blob-worm or a slime-snake to you. At least call the animals here ‘serpents’, for pity’s sake. And would a ‘dragon’ here or there kill you?”

  “And what’s that, then?” Anne pointed past him, across the belt of umber lawn to the forest of towering trees beyond. The nearest specimen looked like a mad Gothic baron had built a cathedral out of cheddar-flavored Legos. “A Rapunzel tree? A Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?”