“No,” Moon looked down. Nodded to himself. “No, I like Anne’s plan. It’s the fastest way.”
“If the pod closes around us, how will we leave it to launch the satellite?” Daisuke asked.
“Who cares?” Moon said.
“You don’t care about the satellite?” Daisuke asked.
Farhad put out his hands to silence them. “I’ll talk to Turtle and Boss Rudi about that. And maybe some more clothes for you, Anne? You must be cold.”
She had to admit that she was.
Farhad bowed. “Then it’s a good thing I had your space suits carried all this way up the mountain.”
***
Farhad gave the tether a tug. It seemed quite firmly fixed to the inside of the capsule-pod. Some things he was not willing to leave up to the grace of the hole-worm.
“Why do you want me to do this?”
He turned at Anne’s voice, but it hadn’t come from behind him. Of course, Anne was already inside the capsule-pod. The aperture at the top had sealed shut around the spare tire they had used as a porthole. Farhad was hearing her voice in his headset. You foolish old man.
“Are you asking me to abort?” he said. “If you don’t want to go—”
“No, I do, but why do you?” He couldn’t see her expression, but the voice got softer. “Why do you trust me?” Now that was a defter question than Farhad would have expected from the socially maladroit biologist. Something had happened to her on her climb up the mountain. Anne had made her transformation.
Farhad didn’t expect she would thank him, but he still felt pride anyway. It wasn’t the first time he’d saved an employee’s marriage.
But there was still her question to answer. Farhad checked to make sure they weren’t talking over the global channel and said, “I have several reasons to trust you, Anne.” He heard her snort and skipped them. “But it’s more to the point that I trust Professor Moon rather less.”
“Why? Isn’t he doing exactly what you want?”
“No, he’s doing exactly what he wants,” Farhad said. “I’m enabling that because it fits within my greater goals. But now that we’ve come to a potential divergence, I need to be absolutely certain that my experiments get carried out, not just his, and that I am told their results accurately.”
Silence over the radio. The aperture was closed now, tight around the spare tire porthole. The edges of the aperture had sawed through the rubber of the tire, but the metal hub and the tether threaded through it seemed fine.
The skin of this capsule-pod would make Farhad a lot of money. It weighed almost nothing – the pods could be sucked into the worm’s mouth with the force of air pressure alone, after all – but it had been very difficult to drill into.
Anne had speculated wildly about the material’s composition and Farhad had smiled and nodded. What a relief it was to not have to push and pull the biologist everywhere. Instead, he could do what he had always wanted: let Anne ramble, take notes, and make a fortune off her little parenthetical asides. A material as hard as rock and light as air. Soap-bubble semiconductors. Rocket-animals. A biological spaceport. And that was just what she’d discovered on the climb up the mountain. If all it took to get her co-operation was a concession that risked her life? Well, she’d signed the forms.
“Ready,” came Moon’s voice over the radio, followed by Daisuke’s and Anne’s. Farhad waved to Turtle, who started up the chainsaw and pressed it to the stalk of the capsule-seed.
It was very much as before. The outer layer of the trunk wasn’t fibrous like wood. It was tough like leather, hard like concrete, and soft like wet clay in concentric layers. Turtle said that the first time he’d done this, the hard parts had retracted. A response to damage?
The capsule shuddered and tipped onto its side. It stuck there, hooks digging into the ground.
And the worm arrived.
It flowed like water from the mouth of its cave. Transparent, stinking, salted with multicolored organs and threaded with white vessels that might have been for blood, the amorphous blob spilled down the hillside and washed over the capsule. Gobbets of transparent flesh splashed up with the force of the impact, but they did not fall.
The transition was as fast as blinking. One moment, the hole-worm was a wave of liquid protoplasm cresting over the capsule. The next, it was a solid, glassy tube. The transparent substance of its body had snapped into shape, every chunk sucked back into its smooth walls.
The worm rested. Waves of iridescence washed up and down its length, highlighting diamond facets. A fitful shudder as the organism seated the capsule more securely within itself. Its front end had become a smooth cap, slightly puckered around the place where the tether protruded.
Farhad’s ear hairs tickled, and he became aware of a high, teakettle whistle.
“Back!” he shouted to Aimi and Turtle.
The rock around the mouth of the cave was covered in white, serpentine organs. Tentacles? Tree roots? Anchors? What sort of magic phase-changing stuff was this worm made of? Another potential fortune there.
But he was running. He had to run down into the remaining buds, because the whistle had become a roar. A howl. The air ran with living mist.
His ears popped. The mountain hopped under him, as if he stood on the chest of a giant who’d just sneezed. There was a horrible sound. And the hole-worm and capsule were gone.
Farhad swallowed and watched the tether hiss away down into the mountain.
***
The capsule went dark and a sudden noise and acceleration shoved Anne against the inner wall.
“Not anything near what we need,” Moon muttered.
“Anne, what’s happening?” asked Daisuke.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ve just been swallowed.”
One nice thing about the space suits was their radios. The roar of the vacuum at the center of the mountain should have been deafening, but all Anne got from it were the rumbles transmitted through her suit pressing against the skin of the capsule.
Something brushed past the wall. Another something. Anne imagined combs, baleen, and the scrubbing cylinders of an automatic car wash. The hole-worm, sucking the nutrition off their capsule’s skin? Or maybe there was something more subtle going on here? Kinetosynthesis powered by their movement over biological switches? Magnetosynthesis? In any case, the worm was taking its payment for the journey.
Daisuke switched his helmet light on. It didn’t illuminate much except their three huddled bodies and the dirty inner surface of the capsule-seed.
He swallowed a sudden bubble of nausea and said, “Anne, how is our rope?”
She turned to look at it and got a glimpse of the vibrating nylon cord, a great deal of transparent mucus, and a flash of light from outside the capsule.
The vibration of their passage rose to a peak and vanished.
“Oh,” Moon said. “Hold—”
The capsule-seed filled with wind and light.
Chapter Nineteen
Space Monsters
Anne felt the blast in her whole body. Especially in her waist, where the savage tug on her carabiner tried to rip the belt off her space suit. The air in front of her was white with swirling fog and her back hit something that spun up and away forever.
She blinked up through the top of her helmet. Their impromptu plug was gone. Wisps of fog tore away from the spare tire, flipping end over end like a dropped coin.
And beyond it, the spinning stars.
Her suit radio crackled with Daisuke’s voice. “Anne! Anne, are you all right?”
“I’m in space,” she whispered. Then, “Uh. I think so.” Anne wiggled her arms and legs, and nothing hurt. It was just that she couldn’t move. “What happened?” She looked down. “Oh.”
Moon said something with lots of sh and kh sounds in it. Most likely profane. “The capsule-po
d exploded!”
“Yeah,” Anne agreed, patting the skin of what had once been a spherical pod.
That skin came up to her waist, hugged her legs, and bulged back outward again. The pod looked like a pear, now, the aperture fractured around four fault lines and pursed out into a long bottleneck, which Anne currently plugged.
She was stuck halfway out of the pod like a reversed Winnie the Pooh. No damage to her suit as far as she could tell.
“Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense. Normally the air and water would diffuse out of the aperture of the pod and into the body of the worm, where I guess it would release them slowly. But the hubcap airlock we rigged screwed up the system. Good thing we have our own tether and space suits, otherwise we’d be floating in, uh, space.” And dead.
Anne closed her eyes and told her heart to slow down. Too late for second-guessing now.
She should have told that to Moon. “Why didn’t you predict this?” he demanded.
Anne wiggled irritably and the pod’s skin flexed around her. “I’m not actually omniscient. You’re the one who kept rushing the preparations.” And at Daisuke’s noises. “No, I’m sure my suit’s still good. I’m just stuck.”
“Farhad to Moon,” came another voice. “Come in, Moon. Come in, Anne. Daisuke? Are you there?”
At least the relays in the tether were undamaged. “We’re here,” Anne answered. “We’re through.” She kept her eyes closed. The spinning was making her dizzy, and she had this pervasive sense of falling.
“How’s the tether on your side?”
A pause, then Daisuke answered, “I think it is still firmly attached to the inside of the pod. Moon, help me pull Anne back inside.”
“Uh, tether looks good.” At least, they didn’t seem to be drifting anywhere. They just stopped twisting one way and began untwisting in the other. That meant the tether had to be under tension, which meant it was still anchored to a mountain on the surface of Junction.
How did that work? They went right through one end of the worm and out the other, with the worm itself threaded through the wormhole, straddling both sides of the…surface? Meniscus? Event horizon? The boundary must extend all the way through the worm’s cross section. Otherwise it wouldn’t be able to pass things into orbit. Or circulate blood to its nether regions. Every second it sat there, however much mass of blood and air and everything else had to be magicked into and out of Junction’s gravity well.
Where did the energy come from to do that? And what if you had two worms, one above the other, each threaded through different ends of the same wormhole? Something could drop from the mouth of the top worm into the mouth of the bottom one, get teleported back to the top one, and fall again, forever. Anne began to understand why wormholes upset Moon so much.
“Excellent!” Farhad said. “Scientists, you may begin your science!”
“Can we bring Anne back inside?” asked Daisuke.
“Pushing her out would be easier,” Moon said.
“Here, let me see if I can pull myself out.” Anne placed her hands on the lips of the aperture. The edges resisted like cold caramel, cracking off and bending. “Give my feet a push, would you?”
“Yes, Anne. Moon, help me.”
“No. I’m busy.”
“Busy doing what?” Anne asked. “What could you possibly be busy with inside a three-meter-across pod floating in space?”
“He’s trying to open the plastic tube. What is that, Professor? Is it important?”
Silence from Moon, a sigh from Daisuke, and ineffectual shoves and nudges while he figured out leverage in free fall. Anne felt pressure on the soles of her feet, and rocky skin crumbled around her waist. Her arms windmilled as she found herself sliding out of the neck of the bottle.
There was a moment of intense nausea. Without gravity, Anne’s brain couldn’t decide whether she was rising up the tether, or sliding down headfirst.
She closed her eyes and swallowed, willing her inner ears to accept the first interpretation. There were stars out there, weren’t there? Stars were in the sky.
Except now the stars were all around her. And, as the capsule, tether, and Anne spun, more celestial objects joined in the carousel. A yellow sun and blue planet passed back and forth across Anne’s view, as if the universe had decided that she belonged at its center.
“Okay,” she said. “There’s a planet out here.”
“Is it Junction?” asked Moon urgently. “No. No, it can’t be Junction.”
“Isn’t that the whole point of this operation? Figuring that out?” Another pause as the tether reached the end of its spin in one direction and started in on the other. Anne closed her eyes and focused on not throwing up.
“Exactly. It is time to launch the nanosat,” Farhad said over the radio. “Then we’ll see if I can pick up its signal.”
“What about the spin?” asked Daisuke.
“None of that matters,” Moon growled. He grunted as if pushing on something. “The only thing that’s important is…oof! This….”
The intersuit radios worked great. Anne heard Farhad’s sigh as if he was breathing in her ear. “Daisuke, would you see if you can poke your head out the hole, then? Just shove the nanosat out.”
“This is such a bullshit operation,” Anne muttered, looking down.
Daisuke looked back up at her, his body angled somewhere between the horizontal and vertical. In one hand he held the tether, cradling the toaster-sized nanosat in his other arm.
It was only because she happened to be looking in that direction that Anne saw the flock of animals. They were the size and shape of muffins, but moving faster than thrown javelins. They hit the capsule muffin-top-first, stuck for a second, then bounced off at an angle. The capsule’s spin slowed.
“What happened?” Daisuke demanded.
“Ha,” Anne said. “Momentum parasites.”
“There are living things out there?” He shook his head in the helmet. “Of course, that’s why we came here. Anne, I’m going to give you the nanosat. Will you grab it?”
Anne reached down to grab the little machine. She’d had dogs that wouldn’t fit in a box this big. “I just throw it somewhere?”
“There’s no need to throw anything,” said Moon. “If we’re orbiting the planet, you can just hold it out and let it go. Now, Daisuke, will you please come help me?”
Were they orbiting the planet? Anne watched the blue-and-white disk slide past, as big as half the sky. They were spinning slowly enough now that she could make out the shapes of clouds and continents, but she couldn’t tell if they were sinking toward it or rising away.
Anne held the nanosat out and let go of it. The cube neither fell nor rose nor went anywhere at all. It just sat there in the space where she’d placed it, with just a bit of wobble. Anne thought about that.
Nanosat and Anne faced each other. Anne faced the blue planet, at the moment at least, with the sun at her back. At her feet was the capsule-pod. Above her head….
Anne grabbed the tether and leaned back, looking down…up…along the twisted nylon to the wormhole.
At least that’s what Anne assumed was up there. All she could see right now was a giant pearly mushroom. At first, Anne thought that was the cloud of air blown out of the capsule-pod. Except there seemed to be an awful lot of it. Air hemorrhaging out of Junction’s atmosphere? But that should look like a jet, shouldn’t it? This cloud spread very slowly, gaining bulges and wrinkles, shot through with tiny, darting shapes. It was hard to judge how large those shapes were, but they swarmed, swung, and blasted about on puffs of exhaust. Laser light flickered.
A spring-shaped animal twisted out of the cloud, compressed flat, and sprang off. It left a crater behind.
“Not a cloud, then, but some kind of gel? An excellent way of conserving resources, make sure that the air and water don’t get away,”
Anne said. “Maybe the worm is related to the living mist. Or uses living mist as a symbiote? Or is the mist even alive in its own right? Maybe it’s just an excretion.” That would make sense, given the speed they were going and the number of spines on the capsule-pod. “Without an awful lot of lubrication, we would have torn this worm a new one.”
“Ugh,” said Moon and Daisuke.
“Anne, is the nanosat broadcasting?” Farhad asked.
Anne checked. “The little green light is on.”
“I’m not getting anything yet,” Farhad said.
“Good. Finally something makes sense.” Another grunt. “Daisuke, help me open this.”
Anne turned her attention back to the gel cloud. Small objects pelted it like hailstones. More momentum parasites? Some managed to chip a few pieces off it. That gel must be hardening quickly.
And beyond it….
At first she thought they were unusually bright, unusually colored stars. Then she saw one with a cage around it. Others were covered in foam or shimmering bubbles or bloomed with the mucus-clouds of other hole-worms. Others shone unprotected, transmitting light from some distant part of space.
“It’s the Nightbow,” Anne said.
“The what?”
“The ring of wormholes around Junction. You saw it on our first night here. There.”
She twisted her head around. The wormholes seemed to form a ceiling above her head. “We must be to the right or left of it. Sticking out sideways, and spinning.”
Moon managed to disagree with her while saying she was right. “You mean we’re above or below the plane of an equatorial portal ring. That’s the best configuration for placing things in orbit. Above some other planet.” Moon was still trying to open his tube.
“Everything all right up there?” asked Farhad.
“Moon’s frustrated,” Daisuke said. “He can’t open his pipe. Is there a machine inside?”
Anne decided not to get involved. Better to take in the scenery while she was in a position to enjoy it.
“We can bring you back and try again,” Farhad offered.
Interchange Page 28