“No! No time. No second chances.” Moon’s voice descended into a growl.
The spinning wasn’t so bad now. If Anne circled the tether with her arms and jumped off the capsule at just the right angle….
“Oh! The wall moved,” Daisuke said.
Moon said, “Anne, what are you doing?”
She was spinning, was what she was doing. Contrary to the spin of the capsule. That meant that relative to Junction, Anne was more or less stationary.
And she could finally look at it.
The planet shone blue below her. Swirled with clouds, ringed by wormholes and life. Objects down there in the atmosphere, like black arrowheads, their noses shining, silhouetted themselves against the colors of their planet.
Sunlight refracted off air that pooled like tears over the lens of an eye. Algae-colored oceans exhaled clouds. And past fractal coastlines, over land wrinkled and upthrust by opposed tectonic forces, a boiling chaos of colors – green, red, brown, yellow – as different kinds of life battled each other. The planet was a patchwork, at once seething with competition and timeless in stability. A battlefield and a mosaic as lovely as a butterfly’s wing.
“Look,” she whispered to herself. “Look at this view.”
“Oh,” Farhad said in her suit radio. “Wait! I’m getting something! Yes. Yes! We’re receiving a signal from the nanosat. You’re in orbit! You’re above me. You’re orbiting Junction!”
Anne smiled behind her visor. “I know.”
***
Moon’s hands twitched and he lost his grip on the tube. Again!
He was going to die. Here or down on some planet, it didn’t matter. His brain would scramble itself and he’d never know why – why! – one face of the portal had brought him into the same light cone as the other.
“Moon? What’s wrong? Are you all right?”
It was Daisuke again with his stupid questions. Moon put his hands up to his faceplate, trying to hide his tears.
“Moon, come in. Come in, son!” That was Farhad, the cruel old manipulator.
“I’m….” But he couldn’t say ‘fine’. Some things were just impossible. “I’m done. I give up. I can’t understand these things.”
“The wormholes?”
Moon twitched again. His heart sped up, flushing warm blood through his extremities. What a ridiculous sack of meat the human body was. “You’re still calling them wormholes. They can’t be wormholes. They’re something else. Something with its own internal energy source. Something that protects the people traveling through it. A user interface.”
“So, son,” said Farhad. “Use it.”
“Use it.” Moon blinked and droplets floated away from his eyes. “Yes.” A strange laxness had come into his limbs. A kind of peace. He would never know how the portals worked. He could only mash his pitiful paws against them and see what happened. Was that enough? Maybe when the monkey beeped the car’s horn enough, he might attract the owner’s attention. Maybe the owner would give the monkey what it needed.
The plastic pipe floated between Moon and Daisuke, spinning like a baton. Moon reached for it.
“All right,” he said. “Daisuke. Help me with this.”
***
Anne breathed a sigh of relief. She had no idea what Moon was going on about, but Daisuke and Farhad would know. Trust. She would trust them to work their people-magic on Moon while she got down to the business of understanding this orbital ecosystem.
She was reminded of blue-water diving. Out in the ocean, you found yourself floating in a medium that seemed to extend to infinity in every direction. Here, there weren’t even bubbles to follow to the surface. Only stars.
And some things that weren’t stars.
The easiest to spot were the disks. They were right in front of her, if very far away. Perfect circles, at least as far as Anne could tell, which ranged in shade from ‘dirty snow’ to ‘coal’, these latter only visible when they passed in front of something else. Most of the circles, though, were somewhere in between, a color Anne decided to call ‘pigeon’s tummy’.
The disks looked rather like a bloom of moon-jellies seen from above. Except these creatures didn’t seem to be moving – no, that sort of thinking didn’t work up here. Of course, the disks had to be whizzing about the planet just as fast as Anne was. Say instead that they weren’t visibly changing position relative to Anne or each other, although Anne did have the impression that the largest ones were spinning.
Spinning. Anne’s fingers clenched in her gloves, as if to clutch around that little black velvet box. The gift from the Nun, the bait on Farhad’s hook. Anne was looking at vacuum-spinners.
Unfurled, the skirts of the spinners were each many kilometers across. The organisms had angled themselves – yes! – to catch the sun, presenting their biggest profile to Anne. They would also have to be spinning against Junction’s magnetic field. The only place they could spin and face the sun, then, would be if they were hovering above Junction’s day–night terminator.
No, of course, not hovering; the spinners were orbiting as well. They would be in a ring, but tilted perpendicular to the equator-girdling Nightbow. The ring of spinners would pass over the poles instead. That would explain what Anne was seeing now, which was a wall of variously shaded disks, stretching above and below, curving to outline Junction’s horizon.
Anne imagined those organisms spinning, orbiting, pushed away from the sun by the pressure of light and toward the equator by the charged particles they captured. How did they stay on the right path? Minute adjustments of the shade and shape of their skirts? Her eyes crossed. When she focused again, the arcing curtain of spinners had changed. The ones farthest away, at the ends of the arc, were farther apart, and the ones more directly in front of her were larger. Aha. They hadn’t moved; Anne had. Her part of the Nightbow was carrying her toward the ring of spinners.
What happened in the places where the two rings met? That should be interesting.
Moon groaned over the radio.
“Is everything all right?” Farhad asked.
“This pipe is very hard to open with space suit gloves,” said Daisuke, his voice earnest.
“Sorry,” Farhad said. “I didn’t think of that. Should I reel you in and try—”
“No!” Moon started shouting before Farhad could finish. “I can open it. I’m so close!”
“Close to what?” Daisuke asked.
Anne wanted to tell him to just take the damn pipe away from Moon. They could figure out what was in it when they got back to Junction.
But Daisuke’s plan was more subtle. “I think that you’re obsessed with wormholes, Professor Moon.”
“Portals!”
“Okay, okay. Try it this way. Hold it.”
The capsule twisted under Anne, rotating around the tether.
“Whoa,” said Anne. “How’s it going down there?”
“Moon’s feet are on the wall and he is twisting us around,” Daisuke answered. “He’s using himself and the whole capsule and tether and worm as a giant wrench.” Moon grunted, and Daisuke said, “It’s very frustrating, isn’t it? The portals don’t make sense to you. Even after you destroyed one and passed through another. The third one you stole, didn’t you?”
“No,” Moon said, utterly unconvincingly. “Like this. Give it back. Now hold it orthogonally. No, not that orthogonal. Like you’re lifting weights. Yes.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Daisuke,” said Farhad. “How would one move a wormhole?”
The capsule twisted north-to-south, pressing the tether against the side of the hole.
“Christ,” Anne said. “Hey, boys! Stop…well actually keep on it. I can see something under the capsule. I mean, uh, below the plane of the Nightbow.”
There were things down there. Or possibly up. Pole-ward, Anne decided to call that direction. Out of the plane of
the Nightbow, past her feet and the capsule-pod, objects moved. Organisms. Wrinkled and silver-gray objects like regularized meteors. The closest was rising sedately, rimmed with the light of Junction’s sun.
“I don’t know how you did it,” said Daisuke. “I was distracted at the time. But if you could move a wormhole, that would be a very important discovery. If you could move a wormhole through another wormhole, that would be much more. If that was possible, you could move wormholes from Junction to Earth. You could sell them and make a fortune. Right, Farhad?”
Moon giggled. It was the sort of noise someone made when he could no longer control himself. “Who cares about the Earth? It’s as much a distraction as Junction. Pretty animals and lights.”
“Now, Daisuke, it is absolutely not my intent to sell wormholes to anyone who asks for one.”
Anne knew the feeling in her chest, as if someone was draining the air in her lungs out the bottom. Farhad was about to say something political.
“Junction is a bottleneck, don’t you see? If the entire effort has to go through the highlands of New Guinea, we won’t be able to get nearly enough people off the Earth in time. But if Canada has one wormhole, for example, and Sweden has another.”
“If people know that wormholes can be moved, anything can happen,” Daisuke said. “Bombs. Wars! The powerful countries will collect all the wormholes they can find on Junction and hide them.”
“Assuming someone doesn’t try to send an aircraft carrier through a wormhole and cause it to evaporate and lose it forever.” Anne couldn’t sit down in free fall, but she dangled against the tether. “Shit,” she said.
“World War Three,” said Daisuke.
“The destruction of Junction!” Anne said. Blood hammered in her temples. “This is it. This is what this whole mission was really about. You came here to mine Junction of its wormholes.”
“Who cares?” Moon said. “Aside from you? You just want to preserve Junction as a playground for yourself. So what if there’s an ecological disaster, so what if there’s a war? I’ve cracked the universe open and seen what’s inside.”
Anne saw the opening. Daisuke must have too. “So,” he said, “what do you see, Professor Moon?”
“I’ve discovered nothing,” Moon said. “After everything I’ve done. All the hope and fear in your eyes when you look at me. ‘Moon, don’t kill the pretty animals. Don’t destroy the geopolitical order.’ I have the power to grant or deny you whatever I want, and I still don’t know how!”
Silence, then, Farhad said over the radio, “All right, I’m hauling you back. Forget the pipe, Moon. We can try to pass it through the wormhole you found in the Cavalier biome. Or somewhere else. Daisuke? Don’t interfere. Come in, Daisuke! Come in!”
Something flashed on the surface of the meteor. Again. And a third time. Anne’s eyes, attracted by the light, caught on familiar shapes. Mounds. Crowns of prickly growth, fuzzed with leaves like giant lead-colored ribbons. A shape like six clumps of broccoli stuck trunk-to-trunk and smooshed into a pyramid. The asteroid looked, in other words, like the Howling Mountain. Although much smaller….
Anne squinted.
Now the orbiting, living mountain looked bigger. And bigger still. It was moving much faster than Anne had realized. It was just that so much of that movement was right toward them.
“Guys?” she said. “I think we’re going to need to abandon ship.”
Of course the guys both said, “What?”
“Come in,” said Farhad, which was harder to explain.
The space broccoli now filled the entire lower half of Anne’s world.
“No!” Moon said. “It has to be now, there’s no time!”
“You’re panicking, Moon. There is still time. When America invades and collects all the portals, they’ll put them in a research facility. You can head that facility, son.”
The tether jerked. A vibration ran down it. Farhad was reeling them in. A second ago, Anne would have thought that was a bad thing. Now….
“Come on, son,” said Farhad. “We’ve talked about this. My plan is the only way for you to make your discoveries while your brain still works.”
A gleam against the blackness of space. Three shadows against the blue of Junction. Anne blinked and they were gone, but she had an impression of something long and thin, with a glow at its tail.
“Come on, son,” Farhad repeated. “Moon. Come in!”
“Missiles,” Anne said. “But I think they missed.” Even Anne’s tiny glimpse could only have come as the missiles passed her.
She turned, looking away from the mountain-ship, to see four bright sparks. Rocket engines? But why would the mountain fire missiles past the capsule? Was there something else waiting in space?
One of the missiles flipped.
It was as fast as flicking a light switch. A puff of white vapor and the drive flare flattened and vanished behind a dark, irregular oval. The nose of the missile was hard to see against the backdrop of space, but it seemed to be growing larger. Closer.
“Moon, come in!” Farhad’s voice was strangely calm.
Of course! The mountain-ship was much too bulky to swoop around swallowing things in orbit. It would have trained rocket-animals. Mutualists like hunting falcons would snatch its prey for it.
“Moon, come in. Anne, come in. Daisuke, come in.”
“Farhad, would you shut up!” Anne snarled. “Daisuke and Moon, get out of the pod right the fuck now!”
“Anne, I haven’t said anything!” Now Farhad sounded as panicked as he should. “You’re panicking. Come in.” And calm again.
“Moon. Come. In.”
The hair’s bristled on Anne’s neck. She gripped the tether tighter and bared her teeth at the mountain. The ship. A monkey might snarl like that at a zoologist with a net.
Exhaust sputtered around the outline of the mountain, aligning the clyclopean mouth that opened at its peak. “Come! In! Anne! Moon! Daisuke! Get out of the pod right the fuck now! Come! In!”
“Yes,” said Moon. “Yes.”
Anne’s stomach lurched. Or, rather, it settled. The sensation was pleasant after the floating feeling of free-fall, as if she were….
Was she accelerating? She looked around, but the missiles were still incoming, three of them on course to push three astronauts into that mouth. But the acceleration from the missiles would push her forward. This acceleration was pushing her up. Or pulling her down.
Dust settled around Anne’s feet, onto the surface of the pod.
“Oh. Gravity,” Anne said, and the pod blew out from under her.
Chapter Twenty
The Purpose of Junction
It was as if Moon had uncorked a hurricane.
The cap of the pipe flew out of Moon’s gloved fingers with the force of a gunshot. He could feel the concussion through his suit. He could hear it. Bang.
His eyes snapped closed, leaving afterimages burned onto his retinas: Daisuke’s snarling face, his hands on Moon’s wrists, Moon’s own hands on the pipe, and the brilliant, orange-and-blue sphere of the wormhole.
Moon had known this was going to happen. Of course, what else could happen? If portals existed, and you could change their size, change their position, put one in a bottle, and pass it through another wormhole, what else could happen but violence and madness?
Now, though, there was nothing but howling wind, white with ice crystals. Segmented sticks smashed against squirming animals. A creature like a fish made of coiled ribbon bucked and belched as pressure differential unspooled its body. An entire world’s atmosphere vomiting from the hole that Moon had made.
Detritus rattled and squelched against Moon. Something tugged on his wrists and waist. Something pressed against his belly. Those would be Daisuke’s grip, the carabiner attached to the tether, and the butt end of the pipe. Yes, those vectors all lined up
with Moon’s predictions.
Except where was the impact on his back? Moon had expected to be thrown into the wall of the capsule. He’d also expected more spin than this. Moon had tried to align the pipe with his center of gravity, but Daisuke had been trying to wrestle the pipe out of his grip at the time. Moon was sure he hadn’t achieved a ninety-degree angle with his belly. And where was the wall of the capsule?
The wind cleared, the pressure eased. The wormhole at the end of his pipe had vanished, and Moon could see the wall of the capsule now, flipping away into space behind Daisuke’s shoulder, already thirty meters away or more.
Moon and Daisuke, clinging to each other, now spun in empty space.
Moon could explain that. The force of air outgassing from the portal had blown the capsule-pod. And most likely torn the pod inside-out.
Moon was in space, and Daisuke was with him. The carabiners that clipped them to the tether were designed to give way before the fabric of their suits, and so they had. All very sensible, post facto. But he hadn’t predicted this. He hadn’t predicted this!
Moon laughed. He was tethered to Daisuke, but not to any other reference point. The two of them were floating free in space! He laughed so hard he choked. He wept and gasped in his helmet. Moon had achieved the impossible. He had moved a portal through a portal. Everything would change now! Everything would be destroyed and remade! It was glorious.
New vectors of movement. Not around, as one would expect from the dynamics of gas escaping a roughly spherical volume, but back and forth. Ah, of course, that was oscillation caused by the observer being shaken. Another fascinating result of his experiment. The opening of a portal between vacuum and a planetary atmosphere causes a destructive outgassing, the death of the experimenter in space, and the violent anger of his companions. Moon should have predicted that too.
***
Daisuke grabbed the pipe and the wormhole vanished.
It was as if he’d flicked a switch. Daisuke’s glove closed around the white PVC plastic and the misty, orange-blue heart of the hurricane blinked out. The tension in his stomach slacked. Gravity no longer pulled him toward the end of the pipe. The storm continued, but with each moment it was weaker.
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