Imagination Fully Dilated: Science Fiction Part 21

How remarkable."

First Chair rapped the tank again thoughtfully. "What are our options?"

The environmental engineer said, "We recycle, alot . No more baths.""Yuck," said someone.

He continued, "We can build dew traps, but there isn't much water in the atmosphere. We're not going to get a lot that way."

"Can we make it?" said First Chair.

The engineer shrugged. "If nothing breaks down."

"Check the ship. If this stuff eats at the engines, we won't be going anywhere."

They shuffled away, stirring dust with their feet. I stayed with Lashawnda. "A daily bleach wash would probably keep things clean," she said. She crouched next to the pipes, her knees grinding into the dirt. I flinched, thinking about microscopic spores caught in her suit's fabric. The spores had killed Marvin and Beat.i.tude. On the third day they'd come in from setting a weather station atop a near hill, and they rushed the decontamination. Why would they worry? After all, the air tested breathable. We all knew that the chances of a bacteria from an alien planet being dangerous to our Earth-grown systems were remote, but we didn't plan on water-hungry spores that didn't care at all what kind of proteins we were made of. The spores only liked the water, and once they'd settled into the warm, moist ports of the two scientist's lungs, they sprouted like crazy, sending tendrils through their systems, breaking down human cells to build their own structures. In an hour the two developed a cough. Six hours later, they were dead. Working remote arms through the quarantine area, I helped zip Beat.i.tude into a body bag after the autopsy.

Delicate-looking orange leaves covered her cheeks, and her neck was b.u.mpy with sprouts ready to break through.

At least they didn't suffer. The spore's toxins operated as a powerful opiate. Marvin spent the last hour babbling and laughing, weaker and weaker, until the last thing he said was, "It's G.o.d at the end."

A quick a.n.a.lysis of the spores revealed an enzyme they needed to sprout, and we were inoculated with an enzyme blocker, but everyone was more rigorous decontaminating now.

Lashawnda said, "Come on, Spencer. I want to show you something."

We walked downhill toward the closest gully and its forest. She limped, the result of a deteriorating hip replacement. Like most people her vintage, she'd gone through numerous reconstructive procedures, but you wouldn't know it to look at her. She'd stabilized her looks as a forty-year-old, almost a tenth her real age. Pixie-like features with character lines radiating from the mouth. Just below the ears, dark hair with hints of gray. Slender in the waist. Dancer's legs. Economical in her movements whether she was sorting plant samples or washing her face. Four hundred years! I studied her when she wasn't looking.

I picked thirty for myself. Physically it was a good place to be. I didn't tire easily. My stockiness contrasted well to her slight build.

Lashawnda suffered from cascading cancers, each treatable eruption triggering the next until the body gives up. She'd told me she had a couple of laps around the sun left at best. "Papaver will be my last stop," she'd said during the long trip here. Of course, once we've slept with everyone else (and all the possible combinations of three or four at the same time), and the novelty of inter-ship politicking has worn thin, we all say we're done with planet hopping forever.

I suppose it was inevitable Lashawnda and I ended up together on the ship. I was the second oldest by a century, and she had one-hundred-and-fifty years on me, plus she laughed often and liked to talk. We'd go to bed and converse for a couple hours before sleeping. I'd grown tired of energetic couplings with partners I had nothing to say to afterwards. My own two-hundred-fifty years hung like a heavy coat.What did I have to say to someone who'd been kicking around for only sixty or ninety years?

I cared for her more than anyone in my memory, and she was dying.

When we reached the gully, she said, "What's amazing is that there are so many plants. Papaver should be like Mars. Same age. Lighter gravity and solar wind should have stripped its atmosphere. Unlike Mars, however, Papaver held onto its water, and the plants take care of the air."

Except for the warped orange and brown and yellow "trees" in front of us, that looked more like twisted pipes than plants, we could have been in an arctic desert.

"Darn little water," I said, thinking about our empty tanks.

"Darn littlefree water, but quite a bit locked into the bioma.s.s. Did you see the survey results I sent you yesterday?"

We pushed through the first branches. Despite their brittle looks, the stems were supple. They waved back into place after we pa.s.sed. Broad, waxy leaves that covered the sun side of each branch bent to face us as we came close. I found their mobility unnerving. They were like blank eyes following our movements. In the trees' shadow I found more green than orange and yellow.

"Yeah, I looked at it." Except in a narrow band around the equator, Papaver appeared lifeless. But in the planet's most temperate region, in every sheltering hole and crevice, small plants grew. And peculiar forests, like the one we were in now, filled the gullies. The remote survey, taking samples at even the coldest and deadest-looking areas found life there too. Despite the punishing changes in temperature and the lack of rain, porous rock served as a fertile home for endolithic fungi and algae. Beneath them lived cyan.o.bacterias.

"If the results are uniform over the rest of the surface, there's enough water for a small ocean or two."

She wiggled between two large trunks, streaking her suit with greenish-orange residue. "Do you know why the leaves stick to our suits?"

"Transference of seeds?" I hadn't had time to study the trees' life cycle. Cla.s.sifying the types had filled up most of my time, and I did that from within the ship. Lashawnda sent samples so fast, I'd had little chance to investigate much myself.

"Nope. They use airborne spores. What they're really trying to do is to eat you."

Obviously she knew where she was going. We'd worked our way far enough into the plants that I wasn't sure what direction the ship lay. "Excuse me?" I said.

"You were wondering what preyed on the gopher-rats. They're herbivores. You said they couldn't be the top of the food chain, and they aren't. They eat lichens, fungus and leaves, and the trees eat them."

She stopped at a clump of stems, like warped bamboo, and gently pushed the branches apart. "See," she said.

Half a meter off the ground, a yellow and orange coc.o.o.n hung between the branches, like a football-sized hammock. I'd seen the lumps before. "So?"

She dropped to her knees and poked it with her finger. Something inside the shape quivered and wiggled, pushing aside several leaves. A gopher-rat stared out at me for a second, a net of tendrils over its eye.

I stepped back. For a second I thought of Beat.i.tude, her face marked with the tiny, waxy leaves. "Howlong . . . when did it get caught?"

She laughed. "Yesterday. I startled him, and he jumped into the trees here. When he didn't come out, I went looking."

I knelt beside her. Up close I saw how the plant had growninto the gopher-rat. In the few uncovered spots, tufts of fur poked out. The biologist in me was fascinated, but for the rest, I found the image repugnant. "How come he didn't escape? The leaves are a little sticky, but notthat sticky."

"Drugs. Tiny spines on the leaves inject some type of opiate. I ran the a.n.a.lysis this morning. Same stuff that kept Marvin and Beat.i.tude from feeling pain."

"A new data point to add to the ecology." I rested my hands on my knees. The poor gopher-rat didn't even get to live out its short life span. For a second I thought about burning down the entire forest for Marvin and Beat.i.tude and the gopher-rat, who were dead and never coming back, except the gopher-rat wasn't dead yet. I wondered if it knew what was happening.

"Don't you see what's interesting?" She pushed the plants back even farther. "This is important."

"What am I missing?"

She smiled. Even through her faceplate I could tell that she found this exciting. "The gopher-rat should be dead. If the plants grabbed him just for his water, he'd be nothing but bones now, but he's still living.

Obviously something else is going on. There's lumps like this one all through the forest. I dissected one.

Without a thorough a.n.a.lysis, I can't tell for sure, but it looks like the plant absorbs everything except the gopher-rat's nervous system. It's symbiotic."

The leaves seemed to tighten a little around the gopher-rat. We stood in the middle of the forest. I couldn't see anything but the trees' tall stems and the sticky leaves that covered most of the ground. The sun had dropped lower in the sky so I couldn't find it through the trees, although their tops glowed orange and yellow in the slanting light. Even through the suit, I could feel that it was growing cold. "It doesn't look like an equal relationship to me."

"Maybe not, but it's an interesting direction for the ecology to take, don't you think?"

"Why would a plant want a nervous system?" I said. We'd turned the lights out an hour earlier. My arm was draped over Lashawnda's shoulder, and her bare back pressed warmly against my chest. I didn't want to let her go. Even though my side ached to change position, I wanted to savor every second. I wondered if she sensed my grief.

"No reason that I can think of," she said. Her fingers were wrapped around my wrist, and her heart beat steadily against my own. "But it must have something to do with its survival. There's an evolutionary advantage."

For a long time, I didn't speak. She was so solid and real andliving . How could her life be threatened?

How could it be that she could be here today and not forever? She breathed deeply. I thought she might have gone to sleep, but she suddenly twisted from my embrace, cursing under her breath.

"What's the matter?" I said.

She sat up. In the dark I couldn't see, but I could feel her beside me. Her muscles tensed.

"A little discomfort," she said."What did the medic prescribe?"

"Nothing that's doing any good."

She coughed heavily for a few seconds, and I could tell she was stretching, like she was trying to rid herself of a cramp. "I'm going down to the lab. I'm not sleeping well anyway." She rested her hand against my face for an instant before climbing out of bed.

After an hour of tossing and turning, I got up and did what I'd never done before: accessed Lashawnda's medical reports. After reading for a bit I could see she'd been optimistic. There were a lot less than a couple trips around the sun left in her, and her prescription list was a pharmacopoeia of pain killers.

She hadn't returned by morning.

"It's standard operating procedure," said the environmental engineer. She held her report forms to her chest defensively. "If the atmosphere isn't toxic, we're supposed to vent it in to cool the equipment.

We've been circulating outside air since the first day. Thereare bioscreens."

First Chair looked at her dubiously. The four of us were crowded into the systems control room.

Lashawnda broke the seals of her contamination suit. She'd rushed from decontamination without taking it off. "I should have thought of it," Lashawnda said. The helmet m.u.f.fled her voice. "The fungi are opportunistic, and they're adept at finding hard-to-get water. You reverse airflow periodically, don't you?"

The environmental engineer nodded. "Sure, it blows dust out of the screens."

"The spores are activated by the moisture you vented, and-"

"Ididn't ventanything ," snapped the engineer. "It is standard operating procedure."

"Right," said Lashawnda, pulling the helmet off her head. She brushed her hair back with a quick gesture.

"The fungus grew through the screen, spored, and that's what's in the machinery."

"Theentire water recycling system? The backup system too?" asked First Chair, a tinge of desperation in his voice.

"Absolutely. There are holes in the valves. All the joints are pitted. The holding tanks would have more fungus in them than water, if there was any water left. Pretty happy fungus at that, I'd guess." She pulled the top half of the suit over her head, then stepped out of the pants. "Here's the unusual part: The water that was in the tank isn't in the room anymore. There are skinny stems leading to the vent that go down the ship's side and into the ground. The fungus pumped the water out. These plants are geniuses at moving water, which they have to be to survive."

First Chair asked, "Why weren't the external tanks already ruined when we got here? They were exposed to this environment much longer than our recycling equipment."

"They landed in the winter. That's the same reason the initial probes didn't find the spores," said Lashawnda. "It's spring now. The plants must only be active when its warmer. Bad timing on our part."

I looked through the service window into the machinery bay. Even through the thick gla.s.s the fungus was evident, a thick fur around the pipes. "You're sure the growth started inside the ship and went out, not the other way around?"

Lashawnda smiled. "Absolutely.""So what?" said First Chair. I could see the wheels spinning in his head: how much water did we have stored elsewhere? How well were the dew-catchers working? Then he was dividing that amount of water by the minimum amount each crew member needed until the resupply ship arrived. By his expression, he didn't like the math.

Lashawnda said, "That means the plants cooperate. They share the wealth. It's counter-Darwinian. I compared the fly-by photos of this area from the first day until now. Since we've landed, plant growth has thickened and extended, which makes sense. When we lost the external tanks we introduced more free water into the system than it's seen in years, but the forests in the neighboring gulches also are thicker. We thought they were separate ecosystems. They aren't. Water we lost here is ending up as much as five kilometers away. The plants move moisture to where it's needed."

"Will knowing that help us now?" asked First Chair. "I don't care if the plants are setting up volleyball leagues; we've got to figure a way to find enough water to last us five months." He glared at the environmental engineer on his way out. She turned to me.

"I know," I said. "Standard operating procedure."

"Let's go outside," said Lashawnda. "We've got the afternoon left."

"Could we harvest the trees and press water out of them?" I asked.

Lashawnda attached another sensor to a tree stem, moved a few feet along, then fastened the next one.

She straightened slowly, her eyes closed against the discomfort. I wondered how she really felt. She never talked about it.

"You did the reports. How many plants would we have to squeeze dry to get a single cup?"

I didn't answer. She was right. Although the plants tied up most of the planet's water, it was spread thinly. I dug into a bare patch of dirt between two stands of trees. Only a dozen centimeters below the surface, a matted network of plant tendrils resisted my efforts to go deeper. I picked one about a finger in width and fastened a sensor to it.

We were deep into the tree-filled gulch. With no sun on us, I had to keep moving to stay warm, and my faceplate defogger wasn't working well.

I looked into a bundle of tree stalks. An old gopher-rat lump hung between the branches. Now that I knew where to look, I found them often. "Have you gone this deep into the gulch before?"

Lashawnda consulted her wrist display. "No, but by the map we are nearly at the end. We'll save time if we go back along the ridge."

Fifteen minutes later Lashawnda pushed through a particularly heavy patch of trees, and she disappeared.

"Oh!"

"What?"

Pulling my way through the vegetation, I found what stopped her. The gully pinched to a close twenty meters farther, and there were no more trees, but the same kind of sticky leaves that captured the gopher-rats covered the ground in a bed of orange and yellow, like broad-surfaced clover. The setting sun poured a crimson light over the scene, and for the first time since I'd landed on Papaver, I thought something was beautiful. As I watched, the leaves turned their faces toward us and seemed to lean theleast bit, as if they yearned for us to lay down.

Lashawnda said, "Let's not walk through that. We'd crush too many of them." She fastened the last of the sensors to the delicate leaves at the end of the little clearing. Her movements were spare, exact. The final sensor fastened, she paused on her knees, facing the bed of plants. She reached out, hand flat, and brushed the leaves gently. They strained to meet her, leaves wrapping around her fingers; a longer-stemmed leaf encircled her wrist. Within a few seconds, her hand, wrist, and arm to her elbow were encased.

I stepped toward her. The expanse of leaves had changed color! Then I realized the color was the same, but the plants had shifted even further to face her. Sunlight hit them differently. All lines pointed toward Lashawnda. My voice felt choked and tight. "What are you doing?"

"If I move, I must contain water. They're just trying to get it. They work together; isn't that superb? If they got my water, they'd send it to where it was needed." Gradually she pulled her arm free. The leaves slipped their hold without resistance.

Careful not to step on the plants, we made our way to the edge of the gully and clambered out. The startlingly pink sun brushed the horizon, and yellow and gold glowing streamers layered themselves a third of the way up the sky.

"That's amazing." I held Lashawnda's hand through the clumsy gloves, the same hand the leaves had covered.

"You haven't seen one before?" She squeezed my hand back. "Every sunset is like this. It's the dust in the atmosphere."

The streamers twisted under the influence of upper air disturbances that didn't touch us.

"I saw your medical reports," I said.

She sighed. The sky darkened as more and more of the sun vanished until only a pink diamond winked between two distant hills, and the final golden layer dulled into a yellow haze. "You're the last one. Are you going to wish me well too? You'd think everyone turned into death and dying counselors. If I hear, 'You've had a good four hundred years,' again, I'll scream."

"No, I wasn't going to say that." But I don't know what I was going to say. I couldn't tell her that I wanted to do some screaming of my own.

By the time we returned to the ship, the night had grown incredibly cold, and the decontamination chamber wasn't any warmer. I longed for a hot spiced tea, but First Chair was waiting for us on the other side.