Dancing in Dreamtime (39 page)

Graham's own breath came in shallow puffs. The atmosphere was supposed to be as close as damn-it to E-normal. Yet no human lungs had ever breathed here, so he kept bottled air handy. Before leaving the warpship, he and Carl had been dosed against toxins and alien microorganisms. Against larger organisms, they would have to use their wits and their weapons.

“No trances, nature boy,” Carl hollered from the camp, where the dome had begun to rise. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

“Wide awake,” Graham answered. It was the condition of his sport, his art, his job, this adrenalin rush. If he ever lost that edge, he would be finished. The heightening of perception that kept the brothers alive also kept them employed. The studio paid their salaries and the enormous costs of warping them to unexplored worlds for the sake of Graham's raw sensations, which even now, as he scanned the jungle, were being picked up by a recorder at the base of his skull. The stronger the sensations the better, for they would be made into yet another
Wild Cosmos
feelie to divert the city-bound dwellers on Earth, who had an insatiable appetite for virtual danger. For Carl and Graham, the danger was real.

Left to himself, Graham would forget to eat, as he would forget to pitch his tent or charge his gun. So as usual Carl cooked, and when supper was ready his voice boomed across the field. “Come and get it!”

They ate in the faceted green dome. Although tripflares and mines had been set in a ring around the camp, the brothers kept rising from their meal to stare out the windows, leery about what might be stealing up on them from the forest. Reinforcing mesh in the windows imposed on the view a grid of lines, giving the illusion of order. But the planet had never been mapped; its life forms
had never been catalogued. Videos from orbit showed a continuous land mass wrapped in a belt around the equator, separating the polar seas. This lone continent bristled with vegetation that was broken only by rare clearings, such as the one in which the brothers had landed, and by gashes that could have been riverbeds or game trails. Nobody knew if there were any animals to make trails. Nobody knew much at all about Amazon-7, which was what appealed to the brothers, and what made Graham's sensations worth a few million to the studio.

“So how far to those mountains?” Carl asked.

“Five days,” Graham answered, “maybe seven. Depends how mean the bush is.”

The videos had shown a series of white peaks strung out along the equator, rising like teeth above the rust-dark jungle. Planning a feelie called
Journey to the Crystal Mountain
, the studio wanted the brothers to hike to and from one of those peaks, with gritty adventures along the way. While descending in the shuttle, Graham had taken a bearing on the nearest shining mountain. What made it gleam? he wondered. Not snow, at this latitude. Stone? Volcanic glass?

Carl tilted up his mashed fighter's nose, hairy nostrils flaring. “You trust this air?”

“It'll do. I'm not lugging tanks, even in point-nine G.”

“Risk it, right?” Carl thumped him, hard, and filled the dome with rowdy laughter. “My daredevil bro.”

Graham was older by two years, but Carl was taller by a hand and heavier by thirty kilos. He was large and steady, slow to excite and slow to calm down, like a boulder resisting changes in temperature. The older brother picked his way around obstacles, while
the younger one bulled his way through. The elder sensed patterns, nuances, details; the younger tuned in on threats. And so in their treks they had fallen into complementary roles, Graham leading them into the uncharted zones and back again, Carl keeping them in one piece.

After supper, Carl began methodically packing their two rucksacks, checking the food, the clothes, the stove and fuel, the lights, especially the guns and explosives and flares.

Unsettled by the silence that came on at dusk, Graham kept pacing from window to window, staring out at the mazy woods. No movement, no glint of eyes. Abrupt and final as a wall. Somehow he must find a way through that tangled mass to the dazzling mountain. He trembled. Unless you could die from going there, no place was truly wild. On Earth, death had retreated to the intensive-care wards. Off Earth, it could meet you anywhere.

“Ease up, bro,” said Carl.

“I'm loose. You don't think I'm loose?”

“You're wound tight as a top.”

Graham knew it was true. But the excitement was sweet, the tension of standing on a cliff's edge.

Their shimmersuits were opaque in the early light, clinging to them like brown pelts, and their packs bulked high above their helmets. It was the twilit hour when nighttime predators yield to those of the day. Nothing stirred.

“Point the way, big brother, and let's move.” Even though Carl whispered, his voice sounded huge in the stillness.

“I'm looking.” Graham always savored this moment on the threshold of a wild zone, deciding where to enter. At length he ducked under a limb and stepped into the russet woods.

They moved slowly at first, cautiously, then more quickly as Graham picked up the grain of the land, Carl lumbering behind with stungun in hand, the two swinging along in tandem like a four-legged beast, rarely talking, rarely needing to talk. Beyond the palisade of trees at the jungle's edge, the undergrowth thinned out. Light from the orange star speckled the ground. The spongy soil yielded beneath their boots, preserving the faint mark of their passage.

In the first few hours, they paused only for Graham to sight back along the way they had come, memorizing the gestalt of trunks and limbs so that days from now he could lead them back out. Then as the shafts of light from the local sun tilted toward vertical, the brothers halted as if on signal. They shrugged free of the packs and sat on their helmets.

Graham took a pinch of dirt and held it to his nose. Must, mildew, iron. From overhead came that metallic clinking, as of jangled keys. “I can't figure out that noise.”

“That's my gears seizing up from this heat,” said Carl, mopping his broad face. The gun lay in his lap. “Melt me to a puddle of grease, at this rate.”

Graham surveyed the jungle. The leaves and vines and fernlike fronds were in shades of red, the solid trunks nearly black, creating an impression of embers and ashes. The trees rose about three times a man's height before branching horizontally. Wherever they touched, the limbs of neighboring trees interlaced, and the joints blazed with gold and blue growths like bright flowers. Dead trees, their trunks rotted through, dangled from the lattice
of branches, and creepers looped down in festoons. The canopy appeared so tightly woven, Graham imagined a person could walk up there. Animals certainly could. “You see anything move yet?” he asked.

“Negative,” Carl answered.

“Better not be all plants. No animals, no action.”

“I figure they're here, just back deeper in the woods.”

On their next halt, Graham asked the question again, and Carl answered, “Nothing to sweat about.”

“What? I didn't see anything.”

“You notice those things like gray bags hanging from the trunks, spikes all over them?”

“Those are animals? I thought they were epiphytes.”

“They move. Tree-burrs, I call them.” Pointing overhead with the gun, Carl added, “And those snaky dudes that slither through the roof I call branch-weavers.”

Graham peered long before making out a gliding shape, like a scarlet rope, moving through the web of limbs. Having detected one, he saw them everywhere. The canopy was in fact crawling with these snake-like animals, which seemed to be lacing the branches together, binding twig to twig.

“Want a closer look?” said Carl. “Give the gawkers back home a thrill?”

Before Graham could protest, Carl fired a quick burst up through the canopy. Three of the branch-weavers clattered to the ground and lay still, like hanks of rusty chain.

“You and that gun,” said Graham.

“It won't hurt them. Give them a minute, they'll be squirming again.” He turned over one of the scaly bodies with his boot.
“Check out that armor. See how these plates mesh? And look how this gooey stuff seeps out between the joints. I figure they smear that on the bark and glue the whole mess together tight as a net.”

“To catch what?”

“Anything that's crawling around up there.”

Graham studied the scaffolding of limbs. He would have to climb up there eventually to get a bearing on the crystal mountain. But he was in no hurry. He shouldered his pack, pulled on helmet and gloves, yet he did not want to leave until the branch-weavers revived. As the seconds passed, and the bodies failed to stir, he grew uneasy. “Maybe you gave them too high a charge.”

“It was nothing. A tickle.” Carl prodded the motionless bodies, the plates clicking. He snorted. “Well, crap. I do believe the suckers are dead. You wouldn't think anything this tough on the outside could be so weak on the inside.”

“Too weak for you to go blazing away with that damn gun.”

“I wasn't blazing away. What I shot them with wouldn't have stopped a rat back home.”

“Well, we're not back home.”

“I noticed. So don't get us lost.”

They had walked only a few paces when there came a snarling and scratching from behind. Wheeling, they saw a pack of many-legged animals the size of cats tearing the ropy bodies of the branch-weavers to shreds. In less than a minute, the beasts had stuffed the scraps into pouches along their flanks and were scurrying into burrows under the roots.

Carl whistled. “You talk about hungry.”

“And quick,” said Graham, disturbed by the scavengers, yet doing his job, filling his senses with the oily smell, the scrabbling
sounds, the bitter tang of this first kill. There would be others. Every year, Carl became more trigger-happy, firing at anything that was even vaguely menacing, as if he feared their luck was running out.

They swung into motion, Graham at point, Carl behind. Their shimmersuits took on a ruby sheen from the heat. They sauntered easily, a pace they could maintain all day, if need be, for days on end, for weeks, like caribous migrating. Now and again Carl would whistle, gesturing at the canopy or the undergrowth, and Graham would stare and stare before seeing a camouflaged beast. This was always the way of it: Graham had an eye for the still pattern of things, Carl had an eye for anything that moved, and each brother was nearly blind to what the other could see. “If it can't run or jump, it can't hurt you,” was Carl's slogan. “If it moves, you can't find your way by it,” was Graham's counter.

Because the local day was little more than twenty E-hours long, the afternoon passed quickly, shafts of light piercing the jungle at lower and lower angles. They pitched camp beside a creek. After shaking a slug of the water in a toxi-vial, to make certain it was safe, Carl lay down and plunged his face into the stream. “I'll set up,” he said, chin dripping water, “you remember.”

While the encampment took shape under Carl's big hands—domed tent blossoming, sleep-mats inflating, supper brewing, tripwires unfurled around the perimeter—Graham sat on the bank with his bare feet in the creek, recalling the day's trail. He retraced their steps until he reached the beginning point in the parachute field. Then he turned about and worked his way forward to this creek, then back again, as if he were winding and unwinding a ball of string.

When he opened his eyes, Carl was serving out the stew. It tasted of catfish and potatoes, but it was the same high-energy confection that would wear other flavors on other nights. Graham swallowed some, then spoke about what had been troubling him: “Let's not do any more killing than we have to, okay?”

“The feelie crowds love it,” said Carl.

“I know they do. But I hate it. I'm sick of it.”

Carl did not reply. A movement in the vault of limbs had snared his attention. “Visitors,” he grumbled.

This time Graham easily spied the beasts, inky blobs against the darkening sky. There were ten or so, arrayed in a circle above the camp. Two more joined them, then two more and two more. They kept arriving in pairs until their bodies formed an unbroken ring. The limbs creaked under their weight. They were larger than the scavengers that had torn up the branch-weavers, as large as wolves, but thick and slow-moving.

“Ring-watchers,” whispered Carl, naming them.

Graham placed a hand on his brother's arm. “Don't shoot.”

“You want to sleep with that party upstairs?”

A tremor passed around the circle of bodies, setting off harsh grating noises in the network of limbs.

“Let's see if the light will scare them off,” said Graham.

With a grunt, Carl switched on the perimeter flare. There was an explosive release of gas, and the camp was haloed in a blaze of light. Guttural cries sounded in the branches, then a jostling of sluggish bodies. “Go on, you hairy bastards,” Carl shouted, “find somebody else for supper.”