The Seeds of Time (32 page)

The med tent was in shreds. Must’ve taken at least fifty rounds to slice it up like that. Through the tears, Janacek could see cots overturned, bandages festooned from floor to roof, med kits cracked open and gutted. Whiteout ducked inside. “Hey, Janacek, get a load of this,” came his voice from the tent.

Janacek pushed inside through the tattered flap.

Whiteout stood there, shit-eating grin on his face, with an opened bottle of whiteout. He took a hit, offered it to Janacek. “How sweet it isssss,” he said.

“You null, I thought you said you were out.”

“Emergency stash, man.” He offered the little black and white bottle to Janacek again.

Janacek waved him off. “You must have been one of those glue sniffers when you were little, huh?”

Whiteout shrugged, grinning.

“Jesus, grow up.” Janacek pushed out of the tent, squinting against the piercing light. Above his head, the local star burned hard, swallowing his shadow. In his mind the bloody scene played out, of crew killing crew, the cries of the women, the raving of Harper Teeg as he swung the machine gun wildly through camp. Harper Teeg. Kill him on sight. His co-conspirator, Liu, kill him as well. Before they kill us. Freeping crazy they must be by now, trapped in the endless turquoise jungle, their dreams of a new paradise smashed when the lander escaped with the women, the blossoms of their imagined empire.

The platoon set up a new perimeter wire tight around the lander, a good hot one. With that, Sergeant Fraley led half the platoon plus three science crew into the clearing, stopping just short of the jungle mass.

“You heard it before, but I’m tellin’ you again, so listen up,” Fraley said. “Somewhere in this damn blue swamp is a ship. It’s covered with plants, so you won’t see it like a ship, but that’s what it is. You find it, you tone me out, and state your position. Me and the science team will join you. You encounter the mutineers … take them out.” He looked each soldier in the face, waiting for nods. “I know it sounds simple. Those are the missions that usually fuck up. Anybody here going to fuck up?” Again, he looked for nods, found a few. “Whiteout, you nod your head yes every time I ask you a question?”

“Yessir.”

The sergeant stared at him a couple seconds, sighed through his nose, scowling. “Janacek, you and Whiteout pair off, head southeast along the jungle perimeter. You catch him snorting from a little bottle, you shoot him on the spot. Got that?”

Janacek nodded. “Yessir.”

Fraley looked at the two of them. Shook his head.
“Rest of you in your teams, fan out. Check in on the half hour. Meet back here in two hours. Any questions?” Without waiting for an answer, he said, “OK, get moving.”

One by one the teams dove into the wall of undergrowth flourishing under the jungle canopy. Engorged leaves parted before them with soft slaps, leaving their remnant of dew on fatigues and exposed skin. Janacek and Whiteout peeled off southeast, and fought their way through the steaming thicket with knee and forearm until, moving deeper into the woods, they found clearer passage where shade limited growth.

Here, under the dusky skirts of the trees, hairy vines swayed from their distant anchors in the canopy. Janacek looked up to the treetop ceiling, where, they said, most of Niang’s creatures lived.

Whiteout followed his gaze. “Think those fanged monkeys live up there, man?”

“That’s what they say.”

“Think they come sliding down those vines like firefighters?”

“Yeah. With fire axes.”

Janacek tried to be gruff to ward off the queasy feeling in his gut. It started with the wrecked camp, grew worse in the jungle, the feeling of being watched. Maybe space-case crazy Harper Teeg. Maybe leopards, crocodiles, whatever the Niang equivalent was. Whatever crouched unmoving in the maze could watch, undetected, whatever moved. And
they
were moving. To make matters worse, the screaming of the forest masked the sound of anything approaching. You heard everything at once, and so you heard nothing. Janacek held his gun at the ready, and trooped on, setting each footstep carefully in the bluish webbing of the forest floor.

At first they walked past the ship without recognizing it. They had been walking down a long, fifty-meter-wide clearing when Janacek referred to it as a corridor. He and Whiteout looked at each other. A straight-as-an-arrow runway through the forest.

They went back and looked at the burly mass tucked half in, half out of the jungle. The ship was cloaked, like the
sergeant said. Moss clung to the contours of the ship in a turquoise fur, transforming it into a mere boulder, unless you were looking for it.

Looking for a ship. A starship.

“Well, Jesus H. Christ, looky this.” Whiteout circled around to the other side. “Ain’t no lander, this size,” came his voice. “Could be we won the jackpot, or what?”

Janacek stared at the massive hulk, heart racing. No wings, but an overall cylindrical shape, bulges for cockpit and thrusters, opposite ends. Indentations in the moss that might define a hatchway. Looked like. The queasy wobble in his stomach ran up his torso, through his face. Not Biotime. Not Earth. Alien. And stranger yet, the fleshy growths of flowers blooming from its sides like hands reaching through a blanket.

He swung his rifle around to the jungle. Shit almighty. Not paying attention. Way to get killed. He remembered his comm unit, unclipped it from his belt. “This is Janacek, Sergeant.”

He waited. Tried again, hit buttons. Nothing.

Now his stomach was turning over like a rotisserie. Hadn’t heard anything from Whiteout from the other side of the ship, either. Jesus, in how long? He approached the ship, back against the mossy side, inched along it in the direction Whiteout had taken. Something screamed, louder than monkeys, but maybe a monkey. Janacek gripped the rifle harder, to make it stop trembling, and shook the sweat out of his eyes.

As he came around the cockpit, he saw the boots first, then Whiteout lying there, still as a fallen tree, his face frozen in horror, his shirt ripped open. Oddly, no blood, no trauma, but shirt half blown apart. Janacek swung his rifle back and forth, trying to see through the sweat streaming over his eyes. He kicked at the body. “Whiteout? You son of a bitch. You lazy son of a bitch.” His voice sounded like somebody crying. He knelt beside his buddy, heart lurching. Realized he was too near the turn at the end of the ship. Staggered backward for cover. Pivoted to cover his backside.

A man, a soldier, was standing there. Dressed in a brownish green jumpsuit. A leathery vest studded with bright stones or buttons. Handgun drawn, pointed at Janacek’s head. His own rifle useless at these close quarters. Janacek fell backward. “Please,” he said.

Another of them appeared at Janacek’s back. He swung his head around to face this new one. Same fancy vest, clean shaven, very young. Too young to kill.

The young one slapped his rifle away, pinned his arms down.

The first one bent close, pushed his hand into Janacek’s chest. The fabric split, the hand disappeared up to the wrist, and as his ribs cracked the pain began. A pain that a body couldn’t hold. Janacek looked down at the hand in his chest. No blood.

The stranger’s hand closed around his heart.

Janacek opened his mouth to scream, and all the jungle screamed with him.

Clio Finn approached the overgrown alien ship. She parted the curtain of vines fallen over the hatchway and thrust her way in with her boot and knee. Oh, dark in here.

Have you turned on your belt lamp?

Turned on her belt lamp, unhooked it, peered into the gloom. She was in a narrow passageway. Light screwed its way in via a collapsed section of bulkhead down to her left. She turned that way. The inside of the ship was a garden, flowers growing from the bulkheads, a bluish moss cushioning her steps. Niang everywhere, the ship turning to plants and soil in an effusive decay. Door handles like mushrooms. Funny things. Follow the white rabbit.

And then you find the flight deck. Tell us about this, Clio
.

And then the bridge. Unmistakable beneath the layer of Niang. A semicircular bridge. Control panels. Seats for crew. Storage hatches. Sat in the pilot’s chair. Dreamed of who had sat there, what had sat there. And what happened to them. Sat in the green-blue, brocaded chair, thinking, not alone. Not alone in the universe. Someone is out there, someone who’s been in this chair.…

I’d like to hear about the instrumentation, Clio
.

Instrumentation. The layout was strange. Holes and indentations where knobs and levers should be. The console wrapped completely around the deck, more like a diving bell than a spacecraft. Took out a utility knife, scraped at the panels. Hard to tell where the overgrowths ended and the instrumentation began. Peeled back a whole panel section. Gave way in shreds, like banana peels. Underneath,
conduits looping still. Everything covered in turquoise, but not exactly rotted. Not yet collapsed into pulpy slime. Niang slime, has a certain ring. Niannnng sliiimmme.

Clio. Clio. You told us before about the star charts. What else do you remember?

Star charts intact, some of them. Fibrous pages, so thin, like pressed leaves. Crumbled in my hand …

But some don’t crumble
.

Some don’t. Some that shouldn’t have been there, were there. Don’t recognize them. Not Earth, not Niang.

Think hard about the charts, Clio. Which stars?

Other charts, other pages, turning and turning, stars upon stars.

What regions, Clio? What quadrants? Think
.

Not an astronomer, goddamn it.

But think
.

Charts. Not familiar. Crumble to my touch. Crumble like old leaves. End of report. Sir!

She’s useless beyond this point. This is as far as she gets
.

Not a damn astronomer. A Dive pilot. Damn good one too. Thirty-one missions, world record. Now retired. Too tired.

Bloody hell. Wake her up
.

Clio staggered against the guard as he hauled her across the quarry main yard. She saw two lines of patients fanned out for noon meal, two guards on her arm, two suns, everything double. Tears streamed from her eyes, cut a cold course down her cheeks in the brisk autumn air.

“Keep moving, bitch, or I’ll drop you here, let you crawl back.”

She swayed in place as the guard shook her shoulders. He smelled of sweat and aftershave and onions. Over his shoulder, a portly man in the grey quarry garb stood in the meal line. A new quarantine acquisition. Soon lose that fat. He looked away from her, the way they all did. Don’t look the guards in the eye, draw attention to yourself. Don’t
look a distressed fellow-prisoner in the eye, share their sorrow. You’ve got enough of your own.

Clio allowed herself to be propelled onward by the ill-smelling youngster in the guard uniform. Her body didn’t respond to the command to move legs. She didn’t care. Her quarry sandals toed the dirt. If he dropped her, she would break her face on the main yard grounds. Didn’t care. No joy in being the only survivor, so let him freeping well drop her in the dirt.

As the morning fog waned, it revealed the brownish eye of the sun, glaring through fathoms of smog. The lines of patients queuing up for meds emerged and receded behind the vapors like apparitions. The dead calling the near-dead.
I’m coming. Save me a place in line. I’m coming
.

Always there were the lines for the Sick and lines for the Clean, giving the lie to DSDE’s contention that all who came here were Sick. The patients sorted themselves out, enacting the eternal quest for hierarchy, here where the last difference among them all was merely life itself. In the Sick line, parents kept their children in tow, though often the children were Clean. Children of Sick parents carried the family’s stigma, of weakness, death, and sexual deviance. Not welcome in the Clean lines, no. As Clio and the guard moved haltingly through the main yard, a small cluster of children shadowed them, drawn by Clio’s apparent collapse from the Sickness. A rumpled, towheaded child of about eight dangled a long insect larva in front of his lolling tongue. His eyes rolled; then he swallowed the thing, to the cheers of the others who chanted,
The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout, boo hoo, boo hoo
. The guard glared at them, and they scattered.

She felt herself being hauled up the four steps to her barracks. The guard pushed her against the doorjamb, leaned in to her, close. His double head began to melt into one. She was starting to track again.

He cupped her breast and squeezed. “This is my first day in your lovely quarry. Initiate me.” He spun her around, thrust her ahead of him through the door.

Heads turned as they crashed through the door. Twelve bunk beds held down the floor of a spare, cold room, still wobbling from the drug. He dragged her toward an unoccupied bed in the corner.

“This your boudoir?”

“Yes, this is my boudoir.” Clio sat on the lower bunk, looking up at this boy in a brown guard uniform. Her chest was cold and tight, not from fear but hate. Didn’t get a chance all that often to call up a grand cold surge of feeling. It was upon her now.