Chapter 9 #2
Then we were approaching the doors.
“Business?” asked one of the guards. That felt like the right word. I didn’t have a better one under the circumstances.
“Afternoon leisure, officer,” said Fetch.
“All at once?”
“We are assigned to the same task within the research division. It is most efficient if we act as a unit even when outside our duties.”
“Case?”
The mental static rolling off of Fetch drew tighter, turning somber.
“The unauthorized instar detected in the dimensional cluster designated,” and then she was off, reciting an algebraic equation long and complicated enough to make my head spin, even as my fingers itched to pin it on a piece of paper and begin ripping it apart.
I recognized part of it from the equation I’d used to get us all back to Earth after our first, unintentional visit to Greg’s dimension. She was talking about Earth. She was talking about me.
That wasn’t really much of a shock, given the situation, but it was still unsettling to know for sure. I kept my face composed and my posture loose, mirroring Carry as best I could, while the Fibonacci continued to roll, familiar and friendly, through the surface of my thoughts.
“Yes,” said the guard, and nodded, eyes flashing white.
Barely able to believe our luck, I watched the first set of doors slide open.
The three of us stepped through into the airlock, the guards stationed there watching us impassively.
The doors closed behind us. The doors opened in front of us.
Fetch started smoothly forward and we followed, exiting the building.
Once we were outside, we paused again, waiting for the doors to close behind us before beginning down the steps. Fetch remained calm, back straight and chin up, and I emulated her, not gawking as I wanted to.
We were on an alien world. We were on the world where my species had evolved.
I had never been overly eager to see it for myself—had never even considered that it might be possible—but now that I was here, I wanted to see everything.
I wanted to spin in circles and stare at the buildings and streets surrounding me.
I kept walking calmly forward, eyes fixed on the back of Fetch’s head.
The building where I’d been held resembled nothing so much as a giant paper wasp nest, the outside soft and irregular, made of gray-brown paper. There were windows, not only in the great atrium, but scattered around the exterior of the building.
It was a common architectural style: about two-thirds of the buildings I could see shared it.
None were labeled in any way. The other buildings were roughly split between muddy domes that looked like termite mounds and complicated wooden structures with open sides, allowing the air to pass cleanly through.
And everywhere I looked, there were Johrlac.
The streets were stones pressed snugly into the earth; no concrete, no drivable surfaces.
I didn’t see any vehicles. There were wheels: a few of the people I saw were using wheeled chairs to move, either self-propelled or drawn like little carriages by bright-shelled beetles the size of goats.
You’re staring, said Fetch, sounding amused. Try not to. We need to get you to our hive. Once we’re there, you can stare all you like.
I nodded, not replying in case it somehow stood out. She sent a wave of satisfaction in my direction, and we walked on.
We were almost out of sight of the municipal building when an alarm started to sound, high and droning, like the descent of a thousand wasps. Fetch didn’t look back, and so neither did I. All three of us just kept walking on.
The air on Johrlar was hot and moist, like the air in Florida.
I was used to it from summers at Lowryland, but that didn’t mean it was something I dealt with on a daily basis.
By the time we turned down a narrow byway lined with tall, broad-leafed trees like banyans, their trunks made up of dozens if not hundreds of accessory roots, I was overly warm and felt faintly nauseous, my morning smoothie consigned to the deep past.
Things I initially assumed were birds flitted through the branches. One of them froze as we passed nearby, and I realized they were heavy-bodied moths with ragged-looking wings, large enough to disturb the leaves the same way songbirds would have.
Neither Fetch nor Carry paid them any mind, and so I struggled to ignore them, dismissing them as commonplace and unremarkable.
Gather would have known what they were, would have grown up with them flying outside her window, would no longer take any more notice of them than I did of the pigeons in New York, or the squirrels in Oregon, or the tailypo in Michigan. I just had to keep walking.
We continued for what felt like half a block, then turned and walked deeper into the trees, until a mottled gray-brown structure came into view.
It was made of the same papery substance as the larger buildings, resembling nothing so much as a house-sized wasp’s nest; it had been constructed around several large bamboo poles and the entirety of one of the multi-trunked trees, with windows winking at us from irregular points around the structure.
The color was oddly soothing, and I realized after a moment’s thought that it was the same mottled, lightly decaying flesh shade as the house in Michigan.
It looked like home.
Fetch led the way up the path, and as Carry was still maintaining her perfect calm, I followed without asking any questions or betraying any specific interest in the location.
The door was once again made of sliding paper panels, but there were no guards here: instead there was a lever, which Fetch pulled.
The doors slid open, allowing us into the airlock.
That was the only lock involved: there were no keys or latches I could see.
The three of us piled into the airlock space, and Fetch hit a button on the wall, which caused a warm, dry wind to blow briskly through the room.
Several small beetles I hadn’t noticed before blew off of our clothes and hair, smacking against the far wall.
There were sticky-looking flowers planted at the four corners of the room, high up where the walls met the ceiling; one of them extended a quick tendril, snatching a beetle out of the air before it could find a safer place to land.
I blinked. Fetch smiled. “I suppose you wouldn’t have cleaner plants where you’re from,” she said.
“They’re harmless to anything as big as we are.
They keep the bugs out of the house.” She held a hand out toward the nearest of the plants, which reached down with a tendril and caressed her fingers before withdrawing, apparently realizing that it couldn’t eat her.
Carry pulled another lever, and the interior doors slid open, revealing the house. Fetch motioned for us to follow, heading inside.
The first room of the house, which I assumed was cognate to a living room or parlor back on Earth, was large and high-ceilinged, with several windows scattered around the edges, and some surprisingly soft-looking furniture set in the middle, what looked like a couch and several easy chairs, all well padded and welcoming.
There were no decorative pillows or anything like that, just plush fabric in a surprisingly delicate shade of yellow fading into orange.
I blinked, and realized it was so delicate because it wasn’t fabric at all; it was soft cellulose, pressed into a massive flower petal.
The furniture was actually furled flowers.
Looking at the room from that perspective, I could see how all the furnishings had grown up out of the floor or from the walls; the shelves were some sort of hard fungus, the chairs were closed flowers, the table was probably some kind of toadstool.
There wasn’t much in the way of what I would have called ornamentation: no pictures on the walls or books on the shelves.
“You can put your bag down,” said Fetch magnanimously.
I dropped the bag on the nearest couch. “Explanation time now.”
“You did very well back there,” said Carry. “If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn you were domesticated.”
“I would like to know what’s happening, please,” I said. “I don’t think I’m being unreasonable by asking.”
“We did say we’d explain,” said Fetch, with a heavy sigh.
“First off, you should know we’ve been hoping for something like this to happen for quite some time, and you can speak freely here.
We’ve been encouraging the growth of a sort of fungus in our walls.
It puts out hyphae and forms a mycelial mat that surrounds the hive and makes it difficult for anyone to casually read the people inside. ”
“Best of all, it’s normally occurring in this region,” said Carry.
“People are constantly having to call in the mycologists to have their property treated, but the treatment is expensive and we’re young people just starting our careers in earnest; no one’s going to question us allowing it to fester for a little while longer.
We’ve encouraged the growth three times and had it removed twice, but it just keeps coming back, and people have started to suspect this whole grove may be infected.
It keeps them from building nearby, and it allows us to maintain our privacy. ”
“You’ll be as safe here as you can be anywhere,” concluded Fetch.
“Where is here?” I asked. “I mean, I’m assuming Johrlar, based on everything I’ve seen so far, but I can’t be certain, because no one’s been telling me anything.”
“This is Johrlar,” said Fetch. “More specifically, this is the territory of Neyvar, and the capital city of Ka’krin. I could give you our address, but I doubt it would mean anything.”
I didn’t say anything, just blinked at her. I had never considered that Johrlar would be more than just a single undefined location, but it made sense. Earth was huge. It had continents and countries and cities. It wasn’t just one place, undistinguished and unvaried.