Ten #2
The kit chimed a rising tritone. The run was complete.
She sat up and brushed the dirt and dead grass off her arms. For a moment, she couldn’t find her notebook, but only for a moment.
It was on the other side of the kit. She pulled it up and opened a new draft entry…
then shifted to see whether Garral had added anything recently, and if he had, how far away he was from the orchard.
Maybe it would be a good evening for them to compare notes again…
But he hadn’t, and she was being silly and self-indulgent. She didn’t feel guilty about that.
The best that she could expect from the initial run was an overview of the new tree of life with maybe a few plausible molecules identified that could act as genetic codes.
Something big and aperiodic capable of carrying instructions to some mechanism for spinning out proteins and lipids and connective matrix.
Evolution only had a few hard rules—heritability, mutation, and the reward of greater fitness.
All the different ways the universe could find to solve those puzzles were where the interesting work waited.
She opened the assay results ready to find anything except what was there.
The pear-like thing was a pear.
The result bars listed DNA, chloroplasts, mitochondria, cellulose.
If she had taken the sample from the corner grocer at Dyan Academy, the results would have looked the same.
She and the trees in this orchard were closer cousins than any of the inhuman things she’d been traveling with.
More related to her than half the life on Anjiin.
Her hands were trembling badly enough that the results were hard to read.
She shoved the notebook in her pocket and sat back, her fingers pressed to her lips and her mind on fire.
The trees had to have come from Anjiin. The trees obviously had not come from Anjiin.
The trees in the orchard, the pear in her sample kit, shared a lineage with the ones she’d known before. They had a common ancestor.
It was a truism that human life and its biome hadn’t originated on Anjiin. It was the kind of thing she learned along with This shape is a square and This color is blue . Basic facts of the universe that you accepted because you were a child. The implications fell in on her, shook her.
The species from the city had been human height. Had painted its sign in the spectrum visible to humans. Because they had been human.
This planet had been inhabited by the great and deathless enemy of the Carryx. The opposite side of a war that stretched out past the edge of history.
Humans were the enemy. She was the enemy. And somehow—how was it possible?—the Carryx didn’t know.
Her laugh came out like a bark, one hard sound and then nothing.
She turned back to the kit, pulling out the spent samples with trembling hands.
She went to wipe the results, but hesitated.
The deletion might attract attention. If Third Gardener and their Carryx overlords figured out that the human moiety and the deathless enemy were one and the same…
She didn’t know what they’d do. Maybe the best they could hope for was quick death.
She had to tell Garral. She had to tell all the humans in the search party. There had to be a way to keep the secret a secret, but she didn’t know how. She wanted to vomit.
The tall grass shifted again, and she looked up.
The movement was growing still, but she hadn’t imagined it.
Slowly, she rose to her feet. Probably it was just some local fauna.
The equivalent of deer. Or, shit, maybe an actual deer.
But what if it was one of the other researchers? Or the Sinen come to check on her?
“Hello?” she said. “Is someone there?”
The grass didn’t respond.
She walked toward the place where the movement had been, each step feeling like she was wading through syrup.
Maybe there was nothing. Maybe it was the yellow bird-bug.
Did she see a glimpse of color behind the waving blades?
She had almost reached it. The grass was close enough she could brush it with the fingertips of an outstretched hand, but she couldn’t bring herself to take the next step. Her throat was tight.
What if it was a predator? A mountain lion or a bear?
She’d assumed she was safe because she wouldn’t smell like the sort of thing local apex predators would eat, but that wasn’t true.
Maybe there were things in the wild here perfectly familiar with the taste of human blood.
It would be so absurd to die that way now. But dying was always absurd.
You can do it , she thought. Just put your hand out and push the grass aside. Maybe there’s nothing there.
The chime of the kit’s completed taring run startled her into a scream, and a wide black-feathered body the size of a football rose from the grass, wings flapping desperately as the bird—a raven?—fled into the sky. She let out a long, shuddering breath and turned back toward the kit.
A man was standing beside it.
He was only about half a head taller than her, with dark, greasy hair framing a long, pale face.
Prominent teeth and a thin, dark beard. His build was more like an office worker than an athlete.
His worn blue jacket went down past his hips, and covered a beaded vest and rough, filthy undershirt.
His trousers were gray fabric with half a dozen pockets down the sides, and they tucked into what were obviously hiking boots, even if it wasn’t a design she’d seen before.
His eyes were wide with something like fear.
They stood in silence for what felt like an eternity.
“Oh God,” Jessyn said. “No no no. You can’t be here. It’s not safe here. You have to go. Go!”
He stepped toward her, saying something she couldn’t make sense of. If there were words in it, she couldn’t tell where one stopped and the next began. He patted at the air between them with open palms and then gestured to the east.
“What? No, I can’t go anywhere. I need to stay here.” She pointed to herself and then the ground. “I. Stay here . You”—she gestured to him, and then waved east—“you get the fuck out.”
His face hardened and he gibbered again, the same as before or different, she couldn’t tell.
He patted the air between them again, then stepped closer.
She could smell the funk of his body. His hand gripped her shoulder and began turning her toward the east. She tried to remember what the map showed in that direction.
More hills, she thought. An outcropping of rock that the geologist had marked as probable limestone.
She couldn’t remember how far the evacuation zone extended in that direction, and she didn’t want to go find her notebook.
“If I go missing…” she said, and then stopped. If I go missing they may not even look for me. If I go missing, maybe no one cares. Wasn’t that exactly what she’d just been thinking? “I’m not from here. I’m not one of you. You have to let me go.”
He scowled and tugged at her. His eyes had lost their fear and gone flat. He said something with three distinct syllables. Something like Ash pat low . When she tried to pull away, his grip on her tightened. He rooted in his jacket pocket with his other hand.
When his hand came out, it held a knife.