Photosynthesis
It is first noon, and I am drunk.
This place has two suns. The second is much bigger. First noon is the one you sit outside for. Second noon you find somewhere indoors or, ideally, underground. I am tempted to stay out and see what it’s like. EAD sent me with some heavy duty UV-repel and I am good with heat.
The local liquor is made out of the same tough ferns which completely carpet the land, apart from the bits cleared for agriculture. From what I can tell it’s a losing battle. Most of the working day is spent hauling root boles out from under fields where they’ve been growing like cancers, strangling the life out of anything else that tries to germinate.
Wheat, probably. It’s always wheat.
The ferns grow so fast you can almost see it happening. They’re full of horrible sticky sap which gums up the machinery they use to clear it, and they are completely inedible until they’ve gone through multiple stages of costly processing to spit out a log of fibre at the end.
Why take pride in a place like this? Why waste the energy? Another grinding day under two suns. One of them gives you cancer.
It is their business how they live. Let them call themselves the Sapdrinkers of Persephone XV. Let them pretend that they ‘breed ’em tough’ among the ferns. I am not planning on staying.
E A D. External Affairs Division. A name so anodyne it could mean almost anything. My employers. I come to dusty little worlds like this because long range scanning has found some old ruins which bear a passing resemblance to Before architecture. Not a very grand name for a grand culture, but you don’t get to decide which words stick. The Before. They were here before us, and now they’re gone.
I am, technically, an archaeologist, but I never went to school. My background is in private security. They used to send real archaeologists to do this job, but not every world enjoys visitors, or laws, or fair trials. They are in principle beholden to Central, but there are a lot of worlds and not so many judges. You can wait five years for one of the Roving Judges to make planetfall or you can chop off the hand of your neighbour who stole your jar of salt. Justice takes too long when you’re angry now. So now it’s people like me who get sent. People who aren’t dissuaded by an armed militia.
As it goes, I don’t get into many shootouts. I just bribe them. There is always something they want, and usually I can conduct the scan and leave without them even being aware I’ve done anything. The ruins almost always aren’t of Before origin, and if they are, I tell them that they might have to put up with a couple of scientists for a few months at worst.
That is of course a lie. The last genuine Before site I found had such a trove of archeotech that they practically built a new city on top of it to process everything. The colonials don’t like Central turning up in numbers. Makes them feel like naughty children. If you ask me, that is best avoided by not behaving like naughty children. They don’t ask me, which is probably for the best.
So I am on Persephone XV. Call it P15. Not one of the wilder places from what I can tell. I think they might be religious. I don’t know. Like I say, I don’t care what they do, or who they are. If they’ll put me up for a couple of nights all the better, and then I am out of their hair, not that any of them have hair. They keep it shaved because the sap gets caught in it. I am staying in the closest thing they come to a hotel, which is a small lodge near the airfield. They don’t get many guests and they seemed excited about me when they saw the EAD markings on the shuttle, but that excitement soon dissipated.
I am heading out tomorrow, so today I am drunk. I am on a concrete veranda, on a concrete bench. There are no clouds in the sky. I think this town is called Landing. I’ve been to more towns called Landing than I’ve seen sunsets. The air in Landing is close, sweet, humid. The stink of the ferns, once it gets into your nose, is impossible to remove. I already hate it. I smell it, I taste it, it clings to my skin. I am alone on the veranda, because most people are at work, digging ditches or installing machines to process the fern pulp into something half useful. The drink was free. Maybe they’re hoping I’ll take a shine to the place and stay. Help broaden their gene pool a little. They’re barking up the wrong tree with that one.
I take another sip, rolling it around in my mouth to see if it has become any less cloying. To see if it might reveal some hidden subtlety. I say I am an optimist, but nobody believes me.
It doesn’t reveal anything. In the way of most colonial moonshine it tastes of sugar and ethanol. It has undergone the same reaction it does everywhere else, probably in the same vats. It is the taste of no better options. I stop trying to taste it and pour it down.
Sometimes they’ll send me with my own transport. Not this time. Not to P15. They designated it sufficiently harmless that I could hire a local vehicle. It usually works out cheaper unless I am likely to get killed, which can become expensive. Not because I am important, but the gear I carry is. See, I said I wasn’t an archaeologist, but someone still has to do the archaeology. They stay safely in orbit while I take measurements, set up the drone, make sure there isn’t any local wildlife or guerilla armies likely to take an interest in it.
So, a local vehicle. They fly light copters here. It can sometimes be hard to find a place to land, what with the ferns, so standard protocol is for a two-man team, one to keep it in the air while the other rappels down with a chainsaw and cuts enough space for a real landing. I don’t want to use a chainsaw, so we will be a team of three. They told me the names of the ones who would be taking me but I immediately forgot them. They’ll knock on at dawn tomorrow. Fine by me. The sooner it’s done, the sooner it’s over.
The bartender sticks his head round the door to see if I need a refill. I need a refill even when I don’t, but as it happens I do. He must be about at least a hundred, which explains why he isn’t in the fields. Not much emphasis on the service industry in a place like this. They’ve found something useful for him to do in his decrepitude, and that useful thing is to bring me drinks. He seems minded to instigate a conversation so I pretend to read something on my pad, scrolling blindly past a set of vitals and atmospheric information. I keep pretending until he leaves, comes back with the drink, and then leaves again. I do my best not to appear too cosmopolitan to these people. Just a working stiff. Nothing interesting to say. Still, my appearance can be enough of a novelty to generate all manner of uninteresting conversation.
Something is beeping on the pad. I focus. Some weird proteins in the air. Nothing life threatening, but the pad doesn’t like new. Something missed in the initial assay before arrival. I don’t like it when they miss stuff. I take it personally. The last thing I need is a full body purge because some local algae is growing in my tear ducts. I send the report up to orbit. They should already have received it, but there’s no harm in giving them a nudge.
I take a sip of the fresh drink. If there’s shit in the air, I’ve already breathed it in. There is no sign of increased morbidity from respiratory illness in the locals, and they’ve been inhaling the air for years. I file it away in the back of my mind. I don’t forget, but I don’t let it upset me either. I am good at compartmentalising. I have a great many compartments.
You can see a long way from this veranda. It’d be a nice spot, somewhere less hellish. Landing is at the top of a long valley and you can see all the way down. One side is dominated by the processors, chewing up the ferns and spitting out lubricants, fuel, dinner, booze. They just look like grey boxes from a distance, with rows of chimneys releasing whatever doesn’t get used.
The other side is fields, blocks of murky green with the bright yellow flashes of irrigators tracking up and down. A couple of fires are burning. I don’t know what they are for, and I don’t ask. Closer to me are the habs, made from the same concrete I’m sitting on, tightly packed together like they’re huddled for warmth. It doesn’t rain much here apparently. They’ve got flat roofs, speckled with little flashes of colour where someone has put down a rug or a table and chairs. Cultivated a little garden, once it has been tested to make sure nothing there is likely to be invasive, or so the policy goes anyway. Not that anyone is here to stop them. You do your best, I suppose, to make a home.
I’ve already decided I don’t want to stay when the workers arrive. I am too tired for questions, and I am too tired to fuck. And, like I say, I strongly suspect religion, which means they might have robust views on who fucks whom anyway. Not worth the trouble. I speak from experience.
Some time passes.
I am jerked out of a daydream by the sound of a siren. I almost reach for my gun, but then I remember what it is. It’s second noon. The old man pokes an anxious head around the doorframe again, but I wave him away.
“I know what it is. I’m fine.”
He starts to bluster so I turn back around and turn up my earbuds. The music drowns him out. I don’t know how long he complains for, but he must give up at some point, because when I next look round he is gone. Off to tell stories of the mad offworlder I don’t doubt.
Down in the valley I see tiny figures scuttling away under shelters, into ditches, in some cases just under silvery UV-resist sheets, to lie in the dirt until the danger passes. The second sun is approaching its zenith. Some unique quality of the planet’s atmosphere, of its orbit and its spin, mean that the second sun is only dangerous for an hour or so, when it crosses a particular area of the stratosphere. I watch it climb. It is fat and pale, where the other burns with a deeper, redder light. Dueling shadows criss-cross the veranda. I am alone.
I try to convince myself that it feels different on my skin. It is getting hotter, and it is a dry heat, burning away some of the humidity. I squeeze some of the UV-resist out of the tube and rub it into my exposed skin. It smells fresh and medicinal. Slightly metallic. I am thorough.
There is a stinging sensation in my eyes as my lenses darken. I look directly up at the second sun. It feels good, hotter than I was expecting. Not that the heat is the danger, of course. It’s the UV. But the heat is no joke either. It’s like a pressure. It makes me short of breath.
Some people like to be crushed by heavy weights. Me, I like being hot. It isn’t a kink. I’m not getting my rocks off. But it feels good to cook.
#
I am waiting when they knock at dawn. Sat on a chair facing the door. Maybe they were expecting me to be asleep, but if they were, they hide it well. A lean young woman and an older man. She wordlessly helps me load up the gear. They’ve been forewarned that it’s delicate and expensive, which is half true. It is expensive, but they could launch it from orbit and it’d probably survive in its case. Anything that expensive is designed to be dropped. It’s heavy enough that it needs the two of us, one on each handle, but we wrestle it onto the back of the copter.
She’s strong. I’m impressed. They’re both wearing matching overalls. They have the kind of lean, ropey build that you find in people who spend all day doing manual labour. The copter looks functional enough. I start to think that the job might be relatively painless after all.
The ruins are two days of flight away, which means we’ll be stopping off to spend a night. They assure me they have a regular location lined up. I trust them. They seem like trustworthy types. Besides, I have no other choice. We’re already running over budget for this quarter and buying a copter myself might put a fatal dent in it. They haven’t even asked for a bribe. I am playing nice. I am grateful.
I try to watch the scenery as we fly, but I soon become bored. There is more to the landscape than just ferns, but not much more. On areas of higher ground, where the soil is thinner, they recede a little, exposing clusters of yellow and white flowers which sit low to the ground. Some sort of animal lopes across a hilltop, its muscles rolling beneath russet fur, frightened by the noise of our passage.
Mostly it is just green. I wonder whether the ferns themselves aren’t some sort of invasive species, because it looks like no ecosystem I’ve ever seen. There is no balance to it. They choke the world. I am not a biologist, though. I don’t know what’s natural or not.
Maybe they’re too professional, or maybe they’re just not interested, but neither the man nor the woman try to talk to me. I am not antisocial, though I may seem it. I just have little stomach for tedious conversation. Eventually I break the silence, speaking through the internal comms, the rotors too loud to be heard any other way.
“Are the ruins known locally?”
There is a long pause, enough that I wonder if the comms are working properly, and then the young woman replies.
“They’re recorded on the early maps,” she says. “But it’s a long way to go to look at some rubble. We’re busy. There’s a lot to do.”
“You never thought there might be treasure?”
Another long pause.
“Is there treasure?” she asks eventually.
“Probably not.”
“Then I think we made the right decision.”
Fair enough, I think. Not much room for history beneath the ferns. I don’t care much for the history either, but it makes me feel sorry for them all the same. I have other things to distract me. Curiosity remains an option for me, if I ever choose to indulge it.
This satisfies me as far as conversation goes, so I hold my tongue for the rest of the trip, allowing myself to drift off into a meditative haze, letting my thoughts unspool. When I next become aware of a change, it is a sinking in my gut as we lose altitude. I look at my pad and we’re no more than halfway there. I key on the comms.
“What’s happening?”
There is no reply on the comms, but from the seat in front I see the old man pointing out of the window at something. My eyes follow and I see the second sun beginning its final ascent.
In the other front seat, the young woman is clipping a rope to her harness. She removes the guard from a lightweight chainsaw and gives it a couple of practice revs, loud enough to hear even over the sound of the rotors. She seems satisfied, because she replaces the guard and clips it to a carabiner on her belt.
There is a loud thumping sound and then I feel air rushing in around my feet and ankles. A trapdoor has been opened. I feel strangely exposed, like we’re on a boat and a hole has just opened in its hull. I’m being stupid. She sits on the edge, her feet dangling into nothing, and the old man brings the copter slowly to a halt, so that it is hovering in the air, ten or fifteen feet from the carpet of ferns below. These are much larger than those I have seen so far, and though it is hard to see the ground beneath them, there is surely another ten or twelve feet.
She grips onto the top of the rope where it is secured to a crank and lowers herself out. I give her a smile for good luck, surprised at my generosity, but she doesn’t see it. She is gone. I crane my neck to look out of the window but I can’t see her, and I can’t look down the trapdoor without unclipping my own hardness.
I do nothing.
A few moments later and I hear a buzzing sound from below. The chainsaw. I key on the comms again.
“How long does it take?”
I expect an answer from the old man, but she seems to still be on the line.
“A minute. Maybe a bit more.”
“You’re fast.”
No reply. It doesn’t deserve one. I lean back and wait. A minute and a half later and I heard the crank whirring as it brings the rope back up, the woman no longer attached. The trapdoor closes. We descend, lowered neatly through a gap cut in the ferns to a bare concrete platform below. My guess for their height was wrong. By the time we hit the ground with a bump, they are towering over us.
It is a strange, furtive place under the ferns. They are a rich, dark green at their top, but down in the earth they are a yellow-brown colour, and the sickly sweet smell is multiplied tenfold. I half expect to see some sort of flourishing microclimate beneath their canopy but it is just dirt and stems.
The young woman climbs back into the copter just as I am about to get out. I sit down again. She clicks a switch above her and all of the windows are tinted, plunging us into relative darkness, the only light coming from the blinking console at the front of the copter.
“What do we do now?” I ask, already knowing the answer.
“We wait.”
We wait. They seem happy to do so in silence. I had taken them for stoic before, but they are beginning to seem almost hostile in their mute professionalism. I wonder whether they had any choice in escorting me, and whether they have anything better to do. I wonder whether I should offer them the payment after all, but I hold my tongue. There is no profit in offering money that isn’t demanded.
It is a little eerie to be in this lightless space, knowing I am surrounded by the ferns. They gently creak as they move in the breeze, and a hissing comes from above as their fronds brush together. I imagine that when the light re-enters we will have been enveloped by them entirely, buried beneath their embrace.
A small alarm rings in the front. The young woman reaches up to flip the switch again, and light fills the copter. The ferns have not grown around us. The second sun has passed. There is a roar as the rotors start up again, and we take to the air.
Now that I have seen the land beneath the ferns, I stop thinking of them as an oversized lawn and more like a body of water, concealing hidden depths. If the ruins are beneath this volume of vegetation it might be the work of days to clear it entirely so that readings can be taken properly. Perhaps that is the source of my escort’s annoyance. They already know better than me that they have days of hard labour ahead.
We fly on.
#
Our campsite, such as it is, is a concrete platform, large enough that it does not need to be cleared, because though the ferns fringe it entirely and flap across its edges, the centre remains untouched, or so it seems from a distance. Only when we touch down do I realise that the concrete is already being split and ruptured by plants attempting to grow from beneath. The copter sits slightly askew.
What a place to live. What hostility to civilisation. There has yet to be a concrete invented which can resist the determined thrust of a sapling.
The pair of them get out and I follow, eager to stretch my legs. They chain the copter down to lugs embedded in the concrete and lower the rotors. The old man locates a hatch which he pops open and removes a length of cabling which he attaches to the copter’s undercarriage. It is getting dark. There are still no clouds, and the temperature is dropping fast.
“Where do we sleep?” I ask, seeing no sign of shelter at all.
“On the copter,” comes the reply. I look back through the window. It isn’t very big, and much of the rear compartment is taken by my equipment. I can probably just about find a corner to lie down. I am not very tall. I can’t see any room for the two of them.
The young woman senses what I am thinking.
“The chairs recline. We sleep on them.”
The chairs look quite a lot softer than my seats. I don’t complain. I will make it work, and besides, I am too proud to look weak in front of them. I already suspect their dislike for me.
Still, a whole evening of their uneasy company does not appeal.
“Is it safe if I go for a walk?”
The two of them look at each other. The old man shrugs. It’s good enough for me.
“I’ll be back before it gets fully dark.”
I recall my prep pack. Having experienced second noon, we are now approaching first dusk, the period of half-light before second dusk plunges the world into true darkness. I have, I believe, a couple of hours.
“There’s not a lot to see,” the young woman says.
“I still want to see it.”
She gives a shrug of her own. I hop down from the concrete platform and my boots hit the soft soil beneath them. A thick forest of gently shifting ferns lies before me.
I walk.
#
After a while there is a comfort to the tracklessness of it all. I mark the location of the copter on my pad, now clipped to the inside of my wrist, and I walk. There are no natural paths, no animal runs, no distinguishing features. Once they reach a certain height, the ferns seem to thicken at the base and stop growing outwards, making it relatively easy to move between them, despite the denseness of the canopy above.
I realise that I have no notion of if I am retracing my steps or not. I choose not to look at the map marker. I try to walk in a straight line, but I doubt that I am.
With my enhanced vision I am able to see well despite the dusk, though there is an occasional sharp sting as I look into a patch of greater-than-usual darkness and a readjustment is made. I take a bac-stick out of my top pocket and light it, blowing a plume of smoke up into the air to drift among the swaying fronds.
It amuses me to think of one dried plant being burned and released into the forest of an alien place. To imagine that the ferns might have some common vegetal understanding of the place this bac came from. I know this is a foolish thought, brought on by the smoke. I am not predisposed to foolishness, which is probably why I do it.
Over time my walk becomes hypnotic. I am lulled into a strange state of mind. Not knowing where I am, where I am going, where anything is relative to anything else, begins to feel like a dream. Like I am disarticulated. I indulge the sensation, because it is an unusual one. I refuse to look at my pad. I am in control.
In time I tire. The sky begins to darken again, and I am forced to turn on my torch. I look at my pad.
It doesn’t have a signal.
A tiny status bar flickers in the top corner.
I hold it up higher, the eternal gesture of the lost, and nothing happens.
I am surrounded on all sides by shifting ferns, and they multiply in the shadows cast by my torch.
The signal goes up to orbit. They should know the signal has been lost. The signal should not have been lost. Even if they are passing on the other side of the planet, the signal should maintain.
I look again. The status bar flickers. There is no signal.
I do not panic.
I do not panic.
I do not panic.
I activate the crampons on my boots and gloves. Tiny metal spikes are extruded. I stamp on the base of a fern, testing it for grip. The smell of sweet sap fills the air. It holds.
I begin to climb.
At its base the fern is sturdy. It takes my weight. As I get higher, it soon begins to bow. This is a problem. To get above the canopy and orient myself would involve climbing on fronds too weak to take my weight.
I need another idea. I keep climbing.
I check my pad.
There is no signal.
The ferns are thick and fibrous. I do not think they will break if I reach the end. I believe they will sag, and leave me suspended. I believe this will be enough.
I keep climbing.
Sap bleeds from the wounds in the tree left in my gloves, running between my fingers, coating my arms and my sleeves. At first it is just annoying, but soon it becomes a major impediment, hardening into a tacky glue which takes all of my strength to tear away from each new grip. I try to withdraw the crampons but the sap has set around them, so they are fixed. My progress slows. My muscles burn.
I keep climbing.
My fern begins to bend. This is good, because I am coming closer to the top. It is bad for many other reasons.
I check the pad, and for a moment I am certain I see a flicker of signal.
I keep climbing.
It begins to bow alarmingly now, so much so that I am half climbing on it, half lying across it. I begin to question my previous assumption that it would not break. I am a long way off the ground.
I am as high as I can go. I raise my wrist high up to the sky, and it finds a signal.
I stop not-panicking.
I have somehow moved around to the other side of the concrete platform. It is not too far away. I believe I can see lights.
There is a splintering sound from beneath me.
I scuttle back faster than I thought possible, tearing each hand and boot violently free of the stem of the fern. I jump the last few feet, fearing that each new grip will entomb my hands and feet in place.
I take a moment to orient myself. I know which way I am going. I fix my eyes in the direction I need to go, and I walk. The ferns swallow me up again.
#
It takes me a long time to get back. So long that I fear I have misjudged, that I have walked past the platform without noticing. I think I have. There is no other explanation. It was not far.
Eventually I see lights. I follow them, and climb onto the platform. I am aware I look a mess. Filthy, covered in sap, my gloves and boots caked in the stuff. Flashlights play over me as the pair of them rush over.
“My signal dropped,” I say. I am exhausted. I don’t want to explain myself.
“You — ” the young woman begins, her voice sharp with emotion, and then the old man places a hand on her shoulder and speaks slowly.
“Do you need medical help?”
“No. But if you could help me clean myself, I would appreciate it.”
“We have acid in the copter.” He walks away. The young woman remains. I do not shine my flashlight in her face, so it remains in shadow, until my eyes sting and refocus. She looks angry. I try to look apologetic, but I am too tired to be convincing.
She glares at me and does not speak.
The old man returns with a tube of something, which he hands over.
“Don’t leave it on your skin if you can avoid it. It dissolves the worst of the sap. Might dissolve your gloves a bit too. Don’t waste it. We have a limited amount and we will need all of it.”
I thank him and take the tube. I can already smell it, a caustic odour. I squeeze a tiny bit out and it almost immediately starts to remove the sap. It’s strong stuff. I grab a leaf and use it to apply the acid, smearing away the goo and scraping it on the concrete. It is a slow process, especially under torchlight, and the pair of them leave me to my folly.
I don’t mind. I do my penance.
It is a few hours later when I slink into the copter and try to put together a makeshift bed in the back. The two of them are already wrapped up and asleep, or at least pretending to be. A single woven blanket has been left on my seat. I take out my own thermal foil blanket and wrap it around myself, using the blanket as a pillow, rolled up tight. With a little maneuvering, conscious of the noise I am making while they sleep, I work myself into a comfortable position.
I sleep.
#
There are preparations to be done in the morning before we can fly. I am required to leave the copter for them to be done, and my equipment is briefly unloaded. It is a blustery day, and the sky is white.
I see the two of them sharing something from a lunchbox which steams in the morning chill. I am not offered anything. I eat one of my ration bars, which tastes of a fruit I have never eaten.
No more words are exchanged about my embarrassment last night, though I send a couple of unhappy messages up to orbit. They aren’t sure what went wrong. They say it was related to me going under the ferns. I tell them that the signal can penetrate an entire planet. It can penetrate ferns.
They are working on it.
I make good use of the daylight to dislodge my crampons, but they won’t retract smoothly, so I remove them. If I have to climb anything else it will have to be with a firm grip.
After a time the two of them come over and introduce themselves. I don’t know what has changed, but I’m pleased. I was beginning to wonder if I needed to watch my back. The old man is called Gannon, and the young woman is Erzbet. They identify themselves with stiff formality.
They ask me my name and I tell them that it is Last.
They don’t probe. I don’t explain.
We climb back into the copter and take to the sky. I watch the concrete pad recede behind us, a little grey island in amongst all the green.
The ice finally broken, we exchange a few more pleasantries. The pair are not related, as I had imagined, but regularly work together. It is regarded as good practice for copter teams to stay together. They have been working together for over six years. There are other more isolated towns and homesteads away from Landing, and they need supply drops or medical assistance occasionally. This seems a particularly doomed world to try and exist away from civilisation, but it doesn’t stop them. They spend their entire waking lives at war with the greenery as it tries to choke the life out of their home.
I notice the land getting lower. We are entering the crater. The ruins are at its centre. It is hundreds of kilometres across, and every square metre is covered in ferns.
Gannon brings us down lower. There is some awkward scanning, flying back and forth, looking for some particular geographical feature or other, and then he is satisfied. The trapdoor opens and Erzbet rappels out. A moment later I hear the buzzing of the saw once again. It takes much longer this time. There is no concrete pad to land on. She is clearing a large area by herself. I peer out the window, concerned, but I see her working away and I am reassured.
Some time later we set down. I look around for the ruins and see nothing. Just more waving ferns.
“Where is it?”
Gannon rubs his white hair and sighs, before stamping on the floor with his boots.
“Underneath.”
I look down and see only soil. Though now he mentions it there is a distinct shape to the earth below us, like we are standing on the top of an upturned bowl. The land falls away gently around us.
There is a clattering from behind me. It is Erzbet, and she is holding three spades.
I begin to understand why they didn’t like me.
Despite my antipathy to labour, I accept the tools. We get to work. The task feels impossible. It is the work of half a day just to clear the area for digging. I wonder if it might not have been wiser to firebomb the area before arriving. I wonder if they’re laughing at me in orbit. It has been a long time since I have been obliged to dig a hole myself.
I don’t ask them if a digging machine can be flown over. I know the answer. There is nothing to do except dig.
#
I am covered in soil, from head to toe. No inch of me escapes it. I am stripped to my vest. We are all stripped to our vests. The work is exhausting, and we are covered in soil. It is rich, dark and crumbly. No wonder the ferns grow so voraciously in it. I wonder once more about the ecology of such a place. With so little vegetation beyond the ferns, do they grow only in their own decay? Is life not corrupted by feeding on itself? What can the compost be composed of except the fallen sap and splinters of the things which grow in it?
Every day we dig. It has been three days, and we have yet to hit stone. The data from orbit suggests that it is no more than another couple of metres down. The entrance to a Before ruin is often at the top, at its highest point. I hope we are at the right place. We have only one direction to dig. Straight down.
I begin to feel like I am climbing back into the womb when I step into the hole. The sides enclose me, and more soft soil crumbles down, patters across me, clings to my hair. I am below the earth. I burrow. Where there are roots in the way, we cut through them with the saw if we can. We are not interested in removing the ferns. We are only interested in going down.
In the mornings we eat reheated logs of protein over a chemical fire. I share my rations. The protein is tasteless and unpleasant, but I enjoy the ritual and I enjoy the company. They treat my rations like they are impossible delicacies, with their bright colours and spices. Gannon has a device which is able to extract water from boiled sap over the course of the day, and a section of fern must be pulped and fed into it every morning to provide the next day’s drinking water. There is a backup supply on the copter but it is retained for emergencies. The water tastes as sickly sweet as everything else, but when the soil creeps into my mouth and between my teeth it is what I need.
We hum as we work, nonsense songs which rise and fall to improvised rhythms. We have no shared cultural knowledge, but we have voices. We find pleasure in harmony. Sometimes I try and tune my voice to the creaking of the ferns. To hum a duet with the endless greenery.
I receive a message on my pad but I don’t get it until the evening. They have been running further analysis on the strange protein. They advise not consuming too much of the local food, and to reduce exposure to the vegetation where possible. I laugh out loud at this. My face is black with soil. It is under my fingers and in my hair. I drink from the ferns every day. My exposure is absolute.
Gannon wanders over to ask me what I am laughing at. I tell him he wouldn’t get it.
My nights are uncomfortable but manageable. The copter does not have heating because it drains the batteries, but it is a small space, and the three of us breathe warmth into the air. When we wake, the windows are opaque with condensation from our mingled exhalations. My pad keeps a track of CO2 levels. It tells me they remain manageable. I wonder whether we should bring in a fern sapling to counteract it. Let it taste of us. Share in the cycle.
I don’t suggest it. They stay outside, looking in, muted green shapes which shift and groan through the misted glass.
It is on the fourth day that I begin to feel strange. The strangeness has been approaching for some time, I think, building in my periphery. On the fourth day I isolate it. Examine it. My vitals are strong. Stronger than usual. I feel strong. This is part of the strangeness. I feel stronger, and I feel more than myself. I feel like my personal space is pushing outwards like a bubble. Like I can feel the skin on Gannon’s face while he sleeps, two metres away from me.
I do not tell those in orbit. They will only worry. They see my vitals too. They have my medical information available. They will let me know if anything becomes a problem.
I do not feel like a problem. I feel good. I am eager to return to the soil.
I keep digging. I go deeper. I lean into the sheer walls of our excavation and imagine being drawn into it, swallowed whole, so that I might grow like a bulb, drawing nutrients from the soil. If Gannon and Erzbet notice me behaving strangely, they do not comment. Perhaps this is how all offworlders behave. They have no point of reference.
The ferns steal all perspective.
I dig.
#
We hit stone.
Erzbet is holding the spade, but I feel it. My hands curl around the handle. The shock of it jars me to my elbow. The scar on the inside of my leg itches. I am menstruating. I am tired. I want to go home to Landing.
I am watching from the other side of the dig as Erzbet hits stone. It rings out like a bell. I am certain I feel the reverberations through my boots.
We break off to celebrate a milestone. Gannon has a flask of important brandy. He has been saving it for a long time, he tells us. I drink it and I know that it is cheap, vat-brewed brandy. He tastes it, and he tastes something rich, spiced, and alien, and so I taste it too.
It is almost first dusk. We decide to do no more work for the day. We sit down and we talk.
I have an urgent message on my pad. I don’t open it. I put it in the copter.
A weight has been lifted. I see Erzbet laugh. The pair of them teach me one of the songs that are traditionally sung on their summer solstice. Gannon is the baritone, I am the alto, Erzbet is the mezzo-soprano.
The ferns listen. I hear them hearing us. There is soil in my mouth and I swallow it.
We drink and sing until night falls, and then we go to sleep. Before I climb in, I move into the forest of ferns until I find a small frond, growing alone. I scoop it up with my hands, capturing the soil beneath it, and bring it with me to the copter.
I exhale.
#
It is morning.
I am awake before Erzbet or Gannon. I am digging. I take a fistful of soil and I swallow it. It enriches me. My spade parts the soil and I toss the spoil over the side in great swings. Each load briefly blocks out the sun. For a moment I am encircled by soil.
The ruin is a dome. At its top is a hole. I scrape the soil from around it until the hole is exposed.
I look down into it.
#
I think my heart stops. I don’t feel it any more. I am diffuse. I disperse. My matter pours from me and drifts away like pollen, over the ferns, into the sky, dancing on the breeze. I feel the sun on every molecule. I multiply.
#
There is a sound behind me. Gannon and Erzbet are standing there. Gannon is holding my pad.
“It’s making a noise,” he says.
I look at it. One message repeats.
Get out.
Get out.
Get out.
Get out.
I hand it back to him. I smile.
“It’s yours,” I tell him.
He looks at me in confusion. I turn back around.
I look down into the hole.
I step forward.
I am gone.
#
I feel the wind moving across my fronds. I push my roots into the earth. I feel everything. I feel the sweetness inside of me. I feel myself bursting with light.
I turn to face the sun.
It is second noon.
