Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) (24 page)

16

She’d gone over it in her head a
thousand times. Looking down from the shuttle, she’d seen the installation and
the clean-cut edge of the jungle’s perimeter. She let the thought, the evil
thought, that perhaps she’d missed the installation,
 
somehow walked past it, exist just long
enough to shove it back down into the dark pit from whence it came.

She had to be on course, she just
had
to be.
It couldn’t be that
far.

Please
let me be on course.

She checked the time. It would be dark in another three hours. She
would continue for one more hour, then stop for the night. That would be enough
for one day.

The sleeves to her coveralls were frayed and tattered from the
constant abrasion of vines and rough limbs on cotton. Her face stung in a dozen
places, and she had a patch on her leg that burned like fire. She wanted to
take a look at it, but not yet. Just a few more steps then she’d take a little
rest.

She finally stopped and sat on a moss-covered limb a full meter
thick. She untied the vine from around her ankle and pulled up her pants leg.
The rash was right along her shin in a narrow, raised and angry line. It burned
when she touched it. She had no idea what had caused it. Her best guess was
that some crawler had left a noxious trail on her leg during the night; but,
for all she knew, something "hazardous" in a blowing leaf had come
into contact with her skin.

She lowered the pants leg and retied the vine around her ankle,
promising herself she’d bathe the spot when and if she came across clean water
again.

She stared out into the formless mass and wished she could see
something else, anything else for only a moment. A wide ocean vista with cool,
blowing wind and clean, blue air would be nice.

She snorted at the absurdity of it.

She rose heavily off the limb and continued on. With one
stumbling, awkward step after another, she fought her way through the tangle.

The ground under her feet began to get softer and mushier as she
walked. When the mud got half-way over her boots, she began to get concerned.
She forged ahead a few hundred more meters before she pulled back a wide, heavy
frond and saw it.

“Yes!”

There before her was the swamp she’d seen from the shuttle, its
still, glass-like water pierced by thousands of plants and trees. The
installation couldn’t be more than a few kilometers away. Once she got past the
swamp, she’d be home free. She would have her vista, her light and air. The
swamp was her last obstacle.

All she had to do was get across it
.

* * *

That could be tough. She remembered how long and serpentine the
swamp had seemed from the air. It had stretched to the horizon in both
directions. There would be no going around it.

She decided to back track to drier ground before she set up camp.
She didn’t like the idea of camping too close to a swamp with nightfall
approaching. The jungle was bad enough without a million acres of nearby water
from which things could crawl.

She found a slightly higher piece of ground well back from the
mush and pronounced it
good
. Building
the yurt went slightly faster than it had the night before; she’d learned some
things about making it tighter and more bug-resistant. She used more vine and
laid the leaves in a heavily overlapped pattern that left fewer spaces. It
fell far short of having flow-through ventilation, but she didn’t think she’d
suffocate.

 
With nightfall approaching,
she slipped into the yurt and sealed the door behind her. By the pale light of
dusk, she ate her last bundle of grapes, dreading with each measured bite, the
coming darkness and its promise of frenetic buzzing, whirring and crawling
activity.

Munching a grape with one hand, she lightly tested the strength of
a leaf with the index finger of the other.

When the first insects started bumping and fluttering against the
tent, she lay on her side, curled up and tried to sleep. What seemed like hours
later, she managed to doze a little.

Sometime during the night something passed by the yurt with a
sound of leaves shaking, up high. It seemed to jump from limb to limb with
incredible speed, and she could hear the trees shake, far into the distance, as
it hit them, one by one.

In shallow twilight sleep, she imagined and dreamed about the raft
she would build that would carry her across the swamp. It was made of neat,
clean logs lashed together just right and had an oscillating paddle attached to
the back. She worked the paddle back and forth easily and within minutes
propelled herself to the dry, raised bank on the far side.

The vision was still with her in the morning when she woke up and
crawled out of the yurt. But the pale monotony of the jungle’s fallen and
rotted trees and branches literally twisted the spirit from the dream, wrung it
out and left it juiceless and dead. There was no way she could make a raft like
the one she envisioned. She had no logs, no rope, no paddle, and no tools. All
she had was a dream; a stupid dream turning into a lie before her eyes.

She wolfed down a bundle of grapes and headed for the swamp.

She slogged across the mud flats, walking on logs and branches
when she could. She’d just climbed up on a thick, fallen tree trunk when
something bolted from the other side of it and dashed toward the water. It took
her a second to recognize it as one of the horse-things she’d seen the night
before last. The creature had probably come to drink, and she’d surprised it.
The creature galloped right into the swamp, splashing loudly; and when the
water got so deep it could no longer leap, it started to swim, its head held
high. The encounter left her unnerved all the way down to her feet.

“Chicken,” she said, smiling at it.

She watched as the creature turned to parallel the bank for a
short distance, then turn toward shore.

Suddenly, with a single yelp of distress, the animal vanished
beneath the surface without a trace. There was a massive swirl and swell at the
spot suggesting something huge under the water—then nothing.

“So much for swimming across. Sorry horse.”

The fallen tree she was standing on lay all the way out into the
water where its thick, broken branches stuck up and out, dead and rotting. She
walked carefully out along its rot-slickened surface, watching as the trunk
slowly sank in the black water, and the swamp bottom faded, then finally
dropped off into blackness. She was still twenty or thirty steps from the
tree’s branches.

“That’s far enough, Donna,” she whispered.

The water under the trunk wasn’t opaque, but it was deep, black
and shadowy. The idea of being down in it made her shudder. Looking into its
dark and menacing depths filled her with an apprehension greater than any the
jungle itself could spawn. She could imagine the little evil things down in
there bumping against her skin, biting her, attaching to her, squirming into
her orifices.

She wanted to run away. She wanted to beat something with her
fists. This was impossible. The big monster was nothing. There was no way she
could bring herself to submerge herself in that evil, squirming stew. She
opened her mouth to swear a stream, but sighed a deep and loose-jawed sigh
instead. If she was going to live, she had to find a way across, even if it
meant bathing in that scary water—big horrible thing and little scary things be
damned.

She stood there, as still as one of the branches, and studied the
situation. The swamp was peaceful and primordial on the surface. A thin layer
of mist hung like a veil over it. The swamp was too wide and too overgrown to
see the far side, but she guessed it was less than a kilometer away. There were
wide spaces to navigate through where no plants grew above the water line. She
guessed those were the deeper channels. The horse-like creature had been
grabbed in just such a channel. As appealing as the channels were at first
glance, she decided not to use them under any circumstances.

It made sense that activity like splashing attracted the big
bastard. Maybe it took a lot of splashing to get its attention. If she knew
what its attack threshold was, she might be able to sneak past it.

That was
it. Float quietly past the big monster and keep the small ones from wriggling
up my ass. Sure . . .

She turned around, being careful of her footing and walked back
toward shore. When she was clear of the water, she hopped down into the mud and
slogged back to dry ground.

I’m dead.

* * *

She found
a tree limb and sat on it. From where she was she could see a patch of swamp
water through the foliage. The thin layer of mist, level with her line of
sight, looked like a white line drawn across the scene.

As she stared, her anger grew. She’d come this far and now this
last barrier stood in her way, mocking her. She hated it. She hated the length
and breadth of it. She hated everything in it.

Think.

Stilts were out. If she tried to swim, the thing would catch her
and eat her. She couldn’t fly or climb over it.

Raft. Somehow. Somehow, build a raft and paddle with my hands as
gently as I can. Stick to the shallows where the plants grow. Become a piece
of floating debris moving slowly across. It might take me days to get to the
other side. But I might make it.

She yanked a big leaf from the branch above her head and looked at
it. It was heavily veined and tough. She tore it in half. The leaf itself was
thick, leathery and porous. It would float like a sonofabitch.

She tore a couple more leaves off and wadded them up into a ball
about the size of her head. Then, using her knees to help hold it, she tied the
ball up with a piece of vine. She hefted it. It was light and tough.

She carried the ball back along the fallen tree until she was over
water and dropped it in. It splashed quietly and bobbed once then rolled over.
It floated high in the water.

“Excellent.”

She lay down on the trunk and retrieved it, then picked a likely looking
spot in the closest channel and heaved the ball over the branches into it. The
ball smacked loudly, splashed and bobbed. A moment later a familiar swell and
heave of the water under it gave the monster away. There was a quick, loud sucking
sound, and the ball disappeared, only to float up a moment later in pieces.

“That answers that question.”

She went back and started to visualize what she had to do, what
she’d need and what the raft had to look like.

Vines and
leaves are a jungle girl’s best friends.

When the raft was done, she wouldn’t want to haul it any farther
than she had to, so she picked a dry spot as close to the mud flat as she could
get to build it. She stomped the area flat and uprooted what she could until
she had a good place to work.

The raft would need a frame made of one central piece and at least
two cross members. They wouldn’t have to be huge; just light and tough. She
chose the straight stalks of the same pulpy plants she used for her tents. She
picked one and bent it back and forth until it broke, then twisted it and
worked it around until it tore off close to the ground. She started to trim off
the smaller limbs but left them in place; they could only help to hold the
leaves in place.

She ripped a few more stalks out of the ground and laid them out
in a design she thought would do, adjusted them, added another one, played
with it, and finally got what she thought would work. By the time she was
finished, her already bruised and blistered hands ached even more.

The structure would have the shape of a canoe with outriggers.
She would lie prone on the middle part and paddle gently with her arms in the
spaces between canoe and outriggers. She would cover the entire raft with a
canopy, like a floating blind. If she were quiet, it might just work. If she
could stay in the shallows, she could use a pole and shove her way along. A
pole with a hook on one end to grab with would be even better, quieter.

She started to gather her building materials in great armfuls.
There was no shortage. In an hour, she’d stripped all the pulpy leaves she
could reach from the plants in the area and had a pile almost as tall as she
was. Vines were next; and before she stopped to eat, she had miles of thin,
tough vines to work with.