Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) (39 page)

The
beaches were covered with tall, sparse grass and storm-blown debris causing
Donna to think that it was probably less buggy than the jungle behind it, but
it wouldn’t be bug-free by any means. After her recent ordeal, such
considerations were very important to her. She reached out and touched the
shuttle’s stiff, strong wall with the palm of her hand. She knew where she’d be
sleeping.

“What do
you think?” he said into the window. “It looks pretty good if you ask me.”

“It’s
cleaner than the jungle,” Rachel said, “and there’s at least a view of
something other than jungle.”

“Let’s go
for it,” Donna said. “We won’t find better.” John swooped down and circled low over
the inlet. He picked a fairly level spot on the northern side, hovered over it,
and then put the shuttle into a slow vertical descent.

“We’ll
have to do this in the dark. I don’t want to risk using the landing lights,
you can see those damned things from space easy. I just hope there’s nothing
weird underneath us.”

“There’s
always something weird under you on this ball,” Rachel remarked.

The craft
sat down with a few scraping sounds and a slight bump. Rachel studied John’s
face for some sign that he sensed damage and got a wink in return that put her
at ease.

“Home
sweet home,” he said.

“For a
while,” Donna added.
        

 
They slept poorly. The makeshift beds were
rough, and the floor of the shuttle hard. John had an especially difficult
time. The animal warmth from Rachel’s body seemed to reach out and touch him,
excite him with the promise of its supple smoothness.

  
They all awoke bone-sore, bleary-eyed and
grumpy. The food was oddly tasteless to Rachel, and she wondered just how long
this would have to go on. It wasn’t comfortable.

“At least
it’s better than being dead,” John said as if reading her mind.

“I
suppose,” she said.

She
looked flushed. That was a bad sign. He reached over and put his hand on her
forehead. “You’re hot,” he said. “Are you having another reaction?”

“It’s
just hot in here is all,” she said puffing at a strand of twisted hair. “I’m
fine.”

“Are you
sure?” he asked gently.

“Yes. I’m
fine,” she said turning away.

The idea
of having another episode made her flush with fear. The last one had caused
convulsions that left her bruised and exhausted.

The
centipede’s poison had done some damage, and the effects had persisted. Donna
had figured it out following a brief medical interview she gave Rachel after
seeing one of the seizures firsthand two days ago. Donna told her that she had
no way of knowing how much damage had been done, and the specialized
diagnostic equipment required to find out more was nowhere to be found on the
planet. Rachel had had three convulsions since the bite, each one a little
more severe than the last.

“I worry
about you,” John said. “Donna said the damage might be progressive and to be
aware of any change in the way you feel.”

“I’m
fine, John. Really I am. Besides, there’s nothing we can do about it now. Don’t
worry about it. I’ll be fine.”

They went
outside and milled around their new home, kicking at grass and driftwood and
taking a close look at this or that. The air that close to the water was heavy
with the rich scent of ocean and fertile shore, as sweet to Rachel as perfume.
She lifted her head and sucked the sweet scent in with a deep inhale, eyes
closed, savoring it. She couldn’t imagine a better scent and wondered why, for
the hundredth time in her life, why someone hadn’t bottled it.

They
ambled over to the shore and looked at that, too. The water was clear, cool and
the narrow strip of wet sand was streaked with tracks of nocturnal crawlers
going in and out of the gently lapping water. The biologist squatted down on
her haunches and took a close look. John didn’t fail to notice how that
particular maneuver emphasized her thighs under the material of her clothing,
and he longed to run his hands over those smooth curves from the back, the
front, from underneath.

God
. . . he thought.
She is beautiful.

* * *

Rachel spotted it first, just
when the sun came up far enough to illuminate it. She wished she were higher
off the ground and thought about asking John to lift her up in the shuttle to
get a better view. Down low, only the top portion of it could be seen, but she
could see enough to know it was either a completely unnatural artifact or the
biggest, strangest goddamned plant she’d ever seen.

From
where she stood, she guessed the object to be nearly four hundred meters high
and perhaps two hundred in diameter.

“What is
it?” Donna asked, shielding her eyes against the sun.

“I have
no idea,” Rachel said.” I suppose it’s a plant. It has some floral symmetry.
That’s all I’d hazard to guess at this point.”

The
object roughly resembled the trunk of a tree, cleanly chopped at the top and
with numerous thick and twisted shoots protruding from it at right angles like
branches at irregular intervals. Its color was brownish with mottled patches
of darker brown. Some patches near the top had a yellowish tinge.

“A tree?”
Donna asked, scowling. “Is it some big-assed tree?”

“Unknown.
I’d like to take a closer look at it, though,” Rachel said with a strange sense
of longing that surprised her. “It’s . . . interesting.”

“That
could be arranged,” John said smiling. “You know how I feel about discovering
new things.”

“Yeah, a
real searcher of truth, you are,” Rachel said with a grin. “You’d like that
wouldn’t you—just go land right on the damned thing and snoop around for a
while.”

“Yep.”

“What are
you two talking about?” Donna wanted to know.

“We’re
just thinking about doing a little exploring,” John
said, keeping his eyes locked on Rachel’s.

“Just a
side-trip,” she said, similarly locked onto him. “Nothing major.”

“We have
enough to worry about without complicating our lives to Hell and back. It’s a
plant. Big deal. I mean, it’s a big plant, but so what?”

“You
wouldn’t understand,” Rachel said.

“No, it’s
personal,” John said.

“Oh,”
Donna said.

“Now?”
Rachel asked to John.

“Why
not?” he said.

Rachel
took him by the arm and dragged him toward the shuttle. “C’mon, Donna,” she
said. “It’ll be fun.”

“I’m not
so sure about
that,
but I’m sure as hell not staying here alone.”

John took
a quick look around the shuttle, making sure there weren’t any sticks or vines
snagged around the propulsion coils.

It took
just a minute to fly from the inlet to what appeared to be a gigantic tree.
Looking out at the sea of green, Donna remarked to herself that the trip would
have taken days and gallons of sweat on foot. She would know.

John flew
the craft to within a hundred meters of the structure then banked around it,
making a complete circle.

It looked
to Rachel to have grown up out of the jungle floor but she was at a loss to
explain from
what.
It seemed to be a one-of-a-kind something and that seemed inexplicable. If it
were a plant, it should have had progenitors visible. But on this planet, she
thought ruefully, anything was possible. The organism could have had a life
cycle unfathomable by Terran standards. Perhaps it had a few millennium or two
to go before going to seed.

“How tall
is it?” she asked. “What’s our altitude?”

“Three,
four hundred meters. We’re a good hundred meters from the top right now.”

“It’s
huge . . .” Donna said.

Up close,
the structure seemed to have the texture of polished wood, and when not
backlit by the sun, was much lighter in color than it had seemed. When the
light was right, the brown, mottled surface reflected the red light of the sun
and sent back bands of gold.

Rachel
studied it. The unknown shape sunk deep to some remote section of her mind and
made a connection. She felt a sudden sense of awe that rose up from her bosom
and through the nerves in her neck and the back of her head. The shape seemed
to be more than the sum of its parts. It seemed more like sculpture than a
mere object; a grand,
inexpressible symbol of
something else.

“Get away
from it,” she said.

“What?”
he said.

“I mean move
back. I want to see all of it at once.”

John
turned the craft out, then brought it back into a slow loop.

“Good,”
she said.

Rachel
recognized that the monolith had formed eons ago, erupted, from the jungle
floor as if thrust by some explosive force. From one angle, the flat sea beyond
seemed to frame it, caress it, with soft gray. In sharp contrast to its golden
sheen, the ocean was a calm and tranquil backdrop that accentuated its
strength.

She felt
her head buzz with a sudden revelation.

Rachel
had spent her entire life in the study of things alive, of life; from the
smallest proto-organism to the most complex forms. She’d seen their shapes in
every conceivable configuration. Those shapes possessed her waking hours and
crept into her dreams, moving, twisting and slithering in symmetrical halves
and quarters. This structure, this peculiar shape, reached into her psyche and
with one of those twisted, powerful arms plucked some chord deep, deep down.
Finally, she was able to find the words.

“It looks
like life itself,” she said and swallowed hard.

“What?”
Donna asked, not sure if she'd heard right.

“That . .
. plant. It looks like life itself.”

“I
thought you said you didn’t know it
was
a plant.”

“I still
don’t.”

As Rachel
watched the light bounce in gleaming splendor off the structure’s resilient
surface, the sudden realization came to her, carried like some gift by the
monolith’s bronze perfection.

If this
fertile planet has a heart, surely this is it. It is the planet
's
center.

She felt
herself trembling. The object’s mass seemed to pull her in as if by magnetism.

“Land on
it. I want to touch it.”

“You’re
the boss,” John said.

“You
can’t just land on that thing,” Donna protested.

“Sure we
can,” John smiled at Rachel.

“Go,”
Rachel said. “Land right . . . right in the center.”

The top
of the monolith was flat and smooth. He brought the craft slowly over it and
went into a vertical descent. The surface looked solid enough, but you never
knew. He put the craft on creep and let the suspensors gradually ease it to
within a meter of the surface.

“That’s
close enough,” he said. “We don’t know how much weight it can take.”

“It can
take the weight of the universe,” Rachel said. “And hold it like a feather.”

“I think
she’s in love,” Donna said ruefully to John.

John
locked the craft in place, then slid the side door open. The light from the
object’s surface flooded the shuttle’s gray interior with gold, making them
squint against it.

Without
hesitation, Rachel stepped into the suspensor field and waded through it.

When she
stepped out onto the surface and away from the suspensor’s influence, it felt
as if she’d stepped onto the very earth itself so solid was the surface
underneath. Her boots made faint clomping sounds as she walked, and she heard
her breath as if she were listening to someone else’s. She stopped and stomped
hard once just to feel the object’s immutable strength under her foot. She bent
down and ran her hand over the surface and felt its smoothness like fine
polished wood. When she looked at her hand, she noticed that it was trembling.
She was having another reaction. The trembling was the first concrete sign.
She clenched a tight fist to make it stop, willing it to go away.

I’m
stronger than you.

She
marched across the plateau, turning and walking backwards every few steps.
Taking in the incredible vista all around with a broad smile, she could feel in
the muscles of her face but could scarcely understand. From atop this life
form, she felt as if the planet had unfolded from the substrate beneath and now
lay before her like a vast living carpet in one plane. The rolling waves of
deep green went on forever in three directions, punctuated to the east by the
red ball of the sun and framed by the gray strip of the ocean to the west. From
this high place, she could open her arms and fill them with the planet’s very
spirit. It would flow into her, fill her and transform her—she knew it. She
felt it in every fiber. Reason told her that coming to this place was mere
chance, but her heart felt some profound and frightening design at work, as if
every thought she’d ever had or act she’d ever done had brought her inexorably
to this place.