Deep magic second coll.., p.33
Deep Magic - Second Collection, page 33
part #2 of Deep Magic Collection Series
Pretty quickly, those blue marbles were set in a face red as Mars.
“Pansy,” I added for good measure.
He muttered something and found handholds on the wall. I went slowly—Bodi got sullen when I beat him at things—and together we spidered our way up.
Hydrogen sulfide—H2S—was the biggest threat to our colony’s viability. No matter how much we removed, more always seeped in from vents we couldn’t locate. An olfactory paralytic, the gas was so pervasive no one even smelled it anymore. But you knew when it was thick—you’d get dizzy, your chest would feel like lead, and if you didn’t get out quickly, you’d die. Every year, at least a couple of people, usually kids, would forget their monitors and lose their lives. One of the many reasons I loved climbing was that hydrogen sulfide collects near the ground.
The hole in the wall was big—a couple of meters around, probably from an ancient underground river—but parts of it were filled in, and loose rocks jutted from the ceiling like teeth ready to bite down on anyone who dared enter that mouth.
Bodi squinted as he looked inside. “I don’t know, El. If our parents find out about this, we’ll be in for it.”
That much was true. My parents always chided me for climbing, for wandering the karst. I’d never understood that. I told them that if they’d stifled their own instinct to explore, they never would have come to Mars. They didn’t like that. Adults never like it when you expose their hypocrisy.
I climbed inside the hole, and after I called him a eunuch, Bodi entered too. Rubble filled the downward-sloping tunnel, but a faint, almost imperceptible glow seemed to reach through the gaps.
“Do you see that?” Bodi asked.
“Yeah,” I said with a grin. “Let’s clear a path.” A cold breeze flowed over our sweating skin as we moved debris. Finally, we squeezed through the narrow passage we’d made and reached the cavern on the other side.
It glowed a deep, exquisite, earthy green.
We craned our necks up toward the source, and that’s when we saw them—the upside-down trees, hanging from above like living chandeliers. Their luminescent roots traversed the ceiling in a light-show lattice joining each tree to the others, anchoring the ethereal forest to the rock above.
“They’re . . .” Bodi trailed off, speechless.
“Beautiful.” My wrist monitor shrieked. Though the oxygen was acceptable—the little cyanobacteria friends we’d brought from Earth had been working overtime to oxygenate the chamber—the hydrogen sulfide was dangerously high. The upward path to the other cavern had allowed the gas to collect in the trees’ chamber, outside the reach of our mitigation team’s pumps. I showed Bodi the readout and pointed up at the trees. “I’ll race you to the top.” That time, I didn’t wait for him.
I will never forget the feeling of that first root I touched. I did not expect it to be warm, so different from our cold, lifeless clay-and-rock prison, to feel so . . . alive. The moment I touched that root, something quaked within me to fill the emptiness I carried. That ceaseless, nagging knowledge that I would never walk the forests of Earth, would never have a connection to other life, it disappeared. I’d found my own forest.
Even Bodi forgot his fear when he made contact, and we swung from root to root like monkeys of Earth. When we reached the first tree, we slid down—or up, if you’re stuck with a Terran’s view of trees—into the canopy of great glowing limbs reaching out around us. Fist-sized globes protruded from the wood, glowing pale white. Some were just little bulges on the branches, but others were fully formed spheres, barely hanging on.
We climbed from tree to tree until our arms were paste. Then Bodi and I sat atop one of the great limbs, caught our breath, and surveyed our forest.
I picked one of the white globes and held it to his lips. “Should we try it?”
“I don’t think so, El.”
I sunk my teeth into the fruit. Flavor flowed from my mouth through my nerves to my fingers and toes and back, fullness pouring in until I felt whole and then building even more until I thought I would explode.
Reluctantly, I spat it out. “Is fruit from Earth trees this good?”
He laughed. “I can’t say, ’cause there is no way I’m tasting that thing, you nut.”
“Bodi, we need to keep this place a secret.”
He turned to me, incredulous. “Are you crazy?”
“You already established that. I’m serious.”
“We have to tell the others.”
“No we don’t. We have to hide the tunnel. If the adults find out about this place, they’ll block it off so they can prick and probe them.” I stroked the smooth skin of our tree. “They’ll never let us back in here. We have to keep it secret . . . hey, you know what? The letters for secret also spell trees, c? Trees, see?”
I’ve always seen words in my mind as I said them, and sometimes the letters jump around, rearranging themselves to form new words. I just thought it was good fun, but when I first told my parents about it, they had me diagnosed with speech dyslexia.
Bodi tilted his head in thought, then laughed. “You really are crazy.”
“Promise me, Bodi. Say you won’t tell anyone.”
“ ‘You won’t tell anyone.’ ”
I flicked his ear.
“Ow—okay! I won’t tell anyone.”
“Thank you. This is important to me.” I kissed his cheek and looked around at the canopy cradling us in its luminous limbs. “I need this place.” I put my arm around him, he put his arm around me, and together we sat in the tree’s embrace while hatching plans for how to hide the tunnel entrance.
* * *
“Did you hear what Bodi discovered?” my dad half shouted as he came into the kitchen.
My spoon clattered to the table. “What?”
“I just spoke with his father. The quake opened a new chamber, and Bodi, brave bugger, went in and discovered the most complex lifeform we’ve found yet . . . are you all right?”
I was already walking to the bathroom. “I feel sick,” I said, and that was not a lie.
After jettisoning my breakfast, I went to Bodi’s family’s unit. His mother greeted me at the door.
“Hi, Mrs. Watson. I need to speak to Bodi.”
“Seems everyone does today,” she said, a proud smile stretching across her face. “He’s with the biologists, showing them his discovery.”
I ran to the cavern of the hanging trees. The biologists had worked quickly—they’d already printed and assembled a ladder to the hole in the wall. I climbed it, and when I looked inside the tunnel, I could see straight through the path they’d cleared. At the end, wearing a respirator, was a biologist setting up an airlock. And with him, Bodi.
The moment he saw me, he turned and disappeared into the cavern.
“Bodi!” I ran through the tunnel after him.
The biologist blocked my way. “Sorry, miss, but we’re sealing off this chamber.”
“What about him!”
“Bodi Watson? He made the find.”
“I made the find with him!”
He patted my head. “Nice try, miss.”
I slapped his hand away. “Really! I know what they look like—they’re upside-down trees, and they glow, and—”
The man laughed. “By now everyone knows what they look like. Sorry, miss, but I really need you to step back so we can seal it off. The hydrogen sulfide level is high in here, and we don’t want to contaminate things any further.”
This was not how things were supposed to be. Everything was upside down. Upside down. From then on, whenever I said those two words, some of their letters would jump around to make another.
Wounded.
* * *
I tried to catch Bodi over the next couple of days, but he spent all his time with the biologists. They just adored him. On the third day, I hid near the base of the ladder until he climbed down with the research team.
“Bodi.”
He ignored me.
“Bodi Watson, I need to talk to you.”
One of the biologists tousled Bodi’s hair. “You should spend some time with kids your own age too. See ya, big guy.”
Bodi looked longingly at the biologists as they walked off, and then it was just me and him.
“You promised.”
He looked at his feet.
“You said it would be our secret.”
When he glanced up, annoyance flashed in his blue eyes. “It was a stupid promise, El. They’re saying it’s one of the greatest discoveries ever, and you would have kept it secret.”
“Yes, I would have. But you broke that secret. And you haven’t even given me credit.”
“Look, I was just excited when I told my parents. I didn’t mean to leave you out of it, it’s just . . . it should be about the trees, not who found them.”
That was the only time in my life I slapped someone.
* * *
Two weeks after we found the hanging trees, the mitigation team found a girl unconscious near the vents, down where the hydrogen sulfide liked to collect. They said when they found her, her skin was flushed red as the Martian surface.
“Mars took her,” my parents said when they told me she didn’t make it, as if the planet was some child-thieving monster.
To my parents’ distress, whenever I didn’t have studies, I explored the karst. I was obsessed. I found those trees, and I would find more. But I wasn’t the only one looking—the scientists borrowed drilling supplies from the miners to search for new chambers. Still, after months of hunting, no one found another tree.
I came home from general studies one day to find my parents waiting for me in the kitchen. They told me to sit down.
“Eleanor Franklin.” They only used my full name when it was something serious. “It’s time for you to choose a specialty,” my dad said. “You need to decide which field you want to work in.”
“You could apprentice with me in thermoregulation,” my mom said. “It’s always warm near the vents.”
“And we could use a bright mind in mitigation. You could be the one to find the missing hydrogen sulfide sources. You’d save lives.”
“I want to work with the upside-down trees,” I said. And to my parents’ credit, they were okay that I chose biology over their fields.
The only biologist taking on an apprentice was Mrs. Peterson. She specialized in the geothermal vents, where they’d found bacteria and a few small complex organisms, nothing like the trees. But her husband worked with the trees, and I steered our conversations toward them whenever I could. Did you know you can spell roots in caves from conversations?
“They’re unlike any organism on Earth,” Mrs. Peterson said, as if that should have been somehow surprising. Earthborn always say silly things like that. “They’re composed of chitin, like fungi—”
“So it’s a humongous fungus?”
She laughed. “Well, they are quite large, and bioluminescent like some fungi, but they’re not really fungi. They’re also made of lignin, the substance that gives trees and other plants rigidity. And they’re quite good at taking up minerals through their roots, but they’re obviously not photosynthesizing. We don’t yet have a classification for them.”
“What about the white spheres?”
“Yes, those are rather interesting. They contain high levels of cyanide, enough to be lethal to humans—”
Good thing I spat out that bite.
“—but also sugars, which suggests a missing species. At some point there was probably a creature that lived symbiotically with the trees, getting fruit sugars in exchange for dispersing the spores. With that species gone, as far as we can tell, the trees cannot leave their chamber, as they seem to now reproduce only from their own roots, or more technically, rhizomes.”
“Couldn’t we move some to new chambers?”
She smiled at me like I was a child. I still was, of course, but I hated how adults did that in response to perfectly reasonable questions.
“Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. We don’t yet know enough about them.”
“Have they at least named them?”
Mrs. Peterson had taught me a bit about binomial nomenclature, so I knew the first name was the genus, and the second, the specific epithet, was sometimes based off the name of whoever discovered the species.
“Arborinversus watsonii.”
Bodi Watson’s inverted trees.
* * *
When we started chemistry lessons, one of the first equations Mrs. Peterson taught me was for photosynthesis.
6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2
I loved the way the letters jumped around from carbon dioxide and water to form sugar and oxygen, completely new compounds, just like the letters jumped around in my head to form new words. I was good at chemistry, and there was something elegant about how everything balanced.
I loved the equations, until I learned this one:
H2SO4 + 4H2 → H2S + 4H2O
I already knew H2SO4 was sulfuric acid. Everyone in the colony did—it was in all the water from the vents. We even borrowed an old Earth saying to warn kids from drinking untreated water:
Little Timmy took a drink,
but he will drink no more.
For what he thought was H2O,
was H2SO4.
What I didn’t know, what no one had known until the biologists discovered it that week, Mrs. Peterson then explained: “We now know a bit about the pathways the trees use for energy. In one step they extract hydrogen from mineral hydrates. Then they oxidize that hydrogen and reduce sulfuric acid to form water and—”
Hydrogen sulfide. The deadly gas threatening the viability of our colony. It wasn’t coming from the vents.
It was coming from the trees.
* * *
The airlock in the tunnel was little use: hydrogen sulfide still seeped through the rock, and the adults had a big argument about it. Most of the scientists insisted on living with the risk in order to preserve what they said was one of the greatest finds in history. And discovered by such a young boy!
But not everyone valued the trees: most miners, driven not by curiosity but by selling ordinary Martian metals to Terrans who deemed them precious, insisted on eliminating the risk. Even some of the scientists, largely those working on long-term terraforming, said it made no sense to keep around something that made Mars less habitable.
In the end it was the miners, the ones who kept the colony financially viable, who had the final word. Led by parents who’d lost children, a group of them used explosives to eliminate the hazard.
When they caved in that cavern, they crushed more than my trees.
But the colony breathed easier after that—hydrogen sulfide levels dropped forty percent. Everyone was happy at the reduction; I was happy that sixty percent still remained. If there was still hydrogen sulfide, there could still be trees in some hidden cavern, and that knowledge drove me back through every dark corner of the karst, tapping the rocks on every meter of every wall.
A year passed, nothing turned up, and I stopped searching except after quakes. Then I’d poke around with the faint hope that another cavern had opened.
Life went on, as it does. Arborinversus had found a way to live in our harsh, upside-down world, and so did I. With the trees gone, I specialized in biomaterials and threw myself into the work. We brought some transgenic bacteria up from Earth that could produce synthetic spider silk, and by the time I was thirty-five, I’d mastered the process. I could produce any kind of silk I wanted, from the soft and flowing sheets everyone used for clothing, to fibers strong and rigid enough for construction.
I built clear spiral staircases up to floors that hung from the ceiling on silk ropes, and homes that dangled from above like chrysalises. Everyone wanted to move up to where the air was cleanest, and they kept me busy. I built my own home on the wall of a little side cavern, far from everyone else.
I felt proud whenever I looked at the community I’d made possible, dangling from the ceiling just as my trees had, but that pride was always tinged with sadness. We’d never needed to destroy the trees. We just needed to learn from them, to adapt to our environment as they had.
The other colonists called me the Spinster, the crazy unmarried woman who lived off on her own, weaving her webs, but they needed my work. My favorite projects were for the children—spiderwebs stretched from the floors all the way to the ceiling, where they arched over the corners for the bravest climbers to test their skill and courage. Of course, the parents insisted that I make their kids silk harnesses and ropes. With hydrogen sulfide less of a threat, they needed something to worry about.
They called me a workaholic, and they weren’t wrong, but I liked my job. The bacteria were like my own flock of tiny sheep that gave me silk instead of wool. But it wasn’t lost on me that they were just goo in tubes. Not quite as charismatic as glowing upside-down trees. I never stopped thinking about my trees ….
* * *
And still life went on, until I developed bone cancer at forty-five. Living underground protected us from the surface’s intense solar radiation, but there were other dangers, mostly from the rocks and vents—thorium and other elements that like to jumble the letters of DNA and make new words. The cancer spread from my pelvis to my femur, then to my shoulder, and finally, to my lungs. The tumor in my hip compressed a nerve so that any time I moved, fire shot down my leg. When the one in my shoulder did the same thing down my arm and back, and the pain meds did nothing, I lost my drive to work. I forced myself to keep at it, but all I really wanted was to sleep, to escape the pain.
Around others, I hid it as best I could. Only my doctor knew I was dying. I didn’t talk to people much, and when I did, it was always about what they wanted me to make.
