Josh thought at once of his own teeth. In the general excitement of leaving Burnt Willow Farm, dental treatment had been forgotten.
“So.” Brewster stirred in his seat. They had been listening to him in total fascination, and now he looked them over, one by one, as though assessing any medical problems they might each have. “What is it? Something in the water, something in the soil, something in the air, something in the radiation from Grisel? We don’t know.
“But I’ll tell you this: If you do exactly what I tell you to do while you’re on Solferino, you won’t come to any harm. And maybe there’s more than that. After a few months here, maybe you’ll be fixed up to live forever.”
Chapter Seven
Morning on Solferino. It was like the first day at Burnt Willow Farm, when Josh had been so tired and had slept so heavily that when he woke he didn’t know where he was. This was even more confusing. He had that early-morning feeling, but the light through the little porthole-like window carried the ruddy glow of late Earth evening.
Josh climbed out of his narrow bunk. Before they went to bed, thin walls had extruded from the floor to divide the single big room of the dormitory into half a dozen separate cubicles. Those dividers must have been soundproof because he could hear nothing, not even the sound of the Laskers’ breathing in neighboring cubicles.
He slipped on his shoes, went to the window, and stared out. He was facing the rising sun—was that direction still called “east” on Solferino? Grisel, peeping over the horizon, showed as a thin crescent of a gigantic red disk. He watched the bloated sun creep higher, thinking of what Brewster had told them. Maybe he ought to be outside, breathing the planet’s health-improving air deep into his lungs.
Was it safe to do that yet, without a breathing mask? Gage had said it might need a few more days.
As Josh had that thought, he saw a movement on his left. Someone—was it a girl?—had appeared briefly before heading beyond his field of view.
If that was Dawn, and she had gone outside without her mask—
Josh hurried from the cubicle and ran to the building’s main door. He reached in for a mask from the dispenser, but the machine apparently knew more than he did. It wouldn’t release one.
“A mask is unnecessary,” said an impersonal voice. “Your biological parameters are within the acceptable range. Do you need a mask for some other individual?”
Josh didn’t bother to answer. He continued out through the door. The machine was smart enough to figure out that no answer was equivalent to a negative.
Everything, buildings and fence and cargo aircar, had a drenched, soggy look to it. The stalks of the low-growing plants were bent over and heavy with moisture. Either it had rained in the night, or dew here was heavier than anything Josh had encountered at Burnt Willow Farm. The air was breathless, without the slightest hint of a breeze.
He began to hurry to the left, where he had caught that fleeting glimpse of a girl’s figure. Before he had taken half a dozen steps, a sweet and familiar aroma filled his nostrils.
He stopped, rigid with astonishment. Triple-snap. He had last encountered that on the grubby back streets of an Earth city. Of all the smells that he might have expected on Solferino, it seemed the least probable. He saw Sapphire Karpov, leaning against the wall of the building. She was staring blank-eyed at the rising sun, the little twisted cylinder dangling loosely from between her lips. What was going into her lungs was anything but health-giving.
Josh made a rough, throat-clearing sound to announce his presence.
She turned slowly, the cylinder drooping from the corner of her mouth. Her scowling glance told Josh that whatever truce might have been in operation the previous evening was now over. Close up, he could see a faint scar that he had never noticed before, running from the left side of her mouth across her cheek and toward her ear.
“Yeah?” Sapphire peered at him through slitted eyes.
“Where did you get that snap?”
“None of your damned business.” She took a long, luxurious draw, inhaling to the bottom of her lungs. “But as a matter of fact, I brought it with me. It wasn’t easy. I’ve got to be careful with these, ’cause I’m down to my last dozen.”
“What happens afterward?”
“I don’t want to think about that.” Sapphire removed the tube from her mouth and stared at it. “Maybe the last hit will kill me. That’s what you hear all the time, snap is a killer and triple-snap is worse. Maybe I’ll kill myself. Withdrawal symptoms are supposed to be a bitch. Maybe I’ll kill you, just for the hell of it. And that big hairy creep Brewster, too. Him and his asking all our names. He was rattling our cage on purpose last night. I’d like to kill him—just like I ought to kill my goddamn father.” She took another deep draw and shuddered from head to toe as it hit. “Oh, hell. I don’t know and I don’t care. Bug off, Joshua Kerrigan. I’ve not got a thing to say to you. Or maybe I do—just one. Keep your dirty paws off Topaz. If you don’t, you’ll find out if Solferino will cure crushed nuts.”
“Topaz?” The switch in subject bewildered Josh. “I’ve not said one single word to her.”
“You think I didn’t see you two sniffing round each other last night? You think I didn’t notice her bringing you food? If you believe I’m gonna let you mess with my little sister, you’d better think again.”
“She didn’t talk to me.”
“I saw her doing it.”
“What I mean is, it wasn’t me she wanted to talk to. She was interested in Dawn, not in me. Oh, jeeks.” Josh remembered the original reason he had come outside. “Have you seen Dawn—this morning?”
“Sure.” Sapphire again sagged back on the wall, her eyes closed. “She went out the gate.”
“The door of the building?”
“Nah. Not the door, you dummy. The gate. The gate in the fence.”
Josh hadn’t even noticed a gate. But there it was, slightly ajar. When he went toward it, he saw the sign, keep closed. But that wouldn’t have meant a thing to Dawn.
Or would it? He remembered Topaz’s unanswered question, “Can you read, Dawn?”
He opened the gate and went through, nervous about what might be on the other side. He found himself in a dark world of red gloom and purple shadows. It was as though the two-inch stems of the clearing, released from human constraints, grew here to giant size. They were as thick as his wrist and reached up above his head to form a canopy about eight feet high. The top layer was translucent, ribbed and continuous, like open paper-thin umbrellas. The plants competed for light, filling in every square inch of space except in places where a rounded balloon shape somehow cleared everything within three feet of it. There, shafts of sunlight speared down to illuminate an ankle-deep ground cover of succulent sickly-yellow stalks. They reminded Josh of fat, slow-writhing worms. He flinched as he stepped on a bunch, but they proved to be crisp and brittle. When he moved to peer at the exposed side of one of the balloons, fat stalks snapped beneath his feet. He felt a spurt of juice wet the calf of his leg and smelled a pungent, peppery odor.
If touching wild plants on Solferino was dangerous, then he was in trouble. Josh stared upward, and found that the balloon was not as smooth and featureless as it seemed from a distance. Its upper part had vertical corrugations on the surface. He could see tubes, like veins, ascending. Waves of contraction swept rhythmically up them, one after another at regular intervals, as though the tubes were throats and the plant was swallowing upward.