“Perhaps you should reconsider. Further observation from orbit could yield—”
He hit the emergency override, which keyed to his genetic code. Mona fell silent, and Michael guided the Ship down to a clearing in the jungle.
Or what looked like a clearing.
A sensor indicated touchdown, but the ship’s feet sank into muck. Michael stared at his instrument displays. The ship rocked back, canted over, stopped.
Mona said: “You’re still over-riding me. I can’t lift off.”
“We just landed.”
“We’re sinking, not landing.”
“What’s going on,” Natalie said on a different channel.
“Nothing,” Michael said.
Mona cut across channels: “We’ve touched down in a bog! We—”
Michael switched off the audio for both Mona and Natalie. He released his safety restraints and popped the hatch, compelled, almost as if he were in the grip of a biological urge.
His helmet stifled him. He didn’t really need it, did he? Michael screwed it to the left and lifted it off. The air was humid, sickly fragrant. He clambered out of his seat, wiped the sweat off his forehead, then slipped over the side and into the sucking mire and began groping for shore. The more he struggled forward the deeper he sank. Fear and adrenaline momentarily flushed the fog from his mind.
“Mona, help!”
But his helmet was off and Mona could not reply.
Then, strangely, he stopped sinking. The mire buoyed him up and carried him forward toward the shore as several figures emerged from the jungle. His feet found purchase and he walked on solid ground, his flight suit heavy and streaming. The figures weren’t from the jungle; they were part of the jungle—trees that looked like women, or perhaps women who looked like trees. One stepped creakingly forward, a green mossy tangle swinging between its knobby tree trunk legs. It extended a limb with three twig fingers. Irregular plugs of amber resin gleamed like pale eyes in what passed for a face. Michael’s thoughts groped in the drugged fragrance of the jungle. He reached out and felt human flesh, smooth and cool and living, and a girl’s hand closed on his and drew him forth.
They opened his mind and shook it until the needed thing fell out. Mona was there but wrong. They shook harder and found Natalie:
New San Francisco, Mars, a scoured-sky day under the Great Equatorial Dome. Down time between Outbounds. The sidewalk table had a view towards Tharsis. Olympus Mons wore a diaphanous veil of cloud, but Michael looked away to watch Natalie approach in her little round glasses, the black lenses blanking her eyes.
“Of all the gin joints in all the worlds you had to pick mine,” he said; Michael was obsessed with ancient movies.
She removed her glasses and squinted at him.
“What?”
“Old movie reference. Two people with a past meet unexpectedly in a foreign city.”
“But we don’t have a past. And this was planned, though I guess you could call it unexpected.”
“I have a feeling we’re about to.”
“About to what?”
“Make a past out of this present.”
She sat down.
“You’re a strange man, and I don’t mean the gills. Also, this isn’t a foreign city. What are you drinking?”
“Red Rust Ale.”
“Philistine. Order me a chardonnay.”
He did, and the waiter brought it in a large stem glass.
“I bet this is the part you like best,” she said.
“Yes?”
“The flirting, the newness, the excitement. Especially because we aren’t supposed to fraternize.”
“There are good reasons for that non-fraternization rule,” he said, smiling.
She sipped her wine. He watched her, thinking: she’s right. And also thinking, less honestly: it doesn’t mean anything to her, not really. And hating himself a little, but still wanting her even though he knew in a while he wouldn’t be able to tolerate her closeness. That’s how it always worked with him. Automatic protective instinct; caring was just another word for grieving. But Natalie was a peer, not his usual adventure. An instinct he couldn’t identify informed him he was in a very dangerous place. He ignored it and had another beer while Natalie finished her glass of wine.
“Did you say you had a room around here someplace?” she said.
He put his bottle down. “I may have said that, yes.”
The narcotic jungle exhaled. Michael, sprawled on the moss-covered, softly decaying corpse of a fallen tree, drifted in and out of awareness. He saw things that weren’t there, or perhaps were there but other than what they appeared to be. Insects like animated beans trundled over his face, his neck, the backs of his hands. He was sweating inside his flight suit. Something spoke in wooden gutturals, incomprehensible. The sounds gradually resolved into understandable English.
“Kiss me?”
Michael blinked. He sat up. The steaming jungle was gone. He was sitting in an upholstered hotel chair and a woman was kneeling beside him. He recognized the room. The woman looked at him with large shiny amber eyes. The planes of her cheeks were too angular, too smooth.
Michael worked his mouth. His tongue felt dry and dead as a piece of cracked leather.
“I don’t know you,” he said.
Her mouth turned down stiffly and she rocked back and seemed to blend into the wall, which was patterned to resemble a dense green tangle of vine.
Michael closed his eyes.
Time passed like a muddy dream, and there were others.
They all called themselves Natalie. One liked to take walks with him in the rain, like that girl he had known in college. Michael, watching from his bedroom window, wasn’t surprised to see it out there with it’s umbrella. His breath fogged the faux leaded glass, and the tricky molecular structure of the pane, dialed wide to semi-permeable, seemed to breathe back into his face. Internal realities overlapped. This wasn’t New San Francisco or even old San Francisco on Earth. It was his lost home in upstate New York (as a child Michael used to play with the window, throwing snowballs from the front yard, delighting in how they strained through onto the sill inside his room. His mother had been something other than delighted, though).
Michael, staring at the thing waiting for him down there, pulled at his bottom lip. He clenched his right fist until it shook, resisting. But eventually he surrendered and turned away from the window. On the stairs reality lost focus. The walls became spongy and mottled, like the skin of a mushroom. The stairs were made of the same stuff. His boots sank into them and he stumbled downward and out into the light of the foyer. That was wrong, he thought, and looking back he saw an organic orifice, like a soft wound, and then it was simply a stairwell climbing upwards, with framed photographs of his family hung at staggered intervals. Dead people.
He opened the front door to the sound of rain rattling through maple leaves. College days, the street outside his dorm, and his first girl. Only this wasn’t a girl, the thing that called itself Natalie.
Michael stood a minute on the porch. The wrong porch. Inside had been the familiar rooms of his boyhood home (mushroom skin notwithstanding), long gone to fire and sorrow. This porch belonged to his dorm at the University of Washington. After a while he stepped down to the sidewalk and the Natalie-thing smiled.