The monitor showed a series of moving graphs, like separate seismographs. “It could be anything. Sound waves maybe. Are those from the sensors we placed?”
“Yep. Now, watch this.” She reached across her table and pressed a switch. Within a couple seconds, all the graphs showed activity so violent that the screen almost turned white. Gradually the graphs settled into the same patterns I’d seen at first.
I leaned closer and saw the readouts were numbered. The ones near the top of the screen corresponded to the sensors we’d placed at the far end of the gully. The bottom ones were nearest to the ship. “What did you do?”
“I shut the exterior vents into the equipment room. The change in the graphs happened when the hatches cut through the fungus stems connecting the growth in the ship to the ground.”
“The plants felt that? They’re thinking about it?”
“Not plants. A single organism. Maybe a planet-wide organism. I’ll have to place more sensors. And yes, it’s thinking.”
The lines on the monitor continued vibrating. It looked like brain activity. “That’s ridiculous. Why would a plant need a brain? There’s no precedent.”
“Maybe they didn’t start out as plants. As the weather grew colder and it became harder and harder for animals to live high on the food chain, they became what we see now, a thinking, cooperative intelligence.”
Lashawnda put her hands into the small of her back and pushed hard, her eyes closed. “A sentience wouldn’t operate the same way non-thinking plants would. We just need to discover the difference.” She opened a floor cabinet and took out a clear sample bag stuffed with waxy orange shapes.
I barely recognized it before she opened the bag, broke off a Papaver leaf, and pressed it against her inner arm.
After a moment, she opened her eyes and smiled. “Marvin said, ‘It’s God at the end,’ so I thought I’d give it a try. He wasn’t too far off.” She enunciated the words carefully, as if her hearing were abruptly acute. “The toxins are an outstanding opiate. Much more effective on pain than the rest of the stuff I’ve been taking. I don’t think the gopher-rats suffer.”
No recrimination would have been appropriate. Although it was most likely the leaves wouldn’t affect her at all, the first time she did it she might have just as easily killed herself. “How long?” I took the bag from her hand. It wasn’t dated. She’d smuggled it in.
“A couple of days.”
“Is it addictive?”
She giggled, and I looked at her sharply. She seemed lucid and happy, not drugged.
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried quitting.” She held her hand out. I gave her the bag. She said, “I wonder what an entity as big as a planet thinks about? How old would you guess it is?” The bag vanished into the cabinet. “Not very often I run into something older than me.”
“Did you tell the medic about that?” I nodded toward the cabinet.
She levered herself up so she could sit on the counter. “I’m taking notes she can see afterwards. No need to bother her with it now. Besides, we have bigger problems. If First Chair is right, in a month we’ll have died of thirst. How are we going to convince a plant to give us back the water it took?”
Sitting where she was, her heels against the cabinet doors, she looked like a young girl, but shadows under her eyes marked her face, and her skin appeared more drawn, as if she were thinning, becoming more fragile, and she was.
“How do you feel?” I asked. I had tried to maintain within myself her concentration, her ability to ignore the obvious fact, but I couldn’t do it. I worried about the crew and the water they needed. But for me? I didn’t care. Death would find Lashawnda before it took me.
She slid off the counter and tapped in a code into her work station. The recording of our landing came up again. Clouds of steam surged from the ground. She said, without meeting my eyes, “Look, Spencer. I can’t avoid it. It’s not going away. So all I can do is work and think and act like it’s not there at all. You’re behaving as if I should be paralyzed in fear or something, but I’m not going to do that. There’s still a quest or two for me in the last days, some effort of note.”
I had no answer for that. We went to bed hours later, and when she held me, her arms trembled.
A nightmare woke me. In the dream I wandered through the twisted forest, but I wasn’t scared. I was happy. I belonged. The crooked stems gave way before my ungloved hands. My chest was bare. No contamination suit or helmet or shirt. The air smelled sharp and frigid, like winter on a lake’s edge where the wind sweeps across the ice, but I wasn’t cold. I came upon a thick stand of trees, their narrow trunks forming a wall in front of me. I pushed and tugged at the unmoving branches. I’d never seen a clump of Papaver trees so large. Nothing seemed more important than penetrating that branched fortress. Finally I found a narrow gap where I could squeeze through. At first I wandered in the dark. Gradually shapes became visible: the towering stems forming a shadowy roof overhead, other branches reaching from side to side, and the room felt close.
“Spencer?” said Lashawnda.
“Yes?” I said, turning slowly in the vegetable room. Waxy-leafed plants humped from the ground, but I couldn’t see her.
“I’m here, Spencer,” she said, and one of the humps sat up.
I squinted. “It’s too dark.”
A dim light sparked to life, a pink diamond, like the last glimpse of the sunset we’d seen the day before, growing until the room became bright, revealing a skeleton-thin Lashawnda.
“I’m glad you came,” she said.
I stepped closer, all the details clear in the ruddy light. Her eyes sparkled above sharp cheekbones. She smiled at me, the skin pulled tight across her face, her shoulders boney and narrow, barely human anymore. She wore no clothes, but she didn’t need them. The plants hid her legs, and leaves covered her stomach and breasts. Like the gopher-rat, she’d been absorbed.
“The plant is old, old, old,” she said. “We think deep thoughts, all the way to Papaver’s core.”
I put my arm around her, the bone’s hardness pressing against my hand.
In the dream, I was happy. In the dream, the plants sucking every drop of water from her was right.
“And, Spencer, this way I live forever.”
I woke stifling a scream.
She wasn’t in bed.
In the decontamination unit, her suit was gone.
I don’t remember how I got my suit on or how I got outside. Running, I passed the empty water tanks, avoided the lichen-filled depressions, and plunged into the forest. The sun had barely cleared the horizon, pouring pink light through the skinny trees. I tripped. Knocked my face hard against the inside of my helmet. Staggering, I pushed on. The dream image hovered before me. Had the pain become too much for Lashawnda, and the promise of an opiate loaded bed of leaves, eager to embrace her become too tempting? I imagined her nervous system, like a gopher-rat’s, joining the plant consciousness. But who knew what the gopher-rats experienced, if they experienced anything at all? Maybe their lives were filled with nightmares of cold and immobility.
Trees slapped at my arms. Leaves slashed across my faceplate.
When I burst through the last line of trees at the clearing’s edge, she was crouched, her back to me shoulders and head down in the plants. I pictured her faceplate open, her eyes gone already, home for stabbing tendrils seeking the moist tissue behind.
“Don’t do it!” I yelled.
Startled, she fell back, holding a sensor; her faceplate was closed. For a second she looked frightened. Then she laughed. I gasped for breath while my air supply whined in my ear.