“What are you doing, Spencer?” A bag filled with the sensors we’d put on the plants sat on the ground beside her. She’d been retrieving them.
“You weren’t… I mean, you’re not… hurting yourself… you’re okay?” I finally blurted.
She held me until I quit shaking and my respiration settled into a parody of regularity.
The sun had risen another handful of degrees. We stayed still so long that the plants turned away to face the light. She hugged me hard, then said, “I know how to find water.”
I hugged her back.
“Can you carry the bag?” she said as she pushed herself to her feet. “It’s getting darned heavy.”
The crew stood around the one meter deep depression beside an empty water tank. Like every sheltered spot, lichens covered the rock. Lashawnda supervised the engineers as they arranged the structure she’d sketched out for them, which was two long bars crossing the hole, holding an electric torch suspended above the pit’s bottom.
First Chair stood with his arms crossed. “What do you mean, we should have figured out how to get water from the first day?”
Lashawnda sat in a chair someone had brought for her. “The plants here are cooperative. They’re not just out for themselves like we’re used to seeing. I watched the records of our landing. The ground steamed, but, as Spencer will tell you,” she nodded to me, “you couldn’t get an ounce of water out of a ton of the lichen no matter how hard you tried.”
First Chair looked puzzled.
Lashawnda pressed a button, and the electric torch began to glow. I could feel the heat on my face from ten meters away. Lashawnda said, “The plants were protecting each other, or, more accurately, protecting itself. They’re geniuses at moving moisture.”
In the pit, some of the yellow lichens began to turn brown, and then to smoke. Suddenly the bottom of the pit glistened, rivulets opened from cracks in the rock. Water quickly filled the bathtub-sized depression.
The crew cheered.
“The plant is trying to protect itself,” Lashawnda said. “You better pump it out now,” “because as soon as the heat’s off, it will be gone.”
First Chair barked out orders, and soon pipes led from the hole into temporary tanks in the ship.
That night I held Lashawnda close, her backbone pressed against me; my lips brushed the back of her neck.
“Did you really think that I’d kill myself by throwing myself into the plants?”
She held my wrist, her fingers so delicate and light that I half feared they’d break.
“I didn’t want to lose even a single day with you,” I said.
Lashawnda didn’t speak for a long time, but I knew she hadn’t drifted into sleep. The room was so quiet I could hear her eyelashes flutter as she blinked. “I don’t want to lose a day with you either.” She pulled my arm around her tighter. “Four hundred years is a good, long time to live. I don’t suppose when I do go that you could arrange for me to be buried in that clearing at the gully’s end?”
I remembered how the plants had grasped her hand and arm, how attentive they were when she passed.
“Sure,” I said.
It occurred to me that I wanted to be buried there too, where the beings work together to save each other and share what they have to help the least of them.
“But we’re not there yet,” I said.
WHERE AND WHEN
The two scientists surveyed the cabin’s interior from their positions behind the crowd at the windows. Jake flicked the command that turned his recorders on, his eyes and ears sending the signal to the computer buried in his jawbone, while Martin stepped to a table and retrieved what turned out to be a menu. He held the pages like they were holy script.
“After all these years,” Jake exulted while turning slowly for the recorder’s sake. A silk wallpaper imprinted with a map of the world covered the wall beside him. Rich contrasting carpet. Recessed ceiling lights. The transition had been without effect. No sound or dizziness. No flash of light or sensation of falling. Just a blink. “What did we do differently?”
“The math never came out even, but it should have always worked. Maybe there are more opportune moments.” Martin carefully opened the thin document. “A thousand failed attempts. Wouldn’t Brownson be proud.”
Jake grimaced. “If he had survived.” For an instant, he thought he saw Brownson among the people at the window. Broad shoulders. One arm. Gray hair. But the light shifted, and Jake could see he was wrong. Two arms. Blonde hair. A stranger. The project had been Brownson’s from the beginning. All the theoretical work, most of the construction, only letting them help when he needed two hands. Spending long nights bouncing his ideas off them. Arguing with them about paradoxes. His faith buoyed them when they were ready to quit. His determination to succeed drove them on. His obsession. He should be here, Jake thought. This day belongs to him.
A soft thrumming filled the air, and both men compensated slightly as the floor moved beneath their feet.
Jake’s breathing came hard. It had been a thousand attempts. They’d poured over Brownson’s papers until their vision had blurred. Constructed and reconstructed the device dozens of times. Was it a math problem? Was there a flaw in the underlying theories? Were the old saws about paradox and the impossibilities true, the ones that worried Brownson incessantly? “We must be able to get around it,” he’d said. If only the old man had confided in them more before he’d died in the explosion, alone in the lab. “I’m going to try something,” he’d said. The investigators concluded later that a bomb destroyed the building. They found chemical traces and a melted timing mechanism. Rival government? Terrorists? Jake and Martin had labored from then on in paranoid secrecy.
“Where and when are we?” Jake said to himself. We’re here! he thought, wherever here is. And we’re now, whenever that is. He panned around the long room, across the backs of the people at the windows, and over metal-framed chairs pushed up to the tables. He lingered his focus on a yellow piano in the room’s center. A wine glass and crystal carafe poised above the keyboard tossed bright glisters from the ceiling lights. The room smelled of cologne and perfume and roast beef. His fingers glided coolly on the silk wall. Jake smiled. What style were the clothes the people wore? 1920s? 1930s? If he queried the computer, it might tell him, but it was more fun to guess. None turned to look at them.
At the window, a middle-aged woman with a cane hooked over her arm said, “Finally. The family has been waiting for hours.” Reading glasses hung from a silver cord around her neck.
Ahh, English, thought Jake. He spoke French, German, Italian, Spanish and a smattering of Mandarin. Martin knew Portugese, Swiss and Russian. If needed, their computer implanted in his jaw could translate, but that was an awkward way to talk. Jake hoped the recorder caught what the people said. Voices from the past. Real ones. The linguists would salivate over the subtleties of vowel shifts, the nuances and shading of pronunciations from hundreds of years in the past. Not radio recordings or movie voices, but real people talking among themselves. The social historians would write treatises on the ways of the era based on his recordings. Whole new areas of study would be opened up. They’d succeeded! They’d jumped the unjumpable chasm.
“The Germans build a marvelous ship, but they can’t control the rain and wind,” an older man with dark muttonchops and a gray smoking jacket replied. “Not yet, anyway.” From the way the woman with the cane and the muttonchopped man stood together, their arms almost touching, their chins at the same angle as they looked out the window, Jake guessed they were husband and wife.