Dancing in Dreamtime (36 page)

Their fatigue was obvious to Kyle Benton, leader of the five-person team. But he was a stickler for schedules, and so he would keep them looking until songtide. They could rest for the hour or so while the trees howled and screeched, then the search would resume. In every direction the songtrees rose on scaffolds of roots, like muscular arms propped on splayed fingers. Benton could not shake the feeling that, behind his back, the trees kept shifting, their knobby roots astir in the muck. Everything was a purple tint, shading from violet through lavender and mauve to near-black. Returning to camp this evening would be a relief, if only to see the bright orange dome, its geometrical curves defying this vegetable disorder.

When the trees began the creaking and groaning that preceded songtide, Benton called a halt. Though the team had encountered nothing on Memphis-12 that could upset the boat—no wind, no current in the inky water, no beasts—he ordered that the craft be moored. It paid to follow routines; they kept a man steady in face of the unexpected. That was why he set one dial of his watch to Pacific Time, no matter where Project VIVA sent him on rescue missions. Obeying routine had kept him and his crews alive and
sane through two decades of hunting for scientists who had run amok or gotten lost or died in dozens of ways on dozens of worlds.

“Okay,” Benton called, “we knock off for an hour.”

“May we swim, Captain?”

The question was from Megan Kerry, a cyber engineer fresh out of Chicago, with the reckless energy and curiosity of a first-timer. Her genius with electronics had persuaded Benton to take her on, in spite of that dangerous enthusiasm and her Irish good looks. She had pestered him about swimming since the first day.

“Why are you so eager to get into that filthy soup?” he asked.

“I want to hear how the music sounds in the water.”

“Music?” he scoffed. But she was so unjaded, so eager, that he relented. “All right. Go ahead and swim. But take detox.”

Kerry tucked a loop of sandy hair behind her ear. “We have to wear helmets?”

He wished the woman would either chop off her luxuriant hair or tie it back in a knot. “Yes, you have to wear helmets. I don't want any skin exposed to that swill.”

She obediently swallowed the medicine and sealed her bubble helmet to the neck-ring on her yellow shimmersuit. Then she plunged over the side, her sleek body sinking into the lavender broth. A moment later she surfaced, glistening like a seal. The pleasure on her face unsettled Benton. He was reassured to see that Seth Cummings, the doctor, was also taking detox and donning a helmet. Ingrained caution had enabled Cummings to survive thirty missions. If he would entrust himself to those scummy waters with only a pill and a suit for protection, Benton could stop worrying.

Mary Zee, the communications tech, also went swimming, which left Benton alone in the boat with Reynaldo Valdez, the pilot, a droopy man in his forties who never exerted one joule of effort more than was absolutely necessary. Without a word, Valdez leaned back and closed his puffy, red-rimmed eyes.

Benton endured the bellowing and caterwauling of the trees with gritted teeth. Whoever had named them songtrees must have possessed a tin ear. For that matter, the burly growths with their vaulted roots and purple canopy were not really trees at all, any more than the spiky fans bristling from every hummock were ferns or the rafts of scum were algae. How many of these organisms had the biologists named before breaking off contact with VIVA Control? Labeling things seemed to be mostly what researchers did on these E-type planets. Benton never stayed long enough on any world to learn the exotic names, so he called things by whatever terrestrial analog they brought to mind.

The scrawking of the trees grew louder, like a crescendo of voices in a madhouse. He glanced at his watch. Another half hour or so, and then the breathless calm.

A splashing caught his eye and he jerked. It was Kerry, back-stroking from one songtree to another, her knees and arms churning with each stroke. Inside the helmet her mouth was open wide, as though panting or singing. Had he ever felt so exuberant, even as a child?

Eventually the high-pitched squeals gave way to mutterings, and then to silence. The craft wallowed as three dripping figures climbed aboard, the young woman last. She pulled the helmet away and gave her head a vigorous shake, the long hair whipping
out in russet curls. “You should try it, Captain,” she said. “The singing makes you tingle all over.”

“I'll leave the tingling to you,” said Benton.

She turned away abruptly and moved to her seat.

“Cast off the lines,” he commanded, “and let's get moving.”

In the stern, Valdez yawned, and reached for the throttle. They swept another circle through the bog, Kerry and Zee sharing the middle seats, Benton and Cummings the bow, on the lookout for movement in the mazy stillness, for a break in the monotonous purple.

“Their bodies couldn't just vanish,” Benton muttered to the doctor. “The suits would have kept them afloat.”

“If they're dead,” said Cummings, always the hopeful one. At fifty he was the oldest of the crew, with a squat body and a face as round and blank as a plate. He never ceased to expect good news, no matter how many times he stumbled upon disaster.

Benton ducked as they passed beneath the arching roots of a songtree. “Two months without logging in to Control? Their boat tied up at the dome and their camp a pigsty? Of course they're dead.”

From behind, Kerry said, “I understand why VIVA wants the data and gear, but why are they so intent on collecting the bodies?”

“Because nobody wants to rot alone and forgotten on some stinking planet,” said Benton.

“When I die, Captain,” said Zee, a thickset woman with the abrasive rapid-fire voice of an auctioneer, “just chop me up and dump me in the fish tank.”

“I'll do that, Zee.”

“It's getting too dark to see,” Valdez called.

“It's light enough,” said Benton. “We'll finish this circuit and then head back to camp.”

Again he checked his watch—midday back in Oregon, which he still thought of as home, although he visited there only briefly between missions. On Memphis-12 it was late evening, but in the perennial gloom you could only tell it was nightfall because, here and there, phosphorescent stumps began to glow. To some eyes, he thought, the twilit swamp might almost appear beautiful.

Sleep had always seemed to Benton a bite of emptiness out of the day, and he got by on as little as possible. Long after the others had curled up in the antechambers that encircled the dome, he sat at the main console listening to the biologists' log.

“. . . synchronous variables for sound contour in lower registers . . . songtide enunciation period . . . mimicry blended with improvisation in the mocking-trees . . .”

Skeins of jargon. He punched the fast-forward, released it, heard a rattle of numbers, punched the control again, heard a buzz of polysyllables. He kept skimming the record, without finding any clue to the disappearance of the nine researchers. Toward the end, the log became fragmentary, days passing between entries; he detected a note of boredom, almost of lethargy, as if the ponderous rhythms of the swamp had invaded their blood. But the substance of the entries remained the same—numbers and jargon—so perhaps the boredom he heard was his own.

He shut off the log, rubbed his eyes, then peered through the console window. He imagined the vegetation out there seething,
roots groping through the mire. The darkness was broken only by those glowing stumps. On Earth their pale light would have been called foxfire, a kind of fungal decay. No telling what it should be called here, or what caused it.

Startled by a shape blurring the edge of his vision, he swung round. Kerry's wiry figure, clad in a sleepsuit the color of mint, swayed toward him on bare feet. Her eyes were closed, her lips moved, and her body undulated to whatever music was playing through her headphones.

Benton stood up, hesitated, then grabbed her shoulder and gently shook her.

Her eyes blinked open, dreamy, gray. She removed the headphones, setting her curls jouncing. “What?”

“You're walking in your sleep.”

She looked about in confusion, then crossed arms over her chest. “Oh, my.”

“You aren't on anything, are you?”

The confusion in her eyes gave way to indignation. “I'd never touch a chemmie during mission, sir.”

“You'd better not, or I'll warp you straight home.” Her lips crimped into a hard line. A twitch beneath his hand made him realize he was still clutching her shoulder. He lifted the hand casually, as if no longer feeling the need to steady her. “What were you listening to?”

“Recordings of the songtrees.” The contour of her lips softened. “They're lovely.”

“Lovely? They sound like bedlam to me.”

“But there are melodies, subtle ones. Sometimes you can almost make out words.” She combed fingers through her sandy
hair, clutching a handful and letting it fall over her shoulders. “If you'd go in the water when they're singing, you could hear.”

“I don't give a damn about moaning trees. I want those nine bodies.”

“If it's not rude to ask, sir, do you get any pleasure from exploring new planets?”

He considered a moment before replying, “I get pleasure from finding things.”

“Things?”

“Equipment, tools, people—whatever's lost.” He felt unaccountably defensive, here in this pocket of light, surrounded by the impenetrable swamp, confronted by a woman still warm from sleep. He added, “I hate for things to be lost.”

“A place for everything and everything in its place?”

He looked sharply at her. Was she mocking him? Her cheeks, he noticed, were lightly freckled, her lashes as pale as gauze, her rosy Irish face unlined. So young—twenty-three, was it? twenty-four?—too young to understand how easily things fall apart. “You'd prefer chaos?”

“No, sir. Of course not.”

“Because that's how everything trends, don't you see? Toward increasing disorder, maximum entropy. Everything we've made is fragile. If we relax, it will collapse.”

“Is that why you're out here? To push back chaos?”

He shrugged the question aside. “Back to bed, Kerry, and don't go wandering.”

Her hand rose in a gesture of apology, but he refused to acknowledge it. She backed away, placing her bare feet carefully as if she were approaching the brink of a cliff.

If the instruments had not assured Benton that each sweep of the boat covered new territory, he would have sworn they kept circling over the same path, for on all that soggy planet there were no shorelines or mountains, no lakes or rivers to mark boundaries, nothing but hectare after hectare of swamp. At dusk and dawn he called a halt during songtide, for he did not trust his crew to keep a watchful eye during that nerve-grating din.

Valdez took advantage of these respites to catch up on his sleep, as if he were compensating for a lifetime of wakefulness. Zee and Cummings sometimes played chess, sometimes sat reading on the upthrust knees of songtree roots, sometimes floated lazily in the water. Kerry always swam. Too often, Benton found himself watching her. He would be seated in the bow, mapping search patterns or writing in his log, when the sleek figure would hook his attention and drag his gaze along.

Catching him at this once, Valdez commented drowsily, “Bit of a distraction, isn't she, Captain?”

“I'm worried about her, is all,” Benton said. “I keep wondering if there's something in the muck that detox won't handle. I can't afford having anyone get sick.”

“No, indeed, sir,” Valdez replied with a skeptical smacking of his lips. “Still and all, she livens things up.”

On the sixth day the scanner guided them to a concentration of metal, which proved to be the nine survival belts, concealed in a hollow stump. Some of the tools were missing, but each belt still carried its locator. Instead of beaming out signals, however, the transmitters were silent.