The Radio Magician and Other Stories (17 page)

“Why would a plant want a nervous system?” I said. We’d turned the lights out an hour earlier. My arm was draped over Lashawnda’s shoulder, and her bare back pressed warmly against my chest. I didn’t want to let her go. Even though my side ached to change position, I wanted to savor every second. I wondered if she sensed my grief.

“No reason that I can think of,” she said. Her fingers were wrapped around my wrist, and her heart beat steadily against my own. “But it must have something to do with its survival. There’s an evolutionary advantage.”

For a long time, I didn’t speak. She was so solid and real and
living
. How could her life be threatened? How could it be that she could be here today and not forever? She breathed deeply. I thought she might have gone to sleep, but she suddenly twisted from my embrace, cursing under her breath.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

She sat up. In the dark I couldn’t see, but I could feel her beside me. Her muscles tensed.

“A little discomfort,” she said.

“What did the medic prescribe?”

“Nothing that’s doing any good.”

She coughed heavily for a few seconds, and I could tell she was stretching, like she was trying to rid herself of a cramp. “I’m going down to the lab. I’m not sleeping well anyway.” She rested her hand against my face for an instant before climbing out of bed.

After an hour of tossing and turning, I got up and did what I’d never done before: accessed Lashawnda’s medical reports. After reading for a bit I could see she’d been optimistic. There were a lot less than a couple trips around the sun left in her, and her prescription list was a pharmacopoeia of pain killers.

She hadn’t returned by morning.

“It’s standard operating procedure,” said the environmental engineer. She held her report forms to her chest defensively. “If the atmosphere isn’t toxic, we’re supposed to vent it in to cool the equipment. We’ve been circulating outside air since the first day. There
are
bioscreens.”

First Chair looked at her dubiously. The four of us were crowded into the systems control room. Lashawnda broke the seals of her contamination suit. She’d rushed from decontamination without taking it off. “I should have thought of it,” Lashawnda said. The helmet muffled her voice. “The fungi are opportunistic, and they’re adept at finding hard to get water. You reverse airflow periodically, don’t you?”

The environmental engineer nodded. “Sure, it blows dust out of the screens.”

“The spores are activated by the moisture you vented, and . . .”

“
I
didn’t vent
anything
,” snapped the engineer. “It is standard operating procedure.”

“Right,” said Lashawnda, pulling the helmet off her head. She brushed her hair back with a quick gesture. “The fungus grew through the screen, spored, and that’s what’s in the machinery.”

“The
entire
water recycling system? The backup system too?” asked First Chair, a tinge of desperation in his voice.

“Absolutely. There are holes in the valves. All the joints are pitted. The holding tanks would have more fungus in it than water, if there was any water left. Pretty happy fungus at that, I’d guess.” She pulled the top half of the suit over her head, then stepped out of the pants. “Here’s the unusual part: The water that was in the tank isn’t in the room anymore. There are skinny stems leading to the vent that go down the ship’s side and into the ground. The fungus pumped the water out. These plants are geniuses at moving water, which they have to be to survive.”

First Chair asked, “Why weren’t the external tanks already ruined when we got here? They were exposed to this environment much longer than our recycling equipment.”

“They landed in the winter. That’s the same reason the initial probes didn’t find the spores,” said Lashawnda. “It’s spring now. The plants must only be active when its warmer. Bad timing on our part.”

I looked through the service window into the machinery bay. Even through the thick glass the fungus was evident, a thick fur around the pipes. “You’re sure the growth started inside the ship and went out, not the other way around?”

Lashawnda smiled. “Absolutely.”

“So what?” said First Chair. I could see the wheels spinning in his head: how much water did we have stored elsewhere? How well were the dew-catchers working? Then he was dividing that amount of water by the minimum amount each crew member needed until the resupply ship arrived. By his expression, he didn’t like the math.

Lashawnda said, “That means the plants cooperate. They share the wealth. It’s counter-Darwinian. I compared the fly-by photos of this area from the first day until now. Since we’ve landed, plant growth has thickened and extended, which makes sense. When we lost the external tanks we introduced more free water into the system than it’s seen in a years, but the forests in the neighboring gulches also are thicker. We thought they were separate ecosystems. They aren’t. Water we lost here is ending up as much as five kilometers away. The plants move moisture to where it’s needed.”

“Will knowing that help us now?” asked First Chair. “I don’t care if the plants are setting up volleyball leagues, we’ve got to figure a way to find enough water to last us five months.” He glared at the environmental engineer on his way out. She turned to me.

“I know,” I said. “Standard operating procedure.”

“Let’s go outside,” said Lashawnda. “We’ve got the afternoon left.”

“Could we harvest the trees and press water out of them?” I asked.

Lashawnda attached another sensor to a tree stem, moved a few feet along, then fastened the next one. She straightened slowly, her eyes closed against the discomfort. I wondered how she really felt. She never talked about it.

“You did the reports. How many plants would we have to squeeze dry to get a single cup?”

I didn’t answer. She was right. Although the plants tied up most of the planet’s water, it was spread thinly. I dug into a bare patch of dirt between two stands of trees. Only a dozen centimeters below the surface, a matted network of plant tendrils resisted my efforts to go deeper. I picked one about a finger in width and fastened a sensor to it.

We were deep into the tree-filled gulch. With no sun on us, I had to keep moving to stay warm, and my faceplate defogger wasn’t working well.

I looked into a bundle of tree stalks. An old gopher-rat lump hung between the branches. Now that I knew where to look, I found them often. “Have you gone this deep into the gulch before?”

Lashawnda consulted her wrist display. “No, but by the map we are nearly at the end. We’ll save time if we go back along the ridge.”

Fifteen minutes later Lashawnda pushed through a particularly heavy patch of trees, and she disappeared.

“Oh!”

“What?”

Pulling my way through the vegetation, I found what stopped her. The gully pinched to a close twenty meters farther, and there were no more trees, but the same kind of sticky leaves that captured the gopher-rats covered the ground in a bed of orange and yellow, like broad-surfaced clover. The setting sun poured a crimson light over the scene, and for the first time since I’d landed on Papaver, I thought something was beautiful. As I watched, the leaves turned their faces toward us and seemed to lean the least bit, as if they yearned for us to lay down.

Lashawnda said, “Let’s not walk through that. We’d crush too many of them.” She fastened the last of the sensors to the delicate leaves at the end of the little clearing. Her movements were spare, exact. The final sensor fastened, she paused on her knees, facing the bed of plants. She reached out, hand flat, and brushed the leaves gently. They strained to meet her, leaves wrapping around her fingers; a longer stemmed leaf encircled her wrist. Within a few seconds, her hand, wrist and arm to her elbow were encased.

I stepped toward her. The expanse of leaves had changed color! Then I realized the color was the same, but the plants had shifted even further to face her. Sunlight hit them differently. All lines pointed toward Lashawnda. My voice felt choked and tight. “What are you doing?”

“If I move, I must contain water. They’re just trying to get it. They work together; isn’t that superb? If they got my water, they’d send it to where it was needed.” Gradually she pulled her arm free. The leaves slipped their hold without resistance.

Careful not to step on the plants, we made our way to the edge of the gully and clambered out. The startlingly pink sun brushed the horizon, and yellow and gold glowing streamers layered themselves a third of the way up the sky.

“That’s amazing.” I held Lashawnda’s hand through the clumsy gloves, the same hand the leaves had covered.

“You haven’t seen one before?” She squeezed my hand back. “Every sunset is like this. It’s the dust in the atmosphere.”

The streamers twisted under the influence of upper air disturbances that didn’t touch us.

“I saw your medical reports,” I said.

She sighed. The sky darkened as more and more of the sun vanished until only a pink diamond winked between two distant hills, and the final golden layer dulled into a yellow haze. “You’re the last one. Are you going to wish me well too? You’d think everyone turned into death and dying counselors. If I hear, ‘You’ve had a good four-hundred years’ again, I’ll scream.”

“No, I wasn’t going to say that.” But I don’t know what I was going to say. I couldn’t tell her that I wanted to do some screaming of my own.

By the time we returned to the ship, it had grown incredibly cold, and the decontamination chamber wasn’t any warmer. I longed for a hot spiced tea, but First Chair was waiting for us on the other side.

“I need you to drop your other projects and concentrate on the water problem.” His eyes had that haunted I-wish-I-didn’t-have-a-leadership-position look to them. “The geology team is looking for aquifers; the engineers are making more dew traps, and the chemists are working on what can be extracted from the rock, but none of them are hopeful we can find or make enough water fast enough. Is there anything you’ve learned about the plants that might help?”

Lashawnda said, “They’ve spent millions of years learning how to conserve water. I don’t think they’ll give it up easily. Spencer and I are working on an experiment right now that ought to tell us more.”

“Good. Let me know if you get results.” He rushed from the room, and a few seconds later I heard him say to someone in another room, “Have you made any progress?”

“We’ll need to sedate him if we want to work uninterrupted,” she said.

“What
is
the experiment we’re doing?”

“Electroencephalograph.”

“An EEG on a plant?” I laughed.

She shrugged. “You wondered why a plant would need a nervous system. Let’s find out if it’s using it.”

In her lab, Lashawnda bent over her equipment. “What do you make of that?” She pointed to the readouts on the screen. “Especially when I display it like this.” She tapped a couple keys.

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.