The Crystal Variation Page 3

  He sat down, finally, for standing was taking its toll on him, and leaned against the rock where he could touch the tree, lightly. He was tired, for all that it was not yet noon, but he had shade—green shade—and could use a rest.

  If only his pick-up would come. He’d grab the tree up in a heartbeat, and take it away, for there was nothing to keep it here, or him. He’d take it someplace where water was certain. Someplace with good light and good food, and dancing girls. He was partial to dancers and to pilots—people who knew how to move, and when. They’d have a great time, him and the tree, and there’d be room for a dozen more trees—and why not?—dozens of dancers . . .

  He fell asleep then, or passed out, and dreamed a dream of storms and floods and trees lying across swollen rivers and falling in the depths of snow, and of landers coming down from the sky, unable to rise again—and behind it all both a sense of urgency and a sense of possibility. He dreamed of his dozen dancers, too, recalling names and lust.

  HE WOKE WITH the smell of food in his nostrils, and a clear sense that he’d made a decision. He opened his eyes and saw the leaves rattling in the breeze.

  He knew he’d die soon, but if he drank the last of his water and then—rather than going to shelter in a cave or a hole—arranged himself to die here, beside the tree, so he’d not be alone, it was likely that his fluids and remains would nourish the tree for some time, and that would be the best use of what duty he had left to him.

  And then maybe, just maybe, that seed pod would sprout, and the soldier born of it might have the chance to be found and taken away, to continue the fight.

  Food. The smell of fruit. He eaten the last partial rations—when? A day ago? A year? And the smell of the pod so close left him hungry,

  Guiltily, he got to his feet and moved a few steps away from the tree.

  No, he couldn’t. It would have been one thing if he’d found the pod beside the tree, with no chance of it growing, no rainy season to hope for at this latitude any longer, no winter. But now, at best, what could it do? Give him another hour? Or kill him outright?

  He was hoping that his eyes deceived him, for the leaves around the pod looked browner now than when he’d first spotted the tree. He didn’t want it to be failing so quickly. He didn’t want to see it go before he did.

  The tree moved slightly, and the leaves rattled a bit in the breeze. There was snap, sudden and pure.

  Aghast, Jela watched the leaves flutter away as the pod tumbled to the silty soil.

  The pod sat there for a dozen of his accelerated heartbeats. It seemed to shiver in the breeze, almost eagerly awaiting his touch, his mouth.

  Jela pondered the sight, wondering how long such a pod might be fresh, considering how useless—and how senseless of duty—it would be to let it lie there unused and uneaten.

  He moved carefully and bent to the pod, lifting it, cherishing it. Feeling the sections of rind eager and ready to peel away in his hand, he wondered if he had waited too long, and was even now hallucinating in the desert, about to eat a pebble found next to a dry, dead stick.

  He sniffed the pod and found an aroma promising vitamins and minerals and, somehow, cool juicy refreshment.

  He saluted the tree, and then, dragging from memory the various forms he’d learned, he bowed to it, long and low.

  “I honor you for the gift freely given, my friend. If I leave this place, you will go with me, I swear, and I will deliver you into the hands of those who will see you as kin, as I see you.”

  Then his fingers massaged the pod, and it split into several moist kernels.

  With the first taste, he knew he had done the right thing. With the second he recalled the joy of rushing water and spring snow, and the promise of dancers.

  And then, considering the promise of dancers yet again, weighing the fragility of the inner kernels, Jela pushed aside the restraint which suggested he try to save one kernel out, just in case . . . and he devoured the entirety.

  THE IN-BETWEEN PLACE—the plane of existence between sleep and consciousness—was a place Jela rarely visited. It generally took drugs or alcohol to get him there, and even achieving there he rarely stayed, as his optimized body sought either sleep or wakefulness, the latter more than the former.

  His dreams, all too often, were also optimized: explicit problem solving, pattern recognizing, recapitulations of and improvements on things he’d actually done, or actually attempted to do.

  So this was unusual, this feeling of being comfortably ensconced below wakefulness. Odd in the security of it, though he had a right to be tired, having laid out an arrow of rocks—actually a double row and more of his tracks and a row of the whitest stones—pointing to the tree and his fox-den nearby.

  Perhaps it was completion he felt; he’d done the best he could, all considered, and if he were now to fall into the fullest sleep and never wake it would not have been for lack of trying to do otherwise. Certainly, he was not one who might call to him ephemeral magics and gossamer wings to fly to the edge of space and command a comet to carry him, cocooned, to a place where others of the sheriekas-bred might find and thaw him . . .

  That briefing came to him now, of how certain of the others created by the sheriekas as spies and weapons were able to move things so easily to their wills . . . That such were rare, and as erratically dispersed as the killer things was to the good . . .

  But there, the doze was both deeper and lighter now, and he had truly not meant to sleep.

  Not dream, he’d nearly said, all the while hearing the wind and its acts: the slight rustle of leaves near his head, the sound of gritty sand-bits rushing to fill an empty sea, perhaps an elegant thunderstorm distantly giving impetus to waves on a beach and wings that beat. Perhaps the distant tremble of air as some flying thing cavorted . . .

  Now here there was comfort, for there had been flying things once, of many sizes, and if they’d fought amongst themselves at times, they’d done their work, too, moving seeds and pods about, taking away loose branches, warning of fires and off-season floods, sharing a measure of joy in the world until they were vanquished by some short-term calamity beyond the thought of trees.

  What an interesting idea . . .

  In his mind’s eye, he soared with great wings above a world populated by trees and quiet creatures, above seas willing to carry rafts of the flood-swept for years, rafts where nests and young might travel in the shade of those still green, growing, and accomplishing. Very nearly he could feel the weight of such a pair, singing and calling, perched in his crown at sunrise, answering the call of others across the canyon, and those passing on rafted currents along the sometimes untrustworthy coastal cliffs . . .

  No! He knew he had never had a crown of green, nor had creatures perching in it! His mind took that thought, rejected it as it might a bad element in a dream, came back to the sounds, things that he might measure, rather than ones that might keep him comfortably immobile.

  The sounds he was hearing were old sounds, echoed off of canyon walls last week or last month or last year or . . . or when?

  If he’d been half asleep moments before, now he was one quarter asleep. His muscles still lounged, and his eyes, but his ears recalled a distant mammalian heritage and would have twisted like those of a fox if they could . . . for there was something there, something that hadn’t been there in the days of his walk, or the nearer days of his hibernation—something he was hearing as if through a template.

  He agreed with himself somewhere deep in the near-sleep: a template. A template not of sight, but of sound and vibration. An old template that shuffled a million years of experience and separated the sounds and shifted other templates to form a nearest match.

  Flying thing.

  Not a fox’s template though. Not usually heard through ear, but through branches.

  Flying thing.

  He willed his eyes open, did Jela, who found his name then, and his duty, but his lids remained closed, so he listened harder, for this was a template recentl
y used, despite its age, and he must connect it to the sound in the root and branches and—

  Then there was thunder enough to open his eyes, and his ears were his, and to his wakeful mind the pattern came: sonic boom.

  He shed sleep entirely then, and glanced at the tree, which had been shading him as best it might.

  “Flying things, my friend? And dragons?” He laughed, to hear his voice sounding remarkably like the dragons of the dream. “Dragons and now spaceships? What a fine delirium you bring!”

  His eye caught the line of a single narrow contrail in the sky, floating with no obvious sign of an attached craft. It looked like they were heading away from him—to the place he’d touched down. Else they were headed in the other direction. Directly for him.

  Sighing, Jela the soldier reached for his sun shades, tapped the knife on his belt for comfort, and drew the gun to be sure the barrel was not full of sand, nor the charge useless.

  “Field of fire,” he remarked to the tree, “favors both of us. If it isn’t someone we know and they can read the signs, they’ll have an idea where I am, so I’ll be just a little bit someplace else. If they’re bright, they’ll expect it, but hey, I’ve got the rescue beacons on.

  “You . . . I’m going to camouflage as best I can.”

  His handiwork, when admired from a distance, appeared to be another random pile of debris, though his tracks around it were hard to disguise entirely. He’d used his vest to sweep the more obvious tracks into smudges, and left the beacon on. He took one transceiver, leaving all the other powered items in the den, where they’d either not be noticed or, if detected, where they’d serve to convince anyone oncoming that he was sensibly in the shade.

  He was not exactly sensibly in the shade, though he had some of it. That wouldn’t be a problem for much longer today, in any case, since the sun would soon be on the horizon.

  His choice was a gully where the meandering of the stream bed had made a short-lived branch; there, looking across at the tree, he laid out his pistol and his backup, and emptied his pockets of anything that might weigh him down if he needed to move fast.

  He laughed mirthlessly, no doubt in his mind that he was running on adrenaline and hope, knowing too that his chance of moving with speed or stealth was pretty slim, this far into no rations.

  It was then that he felt the ship, as if large welcome wings were overhead. There was a whine of the wind, and some slight hissing—remarkably like that of the CC-456s he’d known for decades.

  It swept in low over the tiny campsite, its wings not all that large—indeed the ship itself was not all that large!—did a half-turn, displaying a single black digit on each of its stubby maneuvering wings, then another half-turn—incidentally bringing the nose cannon to bear on the campsite. Then it hissed itself quietly into the empty ocean, and was still for very nearly eight full seconds, at which point Corporal Kinto jumped out the open hatch, slipping on the shifting sand with an obscenity.

  FOUR

  On the ground, Star 475A

  Mission time: 14.5 planet days and counting

  “That’s an order, Jela. Prepare to embark.” Chief Pilot Contado’s voice was getting quieter, which was not a good sign.

  “We’re not done here.” Jela’s voice also got quieter. He was standing on top of his den, half-facing the tree, what was left of his kit packed into his pockets.

  Contado stood beside the tree, towering over it, his permanent grimace accentuated by his squinted eyes in the shadows of the low sun. He was pointedly ignoring Jela’s inclusion of the tree in the “we” of his intent.

  Around Jela were the remains of the hasty moist meal they’d given him, along with discarded med-packs—they’d hit him with doses of vitamins, inhalants of stim, sublinguals of anti-virals—and three empty water bulbs.

  Sated in many ways, refreshed naturally and artificially, shaded by his rescuers’ craft, Jela felt stronger than he had in days, and as stubborn as the trees he’d followed to the ocean of sand.

  “I will take the tree with me,” he said, very quietly indeed.

  “On board, dammit! Our launch window . . .” This was said loudly—meaning Jela had made a gain . . .

  “That launch window is an arbitrary time chosen by the pilot. You’re working with guesses. There’s nothing yet on the sensors . . .”

  “Troop, this is not a biologicals run. I’m not . . .”

  “Chief, this tree saved my life. It and its kin fought off the sheriekas for . . . who knows how long . . . for dozens of centuries! There’s no other reason I can think of that this system was left alone for so long, and why it’s got so much attention now. We can’t simply leave it unprotected.”

  From inside the ship—off-com but still clearly audible—came Kinto’s voice: “He wants to protect it, give him another gun and put him in charge. I told you it wasn’t worth coming back for him . . .”

  There was a brangle of voices from within the ship and then:

  “Just moments to sundown, Chief. I’ve set a countdown, and Kinto’s doing the pre-flights in case we need to boost directly to rendezvous.”

  This new voice on the comms was Junior Pilot Tetran; and Jela bet himself that in addition to the pre-flights, Kinto now owned either a bruise or a run of make-work when they got back to base—or both.

  Chief Pilot Contado looked at the tree, and at Jela, and then at the ship and beyond, holding a hand above his eyes.

  “Chief, as a bonus—I mean as recompense for being shot down while saving both the commander and the Trident, you can arrange it for me—” Jela murmured.

  There was a gasp at that, that he should so blatantly claim such a thing, but he pushed on, defiant.

  “And I promised, when I ate the fruit . . . I promised I’d save it if I could! All I need, sir, is . . .”

  Contado cut him off with a slash of the hand and a disdainful grunt.

  “Troop, if you insist on it, it’s yours. You have until the ship lifts to take your souvenir. The quartermaster will charge carrying fees against your account—I’ll not have that thing dignified as a specimen—and you’ll report for trauma testing as soon as we arrive at an appropriate location.”

  “I’d prefer to lift in daylight!” came the junior pilot’s voice, merciless.

  Jela broke toward the tree, survival knife and blanket out, hoping he didn’t kill the fool thing trying to save it!

  “We lift with or without you, Jela,” said the Chief Pilot, and the wind carried his voice elsewhere, unanswered.

  JELA WAS NOT a gardener, nor a tree surgeon, and if ever he’d felt a lack of training in his life it was now, on his knees on an alien planet, battle-knife in hand, facing the tree that had intentionally saved his life. His utility blanket was laid out beside it, and he fully intended to wrap the tree in that to carry it.

  “Thank you,” he said, bowing, and tried to recall a life’s worth of half-heard lore of those who had tread the forests on other worlds.

  And then, as there was absolutely nothing else to do, he began to dig a trench with the knife, cutting into the earth as he had been trained, recalling now the proper method of slicing through the outer roots quickly. The training—how best to avoid entangling the blade, how to get under the over-roots so that they might be preserved as camouflage or cover—came back, reinforced by the experience of digging for his life under fire.

  He knew that he shouldn’t take the tree entirely from the earth, that he needed to keep soil around some of the roots—but how should he know how much?

  The dirt surprised him, being drier even than he’d been expecting. He trenched the first circle around the tree hurriedly, realized that the sandy soil wasn’t likely to hold together anyway, and dug a new trench barely three hand-spans away from the spindly trunk.

  As he dug, he realized he was talking to the tree, soothing it, as if it could understand—as if it were a child, or a pet.

  What cheek I have, to tell the king of a planet to be calm while I dig it out of its
safety!

  Despite that, he continued to talk—perhaps for his own comfort, to assure himself that what he did was right and correct.

  “We’ll get you out of here soon,” he murmured. “Won’t be long and you’ll see the dragon’s eye view . . .”

  The breeze began to pick up, as it always did at dusk, and the scents that played across his nose were those of sand and dirt and some sweetness he could not identify at first, until he realized it was the scent—the taste even—of the tree’s gift he’d eaten . . .

  Another turn around the tree, and Jela’s blade was much deeper, but digging toward the center. The sounds from the ship were familiar enough, and they were the sounds of vents being closed, of the testing of mechanical components, of checking readiness for lift.

  It was during the third turn around the tree that Jela could hear several of the hatches closing; and during that turn he realized that much of what he’d thought was a ball of dirt was in fact a bulbous part of the tree’s tap root. It was easily twelve times the diameter of the portion above the ground, and as he dug away he could feel that it likely weighed more than the visible stalk above as well.

  Finally, he reached beneath, found several strong cord-like roots leading deep into the bowels of the planet. He hesitated, not knowing which life-lines were critical, nor even knowing how to test—and in that moment of hesitation he felt the tree shift as if some inner ballast had moved. Then, with a sharp snap, the tree lurched and the roots he’d been concerned about were severed, his blade a hand-width or more from the spot.

  The full weight of tree and remaining roots descended into his hands, and he staggered, nearly pulled down into the pit he’d dug.

  With back-straining effort he gathered the tree to him, feeling the unexpected mass of that head-sized bulb, shaped like some giant onion beneath his hands.

  Now the sounds of ship generators revving came to him, and he wrestled the tree out of the ungiving ground and with a single motion wrapped it in the blanket and stood, moving at a run toward the ship.