Putting Up Roots

Chapter Five

Josh had thought of little else for two weeks. Now, with the reality sitting in front of him, he rather wished that it would go away. The node. There it was, right outside the ship, bright and threatening. To Josh’s eyes it loomed as big and cold as the summer moon on his last night at Burnt Willow Farm.

Dawn sat next to him, a sketch pad on her knee. He wasn’t sure that she knew he was there. She was staring out of the observation port and at the same time drawing furiously, totally absorbed. He glanced down at her pad, forcing his attention away from the node. She wasn’t sketching what she was seeing. She was, of all things, making a beautifully detailed picture of Burnt Willow Farm, as it had looked from the ridge.

What went on inside that smooth, dark-haired head? Did she even notice that they were in free fall? Did she realize that in another twenty seconds the ship would enter the glowing pearly sphere of a network node?

Other people were not as oblivious as Dawn. The row of seats held five reclining couches, all occupied. Josh looked past Dawn to the three Lasker brothers. He had been introduced to them for the first time at the spaceport, before they took off for orbit, and disliked them on sight. Like the five other trainee passengers on the ship, they had been ticketed by Foodlines for transportation to Solferino. They had been loud most of the time while they waited to board the ship, and when they were not shouting or fighting they were huddled together and whispering. If their sideways glances were anything to go by, they were sneering at the other travelers.

At the moment they were not sneering at anything. They were staring pop-eyed out of the port. Sig Lasker, only a year older than Josh but a head taller and forty pounds heavier, had a face the color of dirty snow. Rick and Hag, the thirteen-year-old twins, were not much better. All three of them had been throwing up off and on since the ship went into free fall. That was rather pleasing to Josh, because he and Dawn had had no trouble at all of that kind (so far, said a warning voice in his head). He wondered how the Karpov sisters were doing in the row behind. They didn’t say much, but Josh had the feeling that all four of them, even little Ruby, were pretty tough.

“Twenty seconds to node entry.” The prissy voice on the ship’s general address system belonged to Bothwell Gage. He was the Foodlines employee responsible for delivering the trainees to their destination. “Return to your assigned seats,” he went on. “Node entry can produce peculiar physical and mental effects.”

Gage was a company biologist who did not pretend to be thrilled with his present assignment. As he had pointed out, several times, he was headed somewhere else entirely. He had been given responsibility for the trainees only when someone at FoodLines headquarters realized that Gage knew Solferino well, and the planet was on the way to his final destination. Gage had made clear to the group the extent of his duties: He would tell them about Solferino, get them there in one piece, and hand them over to their teachers when they reached the planet. He seemed knowledgeable enough about facts, but when it came to people he was, in Josh’s opinion, totally naive. The biologist was small-boned, large-headed, and round-shouldered, and while he might do well on a place like Solferino, he wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes on a big-city street after dark.

“If you aren’t in your own seats now”—Gage’s voice turned coy—“in another half-minute I guarantee you’ll wish that you had been.”

On his final words, another voice chimed in. It was the control computer of the Cerberus, reading the record aloud for the benefit of the humans on board.

“Node surface distance two hundred meters. Velocity match twelve meters a second—eleven—ten—zero relative rotation—distance one hundred meters—velocity match eight meters a second—seven—six—separation forty meters—ship fields off, radio blackout commences—two meters a second, we are beyond abort option. Node entry beginning. Radio blackout is total.”

In other words, the ship was cut off from all contact with anything in the solar system. The pearly glow had grown until it filled the sky. Close up, it showed streaks and swirls of darkness, and within those, point scintillations of blue-white light.

“Node entry is beginning,” Bothwell Gage took over again from the computer. “The more you can relax, the better you will feel. We are doing fine.”

Relax, sure—if you could. But Josh was not doing fine at all.

Something was terribly wrong. It was not the nausea that he had briefly experienced when first entering free fall, but something much worse. As the Cerberus passed into the node, Josh felt his whole body begin to rotate in one direction, while the inside of his head went in another. It made no difference if his eyes were open or closed. The interior of the node was a rainbow glow, and it seemed to turn in a hundred ways at once. He was riding a giant multicolored whirligig, that every few seconds chose to vanish and reassemble itself, and then turn all the different parts of him in multiple different directions.

Worst of all, his whole body trembled and shook under an internal force that seemed to have nothing to do with anything outside it. He opened his mouth to scream. In that same moment, the ability to scream was lost. A final spin took him off in a direction where there were no directions.

Josh was twisted out of space itself; and in that ultimate nowhere blackness, he felt nothing at all.

Josh awoke, wondering how long he had been unconscious. According to the preflight briefing, if he did black out it should be for no more than a fraction of a second. But it felt like he had been unconscious for ages.

He opened his eyes. The multicolored glimmer of the node interior was gone. In its place a diffuse blue glow filled a third of the sky.

“All right.” Bothwell Gage on the address system spoke as though nothing had happened. “I told you that we would be fine, and we are. We have completed the first node transition. The sensors need a couple of minutes to recalibrate, then we will make our jump to Solferino. That will give you a chance to examine the structure of the Messina Dust Cloud. The physicists back Sol-side claim to understand where it came from and what it’s all about, but if you ask me”—he laughed, but it was more like a giggle—“if you ask me, they’re in a cloud themselves. However, you won’t see anything like this again for a long time, so I suggest that you look and enjoy.”

The great blue and purple haze of the Cloud was shot through with streaks and swirls of brighter colors, greens and yellows and glowing crimsons. Josh could see that those rainbow lines and curves defined currents and whirlpools, which taken together provided the outline for a set of broader patterns. Those had to be the sluggish space rivers of dust and gas described in the online documentation that he had studied back at Burnt Willow Farm. In those broad rivers you’d find invisible pockets of stable transuranic elements, carried around some unseen center.

“Found only in the Cloud,” Gage answered a question from Amethyst, one of the Karpov sisters. “And enormously valuable. Unimine ships have looked for stable transuranics in a thousand other places, so far without success. Anyone who does find those elements outside the Messina Dust Cloud is assured of a great fortune. Cloud collection is slow, laborious, and expensive.”

And elsewhere in the Cloud, Josh hoped not too close, were the cloud reefs. In those regions of intense electric and gravity fields, something very strange happened to space-time. The Unimine rakehells explored them, because that’s where you were most likely to find shwarzgeld and starfires. But there you would also find space sounders, about which the documentation said nothing—except that they were dangerous.

No one knew if a sounder should be thought of as living or nonliving. Rakehells had a habit of disappearing near reefs and sounders, without so much as a call for help. And sounders were supposed to be able to pop out of nowhere, at any time.

Josh scanned the Cloud, wondering how you knew when a space sounder was on the way. Suddenly he was quite willing to head back into the gut-wrenching interior of the node.

“Velocity match six meters a second.” The voice of the control computer of the Cerberus began again. “Zero relative rotation. Distance thirty meters—ship fields off, radio blackout commences—two meters a second, beyond abort option. Node entry beginning.”

This time the shock was not so great. Josh, as his insides were knotted into complex shapes that felt as though they could never be unraveled, had one final thought: life on Solferino would certainly be hard, it might even be horrible; but you didn’t encounter the word danger, over and over again, as you did whenever Unimine activities were mentioned.

Anything would be better than working for Unimine, burrowing kilometers deep into naked rock, plumbing oceans of molten iron, or chasing space sounders through the dark unfathomed reefs of the Messina Dust Cloud. Compared with that, Solferino was going to be Funland.

The first solar system network node had been established in the Asteroid Belt, hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth. The official reason had been caution: The nodes and the network were an unknown quantity, and danger to Earth must be avoided at all costs.

The true reason, according to Bothwell Gage, was very different: Intense lobbying pressure had come from established transportation companies. They feared their business would be eroded or destroyed by instantaneous travel from node to node.

That worry should have been nonexistent in other stellar systems, or within the Messina Dust Cloud. But rules were hard to change, and habits hard to break. The Solferino node could have been conveniently placed in low orbit about the planet. Instead, the Cerberus was forced to make a boring three-day trip from the node to Solferino. It seemed forever until the Cerberus computer announced that rendezvous had been achieved, and passenger transfer would take place to a vehicle able to descend to the surface of Solferino.

That news apparently revived even the Lasker brothers. At any rate, they were well enough to jostle Dawn and Josh out of the way as they all entered the single-stage landing orbiter. Josh pushed right back. It didn’t take a genius to guess that there was trouble ahead, but he wasn’t going to be shoved around by anybody. He was pleased to see Sapphire, the oldest of the Karpov sisters, give Sig Lasker a vicious elbow in the ribs in the doorway.

“Boys and girls, if you please, let us have a little decorum.” Gage had noticed what was happening. “Let me remind you that you are not in the Pool now. Save your energy for the surprises you may encounter on Solferino.”

Boys and girls. Josh could guess how Sig Lasker, with his starting beard and powerful build, must be reacting to that. Bothwell Gage seemed to think he was dealing with seven-year-olds. Unfortunately, all of them had no choice but to deal with him. The man knew what Solferino had in store for them. They did not. Josh was aware of his own ignorance, although he had picked up all he could in the scattered briefings that began the day after Uncle Ryan and Aunt Stacy had signed the papers on his and Dawn’s behalf. What had Stacy said or done to persuade her husband that it was all right for Dawn to go with Josh? Josh would like to have been in on that conversation.

As for surprises, you could start with the color of the planet. Josh stared out of the window as he and Dawn, last of the trainees to be shepherded out of the Cerberus by Bothwell Gage, settled into their padded seats and waited for the lander to ease away from the main ship. Earth from orbit had been a cloudy ball of blues and grays. Solferino had plenty of white clouds, too, but the ground beneath was a mottled mess of pastel pinks, ugly purples, and random yellow smudges.

“Well, look your fill.” Bothwell Gage knew they were all gazing out of the ports. “We are on our way. You will be down there in half an hour. Are there any questions?”

“Why zit look like that?” Hag Lasker said. The twins were fraternal, not identical, with Hag as dark as his brother Rick was fair.

“Like what?”

“Like them funny colors. It’s funny colors down there.”

“You mean, purple and pink?”

“Yeah. Them.”

“Aha! That has to do with the way that plants on Solferino employ the energy of sunlight. You know what chlorophyll is, don’t you?”

Hag stared at Gage as though the man had started to talk Chinese. Josh wasn’t sure of the word, either, but Amethyst, the fat one of the Karpov sisters and the only one who, so far as Josh could see, had a working brain, piped up, “Chlorophyll makes plants green.”

Her sisters scowled at her.

“Indeed it does,” Gage said. “But it does much more than that. It allows plants to use sunlight to convert raw materials—carbon dioxide and water—to foods. Chlorophyll on Earth is actually a mixture of two kinds, one green and one yellow. Plants on Solferino employ only the yellow chlorophyll. Its actual name is ‘xanthophyll.’ But Solferino plants also use another chemical, called ‘rhodopsin.’ Did you ever hear of it?”

This time, nobody spoke. Josh thought he might have heard that word before, too, but he had no idea what it meant. Dawn, for all that he could tell, was off in another world. The Lasker brothers and the Karpov sisters, except for Amethyst, regarded Gage with their usual combination of dislike, incomprehension, and utter lack of interest.

Gage seemed more resigned than surprised. “Rhodopsin,” he went on, “isn’t just found on Solferino. You have it in the retinas of your own eyes. It is necessary in seeing. It can also use the energy in sunlight to make carbohydrates for plants, the same way that chlorophyll does. But rhodopsin is not green or yellow. It’s purple. The plants on Solferino use rhodopsin, and sometimes chlorophyll. Thus, as you’ll see when we land, they range in color from purple to a pinkish yellow. You won’t see much green. But if you do, don’t be tempted to eat something just because it looks familiar. You will vomit more violently than you ever did in free fall. Are there any other questions?”

“Mm.” Ruby Karpov, the youngest of the sisters, had shown no interest in listening to Bothwell Gage. She had been staring out of the lander’s window. “What’s that?”

She pointed a finger—not down, but up. Gage started to say, “Actually, I meant questions about the planet,” but he trailed away on the final word. The lander was entering the atmosphere, and the trainees were beginning to feel weight again as air drag slowed the vehicle. Their ship was on the night side of the planet, where the only thing visible ought to have been stars and Solferino’s single moon. But in front of and above the lander, accelerating steadily away from it, was the long plume of a ship’s exhaust.

“My goodness.” Gage was leaning forward and frowning. “That is certainly not the Cerberus. And it is not a conventional lander.”

Gage continued—not to the trainees, or to himself, but to the lander’s computer. “Tell the Cerberus that we have an unfamiliar ship in sight. I think it is not one of ours. Request a spectral analysis of the exhaust, plus anything else that they can tell us.”

There was a five-second pause, while wild thoughts ran riot through Josh’s head. He had seen this often enough on the tube. A star system far from Earth. Approach to a new planet. An unfamiliar and unexpected ship. Aliens!

Before he could go any farther, the computer’s quiet voice was returning a message. “Identification is complete. The ship visible ahead of the lander is a Unimine M-class vessel, the Charles Lyell.”

“Unimine!” Gage snorted in disbelief or disapproval. “Their ships should not be anywhere near Solferino. Don’t we have exclusive rights to development here?”

There was a brief pause—time enough for a lengthy exchange of data between the lander’s computer and that on the Cerberus.

“That is correct,” the computer said. “Foodlines has exclusive rights to the development of Solferino for twenty years, unless the company chooses to give them up. However, that does not prohibit the Unimine conglomerate access to the space around the planet, or prohibit travel anywhere within this stellar system. In fact, Unimine has exploration rights for Cauldron, one of the lesser and lifeless worlds of this system. The Charles Lyell is recorded as a prospecting ship, but it is capable of planetary landing.”

“Doesn’t our franchise prohibit other landings on Solferino?”

“It does.”

“Then what’s their ship doing here?”

“We do not know.”

“So ask them!” Bothwell Gage’s voice rose to a squeak.

“We did ask them.” A computer could not sound apologetic or puzzled, but its choice of words was significant. “The Charles Lyell is under no obligation to answer our inquiries. Regrettably, it declined to do so. The most logical reason for its presence is that the Unimine ship is employing Solferino in a gravity-assisted swing-by maneuver on its way to the outer system and the planet Cauldron.”

“You think that’s it?”

“It is certainly possible. Unfortunately, our analysis assigns that assumption a probability of only one in ten.”

“So what are you suggesting that we do?” The G forces were affecting everyone on board, and Bothwell Gage’s voice was increasingly distorted.

The computer made a minor adjustment to the lander’s angle of attack, and the deceleration forces lessened. “We have already taken the appropriate action,” it replied. “The presence of a Unimine vessel close to Solferino has been assigned to the general file of unanswered questions.”

Josh was a newcomer to space, and he knew next to nothing about either Foodlines or Unimine operations, but even he could tell that the computer’s answer was hardly one that Bothwell Gage found satisfactory.