Putting Up Roots

Chapter Fifteen

Next morning Josh awoke filled with excitement. The feeling faded as the morning went on, for during that day and the three following it became clear that planning was one thing, but carrying something out was quite a different matter.

The problem was Brewster. He was loud, and bullying, and sometimes strangely ignorant or disorganized; but he was the boss. He kept everyone running from early in the morning to late at night. Even Ruby was not excused, which shot down Josh’s idea that she might be able to come and go as she pleased. Winnie Carlson was the subject of special wrath and scorn. Something on Solferino did not agree with her, and she appeared each day yawning, pale, and blotchy, with dark bags under her eyes. Brewster assumed that she was his personal slave, and ordered her around accordingly; Winnie never uttered one word of protest.

Josh was able to talk to Topaz for only a few minutes a day, and rarely alone. Their plan had to be unsuspected not only by Brewster, but also by everyone else—especially Sapphire. Josh had to be content with a quick nod from Topaz, or her terse, “Getting stuff together. Making a food cache beyond the fence. Pass me anything you can snitch—I can’t take too much, and I don’t think we dare try to live off the land.” He had no idea what Topaz said to Dawn, but his cousin’s smile was as Sphinx-like and mysterious as ever.

The compound and buildings began to feel like home. Everyone learned how to use the cleaning facilities, the kitchen, and what was left of the computer systems. After four days it even felt natural to wake to a dawn of reds and orange, or stroll from building to building across a purple sward.

Finally, the evening came when Topaz, standing at Josh’s side putting plates into the disposal, muttered: “Tomorrow. Don’t look for the two of us after midday.”

Before midday, however, other events intruded.

Early in the morning, when everyone was waiting in the dining area to be assigned their daily duties, Sol Brewster threw them another curveball.

“You’ve all adjusted to Solferino.” He was standing at the wall display, and grinning as though something was giving him special pleasure. “That’s good. What’s not so good is that you haven’t done a stroke of work since you came here.”

He watched closely for signs of protest. Everyone stoically waited, and finally he went on: “I mean real work. Something that will repay Foodlines for the expense of shipping your carcasses out here and training you. Well, the holiday ends today. You begin to earn your keep. Take a look.”

The wall behind him came to life. It provided a view of Solferino, taken from space. As they watched, the picture zoomed in on one area of the upper hemisphere.

“We are here.” Brewster placed his finger on a point near the center of the display. “To give you an idea of scale, these are the Barbican Hills, near the bottom. But the area that the company is more interested in is this one.” He tapped the wall, where a long, dark gash showed in the surface of Solferino. “That is the Avernus Fissure. It’s a low-lying area, some of it well below sea level, and it’s volcanically active. It was chosen by a space survey as a place which may have new and valuable biological products. However, there has never so far been a systematic ground survey. I, with your assistance, will be performing the first. We’ll be taking the cargo aircar there later this morning. Each of you will be issued a test kit, designed to detect the presence of certain substances valuable to Foodlines, in the native plant life. I will assign you your territories and monitor your results. All clear? Good. I want you back here and ready to leave in”—he paused, as usual when he was giving out schedules—“five minutes. A personal pack is not to exceed six kilos. Don’t try to bring your usual rubbish. Carlson!”

Everyone stared at Winnie. She had been standing with her mouth open and her eyes closed, and she came to attention only when Brewster shouted her name.

“Yes, sir.”

“Did you hear what I said, Carlson? You certainly didn’t look like you were listening.”

“I was, sir. Sir, do you wish me to go with the group?”

“Why, yes, I think that would be nice.” Brewster’s voice dripped sarcasm. “I certainly had it in mind. Surely you do not imagine that we could get along without your valuable presence? What other plans do you have? To spend the period of our absence loafing in bed?”

“No, sir.”

“Then let’s get moving.” His voice rose to a roar. “Any questions?”

“How long will we be gone, sir?” Josh was breaking the golden rule: With Sol Brewster, you never drew attention to yourself in any way. But he had to ask for Topaz’s benefit.

The question didn’t receive Brewster’s usual dismissal of the questioner as a total moron. It rather seemed to surprise him. “Three days,” he said after a moment of frowning uncertainty. “Yes, that’s right. You should plan to be away for three days. Any other questions? No? Then go to it.”

Topaz walked with Josh to the door. As they went out she muttered from the side of her mouth, “Think he guessed, and did it on purpose? We’re screwed. I daren’t take the cache on the flier, and by the time we get back most of the food will spoil.”

The test kit was so simple, even Ruby would have no trouble using it. Brewster demonstrated it as the flier’s automatic pilot took them east.

“Here’s the feeder.” He pointed to an aperture in the top of the unit, which was a squat upright cylinder about six inches tall and three across. “All you have to do is put in a sample of the plant you’ve picked. Leaves, stem, or root—but don’t assume that because you’ve tested one part, there’s no need to test another. Some plants concentrate materials in one particular place.”

“Like hydrogen cyanide in peach kernels, sir? Or vanadium in tunicates.”

It was Amethyst again, determined to show off even if it guaranteed a roasting. The comment didn’t get praise from Brewster—nothing seemed to—but this time all it led to was a startled glare and a mild, “When I want your inputs I will ask for them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You put the sample in here.” Brewster took a piece of umbrella plant leaf. For a change, he sounded enthusiastic about what he was doing. “There’s only one thing to remember: You put the plant into the unit where you collect it. Don’t go wandering off with a sample, then decide it’s time you processed it. There’s a good reason for that. Each kit has its own inertial navigation system, good enough to determine your position on the surface of Solferino to within a meter. But the unit doesn’t know where you pick the sample, only where you are when you process it.

“Once the sample is inside, you press this.” He touched a button on the side of the cylinder. “Then you wait for five to ten seconds. If there is nothing in the sample to merit more detailed analysis, this light on the side will flash yellow. That will happen most of the time. Any substances that we already know about, but find interesting, will be identified here. The light will flash red. Real anomalies—substances that the test kit has never seen before, and can’t explain chemically—make the light on the side flash bright blue. Before you get excited, I’ll tell you that an anomaly is a one-in-ten-thousand chance. It’s so rare that you shouldn’t expect to see it at all in your whole five days of testing.”

“Three days,” Ruby said promptly. “You said three days.”

The others winced in anticipation, but Brewster only frowned and said mildly, “Three days. Yes. That is what I meant. Three days of testing before we return to the compound.”

The little light was flashing yellow. The kit had finished its work with the umbrella plant leaf. And the dark scar of the Avernus Fissure was coming into view on the far horizon.

Josh had given up on the idea of the search for ruperts. Topaz hadn’t.

After the flier had landed, and while they were watching again the miracle of the self-erecting buildings, she edged over to Josh. “Tonight. Outside, by the fissure. Wait until you’re sure everyone else is asleep.”

The message seemed clear as could be, but after everyone else was in bed, and Josh was wishing that he was, he found himself alone in the darkness. It was a crescent moon, on a chilly, cloudless night. The camp was on his left. The Avernus Fissure, smoking and ominous, was a red glow and sulfurous smell off to the right. The stars were bright overhead. But of Topaz, there was no sign at all.

It was more than chilly. It was cold. Josh shivered, crossed his arms over his chest, and cursed. He was ready to give up and head off to bed when he glimpsed a dark shadow moving away from the camp.

He almost called out, until he realized that the almost-invisible figure was not heading toward him, but angling away to the left. He peered into the darkness, suspecting that maybe he was making up the whole thing from half-seen patterns of light and dark.

Before he could convince himself of that, a second spectral figure appeared from the camp. It flitted across his line of sight, heading the same way as the first one.

Josh had suffered all that he could stand. He stole toward the camp, determined to follow what he had seen and find out for sure what was going on. Halfway there he saw yet another dark shape, creeping along uncertainly toward the edge of the fissure.

By now his eyes were as adjusted to the darkness as they would ever be. He reached out and took Topaz by the arm. It was her turn to jump and utter a near-inaudible squeak.

“Is that you, Josh?” Her hand groped for and took his.

“Yes. Topaz, something really strange is going on here. You’re the third person who’s come out of the camp. Do you think that Sapphire knows what you’re planning to do?”

“I’m sure she doesn’t.” Topaz was still holding hard to his hand. “When I left her she was asleep with her arms around Ruby. Snap withdrawal is hitting her really hard. If she didn’t feel she has to look after the rest of us, I think she’d fall apart.”

He could see her eyes now, wide open and glinting reddish-brown in light from the Avernus Fissure’s smoking deeps. She was glancing from side to side, imagining people where there were only shadows.

Had he done the same? Or had he really seen people leaving the camp?

“What’s going on, Topaz? Why did you want to see me outside here?”

“To tell you that I’m going ahead. If we stop every time Brewster makes us do something we didn’t expect, Dawn and I will never get started.”

“You’re going to do it here?”

“Where else can I do it? Here is where we are. And from the point of view of finding ruperts, one place is as good as another.”

“But what about supplies?”

“I’m going to steal them. Why shouldn’t I? I won’t be in any worse trouble with Brewster, just because I helped myself to a bit of food. What’s wrong?” She was still holding his hand. “You’re all tensed up.”

“I sure am. Maybe it’s that.” He turned his head toward the dim red glow. “I don’t care what Brewster says, or Bothwell Gage says, or anyone says, the Avernus Fissure is a dangerous place. What would happen if you fell into it?”

“You’d burn to a crisp. But don’t worry, Josh, we won’t be going that way. Dawn and I will head in the opposite direction.”

“There could be other fissures out there.”

“Sure there could. There could be boojums, too.”

“What?”

“Ask Amethyst, she’ll tell you more than you want to know. Look, Josh, I didn’t get you out here to ask for your approval. I came to ask for your help.”

“How?”

“Dawn and I are going to sneak away before anyone gets up.”

“Do you think she understands that?”

“She does. Trust me. The trouble isn’t Dawn, it’s my sisters, ’specially Saph. Now she’s off triple-snap she doesn’t sleep normally. We’re in the same expanded dorm room, and Saph wakes up a few times in the night and checks that everything’s all right with the rest of us. Provided it is, she goes back to bed.”

“I can’t do anything about that.” Josh had an awful feeling that he knew what was coming.

“Sure you can. Saph won’t wake me up, she’ll just check that I’m there. I want you to go back right now, get into my bed, and sleep the rest of the night there.”

“Topaz!”

“Of course, it won’t be nearly as much fun as if I was in there with you. Sometime, maybe, but not tonight. This isn’t about fun. Will you do it, Josh? Will you go right now and pretend you’re me, in my bed? Say you will.”

“Topaz!”

“Say it, Josh. Promise you will and I’ll owe you forever.”

“I won’t—I mean, Topaz, I just can’t.” Her face was only a few inches from his. He could feel her breath, warm on his cheek. “Oh, all right. I will. I’ll do it.”

“Great! Let’s get back. I don’t want Sapphire even suspecting that I might not be there.”

As they headed toward the camp, Josh had only one thing on his mind. It wasn’t the warm touch of lips on his cheek when he said yes, though that was unexpectedly pleasant. It wasn’t the hint of possible things to come, which sounded ever better. It wasn’t the mystery of who else had left the camp, and what they were all doing, which at the moment felt abstract and remote.

No. At the top of his head was the thought of what he would say and do when Sapphire found him in Topaz’s bunk.

Josh knew that he would not sleep for a single moment. He would lie all night in the darkness, waiting and worrying.

It was a great shock to open his eyes and find he was looking up into Sapphire’s perplexed face.

“Where’s Topaz?” she said. “This can’t be what it looks like, because she’s not here with you. What the hell is going on?”

There were times when a person could plead innocence and ignorance. This wasn’t one of them. Josh pushed back the covers and sat up.

“I can explain everything.”

“You sound just like Sig Lasker.” Sapphire glanced down at him. “At least you’ve got all your clothes on and you aren’t bare-ass naked. That’s a good start.”

“Of course I’m not!” Josh scrambled out of bed. He looked to where Amethyst and Ruby were still peacefully asleep. “Look, I’ll tell you everything, but only if you promise not to tell Brewster.”

“I wouldn’t tell Brewster if his ass was on fire. Talk, Josh Kerrigan. Amy and Ruby usually sleep another hour, both of ’em. I want to know what’s going on before they wake up—and keep the noise level down.”

Josh’s explanation, in the chilly orange light of dawn, sounded worse than stupid. Sapphire simply shook her head.

“She talked you into it, didn’t she?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, I do. You have to know our Topaz. She’d talk a witch out of her broomstick. The question is, what are we going to do about it? Are you worried about your cousin?”

“I should be. But it’s funny, I feel more comfortable than I expected, knowing the two of them are together.”

“Funnily enough, so do I. But I guess we’ll act as worried and puzzled as everyone else, and we don’t tell anybody what happened to Topaz and Dawn. Except maybe Sig.”

“Does he have to know?”

“If we don’t tell him, he’ll probably guess. He’s smart.”

Josh sensed that there were other reasons for including Sig, but he didn’t pursue them. “What about you?” he said. “Do I have to worry about you?”

He didn’t want to have to explain that question, but luckily Sapphire was ahead of him.

“No. You would have had to worry, four days ago.” She breathed deeply, as though inhaling an invisible something into her lungs. Her eyes, like Winnie’s, had black bags underneath them. “I feel like it’s killing me, but it’s for my own good.”

“You don’t have any more of it?”

“Not a single sniff.” Sapphire smiled, but without a trace of humor, and her eyes wandered around the room as though seeking out hiding places where a small tube might have been mislaid. “Oh, hell. If I did have any, I’d be taking a whack right now. May I make a suggestion?”

“Anything.”

“Good. Now you’ve fooled me for long enough, and told me how and why, get the hell out of here and back to your own bed. You probably think you look like Goldilocks. But I think Amy and Ruby will have a few questions if you’re still here when they wake up.”

Josh expected to be the one grilled most severely. In fact, it was the Karpov sisters who bore the brunt of Brewster’s questions. Apparently Sol Brewster shared Aunt Stacy’s view, that Dawn was a total retard, so nothing that she did could be expected to make sense.

Amethyst and Ruby were genuinely worried and puzzled, and only a little reassured by Sapphire’s shrug and dismissal with, “Topaz knows how to look after herself. I’m not her keeper.”

If Brewster had been more sensitive to relationships, he might have realized that Sapphire saw herself as exactly that. Instead he grumbled and threatened about what he would do when Topaz and Dawn came back.

“But the rest of you are going to work,” he said. “You don’t get away with anything, just because they think they can. Take your test kits. I’ll tell you the areas where each of you will operate. I don’t want you straying outside the places I tell you to be. This part of Solferino has natural hazards, but as I told you before: Do as I say, and you’ll be in no trouble.”

While Brewster was talking, Josh examined the rest of the group. He was no longer sure what he had seen the previous night. But if his eyes had not been deceiving him, who could it have been?

His first choice, from what he had seen recently, was Sig and Sapphire, sneaking off together. Since that wasn’t the case, then who?

The twins were game for any sort of wildness, but they would surely have gone together, not one at a time. Ruby and Amethyst had been asleep when he crept into Topaz’s bed. That left two people: Sol Brewster and Winnie Carlson. He grinned at the idea of those two going off together. He didn’t believe it for a moment.

His pondering ended when he was given one of the test kits and walked by Brewster to the area assigned to him. It was closer to the fissure than he had been before—quite a bit too close, in Josh’s opinion.

Brewster then moved him to a point thirty meters closer yet, well past the place where all plant life ended. “This is a little farther than you should go. It’s perfectly safe here, but I can’t vouch for what happens if you start fooling around here. Take a good look. Then go back up and get to work.”

He left. Josh took a look, a very good look, and wished that he were back at the main compound, or Burnt Willow Farm—or anywhere else at all. From his position the ground sloped down, steeper and steeper, to become a vertical wall that dropped to the bottom of the fissure. The opposite side was a couple of kilometers away, and the length of the chasm stretched out of sight in both directions. A thin pall of yellowish smoke sat over the great rift in the surface. It never dispersed, even though Josh could feel a steady warm breeze on his face.

He stared along the steepest line of descent. Nothing grew or moved, except at the very bottom where a dark something churned and smoked. In daylight it was all blacks and grays. He knew from the previous night that when the world was dark, the fissure bottom glowed with its own dull red fire. If it were not hot enough to make the rocks molten, it was close to it. A human who fell to the fissure floor would not survive more than a few seconds.

He heard a sound beside him, and turned in alarm. It was Amethyst, peering down toward the fissure bottom.

“Brewster told me I could,” she said defensively “I’m working just up from you, but this is a lot more interesting. Do you know how hot it is down there?”

“No. But if you look at it at night it glows a sort of dull red.”

A mistake—Amethyst might ask him how he knew. Instead she merely said “Interesting” again, craned forward, and added, “For something naturally black, like the rocks there, a dull red heat means it must be at least five hundred Celsius. Fall down there, you’d be burned to a crisp.”

A fact that Josh had no wish to hear again—Topaz had said almost exactly the same thing. But Amethyst was apparently marking time on the way to her real subject, because she added, still without looking at Josh, “You know where Topaz went, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

It was literally true, but it didn’t work. Amethyst said, “All right, maybe you don’t know where. But I bet you know why she went. And I bet I do, too. She’s gone off with your cousin. They’re looking to catch a rupert.”

“Why would you think a thing like that?”

“I don’t hear you denying it. I’m not an idiot, you know. You’ve been babbling about ruperts ever since that first night at camp. You try to give everybody the impression that you’re totally cool and you don’t care about anything, but Topaz says that’s not true, inside you care an awful lot. You really want to prove you’re right about the rupert. Saph says you hide your feelings like this because of the way you were brought up, with your mother and everything. You’ve learned not to let things show, ’specially when you care a lot.”

“Have you finished? How I feel about things is my business, not yours. And what I said was true. I don’t know where Topaz is.”

“I believe you.” Amethyst sighed, heavily and artificially, and oddly it reminded Josh at once of his mother. “Topaz is so lucky, you know. The rest of us really envy her. She can talk anybody into anything.” She studied Josh as if she had just discovered a new Solferino life form. “You seem to have your head screwed on the right way, but you went along with it. Do you mind my asking, what did Topaz do to persuade you?”

Josh did mind. He minded this whole conversation. He was saved from having to answer by a bellow of rage from farther up the hill.

“Are you two going to stand there and bullshit all day long? I said a quick look at the fissure. Get working.”

“Topaz is so lucky. Talks anybody into anything,” Amethyst started back toward her assigned territory. “Except maybe for horrible old Frankenstein’s monster up there. I’d like to do something to his fissure. He’s immune to all human feelings. Nobody mentioned him when Saph asked us if we’d like to go to Solferino. If she had, we might have stayed home. At least we’d have thought about it twice.”