The Wellness Plague

IV.

Lopez Vega snapped the cable onto Rey’s harness and tugged hard to make sure it was secure. Rey looked doubtful.

“We use these cables for lifting everything from livestock to heavy machinery,” Lopez said, shouting to make himself heard over the roar of the VTOL’s engines. “You don’t have to worry about that.

“Keep an eye on the time, though. Ting Lim can’t hold us here for more than half an hour. If you need more than that, you’ll have to unhook and let the Canberra Freehold VTOL take you back. It’s on its way now.”

Rey nodded to show he understood. As clean and safe and simple as it was to obtain hydrogen from water, it was still not as energy-intensive a fuel as Earth’s petrochemicals had been. Having come this far, the time they could spend on station was strictly limited.

“Ready, Doc?” Ting-Lim Chan’s voice came over Rey’s earphones. As pilot, he would have to hold the VTOL steady as the combination of his reflexes and electronics allowed. Breezes were light. On the other hand, the higher air pressure gave an unexpected force to even low wind velocities. Ting-Lim was trying something never done before.

“Ready,” Rey said, his mouth so dry the word came out as a croak. Then, because he feared he might freeze if he did not move immediately, he stepped to the cargo door, leaned out, and kicked off.

The first five meters were almost free-fall. “Want to get you beyond the worst of the prop wash,” Ting-Lim had explained. His descent slowed abruptly. The world rotated around him, back and forth in 270 degree arcs. Rey closed his eyes, waiting for his rotation to damp out. When he opened them, he was just above the trees.

There are no trees on Skylandia. That was what they taught you in school. Real trees, Earth trees, have xylem and phloem, bark and leaves or needles. Local flora have none of these. But there were organisms drawing water and nutrition from the soil, organisms extending sunlight-absorbing surfaces from strengthened central stalks many times longer than a man is tall. And since that was the common, if not the scientific, definition of a tree, all the school definitions went for naught.

The ridge slanted away below him, a canted field of pinkish-white puffballs. His feet brushed the upper branches, seeming to sink into a huge ball of cotton.

“Slowly,” he said, hoping this throat mike was working. “I don’t want to get tangled.”

“Roger that.”

He moved branches aside as they came within reach. What had looked like a vine coiled around one branch vanished in a sudden flurry of sinuous motion. Startled, Rey let go of a branch, which whipped away his breathing filter.

The branches thinned as he descended, the leaves changing from white to greenish-yellow to nearly black. A dimly-lit dome seemed to open around him. The VTOL motors sounded very far away.

In school, he had watched a film titled Memories of Earth. Children in a field, playing with a dead plant called a dandelion, blowing its seeds to the wind. The tree seemed to have a similar structure. Branches extended from the top of a central stalk in all directions, forming a sphere.

“Can you see anything?” Lopez’s voice was unexpectedly loud in Rey’s earphones.

“Not yet.” Rey looked around, squinting at shadowy, unidentified forms. Sunlight poked small holes in the canopy. There was an intermittent rustling, which might have been the wind.

“There it is!” he said. “Right between my legs. No wonder I couldn’t see it at first. Great job, Ting-Lim.”

“Any movement?” Lopez asked.

“No,” Rey said. On the other hand, there were no bodies visible, either.

The VTOL had apparently crashed through the canopy and broken several branches, which slowed its fall before hitting a limb strong enough to stop it.

“It’s caught in the cleft between some of the main limbs. One of the rotors came off in the crash. The door to the cargo bay must have popped off at the same time. The whole frame is leaning over. Getting in is going to be tricky.”

Rey stopped his descent when he was even with the open cargo bay. The upper edge of the craft extended about a meter beyond the floor.

“I’m going to try to swing in.” Rey pumped the cable back and forth. His arc carried him into the cargo bay. After two unsuccessful attempts, his scrabbling hands grabbed one of the ring mounts used for lines to secure whatever was being transported. His feet found the floor. Very carefully, he unhooked the cable from his harness and attached it to the ring mount.

“The cargo bay is empty,” he reported. “I’m going forward to check the cockpit.”

As he moved forward, the VTOL groaned and tilted in response to his shifting weight. Rey held his breath, wondering how far it was to the ground. Nothing happened. After a minute, he began to edge forward more cautiously.

A figure sat slumped over in the pilot’s chair. Small food cartons, the type that made up part of any VTOL’s emergency kit, formed a pile in the comer. Already knowing what he would find, Rey felt for a pulse. He sighed as he let the wrist fall.

“Belkom Michaels-Nye. There are splints on both legs. Dead a little more than a day, as far as I can tell. We just missed him.”

“Anyone else there?” Lopez asked.

“No.” Rectangles on the wall showed where the emergency kits had been. At least one other member of the party had survived, had done his or her best for Belkom, and then… what? Climbed down the trunk to attempt to walk back to Far Edge? Stupid, stupid, stupid! “Stay with your craft” in case of accident was drilled into you from the time you could walk. It had been hard enough to spot the VTOL. Individuals would be invisible under the jungle canopy.

“Excuse me.” Ting-Lim’s voice. “I can hold here for only about ten more minutes.”

“Right,” Rey acknowledged. He reached around to detach a body bag from his backpack. “We’ll be right up.”

He sat across from the open cargo door on the flight back to Far Edge. The jungle skimmed by beneath them. O’Donnel and his other three friends might be anywhere below. It was even conceivable that they were still alive.

There was nothing more anyone could do except arrange for the memorial service.

Two nights later there was another storm. Paabo Bhagwati awoke, listened to the pounding of the rain and the roar of distant thunder. There had been something else—there! From the front of the house, a sound midway between a scratching and a tapping. It was not loud, compared to the other storm sounds, but it should not have been there at all. He got up, wondering if something had been tom loose by the wind and was now battering his door. Or if somehow one of the sheep had somehow escaped the adjoining bam and was now scraping at the door for shelter.

The wind nearly tore the door from his hand as he opened it. A man stood before him, face dark with at least a week’s growth of beard. His clothes were tom. Three other figures huddled behind him under the overhang.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” O’Donnel Buergher-Murchison said hoarsely, “but my friends and I have had a bit of trouble. May I use your comm set to call my mother, please?”

O’Donnel Murchison. Judith Speigelman-Fromm. Anderson Perry-Barlow. Maria Castillo-Schmidt. They had done something no one else had done since the first landing. They had crashed in the jungle and walked out on their own.