The getaway special Page 27

  "But do you have any space that's big enough for us to stay?" Judy asked. Tippet laughed again. "We are aerial creatures. Of course we do." 40

  That was an understatement. When they matched course with Tippet's ship, it was hard to imagine how there could be anything but open space. The thing was over a mile long, and at least a third that wide. If it had the density of a wiffle ball, it would still mass millions of tons. Even with the four oversized engines sticking out the back, it would take forever to accelerate to any fraction of lightspeed unless it was mostly air.

  Judy's blood felt like it was mostly air, too. Her legs ached, and her right hip felt like somebody was twisting a knife blade in the joint. It had taken only twelve minutes to rendezvous with the starship, but that was about five minutes too long for comfort.

  They were almost there now. She watched the video feed from the one good security camera as it approached, the immense vessel doing all the maneuvering just to match velocity with their tiny tank. The situation seemed odd enough, but as the starship drew alongside them she kept feeling little hits of deja vu. The Getaway's rotation gave her only a momentary glimpse every few seconds, which only heightened the effect. Tippet's ship looked a little like a blimp, with its blunt nose and long cylindrical body, but that wasn't what felt familiar. Its four engines mounted evenly around the circumference looked a little like a Russian rocket with all its strap-on boosters, but that wasn't it, either. She had seen something like it before, though.

  Then its shape registered, and she gasped in surprise.

  "Judy?" Allen sounded worried. "Are you all right?"

  "Yeah. I just . . . Tippet, did you guys find a planet that was all water at one of the other stars you visited?"

  He had crawled back into the tank through the same seam that he'd been blown out of. Now he clung to the wires leading from the hyperdrive engine to the laptop computer, a vantage that let him see what was going on and also afforded a good grip now that his wings were useless. "We did," he said.

  "Why?"

  "Was it about fifteen light-years from here?"

  It took him a second to make the conversion from his own units. "Yes. Why?" he asked again.

  "The last star we visited had a water planet. We found this thing that looked like a spaceship in orbit around it, but the ship was hollow, like a mold. We couldn't figure out where it came from, because there wasn't any evidence of life anywhere else in the system, but it looked an awful lot like this." Tippet said, "Hmm. Interesting. Describe the rest of the planetary system." She tried to remember. It was only yesterday, but it seemed like a lifetime ago. "Let's see, there were four other planets, weren't there Allen?"

  "Yeah. One was an airless rock close to the star, then there was the water world, then farther out there was a gas giant with rings and moons, a double gas giant, and a ball of ice with an atmosphere that was probably methane or ammonia. Does that sound like the place you guys were at?"

  "Yes," said Tippet. "It was methane, by the way. We spent several years in that system, exploring each of the planets in turn, but none of them were habitable. Eventually we gave up and came here. But our starship was old and battered from collisions with interstellar dust and gas from the previous voyage, so before we took it back into deep space we let it metamorphose a new body. What you found was its cocoon."

  Judy looked back out at the ship, now just a flat wall dimpled with portholes and hatches. "Your starship is alive?"

  "Of course. How else could beings of my stature create something large enough and powerful enough to carry us between stars?"

  "Wait, wait, wait. You genetically engineered it?"

  "We did. From spaceborne lifeforms that already exist in our home solar system, but yes, we modified them to suit our purpose."

  "Ho-ly shit." She'd already been daunted by their level of technology; now she felt the last vestige of anthropocentric pride vanish under the sheer magnitude of their accomplishments. When she'd seen the shell around the water world, she'd assumed the rows of round circles along its flanks were portholes. She'd been partly right; they were windows for looking out of, but they were not butterfly-scale windows, nor even human-scale. These were dozens of feet across, revealing huge sunlit parks and grottos filled with vegetation. Judy wouldn't have been surprised to see dinosaurs casually peering out without bothering to stoop down. She did see smaller animals, brightly colored and curious, with their faces to the windows as the Getaway drifted in toward a cavernous docking bay. Allen was looking over the hyperdrive engine at her monitor, his face stretched wide in a big, goofy grin. "Where's a camera when you need one, eh?" he said.

  "In Trent and Donna's living room." They had planned to bring a couple disposable Digimatics with them, but those had still been in the house with the rest of their last-minute gear when they'd made their hurried escape from the law.

  It didn't matter. Even with photographic evidence, nobody would believe this. The whirling septic tank with its arboreal passenger cleared the landing bay door without scraping a twig. The door irised closed behind them, and a moment later air rushed in through the crack in the tank. Moments after that, their rotation began to slow until the image in the monitor was steady. All the loose junk that had been tossed up against the walls drifted free again. Judy's spacesuit deflated as the outside pressure matched the inner, then it began to wrinkle and press against her. She could have left it on and let it squeeze her body without risking contact with another alien atmosphere, but she would run out of oxygen in a couple of hours anyway. If the air was going to kill her, she might as well get it over with. And if it didn't, well, then she should save what was left in her suit for the next emergency.

  She popped off her helmet before the inrushing air made it too difficult to lift, then took a cautious sniff.

  Green. It smelled of living things, both vegetable and animal. It was chilly, but that might have been just a consequence of expanding out of storage tanks to fill the landing bay. Tippet pulled off his helmet, too, then tossed it into the rising cloud of debris. " Sppzzz!" he said, his voice still coming through the communications carrier on her head. "Real air! I was certain I would never breathe it again." He scrabbled at something on his chest, then peeled off the rest of his suit, the motion so resembling an Earthly butterfly emerging from its cocoon that Judy watched in delight, momentarily transported back to her childhood. His wings came off with the suit, and she suddenly realized they were mechanical, but he had his own beneath, which he unfurled as soon as he pulled himself free. They were gorgeous: iridescent blue with swirls of green and red and gold all through them. His body was equally colorful, not at all like the monotonous yellow of his suit.

  "You're—you're beautiful!" she whispered.

  "I feel like I've been coughed up by a plkktt." He used all eight legs to comb his wings and scratch his body simultaneously. "Ahh, that feels better." He flapped his wings a couple of times, then did a figure-eight loop around Judy's helmet and the hyperdrive.

  Air continued to rush into the tank. "We're over-pressurizing the atmosphere to match what we just left,"

  Tippet said, settling down to hover between the hatches. "Will that stop the progress of your bends?"

  "Yeah," Judy said, swallowing to help her ears pop. "We should be all right if nothing in the air kills us. How about the tree?" She could hear plastic protesting and see shadows moving as its roots shifted their grip on the tank.

  At least they were still in free fall. If Tippet's ship had had artificial gravity, that would have been one surprise too many, both for her and the septic tank. And probably for the tree as well.

  "It seems to be trying to find the ground. Do you object if we move your spaceship into one of our gardens, where our passenger might feel more at home?"

  "Go for it," Judy said. What did it matter? They weren't taking the Getaway anywhere else anytime soon, not with a blown seam.

  Allen had removed his helmet as well. Now he pulled open his hatch and pushed his head
out. Judy did the same on her side, ready to duck back if a root or a branch came too close, but the tree was only moving the ends of its limbs. Its trunk stood straight out from the tank at a sixty-degree angle or so from the hatches, and its somewhat bedraggled-looking fronds waved slowly from side to side like seaweed in a tide pool. A dirt-covered root the size of Judy's leg had wrapped itself across the top of the tank between the two hatches, and it was squeezing so hard it was making a dent in the plastic. She couldn't see any bullet holes in its trunk. That was no surprise; given her lack of experience with guns and her agitation at the moment, she would have been surprised if she'd hit anything. At the time she'd been trying to kill it, but now, even after all the damage it had done, she was glad she hadn't. A couple of dozen butterflies riding in the middle of basketball-sized metal frameworks moved in on tiny puffs of compressed air, bumped up against the sides of the tank and the tree, and pushed them toward a slowly widening circular doorway into one of the green oases they had seen from outside. The chamber was irregularly shaped, like a natural cavern. The sides were concave in places, and convex elsewhere, as if other rooms were pushing inward from beyond, and the end opposite where they had come in angled upward for maybe fifty feet in a cascade of ragged terraces like a tumbled-down cliff face. Everything was covered in plants, their leaves glistening with dew, and raindrops floated lazily through the air, softening the edges of the distant corners and glowing like tiny diamonds in the sunlight that flooded in through the huge window off to the left. There weren't any animals in evidence; either there weren't any in this "garden" or they were hiding under the bushes. Judy was glad for the sunlight. The air didn't feel that much warmer in here, and the humidity felt like it was at least ninety percent. She thought about all the trouble she had gone to on the ground to boil water to kill any microbes that were living in it, but that would be pointless here. Here she would be inhaling the water with every breath.

  The thought didn't scare her as much as it might have. Even if she got sick, she imagined Tippet and his cronies could just send some bio-engineered bug into her bloodstream to root out the problem. The cargo handlers zipped around to the other side of the Getaway and brought it and its passengers to a gentle halt against the wall opposite the window. They even oriented it bottom-first. Judy's worldview did a somersault when they bumped the ground; they were still in free fall, but suddenly the window felt like a skylight, with the sun shining down from overhead. The end of one of the tree's roots found the dirt. A little shudder ran all the way up the trunk, then the roots slowly slid away from the tank and burrowed into the ground, pulling the whole tree down until it was anchored in the soil as if it had been there for years.

  The butterflies fired their air jets and pushed the Getaway across the garden to put some space between it and the tree.

  "Thanks," Judy said.

  "You're welcome," Tippet said. She wondered if it was actually Tippet who had spoken, or one of the others.

  They swirled around, swooping playfully in their framework cargo pods, then flew back into the landing bay, closing the door behind them and leaving Tippet, Judy, and Allen alone with the tree. Didn't they have any curiosity? But then she realized that they were getting everything Tippet saw and heard, without the danger. They were Tippet, almost as much so as he was. They could go on about their business and remain here at the same time.

  Tippet fluttered out into the air above Judy's head. "The tree seems to have survived its experience," he said.

  "It'll have a hell of a story to tell its grandchildren," Allen replied. Judy snorted at the image that conjured up: a circle of trees standing around a campfire while they told spooky stories to one another.

  Tippet said, "Let's see if it's more amenable to conversation now. Do we still have the walkie-talkie?"

  41

  Despite his multiple components, sometimes Tippet had a real one-track mind. But Judy supposed he had good reason at the moment: he and his hive-mates had no idea how the tree would behave on board their ship, and the sooner they could learn to communicate with it, the sooner they could relax. Or toss it out the airlock.

  She looked up/out at the porthole. It wasn't exactly an airlock, but she bet it could be opened if necessary. Maybe she would keep her spacesuit on a while longer . . . . She said, "Transmit on the walkie-talkie's frequency," and pushed herself back inside among the debris.

  "What do you want me to say?" The voice came from somewhere low in the tank.

  "Anything. Recite the Gettysburg address."

  "I don't know what that is."

  "Then sing me a—never mind." The walkie-talkie was slowly tumbling past Allen's legs. She snagged it in her left hand and pulled herself partway through the hatch again, holding it out toward the tree.

  Tippet said, "Should I echo some of the speech I recorded on the ground?" Allen shook his head. "Given how it reacted last time you did that, maybe you should say something else."

  "That would be difficult," Tippet replied. "I don't even know the structure of its language yet, much less any of its individual words. But you have a good point. You were getting a response with cardinal numbers; perhaps I should try prime numbers and see what happens." Oh, great, Judy thought. Math again. Why did it always come down to math? She wondered if Columbus had tried prime numbers on the natives when he landed in the Caribbean.

  "It's worth a shot," Allen said.

  The walkie-talkie peeped like a sparrow going for the record on ascending trills. Judy heard no response, and evidently neither did Tippet.

  "Nothing at all," he reported. "Let me try something simpler." The beeps and twitters didn't sound any different to Judy, and apparently the tree wasn't any more excited by these than the earlier ones.

  "Trying simpler yet," Tippet said. This time Judy heard the ascending pattern of beeps, but after a few seconds Tippet said, "Still nothing. This is odd."

  "It's probably going catatonic with shock," Judy said. "After what it's just been through, I wouldn't blame it a bit."

  "Yet Allen got results by banging on the wall while we were still in space." He had, hadn't he? And the tree had been active the whole time, trying to hide its head—well, its leaves—from the sun while the Getaway rotated beneath it. Judy looked at the window, then back to the tree, remembering the way the tree last night had frozen under her flashlight beam, and the way this one and its companions had held their fronds behind them, out of the light, while they charged. Now it held them up to the light, leaves spread wide to gather the sun like any tree.

  "Wait a minute," she said. "Does that window have a shade?"

  "Yes," Tippet answered. "Is the light too bright for you?"

  "Not for me, but I think maybe it is for the tree. We've never seen them move except at night. During the day, they just stand there, even if you cut one down right next to them. I think maybe they only wake up at night."

  Tippet pondered that for a few seconds, then said, "I would have thought of that eventually." The window's inner frame bulged inward, then slowly constricted, covering the clear lens like the iris of an eye.

  Judy wondered if the space they were in had started out as an eye before Tippet s ancestors had genetically engineered the ship for their own needs. She shuddered at the thought, but she supposed it was better than some of the alternatives. The iris wasn't the only contractile muscle in a living body, after all.

  It grew darker in the garden. The iris stopped just short of closed, then a translucent membrane slid across the rest of the gap, leaving a pale white glow about as bright as a crescent Moon. They waited for the tree to react, but after five minutes with no change, Judy found herself growing impatient. And thirsty. She tucked the walkie-talkie under one of the straps holding the parachute to the tank, then ducked back inside and found one of the cans she had filled with water, still wedged into its crevice in the wall. It hadn't boiled dry, but what was left was a lump of ice. She supposed she could melt it with her hands, but she was already too cold. It didn't
seem worth it just for a drink of ice water. On the other hand, the camp stove could solve both problems at once. Normally she wouldn't even think of lighting an open flame on board a spaceship, but Tippet's ship had air to burn. Literally. She patted around with her hands until she found the stove, then stuck her head and arms outside again and set the stove on the flat space between her hatch and Allen's. Heating things could be tricky in zero-gee, but at least the can was mostly enclosed. If she set it spinning above the flame, the heat would be fairly evenly distributed, and the meltwater would flow out to the side of the can. There was enough of a lip that it wouldn't pour out the mouth-hole immediately, and when it did start to escape, she could drink what had liquified and set the can back in the flame.

  "Here," she said to Allen. "Help me hold this down." He obligingly took the butane canister in his hands and pushed it down so the bottom of it was flat against the top of the Getaway. The reaction tried to push him outward, but his spacesuit's backpack wedged against the underside of his hatch and held him in place. Judy braced her feet against the sides of the tank and pushed herself upward until she felt her suit hold fast as well. She made sure Tippet was out of range—he was drifting eight or ten feet above her head and still trying to talk to the tree—then she opened the gas valve and flicked the flint wheel.

  The stove lit with a loud whoosh, and a cone of bright yellow flame roared out six or eight feet from the burner.

  "Yow!" Judy yelled.

  Allen jerked his hands back with a startled "Whoa!"

  Tippet frantically flapped away from the flame, his walkie-talkie voice repeating " tpt-tpt-tpt-tpt-tpt-tpt!"