1

The pool was cool…and inviting. Here, beyond the reach of the Dome, they felt they could break the rules a little… Marta Fernandes could see her face reflected mistily in the clear water. The place was a sun trap, one of the few places on A5 where it was actually warm.
They slipped into the water, feeling its icy bite on their shoulders. There was no danger. ‘Oswald’, the crusty they’d visited as part of their research, was twenty kliks away. The Mission had been a disappointment. They had used a small cam-equipped autonomic tractor to approach the beast, but as Marta had suspected, without the presence of human beings, the creature had paid absolutely no attention. She was all in favour of approaching it in the rova, but Priya urged caution. Although there were out of range of Mission AI’s direct control, Marta conscious of previous events did not push this. They had however, followed the creature at a safe distance, and had observed a previously unreported phenomenon. The animal had come across something…the pale almost-fossilised exoskeleton of a long-dead pseudo-crustacean. The creature had stopped, they’d adjusted the forward cam for maximum zoom to watch it… Gently, tenderly even, the crusty approached what was left of its forebear and touched it, feeling it with its mouth parts… It stayed there for nearly an hour before reluctantly leaving,
“…I think this is quite important…” said Priya in a hushed voice,
“Yes, another piece of the jigsaw…” murmured Marta
“Elephants, back on Earth, do this…” said Priya, “…they recognise the dead of their own species, and come to pay their respects…”
“Another sign that they’re intelligent…?” said Marta
“I think so…”
She had been sitting in the shallows where the water was warm, remembering this. Priya had come over and started splashing her,
“This is fun…!”
“Hey, that’s cold…” protested Marta, which of course started a water fight…
And it was fun…after so much tension, the feeling of release was palpable. Marta sank under the water, she could hear the buzzing in her left ear more clearly now, an unwelcome reminder of recent events.
They had discovered this place on their last Mission Out together, and so far it was their secret. They kept to the shallow part of the pool, as neither of them could swim… This not being thought necessary by their guardians. Later, they lay side by side soaking in the orange rays,
“…Jorja told me the tendril that attached itself to Rai is sort of like a giant neurone…” said Priya,
“Like a nerve cell…in the brain…?” Marta was suddenly all ears,
“That’s the closest analogy we’ve been able to come up with… It somehow seemed to have linked up with the nerves in the solar plexus…”
In the three months since the rescue, the children and their nursemaids had been digesting recent events and discoveries. Rai’s ordeal had implications for them all. The boy had reported vivid dreams during his period of unconsciousness. He had been aware of two distinct presences. The pseudo-crustacean sleeping beside him had seemed like a small flickering candle, faint but visible in the darkness, but overshadowed by a much larger milky luminescence. This was the pod… Rai couldn’t have put it properly into words, but he’d known that the pseudo-plant was somehow aware of him as a separate living entity, and was curious…
“Almost like brushing against the mind of God…” Priya had commented at the time.
Rai was also aware of the pod not as a singular thing, but rather a vast plurality of awareness, linking everything…
Later, or so it seemed to the boy, it had shown him pictures. These were very strange…odd colours and perspectives, but apparently all places on the planet’s surface. The boy’s interface had remained active during all of this, but was incapable of registering what his unconscious mind was experiencing. There was a paradox, Rai had remained in a deep sleep throughout, but yet he dreamed,
“Did Han tell you about his most recent discoveries…?” Priya’s voice brought Marta back to the here and now,
“No…! I haven’t had the opportunity to catch up with him, yet!”
“I think you’ll be interested…you should go and talk to him…”
“Can you give me, like, a heads up…?”
“Well, he’s made more fossil record discoveries. These seem to show a series of mass extinctions, in recent geological times…”
“Tying in with return of Light-out, you mean…!”
“Exactomundo…! And get this, the creatures that went extinct were all the medium sized arthropods…the sort of creatures that our crusties would be expected to prey upon…”
“Assuming that they are indeed carnivorous….!”
“We think they were, physiologically that’s what they appear to have evolved to be, but their prey animals all died out…”
“So, how did they survive…? And what in Alph’s name do they feed on now…?”
“That is the question…”
Priya paused for a moment, lost in thought,
“Seriously Marta, you should talk to him about it…”
“It’s kind of awkward…” said the other girl, “…we don’t really talk…”
“Look, I know he can be a bit childish…a bit boring sometimes when he’s going on about machines and tech things…” Priya looked serious,
“But, he’s alright really…since he’s been with Su-ying he’s started to turn into a human being…she’s been really good for him…”
Marta still looked doubtful,
“There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there…?”
Marta groaned inwardly, she could never keep anything secret from Priya,
“…it’s kind of embarrassing…” Priya was giving her that look, so she knew she couldn’t turn back now,
“Well, back before we met the others… Uh, I was sort of interested in him for a while…”
“What happened…? Tell me…!”
“Well, you and Sal…and Jorja and Rai were an item…so that left Han…!”
“Did he…did he come on to you…?” Priya looked amazed,
“Well, no…! The other way ’round, actually…”
“Oh my God…! What did he say…?”
“Well, I don’t think he even noticed…?” Marta hung her head in shame,
“Never good for a girl’s ego…” Priya paused, “…look, if he didn’t even notice, then what’s there to be embarrassed about…? After all you’ve got Jorge, now…!”
Priya could see Marta was still not happy,
“Marta, things are OK between you and Jorge…?”
Her natural tendency to want to keep things to herself warred with her need to tell someone,
“Priya…if I tell you…it goes no further…you can’t even tell Sal… Promise me…!”
“I promise…!”
“Well…sometimes with Jorge…I just feel…I just feel like I’m his nurse…..”
“I’m sure he doesn’t see you like that…”
“…and I don’t even know…when the time comes, if he’s going to be able to do anything…!”
“This is all to do with what Jorja said, isn’t it…?”
Marta nodded mutely, tears weren’t far away,
“Look Marta, Jorge isn’t paraplegic…he can feel down there, it’s just his legs don’t respond to what his brain is trying to tell them…when the time comes I’m sure it’ll be OK… And I did talk to Jorja about what she said…and I made it clear to her that’s it’s not alright…that you’re my friend, too…and if she ever says anything like that again…then, I’ll just stop talking to her…!”
Priya had put her arm ’round her friend,
“It’s OK, It’s really OK…things will work out…”
After that they decided to have another dip…their failure to engage ‘Oswald’ had left the girls with some time to kill. The water felt lovely and Marta started to feel better. Their splashing game was taking them further towards the middle of the pool. Marta was furthest out, and facing the shore. She stepped back on the sandy bottom…and the sand wasn’t there…
Losing her footing completely she fell backwards into the pool…she could hear Priya’s shout of alarm just as the waters closed over her… She seemed to go down forever, the buzzing in her ear increased sharply in volume…thrashing about wildly she reached for the bottom that wasn’t there before her buoyancy took her back up… As she broke the surface she tried to yell but all she could do was cough and splutter as she tried to rid herself of the water she had swallowed,
“Hang on…! I’m coming to get you…”
She could see Priya waist-deep wading towards her before she went down again… This time she managed to hold her breath while her mad thrashing drove her to the surface again,
“Priya…..!” she managed to gasp before going down for the third time…she was now very frightened,
’…didn’t going down for the third time mean that was it….you were going to drown…’
She was trying to hold her breath but the pounding and buzzing inside her head was increasing in volume all the time, and she knew she would have to breathe in,
Something knocked against her and like the proverbial drowning man she grabbed at this straw…the thing felt smooth and soft…suddenly she felt herself being pulled forward and she broke surface again just in time to heave in an almighty breath… Priya rose from the water a metre from her,
“Grab my hand…”
Marta did, and for a horrible moment she almost pulled the younger girl off her feet, but Priya stood firm and Marta’s foot suddenly struck the bottom…
They hugged for ages and then Priya helped her to the shore…she sat there gasping and coughing,
“…I think I swallowed some water…” she finally managed to say,
“Don’t ever do that again…don’t ever scare me like that again…”
Priya, normally so calm and sensible, had started hitting her really hard… Marta hugged her close to make her stop and the younger girl burst into tears,
“Thanks…thanks for saving me…” she whispered.
Later, after they dried off and dressed, Marta asked her friend how she’d managed to reach her,
“Well, I tried to reach you with my hand, but I couldn’t get close enough…and, I wasn’t sure where the deep bit started, so I ducked my head under the water…” Priya paused, “…I could see the edge, and I could see you in the water…so I sat down and looked for something to hang onto… There was a rock near the edge…so I grabbed hold of it and pushed my legs out towards you…”
“That was your foot, then…that I grabbed on to…”
“Then, I just used my legs to pull you towards me…”
“I don’t think we should tell the Nurses about this…” said Marta,
“More secrets…”
“I know, but they’ll probably ground us for a month if we do…” Marta said this with a smile,
“I see it takes more than nearly drowning to rob you of your sense of humour…”
“Seriously, we’re going to have to come up with a story to account for our time today… Lazing by the pool…water fights, and life saving don’t come under normal Mission protocols…”
Their location today was fairly close to the Dome, but behind a ridge of low hills that left the area beyond in radio shadow…and no-one had yet thought to place a ground station on the ridge,
“We’ll have to extend the time we followed the crusty for…” said Marta as they drove home,
“Won’t Earthcomm downlink have been tracking us…?”
“Hmm, good thinking… OK, we found something interesting in the rocks, a new species of arthropod or something…but it scuttled under a stone and we lost it…”
“Yeah, and we spent absolutely ages looking for it…”
They drove in silence for a while,
“Have you spoken much to Rai…?” asked Marta,
“Yes, but only when Jorja’s been there…never on his own…”
“How’s he doing…?”
“He’s different, the whole experience just seems to have changed him, somehow….!”
“How so…?”
“Well, he was always moody, and sometimes a bit withdrawn…but now he just doesn’t seem there a lot of the time…”
Marta sighed. This was all rather academic to her, most of the time Rai definitely hadn’t been there as far as she was concerned. Except when making hurtful comments, he’d been an absence rather than a presence in her life. However, when she stopped to think about it, there had been times when she’d been able to break through…the time in the foxhole, the ride home after they’d found the infant crusty…she wondered if he was still opening his Earthside packets. Priya was speaking again,
“But his experience…it changes the game…completely…”
“What do you mean…?”
Priya was speechless for a second,
“I sometimes despair of you…some of that water must have got to your brain…! It means amongst other things, that its not just the crusties that are intelligent… We have evidence that the pods individually, or possibly collectively, constitute an even more powerful intelligence…maybe even a world consciousness…”
“That’s assuming that you accept that there is some sort of objective reality to Rai’s experience…that he wasn’t just interpreting a unique event in terms he could understand… Imagining or dreaming it, in other words…”
“You’re forgetting that Rai wasn’t actually dreaming when he experienced these things…he wasn’t in REM sleep…!”
“Honestly Priya, you’re supposed to be a scientist…we have no proof that any of these things are true, and how do we know that he wasn’t in REM sleep some of the time… We’ve only got Jorja’s word for it, and she wasn’t with him all the time…”
“Why can’t you accept that this was an attempt at communication…? In any case his interface record proves he didn’t enter REM sleep…!”
“Look, he was affected by the sap, a powerful narcotic… Then the thing attached itself to him and put him in a coma…”
“OK, explain this! How did he know the crusty was there, what drew him into the grove in the first place…? You’ve heard what Sal and Jorja saw, the crusty was really well hidden…he couldn’t have found it by accident…”
“…some sort of pheromone…” Marta thought she was on shaky ground here,
“…and what about the fact that the pod linked directly to his central nervous system…why would it do that…? In fact why would it attach itself to him at all…?”
“Maybe to feed on him…”
“Now who’s being unscientific…! We have no evidence for that at all… Rather than harming him it appears the pseudo-plant was sustaining him…”
“OK…! I accept that there’s obviously some kind of symbiotic relationship going on here…between the pods and the crusties…which Rai just sort-of piggy-backed…”
“So the pod just mistook him for a crusty…” Priya was incredulous. Marta was starting to feel uncomfortable, she didn’t like arguing with Priya,
“But can’t you see, what we’ve found out already is remarkable enough…about the relationship between the pods and the crusties… If what Han has reported is true, then this could explain how the creatures have managed to survive, when their prey animals…when all the medium sized arthropods disappeared… They probably developed this symbiotic relationship during this period of extreme ecological stress, and started getting nourishment from the pods to supplement their diet…”
“What I can’t see is what the pseudo-plants get out of this arrangement…” said Priya,
“Well that’s what we, or rather you, need to find out…the point I’m making is that this is all remarkable enough…without bringing in world consciousness, or some kind of spiritual dimension…!”
And that was it in a nutshell. Priya believed in the existence some kind of spiritual or higher plane…Marta, the arch rationalist, did not…

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2

No-one was waiting to greet them when they returned. They’d half expected Nurse Gee to be there, with lots of awkward questions… But, in truth, their Mission wasn’t high priority, behavioural experiments on crusties were now taking a back seat to analysis of the pod groves… Rai and Han had gone out to collect more samples of pseudo-plant material on the same day and had left behind an array of sophisticated sensors, designed to detect the so-far unknown means of communication apparently being used by several Alphane life forms…and they went by ’plane,
“I suppose they’ll catch up with us at the next briefing…” said Marta,
“If they can be bothered…” said Priya over her shoulder as she left…
Marta headed for Jorge’s quarters,
“Hi…! Did you have a good trip…?”
“Please hug me and I’ll tell you about it…”
“What’s the matter…?”
“Well, the Mission was a bust for a start…! The crusty paid no attention at all to our robot, as I said it wouldn’t…and I argued with Priya…and…I nearly drowned…!”
“You what…”
“…I said I nearly drowned…” said Marta in a small voice,
“Come here…”
Marta sat on Jorge’s lap while she told him…she felt safe in his arms,
“…I never felt so scared…even when I was with Rai in the foxhole…even when the crusty was outside the tent …” she had started shaking again,
“Hush, you’re here now…you’re safe…” Jorge stroked her hair, “…have you told Nurse Gee…?”
“No, I’d rather she didn’t know what we really get up to on our Missions Out…and I don’t think she’s bothered…other stuff’s far too important…”
“You mean Rai and Han…”
“Yes, sap is now flavour of the month…” Marta paused, “…bad puns aside, it seems ironic really, I survive getting caught outside during Light-out, I escape a horrible death at the hands of massed crusties…but then I nearly die because of a stupid accident…”
They were silent then for a while, before Jorge spoke again,
“What did you argue with Priya about…?”
“It was stupid, really…! We were talking about Rai’s dreams…visions, whatever you want to call them…and she went all spiritual on me…”
“What do you mean, spiritual…?”
“Well, she starts talking about the pods having some sort of world consciousness…I mean, that’s such a huge leap to take, based purely on the dreams of an adolescent boy under the influence of a powerfu…”
“You think he’s making it up…?”
“Well, no…I wouldn’t put it past him, mind…but I don’t think he’s got the imagination…”
“Well, I wasn’t there, obviously…” said Jorge, “…but there are an awful lot of unanswered questions… There’s the whole question of how he found the sleeping crusty, in the first place…”
“Yes, Priya said that…”
“…there’s the fact that pods in a particular grove are physically linked… There’s the structure of the tendril, its similarity to animal nerve tissue…the fact it was linked to the pseudo-crustacean…and did the same to Rai…there’s the composition and the narcotic effect of the sap…” he smiled, “…and there’s Rai’s own account of his dreams…and, as you pointed out, he hasn’t got the imagination to come up with that story on his own…!”
“But, I just get the impression everyone’s putting two and two together and coming up with twenty two all the time… We have to maintain perspective…we’re scientists, we collect data…we do experiments…we shouldn’t be trying to find God every other minute…”
“I think it’s an occupational hazard…”
“Of what, being a scientist…?”
“No, going into space…they say all the original Apollo astronauts…you know, the ones that landed on the moon, they all ended up finding God…”
“I don’t know about you, but apart from a few airplane flights, I’ve kept my feet firmly on this planet…”
“You know what I mean…”
“I know…I’m sorry…being terrified has this way of bringing out my sarcastic side…”
“We know so little about this world…” continued Jorge, “…even the Polynesians when they landed on Easter Island, had some idea what to expect… We are like the Polynesians in many ways…they couldn’t go back, neither can we… The Island became their whole world, as this is ours…but this world may be stranger than anyone could imagine…!”
Marta shivered, she had a sudden vision of a campfire around which they all sat, feeling the heat on their faces…seeing the other faces illuminated by the flickering firelight…while all around lay an immense blackness,
“I don’t think we can explain everything in purely rational, material terms…” said Jorge, “…think of a planet as a vast gestalt…greater than the sum of its constituent parts… It’s been here for millions of years, I hesitate to say waiting for us, because I don’t think that’s true…let’s say minding its own business, when something completely new…completely unanticipated, comes along…and the gestalt has started to notice, started to react…”
“That sounds to me like you think the planet is somehow alive…that it’s some kind of planetary spirit…”
“…I wouldn’t put it quite in those terms, but an ecosystem is a living thing…and may react in ways that are analogous to the way an organism reacts… But beyond all that, the way things work on the subatomic…on the quantum level, is not something we really understand…or maybe it’s just not something we’re are even capable of understanding, in purely rational terms… What we call the spiritual plane is maybe our unconsciousness’ way of interpreting those things for us… “
“…so at the end of the day, Rai’s dreams may be worth more than all our science…?”
“‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy…’”

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Rai approached Marta three days later, he was typically brusque,
“Fem, me chaan yo bat…!”
“Kase, hom…! What do you want to talk about…?”
“In here…” said Rai, switching reluctantly to Standard. They sat down in the empty training room,
“Jorja says I’ve got to deal with it…she says they’re not going to go away…”
Marta went completely still,
“…who’s not going to go away, Rai…?”
“Who d’ye think…? The chodan babies, of course…”
“Those would be our children, then…?” said Marta carefully… Rai looked for a moment as if he was going to storm off again, but the mood passed,
Yes…those…” he said quietly,
“What do you want to say about them…?”
“I’ve been thinking…about what Gee said, about them needing a name…and about us being the one’s to name them… And I think it’s time…!”
She could see what an effort it had been for him to say those few words,
“Yes, Rai…I think it’s time…”
“So, will you think of some…”
Not sure if this was an order or a question, she thought for a moment before replying,
“I think we should name one each… Get Jorja to help you…”
And with that he was gone, Marta took his parting grunt as a yes. She sat in the deserted room after that,
‘How does one go about naming a child…? How do you name your first children, born on a new planet….were there rules for this…etiquette…?’ It was suddenly all too much,
‘We are making this up as we go along…!’ she thought, ‘…and the responsibility is too hard to bear…’

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Chapter 14. Significant Others >>