Chapter Nine--THE WETLANDS

 

 

The Keeper of the Dawn launched the sun at the horizon. Another day of precious life had begun. In six days the inheritance of all Atlantis would be carried into space or risk incineration.

Ari regarded the vague jungle pathway as if it were taking him into undiscovered country or out onto vast uncharted seas. Despite the fellowship of his two friends, part of him felt like a lone pioneer. This was his Pangea. He was schooled in it and in the twists and turns of the trail. Yet this was a fresh exploration of his ancestral home. Each day held its own mysteries. This morning led through low musk-scented wetlands.

In the warm moist lowlands, tall ferns and seas of leafy vegetation hugged the trail, covering it in places. Soft and fuzzy, hard and thorny, the fronds alternately caressed and scratched at them. Their anti-gravity suits were good protection, a shield from the green needles that poked through endless verdant waves.

Ari's consciousness still hid under a psychic veil of forgetfulness. He struggled to lift it. He would gladly have suffered the sting of a thousand nettles if their sharp prodding had pricked him into awareness of the foggy memory that slipped too quickly, too easily into a blurry camouflage green.

This was a land of horsetail reeds, cycads, and wild magnolia bushes. They clogged the trail, making passage difficult. To the young that was a challenge. It drew their efforts as naturally as it attracted scattered seeds from tangled jungle winds, pulling them deep into procreative soils.

The trail skirted hot fetid swamps. Deeply buried pits of sodden rot gave rise to a foul steam, rising just high enough for the filtered sunlight to transform it into opaque mists. A lingering mirage of sweltering mists of time played on rain-slicked panes of air.

Here and there the bog overtook the trail. They had little choice but to step ankle deep into thick, sucking ooze. The muscled frame which Face had chosen was excellent for this terrain. He could easily have outdistanced Yu and Ari, forging ahead or waiting for them to catch up. Because that would have irritated Ari, Face went a short distance, turned and walked back to them. Ari found that infuriating.

When he reached them, Face sloshed into a sticky pivot and glided backwards through the glue binding his friends. He'd amuse himself now and again by literally running circles around them.

Ari bit his tongue as he slogged away for miles. He couldn't stand it anymore. The word blasted out. “Show off!"

"I'm not showing off. Braggarts flaunt the ease with which they do something difficult. This is easy for me. Besides, I have no choice. I have to face you."

Heated silence greeted his pun. Missing a friendly groan, he continued, "One might say I'm face-ile. My face-ility matches my agility!"

Ari couldn't resist a small smile.

Yu laughed outright, sliding into the obvious rhyme as easily as Face slipped along on the mud in a carefree glissade. "Your agility is a product of your imbecility."

Face took no offense. "Indeed it is. The ease with which I slip along simply reflects my simplicity. I take the mud at face value! By staying on its surface, I don't take the time to delve into it. Prove yourself worthy"

Ari grumbled, "You could inspire worth!"

Face insisted. "Would you choose to grovel before me as you do before the mud? You know nothing will stick to your anti-gravity suits. But you see the stickiness of the mud and are caught in an illusion of how you think it will behave. It is as though you need for this to be difficult, choosing adversity. You know that even when your suit is turned off the inside stays cool. Yet you also know that you are in a hot jungle and burden yourself with that knowledge. I suffer no such tribulation, because I do stay on the surface. I suffer no hardships. I am not handicapped by misfortune. I suffer no difficulty from my limp, because I chose it. You still see it as a handicap, a quirky and perhaps endearing affliction, but an affliction none-the-less."

"I admit your limp is an affliction I regard with affection." Ari softened just a bit.

"You are catching yourself in your own cleverness and missing the thought." Having had his say, Face grew bored with retracing the trail to play tag with them. He glided down the trail, out into their future, just beyond their sight, but not really leaving them.

They slogged onward. Finally, Yu turned from her efforts to see the familial skull face at shoulder level against multicolored ferns. Yu wondered how many hues of green there were in the world.

Face glowed, a signal he was about to speak. "You two look uncomfortable."

Yu's big baldhead glistened with sweat as she struggled in the mud. "You’d be uncomfortable too if you had a body of flesh and bone — if you knew better!"

"Are you saying it takes flesh and bone to have intelligence?"

"No," Yu snapped with displeasure. "And apparently it doesn't take flesh and bone to rise above your struggle!"

"But it does take flesh and bone to have a struggle!" Face was jousting with Yu and winning.

That further irked the impressionable youth. "What are you doing here anyway, Face?"

"Just checking on my trail mates.” He flickered at Yu, “I understand Ari being caught in the mud, but a Yutan should know better than to get stuck in the shadows of Ari's illusions."

Knee deep in muck, Ari stopped and grinned. What humor Ari gleaned from this escaped Yu. She was still smarting from Face's parting patter.

Paradoxically they were taking Face as Face, but in the wrong way. They assumed that the real reason he could move on the surface of the mud had to do with the chemical properties of being a SIC, not with the way that his intelligence made him perceive the mud.

"Play with it," Face instructed them. He bent and scooped up some mud, structuring it with his fingers into a slippery mass that took on the form of a toy familiar to children. He easily held the wiggler in his hand and lightly tossed it to Ari.

Predictably Ari caught it reflexively, but then had it squirt from his grip and rebound to Yu. Yu also caught it, only to have it immediately elude her.

"You've been playing with wigglers since you were babes and you still can't grasp them. Or more correctly, the problem is that you do grasp them and so you can't hold on to them."

Anger made Ari seize even more firmly at the sloppy glob Yu had volleyed back to him. It sped away at still greater velocity.

"You just can't resist grabbing up difficulty," Face said, easing his way down the trail.

Hours later, they struggled onto solid ground. Face caught their attention with a glimmer of green.

"Where did you disappear to?" Yu asked.

"I didn't. I’m always here. You just weren't looking in the right place. The wiggler no sooner hit the dirt than your eyes glued themselves to the goo."

Yu brightened. Whether her mood lift was due to the firm footing or fleeting jokes by Face was debatable.

The trail narrowed, bound on all sides by yellow and emerald reeds. It bent right, then left, before it shot straight up, forcing the friends to walk single file.

It was time for a break. Yu, ever the scientist, noted the flora. She twirled a small yellow flower bud. "It’s too long since I’ve been with Nature! New things are developing in our old world. After untold millions of years of green plants that had produced spores and even seeds without flowers, here’s a new blossom."

Face studied it along with them. "It is fresh-faced and so it is kith to me, though I am without natural kin. So as friends, are ye kindred to it, facing your own unborn sons as you bloom."

“You’re both really nuts,” Ari jibbed. He wanted to close his eyes for just a few minutes. Wonders could wait.

Warming to his subject with increasingly shameless wordplay, Face swept his glistening green arms outward expansively. "This small flower makes me feel so one with you and the whole world that I could just kith you all."

Yu leveled him with a mock stare of disdain. "Growing things are better than groaning things."

Ari studied a crimson bough with yellow sides and sea-green phloem. "Our magnolias are perfect."

Yu voiced an unexpected passion. "They are engineered! DNA enriched! This little guy here is natural. This jungle is a spawning pool of rampant growth.”

Ari noticed his friend’s pulsing vein. “Don’t have a meltdown.”

“We can’t let it perish.” Yu’s wide eyes grew righteous. “We can’t allow the extinction of our world just when it's beginning to blossom."

Ari tried to console her. “You’re a good Protector Yu. Nature’s abandoned children will bloom in your care no matter where you are in the universe. What is that piece of poetry? ‘As flowers bloom but a day and die, we are all ephemerons, dancing down the wind of day. Nature’s wrath marks us as expendable beings”

Returning to the trail, the three companions paced side by side in unusual quiet. By late morning they were deep in rain forest. Thick tree trunks covered with climbing vines supported a ranging, waving canopy thirty meters overhead.

Ari sighed with relief. "This cool air is delectable."

"At least you know enough to savor it, even if you won’t gloss your way over mud." Face meant it as a compliment.

"Hear that?" Ari asked as a dead branch snapped underfoot, followed by the husky crunch of dried leaves. "The air may still be wet, but the ground is firm."

"The Earth here chooses to slant just as I do." Face exaggerated the tilt of his limp. "When there’s too much rain, it lets it roll downhill to form the wetlands below. The ease it gives you now created the grief you slogged through to get here."

Without sun, the forest floor was free of vegetation, giving all firm footing. The humid air hung heavy on them, thick with the musty smell of rotting plants. The swamp below exuded a fluvial, foul breath of corruption. Bubbling muck reached out everywhere with its stench. Although their anti-gravity suits cooled them, Ari and Yu felt the fetid air cling to their faces like a noxious sticky curse.

"No sweat!" Face urged, seeing his friends' energy wilt. "I'm the only limp one!" His gimpy cheerleading nudged them forward.

Finally they started to move quickly. Ari immediately grew careless, tripping on a hidden root. He crashed into the gnarled brown arms of the tree.

As Yu helped him up, Face saw Ari was unscathed except for a bruised ego. ""What a brilliant discovery! You have stumbled upon yourself. Better to break a fall than break a bone!"

Ari didn't have time to respond. Misfortune shrouded them. His Bioisomer Deflector dangled on his arm, irrevocably smashed. It could no longer veil Ari with a photosynthetic aura of plant life, providing camouflage as effective as Nature’s own. The tree that saved Ari from injury had claimed the device as payment for its services.

"It's a goner," Yu pronounced, weighing the fateful price the misadventure had exacted.

Ari's swift conclusion was inevitable. "We have to stay off the main trails. The going will be rougher."

Yu nodded. "It's worth the delay. If we're careful, we’ll only be a bit more detectable from above. Face's deflector is the most critical, since he gives off so much energy."

Yu tilted her chin, causing a ray of sunlight to bounce off her hairless head. "Even turned off, our anti-gravity suits conceal energy. We may not be as bad off as we thought!"

As she checked their energy flow her mood shifted back to dismay. "The solar seals aren't providing energy to the bio-isomers. Something’s wrong. Not even a swamp should corrupt the internal workings."

"I do wish we had checked the solar energy seals."Given the emphasis Face placed on we,” he might as well have said, "I wasn't consulted in your preparation of this adventure -- I'm the last to know anything!”

"Is that vital?" Ari asked.

"What should I do with you, Ari? Vital! The solar energy seals prevent moisture from entering the bioisomer deflectors. Moisture is corrosive! Even a clutch of nymphs knows that! The dampness is already making it shut-off periodically. I didn't have time to get an extra set of seals."

Ari observed Yu's thought vein pulse. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know. I'm missing something. There's something here I'm not getting."

"Changing paths is always choosing a different future," Face offered.

"It's more than that. Something’s just out of sight here."

"Hopefully we are invisible and will remain so." Face paused. "What’s the longest anyone ever kept a secret?"

"This is no time for riddles." Ari slipped the broken pieces of his shattered armband into a zippered pocket, as he strode down the trail. "Let's get tracking."

Face and Yu regarded each other. Neither moved.

Ari pivoted toward them. "What?"

Face replied, "It’s wise to know not only where you're going but how to get there."

Ari felt properly chided. "Let's just get off the trail. Who knows what frequencies they’re monitoring?"

"I don't think we can even be sure what frequencies they aren't monitoring. Face is right. What’s the longest anyone ever has kept a secret?"

Ari stared at the flickering sun in the underbrush, looking for the best opening. He chose a bare spot and walked toward the scimitar-eaten sun. "At least if we follow the sun, we’re going West. We can redirect ourselves without resorting to technology."

Yu followed into the brush, in agreement with Ari’s choice.

Face was on his heels too. "You’re right. We shouldn't call up a holomap."

Unlike her clan, Yu’s ways were rooted in Nature. This was a chance for Yu to reaffirm her faith. "If creatures smaller than my thumb can migrate thousands of miles, the three of us should be able to triangulate our position and path."

As soon as they were out of scanning range of the trail, they stopped. Ari flicked his hair back. Yu widened her thought vein. Face's skull face softened, a bone mask becoming permeable. In silent consensus, they focused inward, while stretching their arms out, touching fingertips. What had once been a child's salute to their friendship had evolved into a synergistic tripling. Three races, three sets of unique and elaborate genetic capabilities conjoined. They stretched their minds to encompass each other. Gradually they merged into a unity of thought, connecting in chrysalis-like clarity. They faced the perils of an inner journey.