By its Best Names
The white hull of the Bullmoose reflected the orange light of a nearby star as it hurtled through space. The ship was shaped like a hammer, with a large, sweeping prow and thin cylindrical body. The star, Delta Piscium, burned with a coppery luster, and its planets circled slowly- much slower than the Sol system. DP-C, the second planet in the system, took just over two hundred and forty-six Earth years to orbit its home star. Thick white clouds covered the planet. It looked like a pearl illuminated by the light of a candle. The vast blackness of space hung behind it, and Sharon, looking out her window, imagined the planet hanging from the enormous, invisible ear of a goddess.
“We’ll be landing shortly,” an attendant said to her.
Sharon pulled her eyes away from the dark vista out her window and answered the attendant.
“Thank you. Would you mind getting me another motion pill? I tend to get sick on orbital entries.”
The attendant nodded and left.
Around Sharon, the cool white and blue of the cabin contrasted the fiery light from the star that came through the window. The other passengers were mostly company men, and they were so used to commuting from one star system to another that most of them were sleeping. They wouldn’t even wake up when the ship decelerated into orbit.
The only person in her line of sight that was awake was another scientist. She met him only briefly in the spaceport before they left, but he seemed nice enough. What was his name? Logan? Luthor?
“Excuse me,” she ventured, “Mr… Logan?”
The man perked up, “Yes! Henri Logan.”
“Have you been to DP-C before?” she asked.
Mr. Logan had been reading a book, but he folded it neatly away and sat in the empty seat next to Sharon. He was almost as grey and dusty as his book, but he seemed nice.
“Yes Miss, eh…”
“Proust. Sharon Proust. Sorry. Once I get nervous all civility goes out the window,” she glanced nervously at the thick pane of aluminum glass next to her, “so to speak.”
“It’s fine,” he laughed, “it took me a while to get used to the trips. Are you here with the survey team?”
“Yes.”
“Me too. Mason Materials pays well don’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m not here on their money,” she said.
“Oh? A government agent ey? I guess it puts bread on the table.”
She nodded and searched for a clever answer but one never came.
“Here you are ma’am,” the cruising attendant returned with her pills and Sharon took them gratefully. The last thing she needed was to be vomiting into her own esophagus as the ship hit two or three g’s on orbital entry.
“Hey,” Henri noted her discomfort, “don’t worry about it. I do this all the time. Best thing to do is to think about something else, that’s why I bring a book and sit away from the windows. Staring out into forever has a way of making people imagine the worst.”
“I know. I know. I’ve been on my share of transports, but I can never seem to get used to it.”
“You bring a book?” he asked.
“Yes actually. I’ve been neglecting it.”
She pulled out her orbital phone, then smacked her head.
“No! I forgot. This isn’t my phone. I bought it at the gate before we left. I forgot mine at home. So clumsy of me.”
“Ah, a shame. Too bad we’re too far away for a signal to reach the net. Otherwise, you could just download one.”
“Yes… how long would a signal from here take to get to the beaming network anway?” she pondered.
“Well we’re three hundred light-years and change from Earth, but only about ten light-years away from the beaming network. Once it’s at the beaming network, the station can use its faster-than-light engine to transport a data block back home. So… it would take a decade for the signal to reach the station, a few seconds for the station to bounce a signal probe back to the central relay, a few seconds back and then another decade of regular-light speed signal back here. You think you can wait twenty years for your book?”
“Ha! Well it took the author twenty years to write it, so it would only be polite. I can wait.”
“Twenty years! Sounds like a monolith.”
“Not so bad. It’s an old bit of science fiction. Some scientists find a crashed alien sphere in South America…”
“And they took it apart and sold it for millions of dollars right?” a young woman in a white jacket, tight collar, and green pants said as she approached the couple.
“Tellara!” Henri said.
“Good to see you again Henri,” she gave him a peck on the cheek, then she looked down at Sharon.
“Well? What happens in the book? Do the scientists get rich?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t finished it yet,” Sharon said.
“Ah, well if you do, let me know. I hate cliffhangers. I’m Tellara by the way. I run this little skiff.”
“A bit more than a skiff isn’t it?” Sharon asked, indicating the massive interior of the ship.
“Ah, she’s alright. The Bullmoose was military surplus so the company got it on the cheap. I had her cleaned up, put a few thousand of my own cred in actually. I love her. You seen her from outside?”
“Yes, while I was boarding.”
“That’s the way she was meant to be seen, from the bridge of an enemy cruiser. The jarheads back in the navy shipyards really know how to make an imposing profile.”
“Are we planning on intimidating any vessels out here?” Sharon asked.
Henri and Tellara laughed.
“I guess not,” she said, “you’re with the survey team right?”
“Yes.”
“Good, you and Henri will be working together in this sector,” Tellara handed a folder with some maps and papers in it to Sharon.
“Look it over before you go down. You’ll only have about six or seven hours there before the return trip.”
“I was told I had two days to complete the survey!”
“I’m sorry. Company orders. Mason Materials has to have us shipping back Earthways in a day. We’re just here to drop off the new construction team. Your survey is ancillary to the company’s concerns.”
“As a representative of the Terran Ecological Impact Committee, I’m afraid that you’re incorrect.”
“Oh?” Tellara crossed her arms and her eyebrow cocked like a revolver.
Sharon held her ground.
“Mason Materials does not have final say over the duration of my survey. TEIC must complete its twenty-year review of Mason Materials' impact on the local ecology. Everything that humans bring down to that planet comes back up when the mining operation is done. No dumping, no garbage. Not so much as a fingernail should be left out of place in any areas not designated for mining. If my report is not favorable, then the Bullmoose won’t be dropping anyone off, it will be bringing everyone back.”
Tellara’s pleasant demeanor couldn’t decide if it wanted to stay pasted to her face or fall off and plop to the floor like a wet towel.
Finally, Henri broke the tension.
“Well as a private surveyor, I can assure Miss Proust that Mason Materials is an extremely conscientious company, and I am sure they will have no issue extending your survey time.”
Tellara leaned casually against the seat back of the next row of chairs, but Sharon noticed her knuckles were white.
“Yes!” Tellara said with a smile, “you do what you need to do, file whatever it is you need to file. We’ll give you all the time you need.”
Orbital entry was smooth, but two g’s of deceleration, then the fiery vortex of plasma, and the rocking motion of the ship making a vertical landing were a bit too much for Sharon. She managed to keep her lunch down, but she was sweating fiercely and her vision swayed. It took her several minutes just to stand up.
She joined Henri who had packed her things for her.
“Have your orbital phone?” he teased.
She checked her pockets and found the device right where it should be.
“Thanks. Wouldn’t want to forget that again.”
They got in a small silver transport ship that looked somewhat like a flattened take-out container. The pilot called it a “puddle jumper” and affectionately referred to it as “Skip”, but the name on the side of the ship was Beagle. From the air, they could see the full scope of the Mason Materials facility. Massive transport lines carrying expertly extracted freight spread like roots from a low stump of steel and glass. The central processing facility was a city of drones. It bustled with robotic highways, busses of mining robots, schools of repair drones swimming like fish through the highrises of silos, and ships waiting to lift off.
After a one-hour flight to a continent on the south end of the planet, Sharon and Henri were finally released to their destination. The processing facility was thousands of miles away now, and its influences should be undetectable this far away.
She grabbed her bag from the Beagle and reviewed the sector on her map. They were close to the ocean. First, they would take water samples at the shoreline, then soil samples every kilometer for ten kilometers inland. Finally, they would do a chemical analysis of various plants to test chemical absorption.
All that would easily take a day, but since they were starting late, they’d only get a couple hours of work in. It would be at least forty hours before she could finish the task.
“If only we could take some chainsaws to the foliage, right?” the pilot said as he kicked a thick fern-shaped plant out of the way of his cockpit door.
“You didn’t need to get out of the ‘puddle jumper’,” Sharon said.
“I needed to stretch my legs, lady. Give a guy a break. I’ll be right back. Gotta take a leak.”
The pilot started in the direction of some tree-shaped plants but Sharon called to him.
“Excuse me! You absolutely may not urinate on the foliage! Get back here this instant and use the facilities on the transport!”
The pilot rolled his eyes.
“Come on, if you were cooped up in a hunk of metal like that all week you’d want to piss on the leaves too.”
“And what if those ‘leaves’ contain pressure-sensitive pockets like the Impatiens capensis? What if it can fill the air with microscopic needles that stab your prick with neurotoxin, like Dendrocnide moroides? You want to feel like your balls were cut off for two days while they swell up like tomatoes?”
The pilot put his hands up and marched back into the ship.
Henri leaned over to Sharon and whispered.
“Dendrocnide moroides doesn’t have airborne toxins.”
“It does if you wipe your ass with it,” she said.
That kept Henri laughing the whole way to the shoreline.
By the time they reached the shore, it was nighttime, and they had to set up camp in the dark. Their transport ship couldn’t land on account of the soft sand and changing tides, so it had to set down two kilometers into the jungle.
Sharon deferred to Henri’s expertise for most of the journey, but she cataloged the plant species she saw along the way, matching them with the observations of previous survey teams.
As they sat next to the camp heater and ate their dinner, Sharon marveled at some of the species she had seen.
“Did you know there is a type of vine here that grows in the direction of a specific sound? Apparently, there is a slow-moving arboreal primatoid that lives in the canopy of the jungle, and it nests in the same place for several years. Its droppings are powerful fertilizer, so the plant has adapted to detect the sound of that creature’s calls and contract the cells on that side of the stem, causing it to bend toward the nest!”
Henri nodded.
“I came across a patch of it once. There was a mine shaft that had been experiencing intermittent power loss. Some of that vine had crept into the ventilation shaft and wound its way up and into the wires. The echoing of the drones sounded similar enough to the call of monkeys that the vine couldn’t tell the difference and followed the sound all the way up through the shaft. I had to relocate the whole patch.”
“A shame you couldn’t relocate the mine,” she said.
“We do what we must and call it by the best names,” he sighed and finished his prepackaged dinner.
The “morning” of the next day went by quickly even though days last thirty hours on DP-C. Sharon and Henri collected water samples, soil specimens, and even cataloged a new species of… critter.
It had the hard exoskeleton of an insect, but two legs on either side like a mammal, and white keratinous growths similar to feathers on the upper portions of its legs. Its face had three eyes, with two forward-facing and one smaller one on the top. They were black and probably compound.
Despite its small size, it packed a powerful bite and was able to snap a small twig in half with its pincers. Sharon dubbed it “Fortis avem arachnis”, or “Harpy Spider” for short.
“Powerful bird spider…” Henri mumbled to himself, “if we find anything else like that I’m finding a new job.”
After a midday nap, meal, and radio check with the transport, they continued the last part of their survey. Sharon was able to see that strange audiophilic plant and even got to see it move when she imitated the call of the primatoid.
“Strange we don’t hear any of those Lemur Sloths. Usually, they don’t shut up,” Henri said.
“They must not be active this time of year,” she said, making a note of it in her logs.
“What did you call them?”
“Lemur Sloths,” Henri said.
“Cute! Sounds like the perfect pet. Cuddly and they can’t get away!”
The sun was setting on their survey as well as the day. They would take one last sample then head back to the transport.
Looking around, Sharon found several species of plant that had been previously sampled. She investigated the foliage, dug to the roots, and bent the stems, checking for any abnormalities. On two of the fern-shaped plants, she found a discoloration of the underside of the leaves.
The discoloration was white and made up of hundreds of tiny cilia that grew from the leaf.
Sharon opened her pack to retrieve her biopsy kit but was shocked to find that it was missing.
“Henri!” she called. He was nearby and came over quickly.
“What’s wrong?”
“My biopsy kit. Did you borrow it?”
“No. I have my own.”
She put her hand to her face and sighed.
“I’m such a clutz. I must have forgotten it… I can’t believe it! I always keep these things together. I didn’t take it out on the Bullmoose. Maybe it’s at my lab at home I don’t know.”
“It’s okay! Don’t worry. Here. Take mine.”
Henri pulled out his biopsy kit and gave it to Sharon.
“Thanks.”
Sampling each part of the plant, Sharon put the small cuttings into the machine, which internally spun them at several thousand RPM to separate the particulate and draw out any chemicals in the cells. After a minute or so. It beeped and gave a readout of the contents of the plant.
“Hmm.”
“What’s wrong? You look worried,” Henri said.
Sharon emptied the sample containers and took another cutting. The machine spun up, and, again it gave a readout but Sharon shook her head.
“Something isn’t right here. The biopsy kit isn’t detecting anything anomalous. It says there’s nothing wrong with this plant, but look,” she pointed to the underside of the plant. Henri observed the white, fuzzy growth.
“Huh. Looks weird, but a lot of things look weird on this planet,” he glanced up at the pale white sky and dim orange sun.
“It’s more than weird. The previous survey teams have never identified a growth like this, but I found four in just this eight-meter patch. Come on, let’s look for more.”
After half an hour, they found another twenty examples, all following a diagonal path through the clearing of low ferns. Sharon took soil samples from under each of the ailing plants. One of the plants was so thick with the growth that it was weighed down and had split at the base. The shade of the nearby trees seemed to have enhanced the growth of the white fuzz.
She ran tests on each soil sample and eventually discovered that the plants that were infected had nearly twice as much nitrogen in their soil. At first, this puzzled her. Wouldn’t nitrogen generally enhance the growth of plant life? But no, nitrogen is also absorbed by plants, and these ferns had thick, complex root systems. It seemed that the ferns that were infected were not absorbing as much nitrogen as their healthy counterparts.
“Is this going to negatively impact your recommendation?” Henri said.
“I don’t think so…” she pondered, “we’re thousands of miles away from the mine. I don’t see how anything could affect this area.”
“Well, if the biopsy kit says the plants aren’t abnormal, then they must not be abnormal,” Henri speculated.
He continued, “Sharon, this is an alien ecosystem, and we don’t know all the ins and outs yet. For all we know this is a strange, but normal, life cycle for the plant. A previous survey team must have cataloged it otherwise the biopsy kit would tell us that there was a new chemical signature.”
“Sure, sure. But look at this plant,” she said, indicating the dying fern.
“Does this look like a natural life cycle to you?”
Henri shrugged.
“There are octopuses on Earth that die in their brood dens and let their babies eat their bodies. Nature is a dark goddess.”
Sharon’s curiosity nagged at her and she lifted one of the leaves.
She looked underneath and was staring directly into the three eyes of a harpy spider.
She gasped and dropped the leaf, causing several of the white, feathered critters to scuttle away from the plant as they abandoned their hiding place.
“They hide in it!” Sharon said. Her curiosity overtook her fear and she lifted the leaf again. There were no more spiders underneath, but the white cilia still had imprints where the spiders hid. Their white feathers blended in perfectly with the cilia.
“Something isn’t right here. The biopsy kit is malfunctioning. These are not natural growths. Look at how thick the white growths are. The spiders are using it as camouflage.”
“Again, I don’t see how this affects our report,” Henri said, getting frustrated.
“This could all be natural. Maybe it’s an invasive mold from another area of the jungle. Maybe the harpy spiders were relocated from a nearby island and are changing some local ecology. None of this is on the company. They’re thousands of miles away.”
“Will you shut up about the company? This is more important. We could be observing a drastic change in the ecosystem and you’re worried about a mine on another continent? Come on Henri, where’s your scientific spirit?”
“It’s back on the ship where my paycheck is waiting, now can we please just wrap this up? This doesn’t concern us.”
Sharon wouldn’t be sated. She stayed another hour, watching the local fauna skitter about and do its business. She was almost ready to give up when she finally saw what she needed to.
A reptilioid with no legs and a wide mouth slithered through the ferns. It snuck up, silently, behind a harpy spider, then lunged. The spider didn’t move out of the way fast enough and the snake-like creature gobbled it up.
“A predator! Look, Henri. This might be what we’re looking for.”
The snake lifted its head and looked around. It spotted another harpy spider and made for it, but the spider had noticed its brethren being eaten, and it scuttled up the underside of a fern. The snake chased it, then stopped at the edge of the white mold.
“Ah! It can’t follow the spiders to the underside of the leaf! The mold confuses it, or perhaps it looks like a large spider. Whatever the case, it is protecting the spiders from a predator. This is incredible.”
“Agreed, but we’re overdue. Our survey should have been finished by now. Tellara is going to be upset if we don’t get back to the Bullmoose.”
“Then they can leave without me!” Sharon said, following the snake into the jungle.
Henri, exasperated, chased after her.
In the twilight hours, the jungle was even darker, and their footing became hazardous. They were now a full kilometer outside their survey zone and their maps didn’t cover this far. They would have to use their sense of direction to get out, or call in the Beagle and have it blast away some trees to rescue them if they got lost.
Every stump, log, and dead leaf in an eight-meter-wide swath through the forest had the white mold growing on it. The patch continued in a straight line until it abruptly ended with no clear sign as to why.
“There, you happy now? You have run us off the path, and we’re probably lost.”
“Shut up!”
“I will not. You’ve had enough run of this venture and I’m-”
“No, really Henri. Shut it! Listen.”
Somewhere in the trees above them, they could hear a cooing, like the voice of a child. It rattled and swayed.
“That’s the sound of those slow monkey things! The uh… Lemur sloths!”
“Yeah,” Henri said, “I guess.”
“I need to see it,” Sharon said, and she began to climb the tree.
The “trees” of DP-C aren’t really trees at all, but a fibrous plant with a spiral core that created branches similar to trees on earth. They tended to fan out at the top, but sometimes the branches stuck out at odd angles from the central fiber core. Flat, leaf-like structures peppered these branches and gathered sunlight as well as water and minerals. Unlike leaves on Earth, the leaf structures on DP-C were responsible for gathering much of the nutrients the plant needs beyond carbon. They were more like air-borne roots, hence the success of the audiophilic vines that sought to live under the droppings of other animals. Every errant bit of dung was a meal for the vine.
Sharon was halfway up into the canopy when she noticed that the white mold was even up in the trees. The distant light of the orange sun was all but gone, meaning that it could grow unimpeded.
The sound of the lemur sloth was getting louder and more desperate. As she got closer, Sharon also noted a smell of rot. Perhaps the dung of the creatures?
The nest was now only about a meter above her, she climbed around the spiral branches of the tree, and came out on the other side just above the nest. When she looked down, she screamed.
Inside the nest were dozens of harpy spiders feeding on the bodies of three juvenile lemur sloths. One was still alive, and it wailed as the spiders bit into flesh. Despite their number, the harpy spiders were difficult to see. The white-blue mold covered everything, including the rancid fur of the lemur sloths that had died in the days prior.
Sharon wanted to reach out, to grab the animal and wrench it from the writhing mass of feathered legs and fangs. She knew she couldn’t, and she had to abandon it. Yet, before she climbed down, something caught her eye. It almost escaped detection.
One of the harpy spiders was standing on a brightly colored lump that sat awkwardly in the nest. It looked like an egg and was covered in mold. Sharon pulled her orbital phone out of her pocket and poked the shape to move it.
It rolled over, and Sharon was shocked to see that it was nothing more than a desiccated orange peel.
Sharon reached the ground, gasping.
“Henri. The mold. It’s not native. It’s fucking penicillin!”
Henri looked at her with disbelief.
“Up there. I found an orange peel and those spiders. Dozens of them. They aren’t affected by it, but the mold grows everywhere. It must have come from garbage that was dumped here. That explains the strange pattern, it was aerial dumping! They scattered waste across this whole sector. This could destroy the ecology of this entire forest. We are talking about the extinction of hundreds, maybe thousands of species. Quick! Look around. We might be able to find something more incriminating…”
But Henri didn’t move.
“Sharon. This will not be in your report.”
At first, she didn’t understand, then it clicked, and all civility went out the window as she shrieked at him.
“You stole my biopsy kit! I didn’t forget it! You did take it. You probably left it on the ship. And yours… yours is programmed to return negative tests no matter what we put in it! You’re a sell-out!”
Henri got in her face and tried to make himself look intimidating.
“Mason Materials ships thousands of workers a year to this rock, and they produce waste. A lot of waste. It would cost a fortune to ship it all back. This mine, and all the workers… they depend on the profit. So when a few thousand tons of minerals get shipped back, labeled as waste, the company can sell the excess. That’s how things are done out here.”
“Look at what it’s doing to the planet!”
“A few monkeys die!” Henri shouted, “so what? Would you rather have the men on the mining rig starve?”
“You’re full of it. You know it’s more than that. Introducing even a single foreign species could permanently damage this planet. I can’t believe you call yourself a scientist!”
“I do what I have to!” he said, “now stay here while I call our transport!”
Henri used his belt to tie her to a tree. She didn’t resist. She knew she had nowhere to run. He then climbed up to the nest, removed the orange peel, and put it in a sample bag to be discreetly eliminated. Once he was down, he untied her and kept her close by until the transport arrived.
Using its guns, it cut down a swath of forest and landed. It took on its two passengers. It took off, and the engines scorched the earth, leaving a black mark in their wake.
Back on the Bullmoose, Tellara was grilling Sharon.
“You were supposed to stay in your sector.”
“It’s a good thing I didn’t.”
“A good thing? You must have a strange definition of the word good. If you breathe a word of this, you will have the full power of the Mason Materials legal team swat you out of whatever office you came from! You’ll be buried under so much litigation for slander that it will take you decades to crawl out.”
Sharon couldn’t help but laugh.
“Good then,” she said, “that should be enough time for my message to reach Earth.”
“What message?” Tellara said.
“The one I recorded when Henri had me tied to a tree.”
“That’s impossible! We would be registering a transmission from inside the ship!”
Tellara ordered security to search her for her orbital phone but they came up empty.
“Oops,” Sharon said, “I must have forgotten it down on the planet. I’m such a clutz.”
Tellara’s face changed from angry to frightened, and she ordered the communications officer to scan for any unregistered signals being sent from the planet. He found one and put it on the screen in the cabin.
Sharon’s face appeared on the screen, her one arm bound to the tree and the other holding the phone.
“My name is Sharon Proust, agent with TEIC. I am on the planet Delta Piscium- C. The Mason Materials mining operation has been illegally dumping industrial and human waste on the southern continent. By the time this message reaches the relay network, it will be ten years delayed. My report, if it is ever filed, will be a fabrication. This is what is really happening here.”
Sharon then scanned the mold-filled forest around her, zoomed in on a harpy spider that stalked nearby, then buried the phone in the dirt next to her. From there, the video was black, but the audio still came through.
In a minute, the voice of Henri could be heard speaking over the dull cries of the lemur sloth.
“You really fucked this up, Sharon. You could have kept your head down and had a good thing going. This is going to look bad for both of us.”
“You won’t help me tell anyone about Mason Materials’ illegal dumping?” Sharon could be heard asking.
“No. But I will help them keep you quiet.”
Nothing in the rest of the video was as damning as the first minute.
Tellara’s mouth moved up and down as if to speak, but no words were coming out.
“It’s okay,” Sharon said politely, “take your time. I can wait.”
