Under the Surface by Alison McBain

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This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions #13

“Listen to what the moles say and you should be fine.”

Delma nodded her head and tried to look like she was paying attention. Mostly, though, she was looking out the window as the car descended down the space elevator to the planet’s surface. She hadn’t had time to study the complete histories–just skimmed them on her way to the station. Now, she couldn’t remember why the planet was called Millipede, and it seemed too basic a question to ask.

From up above the surface, all she could see was white. As they got closer, the white resolved into darker and lighter patches of cloud and snow that whirled in and out in a dizzying perspective.

“Not long now,” the captain said behind her. “Hope you packed your woolens.”

#

The station was stark, a shade of grey barely darker than the snow outside the windows. The welcoming party consisted of one man bundled in layers of color, his face bare of any covering except for a wiry red mustache and beard curling in every direction. Against the monochromatic background, he looked like a patchwork quilt.

Expecting a booming voice from so large and imposing a figure, Delma didn’t quite catch what the man said when he mumbled something under his breath.

“I’m sorry?”

The man moved closer to her. He smelled of sweat, but Delma tried not to make it too obvious she was leaning away. “We can’t speak too loudly or it’ll affect the pods,” he said. “Is this everything?”

The captain and his two underlings helped carry her equipment and personal bag from the elevator car. There was only one pathway sloping down from the domed room. By the time they reached the large double doors at the end, Delma estimated they must be several dozen meters under the top layer of snow. When the man–she realized she had never caught his name–used a code to open the doors, they found themselves in a tunnel with walls glaring white with reflected light. The tunnel was snow compressed under layers of more snow until it had become a nearly solid sheet of ice. Delma wondered how far down the freeze went, or if the planet could be just one giant snowball, thrown from the careless hand of a playful god.

She helped load her bags into the back of the sled. The captain shook her hand.

“We’ll be back for you in a month. Good luck.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

“Thank you, sir.”

There were four seats in the sled, and an additional two folded down to make room for cargo. It was day on this side of the planet and the ice around them glowed white where the headlamp flared across it, but returned to old-glass green when the artificial light faded away. The route was worn smooth by the skidders, and it felt almost as if they were not moving at all. When the path branched, they went left.

“What’s that way?” she asked, but was quietly shushed.

Finally, after what felt like an interminably long journey, but which was probably only half an hour, artificial light glowed ahead. The man pressed a button on the console and the light brightened–a door opening. The sled slowed and the man angled it up the ramp and into the bay. Another press of the button and the door shut behind them.

“Thank you. Now what about–“

The man shushed her again, glaring. Delma’s face burned as she followed the man from the vehicle and unloaded two of her bags from the back without another word. He led the way up another ramp and into a dome smaller than the space elevator station. When the door swished shut behind the two of them, he tossed her bags onto the floor, as if they were trash. Delma winced, although nothing could damage the equipment secure in its padding.

“There, now. Extra soundproofing,” said the man in an almost normal tone of voice. “Are you daft, woman? Didn’t you read the notices before they let you loose here?”

The curse of fair skin. She was sure her face was even redder than before. “They rushed me over here. I didn’t look over all of them.”

“It’s the basics! If you’ve ruined the H-2 quadrant, Jenna will have my head.” He started to unpeel the layers of clothing swathing him from head to foot. When he finally emerged, after unzipping and unwrapping and unwinding, he looked somewhat like a Viking dressed in a one-suit of rainbow stripes. His hair was long and in a braid halfway down his back.

“Jenna?” Delma picked out what she thought the most innocuous part of the statement.

“My neighbor.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name?”

The man laughed. There it was, the big, booming laugh she expected to go with the man, a sound to make others laugh with him–except the sound had been turned way, way down. “Blimey, they really told you nothing. My name is Smith.”

“Thank you for all your help, Mr. Smith–“

“Mister nothing,” he interrupted. “Just Smith.”

“Okay. I’m Delma.”

The man rolled his eyes. “I know. I read the reports.” Smith turned his back. “Let me show you where you’ll be working.”

The dome was divided into open-air partitions, with only one part of it closed off in a completely contained box. They headed for that part first. Delma peeked into the “rooms” along the way–spartanly furnished, everything splashed with bright, garish colors like peacock plumage against the dull grey walls. Two bedrooms, a bathroom. The first room they’d entered had been a galley with a table and four chairs and a counter lining the outside wall, with storage bins stacked neatly under the shelf.

“First one’s mine. This one’s yours,” Smith explained with a casual wave. “This is the lab.” The door opened after he typed something on the outside panel. Inside was a glass enclosure barely big enough for the two of them. After the first door closed behind them, they faced a red light flashing off and on. After a hiss of new air, the light glared green and the glass wall slid aside to let them in.

“Standard decom,” Delma noticed. “But are there clean suits?” She stepped into the grey room, empty except for a shelf circling the walls of the room and a large grey table in the center that matched the walls.

“No one else asked for them.”

“No one else made much progress here, did they?” She walked the perimeter of the room. “What happened to the rest of the equipment?”

“They took it with ’em. Didn’t leave behind anything when they were called back.”

“Good.” She stepped up to the panel next to the door, studied it. It seemed standard. “What’s the schedule like around here?”

“Harvest not for another month. Growing season now.”

“Perfect. I’ll set up here, and then let’s go get some samples.”

#

Delma supposed she didn’t blame Smith leaving her behind when he visited the fields, but the man’s bedside manner left a lot to be desired. When Delma questioned him, Smith growled, “Are you trained in the five-step method of pod harvesting? No? Then don’t try to get in my way.”

While waiting for the Viking to return, Delma set up the lab. After that, she found a slightly squishy chair in the common room and sat down to catch up on the data she’d been forwarded by headquarters, but never gotten to.

By the time Smith walked through the door, Delma felt ten times more the fool after reading the reports. No wonder Smith had had zero patience with her.

In Smith’s hands was a cylinder about four hands wide and two hands tall. The Viking gave her a glare, but Delma shrugged without saying anything, and silently followed him back to the lab. Once the plant sample was gently placed in the master storage container, she manipulated the outside controls to unlock the cylinder and discard it in the chute, where it would be sterilized for another use.

The plants from the cylinder resembled nothing so much as conical mushrooms. They were shaded a dusty color of lavender or green, very pale. The container had a layer of snow from outside covering the bottom of it and would be maintained at the same temperature as outside the dome, changing to reflect any sudden drops or increases. When it snowed outside, there would be big, fat artificial flakes cascading down onto the pods inside.

It was never enough. No matter how reliably their natural environment was duplicated, the plants never survived very long away from their colonies. Without a full field of their fellows about them, the plants slowly withered and died. The maximum they’d been kept alive when secluded like this was about a week. The process seemed to accelerate the farther away they were taken. Samples taken off-planet lasted barely a couple days before crumbling away to nothing. And once they were dead, they were useless. They were only valuable alive.

Once they’d left the sterilized, sound-proofed lab, Delma felt obliged to turn to Smith. “Thanks for the sample. I’m very sor–” before she realized Smith had walked away from her without a backward glance.

It didn’t matter. She was here for as long as it took to gather enough data to proceed. She could live with the man until then. It was no different than being on long space voyages with only a few strangers for company. She was here to do a job, nothing more.

Might as well start now. Shrugging, she turned around and returned to the lab.

This was where patience came into play. No one would ever compare molecular biology with high-speed car chases, that was for sure. The tests she needed to run could take hours, even days. She began with the most basic, settling in for a long wait as he subjected each pod to a measured dose of light.

After moving on to a thorough testing of the effects of different levels of radiation stimuli on the pods, Delma came to a conclusion, and one that the Viking wouldn’t like. She went through the sterilization room, discarded her clean suit in the bin and headed to the galley.

She found Smith already there, eating something monochromatic and staring off into space. Pre-packaged rations. Delma investigated the cupboards, finally returning with a similar container. When she popped the seal, steam rose to greet her from the chemical heating reaction. The food wasn’t as tasteless as it looked–although similar to oatmeal in texture, it was rich with spices.

Around a mouthful, she said, “I need to do on-site testing.”

Smith’s eyes bugged out. “Whose crop do you intend to ruin? Mine, I suppose?”

Delma took another bite. “The Company will compensate you for any loss of profit.”

“Are you mad? What about long-term? The fields don’t recover when we go out, not for years. Only the millis can safely go through so that the pods recover. Even then, it’s months before the fields grow back.”

“Yes, the millipedes.” Through trial and error–a lot of error–Company scientists had created a harvesting machine for the pods that could capture live samples, like the one the Viking had brought her. They were a series of linked spheres, each containing one cylinder for collection and “walking” on metal spikes that kept a firm grip on the ice while disturbing the least amount of surface. While the pods reacted unfavorably to the mechanical invasion, the harvesters weren’t as destructive as if a human walked among the fields, picking the pods by hand or machine. As Smith had said, the pods wouldn’t creep back to fill the space for years after a human’s touch. “Maybe if we worked together, we could modify one of the millipedes to carry out the measurements I need,” she suggested instead. “But you have to sign the same confidentiality clause that I’ve signed. This is Company business.”

“Fine.” After only a cursory glance at what he was signing, Smith put his thumb-print on the tablet Delma gave him and said, “Well?”

Delma filed away the tablet. “The pods are very valuable medically, as you must know.” Smith rolled his eyes, and Delma cleared her throat. “Okay, well, you know that. But they are only a local phenomenon. The Company can’t transport them any further than the space station circling this planet before the components break down. So far, with all the rich clients willing to pay for a miracle cure for their diseases, this hasn’t been a problem. But the Company would like to take this to the next level, to help more people, for the greater good. As such, they have hired me to see if we can engineer a recombination of the pod DNA with a hardier off-planet plant… such as spiros from Larunda, which are genetically similar. The only problem is that all the testing done on the pods has been done in the labs, once they’ve already started to die. To get a truly accurate idea of what it is that is causing their sensitivity to transportation, I need to figure out how they react in their natural environment, before any decay sets in.”

Smith’s small eyes traveled the length of Delma’s face. “No.”

“No?”

“Do your testing in the lab. If it fails, then find another guinea pig. I’m not subjecting my fields to your experiments.”

Delma stared at him. “The captain assured me of full cooperation. I can inform him–“

“Inform away. I own this land, Company be damned. The answer is still no.” Abruptly, he asked, “What happens if you’re successful?”

Pausing a moment before answering, Delma finally shrugged. She didn’t know how to change Smith’s mind about the testing. She would try the official route, but the Company’s official influence ended at the elevator. “Well, then we’d be able to export them. Grow them on other planets. It would be a revolution for modern medicine. We could help so many of the sick. The dying.”

“Hunh. No, I mean what happens to us? To the farmers here?”

Delma drew in a breath. “Um… I don’t know. Honestly, I’m only on the science side of the equation. I don’t have any part in policy.”

“I see.” Smith drained his drink. “Well, I think I can modify the millis to take the measurements you need. It’ll take me the better part of today. But mark my words, I’m not budging on the field tests. You won’t find a farmer here who would subscribe to such idiocy.”

“Millis.”

“What?”

“I’ll need more than one sample.” She rubbed her chin considering. “I think a hundred

should do it.”

The Viking threw back his head and laughed. “A hundred!” Still chuckling, he dropped his food container in the recycle. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I only have five machines. How much time you got?”

Face red, Delma said, “Fine, then. Five is good.”

#

The next day as the data rolled in, Delma began making calculations. By afternoon, she was ecstatic.

“I think it’ll work,” she told the Viking, having caught him at his evening meal again. She shoveled food into her mouth around the words. “I’ve brought sample DNA to try out, and I can start work on the specimens in the labs. They’ve already started to break down, but I think…”

Smith stood up, dumped his plate and walked into his bedroom. The door shut behind him.

Her jaw dropped at Smith’s behavior, then she wondered why she continued to be surprised at his rudeness. So, Smith wasn’t receptive. She didn’t need to make a good impression on him. The only people who mattered–her bosses up above–should be as excited as her. She’d send off a report to them right away.

The response she got back, though cautiously optimistic, wasn’t as thrilled as she thought they should be. “Please send additional test results,” was the final request.

Okay, then. It had only been a few days. She was counting her eggs a bit.

That night before going to bed, she inserted the engineered virus into each pod. Since she only had a small sample, she used the same DNA for each plant–the spiros she’d mentioned to Smith. She had about ten sample plants to try before she would run out of time.

When she woke the next morning, she felt like a kid at Christmas. Not bothering with coffee or wanting to see Smith’s sour face, she headed straight to the lab. As the decom cycled for the second time after she donned her clean suit, she found herself grinning.

An hour later, she came out of the lab. She’d done every test conceivable on the melted puddles of goo splashed across the snow in the bottom of the master storage container. The plants had liquefied overnight, significantly speeded in their decay by the attempted DNA modification.

“I need another sample,” she told Smith, who was loitering in the kitchen area. Without a word, the big man walked out the bay doors, returning an hour later with another cylinder.

The days passed. As she used up her offworld plant samples, each with dismal results, she grew more and more depressed. What had seemed so promising was now inexplicable. It should work, that was the problem. On any other plant, it would have. But she couldn’t come up with any other effective strategies.

A week before she was to return to the space station, she woke up with the germ of an idea. She checked the outside temperature on the monitor, then sat down in the kitchen unit while Smith ate his breakfast.

“I need to get outside.”

Smith argued, but it wasn’t hard to reassure him that she intended to do nothing except look around. Finally, the glowering giant led her to the escape hatch.

Delma wouldn’t have known it was there if it hadn’t been pointed out to her. The Viking typed a special sequence of numbers in a covered touch pad, and a panel slid aside in the ceiling, a ladder descending to the floor. “After you,” Smith growled.

At the top, another touch pad, another panel, another climb. A third pad, and the final panel slid open to the sky.

Delma’s legs ached from the climb up the endless ladder, so when she finally heaved herself outside, she spent several moments resting splayed out on her stomach, panting great plumes of fog into the cold air. Smith levered himself out of the hole, closing it behind him before turning upslope and marching off without waiting for her.

Restraining the urge to call after him, Delma scrambled to her feet and hurried as much as she could on the slippery surface without actually running.

Abruptly, Smith stopped walking at the summit of the snow-buried dome, and Delma almost ran into him. All around them was glaring white ice, although squinting into the distance, she thought she could see lines of purple and green stretching for kilometers further out. The muted colors blended into the shadows and ridges of the snowfield.

Smith waved his hand, his expression fierce. As if to say, Now what?

Delma shrugged. Looked around.

The plain was fairly flat, with only minor ridges and whorls, probably caused by wind. In the far, far distance was a smudge of grey against the horizon–that must be the mountain range named Olympus, the tallest mountains on the planet.

Turning in a circle, she shaded her eyes with one hand against the glare of the sun. There were clouds hovering by the mountains; Delma wondered if they would be coming this way or if this part of the world had just weathered a massive snowstorm and what they saw were the fleeing remnants. She honestly didn’t know, cocooned as she was inside the bunker and oblivious to all happenings outside of it.

With a nod at Smith, she turned to go back down the hatch.

Once sealed in the soundproof bunker, Smith balked at what Delma suggested. “The mountains? What do you want them for?”

“Well, do you know if any pods grow there?”

Smith considered, finally shook his head. “Most of the planet has farms, but not up there. Maybe the pods can’t grow on rock or on such an angled surface.”

“Is there a lot of seismic activity in the mountains?”

Smith looked thoughtful before he answered. “Some volcanos, perhaps.”

“Could be natural vibrations are what disturb them, so our artificial vibrations of speech and movement mimic what is anathema to them,” said Delma. “Worth checking out.”

“Why? Seems like a wild goose chase.”

Delma stared at Smith. For once, the man didn’t seem to be asking the question in a hostile manner–more as if he really wanted to hear the answer.

“Sensitivity seems such an odd survival tactic. Especially for a plant,” Delma answered. “Look, most mutations that are successful allow a species a greater chance to propagate. What use would such an extreme sensitivity to sound/movement serve? And why are the activities of humans so much more destructive to the pods than machines, which make the same amount of noise? There’s got to be a reason that the pods developed the way they did, and why they respond to similar stimuli with different results.”

“Maybe there is no reason. Maybe it’s enough to work with what is, not find out what isn’t.”

“Not for me.” Delma shook her head for emphasis. “This is what I do. I get paid to figure things out.”

“Okay, then.” Smith took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh. “I’ll have to get the big sled from Jenna. It’ll take us ten days there and back.”

Delma stared. “I only have a week before the shuttle returns.”

Smith shrugged.

“Okay,” Delma said. “I’ll inform the captain.”

#

“We can’t afford to change the schedule now. It’s too close to your departure, and we have a timetable.”

“I think I finally have the answer,” Delma repeated for the fifth time, which was only a slight exaggeration, really. She had no idea if she had the answer or not, but something about this felt right. There was a key to this mystery, and she knew she was getting close to a solution.

“Please stick to the targeted departure,” was the final word.

Delma met Smith in the common room. “We’ve been approved. Let’s go,” she said uneasily.

The Viking didn’t seem to notice the lie–or perhaps he didn’t care. Jenna came by to drop off her sled, which had a trailer compartment attached to it containing two sleeping bunks. In return, she borrowed Smith’s sled to use while they were gone.

“Bring it back in one piece,” Jenna told him, smiling easily. She had grey and white hair, but her face seemed younger than the hair implied. The big man grinned back at her, murmuring something in her ear that was too quiet for Delma to hear, but which made her laugh and slap his shoulder in a friendly manner.

They left soon after that. After the brief interlude with Jenna, Smith was back to frowning fiercely. Ugh, ten days of this, thought Delma.

The time passed as slowly as she thought. After the first couple of days, Smith turned on the drill function of the sled and they made their slow progress up to the surface of the ice at the foot of the mountains. And then they began their ascent.

They camped that night with all the emergency brakes dug into the snowy crust to anchor them nearly sideways. Although the sled had soundproofing, it wasn’t quite strong enough to keep out an ominous rumbling that kept Delma awake most of the night, replaying endless scenarios of avalanches and rockfalls in her imagination.

It was late afternoon by the time they reached the end of their plotted course and topped the rise to a flat surface. Abruptly, Smith shut off the engine of the sled, which ground to a neck-jarring halt.

Ah, Delma thought. She should have realized. They were on a flat surface, and pods grew on flat places. This plateau was filled with them, all squeezed tightly together over its too-small surface. On three of the four sides were sharp drop-offs. This was an isolated community of the pods, trapped here for who knows how long. Delma squinted against the snow-glare outside the window. These pods were swaying slightly, but it didn’t seem as if there was any wind up here. Now they seemed to be moving–moving of their own volition. Albeit slowly, they were creeping away from the sled, creating an ever-widening circle of ruffled-looking ice.

Smith realized at the same moment as Delma, and his mouth dropped open. Together, they watched the pods sway away from their unwelcome entrance, their movements in real, visible time.

Plants didn’t behave like that. At least, none that Delma had run across a lifetime of study. There might be gradual movement, such as phototropism, when a plant turned to follow the movement of the sun, and there might be abrupt, reactionary movement of the parts of a plant, such as thigmonasty–a Venus flytrap. This was full-bodied movement away from them, more than a simple reaction to a stimulus.

Delma watched. The pressure of their movement pushed against the pods in front of them, and the ones in front of them–until the ones on the farthest edge of the plateau seemed to disappear into thin air. Smith abruptly restarted the engine while Delma was still feeling awe at watching the pod migration, and backed quickly down the slope.

Delma opened her mouth to complain, but remembered just in time. As she was typing out an angry demand to Smith to go back, she looked up and saw the far side of plateau receding in the distance. Hurtling over the steep drop of the cliff were small figures falling like rain, pushed to their deaths by their brethren as they struggled to get away from the intruders into their peaceful Eden.

Her fingers stilled. This was why none of the modified DNA she’d subjected them to had taken hold. However strange their composition, however similar they were to plant life on other planets, they might not be plants, not as she understood them. Not at all.

#

When they got back to the bunker, she asked Smith for a new pod sample to experiment on. Delma separated each of the pods into an isolated, soundproof container and exposed them to an array of audible stimuli. The higher the frequency and decibel, the more damage caused to the pods. At medium to low frequencies, the pods would move–often slowly and almost indecipherably, but they would migrate away from the source of the sound. The lower the frequency, the faster they moved.

She told Smith what he had found. Smith nodded, his eyes serious. “I would like to do one additional test,” Delma said. “I’ve tried only to DNA splice the pods with plant samples. But I would like to try…” She paused, almost embarrassed to say it. “I would like to try animal DNA, but I didn’t bring any with me. Do you happen to know if any of the other moles have pets? And would mind my taking a sample from them? It wouldn’t be significant enough to harm the animals.”

But Smith shook his head. “No pets here. Too much risk to the pods.”

Delma nodded glumly, unsurprised.

They sat in silence for a while. Smith was sipping coffee, staring away into space. “What about human?” he asked.

“Human?”

In answer, the big man put down his cup and rolled up his sleeve, holding his hairy arm out to Delma. Their eyes met.

Delma was the first one to break away. “I’ll get my kit,” she said, standing up.

#

She had asked Smith if he wanted to be present for the results. The man had snorted and gone off to his room. So much for that, then.

Plant and animal DNA could often combine. Scientists had been doing it since the late twentieth century, so it wasn’t anything new. But the extreme sensitivity of the pods made a combination of their genes with common plant DNA a failure. They resembled plants; they were not plants.

The experiment with animal DNA was a success.

The captain was furious when Delma sent him a brief message that night. “We waited for a full day before pulling up!” he shouted.

“I know why the pods die,” Delma said. “And I know how to stop it.”

After that, the captain was all smiles. “We’ll be down to pick you up in one hour.”

#

“What are you going to do?”

Those were the first words Smith had spoken to Delma since he’d volunteered his DNA.

“I have to try to convince them to leave this planet alone while we study the pods further. They are group animals and communicate with each other. I don’t know to what extent their sentience reaches.”

“They won’t want to listen to you.”

“Probably not. Easier for all of them not to believe what my findings mean.” Delma shrugged uncomfortably.

“I’ve been a mole for years. All those pods I’ve harvested…” Smith’s expression was stark.

Delma realized that she felt numb. “If I had to decide between supporting the status quo versus giving them the key to exporting the pods for mass consumption to save lives, I know what I would choose.”

“What you have chosen.” The large man’s tone was sarcastic as he quoted the scientist’s words back at her. ” ‘For the greater good.’ “

She hadn’t realized until Smith said it that her mind was already made up. It had been, before she even came here.

“Yes,” she said quietly, without inflection. “What I do is for the greater good.”