Silk
Silk
ooks like I wasn’t spotted.” Max switched off the star skimmer’s engine and let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. “I wonder if they’re even looking.”
The star skimmer was a tiny ship, about the size of a one-bedroom apartment back on earth. It reminded Max of his ex-wife: temperamental, high maintenance, and a belly full of pills. Its cargo hold was packed with cases of prescription drugs from a factory in Taiwan. They had been on their way to earth’s moon, where they were to be sold to colonists at inflated government monopoly prices. But a heavily-bribed crew member had “accidentally” ejected their cargo into space, where it was quickly intercepted by Max’s waiting ship. Moments later, he was on his way to the colonies at Gliese 581, where hospitals paid in cash and patients were too sick to ask questions.
The ship drifted towards a small, greenish planet and drew in close for a “slingshot” maneuver, using the planet’s gravity to fling itself deeper into space.
“The best part is,” he thought, “these pills are so cheep to produce, they probably won’t even bother chasing after me…” His thoughts were interrupted by a small, white triangle on his radar screen. “…They’ll just send a missile instead.”
The dashboard burned with the fire of a thousand warning lights. The star skimmer jolted and rocked, spraying bits of metal in its wake. Max punched the controls like they had insulted his mother. The ship turned back towards the green planet, burning through the atmosphere. As the ground rose up to meet him, he checked his status screen – only four out of the ten landing thrusters had fired. “Alright, I’m going to die, but at least I’ll have plenty of time to panic first.”
The ship dropped down over a forest, its wings tearing off the tops of the trees. It slid on its belly, digging a hundred-yard trench in the forest floor. He attempted to unstrap himself from his chair, but the mechanism was jammed. He pulled a miniature cutting torch from his tool belt and carefully burned through the straps. Taking a deep breath, he did a quick inventory of his body parts – arms, legs, fingers, toes – everything still intact. “What’s the damage?”
“All six landing gear gone,” the computer said calmly in its Indian English accent. “Forty centimeter hole in hull. Hairline fractures in landing thrusters and main engine.”
“How long will it take to fix?”
“Spare part reserves low, but environmental scans show nearby mineral deposits. Estimated time for ship robots to extract minerals and make repairs: twenty-three days.”
He sighed. “Alright, fine. Is there a city nearby?”
“No data.”
“What planet is this?”
“No data.”
He slammed his fist on the instrument panel. “You’re lucky computers don’t have necks,” he thought, “or I would strangle you until your eyes popped out of your face.” Out loud, he said, “Can you at least tell me if it’s safe outside?”
“Environmental scans show a higher concentration of oxygen than earth, but within safe range.”
“Fine. Send out the robots, then switch to low power mode. I’m going outside.” He grabbed his wristlink computer and slapped the button to lower the ramp.
The ship had crashed in a narrow clearing in the middle of a forest. The trees were immense, skyscrapers painted green and brown. As he walked, glistening insects scattered, dancing, hurrying out of his path. A warm wind picked up, and a group of blue flowers suddenly squirted their seeds into the air, a cloud of dust carried away on the breeze.
At the edge of the clearing, the grass was trampled flat and covered in a thick layer of dried leaves. He checked his wristlink; the sensors still showed the atmosphere was safe. Other than the gigantic trees, this place didn’t seem too different from earth.
A cold shadow fell over him. A dark shape in the sky – a enormous blackbird, big enough to build a nest with iron girders. He threw himself against a tree, watching through the leaves as the mammoth bird passed overhead.
He waited a few moments, listening to his heart pound, but the bird did not return. Perhaps it wasn’t interested in such a small meal. Hiking deeper into the forest, he came across a tree with branches weighed down with blue, basketball-sized fruit. He yanked the knife from his belt and cut one down. “It smells like a raspberry milkshake,” he thought, “but it could be toxic. Better test a sample.” But the skin of the fruit wouldn’t cut. It was like trying to slice through a tire with a butter knife.
The leaves rustled overhead. “What’s that? Another bird?” He sprang to his feet. A young girl was straddling a high branch, smiling down at him. She appeared to be around ten. Her skin was apple green, her mouth stained blue. Her well-fed frame was covered in nothing but a skirt of woven grass. She chirped and whistled, pointing excitedly at the fruit just over her head. She plucked it down and ripped out the thick stem. Plunging her fingers into the hole, she scooped out a handful of blue goo and shoved it in her mouth. She whistled down at him again, gesturing for him to try it.
“So that’s how you do it!” he said. “Thank you.” He twisted off the stem of his fruit and dug out a small sample with his knife, testing it with his wristlink. “Sugar, citric acid, water… Seems safe enough.” He cut down a couple more fruits and sat at the foot of the tree.
The girl tossed her food aside and leaped from branch to branch, finally landing on the ground beside him. She nodded and whistled, and Max’s wristlink dinged. “Translation data complete.” Speaking in a vague imitation of the girl’s voice, it said, “My name is Luna. Who are you?”
Max put away his knife and extended his hand, but Luna backed away. “No, no, don’t be afraid!” he said. The wristlink echoed his words, translating them into Luna’s language. “My name is Max. I come from another planet. Do you know what planets are?”
She laughed. “Of course I know what the sky is, silly!”
“The sky?” he thought. “The translation failed. They must not have a word for ‘planet’ in their language.” To Luna, he said, “What do you call these fruit?”
“Big blues! They’re my favorite. Do you like them?”
He dipped a finger into the fruit and tasted the blue goo inside. “You know, I do! … Just two of these fruit ought to feed me for a week. Not much variety, but at least I won’t get scurvy. Do you know where I can get some more food?”
“We have lots of food !” she said. “Come with me!” When she waved for him to follow, he noticed that she had seven fingers on each hand. She lead him through the trees to a large clearing ringed with thatched huts. Around a hundred children were scattered throughout the clearing, tending to a bonfire, singing, wrestling, eating, or playing a game with one of the “big blues”. Half the children looked to be Luna’s age, and the rest appeared to be toddlers.
“These are my friends!” Luna said. She gestured in the direction of a child by the fire. “Beetle is cooking. Go tell him I say to give you some food! He always does what I say.”
Max examined his surroundings. The huts were tiny, and there didn’t appear to be anyone inside. “Luna, where are all the adults? Your parents?”
“You’re silly,” she laughed. “Go have something to eat before Beetle eats it all!”
“Another mistranslation?” he wondered. “Have to investigate that later. I’m starving!” He crossed the clearing, stepping through the crowd of children. None of them seemed frightened by the stranger in their midst. Perhaps he wasn’t so scary, compared to the giant birds.
“Hello!” Beetle chirped.
“I’m a friend of Luna’s,” Max began slowly. “She said you might share some food.”
Smiling, Beetle gestured to the fire. “Have a green leg!” There were several long tubes lying near the fire, plant stems of some kind. A foot-like protrusion at one end made them resemble the legs of some gigantic insect.
Max chose one and tore off a small piece, feeding the sample to his wristlink. Again, it seemed safe. Chemically, it was somewhere between broccoli and an onion, but its texture was more like a mushroom. Beetle seemed to have an unlimited appetite, but the green leg was so large, Max could only finish the “foot”.
The children playing ball invited him to join their game. A boy named Stone explained the rules. There were three teams of seven players. Each team controlled a thirty-foot square of land with a goal at the center marked by a circle of rocks. Players were required to pass the ball to a teammate every ten steps, to make it easier for the other team to steal the ball.
The game made the time pass quickly, but it was hard to tell who won, because the children counted in a base fourteen system. After the game, one of the team captains, a girl named River, produced a sharpened stone and carved a mark on a nearby tree. Noticing Max watching her, she said, “We play ball every day. When we play twenty-eight times, we will stop, and then the young ones play instead.”
Max wanted to ask what she meant, but it was getting dark. If there were giant birds in the daytime, the night might hold even worse things. Luna tugged at his sleeve. “Max, I’m tired! Come sleep in my hammock.”
She pulled him to a hut near the back of the clearing. Inside was a gigantic seashell filled with water, evidently used as a bathtub, and a pile of firewood. A long, grass dress was hanging on the wall. Apparently the forest was occasionally too cold for just the grass skirt. The hammock itself was made from a single leaf from one of the planet’s enormous trees. It was about eight feet long, and stretched from one end of the hut to the other.
He tested the leaf carefully; it was soft like lamb’s ear, and it seemed like it could hold his weight. He stripped to his boxers and undershirt and climbed inside the hammock. “This is wonderful, Luna, but where are you going to sl – oof!”
Without warning, Luna flung herself into the hammock, landing on top of him. “Go to sleep!”
The light of the bonfire outside was still shining through the door. “Is anyone going to put out the fire?”
“No,” she sighed. “Why would we do that? It keeps the blackbirds away.” She touched a finger to his lips. “Now, no more talking!” She curled into a ball and was soon asleep. The rhythm of her breathing carried him into the night.
A crash outside jolted Max from his dreams. Through the doorway of the hut, he could see five children standing in a line, passing logs from one to the other. River, the closet to the fire, was tossing each log in with a bang. At last, they stopped their noisy work. Hand in hand, they headed from the center of the village toward the darkness of the forest.
He jumped down from the hammock and ran outside. “Where are you going?” he called. “What about the birds? River, come back! You’ll be killed!”
Luna appeared in the doorway, her eyes still half-closed. “Leave them alone. We want them to die.”
“Are you crazy? You have to stop them!” He ran for the forest, but children poured from their huts, blocking the path. A few boys in the front produced spears. He could have fought them off, but he couldn’t bring himself to strike a child. “Alright, alright. I’ll let them go.”
Reluctantly, Max returned to Luna’s hut. Catlike, she stretched, yawned, and climbed into the hammock beside him, curling into a ball. He waited for her to fall asleep and then gently, slowly, climbed out of the hammock and slipped back into the clearing.
The children had all returned to bed. Cautiously, he crept down the path into the trees, scanning the sky for any sign of the blackbirds. So far, all was quiet. He followed the path back to the long trench that had been dug by his ship.
A noise in the branches above him sent him diving to the ground. He looked up, expecting to see a gigantic beak snapping at his throat. Instead, he saw a woman. A woman with bone white skin was standing on a tree branch, staring up at the sky. She was nude, her only covering a waterfall of thick, white hair. A dark shape behind her covered her in shadow. She waved at something in the air and, in an instant, she was gone.
Weeks passed, but Max was unable to discover where the five missing children had gone. Luna, Beetle, and the others avoided his questions. Every time he spoke of the missing children, they pretended not to hear, saying it was time to play ball or the fire needed feeding.
Max took to making nightly patrols of the village, exploring deeper and deeper into the forest, but he didn’t find so much as a footprint. Perhaps the children had been devoured by the birds, or something even worse. Luna said that the darker recesses of the forest held a kind of carnivorous spider. The way she described them made them sound like crawling, venomous piranhas.
Luna herself seemed like a peach: very sweet, but clingy. When they walked together, her hand always found his. He always told himself that it was an innocent gesture, but his conscience wouldn’t listen.
As a waning moon rose, once more, he stepped out into the village. Just past the ball court was a small pit where the children dug up the shiny, yellow rock they used to make spear points. He circled the clearing, exploring its edges. The children’s fruit and leaf harvesting had left many of the trees with four-foot-high bare patches.
The creek where the children gathered water just touched the edge of the clearing. He followed the silver stream as it twisted and turned, until he came upon something strange. At the edge of the water lay a large, white piece of piece of peculiar fabric. “No,” he thought, “this is natural. Some animal made this.” It was like tightly-woven spider’s silk, dried and ripped. It was about five meters square, but looked to have been torn from something even larger.
The darkness suddenly seemed threatening. He swallowed hard and, dropping the silk back in the dirt, he followed the stream back up to the village.
The hammock swung gently as Max punched at his wristlink. Luna had asked him to go hunting for big blues, but he had had more than enough of the cloyingly sweet, sticky fruit. So, instead, he had elected to stay in the hut and play with his wrist computer. It only had one game, a piece of monochrome drudgery called “Stack The Boxes II: The Adventure Continues.”
From somewhere outside, Luna’s voice called, “Max! Come quick!” He continued stacking imaginary boxes, but a moment later, the call repeated. “It’s an emergency! Help! Come now!”
He tossed the game aside and bolted to her aid. Luna was standing at the foot of a tree, pointing urgently up at a gigantic, purple fruit. “I can’t reach it!”
“This is your emergency? I thought you were being attacked!”
She put her arms on her hips and wrinkled her nose. “This is an important! Big blues almost never turn purple! If you don’t get it down for me, someone else will take it, and I won’t get to have it.” Sighing, he plucked the fruit and handed it down to her. “I’m glad you’re here.” She reached up to touch his face.
For a moment, he stroked her fingers gently, but then he pushed her hand away. “I’m a grown man, Luna. Do you know what that means? Do you know what an adult is?”
“You’re so much taller than the other boys.”
“I think Beetle needs some help with the fire. I’d better go.”
Somewhere in the darkness, insects sang like fingertips sliding across the rim of a water glass. Max stared into the fire and rubbed the back of his neck. “The disappearances seem to be happening faster now. Stone is gone, Cricket, Wind, and those two quiet girls who were always off by themselves. I’ve searched in every direction for twelve kilometers and not a trace of any of them! What could have happened?”
The crunch of feet on leaves drew his attention back to the huts. Five children were walking, hand in hand, towards the path into the forest. At the rear of the group, Luna was laughing and urging them forward. Max hurried across the village, following the children into the darkness. The group wandered deep into the trees, eventually leaving their companions and walking off in different directions. Max crept after Luna. He was desperate to call her name, to drag her back to the village, but he had to see where the children were going.
She stopped at the foot of a tree and, gritting her teeth, pulled herself up into its branches. She climbed higher and higher, finally walking out to the end of a branch and sitting down. She closed her eyes and parted her lips. A thick, viscous, white fluid dripped from her mouth. The liquid clung to the end of the branch, forming long, glistening strands like wet silk. Gradually, the strands joined together, forming a six-foot-long pouch. At last, Luna wiped her mouth and slipped into the hole at the top of the pouch.
A dark shape appeared in the sky. “Blackbird!” The bird landed a few branches above Luna’s. It’s cold, yellow eyes examined the silken pouch. Max pulled a set of climbing claws from his tool belt and scrambled up the side of the tree. He pulled himself up to Luna’s branch. He hoped that the bird would view his arrival as a threat, not a second course.
The bird lurched down and Max rolled to the side, the monstrous beak nearly severing his leg. He kicked at the bird, his heavy boots slamming into its beak, but the bird didn’t seem to notice. Moving quickly, he pulled the pocket cutting torch from his belt and turned up the heat. The blast hit the bird in the eye. The winged beast screeched in pain and flew off, abandoning its meal.
Max peered down into the pouch. Luna was curled in the fetal position, eyes tightly closed. Her skin had faded from apple green to bone white. “She must be sick,” he thought. “I should take her back to my ship. The computer could figure out what’s wrong..” He slipped down into the pouch. His weight made it stretch, and suddenly the opening was twelve feet away. “This might have been a bad idea…”
Luna had a pulse and, though her breath was shallow and rapid, at least she was breathing. “How do I get us out of here? Maybe I can cut some slits in the cocoon and climb up it like a step ladder.” He drew his knife and plunged it into the side of the cocoon. He made a ten-inch slit, and tested it with his foot. The tear spread, growing into a large hole. Clearly, if he cut a series of slits, the cocoon would fall to pieces. “And we would fall to our deaths. Looks like I’m stuck here for a while.”
Max woke to the sound of Luna crying in her sleep. She was whimpering softly, a child caught in a nightmare. The hole let in just enough moonlight to show her tears. He touched her shoulder and shook her gently, but she refused to wake.
Gasping, she rolled on her side. Two bony lumps jutted from her back, the flesh pulled tight. Her skin rippled like the surface of a lake being caressed by a gentle breeze. Over the next several hours, her limbs stretched and lengthened. Her layer of baby fat melted away, replaced by muscles and curves.
The lumps in her back grew larger, finally piercing her skin. She howled in agony as two glistening, translucent wings emerged from her back. The wings were coal black with tiny, silver flecks like scattered stars.
She folded her wings against her back. She rose unsteadily to her feet and turned to face him. Her mouth had vanished. Under her nose was just a smooth patch of skin, not a sign that it had ever been different.
“Luna, I…”
She lunged for him, wrapped her arms around him, and dove through the hole in the cocoon. For one breathless moment, they were in free fall. She stretched her wings and carried him into the air. They landed in a branch near the top of the tree.
“Luna, this is amazing! You’re… you’re… a woman in a single night! I can’t believe… ” She touched his lips, and gestured to the branch beneath them. “No, no, I can’t. You were a child just hours ago! How am I supposed to feel?”
She nuzzled against his neck, and slid her hand to his waist, pushing him down.
The sun climbed over the horizon and spilled its light on the forest below. Max opened his eyes, suddenly faced with the reality of what he had done. Whatever trick of biology had caused Luna’s transformation, she was only hours outside of childhood. What did that even mean to her species? Was her mind the same? Did it matter?
He turned and reached for her.
Her skin was withered, the color of old newspaper. Her wings hung dull and limp at her sides. “This is the end,” he thought. He pulled her close and whispered in her ear. “Your people only have a single night to live as adults, only one chance to make love, and you spent it on me. We’re different species! You spent your last night on earth with me, but I can’t give you children. I’m so sorry…”
She pushed him away and gestured for him to stand, and then to help her up. Once more, she wrapped her arms around him and carried him into the sky. Far below them, in a narrow clearing, a silver object rested silently. “Take us down,” he said. “It’s my ship. We’ll be safe from the birds.”
They landed in the trench behind his ship, and Luna collapsed. Max carried her up the ramp to his bed. He fell asleep in the shelter of her wings.
Max woke in the night, expecting to feel Luna’s wings still pressed against his body. Instead, he felt nothing. He was in bed alone. “Computer! Lights!” Luna was collapsed in the doorway, covered in what looked like black confetti. Her wings had disintegrated.
He pulled the sheet from the bed and wrapped it around her body, carrying her out of his cabin and onto the bridge. The walls of the bridge were covered in hundreds of green, translucent egg sacks. Inside the eggs, tiny fetuses floated peacefully.
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