New Horizons

This Peaceful State of War-5

It’s almost daytime. It has stopped raining, and humidity is dropping.

Another Hern throws a burning log into the pile of bodies. Fire spreads like an ink stain.

Fire.

My mind rings with warnings. Warnings in the cabin of the craft that brought me here. Warnings plastered on every wall in every corridor of the mission building.

In case of fire, make your way to the bunker immediately. Do not try to save others. Do not try to retrieve material goods. Do not fire weapons. Do not hesitate.

I run. I didn’t think I could, but I do. Past the half-built houses, past the fields, my crutches sinking deep into the mud. I see no Pari, only Hern. Some are still gorging themselves, others are running around with burning torches, others still look like zombies, clutching bellies that are visibly swollen, their eyes wide and faces gaunt with what I presume is pain.

"Thank the Lord, Envoy, there you are!"

A single brother waits at the entrance of the camp. "Quick, let’s get out of here." He grabs my arm and drags me onto the white field with its oozing thick mud.

I gasp, "The truck."

"Can’t use it... would blow up... in the daytime. Run... as fast as you can."

I push down my crutches, haul myself forward, again and again. I think both my knees and my hips will need surgery after this, but I run. For Brother Copernicus.

Behind us, the burning camp lights up the morning sky. The heat radiates through the back of my robe.

At the mission’s entrance, the alarms are ringing. The air whooshes past with the rush of oxygen making its way to the fire. Fifty percent oxygen in the air. It’s like a bomb. White flames leap from the camp to the trees, higher than I’ve ever seen. There is an explosion, a flash; the sound follows a second later. I’m thinking how there is no way the Hern can escape the inferno to birth their young safely. Flames billow out from the forest, spreading over the canopy, engulfing it.

"In the bunkers, now!" Brother Tycho shouts over the roar.

In the throng of bodies, I’m unsure who helps me. Even inside the building, the air shimmers with that sort of tension that makes me sure it’s about to explode. A brother stands at the entrance to the bunker, making sure everybody has their rebreather masks and supply packs, because when the fire has passed, there will likely be nothing left of the building.

Down the stairs, one, two, three stories, into claustrophobic darkness. We all huddle on the floor while explosions shake the ground.

I don’t know how long I sit there, concentrating on my breathing in that dark and cramped space that smells of sweaty bodies even through the mask. It’s pitch dark, and I count the time by how often I have to crawl over legs to visit the toilet. The hole in the ground is designed only for men, and after three days, or what I think has been three days, I can smell it through the mask.

Eventually someone decides the fire is over and climbs up the stairs to open the air lock. I’m busy thumbing messages on my PAD for the next beamsweep, which is due very soon. I’m not going to wait until I’ve surveyed the disaster outside. With that chemical cocktail, there’s not going to be anything left for us to survive. We’ll need to be lifted off this hellhole. Soon.

When I finally climb outside the bunker, it turns out I’m even more right than I thought. Not only has the building burned to cinders, there is nothing left of the forest. The ground is covered in white ash as far as I can see. There is no sign of the Pari or the Hern, or indeed of any life.

It’s raining.

A brother is walking around with an air quality meter. He turns around, and laughs. Takes off his mask. Everyone yells at him, but he just laughs.

"It’s safe," he shouts and balls his fists at the sky. "The air is safe!"

The ash in the older burnt tracks is no longer white, but gray with soot. I kick the muddy clods, angry with the waste of life. I was sure the Hern were about to go through a mass birthing event. Now, thanks to us, they’re all dead. My boot dislodges a rock. Underneath, I can see green.

With difficulty, I sink to my knees and push the ash away with my gloves.

I find a seedling.

Another piece of the puzzle falls into place. The ash, and specifically the titanium oxide, protects the soil from the excessive UV radiation. That is necessary, because the soil is mostly inorganic. With high-oxygen atmosphere, fallen leaves take next to no time to decay, so there is no leaf litter to shelter seeds.

The Hern create paths where the catastrophic fires that are inevitable won’t reach. Fire breaks, as it were. Corridors where regeneration will be a few months ahead of everywhere else, so that when the fires come, their progeny will have food.

But there is no progeny. The entire planet is dead.

The rescue team takes time to turn up. In the days before they come, we witness a transformation of the track of formerly ash-covered land next to the ruins of the mission.

On the first day, whole slabs of ground lift up with the force of growing seedlings. We camp in tents and we’ve had to put our masks back on. The air is heavy with cyanide, which I’ve come to associate with growing plants on this planet. Soon, plants jostle each other for sunlight, spreading out their little canopies further and further. If we could see the planet from space now, it would look like a negative image of what I saw on arrival: a white planet intersected with bands of green.

On the second day, I notice movement in the greenery. There are already some butterfly-like creatures out, fluttering in the shimmering air.

On the third day, the smaller plants burst into flower. I suspect they will set seed and will not grow again until the next fire.

On the fourth day, I am busy recording the astonishing growth when my scanner picks up a weak signal. The beamsweep isn’t due for another two days, and the signal isn’t strong enough anyway. It repeats a single ID tag, a twelve-digit code. That’s like... a travel tag.

My heart thudding, I dig in the layer of ash and mud and locate my armband, no longer white, but half-melted and gray. I’m standing on the remains of the Hern girl.

Again, I dig in the cover of ash. I smear it all over my sleeves, but I don’t mind. With all the bending and kneeling, some of my muscle strength has returned, and in the past few days, I’ve felt better than I have for years.

My gloves strike something soft.

Carefully, I scrape ash away from a white mushroomy thing, egg-shaped and longer than my forearm. Its soft leathery skin quivers when I touch it. The surface is warm. I dig it free from the soil and have just lifted it onto my lap when the skin ruptures, peeling back as if it’s been shot from the inside. Slime oozes onto my robes. Something moves inside the leathery sac. I push the membranous flaps aside and out crawls a humanoid creature, unfolding long legs and stretching out of its confines. It rolls off my robe and crawls to its feet. It only reaches to my knee and is skinny and covered in slime, but I recognize the brown skin and lithe form of the Pari. All around me similar "mushrooms" are popping.

The life cycle is complete.

The recently-burned soil is barren still, but I have no doubt that, given a few months of regeneration, it will burst with life. Then the trees will grow and the Pari will get bigger. They will start building, accumulating fuel for the fires. And then, after years of growth, when the forest is mature, the Pari will start to change, entering their last phases of metamorphosis, losing the ability to communicate and focusing only on the instinct to cannibalize for the need to reproduce. How long this will take is anybody’s guess. We might hang around to study the process.

Yes, I think I might recommend that to the board. I might even do a stint myself, but: no more missionaries, only observers. Bianca doesn’t need us and has never done so.