Independent Means by Simon Kattenhorn

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Chapter Four

Julia stared at the Terrian towering over her, stunned into silence. After all these months, she still couldn't quite get used to the sight of them. The dry, leathery skin; the unnerving way they simply stared at you as if that were enough to make it completely obvious what it was they wanted.

"I was just trying to get my diaglove," Julia attempted to explain, alternately rubbing her forearm and pointing up the slope to where she hoped her diaglove waited. She wasn't exactly sure why she was trying to explain this to the Terrian, who remained both indifferent and oblivious to the meaning of her gesticulations. She thought that perhaps she had entered an area that the Terrians preferred her not to. Who could tell?

"You know? Diaglove?" Julia acted out pushing various buttons on a make-believe diaglove on her left arm. "For helping the sick?" Despite the arched eyebrows and verbal declensions, Julia realized the futility of her charade. The Terrian cocked his head to one side, blinked, then ululated once more for good measure.

Julia wasn't sure what to think. The Terrian was obviously trying to tell her something. She needed to try a different approach. Perhaps the creature knew something about the Eden Advance team- about the illness.

Julia began looking around her, desperately searching for some sort of prop or aid to facilitate her attempts at communication. Seeing some nearby fairly leafless plants, she had an idea.

"Well here goes nothing."

She yanked at the stem of one of the plants, pulling it free of the loamy soil, and brushed the root free of dirt.

"Food," she motioned by imitating taking small bites from the root. The Terrian was watching her with a stare that seemed to Julia to have equal likelihood of conveying the thought "eating" as it did "insane", or "transrover" for that matter. "Such an expressive race, these Terrians," she thought in exasperation. Trying a new tactic, she then began acting spitting the root out of her mouth with a look of disgust. She then grabbed at her stomach, and bent over double as if in pain.

When she looked up, the Terrian wasn't even looking at her. She thought that it had perhaps lost interest in her inconsequential antics and had moved its attention onto more exciting matters, such as the appearance of a nearby rock.

The Terrian then lifted one arm and pointed off into the distance, towards the nearby desert plain. It trilled again, and cocked its head to look at Julia.

"Desert," said Julia, looking confused. "Is that where you're from? The desert?"

The Terrian then pointed at the root in her hand, and motioned again towards the desert. Julia looked down at the root and frowned. "Ah!" Imitating the Terrian, she pointed to the root in her hand and then pointed towards the desert. "The plant came from the desert, that's right. It made us sick."

Julia proceeded to point at the Terrian, and back again to the desert. "Are you from the desert where the plant is from?" She wasn't exactly sure why she was accompanying each gesture with spoken English, but it somehow seemed that it should make all the difference in trying to explain things. It was human nature. Like when a human tries to communicate with someone who speaks a different language by speaking much slower, as if that would automatically be enough for the other person's brain to spontaneously become fluent in the foreign tongue.

In response, the Terrian pointed off towards the direction of the river, somewhere in the middle of the adjacent forest, and pointed off again towards the desert. Then, as if deciding that was quite enough pointing off into the distance for one day, the Terrian bowed its head to its chest and rapidly retreated back into the ground, leaving Julia looking most perplexed.

"A river in the desert?" Julia wondered out loud.

***

Devon pointed the scanner at the ground. "I don't know, Yale. It all seems pretty much the same to me. Still mostly aluminosilicates, iron oxides, minor amounts of calcium carbonate, magnesium, and titanium, and trace amounts of a few other minerals. If there's something unusual in the soil, it must be at concentrations less than the resolution of the scanner."

"I suppose it's possible that even minor amounts of the substance is enough to induce a toxic reaction," Yale conjectured. He began walking around randomly, scrutinizing the soil beneath his feet. "If we could only find....ah! Devon, over here!" Yale crouched down, examining something in the ground, while Devon got up and walked over to him.

"What have you found," she asked?

"Look here," said Yale, pointing at a woody stem protruding from the ground. "Look familiar?"

"It's one of the plants!" Devon said excitedly. "That must mean..."

"...that this soil contains the substance," Yale cut in. "I think we've found our spot for taking a sample."

Devon kneeled down and pulled out her water canister. She had already emptied the contents into Yale's canister so that they could use it for bringing back the sample of soil that Bess had indicated they should bring back.

When Bess had first told them that she thought the soil from the desert plain could offer an explanation, and perhaps even a solution to their predicament, Devon was unconvinced. No disrespect to Bess, she had thought, but it seemed highly improbable to her that Bess would be able to solve a scientific problem in five minutes that had eluded Julia's comprehension for days. After all, Bess had no formal higher level education, and besides, everyone knew that educational institutions on Earth were far inferior to those on the stations. Bess *was* intelligent, Devon had come to realize during the many weeks spent on this planet, but it seemed implausible that she had the educational background to be solving medical enigmas. Nevertheless, these *were* desperate times, and for that reason Devon had been willing to give Bess the benefit of the doubt in this case, and return to the plains to retrieve a sample of the soil there. At this point, she was willing to try anything to cure this illness that had attacked most of the group's men. And Uly.

Devon began scooping at the soil and emptied handfuls of it into the canister. "Yale, we should bring back that plant too. Julia may need it to perform extra tests," she said, turning her head to look at Yale, who was still crouched down where he had found the plant. "If we ever find Julia," she thought to herself anxiously.

Yale began excavating the soil around the plant's root so that he could pull it out of the ground. Having filled up the canister, Devon replaced the cap and tucked the container into her haversack. In the distance, she watched the plains shimmering in a heat-mirage that blurred the horizon out of distinct definition. "That's our future," she thought to herself. "We know we have to keep going towards that horizon, but we have no idea what's really there. It's just a big blur. And when we get there, it could just as easily be a raging river, or an impassable canyon, or New Pacifica itself. And we never know if it will be all of us making it there or just a handful of us. And yet towards it we go, drawn forward as if caught in a magnetic vortex." Devon sighed. "After all, it's the promise of what that horizon holds that gives me the strength to do this every day..."

"Devon? Devon?!" Yale's voice broke her reverie.

She turned to look at him. "Yes, Yale? What is it?" Yale had finished retrieving the plant and was standing watching her with an 'I know that expression, Devon' look on his face.

"Welcome back," he smiled. "Shall we get going? The sun is starting to get low."

Devon glanced up at the sun. It *was* getting low. She guessed it must be late afternoon already. "Okay," she agreed. "We'd better keep up a good pace if we want to beat the darkness."

They began retracing their footprints back towards the mountain pass, about a kilometer away. For a while they proceeded in silence, kicking up a small cloud of dust as they walked. Yale could tell from Devon's pace that she was eager to get back to the camp. She had been hiding her worry over Uly's sickness quite efficiently, but he knew *very* well how badly it was eating away at her on the inside. After all, he had watched her go through this so many times before, whenever the syndrome had caused Uly to take a turn for the worse. She had become very convincing at hiding away her true feelings.

"Devon," he began gravely, "there's something we have to consider."

Devon cast him a quick glance that said she would rather this topic never come up, but she knew it had become inevitable. "I know Yale."

"What will we do if we don't find Julia?" Yale brought the question that had been on both their minds out into the open.

Devon grimaced and blanched. The very thought was utterly unnerving. She still had a difficult time reconciling the fact that they had abandoned Julia at one point after discovering her secret involvement with the Council. The very idea that they could survive easily without her was immature and ignorant. They hadn't appreciated that fact- after all, Julia's unsettling actions at the time had clouded all other considerations- but it had become obvious in the interim that Julia Heller was a vital part of the Eden Advance team. They *needed* her. And they especially needed her now.

"I just don't know how to answer that, Yale. I keep trying to convince myself that this is all something ridiculously silly and explainable, and that Julia is going to just turn up any minute now. But deep down, I just can't hide away the fear that we may need to come up with a solution to this by ourselves."

Yale nodded in agreement, as Devon continued.

"We have Julia's recorded notes. Maybe we can find some clue as to where her thinking was going with this thing. There must be *some* indication as to why she took off so suddenly. She must have been on to something, Yale, I'm sure of it. And I'm not going to rest until I find out what it was."

"Maybe the soil will provide a clue too," Yale suggested. Bess' idea wasn't a particularly fanciful one after all, Yale had decided. He had been examining his database during the afternoon for any possible information that might support Bess' hypothesis.

Devon glanced at Yale questioningly. "Did you discover something?"

"Nothing definite," he replied. "My records of geological specifics are fairly limited. But biogeological studies became quite prominent on Earth when industrial pollution began contaminating major sources of drinking water about two hundred years ago. We really should give credence to what Bess has to suggest."

Devon considered Yale's suggestion and then concurred. "Alright, Yale. That will be the first order of business when we get back to camp."

They were interrupted by the trilling of Devon's gearset. It was Bess.

"Devon! We have a problem..."

This was not particularly the words that Devon had been hoping to hear right now. They had enough problems already.

"Bess? What's happened? The sickness...?" she let the implication dangle.

"No Devon, it's Magus. She's disappeared. You'd better get back here as quickly as possible."

Devon and Yale exchanged worried looks. "We'll be back in about thirty minutes." Cutting the gear connection, she picked up the pace even more and she and Yale hurried through the pass with sombre expressions.

***

Magus opened her eyes. She was happy to discover that her body was still in one piece, instead of being dematerialized into millions of constituent atoms spread across the subsurface of the planet.

"Cameron?"

The question was met with silence- not that she was really expecting something other. She was obviously in an entirely different place. Magus slowly moved her eyes around, taking in her new surroundings. It was another cave, although a much smaller one than from where she had just come. The cave opening, about five meters away from where she sat, afforded a view of the early evening sky. "Huh? It's getting dark already?" she thought. Standing slowly she moved over to the cave entrance. It was sheer luck that she had her left hand grasped around a fist-sized rock on the cave wall when the loose earth gave way beneath her feet. Her grip tightened around the rock instinctively, and her whole body swung around in a close arc to the left and slammed against the rock face. Magus realized that she was dangling over a more or less vertical drop of about eight meters. The cave was positioned part of the way up a steep cliff.

The rock was starting to cut into her fingers, but Magus managed to pull herself up with one arm, and scrambled back into the cave entrance, where she collapsed for a few moments to regain her breath. Sitting up again, she then inched towards the edge of the cave and peered over. It was more or less a straight drop of a few meters before the slope began curving away from the rock face in the form of a pile of talus that had collected at the bottom of the cliff. "Too far to jump," she decided. Searching to the left and right, Magus noticed a narrow ledge running along the cliff to the left of the cave entrance. "Seems wide enough," she thought, "if I keep my body close to the rock face."

Magus glanced around the inside of the cave again. She confirmed something that was immediately apparent to her when she first opened her eyes: no tunnel.

"How the hell am I supposed to get out of here?"

Magus stared at the back of the cave wall and bit against her lower lip as she contemplated what to do next.

"If there's no tunnel," she decided, "then I'll have to go and find one."

Moving back to the cave entrance, Magus turned around to face inward against the rock face, with her heels protruding over the small ledge. Shuffling along slowly, with arms held out slightly from her body against the rock face for balance, she moved along the ledge away from the cave. The rock was only inches in front of her face, and she tried to distract her thoughts of the drop beneath her by contemplating the tiny particles of grit that comprised the rock itself. After a few minutes, the rock particles became as fascinating as watching paint dry, and Magus found herself thinking about the Eden Advance crew- how much she cared for them all dearly and how desperate she was for the sick to get well again so that they could continue their quest for New Pacifica. Of course, it would be much easier to accomplish that herself if she weren't presently located on an entirely different part of the planet. She could tell that the sun was setting rather than rising, which meant she had been transported eastward, probably a few thousand miles.

The ledge began to widen to the point where Magus could turn and walk normally along it. It led up to a grassy clearing approximately ten meters across, and ringed by steep slopes that continued upwards for a few more meters. She decided to search the edge of the clearing in hope of finding some route away from the cliff edge. Moving across the clearing, Magus reached the rocky area at the base of the next slope. There were huge boulders scattered around, which she hoped were hiding possible pathways out of the clearing. Seeing a particularly navigable pathway between two of the nearest boulders, Magus walked over and began rounding the boulder. At the same time, something else rounded the boulder from the other side and collided with Magus. Taken completely by surprise, Magus screamed.

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