A Dream of Junction
The following is based on a dream I had a couple of years ago that grew into the world of Junction (called “Router” in this earlier version). You’ll note a lot of details have changed, but I still kind of like this little scene.
Our sealed and armored helicopter flies over a flat, sparsely wooded plain. Silver autumnal grass ripples under our shadow. Stands of slender, birch-like trees cluster around meandering creeks. The landscape could be anywhere in central North America or Asia, but it isn’t even on Earth. The creeks occasionally part around the pine-colored, deceptively-soft-looking mounds of steel-wool bushes. To the north, beams of actinic blue light pierce the clouds: light leakage from the Class A star behind the Z-7 Hole. And to the east, the direction of our flight, I can see a rolling, glistening mass, like a gelatinized ocean. This is the border between the earth-like Z-1 biome, and Z-6.
“See the babylon trees?” My host hands me a pair of small binoculars. Beyond the oily border zone, a dark, serrated mass I had taken for distant mountains resolves into a wall of dark purple, cup-shaped leaves, each the size of a Roman Colosseum. The trees are much closer than I thought, which means they must stretch twice as high as our current altitude.
“Magnificent, aren’t they?” Alexander Wai Lim, Singaporean pharma-tycoon, is the director of the Golden Gateway Group, or 3G, the most powerful international lobby for de-regulation of the Papuan Hole. He is a heavy, tightly-coiled man, his brown skin roughened by a contamination accident early in the years of Routerian exploration.
When I ask him about his traumatic past on the Patchwork Plant: “Don’t such dangers necessitate strict guidelines about transgress through the Hole?”
“And do you think guidelines would help?” Lim gives me his characteristic chuckle and headshake, as if mystified the blind foolishness of the world. Both worlds. “The regulations in place don’t protect people on Earth from alien plagues. Their only function is to secure Japanese and Australian interests on Router against American Big-Pharma.” He favors me with a patronizing smile. “Now, I’m all for shouldering aside you Americans, but this bickering makes it impossible for anyone to get any real work done over here.”
“And that work is Pharmacognosic exploitation?” I ask.
“Exploration. Taking samples does no harm to Router. Rather the opposite.” He nods at the curly black hair of our native pilot, a man introduced to me as Mystery-Prince Ghegwu. “Our native employment programs and infrastructure enhancement have received international praise.”
And international condemnation. I inquire about the nature of the laws Lim and 3-G are attempting to overturn.
“That would be the entirety of the Exploration Charter, whose ratification was unilateral and completely illegal by international law.” Lim cannot be accused of thinking small. “Look, the Charter was drafted by people who had never been to Router, people who never even took a university biochemistry class. We, the early explorers, were never even consulted. The Australian military just moved in one day and built a bunker on top of the Hole. Completely illegal. Completely stupid.”
“And why is that?”
“What do you know about Taq polymerase?” Lim clearly has this speech prepared. “It’s an enzyme used for DNA amplification. Industry standard for almost any kind of genetic work. Worth a mint. And it originally came from an extremophile bacterium species that lives in the hotsprings at Yellowstone. Pharmacognosy has given us countless similar treasures, from drugs to industrial processes. And that was just on Earth.”
Practiced speech or no, Lim seems entranced by his own arguments. He sweeps his hand toward window, where a wall of alien vegetation casts long shadows over the grassy prairie. “There are animals in those giant trees with ferrofluid for blood. There are plants there that grow high-grade fiber-optic cable instead of leaves. Or fix earth metals in their wood. And the microbes! Give me a scoop of the sludge growing on the biomic border, a decent lab, and a few years, and I can revolutionize medicine, toxic waste management, mining. Not that gold mining is a tenth a lucrative as Pharmacognosy. And those idiots want to close the Hole?” His expression hardens, damaged skin like granite. “Over my dead body they will.”
