Earth Thirst (The Arcadian Conflict) - By Mark Teppo Page 0,56
fiddles with the settings, and I take advantage of her hand moving away to step out of her line of sight.
“Oh,” she says, grabbing my arm without missing. “I see something. There's a blob out there. Sort of red and yellow.”
“It's a heat bloom,” I say, realizing she's got the thermal filter on. “Ambient heat. Usually from a building.”
“Maybe it's Orongo,” she suggests, “though…” She cocks her head to one side as if the change in perspective will help her decipher what she is seeing.
“It can't be,” I tell her. “Orongo is on the western rim of the crater.” She's looking off to our left, and since we're facing nearly south, she's looking in the wrong direction. My night vision is good, but whatever heat signature she has spotted is too subtle for me to pick out.
“It's almost like a cross.”
“There shouldn't be anything like that out there. The natives weren't Christian. Nor would they build something like that if they were.”
“Well, there's something out there now.” She offers me the optics. “Here. Look for yourself.”
I do, and I can tune the settings more delicately than she can. The shape wavers, solidifies.
“It's a building,” I announce. “Four wings off a central hub.”
“Well, I guess I know where we're going, then.”
I hand back the optics. “I guess so.”
Why would Arcadia build something like that?
* * *
We work our way down the sloping rim of the crater and enter the rows of trees, and I'm struck almost immediately by the methodical organization of the trees.
There are toromiro, of course, a leafy tree almost fernlike in its appearance; it used to cover the hills of Rapa Nui. Ranks of miro stand in stately lines, while clumps of carambola—star fruit trees—huddle together like displaced children. I think I smell the tang of citrus trees, though I haven't seen any yet. There are several different species of palm trees, as well as two varieties of the plant whose fruit is known as the miracle berry. Both of these last two species are native to Africa, and their presence crystallizes a suspicion that has been building in the back of my brain.
“It's amazing,” Mere says. The moon has risen, and she's taken off the optics as there's enough light to follow the track between the rows of trees. “It's a tree farm.”
“Yes,” I say, “but it's not right.”
“What's wrong with this? There are species here that live nowhere else, right? I thought you'd be more excited about it.”
“I am. Don't get me wrong. I thought the toromiro were extinct.” I wave a hand up and down the row we're walking along. “But this isn't, well, organic. Notice how the toromiro are all exactly the same distance from one another.” I point at the next row. “See those over there? Those are tualang. They're not much taller than the toromiro now, but give them time and they can grow to heights of more than seventy-five meters. Bees like them. The sorts of bees that build nests a meter across. They're not terribly aggressive, which makes it easy to harvest their honey and beeswax.”
“So there are bees here too?”
“Perhaps. The use of honey as an antiseptic goes back thousands of years.”
“You said this was a spa. That's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect to find here. The bacteria you were talking about earlier. The honey from bees. It all sounds like the sort of things you'd find at a private Beverly Hills spa for the stupidly rich.”
“It's the organization,” I say. “The building, too.” It's obvious to me, and I know why she doesn't see it as I do. She's never been underground; she's never experienced the fulsome chaos of the systemic nervous system of plant life. The way roots of different species—weeds, flowers, shrubs, trees—all share the same space, the same water and nutrients. It only looks chaotic from the outside. If you are in it—if you can sense every other root and tendril around you—then it becomes part of you. Order out of chaos.
“This is too much like an orchard or a vineyard—the sort of layout that makes it easy to harvest fruit. This is order for order's sake,” I explain. “This is the way corporations think.”
That stops her. “Big Ag?”
I shake my head. “Does the thought of a multinational agricultural conglomerate investing in a tree farm in the middle of the Pacific Ocean make sense to you?”
“Only if there is a functional profit model. But why couldn't this be an Arcadian project?”