Deadman Switch

Calandra shook her head. "That might explain why there are so many here. It doesn't explain why they're alive."

I chewed carefully at a sun-chapped lip. "Maybe they can feed more than one way," I suggested. "Parasitic when they're out among other plants, something else when they aren't."

"Maybe."

For another moment we lay there in silence. Then, moving stiffly, Calandra rolled over and got to her feet, her sense that of someone bracing for unwanted but necessary activity. "What are you doing?" I asked, not at all sure I wanted to hear the answer.

She nodded up at the bluff towering over us. "There's a thunderhead up there, remember? I'm going to go take a closer look at it."

I looked up, a sinking feeling starting in my stomach and seeping down into my legs. It wasn't enough that we'd climbed forty million hills today already; Calandra wanted to do it some more. "Why?" I growled. "Or at least, why now?"

"You don't have to come," she said shortly. Glancing at the two ridges stretching to either side of us, she chose the leftmost and started up.

I watched her climb for perhaps a minute. Let every valley be filled in, every mountain and hill be levelled... As far as I was concerned, the fulfillment of that one couldn't come too soon. Swallowing a word I'd once been severely punished for saying, I got to my feet and followed.

It was, fortunately, not as bad as it had looked from flat on my back. Fairly gentle in slope to begin with, the ridge was also heavily studded with large and solidly inlaid rocks, giving it the appearance in places of a highly irregular staircase. Even so, it was a good fifteen minutes before we finally puffed up onto the flat top.

For a few minutes I just stood there in the brisk wind, well back from any of the edges, my eyes reflexively sweeping the horizon as my legs trembled slightly with fatigue. As usual, nothing that seemed out of the ordinary was visible out there.

"There's a thunderhead on each of the other bluffs, too," Calandra said in an odd voice.

I turned to look. She was right—precisely right, in fact. One thunderhead, exactly, perched atop each of the four bluffs.

From the top of the tall cedar tree, from the highest branch I shall take a shoot and plant it myself on a high and lofty mountain... A shiver ran up my back, totally unrelated to the wind. "All right, I give up," I said, trying to keep my voice light. "How did they get up here?"

Calandra licked her lips. "You feel it too, don't you?" she asked quietly.

I waved my hands helplessly. "I don't know what I feel," I had to admit. "Something here isn't right... but I have no idea what it is."

Calandra took a deep breath. "Me neither. And I don't like not knowing." She gestured to the lone thunderhead on our bluff, quivering in the breeze a half meter from the bluffs outer edge. "Let's have a look."

Standing at my cubicle window in the Carillon Building, a hundred twenty stories above ground, I'd never had even a twinge of acrophobia. Walking in a steady wind toward the edge of an open-air bluff a tenth that height was something else entirely, and I had to force myself to go the last couple of meters. "Looks reasonably normal to me," I said, dropping to my knees beside the thunderhead.

"Pretty hard rock it's dug into," Calandra pointed out, scratching at the cracked rock at its base with a fingernail. "The spore or whatever must have found a crack or hollow to germinate in."

I thought about that. "Maybe. On the other hand... there are an awful lot of cracks up here."

She hissed softly between her teeth. "Or in other words, why is there just one." Slowly, she shook her head. "I don't know."

I looked at the thunderhead again. A fungoid plant, stuck all alone in the middle of a rocky clifftop without other plants or decaying material anywhere around. A deep root system, perhaps, tapping into some source of nutrients within the rock itself? "Maybe it just so happens that thunderheads like fusion drive emissions," I suggested, only half humorously.

She shivered. "I don't like that idea at all," she said quietly.

I thought about it. If we were, in fact, sitting on top of a smuggler hideout... "Neither do I," I admitted.

Almost hesitantly, she reached out and touched the thunderhead's outer skin, resting her fingers there for a moment. Then, with a sigh, she lowered her hand and climbed back to her feet. "There's nothing here. Come on—let's go back."

We headed back across the bluff to where the two ridges began their sloping way down. "You want to try the other one this time, or stick with the one we already know?" I asked.

"Let's stay with the known," Calandra said. "I'm too tired to have to figure out new footing."

"Yeah," I nodded. Something on the second ridge caught my eye—"Hold it a second," I said, catching hold of her arm.

"What?" she asked, her voice suddenly taut.

I pointed down the ridge. "Discolored spots in the rock, about twenty centimeters across each—there and there; see? In fact," I amended, an odd tightness settling into my stomach, "they go all the way down."

She stared down the ridge in silence for a long minute. Then, still without speaking, she started down toward them.

The second ridge was, fortunately, as easy to climb as the first had been. The nearest of the discolorations was perhaps ten meters down, and we reached it without difficulty. Squatting awkwardly on the slope, Calandra below the spot and I above it, we gave it a careful look.

It was clear right from the start that the discoloration hadn't been my imagination; equally clear was the fact that it wasn't just a chance placement of different colored rock. The patch was obviously a changed section of the stone immediately around it...

I reached out to touch it. Smooth, or at least smoother than the rest of the surrounding rock. Wind or water treating could account for that, possibly, except that there was no reason I could see why one section would be so affected and a nearby one not. Off-colored rock; with a shiny, almost glassy hint to it...

I looked up and met Calandra's eye... and I could tell she'd reached the same conclusion I had. "It's been heat-treated," I said quietly.

Calandra licked her lips. "There's nothing here that could do that," she almost whispered. "Nothing at all."

The mountains melt like wax before the God of all the earth...

I swallowed hard, fighting back the dark, half-remembered fears of childhood. Spall was not—could not be—the seat of God's kingdom. Period. There was a reasonable explanation for what had happened here—a reasonable, scientific, non-miraculous explanation for what had happened here.

All I had to do was find it.

My probing fingertips caught something else. "Hairline cracks," I grunted to Calandra.

She nodded. "There's a whole network of them," she said absently. "More visible from my angle, I guess. They seem to radiate from the glazed part outward into the surrounding rock."

I leaned forward to see. "Cracks from the heating?" I hazarded.

She shrugged, oddly hunch-shouldered. For all her current rejection of her faith, she'd had the same upbringing I had... upbringing that would have included the same scriptures about God's fire and lightning that were currently bouncing around my own mind. "Maybe," she said. "They look a lot like the cracks around the thunderhead up there, though."

I looked back down again, chagrined that I hadn't made that co

She snorted. "Oh, certainly. What, no one ever taught them not to play with fire when they were seedlings?"

Under other circumstances I might have tossed out a pointed reference to God's lightning. But with a sense of creepiness growing steadily around me, I couldn't even resent her sarcasm. "It's not that crazy an idea," I told her. "I've heard of plants whose seeds germinate best after a forest fire has passed through the area. Why not one which spontaneously burns down at the end of its life to give that kind of seed a good head start?"