His team moved across the hundred-meter perimeter, sweeping uphill.
The gray haze descended, touched the jungle floor, settled into nooks. Species pattered down through the branches, thumped on logs, a dying rain. As he worked downslope the insecticidal fog bombs popped off in the high canopy. Birds cooed and warbled and stabbed insects from the air. Tall grass blades cut the shifting sunlight. Carrion moths fluttered by on charcoal wings in search of the fallen. Rustlings escorted him through dappled shadows which held a million minute violences. He sidestepped a blood vine’s barbs, wisely gave a column of lime ants their way. A conservation biologist, he had learned to spot the jungle’s traps and viper seductions. Hand-sized spiders scuttled like black motes across the intricate green radiance. He left the cross-country van on the clay road and continued, boots sinking into the thick mat. Swirls of iridescent lichen engulfed thick-barked trees. Rotting logs shone with a vile, vivid emerald. Through terrain that reflected his inner turmoil. But after you’ve cooled off, remember that if you leave us alone, we’ll be another human settlement someday. If you’re from the System and you’re reading this on the way back home, you’ve just found out you’re holding the sack. On it someone-he knew instantly it must have been the old woman, or somebody damned like her- had hand printed a message. In the lowest access drawer was a simple scrap of paper. Only later did he look carefully through the canisters. He sat and looked out at the blankness and thought about that. Now the Flatlanders knew what to defend against. So on her five-year watch she had arranged a dodge that would work even if some System ship caught up to them. Seventy-three years ago the woman had known they couldn’t protect themselves from what they didn’t know, ships that hadn’t been invented yet. Used it to relax him, make him think the touchy part of the job was done so that he didn’t think to check inside the stenciled canisters. But maybe she’d known Jacob would try something and since she couldn’t do anything about it she used it. The risky part of it had been the business with Jacob.
Something about it, something about the way she’d looked, told him it had been the old woman’s idea. They must have planned it all from the first.
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