How long would it take before he got used to falling, he wondered?
Already, he’d lost track of how long it had been.
He tried resigning himself to the fact of his falling, since there was nothing else he could do.
The nano-computer was certainly no help.
“You’re falling,” it told him.
“And what am I going to land on?” he queried, notes of stress in his voice.
“Unknown at present,” it responded, in its usual equitone.
A faint murmur of light came from beneath, too diffuse to reveal anything much. Barely visible, rocky walls sped past.
He reasoned to himself the Worm wouldn’t drop him here or anyplace he couldn’t survive. While it had a habit of throwing him in harm’s way, he didn’t think it wanted to kill him. Still, it had a completely alien mind and he had no way to know its motivations—or what its conception of harm was.
It seemed to want him breathing, at least. His face was fitted with some sort of apparatus. His breath rasped noisily inside it. The smell of his own spittle was already cloying.
An updraft of some kind of air ruffled his clothing. This was warm and detectably moist, but presumably not germane to human lungs. The larva seemed to find the air tolerable. It pulsed with slow rhythm, like breathing, as it tumbled beside him.
Its pale, grub-like body was curled, crescent-like—about the size and posture of a sleeping cat. It seemed fully placid about its fate, like it was napping its way to the bottom. When it first found him, the creature had fallen from a window, so maybe this seemed normal—though he doubted it perceived much at all in its current undeveloped state. Still, it was some sort of company.
He wasn’t certain what the larva would become. It was just bathed in acids meant to trigger changes before they came here. And it might be changing already. It looked like it was fluttering in the updraft, like the cloth of his coat, but that could be a trick of the light. He thought the diffuse glow underneath was increasing and showing a greenish hue. Perhaps that made effects.
The updraft seemed warmer and more viscous. Hopefully that meant he was slowing down. He queried the nano-computer.
“Air density has increased. However, your body surface is a negligible check on velocity and your garment presents inadequate wing loading to counter exit weight.”
“So I’ll die when I hit, you mean?”
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“Data points inadequate to predict.”
Exasperation battled with fear.
He held out the ends of his coat anyway, for what the good it would do. He lamented losing his umbrella. It lay useless, in the rain, on some other planet.
The larva’s tight coil was flattening into a doughy disk that rippled furiously in the vertical wind. It started to distend like a parachute. Its descent slowed, while his did not. He watched it pull away, bathed in green, like it was headed to some sickly afterlife. Only then did he despair.
His funk was broken when something snaked around one wrist, then an ankle, then his midsection, then all over—tentative, then cinching tight. With a jolt, he decelerated. The creature had become his parachute. He was prone and harnessed like a gondola, but safe.
The nano-computer was effusive, now, with velocity data he didn’t want or need. He bid it to shut up.
Below he saw luminous patches. He parsed them as rainbow-tinted lava seams, multicoloured stars or northern lights the wrong way around. He couldn’t decide.
Then it struck him he was looking at a forest.
Finger-like spires of bioluminescent lime towered over a community of forms radiating violet, orange and other hues. They bloomed out of swampish-looking pools. Droplets condensed, spotting his goggles.
The further he sailed down, the less these resembled trees or any sort of plant. They were entirely leafless. Their forms were leathery domes, vulva-like foldings and crenelated pitcher shapes, like various mushrooms. He was headed face-first into a swamp of luminous fungi.
The tallest, greenest specimens bounded him like standing stones as he drifted closer to those murky pools. No longer fearing a hard fall, he worried over ending up submerged.
Luckily, ground zero was a sprawling, shield-shaped toadstool—vividly purple, spotted with yellow. He came to rest there, gentle as a falling feather.
Bathed in its violet glow, he was overcome and almost instantly drifted off to sleep.
(Next: Dream of Fungus)
(Previous: Periods of Rainfall)
