Page 43 of Butterfly Effects

Alice was leading Thomas to the third stromopod. Thomas was better at following her instructions than Sam was; that, or this one was more prepared to be mounted, after seeing both of its friends get ridden off, because they were on their way back in no time.

Alice climbed back up the side of her own stromopod, and waved for the rest of us to follow her as she turned it and began riding off, moving parallel to the edge of the forest. “Does she know where she’s going?” asked Sam.

“Hope so,” I said, shrugging, and we followed her.

After we’d gone what felt like about a mile, Alice looked back. “Most of the life forms on this planet are insects or crustaceans,” she said. “Not as many spiders as you’d expect, a lot of annelids, no true mammals or even reptiles. The invertebrates got real ambitious in the skeleton department at some point, and most of them are chordates now, which helps with getting larger than we necessarily want them to be, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is that life on this planet evolved along different lines.”

“Okay,” I said, dubiously. “What does that have to do with the price of coffee?”

“A surprising amount, really,” she said. “Life seeks out the places it’s most suited to when it comes time to start building permanent settlements. Fūri build in jungles, humans build on plains—there are always exceptions, but we’ll preferentially move toward wide, flat spaces where we can see dangers coming. And Johrlac build on estuaries. They like the mud and the presence of brackish water. If we’re lucky and we’ve been dropped near Ka’krin, moving toward the coast will basically guarantee we find it. It’s large enough that it swallowed the whole river estuary a long time ago, and extended fairly deep into the surrounding jungles.”

“You’re enjoying this way more than I’m comfortable with,” I said. “I would like an adult.”

“I think we’d all like an adult, sweetheart,” she said. “And I guess I am enjoying this. After finding Thomas, the people who helped me recover made me promise to stay home for a while. I’m not supposed to go dimension-hopping without a really good reason. It’s nice to be home. It’s so nice to have a little stability back in my day-to-day life. But I got used to things being a lot more exciting than they usually are in Michigan. You don’t spend years building a relationship as one of the best pan-dimensional bounty hunters out there and then go cold turkey overnight.”

“I guess that makes sense,” I allowed, glancing over at Thomas to see how he was taking this. He was riding his own stromopod serenely, looking untroubled by the things his wife was saying. “And I guess you have good reasons to stay home for now.”

“I do,” said Alice.

“We’ve been working on the idea that she has backup now, and needs to stay where her backup can find her,” said Thomas. “As long as she lets me come with her, I don’t care if she needs to run into danger from time to time in order to stay happy and healthy.”

“How is running into danger healthy?” asked Sam.

“Mental health counts too,” said Alice.

He groaned, leaning his forehead against my shoulder. “Every time I start to think maybe your family isn’t completely deranged, I’m reminded of how wrong I am,” he complained. “Every single time.”

“I am what I was made to be,” I said, twisting to kiss him on the temple. “But I love you, and I do not share my grandmother’s unreasonable desire to go roaming through hostile dimensions for fun.”

“Thank fuck for that,” said Sam fervently.

“And thank fuck for that,” said Alice up ahead of us, pointing to something in the distance. She had managed to guide her stromopod to the top of a small rise; we hurried to catch up with her, Thomas and Sam each urging their own steed to move faster.

In a matter of seconds, all of us were lined up along the top of the rise, looking down into what must have been a fertile bowl once, fed on the sediment deposited by the large river we could see running toward the sea. The estuary was gone, swallowed by city.

The capital city of Ka’krin was large, sprawling to virtually fill the bowl; there was no farmland left that I could see, unless they were farming trees. Patches of the city had been all but swallowed whole by trees, their branches rising high and green into the sky.

The buildings were mostly irregular and brownish-gray, like a series of wasp’s nests driven onto spikes. The rest were boxy and solid, and glass panels winked up at us from all the structures, and from the depths of the forested places. I didn’t see any roads running either in or out of the city, although there was a bridge across the river, and a tall structure like a monorail running off into the distance. No trains moved there; it was just a long flat path, elevated from the ground and approaching the city. Ships dotted the bay, but I couldn’t make out anything resembling a harbor.

“How are they…?”

Alice looked at me. “Don’t assume the things you see have the same functionality as they would in a human settlement. Try looking at them in context.”

Looking in context, the monorail would work as a path for trading caravans and people riding beasts like our own. I squinted. Some of what I’d taken for supports were actually winding ramps, slope shallow enough that pedestrians could make their way to the top. And the glinting windows weren’t as irregularly placed as they’d originally seemed; they were angled to catch light from all the suns above us, and would provide the foundation for an excellent solar network, if that was the ambition.

There was a large stone structure at what I assumed was the center of the city, a squared-off replica of the lumpy nests around it, rising like an irregular fruit into the air, ringed with balconies and dotted with more of those windows-slash-solar panels. It was next to a bumpy organic structure that was almost as tall but less visibly constructed. It seemed to “fit” better, for lack of a different word.

I peered down at the green rim around the city just in time to see a massive beetle coming in for a landing, having launched itself from somewhere in the cliffs off to the side. It tucked its wings away and trundled into the city proper, its rider a tiny speck in the distance.

“They don’t use motor vehicles because they don’t need them,” I said slowly. “Do they use electricity?”

“Yes. Thanks to the cycle of the suns, night lasts only a few hours here, but while it’s happening, the city lights up like anything. It attracts enormous moths, which the hunters will bring down before the suns rise again. That’s about half of how they supply meat to the city. Moth is surprisingly filling.”

“That is … actually really clever,” I said. “Turning the whole city into a moth trap? Not the worst plan I’ve ever heard someone come up with.”

“They also have water purification, advanced medical technology, and everything else they need to be a stable, thriving society. It helps that the hive mind keeps them from wanting much more than the necessities: you’ll never meet a Johrlac who’s focused on accumulation of personal wealth. It isn’t needed, since no one would imagine letting someone else go hungry or cold or uncared-for.”

“That sounds … pretty okay, really,” said Sam carefully.