ROOTS
by Kate Thornton

I hate it when I have to learn something the hard way. This implies that there might have been an easier way to learn something, but that's not always true. Sometimes the hard way is the only way, and you end up starting a war or something over it.

Like a few years ago, when I was still on the shuttle run between Mare Tranq and Otherside, our two big lunar bases, piloting a bucket of bolts and duct tape on an expired transport license. My sometimes-co-pilot, Ndoro, had taken a vacation and was languishing amid the splendors of three square meals a day and all the exercise you could hope for in the penal camp at Mare Nec. I forget exactly which brawl that little stay at the Company's expense was about, but maybe it was the one in which my six-foot companion punched the living daylights out of a Company VIP, having mistaken him for a "ferret-faced piece of offworld effluvium," whatever the hell that was.

Anyway, I was on my own, transporting miners back and forth between the mines at Otherside and the pleasure palaces at Mare Tranq. Both bases had large ports and were fully equipped for real space travel, but Mare Tranq was the only one that qualified as an actual city rather than just an overblown Company settlement. The work was dull and monotonous, but the occasional bit of creative transportation, read smuggling, made it worth the effort.

The trip from Otherside to Mare Tranq was usually a raucous affair, with a dozen or so miners wanting to part with their paychecks. I charged exorbitantly for the liquor and let them get all worked up before I dropped them at the door to one of the shadier sex parlors. The owners, Lester and Big Red Snipeley, gave me a small kickback.

The trip back was always very quiet, with a dozen or so miners badly hung over and trying not to puke or even move.

There wasn't a big call for smuggling - just the usual stuff the Company wouldn't let the miners have back at Otherside. I hauled in cigarettes, dope, offworld booze and once in a while a young lady or boy or something, always with their consent, of course. I even smuggled in someone's mother once, for crying out loud, but that nearly got me into a lot of trouble. Usually it was just enough to break the routine and give me pocket money.

But this trip, Lester and Big Red had something for me.

"Just take this to Otherside," Big Red said, in her working uniform of two wisps of red lace and a cork. She handed me a small pet carrier, the kind with breathing holes and a little metal gate through which something that looked like a wise old turnip stared me down with luminous brown eyes.

"What is it?" I asked. I had seen quite a few interesting things, but a sentient root vegetable was a first.

"A customer left it here," she said. "I dunno what it is, some kind of Martian ground digger or something. Anyway, here's the address." She handed me a slip of paper with an Otherside mining barracks number on it.

"Okay," I said, slinging the carrier over my shoulder. "Usual rates, though." What was I thinking?

I picked up the miners - there were eleven of them, looking like Death - and put the kitty carrier in Ndoro's co-pilot chair next to mine in the scarred and peeling anteway we grandly called "The Bridge." I guided the 'Linda Rae' through a queasy take-off then went to the passenger compartment to make sure all eleven survived whether they felt like it or not. They looked like they were waiting for rigor mortis to either set in or wear off, so I went back to the bridge with a cup of synthetic tea and the latest copy of 'Shuttle Digest.'

I was halfway through an article about avoiding the speed traps near Mars Colony, not that my crate would have made Mars Colony, much less been noticed in a speed trap, in a lunar month.

"Excuse me," a disembodied voice piped up, "but I need to get out and walk around a bit."

"Sorry, pal," I said without looking up. "Once we take off, we can't open the door. No air out there, you know. Just go back and sit down and we'll be landing real soon."

I got 'em once in a while - the after effects of lunar liquor could be pretty devastating. I even had one guy actually try to open the door and walk out. We were cruising at about two thousand meters over the desolate and rocky surface. I was tempted, let me tell you, but I just talked him into going back to his seat quietly.

"No," the voice said patiently, too patiently for a miner, "I want to get out of the cage."

I felt a little prickle on the back of my neck. It was the turnip. It was talking.

"Uh, where do you want to go?" I asked. I was sure the sight of a walking and talking turnip would upset the miners. So far no one had thrown up this time out. I sorta wanted to keep it that way.

"Just let me out for a few minutes," it said. "I am cramped in here."

I picked up the cage and looked through the gate. The thing seemed harmless enough.

"Okay," I said to it, "but you'll have to stay here on the bridge. I don't want you frightening the passengers." I opened the cage door and watched as the turnip-headed thing crawled out. It had little arms and legs which seemed to lengthen and contract as necessary. It climbed down from the chair and paced around on the floor. It couldn't have been more than half a meter high, even with its legs stretched out to the maximum.

"So," I said by way of conversation, "what are you?" I could see the smooth creamy flesh of its head, turning to a sort of lavender then purple at the edges. That was what really gave it the appearance of a turnip I decided. The arms and legs projected directly out from the head and there was a flat blade-like structure in the back like a rudder. It had a faintly aquatic look about it. A water turnip.

The face had no expression. The eyes, large and luminous, were the main feature, but there was a tiny mouth almost hidden underneath them. There was no nose.

"I am what your kind calls a Martian digger, as your friend in Mare Tranq rightly guessed." Its voice was soft and well-modulated, with a tiny bit of a patrician accent, as though it had learned its Chinglish in a formal school.

"Wow, I thought you guys were a myth," I said admiringly. "So how come you're in a cage bound for Otherside?" The Martian diggers were rare, a life form too intelligent to have much truck with the dregs of the human race. When we first colonized Mars, they made themselves known, then all but disappeared. As a First Contact, it was spectacularly disappointing, probably to both sides.

I guessed they just sort of disappeared into legend or wherever else things that have seen and dismissed the human race went. It was probably getting crowded there, but what did I know?

"I am actually a diplomatic envoy," the turnip said. "I have agreed to this mode of transportation for security reasons." It was on the floor flexing its legs in some sort of rhythmic motion, aerobics, maybe.

"Security reasons," I said. "Then why are you telling me? Wait a minute. I picked you up in a kitty cage at a brothel for crying out loud." I knew the turnip was lying.

It stopped exercising and climbed back up to the cage. "Okay," it admitted. "I'm not a diplomatic envoy. I'm a spy."

"Well, that's more like it," I said. I mean, that I could believe. James Bond from the vegetable garden.

It settled back into the bit of towel on which it had reclined in the cage. The gate was open and its little feet dangled out. "We have several hours," it estimated correctly. "I will tell you the story. Then I will have to kill you." Its large eyes blinked seriously

"Yeah, just tell me the story, pal," I said. "You'll probably kill me with boredom." Or food poisoning, I thought.

"In the beginning," he began, and I braced myself for a long two hours, "we slumbered beneath the rocks and sand as the red winds blew unnoticed far above us and we were immobile. The security of our world was all around us, pressing in on every side in safety. We communicated through this sleeptime with our thoughts, and for time immeasurable, we stayed in silent stillness."

I flipped on my recorder. It occurred to me that a Martian digger's story might be of some value.

"Then the noises came. Far above us, on the surface where we had never ventured, there was noise. We ignored this as it was happening in a part of the world which we did not inhabit, the useless surface world. But it did not go away. It was a long time between the beginning of the noise and the great disaster which your kind wrought upon us, but in those days time meant nothing to us. We had no regular motions of the planets to track, no sun, no stars. We had only the interior life."

"When the first burrows were breached and our people were dug out of their homes and heaped up like so much refuse, we tried to protest. But we had been silent for so long that we had no voice. It took more time for us to develop a way to speak. By then, hundreds of thousands of us had been excavated and killed in great rotting heaps."

This wasn't the way I had heard it, but I had heard it from the other side, from a construction worker. The guy who told me about it just shook his head. "Yeah," he admitted, "we dug 'em up. We thought they were food. But they were tough and stringy and tasted like shit, so we threw 'em away. We were diggin' around there to put in the foundations for the landing site. We didn't know they were intelligent. Hell, we thought they were potatoes or something."

An easy mistake, I thought, looking at the creature's head again. The few tiny sprouts of fibrous hairs on its wrinkly pate resembled the micro-roots which are always so hard to clean on regular vegetables, the ones you try to scrub off with a stiff brush.

The Martian continued. "And then we found our voices and tried again to communicate, but it did no good. And we found our legs and arms and our steering blades and with mobility we were able to flee. But our life underground and undisturbed was over."

"So, where'd you all go?" I asked. I was mesmerized by the critter. I had heard spooky tales of the early attempts to eat them, stories of soups and stews and butter sauces which invariably ended in severe stomach cramps. It was the sort of story mothers told children to get them to stop putting dirty things into their mouths. Well, my mother, anyway.

"We went into the mountains where there was nothing to attract your kind," it answered. "Those of us who were left," it added.

There was a short silence before it continued.

"But we had learned our bitter lessons. We adapted to life above the ground and studied your kind. We abandoned our sedentary ways and became physically active, developing our arms and legs into the useful appendages you see now. And we kept thinking and planning and absorbing all we could."

It eyed me with the faintest suggestion of smugness. "And now we are ready," it said.

"Oh, yeah?" I said. "Ready for what?" What were they going to do, I wondered. Rise up in their tiny crock-pots and wage war on us?

"We have a business proposition for you," it replied. "We have knowledge of the interiors of planets. We are superbly suited to underground operations of all sorts. And we control more than half of the Martian surface."

"So how come you're hitching a ride to Otherside?" I queried. "What's so interesting there?"

The critter rolled its luminous eyes. Talking to me must have been sorta like talking to a dog, I guess.

"The mines. You are mining minerals at Otherside and I need to see your mining operations. No one would let me see anything in my present form, but masquerading as someone's pet is a perfect disguise. My miner will take me everywhere and I will see everything."

"Yeah," I said, "so what? So you see everything, big deal. There's nothing secret there anyway." Well, there might have been, but I was hardly in a position to know that sort of stuff.

The critter spoke to me patiently, the way you might explain something to a three-year-old.

"Your world depends on the resources you find in other places. Your world no longer supports you - the mines at Otherside supply more than half the requirements of your home planet. What would happen if that resource dried up?"

"We'd be up the creek with no paddle," I admitted. "But how're a couple of guys like you gonna take over the largest corporate entities in the universe?"

"Oh, that part is easy," he said. "The hard part is running things once we have them. That's why we need you, why we can't just destroy the human race outright."

Well, that was a relief. No sudden obliteration of the human race by vegetables. Whew. Had me worried there for a moment.

"So we can stick around as partners, is that it?" I asked.

"Well, in a very general sense," the digger said.

Okay, the human race subordinated to a race of roots. Well, it beat extinction, I guess.

Let me state right here for the record, that it never once occurred to me that the little critter might be a danger to the human race or even just myself. If I had thought any danger whatsoever existed, I would have planted his shriveled little rump in about eight meters of rocky lunar dust and left him. But come on. He looked totally harmless.

As we neared Otherside, the creature grew silent and crept all the way back up into the kitty carrier. I reached over and strapped it in for landing, dragging Ndoro's seat belt across it.

The landing was okay, everyone survived and no miners threw up until they had cleared the shuttle. That's what I call a successful trip.

I checked on the thing - it hadn't given me a name and when I inquired, it seemed to be at a loss for words. "We don't do that," it finally replied.

You'd think if something had delusions of conquering the known universe, it would at least have a name for itself. But it seemed okay, so I unhooked the safety belt and slung the carrier over my shoulder. I rechecked the address Big Red had given me and started out toward the mining residence elevators.

Mining operations, to include residences and everything else, were all under the lunar surface. Back when we first colonized the moon, there was a lot of environmental concern over the lunar surface, and it had been forbidden to disturb it, except at Mare Tranq, which on romantic moonlight nights on Earth resembled a bulbous scab.

I located the host miner, a guy named Bertie Huggins, turned over my cargo, collected a nice little fee, and went back to my shuttle.

That should have been the end of it, right?

Wrong.

Three days and a trip to Mare Tranq later and I'm looking at the furrowed face of one of the toughest magistrates on the lunar surface, namely Hizzoner Judge Malcolm Conley, or 'Malcontent' as he was known in legal and other circles.

"Where's the alien life form?" he bellowed at me, ceremonial gavel raised dangerously close to my head.

"If you mean the turnip in the pet carrier," I said, "I delivered it to one Bertie Huggins at Barracks 4, Otherside Mines." I had on my best "who, me?" expression.

The judge didn't buy it. "Smuggling," he said with a twisted little smile, "willful disregard for offworld quarantine laws, transporting live cargo without a permit, operating a shuttle on an expired license, and causing a public disturbance!" He grinned triumphantly.

I was puzzled. Why would the worst judge in Mare Tranq be picking on me? Okay, so I was guilty of most of that stuff, but no one ever enforced those laws. What was going on?

A weasel-guy in the uniform of a Company inspector addressed the court. "Your Honor," he said with more than a trace of self-important arrogance in his voice, "we are aware of these heinous crimes. However, the Company will choose to overlook them if Mr. Sullivan surrenders the alien life form." The Company could choose anything it liked - it had no jurisdiction on Mare Tranq.

And besides, Mr. Sullivan, namely me, didn't have the damned life form. The life form was delivered to a miner. I pointed this out to the Company inspector and Hizzoner.

Malcontent banged his gavel again, reminding me of the traffic judge in Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. "Guilty!" he shouted. "Guilty, guilty, guilty!" He grinned and I remembered the rumors about happy drugs.

The Company weasel rolled his eyes and waited patiently before continuing in the same arrogant little whine. "In that case, Your Honor, we will give Mr. Sullivan exactly forty-eight hours to either produce the life form or be taken into custody." Considering they didn't have any jurisdiction, they sure had a lot of pull.

Malcontent grinned again and banged the gavel a few more times. The bailiff escorted me out of the courtroom, removed his earplugs, and returned my personal possessions which had been confiscated. "Go," he said curtly with the eloquence of a man unused to speaking aloud. I went.

Forty-eight hours isn't very long when you have been given some impossible task. I left my co-pilot Ndoro in the slammer in Mare Nec where he was still sleeping it off and went back to Otherside, this time without any paying passengers, a situation which pained me.

I politely knocked on Bertie Huggins' door and waited for him to open it. I waited with my Glock Stingray set on "stun - maybe kill."

Bertie did not open the door, however. The force of my polite knocking caused the door to fall inward and reveal a gaping pit where the floor had presumably been. Bertie, having outlived his usefulness, was propped lifeless on the remains of the kitchen counter, a dreamy look on his expired face and a dead hand caressing the upturned kitty carrier. He hadn't been dead too long from the looks of him.

I looked down into the pit. It went down forever, past half a mile of living quarters, administrative offices, stores, amusements, equipment and all the other usual detritus of a lunar mining operation. It was sorta neat, like an exploded diagram or something.

I sighed. The damned turnip was going to be a lot more trouble than I thought.

It was at this point that I could have informed the Company of my suspicions and left the search up to them. I guess I would have suffered the consequences and gone to jail in Mare Tranq for my accumulated tickets, but at least humanity might have had a chance of escaping war and enslavement. I don't know. At any rate, I made the other decision, the wrong one. I started looking for the devil turnip myself.

The breach in Mr. Huggins' quarters, not to mention the hole in that entire portion of the Company's valuable resources, caused alarms to go off and security officers to respond. I was peering into the hole and wondering how I could get down it when a security cruiser came screaming up at full siren and I did what any reasonable person would do. I jumped.

I'm no hero - I was going to jump down it anyway. Lunar surface, remember? One-sixth gravity. I didn't exactly float, but when I came to a halt at the bottom I was okay, just a little bruised up from hitting various bits of junk sticking out on the way down.

A crude tunnel loomed before me and I had no time for fancy thought-processes - I scurried down it like a rat.

I reached the light at the end of the tunnel and realized that I was too late. The mines were deserted, devoid of any human occupants. I ran wildly from machine to machine, looking in every command post, every security cubicle, every office. Nothing, or rather, no one.

I sat down on the cold dirt floor and thought about crying. There didn't seem to be any point to it, though, so I just waited for the Company security guys to fly by and pick me up. Somehow jail at Mare Tranq no longer seemed to so bad.

But they never did. Everyone knows what happened after that, how once the turnips had a foothold, so to speak, in the lunar mines, it was an easy transition to overthrowing the Company. The diggers established themselves as the dominant species on Mars and the moon, and probably would have gone for Old Earth itself if it weren't for the water.

The water, you see, is what finally kept them from conquering the earth, although since we have no resources on the earth, we have to buy them at exorbitant rates from the diggers. They can't stand the water. They developed without water and were very susceptible to mold, mildew, and just plain drowning. But it took us awhile to figure this out, and in the meantime, we lost the Martian and lunar colonies and were confined to the earth in a sort of economic subjugation, supplying slave labor to the mines in exchange for basic raw materials.

I got out of the lunar mines by laboriously climbing up the hole and evading the diggers. I knew what to look for, the spindly legs, the rudder, the fleshy purple-tinged head. I made it to the 'Linda Rae,' and then to Mare Nec where I stopped just long enough to pick up the still-comatose form of my partner from the city jail and fly to Old Earth before the war started. In the pre-war confusion, no one seemed to notice me.

The war dragged on for a couple of years and ended in the usual way, with a lot of complicated trade agreements and sanctions and tariffs and things. Ndoro and I made a pretty fair living during the war, hauling supplies and stuff, but if we had really been on the ball, we would have gone into turnip farming. The Army used millions of 'em as decoys.

My part in starting the Martian wars never came out, and as far as I know, I never saw the original digger from the kitty carrier again. But I work in the Resistance - we don't call it the Underground for obvious reasons - and hope that my efforts there might alleviate some of the guilt I feel over the whole thing. And some day maybe the human race will rise up again to conquer the stars, this time watching out for what's under its feet.

Kate Thornton writes short fiction and has had over thirty stories in print, gleaning much of her inspiration from her Army career, her proximity to Caltech, and her nosy neighbors. She will be delighted to hear from you. e-mail address: kittyf@hotmail.com website url: http://www.sff.net/people/katethornton

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