Short Story: A Breath of Fresh Air

A Breath of Fresh Air

Besnik took a deep breath and released the seal catches on his helmet. The oxygen reserve of his suit was exhausted, and it was time to risk the planet's fetid, steaming atmosphere. The instruments told him it was breathable, but he had no idea if any of the local microorganisms would be compatible enough with his biology to cause problem. Unfortunately, that was a risk he would have to take, to avoid suffocating. His lander, partner, and temporary shelter were still hours away.

With his first breath, Besnik coughed, and suppressed the urge to vomit. The atmosphere had a bad smell, but a worse taste – it was utterly beyond anything in his experience, but it was reminiscent of both rotting meat and an open sewer. As the mists around him indicated, the air was warm, wet, and thick. The alien flora looming out of the steaming haze were misshapen, cancerous things, most of them translucent and vaguely amoebic.

Still, Besnik knew that the world he was stranded on wasn't all that it appeared to be. The organisms he could see were lumpen and inelegant to the eye, but almost all of them were colonies composed of millions of tiny individual organisms working together. Each was, internally, a teeming hive of multicellular creatures, acting as the cells in a human body might – ferrying nutrients, depositing waste materials, repairing injury, fighting off invaders, and so on.

As Besnik fought to gulp the air without emptying his stomach, The helium-filled envelope of a gas tree ahead of him suddenly tore open with a flatulent sound, and the whole organism crumpled wetly to the spongy soil. Suddenly alert, the human explorer put his back to one of the bulging sac-bushes and watched in that direction carefully. He'd been on-planet for almost a week and still hadn't seen any large, mobile predators, but the mist reduced visibility so much that he could have passed a Centauran Ferroceros at ten meters and mistaken it for an overgrown sac-bush.

After several seconds, nothing else in that direction moved. Reluctantly, Besnik took another breath, trying not to think of the polyp-like, microscopic airborne larvae from which all the local flora grew. Most likely, such things would die in his lungs, but he didn't want to think too hard about what might happen if they didn't.

"Vipin, it's Besnik. Please respond." Besnik tried again over the radio, again without success. He'd tried it every hour since his aerofoil had clipped the gas-trees and come crashing down, forcing him to walk back. Either his suit radio had been damaged by the impact, or the atmosphere, with all its poorly-evaporated water, was affecting the signal.

Grumbling, the explorer collapsed his helmet, clipped it to his belt, and set off once again, following the bearing indicated by his wrist unit. The terrain was hilly, but fortunately, there were no major obstacles between his crash site and the base camp. If he'd thought to bring two more oxygen tanks, just in case, he wouldn't even have had to take off his helmet. The gravity was less than Earth standard, but somewhat more than most starships simulated, and he was forced to take regular stops to regain his breath. The air didn't get any less foul-tasting as he breathed more and more of it, but at least he didn't feel anything that might suggest an unfortunate lung infection. Not yet, anyway.

Reaching the top of a particularly aggravating hill, Besnik leaned on the flexible trunk of a gas tree and surveyed what little of the terrain ahead he could see. The land sloped down into a valley, and he thought he heard flowing water in the mist. A minor brook or stream would pose no problem – his suit might even be able to refill its water reservoir from the stream, properly filtered.

As Besnik started down, the gas tree he'd just been leaning on burst with a very balloon-like pop. He turned just in time to leap out of the way of its wet, membranous envelope as it fell to the ground. "Ugh." He grumbled, kicking the tree's ropy branches. He hadn't seen a gas tree burst before he took his helmet off – not since he started walking, not since he'd landed on the ball of putrid meat which could be charitably called a planet. It was a mystery he'd have to mention to Vipin, when he made it back.

At the bottom of the slope, there was indeed a small brook, its waters almost clear. Besnik stuck his wrist probe into the water, allowing his suit to test the liquid and, if it was safe, to refill the suit's reserves. Evidently, the water's contamination was nothing the suit couldn't filter; he felt the tiny pump spin up, drawing water up a tube in his arm to the reservoir behind his back. When the water tank was full, he took a sip from the water tube protruding near his neck and waded across. The stream, despite moving fast, evidently had a thick, muddy bottom – Besnik's boots clung with every step, and gray mud covered them up to the ankles when he emerged on the other side.

"Vipin, it's Besnik. Please tell me you're not napping on the job." Besnik sent again, trying unsuccessfully to kick the sticky mud off.

"Besnik? Where the hell have you been?" Came the reply, punctuated with static. Besnik tried to breathe a sigh of relief, but instead he caught a whiff of the mud he had walked through and gagged violently. It smelled like someone had blended a bucket of rotting fish heads in sulfuric acid.

"I'm..." Besnik struggled for breath. "Almost back. Lost the aerofoil. Any chance you can come pick me up in the rover?"

"Got your locator. I'll get it powered up now." Vipin agreed. "See you in a few minutes."

Besnik grunted a response, kicking his boots against the rubbery side of a sac-bush. The mud continued to cling noxiously, and the bush trembled in a disquieting fashion. In the end, Besnik gave up and began walking again. As he did, another gas tree nearby failed; its ropy, twisted trunk fell limply against an adjacent specimen.

"Why the hell does that happen?" He asked nobody in particular. Idly, he wondered if the planet's miasmatic atmosphere was beginning to affect him. Realizing it wouldn't make any difference since Vipin was probably only a minute away, Besnik approached the fallen tree. With its gas sacs burst, it looked something like a dead, emaciated webbed arm. Its trunk's ropy, vine-like elements twitched like severed lizards' tails. There was nothing redeeming about the horrid things, Besnik decided.

Shortly after he started examining the flaccid tree closely, the twitching turned into a cooperative tug, and the entire tree retracted into the ground with an elastic, slithering motion. "Hey!" Besnik trotted after the limp canopy, which was out of sight by the time he reached the place the tree had once rooted.

The sound of the rover's electric motors heralded Vipin's arrival. "Hell, Besnik. You've been breathing this mess? Why didn't you call sooner?" Came the driver's voice over the radio.

"I was trying." He replied. "Did you know gas trees live in burrows?"

"Besnik, that doesn't even make a little bit of sense. Let's get you to medical." Vipin replied, strapping on his own helmet and climbing out of the rover's cab.

Besnik had a foggy sort of idea, but it was a very unpleasant one. "Wait, Vipin, let me-"

It was too late to warn him. The other explorer leapt from the big six-wheeled vehicle to the ground, but the ground opened up below him. Besnik saw a flash of comically surprised expression behind Vipin's faceplate, then his partner was gone.

"Hell." Besnik said. It was all he had time for before the ground swallowed him, too.

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Originally posted on Cosmic Background on 2946-06-26.