Marooned in Realtime

T But you see why I was nervous, Lelya? Just a few hundred meters downslope was a jungle, a thickly grown, life-gone-to-crazy-excess jungle. There had to be something pretty fearsome keeping all competing plants and all animal pests out of the jac forest. I still had visions of spider armies sweeping down the trees and sucking the juice out of intruders.

T I was very cautious the first few days. I walked close to the northern edge of the forest, close enough so I could hear the sounds of the jungle.

T It didn't take long to see that the jungle/jac border is a war zone. As you walk toward the border, the forest floor is broken by the corpses of ordinary trees. The deadwood furthest in is scarcely recognizable lumps; closer to the border you can see whole trees, some still standing. What had been the leafy parts are drowned in ancient webs. Rank on rank of mushrooms cover the wood. Their colors are beautiful pastels... and the fishers wouldn't touch them.

T Walk a bit further and you're out from under the jacs. Here the jungle is alive and fighting to stay that way. Here the spiderwebs are thickest, a tight dark layer across the treetops. Those webs are silver kudzu, Lelya. The critical battle in this war is the jungle top trying to grow past the shroud, and the spiders trying to lay still more silk on top. You know how fast things grow in a rain forest; the plants themselves play the shade-out game, growing a dozen centimeters in twenty-four hours. The spiders have to hustle to keep ahead. Since those first days, I've climbed into the jungle canopy just outside the Jac forest and watched. On a busy day, the top of the kudzu web almost seems to froth, the little buggers are pumping out so much new silk.

T Where the jungle trees are still living, you do see animals. Webs fan from tree to tree, black with trapped insects. For larger animals, the silk is no barrier. Snakes, lizards, catlike predators-I've seen them all in the thirty-meter-wide band that the spiders' kudzu shades. But they don't have dens there. They are fleeing, or chasing, or very sick. There are no monsters to scare them back; they just don't like to stay. By now I had some theories, but it was almost a week before I knew for sure.

T Once or twice a day, we walked to the jungle's edge. There I did some easy hunting and we ate the berries the fishers liked. At night, we slept several hundred meters into the jacs, farther than any other animals dared come. And as long as I stayed far enough inside the forest, we made very good time. Even old jac trunks molder quickly away and the ubiquitous mulch smooths out most ground irregularities. The only obstacles were the many streams that crossed our path. Down in the jungle, the brush along these streams would have been virtually impassable. Here, the mulch extended right to the water's edge. The water itself was clear, though where a stream broadened and the water slowed, there was greenish scum on the surface. There were fish.

T Ordinarily, I don't mind drinking from a stream, even in the tropics. Any blood or gut parasites are just a tasty meal for my panphages. Here I was more careful. The first one we came to, I hung back and watched my committee of experts. They sniffed around, took a drink or two, and jumped in. A few seconds later they had their dinner. From then on, I didn't hesitate to ford the streams, floating the travois ahead of me.

T But by the fifth day, Hewey was beginning to drag. She didn't come off the travois to play. Dewey and Lewey patted and groomed her, but she would not be jollied. By the next afternoon, they were equally droopy. There were sniffles and tiny coughs. It was about what I had expected. Now for the important questions:

T I found a campsite on the jungle side of the border. It was hell compared to the comfort we'd enjoyed in the jacs, but it was defensible and at the edge of a lake. By then the three were so weak I had to fish and forage for them.

T I watched them for a week, trying to analyze the odds, trying to guess what once I could have remembered in an instant. It was the greenish mist, I was sure. The stuff floated down endlessly from the top of the jacarandas. Other stuff came down too, but most of it was identifiable-leaves, bits of spider, things that might have been caterpillar parts. I had a fair estimate of the spider biomass; the jac tops were actually bowed down in places. The green mist... it was spider shit. That by itself was no big deal. The thing is, if you lived in the forest, you breathed a lot of it. Almost anything that fine would eventually cause health problems. It was clear now the spiders had gone a step further. There was something downright poisonous in that haze. Mycotoxins? The word pops to mind, but damn it, I have nowhere to remember more. It had to be more than an irritant. Apparently nothing had evolved a defense. Yet it wasn't super fast-acting. The fishers had lasted several days. The big question was, how fast would it affect a larger animal (such as yours truly)? And was recovery a simple matter of leaving the forest?

T I got the answer to the second question in a couple of days. All three came out of their funk. Eventually they were fishing and rowdying as enthusiastically as ever. So I had the old decision to make, this time with a bit more information: Should I hike through the jac forest as far and fast as I was able? Or should I hack my way crosswise through a thousand klicks of jungle? My guinea pigs looked as good as new; I decided to continue with the forest route, till I had symptoms.

T It would mean leaving Dewey and Hewey and Lewey. I hoped I was leaving them better off than when I found them. That pond was alive with fish, as good as anything back in civilization. The fishermonkeys were quick to rush into the water at the first hint of land predators. The only threat from the water was something large and croc-like that didn't look very fast. It wasn't precisely like the jungle they had once known by the seashore, but I would stay long enough to build them a sanctuary.

T I ignored the fact that my survival craft was from a different era. For once, being sentimental was deadly.

T The morning of the seventh day, it was obvious that something big had died nearby. The moist air always carried the scents of life and death, but a heavy overtone of putrefaction had been added. Hewey and Lewey ignored it, were busy chasing each other around the water's edge. Dewey was not in sight. Usually when the others squeezed him out he came to me; sometimes he just went off to sulk. I called to him. No answer. I'd seen him an hour earlier, so it couldn't be his demise the breeze announced.