The Monster of Dahk

“Am I suffering from boredism hallucinations or are the walls closer together than when we entered?” Nathaniel asks.

“Are you bored?” Doctor Bill asks.

“No,” Nathaniel answers.

“Then it can’t be boredism,” Doctor Bill says.

“I know. I was making a point,” Nathaniel responds.

Haticat walks over to the narrow spot and puts one hand on each wall. “It is smaller. I couldn’t reach before.” The four explorers have been touring a slot canyon on planet Dahk. Although they have been to Dahk before, it is a big planet of many biomes. Previously, they helped the Pogotail Seals and the Whitetail Dogs resist an invasion of giant shellfish. This time, they are exploring the slot canyons and seasonal riverbeds at the center of one of the continents. This slot canyon appears to be slowly closing.

“Let’s move,” Nathaniel says urgently and leads his crew forward out of the canyon. Soon they reach another narrow area. It is almost too narrow to squeeze through. “Come on.” They race to the final opening, but it is already mere centimeters wide.

“What now?” Haticat asks.

Nathaniel looks up. The narrow ribbon of sky above them is also shrinking. He tries to climb up the wall but it is too slippery. Fred opens his backpack and attempts to use his climbing hooks, but the material is too hard. Haticat tries to soften it with a laser, but it doesn’t work well. “I think I understand now why I detected traces of hydrogen chloride in the riverbed. This canyon is a stomach,” Doctor Bill says.

“And we’re a tasty breakfast,” Nathaniel says, still looking upward.

“What do we do now?” Haticat asks.

“I have an idea,” Nathaniel says.

“What?” Haticat asks.

“Explosives,” Nathaniel says.

“What?” Haticat repeats.

Several seconds later, the four explorers are blown out of the canyon riding a wave of superheated air, well protected by a trazonic force field. They land near a cliff below where centuries of dilute hydrochloric acid have eroded the rock, exposing fossils of daggertails, swamp trilobites, and other creatures. “Hey, look at this buried tree,” Haticat says. “Its branches look almost like a claw.”

“Cool,” Fred says, brushing some dirt off of it. “Hey, what’s this?” He finishes wiping the dirt off. The tree had grown into a strange shape. There are heads erupting from the trunk. Attached to the clawed branch is a face with fangs, large nostrils, and close-set eyes. Next to it are the clear faces of Nathaniel, Haticat, Fred, and Doctor Bill.

Thus begins a long investigation spanning several weeks. What do the trees know and how do they know it? There is no evidence that the travelers’ future selves were on the planet centuries ago before the tree fossilized. Instead, careful study of its rings reveals that the tree is from the future. Its innermost rings line up with those of others, revealing dry summers, wet summers, and a fire, but it then has fifty additional rings on the outside. The oldest one percent of trees apparently have the one-time ability near the end of their lives to teleport to any point in time. The Brown Eagles living in the swamps report that many of the old trees from the future and their descendants grow into grotesque shapes resembling a fat monster with fangs, close-set eyes, and claws of alternating lengths. They call it the monster of Dahk. The shape is encoded in the genes spread by pollen once every year – the only way the trees can communicate. “They’re trying to warn us of something. The shapes are to catch the attention of animals like us,” Nathaniel says.

Attempting to understand what the trees are saying in pollen leads to several discoveries. Their cells each contain three nuclei. One nucleus contains four smaller bodies, one contains three, and one contains two. Of the four, two contain three, and two contain two. This is the same pattern found in their branches. The main trunk of every tree is split in three, with one branch itself branching four times, another branching three times, and the last branching into two. Of the four, two branch into three and two branch into two. Continuing to look for more patterns, the explorers decide that the best classification scheme for the various types of trees present on the planet breaks down in the same way, with three major groups, one subdivided into four, another into three, and another into two.

Then a remote region is discovered with three lakes. One lake contains four islands, another contains three, and the last contains two. Of the four, two of the islands have three ponds each and the other two have two ponds each. “Did the trees help to build these lakes through erosion, or did they copy the numbering of this place to send a message that the spot is special?” Nathaniel asks himself.

An extra-thorough scan by Doctor Bill reveals nothing special. “The chance of coincidence is small but not zero.”

“This is a fantastic mystery,” Nathaniel says. They soon run out of time to figure it out. While they sleep in their ship, another ship approaches the planet. It lands in the middle of the forest and engages its terraforming engine. Yellow walls shoot out from its sides, zigzagging across the land. They grow at the speed of sound, branching into a maze that reaches Nathaniel’s bed-ship an hour later and threatens to cover the entire landmass of Dahk in mere days.

“Yikes,” Nathaniel says when he wakes the next morning. He walks past the edge of his ship’s force field and puts his hand against the wall. It is made of tiny, yellow, feather-like crystals pressed flat. The wall is four meters tall and very hard. It decelerates colliding atoms so rapidly that it is actually painful to the touch.

“Whatever it’s made of, it’s ten times denser than lead,” Doctor Bill reports.

“Look, it’s trapped us here.” Haticat points at the way the walls have curved to fit the innermost limit of the force field.

“Ugh!” Fred says.

They decide to go exploring on foot, taking one of the three openings in the wall. Trees grow in between the walls, giving shade. Climbing up, they see the maze extends to the horizon. They follow it for quite some ways before encountering a Brown Eagle at a five-way intersection. “There’s a monster in the north. It hunts walking animals lost in the maze, but it seems to have the whole layout memorized.”

“What kind of monster?” Nathaniel asks.

“It’s about twice your height, brown, and has big nostrils and long claws. Oh! It looks just like the mutant trees!” the Brown Eagle says.

“This must be what they were trying to warn us of,” Haticat comments.

“It must be some sort of terraforming program. The monster has turned Dahk into its private hunting ground,” Nathaniel says.

“How do we get to it?” Fred asks.

“The maze is too big and convoluted for me to follow; I just fly over it,” the Brown Eagle answers.

“Right.” Nathaniel thinks. “Back to the ship. We’ll have to find a way to get it out.”

On the way back, Haticat picks up some large seeds. One of them has split open. “Hey, I never noticed how the insides look like a maze.” Fred and Doctor Bill look at it. The central spot splits into three dark branches, each of them branching further, filling the interior of the seed. One branch splits into four, one splits into three, and one splits into two.

“It has the same numerical pattern as the lakes, the branches, the taxons, and the cell nuclei,” Doctor Bill comments.

“The other seeds have the same pattern,” Fred says.

“Captain!” Haticat calls. “I know how to get through the maze!”

After some debate about whether the trees know left from right and how they chose their ship as the starting point, Nathaniel agrees to try following the seed map so long as the number of choices at each intersection continues to match. They do! The second choice of four at the five-way intersection leads them to two choices at a three-way intersection. They choose the first. They walk for an hour until coming to the point that branch patterns become too small to follow.

By that time Nathaniel’s pocket computer has finished creating a map of the entire maze from the pollen DNA sequence. They confirm that guanine stands for two choices, cytosine for three, adenine for four, and thymine stands for dead ends. they confirm that the sequence follows the leftmost path first and exhausts all its subpaths before returning to the last branch point. “Now all we need is somewhere to go,” Haticat says.

I don’t think the trees would’ve copied our faces and programmed a map centered on our ship without giving us a clue of where to go,” Nathaniel says. “Every messenger plasmid contains a spot of uracil hundreds of units long. I bet it means something.” Soon, they have the pathway plan to the dead-end thymine just before the uracils start. It contains 256 intersections. They start walking.

It takes them thirty days to get there. They know right away they are somewhere special. A ramp of yellow crystal brings them inside a metal cylindrical object two kilometers long. There are eight ramps leading from a pool of yellow liquid surrounded by electronics. Nathaniel looks around a bit. “This is a ship.”

It takes a couple hours to figure out how everything works. Just as Doctor Bill double-checks to make sure Nathaniel isn’t going to blow something up by retracting the maze, the monster appears in one of the eight doorways. It doesn’t roar. It doesn’t yell at them. It sneezes lasers.

Haticat and Fred are hit and fall down. Fred is up first and returns fire. His shots bounce off the shiny, rubbery hide as the monster runs across the room. It has superspeed. Nathaniel dodges its long claws, both beings becoming blurs to the others as they slip into superspeed mode. He eludes it for a while. Then it headbutts him into the reservoir of yellow fluid. Nathaniel sloshes around. It is thicker than water and more slippery. He climbs out while the creature walks over to the Stuffians. His skin seems fine, but the fluid has turned his clothes black. Just as the monster sinks its claws into Haticat and tosses him in Nathaniel’s direction, Nathaniel rams into it. The monster falls over, but Nathaniel bounces almost all the way back to the pool. He is up quickly, however, and runs back toward the monster struggling to get up. Fast it may be, but agile it is not. Nathaniel stabs it in the neck with his knife and it grabs his hand and crushes the bones. “Aaaaaaaaah!” It has superstrength too. The knife falls on the floor and the monster tosses Nathaniel away. Fred throws a grenade and the monster is down again. Nathaniel runs over to it and begins to push. “The lever!” he yells. Haticat runs to the lever. Nathaniel rolls the monster right into the pool before it can get up. Haticat pulls down the lever. Immediately, the walls retract. Material rushes past so fast it creates a breeze. The monster is sucked under the surface, layers of yellow covering and crushing it. Eventually the entire maze has disappeared.

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