Patreon bonus chapter -- A Lake of Stars

Snowpea couldn’t keep her eyes off the shimmer.

It was well and truly dark. High above, the real stars shone in the cloudless sky, light from places too distant to be meaningful concentrating on this tiny, precious planet. Somewhat less high above, her cluster slept in their temporary sleeper nest; her mother and two of her parents snoring gently, her fairly new baby sister sleeping quietly as she was wont to do when she actually slept. Snowpea should be sleeping; tomorrow would be a busy day, finishing up their analysis here and taking the long walk back to their house and to Valerian, their remaining parent, too old to make these sorts of treks any more. The cluster was too small, these days, to maintain such a big territory, and until baby Ivy could walk or Yarrow came back from his exile, there wouldn’t be much help. Snowpea should sleep, and be strong for tomorrow.

But she couldn’t. The lake was shimmering.

Groundwater in Arborea was almost never completely still. Snowpea’s mother had told her that the groundwater became more and more animated the closer to the shore you got, being buffeted by the waves and tides of currents of the great open ocean with less and less root matter to cause friction before it could reach the surface, until you made it to the edge and saw that ocean itself, which was an enormous lake that stretched far out beyond the horizon of very salty water that was constantly rippling in bug, towering waves and no part of it was ever even close to still. Snowpea had never seen the ocean. Her cluster lived too far inland, and while they travelled sometimes for trade of festivals, there was never any reason to travel that far. To her, the water below was a bit brackish and often close to still and usually temperate, the result of a wild ocean filtered through kilometers of algae and worms and fish and the root mass of plants designed specifically to strip the salts from it and render it palatable. Usually, she didn’t notice the little movements left. Except in the lake tonight.

An algal bloom had caused the problem, her mother had explained. Somewhere in the plant mass that made up their ground, something had died, or broken, or there was some kind of runoff from something, probably with a lot of nitrogen in it, and huge populations of algae and bacteria had grown to feed on it, using up all the oxygen and preventing driving all the fish away to places where it was easier to breathe. And then the algae and bacteria had started to die and in that brief period of time before the oxygen could come back, other bacteria, ones that could resist the poisonous waste made by the bloom and that didn’t have to use oxygen, or even considered oxygen poisonous, showed up to eat all the nutrients from those dead cells. And an upwelling from a deep, dark, oxygen-free pocket somewhere under Arborea had brought these bacteria to the lake, and Snowpea had learned a new word: “bioluminescent”.

The ‘bioluminescent’ bacteria usually helped jellyfish glow, but here, free, in this lake, they glowed when buffeted or disturbed, meaning that when there were so many of them all over the lake, the waves and ripples on the water surface showed up as networks of glowing lines, always moving. It was entrancing.

It wouldn’t last long. The oxygen would have started to come back as soon as the bacteria eating it up all died. Soon, the lake would be too toxic for the deeper bacteria, and they’d die off, and the surface bacteria and the bugs and the fish would all come back and in time, the lake would return to normal.

They hoped. That’s why the cluster was out here – taking samples to look at in the lab, to see if anything toxic to the lake’s normal inhabitants was there, and if it was, whether it would break down fast enough not to cause problems. They didn’t know what had caused the bloom, so they weren’t sure what was in the lake. If it was something long-lasting, it might stay in the lake (which would mean reorganising some of their water treatment and food channels) or it might be washed to another location (which would mean the same thing, and be even more difficult to plan around, since not even Arboreans could predict water and nutrient movement with perfect success). And that could have a knock-on effect to a whole lot of systems.

But that very rarely happened. If it was going to happen, the cluster needed to know, so they could deal with it, but most likely, the ecosystem would heal itself in time without much work needed. It usually did.

There was a rustling in the tree behind her, a muffled thud as somebody’s feet hit the ground. “Snowpea?”

“Hi, Fir.”

Her parent came and sat beside her. “Can’t sleep?”

“It’s so pretty.” She pointed to the lake. “And it’ll be gone soon.”

“Yeah. It will.”

“Is it that bad? It’s really beautiful.”

Fir shrugged. “It’s out of place, in the system we’ve designed. If it stayed, it would make a different ecosystem, maybe one that couldn’t support us, depending on how and why it stayed. It might indicate a problem for us personally, and for this part of Arborea. Or it might not. Whether you can call something good or bad based on if you find it useful or not… I guess that’s a decision you have to make yourself, little pea flower.” Ke laid back, flat on the ground, and stared up at the stars. Fir did that, sometimes. Just stared at the stars for minutes at a time. Snowpea had asked them about constellations and stuff, but Fir didn’t know anything about that, didn’t know much about the stars at all except for what ke had to know from kes work as a spaceship engineer long before Snowpea was born. Ke just liked to look at them.

Maybe they were just pretty. Like Snowpea and the lake. At least Fir’s pretty lights would last more than one night.

“Maybe we could make an ecosystem where bioluminescent bacteria up high in the water is helpful,” Snowpea suggested.

“Maybe they already have, out there,” Fir says quietly enough that it might just be to kemself. “Oxygen wouldn’t be a problem, depending where they put it.”

“What?”

“I mean, maybe you can do that.” Fir ruffled her hair. “You’re smart. You could be a genetic engineer, or a really good ecologist. Although you’d have to find a way to do it so it didn’t disrupt the ecology of Arborea as a whole, or get overwhelmed and eaten by the rest of it. Bacteria tend to get everywhere.”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be on the mainland. They say the ocean is really, really big. You can just sail away to a different part of it and never ever meet the people you sailed away from again and make glowing bacteria without bothering anybody. Maybe I’ll do that.”

Fir ruffled her hair again, and this time, ke didn’t seem to want to take kes hand off her head. Ke just smiled, a little wistfully. “Yeah,” ke said. “Maybe you will. But I really, really hope you don’t.”