Pandora's Star

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Ur, yeah.’ He squinted up at it, not wanting to damage the image, although it was a very bright pink, especially for this time of day – that is, the time of day on his digital timer. If they were on a different world . . . ‘I dunno; there’s more than one red star in the galaxy.’

  He tugged out his battered parchment as he slid over to the front of the sledge, and wrote: I think we made it. Can you keep going a little while longer?

  As long as I live.

  When Ozzie held the friendship pendant up, the spark of light had almost vanished. ‘This way, I think,’ he said, and pushed off once again, not that he was really worried about direction now. Physically, the conditions had hardly changed, but simply knowing they were clear of the dreadful Ice Citadel world allowed his body to tap some previously unknown energy reserve. Just like an icewhale, he told himself.

  Of course, now he knew what to look for, the signs were obvious. The thick snow, different types of tree with bony branches outlined against the sky, the lighter sky itself. With every yard they moved forward things changed. It wasn’t long before he saw thin henna-coloured wisps of grass sticking out above the snow. Then there were little rodent creatures scampering about around the trees. Branches shed little piles of snow to fall around them with constant wet thudding sounds as the thaw grew. They were heading down quite a steep slope now, losing height rapidly.

  The end of the forest was abrupt. Ozzie shot past the last trees and onto a snowfield that was broken by boulders and widening patches of orange-tinted grass. They were halfway along some massive valley created by Alp-sized mountains. A lake of beautifully clear water stretched out below him, extending for twenty miles on either side. Its shores were also ringed with trees, whose dark branches were just starting to bud. The snowfield died out completely about half a mile ahead of them, with the grass sliced by hundreds of little seasonal streams as the melting edge slowly retreated upwards. On either side, the treeline was almost constant, drawing a broad boundary between the lower grass slopes of the mountains, and their rocky upper levels.

  When he looked back at the forest he’d just come from, Ozzie was sure it would only take five minutes or so to ski through, yet they’d paused a good quarter of an hour ago. A brilliant sun was rising at one end of the valley, and he finally understood the pink sky. They had come out of a gloomy maroon nightfall and straight into a vibrant dawn.

  Ozzie slowly pushed his hood back, and smiled into the strengthening light as it began to warm his skin.

  18

  No Prime immotile had a name. Names were derived from a communication system completely different to their species’ direct nerve impulse linkages. They did of course have ways of identifying each other. Immotiles, even in their group cluster form, were above all individual, a factor which sprang out of their early history’s territorialism. Alliances between them were built and fractured with reliable regularity in their planet’s pre-mechanization age, when even the closest partnerships were liable to be swiftly discarded if an advantage could be pursued with another. Disputes in those days were always over the size of territory and the available resources – mainly fresh water and farmland. Little changed over the millennia.

  After mechanization flourished, the nature of the alliances altered as the demands of machinery had to be met. Although the manoeuvring and ever-flowing tides of allegiance continued to be played by the same rules of deception and force.

  There was one immotile which always managed to retain its pre-eminence amongst the rest of its species. Always building the strongest alliances, always advancing itself at the expense of others, always holding its boundaries secure, always the most wily. In later times the largest and most powerful of all. Although not named, it could be characterized by its location: MorningLightMountain, a large cone of rock and earth that sprouted at the centre of a long valley defined by rugged cliffs rising hundreds of metres from its swampy floor. Such was the alignment of the high walls, that the thick beams of sunlight which the irregular edges produced only swept across the central peak during the morning.

  It was the perfect place to establish a new Prime immotile territory. At the time of its amalgamation, seven or eight thousand years before Christ appeared on Earth, there were thousands, possibly even tens of thousands, of immotiles, served and protected by their clans of motiles, occupying the planet’s equatorial zone. They were primitive then, creatures whose long evolutionary sequence was only just bearing fruit. Sitting in the middle of their covetously guarded fragment of land, immotiles flexed their rudimentary thoughts by plotting against their neighbours. Herds of standard motiles busied themselves consuming their own base cells from muddy streams and tending the edible vegetation, while the soldier variant motiles started to develop as the stronger, more agile members of each immotile’s herd were pressed into duty bashing rival herds’ brains out with wooden clubs.

  The little sub-herd of twelve motiles was sent out by its birth immotile, seeking a place where a fresh herd could be established. Such a new neighbouring territory would be advantageous to the founder immotile; with a joint personality origin their allegiance would be the strongest of all, at least for the initial years. After a while, divergence crept in, it always did.

  MorningLightMountain still retained the memory of itself before amalgamation and true thought began. The sub-herd had spent days carefully picking their way down the valley walls, dodging rockslides and clambering over sharp outcrops. Now they bunched together as they walked through the rainforest which sprang from the boggy ground along the valley floor. Every daybreak a mist would slither upwards from the lush vegetation, a legacy from the nightly rains hazing the air and turning the mighty sunbeams a delicate orange-gold.

  They saw it then, a symmetrical cone rising up out of the shadowed land ahead, the only feature of the entire valley to be struck by light, fluorescing a brilliant emerald against the roseate sky. Sunlight glinted off tiny streams that trickled down its sides. Small black specks circled far overhead, wings extended, idling in the thermals – one of the few remaining non-Prime lifeforms left in the planet’s tropics.

  The four largest herd members pressed up against each other, allowing their nerve receptors to touch so that their brains were linked together. Their individual thoughts were virtually identical, the simple memories and commands issued by their birth immotile, but joined like this their decision-making capability was significantly enhanced. Since reaching the valley floor they hadn’t encountered any other motile, or seen signs of a herd’s occupation. The valley with its difficult approaches was easy to defend. Its size was capable of supporting three or four herds. One immotile with its herd would have an abundance of water and land, giving it a strategic advantage over the surrounding immotiles.

  As to the exact location the immotile should be placed . . . On each of the motiles, two upper sensory stalks twisted round so their eyes could all regard the conical mountain. With so many streams, there must be a spring of some kind at the top. Such a place would be ideal for an immotile. The water would always be clean, unlike those whose territories were bunched along rivers and had to make do with water contaminated from upstream.

  They agreed, then: the mountain that was drenched with light. Their temporary linkage was broken as they moved apart. The other eight members of the sub-herd were summoned. Upper sensor stalks bent round so that nerve receptors could be touched, the instructions passed to all members. In unison they began to march towards the mountain.

  Two thirds of the way up, they found a large pool fed by several of the gurgling streams. The four large motiles fused their thoughts together again and examined the area with their extended intellect. One of them sucked up some of the water, and found it contained a satisfactory level of Prime base cells swarming inside. Their presence confirmed the site would be suitable for an immotile, subject to a few alterations. A host of new instructions was issued to their fellow herd members.

  The type of motile that had come walking into
the valley was the most simple of all the varieties which the immotiles birthed, and as such the most adaptive in the tasks it could perform. It had a pear-shaped torso of waxy white skin which measured over a metre in diameter across the base, with four tapering ridges of hard skin running vertically up its flanks. That quadruple symmetry was a constant within Prime life. The motile had four legs sprouting at the end of the skin ridges on the rim of its lower torso. Each of them had a flexible support ‘bone’ running down the centre, wrapped with bands of muscle tissue to provide a considerable range of movement. Each leg ended in a small hoof of tough ochre gristle that could dig in hard on soil or even wood – not that they often climbed trees.

  Four arms protruded from the body, branching out sixty centimetres above the hip joints. They were similar to the legs in respect of their size and all-round flexibility; differing only at the tip which split into a neat quad pincer arrangement that was quite capable of snipping through medium-sized branches. On the top of the main body four gill-like vents were spaced equidistantly around the crest, drawing air down into its lungs. Between them were the food inlets, mini trunks of rubbery flesh that had some independent movement. Motiles grazed on specific vegetation for the chemicals they contained, but mainly they sucked up water saturated with base cells. Both were processed in a large double stomach. The pap could be semi-digested before being regurgitated to feed an immotile; with full digestion the residue was excreted from a single anus at the base of the body.

  Above the gills and mouths, the body’s crown divided up into the four sensory stalks, which were the most pliable of all its limbs, capable of bending and twisting in every direction. At the very apex of them was the delicate nerve receptor, a thin impulse-permeable membrane stretched over raw ganglions; slightly below them were the eyes, then a pressure-sensitive blister that could detect sound waves, a plume of thin chemically-responsive fibres that smelt the air, and a cluster of tactile cells capable of detecting temperature.

  For such creatures, modifying the area around the pool to their own requirements was a relatively simple matter. They had long since mastered the rudimentaries of tool use, and quickly adapted sharp stones and sections of hard bark from the nearby trees. Using these as shovels and scoops, the twelve of them dug a shallow pond slightly upstream from the main pool, then lined it with stone taken from the excavated soil.

  With the work complete, the four largest motiles waded into the pond, and once again linked their nerve receptors. This time the union went a lot deeper than simply connecting their thoughts. Their bodies were pressed up tight together, ready for amalgamation. The process was triggered by an internal hormone deluge brought on by the mental merger. Over the subsequent five weeks they underwent a tremendous metamorphosis. Their four separate bodies slowly coalesced on a cellular level to produce a single entity. Where their skin touched, it softened and melted away, creating a single giant body cavity. Inside that, their brains fused together and expanded; a transformation pattern followed by most of the major organs. The muscles simply wasted away, providing a source of nutrition to power the other changes. Legs shrank until they were nothing but a circular series of solid fleshy lumps that supported the new large body. Arms shrivelled and dropped off, there was no need for them now. Digestive organs stretched out, and spread up around the new singular brain, like shoots of ivy twining round a tree trunk. While underneath the brain, there was a new growth. The reproductive system which until now had been nascent, began to grow into fully viable organs. Only the sensory stalks remained the same, feeding the developing brain a dodecagonal impression of the world around it.

  At the end of the process, the new immotile Prime, MorningLightMountain, began to secure its territory. The remaining eight motiles came and went continually, feeding the immotile with their regurgitated pap. They had been instructed to gorge themselves on specific types of plants, enriching their food with certain vitamin-types.

  Triggered by the nourishment contained within its food, MorningLightMountain’s reproductive organs began to ovulate. The first batch of a hundred nucleiplasms was discharged from its body into the water, allowing them to drift down to the large pool. Base cells began to congregate around them.

  By themselves, Prime base cells followed a lifecycle similar to amoebas; they absorbed food through their membrane walls, and reproduced by fission, remaining a single-cell life-form that inhabited most of the planet’s waterways. But they also carried the DNA for a lot more than that. It was the nucleiplasms which initiated the multicellular stage, releasing activants for new sequences in the DNA, and switching off the amoeba-stage sequence. The cluster of cells around the nuclei-plasm began to change, developing fresh organelles that provided specific functions. Like any multicellular organism, the cells began to specialize. The immotile had a degree of control over the type of nucleiplasm it gestated inside its reproduction system. By consciously controlling hormone secretion into the nucleiplasm, it could dictate the size of various organs, and by doing so design the structure and composition of a motile. If it needed heavy work doing, it would produce a batch of nucleiplasms which would congregate the largest and strongest motile. In a time when its territory was under threat, nuclei-plasm to engender soldiers would be released.

  The first herd of MorningLightMountain’s motiles began to wade out of the pond after three weeks of congregation. The existing motiles guided them over to the immotile, who touched its nerve receptors to theirs. Memory and instructions flashed through the impulse-permeable membrane, filling the motiles’ virgin brains with a compact version of its own thoughts.

  Over the first decades, MorningLightMountain began to shape and fortify its valley. In those days there were few non-Prime lifeforms left in the equatorial lands. Those that did still inhabit the valley such as the birds and a few rodent-like creatures were swiftly hunted down and exterminated – no immotile would tolerate competition for its own resources. The wild jungle was gradually cut back, the swamps drained into a network of canals which irrigated the big ferns which motiles ate. Stone was quarried, and used to construct a simple igloo-dome over the immotile as protection from the elements and any rogue predators from other territories. Metal ores were mined, and fires were used to forge crude weapon tips. The congregation pool was dredged and lined with stone.

  After forty-five years of unrestricted growth, MorningLightMountain was reaching the limits of its management capacity. Over a thousand motiles were at work in the valley, and supervision was becoming difficult. A second immotile was amalgamated to compensate for the shortfall. Morning-LightMountain’s pool and dome were extended, and four motiles brought together a couple of yards away from it. While the amalgamation was progressing, MorningLightMountain had six of its nerve receptors linked with those motiles undergoing the merger, pushing its thoughts into the new-growing brain. When it was all over, the two were permanently linked by four nerve receptors, producing an immotile duo with a much expanded mental capacity, and capable of organizing many herds of motiles.

  A new phase of productivity began. The valley, when properly agrarianized, was capable of supporting thousands of motiles. Although, to MorningLightMountain’s disappointment, it took almost all of its motiles just to keep the valley maintained. Thirty-five years later, a third immotile was amalgamated next to the initial duo. That was around the time it began to trade with immotiles of surrounding territories. Metal ores were exchanged for the use of soldier herds to repel a territory that was starting to encroach the top of the valley ramparts. Food ferns were swapped for hardwood trunks that made better spears and clubs. Ideas were bartered, chief among them the concept of ploughs and crop rotation brought in from immotiles thousands of miles away. It was the start of true agriculture for the Prime civilization, and the associated revolution which the innovation always introduced. The amount of produce grown by a motile doubled within a decade. Seeing the possibility of the concept, the immotiles began to experiment, studying how the plants grew, what soils were
best. MorningLightMountain itself was the one who worked out cross-pollination as a method of increasing yield and breeding new varieties. It was the start of the scientific method, and all that implied.

  MorningLightMountain amalgamated its twenty-ninth immotile a decade after it began sowing crops. Twenty years later, a thousand years after it had begun its original singleton life, the number of connected units in the group reached forty, an unheard-of rate of expansion. Its linked brains were abuzz with ideas and thoughts as it observed its immediate universe with ever more scrutiny.

  On the edge of the tropics, Prime immotiles were pushing further and further into the temperate lands, armed with their new knowledge and understanding of nature. Fire made it possible for them to live further and further from their original climate. Heated buildings, cultivated fields, canals, bridges, saws and axes helped them travel further and further to establish allied territories.

  Inevitably, as they began to grasp the principles of construction, and strength of materials, the mathematical tools were developed to aid fabrication. For creatures that were essentially a giant brain, mathematics pushed them into their primacy – it was the key to understanding everything. They devoted themselves to it with a devotion that was almost religious. All the elements were now in place for the mechanical age to begin. When it happened, the pace of change was very very swift.

  After a thousand years, MorningLightMountain was now a group immotile comprising three hundred and seventy-two separate units. Few had ever grown to such a size before. Its individual bodies had formed a living ring around the conical mountain. The spring which bubbled up at the top of the mountain was now channelled through clay pipes into the crown building which housed the immotile group in its entirety. They lived inside a single giant hall with a vaulting glass-topped roof letting sunlight shine down. During the night, iron braziers were lit, keeping the inside of the building illuminated, allowing the immotile group to keep working, instructing their motile herds, producing their nucleiplasms, and scrutinizing experiments and projects. Little shower nozzles sprinkled the immotiles several times a day, helping to keep them clean. Waste products were carried away via a network of culverts down the mountain, while dedicated channels swept nucleiplasm batches into the neck-lace of congregation lakes which had been dug below the building.