by Greg Bear
Crossing 29, 134
At Mareotis for a day now. At some peril, we have hiked along the truce and seen wonderful, terrible things. The truce boundary—white dead soil between the ecoi—has become invaded with soil preparers, including what I am calling Tillers, a scion either unseen until now or new. These are massive and crudely made forms as much as eight meters long and five high, resembling wheeled spiders, that roll and crawl methodically—
I had been reading about wheeled scions but until now had not considered how seriously improbable such creatures were. With a little cross-referencing, I found a small piece in Redhill's encyclopedia about scions with wheels:
Wheeled forms defy practical explanation in terms of terrestrial biology. We must not forget, however, that scions are very likely not created from seeds containing their own genetic instructions, but are assembled in biological factories. Wheels and the creatures that bear them may not be made all at once and together, but at different times and separately. The difficulties of imagining a creature that can grow and maintain its own wheels are overcome. The wheels may even be thought of as separate scions, or as constructs made of organic materials, but no longer alive.
Observations from Kandinsky's zone in Tasman point to wheeled scions that may actually create their wheels from recycled, compacted arborid or phytid tissues, replacing or repairing worn wheels as needed...
I returned to Nkwanno's journal:
—churning the soil and preparing it for occupation. But among these forms dart many varieties of thieves and defenders, some sighted in the silva—though infrequently—and others never seen before.
The thieves and defenders do what they have always done, but on a scale and with a frequency never witnessed before. Defenders—serpents and arthropods, translucent five-legged ursids with shining glassy saber-teeth on the leading and trailing edges of their forelimbs—keep behind the old boundary of the truce, grabbing and dispatching scions that cross from the opposite side. But more and more scions cross, and the defenders are overwhelmed. We have seen worn-out defenders, sitting in the redefined silva like exhausted warriors, twitching and spilling their fluids from torn joints—and all around them, foreign scions pass, as if in glee at new freedom. Yet dead scions line the silvas on both sides. It seems that here, a war is being combined with an orgy.
Crossing 29, 136
Our food has run out, and we risk starving before we return to Moonrise. We stay nevertheless.
The carnage has increased to such a level that we can't imagine the outcome. Are the ecoi caught in a struggle to the death? Has one seed-mother or queen taken offense at the actions of its neighbor, and declared destruction that must inevitably become mutual?
What Shevkoti fears—and his fears translate easily to us, hungry and terrified—is that all of Liz's scions we have come to identify as edible or useful will be destroyed, leaving us with a much-reduced food supply.
Crossing 29, 137
New transporter forms have arrived and are carrying away dead and dying scions. The once-fertile stretches along the truce and around Mareotis are denuded, or covered with a sad wreckage of scions, which of course will not decay. Pink worms cluster on many of Liz’ s casualties, consuming much of the remains, but then the worms themselves die and liner the ground ... The process is never completed, and we can see only endless hectares of destruction and waste.
Crossing 29, 139
We have begun to scavenge dead scions ourselves. With our small radio, we have kept in touch with Moonrise, and the destruction is happening there, as well. The villagers are terrified. We have actually fought against defenders and transporters trying to remove edible scions, but scavengers the size of ants enter our larders and remove any scion foodstuffs, however processed they may be. This is a purge, and all of the old forms must go.
I have sickened myself trying to chew on remains of scions we have collected as samples. Fortunately I have eaten nothing that has done more than make me violently nauseated, and I have recovered quickly. Shevkoti is less fortunate, and the lining of his mouth and his gums have become blistered and hang in shreds.
It is as if we begin all over again, in a new Lamarckia, with new perils.
Smaller transporters have begun to arrive, filled with young immobile scions whose eventual forms we can only guess at. Shevkoti, even in his agony, has discovered young arborids and classified them as combinations of elements from Liz's arborids and Calder's. He believes that in this conflict, Liz has predominated, however; we see many new scions that are quite familiar, though with some changes in design.
Crossing 29, 141
We must return to Moonrise to share our fates with those of our neighbors. We can't eat even the most familiar of the new scions, which are growing rapidly and replenishing the silva. In a few days we will die if we stay.
The truce has been erased. Zone one and zone two seem to have united. From Moonrise by radio we hear that Athenai's scientists believe this may be a kind of sexual act. They are describing this event as a sexing and a fluxing.
Our fields in Moonrise have been trampled by marauding scions, and our orchards destroyed. Buildings within the village itself have been damaged. I think this may be the end, unless we can somehow remove all the inhabitants of Elizabeth's Land to Tasman. But that will be an impossible task.
I turned off the slate and sat in the darkness for a few minutes, thinking of the terrors and hardships Lenk's people had passed through. I knew in rough outline the outcome of the sexing and fluxing between Liz and Calder. There were no complete explanations of what had actually happened, but Calder no longer existed, and Liz was forever altered.
I clasped the slate with an emotion I had never experienced in my brief and inadequate life: something like reverence. The body on the dock had been a powerful and experienced man, in some respects a better man than I. Yet he had been ruthlessly slaughtered.
I could not absorb it all. My mind was crowded and I felt half-sick with sadness and confusion.
But they survived. Without my help, without the help of the Hexamon, Lenk's people survived and returned to a kind of prosperity.
Sleep, it seemed, would finally come to me. I drifted in a dark, cloudy void, neither comfortable nor particularly concerned about comfort, thoughts flitting in and out of my awareness, which was fading into something deeper and more basic. I had not slept in many years, and the sensation was more unnerving than the sounds from the shore, or what I had just read in Nkwanno's journals.
I heard a rapping nearby, thought for a moment it was a group of friends in my apartment in Alexandria, in Thistledown, trying to fix a broken toy by striking it gently on the edge of a table ... And then I opened my eyes. Shirla's round face peered at me, half-hidden by the drape of my bunk's curtain. “Good,” she said. “You're awake. Randall and Shankara and the mate and a few others are talking on deck. They thought you'd like to join us.”
I foggily wondered if I was about to be drawn into a conspiracy to mutiny. The day had not been that miserable, however, and the captain had certainly not shown himself to be unfit for duty ... I crawled out of the bunk, slipped on my pants while Shirla waited, and followed her up the ladder to the forecastle deck.
A group of nine stood around two electric lanterns: Randall, Shatro, and the mate, the sailmaker Meissner representing the craft rates, Talya Ry Diem and Shankara for the A.B.s, and I supposed, Shimchisko and myself for the apprentices. Beyond the ship's bow, outlined by stars and clouds glowing dimly in the light of a single small moon, rose the distant black shadow of Mount Pascal. Having brought me on deck, at Ry Diem's request, Shirla stood to one side, out of the lantern light.
“The captain's asleep,” Randall said. “He's had a bit of a setback ... He overdid his stay on Mount Pascal, I'm afraid. He's asked me and Ser Soterio and Ser Shatro to talk about what we'll do if we can't finish this voyage, if Jakarta's taken, in short, what if the Brionists move in to Elizabeth's Land in force.”
“Which m
any think may happen soon,” Shatro said somberly.
Randall cleared his throat. His own voice sounded hoarse. “The captain's put his personal fortune into this ship. I've contributed what little I can spare. The rest of you get an adequate wage, but ... if we put out to sea, and nothing's certain on land, we could come back, find our money's no good—Brion's appropriated everything, shifted currency ... We don't know, because frankly, we don't have much experience with this sort of thing. So we've brought some of you together, members of the crew we place trust in, as intelligent types, to start sounding out individuals, see whether this voyage is feasible. If we can't go on beyond Jakarta, we need to know now.”
Shatro stepped to the center of the group and said, “Some of the crew may even sympathize with Brion and hope to join his forces.” He shifted his glance from face to face, fingered on mine, squinted, and moved on.
“I don't know much about Brion, except that he's taken over Hsia and been thieving and killing,” Ry Diem said softly, glancing around the circle.
“The captain had hoped we could spend a few days exploring the Chefla waste,” Randall said, “waiting to see if the Brionists left. Then put into Jakarta and pick up the supplies and the researchers. That's not possible. Seems the Brionists are in for a long blockade, to force some sort of settlement. Jakarta advises we just clear out. It might mean war.”
“We're not equipped for a war,” Soterio said in an undertone.
“We should get on to Wallace Station and pick up Ser Salap,” Ry Diem said wearily. “We should get on and do what we can.”
“That's what the captain thinks,” Randall said after a pause.
Shatro considered that for a moment. “Makes sense,” he agreed.
“But it puts us critically short of researchers,” Randall observed.
“Salap and I can do the work,” Shatro said. “Perhaps he can spare a few others from Wallace to come with us.” Clearly, Shatro regarded this as an opportunity. A junior, he might quickly advance. Ser Randall seemed less convinced.
“You think the crew will agree ... that we proceed down the coast to Wallace Station, and plot our course from there?”
Ry Diem shook her stiff, graying shag. “We're not amateurs,” she said. “Speaking for the A.B.s. We do our work. It seems worthwhile work to me.”
Shimchisko and I glanced at each other, and he nodded. “The apprentices have no other pressing duties,” he said. “Wherever we go, there might be war.”
“I agree,” I said.
Randall seemed relieved. “I'll tell the captain in the morning,” he said.
8
During our trip south, skirting Jakarta and sailing along the shaggy black and brown Cheng Ho Coast, the captain kept in constant radio communication with Salap at Wallace, less frequently receiving instructions or bulletins from Jakarta and Athenai. He shared these snatches of information only rarely, passing something along to Randall or Soterio for the consumption of the rest of the crew. None of the news sounded good. Perhaps Keyser-Bach wanted us to feel isolated from the unfolding history in Jakarta. He succeeded in part; we kept our focus on handling the Vigilant, though we always kept a sharp eye out for Brionist ships.
South of Jakarta, we saw no ships at all. There was little commerce in these waters. The coast north and south of Jakarta lay in Petain's Zone, which had been explored by harvesters and mineral prospectors under the leadership of Jorge Sao Petain just months after the immigrants’ arrival. They had sailed in crude boats along the Cheng Ho Coast south from Jakarta, venturing inland every few dozen miles, finding little of interest from the point of view of ores and mineral resources.
While Elizabeth's Zone, blessed with steady rainfall, seemed to concentrate on thick silva with four main types of arborid scions and perhaps thirty types of phytids, Petain's Zone, with many different climates, showed considerable variety, both on land and in the sea, which it favored. Most of Petain's variety was found in seas and rivers. The land south of Jakarta it covered with a desultory and uniform carpet of small black bushy phytids called sootbrush, seldom reaching waist-high. The captain, when he resumed his lectures, showed us photographs and drawings of these forms, and their attendants: blue crowflies—pterids the size of a human hand, which functioned as cleaners, scavengers, and defenders; deadeye trees, covered with shrunken white or gray berries that served as nutrients for various small arthropod scions, induding crowflies; and a dozen or more others, none as large or widespread as the pelagic forms.
It had been Jiddermeyer's main triumph to prove the original surveyors’ theory—using specimens returned by Petain, analyzed with standard medical equipment—that zone one was one individual organism and zone five another.
Jiddermeyer had first stated the firm principles of Lamarckia's biosphere, toppling centuries of evolutionary theory—for that was all it took, one exception to the established rules. There was no competition between what he first called “scions” within an ecos because they were in fact parts of one organism, one genetic individual, grown or created in some unknown fashion to play specific roles and accomplish certain tasks.
His colleagues and students—including young Baker and Shulago—had tried to chart the life cycles of scions, traveling deep into the silvas to find the fount, the birthplace or places of all scions. They had never succeeded. They had learned that arborids and phytids began as blue-gray sluglike forms, called pre-scions or neonatals, which traveled or were carried across hundreds or even thousands of kilometers, led by the silva's status singing to find sick or dying scions and replace them. Arborids and phytids performed the function of Earth plants, and made up ninety-eight percent of scions by count in Liz. Mobile scions, which fed from special stomata rather than consuming their comrades, tended the silvas, cleaning up the environs, consuming and removing dead scions, preparing the soil and growing beds, and in general acting the role of expert gardeners.
Other mobile scions, Jiddermeyer believed, acted as scouts, the eyes and ears of the hypothetical “queens” or “seed-mistresses.” Still others—such as samplers—monitored scion activities, searched for intrusions from other zones, or crossed zone boundaries to act as spies. Jiddermeyer first found and described examples of disguised intruders, boundary-crossing scions, the carcasses of failed mimics being cleaned up by processors and gardeners, or on several occasions successful mimics discovered quite by accident.
Each zone had managed, without direct competition, without obviously obeying the laws of survival of the fittest, to fill all the major niches available, to take complete advantage of sun, air, water, and minerals—Lamarckia's environmental qualities and resources.
The zones received their human-assigned numbers by order of discovery, not identification as separate organisms. Explorers heading upriver from Calcutta had first discovered zones two and three, followed by zone four along the western coast. Petain's expedition had set out shortly thereafter. What had astonished the early explorers—all searching desperately for good farmland and resources—was the lack of variety in the various zones. Most zones contained less than a thousand types of scions—including microscopic varieties. Even more astonishing had been the apparent lack of competition between scions, except at zone boundaries, where a kind of long-term “cold war” went on.
The evening before our arrival at the station, about half a day's sail if the wind maintained its present direction and speed, we saw the edge of a huge storm. As the sun burnished the storm's leading edge, turning it into a distant red and gold temple of clouds, the captain paced on deck, scowling deeply. He watched the storm closely through binoculars, swinging them east to west repeatedly.
True to his word, Randall invited me into the captain's study and lab for a conference among Shatro, the captain, and himself. I sensed my delicate position, having no established role in the proceedings yet, and listened attentively.
The captain was still agitated. He marched back and forth in front of the wall-mounted cages containing boxes of empt
y jars and shelves of books, arms swinging loosely at his sides. “We had hoped for time and purity of concentration,” he said. “We may have neither. Athenai may recall all shipping ... unless talks begin soon with Naderville. Good Lenk can't afford to lose his ships—whether to storms or pirates.”
Keyser-Bach stopped his pacing to peer through the small window on the wide cabin's port side. The storm clearly worried him. “Ser Salap wants us to spend two weeks at Wallace, so he can put a cap on this portion of his work there. He cares little for the Brionist troubles. I wish I could afford his nonchalance, but we can't spend more than two days at the station, much less two weeks.”
“Then our course is clear,” Shatro said firmly. His eyes shifted around the room, looking for the flow of consensus. “We need to pick up Sers Salap and Thornwheel and Cassir ... and get on with our voyage.”
The captain shrugged and turned away, staring again through the window at the wall of grayness beyond the horizon. “In this atmosphere, no storm should last decades.” He tapped his fingers on the sill. “We could be out of range of recall in a matter of weeks. Radio reception has always been chancy below these latitudes.”
“Not that chancy,” Randall said.
“A problem, Erwin?” the captain asked.
“I dislike avoiding or ignoring orders,” Randall said.
“As do I,” Shatro hastened to add. Then, unsure whom he might displease most, he stumbled on, “But the ... reception does fade now and then. South, below—”
“Not a matter of disobeying orders,” the captain said tightly. “More a matter of riding ahead of the storm. I am an Ahab with two white whales, but I don't seek them out, I flee from them.” He flashed a grin at this conceit. “One is politics, which has bitten one leg off, and which I shun at every opportunity—”
