The Mammoth Book of Mindblowing SF

by Mike Ashley

John brought in chemists, biologists in an ensemble suite: Odis and Lissa claimed in the scientific choir. In the wraparound display he felt them by the shadings they gave the data.

  The tiles, Lissa found, fed on their own sky. Simple sugars rained from the clotted air, the fruit of an atmosphere that resembled an airy chicken soup. Atmospheric electro-chemistry seems responsible, somehow, Lissa sent. Floating microbial nuggets moderated the process.

  The tiles were prime eaters. Oxidizing radicals the size of golf balls patroled their sharp linear perimeters. These pack-like rollers attacked invader chemicals, ejecting most, harvesting those they could use.

  Lissa brought in two more biologists, who of course had many questions. Are these tiles like great turtles? one ventured, then chuckled uneasily. They yearned to flip one over.

  Diurnal or nocturnal? Some are, most aren’t.

  Are there any small ones? A few.

  Do they divide by fission? No, but . . . Nobody understood the complicated process the biologists witnessed. Reproduction seems a tricky matter.

  There is some periodicity to their movements, some slow rhythms, and particularly a fast Fourier-spectrum spike at 1.27 second – but again, no clear reason for it.

  Could they be all one life form? – could that be?

  A whole planet taken over by a tiling-thing that co-opts all resources?

  The senior biologists scoffed. How could a species evolve to have only one member? And an ecosystem – a whole world! – with so few parts?

  Evolution ruled that out. Bio-evolution, that is. But not social evolution.

  John plunged further into the intricate matrices of analysis. The endless tile-seas cloaking mountains and valleys shifted and milled, fidgety, only occasionally leaving bare ground visible as a square fissioned into triangles. Oblongs met and butted with fevered energy.

  Each hemisphere of the world was similar, though the tiles in the north had different shapes – pentagonals, mostly. Nowhere did the tiles cross rivers but they could ford streams. A Centauri variant of chlorophyll was everywhere, in the oceans and rivers, but not in the Circular Ocean.

  The ground was covered with a thin grass, the sprigs living off the momentary sunlight that slipped between the edges in the jostling, jiggling, bumping, and shaking. Tiles that moved over the grass sometimes cropped it, sometimes not, leaving stubs that seemed to have been burned off.

  The tiles’ fevered dance ran incessantly, without sleep. Could these things be performing some agitated discourse, a lust-fest without end?

  John slowed his descent. The tiles were a shock. Could these be the builders of the Circular Ocean? Time for the biologists to get to work.

  The computer folk thought one way, the biologists – after an initial rout, when they rejected the very possibility of a single entity filling an entire biosphere – quite another.

  After some friction, their views converged somewhat. A biologist remarked that the larger tiles came together like dwarf houses making love . . . gingerly, always presenting the same angles and edges.

  Adventurer had scattered micro-landers all over the world. These showed only weak electromagnetic fringing fields among the tiles. Their deft collisions seemed almost like neurons in a two-dimensional plan.

  The analogy stirred the theorists. Over the usual after-shift menu of beer, soy nuts, and friendly insults, one maven of the digital realm ventured an absurd idea: could the planet have become a computer?

  Everybody laughed. They kidded the advocate of this notion . . . and then lapsed into frowning silence. Specialists find quite unsettling those ideas that cross disciplines.

  Could a species turn itself into a biological computer? The tiles did rub and caress each other in systematic ways. Rather than carrying information in digital fashion, maybe they used a more complex language of position and angle, exploiting their planar geometry. If so, the information density flowing among them was immense. Every collision carried a sort of Euclidean talk, possibly rich in nuance.

  The computer analogy brought up a next question – not that some big ones weren’t left behind, perhaps lying in wait to bite them on their conceptual tail. Could the tiles know anything more than themselves? Or were they strange, geometroid solipsists? Should they call the tiles a single It?

  Sealed inside a cosmos of its own making, was It even in principle interested in the outside world? Alpha Centauri fed It gratuitous energy, the very soupy air fueled It: the last standing power on the globe. What reason did it have to converse with the great Outside?

  Curiosity, perhaps? The biologists frowned at the prospect. Curiosity in early prehumans was rewarded in the environment The evolving ape learned new tricks, found fresh water, killed a new kind of game, invented a better way to locate those delicious roots and the world duly paid it back.

  Apparently – but don’t ask us why just yet! the biologists cried – the game was different here. What reward came from the tiles’ endless smacking together?

  So even if the visiting humans rang the conceptual doorbell on the tile-things, maybe nobody would answer. Maybe nobody was home.

  Should they try?

  John and Odis and Lissa, Tagore and the captain, over a hundred other crew – they all pondered.

  2

  While they wrestled with the issue, exploration continued.

  A flitter craft flew near the elevated ocean and inspected its supporting volume with distant sensors and probing telescopes. Even Shiva’s weather patterns seemed wary of the Circular Ocean. Thunderclouds veered away from the gap between the ocean and the rugged land below. In the yawning height clouds formed but quickly dispersed as if dissolved by unseen forces.

  Birds flew through the space, birds like feathery kites.

  Somehow they had missed noticing this class of life. Even the microlanders had not had the speed to capture their darting lives. And while the kite-birds did seem to live mostly on tiny floating balloon-creatures that hovered in the murky air of the valleys, they were unusually common beneath the Circular Ocean.

  John proposed that he send in a robo-craft of bird size, to measure physical parameters in the heart of the gap. Captain Badquor approved. The shops fabricated a convincing fake. Jet-powered and featuring fake feathers, it was reasonably convincing.

  John flew escort in a rocket-plane. The bird-probe got seventeen kilometers inside and then disappeared in a dazzling blue-white electrical discharge. Telemetry showed why: the Circular Ocean’s support was a complex weave of electrical fields, supplying an upward pressure. These fields never exceeded the breakdown level of a megavolt per meter, above which Shiva’s atmosphere would ionize. Field strength was about a million volts per meter.

  The robo-craft had hit a critical peak in the field geometry. A conductor, it caused a flashover that dumped millions of watts into the bird within a millisecond.

  As the cinder fell, John banked away from his monitoring position five kilometers beyond the gap perimeter. There was no particular reason to believe a discharge that deep within the gap would somehow spread, engulfing the region in a spontaneous discharge of the enormous stored energies. Surely whoever – no, whatever – had designed the Circular Ocean’s supports would not allow the electromagnetic struts to collapse from the frying of a mere bird.

  But something like that happened. The system responded.

  The burned brown husk of the pseudo-bird turned lazily as it fell and sparks jumped from it. These formed a thin orange discharge that fed on the energy coursing through the now-atomized bird. The discharging line snaked away, following unerringly the bird’s prior path. It raced at close to the speed of light back along the arc.

  The system had memory, John realized. He saw a tendril of light at the corner of his vision as he turned his flitter craft. He had time only to think that it was like a huge, fast finger jabbing at him. An apt analogy, though he had no time to consider ironies. The orange discharge touched the flitter. John’s hair stood on end as charge flooded into the interior.


  Ideally, electrons move to the outer skin of a conductor. But when antennae connect deep into the interior, circuits can close.

  Something had intended to dump an immense charge on the flitter, the origin of the pseudo bird. Onboard instruments momentarily reported a charge exceeding seventeen coulombs. By then John had, for all intents and purposes ceased to exist as an organized bundle of electrical information.

  John’s death did yield a harvest of data. Soon enough Lissa saw the true function of the Circular Ocean. It was but an ornament, perhaps an artwork.

  Ozone fizzed all around it. Completely natural-seeming, the lake crowned a huge cavity that functioned like a steady, standing laser.

  The electrical fields both supported the Ocean and primed the atoms of the entire atmosphere they permeated. Upon stimulus – from the same system that had fried John – the entire gap could release the stored energy into an outgoing electromagnetic wave. It was an optical bolt, powerful and complex in structure – triggered by John.

  Twice more the ocean’s gap discharged naturally as the humans orbited Shiva. The flash lasted but a second, not enough to rob the entire ocean structure of its stability. The emission sizzled out through the atmosphere and off into space.

  Laser beams are tight, and this one gave away few of its secrets. The humans, viewing it from a wide angle, caught little of the complex structure and understood less.

  Puzzled, mourning John, they returned to a careful study of the Shiva surface. Morale was low. The captain felt that a dramatic gesture could lift their spirits. He would have to do it himself.

  To Captain Badquor fell the honor of the first landing. A show of bravery would overcome the crew’s confusions, surely. He would direct the complex exploring machines in real-time, up close.

  He left the landing craft fully suited up, impervious to the complex biochem mix of the atmosphere.

  The tiles jostled downhill from him. Only in the steep flanks of this equatorial mountain range did the tiles not endlessly surge. Badquor’s boots crunched on a dry, crusty soil. He took samples, sent them back by runner-robo.

  A warning signal from orbit: the tiles in his area seemed more agitated than usual. A reaction to his landing?

  The tile polygons were leathery, with no obvious way to sense him. No eyes or ears. They seemed to caress the ground lovingly, though Badquor knew that they tread upon big crabbed feet.

  He went forward cautiously. Below, the valley seemed alive with rippling turf, long waves sweeping to the horizon in the twinkling of an instant. He got an impression of incessant pace, of enthusiasm unspoken but plainly endless.

  His boots were well insulated thermally, but not electrically; thus, when his headphones crackled he thought he was receiving noise in his transmission lines. The dry sizzle began to make his skin tingle.

  Only when the frying noise rose and buried all other signals did he blink, alarmed. By then it was too late.

  Piezoelectric energy arises when mechanical stress massages rock. Pressure on an electrically neutral stone polarizes it at the lattice level by slightly separating the center of positive charge from the negative. The lattice moves, the shielding electron cloud does not. This happens whenever the rock crystal structure does not have a center of structural symmetry, and so occurs in nearly all bedrock.

  The effect was well known on Earth, though weak. Stressed strata sometimes discharged, sending glow discharges into the air. Such plays of light were now a standard precursor warning of earthquakes. But Earth was a mild case.

  Tides stressed the stony mantle of Shiva, driven by the eternal gravitational gavotte of both stars, A and B. Periodic alignments of the two stars stored enormous energy in the full body of the planet. Evolution favored life that could harness these electrical currents that rippled through the planetary crust. This, far more than the kilowatt per square meter of sunlight, drove the tile-forms.

  All this explanation came after the fact, and seemed obvious in retrospect. The piezoelectric energy source was naturally dispersed and easily harvested. A sizzle of electric micro-fields fed the tiles’ large, crusted footpads. After all, on Earth fish and eels routinely use electrical fields as both sensors and weapons.

  This highly organized ecology sensed Badquor’s intrusion immediately. To them, he probably had many of the signatures of a power-parasite. These were small creatures like stick insects that Badquor himself had noticed after landing; they lived by stealing electrical charge from the tile polygons.

  Only later analysis made it clear what had happened. The interlinked commonality of piezo-driven life moved to expel the intruder by overpowering it – literally.

  Badquor probably had no inkling of how strange a fate he had met, for the several hundreds of amperes caused his muscles to seize up, his heart to freeze in a clamped frenzy, and his synapses to discharge in a last vision that burned into his eyes a vision of an incandescent rainbow.

  Lissa blinked. The spindly trees looked artificial but weren’t.

  Groves of them spiraled around hills, zigzagged up razor-backed ridges and shot down the flanks of denuded rock piles. Hostile terrain for any sort of tree that earthly biologists understood. The trees, she noted, had growing patterns that bore no discernible relation to water flow, sunlight exposure, or wind patterns.

  That was why Lissa went in to see. Her team of four had already sent the smart-eyes, rugged robots, and quasi-intelligent processors. Lightweight, patient, durable, these ambassadors had discovered little. Time for something a bit more interactive on the ground.

  That is, a person. Captain Badquor’s sacrifice had to mean something, and his death had strengthened his crew’s resolve.

  Lissa landed with electrically insulated boots. They now understood the piezoelectric ecology in broad outline, or thought they did. Courageous caution prevailed.

  The odd beanpole trees made no sense. Their gnarled branches followed a fractal pattern and had no leaves. Still, there was ample fossil evidence – gathered by automatic prospectors sent down earlier – that the bristly trees had evolved from more traditional trees within the past few million years. But they had come so quickly into the geological record that Lissa suspected they were “driven” evolution – biological technology.

  She carefully pressed her instruments against the sleek black sides of the trees. Their surfaces seethed with electric currents, but none strong enough to be a danger.

  On Earth, the natural potential difference between the surface and the upper atmosphere provides a voltage drop of a hundred volts for each meter in height A woman two meters tall could be at a significantly higher potential than her feet, especially if her feet had picked up extra electrons by walking across a thick carpet.

  On Shiva this effect was much larger. The trees, Lissa realized, were harvesting the large potentials available between Shiva’s rocky surface and the charged layers skating across the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

  The “trees” were part of yet another way to reap the planetary energies – whose origin was ultimately the blunt forces of gravity, mass and torque – all for the use of life.

  The potential-trees felt Lissa’s presence quickly enough. They had evolved defenses against poachers who would garner stray voltages and currents from the unwary.

  In concert – for the true living entity was the grove, comprising perhaps a million trees – they reacted.

  Staggering back to her lander, pursued by vagrant electrical surges through both ground and the thick air, she shouted into her suit mike her conclusions. These proved useful in later analysis.

  She survived, barely.

  3

  When the sum of these incidents sank in, the full import become clear. The entire Shiva ecology was electrically driven. From the planet’s rotation and strong magnetosphere, from the tidal stretching of the Centauri system, from geological rumblings and compressions, came far more energy than mere sunlight could ever provide.

  Seen this way, all biology was a
n afterthought. The geologists, who had been feeling rather neglected lately, liked this turn of events quite a bit. They gave lectures on Shiva seismology which, for once, everybody attended.

  To be sure, vestigial chemical processes still ran alongside the vastly larger stores of charges and potentials; these were important for understanding the ancient biosphere that had once governed here.

  Much could be learned from classic, old-style biology: from samples of the bushes and wiry trees and leafy plants, from the small insect-like creatures of ten legs each, from the kite-birds, from the spiny, knife-like fish that prowled the lakes.

  All these forms were ancient, unchanging. Something had fixed them in evolutionary amber. Their forms had not changed for many hundreds of millions of years.

  There had once been higher forms, the fossil record showed. Something like mammals, even large tubular things that might have resembled reptiles.

  But millions of years ago they had abruptly ceased. Not due to some trauma, either – they all ended together, but without the slightest sign of a shift in the biosphere, of disease or accident.

  The suspicion arose that something had simply erased them, having no further need.

  The highest form of life – defined as that with the highest brain/body volume ratio – had vanished slightly later than the others. It had begun as a predator wider than it was tall, and shaped like a turtle, though without a shell.

  It had the leathery look of the tile-polygons, though.

  Apparently it had not followed the classic mode of pursuit, but rather had outwitted its prey, boxing it in by pack-animal tactics. Later, it had arranged deadfalls and traps. Or so the sociobiologists suspected, from narrow evidence.

  These later creatures had characteristic bony structures around the large, calculating brain. Subsequent forms were plainly intelligent, and had been engaged in a strange manipulation of their surroundings. Apparently without ever inventing cities or agriculture, they had domesticated many other species.

  Then, the other high life forms vanished from the fossil record. The scheme of the biosphere shifted. Electrical plant forms, like the spindly trees and those species that fed upon piezoelectric energy, came to the fore.