Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System

by T. K. F. Weisskopf

  "It is made of tiny carbon fibers," Searcher said. "They regrow daily, and can take more strain than any material."

  "I thought diamond was strongest."

  "It, too, is carbon—but not living, and so evolution has not worked upon it."

  She gazed down at the shimmering Earth. It, too, was a thin skin of verdant life atop a huge bulk of rocks. But far down in the magma were elements of the ancestral hordes which had come before. She felt the slide and smack of whole continents as they rode on a slippery base of limestone, layers built up from an infinitude of seashell carcasses. All living systems, in the large, were a skin wrapped around the dead.

  "Time to go," Searcher said, getting up awkwardly. Even its strength was barely equal to the centrifugal thrust.

  "What! You're not leaving?"

  "We both are."

  A loud bang. Dawn felt herself falling. She kicked out in her fright. This only served to propel her into the ceiling. She struck and painfully rebounded. Flailing, she hit another wall, and another. Her instincts kept telling herself she was falling, despite the evidence of her eyes—and then some ancient subsystem of her brain cut in, and she automatically quieted. She was not truly falling, except in a sense used by physicists. She was merely weightless, bouncing about the compartment before Searcher's amused yawn.

  "What happened?" she called, grabbing a protruding handle and stopping herself.

  "We are free, for a bit."

  "Why?"

  "See ahead."

  Their vines had slipped off, retracting back to the nub. Freed, their tree shot away from the Pinwheel. They sped out on a tangent to its circle of revolution. Already the nub was a shrinking spot on the huge, curved tree that hung between air and space. She had an impression of the Pinwheel dipping its mouth into the rich swamp of Earth's air, drinking its fill alternately from one side of itself and then the other. But what kept it going, against the constant drag of those fierce winds?

  She was sure it had some enormous skill to solve that problem, but there was no sign what that might be. She looked out, along the curve of Earth. Ahead was a dark-brown splotch on the star-littered blackness.

  "A friend," Searcher said. "There."

  They soared away from the release point with surprising speed. The Pinwheel whirled away, its grandiose gyre casting long shadows along its woody length.

  She could see it better now. Despite the winds it suffered, bushes clung to its flanks. The upper end, which they had just left, now rotated down toward the coming twilight. Its midpoint was thickest and oval, following a circular orbit a third of Earth's radius above the surface. At its furthest extension, groaning and popping with the strain, the great log had reached a distance two-thirds of the Earth's radius, poking well out into the cold of space.

  "We're going fast," Dawn said.

  Searcher yawned. "Enough to take trees to other planets, yes."

  "That's where we're—?"

  "No, that is not our destination."

  She knew better now than to press Searcher for its plans. When Dawn had asked for help escaping the Supras, the procyon had been following some agenda, and part of it was nondisclosure. Maybe it didn't like to give away its moves and then have them fail; everybody had pride.

  Or maybe it didn't want to scare her. Or scare her off. The Pinwheel—who would sign up to ride that? Not Dawn, no. Or anybody she knew.

  So far, Searcher's mysterious aims had aligned with Dawn's. Plainly something enormous was happening, and neither Supras nor Searcher would explain in bite-sized words exactly what was up. So be it.

  But Dawn remembered Searcher's answer when she had asked about other Originals. "They are gone." Gone from Earth, maybe, but not gone as in extinct. So there might be Originals up in the sky somewhere. Not her Meta, but kin.

  And just maybe . . . her father.

  They shot ahead of the nub, watching it turn downward with stately resolution, as though gravely bowing to necessity by returning to the planet which held it in bondage.

  She could not take her eyes from the grandiosity of the Pinwheel. Its lot was to be forever the mediator between two great oceans. Others could sail the skies in serenity, in air or in space. The Pinwheel knew both the ceaseless tumult of the air and the biting cold of vacuum. She wondered if many life forms had dwelled at the border of the ancient oceans of Earth, where waves crunched against shore. Some had to, mediating between worlds—and must have paid the price, beset by storm and predator.

  Dawn watched silently, clinging to one of the sticky patches on the compartment's walls. There was a solemn majesty to the Pinwheel, a remorseless resignation to the dip of its leading arm into the battering winds. She saw the snug pocket where they had been moored show a flare of ivory light—plasma conjured up by the shock of re-entry, she guessed. Yet the great arm plunged on, momentum's captive, for its next touchdown.

  She saw why it had momentarily hung steady over the forest; at bottom, the rotation nearly canceled the orbital velocity. The backward sweep of the Pinwheel's arm was opposite to the orbital velocity. That subtraction happened just as the tip reached bottom, hanging over the treetops. Craft on such a scale bespoke enormous control, and she asked in a whisper, "Is it . . . intelligent?"

  "Of course," Searcher said. "And quite old."

  "Forever moving, forever going nowhere." She noticed that she was whispering, as if it might overhear. "What thoughts, what dreams it must have."

  "It is a different form of intelligence from you—-neither greater nor lesser."

  "Somebody planned that thing."

  "Some body? Yes, the body plans—not the mind."

  "Huh? No, I mean—"

  "In far antiquity there were beasts designed to forage for iceteroids among the cold spaces beyond the planets—ooof! They knew enough of genecraft to modify themselves—ah! Perhaps they met other life-forms which came from other stars—I do not know—uh! I doubt that it matters. Time's hand shaped some such creatures into this—oof!—and then came the Quickening." Searcher seldom spoke so long, and it had managed this time to punctuate each sentence with a bounce from the walls. Which it enjoyed immensely.

  "Creatures that gobbled ice?"

  Searcher settled onto a sticky patch on the wall, held on with two legs, and fanned its remaining legs and arms into the air. "They were sent to seek such, then spiral it into the inner worlds."

  "Water for Earth?"

  "By that time the bots had decreed a dry planet, as I recall. The outer iceteroid halo was employed elsewhere."

  "Why not use spaceships?"

  "Of metal? They do not reproduce."

  Dawn blinked. "These things would give birth, out there in the cold?"

  "Slowly, yes."

  "How'd they make the Pinwheel? It's sure not an ice-eater, I can tell that much."

  "Time is deep. Circumstance has worked on it. More so than upon your kind."

  "Is it smarter?"

  "You humans return to that subject always. Different, not greater or lesser."

  Embarrassed without quite knowing why, Dawn said, "I figured it must be smarter than me, to do all that."

  "It flies like a bird, without bother. And thinks long, as befits a thing from the great slow spaces."

  "How does it fly? The wind alone—" The question spoken, she saw the answer. As the other arm of Pinwheel rose to the top of its circular arc, she could make out thin plumes of white spurting behind it. She had seen Supra craft do that, leaving a line of cloud in their wake. Jets, probably of water plucked from the air.

  "Consider it a large tree that flies," Searcher said.

  "Huh? Trees have roots."

  "Trees walk, why not fly? We are guests now inside a smaller flying tree."

  "Ummm. What's it eat?"

  "Some from air, some—" Searcher gestured ahead, along their trajectory. They shot above and away from the spinning, curved colossus. And Dawn saw a thin haze now hanging against the black of space, dimmer than stars but more plentiful
. There was a halo around the world, like fireflies drawn to the planet's immense ripe glow. Beyond the nightline the gossamer halo hung like a wreath above Earth's shadow.

  One mote grew as they sped near it. It swelled into a complex structure of struts and half-swollen balloons. It had sinews like knotty walnut. Fleshy vines webbed its intersections. Dawn tried to imagine the Pinwheel digesting this oddity and decided she would have to see it to believe.

  But this minor issue faded as she peered ahead. Other trees like theirs lay fore and aft, some spinning slightly, others tumbling. But all were headed toward a thing that reminded her of a pineapple, prickly with spikes but bristling with slow-waving fur. Around this slowly revolving thing a haze of pale motes clustered.

  "All that . . . alive?"

  "In a way. Are bots alive?"

  "No, of course—are those bots?"

  "Not of metal, no. And they do mate. But even bots can make copies of themselves."

  Dawn said with exasperation, "You know what I mean when something's alive."

  "I am deficient in that."

  "Well, if you don't know, I can't tell you." Sometimes Searcher was deliberately opaque.

  "Good."

  "What?"

  "Talk is a trick for taking the mystery out of the world."

  Dawn did not know what to say and decided to let sleeping mysteries lie. Their tree convoy was approaching the fog-glow swathing the pineapple.

  Gravity imposes flat floors, straight walls, rectangular rigidities. Weightlessness allows the ample symmetries of the cylinder and sphere. In the swarm of objects, large and small, Dawn saw an expressive freedom of effortless new geometries. Necessity dictates form, she knew. Myriad spokes and limbs jutted from the many shells and rough skins, but she could not imagine their uses.

  She watched an orange sphere extend a thin stalk into a nearby array of pale green cylinders. It began to spin about the stalk. This gave it stability so that the stalk punched surely through the thin walls of its . . . its prey, Dawn realized. She wondered how the sphere spun itself up, and suspected that internal fluids had to counterrotate. But was this an attack? The array of rubbery green columns did not behave like a victim. Instead, it gathered around the sphere. Slow stems embraced and pulses worked along their crusted brown lengths. Dawn wondered if she was watching an exchange, the cylinders throbbing energetically to negotiate a biochemical transaction. Sex among the geometries?

  Swiftly their flotilla of trees cut through the insectlike haze of life, passing near myriad forms that sometimes veered to avoid them. Some, though, tried to catch them. These had angular shapes, needle-nosed and surprisingly quick. But the trees still plunged on, outstripping pursuit, directly into the barnacled pineapple. She braced for an impact.

  But she saw now that only parts of the huge thing were solid. Large caps at the ends looked firm enough, but the main body revealed more and more detail as they approached. Sunlight glinted from multifaceted specks. Dawn realized that these were a multitude of spindly growths projecting out from a central axis. She could see the axis buried deep in the profusion of stalks and webbing, like a bulbous brown root.

  She stopped thinking of it as a pineapple and substituted "prickly pear," a plant she had seen. As they came in above the lime-green crown at one end of the "pear" a wave passed across it. The sudden flash made her blink and shield her eyes. Many facets sent the harsh sunlight back in jeweled bands of color. Her iris corrected swiftly to let her see through the glare. The wave had stopped neatly halfway across the cap, one side still green, the other a chrome-bright sheen. The piercing shine reminded her of how hard sunlight was, unfiltered by air.

  "It swims," Searcher said.

  "Where?"

  "Or better to say, it paces its cage."

  "I . . ." Dawn began, then remembered Searcher's remark about words robbing mystery. She saw that the shiny half would reflect sunlight, giving the prickly pear a small push from that side. As it rotated, the wave of color-change swept around the dome, keeping the thrust always in the same direction.

  "Hold to the wall," Searcher said quickly.

  "Who, what's—oh."

  The spectacle had distracted her from their approach. She had unconsciously expected the trees to slow. Now the fibrous wealth of stalks sticking out from the axis grew alarmingly fast. They were headed into a clotted region of interlaced strands.

  In the absolute clarity of space she saw smaller and smaller features, many not attached to the prickly pear at all, but hovering like feasting insects. She realized only then the true scale of the complexity they sped toward. The prickly pear was as large as a mountain. Their tree was a matchstick plunging headfirst into it.

  The lead tree struck a broad tan web. It stretched this membrane and then rebounded—but did not bounce off. Instead, the huge catcher's mitt damped the bounce into rippling waves. Then a second tree struck near the web's edge, sending more circular waves racing away. A third, a fourth—then it was their turn.

  Searcher said nothing. A sudden, sickening tug reminded her of acceleration's liabilities—then reversed, sending her stomach aflutter. The lurching lasted for long sloshing moments and then they were at rest. Out the window she could see other trees embed themselves in the web, felt their impacts make the net bob erratically.

  When the tossing had damped away she said shakily, "Rough . . . landing."

  "The price of passage. The Pinwheel pays its momentum debt this way," Searcher said, detaching itself from the stick-pad.

  "Debt? For what?"

  "For the momentum it in turn receives back, as it takes on passengers."

  Dawn blinked. "People go down in the Pinwheel, too?"

  "And cargo. The flow runs both ways."

  "Well, sure, but—" She still could not imagine that anyone would brave the descent through the atmosphere, ending up hanging by the tail of the great space-tree as it hesitated, straining, above the ground. How did they jump off? Dawn felt herself getting overwhelmed by complexities—and quiet fear. She focused on the present. "Look, who's this momentum debt paid to?"

  "Our host."

  "What is this?"

  "A Jonah."

  "What's that mean?"

  "A truly ancient term."

  Dawn frowned as she felt long, slow pulses surge through the walls of their tree. "Say, what's a Jonah do?"

  "It desires to swallow us."

  "Swallow us?—and we want that?"

  "We could return to Earth and face the things in the sky."

  "Um, return on the Pinwheel? No." Her nerves were not up for that.

  Creatures were already busy in the compartments. Many-legged, scarcely more than anthologies of ebony sticks and ropy muscle strung together by gray gristle, they poked and shoved the bulky cargo adroitly, forming into long processions.

  Though they were quick and able, Dawn sensed that these were in a true sense not single individuals. They no more had lives of their own than did a cast-off cell marooned from her own skin.

  She and Searcher followed the flow of cargo out the main port, the entrance they had used in the forest only two hours before. Swimming in zero-g was fun, though she had quick moments of disoriented panic she managed to cover. They floated out into a confusing melange of clacking spiderlike workers, oblong packages, and forking tubular passages that led away into green profusion.

  Dawn was surprised at how quickly she had adjusted to the strangeness of zero gravity. Like many abilities which seemed natural once they are learned, like the complex trick of walking itself, weightlessness reflexes had been hard-wired into her kind. Had she paused a moment to reflect, this would have been yet another reminder that she could not possibly represent the planet-bound earliest humans.

  But she did not reflect. She launched herself through the moist air of the great noisy, moist shafts, rebounding with eager zest from the rubbery walls. The spiders ignored her. Several jostled her in their mechanical haste to carry away what appeared to be a kind of inverted t
ree. Its outside was hard bark, forming a hollow, thick-walled container open at top and bottom. Inside sprouted fine gray branches, meeting at the center in large, pendulous blue fruit.

  She hungrily reached for one, only to have a spider knock her away with a vicious kick. Searcher, though, lazily picked two of the fruit and the spiders back-pedaled in air to avoid it. She wondered what musk or gestures Searcher had used; the beast seemed scarcely awake, much less concerned.

  They ate, ruby juice hanging in droplets in the humid air. Canyons rimmed in shimmering light beckoned in all directions. Dawn tugged on a nearby transparent tube as big as she was, through which an amber fluid gurgled. From this anchorage she could hold steady and orient herself in the confusing welter of brown spokes, green foliage, metallic-gray shafts and knobby damp protrusions.

  Their tree-ship hung in the embrace of filmy leaves. From the hard vacuum of space the tree had apparently been propelled through a translucent passage. Through a membrane Dawn could see a slow pusher-plate already retracting back toward the catcher's mitt that had stopped them. Small animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping, squealing, venting visible yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, purpose, hurry. Momentum.

  "Come, please," Searcher said. It cast off smoothly and Dawn followed down a wide-mouthed, olive-green tube. She was surprised to find that she could see through its walls.

  Sunlight filtered through an enchanted canopy. Clouds formed from mere wisps, made droplets, and eager cone-shaped emerald leaves sucked them in. She was kept busy watching the slow-motion but perpetual rhythm of this place until Searcher darted away, out of the tube. She followed hand over hand into a vast volume dominated by a hollow half-sphere of green moss. The other hemisphere, she saw, was transparent. It let in a bar of hot yellow sunlight that must have been reflected and refracted far down into the living maze around them.

  Searcher headed straight for the mossy bowl and dug claws into a low plant. Dawn awkwardly bounced off the resilient moss, snatched at a spindly tree, and finally got a hold. Searcher was eating crimson bulbs that grew profusely in grape-like bunches. Dawn reached for some—and the bulbs hissed angrily as she plucked one loose. All bluster—the plant did nothing more as she bit in. She liked the rich, grainy taste.