"But then why did you—I mean, usually we don't . . ."
Searcher gave Dawn a glance which combined a fierce scowl with a tongue-lolling grin. "Whereas we never think of one thing at a time."
"Even during sex?" Dawn laughed. "Do you have children?"
"Two litters, which I bore with joy."
"Searcher! You're female? I never imagined!"
"Not female as you are."
Dawn's mind whirled around this new, fulcrum fact. Searcher had been looking after her, like a mother. At once came rushing in the memories of her own Mom, the warm force of her, mother and Meta. Somehow, she saw, Searcher had known this, how to make contact with Dawn at a level below conscious understanding. Otherwise, Dawn would never have gone along on this strange odyssey, no destination known. What else was going on beyond the powers of her observation?
She groped for words, "Well, uh, you're certainly not male if you bear litters."
"The choice is not always binary. Simple sex like yours was a passing adaptation."
Dawn chuckled. "Searcher, sounds like you're missing a lot of fun."
"You have no idea." Searcher grinned. "Literally."
"It'll take a while to think of you as a she."
"As it was for me with you. Humans are noted as sexual connoisseurs, and Originals especially so."
Dawn blinked. "My . . ."
"With enlarged organs as a result of evolutionary selection."
"Ummm. I'll take that as a compliment."
Out of nowhere she made another connection. "That Semisent—you were acting like a mother. Protecting me."
"I suppose there is some truth in that."
A faint scurrying distracted Dawn. She pushed aside a huge fern bough and saw a human shape moving away from them. "Hey!" she called. The prospect of company lifted her heart; the last few days had made her miss terribly the comforts of simple humanity.
The silhouette looked back and quickly turned away.
"Hey, stop! I'm friendly."
But the profile blended like liquid into the shifting greens and browns and was gone. Dawn ran after it. After blundering along limbs and down trunks she stopped, listening, and heard nothing more than a sigh of breezes and the cooing calls of unknown birds.
Searcher had followed her. "You wished to mate?"
"Huh? No, no, we're not always thinking about that. Is that what you think? I just wanted to talk to him."
Searcher said, "You will find no one. And you were sure it was male."
She dipped her head in salute. "I apologize for thinking you weren't female."
"You humans do not enjoy the advantage of extra appendages beyond two, so you make binary choices."
"But who was that?" She swung on a limb, spun completely around it in the light gravity of this place, and laughed with the joy of it. "Say, that wasn't an illusion, was it? Like those who killed my tribe and that Rin said were just images?"
"No, that was the Captain."
Dawn felt a surge of pride. Humans ran this huge thing. "So this Captain is some other kind? Supra?"
"No. I do not think you truly wish to explore such matters. They are immaterial—"
"Look, I'm alone. If I can find any kind of human, I will."
Searcher tilted its massive head back, raising and lowering its brow ridges in a way that Dawn found vaguely unsettling. "We have other pursuits."
"If you won't help me, I'll find the Captain myself."
They worked their way upward against the slight centripetal gravity and finally stood on a broad slope made only of great leaves. Sunlight streamed fierce and golden from an open sky that framed the -shrinking moon. Dawn knew that when the Earth had come alive, over five billion years ago, it had begun wrapping itself in a membrane it made of tailored air and water, for the general purpose of editing the sun.
Buried deep in Earth's forest, she had never bothered to think of other planets, but now she saw that the moon too had learned this skill from Earth. She was beginning to think of worlds as self-aware, larger entities with their own agendas. There was something fresh and vibrant about the filmed moon, and she guessed that it had not shared the long withering imposed by the Supras' bots. Where once maria had meant the dark blotches of volcanic flows, now true dappled seas lapped at rugged mountains with snow-dappled peaks. And once again, Earth's spreading voracious green could mimic its junior companion in exuberant disequilibrium.
"See there?" Searcher pointed, as if reading her thoughts.
She shielded her eyes against the sun's glare and looked that way. A barely visible circular film floated inward from Earth, glowing with refracted energy.
"It was put into place long ago, to deflect a fraction of the sun's glare from our world," Searcher said admiringly. "It solved the problem of warming for you Originals."
"Our kind made that?" She was feeling more proud of humans than ever.
"It is less thick than your skin. Of course it worked only for a while." Searcher brushed her hands together, as if dismissing such obvious measures. "Over there—" another pointed claw "—is a later solution."
Dawn made out a swiftly moving mote. She judged angles and guessed that it came arcing in from the outer depths of the solar system, for it was moving fast with its infall velocity. The tiny twinkle of tumbling light was passing close in to the leading edge of Earth, breathtakingly close but also furiously fast. Suddenly she saw the point—to tug the planet outward with this fleeting kiss, seducing it with gravity into a small step outward. To flee the sun's growing wrath.
She was even more impressed. "And it keeps working . . ."
"With the fine tuning of those we can hope to meet, later."
"People?"
"You mean humans? No, these crafters work in space itself."
"All this to make the Earth work a little longer?"
"Editing the sun is not enough." Searcher bent and pressed an ear against a purple stalk. She nibbled at the young shoots breaking through the slick bark but also seemed to be listening. Then she sat up alertly. "The Captain says that we are bound for Venus."
Ignoring how the procyon knew this, she asked, "What's that?"
"The planet next out from Earth. Second from the sun."
"Um. Can we live there?"
"I expect the question will be whether we can avoid death there."
With that Searcher fell asleep, as abruptly as ever. Dawn, wary of the tangled jungle, did not venture away. She watched the Earth and moon shrink, twin planets brimming against the timeless blaze of the galaxy.
She knew instinctively that the moon was not merely a sheltered greenhouse maintained by constant outside management. Who would tend it, after all? For long eons humankind had been locked into its desert fastnesses. No, the ripeness came from organisms endlessly adapting. To imagine otherwise—as ancient humans had—was to see the world as a game with fixed rules, like human sports, strict and static. Yet even planets had to yield to the press of suns.
She had learned much in the Library, but seeing this silent grandeur made the points far better. The sun had burned hydrogen for nearly five billion years before Earth evolved a species which could understand that simple fact, and its implications. Unlike campfires, solar furnaces blaze brighter as their ash gathers.
Earthlife had escaped this dead hand of -physics . . . for a while. Long before humans emerged, a blanket of carbon dioxide had helped warm the Earth. As the sun grew hotter, though, life thinned that blanket to keep a comfortable clime.
But carbon dioxide was also the medium through which the rich energy of the sun's fusing hydrogen became transmuted into living matter. Thinning the carbon dioxide blanket threatened that essential reaction. So a jot of time after the evolution of humans—a mere hundred million years—the air had such skimpy carbon dioxide that this imperiled all the plant kingdom.
At that point the biota of Earth could have radically adjusted their chemical rhythms. Other planets had passed through this knothole before and survived.
But the intelligences which thronged that era, including the forerunners of Searcher, had intervened.
Moving the Earth farther from the solar furnace would offset the steady banking of the inner fires. So came the era known as the Reworking. It led to the great maneuvers which rearranged the planets, opening them to fresh uses. All this lay buried in Sonomulia's dusty records and crossed Dawn's thoughts only as a filigree of myth.
The much-embellished stories her tribe had told around campfires taught such things through parable and grandiose yarns. Her kind were not studious in the strict sense of the term, but their forest crafts had needed an underpinning of sage myth, the "feel" of why and how biospheres were knit and fed. Some lore was even hard-wired in Dawn at the level of instinctive comprehension. She knew this, too, and was deeply grateful that she would never know which of her ideas came from those depths.
So the cloud-wreathed beauty of the twin worlds made her breath catch, her heart race with a love which was perhaps the hallmark of true intelligence. As Searcher slept she watched specks climb above the sharp-edged air of Luna to meet other dabs in a slow, grand gavotte. Another Jonah approached from Earth. Motes converged on it from eccentric orbits about the moon.
She adjusted her eyes to pick out the seeping infrared glow that spoke of internal warmth, and saw a greater cloud, a snapshot of teeming bee-swarm wealth. Streamers swung between Earth and moon, endless transactions of species. A thinner rivulet broke away from the figure-eight orbits that linked the twins. It trickled inward and Dawn—holding a hand against the sun's glare, shutting down her infrared vision entirely—saw that it looped toward a thick swarm that clustered about the sun itself.
She felt then both awe—that reverent fear of immensity—and a hollow loneliness. She wished her clan could see this, wished that there were other minds of her cut and shape to share this spectacle.
Her attention was so riveted on the unfolding sky that she did not hear the stealthy approach of scraping paws. But she did catch the jostle as something launched itself in the weak gravity.
The shape came at her from behind. She got only a snatched instant to see it, a thing of sleek-jacketed black and flagrant reds. It was hinged like a bat at the wings and slung with ball-bearing agility in its swiveling, three-legged attack.
Claws snatched at the air where Dawn had been. She had ducked and shot sideways, rebounding from a barnacled branch. In a heartbeat she decided. Instead of fleeing into unknown leafy wilderness, where a pack of the attackers might well be waiting, she launched herself back into the silent sleek thing.
This it had not expected. It had just seen the sleeping Searcher and was trying to decide if this new development was a threat or an unexpected banquet.
Dawn hit it amidships. A leg snapped; weightlessness makes for flimsy construction. She had flicked two of her fingers into needles, usually used for the fine treatment of ailing creatures. They plunged into the flared red ears of the attacker, puncturing the enlarged eardrums which were its principal sensory organ. The creature jerked, yowled—and departed, a squawking blur of pain and anger.
Dawn landed on a wide branch, hands ready. She trembled with a mixture of eagerness and fear which a billion years of selection had still retained as fundamental to the human constitution. The foliage replied to her intent wariness with silent indifference. Silence.
Searcher awoke, stretching and yawning. "More food?"
They sighted the Supra ship their third day out. It came flaring into view from Earthside, as Dawn now thought of the aft layers of the Leviathan.
She and Searcher spent much of their time aft. They enjoyed the view of the steadily shrinking, cloud-shrouded moon as they rested among a tangle of enormous fragrant flowerpods. Searcher spotted the bright speck first. Near the moon a yellow star grew swiftly. It became a sleek, silver ship balancing on a thin torch flame.
This had just registered with Dawn when Searcher jerked her back behind an overarching stamen, whispering, "Do not move."
The slim craft darted around the Leviathan as though it were sniffing. Its nose turned and swiveled despite being glossy metal. The torch ebbed and fine jets sent it zooming beyond view along the long coarse bulk of the Leviathan.
In her mind Dawn felt a shadowy presence, like a sound just beyond recognition. A murmur of -Talent-talk. The Supra ship returned, prowling close enough to the prickly growths to risk colliding with upper stems.
Searcher put both of her large, padded hands on Dawn's face. Searcher had done this before, to soothe Dawn when her anxieties refused to let her sleep. Now the pressure of those rough red palms sent a calming thread through her.
She knew what the touch implied: let her mind go blank, so her Talent would transmit as little as possible. Any Supra aboard the ship could pick up her thoughts, but only if they were focused clearly into perceptible messages. Or so Dawn hoped. After all, she knew little of this.
The ship held absolutely still for a long while, as if deciding whether to venture inside. The cloud of spaceborne life that surrounded the Leviathan had drawn away from the ship, perhaps fearing its rockets. Its exact cylindrical symmetries and severe gleam seemed strange and malevolent among the drifting swarms—hard and enclosed, giving nothing away. Suddenly the yellow blowtorch ignited again, sending the life-forms skittering in all directions. The ship vanished in moments, heading out from the sun.
"They must've guessed I was running this way," Dawn said.
Searcher took her paws away. "They try every fleeting possibility."
Searcher still seemed concerned, though Dawn was seldom sure what meanings attached to her quick frowns, fur-ripplings and teeth displays. "I felt something . . ."
"They sought your thought-smell."
"Didn't know I had one."
"It is distinctive."
"You can smell it?"
"In your species many memories are lodged near the brain's receptors for smell. Scents then evoke memories. Remember where you were as a child and first caught the wonderful bouquet of approaching rain?"
"Oh, yes. I was under a tree—"
"I do not share this property, but I've heard of it."
"That's sad. So?" Sometimes Searcher's roundabout manner irked her. She was not sure whether the procyon was suggesting much by saying little, or simply amusing herself. Maybe both.
"A Supra can remember the savor of your thinking. This act of recollection calls up your Talent, makes it stronger."
"Just by remembering, they make me transmit better?"
"Something like that."
Dawn could not match this idea with the odd, scratchy presence she had felt. "Well, they're gone now."
"They may return."
"You've got the Talent, don't you?"
Searcher grinned. "If you cannot tell, then I suppose I do not."
"Well, yeah, I sure can't pick up anything from you. But—"
"Let us move away from here. The ship could try again."
They left the flower zone where they had foraged for a day, supping on thick nectar. Dawn did not register a transition but somehow they came into a region with little centripetal gravity. This place did not have as simple an inner geometry as the Jonah's. Internal portions of Leviathan spun on unseen axes, and streams flowed along sloping hillsides that seemed to the eye uphill. The local gravity was never more than a subtle touch, but it gave shape and order to the rampant vegetation.
They came into a vast chamber with teeming platforms, passageways, tunnels, balustrades, antechambers, all thronged with small animals moving on intent paths. It was a central station for a system of tubes that seemed to sprout everywhere, even high up the walls. The moist air above was crisscrossed by great shafts of filtered sunlight rising from sources near the floor, up to a distant arched ceiling.
She could see no obvious biological point to this, nor to the transparent membrane brimmed with a view of the starscape outside. In the middle, the galactic center glowed brilliantly. The sun had migrated inward from it
s original orbit, due to swing-bys with other suns. Dawn knew this from far history, but could not imagine how it was done, or why.
Yet all the moist, busy grandeur of this place did not intimidate her; it was even inviting. The scurrying animals were intelligent, in their way, going about swift tasks without giving her more than a glance. Humans were apparently uninteresting, maybe not even unusual. She doubted that many Supras used Leviathans to journey, given their swift ships.
She did not dwell on the Supra pursuit. As the momentum of events carried her farther from her lands she had resolved to plunge forward rather than endlessly fret. Perhaps she could find Ur-humans somewhere out here, as Searcher had said.
It had taken a few restless nights to truly feel this, but now it held firm in her. She remembered the bright-eyed girl who had breathlessly sought the company of Supras, especially the men. That girl seemed very far away now. Yet she lay fewer than ten megaseconds in the past, her inboards told her.
Her hunting skills reawakened as she followed Searcher in her foraging, unhurried but quick. They trekked through the light gravity of this inner vault, eating berries that swung from palmy trees. These were not mere passive trees, though; the berries were a lure. The sharp fronds could slice off an arm. Searcher showed her how to confuse the tree's ropy reflexes long enough to snatch a handful of berries.
There were even lakes. They hiked for two days along a broad beach, Searcher catching the yellow fish that thronged the shore. Through clouds Dawn could see the lake curling over their heads, far away, describing the vast curve of a rotating cylinder.
"Why do we keep moving so much?" Dawn asked when Searcher marched on resolutely, despite gathering gloom. Blades of sunlight ebbed and flowed in the huge cylindrical vault like tides of light.
"We hide among life. Life moves."
"You figure the Supras're still looking for me?"
"They have gone. They continue outward."
"Great. Let's go back to Leviathan's skin, then. I liked the view."
Actually she wanted to search for the Captain. She had glimpsed humans near the transparent blisters and each time they had seemed to evaporate into the humid jungle before she could pursue.
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 36
