Beyond Infinity (27 page)

“It is made of tiny carbon fibers,” Seeker 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.”

“Who built this?”

“Grew it, you mean? No idea.”

“Ah, something Seeker doesn’t know—at last.”

“My order knew these as the Great Trees. Only a living thing has the supple nature to adjust to vacuum and air, and thrive.”

“What a ballet!”

“Its trick is to not let the Earth’s spin foil it. Instead, it swims in the atmosphere, propelling itself. More artful than the awkward way your species flails its arms in the water.”

“Hey, I’d like to see you swim at all.”

Seeker gave her its silent, fang-baring laugh. “Water is where we keep our food.”

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 rocks. In her mind 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. The Great Tree was an artwork in carbon, shaped like a living diamond.

“Time to go,” Seeker 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. Cley 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 Seeker’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 speeded 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,” Seeker said. “There.”

T
HEY SOARED AWAY
from the release point with surprising speed. The Pinwheel whirled away, its grandiose gyre casting long shadows along its woody length. Splashes of color played where vacuum barnacles stretched their fronds to catch sunlight.

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 farthest 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 clasp of space.

“We’re going fast,” Cley said.

Seeker 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 Seeker for its plans. When Cley 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 Cley, no. Or anybody she knew.

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

But Cley remembered Seeker’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 still her kind. Kin.

And just maybe…her father? When you know nothing, you are free to hope.

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

Cley 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. Looking back at it, she saw where they had been held, which was now the Pinwheel’s leading edge. It punched into the upper atmosphere with a blare of ivory light conjured up by the shock of reentry. Huge forces worked along the Great Tree. Yet it plunged on, momentum’s captive, swimming toward its next touchdown.

She saw now why it had momentarily hung steady over the forest: At bottom, the rotation nearly canceled the orbital speed. The backward sweep of the Pinwheel’s arm was opposite to the orbital speed. That brief balance of motion 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,” Seeker 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.”

“How old is it?”

“An early artifact of the time well before the Quickening, as I remember. Though it also made itself, in part.”

“How can anything that big…?”

Seeker spun playfully in air, clicking sharp teeth in a disjointed rhythm. It seemed uninterested in answering her.

“Rin and the others made it, right?”

Seeker yelped in high amusement. “They could not, no.”

“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.” Seeker seldom spoke so long, and it had managed this time to punctuate each sentence with a bounce from the walls, which it enjoyed immensely.

“And the Quickening…?”

“The time when human abilities expanded beyond ordinary perceptions.”

“You mean, my perceptions?”

“Yes. Mine, too.”

“Uh…let me mull that one over. Those ‘beasts’ that did in iceteriods—you mean creatures that gobbled ice?”

Seeker 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?”

“It was needed. Far later, the bots decreed a dry planet. The outer iceteroid halo was exhausted by then, anyway, employed elsewhere.”

“Why not use spaceships?”

“Of metal?” Sad shake of a shaggy head. “They do not reproduce.”

Cley 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.”

Humbled, Cley 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 the 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,” Seeker 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, from sun-sucking chemistry, some…” Seeker gestured ahead, along their trajectory. They shot above and away from the spinning, curved colossus. And Cley 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. Cley 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.”

Cley 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 Seeker was deliberately opaque.

“Good.”

“What?”

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

Cley did not know what to say and decided to let sleeping mysteries lie. She was just a forest girl, and this leap into space had terrified her. But in these alien voids dwelled more living things than she had dreamed—an exotic biosphere. She was sure there had been talk of this in school, but then, she had nodded off a lot. As a girl she had found indoors dull, outdoors thrilling. Well, maybe her forest-folk skills could get her through here, as well. Space was a really big outdoors.

She sighed and resolved to stop worrying and just live. She could ruminate when they got a quiet spot in their lives. If ever.

“Okay, what’s up?” she made herself say brightly. Seeker pointed. 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, Cley saw an expressive freedom of effortless new geometries. Myriad spokes and limbs, rhomboids and ellipsoids—she got those terms from her inboards. These jutted from the many shells and rough skins, but she could not imagine their uses. Necessity dictates form, she knew.

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, Cley supposed. 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. Cley 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. Cley 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 in the valley where the Library of Life lay. 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 eyes 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.