Ry Ornis and I descended from the flawship in a small transfer craft. The journey took less than ten minutes. The deltoid vehicle maneuvered in a cautious spiral. The closer it came to the wall, the more weight it acquired. And, contrary to its name, the wall behaved more like a floor—a gravitating surface. The craft landed lightly, with no discernible jolt.
Ry Ornis and I put on light pressure suits. He picked up a box not much larger than his head and tucked it under his arm. We nodded to an eye conveying our images to the pilot waiting in the flawship above; then we stepped outside.
Beneath our boots, the wall felt as hard as rock. Ry Ornis immediately set out across the bare bronze surface, long legs carrying him two meters with each stride. He removed a clavicle from the box, dropped the box carelessly, and immediately gripped the bars of the device, swinging it back and forth ahead of him. I had read of old-fashioned dowsing rods, once a fad on Earth; Ry Ornis wielded his clavicle in much the same way as an ancient seeker after water.
Beneath us lay one of the fabled, fearful regions called geometry stacks, where the Way's physics adjusted itself unpredictably—often compared to a wrinkle in the skin of a many-dimensional worm. I did not like the comparison.
“This whole region is knotted,” the gate opener said, voice rough, his tone between wonder and disgust. “What color is it? My God, what does it smell like?”
Puzzled by the questions, I did not answer. Best not to interrupt, I decided.
Ry Ornis continued, “Do you know a geometry stack hurts? When we search it? It gives us colossal headaches that are tough to cure. Somebody's clearly been here before us, though. They've left their own kind of dirty fingerprints: bulges; world-lines pulled out of place; accesses ruined. My God, what amateurs.”
I followed him at a measured pace. I carried nothing; I would take nothing with me but the clothes beneath my pressure suit. All of my baggage was internal—weeks of training and education, the careful transfer of relevant knowledge from my supplements to biological memory...
The pilot's voice sounded in our helmets. “The Jarts are painting us every few seconds. I'd be happier if I could leave soon.”
Ry Ornis said, “I can't guarantee putting you on Lamarckia at any particular time.” His voice dripped disgust. “It'll be very difficult to get you to within a decade of when the informer made his temporary gate. Lenk must have left a nipple, a node, or the informer could never have returned at all. But that's gone now.”
The gate opener stood straight, his tall, emaciated figure and white suit a startling contrast to our surroundings. Light played tricks in this immense featureless, shadowless pipe. To stand and stare at the distant curve of the wall, rising above the flat nearness until it arched high overhead, disoriented me even more. I squinted up at the plasma tube, running the length of the flaw to a dazzling blur of brightness in the south, illuminating the Way for millions of kilometers ... But ending not far north of where we stood, leaving the Jarts in a darkness all their own.
I looked down to keep from getting dizzy. My body had no help overcoming feelings of vertigo. Naked inside.
The gate opener bent over, gripping the bars of the clavicle, passing its spherical head a few centimeters above the surface. “Found something,” he announced. “Knots retied. Some attempt to renormalize, to heal, apparently.”
“Heal?” I asked.
Ry Ornis did not hear, or simply ignored me. “Most of these lines pour out into empty expanse. So much desolation, measure without interest. Makes us all very lonely. Here a solitary star, there an airless ball of rock. So easy to be attracted by false worlds, dreams of futures not yet accessible, not yet quite real. Ten years, twenty years ... Maybe two dozen years. No guarantees. I might drop you before Lenk's immigrants arrived. Wouldn't want that. And no way to return, for any of you ... must be careful to leave a few more accesses.”
“Please do,” I said, shivering. I had pictured this time as a trouble-free interlude, a brief moment watching the precise and even inhuman work of a master gate opener. Instead, the assistants to the Presiding Minister had assigned this stick figure, this insect man with his long face and propensity to babble. Perhaps they really do want to lose me.
“Found something. Come here, Ser Olmy.” Ry Ornis beckoned for me to step closer and watch.
I walked up beside him and peered at the cryptic display between the bars of his clavicle.
Ry Ornis drew his gloved finger lightly over the colors on the display. “See this?” I saw only twisted lines, flashing fields of green and blue. “An access. It tells me it's a locus of extreme interest. Nothing around it ... No doubt that's Lamarckia. And it follows chronologically what must be the Lenk access. But where do I shift it? Where do I drop you in Lamarckia's world-line? Here to here,” sketching across the display with his finger, “comparative boredom, boredom, nothing ... but here.” He smiled radiantly behind his visor. “These are exquisite loci. I look for things of interest to humans, Ser Olmy, and I find them. If Lamarckia is of interest all by itself, then these points on its world-line are even more interesting to us. To you and to me. Understand?”
“No,” I said.
Ry Ornis shifted his finger again, waving the clavicle gently. “Loci of large human-centered events. Lamarckia is a huge event behind them, unfamiliar ... But definitely ready to change. Shall I place you at one of the most fascinating loci, Ser Olmy?”
“Just get me there,” I said. I bit my lower lip, trying to still my growing anxiety. Courage seemed a sorry abstraction.
“Within a decade or two of Lenk's access. Can't be certain. It's really the best I can do.”
“Do it. Please, just do it.” I had already disgraced my family and the memory of my father by cleaving to the progressive Geshels and putting unnatural devices within my body, by signing up in Way Defense, by rejecting the woman I had pledged to. I did not want to disgrace myself again by failing here and now.
“No reason to be nervous. No gate will open if I can't put you someplace truly interesting.”
I wanted to hit the man.
“So I spread my carpet here ... And dub this gate number thirty-two, of stack region twelve...” Ry Ornis traced a glowing red line on the wall with the sphere of the clavicle. “Stand aside.”
I stood aside.
A bump rose from the surface of the Way, five meters wide with a dimple in the middle. Red and green lines danced across its fresh surface, vibrated rapidly, and became the familiar color of fresh bronze. Ry Ornis spread it by backing away, trailing the clavicle behind him. A disk-shaped canopy grew over the new gate.
Mouth dry as stone, head cold as ice, I climbed the side of the bump on hands and knees, perched on the rim of the dimple, and stared down into a storm of fluid darkness.
“It'll take you where you need to go,” Ry Ornis said. “And it will vanish after you.”
I stood erect on the lip of the gate, pushed by the very last of my limited courage. I would walk straight ahead, in a straight line, and come out where the informer had left Lamarckia.
“Just walk,” the gate opener said, voice hollow in my helmet. “Don't forget to remove your suit halfway across. There will be air from Lamarckia in the gate at that point.”
“All right,” I said.
“Only two more accesses left, I judge. How you'll come back, I don't know. Good luck.”
I looked over my shoulder, saw the gaunt white-suited figure, the eye-twisting uniformity beyond and above ... turned, and met another kind of illusion, even more extreme.
Here, there were no straight lines, would never be any unswerving paths. In the gate, I would crawl through a hole punched into all possible worlds, a fistula between the Way and somewhere else...
I had to put complete faith in Ry Ornis. My body did not think that was wise. I clenched my teeth, pushed one leg forward, then the other. Felt the pressure build around me. I removed the suit and dropped its pieces on the gate's slope behind me. I now wore only the clothes that migh
t be worn by one of Lenk's immigrants.
I could no longer see the Way or Ry Ornis.
“Gate's pressurized. Hurry.” The gate opener's voice echoed around me like the buzz of an insect, issuing from the discarded suit. Ahead, I saw a swirl of purple and red and black, bands of blue and a bright arc of yellow-orange: my destination, viewed through the distorting lens of the gate.
I closed my eyes, held out my arms, made one last step forward...
And fell feet-first into lumpy wet soil, spattering my boots and brown pants. For a moment I thought I would fall over. I held out my hands, knelt with boots firm in the muck, and steadied myself. Behind me, the wheeling darkness dilated to a point, sucked at my coat's fabric, and abandoned me in a tiny eddy of air.
1
The sun hung two hand-spans above the horizon. Late morning, early evening: I could not judge. I stood on the crest of a low hill, between thick black trunks smooth as glass. Behind me, a dense enclosure of more black trunks. And ahead ... detail rushed upon me; I sucked it in with frantic need.
Red and purple forest pushed over low boxy hills, fading to pink and lavender as the hills receded toward the horizon. Mist curled languidly between. Immense trees like the skeletons of cathedral towers punctuated the forest every few hundred meters, pink crowns perched atop four slender vaulting legs, rising high over the rest of the forest. Above the hills, sky beckoned crystal blue with mottled patches of more red and purple, as if reflecting the forest. In fact, the forest inhabited the sky: tethered gas-filled balloons ascended from the distant stands of black-trunked trees into thin shredded-ribbon clouds.
Everything glowed with serene yellow light and brilliant blood-hued life. Everything, related. For as far as the eye could see—what Darrow Jan Fima had called Elizabeth's Zone, one creature, one thing.
From where I stood, at the top of a rise overlooking the broad, dark olive Terra Nova River, Lamarckia hardly seemed violated. Not a human in sight, not a curl of smoke or rise of structure. Somewhere below, hidden in the tangle of smooth black trunks, huge round leaves, and purple fans, the ferry landing was supposed to be ... And inland a few hundred meters along a dirt and gravel path, both hidden in the dense pack, the village of Moonrise.
I touched my clothes self-consciously. How out-of-place would I look?
I realized I had been holding my breath. I inhaled deeply. It was a sweet and startling breath. The air smelled of fresh water, grapes, tea leaves, and a variety of odors I can only describe as skunky-sweet. Rich aromas wafted from nearby extrusions resembling broad purple flowers with fleshy centers. They smelled like bananas, spicy as cinnamon. The extrusions opened and closed, twitching at the end of each cycle. Then they withdrew altogether with thin, high chirps.
I reached out my hand to stroke the smooth black curve of a trunk. At my touch, the bark parted to form a kind of stoma, red and pink pulp within. A drop of translucent white fluid oozed from the gash, which quickly closed when I lifted my hand.
“Not a tree,” I murmured. The Dalgesh report—by the original surveyors—had called them “arborid scions.” And this was not a forest, but a silva.
There were no plants or animals as such on Lamarckia. The first surveyors, in the single day they had spent on the planet, had determined that within certain zones, all apparently individual organisms, called scions, in fact belonged to a larger organism, which they had called an ecos. No scion could breed by itself; they did not act alone. An ecos was a single genetic organism, creating within itself all the diverse parts of an ecosystem, spread over large areas—in some cases, dominating entire continents.
Each ecos was ruled, the surveyors had theorized, by what they called a seed mistress, or queen. Neither the surveyors—nor the immigrants, according to Jan Fima—had ever seen such a queen, however; understanding of Lamarckian biology and planetary science in general had still been primitive among the immigrants when the informer left.
Above, the black trunks spread great round parasol-leaves, broad as outstretched arms, powdery gray at their perimeters, rose and bloodred in their centers. The parasols rubbed edges in a canopy-clinging current of air, making a gentle shushing noise, like a mother calming an infant. Black granular dust fell in thin drifts on my head; not pollen, certainly not ash. I rubbed some between my fingers, smelled it, but did not taste.
The last light of the orange sun warmed my face. So this was not morning but evening; the day was ending. I savored the glow. It felt wonderfully, thrillingly familiar; but it was the first sunlight I had ever directly experienced. Until now, I had spent my whole life within Thistledown and the Way.
My terror passed into numb ecstasy. The sense of alien newness, of unfamiliar beauty, hit me like a drug; I was actually walking on a planet, a world like Earth, not within a hollowed-out rock.
Reluctantly, I turned from the sun's warmth and walked in shadow down an overgrown trail. If I had come out in the right place, this trail would lead to the Terra Nova River and the landing that served the village of Moonrise. Here, I had been told, I might catch a riverboat and travel to Calcutta, the largest town on the continent of Elizabeth's Land.
I wondered what sort of people I would meet. I imagined feral wretches, barely social, clustered in dark little towns, immersed in their own superstitions. Then I regretted the thought. Perhaps I had spent too much time among the Geshels, having so little respect for my own kind. But of course Lenk's people had gone beyond my own kind. Yanosh had characterized them as fanatic.
The moist air of the river valley sighed around me, like an invisible chilly flood. Picking my footsteps carefully, avoiding lines of finger-sized orange worms topped by feathery blue crests, I listened for any sounds, heard only the rubbed-silk hiss of air and the liquid mumble of the river.
The trail at least had once been traveled by humans. Dropped between the trunks, in a tangle of stone-hard “roots,” I spotted a small scrap of crumpled plastic and knelt to pick it up. Spread open by my fingers, it was a blank page from an erasable notebook.
At least, I realized with considerably relief, I had not arrived before the human intruders. That would have meant I was truly trapped here, with no chance of returning until they arrived ... Or someone came from the Hexamon to get me.
I pocketed the scrap. I still could not be sure how much time had passed since the arrival of Lenk and his followers.
Four thousand one hundred and fourteen illegal immigrants; as much as three decades between my arrival and theirs. What could they have done to Lamarckia in that time?
I pushed through a tangle of purple helixed blades. My feet sank into a grainy, boggy humus littered with pink shells and pebbles. No landing visible; no lights, no sign of river traffic. For a moment, I knelt and dug my fingers into the soil. It felt gritty and resilient at once—grains of sand and spongy corklike cubes half a centimeter on a side, suspended in inky fluid that globbed immiscibly amid drops of clear water. It looked for all the world like gardener's potting soil mixed with viscous ink.
I picked up a pink shell. Spiral, flat, like an ancient Earth ammonite, four or five centimeters across. I sniffed it; clean and sweet, with a watery, dusty smell backed by a ghost of roses and bananas. I poked it with a finger; it crushed easily.
More black powder fell in thin curtains nearby. I glanced up and saw what looked like an immense reddish-brown snake, banded with deep midnight blue, dozens of meters long and as thick across as my own body, twisted around and draped across the trunks and leaves above. It wriggled slowly, peristaltically. I could see neither its head nor its tail. With a clamping sensation in my throat and chest, I trotted down the trail, trying to get out from under the serpent.
The trail became thicker, overgrown by smaller red and purple plantlike forms, phytids, filling in between the arborids. I lost my way and had to listen for the sound of the river to orient myself.
Several minutes passed before I realized I was smelling something out of place, rich and gassy. During my walk, I had not once s
melled mold or methane, not once felt the squelch of dead vegetation. Plants, trees—convenient words only—grew from soil that might have been prepared by diligent and cleanly gardeners. Only the pink shells, mired in the mud, gave a hint that anything here lived, then died, and in dying, left remains—
And this fresh scent of decay.
I thrashed down to the bank again and stared over the deep brownish water to the black silhouette of the opposite shore. Faint, broad patches of blue glow sprang up between the trees across the river. They sputtered and went out again. I could not be sure I had seen them. Then, high above, the undersides of the broad parasols flashed blue. Somewhere, high-pitched tuneless whistling. A flutter beneath the parasols: dark winged things carrying fibrous scraps. Something small and red darted past my face with an audible sniff.
The wind died. The night air sank. Fog danced and twisted in the middle of the river. With the silence came another whiff of decay. Animal flesh, rotting. I was sure of that much.
I followed the scent. Back up the bank, stepping gingerly over writhing purple creepers, guided by faint blue flashes through the undergrowth, I found the remains of the trail.
Something made a sound between a squeak and a sigh and scuttled on three legs out of the undergrowth: a pasty white creature the size of a small dog, triangular in shape. It stood by a black trunk and regarded me through patient, empty eye-spots mounted along a red central line. It pulsed and made tiny whistling sounds. Its skin crawled in what I took to be disgust at my presence. But apparently disgust was only disapproval—or something else entirely—for it did not retreat. Instead, it slowly clasped and crawled its way up a trunk, opened a stoma with a tap of its pointed tail-foot, and began to suck milky fluid. I watched in fascination as its white body swelled. Then, half again as large as before, the creature dropped from the trunk, landed in the dirt with a rubbery plop, and crabbed away with a half-circling gait on the down-bent points of its triangle.