Ramstan thought that, if Wassruss's chant was not nonsense, that phrase indicated that the inhabitable planet was his goal. Fortunately, he did not have to choose between two planets. He had not expected to. No solar-type system so far found had more than one inhabitable planet. There was a narrow range of distance from the sun which determined whether or not life could originate and thrive on a planet. And sometimes even then the planet in that range was biohostile.
Life was rare and fragile. Yet it was also frequent and tough. Give it a foothold, and it fought to hold on, to flourish, to evolve into forms impossible to imagine until seen.
Al-Buraq's probes reported that this world was slightly smaller than Earth but had slightly more mass. She went into orbit just above the atmosphere and over the only continent. This was much longer than it was wide and stretched around the southern hemisphere in the temperate zone. Its two extremities were separated by 3,000 kilometers of islandless ocean.
"'To the tree which does not stand alone.'"
How in the seven hells was he to find that one? Except for freshwater bodies and the upper slopes of the highest mountains, the continent was covered with thick trees. There were no meadows or open spaces of any consequence.
Ramstan sent ship down into the atmosphere about twenty kilometers above land-level. He ordered her to follow a path which would eventually cover every hectare. They soon determined that there was much bird and insect life in the upper reaches of the forest and many species of animal. Among these were monkey- and apelike creatures.
The biodetectors showed that each tree was attached to its immediate neighbors by four to six thin, leafless, glossy-black branches extending horizontally in a circle from the upper middle part of the trunk. These formed an interconnecting and supporting system extending continent-wide. The trees on the edges of the beaches and seacliffs only grew the connectors inward to their neighbors.
Though approximately one out of a hundred trees was dead, they did not seem to fall until completely rotted and eaten by the insects. Where this had happened, treelets were growing up from the mounds of the dead predecessors.
"'To the tree which does not stand alone.'"
Allah! How could he make any sense out of that?
He began pacing back and forth but stopped after a minute. It was not good for the bridge people to see him so obviously worried. He ordered Toyce to call him if any sentient life was detected.
"Yes, sir. But sentiency may not be obvious."
"Do the best you can."
He went to his quarters and there resumed pacing. Once, he stopped to take the glyfa out, but it did not respond.
"I need you now!" he cried, and he struck it a glancing blow with his fist. The round a-g units attached to it did not prevent it from rolling over and dropping off the table onto the deck. The deck quivered, not from the impact itself but from al-Buraq's reflex to what it considered might be Ramstan's fall. Or was it due to ship's monitoring of his emotional state? She was always sensing him, the play of electrical fields on his skin, his body temperature, the tone of his voice.
He turned, jumped, and gasped. The green man was standing by the far bulkhead. His arm was outstretched, and a fingertip was on the center of a seven-sided screen.
The vision lasted no longer than two eyeblinks.
The green-shrouded man had indicated the empty screen. What did that have to do with the tree that does not stand alone? Perhaps nothing. Something else might have been meant by that fingertip on the center of a blank field.
Did al-Khidhr really exist? Or was the thing that he, Ramstan, had seen just a form beamed by someone? Had al-Khidhr been shot forth like a three-dimensional hologram from Ramstan's four-dimensioned brain, self-awareness being the extra dimension?
Something, objective or subjective, nonhuman or human, was trying to tell him something.
He began pacing again but halted after twelve steps. Perhaps the vision was not referring to the screen as a whole but to its center. Look for the center was the message. The center of what? His own center, the inmost recess of his being?
No.
Look in the center, the middle, of the forest.
That could be it.
At one time there may have been only one tree on this continent, an Urgenitor, the hermaphroditic Adam-Eve of all these now existing. Possibly, it had stood or was still standing in the geographical center of the land-mass, and where it was was his goal.
He called the bridge. The scanners having fed the data into al-Buraq's brain, the geographical center and the middle point of the land-mass were located. The latter was that point halfway between the two extremities of the continent and halfway between the north and south coasts. Since the two centers did not coincide, Ramstan ordered that ship go to the latter first.
Her central part contracted into a rocket-shape, her lower outer part shaped like the wings of antique airplanes, al-Buraq sped above the surface of the green arboreal-ocean. At 300 kilometers from her destination, she began descending and decelerating and within ten minutes was poised over it. Ten meters below the bottom of her hull, the tip of the highest tree rocked in the wind. Ramstan did not think that it was a coincidence that the tallest and most massive tree grew from the continental center.
The sun had almost zenithed. The sky was cloudless. The only life visible to the unaided eye was aerial: large insects, primitive birds, and some small and some large mammals. At least, the latter were assumed to be mammals since they were furred. The biggest had wingspreads of eight meters, batlike bodies and wings, and bloodhoundish faces, but their cries were monkeylike. They were too heavy to take off from the tree branches, and their webbed feet suggested that they used water as their landing fields. The nearest large lake was 50 kilometers away, so the dogbats must have an amazingly extended range of flight. They dived down and caught the smaller birds and mammals and ate them while flying.
Though the tossing green surface looked lifeless from a distance, it was, when seen closely, surging with vitality. In addition to the winged things skimming it, insects and some unclassifiable creatures crawled, ran, or hopped on the broad, dark-green, leathery-looking, cupped, and immense leaves of the Brobdingnagian tree just below them. The foliage did not swarm with the creatures, but it was well-populated.
This was where the top branches met the open air. What about below that level?
The viewbeams could not penetrate the density more than a few meters.
Nuoli, looking at the magnification on the screens, said, "You'd think that the leaves below, all growth below the upper leaves, would die from lack of sunlight. Surely . . ."
Ramstan said, "Yes?"
"Surely, it can't be as thick as it seems. At least, elsewhere, the sun must be able to penetrate here and there."
What could live down there besides pale things of low or no intelligence, blind, moving slowly in the darkness?
But if "the tree which does not stand alone," meant anything, it must apply to the prodigious plant below him. It stood higher than the others by a thousand meters. Its circumference, the circle formed by the tips of the branches at a level with the tops of the surrounding trees, was 10,000 meters. Outside the edge of the circle, through small breaks here and there in the foliage of the smaller parts of trees, the connecting branches could be seen.
"The mothertree?" Ramstan muttered to himself.
The sunlight glanced from some of the tossing leaves, which seemed to contain mica. There was nothing visible to suggest anything sinister. Yet, he felt that there was danger under those leaves. Not the expected peril of feral animals or poisonous reptiles. Something or some things which he could not possibly anticipate, entities which had been beyond the ken, and still might be, of humankind.
The unknown had always held fear. The human mind was constructed to project fear into the nonexplored whether or not there were reasons to be afraid. On the other hand, the unknown also enticed. Humans could not resist its allure and had to plunge into whatever danger
s might exist there. Also, there was a fascination about fear itself that had its allure. Humans, some humans, anyway, liked to be afraid -- to a certain degree. Perhaps the basic drive here was the desire to test their courage. No, that was not the only basic. Curiosity, monkey curiosity, also pulled them into the unknown.
This situation, however, differed from any which Ramstan had been in. He had always felt confident that he could handle any predicament. But this one . . . there was something about it. . . something so vast and powerful that it made him feel very small and weak . . . no . . . he must not think like that. Even smallness and weakness had their powers, their advantages.
"Besides," he said aloud, "I am Ramstan!"
Nuoli, who was standing near him, jumped. She said, "What?"
Suzuki was also looking strangely at him.
"Nothing," Ramstan said. "Nothing."
So . . . he was Ramstan? So what? He was unique, but so was every sentient being. So, for that matter, was every one of the millions of seemingly alike trees on this land. The difference was that he was sentient, self-conscious, and he had a self or a series of selves called Ramstan, and that Ramstan had a body-mind and a development through a unique environment that no one else had. No one, not even God. God might know every sentient, might even participate in the full consciousness and unconsciousness of every unique sentient. But not even He could be that person. There were limits even to God's powers. Which, since God was by definition all-powerful, meant that God was not God. Which meant that the definition should be restated.
He had no time to think of the implications of that. He ordered that a launch be readied for take-off in ten minutes. He also told Tenno that he, Ramstan, would be on it.
"We're going down to the surface," he said.
Tenno had obviously been speculating on his captain's reasons for coming here. He said, "You're following the directions in Wassruss's chant?"
Ramstan hesitated, then said, "It may be in vain. But, after all, our mission is scientific, and anthropology, I mean, sentientology, is one of our main studies. This chant . . . it's so curious . . . it intimates that there have been alaraf drives in the very distant past . . . perhaps before humanity was quite evolved from the ape. Anyway, I have more than one motive for traveling through the walls of the universes."
Tenno interrupted. " Walls?"
That slip checked Ramstan for an instant. He opened his mouth, could not get the words out, glared, shut his mouth, briefly closed his eyes, then spoke.
"Yes, walls. I'm not at all certain that we are, per theory, traveling from one galaxy to another either by time travel or by tunnel-bell. You know that it's been suggested, though, I'll admit, not seriously, that when a ship jumps it penetrates the 'wall' between one universe and the next."
He paused, and Tenno said, "The multiverse hypothesis. Though, really, it's not even a hypothesis. It's a wild speculation, and . . ."
"I tend to think that it's more than that. But what's the difference what the truth is? In this situation, anyway. You're in charge of ship now, Tenno. You have your orders on what to do if the Tenolt or that monster appears."
Tenno said, "Aye, aye, sir," and saluted.
Five minutes later, Ramstan was seated in the launch. It left its port and nosed down toward the tree. Seen from ship with the naked eyes, the plant seemed a solid monolith. As the launch neared it, however, its occupants saw vast openings, the entrances to the emptinesses between the levels of branches. The branches were gigantic, ranging from 50 to 70 meters in radius near the trunk, and were supported about a third of their length from the trunk by arboreal flying buttresses, branches growing at a 45-degree angle upward from the trunk and merging into the lower part of the branches they upheld. In the outer part of the vertical aisles formed by the branches was a space about 100 meters high. The launch moved into the aisle formed by the seventh and eighth branches from the tip of the tree.
They went abruptly from brightness and a not-quite-comfortable warmth into an illumination like that just before dusk. The temperature was another degree lower.
The animal, bird, and insect population here was more numerous and much noisier than the aerial life above the tree. The creatures did not have to go down to the ground to drink water. It oozed from the branches where the thick bark formed shallow crevices and collected into little pools and springs.
Here and there, the sunlight broke through and fell on hairy, scaled, feathered, or chitinous things. It also was reflected from the huge leaves, some of which curled upward and contained rainwater.
Ramstan ordered the launch to stop long enough for a yeoshet to pull loose three leaves for specimens.
"The glittering stuff can't be mica," he said. "It would make the leaves too heavy."
The upper transparent part of the rowboat-shaped launch closed down, and it went on with its passengers protected from attack by the sometimes aggressive actions of the citizens of the tree. Most of these consisted of fruit hurled or excrement dropped by monkeyish creatures or kamikaze-divebombings by squadrons of insects. Several times, Ramstan had to order the de-icing liquid released over the upper-sheet shell to kill the cloud of insects obscuring the pilot's vision.
When the launch dropped 600 meters, it was no longer among such thick masses of insects. There were plenty at this level, but they did not gather on the upper part very heavily.
Though the buzz and screech were less, the darkness and cold increased. On reaching the twentieth branch-level down, Ramstan had the lights turned on. It was still possible to see objects without them, but easier with them.
At ten more levels down, the air temperature stabilized. The launch people were quite comfortable, since the vehicle was air-conditioned, but the exterior heat was not quite enough to be comfortable. It was at this level that Ramstan noticed that many of the leaves were turned at different angles. And as the launch sank, the illumination became more, not less.
Nuoli said, "It's a system to reflect sunlight down."
Here they first saw the seemingly parasitic plants sprouting from the trunk and branches. These were of three kinds: toadstool-shaped, cone-shaped, and seven-pointed star-shaped on long drooping stalks. All glowed with a light, each having a will-o'-the-wisp brightness, but the total illumination was that of just-after-dusk. The eyes of some animal, bird, and insect life glowed as if reflecting light from a campfire. Since there was not enough light for this, Nuoli speculated that the eyes had their own source of illumination. The winking of these, she said, reminded her of the glowings from Terran fireflies.
"Some sort of cold light activated by electrochemical means."
Though he'd seen many strange things since his first landing on a non-Terran planet, Ramstan thought that this phenomenon was among the strangest. It also seemed unexplainable -- at least, for the moment. Fireflies excited their photonic-emitting tails as sexual signals. Did these creatures flash their eyes off and on for the same reason? If they did, the flashing must leave them temporarily blinded.
He thought, Perhaps the light shed by so many of the things and events I've encountered recently, especially the glyfa, should be illuminating. But it's blinded me.
Another curious thought strayed or swooped across the field of his mind.
What if these creatures were in league with, or controlled by, the entities he guessed were at the base of this tree? What if their eye-flashings were signals, biological Morse, to the entities that his imagination had visioned as waiting for him; the signals telling the shadowy things at the base that an object bearing passengers from a far distance and time was approaching, and what the passengers looked like?
He failed to discern a pattern in the flashings. They seemed to be just so much "noise." What seemed to him randomness might, however, be intelligence to someone else.
The launch dropped down at the rate of ten kilometers an hour in a vertical zigzag around the branches. The photon-emitting growths increased until branch and trunk seemed to be encrusted with strangely
cut jewels. Unlike Terran trees, the horizontal branches at the lower levels became shorter and more slender. Nevertheless, the flying-buttress supports were thicker and extended further out. This, Ramstan supposed, was because the luciferian plants were so many that they heavily weighed down the branches.
The Unreasoning Mask Page 16