Rhapsody in Black

by Brian Stableford

  There were four of them. One I didn’t know and one I couldn’t see. The other two were Rion Mavra and Cyolus Capra. The four of them were engaged in a conversation—whose content we still could not identify. They paused just outside the entrance to the grotto so that the leading man—the one I didn’t know—could emphasise some point he was making.

  I felt Bayon tense as he levelled his gun, but he still held back and allowed them to come on.

  Mavra and the unknown man moved forward together, and the others dropped back, apparently temporarily disengaged from the conversation. I saw the fourth figure highlighted briefly beyond and between Mavra and the other. It was Angelina. The surprise was momentary—I couldn’t afford the time to think about it.

  Then Bayon moved.

  Involved as they were with one another, neither man saw us as we covered the three paces which separated us. They reacted only when violent hands were laid upon them.

  Bayon reached out to take Mavra’s head in the crook of his arm, and swung the smaller man around effortlessly. Mavra gasped, but he was drowned by Bayon’s loud yell.

  ‘Ezra! Get Krist! Tob the other one! Grainger the girl.’

  The allocation of tasks did not represent any denigration of my fighting spirit relative to his own men, but merely reflected the way we had lined up. We were already halfway to completing what Bayon demanded of us.

  Ezra took hold of the man that I had not recognised—Akim Krist, it seemed—and shoved him into the wall of the tunnel, moving in behind him so that Krist’s body shielded him from the armed men, while his own rifle was aligned across Krist’s chest in a threatening position.

  Meanwhile, Bayon had gone forward, moving Mavra with him as a human shield.

  Capra had moved instinctively backward and to one side, and it was not necessary for Tob to clear him out of Bayon’s way. But Angelina froze, and I had to lunge forward, lift her bodily, and then force her right down, so that Ezra and Harl could—if necessary—fire over our bodies. Chivalrously, I fell on top of her instead of getting underneath her so that she would absorb any loose lead. I think it was an accident—it was the way we fell.

  The guards had acted with all due suddenness in levelling their guns and striking an aggressive pose. Mercifully, though, they were not so trigger-conscious as to let fly without a decent amount of premeditation. Sensibly, they didn’t fire at all.

  There was a sudden and profound silence. I caught myself waiting for something to happen, and remembered that I was the mouthpiece.

  ‘Put the guns down,’ I said levelly.

  The guards hesitated. Their exaggerated trepidation clearly showed that they recognised Bayon, who was only a few feet away, staring at them over Mavra’s head. But it was quite clear that the Hierarch himself, Akim Krist, was convinced of the reality of the gun which held him pinned to the wall, and he was having no trouble compromising with the unreality of its holder.

  ‘Tell ‘em, Krist,’ growled Ezra, relishing the menace in his own voice. Heroically, Krist ignored him.

  I released Angelina, leaving her huddled on the ground. I brushed past the trailing arm of the prisoned Mavra and walked up to the guards. They looked at me with distaste, but they had already relaxed the attitude of their guns. I secured both rifles, and used them to point the way into the grotto. Both guards accepted the invitation, and descended the short slope into the glittering interior of the treasure cave.

  I turned around, bowed slightly, and gestured to the grotto with my empty hand. My eyes met Mavra’s. His gaze was colourless, lacking both surprise and reproach. Krist, however, had realised that I was solid, and was regarding me with mixed hatred and anger. His eyes were fixed on me, as he refused to honour my companions with the direction of his stare.

  One by one, they all filed past me into the grotto. Harl helped Angelina to her feet, and to my surprise—and his—she thanked him in a low voice. She almost smiled at me as she brushed past, but her face couldn’t quite manage it. In any case, it would have been an enigmatic smile—I was reasonably sure that she was not amused, and she could hardly be making us welcome.

  I was about to enter, last of all, but I had to step back to let Harl out again. After the slightest of glances around the object of our exercise he had been ordered out again by Bayon to replace the previous guardians. He carried both of our lamps, and he was taking the masks off the other lights preparatory to distributing them intelligently in the corridor when I stepped into the grotto.

  It was full of light.

  Even so, there was no glare. The light was faint and filmy, like the light of the Milky Way as seen from a rim world on a clear night. It was an oddly familiar and—to me—beautiful effect. The floor had been cleared to leave a short pathway and a square space in the centre of the cave, which was just adequate to accommodate the ten of us. Standing room only.

  The grotto was shaped like a cone with the point lopped off, but the interior surface was knobbed and distorted, with abundant rock-forms like stalagmites and stalactites. It looked to be a stress-cyst rather than an alveolar pocket. Its base diameter was about five metres, but the walls sloped inwards, tapering so that at eye-height the grotto only seemed to be about three metres wide.

  The entire inner surface except for the patch where we stood was encrusted with blue-grey and green-grey growths which had luminescent facets set in ordered array over their tegument, like tiny sequins.

  There was a small semicircular pool in the rear of the cave. Its surface was jet black, but set with a multitude of very faint pinpricks which were the reflections of the facets in the water. Beside the pool was an irregular heap of randomly lighted debris—obviously the detritus which had been cleared to allow spectators the room to stand.

  ‘Very nice,’ I commented.

  Bayon and his men were strangely wary, now that the action was over. They were looking about suspiciously, trying to see something which might be worth all this fuss. But there was nothing which could even seem unfamiliar to them.

  ‘It’s gone!’ said Ezra.

  ‘No it hasn’t,’ I told him. ‘This little collection we’ve assembled didn’t come here for the privacy. And no one guards empty caves. It’s still here, whatever it is.’

  I wanted to get a close look, but it was impossible with the crowd crammed into the small cleared space.

  ‘Get them out,’ I said to Bayon. ‘They’re in the way.’

  ‘You’ll have to tell them,’ he reminded me.

  I located Rion Mavra and addressed myself to him. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘If we’re going to be difficult about this, there’s going to be a lot of unnecessary tension generated. Do you think that you could possibly admit—temporarily—that those guns have trigger-fingers on them, and that the men with the trigger-fingers should be obeyed?’

  ‘We’ll do as you say, of course,’ said Mavra, without committing himself.

  ‘Well then, I’ll put you in charge of liaison. If my wishes aren’t carried out, one of you might get shot by some nasty non-existent person. I want you all out of here and into the blind end of the mine-workings. I want you to imagine that there’s a guard with you watching your every move. This imaginary guard will be called Ezra, if you wish to imagine that you can talk to him for the purpose of asking for something. I want you to make yourselves as comfortable as possible and wait. Do you think that you can handle all those instructions in one go?’

  ‘We’ll do as you say. But I’d like to talk to you about what you’re trying to do.’

  ‘Capture your big prize,’ I said, waving an arm about my head (with some difficulty) to indicate the span of my ambitions.

  ‘What do you hope to gain by taking by force what your employer might well get by honest means?’ he followed up.

  ‘Ah, well, there’s the rub,’ I said. ‘It’s not primarily what I want which brought me here. I’m looking after the interests of some other people. You might not know them, though I’m sure you could if you made the effort. It would sav
e you from having to assume that it was the will of God which picked you up in the corridor and brought you back in here.’

  He didn’t seem impressed.

  ‘Do you intend to hold us as hostages?’

  ‘Bayon?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bayon.

  ‘Yes,’ I repeated, playing the game. ‘Now get out and do as I told you. Ezra, sit them down in a neat little group. If they don’t know what you want them to do, hint by means of a few swift kicks. I think they’ll catch on. We’ll come back to them in a few minutes, when I’ve had a look around.’

  They all filed out, and a sudden afterthought sent me out into the tunnel after them.

  ‘By the way,’ I said, tapping Mavra on the shoulder, ‘you wouldn’t care to tell me what to look for, I suppose?’

  It was Angelina who answered. ‘I’m sure, Captain Grainger, that you have sufficient intelligence to see what is before you.’

  It was the first time she’d spoken in my presence, and the heavy irony startled me. ‘I’m not the captain,’ I said. ‘I only fly the ship.’

  ‘What about you?’ said Ezra to Akim Krist. The Hierarch ignored him—looked straight through him.

  ‘Capra?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s nothing in there,’ he said, with a grotesquely ineffective attempt at defiance.

  ‘Ah, forget it,’ I addressed them collectively. ‘I’ll find out for myself.’ And I returned to the grotto to do just that.

  There were three types of organism.

  The primary producer was the luminescent organism. It was—quite literally—the base element of the system. It spread vegetatively over the inner surface of the grotto, like a thick coat of paint. It varied in thickness from about half an inch to one-and-a-half, according to the pieces which I inspected. (I took fresh specimens from the wall rather than look at the organisms which had been cleared from the floor, in case the latter had deteriorated.) Its texture was soft and easily breakable, like a dry, firm fungus. Internally it was partially differentiated into ill-defined strata, in and between which were suspended cloud-like ‘organs’. There did not seem to be any cellular structure, nor was there a multi-molecular fibrous skeleton. The differentiation seemed to be purely and simply a matter of molecular densities and protoplasmic cohesion. It was difficult to be certain with only the feeble light of my flashlight, and without any magnifier, but I formed the impression that the cloud areas were motile within the strata, and that there must be considerable streaming of molecules within the protoplasm. I noticed that as I held a plaque of the substance between my fingers, the luminescence died, but if I placed the distal surface against the palm of my hand, it grew brighter. The reaction was quick, and quite considerable for such a minor difference in temperature; it seemed obvious that the organism was thermosynthetic, gaining energy from the excitement of molecules by heat energy. The luminescence was probably an energy-excretory process—a means of disposing of absorbed energy which could not be immediately channelled into anabolic and catabolic processes.

  This type of organism was representative of a class which often developed on conductive faces near hotcores. It could not be the cause of all the excitement.

  The second type consisted of certain small growths which studded the sequined carpet. Each growth looked like a tiny tree, beginning at a single point and bifurcating as each branch reached a length of two and a half inches. The branches did not grow high but remained close to the substratum, so that the dendrite proliferated mostly in a horizontal plane. Some of these organisms had attained a diameter of fifteen inches, but most were a great deal smaller.

  The active elements of the organism were borne at the tip of each branch—oval, sapphire-like bodies (not luminescent) which apparently secreted the branches over a period of time, and caused a bifurcation every time they divided—presumably by ordinary binary fission. I detached one of the dendrites from its bed, and carefully inspected the material which made up the skeletal elements. It had a curious almost-metallic texture, which reminded me of something which momentarily eluded my mind. The translucent blue skin of the vital cell, coupled with the familiar form of the organism, led me to believe that it used as its energy source the light excreted by the thermosynthetic carpet. Since it was basically similar to eukaryot types which could be found on virtually every habitable world in the galaxy, I concluded that this also could not be the Great Discovery. Leaving aside the microscopic endoparasites which undoubtedly existed in the system, I was thus left with the last visible type.

  This type was difficult to spot, even though I knew roughly what to look for—a secondary consumer. I expected to find some kind of motile plasmid which ate the vital cells of the dendrites, but all the dendrites I inspected had all their cells intact.

  It took me some time, but I finally noticed that it was the dendritic stalks, and not the living cells, which showed evidence of attack. This was unusual. It is not uncommon, of course, for non-living structural material to be organic in content, and hence an available source of food for another organism. But these dendritic skeletons had seemed to be metallic rather than carbonaceous. I puzzled for a while over this peculiarity, wondering what it could mean, while I continued my search for the organism itself.

  It was, as I’d expected, a motile form, but the specimens which I eventually located were sitting quite still, wrapped around the dendritic elements like tiny protoplasmic rings. They could be induced by a gentle prod to unwind and reveal their true nature—long, thin and vermiform.

  No infected dendrite, so far as I could see, carried more than one ring, and most had none, which made the worms rare by any standard. Their total biomass couldn’t be more than a couple of grams.

  Since the stalks which supported the teardrop cells did not seem to me to be nourishing enough to support a reasonable standard of living, it occurred to me that the worms might also make use of the light so obligingly provided by the thermosynths.

  Accordingly, I fished out my flashlight for the second time and shone its wan glow upon one of the coiled-up worms.

  Which promptly became two worms. The plasmid divided in situ, without uncoiling. One of the two shuffled sideways and where there had been only one ring, there were now two. The stalk had been thinned extensively during the process—corroded away as though by strong acid. The reproduction took less than a minute. I switched off the flashlight promptly, not wishing to precipitate a population explosion. The rate at which the plasmid had absorbed the light energy, sucked up the stalk material and used it to good purpose was nothing short of phenomenal. In a cave like this, of course, conditions would have been more or less stable for millions of years. The energy supply at the conductive face would be very slow and very constant. The differences in temperature with which the thermosynth mobilised its heat energy were probably minute—hence the strong reaction to my body heat, which must be very close to the temperature of the rock. The light generated under natural conditions here must have been stable in intensity for all those millions of years. The whole system was perfectly attuned, and overreacted when new stimuli were applied. Had the people of Rhapsody cut their way in here with beamers, and then leaped into the space with bright lights blazing, the delicate balance of the system would have gone completely wild, and the entire ecocomplex might have been destroyed in a matter of days. But Rhapsody’s miners worked with pickaxes and without light. So the complex was still here, and would probably have sufficient resilience to take the new conditions into account and go on for ever.

  But the question of its value was not yet settled.

  The worms were the unique types. They were a product of split adaptation, and that they had evolved to balance the system rather than a more conventional secondary consumer had to be a million-to-one chance. The key to it all was in the limiting factors. The thermosynth was limited by space, not by consumption on the part of the dendrites. The dendritic cells were not limited at all except by the supply of light energy. The same factor limited t
he capacity of the worms to metabolise the stalks. Thus the efficiency and continuity of the system were not determined by mortality, but by the constancy of the conditions applying a restraint to natality. There were no sources of mortality external to the populations themselves.

  If, therefore, the only limiting factor constraining the worms was light, and they could eat stalks ad infinitum given that light, take them out into the sunlight and they would eat up mountains of the stalk-stuff.

  But what was the stalk-stuff? The living cells were at the termini of the branches, and were connected to their substratum only via a narrow canal through the centre of the dead stalk. I judged that there would be no sense in their being up there rather than embedded in the thermosynth unless they absorbed atmospheric gases, and could not afford to be overgrown by the slowly-thickening carpet. That made sense too. Luminosity usually involves oxidation. If the thermosynth was taking oxygen out of the air to make its light, something must be putting it back. So the dendrites might well take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen, in typical plant fashion. That implied the stalks contained carbon. They also contained something which was brought up from the rock via the canals. Metal. To be specific, copper.

  Which implied...

  All of a sudden—and belatedly, it seemed—inspiration struck home, and it all fell into place. I knew why the worms were so valuable. It wasn’t mountains that they could eat, but cities.

  ‘Obviously,’ I commented drily.

  I’d accidentally spoken out loud, believing that I was alone in the grotto. But Bayon had apparently been sitting in the entrance watching me for some time.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘There are three types of organism here,’ I told him. I searched for simple terms which he might be able to understand. I couldn’t hope to give him the entire picture, let alone explain my logic, but I could give him a fair idea of what was what. ‘The first eats heat and gives off light. The second is like a plant. It uses the light as energy. It has stalks which are made from carbon taken out of the air and copper taken out of the rock. The third is odd. It might have started out in life trying to be another plant, but found it couldn’t make it. Nor could it make it as pure animal, so it had to be both.