“I don’t know. I’d only set my timer to record integer seconds.”
Leidecker sat staring, speechless and blank. Then he said, “But Isabeau, if the calculation would take you more than a year . . . how do you know it was right—”
“Lords, Amos—every collegian knows the answer to that problem. It’s the first thing they do in elementary number theory—try to do actually. When everyone fails, they give the answer out. Of course the lithomorph was right.”
Amos closed his mouth. Possibility upon possibility began to flower in his astounded mind’s eye. “Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” he whispered. “What we could do . . .”
“Yes,” cried Isabeau. “Yes, now you see! We cannot only test Mendelson’s Hypothesis, if it proves out we can use it! We could calculate entire genomes in minutes! Less! Think of what it could mean for genetics! For extinction recovery—for eco-modeling!”
“But Isabeau—Isabeau!” Leidecker cried, gesturing absently, pushing at the ideas that were swarming through him, possessing him. “How does it create these astonishing results? Why have you not published?”
“Oh that.” Isabeau waved her hand distractedly. “We aren’t ready yet. There’s so much more to understand. We’re just scratching the surface now. I want to have something really concrete to go forward with—not just suppositions. For example, we really have no idea how it does what it does. Maybe it understands something fundamental about number theory we haven’t yet discovered—”
“I should say so!”
“—or maybe they’ve just been at it longer.” Isabeau pointed. “Look, Amos. We collected that formation in the Methuselah Cluster. I’ve had it dated at seven billion years. The lithomorph has been inhabiting it for, I’d say, no less than eighty-five percent of that time. Over six billion years, Amos. Just think, it’s been solving these problems for six billion years, never forgetting, never distracted—oh dammit!” This last in an entirely new tone of voice, followed by the stamp of Dr. VelSilinjes’ foot. “There it goes again! That’s the second time this week!”
“Goes what?” asked Leidecker, startled and bemused.
“Look,” Isabeau said, pointing at the screens. The blank screens.
“It stopped,” Leidecker said. “Why did it stop?”
“We don’t know,” Isabeau fumed. “It just does every once in awhile. Usually for only a day or two, but once almost a month. We thought we’d killed it. Imagine worrying about killing a rock! But no, it was just napping or bored, or—who knows?—annoyed with us. We tried changing the light, the temperature, the tickle current, then we learned about the bath. It’s been better since we put it in the bath, but sometimes it still won’t talk to us. Maybe I should change it again, though this batch is pretty fresh . . .”
Leidecker got up, leaving Dr. VelSilinjes to her muttering, to her fruitless checking of the leads in case it was just a simple hardware problem. He poked the rock gently, experimentally, snatched his hand back from the liquid running over the sides—he’d been expecting it to be cold.
“It’s hot,” he said.
Isabeau looked up and nodded. “That’s the second thing we learned. It didn’t like it cold at all.”
“What is this bath, Isabeau?” Leidecker asked, stooping to examine it.
“A mild tannic solution, similar to the streams where these formations grow. We’ve spiked it with a little sucrose. I don’t know why, but it seems to help.”
Leidecker bent closer and sniffed. “One lump or two?”
“What, Amos?”
“It smells like tea.”
“Lapsang suchong,” Isabeau admitted with a vaguely embarrassed look. “Maybe it doesn’t like it. Last week we tried Darjeeling—that gave superb results.” She gathered up her hardcopy, tapped it on the desktop to align the pages. “I think we’re done here, Amos, don’t you? I’m famished. Should you like to eat?”
“Oh yes. Yes, certainly,” Leidecker replied, as she riffled the hardcopy with her thumb. Then they walked out the door together, with Isabeau checking the room’s environmentals and muttering under her breath: “Did I make it too strong? Too sweet? I shall try the green kind next . . .”
~ ~ ~
Day 192 (AM)
Albemarle Range, Traumerei Mountains
Southern Continent, Iona, Cygnus Mariner
A perfect wilderness stretched away before them, unbelievably lush, hemmed in on the right by sheer-sided mountains, their glaciers gleaming white and dazzling aquamarine, all the way to the horizon—the far horizon of an aircar cruising at five thousand meters. The sky that came down to meet that horizon was itself a wonder, full of gigantic thunderheads, towering cathedral-like, lit pale rose and lilac by an atmosphere that scattered the light of Iona’s blue-white primary far into the violet.
“Earthquake,” said the pilot, an affable young man named Hardestan from Ionian Planetary Security, pointing off his left. Throughout the trip, he’d kept up a light pleasant patter of the type he believed foreigners were entitled to. Kris looked out a window. The trees below were swaying violently, a great sideways lashing motion. As she watched a long rift opened in the canopy: trees falling majestically—they were a hundred or more meters tall—falling by the thousands, the tens of thousands, allowing the blue-white light to pierce down the dark leaf-covered ground, germinating seeds that may have waited centuries—or merely weeks—for this chance.
“Big one,” the pilot said, “that’ll make the news back home.” He smiled as he said it, but Kris understood, as she never had before, why most of Ionians lived above their planet’s turbulent crust in their floating cities. The pilot swept out his hand, encompassing the devastation below. “But fly over here in a couple of months and you’d never know it happened.”
Unlike many Ionian utterances (which tended to graft gross understatement onto wild exaggeration, not to say an outright flaming lie), that was perfectly true. Nothing in Kris’s experience had prepared her for the spectacle of life on such a scale; life that grew at such a ferocious rate, whether repairing the kilometers-wide rift below or colonizing miles of black lava crust while it was still warm; often to be wiped out by the cataclysmic convulsions of the young planet, but starting again with unchecked vitality. Parson’s Acre, where Kris grew up, was a very old planet—old even as the universe reckoned these things—her tectonic energy all but dried up and her last mountains ground down to mere lumps along the edges of depressions that a billion years ago had been shallow tideless seas. Kris’s feelings on Iona’s landscape could only find expression in a kind of blank unholy surprise, which over the course of days had given way to blank unholy awe.
The car rose and banked towards the mountains. The range was so tall, said the pilot cheerfully, that you could see the curve of the planet from its highest peaks. It was still young and growing too, continental uplift going on at rates up to a meter per standard year.
“If we’re lucky,” he said with a display of strong white teeth, “we’ll get a good look at Hells Reach here in a few minutes. She’s almost always in form for the tourists.” Hells Reach was the name of a massive volcano that for the past several millennia had been busy creating a moderate continent in Iona’s equatorial seas. Its frequent and spectacular eruptions were featured in all the material put out by the planetary tourism board.
Looking the direction Hardestan indicated, a pinkish amber glow was already visible and within the promised few minutes, Hells Reach itself came into view on the horizon. To Kris, whose impressions of a biblical hell had been formed by the dour, starchy religionists of her early youth, the volcano seemed quite aptly named. It did not merely erupt, but hemorrhaged lava in great spouts and geysers and fountains, shooting to unbelievable heights, a shockingly vivid testament—even more than the earthquake—to the planet’s internal paroxysms.
Hardestan turned to see what effect the display was having on his charges. “We can go in for a closer look, if you’re interested. Won’t take but an hour or so.”
&
nbsp; His charges disappointed him: no expressions of interest appeared. Kris wanted nothing to do with the spectacle—in truth, it made her feel a trifle queasy—and volcanic charms could not compete with those of the biologic variety, insofar as Leidecker and Vasquez were concerned; certainly not at the cost of a whole hour.
“Perhaps another time,” Leidecker offered with dry politeness, eked out with a tepid smile.
Hardestan slid back around in his seat and suppressed an impolitic shrug. Slaloming an aircar through the turbulence the eruption created always gave a nice bouncy ride, even better than the best anti-grav rollercoaster. So what if it sometimes turned foreigners a touch green. No harm in that.
Or not much.
Resigned, he continued towards Albemarle Range. Waste of a fine day. But if these three wanted to spend it bashing about in the wilds looking for critters hardly anyone had ever seen, only to return footsore and disappointed, that was no skin off his ass. As long as they didn’t run into any mosquitos. Half a dozen of those nasty fuckers could practically fly off with you. He hated ’em.
Now, the jumping spiders—those could be diverting. They weren’t real spiders (they had fourteen legs), just one of the local arachnoids, and they were pretty harmless. But they were also the size of soup plates and having one land on you unexpectedly was quite the jolt. He’d never been to the Traumerei Mountains before; maybe they didn’t have them down here. (The tourism board wasn’t nearly as forthcoming about things like jumping spiders and mosquitos.) They probably had something down here, though—there always seemed to be something—but he wasn’t terribly concerned.
The main thing was that no one got stepped on, or eaten by anything. Explaining how he’d lost a League military officer or a senior diplomat’s physician would be a real bitch. The chip work alone would probably kill him.
* * *
As the slow-flying aircar, cruising at treetop altitude, crested the thickly forested ridge, the land beyond opened before them in a wide expanse of variegated green: hectares of wide-bladed, meter-tall grass that rippled in the breeze like waves on verdant ocean. Here and there, islands of deep-throated flowers almost half a meter in diameter bloomed, rich ivory or pale saffron with magenta centers brimming with intoxicating nectar. Growing among these in what was, by Ionian standards, splendid isolation were majestic conifers that, freed from the intense competition of the forest, reached astounding heights.
Densely needled branches grew only from the upper third of these giants, and within their dark green fastness hung massive clusters of fruiting bodies, two or even three meters long, resembling nothing so much as grapes twice the size of human head, right down to their aubergine color and satiny sheen. What observation from the aircar could not reveal was the meter-long, saber-edged spines hidden in these clusters to discourage whatever marauder sought to profit from this bounty.
Taken together, the vista presented the aspect of a carefully groomed parkland, done on a colossal scale, except for one peculiarity: the jagged stumps of trees that appeared to have been snapped off five or more meters up which dotted the area, and—stranger still—each of these had a scar in the greensward near it: a large scorched lesion, as though the tree had ignited where it fell.
What agency could be responsible for this, Kris could not imagine, but Vasquez and Leidecker were exchanging looks verging on glee, and this was in no way reassuring.
“Might we go in a little closer?” Leidecker asked Hardestan, eyes shining with barely suppressed anticipation.
The young man’s tone expressed anticipation of another kind. “Y’know what that is down there, don’cha?”
“Oh, assuredly.” The doctor’s voice was buoyant and Vasquez seconded him with an expectant smile.
“I can take it in to hover, if you’d like. How close do you wanna get exactly?”
“In truth, I thought we might observe from that outcropping somewhat to right.” Leidecker indicated a sizable formation of light-colored igneous rock erupting from the soil near the top of the ridge. “It offers a fine prospect of the surroundings, don’t you agree?”
Who the question was directed to was unclear—it was clear that Hardestan did not agree. “You mean land?” This was starting to push the envelope of his job description.
“If you would, yes. We should be most grateful.”
“It’s not the mating season, is it?” asked Vasquez with mild concern.
Leidecker responded with a perplexed look and touched a finger to his chin. “I don’t believe so.” Consulting his xel, his face relaxed. “No. No, indeed. I apprehend no difficulty. None at all.”
“Alright,” Hardestan acquiesced. He was under orders to be accommodating, nothing unusual was showing on his scanners—although he wasn’t one hundred percent sure what constituted usual in this part of the world—and that ridge did look competitively safe. As long as these foreigners didn’t wander off, or insist on doing something equally stupid. But he couldn’t let it go without a private comment. Seated directly behind him, all Kris caught of it was “your hide.”
She nudged Vasquez. “So just what is it we’re looking here?”
The corporal turned to her with a smile like Christmas morning—at the least the way she remembered it from the few times they’d celebrated Christmas when she was small. “Herculean Probostelli. This is one of their feeding grounds.”
Kris recalled the name from the comment Leidecker had made before the Anson’s Day dinner. Something about noise and the London Zoo. But noise didn’t concern her at the moment.
“What do these things eat?”
“The males are omnivores. The females are almost completely herbivorous.”
Almost, huh? “And that’s what you think’s down there?”
“We hope so. Males forage in small bands. Four or five individuals, maybe. The females are—”
“I’m gonna put this down in the lee of that rock formation,” Hardestan interrupted. “I’ll keep the engines hot. Don’t go wandering, okay?” Satisfied he’d fulfilled his responsibility, he set the aircar down in a patch where the grass was thinnest.
Kris tapped Vasquez on the arm as the gull-wing doors opened. “What were you saying about females?”
“Females are extremely rare, ma’am. They can’t be kept in captivity. Few people have ever seen one.”
“I certainly have not,” Leidecker remarked in a wistful voice as they dismounted. “What coup—what a crowning achievement that would be.”
The two of them made their way to the rocks, Kris following. Hardestan remained in the vehicle, watching with that air of resignation most often reserved for the incorrigible and idiotic. As they clambered into positions near the top, Vasquez waiting to see that Kris could negotiate the way with her one arm, Kris resuming her questioning.
“What are these males like, then?”
Vasquez handed her into a sheltered niche, where they could crouch in a degree of comfort and still observe. “They can be aggressive, ma’am, so you’ll not want to expose yourself if they appear. People do hunt them, but it’s risky and the licenses are extremely expensive.”
“Do people hunt the females?”
“Oh no!” Vasquez sounded like she’d suggested committing a particularly heinous war crime. “No one would ever consider that.”
Feeling unaccountably chided, Kris relaxed against the rock, warm from morning sun. So they were waiting for some noisy creature that was aggressive and formidable enough to be risky to hunt with modern weapons. Hardestan had his sidearm, and that was it. Somehow, Kris didn’t think that would suffice in a pinch. But both Vasquez and Leidecker were acting like they were having the best holiday ever …
“Look!” Leidecker called, soft-voiced and brimming with excitement.
Kris and Vasquez looked, shifting to where they could gaze cautiously through clefts in the rock. Three creatures were emerging from a hollow to the south, followed quickly by a fourth. By any standard, they were huge. To Kris, who’d never met
an animal bigger than fat flightless geese they’d raised for a season on Parson’s Acre, they were beyond any such word: the smallest had to be the size of the dwelling that Kris had lived in there. The one out in front—the pack leader, Kris assumed—was noticeably bigger. This individual paused and tossed its long-snouted, mottled gray head. Opening a strange, tubular mouth, it emitted a harsh, braying roar that increased in both pitch and volume by wavering steps to end in a violent note like a giant bell cracking. The other three answered, the volume of sound rose higher still, then reached a painful crescendo—a sensation of being physically shaken—as two more appeared and added their voices to the deafening chorus.
At the climax of their performance, the probostelli reared up on their short hind legs and unfurled what Kris had taken for thick flaps of protective hide along the animal’s flanks, but were in fact wings, which they beat vigorously in time with their trumpeting. When the six beasts dropped down on all fours together, Kris could swear she felt the rock tremble.
“Wonderful,” murmured Vasquez, as the calls finally died away.
“Magnificent,” breathed Leidecker.
“Holy fuck,” grunted Kris. Ears ringing, she scrunched down in the cleft. “People hunt these things?”
Vasquez gave her a happy-go-lucky grin. “Well, not many people, ma’am. As I said, it’s risky.”
Yeah, no kidding. Kris tensed her shoulders at the thought. What d’ya hunt ’em with? A tank?
The male probostelli were now snuffling about industriously in the grass far down the slope and pawing the ground, clearly looking for a meal. That peculiarly narrow head surmounted a powerful, short-necked body with thick forelimbs longer than the rear, giving the animal an uneven shuffling gate. From clods of dirt and lighter colored material they were hurling with a abandon, those forelimbs were intended for digging as much as walking on, and the long snouts were thrust far into the excavation—the animals must have hit pay dirt.
“They eat insects?” asked Kris, when the implications dawned on her.
“Insectiods,” Vasquez answered. “Analogous to termites, but much larger. They make up an appreciable amount of the biomass here.” Naturally they would, with all the vegetable matter there was. Kris had no desire to meet one, however.
Loralynn Kennakris 4: Apollyon's Gambit Page 33