Heaven

by Ian Stewart

  “Here?”

  “I am not certain. I know that it involves this world, though I have no idea how I know. We have been taught to be rational, Stun, as our kind has spread between the stars. But you know, as do I—as do all Neanderthals—that there is more to the mind than the rational.”

  Stun agreed and offered an explanation. “Our minds evolved to recognize patterns, for survival. And many are the patterns that cannot be captured by rational thought. It is not so strange that we can sense patterns that have no rational basis. It does not mean they have no basis at all. Is a friendly touch rational? A mother’s love? An enemy’s hatred? Yet these things have been obvious to our minds since the time our monkey ancestors swung from the branches of trees. Rationality is a tool, not the sole reliable style of thinking.”

  “I would like to argue against you, but what you say makes too much sense,” said May. “Our ancestors were Beastmasters before the Rescue opened the universe to them. They knew the minds of animals; they could sense a leopard’s bite before the cat itself began to flex its jaw muscles. We have inherited that talent.” Her tawny eyes went wide. “I fear, Stun, that a great beast is coming to this world, and its bite will be terrible and sudden.” She paused. “And yet I doubt my fear, for I cannot find anything to support it.”

  She got to her feet. “We are wasting our time waiting here; it is as we expected—the mariner is late as usual. He will not make port today, the tides are running against him. And I am getting old and my mind is wandering, and I am seeing shadows where there is nothing to cast them.”

  Stun laughed, but her laugh was quickly silenced.

  She was seeing shadows, too.

  Polypoids are sea creatures, and their boats are mostly underwater. But being boats, they float, and their upper parts protrude into a more alien environment—air. And air holds its own new possibilities, though it took many generations before the polypoids began to understand them, and even longer before they learned to bend them to their will. The No-Moon boats had evolved from simple wooden structures, the equivalent of underwater carts, barely protruding from the water into the air above, propelled by the polypoid “sailors” who towed the unwieldy vessels behind them as they swam through the ocean. Later, the carts became more elongated, like a galley, and trained teams of sailors coordinated their siphons to direct the boat wherever it was intended to go. The reason for having a boat at all was to carry cargo; even a small crew could convey many times their own weight of goods to ports hundreds of miles away. They topped up basic food supplies by hunting whenever they got the opportunity.

  Soon the rudimentary carts became transformed into more elaborate structures, underwater homes where the sailors could live and work unhampered by the vagaries of the ocean just outside the solid hull. Sallyports, underwater doors, offered instant access to the ocean whenever the fancy took them. They had the best of both worlds.

  The first really big breakthrough in technology was the invention of keels—flat boards of dense, strong lignoid, which caught the current and improved the vessel’s stability, at the expense of drag. Keels were raised when moving against the current, and angled when moving cross-current. It was a difficult skill.

  The second and more significant innovation was to take advantage of air currents as well as water currents. The triangular sail, initially an expanse of heavy shugskin and later of thick, specially woven cloth, was attached to an assembly of wooden poles so that it could catch the wind. The boat was rolled on one side to rig the sail from the safety of the water, and then tipped upright again so that the sail could catch the wind. It was adjusted by ropes that ran over the bulwarks, down the side of the hull, and underneath to the main deck. If anything jammed or broke, the boat could be temporarily capsized to make repairs, or sailed into port if that was easier.

  At first, sails were used for added speed in the same general direction as the water currents. But as the centuries passed, No-Moon’s sailors learned to combine the forces of wind and waves to perform astonishing feats. They could sail against the water currents, provided the wind was coming from the right quarter, and they could even tack up-current in favorable winds. An important (and difficult) step was to redesign the keel as a rigid fixture, which went against the grain of centuries of sea lore but increased the vessel’s speed dramatically.

  Now major voyages thousands of miles long became practical. And direct two-way trade supplanted the previous cumbersome circumnavigation of the globe, simplifying commerce and creating a new business in passenger boats.

  This was only the start. The sail opened up regions of the planet that had previously been accessible only to superfit, specially trained teams of polypoids. New ports festooned the continental coastlines and the countless archipelagos. And where the sailors went, so did their sessile, coralline wives, though these could take up residence only in shallow, warm waters.

  Like all of No-Moon’s mariners, Second-best Sailor always carried a piece of his wife with him, locked away in a mesh closet in his cabin so that the waters could flow over her and keep her healthy. A wifepiece was the best way to maintain mental equilibrium and physical condition on the long voyages away from the home lagoon. Many a new colony had been established from just such a “seed” in the past, but those pioneering days were long gone.

  On this particular voyage, however, his usual chunk of female company had been supplemented by a second piece of living coral, also part of his wife. And this second wifepiece wasn’t just there for sexual companionship.

  Second-Best Sailor had been spawned in a rocky crevice beneath the warm, shallow waters of Crooked Atoll, one of the hundreds of tiny islands belonging to the Mosaic Isles, some four hundred miles southeast of the jutting sickle of rain forest known as The Claw. To its north, the rainforest gave way to the rock-strewn tundra of the Cloudless Continent. Few mariners had ventured inland of The Claw’s jagged coastline, and fewer still had penetrated to the spine of the rain forest, but Second-Best Sailor’s father, Talkative Forager, had won a sailor suit in a game of float-the-cube.

  Talkative Forager was the kind of person who always got value out of anything he owned, so one day he had set off in a small skiff alone; and half a year later he had returned with several scars and wondrous tales of brightly colored creatures that swam through the air like the familiar coastal buzhawks and ocean-faring blannies but made their nests in tall woodweed trees. And weird things covered in fur that lived in holes in the ground and collected fruit husks. And much else, little of which was believed by anyone who listened to him. But they were wonderful tales nonetheless, and Talkative Forager became extremely popular.

  Second-Best Sailor knew none of this, for he was fertilized in a mass spawning by the light of the Quadricorn meteor shower, along with a billion other microscopic prepolyps. He had no idea who his father had been. But his mother knew. His mother knew everything.

  Second-Best Sailor’s mother was Crooked Atoll. All of it.

  Individual polypoid wives were only corals, reefwives, completely immobile. But when these corals became a reef . . .

  Like most of the reefs on No-Moon, Crooked Atoll was an episodic network coral. Sometimes it was much like any normal coralline reef on any of a million planets: a seething slow battleground of chemical warfare, in which dozens of different species of coral-like organisms competed for space, nutrient, and light. No two corals on different worlds were ever the same. But the universals of life were similar on all worlds—the environmental constraints gave rise to the same interlocking systems of self-defining niches, and on any world with an ocean there automatically arose a niche for organisms that could grow their own reefs.

  Yes, sometimes Crooked Atoll was a coral reef like any other. But the rest of the time it was like nothing anywhere else in the Galaxy. Acting on a common impulse, the separate corals could link their rudimentary nervous systems into a gigantic web that spanned the entire atoll. And when they did, their combined brain outperformed the most intelligent
individuals anywhere else by a factor of billions.

  The network was linked now. And the separate reefwives became one, and the one was like nothing ever seen on any other world in the vast universe.

  Across the planet, each atoll’s collective consciousness functioned like the brain of a single organism, the reefmind. And the separate atolls were also linked, by thick cables of nerve fibers that wandered across the sea beds. These cables conveyed information from each atoll to her neighbors. It was a small world network, and no two atolls were ever separated by more than eight links.

  The exceedingly mobile males were also part of that network, communicating with their wives using a language of molecules. Every wash of the waves brought news from the boats, the bars, and the trading posts of the seaports. Crooked Atoll sensed the pulse of the planet; by communicating with her fellow atolls she could make herself aware of almost everything that was happening in the oceans and ports of No-Moon. And, by picking up gossip from the spaceport bars and swimways, she could also keep tabs on what was happening off the planet.

  Only the mariners knew that their wives possessed such an ability. It was a racial secret, and the polypoids never talked about it around other sentient species. Not that they would have been believed if any of them had accidentally dropped hints. An intelligent reef? Nonsense. Just another typical sailor story.

  The reefwives had an unbroken history of collective perception that went back half a billion years, and they remembered all of it.

  And now the reefwives were becoming concerned. Some of the Neanderthal traders were telling the males about a large space fleet that might be heading their way—purpose uncertain. In a corner of their perception the reefwives watched potential events unfolding that would have dire consequences for their mates and their world. And the group mind could segregate itself into separate entities so that different parts of the reef could “discuss” their perceptions and compare them.

  The reefwives had an unusual sense of time. They perceived an “extended present” which caused them to “see” in a single “timechunk” about two weeks either side of what other beings, including their husbands, were aware of as “now.” However, they did not know the future; they foresaw it, constantly and unconsciously extrapolating from the first two weeks of the timechunk, which they updated from sensory input and relayed news and gossip. To them the future was as real as the past, and distinguished only by its position within the static expanse of frozen time.

  Now, in one corner of the “future” section of their perception, they saw events unfold that disturbed them on an atavistic level.

  Not because they were unfamiliar events. On the contrary, the reefwives had witnessed this menace many times before, in many forms. Now it was happening again. The inbound fleet was host to a religion. Not just any religion—a special kind. A benevolent memeplex, a mental hook baited with tolerance and love, which, as it gained adherents, would sometimes rigidify into pure evil. How far along that path had this particular memeplex progressed? It might still be benign, but it might be malignant, well into its runaway phase. The reefwives could not yet decide which; they needed more detailed information. But there was no sense in being complacent—not when they remembered what had happened when a benevolent memeplex had tried to infiltrate their previous homeworld of Three-Moons.

  Age-old contingency plans flashed across their collective consciousness. For a fraction of a second, the collective mind that was Crooked Atoll debated a million alternatives, and came to a decision.

  Implacable resistance.

  The rigging was a tangled mess, and the garden was a wreck.

  No one knew which mariner had first decided that it would be a good idea to grow plants in the otherwise useless ’bovedecks area. The fashion probably started out as decoration—a few salt-tolerant flowers and trailing vines. The polypoids had long grown fruit trees on the more accessible shores of their islands, especially the Isles of the Heliponaise. They had bred them for more succulent fruit, tended them with loving care. Fruit trees were symbols of an untroubled life. Later, various types of root and grain had augmented their horticultural repertoire. Add to that the obvious point that the flat upper surface of a boat was otherwise mostly wasted space, and matters arranged themselves. Gardening quickly gained popularity: It was a relaxing hobby on a long voyage. Of course, it had to be done in a suit, but every boat had at least one of those. And the garden had to be carefully laid out so as not to obstruct the rigging. But those were minor details and easily taken care of.

  Second-Best Sailor had specialized in fruit: every spare yard of the above-sea deck of his vessel was crammed with stumpy trees that grew lumpish blobs of concentrated taste that were rather like lemons. These “lemon trees” were planted in tubs, and apart from twice-yearly pruning they needed little attention. Mariners adored lemons, and any surplus could easily be traded for cash or kind in the ubiquitous sea bars and markets of the ports.

  Second-Best Sailor felt his propulsive organs tighten involuntarily. His garden had been comprehensively ruined. Most of his lemon trees had been washed overboard, and those that remained had lost most of their fruit. They were covered in sticky squidlike creatures, which were common in surface waters around the time of the Change Winds. Second-Best Sailor uttered a robust mariner curse and set to work.

  Before the wind could get up again, or other calamity befall, he made a series of observations of the sun’s position, the directions of wind and waves, and any visible landmarks. When these were combined with underwater observations of the ocean floor, it should not take him long to work out the boat’s position. He was pretty sure he recognized two of the distant islands anyway, particularly the one with the three jagged cliffs, a small one between two larger ones.

  Then he began to pluck the dead but still-sticky squid from the branches of the lemon trees, tossing them over the taffrail. Soon a herd of spiny tallfins gathered in the boat’s wake, attracted by the prospect of an easy meal. They were harmless unless they in turn attracted one of the large predators, but shugs and gulpmouths were unlikely in these latitudes at this time of year.

  He hoped.

  Once the squid were cleared away, it became possible to disentangle the rigging from the trees. Second-Best Sailor could see at once that there was no point in trying to save any of the lines except for the main halyards, which had been coiled and secured when they lowered the mainsail. Those apart, the whole boat would have to be rerigged, and that required a wet-dock and a week’s hard work. But the mainmast was still standing, and he could jury-rig the mainsail by running staylines out along the cross-pole. This temporary fix would last until they reached their scheduled destination, and proper repairs would have to wait until then.

  He busied himself with the crumpled mainsail, pulling it flat and inspecting it for rips. When he was satisfied, he looped runners from the staylines through metal-rimmed sockets in the edge of the sail, thumped the deck twice to alert Short Apprentice to the need to turn the boat into the wind, and hauled the makeshift sail into place. The sailor suit, sensing the heavy forces acting on his muscles, reconfigured itself to take most of the strain.

  Second-Best Sailor tied off the halyards to a convenient cleat and ran his eye over the jury-rigged sail as a final check. He made a few more navigational observations—the way the sun’s angular height changed with time, for instance. Then he stepped off the side and swam back through a sallyport to the main cabin.

  He regretted having no lemons to trade, but those were of small importance. He usually traded them to other mariners or used them as gambling tokens when the mood took him, though he’d intended on this occasion to give a few to the Neanderthal women to lubricate the trading. Tough.

  For a moment he wondered if it would be worth trying to sell his small but exquisite collection of fanworm tubes. It was a kind of coming-of-age ritual for the most daring mariners. The beautiful secretions were to be found in the ocean depths near No-Moon’s rare volcanic vents, w
here superheated mineral-laced water spouted from the sea bed. Here, in the eternal darkness, lived dense clusters of delicate fanworms, which peeped from protective tubes and flashed colored lights at one another. The tubes were convoluted and roughly square in cross-section. Each tube bore intricate patterns of colored deposits, no two the same, and they were prized as natural works of art.

  A sufficiently bold polypoid, equipped with a suit, could dive to the bottom of the ocean, brave the dangerously hot waters near a vent, and liberate a few fanworm tubes. Second-Best Sailor had done just that, on a dare, and he kept his treasures locked away on his boat.

  They were valuable. Could he bear to part with one?

  No. Trade was important but not that important. Even though the damage to his boat would set his income back considerably, this was going to be a very profitable voyage, as long as he could reach port before the Neanderthals moved on. Based on past performance, he was sure that Smiling Teeth May Bite would wait for him, provided he didn’t take too much time. And, safely stowed away in a locker of solid metal, he had the stack of datablets that the reefwives had extruded, containing valuable simulations for offworld customers. The reefmind traded in information, and the Neanderthal women would pay enough for it to outfit his boat for a dozen voyages.

  The Neanderthals thought that the mariners prepared the simulations themselves, no doubt using some high-powered Precursor computer, and the mariners made no attempt to disabuse them. The secret of the reefmind must be kept a secret.

  Later, when night had fallen, Second-Best Sailor made another excursion ’bovedecks to observe the stars. Their positions would confirm his navigational calculations, but mostly he just got a kick out of stargazing. So many worlds, so much life. And tonight there was a bonus, a sight so rare that he knew of it only through legend.

  Stretched across a huge arc of sky were hundreds of lavender lights, arranged like beads on strings, forming a fan that pointed straight toward the horizon, where the sun had just set. He knew what they must be, and excitement surged through his whole body. He had been waiting all his life to witness the passage of the fabled magnetotorus herd. It was even more beautiful than he had imagined from the stories—bejeweled patterns of living light, emitted by streams of wild magnetic creatures migrating under the guidance of their inscrutable herders. He gave thanks to the Maker and counted it a privilege to be alive to witness the herd’s arrival.