Asimov's SF, July 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Chan's eyes widened. “Wow.” It was a dialect word Xaia had never heard before. “The Founders searched for that. Or rather, for traces of the intelligent culture that evidently once inhabited this world, traces besides the ruins on Little Jamaica, and the Reef."

  Xaia frowned. “The Reef ? What's that?"

  "More ruins, to the north of here, surveyed by the Founders ... But just ruins. If you want to find where the Dead went, Lady, you will have to go far beyond that."

  "Then that's how it will be,” Xaia said grimly. “But this Reef sounds the place to start."

  Teif asked, “How far, exactly?"

  Chan said, “About a thousand kilometers north of here."

  Teif groaned and slapped his forehead. Manda laughed. “You can't be serious,” Teif said.

  "We'll send most of the ships home,” Xaia said, thinking aloud. “That will keep your precious crews happy, Teif, or most of them. Keep back just enough to support an expedition to the north, tracking the coast. Pick crew with backbone, who want some adventure. We can live off the land, and the sea. As long as it takes—"

  There was a rumble, like thunder. The building, a massive stone structure, shook. Xaia saw a trickle of plaster dust fall down on the Shuttle's pale surface, like snow.

  Manda snapped, “What was that? An earthquake?"

  Envoy Jeffares laughed. “We don't have earthquakes on the Belt."

  Manda didn't enjoy being laughed at. She grabbed him by the front of his jacket and bodily lifted him off the ground. “Then what, you pipsqueak?"

  "I'll show you! Please..."

  At a nod from Xaia, Manda put him down. He stumbled, coughed, straightened his clothing, and had Chan Hil lead them all out of the Shrine.

  In the open air that thunderous rumble was much louder, and it was continuous, not spasmodic like a storm. Xaia saw Manda and Teif exchange uncertain glances; it sounded like they were in the middle of a war zone. Led by Chan, they made their way to the city's curving outer wall, and climbed another stone stair to a viewing gallery set just below the parapet. And here, along with a line of citizens, they looked down on the plain outside the city.

  The plain was empty no longer. A river of animals washed down from the north, a tremendous stampede that spanned the world from horizon to horizon. Xaia saw horses that dwarfed even the great war beasts of Zeeland and Brython, and long-legged cattle and sheep, and even birds, huge turkeys that ran two-legged with the rest. This must be the source of the dust cloud she had seen on the horizon some hours ago. The whole mixed-up herd was moving at a tremendous speed, and raised a cloud of dust that billowed into the air around the city.

  Every so often, in the headlong rush, a beast would fall. There would be a perturbation in the flow as others stumbled around it, and then predators would descend, cats and dogs and things like rats, to tear the hapless fallen into bloody segments. But these breaks were momentary; the unending surge would pass on and over the scavenged and scavengers alike.

  Jeffares yelled above the noise in Xaia's ear. “I'm glad you got to see this, Speaker. These herds can take a day to pass."

  Teif leaned over. “Now I see why they aren't out working those fields yet—and why the city's shaped like a boat.” He pointed. The herd was forced to part at the “prow” of the city's walls, and flowed around it, as a river would flow around a streamlined island of mud, Xaia thought. No wonder the walls were worn smooth, with the friction of those thousands of carcasses.

  She turned to Chan. “What are they fleeing?"

  "In this season, the heat. Speaker, when the north polar lands face the sun they are baked to aridity; when the pole faces away from the sun it is plunged into a cold so deep every river freezes over. Facing such extremes, animals can only hibernate or migrate. Many herds cross the equator altogether. Animals brought here from Earth grew big quickly, and learned to run so fast because they have so far to go. It is only on the Belt, which stretches from pole to pole, that such migrations are possible. I have made a study of the migration patterns. When I was a boy my brother and I would try to count the individual animals passing in an hour ... It was impossible."

  "Such curiosity seems unusual here."

  He shrugged. “Life is easy in Ararat. People come for the Shuttle; wealth flows in, without us having to do anything much. But I am fascinated by the world we live in. I am a scholar, self-taught."

  "That's probably the best sort.” An impulse hit her, another in a lifetime of impulses. “Keeper Chan, where we're going we could use a guide. Want to come?"

  He stared, eyes comically wide open. “To the Reef ? Are you serious?"

  "Of course."

  "You bet I'll come."

  Another idiom she'd never heard before, but she could tell from his grin that his answer was positive.

  Manda pointed down. “Look what they are doing now!"

  Xaia leaned over the wall to see. Booms were being let down from the walls, bearing nets that dangled into the stampeding herds. Fleeing animals were soon tangled up, horses and cattle and sheep and even a few long-legged pigs, and the nets were drawn up with a groan of pulleys and winches.

  "And so we are fed for a few more months,” Chan said. “In Ararat, even the food just comes flowing in, like the money."

  "Follow me and life won't be so easy. If I can promise you anything it's that."

  He grinned again. “Good."

  The nets were carried through slots in the walls and dropped. The released animals, many suffering from broken limbs, were hastily slaughtered and dragged away, and the booms let down into the stampede once more, like the traps of a giant angler.

  * * * *

  IV

  Maxx loved listening to Jan Stanndish talk, and to watch the lively old man sketch his diagrams and equations on bits of slate, or just wave his arms in the air, miming his fantastic hypotheses into existence. And Stanndish was happy to spend time with Maxx while he waited for his chance to deliver his briefing on the urgency of the Library project to Maxx's father—waited and waited, for Thom was always distracted by more urgent affairs, including the return of the bulk of Xaia's fleet, laden with enough booty to distort Zeeland's economy, but without Xaia.

  It was June now, close to the summer solstice and the height of coolsummer, the season when the world's north pole pointed straight at the sun, which from Zeeland's mid-latitude wheeled around the sky. The days were endless, literally, and full of light and warmth, and life bloomed. Stanndish walked with Maxx and pointed out the intricate dance of predator and prey, of food and eater, working at every scale from the insects with their tiny dramas in rock crevices and dusty corners, to the hunting of wild rats and dogs out on the plains in the interior of Zeeland.

  All living things from Earth, Stanndish said, including humans, still bore the imprint of the home world deep in their chemistry; all living things still longed for the release of terrestrial night, of long hours of darkness each twenty-four-hour day. Well, the “sidereal day” on Earth II, its rotation as compared to the distant stars, was more like thirty hours than twenty-four—but that was irrelevant, as on every point on the planet away from the equator there were long periods each year (eighty sidereal days at the latitude of Zeeland) where the sun never set, and in the winter an equally long period where it never rose.

  "Human bodies long for sleep. Especially the young,” said Stanndish with a gentle envy. “When you get old it doesn't matter so much. Anyhow we organize our societies to allow periods of rest, even when the sun doesn't set, and wakefulness even when it doesn't rise. Such rules are broken in times of war—as are many rules, of course. In the world of nature there are no such treaties, but nevertheless predators and prey are unconsciously working out ways to survive, the prey to avoid being eaten while asleep, the predators to find ways not to allow their food to escape while they sleep. We're seeing much more elaborate interactions between species as a result. All this is behavioral, and we can expect it to continue for many generations until evoluti
onary pressures force these exiles from Earth to abandon their outmoded ‘body clocks’ and adapt to the peculiar cycles of high-obliquity Earth II...."

  Of course the differing lengths of the days made no apparent difference to the Purple, which sat in unregarded places in its reefs and clumps, dark and glistening.

  If the endless days of the coolsummer were times of opportunity and danger for plants and animals, so they were for human beings too. Maxx watched with a kind of hot envy the elaborate games of flirting, seduction, and bed-hopping going on among the courtiers here at Orklund, some of them only a year or two older than Maxx himself. The endless chill night of the coldwinter was the peak time for conception, but in the coolsummer hearts were stolen or broken, and unions made. But every girl Maxx met, the younger daughters of the ministers, parliamentarians, merchants, and philosophers who thronged the court, seemed determined to become a warrior like Manda or his own mother, and their martial mannerisms scared him to his bones. Maybe he would end up like Jan Stanndish, who drifted through the seasons all but oblivious to the flurry and fluster of the human realm.

  Of all Stanndish showed him of the world, it was the Purple that came to intrigue Maxx the most.

  One day Stanndish took him out of town, beyond the patchwork of farms around Orklund and out to an uncultivated scrap of grassland. Here he dug an iron trowel into the ground. Up came handfuls of thick black soil, speckled with green and livid Purple.

  "This is the reality of our colonization of Earth II. There was no soil like this on this planet before the Shuttle landed, not a scrap. Soil is a construct of earthly organisms, many of them entirely invisible, a kind of factory for life manufactured by life itself. Look—a worm, whose grandfather came in a box across the stars! Our deepest colonizers are microbes from Earth that are steadily working their way into the alien dirt. But our earthly presence is but a trace—for most of this world remains held by the native life, a stubborn biosphere even older than ours."

  "But it's like ours,” Maxx said. “Isn't that true? I learned it at school. It uses the same sort of chemicals as we use. Carbon and stuff..."

  Stanndish smiled, showing gappy teeth. “Indeed. ‘Carbon and stuff.’ Life here is based on carbon biochemistry, on a set of amino acids and proteins that overlaps ours, but is not identical. We believe life must wash between the stars, in the form of hardy spores. Life on Earth and on Earth II, which really aren't so far apart on the scale of the Galaxy, both derive from some common origin, perhaps much further away. Separated for billions of years, when both were at quite primitive stages, they have long diverged in fundamental ways. Earth II life doesn't use DNA coding, for instance, but stores its genetic data in RNA molecules."

  "That's why you can't eat the Purple."

  "Precisely. And why it can't eat you."

  "The Founders knew all about this, didn't they? All we do is learn about what they did. I wish I was a Founder. I wish I had been born on Earth a thousand years ago."

  Stanndish smiled. “Oh, I don't know. We're still thinking here, still finding out—some of us, anyhow. Which is why we've discovered we need to build the Library in the first place.... Would you like me to tell you something the Founders never knew?"

  "Yes!"

  He picked a clump of Purple from the soil on his palm. “Look at this stuff. What we call the Purple is actually the multicellular manifestation of the native biosphere. It's purple because—"

  "Of the chemicals it uses to get energy from sunlight."

  "Yes! Very good. Which is different from the chlorophyll green of Earth.” He rubbed the clump gently, until it broke up into dusty spores, and, gently, he picked out a single spore on a fingertip. “Each of these spores is a little clump of cells.

  "What's extraordinary about this, compared to the design of Earth life, is three things. First it's almost autonomous—each Purple spore. Which means it can survive on its own, without other forms of life around it. Drop a single spore on a bare rock, in the sunlight, and it will busily extract the carbon and nitrogen and other materials it needs from the air and the rock. It's as if each is an individual biosphere all to itself—everything you need for life packed into a single genome.

  "And the second extraordinary thing is that this is all the multicellular life we've found. Spores just like this clump together in a variety of forms, of more or less sophistication—stable reefs like stromatolites, or more advanced composite creatures something like slime molds. But all of these, fundamentally, are assemblies of the spores, and can be broken back down into their individual parts. It's extraordinary that you have a whole biosphere, at the multicellular level anyhow, which is actually a manifestation of a single organism."

  "And what's the third thing?"

  "We think we know from fossil evidence—traces of soft-body forms preserved in mud slides and so forth—when the multicellular forms first emerged on this planet: around five hundred and forty million years ago."

  Maxx frowned. That was just a number to him. “So what?"

  "Well, multicellular life emerged on Earth, in a flourishing of diversity called the ‘Cambrian explosion'—about five hundred and forty million years ago."

  Maxx was enthralled. “Something caused it. Something in common, like the spores washing between the stars."

  "Yes, but we have more trouble believing complex life can have traveled across interstellar distances without design, without intervention. And we suspect that the evolutionary leap from single-celled systems to multicellular is a rare one, difficult.... Worlds need help. Maxx, we believe, or some of us do, that something passed through this part of space all those hundreds of millions of years ago, and where it found a planet teeming with single-cell organisms, it uplifted them. Spun out complexity to make multicellular forms."

  "Why?"

  "Who knows? Maybe for the adventure. Maybe for some deeper purpose. Both on Earth and Earth II the multicellular stuff is a fraction the biomass of the single-cell substrate. But it's where all the fun is."

  "What happened to the uplifters?"

  "We don't know. It's so long ago. We, or rather the Founders on the Ark and the generations on Earth before them, learned that we humans are a young species, born of a young biosphere and a young star, in an old Galaxy, where the peak of starmaking was in the deep past, and most civilizations probably rose and fell long before there was life on any kind on Earth, let alone intelligent life. We saw no signs of intelligence at work on a large scale in the universe—no grand projects like the universal uplift working in the present. It is all locked in the deep past."

  "These are wonderful ideas."

  "Yes, they are, Maxx, and I wish more people could appreciate that. But even after the uplift the trajectories of Earth and Earth II diverged. On Earth, even after the multicellular uplift it took a half-billion years for intelligent life to evolve—mammals like us. Here, technological intelligence emerged almost immediately. Well, within a few tens of millions of years. But it vanished almost as quickly."

  "You're talking about the Dead."

  "Yes. That's why traces like the ruins on the island of Little Jamaica, and the Reef on the Belt, are so old."

  "The Reef, where my mother is going."

  "Yes.” He clenched a bony fist. “I wish I could be with her! If only she had thought to stop and take some scientists on her scientific expedition..."

  "If she thought about such things she wouldn't be doing it at all,” Maxx said. “That's what my dad says."

  "Quite. Well, I envy her.” He brushed the dirt from his palm back onto the ground, and checked the position of the sun. “We had better go. It's time for Proctor Chivian's daily audience with your father—and maybe a chance for me, at last, to deliver the briefing on the Library he asked for."

  "We have to be patient,” Maxx said solemnly. “My father's very busy."

  "Busy he may be, but he needs to make a decision soon on the Library, or it will be too late to break the ground this season....” They began walki
ng back to town and the parliament complex, the old man stiffly leaning on Maxx's shoulder. “We do need the Library, you know. It isn't just all about my calculations or the Proctor's personal ambition. I do hope you understand that, Maxx."

  "We have to be patient,” Maxx repeated.

  * * * *

  V

  The day was already ending by the time Xaia and her party came upon the Reef.

  Amid kilometers of arid crimson dust they found an oasis, a hollow surrounded by plates of uplifted rock—evidence of some ancient geological torment, the water pooling from some accidental aquifer. Green plants grew, grass and moss and straggling trees, and clumps of Purple sat passively amid the rocks.

  Xaia allowed the caravan to break up. The great horses were unharnessed and led to the water. She and her aides and her fifty crew members, most of them women warriors, wearily laid down packs and loosened dust masks. Manda clambered up a ridge with a spyglass, to survey the landscape.

  Xaia sought out Chan Hil. Teif followed her. Chan had taken off his boots, replacing them with soft camp sandals, and was unfolding his tent. Xaia had a chart prepared by the Cora's navigator, a sketch map of this northerly section of the Belt, gradually being filled in. “We should be here,” she said, pointing. “At the Reef. Here are the coordinates you gave us, latitude and longitude. Here is our calculation..."

  "I told you we should have sent out scouts,” Teif rumbled.

  "We are close,” Chan insisted. “Unless everything known at Ararat about the Reef is wrong.” Two months after walking out of Ararat, Chan looked quite different, his skin sunburned and leathery, layers of puffy city fat worn away. But as they had approached the site where he promised the Reef would be found, he had grown steadily more nervous. They had soon discovered that nobody alive from Ararat had visited the Reef, and nobody knew for sure if old travelers’ records were correct. “We should be there."

  "Wrong,” growled Teif. “We shouldn't be here at all."

  Xaia suppressed a sigh as he began his usual round of complaints.