by Greg Bear
The crew sang out as one and pushed the lances forward, and the bolts converged on the pit.
Vagno cackled with glee and tossed the flaming wick aside, not needed. "It's a sky fire!" he shouted. "The best there can be!"
The burst of flame where the bolts struck was intense. The accelerant from the hoop spread the ignition in less than a second, and the entire heap of fuel and pellets blazed up against the smoky darkness. In just seconds, the pyre poured flame into the sky to a height of at least forty meters, illuminating the underside of the canopy and all the scuttling creatures and creature-machines there. The entire canopy seemed alive with movement.
Anakin felt as if he were inside a gigantic colony of myrmins.
Then he felt the voices of the seeds. They are afraid. The heat is baking them. Their shells are crisping.
Most of the heat rose in rippling sheets of air, but as the fuel blazed and embers settled out, the seeds were being roasted like sugar hulls in a campfire.
Perversely, Anakin shivered as if with cold.
Obi-Wan put an arm around his shoulders. Anakin saw that his master's face was beaded with sweat. He, too, could feel the seeds in the fire.
"Something wrong?" Vagno asked, his face glinting and flowing in the yellow light from fire, as if he were part of the blaze, a stray ember given human shape. He walked around them critically.
"We're fine," Obi-Wan said.
But Anakin did not feel fine. He wanted to curl up and hide, or run, but he knew the seeds no longer had legs, no way of escaping, even if they wanted to.
"I've never lost a client. No fear, no fear," Vagno said.
The seeds were afraid but did not move under their burden of embers and flame. Theirs was courage, and also an awareness of fate or destiny.
The seeds were not nearly as intelligent as a human-they did not really think for themselves-but inside of each was the potential for awareness and intelligence. The fire was bringing that awareness to the fore.
This will happen to you.
Anakin gasped. He was not dreaming.
This is your destiny, your fate.
Obi-Wan had said nothing. Anakin knew where the voice was coming from, whom it belonged to, but could not believe what he knew.
There will be heat and death and resurrection. A seed will quicken. Will it burn or shine'? Will it think and create or be ruled by fear and destroy?
And then the voice fell silent.
Obi-Wan's arm tightened around Anakin, as if he would protect the boy. "The wave is not what we expected," he said.
Anakin stared into the flames, his inmost self suddenly calm. The seeds were changing. They were no longer afraid.
"They'll pop like bombs! Stand back!" Vagno pushed Obi- Wan and Anakin back just as the first explosion sent a cloud of embers high into the air. Sparks showered around them, crisping little holes in their robes. For a moment, Anakin looked like a devil, his hair sending out tendrils of smoke. Obi-Wan extinguished the little fires with quick, light slaps of his hand.
One, two, three. . suddenly, there were many explosions, too many to keep track of. But Anakin knew that all the seeds had survived, and all had been quickened by the flames.
"It's going to be a fabulous ship!" he enthused, slapping his knees. "It's going to be the greatest ship ever made!"
"Not yet," Vagno said, grimacing critically. "They have to be gathered, annealed, and shaped-we'll teach them ways of the outer worlds! Come. Let the ashes be stirred." He herded Anakin and Obi-Wan back with his hands until they stood beside an empty carapod. "And stand back! Some of the seeds explode twice."
Chapter 39
Obi-Wan felt woozy, a little ill. He had never experienced such a strange twist in his awareness of the living Force. That the twist was centered on Anakin was evident, but something about where they were-about the planet itself-gave the effect a peculiar focus and intensity.
He could almost convince himself that had Mace Windu or Yoda or any other Jedi Master been on Zonama Sekot, the twist-the shape of this strange wave of destiny-would have surprised them, as well.
And perhaps these unprecedented circumstances explained his repeated sensing of the presence of Qui-Gon.
Obi-Wan had seen his Master impaled on the glowing, singing lightsaber of Darth Maul. The Force had not been gentle or supportive then. Qui-Gon's body had not vanished; it had shown the truth of death, of the severing of all connections with the flesh.
And that was as it should be. The Force had a shape, and death was an inevitable part of that shape. Perhaps Obi-Wan was not yet mature enough to let go of all sentiment and all love for his Master, to say good-bye to him forever.
Vagno and his crew stirred the ashes from the perimeter of the pit. The dependent hoop of limbs and tools dropped lower with the subsidence of the flames, and thick, blackened paddles dropped to help them mix the embers. Smoke and ash swirled high into the darkness, and flecks of red ember blinked like feral eyes.
Elsewhere under the broad canopy, in the factory valley, new fires burst forth. Obi-Wan could see, kilometers away, hidden by low hills in the terrain, that the canopy itself glowed brilliant with much larger forges than theirs. New seeds were being forged, far too many to satisfy just a few clients from offworld. The valley was filled with such forges, dozens, even hundreds of them.
The big ones are being made now, even as we watch, Obi- Wan thought.
Vagno put on heavier boots and fireproof waders and jumped into the pit. He flung up clouds of hot ash and laughed as he poked forth something large, maybe twenty times bigger than a seed. He exchanged his tool for a flat- bladed shovel and scooped into the ash, then flipped out a broad, flat, fringed disk, immobile, sooty, and gray. He wiped off some of the ash and revealed a palm-swipe of pearly white. His crew grabbed the disk by its fringe and flung it callously onto the back of a carapod. Vagno probed, discovered, and laughed once more, flipped out another disk, and again the crew grabbed and stacked.
Anakin looked to Obi-Wan, his eyes dancing with joy. The seeds had been forged. All fifteen seeds had survived. Each had exploded in the heat, puffed out into the fringed disks now loaded on the carapod behind them.
Then the boy's face fell. "I don't feel them," Anakin said. "Are they still alive?"
Obi-Wan had no answer. He was almost punch-drunk with what he had experienced. He felt like a boy himself now, lost in shock and wonder and an irritating tickle of fear.
At last you know the spirit of adventure!
Obi-Wan closed his eyes tightly, as if to ward off the voice. He missed his Master intensely, but he would not let a vagrant fantasy besmirch Qui-Gon's memory.
"Adventure," Anakin said. The boy rode beside Obi-Wan on the carapod. Vagno was taking them across the valley, around several of the tall, river-carved pillars, toward a narrower and darker cleft on the southern side. "Is adventure the same as danger?"
"Yes," Obi-Wan said, a little too sharply. "Adventure is lack of planning, failure of training."
"Qui-Gon didn't think so. He said adventure is growth, surprise is the gift of awareness of limits."
For an instant, Obi-Wan wanted to lash out at the boy, strike him across the face for his blasphemy. That would have been the end of their relationship as Master and apprentice. He wanted it to end. He did not want the responsibility, or in truth to be near one so sensitive, so capable of blithely echoing what lay deepest inside him.
Qui-Gon had once told Obi-Wan these very things, and he had since forgotten them.
Anakin stared at his master intently. "Do you hear him?" he asked.
Obi-Wan shook his head. "It is not Qui-Gon," he said stiffly.
"Yes, it is," Anakin said.
"Masters do not return from death."
"Are you sure?" Anakin asked.
Obi-Wan looked south into the dark maw of the cleft. There were no fires there, no forges. Instead, a cold blue light flickered across the wet stone walls, and long tendrils crawled like snakes over the walls and the sa
ndy, rock-strewn floor.
"Clients never return!" Vagno shouted at them as he marched alongside the carapod, his stumpy legs pounding the ground. He capered and poked his blade into the air. "They don't remember, and if they did remember, they'd be too afraid! But me and my crew, we live here We're the bravest in all the universe!"
Obi-Wan, at this moment, could not have agreed more.
Chapter 40
Vagno gruffly introduced them to the chief of the shaping team, a tall, wiry man named Vidge. Where Vagno was squat and red, Vidge seemed more like a tall wisp of night fog-pale, with large, wet eyes. Even his clothes were wet and sprinkled with bits of glowing slime that made him look like a creature hauled forth from the depths of an ocean.
"You've brought so many," he complained in a sepulchral tone as he counted the disks stacked on the three carapods. "What are we to do with fifteen?"
Vagno shrugged expressively. Vidge turned to gloomily sur vey Anakin, then glanced over at Obi-Wan. "Did you pay more to the uplanders, to get so many seeds?"
"No questions!" Vagno cried out. "It's time to paint and shape!"
Vidge raised his hands in mock surrender and turned to his own team, all tall and damp and insubstantial. They wielded different tools, long heavy brushes and rough-edged paddles. Behind them rose a tall warehouse made of roughly assembled sheets of lamina, sagging and corroded from years of rough use. Vidge grabbed the carapod closest to him by its center leg and pulled it toward the warehouse. It hung back reluctantly, as did the other two, who were urged forward by Vidge's crew.
Vagno stood back. "Not my place," he said, suddenly hum ble. "Here's a different art." He waved them to follow Vidge.
The warehouse echoed with hollow bubbling and sighing. Tendrils crept in from around the edges and spread wide and flat, and at their tips grew broad fruits unlike any they had seen elsewhere: swollen, translucent, and filled with a sparkling, thick fluid that swirled slowly within, churned by screw-shaped organs at the core of each fruit.
Anakin and Obi-Wan helped Vidge's crew unload the seed- disks and arrange them upright in racks near the shaping platform. Here, on a riser about ten meters wide, Vidge and two assistants lifted a long knife and harvested one of the fruits, slicing it along a lateral line with three swift whacks. The glowing clear fluid within oozed forth and writhed slowly along the platform, filled with a haze of flexible white needles.
From a door at the back of the warehouse, a large carapod crawled out of the shadows. On its back it balanced a metal and plastic frame, apparently a form for their spacecraft.
"A ready-made frame, sent here by Shappa Farrs," Vidge said sorrowfully, as if announcing the death of a dear friend. "The shaping brings it alive."
Another carapod, protected by thick metal plates woven into a fabric shield, carried objects Anakin recognized immediately: two Haor Chall type-seven Silver-class light starship engines, as well as a very expensive hyperdrive core unit. Anakin saw that on both the engines and on the core unit, some parts were oddly missing, and other parts had been modified.
And yet a third carapod, much smaller-barely as large as Anakin himself-walked with jaunty steps forward into the greenish light emanating from the warehouse walls. This one carried a delicate crystalline structure Anakin did not recognize.
Obi-Wan, however, did. Organoform circuits had been rumored for hundreds of years, and supposedly had been developed on the more advanced Rim worlds that had continued to resist involvement with both the Republic and the Trade Federation. Rumors only. . until now.
"What's that?" Anakin asked, fascinated by the glittering curves and continually active circuitry.
"I think it's the device that will integrate our ship," Obi-Wan said. "The interface between the living and the machine."
The first thing Vidge did was cut away and scoop up a thick glob of fluid from the fruit. He spun the glob about, tossed it in the air, and caught it with his long spade, forming it into a ball. He then dropped it deftly onto the back of the smallest carapod, where, with a hiss, it settled over the organoform circuit. Cutting loose more globs, he spread them on the edges of each of the white seed-disks as his assistants carried them past. Where the gel touched, the disks turned a dark purple, and the edges began to curl and stretch forth sinuous, questing pseudopods.
Next, the shaper critically analyzed the frame atop the largest carapod. "Not enough," he grumbled. "Shappa never tells us what we need to know." To his crew, he said, "Get a second frame."
His crew conferred doubtfully among themselves. Vidge shouted out, "Fifteen forged plates, too many for one frame! We need two frames!"
"Are they going to make two ships?" Anakin asked Obi-Wan.
"I don't think so," Obi-Wan said. But he was in no position to be certain.
"Now, we move fast," Vidge called out, his tone as slow and tomb-haunted as before. "To the Jentari!"
Anakin and Obi-Wan climbed up beside the large carapod just as a second frame was loaded beside the first.
Vidge gave them their instructions. From this point on, they would ride inside the frames, sitting on thick flat beams between the oval-shaped main members, surrounded by a flexible weave of struts and cross braces. "It's the way it's done."
Anakin took his position within one frame. Obi-Wan sat in the other. The frames creaked and rattled on the back of the carapod.
The entire warehouse smelled of flowers and baking bread, and of other things less pleasant, odors that made Anakin dizzy. He felt as if the dream had become too much for him, too strong. His stomach was doing flip-flops.
Obi-Wan felt the same incipient nausea, but kept his attention on the slow, deliberate walk of Vidge beside the three carapods conveying the components of the Sekotan ship. The carapods exited through the back of the warehouse, back into the sea-gleam shadows of the cleft. Darker shadows like giants rose on each side, backs pressed against the walls of the cleft, with more giants on their broad shoulders, climbing hundreds of meters to a canopied ribbon of night, a few lonely stars gleaming through the interlaced branches.
Anakin felt like an insect about to be squashed. Even with the shapers running and walking alongside, he had lost his confidence. Not even the memory of Qui-Gon's words-if they had come from Qui-Gon and not from his fertile imagination-could reassure him now. This was unsettling, disturbing-were there actually giants on either side? Maybe the air was drugged. Maybe it was all an illusion and something dreadful was about to happen to him and to his master. He felt his throat closing down and tucked his chin into his chest, drawing from the exercises he had learned two years ago: control of the body's fear, control of animal chemistry and hormonal rhythms.
The mind's fear-his worst enemy, the deepest and darkest failing of Anakin Skywalker-was another problem, one he was not sure he would ever overcome.
Obi-Wan could feel the faltering of his Padawan's heretofore almost boundless confidence. Strangely, he, himself, was now calm. The smells bothered him, but were no worse than some very unsavory places where he had stood beside Qui-Gon and calmly carried out his duties.
Anakin felt the frame lurch forward as the carapod was brought to a halt by Vidge's crew. Vidge climbed up slowly and gracefully beside them and waved his flat-bladed instrument over his head, letting the fumes of the gelatinous interior of the swollen fruit drift away in dim purple sweeps.
Vidge's assistants played bright torch beams along the shadows of the giants, and Anakin saw not arms and legs, but thick green and purple trunks, gleams of metal, glints of other artificial substances, supplements, add-ons to the natural makers of the boras and the tampasi.
The purple vapors rose between the giants. Limbs stirred, joints creaked.
"Stay here inside the frame, no matter what," Vidge said, and handed Anakin and Obi-Wan breather masks similar to the Jedi issue they carried concealed in their robes. "We're loading up the engines and core and organoform circuitry now. They will be conveyed alongside the frames, until the time comes for their placement. Th
e ships will be made around you. The seeds will make you part of their dreams of growth. They will ask you questions." Vidge leaned forward to examine Anakin closely."They will make demands. This is crucial. The ship will not be made if you fail to give the necessary guidance."
"I won't fail," Anakin said.
Vidge's crew transferred the engines and core and circuitry o smaller Jentari. Large limbs lifted them high, like giant cranes in a starship maintenance yard.
"And you?" Vidge queried Obi-Wan. "You, too?"