Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System

by T. K. F. Weisskopf

  But her irritation grew as her hunger dwindled. Searcher seemed about to go to sleep when she said, "You brought us here on purpose, didn't you?"

  "Surely." Searcher lazily blinked, tongue lolling.

  Angered by this display of unconcern, Dawn shouted, "I wanted to find my people!"

  "They are gone."

  "And you said I could find people like me if I followed you."

  "So I believe."

  "But—but—" Dawn wanted to express her dismay at being snatched away from everything she knew, but pride forced her to say, "Something in the sky wants to kill me, right? So to get away we go into the sky? Nonsense!"

  "You are unsettled." Searcher folded its hands across its belly in a gesture that somehow conveyed contrition. "Still, we must flee as far and as fast as we can."

  "Me, sure. But why you?" She jutted out her chin, thinking, I can fend for myself, and knew immediately that she was lying. Adolescent bravado was not going to work here.

  "You would be helpless without me."

  Dawn's mouth twisted, irritation and self-mockery mingling. "Guess so, up here. In the woods we'd be even."

  "Perhaps. But against the entities who live in higher dimensions, we are equally powerless."

  Dawn shook her head. "We pinned that one, right after we got back from the Tubeworld."

  "I believe they are from the other 'brane,' as humans term it. They wish to intervene in our struggle, clearly, but have trouble manifesting here. I think they will learn quickly and we will lose whatever small advantage we had."

  "Intervene why?"

  "To affect the pinch-point—you."

  "Because I'm Original? There may be others."

  Searcher smiled. "Out here? Not with certainty. No one keeps an inventory anywhere, except the Supras of course."

  "And if I don't make it to this big party somebody's planning, what happens?"

  "We all die, I imagine."

  Dawn blinked. "The Malign? It'll—"

  "Lay waste to the system solar, and much else."

  "Me? I . . . wish I . . ." She let it trail off, not knowing how to finish. She had almost said, had my Meta.

  Searcher said nothing and Dawn realized it was being diplomatic. In truth, despite all Dawn's woodsy experience and skills, Searcher had moved through mixed terrains with an unconscious assurance and craft she envied. "Where do we go, then?"

  "For now, Earth's moon."

  "The . . ." She had assumed they were arcing above the Earth but would return to it along some distant trajectory. Searcher had said they weren't going to the planets, after all. She knew the Supras went to other worlds, too, but she had never heard of her own kind doing so. So— ". . . For what?"

  "We must move outward and be careful."

  Searcher leaned back and arranged itself, all six muscular limbs folded in a comfortable cross-legged posture. It began to speak, softly and melodiously, of times so distant that the very names of their eras had passed away. The great heavy-pelted beast told her of how humanity had met greater intelligences in the vault of stars, and had fallen back, recoiling at the blow to its deepest pride. They had tried to create a higher mentality, and their failure was as vast as their intention.

  And had made a thing that was said to be as much beyond ordinary intellects as a woman was beyond the bacteria that flourished in her gut—and the comparison was deliberate in both magnitude and status.

  This strange mind, the Malign, was embodied without need of inscribing patterns on matter. And it had proved malignant beyond measure, returning at times to prey upon its creators.

  Communications showed that the Malign had formulated a Theory of Everything of infinite, supple nuance.

  Against it humanity had made a guard, the Multifold. Both dwelled in the depths of far space.

  Searcher sighed. "There is more, but I cannot bear to say it."

  "So we've got to help this Multifold against the Malign?"

  "We are doomed to live in a drama created long ago."

  "Why me?"

  Searcher sighed. "Because the Originals know codes that the Multifold can use to unlock its own powers. To give it any chance whatever of defeating the Malign."

  "I don't know any codes."

  "You do not know what you know."

  * * *

  Dawn was subdued for most of the voyage to the moon. She had known a bit of Searcher's story, for fragments of it formed a tribal fable.

  But the Malign was older now than the mountains she had roved, a gauzy myth told by the Supras. They spoke, too, of the Multifold, but that equally tenuous entity was said to be strung like a veil among the crush of stars and radiant clouds.

  The moon swam green and opulent as they looped outward. Jonah's slight spin gave an obliging purchase to the outer segments of the great vessel, and Dawn ventured with Searcher through verdant labyrinths to watch their approach. They spoke little. Dawn sensed a momentum to their passage, a drama being played out beyond her understanding. And Searcher would say nothing more of this, for now.

  The lunar landscape was a jagged creation of sharp mountains and colossal waterfalls. At the edge of the dusk line, valleys sank into shadows lit by reflected yellow from high peaks. Thick clouds, far higher than any on Earth because of the lesser gravity, glowed like live coals. Raw peaks cleaved the flowing cloud decks, leaving a wake like that of a giant ship. From these flashed lightning, like the blooming buds of blue roses.

  These stark contrasts had been shaped by a bombardment of light elements, hauled sunward in comets. To kindle this, a rain had fallen for a thousand years in droplets the size of a human hand. Atop the lunar air sat a translucent film a few molecules thick, holding in a thick blanket of air. The film had permanent holes allowing spacecraft and spaceborne life access, the whole arrangement kept buoyant by steady replenishment from belching volcanoes. This trap offset the moon's feebler gravitational grasp so well that it lost less of its air than did the Earth. Intact, the moon swam like a single cell in the sun's warmth.

  The fat, beckoning crescent moon hung almost directly sunward and so was nearly drowned in shadow until Jonah began to curve toward its far side. For this passing moment the sun, moon and Earth were aligned in geometric perfection, before plunging back along their complicated courses. Dawn watched this moment of uncanny, simple equilibrium and felt, as she had not in a long while, the paradox that balance and stillness lay at the heart of all change.

  Her Mom had taught that, using examples as humble as a bird's flight on rising warm winds. Dawn had never imagined that the lesson could play out on such immense scale, in silent majesty.

  "See," Searcher said. "Storms."

  Dawn looked down into the murk and whirl of the bottled lunar air. But the disturbance lay above that sharp division. In the blackness over both poles there snaked slow filaments of blushing orange.

  "Damn." Dawn whispered, as though the helical strands could hear. "Is that . . . ?"

  "The Malign? I suspect so."

  "You've seen it before?"

  "No. But whatever it is, I think it probes for us. I had thought the Malign would forage elsewhere first."

  Searcher did not explain further. It pointed with its ears at what seemed to Dawn to be empty space around Earth. Searcher described how the Earth's magnetic domain was compressed by the wind from the sun, and streams out in the wake. Dawn blinked her eyes up into ultraviolet and caught the delicate shimmer of a huge volume around the planet. She witnessed a province she had never suspected, the realm dominated by the planet's sturdy magnetic fields. They made a gossamer ball, crumpled in on the sun side, stretched and slimmed by the wind from the sun into a tapering tail.

  Arcades of momentary fretwork grew and died in the rubbery architecture of this magnetosphere, roving violences. Suddenly she knew that these, too, were the footprints of the Malign. That had been Searcher's point. A sullen dread she had been resisting fell upon her like a black weight. "It's searching there, too."

  "I
t relishes the bands of magnetic field," Searcher said somberly. "I hoped it would seek us only in that realm."

  "But it has spread here, too."

  "It is vast in a way that seems beyond description."

  "Huh? How?"

  "There is mathematics our sort cannot comprehend."

  "Hell, there's arithmetic I had trouble with."

  Though she chuckled, Dawn felt a cold shudder. Immense forces lumbered through these colossal spaces, and she was a woman born to pad the quiet paths of sheltered forests, to prune and plant and catch the savor of the sighing wind. These chilly reaches were not her place.

  She stiffened her spine and asked, "It's able to punch through the air blanket?"

  Searcher simply poked one ear at the lunar south pole. She shifted down into the infrared and saw faint plumes geyser below the hard curve of the atmosphere. Orange sparks worked there.

  Dawn felt her pulse quicken. "Damn-all! It's already breached the air layer." She bit her lip and nearly lost her hold on a branch.

  "And it can hunt and prey at will, once inside. It follows the lunar magnetic-field lines where it wishes." Searcher cast off without warning, kicked against an enormous orchid, and shot down a connecting tube.

  "Hey, wait!"

  She caught up in an ellipsoidal vault, where an army of the clacking black spiders was assembling ranks of oval containers. In the dizzying activity she could barely keep up with Searcher. Larger animals shot by her, some big enough to swat her with a single flipper or snap her in two with a beak, moving in a blur—but all ignored her. A fever pitch resounded through the noisy mob.

  Searcher had stopped, though, and was sunning itself just beneath the upper dome.

  "What can we do? Ride back to Earth?"

  Dawn bit her lip. "I don't want to go back to the Supras with an apology in my mouth."

  "I agree." Searcher grinned. "My friend, I sense your foreboding. It is needless. Our deaths need no previews."

  "Thanks for the dollop of optimism."

  "Um. I had thought to catch the vessel now approaching."

  She saw through the dome a smaller version of their Jonah, arcing up from one of the portal holes in the lunar air layer. Searcher had said that the Jonah was one of the indentured of its species, caged in an endless cycle between Earth and moon. The smaller Jonah dipped into the lunar air, enjoying some tiny freedom. She felt a trace of pity for such living vessels, but then she saw something which banished minor troubles. A great mass came into view, closing with them from a higher orbit.

  "What's—"

  "We approach a momentary mating."

  "Mating? They actually . . . in flight?"

  "They are always in flight.

  "But . . . that thing, it's so huge."

  Searcher had found some small wriggling creature. It paused to bite it in half, chewed with an assessing look, and swallowed. Dawn remembered the Semisent. Searcher tossed the rest of the carcass away and said, "It is a Leviathan. The small Jonahs are its half-grown spawn. As it swoops closest to the sun, desires well in it, as they have for ages past. We shall simply take advantage of the joy of merging."

  "So we're part of a sex act?"

  "An honor, yes."

  As the great bulk glided effortlessly toward them she surveyed its mottled blue-green skin, the tangled jungles it held to the sun's eternal nourishing blare.

  Dawn could not help but smile. "I think I prefer my lust in smaller doses."

  Grand beings communicate through emissaries. Slow, ponderous oscillations began to course through the Jonah. Dawn saw a watery bubble pop into space from the Jonah's leathery skin nearby. It wobbled, seeking definition, and made itself into an ellipsoid.

  "Hurry," Searcher said. "Departure."

  Searcher adroitly tugged her along through green labyrinths. When they came to the flared mouth of what seemed to be a giant hollow root, it shoved her ahead. She tumbled head over heels and smacked into a spoungy resilient pad. Velvet-fine hairs oozing white sap stuck to her. A sharp, meaty flavor clung in her nose. She felt light-headed and realized that the air was thick with a vapor that formed and dissolved and met again in billowing, translucent sheets. Searcher slapped away a rubbery blob as big as a man but seemed unconcerned. A shrill hissing began.

  They were drifting down the bore of a narrowing tube. The walls glowed pearly and warm and she felt the cloying sap cloaking her feet and back.

  Searcher snagged a shimmering plate and launched it like an ancient discus toward her. The disk unfurled into a strand and Searcher jerked on it at the right instant so that it spun around her. The sticky stuff wrapped about her twice, whiplash fast, then twisted away. Searcher caught it on the comearound, pivoted and slapped the end against a prickly strand. Dawn was tightly bound. They gathered speed in a swirl of refracting light. Dawn held her breath, frightened by the rising hiss around them.

  "What—" she began, but a soft cool ball of sap caught against her mouth when she breathed in. She blew it away and felt Searcher next to her as the wall glow ebbed. The ribbed tube ahead flexed, bulged with a hollow groan—and they shot through into the hard glare of space itself.

  The Jonah had blown a rubbery bubble. A sap envelope enclosed them, quickly plumping into a perfect sphere.

  "Our Jonah is making love to the Leviathan," Searcher said, holding her firmly.

  "We're seeds?"

  "So we have misled it, yes."

  "What happens when something tries to hatch us?"

  "We politely disregard the invitation."

  Such graciousness seemed doubtful. They were closing with a broad speckled underbelly, the Jonah already dwindling behind. The speckles were clusters of ruby-dark froth. The Leviathan was at least ten times the size of the Jonah, giving the sex act an air of elephantine comedy. As they approached she felt fresh fear; this creature was the size of a small mountain range.

  This time they donated momentum to their new host through a web of bubbles that seemed to pop and re-form as they plunged through, each impact buffeting them. Dawn bounced off the elastic walls of their own seed-sphere. Searcher seemed to absorb them and barely move.

  When they came to rest a large needle expertly jabbed at their bubble. Ruby light from the walls gave a hellish, threatening cast to the approaching spiky point. The needle entered, Dawn braced -herself—but the bubble did not pop. The needle snout seemed to sniff around. The point moved powerfully and was quite capable, Dawn saw, of skewering them both. She backed away from it—and Searcher raised a leg and urinated directly onto it. "No, thank you," Searcher said.

  The needle jerked back and fled. Then their bubble popped, releasing them.

  Again Searcher led her through a dizzy maze of verdant growths, following clues she could not see. "Where're we going?"

  "To find the Captain."

  "Somebody guides this?"

  "Doesn't your body guide you?"

  "Well, I sure thought I was in charge."

  "Then please adjust your digestion so that you never fart again."

  "Is that a complaint? I'll work on it. Where's this Leviathan going?"

  "To the outer worlds."

  "You think we're safe here for now?"

  "We are safe nowhere. But here we hide in numbers."

  Dawn dodged a wriggling slick-skinned teardrop that had sprouted teeth. "You figure the Malign can't be sure where I am? It tracked me pretty well so far."

  "Here there are many more complex forms than you. They may smother your traces."

  "What about this Talent of mine? Can't this Mind pick up my, well, my Talent-smell?"

  Searcher's mouth twisted judicially. "That is possible."

  Dawn had been following Searcher closely, scrambling to keep up as they bounced from rubbery walls and glided down twisted passageways, deeper into the Leviathan. Searcher's remark made her stop for a moment, gasping in the sweet, cloying air.

  Dawn wanted to bellow out her frustration at the speed and confusion of events, but she kne
w by now that Searcher would only give her its savage, black-lipped grin. Searcher slowed and veered into crowded layers of great broad leaves. These seemed to attach to branches, but the scale was so large Dawn could not see where the gradually thickening, dark brown wood ended. Among the leaves scampered and leaped many small creatures.

  She found that without her noticing any transition somehow this zone had gained a slight gravity. She fell from one leaf to another, slid down to a third, and landed on a catlike creature. It squashed like a pillow. Then with a shudder it died in her hands, provoking a pang of guilt. The cat had wings and sleek orange fur. Her heart ached at the beauty of it.

  Searcher came ambling along a thin branch, saw the bird-cat, and gruffed approval. "You are learning." With a few movements of its razor-claws it had skinned the cat and plucked off gobbets of meat. Dawn bit her lip, concentrated on the dripping leaves and moved on.

  The goal of finding the Captain faded as she grew hungry. Searcher snatched at tubular insects and crunched them with relish, but Dawn wasn't up to that . . . yet. It slowly dawned on Dawn that this immense inner territory was not some comfortable green lounge for passengers. It was a world, intact and with its own purposes.

  Passengers were in no way special. They had to compete for advantages and food. This point came clear when they chanced upon a large ribbed beast lying partly dismembered on a branch. Searcher stopped, pensively studying the savaged hulk. Dawn saw that the fur markings, snout and wide teeth resembled Searcher's.

  "Your, uh, kind?"

  "We had common origins."

  Dawn could not read anything resembling sadness in Searcher's face. "How many of you are there?"

  "Not enough. Though the numbers mean nothing."

  "You knew this one?"

  Searcher gazed at the mess pensively. "Ummmm . . . yes. I mingled genetic information with it."

  "Oh! I'm sorry, I . . ."

  Searcher kicked at the carcass, which was now attracting a cloud of scavenger mites. "It was an enemy."

  "After you, ah, 'mingled'? I mean . . ."

  "Before and after."