The Nano Flower

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Greg tested it with his hand, and watched a sluggish ripple ride across to the other side. Eleanor would like to hear about this, she adored waterbeds. He smiled furtively, wondering what she was doing right now. New London was on Greenwich Mean Time, which meant they would have finished the day's picking by now. She would probably be sitting outside by the camp's range grill, supervising the evening meal.

  The clump of Teresa's boots as she climbed down out of the crack broke his train of thought.

  "Tol," Sinclair called. "Tol, me boy. You're all right, 'us only me." He looked at the other two openings in the cave walls, and grimaced ruefully. "Ah, well. I was hoping the lad would be down here. Your tin men, they won't be going shooting at civilians, now will they?"

  "No," Greg said. "If he does wander back into the village cave, he'll be quite all right."

  "That's fine, then. He's a good lad."

  Julia and Rick were already down in the cave, Jim Sharman was bringing up the rear. Julia ignored the gel bed.

  "Where now?" she asked.

  Sinclair pointed to one of the openings. "This one. It goes into one of our storage caves."

  "Carlos," Greg said. "Lead out." He could hear faint whines and thuds coming along the crack to the village cave. Melvyn getting ready. He wished Suzi had come with them.

  The passage sloped downwards. Greg watched the rock grow darker, from burnt ochre at the entrance to a deep slate-grey; it was harder, too, more brittle. Almost like flint, he thought.

  By the time they reached the store cave his breath had become a white mist. There was a sprinkling of hoarfrost on the walls. It was a small cave, barely more than a wider section of the passage, with an uneven floor. A rough lash up of metal shelving stood along one side. Composite cargo pods were stacked opposite them, the names of various shops and New London civil administration departments stencilled next to long bar codes. There was a weak vinegar smell coming from the apples and plums on the shelves. The globes of fruit were large, gene-tailored, their skins crinkling.

  Carlos walked past the end of the shelves, helmet lights picking up the thicker rime covering the rock.

  "This is it?" Greg asked Sinclair. "The drone was here?"

  "That's right, Captain Greg."

  "Dead end," Carlos said.

  "You knew that," Julia said. "And you still brought us down here." Her mind boiled with weary frustration.

  "'Tis what you wanted," Sinclair said sullenly.

  "It's all right," Greg said. They were in the right place, he would have known otherwise. There were levels of intuition, and this seemed to be the most intangible, yet perversely the most resolute. He reckoned that if he shut his eyes and started walking he would wind up standing beside Royan and the alien. Close, it was close now.

  "Wait there," Greg told Carlos. He ordered up a secretion, the neurohormones acting like a flush of icy spring water in his brain. His thoughts seemed to lift out of time as he walked down the cave towards Carlos, mind flicking methodically through the impressions of his sensorium, searching for evidence of Royan, that unique spectral imprint his soul discharged in its wake.

  The rock walls beyond the shelves were lined with small holes and slender zigzag clefts. Tiny splinters had flaked away where water had penetrated hairline cracks and expanded as it froze; the result was as if someone had taken a chisel and meticulously chipped a million pock scars into the walls.

  There was a horizontal gash, about four metres long, varying between half a metre and a metre wide, level with Greg's head. He stood squinting into it, listening to the silence it exuded. The alien's siren song. "Bring some of those pods over here," he said.

  "You can't be expecting me to go in there," Sinclair said as Greg stood on the pods and shone his torch into the gash. It was flat for about five metres, then angled upwards. "'Fraid so. It must get wider past that slope. Carlos, can a suit get in there?"

  Carlos sent a fan of green laser light into the gash from his shoulder sensor module. "Tight fit, but we can get through."

  "Any electronic activity in there?"

  "No."

  Nerves fluttered back to hound him as Greg levered himself into the gash. It had an uncomfortable resemblance to a pair of lips, plates of the mouth waiting to bite down.

  Stop it!

  He lay on his back, and shifted his buttocks sideways, shuffling towards the slope at the rear. His breath was melting the hoarfrost on the rock above him, tiny beads of oily water flowing into droplets that fell onto his face.

  When the floor began to lift he stopped and shone his torch up. It seemed to be some kind of kink in the gash, rising up a couple of metres, then levelling out. Growing narrower, though, maybe two metres long at the top. Sighing, he began to work his way up.

  He could tell there was a cave just beyond the top of the kink. The air had the right deadness for an empty space, sucking up sounds. Exertion was leaving a layer of sweat all over his skin which would quickly turn clammy cold as the suit's shunt fibres kicked in and drained the heat out. The temperature palpitation was bloody irritating.

  There was a shelf at the top of the slope. He rested on it, and shone his torch into the cave. The ledge was about two metres long, ending abruptly. All he could see were the nondescript curves and angles of more dark grey rock. It was too much effort to wrestle his hood into place and use the photon amp, so he inched over to the lip and shone his torch straight down. The floor was a metre below. He swung his legs out.

  This cave was much smaller than any the Celestials used. He prowled round it as the others squirmed their way out of the gash. There was very little frost on the walls.

  "Where now?" Rick asked. There was no scepticism in the big man's tone. He had accepted Greg's talent as genuine. Even Jim and Carlos had no qualms, but then, three of their team mates were sac psychics.

  Greg led them on, down a passage whose walls slanted over at thirty degrees. Selection was automatic. Seductive whispers in his mind.

  They walked for about two hundred metres. In one place the walls and floor contracted, forcing them to crawl on all fours for five metres. Then Carlos said his sensors were picking up magnetic patterns ahead.

  "Can you identify them?" Greg asked.

  "It's a single structure containing several processors, power circuits, and some kind of giga-conductor cell."

  "The drone," Greg said.

  "Could be."

  It was waiting for them in the next cave. A dull-orange oblong box, with a wedge-shaped front, a metre and a half long, seventy centimetres wide. There was a sensor cluster at each corner, two man-black waldos folded back along the sides. He saw a small triangle and flying-V printed on one side near the rear.

  "Its sensors are active," Carlos said. "It's seen us."

  "Any datalink transmission?"

  "Yes."

  "Hello, Snowy," the drone said. It was Royan's voice all right, or at least a pretty good synthesis.

  Julia let out a muffled gasp. There was a powerful burst of emotion from her mind—anger, but mostly worry.

  "Greg, thanks for coming," said Royan. "I knew you wouldn't let me down. You never do. Good job, too. The alternative would have been dire all round."

  "What alternative?" he asked.

  "Clifford Jepson."

  "You do know about atomic structuring, then," Julia said.

  "Yes. There's no such thing."

  "What?"

  "I have a lot to say, a lot to show you. And you're not going to thank me, Snowy. Not for what I've done. Sorry."

  * * * *

  The drone's six independently sprung tyres made easy going of the bumpy rock floor. Greg and Julia followed it, the others close behind. He was painfully aware of the conflicting thought currents in Julia's mind: guilt, relief, and that consistent fiery thread of anger, compressed so tightly it was almost hatred. Flipside of love. He knew there was nothing he could say. They would have to sort that out for themselves.

  And he liked both of them; he and Ele
anor, Julia and Royan, they'd all been through hell and golden days together. Not exactly the happy reunion he'd been anticipating at the start.

  They turned a corner, and saw a blue-green light at the end of the passage. The air was a lot warmer. Long tongues of glaucous fungal growth were probing along the passage walls. It wasn't a true fungus, he decided when they drew level with the tips of the encrustations, it was too wet, too solid.

  "Is this your disseminator plant?" Greg asked the drone.

  "One version. Its internal structuring was quite successful. It's flexible and fast growing, but it couldn't operate in a vacuum. I was thinking of using it to bore out living accommodation similar to the southern endcap complex."

  The cave which the passage opened out into was a perfect hemisphere, completely covered in the plant; there were five equidistantly spaced semi-circular archways piercing the walls. A line of bulb-shaped knobs protruded from the wall at waist height, glowing with a soft light. When Greg touched a wall, he felt the growth give slightly below his finger; it had the texture of a hard rubber mat. Yet to look at it could have been a polyp, it had that same minute crystalline sparkle.

  Something poised in the gap between vegetable and mineral, then.

  It gave off the most unusual psychic essence. Of waiting.

  Endless, eternal waiting. He felt an age here that made the centuries of human history fleetingly insignificant.

  "When did you grow this?" he asked.

  "About a fortnight ago."

  He recognized it then: affinity with the origin microbe; drifting halfway across the galaxy in frozen stasis. A second eternity orbiting Jupiter, a life stretched beyond endurance.

  Greg shivered inside the dissipater suit.

  The drone trundled straight into one of the tunnels. The plant here was slightly different; a marble-like band ran along the apex, radiating a phosphorescent blue light; wide flat blisters mottled the walls. After twenty metres the tunnel began to curve, rising upward in a long gentle spiral.

  "Well, look at all this," Sinclair said. "Right beneath us the whole time, and we never even knew. You've been a busy lad, young Royan."

  Julia's head was thrust forward, mouth bloodless. God help a granite stalagmite that got in her way, Greg thought.

  "The gaps already existed when I came here," said Royan. "The disseminator plant modified this section of the fault zone for me. But there's nowhere to shove processed rock, so it just redistributed the space available. Reamed out the centre, and filled in the edges, so to speak."

  "Did you manage to refine the metals and minerals out?" Greg asked.

  "Some, yes."

  The blisters were becoming darker. Crisper, too, Greg reckoned; they could even have been dead. A faint tracery of black veins was visible under their delicate cinnamon skin.

  "There's some power sources up ahead," Carlos's voice said in Greg's earpiece. "Electromagnetic emissions, magnetic patterns. The works."

  Greg nodded once, without turning round. His mind had felt it already, a slackening of psychic pressure. The eye of the hurricane.

  Red-raw tumours were bulging out from the tunnel walls, fist-size, as if the disseminator plant was suffering an outbreak of hives. Some of them had distended up through the blisters, puncturing the skin; waxy yellow fluid had dripped down the wall below them, pooling on the floor.

  The drone stopped, and extended a waldo arm. Metal flexi-grip fingers closed round one of the tumours, chrome-black ceramic nails cutting into the plant flesh. Severed from the wall, the tumour looked like a ripe apple.

  Greg nearly dropped it when the drone handed it to him. It was impossibly heavy. He peeled the mushy flesh away to reveal a kernel of whitish metal.

  "Pure titanium," Royan said.

  Greg passed the nugget to Rick, who whistled.

  "Is it worth very much?" Sinclair asked hopefully.

  "You'd need a lot more before you can buy a desert island full of geishas," Royan said. "But the system which produces it is priceless. Though not in monetary terms. The value comes from what it can provide."

  "A plant, you call all this?" Sinclair looked round the tunnel sceptically.

  "It was to start with." The drone turned sharply, heading up the tunnel again.

  Sinclair tucked the nugget into a pocket, and gave the tumours a long, measured assessment.

  They came into another hemispherical cave, with just the one tunnel entrance. The disseminator plant had grown scales of rough pale-brown bark around the walls, only the floor was clear of them. A thick tangle of hairy creepers was clinging to the bark, like an old grape vine which had been allowed to run wild. Some of the free-hanging loops were swaying slowly. But there was no air movement. They must have some kind of sap inside, Greg decided. Greenish light was coming from a circle of knobs overhead; they lacked symmetry, as if they had melted at some time, drooping under gravity. Very fine creepers had spread across them, making it look as though they were hanging inside string bags.

  A couple of hexagonal cargo pods lay in the middle of the floor, seals flipped open. One of them had a plant on top, growing out of an ordinary red clay pot. There was a central column sprouting five tall flat leaves with tapering tips; their edges were serrated and ruffed, lined with small furry buds. The ones near the bottom had bloomed into long trumpet flowers, coloured a delicate purple.

  Greg and Julia exchanged a glance.

  "Where are you?" Julia said.

  There was a drawn out splintering sound as part of the bark wall split open, revealing a tunnel.

  "Just you and Greg, Snowy."

  "Hey," Rick protested. He ignored the filthy look Julia threw him. "You can't keep me out of this, Royan. Not if the alien is here. I helped you with Kiley. Damn it, I want to meet the alien. You owe me that, at least."

  "I'm not sure you can handle the disappointment, Rick," Royan said.

  "It's not here?" Rick asked, appalled.

  "Oh yeah, it's here all right."

  "Then I want in."

  "OK, but I warned you."

  Greg turned to the three crash team members. "Keep monitoring us. And if I shout, come fast."

  "Yes, sir," said Jim Sharman.

  "There's no need for that," Royan said.

  "I taught you better," Greg said.

  "Yeah, sure, sorry."

  Greg went first, letting his espersense flow ahead of him. Royan was there all right, his thought currents wound into a compact astral sphere. Greg perceived all the familiar themes, the deep injury psychosis, buoyant self-confidence, bright notes of arrogance and contempt. It was all shrouded by a grey aura of resignation, the scent of failure.

  Then there was the other, the alien. Not a mind as Greg knew them, nothing remotely human, there was no focus, just a hazy presence wrapped around Royan's mind. But for all its ethereal quality, it possessed a definite identity. And it was brooding.

  The tunnel was circular, high enough for him to stand in, and this time it was easy to believe he was inside a living creature. It was made from convex ring segments stacked end to end, translucent amber, as smooth and hard as polished stone. Fluid was circulating on the other side, a clear gelatin with shoals of orange-pink blobs floating adrift, like dreaming jellyfish. Either the walls or the fluid beyond was giving out a soothing phosporescence, there were no shadows as he walked along.

  It opened into a simple rock chamber. The disseminatory plant had been at work here, but something had halted it in the middle of the conversion. Long strings of rubbery vegetation twined their way round the rock walls and ceiling, anchored by a root skin similar to lichen. White dendritic reefs flowered in the interstices. A tenuous silver-hued weave of gossamer fibres had crept up the lower half of the wall; underneath it, the sharper ridges and snags had been digested, smoothed down, while cavities had been filled with a cement-like paste. He could see the start of the curve that would end with a domed roof. There were dense knots of the vegetative strings along the top of the weave, baby light knobs
were germinating inside, silk-swaddled imagoes, casting whorl shadows all around.

  The floor had already been levelled, coated in the usual grey-green mat of cells. Various hardware modules were scattered about, linked with power cables and fibre optics; there was a customized terminal, a couple of lightware memory globes, domestic giga-conductor cells, a hologram projector disk, some white cylinders that he didn't understand, tall circuit wafer stacks with nearly every slot loaded. All of it top-range gear, sophisticated and expensive. The only things he was really certain about were the four silver bulbs fixed to the rock roof: gamma-pulse mines. The military used them for urban counter-insurgency; the energy release, converted to gamma rays, would sterilize an area two hundred metres in diameter. Completely wiped of life, including soil bacteria down to a depth of two metres. They were in the top ten of the UN's proscribed weapons list; production and trading carried automatic life sentences.

  Four of them in a cave barely twenty metres across was a typical Royan overkill.

  But when he saw what was in front of him, Greg was swamped with the terrible conviction that this time they might just be necessary. The skin chill of his dissipater suit reached in to grip his belly.

  Royan and the alien were in the middle of the chamber.

  The alien was shaped like a single gigantic egg; elliptic, fat, four metres high, three wide. It had a pellucid shell which seemed to be vibrating; watery refraction patterns slithered around it, clashing and merging. The first layer, the white, was a clear band of cytoplasm about a metre thick. Inside that was the nucleus, ice-blue, contained within a rumpled ovoid membrane.

  Royan was encased within the nucleus. A solid-shadow adult foetus, naked, legs apart, arms by his sides, head tilted back. Greg peered at the silhouette; Royan had no feet or hands, his limbs tapering away to nothing. The nucleus matter about them was thicker, cloudy, preventing full resolution. There was something wrong with his face, the eyes and nostrils were too large, he had no hair left. Large sections of skin were missing, along with their subcutaneous layers. Greg could see several naked ribs, and most of the skull.