Authors: Stephen Baxter
Mardina herself didn’t pair off with anybody. She’d had approaches, more subtle or less, from the leftover men, Onizuka and Harry – not from Yuri. But she had no trouble
brushing these guys off.
So that left Yuri, Onizuka and Harry without a woman. It drove Onizuka and Harry crazy very quickly, it seemed to Yuri. After all, this was
all there was
, the ten of them, no more
choice of partners – not until their sons and daughters started growing up someday to widen the pool. There had been more choice even in the hulls: lose out now and you’d have lost out
for life. Sometimes Onizuka and Harry would talk loudly about sharing partners, bed-hopping. It would be genetically efficient for the women to have babies with more than one partner; it was what
Major Lex McGregor would have wanted, so they said. Nobody in a relationship listened.
Yuri didn’t care. It seemed to him the partnerships had formed up for mutual protection, maybe for comfort. Not for any logic concerning the destiny of the colony in years or decades or
generations. And certainly for nothing you’d recognise as love. Right now he didn’t feel like he needed any of that, and nor, it seemed, did Mardina. But Onizuka and Harry glared and
spat.
At least on this trek to the forest they would be able to get away from the camp, if only for a few hours. But as Onizuka snarled at Lemmy, and Lemmy cowered by Yuri’s side, Yuri saw that
they hadn’t been able to leave their flaws and rivalries behind.
As they neared the edge of the forest they came to a bank of stromatolites. They kept calling these bacterial-colony formations by that name, inaccurate as it might seem to a
biologist. These particular specimens were huge structures, much bigger than those near the Puddle – maybe four metres high, like tremendous tables with flat, flaring upper surfaces.
The ColU had taken samples from various stromatolites in the vicinity of the camp. They were all made of nothing but bugs, of course, layers of bugs and trapped dirt: Arduan bugs of course, like
Earth bugs but not identical according to the ColU, in dense, complex layers, joined together in structures that might themselves be millennia old. But the uppermost layers contained
photosynthesisers, bugs using the energy of Prox light to break down air and water to produce oxygen – a process similar to what had evolved on Earth, but a different chemistry under a
different light. The ColU said it thought the stromatolites were actually this planet’s dominant primary oxygen producers. The ColU was always curious, always speculating; it was its job, it
said once, to understand how this world worked, so it could be taken apart to become a human world, with the native life restricted to zones the humans didn’t need, maybe a few parks and
botanical gardens. In Yuri’s day, as he recalled while the ColU described all this, they had had tree museums on Earth.
They didn’t linger long in the stromatolite garden.
Beyond, Yuri led the way into the deeper forest. The darkness gathered quickly, until they were surrounded by the strange trees of Per Ardua. The trunks rose slim and smooth and tall, without
leaves or branches until they reached a canopy high in the air, where immense leaves like tipped plates blocked out the sky. The ground here was dry, compacted soil, covered by a shallow litter,
mostly of tremendous leaf fragments like dead water lilies. There was no movement, no sound at first save the ragged breathing of the human party. But Yuri thought he heard a rustle, high in the
canopy above.
Prox trees were different from Earth trees in most ways you could think of. True, your basic tree plan was the same, the roots, the trunk, the green leaves up top. But what the colonists called
‘wood’ self-evidently wasn’t wood at all; each trunk was more like an expanded version of the reed-like stems that grew in the Puddle. The saplings that grew at the southern
fringe of the forest particularly provided decent timbers for construction, long and straight and sturdy, and with few branches save near the very top. But they’d learned that you
couldn’t just throw a Prox log on the fire. You had to bleed it first, of a sticky, strong-smelling, purplish sap – ‘marrow’, they called it. The marrow itself was useful,
however. Harry Thorne had experimented with fixing stone blades to poles with it. Harry had once been a farmer, even if the land he tended had been just a couple of acres in a high-rise, and for a
man of densely urban twenty-second-century Earth he was good with his hands, Yuri thought.
A few hundred metres in they paused, shared water, took stock. Both Onizuka and Martha had crossbows to hand. The air was stained a deep green, deeper than any Earth green.
‘So,’ Onizuka said, ‘who knows anything about forests? Don’t ask me, I’m better at the oceans.’
‘Not me,’ Lemmy murmured. ‘And even in your time there were no forests left on Earth – right, Yuri? But I do know there’s a belt of this forest right around the
face of Per Ardua, where there’s dry land anyhow. It’s the same all the way to the substellar point. You get these circular belts of similar kinds of landscape and vegetation and stuff,
depending on the distance from the substellar point, the middle of the world’s face. Places that get the same amount of sunlight, see, get the same kind of growths. What you get is a planet
like an archery target. Out here, near the terminator – trees.’
Onizuka grinned. ‘An archery target, huh?’ He raised his loaded crossbow, pointed it at Lemmy’s face, and mimed pulling the trigger. ‘Click.’
‘Oh, you’re funny.’
Yuri said, ‘These “trees” look like stems to me, like the stems back in the Puddle. Just bigger.’
Martha rubbed a nearby smooth trunk. ‘So they do. I do know forests, a little. On Earth lots of different species have produced “trees”, palms and ferns for instance.
It’s a common form, if you have a situation where you need nutrients from the ground and have to compete for light from the sky. So it’s no surprise to see similar forms here. A
universal strategy.’
Onizuka sneered. ‘You’re an expert, right?’
She faced him calmly. ‘If you’d ever bothered to speak to me instead of staring at my chest the whole time, you’d know I once made my living out of forests. My grandfather,
probably back in your time, Yuri, was a researcher attached to one of the great logging corporations in the final days. He sent cameras in to capture images of the last rainforests and such before
they were scraped off the planet.’ She grinned. ‘Eco porn. Fleeing Stone Age-type inhabitants, the huge trees crashing down. My family packaged and repackaged the stuff for years; the
more remote it got in time the more exotic it seemed. A real money-spinner, for us. People cheer and place bets on who survives.’
‘Yet you ended up here, with us,’ Onizuka said.
Martha didn’t reply to that. On Per Ardua, and even back on the ship, Yuri had noticed, it was a peculiar kind of bad manners to poke into why and how your companion had ended up in the
sweep.
Instead, Martha stared up. ‘Look at that canopy. See how static it is? And every tree seems to have three big leaves, just three, radial symmetry, one, two, three. See? Every one of them
pitched perfectly up at the sun, which is never going to move. If the light condition isn’t going to change, if there are no seasons, I guess you may as well grow just a few huge leaves to
capture all the light. Hmm. Why not just
one
leaf per tree? For redundancy, I guess. There must be something that would chomp on a leaf, even high up there; you would need a spare or two
while a lost leaf grew back. Those leaves look like they have the usual dull Arduan green on the sun-facing side, paler on the shadow side, to conserve heat, I guess. Maximum efficiency of usage of
sunlight – and that’s why it’s so dark down here. Come on. I think it’s brighter that way—’ she pointed north ‘—maybe some kind of
clearing.’
She led the way, and the rest followed. The trees began to thin out, and Yuri started to see more open sky – free of cloud, but a deeper blue the further north you looked, towards, he
supposed, the terminator, and the lands of endless dark.
Something clattered through the canopy overhead. Yuri looked up, flinching. He had an impression of something big, fragile, a framework with vanes flapping and whirling. It was like the
‘kites’ he had seen over the lake, but much bigger. The kite ducked down towards them, maybe drawn by their movement.
Onizuka lifted his crossbow and shot off bolts, without hesitation, one, two. Onizuka had been practising with the weapon, with Harry Thorne and Martha.
The first shot missed, and went sailing up into the canopy. But the second ripped through the flyer’s structure. Yuri thought he heard a kind of screech as fragile vanes folded back. The
flyer, driven forward by its own momentum, smashed into a tree trunk and came spinning down towards the ground, tearing and clattering, to hit the litter on the deck with a surprisingly soft
impact.
Onizuka whooped and raised a fist. ‘Got you.’ He led the way, jogging through the leaf debris.
The fallen creature was a jumble of broken struts and ripped panels of a fine, translucent, brownish skin, like a crashed Wright Brothers aeroplane.
‘Wow,’ Lemmy said. ‘Its wingspan must have been three, four metres when it was in flight.’
‘But that’s the wrong word,’ Martha said. She knelt, pulled at a panel, unfolded it to revealed ripped skin. ‘ “Wingspan.” These weren’t wings.
They’re more like – what, vanes? They were rotating, like chopper blades.’
Prodding at the fallen creature, they pieced together its structure, or anyhow a best guess at it. There was a stubby cylindrical core body, itself not solid but a mass of rods and fibres. When
Yuri plucked a strut at random from the core carcass, it looked just like a stem, one of the reeds from the lake. There had been two sets of vanes, each a triple set – threefold symmetry,
like the great leaves of the trees – that had each been attached to the main body by a kind of ball-and-socket joint, lubricated by what looked like tree marrow.
Martha poked at the main body, working a finger in through a cage of stems. When she withdrew the finger it was sticky with marrow. ‘Yuck. I’m guessing that’s some kind of
stomach in there. There’s a mass of stems, and skin stuff, and marrow.’
‘Maybe it feeds on the big tree leaves,’ Lemmy said.
‘Maybe. Or on smaller critters.’ Martha shrugged, and glanced up into the canopy. ‘Who knows what’s up there?’
Another rustle, a scrape, this time coming at them along the ground. They stepped back from the flyer and pulled together, instinctively.
In the canopy shadow Yuri saw creatures moving, built like tripods, maybe a metre tall, each a clattering construct of stems and skin panels, like a toy of wood and canvas. They moved in whirls
like spinning skaters, a whole flock of them heading straight for the fallen flyer.
Straight for the human party, in fact.
Again Onizuka raised his crossbow.
Martha grabbed his arm. ‘You don’t need to kill everything we come across.’
‘The damn things are heading right at us.’
‘Then get out of their way.’ She pulled him aside, into the cover of the trees, and Yuri and Lemmy followed.
The tripods ignored the humans. Seven, eight, nine of them, they descended on the fallen flyer, and whirred across its body, this way and that, efficiently cutting it to pieces. Yuri saw fine
limbs – each multiply articulated, like a spacecraft manipulator arm – pluck at bits of the disintegrated carcass and tuck them into the mesh-like structures that were the cores of the
tripods’ own bodies. Yuri had seen beasts like these out on the plains and around the lake, but these were smaller, compact, faster-moving.
‘Messy business,’ Martha murmured. ‘Like butchering a carcass by running at it with chainsaws. Bits flying everywhere.’
‘Yeah, but look,’ Onizuka said, pointing.
From nowhere, it seemed, smaller creatures were appearing, some ground-based spinners like the larger scavengers, some flapping flyers like the downed canopy beast, though much smaller. They
were all put together from rods and sheets of webbing, as far as Yuri could see. They fell on the big corpse, a cloud of tiny workers processing the remains of the flyer in smaller and smaller
fragments.
‘They didn’t break off when they came running towards us,’ Lemmy said. ‘Maybe they don’t see us.’
Martha said, ‘We must look strange, smell strange – if they can smell at all. They don’t recognise us as a food source. And not as a threat either.’
‘Not yet,’ Onizuka said, hefting his crossbow. ‘Give them time. You know, I’ve got some experience of the deep ocean. No rich daddy for me, Martha.
I
made my
money from the reclamation trade, deep-diving for precious metals and such from the drowned cities of mainland Japan. I got a taste for the ocean . . . When you get down deep enough, you go beneath
the layers where light can reach and stuff grows, plankton and so forth. If you live deeper than that, down in the dark where nothing can grow, you spend your whole life waiting for stuff to come
sailing down from above. Scraps, whatever. And when something big comes down, a whale carcass or such, you get a feeding frenzy.’ Onizuka glanced up at the canopy, the huge static leaves.
‘Same principle here. Down on the ground you must get years of darkness, no light to grow. That’s why there’s no undergrowth to speak of, no saplings. Most times it’s just
like the deep ocean. And so you get these very efficient scavenger types, just waiting for their moment when something comes falling down from the light.’
The cluster of scavengers was breaking up now, those big waist-high spinning-tripod types departing first with a hum of whirled limbs, and then the cloud of flyers and the little runners
polishing off the scraps, before fleeing too. When they had done, Yuri saw, you’d never have known the fallen flyer had been here at all, save for some scuffed forest-floor debris, and a few
patches of hardening marrow.
The group pressed on.