Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (36 page)

 
          
 
They climbed swiftly up the rough rise to a
large stand of the tallest trees Cley had ever seen. Long, fingerlike branches
reached far up into the air, hooking over at the very end. She felt exposed by
moving to higher ground, closer to the sky that spat death. From here she could
see distant banks of purple clouds that roiled with spokes of virulent light.
Filaments of orange arced down along long curves.

 
          
 
"Following the magnetic field of Earth,"
Seeker said when she pointed them out.
"Probing."

 
          
 
Cley saw why the Supras had sent no searching
birds. Far away quick darts of blue and orange appeared over the Library of
Life. In her mind she felt a dim sense of frenzied struggle.

 
          
 
"The talent," she said. Seeker
looked quizzically at her. "I can feel . . . emotion." She remembered
Seeker's remark,
You
have emotions, emotions possess
you. What must it be like to not feel those surges? Or did Seeker sense
something utterly different? "The Supras are fighting . . . worried . . .
afraid."

 
          
 
"The being above keeps them busy while it
searches."

 
          
 
They moved on quickly. Cley wanted to get over
the highest peak and work her way along the broad-shouldered mountains toward
where she had lived. She had the image of it all in her head from the flight
with
Alvin
and she felt a powerful urge to return to
the familiar.

 
          
 
When she said this Seeker replied flatly,
"They would seek you there in time."

 
          
 
"So? They'll look everywhere."

 
          
 
"True," Seeker said, and she thought
she had won a small point.

 
          
 
Seeker sniffed the wind and pointed with its
twitching nose. "Come this way."

 
          
 
"Why?" Her home grounds lay the
opposite way.

 
          
 
"You wished to find Ur-humans."

 
          
 
"My people?"

 
          
 
"Not yet."

 
          
 
"Damn it, I want my kind."

 
          
 
"This way
lies
your only hope of eventual community."

 
          
 
"Seeker, you know what I want," she
said plaintively.

 
          
 
"I know what you need."

 
          
 
She kicked at a rock, feeling frustrated,
confused, exhausted. "And what's that?"

 
          
 
"You need to come this way."

 
          
 
They moved at a steady trot. Cley had always
been a good runner, but Seeker got ahead without showing signs of effort. When
she caught up it had stopped beside a very large tree and was sniffing around
the roots. Seeker took its time, moving cautiously, and Cley knew enough by now
to let it have its way.

 
          
 
A large bush nearby gave off an aroma of
cooked meat, and Cley watched it uneasily. A small mudskipper rat with an
enlarged head came foraging by, smart enough to know that Cley and Seeker were
usually no threat to it. It caught the meat smell and slowed, tantalized. The
bush popped and spear seeds embedded in the rat. It yelped and scampered away.
Another victory for the plants; the rat would carry the seed, nurturing it in
return for its narcotic sap, until it died. Then a fresh bush would grow from
the rat's body.

 
          
 
She considered catching the rat for meat, and
not incidentally for the narcotic, but Seeker said, "Come."

 
          
 
Somehow it had opened the side of the tree.
This was no surprise to Cley, whose people sheltered in the many trees
bioteched for just such use. She entered and soon the bark closed upon them,
leaving only a wan phosphorescent glow from the walls to guide them. The tree
was hollow. There were vertical compartments connected by ramps and clamplike
growths all along the walls. Some creature had nearly filled the compartments
with large containers, grainy packages of rough cellulose.

 
          
 
"Storage," was all
Seeker
would say in answer to her questions. They climbed up
through ten compartments nearly filled with stacks of oblong, crusty
containers, until they came to a large vault, completely empty, with a wide
transparent wall. Cley thumped it and the heavy, waxy stuff gave with a soft
resistance. She watched the still trees outside, all stately cylinders pointing
up into a sky that flickered with traceries of quick luminescence.

 
          
 
This place might be safer; she let herself
relax slightly. She took out a knife and gouged the wall. A piece came off with
some work and tasted surprisingly good. She ate awhile and Seeker took some.
Patches on the walls, ceiling and floor were sticky, without apparent scheme.
The compartment smelled of resin and damp wood.

 
          
 
She chanced to glance out the big window as
she chewed and that was why she saw it coming.

 
          
 
Something like a stick poked down through high
clouds, swelling as it approached, so that she saw it was enormously long. Its
ribbed sinews were knobbed like the vertebrae of a huge spine. Groans and
splitting cracks boomed down so loudly that she could hear them here, inside.
Curving as it plunged, the great round stalk speared through the sky like an
accusing finger. And, as she watched, the very end of it curved further, like a
finger beckoning upward.

 
          
 
"Time to lie down," Seeker said
mildly.

 
          
 
A sonic boom slammed through the forest. She
hastily flattened herself on the resilient green floor of the compartment and
gazed up through the big window.

 
          
 
"It's falling on us!" she cried.

 
          
 
"Its feat is to forever fall and forever
recover."

 
          
 
"It'll smash these—"

 
          
 
"Lie still."

 
          
 
She realized that this was the thin, distant
movement she had seen on the horizon from
Alvin
's flyer. Graphite-dark cords wound across
the deep mahogany of the huge, trunklike thing. Fingers of ropy vine unfolded
from its tip as it plunged straight downward. The vines flung themselves toward
the treetops. Some snagged in the branches there.

 
          
 
A hard thump ran through their tree.

 
          
 
She just had time to see the thick vines
snatch at the branches of neighboring trees, grip, and tighten.

 
          
 
The broad nub seemed to hang in air, as if
contemplating the green skin of the planet below it and selecting what it
liked. It drifted eastward for one heartbeat.

 
          
 
Heavy acceleration pressed her into the soft
floor. They were yanked aloft. Popping strain flooded their compartment with
creaks and snaps and low groans.

 
          
 
Out the window she could see a nearby tree
speed ahead. Its roots had curled beneath it, dropping brown clods behind. In
another tree, branches sheared off^ where several thick vines had clutched
together; it tumbled away to crash into the forest below.

 
          
 
She could only lie mutely, struggling to
breathe, as a flock of tree trunks rose beside them, drawn to the great
beckoning finger that now retracted up into the sky with gathering speed. It
swept them eastward as trees lashed in air turbulence, as if shaking themselves
free of the constraints of dirt and gravity.

 
          
 
Against the steadily increasing tension the
ribbed and polished vines managed to retract. They drew their cargo trees into
a snug fitting at the base of the blunt, curving rod.

 
          
 
"What's . . . it . . ."

 
          
 
"Pinwheel," Seeker said. "The
center rides high in space, and it spins as it orbits. The ends rotate down
through the air and kiss the Earth."

 
          
 
Seeker's calm, melodious voice helped stave
off her rising panic. They were tilting as they rose. Cloud banks rushed at
them,
shrouded the nearby trunks in ghostly white—and
shredded away as they shot higher. She glimpsed the underside of the pinwheel
itself, where corded bunches of wiry strands held the vines in place.

 
          
 
"We spin against Earth's pull, but will
slip free."

 
          
 
Seeker's words gave her an image of an
enormous rod which slowly dipped down into the planet's air, one tip touching
the surface at the same moment that the other end was farthest out in space.
Such a vast thing would be far longer than the thickness of Earth's air itself,
a creation like a small, slender world unto itself.

 
          
 
Rolling bass wrenchings strummed through the
walls and floor. Her heart thudded painfully and wind whistled in her ears.

 
          
 
The strain of withstanding the steadily rising
acceleration warped the vines. They stretched and twisted but held the long,
tubular trees tight to the underside. She saw that the nub was festooned with
shrubs and brush. The Pinwheel stretched away into blue-black vistas as the air
thinned around them. The wind in their compartment wailed and she sucked in
air, fearing that there was a leak.

 
          
 
But Seeker patted her outstretched hand and she
glanced at the great beast. Its eyes were closed as though asleep. This
startled her and a long moment passed before she guessed that Seeker could have
done this before, that this was not some colossal accident they had blundered
into. As if in reply Seeker licked its lips, exposing black gums and pointed
yellow teeth.

 
          
 
Her ears popped. She looked outward again,
through the slow buffeting of tree trunks. "Upward" was now tilted
away from the darkening bowl of sky, but still along the chestnut-brown length
of the Pinwheel, as they rotated with it. Black shrubs dotted the great expanse
that dwindled away, gray laminations making the perspective even starker.
Cross-struts of cedar-red tied the long strips into an interlocking network
that twisted visibly in the howling gale that tore along it.

 
          
 
Once they smacked into the nearest tree and a
branch almost punched through the window, but their tree wrenched aside and the
impact slammed against the wall.

 
          
 
Her ears popped again and her breath came
raggedly. Along the great strips of lighter wood, walnut-colored edges rose.
They canted, sculpting the wind—and the roaring gale subsided,
the
twisting and wrenching lessened. Pops and creaks still
rang out but she felt a subtle loosening in the coupled structure.

 
          
 
The last thin haze of atmosphere faded into
star-sprinkled black. She felt that an invisible, implacable enemy sat on her
chest and would forever, talking to her in a language of wrenching low bass
notes. Cold, thin air stung her nostrils but there was enough if she labored to
fill her lungs.