Clarke, Arthur C - Fall of Night 02 (38 page)

 
          
 
"Trees walk, why not fly? We are guests
inside a flying tree."

 
          
 
"Ummm.
What's it eat
?"

 
          
 
"Some from air, some—" Seeker
gestured ahead, along their trajectory. They shot above and away from the
spinning, curved colossus. And Cley saw a thin haze now hanging against the
black of space, dimmer than stars but more plentiful. There was a halo around
the Earth, fireflies drawn to the planet's immense ripe glow. Beyond the
nightline the gossamer halo hung like a wreath above Earth's shadow.

 
          
 
One mote grew as they sped on. It swelled into
a complex structure of struts and half-swollen balloons. It had sinews like
knotty walnut. Fleshy vines webbed its intersections. Cley tried to imagine
Pinwheel digesting this oddity and decided she would have to see it to believe.

 
          
 
But this minor issue faded as she peered
ahead. Other trees like theirs lay fore and aft, some spinning slightly, others
tumbling.
But all were headed toward a thing that
reminded her of a pineapple, prickly with spikes and fur. Around this slowly
revolving thing a haze of pale motes clustered.

 
          
 
"All that . . .
alive?"

 
          
 
"In a way.
Are
robots alive?"

 
          
 
"No, of course—are those robots?"

 
          
 
"Not of metal,
no
.
But even robots can make copies of themselves."

 
          
 
Cley said with exasperation, "You know
what I mean when something's alive."

 
          
 
"I am deficient in that."

 
          
 
"Well, if you don't know, I can't tell
you," she said irritably.

 
          
 
"Good."

 
          
 
"What?"

 
          
 
"Talk is a trick for taking the mystery
out of the world."

 
          
 
Cley did not know what to say and decided to
let sleeping mysteries lie. Their tree convoy was approaching the fog-glow
swathing the pineapple.

 
          
 
Gravity imposes flat floors, straight walls,
rectangular
rigidities. Weightlessness allows the ample
symmetries of the cylinder and sphere. In the swarm of objects, large and
small, Cley saw an expressive freedom of effortless new geometries. Necessity
dictates form, and the myriad spokes and limbs that jutted from the many shells
and rough skins conformed to the demands of momentum.

 
          
 
She watched an orange sphere extend a thin
stalk into a nearby array of cylinders. It began to spin about the stalk. This
gave it stability so that the stalk punched surely through the thin walls of
its prey. Cley wondered how the sphere spun itself up, and suspected that
internal fluids had to counterrotate. But was this an attack? The odd array of
rubbery columns did not behave like a victim. Instead, it gathered around the
sphere. Slow stems embraced and pulses worked along their crusted brown
lengths. Cley wondered if she was watching an exchange, the cylinders throbbing
energetically to negotiate a biochemical transaction.

 
          
 
Their flotilla of trees cut through the
insectlike haze of life, passing near myriad forms that sometimes veered to
avoid them. Some, though, tried to catch them. These had angular shapes,
needle-nosed and surprisingly quick. But the trees still plunged on,
outstripping pursuit, directly into the barnacled pineapple.

 
          
 
But she saw now that only parts of the huge
thing seemed solid. There were large caps at the ends which looked firm enough,
but the main body revealed more and more detail as they approached. Sunlight
glinted from multifaceted specks until Cley realized that these were a
multitude of spindly growths projected out from a central axis. She could see
the axis buried deep in the profusion of stalks and webbing, like a bulbous
brown root.

 
          
 
She stopped thinking of it as a pineapple and
substituted "prickly pear." As they came in above the lime-green
crown at one end of the "pear" a wave passed across it. The sudden
flash made her blink and shield her eyes. Her iris corrected swiftly to let her
see through the glare. The wave had stopped neatly halfway across the cap, one
side still green, the other a chrome-bright sheen. The piercing shine reminded
her of how hard sunlight was, unfiltered by air.

 
          
 
"It swims," Seeker said.

 
          
 
"Where?"

 
          
 
"Or better to say, it paces its
cage."

 
          
 
"I . . ." Cley began,
then
remembered Seeker's remark about words robbing mystery.
She saw that the shiny half would reflect sunlight, giving the prickly pear a
small push from that side. As it rotated, the wave of color-change swept around
the dome, keeping the thrust always in the same direction.

 
          
 
"Hold to the wall," Seeker said.

 
          
 
"Who, what's—oh."

 
          
 
The spectacle had distracted her from their
approach. She had unconsciously expected the trees to slow. Now the fibrous
wealth of stalks sticking out from the axis grew alarmingly fast. They were
headed into a clotted region of interlaced strands.

 
          
 
In the absolute clarity of space she saw
smaller and smaller features, many not attached to the prickly pear at all, but
hovering like feasting insects. She realized only then the true scale of the
complexity they sped toward. The prickly pear was as large as a mountain. Their
tree was a matchstick plunging headlong into it.

 
          
 
The lead tree struck a broad tan web. It
struck this membrane and then rebounded—but did not bounce out. Instead, the
huge catcher's mitt damped the bounce into rippling waves. Then a second tree
struck near the web's edge, sending more circular waves racing away. A third, a
fourth—and then it was their turn.

 
          
 
Seeker said nothing. A sudden, sickening tug
reminded her of acceleration's liabilities,
then
reversed, sending her stomach aflutter. The lurching lasted a long moment and
then they were at rest. Out the window she could see other trees embed
themselves in the web, felt their impacts make the net bob erratically.

 
          
 
When the tossing had damped away she said
shakily, "Rough . . . landing."

 
          
 
"The price of passage.
The Pinwheel pays its momentum debt this way," Seeker said, detaching
itself from the stick-pad.

 
          
 
"Debt?
For what?"

 
          
 
"For the momentum it in turn receives
back, as it takes on passengers."

 
          
 
Cley blinked. "People go down in the
Pinwheel, too?"

 
          
 
"It runs both ways."

 
          
 
"Well, sure, but—" She had simply
not imagined that anyone would brave the descent through the atmosphere, ending
up hanging by the tail of the great space-tree as it hesitated, straining,
above the ground. How did they jump off? Cley felt herself getting overwhelmed
by complexities. She focused on the present. "Look,
who's
this momentum debt
paid to?''

 
          
 
"Our host."

 
          
 
"What is this?"

 
          
 
"A Jonah."

 
          
 
"What's that mean?"

 
          
 
"A truly ancient term.
Your friend Alvin could no doubt tell you its origin."

 
          
 
"He's not my friend—we're cousins, a
billion years removed." Cley smiled ironically, then frowned as she felt
long, slow pulses surge through the walls of their tree. "Say, what's a
Jonah do?"

 
          
 
"It desires to swallow us."

 
          
 
Creatures were already busy in the
compartments. Many-legged, scarcely more than anthologies of ebony sticks and
ropy muscle strung together by gray gristle, they poked and shoved the cargo
adroitly into long processions.

 
          
 
Though they were quick and able, Cley sensed
that these were in a true sense not single individuals; they no more had lives
of their own than did a cast-off cell marooned from her own skin.

 
          
 
She and Seeker followed the flow of cargo out
the main port, the entrance they had used in the forest only two hours before.
They floated out into a confusing melange of spiderlike workers, oblong
packages, and forking tubular passages that led away into green profusion.

 
          
 
Cley was surprised at how quickly she had
adjusted to the strangeness of zero gravity. Like many abilities which seemed
natural once they are learned, like the complex trick of walking itself,
weightlessness reflexes had been "hard-wired" into her kind. Had she
paused a moment to reflect, this would have been yet another reminder that she
could not possibly represent the planet-bound earliest humans.

 
          
 
But she did not reflect. She launched herself
through the moist air of the great shafts, rebounding with eager zest from the
rubbery walls. The spiders ignored her. Several jostled her in their mechanical
haste to carry away what appeared to be a kind of inverted tree. Its outside
was hard bark, forming a hollow, thick-walled container open at top and bottom.
Inside sprouted fine gray branches, meeting at the center in large, pendulous
blue fruit.

 
          
 
She hungrily reached for one, only to have a
spider slap her away with a vicious kick. Seeker, though, lazily picked two of
them and the spiders back-pedaled in air to avoid it. She wondered what musk or
gestures Seeker had used; the beast seemed scarcely awake, much less concerned.

 
          
 
They ate, juice hanging in droplets in the
humid air. Canyons of light beckoned in all directions. Cley tugged on a nearby
transparent tube as big as she was, through which an amber fluid gurgled. From
this anchorage she could orient herself in the confusing welter of brown
spokes, green foliage, gray shafts and knobby protrusions. Their tree-ship hung
in the embrace of filmy leaves. From the hard vacuum of space the tree had
apparently been propelled through a translucent passage which Cley could see,
already retracting back toward the catcher's mitt that had stopped them. Small
animals scampered along knotted cables and flaking vines, chirruping,
squealing, venting visible yellow farts. Everywhere was animation, a sense that
nothing dwelled too long
..

 
          
 
"Come," Seeker said. It cast off
smoothly and Cley followed down a wide-mouthed, olive-green tube. She was
surprised to find that she could see through its walls.