Schild’s Ladder

Tchicaya said, "I don’t know if I’m watching a wolf tearing open a lamb’s throat, or a hummingbird drinking nectar."

"It might even be sex," Mariama suggested.

"Urk. I’ve heard of dimorphism, but that would be ridiculous. Besides, what are the gametes they’re meant to be exchanging?"

"Who said anything about gametes? The mix of specialized vendeks inside the xennobes must control all their morphology. Animals share beneficial symbionts with each other, and pass them on to their young — but in this case, there’s nothing else to pass on. Instead of having a genome, your heritable traits are defined by a unique blend of gut flora."

When the larger xennobe moved away from the airflower to which it had attached itself, and the remnant disintegrated into random currents in the Bright, Tchicaya said, "Wolf and lamb it is — or maybe rabbit and lettuce. And don’t start reminding me about male spiders that die after mating; if there’s no genome and no gametes, why call one creature a sexual partner of another, when at most it’s really just a specialized dietary supplement?"

Mariama conceded the point, begrudgingly. "So do we follow the rabbit?" It had moved up along the column, outpacing the airflowers, apparently finicky about its next choice of meal.

Tchicaya glanced after it, then he looked down along the plume of airflowers vanishing into the haze. As much as anything, he wanted to know where the Bright ended. "Follow the food chain to the top of the pyramid? Or is that just naive?"

"There’s no energy here," Mariama mused, "but there might be a hierarchy of concentrations of the most useful vendeks. Maybe airflowers strain some valuable species from the winds, or make them for themselves, and everyone else steals them from each other."

"Or goes straight to the airflowers. The Signalers could be herbivores, not rabbit hunters."

"That’s true."

Tchicaya sent the ship in pursuit of the rabbit. When they finally caught it between meals, he unfurled the signaling device.

The rabbit froze in midflight. When the sequence was completed, it remained motionless.

Tchicaya waited hopefully for some kind of response. "Do you think we’ve frightened it?"

"It might just be wondering how to reply," Mariama suggested. "Some encounters must put you on the spot, even when you’re half-expecting them. Like your father, cornered by anachronauts."

"I hope it’s not trying to decide how to Mead us. But why would it need to lie, when it knows nothing about our expectations?"

"Maybe the airflowers are sentient, too," she joked, "and we caught it doing something that it senses we might not entirely approve of."

After fifteen minutes with no change, Mariama suggested repeating the sequence. Tchicaya started the banner flickering again.

The probes showed a series of topological changes spreading rapidly through the rabbit’s plumbing. The process was too fast to follow in detail, but it culminated in the release of a rich brew of vendeks from deep within the rabbit’s body. Most of the discharge flowed over the banner, but the portion that reached the Sarumpaet's hull worked its way all around the ship, blocking out probes and sprites alike. The last thing the scape portrayed was the rabbit fleeing into the Bright.

Tchicaya addressed the toolkit. "What’s happening? Is the hull intact?"

"It hasn’t been breached, but it’s not going to take us anywhere for a while. The foreign mixture has invaded a short distance, but it’s not aggressively replicating or advancing."

"Can’t you tweak the hull vendeks to break through?"

"I’m looking for ways to do that, but this mixture seems to have been optimized to make the problem as difficult as possible."

Mariama started laughing. "This is what you get for flashing your Rosetta stone at randomly chosen strangers. They glue you to the spot and run away."

"Do you really think that was more than a frightened animal?"

She shrugged. "Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was a shy cousin of the Signalers, out plucking fruit, who’ll run home and tell the rest of the clan to come and take a look? But you’re right; it was probably just a squid spraying ink in our faces."

They waited for the toolkit to find a way out. If the situation became desperate they could always try the superposition trick again, but the fact that they were hemmed in on all sides would complicate the maneuver: they’d have to leave part of the ship behind to clean up the failures of the part that escaped.

After almost two hours, the toolkit spoke. "We should be free soon."

Tchicaya was relieved. "You found vendeks for the hull that could invade through the glue?"

"No, but the weather is doing the job for us, from the outside. The glue is moderately stable, but it’s not taking any kind of action to remain impervious to changing conditions in the Bright."