Schild’s Ladder

A sixth. Here, the current was flowing down to them, making a U-turn. If they were going to trace it to its origin, they would have to travel an unknown distance back toward the honeycomb.

Tchicaya was torn. They didn’t know if this was an offshoot of a mighty river, the backbone to an entire xennobe ecology, or just a meaningless cobweb drifting through the Bright. They could end up chasing it back and forth, like a cat stalking a feather, until the Planck worms came raining down.

"If we don’t spot another xennobe before the next transition, that will be the last," he declared.

Mariama concurred, reluctantly.

They stood together, staring into the haze. Tchicaya could think of no other strategy, once they abandoned this thread, than plunging straight down, hoping at least to hit bottom soon, yielding a purely physical measure of how much territory they’d be sacrificing if they built the tar pit for the Planck worms.

And if they never hit bottom, if the Bright went on forever? Then there’d be nothing they could do, nothing they could save.

Mariama said, "That’s a sprite-shadow, isn’t it? It’s not just haze."

"Where?"

She pointed. Tchicaya could see a tiny gray distortion in the light. "If it’s another airflower, that doesn’t count."

The shadow grew, but the probes were still not reaching it. The object was much further away than they’d realized, and it was definitely not an airflower.

Tchicaya would have abandoned the vendek current to go after this new find, but the current itself was leading them straight to it. This, ultimately, was the source of the vendeks on which the airflowers had been feeding. And its sprite-shadow kept looming larger, while the probes remained oblivious to it.

Mariama said, "If this is a single organism, we’ve just gone from rabbits to whales. I thought the current must have come from necrotic decay, but this is so huge it wouldn’t need to be mortally wounded; it could urinate a river."

The flickering outline of the shadow was roughly circular. "I don’t think it’s one creature," Tchicaya said. "I think we’ve found an oasis in the desert."

The shadow now dominated the view completely, a sight as overwhelming as the border from Pachner, but its exact form remained elusive. "We have to get those probes to go faster," Mariama complained.

A tiny patch of color and detail appeared suddenly at the center of the object, spreading slowly through the grayness. The framing effect was confusing; Tchicaya found it harder than ever to interpret the probe image. Things that might have been xennobes were moving around on a roughly spherical surface; the scape labeled them as being hundreds of times larger than the rabbits, but they looked like mites crawling over an elephant. The scale of the structure was extraordinary; if an airflower was the size of a daisy, this was a floating mountain, an asteroid.

The window of detail grew, revealing thousands of xennobes streaming about below them — the alignment of the Sarumpaet's deck still made "down" point to the center of the far side, but it was impossible not to grant this minor planet precedence — and that was just the surface. Some xennobes were coming and going from the mouths of tunnels leading into hidden depths. As yet, the probes were spread too thinly to report on the new xennobes' anatomy in any detail, and like the others, their forms swayed wildly in the winds that wrapped around them, merging with their bodies. Yet some system at the core of each xennobe retained its integrity through all the changes sweeping over it, and the same organizational information was endlessly reencoded, endlessly preserved.

As the probe image spread out to encompass the entire colony, Tchicaya’s heart leaped. He struggled to temper his excitement. His intuition didn’t count for much here, and everything he was witnessing was constantly deforming, as if the whole vision was a reflection in liquid metal. He couldn’t even pin down the source of his conviction, the one regularity in all the busyness beneath them that struck him as the signature of artifice over nature. But all technology would be built from nature, here. Nothing entirely lifeless could endure.

He turned to Mariama. "This is not an oasis. It’s not a jungle. We’ve found the Signalers. This is their city."

Chapter 17

The Sarumpaet circumnavigated the xennobe colony, reconnoitering, apparently unnoticed. Tchicaya kept the density of the probes low, lest the rain of inquisitive devices cross the threshold of perception — or some more sensitive, artificial means of detection — and alarm the denizens. He had no urgent need to study these creatures' internal anatomy, and the details of the colony itself were overwhelming enough.