I imagined myself also as a spore floating in the reaches of interstellar space, drifting for millions of years, awaiting the moment of coincidence which would deliver me into a place where life could thrive—into the vaporous maw of a gas giant, or the great hoop of warm cloud surrounding a condensing sun. I imagined myself as a tight-wound thread of nucleic acid, unraveling into a world pregnant with possibility, doubling and doubling and doubling to spin raw organic matter into the stuff of life, bound into organisms which could not only reproduce themselves, but which also carried wrapped in their quiet DNA the apparatus of future evolution: the templates of a million different forms, a million different creatures whose interactions would be the seed of that intricate building process which led inexorably to the complexity of mind, the humanity of man, and the creativity of whatever being it was who was quiet in man himself—in all the millions or billions of humanoid species which the spinning thread of universal life had woven on its planetary looms.
I imagined myself as both the whole and a tiny part of the thread manipulated by the three grey Fates, daughters of Night and sisters of the Seasons. I could catch no glimpse of the Fates themselves, but remembered dimly that in one representation they were one and the same with the Keres, who carried the souls of the dead to Hades, and wore therefore the selfsame faces as the valkyries who had taken possession of my soul. I was sensible of the fashion in which that thread spilled eternally into the darkness which was the universe, woven not into a single pattern but an infinite series of patterns, each one different in detail and yet serving the same aesthetic end.
Finally, I imagined myself as an embryo, floating in an amniotic sac, shaped and formed while I grew by an unfolding plan, sustained by a placenta which I would soon no longer need, waiting for the renewal of sense and sensation, of life of my own… waiting for birth, or rebirth, or a place in the vast unfolding chain of being in which birth and rebirth, duplication and metamorphosis, death and putrefaction, were all mere marks of punctuation in the sentence of existence.
All of that, I knew, belonged to the realm of the possible, the realm of the real…
But I knew, somehow, that it would be denied to me.
I had been shaped for a different purpose. I had not been made ready for immortality, for life in the world of the gods. I might have become divine, but instead I had been prepared for another destiny, another mission. I was still an instrument, a weapon of war. I was helpless in the hands of those who sought to use me.
Knowing that, I realised how easy it must be for men to hate their gods, and how wise it might be not to trust them.
35
The flying spider, with Clio hooked into its nervous system like a possessive demon, returned with 673-Nisreen within half an hour. He was badly shaken, and still suffering from his broken arm, but once he was free of his swaddling-clothes I helped rub his ankles to restore the circulation. He had no weapon, so we remained defenceless until Clio and her assistant brought Susarma Lear down, but nothing emerged to threaten us. The forest floor seemed to offer adequate sanctuary from the horrors that haunted the treetops.
Clio put the flying spider to sleep before disengaging herself, leaving the monstrous thing laid out across the root-ridges, legs and wings sprawled in all directions. I had never seen such an ungainly creature, nor an uglier one, and I was glad when we hurried off, leaving it to the mercy of any scavengers or predators which cared to risk approaching it while it was too dazed to resume the normal course of its life. I rather hoped that it would survive—it had played a vital role in saving us from a particularly nasty predicament, even if it hadn’t been quite itself while doing so. Who was I to minimise the efforts of a helpless instrument, drafted into a conflict far beyond the scope of its own understanding?
From her temporary vantage point high up in the trees Susarma Lear had seen many small lights produced by living creatures, but down on the surface of the starshell it was much gloomier, and we had only our helmet-lights to show us the way. I had not the slightest idea which way we ought to go, but the magic box still had matters well in hand. She climbed up on my shoulders, but refrained from running her neuronal feelers through my suit and into the back of my skull. Instead she began to send electronic signals over the radio link that we used for voice contact. She couldn’t manage a voice of her own but she could understand our speech, and she could answer questions on a buzz-once-for-yes-twice-for-no basis. It didn’t take long to work out a rudimentary system of communication, and to figure out which way she wanted us to go.
“How far is it?” I asked. “An hour?”
No.
“Two hours?”
Yes.
It wasn’t much of a conversation, but the essentials were there.
In anything like Earth-normal gravity the journey would have been very difficult, because the ground was far from flat—the cracks in the carpet made by the root-ridges were anything up to five metres deep and ten across. As things were, we couldn’t have weighed much more than a tenth of our Earth weight, and we found that we could hurdle the cracks with consummate ease, and could have turned somersaults if we’d wanted to. But we had to keep a wary eye on the trees. Their lowest branches were high above our heads, but there were things moving on the trunks, and on three occasions great winged shadows fluttered down towards us, presumably intent on investigating our nutritious potential. Susarma was always ready with her needier in case the situation became desperate, but we obviously didn’t seem appetising enough and the shadows passed us by. There were creepy-crawlies in the cracks between the root-ridges, too, but they kept their heads well down and didn’t bother us at all.
“These roots don’t just overlap,” I said to Nisreen. “They’re all one system. There’s only one organism here, and all the trees are just branches. The starshell is bedrock to a single mammoth plant.”
I didn’t mention Yggdrasil, the mythical world-ash of which I’d dreamed. The name wouldn’t have meant anything to a Tetron—or to Susarma, who’d had a more practical education.
673-Nisreen agreed that the plant was remarkable. From a Tetron, that was a genuine concession. I think he might have entered into the spirit of the thing if his arm hadn’t been troubling him so much. I felt fine again, but he hadn’t gone through the Isthomi’s bodily tuning-up process, and he was conspicuously less than superhuman. Bioscientist or not, a discussion of the wonders of the local ecology simply didn’t warrant a place on his immediate personal agenda. I was left to marvel privately at the multitudinous scions of the single starshell-hugging tree. No doubt there would have been far more to marvel at had the light been better, but the gloom put me in mind of my expeditions into the cold levels in the quiet days before Saul Lyndrach, Myrlin, and Susarma Lear had so rudely interrupted the pattern of my life.
The journey took less than two hours—Clio had underestimated the ground that we could cover in the low-gee conditions. Our destination, it transpired, was a kind of tower built beside one of the spokes which connected the starshell to the outer part of the macroworld. The tower was built in the form of a tall four-sided pyramid with a few square-sectioned extrusions and a hemispherical dome on top. The spoke that vanished into the canopy above it was oval in section, about four metres thick on the long diameter. The dome on top of the building looked as though it ought to be transparent, but there was no light inside it now; the entire edifice was silent and dark.