The highway was heading directly for the base of a low hill where a circle of warm pink light was shining at them. Mark felt the slight tingle of a pressure membrane as the bus passed through. Then he, Liz, and the kids were pressed against the window, anxious to see the new world.
They’d emerged high up in some mountains, giving them a view out over a flat plain that must have been hundreds of kilometers wide. It had strange yellow rock outcrops, and a jagged volcanic canyon running away diagonally from the mountains. The ground was completely bare, with a thin covering of gray-brown sand scattered over dark rock. Right away on the far horizon were some rumpled dark specks that might have been more mountains; the planet’s lavender-shaded sky made it difficult to tell.
They were on a broad ring road that curved around the human settlement, whose clean new buildings stood out against the mottled brown landscape like silver warts. The town had an outer band of factories, similar to those that Mark had worked in back in Biewn, several condo-style accommodation blocks, and five sprawling housing estates. Construction sites made up a good third of the area, swarming with bots. A wormhole generator and four modern fusion stations dominated the skyline opposite the gateway back to Cressat.
Mark couldn’t see any vegetation at all on the ground alongside the ring road; the land was a desert. Then he looked again at the topaz patches daubed on the plain below. At first he’d assumed they were unusual rock formations. Each one was circular—perfectly circular, now that he was paying attention. They had steep radial undulations, like the folds in an origami flower. His retinal inserts zoomed in, allowing his e-butler to do some calculations. They measured over twenty-four kilometers wide. A triple spike rose out of the center of each one, reaching a kilometer into the air.
“What the hell are those?” he asked.
“We call them the gigalife,” Giselle said. “This planet is covered in the groundplants. They come in many colors, but they all grow to about this size. I’ve seen bigger ones in the tropical zones. And there’s a waterplant variety which floats on the sea, though they are made up from a mesh of tendrils rather than the single sheets you can see here. There’s nothing else alive on this world.”
“Nothing?” Liz queried. “That’s an unusual evolutionary route.”
“Told you this would be right up your street,” Giselle said with gratification. “The gigalife has nothing to do with evolution. I wasn’t joking when I said there was nothing else here. We haven’t found any bacteriological or microbial traces other than the ones we brought with us. This planet was technoformed with an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and freshwater oceans specifically to provide a place for them to grow. Up until about twenty thousand years ago it was just a lump of inert rock naked to space. Someone dumped the atmosphere and oceanic water here, presumably through gigantic wormholes; we found evidence of a local gas giant’s moons being strata mined for its crustal ice.”
“Do you know who did it?”
“No. We named them the Planters, because the only thing they left behind was the gigalife. Presumably they are some kind of artwork, though we can’t be sure of that, either. It’s the lead theory because we haven’t found a practical application for them, and the Dynasty has been researching them for over a century now.”
“Why?” Liz asked. “This is a fabulous discovery. They are the most extraordinary organisms I’ve ever seen. Why not share it with the Commonwealth?”
“Commercial application. Gigalife isn’t quite genuine biological life. Whoever produced them has overcome Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; there is some kind of nanonic fabrication system operating inside the cells. Look at those central spires. They’re made up from a conical mast of super-strength carbon strands which the cells extrude. The leaf-sheet is simply draped over it. Gigalife is a fusion of ordinary biological processes and molecular mechanics, which we’ve so far been completely unable to duplicate. The implication if we can crack the nanonic properties is incalculable. We’d get everything from true Von Neumannism to bodies which can self-repair. Human immortality would become integral rather than dependent on the crudity of today’s rejuvenation techniques.”
Liz wrinkled her nose in disapproval. “How long do the groundplants take to grow?”
“We’re not sure. The current structures are about five thousand years old, and just maintain themselves. We’ve never seen one in its growth stage. Several are decaying faster than their regeneration process can cope with. Again, we don’t know if they’re actually dying, or if they’re in a cycle. They could be like terrestrial bulbs and simply recharge their kernels for the next time around.”
“You mean they don’t produce seeds?”
“Who knows? They have a kernel which is the size of a twenty-story skyscraper. Best guess is that they were manufactured and placed in position by the Planters. If they were produced as seeds, how would they ever spread? They’d either need wheels or rockets.”
“Good point,” Liz admitted.
“Can you eat them?” Barry piped up.
“No. We haven’t found one with proteins that a human can consume. Of course, we haven’t sampled more than a tiny percentage so far. We use noninvasive investigatory techniques, which is why our progress is slower than some in the Dynasty would like. But Nigel and Ozzie both agreed we didn’t want the Planters to return and find we’d damaged anything. Any species possessing this kind of knowledge base is best left unannoyed.”
“You’re very knowledgeable about this,” Liz said.
“I used to be director of the gigalife research office.”
“Ah.”
Giselle gave Mark a taunting smile. “Here comes the good bit. Look out over there. Up in the sky. The first one will be rising into view any moment now.” She pointed over the plain to the west.
Mark didn’t like the tone—it was too smug—but he looked anyway. He thought he would be seeing a starship assembly platform, which he was actually looking forward to. The prospect of working in orbit was one that fired him.
It wasn’t an assembly platform. Mark watched in utter disbelief as a moon slid up over the horizon. It moved fast, and it was huge. “That’s not possible,” he whispered. All the kids in the bus were shrieking and pointing with excitement.
The moon was a stippled magenta globe, with a profusion of slender jet-black creases snaking across its surface. It was several times the size of Earth’s moon. Too big, Mark knew instinctively: anything that big that close would produce tidal forces that would rip continents apart and haul a permanent tsunami around the globe in its wake. This wasn’t even disturbing the few wispy high-altitude clouds. Then he began to understand its texture. The multitude of black creases were actually fissures, walled by the same magenta material that colored the surface. It was only in the deeps where the sunlight couldn’t reach that they actually turned black. The moon wasn’t big, just in a low orbit, neither was it solid; it was a gigantic spherical ruff, sheets of thin purple fabric crumpled up against each other.
“Oh, no,” Mark said. He looked from the purple moon down to the topaz groundplant gigalife, then back again. “No way.”
“Yes,” Giselle said. “The third variety of gigalife, the spaceflower. The Planters put fifteen asteroids into a two-thousand-kilometer orbit, and dropped a kernel on each one. They don’t mass more than about a hundred million tons each. It’ll be interesting to see what happens when the kernel runs out of raw material to convert. Some of us think that will be when the Planters come back.”
“They sculpted moons,” Mark said in astonishment.
“Grew them,” Giselle corrected. “Essentially we have a planet which has giant cabbages for moons. Who said aliens don’t have a sense of humor?”
***
As soon as the committee room doors opened, Justine rushed out. Surprised expressions followed her. It wasn’t quite seemly for a senator to run.