Darkness totally obscured the shoreline for all but Cousin Bat, who reported that he couldn’t see anything they hadn’t seen by day.
“Well, maybe something,” Bat corrected. “I can’t be sure at this distance, though. Looks like tiny, little, blinking lights, on and off, on and off, all over the forest—moving around, too, but slowly.”
Lightning bugs, Brazil thought. Was he the only person from their little corner of the galaxy who could remember lightning bugs?
“Well, go on in, then,” Brazil told the bat after a while, “but be careful. Looks peaceful, but the place has a really spooky reputation, and except for the fact that my mind keeps insisting that the life form there is insects, I can’t think of anything else to tell you. Just watch out for insects, no matter how small or insignificant—they might be somebody we’d rather make friends with.”
“All right,” Bat responded calmly. “Insects are a normal part of my diet, but I won’t touch them if I can help it. Just a quick survey, then I’ll be back.”
They agreed and Bat took off into the darkness.
When the sun came up the next morning, Cousin Bat still had not returned.
JUST OVER THE NATION—SLELCRON BORDER—MORNING
The Rel stopped just ahead as the air suddenly cleared and they walked into bright sunshine.
“You may all remove your breathing apparatuses and discard them,” it told them. “The air is now quite safe for all of you.”
Skander reached up and took off her mask, but stowed it in the pack case. “I’ll keep mine, and I think you others should, too,” the Umiau cautioned. “I have no idea what the interior is like, but it’s possible we may need the couple hours of air left in these tanks. If the mechanism is self-operating, it may not exist in any atmosphere.”
“I am well aware of that, Doctor,” The Rel replied. “I, too, can not exist in a vacuum—The Diviner requires argon and neon, and I require xenon and krypton, which, thankfully, have been present in the quantities we need in all of the hexes so far. We had weeks to prepare for this expedition, you know, and I fully expected us ultimately to have to face a vacuum—in which those little respirators will do us no good whatsoever. The packs contain compressed pressure suits designed for each of us.”
“Then why didn’t we use them in that hellhole we just went through?” Hain grumbled, outraged. “That stuff burned!”
“That was a hex of sharp edges and abrasives where the suits might have suffered premature damage,” The Rel replied. “It was a discomfort, no more. I thought it best not to take any risks with pressurized equipment until we have to.”
Hain grumbled and cursed, and Skander wasn’t much better—she was drying out rapidly and itched terribly. Only Vardia was now perfectly comfortable—the sun was very strong, the sky was blue and cloudless, and she even somehow sensed the richness of the soil.
“What is this place, anyway?” Skander asked. “Any chance of a shady stream where I can wet down?”
“You’ll survive,” The Rel responded. “We will alleviate your discomfort as soon as we can. Yes, there are almost certainly streams, lakes, and ponds here. When I find one shallow enough and slow enough that it will not be your avenue away from us, you will get your wish.”
The place was thinly forested, but had tremendous growth of bushes and vines, and giant flowers—millions of flowers, as far as the eye could see, rising on stalks from one to three meters high, bright orange centers surrounded by eighteen perfectly shaped white petals.
Huge buzzing insects went from flower to flower, but the actions were individualistic, not as they would move in a swarm. Each was about fifty centimeters long, give or take, and very furry; and though their basic color was black, they had stripes of orange and yellow on their hind sections.
“How beautiful,” Vardia said.
“Damned noisy, if you ask me,” Skander yelled, noting the tremendous hum the insects’ wings made as they moved.
“Are the insects the life form?” Hain asked. The Rel had to move back close to the huge beetle to be heard.
“No,” the Northerner replied. “As I understand it, it is some sort of symbiosis. The flowers are. Their seeds are buried by the insects, and if all goes well the braincase develops out of the seed. Then it sprouts the stalk and finally forms a flower.”
“Then maybe I can eat a few of the buzzing bastards,” Hain said eagerly.
“No!” The Rel replied quickly. “Not yet! The flowers drop seeds, so they do not reproduce by pollination. The bees bury the seeds, but little else—yet they are obviously gaining their food from the center of the flowers. See how one lands there, and sticks its proboscis into the orange center? If the flowers feed them, they must do something for the flower.”
“They can’t uproot,” Vardlia said sympathetically. “What’s the use of having a brain if you can’t see, hear, feel, or move? What kind of a dominant species is that?”
The ultimate Comworld, Skander thought sarcastically, but said aloud, “I think that’s what the insects do. If you keep watching one long enough, it goes to one other flower, then returns to the original. It might go to dozens of flowers, but it returns between trips to a particular one.”
Vardia noticed a slight lump in the grass just ahead of them. Curiously she went over to it and carefully smoothed the dirt away.
“Look!” she called excitedly, and they all came to see. “It’s a seed! And see! An egg of some kind attached to the outside! Each insect attaches an egg to each seed before burying it! It’s grown attached! See where the seed case is growing over the egg, secreting that film?”
Skander almost fell out of her saddle peering over Hain’s hard shell to see, but the glance she got told the story.
“Of course!” the scientist exclaimed. “Amazing!”
“What?” they all asked at once.
“That’s how they communicate—how they get around, don’t you see? The insect’s like a robot with a programmable brain. They grow up together—I’ll bet the insect hatches fully formed and instinctively able to fly when the flower opens. Whatever it sees, hears, touches, it communicates to the flower when it returns. I’ll bet after a while they can send the creatures with messages, talk to each other. And every time the insect gets to another flower, the old hands give information for it to take back. The creatures live, but they live their lives secondhand, by recording, as it were.”
“Sounds logical,” The Rel admitted. “Hain, I would suggest you eat anything but those flowers and the black, striped insects. You could get huge numbers of them, we all could, but if we upset them we could face a programmed army of millions of the things. I want to be peaceful.”
“All right,” Hain agreed grumpily. “But if there’s nothing else to eat, the hell with them.”
At that moment one of the huge insects flew right into their midst and started carefully but quickly re-burying the exposed seed and egg. Satisfied, it flew off to a nearby flower and buried its head in the flower’s center. They watched it carefully, both for intent and out of curiosity. Finally it seemed satisfied and backed out, flying over to them and hovering menacingly in front of them, darting from one to the other. They stayed still, but Hain’s antennae radiated, “If that thing makes one wrong move, I’ll eat it regardless.”
Finally the creature got to Vardia, flew all around her, then suddenly jumped on her head, and before she could make a move it pushed its sharp, mosquito-like proboscis into the top of her head just under the leafy growth. They were all too stunned to move for several seconds. Suddenly Hain said, “I’ll zap it.”