Saigyô’s silence was his assent.
Dem Lia noticed Far Rider suddenly blinking as if someone had shut off blazing lights that had been shining in his eyes. The Ouster then looked at Dem Lia and nodded slightly. The strange gap of a mouth, sealed away from the world by the layer of forcefield and clear ectodermal skin plasma, twitched in what the Spectrum woman thought might be a smile.
It was the young Templar, Reta Kasteen, who had been speaking. “… so you see we passed through what was becoming the Worldweb and left human space about the time the Hegemony was establishing itself. We had departed the Centauri system some time after the original Hegira had ended. Periodically, our seedship would drop into real space—the Templars joined us from God’s Grove on our way out—so we had fatline news and occasional firsthand information of what the interstellar Worldweb society was becoming. We continued outbound.”
“Why so far?” asked Patek Georg.
The Chief Branchman answered, “Quite simply, the ship malfunctioned. It kept us in deep cryogenic fugue for centuries while its programming ignored potential systems for an orbital worldtree. Eventually, as the ship realized its mistake—twelve hundred of us had already died in fugue créches never designed for such a lengthy voyage—the ship panicked and began dropping out of Hawking space at every system, finding the usual assortment of stars that could not support our Templar-grown tree ring or that would have been deadly to Ousters. We know from the ship’s records that it almost settled us in a binary system consisting of a black hole that was gorging on its close red-giant neighbor.”
“The accretion disk would have been pretty to watch,” said Den Soa with a weak smile.
The Chief Branchman showed his own thin-lipped smile. “Yes, in the weeks or months we would have had before it killed us. Instead, working on the last of its reasoning power, the ship made one more jump and found the perfect solution—this double system, with the white-star heliosphere we Ousters could thrive in, and a tree ring already constructed.”
“How long ago was that?” asked Dem Lia.
“Twelve-hundred-and-thirty-some standard years,” broadcast Far Rider.
The Templar woman leaned forward and continued the story. “The first thing we discovered was that this forest ring had nothing to do with the biogenetics we had developed on God’s Grove to build our own beautiful, secret startrees. This DNA was so alien in its alignment and function that to tamper with it might have killed the entire forest ring.”
“You could have started your own forest ring growing in and around the alien one,” said Ces Ambre. “Or attempted a startree sphere as other Ousters have done.”
The True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen nodded. “We had just begun attempting that—and diversifying the protogene growth centers just a few hundred kilometers from where we had parked the seedship in the leaves and branches of the alien ring, when…” She paused as if searching for the right words.
“The Destroyer came,” broadcast Far Rider.
“The Destroyer being the ship we observe approaching your ring now?” asked Patek Georg.
“Same ship,” broadcast Far Rider. The two syllables seemed to have been spat out.
“Same monster from hell,” added the Chief Branchman.
“It destroyed your seedship,” said Dem Lia. So that was why the Ousters seemed to have no metal and why there was no Templar-grown forest ring braiding this alien one.
Far Rider shook his head. “It devoured the seedship, along with more than twenty-eight thousand kilometers of the tree ring itself—every leaf, fruit, oxygen pod, water tendril—even our protogene growth centers.”
“There were far fewer purely space-adapted Ousters in those days,” said Reta Kasteen. “The adapted ones attempted to save the others, but many thousands died on that first visit of the Destroyer… the Devourer… the Machine. We obviously have many names for it.”
“Ship from hell,” said the Chief Branchman, and Dem Lia realized that he was almost certainly speaking literally, as if a religion had grown up based upon hating this machine.
“How often does it come?” asked Den Soa.
“Every fifty-seven years,” said the Templar. “Exactly.”
“From the red giant system?” asked Den Soa.
“Yes,” broadcast Far Rider. “From the hell star.”
“If you know its trajectory,” said Dem Lia, “can’t you know far ahead of time the sections of your forest ring it will… devastate, devour? Couldn’t you just not colonize, or at the very least evacuate, those areas? After all, most of the tree ring has to be unpopulated… the ring’s surface area has to be equal to more than half a million Old Earths or Hyperions.”
Chief Branchman Keel Redt showed his thin smile again. “About now—some seven or eight standard days out—the Destroyer, for all its mass, not only completes its deceleration cycle, but carries out complicated maneuvers that will take it to some populated part of the ring. Always a populated area. A hundred and four years ago, its final trajectory took it to a massing of O2 pods where more than twenty million of our non-fully space-adapted Ousters had made their homes, complete with travel tubes, bridges, towers, city-sized platforms and artificially grown life-support pods that had been under slow construction for more than six hundred standard years.”
“All destroyed,” said True Voice of the Tree Reta Kasteen with sorrow in her voice. “Devoured. Harvested.”
“Was there much loss of life?” asked Dem Lia, her voice quiet.
Far Rider shook his head and broadcast, “Millions of fully space-adapted Ousters rallied to evacuate the oxygen breathers. Fewer than a hundred died.”
“Have you tried to communicate with the… machine?” asked Peter Delem Dem Tae.
“For centuries,” said Reta Kasteen, her voice shaking with emotion. “We’ve used radio, tightbeam, maser, the few holo transmitters we still have, Far Rider’s people have even used their wingfields—by the thousands—to flash messages in simple, mathematical code.”
The five Amoiete Spectrum Helix people waited.
“Nothing,” said the Chief Branchman in a flat voice. “It comes, it chooses its populated section of the ring, and it devours. We have never had a reply.”
“We believe that it is completely automated and very ancient,” said Reta Kasteen. “Perhaps millions of years old. Still operating on programming developed when the alien ring was built. It harvests these huge sections of the ring, limbs, branches, tubules with millions of gallons of tree-ring manufactured water… then returns to the red-star system and, after a pause, returns our way again.”
“We used to believe that there was a world left in that red-giant system,” broadcast Far Rider. “A planet which remains permanently hidden from us on the far side of that evil sun. A world which built this ring as its food source, probably before their G2 sun went giant, and which continues to harvest in spite of the misery it causes us. No longer. There is no such planet. We now believe that the Destroyer acts alone, out of ancient, blind programming, harvesting sections of the ring and destroying our settlements for no reason. Whatever or whoever lived in that red giant system has long since fled.”
Dem Lia wished that Kem Loi, their astronomer, was there. She knew that she was on the command deck watching. “We saw no planets during our approach to this binary system,” said the green-banded commander. “It seems highly unlikely that any world that could support life would have survived the transition of the G2 star to the red giant.”