Prox trees were different from Earth trees in most ways you could think of. True, your basic tree plan was the same, the roots, the trunk, the green leaves up top. But what the colonists called “wood” self-evidently wasn’t wood at all; each trunk was more like an expanded version of the reed-like stems that grew in the Puddle. The saplings that grew at the southern fringe of the forest particularly provided decent timbers for construction, long and straight and sturdy, and with few branches save near the very top. But they’d learned that you couldn’t just throw a Prox log on the fire. You had to bleed it first, of a sticky, strong-smelling, purplish sap—“marrow”, they called it. The marrow itself was useful, however. Harry Thorne had experimented with fixing stone blades to poles with it. Harry had once been a farmer, even if the land he tended had been just a couple of acres in a high-rise, and for a man of densely urban twenty-second-century Earth he was good with his hands, Yuri thought.
A few hundred metres in they paused, shared water, took stock. Both Onizuka and Martha had crossbows to hand. The air was stained a deep green, deeper than any Earth green.
“So,” Onizuka said, “who knows anything about forests? Don’t ask me, I’m better at the oceans.”
“Not me,” Lemmy murmured. “And even in your time there were no forests left on Earth—right, Yuri? But I do know there’s a belt of this forest right around the face of Per Ardua, where there’s dry land anyhow. It’s the same all the way to the substellar point. You get these circular belts of similar kinds of landscape and vegetation and stuff, depending on the distance from the substellar point, the middle of the world’s face. Places that get the same amount of sunlight, see, get the same kind of growths. What you get is a planet like an archery target. Out here, near the terminator—trees.”
Onizuka grinned. “An archery target, huh?” He raised his loaded crossbow, pointed it at Lemmy’s face, and mimed pulling the trigger. “Click.”
“Oh, you’re funny.”
Yuri said, “These ‘trees’ look like stems to me, like the stems back in the Puddle. Just bigger.”
Martha rubbed a nearby smooth trunk. “So they do. I do know forests, a little. On Earth lots of different species have produced ‘trees’, palms and ferns for instance. It’s a common form, if you have a situation where you need nutrients from the ground and have to compete for light from the sky. So it’s no surprise to see similar forms here. A universal strategy.”
Onizuka sneered. “You’re an expert, right?”
She faced him calmly. “If you’d ever bothered to speak to me instead of staring at my chest the whole time, you’d know I once made my living out of forests. My grandfather, probably back in your time, Yuri, was a researcher attached to one of the great logging corporations in the final days. He sent cameras in to capture images of the last rainforests and such before they were scraped off the planet.” She grinned. “Eco porn. Fleeing Stone Age-type inhabitants, the huge trees crashing down. My family packaged and repackaged the stuff for years; the more remote it got in time the more exotic it seemed. A real money-spinner, for us. People cheer and place bets on who survives.”
“Yet you ended up here, with us,” Onizuka said.
Martha didn’t reply to that. On Per Ardua, and even back on the ship, Yuri had noticed, it was a peculiar kind of bad manners to poke into why and how your companion had ended up in the sweep.
Instead, Martha stared up. “Look at that canopy. See how static it is? And every tree seems to have three big leaves, just three, radial symmetry, one, two, three. See? Every one of them pitched perfectly up at the sun, which is never going to move. If the light condition isn’t going to change, if there are no seasons, I guess you may as well grow just a few huge leaves to capture all the light. Hmm. Why not just one leaf per tree? For redundancy, I guess. There must be something that would chomp on a leaf, even high up there; you would need a spare or two while a lost leaf grew back. Those leaves look like they have the usual dull Arduan green on the sun-facing side, paler on the shadow side, to conserve heat, I guess. Maximum efficiency of usage of sunlight—and that’s why it’s so dark down here. Come on. I think it’s brighter that way—” she pointed north “—maybe some kind of clearing.”
She led the way, and the rest followed. The trees began to thin out, and Yuri started to see more open sky—free of cloud, but a deeper blue the further north you looked, towards, he supposed, the terminator, and the lands of endless dark.
Something clattered through the canopy overhead. Yuri looked up, flinching. He had an impression of something big, fragile, a framework with vanes flapping and whirling. It was like the “kites” he had seen over the lake, but much bigger. The kite ducked down towards them, maybe drawn by their movement.
Onizuka lifted his crossbow and shot off bolts, without hesitation, one, two. Onizuka had been practising with the weapon, with Harry Thorne and Martha.
The first shot missed, and went sailing up into the canopy. But the second ripped through the flyer’s structure. Yuri thought he heard a kind of screech as fragile vanes folded back. The flyer, driven forward by its own momentum, smashed into a tree trunk and came spinning down towards the ground, tearing and clattering, to hit the litter on the deck with a surprisingly soft impact.
Onizuka whooped and raised a fist. “Got you.” He led the way, jogging through the leaf debris.
The fallen creature was a jumble of broken struts and ripped panels of a fine, translucent, brownish skin, like a crashed Wright Brothers aeroplane.
“Wow,” Lemmy said. “Its wingspan must have been three, four metres when it was in flight.”
“But that’s the wrong word,” Martha said. She knelt, pulled at a panel, unfolded it to revealed ripped skin. “ ‘Wingspan.’ These weren’t wings. They’re more like—what, vanes? They were rotating, like chopper blades.”
Prodding at the fallen creature, they pieced together its structure, or anyhow a best guess at it. There was a stubby cylindrical core body, itself not solid but a mass of rods and fibres. When Yuri plucked a strut at random from the core carcass, it looked just like a stem, one of the reeds from the lake. There had been two sets of vanes, each a triple set—threefold symmetry, like the great leaves of the trees—that had each been attached to the main body by a kind of ball-and-socket joint, lubricated by what looked like tree marrow.
Martha poked at the main body, working a finger in through a cage of stems. When she withdrew the finger it was sticky with marrow. “Yuck. I’m guessing that’s some kind of stomach in there. There’s a mass of stems, and skin stuff, and marrow.”
“Maybe it feeds on the big tree leaves,” Lemmy said.
“Maybe. Or on smaller critters.” Martha shrugged, and glanced up into the canopy. “Who knows what’s up there?”
Another rustle, a scrape, this time coming at them along the ground. They stepped back from the flyer and pulled together, instinctively.
In the canopy shadow Yuri saw creatures moving, built like tripods, maybe a metre tall, each a clattering construct of stems and skin panels, like a toy of wood and canvas. They moved in whirls like spinning skaters, a whole flock of them heading straight for the fallen flyer.
Straight for the human party, in fact.
Again Onizuka raised his crossbow.
Martha grabbed his arm. “You don’t need to kill everything we come across.”