"Is that unusual?"
"Fission power," Lindsay said. "It must have sunk with an
atomic pile on board." Common decency forbade him to mention the possibility of atomic weapons.
Vera said, "My instruments show dissolved organics. Creatures
are huddling up around the pile for warmth." She tore at an
ancient bulkhead with the pressure-toughened arms of the
drone. The corroded alloy burst easily, gushing rust. "Should I
go after it?"
"No," Lindsay said. "I want the primeval."
She returned the drone to its hold. They sputtered onward.
Time passed; terrain scrolled by with a slowness he would have
once found dreadful. Lindsay found himself thinking again of
Czarina-Kluster. Sometimes it troubled him that the despair, the
suffering there, meant so little to him. C-K was dying, its elegance dissolving into squalor, its delicate, sophisticated balance
ripped apart, pieces flung like seeds throughout the Schismatrix.
Was it evil of him to accept the flower's death, in hope of seeds?
He could not think it was. Human time meant nothing to him
any longer. He wanted only for his will to leave its mark, to cast
its light down those long eons, in a world awakened, a planet
brought to irrevocable life. And then . . . then he could let go.
"Here," Pilot said.
They had found it. The craft descended.
Life rose all around them: a jungle in defiance of the sun. In
the robot's lights the steep, abrasive valley walls flushed in a
vivid panoply of color: scarlet, chalk-white, sulfur-gold,
obsidian. Like stands of bamboo, tubeworms swayed on the
hillsides, taller than a man. The rocks were thick with clams,
their white shells yawning to show flesh as red as blood. Purple
sponges pulsed, abyssal corals spread black branching thickets,
their thin arms jeweled with polyps.
The water of life gushed from the depths of the valley. Chimneys slimed with metal oxides spewed hot clouds of energized
sulfur. The sea floor boiled, wobbling bubbles of steam glinting
through a haze of bacteria. The bacteria were central. They were
the food chain's fundamental link. Through chemosynthesis,
they drew energy from the sulfur itself, scorning the sun to
thrive on the heat of the Earth.
Within the warmth and darkness, the valley seethed with life.
The rock itself seemed to live, festooned with porous knobs and
slimed crevasses, red-black tubes of cold lava-stone coiling like
snakes, phallic chimneys of precipitated minerals gleaming
copper-green with verdigris. Pale crabs with legs as long as a
man's arm kicked daintily across the slopes. Jet-black abyssal
fish, grown fat on unexpected bounty, moved with slick langour
through the clustered stalks of the tubeworms. Bright yellow
jellies, like severed flowerheads, floated in thick eddies of bacterial soup.
"Everything," Lindsay breathed. "I want it all."
Vera pulled away her eyephones; her eyes were flooded with
tears. She slumped back in the seat, shaking. "I can't see," she
said, her voice hoarse. She handed him the control box. "Please
... it should be yours, Abelard."
Lindsay strapped on the phones, slipped his fingers into the
control slots. Suddenly he was amid it all, the scanners turning
with the movements of his head. He extended the sampling
arms, extruding the delicate clockwork of the genetics needles.
He advanced on the nearest stand of tubeworms. Above the
serried white columns of their wrist-thick trunks, their foliage
was rank upon waving rank of arm-long feathered red fronds,
sweeping with feminine elegance, combing life from the water.
Their white stems clustered with sheltered creatures: barnacles,
tiny crabs, fringed worms in sea-green and electric blue, round
comb jellies glinting in faint pastels.
A predator emerged from the jungle, flowing sinously around
the trunks: a jet-black abyssal fish, leg-sized and flattened like
an eel, its sides studded with serried dots of phosphorescence. It
approached fearlessly, fascinated by the light. Gills pulsed be-
hind its huge-eyed head and it opened a pale, glowing mouth
bristling with fangs. "So," Lindsay addressed it. "You were
pressed past the limits, forced into the abyss where nothing
grows. But see what you've found. The fat of the system, sundog.
Welcome to Paradise." As he spoke he moved the arm toward
it; the long needle leaped out, touched it, and withdrew. The
fish glowed out in sudden gold and green and flashed away.
He moved to the forest, touching everything he could see,
sampling bacteria with gentle suction fillers. In half an hour he
had filled all his sample capsules and turned back to the ship
for more.
Then he saw something detach itself from the hull of the ship.
At first he thought it a trick of the light, a ripple of pure
reflection. Then he saw it moving toward him, wobbling, flutter-
ing, shapeless, and formless, a jellied mirror, fluid in a silver
bag. He heard Vera cry out.
He wrenched his hands from the controls and tore away the
eyephones. She was bent over the videoboard, staring. "The
Presence! You see it? The Presence!"
It was swimming, with an amoebalike rippling and stretching,
deeper into the grove. Lindsay quickly jammed on the
eyephones and took up the controls, following it with the robot's lights. Its formless surface threw washes of reflected brilliance over the clams and coral. Lindsay said, "You see it, Pilot?"
Pilot turned the spacecraft to follow it with tracking systems.
"I see something. ... It reflects in every wavelength. What a
strange creature. Take a sample of it, Lindsay."
"It's not native. It came with us. I saw it attached to the hull."
"To the hull? It survived raw space? And entry heat? And the
pressure of this water? It can't be."
"No?"
"No," the Lobster said. "Because if it was real, I couldn't bear
not to be it."
"It's showing itself," Vera exulted. "Because of where we are!
You see? You see?" She laughed. "It's dancing!"
The thing floated smoothly above one of the smoking chimneys, flattening itself to bathe in the searing updraft of unthinkable pressure and heat. Hot bubbles seethed beneath it, sliding with frictionless ease off its mirrored undersurface. As they
watched, it drew itself together into a rippling globe. Then,
liquescing with sudden speed, it poured itself through a thumb-
sized crevice into the core of the heat vent. It vanished at once.
"I didn't see that," the Lobster insisted. "I didn't see it vanish
into the bowels of the Earth. Should we leave now? I mean,
maybe we should try to get away from it."
"No," Vera said.
"You're right," Pilot quavered. "That might make it mad."
Vera marveled, "Did you see it? It was enjoying this! Even it
knows. It knows this is Paradise!" She was trembling. "Abelard,
someday, in Europa, this will all be ours, we can touch it, feel it,
breathe the water, smell it, taste it! I want it! I want to be out
there, like the Presence is. . . ." She was breathing hard, her
face radiant. "Abelard ... if it weren't for you I'd have never
known this. . . . Thank you. Thank you, too. Pilot."
"Right, yes, surely," Pilot fluted uneasily. "Lindsay, the drone.
Should you bring it in?"
Lindsay smiled. "Don't be afraid, Pilot. It's done you a favor.
You've seen the potential. Now you'll have something to aim
for."
"But think of the power it must have. It's like a god. . . ."
"Then it's in good company, with us."
Lindsay guided the drone into the specimen hold and unloaded the genetic capsules into their pressure racks. He reloaded its arms and returned to work.