The Presence emerged, ballooning suddenly from a second
chimney, beside the drone. It drifted toward him, watching. Me
waved a claw, but it made no response and soon drifted out of
the drone's lights into darkness and invisibility.
The creatures showed no fear of the drone. Vera took over,
gently parting the supple stems of the tubeworms to harvest
everything she could find. The drone walked the length of the
valley oasis, probing the oo7.e, prying into crevices.
They had a stroke of luck where a new hot spring had broken
open, parboiling a colony of creatures clustered above it on an
overhang. They used the dead as bait to attract scavengers; they
opened them to sample gut bacteria and the agents of decay.
Their sample could not be complete; the oasis was far too rich
for that. But their success was still entire. No creature born to
the seas of Earth could live, unaltered, in Europa's alien waters.
That was the task of Europa's angels, the Lifesiders, who would
inherit this genetic treasure, tease it apart, and rebuild new
creatures for the new conditions. The living beings here would
be models, archetypes in a new Creation, where art and purpose
would take the place of a billion years of evolution.
As they packed the robot away for the last time and lifted ship, they saw no sign of the Presence. But Lindsay had no doubt that
it was with them.
He was tired as they ascended slowly toward the surface. More
than his Shaper favorite or the armored Mechanist, he felt the
burden of his hubris heavy on him. Who was he to have done
these things? The light had drawn him, and he had grown
toward it as a tree might grow, spreading blind leaves toward an
unknown radiance. Now he had come to his life's fruition, and
he was glad of it. But a tree dies when its roots are cut, and
Lindsay knew his roots were his humanity. He was a thing of
flesh and blood, of life and death, not an Immanent Will.
A tree drew strength from light, but it was not light itself. And
life was a process of changing, but it was not change itself. That
was what death was for.
When they saw sunlight flooding just below the surface, Pilot
yowled in electronic glee and kicked in the main engines. Steam
blasted out in an explosive cratering rosette as the sea recoiled.
They broke Mach 1 in seconds. As acceleration crushed them
into their seats, Vera strained to see her videoboard and
screamed. "The sky! Blue sky! A wall above the world! Pilot,
give us space!"
Below them, the sea absorbed the shock, as it did all things.
And they were gone.
THE NEOTENIC CULTURAL REPUBLIC: 8-8-'86
Life moved in clades.
Terraform-Kluster loomed over Mars, shattering red monotony
with white steam, green growth, blue nascent seas.
On Venus, death's back was broken, as honest clouds threw
lace across the searing, acid-bitten sky.
Ice ships with freshly minted creatures from the labs splashed
into Europa, dissolving deep within blood-warm abysses.
On Jupiter the Great Red Spot was breaking up, sloughing off
strange blooming clouds of red krill, tiny creatures gathered into
shoals and herds bigger than Earth.
At the Neotenic Cultural Republic, Abelard Lindsay decamped
from a monstrous spacecraft.
In the free-fall zone he moved easily, with the unconscious
grace of extreme age.
But as he moved down the slope inside the cylindrical world,
past the hotels and low-grav tourist shops, he leaned more and
more heavily on the squat head of his robot companion. The
two of them reached level ground, a loamy wilderness with
solemn, ancient ranks of trees. The tub-shaped robot nurse
nicked a quick blood sample from the nerveless flesh of Lindsay's leg. As they shuffled along the leaf-strewn footpath, the machine fractionated the blood and mumbled over its data.
The Republic had become a place of towering gloom, silence
broken by birdcalls, a canopy of foliage cracking mirrored sun-
light into dappled shards. Local Neotenics in studiedly antique
clothing lounged on lichen-eaten stone benches, while their
charges, senile Shapers and obsolescent Mechs, tottered marveling through the woods.
Lindsay paused, gasping as the cuirass pumped his chest beneath his dark blue coal. The baggy legs of his trousers and his
sturdy orthopedic shoes hid the prosthetic framework strapped
to his wasted legs. Overhead, at the core of the world, an
ultralight aircraft spewed a long trail of gray cremated powder
over the rich green treetops.
No one approached him. The embroidered squids and angler
fish on his coat-sleeves identified him as a CircumEuropan, but
he had come incognito.
Catching his breath, Lindsay walked on toward the Tyler mansion and his meeting with Constantine.
The mansion had expanded. Beyond its ivy shrouded walls,
other estates had sprung up, a complex of asylums and retirement wards. Over the years, despite the Preservationists, the outside world had seeped in irresistibly. The Republic's premier industries were hospitals and funerals; rehabilitation for those who could make it, a quiet transition for those who could not.
Lindsay crossed the courtyard of the first hospital. A group of
Blood Bathers basked in the sun, waiting with animal patience
for their skins to grow again. Beyond that estate was a second,
where two young Patternists were surrounded by guards. They
scratched at the dirt with twigs, their lopsided heads almost
touching. Lindsay saw one of them look up for a moment: the
boy's cold eyes had the chilly logic of utter paranoia.
Neatly dressed Neotenic attendants ushered Lindsay through
the gates of the Tyler estate. Margaret Juliano had been dead
for years. Lindsay recognized the new Director as one of her
Superbright students.
The Superbrighl met him on the lawn. The man's face had the
quiet self-possession of Zen Serotonin. "I've cleared your visit
with Warden Pongpianskul," he said.
"That was thoughtful," Lindsay said. Neville Pongpianskul was
dead, but it was not polite to refer to the fact. Following Ring
Council ritual, Pongpianskul had "faded," leaving behind him a
programmed web of speeches, announcements, taped appear-
ances, and random telephone calls. The Neotenics had never
bothered to replace him as Warden. It saved a lot of trouble all
around.
"May I show you through the Museum, sir?" the Superbrighl
asked. "Our late Curator, Alexandrina Tyler, left an unmatched
collection of Lindsaiana."
"Later, perhaps. Is Chancellor-General Constantine receiving
visitors?"
Constantine was in the rose garden, lying in a lounge chair
beside a beehive, staring up into the sun with flat plastic eyes.
The years had not been kind to him, despite the best of care.
Long years in natural gravity had left his body knotted with
muscle, strange knobs and bulges over his delicate bones.
There was no ultraviolet in the mirrored sunlight of the Re-
public, but nevertheless Constantine had tanned, his ancient,
naked skin taking on mottled birthmark tinges of purple and
blue. He had lost most of his hair, and there were dimpled
callosities at strategic points on his skull. The treatments had
been thorough and exhaustive. And at last they had succeeded.
Constantine turned as Lindsay creaked carefully toward him.
The pupils of his plastic eyes were of different sizes; they irised
visibly, struggling for focus. "Abelard? It's you?"
"Yes, Philip." The robot sank down beside the lounge chair;