The greenling dreamed of a strange familiar planet with a fiercer star, hotter days, and colder nights than Earth. Green People spread across the world like a blanket, joining roots and branches to lift up living, leafy substance in dense canopies and glorious vaults. Small, soft, mobile creatures took shelter in the safe green spaces.
Into the greenling’s lucid dream, the racial memory encoded in its genes inserted a brief bit of education. Symbiosis is when dissimilar creatures live together for mutual benefit. They help each other.
The greenling heeded impatiently. It knew about symbiosis, and evolution, and many other things that Memory had explained before, both when the greenling was awake and when it dreamed. Memory was something the greenling took for granted. The greenling was eager for the next and more exciting part of the dream. Its whole life long, whenever it dreamed, it always had the same dream until the very end, when the dream always unfolded a little more than last time.
Green Paradise was imperfect, afflicted by insects: bad creatures with hard skins and sharp mouth parts that bored wood, chewed leaves, and sucked the living sap from People. In the end, the Green People left the plaguesome insects behind in the dust of their first, and outgrown, world. The Green People and their symbiotes leaped from the First World to planets across the stars. The greenling cheered the great triumph of the People even though it anticipated the next turn of the story with delicious dread.
The People met a great and unexpected horror.
Insects from far unknown stars attacked the green worlds of People. These Insects were like and unlike the insect kind on the First World. As large as small People or big symbiotes, the hateful creatures had segmented bodies with hard skins, deadly mouth parts, and cunning minds.
Intelligent insects, interjected Memory. The greenling’s genes were designed to unfold new traits in the natural progression of its physical maturity. Its racial memory unfolded in a coordinated manner, attuned to the greenling’s maturing ability to comprehend. They had starflight too. They weren’t content with the worlds they already infested. Insects are always eager to make new infestations.
The greenling unquestioningly agreed.
Ever since Paradise, the Symbiotes had made tools and machines for the Green People. The insect-Enemy made tools with which to attack People. On world after world, the insect-Enemy ravaged the living-grounds of the Green People.
The symbiotes made special new tools—
Weapons—
—With which to fight back. Attack and counterattack, defeat and victory seesawed across worlds and stars.
War.
The greenling knew that this dream was not a made-up fantasy, having been instructed by Memory that the dream was real history. But the greenling did not understand what “real” meant. It only knew a small, safe, familiar universe of which it was the contented center. It experienced sunlight and rain and home-ground shared with friendly mobile things. Those constituted its reality. The dream seemed like a story, and a very entertaining one at that.
The greenling expected, but still found deliciously chilling, the dreamed image of a deserted town, the bleached vegetable corpses of People heaped on the graveyard, too many dead to decently compost. The Symbiotes were all gone, having fled for their lives. The home-structures they abandoned were broken into by Insects wanting living sap and blood to suck.
In time, the Green People devised new weapons of their own to defend themselves. Not like the machines of the symbiotes and insect-Enemy. Green weapons.
As the part of the story that the greenling knew drew to an end, it shivered with anticipation that the story would go on and dread that it would not. What could possibly happen next? The Green People had to win the war—didn’t they?
In the break room down the hall from her office, Jan poured a cup of coffee for Peter. The pot was fresh and full now. It wouldn’t be by 3 in the morning, when the changing alignment of Earth and Moon closed the communications window for this crucial traverse. “I think I know why I fixated on that stupid rock,” Jan told Peter ruefully. “It reminds me of some geodes my ex-husband brought back from a diving trip to Canada. He found them in a crater lake.”
“Crater lake?”
“Yeah. So I guess the rock on the Moon reminded me of water, so I went for it. Mistake.”
Intuition usually served Jan well. But it could give false positives. She expected her confession to elicit more or less polite disapproval, but Peter murmured, “Very interesting. What hap—”
At that point, Charlie Tangley, the network computer technician, invaded the break room. “I detect coffee!” Charlie proceeded to empty a large fraction of the pot into a big commuter cup with bright Astroworld cartoons on it.
“What happened to the geodes?” Peter asked Jan.
“Well, I kept them around for a while for sentimental reasons, then—”
Charlie interrupted. “Sentimental? You?”
Taken aback, Jan wondered what Charlie meant. She knew that she could come off as brusque and cynical at times. In the years since her relationship with Mike died, had she developed a rough shell—like a geode—herself? “Anyway, after I bought a house, I tossed the geodes into the bluebonnet bed in the backyard.”
The erstwhile bluebonnet bed had been located next to the patio outside the back door. Jan involuntarily remembered the recent burglaries. She did not want to return to her house in the middle of the night. If Cocytus did its job, though, the science team would have enough data and jubilation to keep going all night, and she would go home in the safe light of day.
“You grow bluebonnets?” Charlie inquired.
“I attempted once. Unfortunately, I’ve got a brown thumb.”
“I hear if you scrape the seeds they’ll germinate. There’s a technical term for that. Scarification.”
“I tried,” said Jan. “No dice.”
Charlie Tangley was a nice guy, but people called him Charlie Tangent for very good reason. Peter regarded Charlie with the kind of look he might have given a garish invertebrate encountered while collecting rocks in the field.
“Where do we go next?” Jan asked Peter.
Peter had been updating the modeling of Aitken Crater with the data from Cocytus. “The bug’s not in the deepest part of the cold trap yet. I’m convinced that it needs to be, if Ed can get it going again.”
“I read in Av Leak, that is, Aviation Week, that Japan’s working on a new rover. For Mars,” Charlie informed them. “The Japanese thought it would be technically easier than a lunar-polar rover. Moon pole cold is worse than summer on Mars, you know.”
Ignoring Charlie, Peter told Jan, “I want to revise the road map. There’s a path through the part of the crater where the shadow is deepest, then up a steep wall and back into sunlight in less than an hour.”
Jan nodded eagerly. “Great idea. If only Ed can get the bug going again—”
A faint chime reverberated from down the hall. “Your workstation is calling,” said Charlie cheerily. “Maybe Ed did.”
As Jan hurried down the hall with Peter, he asked, “What was inside those geodes?”
Jan felt momentary embarrassment. Mike had been a limnologist, diving to study populations of fish. He’d found the geodes, one broken in half and the other intact, in the debris of an underwater rock slide in the cold blue bottom of the lake. He brought them to Jan as a present because her research had just veered toward space geology. Her background was chemistry, though, and even doing extraterrestrial chemical geology, she’d never been a rock jock. So his geodes had been of only brief interest to her at the time. “Agate, I guess. Green crystalline stuff in spherical layers. If you’re interested,” Jan went in an afterthought, “I’ll dig them out of the flower bed for you.”