Peter flicked her an appreciative look. Jan noticed that he had large, expressive brown eyes with long lashes, and a good physique. That was the moment—unexpected timing, on a difficult night with the Cocytus mission hanging by a thread—when Jan realized that she had gotten over Mike, once and for all. Getting a better job, buying a house, even sorting through and putting away things that reminded her of Mike, hadn’t made that happen. Time had. It had been six years since she wistfully placed Mike’s old geodes on the ground among bluebonnets that never grew.
To the greenling’s delight, its dream did continue. Among the Green People, and among the symbiotes too, there were individuals with special intelligence, skill and understanding of how the Universe worked—scientists. The greenling saw Green scientists and symbiote scientists join in hope and desperation on a project, the aim of which was to save the future.
They took the essence of living substance—genes—from Green People, plus some from symbiotes, and crafted the genes into new kinds of potential Green People carefully written in artificial seeds. Then they cast the seeds out into the universe.
The scientists realized that hardly one out of thousands of seeds would land in a suitable place. But the seeds were durable to the point of immortality until the moment of germination, and in order to germinate, their needs were few: solar radiation, traces of water, and granular rock—sand, dust or soil—in which to take root. Whether a seed germinated in the time it took for a world to go around its sun, or the time it took for a sun to go around its galaxy, did not matter. Memory said: It took a thousand generations and grief untold for Green People to learn how to defeat Insect Enemies. The memory of how that was done must last forever.
Watchfulness must endure. Forever. Because some of the hive-ships of the Enemy flew away from the fields of war—like winged bark-borers flying away from sterilizing fire, seeking fresh treeskin to infest.
Arbor-ships can’t outrace hive-ships. But Green Seeds can.
That wasn’t the kind of interesting information that Memory usually dispensed to its avid student. This time, Memory meant something different and somehow ominous.
The greenling abruptly awoke from its dream with rain tapping on its outer surfaces. Despite the pleasant sensation, the greenling found itself uncomfortable on the inside. Always before, the entertaining dream had left the greenling feeling pleased. This time, the last part of the dream felt hard and unfriendly to the greenling, like a rock that the roots of its soul had to grow around.
Even worse, the greenling immediately discovered something strange in its own self.
For a couple of years, a cluster of growths had swelled on the greenling’s central stem, gradually becoming a familiar part of its intimate world. But now the cluster felt large, odd and awkward, as though something needed to be done with it.
The hard dream had somehow touched the greenling’s inmost parts and changed the greenling. Such an unsettling thing had never happened to it before.
Tinythings scurried on the ground beside the base of the home-structure. These were the largest sort of tinythings in the greenling’s home-ground, with long active legs and busy feelers. The greenling abruptly flicked a sticky string out, snared a tinything, and ate it.
The greenling could survive on light, grains of rock, and water, but it had the means to supplement its diet with lesser organisms which its metabolism efficiently reduced to their component minerals. The enhanced diet made the greenling grow bigger and stronger with rapidity. Also, it liked the crunchiness of the tinythings as it incorporated them. Tonight, though, the greenling wasn’t really in the mood for snacking. It watched the other tinythings intently, registering them as tiny blurs of heat and weak electromagnetic field, wondering why they held more than the usual temporary interest for it.
Then Memory spoke in its intangible whisper. Those are insects.
Sudden understanding shocked the greenling. Of course! The tinythings had hard, crunchy skins. They chewed and sucked juices from the mindless plants in the home-ground. Insects! Enemy?—the greenling wondered wildly.
Memory said, Those are mere insects like the pests on the First World. Insects but not Enemy. Not yet. Not unless evolution makes them much bigger and more dangerous and intelligent.
A gout of torrential rain descended on the greenling, liquidly pummeling its branches like the realization that beat on its soul. It had always been told that its dream was real. Now it understood what real meant. Dead People, vegetable corpses piled high, desiccated forests and burnt green worlds, everything that the dream had shown the greenling, unfolding over its whole young life, the whole story that it enjoyed so much, had really happened, just like the rain was happening.
Sapthirsty, murdering Insects really existed. And real meant they could hurt the greenling too.
With unaccustomed fear, the greenling urgently scanned its familiar surroundings.
The structure that the greenling grew beside housed a hospitable thing. She let the greenling live beside her own home-structure, which shaded the greenling from the sun and sheltered it from the wind. Sometimes the hospitable thing poured mineral-rich water on the ground near the greenling’s roots, which the greenling liked very much, finding it a tasty treat. The hospitable thing lacked a carapace, and she was warm-blooded and soft-skinned, and so could not be an insect. In the same structure there lived a small warm thing which seemed to be a symbiote of the large thing.
At that very moment, the small symbiote was sitting just inside a glass window of the home structure, motionless, perceiving the greenling through the glass. It did that every day.
No Intelligent Insects infested the home-structure.
The smallest and quickest of warm things lived in the air, sometimes coming to briefly stand on the greenling’s branches, which tickled. Memory had long ago informed the greenling that those were birds, and harmless to greenlings. Twelve drowsed in a nearby tree.
Restless and uneasy, not reassured by the normality around it, the greenling opened its senses to receive the whole scope of radiation that bathed its world. Most of the radiation was meaningful—clots of it meant birds and other things, and stipples in the sky were stars. More of the radiation was patterned in a certain way that meant machines.
The insect-Enemy had created terrible war machines. But symbiotes built machines too, for good and useful purposes. Patterned vibrations in the air and ground told the greenling that big machines moved on the ground and high up in the atmosphere, in exactly the way they always had. The familiarity of it all would have lulled the greenling into its usual, comfortable, happy state, except it still felt troubled about how the dream had ended. Or rather, the dream had ended without an ending, and that felt unfair. Or maybe it was even worse, and harder for the greenling to understand, than unfairness.
The greenling brooded. Deep inside, its cluster ached to do something, only the greenling didn’t know what.
The cluster had started out as a bundle of stalks like a bird’s nest. Now it was a complex array of curved, meshing members. Had the greenling’s foliage not been so thick, and had it been possible for the hospitable thing to see the cluster, she would have been struck by the strangeness of it. But she did not know it was there. Her small symbiote did. Two years ago, the small one had mistaken the cluster, which was busy growing, for an invisible and irresistible bird, and leaped at it. The small one never made that mistake again.