Released from the trammels of alarm, Jan’s tired brain wheeled and careened back to the blurry last image sent from the Moon. The green flash. She belatedly realized that Peter was right, that the last blurry frame had looked—in a vague, Rorschach-blot way—just like a shrub in the bright sun.
Having a wild notion like that in her brain felt uncomfortable to Jan, like water in her ears after swimming. She dismissed it, then checked around the house with a flashlight, found nothing amiss, and went to bed, too tired to worry about the electricity still being off. That was the power company’s problem.
As Jan stretched out under the covers, aching with the overdue pleasure of lying down, she remembered something. Something good.
The EGAD had found water. So manned missions would soon be sent to the south pole of the Moon to build a base, mine the ice and explore the weirdly beautiful terrain. Maybe she ought to update her application to the Astronaut program and maybe, just maybe, someday leave her own boot prints on the icy dust of Aitken Crater.
And find shrubbery on the sunny north rim—?
Jan smiled at the absurdity of the image. No. No plants existed on the Moon. Not yet. With a permanent base—having dome, and air, and warmth and all—somebody’d do some landscaping with grass and bushes under the dome. Moonscaping, as Peter Reiten might put it. Jan liked Peter. He made her feel interested and relaxed at the same time. And he was single… Jan went to sleep dreaming about the future.
The greenling threshed the rain in excitement and disappointment. It hadn’t known how to use the new ability of its cluster. The attempt hadn’t gone right.
Tension had turned into a thrilling instant of release as the greenling hurled a bolt from its cluster toward the enemy things. But it was young. Its weaponry was rudimentary, just sharp bolts split off its own substance, hardened and sharpened by the secretive processes of the cluster. The first bolt had flown faster than a bird. But it missed the enemy thing and shattered the corner of a brick on the home-structure wall. The other bolt hit one of the enemy things, but merely knocked off the mouthpart with which it was attacking the home-structure. The things themselves then ran away with very rapid mobility.
The greenling sensed when the hospitable thing came home to the home-structure and did not die or flee from the lack of electricity but rather went to its usual night-rooting place inside the structure. The greenling was relieved. At least that much of the world was right again.
But it had failed to kill enemies invading its own home-ground.
The greenling extended a sticky string to retrieve the mouthpart and brooded over it, manipulating the object with its inner, flexible twigs. The object gravitated into the greenling’s cluster.
Not insect part, said Memory of the object clutched and fingered by the cluster. Just a tool. A drilling tool.
The greenling was perplexed. Were the things that had invaded the yard not Insects after all? The greenling thought hard. Other than the mouthpart, which turned out to be a tool, they resembled the thing who lived in the house. Maybe they were its own kind.
If so, it had tried to kill beings who were not true enemies. The greenling’s branches sagged in consternation. Without meaning to, it must have made a terrible mistake.
Memory rectified the greenling’s thoughts. Mistake, but no wrong. It was good to drive them off. They may be enemies of the thing that lives here. Not every thing is a friend to its own kind.
The greenling struggled to grasp the difficult new concept. It was the opposite of symbiosis, where unrelated things depend on each other. Kindred things might prey on each other? But the reason for kindred was help and strength in numbers, as it had learned from its dream. Feeling small and lonely in a large and complicated universe, the greenling suddenly asked, Do I have kindred?
Memory replied. The seeds of vigilance fly far and wide from the war-ground, ahead of the infesting hive-ships of the Enemy. There must be others in this part of time and space who found home-ground. Others, like you, growing and learning.
The good world that had received the greenling turned its face to the sun. All that had happened soaked into the greenling’s consciousness like water into loam. Gradually the greenling realized that its dream hadn’t ended for an important reason. The end of the dream lay in the future.
The greenling’s cluster fondled the boring tool dropped by the enemy things. The cluster could alter the tool and use it to make better weapons, if it had the right kind of materials to work with. The industrious cluster made plans.
Sooner or later, the insect-Enemy would come. The greenling and its kindred, equipped with ancient memory and secret arsenals, waited.