Beyond Infinity (26 page)

This place might be safer; she let herself relax slightly. As a girl she had camped among trees something like this, with some of the Meta’s menfolk leading. They had eaten…

Suddenly, memory sprang to life. Those men—they were all dead.

All
…but one, perhaps.

My father.
A wanderer, restless, self-full, drawn by his need to see beyond the horizon.If he never came back to a Meta, he might have escaped the Furies.

The impact of this stunned her. He would not be alive if he had come back to the forests—the Furies searched and killed there.He could be somewhere beyond, maybe. He could have hidden; he could have survived, as she had! Maybe… Where?

The prospect was dizzying. Her head buzzed with the implications of her idea.For a moment she took refuge in the slight memory that had started the thought—of the long-ago outing, camping in the living trees… And she recalled what one practical, dear lost Mom had always said: “Head’s too full? Use your hands.”

She took out a knife and gouged the wall. A piece came off with some work. As a girl, she had eaten this way. She took a tentative bite. It tasted surprisingly good. Once trees had been mere woody cellulose, but Originals had teched this to something far more digestible, if not overly exciting. She ate awhile, and Seeker took some. Patches on the walls, ceiling and floor were sticky, without apparent scheme. The compartment smelled of resin and damp wood.

She chanced to glance out the big window as she chewed, and that was why she saw it coming.

Something like a stick poked down through high clouds, swelling as it approached. Perspective told her that it was enormously long. Coming straight down. Its ribbed sinews were knobbed like the vertebrae of a huge spine. Groans and splitting cracks boomed down so loudly that she could hear them here, inside. Curving as it plunged, the great round stalk speared through the sky like an accusing finger. Her jaw dropped. As she watched, frozen, the very end of it curved farther, like a finger beckoning upward.

“Time to lie down,” Seeker said mildly.

A sonic boom slammed through the forest. The window-wall rattled. She hastily flattened herself on the resilient green floor of the compartment and gazed up through the big window.

“It’s falling on us!” she cried.

Seeker grinned, right beside her. “Its feat is to forever fall and forever recover.”

“It’ll smash these trees!”

“Lie still.”

She realized that this was the thin, distant movement she had seen on the horizon from Rin’s flyer, long ago. Something immense, whirling through the air. It rushed toward them. Graphite-dark cords wound across the deep mahogany of the huge, trunklike thing.

A high, supersonic shriek rose. Fingers of ropy vine unfolded from its tip as it plunged straight downward. The vines flung themselves toward the treetops. Some snagged in the branches there.

“Grapplers,” Seeker said over the shrilling howl.

A hard thump ran through their tree.

She just had time to see the thick vines snatch at the branches of neighboring trees, grip, and tighten.

The broad brown nub hung in air for a long moment—as if, she thought, it were contemplating the green skin of the planet below it and selecting what it liked. It drifted eastward for one heartbeat, then snatched upward.

Heavy acceleration pressed her into the soft floor. They were yanked aloft. Popping strain flooded their compartment with creaks and snaps and low groans.

Out the window she could see a nearby tree speed ahead. Its roots had curled beneath it, tumbling brown clods falling away behind. The forest dropped away. Other trees dangled from vine grips beside theirs. On one, the uppermost branches sheared off where several thick vines had clutched together. Unable to take the acceleration, it dropped away to crash into the forest below.

She could only lie mutely, struggling to breathe. A flock of tree trunks rose beside them, drawn up to the great beckoning finger. The stalk now retracted up into the sky with gathering speed. It swept them eastward. Their tree lashed in air turbulence. She saw the other trees outside, flapping. As if shaking themselves free of the grip of gravity, and of dirt.

She watched, flooded with fear. Hopeless to try to get up—and what would be the point? They were helpless.

Seeker was enjoying the ride, its tongue lolling, eyes alight. She grimaced. Did
nothing
bother the beast?

Their tree groaned in long bass notes. She watched the nearby trees to see what was happening. The sight of one falling away had not given her great confidence.

Against the steadily increasing tension the ribbed and polished vines managed to retract. They drew their cargo trees up, turbulence diminishing as they all rose into the upper atmosphere. The trees nuzzled into a snug fitting at the base of the blunt, curving rod.

“What…is…it…?” Even grunting out a word at a time was hard against the punishing acceleration.

“Pinwheel,” Seeker said. “The center…rides high in space…and it spins as it orbits. The ends rotate…down…through the air…and kiss the Earth.”

Seeker’s calm, melodious voice helped stave off her rising panic. They were tilting as they rose. Cloud banks rushed at them, shrouded the nearby trunks in ghostly white—and shredded away as they shot higher. She glimpsed the underside of the Pinwheel itself, where corded bunches of wiry strands held the vines in place.

“What…is…?”

“We spin…against Earth’s pull. But will slip free.”

Seeker’s words reminded her that this
thing
must be known to the Supras, to the Library. She sent a query to her inboards, and instantly they gave her an image.

She was looking down on the planet from a pole. An enormous rotating stick orbited it. This rod slowly dipped down into the planet’s air, one tip touching the surface when the other end was farthest out in space. It was in orbit but reached down to the surface six times as it circled. At each touchdown, the stick’s tip moved backward at a speed equal to the whole shaft’s orbital speed.

Briefly, they canceled—its ground-track velocity was zero. As it touched down, it could lift the trees with its vines, making a pickup. And in a few moments move cargo from one part of the globe to another.

And she had seen it before, in her first flyer flight…so long ago.

The scale was dizzying. She had thought little about anything beyond the envelope of Earth’s air; forest folk lived in the local. The sole Supra craft she had ridden in seemed capable of going into space, and she had supposed that was all there was. But this…

This vast thing was far longer than the depth of Earth’s air itself. And they were fastened to one end of it, soaring along on an arc that would take them into space.

Still, she could barely conceive of the scale. This creation was like a slender world unto itself. Rolling bass wrenchings strummed through the walls and floor. Her heart thudded painfully, and wind whistled in her ears. Pressures adjusting.

She could see outside that the strain of withstanding the steadily rising acceleration warped the vines. They stretched and twisted in their own agony but held the long, tubular trees tight to the underside. Shrubs and brush festooned the nub. The Pinwheel stretched up into blue-black vistas as the air thinned around them. Hopeless, she realized, to try to see the end of it.

The wind in their compartment wailed, and she sucked in air, fearing a leak. Seeker patted her outstretched hand. It lazed, eyes closed as though asleep. This startled her, and a long moment passed before she guessed that Seeker had done this before, that this was not some colossal accident they had blundered into.

As if in reply Seeker licked its lips, exposing black gums and pointed yellow teeth.

Her ears popped. She looked outward again, beyond the nearby slow buffeting of tree trunks. “Upward” was now tilted away from the darkening bowl of sky. But their acceleration still lay along the chestnut brown length of the Pinwheel, as they rotated with it. Black shrubs dotted the great stretched expanse of the length that dwindled away, gray laminations making the perspective even starker. Cross-struts of cedar red tied the long strips into an interlocking network that twisted visibly in the howling gale that tore along it. The Pinwheel was flexible, bowing like a tree in a hurricane.

They smacked into the nearest tree, and a big, sharp branch almost punched through the window. But in the pummeling wind their tree wrenched aside, and the impact slammed against another part of the wall. Could the window hold against such impacts? She did not want to find out.

Her ears popped again, and her breath came raggedly. Along the Pinwheel’s length great strips of lighter wood rose, with walnut-colored edges. The great shaft canted, sculpting the wind, and the roaring gale subsided; the twisting and wrenching lessened. Pops and creaks still rang out, but she felt a subtle loosening in the coupled structure. It was flying itself.

The last thin haze of atmosphere faded into star-sprinkled black. The floor vibrated. She felt that an invisible, implacable enemy sat on her chest and would forever, talking to her in a language of wrenching low bass notes. Cold, thin air stung her nostrils. She almost panicked but found that there was enough if she labored to fill her lungs.

As she panted, the ample curve of the planet rose serenely at the base of the window. Its smooth ivory cloud decks seemed near enough to touch…but she could not raise her arms.

Along the tapering length of the Pinwheel, slow, lazy undulations came marching. The great trunk was rippling. Waves rushed toward her, growing in height. When they first arrived they gave the nub end a hard snap. Cley and Seeker hung on, barely.

The trees thrashed on their vine tethers. Turbulence, she guessed, drove these waves, which dissipated in the whip crack at its ends. Tree trunks thumped and battered, but their cabin pressure held.

Seeker licked its lips again without opening its eyes.

They revolved higher. Now she could see the complete expanse of the Pinwheel. It curved slightly, tapering away, like an infinite highway unconcerned with the impossibility of surmounting the will of planets. Vines wrapped along it, and near the middle a green forest flourished.

They were arcing up over the planet. Pale sandy splotches marked the lands where human works had eventually exhausted the soil beyond redemption. The Supras vowed to restore those, in a campaign lasting millennia. One huge, bare continent she remembered from her smattering of history: the ruin of artificial mountains made by the Crafters, an ambitious pre-Supra form. Where once the world’s highest peaks had towered, now the rains they captured from passing clouds had ground them into dust. In time, butting continents would probably hoist such ramparts again. The great plates were sliding about as fast as her fingernails grew. Their waltz was the great slow rhythm that played through all the long human adventure, acted out in that thin skin of air.

At the Pinwheel’s far end a needle-thin line arced down. The point plunged into the atmosphere—a flare of pink and glaring white. Undulations from this shock raced back toward her. When these reached her, the buffetings were rough but not alarming, for the trees were now tied snugly against the underside of the Pinwheel’s nub end.

Deep, solemn notes beat through the walls. The entire Pinwheel was like a huge instrument strummed by wind and gravity, the waves singing a strange song that sounded through her bones.

The Pinwheel now stood out against the whole expanse of Earth, a severe green and brown straight line stretched across the blues and whites. Cley still felt strong acceleration into the compartment’s floor, but it was less now as gravity countered the centrifugal whirl. Their air, too, thickened as the tree’s walls exuded a sweet-scented, moist vapor.

The spectacle of her whole world, spread out in silent majesty, struck her. They were nearing the top of their ascent, the Pinwheel pointing vertically, as if to bury itself in the heart of the planet.

She wondered what would happen to them next. If they stayed here, their trees would be dropped onto the surface partway around the world. Was that why Seeker had met this whirling machine?

The Pinwheel throbbed. She had felt its many adjustments and percussive changes as it struggled against both elements, air and vacuum, so this latest long undulation seemed unremarkable. Only a short while ago she had thought that the ravenous green, chewing at the pale deserts, waged an epic struggle. Now she rode an unending whirl of immeasurably greater difficulty.

The kinetic whirligig of all these events dizzied her. The last few days had stripped away her comfortable preconceptions, leaving her open to naked wonder. She was beyond fear now, in a curious calm. Ideas floated through her mind like silent fireworks. She looked down and in a glance knew that the Earth and the Pinwheel were two similar systems, brothers of vastly different scales.

The Pinwheel was like a tree, she guessed. Quite certainly alive and yet also, at its core, perhaps a dead spire, cellulose used and discarded by the ancestors of the living cells that made its bark.

“How can this thing be so strong?” she whispered.