Eternity's Mind (4 page)

In response, the twisted worldtrees shuddered with dread. She could feel pain coiled inside the enormous trunks, and the trees could not escape, could not grow anymore inside their crystalline cell.…

She said, more to reassure Solimar than herself, “I'm sure someone will figure out how to rescue our trees.”

Kotto's two young lab assistants, Shareen Fitzkellum and Howard Rohandas, arrived at the greenhouse in a small shuttle from the admin station. Once presented with the problem of rescuing the trapped worldtress, Kotto had delegated these two to find a possible solution.

Celli and Solimar went to greet the two teenagers and immediately saw that they did not bring any miraculous solutions. Celli drew a deep breath, smelled the rich dampness of the bottled-up worldforest. Shareen and Howard were young, but Kotto insisted they were brilliant. Celli continued to hope. “Have you made any progress?”

“We've tested the materials of the dome, the underlying structure,” Shareen said.

“And the trees themselves.” Howard presented a pad filled with unfathomable calculations. Celli could have dipped into the verdani mind and combed through the engineering expertise compiled over many years, but instead, she said, “What did you find?”

“We thought there might be a way to tow the whole greenhouse to a nearby terrestrial world, using Ildiran stardrives. That way the trees could take root, grow as large as they like,” Shareen said, then looked away and lowered her voice. “But this structure was never designed for stresses like that.”

“Also the bow shock of dust at the edge of the nebula would offer too much turbulence.” Howard looked pained at not having a better answer for them, but he pointed to the calculations as if to give himself strength.

Shareen straightened, crossed her arms over her chest. “The greenhouse wouldn't survive being moved out of the Fireheart nebula, so your trees are stuck here. Sorry. The option of taking them to a planet is off the table.”

Celli looked up at the stirring fronds. Soon—very soon—the dome would no longer hold them. The trees would either break and die, or they would burst through the crystalline prison walls … and die.

“Thank you for trying,” Solimar said as the two left, dejected and guilty.

“We'll keep thinking,” Shareen called. “We might still come up with something.”

“We will,” Howard said.

“We know you will,” Solimar answered.

“I won't leave our trees,” Celli said after the two were gone. She felt a stinging burn in her eyes and a gap in her heart that seemed as empty as that black gateway in space.

As green priests, their duty was to tend the trees and preserve them. She and Solimar had given up so much when they'd left Theroc to come here, because the Roamers needed green priests for communication. And now Celli's duty might be to die here with the trees.

“We will find a way to save them.” Solimar released one hand from the golden-barked trunk to caress her arm. “And us.”

“We have to,” Celli answered, determined.

In the middle of the blazing nebula, the black dimensional gateway throbbed with shadows.

 

CHAPTER

3

ARITA

The worldforest had never seemed so threatening. Arita and Collin felt trapped as they confronted a manifestation of darkness that they had never imagined.

Collin challenged the ebony figure in front of them. “You are no longer a green priest, Kennebar.”

The leader of the isolationist green priests faced the two of them in the empty dwelling high up in the branches of a dying worldtree. Kennebar's skin was flawless obsidian instead of a vibrant emerald, like Collin's. Kennebar was a humanoid figure entirely infused with night, his eyes as dark as the void between the stars. Even his mouth was just a hollow opening.

“I am more than a green priest, now,” Kennebar said, “for I have seen into the void. The thoughts of the Shana Rei are like a shout, and the thoughts of the verdani are a mere whisper by comparison.”

Collin stood his ground before the dark voidpriest. “You betrayed the worldforest. Look at the damage you caused—it's all around you!”

“The worldforest is insignificant.” Kennebar's voice was cold and hollow. “There is so much more.…”

Arita stood firm beside Collin, who raised his voice in defiance. “You are nothing!”

She had gone with her friend to investigate the sudden disappearance of the isolationist priests, as well as the gulf of silence that had appeared in the telink network. With the sprawling worldforest and the connected verdani mind, there should have been no place to hide, yet Kennebar's followers had vanished.

Although Arita was not a green priest, Collin had told her about the alarming gaps. Entire sections of the forests were dying off—he and Arita had seen them with their own eyes—yet the other green priests seemed oblivious to the disaster. Overconfident in their connection with the verdani mind, they couldn't conceive that such a tremendous secret might be able to slide past them.

“We should have brought reinforcements with us,” Arita said to Collin in a low voice.

They stood side by side, in the upper boughs of the large worldtree, where the isolationists had lived and slept high off the ground. Collin's former companions were gone now. Had they been captured and contaminated by the shadows that infiltrated the worldforest mind—just as Kennebar had been?

“The void is nothing,” Kennebar said in a ponderous voice, “and the emptiness is everything. The Shana Rei wish to bring back entropy, chaos … nothing and everything. And the voidpriests will assist them by unraveling the worldforest mind.”

More tainted green priests emerged from the interwoven fronds or climbed down from higher branches: the rest of Kennebar's followers. The priests were also as black as oil, moving with the silence of shadows.

Arita felt a fresh jolt of alarm. She and Collin had no way to fight the ravenous darkness, and she was sure Kennebar would not let them go.

“Collin will join us, as will all other green priests.” Kennebar turned his frightening ebony face toward Arita. “But this one has been found wanting. She must be discarded.”

A shudder passed through her, partly from her own fear … but partly from surprise. Deep inside her mind, she heard a distant voice, yearning, intense and mysterious … something that was not of the trees at all. A call? It was not connected to the telink communication network, and she had to find what it was, hoping it might be some unexpected ally.

“I don't need to be reminded that the trees rejected me,” she said in a voice that shook with anger. But what had Kennebar meant about discarding her?

When they were younger, she and Collin had both tried to become green priests. The trees had tested them, accepted and converted her friend—but not Arita. Nevertheless, the trees
had
altered her mind somehow, before sending her away. Arita had always regretted her failure to become part of the green-priest community. Did these traitorous voidpriests mean to kill her now?

“You will not touch Arita,” Collin said.

Kennebar said, “When you are a voidpriest, we will let
you
kill her.”

Fourteen black silhouettes of once-faithful green priests pressed closer, moving as if they had all the time in the world. They prevented Arita and Collin from fleeing.

In her head, Arita heard that distant whispering again, but it passed along no discernible thoughts beyond alarm and foreboding. She knew it was not the voice of the trees, but a different entity entirely.

She heard the fronds rustling, saw movement above. The black voidpriests glanced up as a swarm of figures appeared—diminutive humanoid creatures with smooth gray skin and large eyes. They moved so quickly and nimbly that they reminded Arita of spiders. The Onthos.

“Help us,” she cried out. “Stop them!”

The refugee aliens had once tended another distant worldforest that was destroyed long ago by the Shana Rei. The last hundred Onthos survivors, the only remnants of their race, had come to Theroc seeking sanctuary. Because the green priests and the verdani vouched for the aliens, King Peter and Queen Estarra had granted them sanctuary, letting them make a new home here in the uninhabited continent of the Wild.

Arita counted at least a dozen aliens emerging to join the ominous voidpriests. They squatted on the fronds above; they swung down from the branches; they came close while Kennebar and his companions stood like shadow people, imprisoning Arita and Collin.

“Help us,” Collin said to the Onthos.

Arita's hope upon seeing the Gardeners changed as the aliens merely stared at them, as if they were insects. She had always thought of the Gardeners as friendly and cooperative, unquestioned allies, because they too had been victims of the Shana Rei. Ohro, their leader, had said that he sensed something in Arita, a connection with that strange voice in her mind, but he had offered no explanation.

Now, the aliens just regarded Arita and Collin as if they were lacking somehow.

Then, as if content with what they'd seen, the Onthos skittered away, climbing along the worldtree branches and disappearing high above, leaving Collin and Arita painfully alone.

The voidpriests closed in.

 

CHAPTER

4

LEE ISWANDER

Unfortunately, Lee Iswander was familiar with losing everything. Ruined, disgraced, nearly bankrupt—he had all too much experience with that.

He boarded his private space yacht to leave Newstation, not bothering to issue either a defiant or defensive statement. He felt like a thief in the night. As the head of Iswander Industries, he had changed commerce across the Spiral Arm … yet now he ran from the Roamer center as soon as he received clearance. Until recently, Iswander had been one of the most influential, and arguably wealthiest, men in the Confederation.

Operative words:
Until recently
.

He left the clans in an uproar. Now that they knew that the ubiquitous bloaters were his secret source of cheap and easy ekti-X, the greedy clan members were so excited that they hadn't yet begun howling for his blood. Soon enough, though, they would demand justice and strip him of even more than they had already taken.

Iswander had been through it all before.

Always, he clung to his determined and triumphant mantra:
A successful man fails more times than an average man bothers to try.
It gave him little comfort, though, as he raced back to his isolated industrial operations. The bloater-extraction field had remained secret until Tasia Tamblyn, Robb Brindle, and Orli Covitz exposed it, uprooting yet another pillar of what had made Lee Iswander great.

He activated the stardrive, leaving Newstation behind—good riddance!—and raced off into the emptiness. They would come for him sooner or later, and he had to decide what to do.

He was furious that his secret had been revealed. Tamblyn and Brindle, the acting managers of Kett Shipping, had reaped great wealth by being his primary distributors for stardrive fuel, yet they had stabbed him in the back. For her own part, Orli Covitz had been cured of an alien plague by immersing herself in the protoplasm of a bloater in his first extraction field. That woman was alive
because of
Iswander's operations. And she, too, had stabbed him in the back.

On top of that, he was angry with Elisa Enturi. Iswander valued efficiency, but he regarded loyalty even more highly. All too often, he overestimated the good in people. Although Elisa was unfailingly loyal, and would do anything necessary to serve and protect Lee Iswander, she had also gone disastrously overboard. Now everything was unraveling.…

But of all those who upset him, Iswander was most disappointed in
himself.
He should have paid better attention, planned for disaster. He knew disasters so well.…

He brooded as he flew back to the bloater-extraction field, which would be—for a time, at least—a last sanctuary for him. Normally, he found the solo trip to be a pleasant journey, time to review business matters without being interrupted. On his recent flight to Newstation, he had been filled with brash confidence. He had compiled indisputable evidence of corruption and outright incompetence against Speaker Sam Ricks. The man had cost the Roamer clans a great deal. Armed with such information, Iswander had expected to walk into the convocation, overthrow Speaker Ricks, and send him off to prison. And then the clans should have placed Iswander in the Speakership, by acclamation. He had been so sure.

Instead, that victory had been snatched from his hands, and he was knocked to his knees … disgraced yet again, forced to flee. How many times could one person pick up the pieces and start from scratch?

He had always been a bold man, espousing the philosophy that made the Roamers great. Innovation required taking risks, and sometimes risks were dangerous. Sometimes accidents happened. Sometimes it couldn't be helped.

Iswander made his first fortune by manufacturing prefab modular habitats, widely used during reconstruction after the Elemental War. When distributing so many modules, it was inevitable that a few would suffer construction flaws. Four orbiting habitats had failed catastrophically when imperfect hull seams had split, exposing inhabitants to explosive decompression. Those lawsuits cost him a small fortune, but he had paid off many people to keep those failures quiet. Considering how many thousands of habitats he had manufactured, the failure rate was minimal.

After that, Iswander invested heavily in the lava-processing operations on Sheol, extracting exotic metals and unusual alloys. He had found treasure in the molten seas, right there for the taking. But Elisa's former husband, Garrison Reeves, had raised questions about the dangers of the unstable planet, warnings that Iswander foolishly ignored. And the geological instabilities triggered a complete disaster: one thousand five hundred and forty-three people had lost their lives during the collapse of Sheol.