I wrapped my arms around my body, chilled from inside. Mist steamed off the dark plants. Roots buckled in curves and rolls, my height and more. Cavities within them showed everywhere, above and below ground, a network of living caves. As the sun moved out of the patch of sky, shadows filled the forest.
My hunger stirred. I hadn't eaten since… I wasn't sure. Could I eat the plants? Their green color suggested they used photosynthesis. But no, that would make them a much brighter green: These were almost black. Perhaps they had an unusual chemistry that let them absorb more light. It would explain their dark color. Unfortunately, it also increased the chance that they might poison me.
The rich, bittersweet smell of the forest saturated my senses. The curving roots resembled waves, green swells in a surreal ocean, breakers rising, rising in great crests…
Rising…
Undulating…
Out to infinity…
Rippling out to infinity…
With a conscious effort, I pulled back into my body. What the hell? Part of me was here. But another part was
there.
Where? What nightmare had caught me?
Ah, no…
2
The Promontory
Awareness returned like waves washing the shore of my mind— and I understood that I had almost ceased to exist. With shaking hands, I pressed my palms against a tripod tree, assuring myself I was solid. Is that what had happened when night jumped into day? Had I just stopped
existing
?
I straightened up and touched my face, my shoulders, my stomach. Solid. I took a long breath. I had to take action. But before I could go anywhere, I needed to see where I was. The large root next to me looked familiar. I clambered to the top and sat with my legs dangling over the other side. The clearing where I had awoken last night lay below. A human-sized dent flattened the moss and foot-prints led to this root. But I saw no indication I had entered the clearing. Either something had lowered me from the air or else I had come into existence here. How? And from
where?
I rubbed my arms, trying to warm them. My shift had no sleeves, just ribbons tied over the shoulders. Mist curled around my legs, damp on the skin. The heavy foliage made it difficult to see, but in one direction the land appeared to slope upward. If I hiked to higher ground, I might get a better idea about the area. That gave me a surge of hope. I might find a landmark I recognized or an outpost with people.
So I set off into the forest. My optimism soon faltered. The buckled terrain made the hike painfully difficult. Hidden twigs poked my feet through the moss, making me limp, and underbrush scratched my legs. Apparently I wasn't used to the gravity; I had trouble timing my steps and stumbled often.
A green beetle-thing the size of a handball flew in my face. Startled, I knocked it away. It threatened battle with frenzied clicks of its little lobster claws. Then it flew off. Other more graceful creatures softened the evening. Diaphanous flyers soared through the air, their gauzy black wings edged in gold. They clung to my hair, covering it like a gilded scarf that lay over my shoulders and hung to my hips. When I waved them off, their wings tangled in my fingers and crushed. I felt like an ogre leaving them crippled on the ground, prey to the red beetle-tanks that lumbered along with chopping claws. So after that I let them stay in my hair. They covered it like a sheen of liquid.
The life here had beauty, shiny and vibrant. In some ways the creatures resembled large insects, but they looked stylized, as if they were made from delicate china and enameled in glossy colors. Some had iridescent wings. In human-standard gravity they would have been too heavy to fly. A few evoked crustaceans, their antennae and carapaces glimmering with jeweled colors. Airborne lobsters.
A skinny creature darted out of the trees, aloft on diaphanous blue wings, its segmented body as long as my arm. It came straight at me and I jumped aside, my pulse ratcheting up. It went on with no more than a high-pitched whine. After that I walked even more carefully. The next one might not be so tolerant.
I christened the animals "arthrops," after the Earth phylum Arthropoda, which included insects and crustaceans. These creatures probably defined their own phylum, though, one unlike any human classification. I chose Earth because human life had developed there, though many of us had long been separated from our mother world.
Yes. Earth.
My memories returned gently, awaking like bubbles adrift in the air, their surfaces thinning, spinning, waning, until finally their contents dispersed in a mist of recollections. I had never considered Earth home, nor had my ancestors. We had been separated from our mother world for six millennia, through the rise and fall of empires, and then their rise again.
I hiked in a daze, my feet and skin burning from scratches. I tried to numb my mind so I wouldn't think about how much it hurt. The sky turned scarlet and red shadows darkened the trees. Nanomeds in my body measured the gases dissolving in my blood.
Nanomeds?
Yes, nanomeds. They cruised my body, little labs the size of molecules. Different types performed different functions, such as catalyzing reactions, repairing bonds, or ferrying nutrients. They also analyzed the atmosphere. It had a low oxygen content, but enough for survival. I doubted this place just happened to fit human life so well. Biosculptors, those gentler cousins of terraformers, had probably fine-tuned it. If so, surely people lived here. Somewhere. If I could just find them.
The night never truly became dark. The sky turned the color of dark bricks. Accompanied by the percussive songs of clicking, clacking arthrops, I clambered over ridges and mossy knolls. My neural compass kept me going in roughly a straight line.
The trees breathed hostility.
Startled, I came to a halt. I turned in a circle, straining to see. Only arthrops moved in the shadows. Was my mind interpreting this bizarre place as a hostile emotion? Saints knew, I was in trouble. I needed shelter, water, and food. Although this forest surely required vast amounts of water, I had found none, and my attempts to dig had brought up no more than a loam so rich its scent overpowered me. The water these huge roots tapped might be buried too deep to reach. The prospect of catching arthrops and drinking whatever fluids kept them alive made my stomach lurch, but soon I might have no choice.
Plunging on, I sought to leave this place of undefined anger. I pushed through a tangle of stalks, flags, and tripods— and ran smack into a gargantuan root three times my height. I couldn't go around it; the ridge extended in both directions, plunging into masses of tripod bush. Dismayed, I stared up at its shadowed bulk. Did this forest have no end? My muscles ached. Gouges covered my arms and legs. Bruises purpled my knees. My feet were bleeding. But if I intended to live, I either had to backtrack or climb.
I exhaled. Then I dug my fingers into the moss-covered ridge and climbed, fleeing the antagonism that saturated the forest. Almost immediately, I lost my grip and slid to the ground. Steeling myself, I tried again. This time I made it halfway, higher, almost at the top— and the moss fell apart in my hands.
"Ai!" I tumbled down, languid in the low gravity, and hit the ground with a thud.
I bit the inside of my cheek to hold back my groan.
Keep going.
Drawing in a ragged breath, I climbed to my feet. Then I swayed. So tired. I looked for a better route, but the underbrush made too much of a tangle. With blurred vision, I peered at the root. It twisted through the trees, curving like the Fourier analysis of a complicated waveform, rippling, flowing, ebbing, swirling…
Rippling…
Riiiiippliiiing…
I wrenched back to reality. What was wrong with me? I felt as if I were coalescing, that if I didn't hang on to reality, I would disperse back into nothing. As I was reforming, refinements added to my body and mind like translucent layers of watercolor paint laid over a picture. Or waves, ebbing in from Elsewhere. But waves of what? Existence? I didn't understand. Yes, sure, quantum theory said all matter was waves, including human beings. But it didn't work like this. People were
solid.
I felt tenuous. Insubstantial. So sorry, I seem to have misplaced the J=236 partial wave of an electron in my eyelash.
Pah. I rubbed my eyes. I needed to sleep.
The air vibrated with hostility.
I took a sharp breath.
Stop it.
Air consisted of gas molecules. It had no emotions.
I tackled the root again, and this time I made it to the top. Hooking my arms over its edge, I stared out at the other side.
More trees.
"Shit," I muttered.
I heaved myself over the top. Halfway down the other side, my fingers tired. I slid the rest of the way and crumpled into a heap on the ground. So weary. But I couldn't stop, not now. I hauled myself to my feet and trudged off again, pushing through the brush, escaping that undefined menace. The shadows lightened into a ruddy predawn. I stumbled through a mass of tripods—
Saints almighty.
I had come out on a promontory of rock. The shelf extended for about ten steps in front of me and two on either side. Its sides fell away in vertical cliffs, far down to a lake. The water glittered in the crimson light as if its swells were lit with spectral fire. Forest surrounded the lake down there, dark and primitive, almost black. Nothing but forest. Tripod trees covered the world. But what stole my breath, what made me stare, had nothing to do with lakes or trees.
I wasn't on a world. This was the moon of a planet.
A huge planet.
It dominated the view. Even with only half that giant orb showing above the forest, it spanned the horizon. The topmost edge of the disk reached a third of the way up the sky. It smoldered. Bronze bands striped it, their turbulence visible as storms wracked its atmosphere. It had to be a superjovian planet, almost massive enough to be a star. It glowed only with its heat of formation, but that was plenty. It lavished fiery light on this moon.
Planet and moon were almost certainly locked face to face, which meant that monstrous, glowering world would always stay on the horizon, forever setting. The planet was probably mostly gas; otherwise, its tidal forces would have ripped this moon apart. Given the moon's small size, it had to be dense to have even this low gravity. The horizon was so close, I could see its downward curve. The trees looked like they were falling off.
Day came fast. A halo appeared at the edge of the gas giant. Suddenly the tiny parent star rose past the planet, a bead of white studded like a diamond into the lurid sky.
" 'So is the splendor of what nature has wrought,' " I murmured, quoting a poet I had long admired, though I only just now remembered. Splendor or no splendor, I wanted to be away from this place and its undefined hostility.
The lake reminded me of my thirst. Could I drink the water? Another memory stirred; the nanomeds in my body had a limited ability to make antidotes. I could further improve my chances by boiling the water. I knew how to make a fire. Well, in theory, I knew. It required friction, enough to ignite flammable matter. Whether I could actually manage it was another question. Nor would the moisture-laden plants here burn well, particularly with the low oxygen atmosphere. But if I could make a torch, it could also serve as a weapon.
All right. I had a plan: start fire, make torch, boil water, drink, cook arthrops, eat the nasty things, find people.
Rustles came from the forest.
I spun around, my hair swinging around my body, covered with glistening black and gold flyers. Shadows cloaked the forest, but light still touched its top. Clouds drifted among the luminous crowns, and mist curled around the shadowed trunks. It looked surreal, as if the tree tops floated in a world separate from the shadowed forest below.
Hatred!
I almost stumbled back off the precipice.
The arthrop clicks stopped. The world went silent. Waiting. Again I saw ghostly waves; back in the forest, they coalesced around a tripod tree, forming a human shape. It detached from the tree and moved through the dusk, gnarled arms hanging at its sides. I couldn't see it well, but I felt its seething anger. I vibrated with it. My mind recoiled and then overextended, spreading too thin, ebbing…
