Another slammed into the mountain, then another. They pelted the whole mountainside. Families shouted with glee, not terror, as more of the big, oblong shapes rained down on them.
Killeen dimly realized that he had not felt fear as the band rushed toward them. Somehow he had quickly sensed that this was not a Cyber machine, not a threat.
Pops and cracks still rained down, but ebbing now, as he saw the long thin line, slightly curved, drawing away again. It had seemed to come nearly straight down, spearing through the sky as though to point a finger of accusation—or beckoning?—at the huddled humanity upon the mountaintop.
Wonderingly, he walked over to the nearest fallen object. The egg shape had split, spattering moisture everywhere. Small gray spheres were mixed in with the juice. Killeen scooped some up and smelled a light sweetness. Without thinking, his normal caution swept away, he bit into one. A pleasant, oily taste flooded his mouth.
“No! No!” A Trey rushed up to him. “Save—for the cooking.”
Killeen watched as the man gathered up the split pod and staggered off with it, scarcely able to carry the weight. Everywhere on the mountainside people ran to collect them. Others stoked the growing fires. Some already spitted the pods on sticks and began roasting them over dancing flames.
Killeen let himself be caught up in the jubilation. The Tribe, worn down by its long retreat and short of food, needed a celebration. Without questioning why, he knew that this manna brought literally from heaven was good, healthy. The thick, heady aroma of the roasting promised delights to the nose and mouth. Even the continuing shocks that surged through the mountain did not bother him.
He watched the dark blade that had cut the sky recede farther, making the sky shudder, curving slightly as it rose. It had
spent only a long moment at its farthest stretch, hovering over the mountain summit as though to deliver a benediction—which
it had.
EIGHT
Through the cold mountain night Quath felt a massive presence descending.
She had taken shelter in a fissure beyond where the Noughts lurked. From this vantage she could pick up their effusions and leakage radiation. They plainly thought their small bubbles of electric perception, damped to the minimum, could elude the podia. Quath penetrated the tiny, wan spheres with ease, inspecting the fitful firefly radiances that simmered there.
But she could extract little of use to her this way. Certainly she learned nothing that went beyond her scorching revelations while actually encased in the Nought. Rivulets of Nought thought slipped through the chilly air and snagged in Quath’s electro-aura, flapping like tiny flags in the perception-breeze. And the telltale she had planted on her Nought was silent.
Still she was reluctant to approach the mountaintop. Another incident might alert them fully, scattering them and making Quath’s quest harder.
Then she had felt the first high, tenuous note sounding down from far to the west. The high treble skated on the air, pursued by booming bass notes. They rolled like steady thunder. The source came down and forward at a speed that Quath thought at first must be an illusion. Stuttered Doppler images came too fast for her. Old fears welled up.
The podia had come from ground-grubbing origins. Heights brought acute, squeezing panic to them. That was why they did not hunt for enemies from the air, no matter how efficient such searching could be. It had taken millennia for the podia to be able to tolerate the keening sense of falling that came in orbit. Only genetic alterations had made space travel possible for them… though it did not erase the persistent terror that flight over the nearby landscape brought, with its gripping images of precipitous possible falls. Quath and the others managed to loft for short distances only by turning control over to a submind, reducing the task to distant mechanical motions.
But this thing!—it plunged as though oblivious to the ram pressure of air. A ship?
No—the dark line spanned a quadrant of the sky. A falling chunk of the podia’s construction? Impossible—its browns and greens were unlike the enormous gray labyrinths they built.
Down it came. Quath broke her aura-silence and called to the Tukar’ramin.
The swelling intelligence came at once, flickering in the crisp air.
*I understand your panic. Had I not been concerned with more grave and pressing matters, I would have warned you.*
<Will it fall on me?> Quath asked, trying to seem composed.
*No. It will not touch the ground at all.*
<Mechwork? Is it mechwork? I shall shoot it—>
*Attempt no such foolishness. Here.*
In Quath’s aura burst a flowering electrical kernel of knowledge, fat and sputtering. Data impacted, data rampant.
She swallowed it, converting the spinning ball of inductive currents into readable hormones. Scents and aromas bloomed, packed with stunning detail.
<This is so rich!>
*It comes unfiltered from the Illuminates.*
The honor of receiving such a holy kernel stunned Quath. She tentatively tasted. An astonishing central fact swept over her like an icy stream: The thing above was alive.
Its history had been buried in a musty vault of supposedly minor knowledge, Quath was shocked to find. Certainly none of the podia had spoken much of this thing. Yet, as she unpeeled the layers of hormonal implications, the crux became ever more impressive.
<Why were we not told this?> Quath cried, as the history of the thing poured through her, her subminds dissecting the myriad nuances.
*We did not consider it vital,* the Tukar’ramin replied. *It is a curious object, granted. It may be of use to us in the future.*
<Of use—!> Quath felt dismayed shock at the Tukar’ramin’s bland unconcern. Then her characterological submind took hold and reminded her that she was, after all, only a recently augmented member of the Hive. Her great advancement, the revelations about her Philosoph components—these still did not mean she could blithely question the Tukar’ramin’s judgment. She savored the strangely cool presence—the very voice of the Illuminates.
Above, the thing came down through thunderclaps and vortex night.
It had started as a seedbeast, far out at the rim of this solar system.
It was then a thin bar of slow life struggling in bitter cold. Threads trailed from it, holding a gossamer mirror far larger than the bar. Wan sunlight reflected from the mica mirror, focusing on the living nucleus, warming it enough to keep a tepid, persistent flow of fluids.
In hovering dark far beyond the target star the bar waited and watched. Passing molecular clouds brushed it with dust, and this grimy meal was enough—barely—to help repair the occasional damage from cosmic rays.
Filigrees of muscle fiber kept its mirror aligned and formed the rigging for later growth. Even so far from the star, sunlight’s pressure inflated the large but flimsy structure. A slight spin supplied aligning tension, through crisscrossing spars.
The wan but focused starlight fell upon photoreceptors, which converted the energy into chemical forms. The seed-beast did not need to move quickly, so this feeble flow of power was enough to send it on its hunt.
No mind sailed in this bitterly cold, black chunk. None was needed… yet.
