Seeds of Earth (39 page)

After that unsettling and curtailed vigil, she had returned to the Human enclave and a restless night of shallow, inconstant sleep. Rising early, she had tried to focus on her backlog of research work, sorting and cataloguing samples, but her mind wandered back to that dream, her childhood at Zhilinsky House, Julia . . .

Yes . . . Julia. Then she had taken out her coram, pondering the fact that there were people she could contact and favours she could call in. In the event, however, the reliable details she gathered provided only a sketchy picture. For about a year the government's Special Designs Division had been maintaining a research post at Pelagios Base, the old oceanography platform ten miles up the east coast. Then several weeks ago a dozen or more additional personnel had arrived but were taken off Pilipoint in a large launch which headed for Pelagios Base. There was never any mention of Pelagios and its staff in any public announcement or memo or directive from Pilipoint's administrators, but the community's rumour-mongers took it for granted that the new people had been Enhanced. Another handful had arrived in the week following, of whom Yurevich was the most recent, all of them with that aura of lofty intellect. And then last night, while she was getting ready for her vigil, some eighteen to twenty of them had left on a special shuttle flight back to Darien, including Julia Bryce - a friend on the embarkation staff had noticed the name on a passenger manifest before it was removed.

Beyond that, there was little of substance. Nothing on Enhanced identities, and not a clue as to the nature of the research taking place at Pelagios. And certainly no explanation for the evacuation, although it wasn't impossible that the Brolturan ambassador's murder had played a part.

It was a setback, this near-perfect information blackout, but not that much of a surprise. The Enhanced and their minders were secrecy obsessives and habitually paid great attention to details, ensuring the integrity of that blackout. Catriona realised that it would take more digging to find out anything useful, more time than she had today.

Instead, she had made a few more calls to fellow researchers in other enclaves dotted around the continent-spanning forest of Segrana. She was looking for any reports of odd happenings or sightings and found herself being offered innumerable reports on the curious and often inexplicably purposeful behaviour of the forest's flora and fauna. But when she made it clear that she was after more mysterious, unattributable incidents documented in the last couple of days, she was left with a handful of accounts: a set of bipedal prints leading up the sandy beach of Emmerson Bay on the north coast; four perfectly circular holes drilled into the 200-foot-wide bole of one of the five pillar trees that made up the outer northeast buttress cluster; the cut-up carcasses of five crab-analog
ogmi
found beside one of the eastern underlakes, every incision smooth and precise; the sighting, on the night before last, of a large, dark bird swooping low over the dense heartlands of the Great Central Uplands before lazily flapping away eastwards.

Catriona brought the spiderlike
trictra
to a halt on a natural shelf of interwoven branches and tied it up within easy reach of edible foliage. Then it was a brief downward climb to the small platform where the
vodrun
waited. She thought about those singular reports and what they might mean if yesterday's dream-vision was right, the possibility that offworld intruders were lurking somewhere, watching, planning . . .

In her left hand she held a plastic tub on a cloth strap - inside were some biscuits, nuts, a small flask of turnsprig tea and a luring candle fixed in a seashell holder. Then with her right hand she took out her comm and called Greg, imagining the signal flying up to one of Nivyesta's comsats and then tight-beamed to another orbiting Darien, then down to the local hub node. After several moments a breathless Greg answered.

'Yes? . . . hello? . . .'

'Greg, it's Cat,' she said.

'Well, hi... did you get my message? Did you ... did you go through with it?' 'I did, and I didn't.'

At the other end Greg chuckled quietly. 'I detect a wee note of indecision there.'

'Not so much indecision as blind terror,' and she gave him a terse summary of that unnerving vision, including her encounters with the younger Greg and Julia, which also entailed a brief explanation of Julia's role in her past.

'Uh huh, so you were dreaming about me, eh? I'm honoured.'

She smiled and shook her head. 'No, Greg, there wasn't any dreaming involved. I'm certain, now, that I was talking to Segrana and that she was using images from my memory . . .'

'I must admit that sounds pretty wild,' Greg said. 'But I had my own share of surprises last night...'

She listened as he told of the huge chamber and the pattern-inscribed floor that Chel and Listener Weynl called a well, and how the Uvovo had awakened some kind of automatic defence (which had apparently obliterated his boots during the first expedition).

'Your boots?' she said, laughing.

'Aye, took exception to certain aspects of their manufacture, it seems.'

'I think I'd rather be down there than up here,' she said.

'Ach, we are where we are.'

'Homespun philosophy, Mr Cameron?'

'Straight from my mother's knee to your ears, Miss Macreadie. So - are you going to try again?'

How did he guess}
she wondered.

'I think ... I think that I have to,' she said. 'It's the precautionary principle -
if
Segrana has been talking to me and
if
there are hostile intruders around, then it's wise to be prepared. In the vision she said I could help now I'm going to find out how.' She laughed drily. 'And if it turns out to be a wild goose chase, I'll be on the next shuttle back to Darien to join the resistance!'

'It's not quite got to that stage,' Greg said. 'In fact, Sundstrom has somehow got the Brolturans to drastically reduce their troop presence at the Hegemony embassy, and persuaded the Earth people to send some marines down from the
Heracles'

'Some good news at last - maybe I'll not have to leave Nivyesta after all.'

'I don't know - we could need a Uvovo expert on call when we get round to studying those underground chambers!'

Their shared laughter was easy and warm, but brief.

'Sorry, Greg, but I'll have to go and get this over with while I'm still convinced.'

'Aye - I have to go, too. Promise me you'll call the moment it's done.'

'I will, I promise. Goodbye, Greg.'

'Bye, Cat.'

Call ended, she tucked the comm away, breathed in deep . . . then swung round, tugged open the
vodrun's
circular door and ducked inside. Moments later, the candle was lit, the tea was poured and the door wedged shut with a wad of leaves.

Right,
she thought as she sipped the hot, herby infusion.
I'm here so let's get to work.

40

CHEL

The zeplin pilot was a Finn named Varstrand who kept up a stream of gossip and rumour as they flew out from Hammergard, heading southwest across Loch Morwen towards the Savrenki Mountains, a southerly offshoot of the Kentigerns. Varstrand's craft, the
Har,
was essentially a true dirigible with a gondola slung beneath a gas-filled envelope shaped like a fat cigar. The gondola's twin-prop motors could run on either alcofuel or battery power and solar cells glued to the outer skin provided an emergency backup.

Chel was seated behind Varstrand, in a wire-andwicker couch that seemed as rickety as the construction of the creaky gondola. He was wrapped up well against the chill and the icy draughts that slipped through cracks in the hide-and-canvas hull. The noise of the engines added to the discomfort but this was his first visit to some of the Burrows to which he had dispatched the teams of Artificer Uvovo over a day ago. He would sit it out - there were worse things to be endured.

A two-hour journey under grey skies took the rest of the morning and, following the map scribed by Uvovo scouts, brought the
Har
to a bushy ridge in the foothills of the Savrenkis. Chel clambered down a rope ladder to be greeted by Tremenogir, the Scholar in charge. Then together they grabbed the mooring lines let down by Varstrand and tied the zeplin between a couple of sturd) trees.

'How long you be, Listener, sir?' Varstrand yelled down.

'Not very long, Pilot Varstrand,' Chel called back. 'Maybe half an hour.'

'Good! - I have book ...'

Chel grinned and waved then looked round at Tremenogir.

'Let us begin, Scholar Trem.'

'It is a great relief to have you here, Listener,' the Scholar said as he led the way down the other side of the ridge then up into a steep-sided gully. 'Our findings are astonishing.'

Chel thought about correcting the Scholar's use of the Listener title, but since he was not entirely sure of the difference himself he decided to leave it until he was.

Rocks, bushes and age-twisted trees cluttered the gully, carved from the hillside over time by a stream which splashed and gurgled down a notched rock face at the gully's end, where four immense boulders were piled to one side. A stair of flat rocks led up onto the second-highest boulder and a dark gap where the third boulder leaned against the gully's undergrowthswathed slope. Chel followed Scholar Trem into the gap, which became a low, narrow, curving passage, clearly hewn out of the tilted boulder.

The passage widened, wood-shored sides showing many signs of recent repair.
Ulby
roots and tethered
ineka
beetles shed enough blue-green light to see by as they continued further into the hillside.

'So, Scholar Trem, your findings,' Chel said as they walked. 'What makes them so astonishing?'

'The expected followed by the unexpected, Listener,' said Trem as they entered a small, shadowy room where three young Uvovo sat at a table, scribbling by the light of a candle. Hastily, they stood and bowed.

'My assistants, Jont, Flir and Kamm - it was Jont who literally stumbled upon our discovery. But first, the roothouse.'

The Scholar showed Chel through a doorway leading off to the right and down stone steps into cold depths. The carapace glows of a few
ineka
beetles speckled the inky darkness. Soon they came to a low, arched entrance where Trem paused, took a shell candle from a waist pouch, lit it with a Human match then continued. The air was dry and musty, like the faint emanation of an ancient decay. The passage was about a dozen paces long and showed many holes and gouges where plant growth had eaten into the stone, most of which had been cleared away except for one thick, rough root which had burst through then snaked along to the other end. And this was the very least of it, as Chel saw when they emerged into the roothouse and Trem raised his lamp.

Twisting, coiling and knotted, rootworks filled the high, circular chamber before them. Through the tangle Chel saw vague suggestions of carved images on the walls, all buried beneath encrusting filth, except for a massive, fallen shard of rock which stood at an angle across the chamber, webbed with roots. He could also tell that several other passages led outwards from the round room - ten or twelve all told.

'I had Flir and Kamm clear away some of the roots from the bottom,' Trem said. 'There's enough room to crawl over to one of the laving galleries.' He crouched down and pointed. 'That one.'

As they crept under the mass of entwined roots, occasionally snagging clothing on twiggy protrusions, Chel went over in his thoughts what Listener Weynl told him about the Burrows. They had been built well before the War of the Long Night as a means of bringing greater focus to the powers of Segrana-that-was, the Segrana whose embrace had once enclosed both planet and moon. Each Burrow, Weynl said, was the meeting point of hundreds of roots, thousands in the larger ones. With the use of nutrients and other balms provided by some of Segrana's most specialised plants, the growth and extent of the forests and jungles could be managed; likewise, Segrana's harsher powers could be channelled and intensified and, if necessary, put forth in anger. This was the Artificer Uvovo's urgent task, to find out if anything useful remained, at least in those Burrows in the immediate vicinity.

A few paces into the laving gallery they were able to stand up and survey what it had come to. From the grey, dust-choked remnants of ducts and wall channels, Chel could see how the roots entered from above and curved down through one or more stone basins, where they were fed specific fluids. Now a snarl of uncontrolled roots filled most of the gallery, grey roots, grey dust, grey webs.

'This has been abandoned for a very long time,' Chel said. 'And it provokes in me a certain sadness rather than astonishment.'

Trem nodded. 'As it did in me until Jont found something more interesting in another gallery.'

A few moments later, in the root-framed entrance to that gallery, they were standing over a rectangular hole in the floor.

'While clearing away dead roots and dried-out debris, Jont tripped and fell to his knees right here.' Trem squatted down beside the opening. 'Some rotted framework gave way beneath and he would have plunged into darkness had he not caught the edge and climbed back out.'

A narrow set of steps was visible by the meagre light of Trem's shell lamp as he led the way down. Chel immediately smelled something different from the roothouse - a hint of damp, a woody odour, then the pungency of mould. Something was growing down here.

The steps ended in a small alcove just off a corridor, but the way was blocked by a large pipe.
No, not a pipe,
he realised as Trem went over to it with his lamp, but a huge root. Like the Scholar he ducked under and saw a high-walled passageway not unlike the galleries above, except that here the roots were big and alive, some bulbous, some bifurcated, some sprouting pale rootlets that spread across the walls, over faint, labyrinthine traces of previous rootlet webs. And there in the quiet, underground dimness he heard the sound of droplets falling from high onto roots or plinking into small puddles. He was tempted to tug aside the blindfold and open some of his new eyes to all this, but his perceptions were still unpredictable so perhaps another time would be better.