And, though she was fully grown, her body was childlike. Ultimate was functionally female — people still gave birth — but there were no males any more, and gender was meaningless. She had no breasts, not even vestigial nipples. Nowadays there was no need for mother’s milk, just as there was no need for the elaborate superstructure of a large brain. The Tree took care of all of that for you.
And she was not bipedal. That was obvious as she made her way back to the Tree: her arms and legs were made for swinging and climbing, her feet for grasping, not walking upright. That particular locomotive experiment had been thoroughly buried long ago. Compared to her ancestors, she was slow-moving, lethargic, like all her kind.
At the Tree, Ultimate looked for her daughter.
The infant’s leafy cocoon nestled in the crook of a low branch. Threads of orange hair littered over her swollen brow, the little girl was safely enfolded in soft white down. As the Tree’s sap passed along the pale thread of the belly-root that wormed into her stomach, the child stirred and murmured, her tiny thumb clamped firmly in her mouth, dreaming vegetable dreams.
Something was wrong. Ultimate was not capable of much in the way of analysis, but her instinct was unmistakable. She prodded at the tangled red fur on the child’s little belly, and smoothed out the fluffy cottonlike lining of the cocoon. The little girl mewled, turning blindly in her sleep. Nothing Ultimate did made that feeling of wrongness go away. Uncertain, she patted the walls of the cocoon back into place.
The wind rose, like a great breath.
Ultimate clambered higher into the Tree’s welcoming branches. Hastily she pulled her own cocoon into place around her body, sealing up the leaves. The leaves were thick and tough, like plates of leathery armor. The others were doing the same, people huddling on the branches, so that it looked as if the Tree were suddenly sprouting huge black fruits.
The clouds streamed overhead, blotting out the intense heat of a too hot sun. Ultimate stared. Curiosity wasn’t much use now, when there was so little difference in the world across great stretches of time and space. But today was different. She had never felt air as moist and heavy and oppressive as this, never seen black clouds that boiled and bubbled like that.
And in the last moment before the storm hit, she glimpsed something new.
Settled on the timeworn plain, it was a sphere. It was twice as tall as she was. It was not blue like the evening sky, nor rust red like the ground, nor the color of sand and dirt like most of the creatures in the world. Instead, it was a shimmering mixture of purple and black, the colors of the night.
On this day of strangeness, here was something extraordinary. She gaped, unable to comprehend. But she sensed that this new thing was not of her world. In that she was right.
But now lightning cracked, and she buried her face in the green, mewling. The leaves closed around her, sealing themselves up seamlessly. In the warm darkness the air grew moist and comforting. But when the belly-root came probing for the valvelike orifice on her stomach, just below her navel, she pushed it away. She was here for shelter; she had nothing to give the Tree today.
And then the storm hit.
Wind and dust came out of the west like a red wall. Dried plants were shattered. Even the scattered, stately Trees were shaken, branches ripped away. People and other symbiotes were wrenched from their cocoons, utterly terrified.
The first few raindrops, landing like bullets, heralded an immense downpour. The rain was so heavy it even began to erode the rock-hard surfaces of the ancient termite mounds. There was nothing to absorb the water, no grass to consolidate the loose soil. Within minutes water was running down every dried-out gully and streambed. A great muddy wave came cascading into the quarry. The water seethed around the roots of the trees, turbulent, tinged red by mud.
But the rain dissipated as quickly as it had begun. The clouds cleared, racing deeper into the heart of the supercontinent. The flood quickly subsided, sinking into the parched sand.
There hadn’t been such a storm since Ultimate’s mother had first opened her eyes. Nothing in Ultimate’s experience had prepared her for such a catastrophic downpour. But the Tree, in its slow vegetable way, understood.
Even as Ultimate cowered, shocked, in her cocoon, she felt the leathery skin pulse around her. She longed to stay here in the moist dark rather than face whatever lay beyond these enclosing walls. But she was made to feel uneasy, restless. The Tree wanted her to leave, to go to work.
She set her back against the cocoon wall and pushed. The leaves came free of one another with a moist, sucking noise. She tumbled out of the Tree, and landed in mud.
All around her people were falling out of the Tree. They took experimental steps and knuckle-walks. The mud felt strange: It was heavy, clinging, crimson stuff that stuck to their legs and feet and hands.
The ferocious sun was shining once more, and the mud was already drying, the water escaping into the air, the ground baking hard. But for these rare minutes the ground was a cacophonous swarm of noise and motion. With visible speed, tendrils, leaves, and even flowers were pushing out of the mud. They had come from seeds that had lain dormant for a century. Soon sacs began to pop. Like tiny artillery pieces, they shot new seeds through the air. Entire reproductive cycles were being completed in minutes.
Insects emerged from their own encysted hiding places to dance and mate over the transient pools. On the ground there were more insects — ants, scorpions, cockroaches, beetles, and their much morphed descendant species. Many of the ants were leaf eaters, and Ultimate could see great chains of them trooping back and forth from the burgeoning plants bearing bits of greenery for their nests.
And there were many, many small lizards. They were hard to see, so well did their reddish skin match the color of the ground. Everywhere they hunted. Some of them had no smarter strategy than to sit with their mouths open by the ant columns, waiting for clumsy insects to stumble in.
One small, sturdy cactuslike plant, a ball of leathery skin and defensive spikes, dragged its upper roots from the soil, abandoning a deep, extensive root system. On roots that quivered like clumsy legs, it tottered toward the still-running water. When it got there, the walking plant subsided into the mud, as if with a sigh. Immediately the inefficient vegetable muscles that had powered its short journey began to dissolve, and new roots began to work their way into the moist ground.
All over the pit people were feeding on the sudden plants, reptiles, amphibians, insects. They were mostly adults: Children were rare in these straitened times; the Tree saw to that.
Ultimate, a rainstorm virgin, stared at all this, gaping.
A froglike creature erupted from the ground. It hopped and stumbled to the nearest of the temporary ponds, where it leapt into the water and began to croak noisily, guiding the emerging females who followed to it. Soon the pond was a splashing frenzy of amphibian mating. Ultimate grabbed one of the frogs. It was like a slimy sac of water. She popped it into her mouth. Briefly she felt its coldness, its heart hammering against her tongue, as if in disappointment that its century-long wait in a cocoon of hardened mud was going to end in such ignominy. Then she bit down, and delicious water and salty blood gushed into her mouth.
But already the pools were drying, the water hissing into the parched earth. The frogs’ spawn had hatched, and tadpoles, fast metamorphosing, were feeding on algae, tiny shrimps, and each other. They swarmed out of the water after their parents — and were snapped up by a mass of tiny lizards in a quivering feeding frenzy. But already the young frogs were digging their way into the mud, constructing for themselves mucus-lined chambers in which they would wait out the decades until the next storm, their skins hardened, their shriveled metabolisms slowing into suspended animation.