“You mean you can’t guess?” Dairine said, leaning back against the pillows with a smug expression.
A television theme possibly much more famous in the British Isles than in North America began to play, against more of that howling sound effect. “Okay now,” Ronan said, “this is just a wee bit illicit. This doesn’t even air for four more days! Whose server have you hacked?”
Dairine placed one hand on her heart and assumed an expression of wounded dignity. “Nobody’s! How can you suggest that I would ever do such a thing?”
“Just like this,” Ronan said, completely unapologetic. “You saw my lips moving, I assume. Pause that first, would you? Thanks, Spotty. So. How?”
If it was possible, Dairine’s expression got even smugger. “The Mobiles are working on a project to store all available data,” she said. “You know about that?”
“The way I heard it,” Ronan said, “it was a project to back up the entire available universe.” He shook his head. “Still not too sure about what you use for media.”
“Not my problem,” Dairine said. “That’s hardware. But since I’m the Mobiles’ mom, they’re particularly interested in backing up all the data on Earth, in case I should need something. They said they didn’t want me to be discommoded.” She smiled sweetly. “Nice of them. Anyway, it turns out that one of the systems they’ve been routinely backing up for me is the entire data storage system of the BBC. And somewhere in that data storage, surprise surprise, is the next Dr. Who Christmas special. I mean, seriously, you don’t think they keep it stored on tape or something, do you?” Dairine raised her eyebrows. “So once it’s backed up to the motherboard world—because they keep all the really important storage, by which I mean everything I’m interested in, backed up locally—it’s really simple for me, well, me and Spot, to run live streaming video from the Mobiles’ backup to here…”
Kit blinked. “Tell me,” he said, “that downloading however many gigs of data it takes to store a Christmas special from umpty billion light years away isn’t doing something really horrible to our broadband allowance.”
Dairine made an amused spluttering noise. “No,” she said.
“Wonderful,” Ronan said. “Now would you kindly fecking unpause this thing? I’m dying here.”
The display unpaused, and Ronan fell back against the cushions on the floor with an expression of complete fulfillment. “You may just have justified your entire reason for existence,” he said to Dairine, and fell silent.
Another hour went by full of time travel and excitement and danger, with a different version of A Christmas Carol and another version of Scrooge woven all through. At the end of it, Ronan looked around and remarked, “I wondered that he’d gone a little quiet.”
Nita followed Ronan’s glance and saw that the cushions among which Darryl had been lying were empty. “Guess it was getting a little late for him,” he said. He rolled over and looked up at Filif. “How about you, Fil? You holding up all right?”
“Oh yes,” Filif said. He rustled, shaking out his branches all around. “It takes some synthesis, all of this,” he said after a few moments. “The way the tales interleave, the way they reach back to the triggering event… It’s complex. And so are the strictly social aspects. I can see this subject will take a lot of study…” But he sounded cheerful about the prospect.
“Do you guys do anything like this at home?” Dairine said. “Is there a holiday time when everyone gets together?”
“Oh, yeah,” Kit said. “I saw something in the manual once. That sort of summer festival where everyone goes up into the mountains…”
“Well, yes. But this time of year… well, our version of this time of year,” Filif said, “there’s something else. Not to get together, though. To get away from everyone else.”
That brought a number of heads up. “What?” said Dairine, and “Hey, that’s one I could get used to,” said Ronan. “Especially if you had relatives like mine…” He rubbed his eyes.
“Sounds a little weird,” Nita said, “to want to get away from other people at a holiday.”
Filif rustled. “Maybe not so strange,” he said, “if you’ve heard the story behind it…”
“Story!!” shouted about half the room.
“Then listen now, and hear the wind in the branches,” Filif said, “and it will tell you the tale of the Outlier, who made us what we are…”
Everyone got quiet.
Filif was quiet too. “The organism from which my people came,” he said, “one of the original species of Demisiv vegetation, arose something like five hundred million years ago as you reckon time. As far as we can tell from our own investigations, it started very small, in a near-equatorial zone mostly surrounded by several of what were then the largest lakes on the planet. We were really shrubs then—” and his berries went pink with amusement at Carmela. “Just low scrubby frondy things, like your earliest gymnosperms.
“That earliest form of Demisiv had a hard time at first, as conditions on the homeworld went through some difficult climatic cycles, and competition among the various arising plant species was fierce. But after a few million years it hit on a useful strategy. It gave up producing seed and instead shifted its energy into producing a communal root system, from which new microcolonies and eventually macrocolonies of plants could grow.”
“Could be smart,” Nita said, “if you’re in a hostile environment.”
Filif rustled, a gesture of agreement. “It’s a smart technique if you’re in a hostile environment: a survival mechanism. A plant that shares a root system with others—a superplant, I think your people call it—has a better chance of competing against plants that grow independently from seed, the ones that have to rely on their own food supplies to last through their period of greatest vulnerability.
“And that strategy became key to that earliest lifeform’s success. It spread, slowly at first and then more quickly millennium by millennium, across the world. It occupied great plains and climbed mountains and pushed down to the waters of every lakeshore. Finally it covered nearly all the world except at the poles. And as the millions of years crept by, since it no longer needed more territory to survive, it began to diversify in other ways. It developed rudimentary local organ structures and the beginnings of a nervous system. That neural network proved very useful in helping the proto-Demisiv locate and leverage the best sources of light as weather and the seasons changed, and it grew more complex with every passing aeon.”
“I bet I know where this is going…” Matt said.
“Of course you do,” Filif said. “It became conscious. And then, after enough time, it became self-aware. The Demisiv was born.”
“Was born,” Kit said. “Not ‘were.’”
“Yes,” Filif said. “Because it was one. It was only one, one huge organism communicating through a single neural net that covered the world, with thoughts that took a whole season to travel from one side to another of that mind. And so it remained for a long time. Millions of seasons went by, winter through summer and spring through fall, and the poles precessed and the stars shifted, and that one lifeform ruled the world unchallenged. Nothing could compete, especially when it finally learned to move—to shift the root structure itself along through the ground, taking with it the structures that grew out of it and absorbed the sunlight and breathed out the air. The whole world was a forest that ebbed and flowed with light and weather the way your oceans ebb and flow with their tides.
“And it might still be that way until something else happened. Very slowly in those vast spaces, a further diversification began, secondary to another, severer wave of climatic changes. It took too long for messages to travel great distances when there was need to react quickly to storms or floods or volcanic activity. As a result the Demisiv organism began to decentralize. Consciousness began to concentrate itself into smaller groups and patches, more tightly knit—still part of the great Whole, of course, but with increased autonomy in moving smaller populations’ root complexes to where conditions were more favorable. And out at the edge of one such population—a small one high up in the habitability range of the furthest northern hemisphere—the thing happened that would change everything.”