AS LONG AS I LIVE.
When Ozzie held the friendship pendant up, the spark of light had almost vanished. “This way, I think,” he said, and pushed off once again, not that he was really worried about direction now. Physically, the conditions had hardly changed, but simply knowing they were clear of the dreadful Ice Citadel world allowed his body to tap some previously unknown energy reserve. Just like an icewhale, he told himself.
Of course, now he knew what to look for, the signs were obvious. The thick snow, different types of tree with bony branches outlined against the sky, the lighter sky itself. With every yard they moved forward things changed. It wasn’t long before he saw thin henna-colored wisps of grass sticking out above the snow. Then there were little rodent creatures scampering about around the trees. Branches shed little piles of snow to fall around them with constant wet thudding sounds as the thaw grew. They were heading down quite a steep slope now, losing height rapidly.
The end of the forest was abrupt. Ozzie shot past the last trees and onto a snowfield that was broken by boulders and widening patches of orange-tinted grass. They were halfway along some massive valley created by Alp-sized mountains. A lake of beautifully clear water stretched out below him, extending for twenty miles on either side. Its shores were also ringed with trees, whose dark branches were just starting to bud. The snowfield died out completely about half a mile ahead of them, with the grass sliced by hundreds of little seasonal streams as the melting edge slowly retreated upward. On either side, the tree line was almost constant, drawing a broad boundary between the lower grass slopes of the mountains and their rocky upper levels.
When he looked back at the forest he’d just come from, Ozzie was sure it would only take five minutes or so to ski through, yet they’d paused a good quarter of an hour ago. A brilliant sun was rising at one end of the valley, and he finally understood the pink sky. They had come out of a gloomy maroon nightfall and straight into a vibrant dawn.
Ozzie slowly pushed his hood back, and smiled into the strengthening light as it began to warm his skin.
EIGHTEEN
No Prime immotile had a name. Names were derived from a communications system completely different from their species’ direct nerve impulse linkages. They did of course have ways of identifying each other. Immotiles even in their group cluster form were above all individual, a factor that sprang out of their early history’s territorialism. Alliances between them were built and fractured with reliable regularity in their planet’s premechanization age, when even the closest partnerships were liable to be swiftly discarded if an advantage could be pursued with another. Disputes in those days were always over the size of territory and the available resources—mainly fresh water and farmland. Little changed over the millennia.
After mechanization flourished, the nature of the alliances altered as the demands of machinery had to be met. Although the maneuvering and ever-flowing tides of allegiance continued to be played by the same rules of deception and force.
There was one immotile that always managed to retain its preeminence among the rest of its species. Always building the strongest alliances, always advancing itself at the expense of others, always holding its boundaries secure, always the most wily. In later times the largest and most powerful of all. Although not named, it could be characterized by its location: MorningLightMountain, a large cone of rock and earth that sprouted at the center of a long valley defined by rugged cliffs rising hundreds of meters from its swampy floor. Such was the alignment of the high walls that the thick beams of sunlight that the irregular edges produced swept across the central peak only during the morning.
It was the perfect place to establish a new Prime immotile territory. At the time of its amalgamation, seven or eight thousand years before Christ appeared on Earth, there were thousands, possibly even tens of thousands, of immotiles served and protected by their clans of motiles, occupying the planet’s equatorial zone. They were primitive then, creatures whose long evolutionary sequence was only just bearing fruit. Sitting in the middle of their covetously guarded fragment of land, immotiles flexed their rudimentary thoughts by plotting against their neighbors. Herds of standard motiles busied themselves consuming their own base cells from muddy streams and tending the edible vegetation; while the soldier variant motiles started to develop as the stronger, more agile members of each immotile’s herd were pressed into duty bashing rival herds’ brains out with wooden clubs.
The little sub-herd of twelve motiles was sent out by its birth immotile, seeking a place where a fresh herd could be established. Such a new neighboring territory would be advantageous to the founder immotile; with a joint personality origin their allegiance would be the strongest of all, at least for the initial years. After a while divergence crept in, it always did.
MorningLightMountain still retained the memory of itself before amalgamation and true thought began. The sub-herd had spent days carefully picking their way down the valley walls, dodging rockslides and clambering over sharp outcrops. Now they bunched together as they walked through the rainforest that sprang from the boggy ground along the valley floor. Every daybreak a mist would slither upward from the lush vegetation, a legacy from the nightly rains hazing the air and turning the mighty sunbeams a delicate orange-gold.
They saw it then, a symmetrical cone rising up out of the shadowed land ahead, the only feature of the entire valley to be struck by light, fluorescing a brilliant emerald against the roseate sky. Sunlight glinted off tiny streams that trickled down its sides. Small black specks circled far overhead, wings extended, idling in the thermals—one of the few remaining non-Prime life-forms left in the planet’s tropics.
The four largest herd members pressed up against each other, allowing their nerve receptors to touch so that their brains were linked together. Their individual thoughts were virtually identical, the simple memories and commands issued by their birth immotile, but joined like this their decision-making capability was significantly enhanced. Since reaching the valley floor they hadn’t encountered any other motile, or seen signs of a herd’s occupation. The valley with its difficult approaches was easy to defend. Its size was capable of supporting three or four herds. One immotile with its herd would have an abundance of water and land, giving it a strategic advantage over the surrounding immotiles.
As to the exact location the immotile should be placed… On each of the motiles, two upper sensory stalks twisted around so their eyes could all regard the conical mountain. With so many streams, there must be a spring of some kind at the top. Such a place would be ideal for an immotile. The water would always be clean, unlike those whose territories were bunched along rivers and had to make do with water contaminated from upstream.
They agreed, then: the mountain that was drenched with light. Their temporary linkage was broken as they moved apart. The other eight members of the sub-herd were summoned. Upper sensor stalks bent around so that nerve receptors could be touched, the instructions passed to all members. In unison they began to march toward the mountain.
Two-thirds of the way up, they found a large pool fed by several of the gurgling streams. The four large motiles fused their thoughts together again and examined the area with their extended intellect. One of them sucked up some of the water, and found it contained a satisfactory level of Prime base cells swarming inside. Their presence confirmed the site would be suitable for an immotile, subject to a few alterations. A host of new instructions were issued to their fellow herd members.
The type of motile that had come walking into the valley was the most simple of all the varieties that the immotiles birthed, and as such the most adaptive in the tasks it could perform. It had a pear-shaped torso of waxy white skin that measured over a meter in diameter across the base, with four tapering ridges of hard skin running vertically up its flanks. That quadruple symmetry was a constant within Prime life. The motile had four legs sprouting at the end of the skin ridges on the rim of its lower torso. Each of them had a flexible support “bone” running down the center, wrapped with bands of muscle tissue to provide a considerable range of movement. Each leg ended in a small hoof of tough ochre gristle that could dig in hard on soil or even wood—not that they often climbed trees.