The Cerebelline Life-mistress who constructed these microforms had outdone herself. There were a thousand variations, each beautiful with weird beauty, but small, very small. She had invented a new way of coding genetic material, like DNA, but containing eighty-one chemical compounds, instead of the four classic amino acids. Complex genetic information could be compressed into very small cells, as small as viral cells, and complex forms of life were swarming and multiplying along the coral arms at a size that usually only simple protozoa used. The speed of their growth and decay was so high, their atoms combining and recombining so quickly, that
the waste-heat was boiling the lake water. The initial high energy to start these reactions came from widely scattered pebbles of special living crystal.
The coral trees that sprang out from these !ife-pebbles were made up of thousands and millions of individuals, each one contributing to and being fed by the whole structure. The branches and limbs of coral seemed rigid only because each microform who darted away left chemical energy behind which only microforms who took up that exact position in the hierarchy, the same place and stance and posture, could fully enjoy. Like a spinning wheel seeming to form a solid disk, the illusion of stability was caused by the continuous effort of each part in motion.
Surrounding each coral tree was a very wide area of desolation, which the microforms could not cross. Each coral tree was centered only on its life-pebble, and all parts operated in magnificent harmony.
But only in isolation was the tree structure symbiotic. While a mother tree could send seeds to start other trees, these new daughter trees could not reach all the way across the desolation to rejoin the mother tree in a peaceful symbiosis.
At the point in the performance when Phaethon joined it, the greatest tree growing from the oldest life-pebble had just learned how to carry water to higher parts, and was lifting shining branches into the air.
This eldest tree had discovered how to use steam pressure through its capillaries to fling seeds through the air. The seeds skipped like tossed stones across the lake surface, passing the desolate zones, and sank into rich lake-bottom soils near other life-pebbles, there to start tree-organisms of their own.
This eldest tree, once it had colonized the immediate circle of closest life-pebbles, flung a second wave of seed-colonists, which, competing with the daughter trees that had grown up from the first wave, made the water boil with an intense and deadly competition.
In order to avoid further destructive competition, the central eldest tree now tried to grow to higher and higher branches, in order to fling its seeds farther. The base of the
structure complained; signals flashed like fire among the swarming microforms; the warnings were ignored.
In a slow and terrifying crash, the central tree collapsed under its own weight. A plume of steam, like a ghost, swelled up over the lake surface.
Phaethon, who had a base-neuroform, could only understand part of what he was seeing. The symmetries, the timings, the nuances, were forever beyond him. He could follow the life experience of a few of the struggling microforms as they poured into his brain, but only one after another. The meaning of the whole was never clear.
This was not to say he was not stirred by the beauty of what he saw. A blind man listening to an opera might not see the pageantry of the sets and costumes, but the music could profoundly move him, even if the language was strange.
Phaethon glanced back up into Middle Dreaming, turned toward the nearest waitress and signaled for a libretto. Smiling, the Canal Dryad looked toward him, paused, and knelt gracefully to pick up a seeing-ring the wind had blown from her tray. She straightened again, tucked her hair behind her ear, came toward him, and proffered the card containing the libretto.
Many men found Martian Dryads quite attractive; they had the deep chests required by the thin air Mars had once had (Dryads dated from the middle of the Second Terraforming Interrum), and a long-legged delicacy lesser Martian gravity permitted. And they did not have the rough hide of a south-hemisphere drylander. But they were not usually clumsy or shy. Why had the waitress paused?
Phaethon deactivated his sense-filter and saw a man dressed as an Astronomer from First-Century Porphyrogen Cosmic Observatory at 500 AUs, of the Undeterred Observationer School, a Scholum now defunct. It had been a period of hardship, before the construction of the artificial ice-planetoid, and
the costume reflected the hardness of those times. He had thick radiation-proof skin, with the internal recyclers and extra layers of fat that allowed him to stand long watches without taking air or water from the common stores. His face was disfigured with multiple eye-jacks, plugs, and extensions, as the Observationers of that period could not afford to abide by the Consensus Aesthetic.
The waitress must have paused to hand a libretto to the Observationer, a man Phaethon's sense-filter had censored from view. The filter could not let him see her hand the card to nobody, and so had invented an action for her to do. Her dropping and stooping and picking up was mere waste motion to account for the missing time.
Phaethon recalled that his sense-filter had been programmed to keep hidden from him a certain disaster in near-Mercury space, brought on solar storms. If the man costumed as an ancient astronomer were an astronomer in truth, he may have ready access to a channel or an index containing information.
Phaethon took the libretto but only pretended to study it as he stepped toward the man. The astronomer was watching the burning collapse of the supertree with several eyes.
Phaethon said, "The life-artist creates a scene of grim disaster."
Phaethon detected signal actions on Channel 760, the translation matrix. There was a moment while the man adjusted to Phaethon's language forms, downloading grammars and vocabularies into himself.
"Truly said," the man replied with a smile. "Though not so grim, I think, as Demontdelune's final hours on the Moon's far side."
Phaethon did not bother to explain he was dressed as Hamlet. He said, "Life can be grim, even these days. Consider the disaster near Mercury."
"The solar storm? A moral lesson for all of us."
"Oh? How so?"
"Well, we'd like to think the Sophotechs can predict all coming disasters, warn, and protect us. But in this case, very
minor, perhaps subatomic, variations in the solar core conditions caused the forces to escape Helion's control during one of his agitation runs. Very minor differences between the initial conditions and the predictive model led to disproportionate results; sunspots and solar prominences of truly unusual size and violence erupted all across the affected fields. Joachim Dekasepton Irem has made a rather nice study of the irregular flare patterns, and set the effect to music on channel 880. Have you seen it?"
"I have not," said Phaethon. He did not explain that his sense-filter, on its present setting, would prevent him from viewing any such thing. "But I am given to understand that he ... ah ... portrays certain of the details, ahh ..."
"Inaccurately?" asked the man.
"Perhaps that's the word I'm looking for, yes."
"Well, it's an understatement! Large segments of Helion's sun-taming array wrecked! Interplanetary communications disturbed by the sunspot bursts! And Helion, staying behind, still in the depth of the sun, to try to prevent worse disasters! Much of the collection equipment, orbital stations, and other materials near Mercury was saved only because of Helion's last-ditch effort to restore the magnetic curtains to operation, and to deflect some of the heavier high-speed particles erupting from the sun away from inhabited zones. Great Helion proved his worth a million times and more that hour, I tell you! And to make such a sacrifice for that worthless scion of his house! I wonder at the gall of the Curia! Is there no gratitude left at all in the courts of law? They should just leave Helion alone! But, at least, the Six Peers (well, I suppose they are the Seven Peers now) had the good sense to reward Helion's valor with a Peerage."