The vid skipped and they caught only a glimpse of the aircraft as it slammed into the desert floor and skidded wildly across the dunes, spewing debris, chunks of airframe, and engine parts. Then the vid ended, and the vast red disc of Ephesus replaced the grainy images.
"You see?" Magdalena had her brush in her paw and was smoothing out the kinks and twists in her fur. "Sometimes the planet eats more than your boots."
Parker shook his head, then flicked away his spent tabac and immediately lit another. Gretchen sat quietly for a moment, studying the images on the panel. She ran though the video again, her face composed and concentrated. After a moment, she said, "Did you extract more vid of this plateau with the lines?"
"Ya-ha," Magdalena coughed. "The second v-feed in archive – yes, that's the one."
Another series of images flowed past, these taken from weather satellite number eight at a slight angle from the west. Dawn spilled over the eastern horizon and the pattern of lines became apparent, elongated and stretched out, making a cross-hatching pattern. Day progressed and the lines shortened, shifted pattern, essentially vanishing at midday. Then, as the sun sank into the west, lengthened again – this time to the east – and went through a similar set of convolutions.
Gretchen played the vid again, but this time she stopped the feed about an hour after the sun had risen, then zoomed and zoomed again. The comp interpolated busily, refining the image, and then a forest of tall pipelike structures were revealed covering the plateau.
"Scale?" Parker was at her shoulder again, a coil of tabac smoke tangling in her hair and tickling her nose.
"They're four to five meters tall," Gretchen said, brushing invisible smoky gnats away from her nose. "But look…they bend as the sun passes. Not too much; the mineralized sheathing must be stiff to let them grow so high, but enough to follow the sun. Like flowers."
"Pipeflowers." Parker grunted. "What made the flash? Did they?"
Gretchen nodded, hand over her mouth. "Sinclair will have to look at this, but all of the microfauna he's found so far have used a kind of electron cascade as their…their blood, I guess. They store and release energy – the fuel that gives them life – by shedding electrons and storing potentials in segregated structures. And these…stems…must trap sunlight in some kind of photocell to sustain themselves."
Parker scratched the side of his head. "They don't look dark, like a solar array."
"No." Gretchen felt a vague thought rear its head. Something she'd almost grasped before, when she was in the medical bay, or when she was examining the book cylinder. "No, the sun gives life, but too much is deadly. Too much UV, right?" Her fingers drummed on the display. "So they build up a mineralized sheath – like the little creatures I found growing in the pulque can."
Gretchen felt the puzzle shift in her mind, some pieces falling into place and revealing a new orientation and shape for other sets of data. She suddenly felt alive, as if her skin were humming and everything became perfectly clear.
"The pulque can is the key," she said, looking up at Parker. "Because it's new and yet the organism had nearly filled the can. Sinclair thinks the whole ecosystem works very slowly, but he's wrong – the species he's examining are only replicating so slowly because they have so little energy to work with. The can was perfect for them – it's a substance they can digest – and it was in the shade of the trench. So they can grow and be protected from the sun." Gretchen nodded. "Because all of these organisms – all of this effusion of Ephesian life – are terribly sensitive to ultraviolet radiation. You saw what happened down in the examining room – everything just died. Or in the shuttle intake with your multispec lamp."
"Okay," Parker said as he stubbed out his tabac. "Then how did all of this develop here? There's no ozone layer to speak of, no heavy atmosphere…the surface is a kill zone for the chapultin. How would they ever get a chance?"
Gretchen's expression changed and Parker thought she looked terribly sad.
"Because there were so many of them to begin with," she said in a hollow voice. "Unnumbered billions, covering the world in a terrible killing mist. They must have blotted out the sun, turned the sky dark with their numbers. But of course, there was no one to see them, not by then."
"Huh?" Parker's tabac hung on his lip, sending up a slow, coiling trail of smoke.
"They were the eaters," Gretchen said, grinding a palm heel against her eye. "The First Sun people came to this world and they scattered thousands of cylinders – just like those Russovsky found. The cylinders broke open and the chapultin poured out, relentless and unstoppable. And, in the end, when they were done, there was nothing but barren rock and stone and an empty world."
Parker drew back, an expression half of amazement and half of disgust on his face.
"Then the great machines descended from the sky and the whole mantle of the world was torn away and reshaped in a way which pleased the gods of the First Sun. Lennox thinks their project was interrupted, that they went away in haste and I think she's right. Because they left behind a ruin and some of their expendable tools were still alive. Some of the eaters lived, burrowing into the stone, hiding from the sun which turned the newly shattered surface into the harshest desert imaginable.
"Smalls is puzzled by the levels of oxygen and nitrogen in the current atmosphere. They're much higher than they should be – like there's a chlorophyll reaction working somewhere – and there's really very little CO2." A wan smile tried to intrude on Gretchen's face, but failed. "The descendants of the chapultin fill the sand, the rock, every niche – just as life always seems to do – and they gobble up any CO2 they might find, releasing plain carbon and oxygen. And they fear the sun, so they've evolved in this swift million years, laying down waste products to protect their crystalline bodies, a shell to block the killing UV."
Her hand opened, indicating the plateau of pipeflowers. "Some of them have evolved to get their energy from the sun, though even then in only a specialized way. They must…they must have thought the engine flare of the shuttle was a new sun – so bright, so close – but there was too much energy, too fast." Gretchen nodded to the pilot. "What's a beam weapon, but a directed stream of excited particles? That plateau is thirty miles wide, Parker, and there must be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pipeflowers. And every one of them probably suffered a catastrophic electron cascade all at once."
"Ugly." Parker said after thinking about it for a moment. "Very ugly. Old crow better be careful flying around down there. Could get his tailfeathers singed."
Gretchen smiled broadly at the thought of the Imperial judge plunging in a ball of fire to the desert floor. The mental image was clear and vivid and accompanied by a very satisfying crashing sound.
"Hrrwht!" Magdalena shook her head, ears angled back. "A Midge won't attract them – it's quiet and unobtrusive – barely leaves a vapor trail. Russovsky was lucky – or figured it all out for herself. She was a careful hunter – well, before they ate her up, she was." The Hesht sighed.
"Yes…" Gretchen suddenly looked thoughtful. She was thinking of Hummingbird and his mysterious errand. "Parker, how much fuel does a Midge carry? How high can one fly?"
"So," Anderssen announced in a very satisfied tone, "he's not coming back."