Hidden Empire - Kevin J. Anderson [15]
The inhabitants of the rescued Caillié had rejoiced upon seeing Theroc's verdant landscape, the sheer potential of this untamed world. This new home was more welcoming than any they had imagined during their generations of blind flight in search of any habitable star system. They had lived for centuries confined aboard a large, sterile starship, and during all that aimless time the colonists and their descendants had little to do but look at images of forests and mountains. And Theroc was everything they had prayed for. The colonists had immediately suspected something unusual about these trees.
The Caillié had carried everything necessary to settle even the most hostile world, but Theroc proved to be fully cooperative. After the Ildirans deposited them here, the colonists set up prefabricated structures as an immediate and temporary settlement while biologists, botanists, chemists, and mineral engineers set out to assess what this remarkable world had to offer.
Luckily, the biochemistry of the Theron ecosystem was mostly compatible with human genetics, and the settlers were able to eat a great variety of native food. They were not required to engage in massive labors of clearing and fertilizing land. The Caillié settlers found ways to work with the forest, discovering natural homes rather than erecting metal and polymer structures.
Decades later, by the time the Ildirans had established diplomatic relations with Earth, the Theron settlers had developed their own culture and established a firm foothold. Although Hansa representatives finally came to reunite them with the greater network of humanity, the Therons were perfectly happy to remain unaligned. When their ancestors had set out on the generation ship, they had never expected to go back, never dreamed of restored contact with Earth. They were a seed cast on the wind, hoping to take root somewhere. They did not intend to be uprooted...
As she paused in her explorations, Estarra ate messy handfuls of splurtberries and wiped the juice from her mouth and hands. Exuberant, she looked up at the nearest worldtree, where she saw handholds and markings of frequent ascents by acolyte reading teams. The bark offered enough bumpy hand- and footholds that Estarra could scale it like a ladder, providing she didn't look down or think too hard about what she was doing. Up there, the green priests walked their highways across the resilient treetops and interlinked branches.
Estarra wore few clothes, for the forest was warm; her feet were callused enough that she needed no shoes. She ascended one handhold at a time, moving upward, always upward. Exhausted but exhilarated, she finally broke through the brushing worldtree leaves. Estarra stared out, blinking into the unobscured sunlight, blue sky, and the endless treescape.
Even from up here, she could not tell where one individual tree ended and another began. Around her, she heard voices and songs, groaning chants and hesitant reading voices, a mixture of high-pitched and deep tones.
Balanced against the fronds, Estarra looked out at the gathered priests, tanned and healthy acolytes who had not yet taken the green, older emerald-skinned priests who had already formed a symbiosis with the worldforest. The acolytes sat on platforms or balanced on branches, reading aloud from scrolls or electronic plaques. Some played music. Others simply rattled off tedious streams of data, reciting meaningless numbers from tables. It was a dizzying hubbub of activity, with the priests entirely focused on increasing the knowledge and data held within the worldforest—a way to show reverence for and help their vibrant verdant spirit at the same time. Hundreds of separate voices spoke to the interconnected forest, and the worldtrees listened and learned.
So much to see and experience, and the green priests did it all by staying here, drawing blessings from the mind of the worldforest. Estarra wished she could comprehend everything the forest knew. The priests sang out poems