Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [145]
Life rose all around them: a jungle in defiance of the sun. In the robot's lights the steep, abrasive valley walls flushed in a vivid panoply of color: scarlet, chalk-white, sulfur-gold, obsidian. Like stands of bamboo, tubeworms swayed on the hillsides, taller than a man. The rocks were thick with clams, their white shells yawning to show flesh as red as blood. Purple sponges pulsed, abyssal corals spread black branching thickets, their thin arms jeweled with polyps.
The water of life gushed from the depths of the valley. Chimneys slimed with metal oxides spewed hot clouds of energized sulfur. The sea floor boiled, wobbling bubbles of steam glinting through a haze of bacteria. The bacteria were central. They were the food chain's fundamental link. Through chemosyn-thesis, they drew energy from the sulfur itself, scorning the sun to thrive on the heat of the Earth.
Within the warmth and darkness, the valley seethed with life. The rock itself seemed to live, festooned with porous knobs and slimed crevasses, red-black tubes of cold lava-stone coiling like snakes, phallic chimneys of precipitated minerals gleaming copper-green with verdigris. Pale crabs with legs as long as a man's arm kicked daintily across the slopes. Jet-black abyssal fish, grown fat on unexpected bounty, moved with slick langour through the clustered stalks of the tubeworms. Bright yellow jellies, like severed flowerheads, floated in thick eddies of bacterial soup.
"Everything," Lindsay breathed. "I want it all." Vera pulled away her eyephones; her eyes were flooded with tears. She slumped back in the seat, shaking. "I can't see," she said, her voice hoarse. She handed him the control box. "Please ... it should be yours, Abelard." Lindsay strapped on the phones, slipped his fingers into the control slots. Suddenly he was amid it all, the scanners turning with the movements of his head. He extended the sampling arms, extruding the delicate clockwork of the genetics needles. He advanced on the nearest stand of tubeworms. Above the serried white columns of their wrist-thick trunks, their foliage was rank upon waving rank of arm-long feathered red fronds, sweeping with feminine elegance, combing life from the water. Their white stems clustered with sheltered creatures: barnacles, tiny crabs, fringed worms in sea-green and electric blue, round comb jellies glinting in faint pastels.
A predator emerged from the jungle, flowing sinuously around the trunks: a jet-black abyssal fish, leg-sized and flattened like an eel, its sides studded with serried dots of phosphorescence. It approached fearlessly, fascinated by the light. Gills pulsed behind its huge-eyed head and it opened a pale, glowing mouth bristling with fangs. "So," Lindsay addressed it. "You were pressed past the limits, forced into the abyss where nothing grows. But see what you've found. The fat of the system, sundog. Welcome to Paradise." As he spoke he moved the arm toward it; the long needle leaped out, touched it, and withdrew. The fish glowed out in sudden gold and green and flashed away. He moved to the forest, touching everything he could see, sampling bacteria with gentle suction filters. In half an hour he had filled all his sample capsules and turned back to the ship for more.
Then he saw something detach itself from the hull of the ship. At first he thought it a trick of the light, a ripple of pure reflection. Then he saw it moving toward him, wobbling, fluttering, shapeless, and formless, a jellied mirror, fluid in a silver bag. He heard Vera cry out.
He wrenched his hands from the controls and tore away the eyephones. She was bent over the videoboard, staring. "The Presence! You see it? The Presence!"
It was swimming, with an amoebalike rippling and stretching, deeper into the grove. Lindsay quickly jammed on the eyephones and took up the controls, following it with the robot's lights. Its formless surface threw washes of reflected brilliance over the clams and coral. Lindsay said, "You see it, Pilot?"
Pilot turned the spacecraft to follow it with tracking systems. "I