CHAPTER 25
From high above and afar, after the planetary shell opened a cleft to let the Tahirian spacecraft through and closed again behind, the spectacle was awesome enough. White steam and black smoke roiled in upward-rushing winds where sometimes flame flared. Below sprawled and reared a step pyramid the size of a small mountain, bearing towers, battlements, portals, keeps, roadways, trackways, kilometers-long tubes of mighty bore, forms as alien to human eyes as functions were unknown to human minds. Around it spread a forest of lesser structures, dense near the center, thinning out with distance until empty desert framed the edge of vision. They bore many different shapes, but dominant was something like a metal tree with an intricate mesh between the leafless boughs. Lights flashed throughout, a tumbling, bewildering shift from moment to moment, so that the men caught illusory half-glimpses of fireworks, waves, a maelstrom, a thing that danced. Machines scuttled about or clustered to do some task. Here and there moltenness welled up, seethed sullen red, rolled slowly down channels until it congealed into dark masses. There the machines were at their busiest.
“Jesus Christ!” Brent rasped. “What is that? Like the middle of hell!”
“I — I think I can guess,” Cleland said.
“Better wait till we have had a closer look,” Nansen advised. The spacecraft sped onward and the titans’ workshop sank below the horizon.
A number of the third planet’s fifteen-hour days passed before the three visitors saw the sight again. Then they were not sure whether it was the same one; there were several, distributed over the globe. Although they and the Tahirians could now communicate slightly, most things remained obscure, occasionally even the interpretation of a map. This particular uncertainty didn’t matter. They had already encountered more astonishments than they could sort out.
The tour began at an enclosed headquarters where air was breathable, with imagery of the original work. Comets had not contented the builders; to win the stuff that was to become atmosphere and hydrosphere, their machines also dismembered an icy moon of a giant planet and put the pieces on a collision orbit. Centuries later, when things had somewhat quieted down but not much gas had yet escaped back to space, they roofed the world. Thereafter they tapped its own buried reserves of ice, though that was a minor contribution.
“Tremendous!” Brent said. “We’ve got to learn the engineering. What we could do with it —”
“I wonder,” mused Nansen. “Will humans ever start anything that will take millions of years to finish? It’s a rare man who tries to provide for his grandchildren.”
“He can’t,” Cleland replied. “Human affairs are too, uh, chaotic. Everything’s bound to change b-beyond recognition in less than a thousand years. Nothing’s predictable. The Tahirians, they’ve achieved a … stable society. And any, uh, profit motive is irrelevant, when self-maintaining, self-reproducing robots do the work.”
“Um, why was the work ever begun? What need for it?”
“Never mind now,” Brent said. “I’m thinking what we could do, we humans, for our purposes, with power like this.”
“We may well find it waiting for us when we return,” countered Nansen.
“Or we may not. Or if we do — we won’t arrive helpless.”
A pillar, one of those that upheld the enclosing sky, was in many ways still more numinous. No plain shaft, it rose organismically intricate, responsive, well-nigh alive. Its interplay with strata and height, ground tremors and winds, not only kept it standing but acted on them, was a force in the development of the planet. The ascent and descent of it, in a bubble that climbed, with stops to go inside for an uncomprehending look, became a voyage in itself.
The waters teemed with microscopic life. Some had begun to aggregate: patches of scum, ragged mats. Crumbling shorelines revealed where germs gnawed rock down to the motes that would go into soil. The life had not arisen naturally, nor was its evolution driven by blind chance and selection. An underlying, interweaving set of mechanisms — biological and nanorobotic together, Cleland speculated — would hold it on the many roads to its destiny, which was to prepare this world for the kind of life that lived on Tahir.