Life Seed, page 22
Sizzra came for him a few days later. She appeared to be agitated about something, and she very nearly cut Elias with one of her glass claws when she carelessly reached for him. She took him all the way up once more, and as soon as Elias stood up and looked around, he realized why she had been alarmed.
Something was growing around the Life Seed.
He approached it carefully. The ancestral memories he had received had never shown anything growing in this chamber except for the Flower and the vines that linked it to the rest of the continent. What he saw now, though, was unmistakably a bud of biological origin, sprouting from one of the three main vines, like a miniature version of the Life Seed.
Sizzra growled in warning when he dropped down into the depression at the center of the chamber and attempted to touch the strange growth, but she did not stop him, and Elias reached forward with care.
As soon as he touched it, the bud shattered.
Like a ripe fruit bursting open, the bud fell apart in a small cascade of golden seeds that dropped onto the vine-covered floor. Elias exchanged a quick look with Sizzra, but he could tell she was as puzzled as he was. This had never happened before. She didn’t know what the little seeds were.
After a closer look, though, Elias realized that he did.
“No way,” he whispered, kneeling down to pick some of them up. Yet there could be no mistake. The faint oval shape, ending in a white tip. The size and the color. “This looks like corn.”
As soon as he held them in his hands, though, he realized that they felt different from corn. Their surface was soft instead of hard, and he was certain the seeds would burst open if he squeezed them. Still, the resemblance was uncanny. He gathered all of them up and put them in his pockets for safekeeping.
Sizzra, in the meantime, had grown impatient. She commanded him silently to go and feed the Life Seed, which Elias did in helpless obedience. This time, though, the touch of his bloody palm to the Seed’s warm exterior carried a message.
He had the same rush of sensation as before, a shift in perspective where he could see all the glowing spirit-lines that linked the life of New Skye. He recognized himself, too, and realized that the Life Seed could finally see him.
At that instant he was assaulted by a burst of unbearable heat that found him through the spirit-lines and reached out to him with tongues of flame. The heat yearned for his flesh, and it seared his palm through his contact with the soul of the world with all-consuming hunger.
Elias screamed. He snatched his hand away, panting, and looked at his skin, expecting to see a blackened mess of charred tissue. His hand was whole, but now Elias felt something else entirely when he looked at the Life Seed: a pull, a yearning that could be deadly if he was not careful. He was a part of the world now, and he would never be able to touch the Seed again and survive.
It surprised Sizzra as much as him, as was plain from their linked emotions in that moment. Nevertheless, the mental image in Elias’s mind lingered even if he was not touching the Seed anymore, and he saw that where before he had been a faint blur of alien color, barely recognizable, now the Life Seed was tracing a clear spirit-line between itself and him. It had also… changed. Elias prodded with his mind, trying to understand his wordless perceptions. No, not changed.
Evolved. Like it had been trying to do for weeks now.
The transformation wasn’t complete, but Elias was still shocked at the speed of it. Evolution took normal organisms millions of years. The Life Seed was evolving in a matter of days, changing itself, mixing its own identity with the DNA of many alien species. Inside its fathomless code there was now incipient recognition for humans. And Terran plants.
With a little cry of surprise, Elias realized that the seeds in his pockets were also linked to the Life Seed. Tiny spirit-lines led from them to the nexus of energy in the continent. Inside each of them, there was genetic material native to New Skye. But they were, in principle, corn seeds.
I can’t believe it, Elias thought fiercely, not daring to hope. Yet the truth was plain to see through his link with the world. The Life Seed offered him a fleeting vision of piercing changes, intrusions that forced it to adapt or die. They triggered memories, and Elias realized that the intrusions were some of the many genetic experiments the scientists had attempted with the Life Seed in the laboratory. Its DNA had been spliced with many different crops, but none of the genetic grafts had taken hold. Instead, they appeared to have changed the structure of the Life Seed itself, so much so that it wasn’t able to live now without Terran genetic material in the form of Elias’s blood.
And now that he had been feeding it alongside Sizzra….
By the generation ship.
These modified corn seeds had grown out of a frantic exercise in evolution. The Life Seed did not have a mind of its own, but just as its driving force was pure biology, so was its limitless adaptation potential. It had created hybrids as a desperate expression of the changes it was going through, hybrids that would almost certainly survive on New Skye.
Elias backed away to a safe distance from the Seed. His thoughts jumped to the inevitable conclusion even as Sizzra carried him down the mountain again.
In his pockets he now held the key. The salvation of Portree.
Chapter 21—Isolation
SIZZRA CAME for Elias several days later, which for him was a welcome relief from the monotony of his captivity. When he looked at her that morning, though, he couldn’t help but grimace. The smoldering wound on her snout had grown, spilling like molten lava down the sides of her upper jaw, exposing pink gums and long, curved fangs. It looked very painful, and when she grabbed him, Elias was able to catch an echo of the agony that now marked her days. He was sad for her, but the connection between them made the gist of his feelings plain to the wurl queen, and his compassion was met with impatient rejection. She all but dumped him onto the floor of the Flower chamber once again, where they communed with the Life Seed from a cautious distance and gave it more life.
Through the blood connection, Elias was able to understand better why the Life Seed had produced hybrid corn seeds before. It was trying to purge itself of the alien DNA, expelling it, but it was not succeeding entirely. Searching with his mind, Elias realized that there were more buds growing on the vines, dozens of expressions of all the crops that had been spliced into the Life Seed by the Portree scientists.
For the Life Seed, the hybrids were a desperate failure, an incomplete attempt to purify its genetic material to what it had been before the alien invasion. For Elias, it was the best news in the world.
The blood ritual was soon over. Sizzra ignored Elias as he walked over carefully to the series of small buds growing on the vines. A couple of them were ready to harvest, and he broke them open with barely concealed excitement. In the first one he discovered beans, similar in every way to those he knew except for the color, which was a dashing shade of purple. In the second one there was rice, white and faintly iridescent, each grain shaped like a Y. Elias gathered all the seeds with great care and put them in his pockets. He made a mental note to check the other buds the next time he was brought to the chamber.
Weeks went by.
Elias spent his days gathering firewood, harvesting berries and nuts, and planning for the future. He upgraded his cave as much as he could, first building a proper windbreak that could also function as a door to cover the entrance when it rained. His door was just a bunch of branches tied together with the flexible reeds from the yellow lilies which grew on the lake, and at first it kept on breaking apart every few minutes. Elias couldn’t fathom why it was so hard to obtain a decent mesh of wood and reeds that wouldn’t disintegrate the minute he placed it over the cave entrance, and he spent nearly a week trying different designs until he was successful. It was frustrating to fail again and again simply because he had forgotten to tie one end of the structure or chosen a reed that turned out to be too weak to hold the weight of the branches. Nevertheless, when Elias could finally place a door at the cave mouth to shut out the night, he was ecstatic. It had been hard, but he had done it. The palms of his hands were raw and blistered in places, and as usual his arms ached from exhaustion, but he had succeeded. That night, he actually smiled as he ate his monotonous dinner.
Other improvements were easier. He built a cache of dried fruit and stored it in a shallow hollow he had dug at the back of the cave, where the temperature was more consistent, and lined with leaves. Digging took almost a day of tireless work, but Elias felt safer knowing that he had food in the shelter with him and wasn’t entirely dependent on the mysteriously rapid-growing purpleberries and velvety nuts around the lakeside. It was on that night, as he was washing his shirt in the lake, that he caught sight of his moonlit reflection on the surface of the water and realized he was changing. He had always been lean, but now the constant physical activity was shaping his body to reflect its growing strength. Curious, Elias flexed his arms, waiting for the water to settle so he could look at his reflection properly. He was definitely getting bigger and more muscular, although nowhere near how Tristan had looked the last time Elias had seen him.
With that memory came a sharp pang of loneliness. Elias had entertainment on his wrist link, sure, but the isolation was starting to get to him, and now that he had essentially completed the majority of his projects, he didn’t know what else to do. It was too cold still to think about planting the hybrid seeds he had gotten, and his immediate survival was no longer in peril.
On the following morning, he decided to do something about his boredom. He started exploring the mountainsides around him, climbing higher every day. Sometimes he looked for specific things, like pieces of flat rock he could use to line the bottom of his improvised cave pantry. Other times he simply climbed to enjoy the view and look out over the forest that stretched to the east, a mixture of dull evergreens and leafless tree trunks.
Sizzra would come every now and then to take him up to the chamber, but for the most part he was alone. Elias spent a lot of time thinking, and at night he activated his link and read passages from the hundreds of books loaded into its memory. It was a pain to read on such a small display, but he had all the time in the world. And anything was better than doing nothing.
Wintertime faded from the world, and the first stirrings of spring whispered timidly on the wind when he decided to start keeping a journal. Maybe it wouldn’t be as interesting as Dr. Wright’s journal, but he had a lot of thoughts going around in his head, and he supposed it would be good to record them.
Even if nobody read them. Even if he remained a prisoner in what he now called Crescent Valley for the rest of his life.
It felt good to record his ideas every night, and now that the weather wasn’t so harsh, he would sometimes sit outside his cave in the darkness, the fire having died out long since, and speak while his link transcribed his words and saved them to his journal file. The sound of his own voice comforted him a little bit, and after he recorded the events of his day, he would look up at the sky and imagine what it would be like to see a different set of stars from a completely different planet. The thought gave him vertigo sometimes, but it made him feel less alone for some reason. He imagined another young man on an alien world looking up at the sky and seeing New Skye’s sun as a tiny dot in the vastness of the black. They would be connected, then, even though neither of them would know it. In his isolation, it was one of the few comforting thoughts Elias could muster.
WHEN THE very first day of spring arrived, three large wurl came to Crescent Valley.
Elias had woken up at dawn, as usual, and he was very surprised to see the three hulking metallic creatures standing near the lake. As quietly as he could, Elias retreated back to his cave and closed most of its opening with the door. He tried to be very silent, and none of the wurl appeared to have heard him as he peeked from his sheltered spot and watched them.
They were beautiful creatures, although now that Elias had spent so much time looking only at Sizzra, he couldn’t help but notice their obvious shortcomings. Although large enough to stand taller than Elias on their six strong legs, their movement lacked the sinuous grace of the female. Their spines were also plain to see, even flattened against their backs like they were now. When Sizzra flattened her spines, they were somehow completely hidden, which always left Elias with the unsettling thought in the back of his mind that he had no idea how many missiles she would be able to fire at him if she ever decided to kill him. With the male wurl, by contrast, Elias knew just where he stood. Besides, the color of their scales could never hope to match the mesmerizing iridescence of Sizzra’s armor. These were simpler creatures that did not have the queen’s searing, penetrating intelligence.
Elias stayed very still in his cave, watching the three males move. As the sun rose fully, Elias realized they were particularly large specimens, very muscular and obviously in the prime of their health. Their claws glinted like polished steel, and their every footstep left clear indentations on the soft ground around the lake.
They were quiet at first, but the peace did not last. When one of them walked to the shore to drink and the other two made as if to follow, the first lumbering giant whirled around in a violent rush of snapping jaws and water droplets. His three eyes blazed in the morning light, and every spine on his body stood on end.
Despite himself, Elias gasped. The male lacked the magnificence of Sizzra’s crown of spines around the neck, but he was still terrifying. As he stomped forward, head hung low in a clear display of threat, he forced the other two males to actually back down, snorting angrily all the time.
His opponents were not cowed for long, however. As the first male lunged, his opponent on the left responded. He also flashed his spines and swiped at the air with his right front foot. The slash connected with the first male’s snout, and there was a screeching sound of metal striking metal.
That was the last straw. With a roar, the first male jumped at his opponent and the fight began.
Elias could barely keep track of everything that was happening. At first it was only two males fighting, but soon the third one decided he also wanted to join the fray, and then it was a whirlwind of stomping feet, slashing claws, and terrifying snarls. Elias was afraid that they would end up killing each other, but when minutes passed and the fight continued without diminishing ferocity, he realized that none of the males were firing their spines. They were using them as deterrents to prevent the others from biting where they shouldn’t. It was all an enthralling choreography of hostility and ferocity.
Suddenly there was a horrible wrenching sound, like an iron door being ripped apart by unstoppable force. Elias realized that one of the males was on the ground now, while another one kept him pinned and the third bit savagely into his chest.
They were killing him. For Elias there could be no doubt. The wrenching sound was the supine wurl’s scales being ripped from the flesh underneath, and he roared in evident pain and anger at his helplessness. The wurl biting him sank his fangs deeper, turned his head, and with a horrible crunch tore out a fist-sized mouthful of metallic scales.
Instead of giving up, however, the trapped wurl went berserk. He used his six feet at once to clamp down on the male pinning him to the ground. Elias saw clearly how his claws sank through the metal armor. They must have found tender flesh because that wurl let go of his prisoner with a scream and rolled away like a spike-covered ball until he was almost at the other end of the valley.
In the meantime, the wurl with the jagged hole in his chest jumped up and faced the remaining aggressor. They both roared, staring each other down, refusing to budge. They were panting, their heavy bellows breath clearly audible to Elias. When they bared their fangs, he was certain they would end up killing one another.
Yet they both backed away. Elias could scarcely believe it as the two males turned around at the same time and headed for opposite ends of the valley. The wounded wurl went straight for the lake and promptly sank into its waters, shaking himself and attempting to lick his chest wound. The other male climbed one of the western slopes and settled down on a flat sunlit rock.
Elias released a pent-up breath he didn’t know he had been holding. His arms relaxed—and bumped the door.
“Shit!” Elias swore, grabbing for it wildly, but he wasn’t fast enough. His makeshift door crashed to the ground and made a disturbing amount of noise in the eerie quiet of the valley.
All three wurl turned to look at him.
Elias gulped, his heart hammering in his chest. He watched them come back from where they had gone, walking slowly but surely until they were standing side by side less than ten meters away from the mouth of the cave. The wounded wurl stood in the middle, and he looked ready to shred Elias to ribbons with his claws.
The cave was shallow and offered no protection. There was nothing stopping any of the wurl from firing a spine right then and killing him instantly. In that moment, knowing that he was helpless prey in the presence of apex predators, he felt true fear. He couldn’t believe he had dared to think of them as lesser creatures. They might be smaller than the large queen and much less intelligent, but they were still dangerous. Deadly. Unstoppable.
The wounded wurl took a step forward, his intentions clear. The spines in his back bent forward slightly, aiming at Elias.
There was no way out.
“Don’t kill me,” Elias pleaded. “Please, please don’t kill me….”
If anything, it seemed as if his voice only angered them more. The other two males stepped forward as well.
Then Sizzra arrived.
