leaving her as a passive, faintly protesting, observer. The Laymil body was trisymmetric, standing one metre seventy-five high, possessing a tough, heavily crinkled slate-grey skin. There were three legs, with a double- jointed knee, and feet which ended in a hoof. Three arms with a bulbous shoulder which permitted a great deal of articulation, a single elbow, and hands with four triple-jointed fingers as thick as a human thumb and twice as long, bestowing considerable strength and dexterity. Most disturbing of all were the three sensor heads, emerging like truncated serpents between the shoulders. Each one had an eye at the front, with a triangular bat-ear above it, and a toothless breathing mouth below. All the mouths could vocalize, but one was larger and more sophisticated than the other two, which made up for their deficiency with a more acute sense of smell. The feeding mouth was on the top of the torso, in the cleft between the necks, a circular orifice equipped with sharp needle teeth.
The body Ione now wore constricted her own figure severely, pulping it below circular bands of muscle that flexed and twisted sinuously, squeezing protesting flesh and bone into a new shape, forcing her to conform to the resurgent identity suspended in the crystal matrix. She felt as though her limbs were being systematically twisted in every direction apart from the ones nature intended. But there was no pain inherent in the metamorphosis. Feverish thoughts, electrified by instinctive revulsion, began to calm. She started to look around, accepting the trinocular viewpoint input as best she could.
She was wearing clothes. The first surprise; born of prejudice, the foreign physique was
And she was walking, a three-legged walk that was so easy, so natural that she didn’t even have to think how to move the limbs to avoid tripping. The sensor head with the speaking mouth was always at the front, swinging slowly from side to side. Her other two heads scanned the surrounding countryside.
Sights and sounds besieged her. There were few half-tones in her visual world, bright primary colours dominated; but the image was flecked with minute black fissures, like an AV projection running heavy interference; the myriad sounds sliced with half-second breaks of silence.
Ione glossed over the flaws. She was walking through a Laymil habitat. If Tranquillity was manicured perfection, this was manicured anarchy. The trees were at war, thrusting and clashing against each other. Nothing grew upright. It was like a jungle hit by a hurricane, but with the trunks packed so closely they couldn’t fall, only topple onto their neighbours. She saw trees with their kinked trunks cupped together, trunks that spiralled round each other wrestling for height and light, young shoots piercing old flaking boles. Roots the size of a man’s torso emerged from the trunks well above her head, stabbing down like fleshy beige fork prongs into the sandy soil, producing a buttress cone. The leaves were long ribbons, curled into spirals, a deep olive-green in colour. And down where she walked, where shadows and sunbeams alternated like incorporeal pillars, every nook and crevice was crammed with tiny cobalt-blue flowering mushrooms, their pilei fringed with vermilion stamens, swaying like sea anemones in a weak current.
Pleasure and peace soaked into her like sunlight through amber. The forest was in harmony, its life spirit resonating with the spaceholm mother essence, singing their madrigal in unison. She listened with her heart, thankful for the privilege of living.
Hoofs trod evenly along the meandering trail carrying her towards the fourth marriage community. Her husbands/mates awaited her, the eagerness inside her was woven into the forest song and rejoiced over by the mother essence.
She reached the borders of the jungle, saddened by the smaller trees, the end of song, jubilant that she had passed through cleanly, that she was worthy of a fourth reproduction cycle. The trees gave way to open land, a gentle valley swathed in high, lush grasses and speckled with vivid reds and yellows and blues of bell-shaped flowers. Spaceholm reared around her, a landscape of tangled greens, rampant vegetation choking the silver veins of streams and rivers, smeared with fragile tufts of cloud. Sunspires stabbed out along the axis from the centre of each endcap, thin sabres stretching for twenty kilometres, furiously radiant.
“Tree spirit song unity,”she called with voice and mind. Her two clarion heads bugled gleefully. “I await.”
“Richness reward embryo growth daughter,”the spaceholm mother entity replied.
“Male selection?”
“Concord.”
“Unison awaits.”
“Life urge rapture.”
She started to walk down the slope. Ahead of her on the floor of the valley was the fourth marriage community. Blue polyp cuboidal structures, rigidly symmetrical, arrayed in concentric rings. On the paths between the featureless walls she could see other Laymil moving about. All her heads craned forward.
The memory ended.
The lurch back into the conformity of the electronics lab was as abrupt as it was shocking. Ione put a hand on the bench to steady herself. Oski Katsura and Parker Higgens were giving her an anxious look, even Lieria’s dark violet eyes were focused on her.
“That was . . . astonishing,” she managed to say. The hot Laymil jungle lurked around the fringes of sight like a vengeful daydream. “Those trees, she seemed to think of them as alive.”
“Yes,” Parker Higgens said. “It was obviously some kind of mating selection test or ritual. We know Laymil females are capable of five reproductive cycles, it never occurred to anybody that they might be subject to artificial restraints. In fact I find it amazing that a culture so sophisticated should still indulge in what was almost a pagan rite.”
“I’m not sure it was pagan,” Oski Katsura said. “We have already identified a gene sequence similar to the Edenist affinity gene in the Laymil genome. However they are obviously far more Gaiaistic than Edenist humans; their habitat, the spaceholm, was virtually a part of the reproductive process. It certainly seemed to possess some kind of veto power.”
“Like me and Tranquillity,” Ione said under her breath.
Hardly.
Give us another five thousand years, and the birth of a new Lord of Ruin could easily become ritualized.
You are entirely correct, Ione Saldana,lieria said. The Kiint continued speaking through her white wafer. “I note considerable evidence to indicate the Laymil mate-selection process is based on scientific eugenics rather than primitive spiritualism. Suitability is considerably more than possession of desirable physical characteristics, mental strength is obviously a prime requirement.”
“Whatever, it opens up a fantastic window into their culture,” Parker Higgens said. “We knew so little before this. To think that a mere three minutes could show us so much. The possibilities it reveals . . .” He looked at the electronics stack almost in worship.
“Will there be any problem in translating the rest of it?” Ione asked Oski Katsura.
“I don’t see any. What you accessed was still pretty crude, the emotional analogues were only rough approximates. We’ll tweak the program, of course, but I doubt we could have direct parallels with a race that alien.”
Ione stared at the electronics stack. An oracle for a whole race. And possibly, just possibly, the secret was inside it: why they did it. The more she thought about it, the more puzzling it became. The Laymil were so vibrantly alive. What in God’s name could ever make an entity like that commit suicide?
She shivered slightly, then turned to Parker Higgens. “Set up a priority budget for the Electronics Division,” she said decisively. “I want all eight thousand hours translated as soon as possible. And the Cultural Analysis Division is going to have to be expanded considerably. We’ve concentrated far too much on the technological and physical side of the Laymil to date, that’s going to have to change now.”
Parker Higgens opened his mouth to protest.
“That wasn’t a criticism, Parker,” she said quickly. “The physical is all we’ve had to go on so far. But now we have these sensory and emotional memories we’re entering a new phase. Extend invitations to whichever xenoc psychology experts you think will be of help, offer endowment sabbaticals from their current tenures. I’ll add
