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the slate screen filled my curtained bunk with false moonlight.
_Crossing 29, 125_
We have survived this long, so many disasters, and have just begun to feel confident, and now the
rules are changing and all that we have learned may become useless.
For weeks there have been rumors from trekkers and small villages in south Liz and at the head of
the Terra Nova that something is happening in the truce between Liz and Calder's zone, where few of us
live. Thief activity has increased across the truce, according to harvesters at Lake Mareotis, and the lake
itself changed color from blue to orange along the east shore.
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Yesterday, a delegation of Lenk's ministers -- two men and one woman -- returned from Mareotis
and stopped here for the evening to rest. I went down to the docks with Johanna Ry Presby and met
them walking up the path. They appeared tired and downcast and refused to answer questions at first.
Johanna invited them to the refectory and we fed them a late cold meal. Their gloom seemed to deepen
as they ate.
I tried to pry information from them. They were adamant about saying nothing, which angered us.
"We should know, if it's something important, to give us time to prepare," I insisted. "Keeping secrets will
do no good." The woman had tears in her eyes but no one would talk. "It will come out soon," she said.
They thanked us for our food and left early the next morning.
Radio messages from Athenai and Jakarta have been received, most in Lenk's code, but some have
been open. The crisis has gradually been unveiled. From here and there, we are putting together rough
pictures of a disaster -- not truly a disaster, but momentous change, disastrous perhaps for us -- but in
truth we have no words yet to describe what is happening.
Crossing 29, 128
I have been invited to accompany Redhill and Shevkoti to Mareotis. Shevkoti became the village
agro upon Ser Mural's death last winter. With Mayor Presby's blessing, we will go upriver and examine
the truce near Mareotis, in hopes of learning for ourselves what the problems may be. We have become
discouraged about learning from Athenai in time to prepare Moonrise for whatever may be happening.
Crossing 29, 134
_At Mareotis for a day now. At some peril, we have hiked along the truce and seen wonderful,
terrible things. The truce boundary -- white dead soil between the ecoi -- has become invaded with soil
preparers, including what I am calling Tillers, a scion either unseen until now or_ new. _These are
massive and crudely made forms as much as eight meters long and five high, resembling wheeled spiders,
that roll and crawl methodically -- _
I had been reading about wheeled scions but until now had not considered how seriously improbable
such creatures were. With a little cross-referencing, I found a small piece in Redhill's encyclopedia about
scions with wheels:
_Wheeled forms defy practical explanation in terms of terrestrial biology. We must not forget,
however, that scions are very likely not created from seeds containing their own genetic instructions, but
are_ assembled _in biological factories. Wheels and the creatures that bear them may not be made all at
once and together, but at different times and separately. The difficulties of imagining a creature that can
grow and maintain its own wheels are overcome. The wheels may even be thought of as separate scions,
or as constructs made of organic materials, but no longer alive._
Observations from Kandinsky's zone in Tasman point to wheeled scions that may actually create
their wheels from recycled, compacted arborid or phytid tissues, replacing or repairing worn wheels as
needed...
I returned to Nkwanno's journal:
_ -- churning the soil and preparing it for occupation. But among these forms dart many varieties of
thieves and defenders, some sighted in the silva -- though infrequently -- and others never seen before._
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The thieves and defenders do what they have always done, but on a scale and with a frequency
never witnessed before. Defenders -- serpents and arthropods, translucent five-legged ursids with shining
glassy saber-teeth on the leading and trailing edges of their forelimbs -- keep behind the old boundary of
the truce, grabbing and dispatching scions that cross from the opposite side. But more and more scions
cross, and the defenders are overwhelmed. We have seen worn-out defenders, sitting in the redefined
silva like exhausted warriors, twitching and spilling their fluids from torn joints -- and all around them,
foreign scions pass, as if in glee at new freedom. Yet dead scions line the silvas on both sides. It seems
that here, a war is being combined with an orgy.
Crossing 29, 136
Our food has run out, and we risk starving before we return to Moonrise. We stay nevertheless. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]