Free Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe by Stephen Baxter Page B

structures, like buildings or like trees, some of which grew and changed as you watched them. Chan said there were patterns everywhere in the City, in the branches of the tree-like structures and in how they interconnected, and even in the layout of the ‘streets’ – if that was the right word, if these broad open avenues had a function anything like the streets in Orklund. Every day the scholar busily mapped what he could, walking the length of the City accompanied by crew holding up lamps. And every day, he said, he found the City changed, on every scale from the smallest to its largest. It had complexity and structure that changed in space and in time, he said, scribbling his maps and charts. He longed for the ‘computers’ spoken of by the Founders, marvellous machines that could have analysed such complexity at the touch of a button.
    And Teif seemed to be right. All of it was made of Purple , the ubiquitous native weed that cost human farmers and gardeners so much energy in eradication. Kick a wall, push your hand through the side of a ‘building’, and the substance crumbled down to elusive spore-like structures, blowing away on the wind from the north, perhaps to settle on some other part of the City, a subtle and endless rebuilding.
    ‘Yes, it really is just Purple,’ Chan said at the end of the day, when Xaia and Teif and the scouts had retreated to the igloo village they had constructed on the City’s edge. ‘I say “just”. The shining is a new phenomenon, though there have been reports of bioluminescent clumps before, found in caves and so forth.’
    Xaia said, ‘Some of the crew don’t believe the City actually glows by its own light, but is just reflecting the aurora’s glare.’
    Chan snorted. ‘That’s easily disproved. Just bring a handful of the stuff into an igloo and douse the lamps. That’s typical of the untrained mind, that it’s incapable even of observing something that defies its own prejudices. In fact I suspect it may be the other way around. That the city’s evolving patterns generate a kind of electrical activity, which in turn interacts with the aurora …’
    Xaia shook her head. ‘I never heard of Purple behaving this way before.’
    Chan shrugged. ‘It could be that’s because humans always treated Purple as just a weed, to be cleared out of the way so we could graze our cattle and plant our beans. It’s said that the Founders’ Shuttle pilots deliberately aimed for the densest Purple reef they could see, on the modern site of Ararat, in order to cushion their landing. We have smashed up the Purple from the first Landfall. It’s only here, far beyond the reach of humans, that it can flourish in these complex communal forms.’
    ‘Complex how?’ Xaia growled.
    Chan produced a notebook, and tried to show Xaia his calculations. ‘I’m doing my best, Lady. In the end, I fear, we’ll have to come back here with a fully equipped expedition. I can only map the changing structure at the gross physical level. I’ve only a handful of measurements of the changing electrical fields, for instance. It’s like trying to understand what’s going on in a human brain by counting its folds. But still, I’ve tried doing raw counts of element types, and then mapped their distribution in space and time, and then done correlations on the clusters that analysis uncovered, and then correlations on them …’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not like a city. It is more like a brain – I believe. Or a machine for storing thoughts. And the patterns I’m detecting, flowing and changing, are like the traces of an ongoing conversation.’
    Xaia tried to understand. ‘And did the Dead build this?’  
    ‘No,’ Chan said. ‘Yes. I mean – I don’t believe this is an artefact of the Dead, Lady. I believe this is the Dead . Or all that’s left of them. Look, the biosphere of Earth II is not like Earth’s, in that there is only one kind of multicelled organism, above a substrate of