‘Here comes the stripper,’ Hannister said, raising her intensifier to her eyes.
The drone dropping out of the lemon-stained sky bore the appearance of a giant horse fly, though it lacked wings. It homed in on the tree like that same insect sniffing bare skin, landed hard, low on the trunk, driving in the piton feet of its lower four legs. Its forelimbs remained free, and at the tips of them something glittered and blurred into motion—chainglass saws.
‘This design of drone is optimum for the task. We’ve learnt that over the years,’ Hannister told them.
‘Why chainglass?’ asked one of the normal humans.
‘Any kind of directed energy is a fire risk, and not very efficient. Chainglass cuts clean, keeps its edge for a very long time, and is cheap to replace.’
The drone began climbing, its pace constant as it reached and severed each branch close to the trunk, though its course necessarily spiralled to take it to every branch. Sawdust snowed down, coating both the drone and the ground below. Falling branches slammed into it, but it continued inexorably. Quickly reaching a point where the trunk was no wider than the branches sprouting from it, the drone cut around twice, and the upper section of the tree toppled. Hannister glanced down to watch treaded handlers with large spidery claws coming in to take up great piles of branches and cart them away for processing into paper. Another device sucked up the fallen sawdust. Nothing was wasted.
The drone then descended to the ground and waited, as around it the handlers soon cleared away all the remaining rubbish.
‘Now the carrier.’ Hannister pointed.
The machine now descending from the sky was a hundred-metre grey cylinder with fins down its entire length on one side, to cool its heavy-duty gravmotors, and with wide pincer clamps down the other side. It was utterly functional. It dropped parallel to the trunk, and closed its three clamps on the wood. Immediately the horse fly began cutting, two fountains of sawdust spraying from where its forelimbs entered the tree’s bole. The tree tottered, and they all heard the humming of the carrier’s gravmotors as it took up nearly a thousand tonnes weight of wood. Slowly, tree and carrier rose into the sky.
‘Now it goes to the sawmill, to be cut up—usually into all sorts of wooden shapes already designated by the numerous customers who have bought the tree. Probably, that trunk will be turned into many thousands of items of furniture, planking, panelling, grips for knives or guns, wooden dice or toys. Not one cubic centimetre of wood will be wasted,’ said Hannister.
‘That is not precisely the case here.’
Hannister glanced round, auging at the same time. Taylor Bloc, the one who had spoken, removed his mask with a slight sucking sound and pulled back his hood to observe her. She bit down on the gasp. One side of the reification’s face was worn down to bone, his teeth exposed on that side in a perpetual grin. In that same side’s eye-socket, surprisingly, there remained an apparently alive but unlidded eye. The revealed skull above was translucent, showing liquid movement and the occasional glint of optics. The other side of his skull was clad in grey wrinkled skin, and his other brown eye retained its eyelid. Strangely, the reif seemed to be wearing silver spectacles—something Hannister had only ever seen in historical entertainments. She realized her mistake when a fine mist sprayed from the frames to moisten his eyeballs. From the spectacles themselves, where they hooked behind the ragged ear on the left side of his head, a pipe ran down, stapled to his neck, and into the collar of his envirosuit. He shrugged, as if accepting that he was hideous. Probably because of the spectacle-frame irrigator, he seemed to Hannister horribly, almost super-naturally, studious.
After a couple of attempts at speaking, she managed, ‘What is the case here, then?’
‘Nothing will be wasted, as you say, but your sawmill will cut whole from this trunk a ship’s keel and, from the remainder, its ribs and many other necessary items. The hull planking for our project we will obtain from yanwood and peartrunk trees.’
‘Ship?’
‘On Sable Keech I will bring my kind to the Little Flint. Some of them, if they are worthy, will become the Arisen, as did he for whom the ship will be named.’
‘Right, right okay,’ Hannister just let that lunacy go and instead eyed the little girl called Smile, who was holding her nose. ‘Let’s move on, shall we?’
1
Spatterjay Virus:
many questions surround this virus and its relationship with the leeches, and few of them can be answered. There is little fossil evidence of leeches, for obvious reasons, and that of viral growth in other life forms tells us only when it began to appear, and then only to the nearest hundred million years. Genetic archaeology is also of little use, since the virus is an eclectic collector of Spatterjay’s equivalent of DNA from the planet’s biosphere.
Terran viruses, upon entering a cell, propagate from it and destroy it in the process. The Spatterjay virus roots in it and grows as a fibre to other cells, gradually networking the host body in a fibrous mass. These cells are then maintained perpetually. But the virus also engineers the DNA. Should the animal be damaged, or its environment change, the virus will alter its host to the optimum for survival in those circumstances. An animal can have its head cut off and yet not die; the virus will stimulate it to grow the necessities of survival. The usual result of this is the body growing a leech’s plug-cutting mouth, probably because the bulk of additional DNA the virus carries is of the leech, its original host. In this manner the virally infected prey become a perpetually reusable food resource for the leeches themselves. So it would seem that when the virus appeared, the leeches swiftly took advantage of it.
Humans, being ill-suited to Spatterjay’s biosphere, are quickly adapted by the virus, unless they take preventive measures. Hoopers stave off the ‘change’ by eating Terran foods which, lacking in nutrition for the virus, very much slow its growth. Drugs such as Intertox also inhibit it. Without these, humans can change into chimerical creatures that are a random combination of Spatterjay animals. Evolutionary effects of the virus on native life are most ably demonstrated in teleost forms such as the turbul -
Ambel listened to the wind in the sail and wondered if the rhinoworm steaks the creature had just eaten might be on the turn. The veined pink sheets of the living sail’s wings were spread in the spars of the Treader, stiffened by its spines and ropes of muscle. It gripped wood with numerous spidery claws at the ends of these spines, and its neck was wound once around the mast, its crocodilian head poised a couple of metres above the deck. It looked contemplative as it turned the mast on the static spar, thus turning the other two masts via mechanisms in the body of the ship. Or perhaps that look was dyspepsia?
‘You all right there, sail?’ he asked.
The sail turned its demonic red eyes towards him. ‘I’m fine,’ it grated. ‘And the name is Gale… catcher?’ It shook its head. Obviously it still could not grasp the new name issued to it by the Boss. But then, barring the Boss himself, it had, like all the other sails, borne for many years the name Windcatcher. Centuries ago these huge batlike creatures of this world had possessed enough intelligence to learn human language and make themselves useful to humans by actually taking the place of fabric sails on ocean-going ships, thus benefiting from food supplied by the humans, but the concept of names ever evaded them. Now, one very intelligent sail was changing all that. Their wages had changed too.