Good Mountain

Worms

Then they were moving again. The pace felt swift, but the worm was sliding down a considerable slope. Without landmarks, the casual eye had trouble discerning their true speed. But later, when they were crossing a flat empty plain, Jopale was sure they were making swift progress. Wandering up into the throat again, he listened to the hard swift beating of the heart, and he was sure that, whatever else, the creature’s body was expending a fabulous amount of energy.

Returning to the stomach, he found every passenger gathered around Do-ane. “Show us that book of yours,” Rit was saying. “Show us your machine.”

“We’re very interested,” said the rich woman’s companion. Then with a wink, he asked, “What harm would it do?”

People were scared and miserable and desperate for any distraction.

Jopale sat next to Do-ane.

She seemed to consider the possibilities. Then she said, “Here,” and opened the book to a fresh page—a page showing photographs of giant chambers and smooth-walled tunnels. Holding her torch above, she explained what she had already told Jopale, and a little more. “We think these were living quarters. It’s hard to realize how big everything… but this is a colleague of mine, here, standing in the background…”

The scientist was little more than a dot on the grayish landscape.

“If this machine was a ship that traveled between the stars, as some believe… as I believe… then its engines would have produced an acceleration, and this would have been the floor.” She pulled a fond finger over the image. “This was taken ten years ago. Do you see the dirt in the corner?”

Some people nodded, but those in the back could see nothing.

Do-ane turned the page. The next image was a large black-and-white photograph showing a skull and ribs and a very long backbone that had curled up in death. The earlier colleague was present again, standing on the giant skull. And again, he was still little more than a dot on this bizarre landscape.

“That’s a dead worm,” Jopale whispered.

Do-ane glanced at him, then at the others.

“This machine came from another star,” Rit said, repeating her verdict.

“Yes,” she said.

“A spaceship, you’re saying?”

“It seems obvious—”

“And that’s where our worms came from too?” The tall man was kneeling on the other side of her, his expression doubtful but focused. “They came from this spaceship of yours?”

Do-ane said, “Yes.”

Then she said, “No.”

“Which is it?” Rit demanded.

The young woman sighed. And then a second time, she sighed. Finally she looked up, telling everyone, “Suppose that we built a starship, and we went out hunting for a new home. Even a machine as powerful as this needs a great deal of time to cross from one sun to the next. And if that new sun didn’t happen to have an inviting world, we’d have to travel farther. And if that next sun didn’t offer a home, then we would have to travel farther still. And if we could never find a planet like our old home, at some point, wouldn’t we have to make due with the best world that was in reach?”

Jopale tried to study the worm’s skeleton.

“I don’t know any of this as fact,” she said. “But we’ve learned this much. This starship’s crew was nothing like us. Not like people, or anything simply organic.” She ran a finger along the edge of the fossil skull. “What looks like bone is not. It’s ceramic and very tough, ancient beyond anything we can measure. And what organs we find aren’t livers or hearts or lungs. They’re machines, and we can’t even begin to decipher how they might have functioned when they were slipped inside a living body.”

Rit started to make a comment, then thought better of it.

“These creatures were built from metals and ceramics, plus rare earth elements that exist to us only in the tiniest amounts. Scarce beyond measure. But if you look deeper into the galaxy, into the spiral arms, you see suns with more metals than our sun has. And presumably, the worlds circling them are built from similar bones.”

She breathed, breathed again.

“Our sun, you see… it is very large and bright, and it is metal-poor and rather young. By many measures, it won’t live long at all. Less than a billion years, which is a short time in the universe.” She lifted her torch higher, allowing more people to see the bizarre skeleton. “I don’t know any of this for sure. I’m telling you a story, and maybe it’s all wrong. But what I think happened… what many of my colleagues, the true geniuses in this endeavor, feel is self-evident… is that this starship journeyed all the way to our world and could go no farther. It landed on the Ocean and tasted the water, tasted the air, and its crew took what they had in reach. Metals were scarce, as were silicon and all the other heavy elements. But at least they could borrow the oldest genetics inside their own bodies. To build a full-functioning ecosystem, they wove a thousand new species. Humans. Mockmen. Copper-eels and many-mouths. Plus all the little scramblers. And they used the other species that were brought with them. We’ve found spores and dead seeds on the ship, so we’re sure that our ancestors brought plants with them. They devised giant plants that could thrive on the Ocean’s surface, roots reaching deep to bring up the scarce minerals. And think of our forest roaches, too. We have found little versions of them dead in the ship’s darkest corners, hiding in the cracks. Incredible as it sounds, perhaps they rode here as pests.”

“But where are the human bones?” Jopale asked.

She looked at him, her face sad for a brief moment, but then drifting into a cautious amusement.

“I mean the crew that piloted this starship,” Jopale continued. “What finally happened to them?”

Judging by the murmurs, others had made the same obvious assumption.

Do-ane shook her head. Then she said, “No,” with a grim finality. “Think if you can in these terms: You fly from star to star. Your body is as much a machine as it is flesh. And everything you need comes to you with the help of your loyal machinery. With that kind of freedom, you can acquire any shape that you wish. Which is why you might allow your limbs to grow smaller with the eons, and why you perhaps would decide, finally, to let yourself become a worm.

“Assuming that we began as human beings, of course. Or something that resembles humans, back on that other world of ours.

“This lost, unnamable home.”