The podia had come from ground-grubbing origins. Heights brought acute, squeezing panic to them. That was why they did not hunt for enemies from the air, no matter how efficient such searching could be. It had taken millennia for the podia to be able to tolerate the keening sense of falling that came in orbit. Only genetic alterations had made space travel possible for them… though it did not erase the persistent terror that flight over the nearby landscape brought, with its gripping images of precipitous possible falls. Quath and the others managed to loft for short distances only by turning control over to a submind, reducing the task to distant mechanical motions.

But this thing!—it plunged as though oblivious to the ram pressure of air. A ship?

No—the dark line spanned a quadrant of the sky. A falling chunk of the podia’s construction? Impossible—its browns and greens were unlike the enormous gray labyrinths they built.

Down it came. Quath broke her aura-silence and called to the Tukar’ramin.

The swelling intelligence came at once, flickering in the crisp air.

*I understand your panic. Had I not been concerned with more grave and pressing matters, I would have warned you.*

<Will it fall on me?> Quath asked, trying to seem composed.

*No. It will not touch the ground at all.*

<Mechwork? Is it mechwork? I shall shoot it—>

*Attempt no such foolishness. Here.*

In Quath’s aura burst a flowering electrical kernel of knowledge, fat and sputtering. Data impacted, data rampant.

She swallowed it, converting the spinning ball of inductive currents into readable hormones. Scents and aromas bloomed, packed with stunning detail.

<This is so rich!>

*It comes unfiltered from the Illuminates.*

The honor of receiving such a holy kernel stunned Quath. She tentatively tasted. An astonishing central fact swept over her like an icy stream: The thing above was alive.

Its history had been buried in a musty vault of supposedly minor knowledge, Quath was shocked to find. Certainly none of the podia had spoken much of this thing. Yet, as she unpeeled the layers of hormonal implications, the crux became ever more impressive.

<Why were we not told this?> Quath cried, as the history of the thing poured through her, her subminds dissecting the myriad nuances.

*We did not consider it vital,* the Tukar’ramin replied. *It is a curious object, granted. It may be of use to us in the future.*

<Of use—!> Quath felt dismayed shock at the Tukar’ramin’s bland unconcern. Then her characterological submind took hold and reminded her that she was, after all, only a recently augmented member of the Hive. Her great advancement, the revelations about her Philosoph components—these still did not mean she could blithely question the Tukar’ramin’s judgment. She savored the strangely cool presence—the very voice of the Illuminates.

Above, the thing came down through thunderclaps and vortex night.

It had started as a seedbeast, far out at the rim of this solar system.

It was then a thin bar of slow life struggling in bitter cold. Threads trailed from it, holding a gossamer mirror far larger than the bar. Wan sunlight reflected from the mica mirror, focusing on the living nucleus, warming it enough to keep a tepid, persistent flow of fluids.

In hovering dark far beyond the target star the bar waited and watched. Passing molecular clouds brushed it with dust, and this grimy meal was enough—barely—to help repair the occasional damage from cosmic rays.

Filigrees of muscle fiber kept its mirror aligned and formed the rigging for later growth. Even so far from the star, sunlight’s pressure inflated the large but flimsy structure. A slight spin supplied aligning tension, through crisscrossing spars.

The wan but focused starlight fell upon photoreceptors, which converted the energy into chemical forms. The seed-beast did not need to move quickly, so this feeble flow of power was enough to send it on its hunt.

No mind sailed in this bitterly cold, black chunk. None was needed… yet.

The filmy mirror played another role. As the bed of photoreceptors grew through the decades, the image formed by the mirror broadened. Occasionally contractile fibers twitched. Weightless, the mirror canted to the side and curved into an artfully skewed paraboloid. Slow oscillations marched across the field of sewn mica. Leisurely, undulating images of the star rippled away to the edges, sending long waves through the rigging. The shimmering surfaces cupped dim radiance, compressed it. Momentarily this gave the receptors a sweeping image of the space near the approaching sun.

For a very long time there was little of note in the expanded image—only the background mottling and lazy luminescent splashes in the molecular clouds. Against this wash of light the prey of the seedbeast would be pale indeed.

But at least the beast found a suspect pinprick of light. Was it a ball of ice? Ancient instincts came sluggishly into play.

Specialized photoreceptors grew, able to analyze narrow slivers of the spectrum that came from the far, dim dot. One sensed the ionized fragments of hydrogen and oxygen. Another patrolled the thicket of spectral spikes, searching for carbon dioxide, ammonia, traces of even more complex though fragile forms.

Success would not come on the first try, nor even on the tenth. Not only did the seedbeast demand of the distant prey a filmy, evaporating hint of ices; the precometary head had to move in an orbit which the seedbeast could reach.

At last one target daub of light fulfilled all the ancient genetically programmed demands, and the seedbeast set forth. A long stern chase began. Celestial mechanics, ballistics, decision-making—all these complex interactions occurred at the gravid pace allowed by sunlight’s constant pressure. Great sails grew and unfurled from the beast. Snagging the photon wind, the thing tacked and warped.

Centuries passed. The tiny image of the prey waxed and waned as the elliptical pursuit followed the smooth demands of gravity. The prey swelled ahead, became a tumbling, irregular chunk of dust and ice.

Now came a critical juncture: contact. Data accumulated in cells and fibers designed for just this one special task. Angular momentum, torques, vectors—all abstractions reduced finally to molecular templates, groupings of ions and membranes. Achingly slow, the beast made calculations that are second nature to any being which negotiates movement. But it could expend its limitless time to minimize even the most tiny of risks.

Slender fibers extended. They found purchase on the slowly revolving ice mountain, each grappler seizing its chosen point at the same moment. The beast swung into a gravid gavotte, spooling out stays and guy threads. The slight centripetal acceleration activated long-dormant chemical and biological processes.

Something akin to hunger stirred in the cold bar.

Its sail, mirrored by countless mica-thin cells, reflected the distant star’s glow onto the prey. This patient lance of sunlight blew away a fog of sublimed ice. The beast tugged at its shrouds to avoid being thrust askew by the gas, but kept the precise focus.

A shaft deepened. At random spots inside, residual radioactivity had melted the water ice, forming small pockets of liquid. The seedbeast extended down a hollow tendril.

The first suck of delicious liquid into the reed-thin stalk brought to the seedbeast a heady joy—if a conglomerate of reproducing but insensate cells can know so complex a response.

More tendrils bridged the gap. They moored the beast to the iceball and provided ribbed support for further growth of the sail. The glinting, silvery foil sent lancing sunlight into the bore-hole, exploding the chemical wealth into fog.

Food! Riches! Many centuries of waiting were rewarded.