Thin, transparent films captured the billowing gas. Eager cells absorbed it. Nutrients flowed out to the seedbeast’s core body. Spring came after a winter unimaginably long.
Finally the conical hole was deep enough into the ice to ensure protection from meteorites and even most cosmic rays. The bar tugged at new contractile fibers. Its nest was safely bored. Gingerly, it migrated. Care informed every move. Painfully tentative tugs at its contractile strands brought the dense, dark axial bar safely down into the pit. Here it would reside forever.
The descent of the central axis, now swelling enormously, inaugurated fresh responses. The beast grew crusty nodules that sprouted into pale, slender roots. Deep molecular configurations came into play. Though it had nothing resembling true intention, the beast began preparing for its next great adventure: the fall sunward.
No intelligence guided it yet. The rough bark and dark browns of the body sheltered complex genetic blueprints, but no mind.
Roots poked and pried through the ice. Complex membranes wriggled, the waste heat of their exploring melting a path. Then they sucked out the thin liquid—building more tissue, forcing open crevices. A fraction of the slow wealth worked back to the central body, where more minute blueprints unrolled in their molecular majesty.
Mining roots sought rare elements to build more complex structures. Ever-larger sails grew. The iceball that might have become a mere comet felt patient, cautious probings. The beast could take unhurried care, lest it find some unexpected danger.
Fans of emerald green crept over the grimy surface ice. In a century the tumbling ice mountain resembled a barnacled ship, overgrown with mottled, crusty plants that knew no constraint of gravity. Sap flowed easily in wide cellulose channels. Contractions brought warming fluid to stalks that fell into shadow.
This spreading, leathery forest occasionally heaved and rocked with sluggish energy. It extended great trunks high into the blackness above. Trees of thick brown butted against one another in competition for the sun. Leaves sprouted, wrinkled and lime green.
Only the ever-swelling sails could stop the woody spears’ outward thrust. When a trunk shadowed the sails, a signal worked its way down through the tendrils. In the offending tree sap ebbed, growth stopped.
The trunks were not simply made. Inside the ice, mining roots sought lodes of carbon. Though the plants above displayed impossibly ornate convolutions and flowerings, this was a minor curlicue compared with the sophisticated complexity that went on at the molecular level of the mining roots.
They harvested carbon atoms and towed them into exact alignment, forming its crystal: graphite. Slight imperfections in the match were negotiated by a jostling crowd of donor or acceptor molecules. Great graphite fibers grew with cautious deliberation, flawlessly smooth.
Countless other laboring molecules ferried the graphite strands beneath the tree bark. Years passed as they merged, providing structural support far beyond what the gravity-free plant needed. The fibers waited in reserve, for the overgrown ice world was steadily swinging inward, toward the sun.
By now the forest had swelled to many times the size of the parent iceball. The star ahead was no longer merely a fierce point of light. Millennia of tacking in the soft breath of photons had brought the comet-beast within range of the planets.
The pace quickened aboard. Small, spindly creatures appeared, concocted from freshly activated genetic blueprints. They scampered among the foliage, performing myriad tasks of construction and repair.
Some resembled vacuumproof spiders, clambering across great leathery leaves with sticky-padded feet. They could find errors in growth, or damage from piercing meteoroids, beneath the pale light of the distant sun. Following instructions carried in only a few thousand cells, these black-carapaced beasts poked thin fingers into problems.
If a puzzle arose beyond their intricately programmed routines, they found the nearest of the coppery seams that laced around the great trunks. These were superconducting threads. Making contact, the spiders could communicate crudely but without signal loss to the core-beast.
Electrical energy also flowed through the threads steadily, charging the spiders’ internal capacitors and batteries. Though biologically hardwired for their tasks, the spiders could receive and store more complex instructions for temporary problems. The greater core-beast was simply a larger example of such methods; complex and resourceful, it was nonetheless not yet an autonomous intelligence.
The moment came for more powerful maneuvers. This registered in the core-beast and brought forth a response that a witness might have found to be evidence of high originality. Silicates began to collect on the one surface spot left bare by the plants. Spiders and crusty fungus together fashioned ceramic nozzles and tanks, linked by clay-lined tubing. Carefully hoarded oxygen and hydrogen combined in the combustion chamber. An electrolytic spark began a steady contained explosion. The comet-beast moved sunward again.
Still, its destination was not the fiery inner realm. Its hoard of ice would have sublimed there, disemboweling the beast. The sun could never be a close friend.
Instead, it followed a gradual inward spiral. In time the heat generated in the crude rocket engine threatened to warm the comet too much. When melting began, the beast switched to smaller pulpy bulbs, grown like parasitic sacs far up the towering trees. These combined hydrogen peroxide and the enzyme catalase, venting their caustic steam safely away from the precious ice reserve.
It pursued a particularly rich asteroid which the solar mirrors had picked out. Cellulose bags grew near the photoreceptors and filled with water. These thick lenses gave sharp images which the comet-beast used to dock itself adroitly alongside its newest prey.
Breaking up the tumbling, carbon-rich mountain took more than a century of unflagging labor. Larger spiders came forth, summoned by deeper instructions. They ripped minerals from the asteroid with jackhammer ferocity. Crawling mites urged on the slow, steady manufacture of immense graphite threads.
From silvery silicates the myriad spider swarms made a reflecting screen. Swung on contractile fibers, this fended off the occasional solar storms of high-energy protons that came sleeting into the comet-forest. The beast continued to spiral inward. Protecting the more delicate growths and preventing ice losses became its primary concern.
The beast grew now by combination. Graphite threads entwined with living tissue along a single axis. What had begun as a thin bar now replicated that form on a huge scale.
The skinny, iron-gray thing grew slowly as meticulous spiders helped the weaving. Gradually the asteroid dwindled. The bar became immense. It was thickest at its middle, where the core-beast now lived inside. Even cosmic rays could not reach through the protective ice and iron to damage the genetic master code.
Then chemical vapors poured again from low-thrust ceramic chambers. And a new trick was turned: electromagnetic drive. Induction coils surged with currents, propelling iron slugs out through a barrel. This mass-driver shed matter that the beast did not need, banging away like a sluggish machine gun.
The assembly began another voyage, this one much less costly in energy. Still, it needed many orbits to complete the efficient loop to the next asteroid.
Centuries passed as the ever-lengthening bar consumed more of the stony little worlds. Solar furnaces made of the silvery reflecting films smelted, alloyed, and vacuum-formed exotic, strong girders for the bar. But the central art was the incessant spooling out of graphite threads to join those already lying along the great bar.