Chapter Eighteen
There is a beginning point to everything, and an ending point, but it is not always possible to identify either one.
—Noah Watanabe, Reflections on my Life, Guardian Publications
At sunset a brown-and-black catus, one of the thick-furred persinnians that ran wild on the grounds of the Ecological Demonstration Project, stalked a bird. The feline remained low on the dry, yellowing grass, its front paws outstretched, and pulled itself toward a fat pazabird, moving forward only centimeters at a time without making a sound. The white-breasted bird dug around the roots of grass for worms, oblivious to danger.
Thinking he felt movement beneath his feet, Noah got down on all fours and placed an ear to the ground. He heard something, a distant rumbling noise, but could not determine the source. He wondered if it could be a nuisance that had been occurring on Canopa in recent years, groundtruck-sized digging machines that were left behind by mining companies. The “Diggers,” with artificial intelligence and the ability to sustain themselves, had been burrowing deep underground and occasionally surfacing like claymoles, tearing up large chunks of real estate and damaging buildings. So far, Noah had been fortunate, but it was an increasingly widespread problem. The Doge himself had ordered their extermination on a variety of merchant prince planets, which amounted to commando raids against the machines in their burrows—going after them like pests.
The rumbling noise subsided, and he felt nothing in the ground. Looking up, he saw the catus pounce, filling the air with feathers. It was an efficient act of predation, with the kill completed in a matter of seconds. Now the catus played with the dead bird, lying on the ground and batting it around like a kittus with a ball.
With the last rays of sunlight kissing his face, he was reminded of an incident from his childhood. No more than seven years old at the time, he had been out in a forest, walking along a path that led from the village to his home. Upon hearing a repetitive thumping sound, he’d noticed a red-crested woodbird pecking away at a rotten log beside the trail. Instinctively, Noah had not moved and was careful not to make a sound. The bird seemed unaware of his presence, and the curious boy stood silently, watching it extract worms from the holes it was making in the soft wood. Presently the bird flew off, into the high branches of a pine tree. Perching there, it fed worms from its beak to hungry chicks that poked their heads out of a hole in the tree trunk.
Afterward, Noah had gone to the rotten log and pulled some of the wood away, enabling him to see many worms writhing around in their moist habitat, trying to burrow deeper into the log to escape him. He had gathered some of the wriggling creatures, taking them home to put in a jar with air holes in the lid. That afternoon, however, his sister Francella stole the worms and chopped them into pieces, just to watch the little segments keep moving. When he found out about this, Noah screamed, but it was too late.
The twins’ governess, Ilyana Tinnel, had separated them as they fought. A kindly woman, she showed Noah other worms in the rich soil of her own garden and explained how they enriched the dirt, adding nutrients to it. She told him something that intrigued him, that soil, worms, and birds were all connected and that they worked together, as other life forms did, to enhance the ecology of Canopa. In her world-view, soil was a living organism, part of the vital, breathing planet.
Though his father discounted the concept of complex environmental relationships, it was an astounding revelation to the boy, and proved to be the starting point for his life’s work. In his adulthood he extended his study to a number of planets … and the roles that Humans and other galactic races played on each of them. Noah learned about incredibly long food chains, all the predators and prey, and marvelous plants that sentient creatures could use for medicines, herbs, and food. For each planet, all of the parts fit together like the pieces of a complicated jigsaw puzzle.…
Now the catus, having grown tired of playing with the bird, devoured its prey, bones and all. It was an unpleasant sight for Noah to watch, but entirely necessary in the larger scheme of existence. He would not think of interfering.
His thoughts spun back again, to a time when he began to wonder how life forms survived in hostile environments, such as snow fleas on mountains, lichen on cliff faces, and desert succulents that stored water in their cellular structures. He had also been intrigued by chemical life forms thriving in the deepest ocean trenches where immense pressures would crush other creatures, and by alien races such as Tulyans, that did not need to breathe.
Noah had tried to put things together in new ways. He considered how seeds fell from trees and were carried by winds, so that saplings grew a few meters away, and even farther. It was a continual process of establishing new root systems, growing young plants, and then having seeds carried off again, to someplace new. When he put this information together with what he knew about comets and asteroids—heavenly bodies that carried living seeds around the galaxy in their cellular structures—he found his mind expanding, taking in more and more data. He envisioned fireballs entering atmospheres and spreading seeds … not unlike the seeds transported around a planet by its own winds.
Such theoretical linkages had caused him to wonder if planetary ecosystems might possibly extend farther than previously imagined, into the cold vacuum of space. Could each planet, with its seemingly independent environment, actually be linked to others? The seeds carried by comets and asteroids suggested that that this might be possible, as did the gravitational pulls exerted by astronomical bodies on one another, and the fact that the same elements existed in widely-separated locations. It seemed connected, perhaps, to a huge explosion long ago, the legendary “Big Bang” that split an immense mass into the planets, suns, and other components of the galaxy.
It all boggled Noah’s mind, but still another analogy had occurred to him. The galaxy was a sea of stars and planets and other cosmic bodies. A sea, with a myriad of mysterious interactions and interdependencies.
Now, thinking back on the events that had turned him into a galactic ecologist, Noah refocused on the grassy spot where the catus had devoured the bird. The feline was gone, and only feathers remained behind. Shadows stretched across the brown-brick and glax buildings of his compound, as if the encroaching night was a predator, sucking away the light. Guardians were leaving the offices, greenhouses, and laboratories on their way home, having completed their work for the day.
Deep in thought, Master Noah left the landscaped area and strode along a path, toward grass- and shrub-covered hills that were beginning to yellow as the summer season established itself. In waning daylight, trail lamps flickered on. He passed half a dozen workers going the other way, and barely noticed them. At the base of the nearest hill he reached a metal gate that covered a vaulted opening cut into the base of the slope. A pool of floodlights illuminated the area. A stocky little guard, armed with a puissant rifle over his shoulder, saluted him.
Passing into a plaxene-lined room beyond the gate, Noah took an ascensore—a high-speed lift mechanism—up to a private tram station on top of the hill. He crossed to the other side of a platform, where he boarded a green-and-brown tram car and sat on one of the seats inside the brightly-illuminated passenger compartment. The door slid shut and the vehicle went into motion, leaving the station and accelerating along an unseen electronic wire that transported him out over forested hills and small, shadowy lakes on top of the plateau.
As the car sped into increasing darkness on its invisible wire, Noah felt the buffeting effects of wind gusts. It was unusual for winds to be so strong at this time of year. Only a small event to the untrained eye, but a troubling one to him. Lately things seemed out of balance on Canopa, as if the forces of nature were refusing to continue business as usual. A steady stream of unusual occurrences were being reported by Guardian patrols … sudden storms and geological upheavals in remote regions of the planet. One of the Tulyans in his employ, Eshaz, had provided him with some of the information, but he seemed to be holding things back. The Tulyans were a strange breed anyway, but in the years that Eshaz and his companions had worked as Guardians, Noah had never seen them this way.
Just ahead, bathed in floodlights on a landing pad, he saw the orange shuttle craft that would transport him up to EcoStation, his orbital laboratory and School of Galactic Ecology. He watched a team of Guardians run scanners with lavender lights over the craft to make certain it was safe to ride. In part of Noah’s mind the need for such caution seemed preposterous. After all, the merchant princes had permitted him to operate freely for years, having done this out of deference to his powerful father. Now, though, following the attack on CorpOne headquarters, anything was possible. The feisty old Prince had tried to ruin his own son … or worse.
Noah could not believe it had all happened. Things were more complicated than ever. Sometimes he wished he was a small boy again, examining flora and fauna with fresh eyes. But the more he learned, the more he realized that he had lost the innocence of youth. His lifelong quest for information, almost desperate because of the finite term of his life, had taken him far away from those early days. Sadness enveloped him now, for it seemed to him that innocence, once lost, could never be regained.
Master Noah boarded the shuttle, and it lifted off. As he looked up at the night sky through the bubble roof of the craft he remembered lying in a meadow one evening long ago, staring in awe and amazement at the stars above him. His life had been a tabula rasa at the time, a white slate extending into the future, waiting for him to make marks upon it.
In the years since that night he had not really learned that much after all, not in the vast scale of the cosmos. Still, as he lifted heavenward, his mind seemed suddenly refreshed and ready to absorb a great deal more, and he felt a new sense of wonder and excitement.