Readyworld

fiction by michael werneburg

Encouraged by the officer's cryptic statements, I hurried down the ramp at full tilt. If the soldier plodding down the path ahead of me at breakneck speed hadn't spotted anything with suits and heads full of gear, what was I going to stumble over?

I called back to Alain, "You ever seen a bird as big as that?"

"Nope. Plenty in the fossil records on Hertzworld, but nothing contemporary."

"Not on Terra?"

"Yeah, but again, strictly extinct."

"So that's a big deal, right?"

"All the more so because two weeks ago any exobiologist on the planet would have told you there were no flying biota on this planet!"

"What was it doing, up there?"

"If I had to guess, I'd say hunting."

Then we came to the first cut-away section of the wall that overlooked the Big Room. I froze at what I saw. All across the floor was a stand of something that looked like those polyp shapes that you'd see in the historical footage of coral reefs. Only, these were the size of mature oak trees. I blinked at the scene in astonishment. How much time had passed since it had been nothing more than a damp stony floor, an hour?

"What the hell?" exclaimed Alain Hu, when he arrived. "I thought we were here to look at microbiota!"

The large life-forms stretched up towards the lights from bulbous shapes that lay buried in the mud. The fronds at the top formed a complex jumble that obscured whatever might lie at their center. Were those things supposed to gather light? I wondered. To me, they looked as alien as anything that grew on Readyworld; unnatural even by the standards of the other habitable worlds humankind had visited.

"I've got to get down there," muttered Hu. He brushed by the soldier kneeling beside me, and disappeared into the ramp's shadows.

"What do you make of it, Doctor?" asked Mead.

"I don't have a clue," I breathed.