Pollen

By theidiotmachine

Prompt: Darwin coined the phrase "abominable mystery" in 1879. He used it to describe the sudden appearance of a considerable diversity of flowering plants about 100 million years ago. Why was there no evidence of gradual evolution? Why was there no trace of any intermediate forms? And why, when flowering plants appeared in the fossil record, were they already so diverse?The vexed naturalist had toyed at one point with the idea that flowering plants might have evolved in an as yet unknown land. But what if something else was behind the geological blink of an eye appearance of Earth's lovely blooms?  (Prompted by Elisabeth_Long).

The system was ruined. Everything was dust and rocks, tumbling around an uncaring G-type star.

Ellit, the theal biologist, sagged with disappointment. She tapped some buttons on the console in front of her. The creed escort was chittering over the comm, flooding it with their melodic, clicking speech. She waved a tentacle at the camera, knowing they were watching, wondering what she was going to say.

'Not what you were expecting, huh?' her pilot asked.

He was a young human male called Reed. On a good day, Ellit enjoyed taking money from him at card games. Today was not such a day.

Ellit forced her basketball-sized body into some semblance of composure, and swivelled her double-pupiled eye round.

'Nope, I was not. Could you take us closer so we can figure out what happened? I need to send a message to our creed friends.'

'Sure,' he replied, and tapped icons onto his console. The ship lurched forward.

'Well okay,' she said. 'Janice, where's this planet?'

'Already on that,' the ship's AI replied. 'I'll let you know what I find. Want me to send the message to the creed?'

'No, it's fine, thanks Janice. I'll do that. You keep doing your thing. Reed, move the ship as Janice needs.'

'Yes boss,' Reed said, already lost in charts and thrust vectors, his skull implants rippling with light.

#

They were a long way up the Perseus Arm, way out of settled POSTO territory. They were even beyond creed space, in a system with no formal name. Because they'd had to cross the entire creed empire, the creed had insisted on sending an escort, although what they were hoping to gain from following them mystified Ellit. Still, they didn't seem hostile, although it was hard to tell from those flat, shiny, featureless white faces. For all that humans were alien to her, huge, loud and ugly things that they were, the creed were even stranger. At least humans had eyes and digestive systems. Who knew what the creed saw or ate.

She shuddered.

The creed ship had already sent a message to her. Creedspeech was so conceptually different to the languages that she spoke that it could only be approximately translated, but as far as she could tell, it basically said 'huh. That's weird.'

'The absence of an intact planet is very surprising to biologist Ellit. Do the creed know what caused the planet to be destroyed?' she typed back. She'd long learned that the most effective way of communicating with the creed was to purge her messages of pronouns and leave nothing ambiguous; it seemed to make the translation more effective.

She let them chew on that, and reached out her tentacles to pull up system scans. She wouldn't be able to find out what had destroyed this planet, but she might be able to figure out if it had ever had life.

Reed, Janice, and her had been travelling for six months on the ship The Bounds of Providence, hunting a mystery which she'd become obsessed with. She'd tracked it first on data, then on simulations, and now, finally on this survey ship, further than anyone of her people had ever been from her home.

There was a tone poem, one of her people's set of oral legends. It was her favourite. Her mother sung it to her when she was tiny. It was about a theal who had desperately wanted to pluck the moon from the sky, and had climbed the highest tree that he could find, far higher than anyone had ever gone to before; he'd climbed up a huge tree on the top of a huge mountain, alone and desperate. The pursuit had driven him insane, but he'd gotten no closer to the puffy yellow moon. In his anger and frustration he'd leapt up, hanging from a great hoop leaf, and had floated away in the breeze, never to be seen again. Well, she felt like that, except she was seeking something much harder than a mere moon: she was looking for flowers. She hoped that she wouldn't float away forever.

Her people weren't scientists by nature. When humanity had come thundering from the sky in huge spaceships, the theal had been hunter-gatherers living in the branches of the huge forests of their home world, farming mushrooms and shivering in wooden shelters in the canopies. The humans had taught them... well, a world of knowledge, incomprehensible amounts of it. Ellit was the first in her family to ever go to university, and as far as she knew, she was the first theal biologist ever. And so, as an absolute outsider, she'd noticed something which the humans, and the tellacks, and the gnuurs and even the mighty human thinking machines had missed: the spread of flowers across the galaxy.

Flowers were everywhere. All planets exhibited a version of the same symbiotic relationship where a stationary lifeform would offer food, and in return for this food, a more mobile one would take the gametes of the stationary one, and spread them.

To attract these, the stationary life would bloom with appealing housings for the food and gametes. These were, of course, flowers.

On the human home world, flowers grew on plants and they were pollinated by insects. On her planet, the pollinators were graceful, gauzy jellyflies: tiny, fragile parachuting animals which filled the evening air as the flower scents were released. On the tellack planet, in endless dark tunnels, flowers were luminescent fungi and the pollinators were tiny scurrying multilobed things. The unfolding of petals was universal and a constant and it made her think of home so much that she had become obsessed.

It was easy to understand why they were everywhere. The advantages were obvious. Parallel evolution is a very real force, and when you can study a dozen planets you found it constantly. But that wasn't the thing which had surprised her, had made her tentacles bristle in shock when she read the results of her simulation.

They had happened at the same time. Well, not quite; it was very hard to guess because flowers rarely appear in fossil records, and she had a wide margin of error: but as far as she could tell, flowering plants had spread across the galaxy, planet by planet, from... well, somewhere outside POSTO space, away from the human alliance of planets.

So then she'd looked at the creed empire. The creed treaty with POSTO was still fresh, and she was expecting a rebuff when she contacted them; but the white, clicking creatures had responded with the closest thing to enthusiasm that anyone had ever seen, providing her with deep analyses of the evolutionary history of the planets in their space. And she followed the trail backwards through creed space, like tracing ripples backwards across water. She'd shown the creed her results, and they'd given her the coordinates of this star system, said that here was a planet which started it all. That message hadn't meant anything to her, but they hadn't elaborated.

So she'd asked the university for a survey ship, and here she was.

'There's all sorts of stuff here,' Janice said, interrupting her reverie. 'Debris everywhere. It's at an unbelievable scale.'

'What do you mean?' Ellit asked.

The AI brought up a window in front of her. 'You see all those little yellow points? They're artificial.'

The screen was full of yellow, a mass of tiny bright stars.

'So they're left over from some station or something?'

'No way,' Reed said. 'This isn't some station. There's much too much stuff for that. Janice, could this be like a busted up Dyson sphere or something?'

The AI considered. 'Perhaps. I'll keep looking. Ellit, you have another message from the creed ship.'

'Oh great. Let me take a look.'

'No need. It's one word: danger. Oh, shit, they're powering up their weapons.'

Reed swore, and Ellit's pulse jumped. But the creed ship wasn't pointing its guns at them; its tracking lasers were dancing off the debris disk, its torpedo tubes open and ready.

'Does it make it better that they're not shooting at us?' Ellit asked. 'Reed, how quickly can you jump the Providence out of here?'

'In four minutes. I've turned on the defence grid.'

'I don't understand what's happening,' Janice said. 'I know creed sensors are better than ours, but there's nothing... No. Wait. Oh shit.'

'Incoming,' Reed said.

Whatever it was, it arced out and up from the debris disk, followed by a dozen other points of heat and light, burning hard, all hurtling towards them.

The first creed torpedo leapt away, a flash in the darkness. The creed ship's thrusters fired, and rushed up and away. Reed didn't wait for instructions, and Jollach was shoved back into her couch by brutal acceleration.

'I'm not sure we can avoid them,' Janice said. 'They're fast, and manoeuvrable. I don't understand how they can turn that fast. We should jump.'

Ellit panted as the g-force robbed her of breath. Janice used a robot arm to push a breathing mask onto her face. Oxygen flooded into her lungs, and her chest felt like it was full of fire, but at least she could breathe.

Reed gasped. 'Creed torpedoes have missed. The targets just... stepped out of they way. Holy shit.'

'They're slowing, though,' Janice said. 'Do you think they're not hostile?'

'I don't want to find out.'

'No,' Ellit grunted, every word a fight. 'Look...'

The alien craft were burning to a stop, spreading out into a pattern in front of them. They flashed, like an underwater animal, shimmering in the dark, as more joined them. Reed slowed them down.

Ellit coughed, her whole body burning. Her people couldn't take gravity like humans could.

'They're showing us the way,' she gasped.

Reed frowned, and leaned forward. 'My god. They are.'

'It's safe,' said the creed, speaking directly in English over the com, its voice smooth and calm. 'Welcome home. Let's go.'

'Holy shit,' Ellit croaked. 'Wait. You can speak our language? Why didn't you do that before?'

'You're proud that you can understand us. We like that, and didn't want to take it from you. But this is too important for misunderstandings. Come. Fly with us.'

#

'We have a legend,' the creed said, over the speaker. 'A legend that all things started in this system. We've never come here. First we believed it, and also believed that this place was forbidden; we sent probes here, and they were destroyed. Then, lastly, our people prospered and spread through the stars and there was no need to disturb this system because our song was full of harmony, and the woven pattern of the galaxy was beautiful and complete, so we left it alone.'

'So why did you take us here?' Ellit asked.

'When we made contact with the peoples in your alliance, we realised that we were no longer the children. You are. We don't know how to be parents, but the fact that you wanted to come here based on your data analysis means you have thought, and then you have acted; and this is the principle by which we live. This means that at least some of you are growing to adulthood. This is where the first adults lived.'

They were following the creed ship, which was following the probes, down towards a cluster of continent-sized rocks, surrounded by a halo of dust which glittered in the sunlight. Reed was snoozing in his chair, implants disconnected. The star hung below them, close enough that it was no longer just a bright pinpoint of light, but now a true sun, old and yellow.

Ellit stretched.

'Uh-huh,' she said. 'So where do you think we're going?'

'We don't know.'

'This place is weird. Humans have myths about ghosts,' Janice said. 'I don't believe in them, but I can see why they do. Do the creed?'

The creed paused. 'We have read about your ghosts. We have no belief in an afterlife, and so no belief in a lost soul. However, our principle is that we think, and then we act. If an act is unfinished, it can remain, causing strange echoes; this is analogous to a haunting, I think.'

Ellit shivered. 'We theals have ghosts. I know the dhengi do, too. I'm not sure about the tellacks. And yeah, I agree, Janice. This system feels haunted.'

'We're approaching a structure,' said the creed. 'We'll share our sensor feed.'

A window jumped up on her screen. Ellit squinted at it, trying to make out shapes in the dark; when she did, she exhaled, surprised.

'It's huge.'

It was bigger than any of the stations she'd seen, maybe the size of a small moon. It was roughly spherical, but covered in spines, so that...

'Pollen. It looks like pollen,' Ellit said.

'That could be a coincidence,' Janice replied. 'They could be sensor towers or radiators or something. It makes sense to have things sticking out of a station.'

'No. It's not. This is why we're here. How long until we get there?'

'Maybe another hour.'

'I'll wake up Reed.'

#

The station loomed around them, its hills and valleys either pitilessly dark or bright in the yellow sunlight. As Reed guided them in, signals raged through their radio, crackling analogue transmissions which hissed through the cockpit. Ellit shivered at the raw, seething rage of it, and wondered what it meant.

Reed blinked and yawned. 'It looks like bones.'

Theals didn't have bones, but Ellit knew what they looked like well enough; the place felt grown, not built, constructed of vast beige arches and cones. Everything was curved, soft browns and greys and stark black shadows. The ships were tiny compared to it, little dots of light and heat in the cavernous space.

The alien probes raced ahead of them to float over a circular depression, which looked part crater, part landing pad, and part orifice. They lit up the ground with floodlights.

'Land there, then?' Ellit said.

'Looks like it. You sure you want to do this?' replied Reed.

'Yes, although you shouldn't hang around. Drop me and then take the Providence to a safe distance.'

Reed swung around, his mouth hanging open. 'You're going to EVA? Here?'

'I'm not sure that's a good idea, Ellit,' chimed in Janice.

'They could have killed us, a dozen ways, hours ago. Either this is safe or we're all dead. So, yeah, I'm going to get out. I'll suit up.'

Reed shook his head, and went back to staring at the monitors. 'You're insane. It's been genuinely nice knowing you, mate.'

'Stop it. Janice, what are our comms options?'

'The creed can block anything we use, so we have to assume this artefact can, too. However, the creed use neutrinos to communicate, so if you're with one of their drones we might be able to route something through that. But I doubt we'll be able to send any of our own drones.'

'I'll be accompanying you,' the creed said. 'We can use our communications to keep in contact with your crew.'

Ellit lifted herself out of her crash couch, and jumped up to a grip hanging from the cockpit ceiling. She swung through the ship's corridors, from bar to bar, heading to the airlock. The hull shivered around her as Reed fired manoeuvrer thrusters.

'It's rude to listen to private conversations, you know,' she said. 'But thanks. I'll be there in ten minutes.'

'I will meet you there,' replied the creed.

Janice sent a drone to help her suit up; it hovered near her, strapping velcro into place, adjusting her seals. It beeped a few times, telling her that everything was working. The ship shuddered as it landed, the metal shaking as the airlock decompressed.

Ellit shivered in fear.

'Good luck, Ellit,' Janice said, soft in Ellit's headset.

'Thanks, Janice.'

The airlock doors swung open, silent in the vacuum.

Once again, she was struck by just how huge this place was. The landing crater must have been half a kilometre across, and the rest of the station towered above her, the spikes so tall that her mind struggled to comprehend the distances. The surfaces were smooth, but pitted with micro-craters, where tiny lumps of rock and ice must have impacted over the millennia.

Her people were tree-dwellers, and being here, exposed on the ground, frightened her.

Come on, she thought. This is the find of a lifetime. You can do this.

She shivered again, tapped a button, and glided out of the airlock, propelled by her suit's thrusters.

The creed ship was a hundred metres away, smooth white and black like everything else creed. The Bounds of Providence looked ugly and primitive in comparison. Stepping from the creed ship, seemingly not wearing any kind of protection against the vacuum, was one of their people: it was standing on its rear four legs, its two arms empty, talons closed. It leaped towards her and then away, graceful in the zero gravity in a way that Ellit knew she would never be.

'Hail, biologist Ellit. My chosen name in your language is Heron. Come. There's an opening over here,' it said.

She fired thrusters and pointed antigravity vectors, and floated after the gleaming white being. It landed on a low depression, and backed away as the ground irised open beneath it.

'Hello, Heron. It's good to meet you. Just calling me Ellit is fine, thanks.'

Ellit drew closer, the pitted grey ground rolling under her. Janice's drone flew ahead, shining a light down into the tunnel.

'It goes down a long way,' she said. 'Last chance to back out?'

Ellit closed her eye and breathed in.

'No, I'm going to do this.'

'Okay, but I don't like it,' the AI replied.

'Good luck, Ellit,' Reed said, his voice already stuttering with interference. 'We'll be waiting for you.'

'Thanks Reed. Janice, would you be willing to come with me as far as you can?'

'Of course.'

Ellit was so scared that if she stopped she would never start again. So she gripped the suit's manoeuvre stick, and pushed herself forward.

'Let's go.'

#

The tunnel was curved and ribbed, like a gullet. Soft brown lights flicked on around them as they glided down.

Heron oriented itself so that it was walking down the wall, its four legs gripping the gentle arcs. Ellit decided that she'd rather be creeping forward through a passage than sinking down into a pit, and so did the same. A few seconds later, a ping on her suit told her that artificial gravity had turned on under her, and then the wall of the tunnel really did become the floor.

Great, she thought. I get to swap acrophobia for claustrophobia.

They were silent as they glided forwards, until they reached an opening, where the muted beige lights illuminated a vaulted hall. Ellit paused, and Janice's probe ran into her.

'Janice, can you see this?'

But the probe just bumped mindlessly on, its connection severed, now nothing more than dumb plastic and metal.

Ellit tapped a button, and the device stopped.

'Just you and me now, eh?' she said, forcing herself to sound cheerful.

'Yes,' the creed replied. 'I think this is our destination.'

It hopped into the hall, white limbs gleaming in the gloom. As it landed, three openings unfurled beside it. Ellit tensed, ready for threat, but nothing happened. Heron swung its head around.

'I think you should come and see this,' it said.

Ellit fired thrusters and hissed up as close as she thought she could safely get to it. She swung her suit round, to see the openings. She gasped.

'Those are planets, aren't they?'

Each opening had a tiny blue jewel hanging in it, swirled with cloud, bathed in sunlight, speckled with green and yellow and white, still and perfect. She wondered if they were projections or physical objects, and decided not to find out.

'Yes. Each one of these is an inhabited planet. I think this one is yours.'

Sure enough, she recognised the lines of the coasts of her world. She was filled with a terrible loneliness.

'What does this mean?' she asked.

'I don't know,' said the creed.

Well, she thought, that's new. I've never heard the creed admitting they didn't know something before.

She backed away, looking at the walls as more orifices unwound themselves, delicate mechanisms shivering open...

'They're flowers,' she breathed. 'Look, petals. I didn't notice because they're all grey, but I bet those are the proto-flowers from each of those planets, lost to the fossil records.'

'And the planets...'

'It's an analogy,' she said, cutting the creed off. 'Pollen, from the planets. Populating the stars. We're the animals which spread life through the galaxy, like pollinators spread life between flowers.'

She looked up at the walls of the construct.

'This thing is ancient. You saw all those impact craters on the surface. It's been here for millions of years. You think that the people who built this kicked off life, all at once, on a schedule, and their signature was flowering plants? That's how they signed their work?'

'We don't believe this. We know this.'

She sighed. 'I don't think now's the time to be arguing semantics. But, yes. Fine. So... what's the point?'

'The point?'

She swung around, and shone her spotlight across the hall. A dozen flowers unfolded, silent in the vacuum.

'Yes, the point. You and I are the first beings to ever see this, the oldest artificial construct ever discovered. It's told us a story, about flowers, about how we move life between planets. But... what's the point? The resource and power cost to build this must have been immense. Unimaginable. No one in our alliance has the technology to do it, not even the humans. And based on what I know, you also don't, and you're a long way ahead of us. So this was the pinnacle of a civilisation. Which just... vanished? So what's the point of all this?'

'We haven't seen everything yet.'

She had no answer to that. The creed continued through the twilight; she hesitated, and then followed it.

#

The flowers paraded on. Ellit tried to record each planet's image she floated past, and the monotony of it meant that she lost count of all the silent, grey shapes. There must have been dozens of them, maybe a hundred. She tried to reconcile that with the number of known inhabited planets, but she couldn't remember all of them, and anyway, she had no knowledge of creed space. She did, however, recognise Earth, where she'd studied for her biology degree. She remembered seeing it hanging above her through the ship's cameras, blue in the darkness, the first alien world she'd ever visited.

I wonder which one is the creed home world, she thought.

Heron gave no indication as it floated through the darkness. Instead it strolled through the vacuum and low gravity, silent and unreadable.

They're such weird things, she thought. As far as I know, it's not wearing a suit. That's just what they look like. They must be incredibly heavily modified people. I wonder how much organic matter it has in there. Humans are weird and alien, but they're nothing on these guys.

I wonder if the people who built this were more like the creed, or us. Or something else again.

She was so hypnotised by the endless procession of flowers that she was startled when they stopped. She looked around, expecting more; but instead the hall widened further, opening into a vault. It was dark, but as she and Heron entered, a set of dots lit up, pale white in the gloom. They were followed by others, more and more, hanging in space, forming a bright shape.

'That's a map of the local area,' the creed said. 'You can see sections of what the humans call the Perseus Arm, the Sagittarius Arm, and the Orion spur. It covers around a fifth of the galaxy.'

'It's also much bigger than alliance and creed space combined,' observed Ellit. 'So this is the area that these people seeded?'

'Perhaps,' said the creed. It leapt out into the darkness, into the sparkling stars. They shone from its white flanks, and it sparkled as it flew between them.

'Come. These are harmless. I think there's something up here.'

She shrugged, and pushed up, gliding into the tiny suns. She turned off her spotlight, because it somehow felt disrespectful to bring any other light into this cathedral of stars.

The creed dived ahead of her. It was like following it through water, lit brilliantly from within.

'Here,' it said.

A single red dot sat, baleful and alone.

'What's this?' she asked.

'I don't know. It's out on the Outer Arm, far away from our populated space.'

'I think it's a map. To them, the people who created this.'

'This is a reasonable guess, yes.'

The creed reached out for it.

'Wait, are you sure...?' said Ellit, but it was too late.

The stars flew apart; the red dot grew so that it was bigger than both Ellit and Heron. Script swirled around it, writing which she couldn't read, which danced and spun.

'My goodness,' she whispered.

'We must go,' said the creed, more urgently than she'd ever heard it speak.

'What?'

'Now.'

The creed leapt, darting through the tiny stars, back towards the hall they'd come through. Not understanding, but not wanting to be left behind, she turned, and accelerated after it. As she flew, the flowers closed, the lights turned off.

'I've alerted your ship to be ready.'

'What's going on?'

'We've been told to leave.'

'What...?'

She imagined things crawling from the walls, pushing blind heads from the flowers in the darkness behind her, but there was nothing on her rear camera; just emptiness and silence, the flowers folding up for their long night.

'I don't understand.'

They hurtled up, out of the hall, out of the tunnel, out of the construct, out into space. The door irised closed behind them, entombing the flowers, the planets, the stars, and whatever else was behind them.

The Bounds of Providence was burning hard, decelerating down towards her, its rear airlock open. Her coms roared to life, making her jump.

'...repeat, Ellit, we can see you, remain on your current course, I'll grab you. Please acknowledge. I repeat...'

'Reed, I can hear you, I acknowledge.'

'Thank shit for that, Ellit. We got you. Hold on, buddy.'

The Providence slowed as it got closer. Janice dropped a pair of drones on cables which locked onto Ellit's suit, and reeled her into the hold. The airlock closed behind her, and the roar of air filled her ears. She looked up at the hard lines of the walls, at the harsh lights, at the metal struts and cables; and she closed her eyes and hoped that she would live to see her planet again, while the ship rattled and raged around her, burning hydrogen to take her away.

#

Three hours later, she was sitting in the mess with Reed, as The Bounds of Providence flew back towards friendly worlds through flux space. Janice had one drone making cocktails, and another dealing cards. The lights were soft, and Reed had put some old human music on, which wasn't something she liked, but it was better than that awful silence.

'Before we jumped, the creed sent you a message, when you were getting out of your suit,' Janice said. 'It asked me not to read it, but to give it to you when you were ready.'

Her drone brought a drink on a tray. Ellit wrapped a tentacle around the stem of the glass, and lifted it up; the amber liquid sparkled in the light. She put it down next to her, untouched.

'Why don't you read it to all of us?' she said.

'Sure. "Hail biologist Ellit. I am privileged to have visited the home of our parents with you."'

'So the creed can be polite, huh?' said Reed. 'That's the weirdest thing we've seen so far.'

'Hush. Keep going, Janice.'

'"This is an approximate translation of the script we saw, in the map room." Are you sure you're ready for this, Ellit?'

She stretched in her acceleration couch, and finally treated herself to a sip of the cocktail. It tasted like citrus fire, a heat blazing into her so unlike the darkness and cold of the alien construct. The music finished, and was followed with a tone poem from her people. It was about the theal who was looking for the moon, and its low, languorous words filled the little room like a warm summer breeze.

'Come on, it's fine. I've just survived contact with an alien artefact older than our homeworlds. I can cope with a bit of mail.'

'Okay. It says, "our children have grown. You've spread through the stars. You've filled worlds with life, and brought technology from planet to plant like pollen, birthing new ideas. You've filled your corner of the galaxy with light and knowledge."'

Janice paused.

'Go on,' said Ellit.

'"However, you had no right to come here. This isn't for you. You think you're adults, but you're not. If you intrude as children again, we'll obliterate you, and start again. You might think that we're cruel, but we're not. Terrible things are coming, across the space between galaxies, and you must be ready. Leave and put aside your toys, or they will be taken from you and smashed." And that's it.'

'Holy shit,' Reed said.

'Yeah. No wonder Heron was so spooked,' Ellit said, taking another sip of her drink. 'Damn, this is good. Thanks, Janice.'

'Heron?' Janice asked.

'That's what the creed called itself. Did I not say? But, yeah, it read that message and then ran.'

Reed picked up his hand of cards, and looked at them, then he put them face down in front of him.

'"Terrible things are coming, across the space between galaxies, and you must be ready." Do you believe that?' he asked.

Ellit held out two of her tentacles, and tried to approximate a human shrug. 'Dude, I just work here. I've no idea. But let's take it back home, and see what everyone makes of it.'

Reed shook his head. The single cable running from the back of his head jiggled. He lifted up his glass. 'You're so cool, Ellit. I wish I was like you.'

'And you're drunk, Reed. But I'll take it. We solved this problem; let's get home and figure out how to solve the next one.'

She raised her glass back, and finished the drink.