Robert Silverberg: Starborne

“Everything all right so far,” he announces.

The year-captain joins him. Together they walk toward the edge of the clearing; and then, after just a moment of hesitation, they step out together onto the upper surface of one of the unburned vines.

It is an unappealing surface. Big scrofulous leaves, blue-black and stemless, pocked with ugly blister-shaped air bladders, sprout directly from the wood at sparse intervals. Dull red streamers hang from their edges like bursts of entrails. In the bare places between the leaves the trunks of the vine have a disagreeably gluey texture.

“Well?” Huw asks.

“A little sticky, isn’t it?”

“I mean your mind.”

“Still functioning, thank you. And yours?”

“I was ready to scream by this point on Planet A. Already was screaming a little, as a matter of fact. Things are different here, it seems. So much for Giovanna’s theory, let’s hope.”

“Vile place even so, isn’t it?” the year-captain says.

“Utterly repugnant. Absolute trumps, as repugnant goes. Shall we move a little farther onward, old brother?”

It is almost like being under water. By their calculations it’s the midday hour, with a medium-size sun hovering right above them just a few dozens of millions of kilometers away, and yet they are shrouded in a deep twilight gloom. There is one place in the sky where a somewhat lighter blurry patch stands out against the thick gray mantle of clouds: that’s the sun lurking back there, no doubt. The rain, falling as it does in dense sheets, is dispiriting in the extreme. It must not have stopped raining here in millions of years. The water hits the corrugated woody surfaces of the huge vines and goes slithering off into the narrow crevices between them. Perhaps some of it trickles downward from the planetary surface for hundreds of kilometers until it comes to rest in pockets of unimaginable darkness along the flat face of the rocky core; but most of the deluge simply bounces right back up in instant evaporation. All about them they can see heavy clouds of vapor climbing stubbornly through the furious vertical scything of the downpour.

The vines themselves form a virtually impenetrable covering. They lie side by side like the threads in some colossal tapestry, occasionally overlapping, each one stretching on and on for what may well be kilometers; there is not so much as a fingersbreadth of room between each one and its neighbor. Their greenish-purplish bark is sturdy and yet rubbery, yielding a little beneath the feet of the two explorers. It bears not just leaves but pulpy fungoid masses that sprout in random patches all over it, and also scabrous gray coatings of the local equivalent of lichen. These are soft as cheese, these parasites or saprophytes or symbiotes, whatever the case may be, creating a treacherously slippery surface, but it is difficult to avoid walking on them. Between these various excrescent outgrowths it is possible to see numerous large oval bodies, greenish in color and smooth in texture, set in the bark of the vines four or five meters apart from one another like a host of unblinking eyes: they appear to have a significant function for the vines, perhaps supplementary instruments that aid the strange leaves in conducting some kind of photosynthetic process in this dismal subaqueous light.

Everything here seems to be rotting, decaying, decomposing, and reconstituting itself all in the same process. This world would have made a good penal colony, maybe, in the fine old days when cruel and unusual punishment was a popular human pastime. But it doesn’t seem good for very much else.

“Have we seen enough, do you think?” Huw says.

The year-captain points straight ahead. There is a round dark place up there, like the mouth of a cave, set between two vine trunks. The entrance, it seems, to one of those long underground tunnels that had shown up on the sonar images. “Shall we take a look inside?” he asks.

“Ah. You want to go in there.”

“I want to go in there, yes,” says the year-captain in a quiet tone.

“Well, then, why not?” says Huw, not very enthusiastically. “Why not, indeed?”

The year-captain leads the way, without discussion of issues of precedence. The tunnel is wide and low-roofed, ten or twelve meters broad but scarcely higher than the tops of their heads in some places. It runs at a gently sloping downward angle right through the corpus of the vines, slicing casually from one to the next; its walls, which are the substance of the vines, are moist and pink, like intestines, and a kind of sickly phosphorescent illumination comes from them, a feeble glow that breaks the dense darkness but is of little help to vision. Huw and the year-captain activate their helmet lamps and step a little farther within, and then a little farther yet.

Huw says, “I wonder what could have constructed these—”

“Hush,” says the year-captain, pointing ahead once again. “Look.”

He walks forward another dozen meters or so and steps up the intensity of his beam. The tunnel appears to be blocked up ahead by a plug of some sort; but as they get closer to the blockage they can see that the “plug” is slowly retreating from them — that it is, in fact, some enormous sluggish, elongated flat-topped creature that not only is moving in wormlike fashion along the floor of the tunnel but is evidently creating the tunnel, or at least expanding it, by devouring the fabric of the vine through which the tunnel runs.

“Fabulous,” Huw murmurs. “What do you know, we’ve found extraterrestrial animal life at last, old brother! And what a beauty it is!”

There is no way for them to tell how long the tunnel worm is. Its front end is lost in the darkness far down the way. But they are able to see that its body is three times the width of a man’s, and rises nearly to their height. Its flesh is translucent and pink in color, a deeper pink than that of the tunnel itself, more in the direction of scarlet, and has a soft, buttery look about it. Black hairy fist-size pores are set low along the creature’s sides, every fifty centimeters or thereabouts, going forward on it as far as they can see. From these orifices comes a steady trickle of thin whitish slime that runs down the curving sides of the thing and lies puddled in rivulets and pools along the tunnel floor around it. An excretion product, no doubt. The worm seems to be nothing more than an eating machine, mindless, implacable. It is steadily munching its way through the vine and turning what it eats into a stream of slime.

Indeed they can hear the sounds of feeding coming from the other end of the creature: a snuffling noise and a harsh chomping noise, both above a constant sixty-cycle drone. All these sounds, which seem to be related, go on without letup. An eating machine, yes.

The two men creep a little nearer, taking care not to let their boots come in contact with the deposits of slime that the great worm has left in their path. When they are as close to the creature as they dare to get, it becomes possible for them to perceive curious glowing cystlike structures, dark and round and solid and about the size of a man’s head, distributed with seeming randomness within the flesh of the thing, scattered here and there at depths of a third of a meter or more. These cysts make their presence known by a bright gleam like yellow fire that emanates from them and rises up through the flesh of the worm to its pink puckered skin.

“Internal organs?” Huw asks. “Elements of its nervous system, could they be?”

“I don’t think so,” the year-captain says. “I think they may belong to this .”

Once more he points, jabbing his finger urgently forward two or three times into the pinkish gloom, and turns the beam of his helmet lamp up to its highest level.