Landfall: Tales From the Flood/Ark Universe Read Online Free PDF

with a kind of hot envy, the elaborate games of flirting, seduction and bed-hopping going on among the courtiers here at Orklund, some of them only a year or two older than Maxx himself. The endless chill night of the coldwinter was the peak time for conception, but in the coolsummer hearts were stolen or broken, and unions made. But all the girls Maxx met - the younger daughters of the ministers, parliamentarians, merchants and philosophers who thronged the court - seemed determined to become warriors like Manda or his own mother, and their martial mannerisms scared him to his bones. Maybe he would end up like Jan Stanndish, who drifted through the seasons all but oblivious to the flurry and fluster of the human realm.
    Of all Stanndish showed him of the world, it was the Purple that came to intrigue Maxx the most.
    One day Stanndish took him out of town, beyond the patchwork of farms around Orklund and out to an uncultivated scrap of grassland. Here he dug an iron trowel into the ground. Up came handfuls of thick black soil, speckled with green and livid Purple.
    ‘This is the reality of our colonisation of Earth II. There was no soil like this on this planet before the Shuttle landed, not a scrap. Soil is a construct of earthly organisms, many of them entirely invisible, a kind of factory for life manufactured by life itself. Look – a worm, whose grandfather came in a box across the stars! Our deepest colonisers are microbes from Earth which are steadily working their way into the alien dirt. But our earthly presence is but a trace – for most of this world remains held by the native life, a stubborn biosphere even older than ours.’
    ‘But it’s like ours,’ Maxx said. ‘Isn’t that true? I learned it at school. It uses the same sort of chemicals as we use. Carbon and stuff …’
    Stanndish smiled, showing gappy teeth. ‘Indeed. “Carbon and stuff”. Life here is based on carbon biochemistry, on a set of amino acids and proteins that overlaps ours, but is not identical. We believe life must wash between the stars, in the form of hardy spores. Life on Earth and on Earth II, which really aren’t so far apart on the scale of the Galaxy, both derive from some common origin, perhaps much further away. Separated for billions of years, when both were at quite primitive stages, they have long diverged in fundamental ways. Earth II life doesn’t use DNA coding, for instance, but stores its genetic data in RNA molecules.’
    ‘That’s why you can’t eat the Purple.’
    ‘Precisely. And why it can’t eat you.’  
    ‘The Founders knew all about this, didn’t they? All we do is learn about what they knew already. I wish I was a Founder. I wish I had been born on Earth a thousand years ago.’
    Stanndish smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t know. We’re still thinking here, still finding out – some of us, anyhow. Which is why we’ve discovered we need to build the Library in the first place … Something new we’ve learned about the world. Would you like me to tell you about something even the Founders never knew?’
    ‘Yes!’
    He picked a clump of Purple from the soil on his palm. ‘Look at this stuff. What we call the Purple is actually the multicellular manifestation of the native biosphere. It’s purple because -’
    ‘Of the chemicals it uses to get energy from sunlight.’
    ‘Yes! Very good. Which is different from the chlorophyll green of Earth.’ He rubbed the clump gently, until it broke up into dusty spores, and, gently, he picked out a single spore on a fingertip. ‘Each of these spores is a little clump of cells.  
    ‘What’s extraordinary about this, compared to the design of Earth life, is, first, that it’s almost autonomous – each Purple spore. Which means it can survive on its own, without other forms of life around it. Drop a single spore on a bare rock, in the sunlight, and it will busily extract the carbon and nitrogen and other materials it needs from the air and the rock. It’s as