The Night's Dawn Trilogy Read Online Free PDF Page A

their ignorant prey swimming overhead.
    When their full size has been reached they slide up out of the water to range through the planetwide jungle. Gills adapt to
     breathe the harsh musky air, tentacle muscles strengthen to support the drooping limbs away from the water’s cosy buoyancy.
     And they eat, rummaging through the matted undergrowth with insistent horns to find the black, wizened nutlike nodes that
     have been lying there neglected since the storm. The nodes are made up of cells saturated with chemical memory tracers, memories
     containing information, the knowledge accumulated by the Ly-cilph race throughout time. They bring understanding, an instant
     leap to sentience, and trigger the telepathic centre of their brains. Now they have risen above a simple animal level of existence
     they have much to converse about.
    The knowledge is mainly of a philosophical nature, although mathematics is highly developed; what they know is what they have
     observed and speculated upon, and added to with each generation. Farside night acts as a magnet as they gather to observe
     the stars. Eyes and minds linked by telepathy, acting as a gigantic multi-segment telescope. There is no technology, no economy.
     Their culture is not orientated towards the mechanical or materialistic; their knowledge is their wealth. The data-processing
     capacity of their linked minds far exceeds that of any electronic computer system, and their perception is not limited to
     the meagre electromagnetic wavelengths of the optical bands.
    Once awoken, they learn. It is their purpose. They have so little time in their corporeal form, and the universe they find
     themselves in, the splendour of the gas supergiant and its multifarious satellites, is large. Nature has ordained them as
     gatherers of knowledge. If life has a purpose, they speculate, then it must be a journey to complete understanding. In that
     respect intellect and nature have come to a smooth concordance.
    In the ninth year after their hatching, the four large innermost moons line up once more. The distortion they cause in the
     supergiant’s magnetosphere acts like an extension to the flux tube. The agitated particles of the ionosphere which use it
     as a conduit up to the first moon’s plasma torus now find themselves rising higher, up to the second moon, then the third,
     higher still, fountaining out of the magnetosphere altogether. The Ly-cilph world swings round into their path.
    It is not a tight directed beam; up at the mushrooming crown the protons and electrons and neutrons have none of the energy
     they possessed when the roiling flux lines flung them past the first moon. But as always it is the sheer scale of events within
     the gas supergiant’s domain which proves so overwhelming.
    The Ly-cilph world takes ten hours to traverse through the invisible cloud of ions loitering outside the flux lines. In that
     time, the energy which floods into the atmosphere is more than sufficient to destroy the equilibrium of the slowly circulating
     convection currents.
    The deluge arrives at the end of the planet’s one and only mating season. The Ly-cilph and their non-sentient cousins have
     produced their eggs and secreted them into the lakebeds. Plants have flowered and scattered their seeds across the landscape.
     Now there is only the prospect of death.
    When the first titanic bursts of azure lightning break overhead, the Ly-cilph stop their analysing and deliberations, and
     begin to impart all they know into the empty cells of the nodes which have grown out of their skin like warts around the base
     of their tentacles.
    The winds howl, voicing the planet’s torment. Gusts are strong enough to break the metre-thick stems of the fern trees. Once
     one goes it starts a domino effect in the jungle. Destruction spreads out in vast ripples, looking like bomb blasts from above.
     Clouds are torn apart by the violence, reduced to cotton tufts spinning frantically in the grip of