colder worlds farther out. Beyond them was a circling field of galactic flotsam and jetsam, a com-etary collection, perhaps remnants of some larger and older thing, and beyond that the darkness of space sequined by a far-off scatter of fully formed stars and galaxies.
She returned her attention to the nearest planet where thin plates of surface rock were thrust across great furnaces of the deep to be suddenly pimpled with a rash of baby volcanoes, each vent a basaltic core that hardened inside its ashen cone into a cyclopean crystalline pillar. Echoes from within the planet allowed her to perceive a spongy crust built up by recurrent layers of lava tubes superimposed on sedimentary structures. She could detect great caverns held aloft by basaltic pillars, one atop another, some created by fire, some by water, some by both together, some mere bubbles with a pillar or two, others measureless caverns with forests of columns.
Here and there chasms split through the layers, bringing light to the inner world. Those deepest down had been invaded by the abyssal oceans where scalding vents spewed black smoke while complicated molecules rocked in the steaming waters at the edge of the white hot magma, spinning in the heat, accumulating and replicating themselves, adhering, separating, drifting away on the currents of the sea.
She turned her gaze outward, and this time saw in the far dark of the cometary field a thing that raised itself upon wide, pale wings and moved inward to roost upon a tiny moon of a cold planet. The Questioner watched the planet as it passed behind the sun, emerged, then arced toward her once more. As it swung by she received the fleeting impression of a wing of pale fire unfolding across the stars.
Something living sat on that cold rock, something from outside. Something akin to time; certainly something accustomed to waiting; a bat the size of a mountain range, perhaps? Or something like an octopus, with membranes stretched between its tentacles to make a winglike structure? Something very large, certainly, and something very old.
Her concentration was interrupted by a vast mooing or bellowing of radio waves coming from somewhere in the system, spreading outward in all directions, a message repeating over and over. Come. Come. Here is a new planet, still warm. Here are fires, still burning. I await. I await.
The message was in no words she knew, no language she had ever heard, and yet it was unmistakable in intent. It was a summons, and something within her responded to it, something she had not known was there. For the time, that was the only response. She could detect no other.
She turned to watch life erupting on the nearest planet. She could feel its burgeoning, though most of it was below the surface. It grew everywhere through the spongified outer layer of the planet, invading tubes and tunnels, caverns and caves, bubbles and blast holes, vents and veins. All spaces were room for it, all interconnected, one draining into another, some floored in fertile soil, some hollow and echoing, some running out beneath the sea where the dry stone corridors shushed to the sound of outer waters, like great ears alive to the pulse of their own blood, and all of them seething with life.
Questioner could feel that life; she could sense its manifestations and varieties. She was not surprised. Life always happened. It might survive an hour, or a year, or a millennium. It might kill itself after a billion years or be killed in half a million, but on this kind of planet and on a dozen or a hundred other kinds of planets, some kind of life always happened.
All this time, the great mooing had gone on in the background and was now answered by another voice, another call coming from the outer dark, faintly and far away. Questioner increased her visual acuity to detect a point of light moving slowly toward the system. When she looked back at the planet, she saw that life had emerged upon its surface. The planetary life forms were less interesting, however, than the interlopers from afar: the one who summoned; the other who came in response, now near enough to take form, a creature sailing with fiery wings upon the solar winds.
At the edge of the cometary field the wings lifted above the plane of that field to fly across it toward the inner planets. It approached the young sun slowly, reluctantly, draggingly, ever slower the nearer it came.