But no sooner had Rene closed his lids than he was roused by the sound of cannon fire. The Amits! The Amits were scaling the walls!

“Man the barricades!” he shouted groggily, rolling out of his bunk and reaching for his gun. Then his eyes cleared and he saw Zildiz regarding him quizzically.

“What’s happening?” he cried as the muffled crump of ordinance echoed back and forth across the land, “What are they shooting at?”

Rene felt a swell off hope and pride in his chest. The Fleet had finally launched the grand offensive! No power on Arachnea could stop the triumphant march of humanity’s progress! They would carve out the new territories in quick succession, and all that remained for him to do was walk over to the nearest picket line and hand over his prisoner over questioning. A wave of patriotic fervor gripped him and whooped and whistled, cheering his brothers and sisters-in-arms onwards to victory.

“It’s the just the trees, you child,” Zildiz said irritably.

“Right, sure,” Rene scoffed, “The trees are shooting at us?”

“Gene edited Cucurbitaceae species,” she explained, “They were designed by the Vitalus to deal with this eventuality. They only propagate their seeds during bush fires. You are hearing the sound of them reproducing.”

Another detonation went off and made Rene cringe and look instinctively for cover.

“The flame gourd trees store their seeds in a hard shell filled with sugar-rich liquid that is its main source of nutrition, while also doubling as a natural fire retardant. When the shell reaches a certain internal temperature, it forcibly bursts open along its seams, scattering the seeds and simultaneously putting out the fires below. So you see, the Vitalus is already healing the damage that your Engine caused.”

Another bang rippled through the fog, followed by dozens more in quick succession. It sounded for all the world like a battery of howitzers firing a creeping barrage. The fog cleared up a little and he saw a distant hillock ringed by a line of smoldering orange that was advancing up its sides until it came to a stand of stunted trees whose boughs were heavy with large brown fruit. As the flames licked the lower branches, the fruit disappeared in cotton-ball puff detonations, smothering the earth in clouds of gaseous effluents. In the aftermath the entire area was soaked in foamy residue.

“You’re telling me that the Vitalus planted all these special trees?”

Zildiz offered him a deprecating smile, saying:

“It was those trees. Just as it was the fish we just ate, and the plankton in the water you swam in. It is the totality of life on Arachnea, and the sooner you acknowledge its mastery, the easier it will be to accept your fate.”

Rene considered what she’d said carefully. It was certainly food for thought. As primitive and naturalistic as the idea had sounded, Rene had to respect the evidence of his own eyes. By unleashing the Divine Engine, Rene had been the direct cause of a natural disaster, and no small one considering how it had followed him all the way from the ruins of Mound Euler. If the woman’s words were to be taken at face value, then this Vitalus had just reversed a literal force of nature. And from Zildiz’s bored tone, it apparently did such things on a regular basis.

From finding evidence of the intelligence of the Amit race, to uncovering of a mythic tool of the gods, Rene had experienced too many impossibilities in the past few days to be a cynic now. But he knew better than to abandon all skepticism, and took the concept to its logical conclusions by asking:

“If your god is so all-powerful, why hasn’t it seen fit to rescue you?”

“This marks a new chapter in the Great Game. The parameters have been altered. Those who can, shall prosper with the change. The rest will die, or serve the needs of their betters. All shall flow as it must.”

“That’s a pretty crummy way of looking at the world. What’s this Game you keep mentioning, and what’s so great about it?”

“Arachnea is a half-made world. It could have been a utopia once. The Betrayers destroyed it in a fit of jealousy, as with everything else they touched. Only the intervention of the Vitalus prevented total system death and corrected the runaway feedback loops. But the process of restoring the planet to conditions ideal for sentient life requires hundreds, if not thousands of years. Factors such as atmospheric composition, axial tilt, carbon and nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, ocean salinity and thermohaline circulation—all these and more must be finetuned, with the living systems of Arachnea themselves acting as the ultimate terraforming tool.”

“Hence, we exist in a transitionary period. During this period, the Vitalus shall allow nature to select the kindreds who shall be worthy of the paradise that is to come. Only those who can adapt to the changing conditions, husband their resources, and achieve total immersion within the All-In-One will earn their place in the world that shall be. A world without famine or war or disease, where the righteous will dwell in an eternal state of perfection that is of their own making.”

For once Rene had no snide witticisms with which to brush aside her barbarity. The sheer force of her belief and conviction surpassed even the most rabid zealots of the Chaplainage. The Fleet had met and absorbed many primitive cultures in the course of its reconquest of the surface world, from the bog-men of the Burning Marshes to the ice farmers of the mesas of Darood. Each tribe had had its own set of deities, but they all paled in comparison to those of Zildiz’s civilization, for the simple reason that her religion had something which they had all lacked: a basis in harsh, merciless fact. Fascinated, Rene quizzed her:

“Will this perfect world contain the Leapers?”

“Before we Gallivants are done, not a single drop of their blood will remain in the gene pool,” Zildiz said with perfect honesty.

“And could this perfect world contain the Fleet?” Rene said quietly.

Zildiz turned to face him. Her mouth twisted at the corners into a disturbing smile that never touched her eyes. Rene flinched and dropped his gaze, clearing his throat uncomfortably.

“We’ll see about that,” he finally muttered, more to convince himself that anything else.

“No, we won’t,” Zildiz replied, “You can’t hear them, can you?”

“Hear what?”

“Give it a moment…there! What about now?”

Rene strained his ears, but could make out nothing but the pop and bang of the flame gourds. After a moment, however, he began to discern a softer, more regular rhythm underneath the din, as of something hollow being hammered insistently.

“Drums,” he breathed, his veins turning to ice water.

“Leapers,” Zildiz said, confirming his guess, “And from the sound of it, all the tribes have mustered. I would tell you to make peace with your god, but the Vitalus has no place for you and your kind.”

“Gathering for what?” he demanded, annoyed by her nonchalant attitude. Zildiz pouted her lips and used them to point upwards at a region of the sky where the fog had thinned. Rene scanned the clouds and saw silver sheets of rain falling directly on the wildfire, which was clearly weakening. Then a smidgen of the suns shone through the roiling troposphere and for a moment Rene saw something that snatched his breath away.

Rainbows. Not one, or two, nor even several of them—it would have been more accurate to call it a wall of rainbows, as if the world had coyly lifted aside the curtain of paradise itself. The shimmering folds of the improbable fabric waved and flapped amid the powerful headwinds, hundreds of kilometers tall and wide and swelling like the bulge of a soap bubble, vivid purple and blue at its edges while the center faded to transparency.

A host of tiny black spots were clambering up and down the rainbow curtain like sailors on a ship’s rigging, weaving the pattern with their many arms even as they rode the wild thermals.

Leapers. Thousands of them, all working in concert as they marshalled the power of the rainstorm. Rene sat in awestruck silence as the threads of the rainbow curtain caught the downpour and funneled it into scores of places at once, drowning the worst of the wildfire and producing great columns of smoke wherever it poured.

Through it all the drums beat their incessant rhythm, a song that changed with the twisting motions of the curtain. Rene hypothesized that they were a communication system by which the Leapers coordinated their gargantuan efforts.

He wondered numbly if the Leapers had summoned the storm themselves by condensing it with their webs, or if they had simply taken advantage of the existing weather patterns. The question was purely academic; either way, their mastery of the elements was frightening and undeniable. Zildiz on the other hand was trying her best to see the high edge of the storm catcher, but her basic ocular organs had limited magnification. She didn’t have to see that far to know that a squadron of Gallivants were holding up the entire superstructure, working in concert with their most sworn enemies to serve the will of the All-In-One. That could only mean one thing: the Vitalus had called for a general truce. History was unfolding before her very eyes, but from here she was powerless to influence it.

The heavy rains would last several days, the smog even longer. Both of these factors would play hell with the reception of her magnetosynaptic organ. The god would also be preoccupied with measuring and repairing the damage, as well as dealing with the Divine Engine. Zildiz had no doubt in her mind that It would solve these problems and restore the precious equilibrium. But the more cogent question was if It would ever arrive in time to save her from the spawn of the Betrayers.

The spawn in question was in a state of shock from which it was already recovering.

“Alright,” Rene told her, “I’ll admit it. I’m impressed. No, scratch that. I’m utterly gobsmacked.”

“Do you see now the absolute futility of your struggle?” she asked Rene.

“I didn’t say I was beaten,” Rene said, getting back on his feet and pulling his boots back on.

“So you mean to continue on your foolish errand?”

“Unfortunately, yes. Consider me properly motivated.”

Zildiz could not help but chortle at that, a rich and warm belly laugh that surprised even her.

“You are much too stupid to die, Fleet-man,” she decided, “I will observe your progress with great interest.”