As she paused in her explorations, Estarra ate messy handfuls of splurtberries and wiped the juice from her mouth and hands. Exuberant, she looked up at the nearest worldtree, where she saw handholds and markings of frequent ascents by acolyte reading teams. The bark offered enough bumpy handand footholds that Estarra could scale it like a ladder, providing she didn’t look down or think too hard about what she was doing. Up there, the green priests walked their highways across the resilient treetops and interlinked branches.
Estarra wore few clothes, for the forest was warm; her feet were callused enough that she needed no shoes. She ascended one handhold at a time, moving upward, always upward. Exhausted but exhilarated, she finally broke through the brushing worldtree leaves. Estarra stared out, blinking into the unobscured sunlight, blue sky, and the endless treescape.
Even from up here, she could not tell where one individual tree ended and another began. Around her, she heard voices and songs, groaning chants and hesitant reading voices, a mixture of high-pitched and deep tones.
Balanced against the fronds, Estarra looked out at the gathered priests, tanned and healthy acolytes who had not yet taken the green, older emerald-skinned priests who had already formed a symbiosis with the worldforest. The acolytes sat on platforms or balanced on branches, reading aloud from scrolls or electronic plaques. Some played music. Others simply rattled off tedious streams of data, reciting meaningless numbers from tables. It was a dizzying hubbub of activity, with the priests entirely focused on increasing the knowledge and data held within the worldforest—a way to show reverence for and help their vibrant verdant spirit at the same time. Hundreds of separate voices spoke to the interconnected forest, and the worldtrees listened and learned.
So much to see and experience, and the green priests did it all by staying here, drawing blessings from the mind of the worldforest. Estarra wished she could comprehend everything the forest knew. The priests sang out poems or read stories, even discussed philosophical topics, delivering information in all forms. The worldtrees absorbed every scrap of data, and still the living network hungered for more.
10
PRIME DESIGNATE JORA’H
At the fringe of the sparkling Horizon Cluster, Ildira basked under the varying light of seven suns. The Empire’s home planet circled a warm orange K1 star that was situated near a close binary pair—the Qronha system—composed of a red giant and a smaller yellow companion. More distant, but still dazzling in the Ildiran sky, hung the amazing trinary of Durris, a closely tied white star and yellow star with a red dwarf orbiting the common center of mass. Finally, also distant, the blue-supergiant Daym shone like an intense diamond.
Night never fell on Ildira.
Mijistra, capital city and jewel of the ancient empire, glittered under brassy skies. Its spires and domes were made of crystal and colored glass, freeform architecture fashioned out of ultrastrong transparent polymers.