River of Gods by Ian McDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

with their herds. Alterre is running a hundred thousand years a
Real World day, so by tomorrow they could be extinct; this high,
humid cloud forest of umbrella-shaped trees desiccated by a climatic
shift.
    But in this ecological moment, this timeslice of what, in another
age, another earth, will be northern Tanzania, today belongs to them.
    The rush and dash of bobbets disturbs a group of tranter, reared up
on their hind legs, sucking leaves from a trudeau tree. The big slow
tree feeders drop to their longer forelegs and canter disjointedly
away. Their internal armour plates move like machinery under
willow-striped hides. Camouflage by William Morris, Lisa Durnau
thinks. Botany by Rene Magritte. The trudeau trees are perfect
hemispheres of leaves, regularly spaced across the plain like an
exercise in statistical distribution. Some of the branches bear seed
buds, penduluming on the breeze. They can scatter seed across a
hundred-metre radius, like a riot-control flechette gun. That's how
they achieve their mathematical regularity. No trudeau will grow in
the shade of another, but the forest canopy is a cornucopia of
species.
    Flickers of moving shadow between the trees; a flock of parasitic
beckhams darts from the dead tranter in which they have injected
their eggs. An ystavat stoops from its high glide path, darts and
weaves and scoops up a laggard sauro-bat in the net of skin between
its hind legs. A flip, a duck of the tearing beak, and the hunter
climbs away again. Invulnerable, inviolable, Lisa Durnau runs on. No
god is mortal in his own world and for the past three years she has
been director, sustainer, and mediator of Alterre, the parallel Earth
evolving in accelerated time on eleven and a half million Real-World
computers.
    Beckhams. Tranters. Trudeaus. Lisa Durnau loves the mischief of
Alterre taxonomy. It's the principles of astronomy applied to
alternative biology; you find it lurking in your hard-drive, you name
it. Mcconkeys and mastroiannis and ogunwes and hayakawas and novaks.
Hammadis and cuestras and bjorks.
    So very Lull.
    She's settled into her rhythm now. She could move like this forever.
Some listen to music when they run. Some chat or read their mail or
the news. Some have their aeai PAs brief them on the day. Lisa Durnau
checks out what's new across ten thousand biomes running on eleven
and a half million computers participating in the biggest experiment
in evolution. Her usual route is a loop around the University of
Kansas campus, her marvellous and mysterious bestiary laid over the
Lawrence traffic. There's always something to surprise and delight,
some new phone-directory name hanging off a fantastical creature
that's fought its way out of the silicon jungle. When the first
arthrotects had appeared out of the insects by pure evolutionary leap
on a Biome 158 host in Guadalajara, she had experienced that thrilled
satisfaction you feel when a plot twist hits you that you didn't
expect. No one could have predicted the lopezs, but they had lain
there, latent, in the rules. Then, two days ago the parasitogenic
beckhams evolved from an elementary school in Lancashire and it hit
her all over again. You never see it coming.
    Then they fired her into space. She hadn't seen that coming, either.
    Two days ago she had been running her loop of the campus, past the
honey stone faculty buildings, Alterre laid over Kansas summer. She
turned by the student halls to run back to shower, shampoo, and
office. In which a woman in a suit had been waiting as Lisa came in
screwing water out of her ears with twists of tissue. She'd shown
identifications and authorisations for responsibilities Lisa hadn't
known her nation ever needed and three hours later Lisa Durnau,
Director of the Alterre Simulated Evolution project, was on a
government hypersonic transport seventy-five thousand feet over
central Arkansas.
    The G-woman had told her luggage was strictly mass-limited but Lisa
packed her running gear anyway. It felt like a