Chapter one
A fine day it was; clear and cloudless, bright (oh, how bright!) and cheerful, a day on which all things seemed possible. Even dying. Dying had not been on Evan Orgell's schedule for the day, but that was the result he was on the verge of achieving. And there wasn't a damn thing he could do to prevent it.
Because his suit was broker.
All around him the extraordinary, phantasmagorical world called Prism teemed with life. His visit to Prism was supposed to set him up for life. Now it appeared likely it was going to set him up for something else.
The air centimeters from his face was rich with oxygen he couldn't breathe. Nearby burbled a stream of fresh, cool water he couldn't drink. It mowed through a forest full of plants and animals he couldn't eat.
Prism's sun warmed his face. It was intensely bright but no hotter than the star which circled Evan's own world, Samstead. At midday the temperature was positively benign. He could breathe the air of Prism, drink its water, eat his own rations, and yet he was going to die. He was going to die because his suit was broken.
It shouldn't be. It was a very special suit, even by the unique standards of Samstead. It had been built especially for this visit. The engineers and designers had constructed it to protect him from every imaginable danger, every conceivable threat a world like Prism could pose. What the suit's builders did not foresee, could not have foreseen, was the utter alienness of Prism's inhabitants, not to mention their insidious cleverness.
It wasn't entirely their fault, he had to admit. The engineers were used to building survival suits for work on worlds whose lifeforms were nothing more than variations on a familiar theme, that theme being the carbon atom. Prism was different. There evolution had proceeded from a different beginning to wildly different conclusions.
It was that evolution which had broken his suit.
The bright sun continued to beat down on his unshaded form. While the temperature outside his artificial epidermis remained pleasant, it was starting its inexorable upward climb within. Evan desperately wanted a drink of water. He tried to roll over. The permanently sealed servos refused to respond and he stayed as he'd fallen, fiat on his back.
His left arm wouldn't move at all. The right groaned as he stretched for the water. It was a radical break with procedure, but he thought he might cup some water in his one operable hand instead of trying to draw fluid from the helmet tap.
Assuming he could do this, though, how could he deliver the water to his mouth through the suit's impenetrable visor? His right arm went limp and he gave it up, exhausted by the attempt, just as he'd been exhausted by Prism ever since he'd touched down on its glittering, disorienting surface.
It had all seemed so simple and straightforward back on Samstead. An unparalleled opportunity for advancement within the company. There was no way he could fail to carry out the assignment. He'd never failed before, had he? Not Evan Orgell.
Methodical, brilliant, incisive, overpowering. Also impatient, overbearing, and arrogant. All those descriptions had been applied to him from the beginning of his career by those who admired him as well as those who hated or simply envied him. All were to varying degrees accurate. Failure was not a term which applied to Evan Orgell.
Until now. Because his suit was broken and survival suits just didn't break. Until now. It was something that did not happen.
As Prism shouldn't have happened.
He lay there on his back, trying to gather his remaining strength and regulate his breathing while he considered what to try next. The first thing was to get out of the direct glare of the sun. Using his right arm as a lever, he slipped it beneath him and pushed. The servos whined, his body lifted, and he managed to roll a couple of meters to his right, beneath the torus of a cascalarian. A tiny triumph, a very minor achievement, but it made him feel a little better.
The cascalarian occupied the same ecological niche on Prism as a shade tree on Earth or Samstead, but it was not properly a tree. It possessed neither leaves nor chlorophyll. The tripartite central trunk was three meters high. From there stiff spines grew parallel to the ground. There supported a transparent glassy torus which was filled, with a great variety of life, some of it motile, ail of it part of the parent growth. It reminded Evan of an imploded Christmas tree.
Everything grew toward the central trunk and the center of the torus. There was no outward expansion. Competition for living space within the torus was fierce and constant, yet all of it was part of the cascalarian's own closed system. The various shapes were competing for food. Which was to say, for sunlight. Like the majority of lifeforms on Prism, the cascalarian was a photovore.
The thin outer shell of the torus magnified the sunlight falling on it. Within the protective magnifying shell the internal lifeforms were colored lapis blue and aquamarine. Here and there a few patches of royal blue-something twisted and throve. There were also unhealthy-looking patches of pink sponge, but they were rare.
The cascalarian was an organosdicate structure, as were most of the dominant lifeforms on Prism, for it was a world based as much on silicon as carbon. A world of glass, beauty, and confusion.
No matter. Shade was shade, he mused.
Icy turning his head he could look down at the stream. The cool, pure, fast-running stream that could save his life, if he could get to it. The stream was alive with snowflakes. Twenty of them would fit easily in the palm of his hand.
Snowflakes had tiny transparent legs which ended in broad fiat pads. Attached to their backs was a single curved sail about the size of a thumbnail. They congregated where the water was still, partying on the surface tension. As the sun rose or fell they adjusted their stance to receive as much of its light as possible, crowding and shoving each other for the best place. Each photoreceptive sail was a different metallic color: carmine red, cobalt blue, deep purple, emerald green. A pair of tiny crystalline eyes marked the location of each head, and the eyes were colored the same intense hue as their owner's sail.
Powered by Prism's sun, the creatures dashed silently back and forth across the water, using tiny vacuuming mouths to suck up the mineral-rich silicoflagellata washed down from above. Thoughts of predation began to worry Evan. He was in no danger from the cascalarian or the brightly colored snowflakes, but he knew that Prism was home also to creatures which would gladly take him apart. Not for meat, but for the valuable store of minerals his body contained. The human body was a mine of highly prized trace elements. So was his suit. A big scavenger would draw no distinction between man and clothing and would devour both with equal pleasure.
His body was particularly rich in iron, potassium, and calcium. A mine. My mine is mine, he thought, too tired to laugh. The sun continued to raise the suit's internal temperature, despite the cascalarian's shade. He blinked against his own sweat. He had to do something soon.
No. He had to do something sooner than that, because something was coming toward him. He was sure his vision wasn't that far gone. Whatever was approaching wasn't very big, but then, it wouldn't have to be to do some real damage, given his helpless semicomatose state.
He couldn't see it clearly because the special discriminatory visor of his suit helmet wasn't functioning properly. The visor was necessary because many of Prism's lifeforms were organized according to fractal instead of normal geometry. They tended to blur if you stared at them for very long, as the human eye sought patterns and organization where none existed. Fractals existed somewhere between the first and second dimension or the second and the third. No one, not even the mathematicians, was quite sure.
It didn't matter so long as you looked through the Hausdorf lenses. They were built into the visor of his suit helmet. Which was broken. As a result, fractally organized figures didn't look quite right when viewed through unadjusted transparencies. Like the whatever it was that was slowly coming toward him.
It was more than merely disconcerting. You could go crazy. Fortunately he was too tired to care. So very tired.
He could feel himself drifting, falling asleep or fainting, he wasn't sure which. Not that it mattered.
He only hoped that the alien entity stalking his motionless form would start by eating the damn suit instead of its helpless occupant.