In the lengthening evening shadows on the waterfront of the Ternian capitals, darkness stretched on the deep channels that brought the sea into the harbor and painted the ocean rollers into dark purple mysteries glinting under the faint light of the twin moons.

Along the twenty-fathom line, the bottom began shelving rapidly into the depths of the Ternian sea, and in consequence it was there -- only a quarter mile from the lampless waterfront of the silent city -- that the deep ocean moved up into usually gentle waves before spreading out into a gentle wide series of six-inch breakers and gliding smoothly to the shoreline. It was at this depth that the huge starship Enterprise sat quietly in a stasis lock pattern just above the oceans surface, and it was at that point, along the bottom sands, that an unusual and unnoticed event occurred.

The sands stirred and began to suck inward into a rapidly forming depression, which in turn became a small tunnel. And from it, growing faster than even the amazing giant kelp tendril of Terran's fabled seas, a small tendril of Ternian helices Carsonii, began to emerge. Rubbery and freckled with the flavors of Tern's own kelp beds, the tendril of Carson's Coils was tightly spiralled and tubular, finer than a cat's hair in cross-section but so tightly coiled that it appeared as dense as a screen door spring. Spurred by some extrarodinary metabolism, the thin strand grew, divided and grew, along the bottom, and then anchoring itself to a half-buried basalt outcropping, up toward the dark surface where the shadow of the hovering Enterprise lay. As it coiled its way toward the shallower surface, the tendril divided from two, to four, and again to eight and then sixteen until it was within inches of the gentle pattern of waves on the surface. It slowed, and spread into rings and curves; and then, much more slowly, a single thin strand wended its way upward until it broke into the night air, and brushed the sleek durometallic hull of the starship.

No sensors did it disturb, for as an organic plant form it had no motion they would find threatening. Just a slow and gentle flower of a strange distant planet, the tendril extended thinner and thinner along the mighty curves of the lower hull and along it toward the bow until it found the small flushmounted discharge valve used to eject plant wastes into the vacuum during deep space transitions in subluminal passages. Feeling its way slowly and cautiously the tiny tendril, now only a few cells across extended into a slight worn surface crack in the sealing ring, and from there into the drain tubes and interlock valves just below the hull's surface.

Slowly extending a few cells at a time it found a crack here, a worn mating of surfaces there, until it found its smallest tip extending less than a millimeter into the warm light of Mandy's plant nursery; the strange sea-plant paused then, and waited for the next wave of compelling pulses from the far-away Root DIrectory of Tern.