Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
“Oh, Mayra, I’m so sorry.” Best to just let this run for the moment, get the words out and be done with it. The emotion was the point here, not the health issue. There was plenty of experience in low gravs, and this region seemed to be about 0.3 g. Maybe not too bad—if they didn’t spend months in it.
“And, and—where are we
going
that it was worth so much?”
Beth said softly, “We had to get out. We all agreed. He was a fine man, and he dealt with that spidow brilliantly. Bravely.” Beth patted her arm, feeling useless in the face of such sorrow.
Mayra nodded, tears running down her face unnoticed. “He was just so, so—”
“I know.” That was all there was to say, really. Sympathy seemed useless, but it was essential all the same. If the bereaved felt isolated, they got even worse. “I’m so sorry.”
In a flash, she recalled her own feelings, looking at Abduss. A thick smell rose up from the body like fumes, stinging the nose. The spidow had flattened Abduss, and the bladder and bowels had let go. Already blood had crusted into reddish brown rivers and the face was squashed beyond even parody of the man who had once enjoyed sharp, symmetric features.
She had worked up spit and swallowed, taking deep breaths, and managed not to vomit. Then she walked away, expelling her lungs and getting rid of the dregs of the smell. Every encounter with death stayed with her, but this one would go to the head of the line.
Even the memory made Beth wonder if Cliff had survived in this strange place. She made herself stop thinking about it and sat beside Mayra, putting an arm around the woman who was sobbing softly.
Fred spoke, slow and even. “So am I, Mayra.” A pause. His head jerked toward the horizon. “Either way we decide to go, we should stick to the ridge.”
This startled Beth; Fred could go for a day without talking. The other women blinked, glanced at one another, and decided to let the moment move on. They tended to look around when Fred spoke. He did it so seldom, so gravely.
Lau Pin was back in time to catch it. “Fred? We can’t. It’ll make us conspicuous.”
“Not
on
the ridge,” Fred said witheringly. “Keep it in reach. It orients us. Look—” His hands sketched a tented line. “When they brought us here, do you remember passing that line of bubble buildings? Then the ridge just went on, dead straight for thirty or forty klicks, under the wall and into the Garden. Under the dirt and rock, it’s a, a structural member, don’t you see it? How shallow the dirt is? If you’re building here, you anchor the important stuff to the load-bearing…” He trailed off, hands waving.
Beth was nodding, hoping this would move them away from Mayra’s grief. There was no solution for that but time. “Along the ridge, right. Stay off to one side and don’t go near the spidows. Keep close watch, and we can see the spidow corridors.”
Fred nodded, too, so she went on. “We already know some of what we can eat. Cook it with the guns so they can’t follow the smoke. There’s no dry wood here, so it’ll smoke for sure. Folks, we need to think about not getting caught. No more ripping through undergrowth. We move along the tops of the trees. Tricky, but we can do it.”
Lau Pin frowned. “Dangerous, and that’ll slow us down.”
“Safer, though,” Mayra said, coming out of her mood. “How much spidow rope have we got? Lau Pin—?”
“I took Abduss’s share of the rope,” Lau Pin said, pointing to the loops of it around his waist. Beth realized that the way to keep Mayra involved was to present decisions to be made. Draw her into the group.
Tananareve said adamantly, “I think Beth’s right. And it’s only for a short distance. So, which way, Fred?”
Lau Pin said, “That was a spaceport, that line of bubbles. I never saw them clearly, I was too dizzy. But, but it has to be a spaceport, doesn’t it? And warehouses and so forth.”
“Could be,” Mayra said, blinking some more and visibly bracing herself, getting back into emotional stability. “But that’s just where they’ll look for us.”
“Yeah. Yeah,” said Fred. “But if we follow the ridge the other way, we’ll find something important.”
Tananareve asked, “Like what?”
“Say, something that wants a solid anchor.”
“Okay. Which way is the ridge?”
They looked at one another. Beth took a big breath, thinking, and said, “We need to climb.”
* * *
From the top of a braid tree the ridge was obvious, a couple of kilometers away. They were on its long, gentle flank. Moving along in the treetops was more like swimming than climbing. The low grav helped a lot, giving their movements a slow-motion grace as they swung among the long, rubbery limbs of the tall trees.
Beth could see immense distances: the landscape was concave, unlike Earth’s. Distant things rose up and got noticed. The ridge was conspicuous, a bony scrabble of boulders at the crest, four or five kilometers away. Beyond was a frenetic sky, the bright pink sun, and the glaring, restless white flare. The Jet cooled into rolling reds and strands of amber as it neared the Bowl. She watched a filament weave around another, each making a helical dance, like snakes dancing to slow music.
They stopped short of the ridge to talk it through.
“Spaceport,” Beth said. “We need to find a way back to gravity. How’s our dead reckoning working today? Fred, which way is that row of bubbles?”
Fred’s eyes danced anxiously and he nodded toward his left.
“Should be that way. Left,” Lau Pin gestured.
Tananareve used her binocs and said, “Folks, can’t you see it? Like a black froth, that way. Left, like you said, Lau Pin.”
“You’ve got good eyes. Anything to the right?”
They looked. The ridge dwindled, dwindled … nothing, nothing …
“Spaceport,” Beth commanded, keeping her voice firm. “I wish I knew how to be less conspicuous. We’re not hidden.” She ducked suddenly. A big black bird with bright yellow canard fins just back of its head cruised above them, inspecting, unafraid. It swooped and dived away, honking.
“Ah, lunch,” Fred said.
Lau Pin laughed. “Those will help. The Astronomers won’t find us by our heat signature, not while the sky is full of big birds. If we can catch a few for dinner, we might use their feathers for camouflage.”
* * *
Marching away from the spaceport, they would have left behind them vehicles that could take them back to gravity. Lau Pin was right: the spaceport was their obvious target.
Too obvious.
Canard bird flesh tasted like meat-eater, dark and rangy, a little like lion, Beth thought. She’d eaten lion at a theme restaurant, centuries ago now. She pushed away the thought that of all those she had ever known—parents, friends, lovers—only the
SunSeeker
crew were still alive.
She smacked her lips and focused on the meat. They conscientiously ate all of any game they got—fat, gristle, crack the bones and suck out the marrow. You never knew where your next meal was coming from here. They’d caught only four of the turkey-sized black canard birds before the rest caught on. Now they had to dip down into the forest to get anything to eat. Water they found pooled in leaves. Shooting from the trees was easy, though; the midsized animals didn’t seem to regard the sky as a threat, and just ambled along.
They’d used the black feathers to decorate themselves, smiling as if at a masquerade. Now they crossed the forest tops in low leaps, like flying squirrels. They’d tied spidow line in loops, to catch themselves in case of a fall. All their Earthside training in fieldwork paid off.
Snaps, pops. Branches thrashed without a wind, off to the left. Lau Pin halted, motioned them back. Fred reached, not for a weapon but for his camera phone. They watched for long seconds. Then Tananareve aimed a low-level laser into the rustling branches.
Branches fell, thrashing loudly on the long way down. Branches? “Tree octopus,” Lau Pin said. “I swear, that’s what it looks like.”
“Couple of snakes, mating,” said Mayra.
Beth said, “Seems more like a bunch.”
Fred was replaying video in slow motion. “Snakes with two or three tails,” he said. “Very strange.” He showed them the phone. “See? Tails with … might be fingernails, or rattlesnake rattles. Look, they caught some lower branches.”
They all paused to listen and heard rustlings below. Lau Pin suggested, “Go down for a better look?”
Fred began working his way down, without waiting. Beth called, “Fred! We need to keep moving.”
“I see something.”
“They could be venomous!”
Fred didn’t answer. Mayra videotaped him until he was out of sight.
And here he came back moments later, waving something the size of a pillow, the shape of a sausage. “They dropped it,” he said as he reached them. “Look, it’s about as wide as they were, thirty centimeters around, snake-shaped. It’s got straps. And—”
“Don’t tear it!” Lau Pin said.
Rip.
“Velcro.”
Beth reached in, stirred the contents. A haunch of red meat wrapped in cloth. A knife with a peculiar handle. Tool with a button: Flashlight? Communicator? Both? Dared they try it?
“Folks, we have to keep moving,” Tananareve said presently. Beth agreed. They resumed their flight, with the sausage pack tied at Fred’s hip.
“What if we have to leave the forest?” Lau Pin wondered. They
rested on the broad leaves that were the size of the main deck on
SunSeeker.
Beth didn’t have an answer. Outside the forest, they would find a vertical landscape. There might be nothing to grab on to. But the greenery seemed to run as far as that row of dots, which was beginning to look like hemispheres of varied size and color. They had decided to move toward large buildings in the distance.
Braid trees became scarce. Vegetation hugged low to the ground. The big canard birds were avoiding them now.
That last meal might have cost us,
Beth thought. Her stomach rumbled.
They prowled through the low scrub bushes and used their binocs. At any movement they froze. Astronomer-sized Bird Folk were wandering among the buildings. And canard birds wheeled over the trees near the bubbles, cawing and diving.
Their approach was slow, methodical. No shadows for cover, and the sky seemed hotter here. The first dome was a sphere as big as a ten-story building, standing up from the jungle on a single leg. Reeds and ferns surrounded it, of types the Bird Folk had used for food.
Beth carefully watched the distant figures as they moved at their bobbing pace, their long necks weaving back and forth to keep their heads stationary as their long legs stroked forward with lazy grace. Walking out from the spaceport, Astronomers would reach this structure last, she saw. It would be the culmination of their path, a final lesson, with a vast garden of delights beyond.
They crept forward warily. The air was fragrant and lush, and Beth listened for suspicious sounds, but there were none.
So what was this bubble? She studied the designs on its outside. Brown abstracts, some with white traces, and each shape surrounded by a dark blue. Almost like—
“It’s a globe,” Tananareve said in her ear. “A globe map.”
“Damn, you’re right! This garden, it’s some sort of … gallery of planets?” She peered at the more distant globes—and, yes, they had the same color patterns, continents swimming in seas. But the spheres were comparatively tiny, not all the same size but no bigger than train cars or even the largest Bird Folk.
Tananareve asked, “So this one—their home planet maybe?”
“Or one they passed by, explored.”
“They’re headed the same way we are, so maybe it’s Glory? At this range, their telescopes could pick out continent-sized features. And look, there’s another big one at the far end of the chain.”
Beth saw it: barely more than a dot. “One is their home world, and the other’s maybe their ultimate target—yes, it could be. You’d think the home world would be treated specially.” The Astronomers might actually know the shapes of Glory’s continents, or this could be some planet they just mapped with big lenses as they passed by its system. If a world wasn’t interesting, they might not land on it at all.
Lau Pin whispered, “What’s up?” so they shared the idea. Beth stared at the nearer sphere, then began circling anticlockwise. The rest came with her, moving in irregular jumps, staying hidden.
It mapped a planet, all right. There were no ice caps; where were the poles? The thing wasn’t rotating fast enough to tell. It might not be rotating at all, though it stood on a single axial pole. Oceans were a mottled blue; land was red and brown. The land masses were all clumped, and white streaks showed chains of snowcapped mountains. It was somewhat stylized, the continent and islands colored more like gems than landscapes, and the blue oceans—three-fourths of the globe’s surface—were translucent, the deep sea floors showing through, subduction zones and midocean ridges clearly defined. Look hard enough, and you saw shadows moving in there. Life-forms the size of mountains? By now they knew that it was indeed rotating, but very slowly.
Tananareve whispered, “Somebody coming.”
Fred sprang up on a strut and surveyed. “Yep.” A handful of bird shapes were moving toward them. Lau Pin said, “We need to hide.”
Fred jerked his head again—“Inside.”
“The only way in is that post holding up the sphere,” Lau Pin said. He loped away.
Beth said uneasily, “I saw motion in there. We don’t want to have to fight anyone.”
“I looked,” Mayra said. “Holograms. Something’s making pictures.”
“Audience?”
“Nothing I could see.”
Lau Pin waved an arm, and they followed silently, swiftly.
The spindly metal pillar that held the ten-story globe would have collapsed in normal gravity. The interior was a spiral stair, steps narrow near the axis, several feet wide near the walls. Lots of room. Accommodation for various species, maybe not just Bird Folk.
They were hidden as soon as they entered the giant stairwell. Tananareve suggested staying in the stairwell, but even she wasn’t pushing it. Wonders waited above.
They entered armed, as best they could.