The pharmacy and first aid kit needed protection more than anything, though. It wasn’t much, but it was what they had.
“Perhaps when we hear the rains we can wrap it in the cloths,” Father Chicanis suggested. “Maybe doing that, and possibly shielding it with big leaves or maybe burying the whole thing might protect it.”
“Worth a try,” N’Gana agreed. Kat Socolov noted that he really did have huge bodybuilder’s muscles, and Mogutu’s weren’t that bad either, although he was slighter of build and it didn’t show as much. Harker, in fact, was probably the one in as poor condition as any of them, something he ruefully noted. Kat Socolov was no pushover; she’d definitely spent a long time lifting weights. She managed to rig up a basic halter top and reworked some cloth in her personal kit for a bottom, but it wasn’t much and probably wouldn’t last all that long.
Oddly, the boots didn’t seem to be getting any worse; it was only the gloss and the laces. Father Chicanis recognized a native vine that had very tough properties and experimented using thin and stripped lengths for his own laces; it seemed to work. They all agreed that they looked somewhat stupid, but the foot protection was still welcome. In this environment you weren’t sure what you were stepping on until you stepped on it, and nature seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of sharp edges.
On day seven they were still only about halfway to their goal, but they came across what must have been the overgrown remnants of a once grand highway.
Like their equipment, the highway had been mostly dissolved long before, but the concrete and gravel pack underneath remained, as did, curiously, rusted remnants of the control rods and wiring for the magnetic levitation and auto guidance systems.
“The Grand Highway,” Father Chicanis sighed. “From Eden to Olympus. You can see Olympus sometimes from high points around here. Not the mighty one of legend, but the tallest peak in the far range, always snow-covered and mysterious-looking. It’s tall enough to make some of its own weather and obscure itself early on in the day, which is why they named it after the legendary abode of the ancient Greek gods.”
“I’m surprised your church wasn’t upset with all this naming of things after ancient pagan gods,” Harker commented.
“Oh, well, it is a good thing to remember your heritage and where your people came from. That’s not at all blasphemous. That age produced the first great thinkers of what came to be called ‘western’ civilization, to differentiate it from the east. Geometry and the higher mathematics, much physics, the first great plays—it was quite a time. The only blasphemy would be to worship the old gods, and I’m not even sure many of the Greek thinkers really believed in them, either. They just had no alternatives at that time.”
N’Gana cleared his throat. “Urn, Father, interesting history, but where does this road go?”
“It’s on the old maps—oh, yes, I forgot, they’re pretty well dissolved by now. Well, it started in Ephesus, coming out of a kind of ring road around the city, and it extended diagonally across the valley and then went through a tunnel almost sixty kilometers long before it emerged in a glacial valley on the other side. More tunnels, more valleys, and finally it reached all the way to Corinth on the opposite coast. It used to take a few pleasant hours at a steady four hundred kilometers per hour.”
N’Gana was only interested in the Ephesus route. “All right, then, so if we can follow it with this overgrowth it should take us where we want to go.”
“The road was built to hit the big truck farms this region had,” the priest told him. “It isn’t exactly straight. At a guess, we’ll go inland from here to go around the coast range and then to Sparta, and then swing around through the pass and down into the coastal plain and Ephesus.” He sighed. “I wish I had a landmark, something that would tell me where we are now. If I knew that I almost certainly could determine if it would be faster or slower to follow the roadbed.”
“What’s the worst case?” N’Gana asked him. “How much would it add?”
“A day, maybe two, of walking,” Chicanis told him. “Why?”
“It’s still here, that’s why,” the colonel replied. “It makes a decent path to follow. We know that the road goes where we want it to and we know that all the major land obstacles would have been removed except—what’s the name of that river?”
“The River Lethe,” Chicanis replied.
“Yes. That we’ll have to contend with, perhaps using ingenuity this close to the ocean. I don’t expect any bridge-works will have met any better fate than the road surface or our own gear. Still, this will give us a trail that may make our going a bit easier. We’re already dependent on the land for most of our food; the road connected the truck farms to the cities and towns. We’ll follow it.”
That night the storms were particularly fierce, and the lightning struck close to them many times. Some of the magnetic materials left over from the old road made nice targets for the bolts, something they hadn’t really thought about. N’Gana was firm, though, that they would stick close to the road although not camp exactly on it. They had still not seen much sign of other humans. If the lightning kept them away, all the better, and the walking was much easier than it would have been otherwise.
The eighth night on the mainland, Harker and Socolov drew first watch, which now began after the storm passed. There was virtually nothing left of their fine packs, tough clothing, or anything else. Even the weapons had disintegrated to the point where they were barely scraps of junk metal and wood. Rifle barrels were now truncheons, and very lethal ones, too, if it came to that. Using a leathery leaf from a common wild bush that Chicanis said was one of the few thriving native species of plant left on Helena—that is, not an import by the terraformers—they managed to create pouches and saved a great many bullets. They were metal and were also filled with gunpowder; they had not been affected by the rot and were still a possible weapon if there was time to use them. The knife handles, unfortunately, proved to be of less natural origin. The blades survived, but they were unbalanced and useful mostly for digging or scraping.
The same tough leaf, with the equally strong and common stripped vine, they used to salvage as much of their modesty as they could, mostly out of deference to the anthropologist. Harker discovered her, with a gun barrel as a weapon, sitting on a rock in the darkness. Achilles was now three-quarters full, and there was at least some light to see with. All of them hoped that they’d be well away before a new moon.
She had, he noticed, gone au naturel. So much for her sensibilities, he thought. It was the last defense; they’d all cast off their boots after discovering that a fairly nasty kind of algae started growing inside them and secreting a toxic irritant on the feet. It was inevitable sooner or later anyway, and the sooner they did it, the sooner their feet would toughen. The first day barefoot, though, had been awful, and tonight wasn’t all that much better.
“No fig leaf?” he asked her, sitting down nearby.
“Why bother? We aren’t hiding anything and those things are a joke when you walk.” She gave a slight chuckle. “It’s funny—somehow it doesn’t seem all that risqué. In fact, it feels really comfortable in this climate. Besides, I think if I were going to be raped by any of you guys, it would have happened before now.”
“Not once we saw that bodybuilder’s physique,” he responded in the same light tone. “Where’d you get muscle tone like that? Not in a college classroom, I bet. I haven’t seen a woman with muscles that developed since I once saw Bambi the Destroyer coming out of the shower.”
“Bambi the what?” She laughed.
“Her name’s really Barbara Fenitucci. A real Amazon warrior and a Marine to boot. Always picking on the men, always having to prove she could do anything they could do better and in half the time.”
“Sounds interesting. I’ve known a lot of women like that, but, no, I was never in the Marines and I never wanted to be a man, which is sort of what that’s about. I bet she was a service brat. Marines and the like are really driven
as kids. No, I spent a lot of time getting this way, and I’m afraid if I don’t do some regular heavy lifting I’m going to lose part of it. It’s a matter of independence. Of being able to do what you want, go where you want to go, and not live in terror of every guy on the street. I did martial arts first—almost everybody does, I think—and got good enough in a couple of useful disciplines, and I kept it up. Then they opened this training and conditioning program at the university where I was working on my doctorate. I gave it a try and liked it. I weighed in at sixty-three kilos and was bench-pressing more than a hundred and forty kilos before I left to board the Odysseus. Fortunately, they had a good and well-equipped gym on board, mostly for the mercenary twins, and I was able to keep it up. I didn’t want to have to worry about being the only female on the trip.”
He made a guess. “And that’s why you were so upset at yourself on landing? All that, and big razor-sharp claws come up and there are monsters under the sand and the only thing you can do about it is listen to the big guy scream at you to run?”
“Something like that. You can’t believe how cocky you get when you have this much of your body developed. I think I’d forgotten what it was like to be terrified, and there I was, all that crap gone to waste. The first crisis on the new world and I froze in fear.”
“Well, I wouldn’t let that get you,” he told her. “What set me apart in that situation was experience, and in Father Chicanis’s case it was knowledge of what was there and a rifle to deal with it. You’ve been good once we got on solid ground, as good as anybody here.”
She smiled. “Thanks. I needed that, I think.”
“Surprised we haven’t run into any of the locals yet?”
“Not really. There aren’t that many for this whole region, and they are widely scattered in groups of perhaps twenty-five to fifty, no more. I’m revising my theories about what they will be like, though, when we do meet them. This corrosive effect, together with ample and well-distributed food, probably means that they are in fact more primitive, more tribal than I’d thought. I’d really like to find them and find out, although without any supplies I have a feeling getting accepted by them will be tough. Dealing with them might be tougher yet. Usually you can bribe your way to at least safe passage, but I’m not sure we’ll have as good a result now as I’d planned. Not unless Father Chicanis is willing to break up our last remaining artifacts.”
“I think he’ll die rather than give up the communion set,” Harker replied. “So—that’s why you’re along? Expert on dealing with primitives by using old established ways and means?”
“Something like that. And I get to be the first in my profession to actually interact with them. It’s a career maker. If, that is, we meet any of them, and if we manage to get off this rock somehow.”
“You think we’re stuck?”
She shrugged. “What’s the boat we left buried back there made of, and how buried does it have to be? Without the boat, how do we get back to the island? Swim forty-odd kilometers of ocean? I’m not sure I’m up to that. I think that poor man who did the Dutchman’s business was in the same fix. That’s why he broadcast.”
“Yeah, but there’s every evidence from the last part of that recording that something was stalking him,” Harker noted. “And since he was never heard from again, that something probably killed him. Who or what was it?”
“Titans? One of the tribes? Who knows? I think we may find out, that’s all.”
“I’m not so concerned about the long-term as the short-term killer,” he told her. “If they can get this lens weapon to work, they’ll eventually be able to land a ship right here and pick us up. If it doesn’t work, we’re back to square one anyway.”
They sat in silence for a while, and her gaze returned to the moon and stars above.
“Still looking for the grid?” he asked her. “In this moonlight. I doubt if it would show up much at all.”
“Oh, it’s there,” she assured him. “I can sense it somehow, more than see it. It plays over me, gets in my head somehow, makes anything but the here and now seem distant, unimportant.”
“I feel something, too, sometimes,” he admitted. “I think we all do, except Hamille, although who can know for sure about it?”
“Hamille isn’t human. This is designed for us, I think,” she responded, still staring at the stars. “I think it’s more than protection and monitoring. I think it messes with minds. Our minds.”
“What kind of effect does it have on you?” he asked, looking away abruptly as her comments fed a healthy paranoia.
“Interesting effects,” she responded enigmatically. “It stirs up parts of me I’d almost forgotten were there. Not strongly enough yet, but we’ll see.”
He got a vague idea she was talking about and around sexual matters, but he didn’t press it. He was still unaffected enough to consider the implications. If they really were exerting some kind of subtle mass stimulation or hypnosis or whatever, then...
Then maybe the Titans weren’t as oblivious to humans as had been assumed.
EIGHTEEN
Ill Met near Sparta
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Kat Socolov said as they walked along under another hot sun.
“Sometimes a dangerous practice,” N’Gana responded.
They’d all pretty well cast off everything except a vine belt that had been twisted and looped and held their batons and other weapons and tools, and Father Chicanis had made a leaf and vine backpack for his cherished communion set. Oddly, the nudity didn’t seem to bother any of them, not even the priest, or particularly turn anyone on, either.
“If this mixture melts away our precious artificial substances,” asked Kat, “then it’s gonna melt away those password cubes as well, isn’t it?”
“I told you, they will be sufficiently below ground to have escaped this. We’ve seen areas under the old roadworks here where things are remarkably well preserved if they’re kept out of that rain and the elements,” the colonel replied.
“Oh, sure—they might well be there, if nobody’s taken them, if they’re still where the incomplete records said they were, and so on. That’s not the point. The thing is, so we get there, we get down, we illuminate everything somehow, and Hamille, here, gets through the holes in the foundation and brings them back to us. Then what? The moment we bring them up here to the surface, they’re gonna be rained on. If we retrace our path, it’s another ten days to two weeks, even if we figure out how to get back to the island. By that time they’ll be mush and you know it. We’re stuck.”
N’Gana wasn’t at all bothered. “There is a contingency plan for everything,” he told her. “I have already determined a method to get around that.”
“Yeah? What?” Harker put in, curious himself.
“First things first. If we don’t have it, the rest is moot.”
Kat Socolov whispered to Harker, “I bet he didn’t even think of it until now.”
But Harker had more respect for the colonel than that. He just wondered if the contingency plan, whatever it was, did not involve sacrificial deaths. He couldn’t get out of his mind the image of that freebooter down here, probably naked, certainly at least as defenseless as they were, possibly stalked by something or someone running from the Titans themselves, knowing that his information was valuable but that he himself could not leave.
The mission, the colonel had said over and over again, was the only thing that mattered. Strong talk for a soldier for hire, but, unlike the pirate, not all of them would need to die to get that information out.
“How well do you think we’ll fit in down here in the Stone Age?” Harker asked her in a loud whisper.
She stared at him. “You really think it’ll come to that?”
“It could. That’s the most likely scenario, at least temporarily, maybe permanently if they don’t find a way to get us off.”
She shrugged. “We haven’t really been tested on much yet here, even with the loss of our stuff. This place al
most seems designed to let a small number of people live on, so long as they remain apes who talk.”
“Huh?”
“Look at us! The climate’s warm enough all year to keep us comfortable like this, there’s a year-round growing season for edible fruits and even vegetables, as we’ve found, if you know how to look for them. Plenty of water, and no large predators. The trick is to not draw any attention to yourself, so no fires, no building of structures—in effect, no real artifacts. We’ve grown comfortable under those rules in just a few days. Imagine what being like that for maybe fifty, sixty years has done to the survivors. I’m already losing track of time. One day looks like another, one grove or one field of tall grass looks like another. I’m beginning to think that my life’s project is going to be myself.”
“Your watch still has a date in it,” he noted.
“I lost it a while back. Makes no difference anyway. I have some kind of weird sense that this place changes you—or that something is doing it.”
He’d tried to get her to elaborate on that, but to no avail.
The old Grand Highway had proven reliable and comfortable as a path up to now, but at some points it had presented problems. The bridges were gone, so coming to rivers and streams meant wading or in some cases swimming. All of them could swim, and none of the distances or depths had been too great, but now they came around a bend and faced their greatest challenge.
It was the delta of a large and complex river system, and the road vanished right into it. It was extremely muddy, and the current seemed slow, but it was clearly quite an obstacle.
Father Chicanis was baffled. “There is no river like this. Not here! I would have remembered such a thing! It wasn’t even on the aerial surveys! There is a river between Sparta and Ephesus, but this can’t be it! We have been following the road and we are still west of Sparta, I’m sure of it!”
“Well, it’s here now,” the colonel sighed. “It is difficult to say if the channel is deep, or what might lie in it, but I see a series of mud bars and mud and rock islands there. I suspect that most of it is shallow, since, if you look carefully, you can see rusted and twisted remnants of the highway here and there. Well, we won’t attempt it today. I would say we camp early and see if we can get some real rest. Tomorrow we can start testing it out.”
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