Titan

by John Varley

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The support cables came in rows of five organized into groups of fifteen, and rows of three standing alone.

  Each night region had fifteen cables associated with it. There was a row of five vertical cables that went straight up the hollow horn in the roof that was the inside of one of the spokes of Gaea's wheel. Two of these came to the ground in the highlands and were virtually a part of the wall, one north and the other south. One emerged from a point midway between the outer- most cables, and the other two were spaced evenly between the center and the edge cables.

  In addition to these central cables, the night regions had two more rows of five that radiated from the spokes but attached in daylight areas, one row twenty degrees east and the other twenty degrees west of the central row. The spoke above Oceanus, for example, sent cables into Mnemosyne and Hyperion. The set of fifteen cables supported the ground under a region equal to over forty degrees of Gaea's circumference.

  The cables that went from daylight through a twilight zone and into a night did so at a sharp angle to the ground, an angle that increased with altitude until approached sixty degrees at the point of juncture with the roof.

  Then there were rows of three cables, associated solely with daylight areas. These cables were vertical, rising straight from the ground until they pierced the roof and emerged into space. It was the middle of Hyperion's row of three that Titanic and her crew now approached.

  It grew more magnificent and more intimidating with each passing day. Even from Bill's camp it had seemed to lean over them. The lean was no more pronounced now, but the thing had grown in size. It hurt to look up at it. Knowing that a vertical column is five kilometers in diameter and 120 kilometers high is one thing, Seeing it is something else.

  Ophion made a wide loop around the cable's base, starting at the south and going north before resuming its general eastward direction. It was a feature they had seen while still distant from the cable. The annoying thing about traveling in Gaea was that the landscape could be seen easily while they were far from it. The closer they approached the more foreshortened the view be- came, until surface features were flattened beyond interpretation. The land they traveled through always looked as flat as the Earth. It was only far away that it began to curve.

  "You want to tell me again why we're doing this?" Gaby shouted ahead to Cirocco. "I don't think I got it."

  The trip to the spoke was harder than they had expected. Be- fore, they had followed the river when traveling through the jungle. It had made a natural highway. Now Cirocco knew the true meaning of impenetrable. The land was covered with an almost solid wall of vegetation, and their only cutting tools had been fashioned from their helmet rings. To make it worse, the ground rose steadily as they approached the cable.

  "I could do with a little less griping," she called back. "You know we have to do this. it should get easier soon."

  They had already learned some useful information. Most important so far was the fact that it really was a cable, composed of wound strands. There were over a hundred of the strands, each a good 200 meters in diameter.

  The strands were tightly wound for most of their length, but half a kilometer from the ground they began to diverge, meeting the ground as separate entities. The base of the cable became a forest of huge towers, rather than a single gigantic one.

  Most interesting of all, several of the strands were 'broken.

  They could see the twisted ends of two far above, curling like split ends in a shampoo ad.

  As she broke through to clear land, Cirocco saw that whatever was under the soil, the rubbery substance the cables attached to, had stretched. Each strand had pulled out a cone of it, and the cones were heaped with sand. It was possible to see between the outer strands to a forest of them diminishing to blackness.

  The land between them and the cable was sandy, with huge boulders scattered through it. The sand was reddish-yellow, and the rocks were sharp-edged, showing few signs of erosion. They locked as if they had been ripped violently from the ground.

  Bill tipped his head back, following the cable to the glare of the translucent roof.

  "My God, what a sight," he said.

  "Think of how the natives must see it," Gaby said. "The cables from heaven that hold up the world.. "

  Cirocco shielded her eyes. "It's no wonder they think of God as living up there," she said. "Think of the puppet master who would use these strings."

  The ground was firm as they started up the slope, but the higher they went the more it began to slip. Nothing grew there to hold the soil together. It was sand, wet on top but dry underneath. It formed a crust which their feet broke into unstable, shifting plates that skittered down behind them.

  Cirocco forged ahead, determined to get to the strand itself, but before long she was sliding back as far as she struggled up, still 200 meters from the top. Bill and Gaby hung back and watched her try to get a grip in the unstable ground. It was no use. She went down on her face and rolled back, sat up and glared at the cable, so tantalizingly close.

  "Why me?" she asked, and slammed her fist on the ground. She wiped the sand from her mouth.

  She stood, but her feet slipped again. Gaby reached for her arm and Bill nearly went down on top of them when he tried to help. They had lost another meter.

  "So much for that," Cirocco said, tiredly. "I still want to look around here, though. Anybody coming with me?"

  No one was too enthusiastic, but they followed her down the slope and started into the forest of cable strands.

  Each strand had its own pile of sand heaped around it. They

  were forced to follow a winding path between them. Tough, brittle weeds grew in the hard-packed soil at the bottoms of the giant molehills.

  It grew dark as they worked their way in-dark, and much quieter than it had been in their weeks on the river. There was a far-away howling like wind through long, abandoned hallways, and far above, the tinkling of wind chimes. They heard their own footsteps, and the sound of each other's breathing.

  The sense of being in a cathedral was impossible to escape, Cirocco had seen a place like it before, among the giant Sequoias of California' It was greener there and not as quiet, but the stillness and the feeling of being lost among vast and indifferent beings was the same. If she saw a cobweb, she knew she would not stop running until she reached daylight.

  They began to notice hanging shapes above them, like tom tapestries. They were motionless in the dead air, insubstantial shapes in the shadows high overhead. Fine dust drifted around them, eddied by the slightest breeze.

  Gaby touched Cirocco's arm lightly. She jumped, then looked up where Gaby was pointing.

  Something clung to the side of one of the strands, fifty meters above the top of the sandhill. She thought it was sitting on a ledge, then wondered if it might be a growth of some kind.

  "Like a barnacle," Bill said.

  "Or a colony of them, " Gaby whispered, then coughed nervously and repeated herself. Cirocco knew how she felt; it seemed like they ought to he whispering.

  Cirocco shook her head. "I'm reminded of the cliff dwellings in Arizona."

  I In a few minutes they spotted more of them, most far higher and less distinct than the one Gaby had found. Were they dwellings, or parasites? There was no way to tell.

  Cirocco took a last look around and thought she saw something in the distance, right on the edge of total darkness.

  it was a building. Shortly after she realized that, she knew it was a ruin. Fine sand was heaped around it.

  It was almost refreshing to find something built on a human scale. The building was the size of some of the smallest pueblas of Colorado, and in fact looked a bit like them. There were three

  layers of hexagonal chambers with no apparent doorways. Each layer was made of rooms slightly larger than the ones below. She moved closer and touched one wall. It was cool stone, cut and dressed and fitted together without mortar, in the Incan fashion.

&n
bsp; Looking closer, she saw there were actually five layers of chambers, but the two lowest were much smaller than the three she had seen from a distance, and made from smaller stones. Brushing away the sand at the base of the wall, she found a sixth layer, then a seventh, each tinier than the me above.

  "What do you make out of that?" she asked Bill, who had knelt beside her while she dug.

  "It's an odd way to build." Cirocco dug deeper but was soon defeated by sand sliding back as fast as she could scoop it out. The lowest layer she had found was made of chambers no more than half a meter high and about as broad, built from stones the size of masonry bricks.

  They circled the structure and found a place where it had crumbled. Massive stones from the top had crushed most of the smaller ones below. There was me chamber intact but for a missing wall. They saw no interior doors, and no place to enter the structure from outside.

  "Why build a place with no doors?" "Maybe they got in from below," Gaby suggested. "Without a bulldozer, we'll never know." Cirocco was thinking of the equipment they had brought for use with the satellite lander, and winced when the thought led her back to the debris of her ship broken and tumbling in space.

  "I was wondering what connection this has to the cable," Bill said. "Was it built for maintenance workers or put up later, after things broke down?"

  Cirocco raised an eyebrow. "We're assuming that things have broken down? "

  He spread his hands. "There's structural damage that hasn't been repaired. You saw those broken strands."

  She knew he had a point. The whole dark miasma beneath the cable reeked of disuse, abandonment. It was a musty grave, or the bones of something that had once been mighty.

  But even in decline Gaea was magnificent. The air was fresh, the water clean. It was true that large areas were now desert or frozen wasteland, and it was hard to believe it had been planned that way. And yet she felt the ecological systems would have deteriorated even further if there weren't someone up there with some degree of control.

  "Gaea is not unguided," Gaby said, echoing Cirocco's thoughts without knowing it. "This building looks old to me. Thousands of years would probably not be too far off."

  "It sure feels that old," Bill agreed. "I know something of the complexities involved in maintaining a biosystem," Gaby went on. "Gaea is larger than O'Neil One, and that makes her more flexible. But in a few centuries things would break down without control. Things have not broken down completely."

  "It could be robots," Bill said. "That's fine with me," Cirocco said. "As long as there's some intelligence behind this, I plan to contact it and ask for help. Computers might be easier to deal with."

  Bill, who had read a great deal of science fiction, could make a dozen theories about any aspect of Gaea. He was partial to the ever-reliable plague mutation: something that came out of nowhere and killed enough of the builders to leave Gaea in the hands of automatic safety devices.

  "She's a derelict, I'll bet on it," he told them. "Just like the ship from Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky. A lot of people set out in Gaea thousands of years ago and lost control on the way. The ship's computer put it in orbit around Saturn, shut down the engines, and is still up there keeping the air pumping and waiting for more orders."

  They took a different route out, partly because it was impossible to tell how they had come in. Cirocco did not worry because as long as they went toward the light they were all right.

  They reached the sunlight at a point far to the north of where they had gone in, and now could see something that had been concealed at their point of entry by the cable itself. It was a broken strand, but this one was on the ground.

  Cirocco's first thought was of the giant sandworm Calvin had described. The strand looked like a living thing, shining in the

  yellow light. Then she recalled the Brazilian pipelines she had seen on survival training: great silver tubes that knifed through the rain forest as if it were a contemptible obstacle.

  The strand had cleared its own path when it fell, bringing down the tallest trees, crashing inexorably to the ground. The jungle had closed over it since that time, but the great mass still looked as if it could rise at any moment and shake off the encroaching vines, turning the trees into matchsticks.

  Five hundred meters above, the severed upper end of the strand curled away from the body of the cable. It was ragged, and the inside revealed by the break glistened and threw back reflections of red and blue-green and tarnished copper. Gray discolorations like bread mold grew in the stump, and from the bottom a waterfall went straight down to a clump of vegetation widely separated from the forest. The volume of water was substantial and noisy, but issuing from the huge and twisted strand it looked like nothing more than a drip from a broken pipe.

  They approached the fallen strand, found it to be composed of an array of hexagonal facets only a few millimeters across, cloudy with swirls of gold just beneath the surface. it threw back dull, broken reflection,, as if they were using the eye of a giant insect for a mirror.

  They followed it down the hill and into the jungle, where the broken end turned out to be hollow but so clogged with brush and vines that entering it was impossible.

  "Whatever was inside, the plants like it," Gaby said.

  Cirocco said nothing. The advanced state of decay was de- pressing. The strand's open end was big enough to have flown Ringmaster right through it. It was a small thing on the stale of Gaea, only one of 200 strands in this cable alone. And yet it was such a towering wreck, going so quickly to rot and dissolution. When it parted, the whole surface of Gaea must have twanged in sympathy.

  And no one had done anything about it.

  She said nothing, but it was hard to look at the remains and feel there was someone still watching the machines.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Two days after their exploration of the cable interior, the crew of Titanic found themselves leaving the tropical forest. The land had never been hilly except in the neighborhood of the cable; now it turned flat as a billiard table and Ophion sprawled for kilometers in every direction. There was no longer a shoreline as such. The only things to mark the end of the river and the beginning of the marshlands were strands of tall grass rooted in the bottom and the occasional meter-high mud bank. A sheet of water stretched over everything seldom more than ten centimeters deep except in the winding mazes of sloughs, bayous, inlets, and backwaters. These were kept clear and gouged deeper by big eels and one-eyed mudfish the size of hippos.

  The trees in the region came in three varieties, growing in widely scattered clumps. The kind that appealed to Cirocco looked like glass sculpture, with straight, transparent trunks and regular branches in a crystalline arrangement. The smallest branches were filaments that could have been used in fiber optics. When the wind blew, the weakest branches broke off. Re- covered and wrapped with chute cloth on one end, they made excellent knives. From the flashing effect when the filaments

  moved, Gaby named them xmas trees, pronouncing it "exmas." The other major vegetation was not so much to Cirocco's liking. One plant--it seemed wrong to call it a tree, though it was large enough -resembled a pile of what can be seen on the ground at any cattle ranch. Bill named them dung trees. on their closest approach to one they could see that there was an internal structure, but no one wanted to get too near because they smelled all too much like what they appeared to be.

  Then there were trees that did a better job of looking the part They had something of the cypress and a little of the willow in them, growing in untidy tangles festooned with creepers that struggled to pull them down.

  It was alien in a much more unpleasant way than the high- lands had been. The jungle they had left behind was not too different from the Amazon or the Congo. Here, nothing looked familiar, everything was misshapen and threatening.

  Camping was impossible. They began tying the boat to trees and sleeping in it. It rained every ten to twelve hours. They rigged chute cloth tents over the bow, but water always leaked
in and pooled in the bottom. The weather was hot but the humidity was so high that nothing ever dried out.

  With the mud, the heat and dampness and sweat, they grew irritable. They were short on sleep, often managing no more than a fitful doze while off duty, doing even worse when all three tried to sleep and ended up competing for the limited space an Titanics sloping bottom.

  Cirocco awoke from a nightmare of being unable to breathe. She sat up, feeling the cloth of her robe peel away from her skin. She felt sticky between her lingers and toes, under her neck, and in her lap.

  Gaby nodded to her as she stood up, then turned her attention back to the river.

  "Rocky," Bill said. "There's something you'll want to-" "No," she said, holding her hands up. "Dammit, I want coffee. I'd kill for coffee."

  Gaby smiled dutifully, but it looked like an effort. They knew by now that Cirocco was a slow starter.

  "Not funny. Right." She stared bleakly out at the land that

  looked as decayed and rotten as she felt. "Just give me a minute before you start asking me things," she said. She struggled out of her clothes and jumped in the river.

  It was better, but not much.

  She bobbed, treading water and holding the side of the boat and thinking about soap until her foot touched something slippery. She didn't wait to find out what it was, but pulled herself over the edge and stood with water pooling at her feet.

  "Now. What is it you wanted? "

  Bill pointed toward the north shore.

  "We've been seeing smoke over that way. You can see some of it now, just to the left of that bunch of trees."

  Cirocco leaned over the edge of the boat and saw it: a thin line of gray sketched against the backdrop of the distant north wall.