by John Varley
“The skin ought to be good for something,” Gaby pointed out. “We could make clothes out of it.”
Cirocco wrinkled her nose, “If you want to wear it, go ahead. It’s probably going to stink pretty soon. And it’s warm enough so far without clothes.”
It didn’t seem right to leave the biggest part of the animal behind, but they decided they had to. They both kept a leg bone for use as a weapon, and Cirocco hacked off a large chunk of meat while Gaby cut strips of skin to tie the spacesuit parts together. She made a crude belt for herself and tied her things to it. Then they started downstream again.
They saw more of the kangaroo creatures, both singly and in groups of three or six. There were other smaller animals that moved up and down the tree trunks almost too fast to see, and still more that stayed close to the water’s edge. None of them were hard to approach. The tree animals, when they held still long enough to examine, didn’t seem to have heads. They were blue balls of short fur with six clawed feet sticking out around the edges, and they moved in any direction with equal ease. The mouth was on the underside, centered in a star of legs.
The countryside began to change. Not only did they see more animals, but there were more varieties of plant life. They plodded on through light that turned pale green by the forest canopy, one hundred thousand steps to the twenty-four-hour day.
Unfortunately, they soon lost count. The huge, simplified trees gave way to a hundred different species, and a thousand kinds of flowering shrubs, trailing vines, and parasitic growths. The only things that remained constant were the stream that was their only guide, and the tendency of Themis trees to be gigantic. Any one of them would have rated a plaque and a tourist turn-out in Sequoia National Park.
It was no longer quiet, either. During their first day of travel Cirocco and Gaby had only the sounds of their own footsteps and the clatter of their salvaged suits to keep them company. Now the forest twittered and barked and yammered at them.
The meat tasted better than ever when they stopped for a rest. Cirocco wolfed it down, sitting back to back with Gaby beside the gnarled trunk of a tree that was warmer than any tree should have been, with soft bark and roots that knotted into burls bigger than houses. Its upper branches were lost in the incredible tangle overhead.
“I’ll bet there’s more life in those trees than there is on the ground,” Cirocco said.
“Look up there,” Gaby said. “I’d say somebody wove those vines together. You can see water leaking out the bottom.”
“We ought to talk about that. What about intelligent life in here? How would you recognize it? That’s one of the reasons I tried to stop you from killing this animal.”
Gaby munched thoughtfully. “Should I have tried to talk to it first?”
“I know, I know. I was more afraid it would turn around and bite your legs off. But now that we know how unaggressive it is, maybe we ought to do just that. Try to talk to one.”
“How stupid, you mean. That thing didn’t have half the brain of a cow. You could see that in its eyes.”
“You’re probably right.”
“No, you’re right. I mean, I’m right, but you’re right that we should be more careful. I’d hate to eat something I ought to be talking to. Hey, what was that?”
It wasn’t a noise, but the realization that noise had ceased. Only the splash of water and the high hiss of leaves disturbed the silence. Then, building so quietly and so slowly that they had been hearing it for minutes before they could identify it, came a vast moan.
God might moan like that, If He had lost everything He had ever loved, and if He had a throat like an organ pipe a thousand kilometers long. It continued to build on a note that somehow managed to rise without ever straying from the uttermost lower limits of human hearing. They felt it in their bowels and behind their eyeballs.
It already seemed to fill the universe, and yet still it got louder. It was joined by the sound of a string section: cellos and electronic basses. Treading lightly on top of this massive tonal floor were supersonic hissing overtones. The ensemble grew louder when it was not possible that it could grow louder.
Cirocco thought her skull would shatter. She was dimly aware of Gaby hugging her. They stared slack-jawed as they were showered by dead leaves from the vault overhead. Tiny animals fell, twisting and bouncing. The ground began to throb in sympathy. It yearned to fly apart and hurl itself into the air. A dust devil skittered indecisively, than dashed itself to pieces on the bones of the tree where they huddled. They were lashed with debris.
There was crashing above them, and a wind began to reach down to the forest floor. A massive branch embedded itself in the middle of the stream. By then the forest was swaying, creaking, protesting: gunshots, and nails wrenched from dry wood.
The violence reached a plateau and stayed at that level. The winds seemed to be about sixty kilometers per hour. Higher up it sounded much worse. They stayed low in the protection of the tree roots and watched the storm rage around them. Cirocco had to shout to be heard above the bass moaning.
“What do you suppose could cause it to come up so fast?”
“I have no idea,” Gaby yelled back. “Local heating or cooling, a big change in the air pressure. I don’t know what would cause that, though.”
“I think the worst is over. Hey, your teeth are chattering.”
“I’m not scared anymore. I’m cold.”
Cirocco was feeling it, too. The temperature was plunging. In just a few minutes it had gone from balmy to chilly, and now she judged it was getting down around zero. With the wind coming at sixty klicks, it was no laughing matter. They huddled together, but she could feel the heat being sucked from her back.
“We’ve got to get to some kind of shelter,” she yelled.
“Yeah, but what?”
Neither of them wanted to move from what little shelter they had. They tried covering each other with dirt and dead leaves, but the wind blew it away.
When they were sure they would freeze to death, the wind stopped. It did not diminish; it stopped dead, and Cirocco’s ears popped so hard it hurt. She could not hear until she forced a yawn.
“Wow. I’ve heard of pressure changes, but nothing like that.”
The forest was quiet again. Then Cirocco found that if she listened carefully she could hear the dying ghost of whatever had made the moaning sound. It made her shiver in a way that had nothing to do with the cold. She had never thought of herself as imaginative, but the moan had sounded so human, though on such a mighty scale. It made her want to lie down and die.
“Don’t go to sleep, Rocky. We’ve got something else.”
“What now?” She opened her eyes and saw a fine white powder drifting through the air. It sparkled in the pale light.
“I’d call it snow.”
They went as fast as they could to keep their feet from getting numb, and Cirocco knew it was only the still air that saved them. It was cold; even the ground was cold for a change. Cirocco felt drugged. It could not be possible. She was a spaceship captain; how had she ended up trudging through a snowstorm in her bare skin?
But the snow was transitory. At one point it was a few centimeters deep on the ground, but then the heat began to well up from below and it melted quickly. Soon the air was getting warmer. When they felt it was safe, they found a place on the warm ground and went to sleep.
The haunch of meat did not smell too good when they awoke, and neither did Gaby’s hide belt. They threw it all away and washed in the stream, then Gaby killed another of the animals they had begun to call smilers. It was as easy as it had been the last time.
They felt much better after breakfast, which they supplemented with some of the less exotic fruits they found in great profusion. Cirocco liked one that looked like a lumpy pear but had meat like a melon. It tasted like sharp cheddar cheese.
She felt as if she could march all day, but it turned out that they could not. The stream, their guide for the whole journey so far, vanished
in a large hole at the base of a hill.
The two of them stood on the edge of the hole and looked down. It gurgled like the drain of a bathtub, but at long intervals made a sucking sound followed by a deep belch. Cirocco didn’t like it, and edged away.
“Maybe I’m crazy,” she said, “but I wonder if this is where the thing that ate us gets its water?”
“Could be. I’m not diving in to find out. So what’s next?”
“I wish I knew.”
“We could go back to where we started and wait there.” Gaby did not seem enthusiastic about this idea.
“Damn! I thought sure we’d find a place to look around if we went far enough. Do you think the whole inside of Themis is one big rain forest?”
Gaby shrugged. “I don’t have enough information, obviously.”
Cirocco chewed it over for a while. Gaby was apparently willing to let her make the decisions.
“Okay. First we go to the top of this hill and see what it’s like. One more thing I’d like to try if there’s nothing worthwhile up there is to climb one of these trees. Maybe we could get high enough to see something. Do you think we could do it?”
Gaby studied a trunk. “Sure, in this gravity. That’s no guarantee we’ll be able to stick our heads out, though.”
“I know. Let’s go up the hill.”
It was steeper than the countryside they had come through. There were places where they had to use hands and feet, and Gaby led the way through those because she had more experience in rock climbing. She was agile, much smaller and more limber than Cirocco, and soon Cirocco felt every month of the age difference between them.
“Holy shit, take a look at that!”
“What is it?” Cirocco was a few meters behind. When she looked up she saw only Gaby’s legs and buttocks, from a distinctly unusual angle. It was odd, she thought, that she had seen all the male crew members naked, but had to come to Themis to see Gaby. What a strange creature she was with no hair.
“We’ve found our scenic viewpoint,” Gaby said. She turned around and gave Cirocco a hand.
There were trees growing on the brow of the hill, but they did not approach the height of the ones behind them. Though they were dense and overgrown with vines, none was over ten meters tall.
Cirocco had wanted to climb the hill to see what was on the other side. Now she knew. The hill didn’t have an other side.
Gaby was standing a few meters from the edge of a cliff. With every step Cirocco took the view adjusted itself, receding, encompassing more area. When she stood beside Gaby she still could not see the cliff face, but she had some idea of how long the drop was. It would be measured in kilometers. She felt her stomach lurch.
They stood at a natural window formed by a twenty-meter gap between the outermost trees. There was nothing in front of them but air for 200 kilometers.
They were at one edge of the rim, looking across the breadth of Themis to the other side. Over there was a hairline shadow that might have been a cliff like the one they were standing on. Above the line was green land, fading to white, then to gray, and finally becoming a brilliant yellow as her eyes traveled up the sloping side to the translucent area in the roof.
Her eyes were drawn back down the curve to the distant cliff. Below it was more green land, with white clouds hugging the ground or towering up higher than she was. It looked like the view from a mountaintop on Earth, but for one thing. The ground seemed level until she looked to the left or right.
It bent. She gulped, and craned her neck, twisting, trying to make it level, trying to deny that far away the land was higher than she was without ever having risen.
She gasped and clutched at the air, then went down on hands and knees. It felt better that way. She edged closer to the abyss and kept looking to her left. Far away was a land of shadow, tilted on its side for her examination. A dark sea twinkled in the night, a sea that somehow did not leave its shores and come spilling toward her. On the other side of the sea was another area of light, like the one in front of her, dwindling in the distance. Beyond it her view was cut off by the roof overhead, seeming to belly down to meet the land. She knew it was an illusion of the perspective; the roof would be just as high if she stood beneath it at that point.
They were on the edge of one of the areas of permanent day. A hazy terminator began to blanket the land to her right, not sharp and clear like the terminator of a planet seen from space, but fading through a twilight zone she estimated to be thirty or forty kilometers wide. Beyond that zone was night, but not blackness. There was a huge sea in there, twice as large as the one in the other direction, looking as if bright moonlight was falling on it. It sparkled like a plain of diamond.
“Isn’t that the direction the wind came from?” Gaby asked. “Yeah, if we didn’t get turned around by a curve in the river.”
“I don’t think we did. That looks like ice to me.”
Cirocco agreed. The ice sheet broke up as the sea narrowed to a neck, eventually becoming a river that ran in front of her and emptied into the other sea. The country over there was mountainous, rugged as a washboard. She did not understand how the river could thread its way through the mountains to join the sea on the other side. She decided the perspective was fooling her. Water would not flow uphill, even in Themis.
Beyond the ice was another daylight area, this one brighter and yellower than the others she could see, like desert sands. To reach it, she would have to travel across the frozen sea.
“Three days and two nights,” Gaby said. “That worked out pretty well from the theory. I said we’d be able to see almost half the inside of Themis from any point. What I didn’t figure on were those things.”
Cirocco followed Gaby’s pointing finger to a series of what looked like ropes that started on the land below and angled upward to the roof. There were three of them in a line almost directly in front of them, so that the nearest partially concealed the other two. Cirocco had seen them earlier, but had skipped over them because she could not understand it all at once. Now she looked closer, and frowned. Like a depressing number of things in Themis, they were huge.
The nearest one could serve as a model for all the rest. It was fifty kilometers away, but she could see that it was made of perhaps one hundred strands wound together. Each strand was 200 or 300 meters thick. Further detail was lost at that distance.
The three in the row all angled steeply over the frozen sea, rising 150 kilometers or more until they joined the roof at a point she knew must be one of the spokes, seen from the inside. It was a conical mouth, like the bell of a trumpet that flared to become the roof and sides of the rim enclosure. At the far edge of the bell, some 500 kilometers away, she could make out more of the ropes.
There were more cables to her left, but these went straight up to the arched ceiling and disappeared through it. Beyond them were other rows that angled toward the spoke mouth she could not see from her vantage point, the one over the sea in the mountains.
Where the cables joined the ground, they pulled it up into broad-based mountains.
“They look like the cables on a suspension bridge,” Cirocco said.
“I agree. And I think that’s what it is. There’s no need for towers to support it. The cables can be fastened in the center. Themis is a circular suspension bridge.”
Cirocco eased herself closer to the edge. She stuck her head over and looked down two kilometers to the ground.
The cliff was as near perpendicular as an irregular surface feature can be. Only near the bottom did it begin to flare out to meet the land below.
“You aren’t thinking of going down that, are you?” Gaby asked.
“The thought had entered my mind, but I sure don’t feel good about it. And what would be better down there than up here? We’ve got a pretty good idea we could survive up here.” She stopped. Was that to be their goal?
Given the chance, she would take adventure to security, if security meant building a hut from sticks and settling down to a
diet of raw meat and fruit. She would be crazy in a month.
And the land below was beautiful. There were impossibly steep mountains with shining blue lakes set in them like gems. She could see waving grasslands, dense forests, and far to the east, the brooding midnight sea. There was no telling what dangers that land concealed, but it seemed to call to her.
“We might shinny down those vines,” Gaby said, reaching over the edge and pointing out a possible line of descent.
The cliff face was encrusted with plants. The jungle spilled over the edge like a frozen torrent of water. Massive trees grew from the bare rock face, clinging like barnacles. The rock itself could be seen only in patches, and even there the news was not all bad. It looked like a basaltic formation, a closely packed sheaf of crystal pillars with broad hexagonal platforms where columns had broken off.
“It’s do-able,” Cirocco said, at last. “It wouldn’t be easy or safe. We’d have to think of a pretty good reason for trying it.” Something better than the formless urge she felt to be down there, she thought.
“Hell, I don’t want to be stuck up here, either,” Gaby said, with a grin.
“Then your troubles are over,” said a quiet voice from behind them.
Every muscle in Cirocco’s body tensed. She bit her lip, forcing herself to move slowly until she was safely away from the edge.
“Up here. I’ve been waiting for you.”
Sitting on a tree limb three meters from the ground, his bare feet dangling, was Calvin Greene.
Chapter Seven
Before Cirocco quite had a chance to settle down, they were all sitting in a circle and Calvin was talking.
“I came out not far from the hole where the river disappears,” he was saying. “That was seven days ago. I heard you on the second day.”
“But why didn’t you call us?” Cirocco asked.
Calvin held up the remains of his helmet.
“The mike is missing,” he said, extricating the broken end of wire. “I could listen, but not transmit. I waited. I ate fruit. I just couldn’t kill any of the animals.” He spread his broad hands, and shrugged.
