by John Varley
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 be whispering.
Cirocco shook her head. “I’m reminded of the cliff dwellings in Arizona.”
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 pueblos 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.
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 one 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 one 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 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 reflections, 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 depressing. The strand’s open end was big enough to have flown Ringmaster right through it. It was a small thing on the scale 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. Recovered 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 highlands 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 chutecloth 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 on Titanic’s 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 fingers 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 clinging 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.
“Let’s beach this thing and take a look.”
It was a long, grueling slog through knee-deep mud and stagnant water. Bill led the way. They began to get excited as they came around the big dung tree that had obscured their vision. Cirocco caught a whiff of smoke over the stronger stench of the tree, and hurried over the slippery ground.
It began to rain just as they arrived at the fire. It was not a hard rain, but it wasn’t much of a fire, either. It looked as if all they would get out of it would be black soot on their legs.
The fire was an irregular smudge covering a square hektometer, smoldering fitfully at the edges. As they watched, the gray smoke began to turn white as the rain fell. Then a tongue of flame licked the bottom of a bush a few meters away.
“Get something that’s dry,” Cirocco ordered. “Anything at all. Some of that marsh grass, and some sticks. Hurry, we’re losing it.” Bill and Gaby ran off in different directions as Cirocco knelt by the bush and blew on it. She ignored the smoke in her eyes and kept blowing until she felt dizzy.
Soon she was piling on reasonably dry wood. Finally she could sit back and feel sure it would keep burning. Gaby shouted and threw a stick so high it was nearly invisible before it started to come down. Cirocco grinned when Bill slapped her on the back. It was a small victory, but it could be an important one. She felt great.
When the rain stopped, the fire was still going.
The problem was how to keep it going.
They discussed it for hours, tried and discarded several solutions.
It took the rest of the day and most of the next to make their plan work. They made two bowls from the swamp clay, fired them carefully, then dried a large quantity of the wood which burned most slowly. When that was done, they made small fires in both of the bowls. It seemed wise to have a spare. The scheme would require someone to tend the fire at all times, but they were willing to do that until they found a better solution.
When they were through, it was nearing time for a sleep period. Cirocco wanted to see if they could make it to dry ground, not really trusting their arrangements for the fire, but Bill suggested they make a kill first.
“I’m getting pretty tired of those melons,” he said. “The last one I had tasted rancid.”
“Yeah, but there’s no smilers. I haven’t seen one in days.”
“Then we’ll knock over something else. We need some meat.”
It was true they had not been eating well. The marsh had nothing like the profusion of fruit-bearing plants they had found in the forest. The one native plant they had tried tasted like a mango and gave them diarrhea. On the boat that was comparable to an inner circle of hell. Since then they had relied on stored provisions.
They decided the big mudfish were the most obvious prey. Like all the other animals they had encountered, the fish took little notice of them. Everything else was too small and quick, or, like the giant eels, too big.
The mudfish liked to sit in the ooze with their snouts buried, moving by flipping their tails.
She and Gaby and Bill soon had one surrounded. It was their first close look at one. Cirocco had never seen a creature so ugly. It was three meters long, flat on the bottom, and bulged in the middle from its blunt snout to a wicked-looking horizontal tail fluke. There was a long gray ridge along its back, soft and loose like a rooster’s comb, but slimy. It swelled and deflated rhythmically.
“Are you sure you want to eat that?”
“If it’ll hold still long enough.”
Cirocco was stationed four meters in front of the mudfish while Gaby and Bill approached from the sides. All three carried swords made from broken Xmas-tree branches.
The mudfish had one eye the size of a pie plate. One edge of the eye elevated until it was looking at Bill. He froze. The fish made a snuffling sound.
“Bill, I don’t like this.”
“Don’t worry. It’s blinking, see?” A stream of liquid spurted from a hole above the eye, producing the snuffling she had heard. “It’s keeping its eye wet. No eyelids.”
“If you say so.” She flapped her arms, and the fish obligingly looked away from Bill and toward her. She wasn’t sure that was an improvement, but took a step forward on the balls of her feet. The fish looked away, bored by it all.
Bill moved in, braced himself, and put his sword through the flesh just behind the eye, leaning on it. The fish jerked as Bill released the sword and danced back.
Nothing happened. The eye did not move, and the organs on its back no longer swelled in and out. Cirocco relaxed, and saw Bill grinning.
“Too easy,” he said. “When is this place going to give us a challenge?�
� He took the hilt of his sword and pulled it out. Dark blood spurted over his hand. The fish bent, touching its snout with its tail, then swung the tail sideways and down on Bill’s head. It scooped deftly under his motionless body and hurled him into the air.
Cirocco did not even see where he came down. The fish arched again, this time balancing on its belly with both snout and tail in the air. She saw its mouth for the first time. It was round, lamprey-like, with a double row of teeth that counter-rotated and clattered. The tail hit the mud and the fish jumped at her.
She dived flat to the ground, ploughing up a wake of mud with her chin. The fish plopped behind her, arched, and flipped fifty kilos of mud into the air as it lashed madly with its tail. The sharp fin sliced the ground in front of her face, then rose for another try. She scurried on her hands and knees, slipping every time she tried to stand.
“Rocky! Jump!”
She did, and narrowly missed having her arm taken off as the fish’s tail hit the ground again.
“Go, go! It’s coming after you!”
A glance behind showed only rotating teeth. All she could hear was their terrible buzz. It meant to eat her.
She was in mire up to her knees and heading toward deeper water, which did not seem like a good idea, but every time she tried to turn the tail flashed out of the mud. Soon she was blind from the constant barrage of filthy water. She slipped, and before she could get up the tail hit the side of her head. She was conscious but her ears were ringing as she turned over and groped for her sword. The mud had swallowed it. The fish was a meter away, curling for a leap that would crush her, when Gaby came running past it. Her feet scarcely touched the ground. She hit Cirocco with a flying tackle hard enough to loosen teeth, the fish leaped, and all three of them skidded three meters through the mud.
Cirocco was dimly aware of a slimy wet wall under one foot. She kicked. The fish lashed at them again as Gaby pulled Cirocco along, swimming through the mud. Then she let go, and Cirocco lifted her head out of the water, gasping.
