Marta knew the territory near Korolev. Her shelter in the realtime wing of the castle was secure, close to water and adequate hunting. It was a good place to collect her energy for the trek ahead. She experimented with the weapons and tools she'd known from survival sport. In the end she settled on a diamond-bladed pike and knife and a short bow. She kept the other diamond blades in reserve; she wasn't going to waste them on arrowheads. She built a travois from a section of Fred's hull. It was enough to do some testing. She made several cautious trips covering a few kilometers.
Dearest Lelya- If I am ever to leave, I suppose it should be now. The plan is still to sail to our mines at West End and then head north to the Peacer bobble, and Canada far beyond that. Tomorrow I depart for the coast; tonight I finish packing. Would you believe, I have made so much equipment, I actually have lists; the age of data processing has arrived!
Hope I see you before I write more. -Love, Marta. ¯
That was the last of the bark tablets she left at the castle. Two hundred kilometers along the southern coast of the sea, Yel‚n found the second of Marta's cairns, a three-meter-high pile of rock at the edge of the jacaranda forests. This was one of the best preserved of Marta's sites. She'd built a cabin there; it was still standing when Yel‚n studied it a century later.
Six months had passed since Marta left the castle in the mountains. She was still optimistic, though she had hoped to reach the mines before stopping. There had been problems, one of them painful and deadly. During her time at the cabin, Marta described her adventures since leaving the castle.
I followed our monorail to the coast. You know I said it was a waste to build that thing when we were going to leave it behind anyway. Well, now I'm glad you listened to Genet and not me. That right-of-way cuts straight through the forest. 1 avoided some tricky rock climbing just by sliding the travois along the rail's underframe. It was like a practice hike-which I needed more than I realized.
I've forgotten a lot, Lelya. I have just one poor brainful of memories now. If I'd known I was to be marooned, I would have loaded quite a different set. (But if I'd foreseen that, I probably could have avoided the whole adventure! Sigh. I should be glad I never offloaded our survival courses.) Anyway, my mind is full of our plans for the settlement, the stuff I was thinking about the night of the party. I have only a casual recollection of maps. I know we did lots of wildlife studies, and were hooked into Monica's work, too. But that's all gone. Where the plants are like the ones back in civilization, I recognize them.
For the rest, I have fragments of memory that are sometimes worse than useless: take the spiders and their jacaranda forests. These are nothing like the scattered trees and isolated webs up at Town Korolev. Here the trees are huge, and the forests go on forever. That much was obvious from the ground, walking along the monorail. We had slashed through that forest, but it towered on either side. The brush that had grown along the path was already covered by matted spider webbing. Ah, if I had remembered then what I've learned since, I'd probably be at the mines by now!
Instead, I wandered along beneath the rail (where for some reason the webs didn't come) and admired the gray silk that spread down from the jacarandas. I didn't dare cut through the webs to look into the forest; at that time, I was still scared of the spiders. They're little things, like the ones in the mountains, but if you look close you can see thousands of them moving in the webs. I was afraid they might be like army ants, ready to swarm down on whoever jiggled their silk. Eventually, I found a break in the shroud where I could step through without touching the threads.... Lelya, it's a different world in there, quieter and more peaceful than the deepest redwood grove. Dim green light is everywhere-the really thick webs are at the fringes of the forests. (And of course I didn't find the explanation for that till later.) There's no underbrush, no animals-only a musty smell and a greenish haze in the air. (I'll bet you're laughing at me now, because you already know what made that smell,) Anyway, I was impressed. It's like a cathedral... or a tomb,
I only spent an hour in there the first time; I was still nervous about the spiders. Besides, the point of this trip was to reach the sea. I still planned to make a raft and sail direct to the West End. Failing that, short hops along the coast ought to bring me to the mines faster than any overland walk. So 1 thought.
It was storming the day I came in sight of the shore. I knew we had wrecked the coast with our tsunami, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw. The jungle was blasted flat for kilometers back from the sea. The tree trunks were piled three and four deep, all pointing away from the water. I remember thinking that at least I would have plenty of lumber for my raft.
I sheltered the travois and went a ways onto the coastal plain. The going was treacherous. Rotted vines swathed the trunks. Tree bark sloughed away under my weight. The topmost trunks were relatively clear, but slime slick. I crawled/ walked from trunk to trunk. All the while, the storm was getting worse. The last time I'd been to the beach was to round up Wil Brierson... ¯
A reader smiled. She did remember my name! Somewhere in the adventures of her next forty years she forgot, but for a while she had remembered.
.. , just before we raised the Peacers. It had been a warm, misty place. Today was different: lightning, thunder, wind driven rain. No way was I going to get to water's edge this afternoon. I crawled along a tree trunk to its uptorn fan of roots, and peeked over. Fantasyland. There were three waterspouts out there. They slid back and forth, the further ones pale and translucent. The third had drifted inland, though it was still a couple of klicks away. Dirt and timber splashed up from its tip. I crawled out of the wind and listened to the roar. As long as it didn't get louder, I should be safe from heaven's dirty finger.
All this raised serious questions about my plan to take a shortcut across the sea. No doubt this was an exceptional storm, but what about ordinary squalls? How common were they? The Inland Sea is a lot like the old Mediterranean. I thought of a guy named Odysseus oho spent half his life being blown from one side of that pond to the other. I wished we had taken maritime sports more seriously. Sailing to Catalina barely qualified us as novices; we didn't even make our own boat. The notion of hugging the coast didn't look good either. I remembered the pictures: our tsunami had smashed the whole southern coast. There were no beaches or harbors left on this side of the sea, just millions of tonnes of broken wood and mud. I would have to carry all my food even if I stayed close to the shore.
So there I was, kind of discouraged and awfully wet. My schedule was in shambles. And that was a laugh. I have all the time in the world; that's the problem.
There was a super-close lightning bolt. From the corner of my eye I saw something rushing me. As I turned, it dropped on my shoulder, grabbing for my neck. An instant later something else landed on my middle, and on my leg. I bet I screamed as loud as ever in my life; it was lost in the thunder.
... They were fishermonkeys, Lelya. Three of them. They clung tight as leeches; one had its face buried in my middle. But they weren't biting. I sat rigid for a moment, ready to start smashing in all directions. The one on my leg had its eyes screwed shut. All three were shivering, and holding me so tight it hurt. I gradually relaxed, and set my hand on the fellow who had grabbed my middle. Through the seal-like fur, I could feel its shivering ease a little.
They were like little children, running to Momma when the lightning got too bad. We sat in the lee of that root fan through the worst of the storm. They scarcely moved the whole time, their warm bodies stuck to my leg, belly, and shoulder.