“Are you feeling all right?” Darya’s voice itself seemed to come from a distance of a million lightyears. The walking car had reached the top of the hill and was making its slow way down the other side.
“If you mean, do I hurt, I don’t.” Ben saw towering objects ahead, shaped like the truncated cones that dotted the area where they had arrived. But these were ten times the size. “If you mean, do I feel pleased at the idea I’m going to be spending the night inside this crapheap, I still don’t.”
“You won’t be. None of us will.”
The car was lumbering toward one of the squat towers. Darya halted it ten meters away.
“Can you walk? If not I’ll get some help.”
“I can walk.” Or die trying. Ben eased himself to an upright position and carefully climbed out of the car. Now his right side did hurt, no doubt about it. Maybe that was a good thing. He had heard that when broken bones were knitting together it was the most painful time. True or not, he moved like an old man.
“A few more steps.” Darya was on one side of him, and now Hans Rebka walked on the other. He brushed away their offers of help.
The outside of the cone structure was an overlapping layer of giant leaves, each one as tall as a human and much wider. As Ben shambled forward, Teri Dahl pulled one leaf aside and gestured him through.
“Home, sweet home, Ben. At least for the time being. In you go. It’s safe and dry.”
He saw that she and the others were not wearing suits, and he envied them. He would love to get out of his own, even though he knew that would be a disaster. It was working hard on his behalf.
The layers of great leaves ran four deep. Once past them Ben stood in a wide space, dimly lit by light diffusing in from high above. The structure was supported by a thick central trunk at least a meter wide. The floor was dry, proof that the outer leaf layers were dense enough to keep out the rain that seemed to fall every few hours. The floor was bare, but not naturally so. Someone had been busy with housekeeping of an unusually gruesome kind. A stack of small mummified bodies stood at the far side of the clearing.
“Don’t worry. We’ll get them out of here in the morning.” Teri Dahl had followed Ben in and seen what he was looking at. “They’re not Marglotta, they’re some form of wild animal. We think they made those, and they probably lived up there.”
Ben turned his head back, feeling the pull on his ribs as he did so. Ten meters above him, the inside of the hollow cone bore drooping interlaced layers of thick white fibers, spreading out from the central trunk and connecting to the outer leaves. Above them, Ben could see bunches of rounded globes, glowing golden-orange even in the faded light, each one as big as his fist.
“They’re edible,” Teri said, “but climbing up to get them is a pain. We could do it if we had to, but Hans Rebka says there are better things to eat within easy walking distance. Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”
Ben didn’t have an easy walking distance, and he was not sure he could ever be comfortable again. He moved to the place Teri had indicated and sat down on a pile of springy undergrowth that someone had cut and dragged in from outside.
“Not luxury, but a lot better than getting drenched,” Teri said. “Hans Rebka claims that the really heavy rain will come at night, when the temperature drops a few degrees.” She came to sit beside him. “We have food, we have shelter, and we certainly have water.”
The others of the group had one by one entered, until now all stood or sat inside the cone-house. Julian Graves, coming in just in time to hear Teri’s final words, added, “Probably more water than we’d like. We are safe enough here, but we have no idea how we might leave the planet unless some others of the expedition show up. I wish I understood how our two groups came to arrive in the same place, when we took such different paths. Fortunately we need be in no hurry to learn that, or to leave. We can take our time.”
Ben saw the others nodding, until Darya Lang said abruptly, “Sorry to be the company killjoy, but that’s just not true. Marglot might seem safe enough, and in one sense it is. But we can’t stay here very long. If we do we’ll be in deep trouble.”
“From what?” Hans Rebka was staring all around him. “I’m usually the pessimist of the group, but I don’t see anything to frighten us. No floods, no earthquakes, no volcanoes, no ravenous beasts looking to chomp on our rear ends.”
“That’s the whole point, Hans. No ravenous beasts—no beasts of any kind. While you were exploring, I dug in the wet soil and looked on and in the plants. I found plenty of animal life. It’s everywhere. Small and big, everything from half-meter crawlers down to sizes I can only pick up using my suit magnifiers. But it’s all like those.” She pointed to the heap of shrunken corpses at the other side of the cone-house clearing. “Dead. I don’t think there is a living animal anywhere on the surface of Marglot.”
Torran Veck shrugged. “So what? I’ve never been to Fredholm, but I understand that it’s the same way. It’s a world with vegetable life and fungi, and a bunch of microorganisms that break down dead materials. But it supports a stable biosphere.”
“It does. Everything is in balance on Fredholm because it evolved that way, over billions of years. The situation here is totally different. This planet had a balanced ecosphere—plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms all doing their bit. Then every animal suddenly died. Marglot is unstable from an ecological point of view. I don’t know how long it will take, but the vegetation will start to die, too—plants all rely on some animal forms. Oxygen content will start to go down as photosynthesis stops. I don’t know what the end point of the change will be, but long before the planet gets to that stage we’d better be gone. Nothing like humans will be able to live here. Think of it this way, Hans. We seem to be the only living animals on Marglot. It’s rarely good to be an anomaly. We need to find a way to escape, and we need to do it fast.”
“I don’t think you should be so worried, Darya.” But Hans Rebka went off to sit by himself with his back against the central trunk.
No one else was eager to continue the discussion. After a few minutes, Ben moved from a sitting position to lie flat on his back. He was actually less comfortable than in the walking car, but he had no desire to go back there. No matter how gloomy the conversation, here he at least was part of it. He was free to offer his opinions.
High up near the top of the tree-cone, the daylight slowly faded. A new sound began, of a gusting wind. The atmospheric circulation patterns on Marglot must follow the moving day-night boundary, even at the Hot Pole. Soon the pummeling of torrential rain began on the sturdy outside leaves.
Night on Marglot. A planet which, according to Darya Lang, was steadily but surely dying. Ben closed his eyes.
In your dreams you encountered situations like this, hopeless corners with no way out. Except that in your dreams, there always was an answer; and you were always the one who found it.
In your dreams. Ben opened his eyes. The interior of the cone-house was dark. He could not hear the others breathing above the sound of the rain.
This was not a dream. This was reality.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Together again
If there was a heaven for embodied computers, which E.C. Tally most seriously doubted, then he was in it.
He sat at the center of a circle of a hundred and more beetlebacks, just as he had sat for the past three days. The silver beetlebacks neither moved nor slept; instead, they talked continuously. A complex syncopation of chatter of radio signals surrounded E.C.