“It’s how everyone sees you. If status in the afterlife is determined by praises sung, yours is assured.”
“I wish you could hear how they talk about you. People hold you in awe, love.”
Thump. Thump. The rhythm of her feet soothed her, when nothing else could. She was even getting resigned to the ceaseless damp, which collected between her toes, between her buttocks, behind her ears. “They love you. They tolerated me. No one ever saw what you saw in me.”
“I did,” Kraken replied. “And quit acting as if I were somehow perfect. You’ve been quick enough to remind me on occasion of how I’m not. This thing, this need to prove yourself... it’s a sophipathology, Dhar. I love you. But this is not a healthy pattern of thought. Ambition is great, but you go beyond ambition. Nothing you do is ever good enough. You deny your own accomplishments, and inflate those of everyone around you. You grew up in Aphrodite, and there are only thirty thousand people on the whole damned planet. You can’t be surprised that, brilliant as you are, some of us are just as smart and capable as you are.”
Thump. Thump –
She was watching ahead even as she was arguing, though her attention wasn’t on it. That automatic caution was all that kept her from running off the edge of the world.
Before her – below her – a great cliff dropped away. The trees in the valley soared up. But this was not a tangled jungle: it was a climax forest, a species of tree taller and more densely canopied than any Dharthi had seen. The light below those trees was thick and crepuscular, and though she could hear the rain drumming on their leaves, very little of it dripped through.
Between them, until the foliage cut off her line of sight, Dharthi could see the familiar, crescent-shaped roofs of aboriginal Cytherean structures, some of them half-consumed in the accretions from the forest of smoking stone towers that rose among the trees.
She stood on the cliff edge overlooking the thing she had come half a world by airship and a thousand kilometers on foot to find, and pebbles crumbled from beneath the toes of her adaptshell, and she raised a hand to her face as if Kraken were really speaking into a device in her ear canal instead of into the patterns of electricity in her brain. The cavernous ruin stretched farther than her eyes could see – even dark-adapted, once the shell made the transition for her. Even in this strange, open forest filled with colorful, flitting flying things. “Love?”
“Yes?” Kraken said, then went silent and waited.
“I’ll call you back,” Dharthi said. “I just discovered the Lost City of Ishtar.”
DHARTHI WALKED AMONG the ruins. It was not all she’d hoped.
Well, it was more than she had hoped. She rappelled down, and as soon as her shell sank ankle-deep in the leaf litter she was overcome by a hush of awe. She turned from the wet, lichen-heavy cliff, scuffed with the temporary marks of her feet, and craned back to stare up at the forest of geysers and fumaroles and trees that stretched west and south as far as she could see. The cliff behind her was basalt – another root of the volcano whose shield was lost in mists and trees. This... this was the clearest air she had ever seen.
The trees were planted in rows, as perfectly arranged as pillars in some enormous Faerie hall. The King of the Giants lived here, and Dharthi was Jack, except she had climbed down the beanstalk for a change.
The trunks were as big around as ten men with linked hands, tall enough that their foliage vanished in the clouds overhead. Trees on Earth, Dharthi knew, were limited in height by capillary action: how high could they lift water to their thirst leaves?
Perhaps these Cytherean giants drank from the clouds as well as the earth. “Oh,” Dharthi said, and the spaces between the trees both hushed and elevated her voice, so it sounded clear and thin. “Wait until Zamin sees these.”
Dharthi suddenly realized that if they were a new species, she would get to name them.
They were so immense, and dominated the light so completely, that very little grew under them. Some native fernmorphs, some mosses. Lichens shaggy on their enormous trunks and roots. Where one had fallen, a miniature Cytherean rain forest had sprung up in the admitted light, and here there was drumming, dripping rain, rain falling like strings of glass beads. It was a muddy little puddle of the real world in this otherwise alien quiet.
The trees stood like attentive gods, their faces so high above her she could not even hear the leaves rustle.
Dharthi forced herself to turn away from the trees, at last, and begin examining the structures. There were dozens of them – hundreds – sculpted out of the same translucent, mysterious, impervious material as all of the ruins in Aphrodite. But this was six, ten times the scale of any such ruin. Maybe vaster. She needed a team. She needed a mapping expedition. She needed a base camp much closer to this. She needed to give the site a name –
She needed to get back to work.
She remembered, then, to start documenting. The structures – she could not say, of course, which were habitations, which served other purposes – or even if the aboriginals had used the same sorts of divisions of usage that human beings did – were of a variety of sizes and heights. They were all designed as arcs or crescents, however – singly, in series, or in several cases as a sort of stepped spectacular with each lower, smaller level fitting inside the curve of a higher, larger one. Several had obvious access points, open to the air, and Dharthi reminded herself sternly that going inside unprepared was not just a bad idea because of risk to herself, but because she might disturb the evidence.
She clenched her good hand and stayed outside.
Her shell had been recording, of course – now she began to narrate, and to satlink the files home. No fanfare, just an upload. Data and more data – and the soothing knowledge that while she was hogging her allocated bandwidth to send, nobody could call her to ask questions, or congratulate, or –
Nobody except Kraken, with whom she was entangled for life.
“Hey,” her partner said in her head. “You found it.”
“I found it,” Dharthi said, pausing the narration but not the load. There was plenty of visual, olfactory, auditory, and kinesthetic data being sent even without her voice.
“How does it feel to be vindicated?”
She could hear the throb of Kraken’s pride in her mental voice. She tried not to let it make her feel patronized. Kraken did not mean to sound parental, proprietary. That was Dharthi’s own baggage.
“Vindicated?” She looked back over her shoulder. The valley was quiet and dark. A fumarole vented with a rushing hiss and a curve of wind brought the scent of sulfur to sting her eyes.
“Famous?”
“Famous!?”
“Hell, Terran-famous. The homeworld is going to hear about this in oh, about five minutes, given light lag – unless somebody who’s got an entangled partner back there shares sooner. You’ve just made the biggest Cytherean archaeological discovery in the past hundred days, love. And probably the next hundred. You are not going to have much of a challenge getting allocations now.”
“I –”
“You worked hard for it.”
“It feels like...” Dharthi picked at the bridge of her nose with a thumbnail.
The skin was peeling off in flakes: too much time in her shell was wreaking havoc with the natural oil balance of her skin. “It feels like I should be figuring out the next thing.”
“The next thing,” Kraken said. “How about coming home to me? Have you proven yourself to yourself yet?”
Dharthi shrugged. She felt like a petulant child. She knew she was acting like one. “How about to you?”