The main entry hatch, normally oriented toward the underside of the hull, was now positioned near the top, Cuiller, Krater, and Gambiel climbed up handholds and over equipment bracing to reach it. Jook stayed inside, nursing his knee in a bubble cast foam-molded by the ‘doc. While they went outside, he would use the time to catalog and schedule their estimated repairs.
After levering themselves through the opening, the three crewmembers stood on the roughened ceramic surface and surveyed the landing site. Callisto lay on clear ground, angled slightly upward at the bow, where the hull was wedged between the smooth trunks of two trees. Those trees, and every other tree in view, supported a high forest canopy whose underlayer was more than ninety meters overhead.
Cuiller searched for the hole they must have made in passing through it but found nothing. No clearings punctuated the vaults of leaves and wailing moss that soared above them. The surrounding world was a uniform green gloom, without a splash of sunlight.
“Beanstalk,” Krater said suddenly. “That’s what we’ll call this planet”
“What?” from Gambiel. “This patch, maybe. But who can say what’s going on in the next county over”
“I can say,” she answered. “There is no ‘next county.’ We’ve been around this world once and taken a radar image of it. This is one huge, unbroken rainforest, girdling the planet, covering probably sixty percent of its surf ace.”
“Well, at the poles, then…“ the weapons officer said, trailing off.
“There ought to be what?” Krater asked. “This planet’s rotational axis is perpendicular to its ecliptic So you won’t get seasonal temperature variations, as you do on Earth. You can expect the temperature to drop uniformly at the higher latitudes, because of the sun’s lower angle in the sky. But that only means that the rain-forest is going to peter out in low scrub, then mosses and lichens, and eventually frozen deserts. This planet dearly has no plate tectonics, which means not much in the way of topography ever formed here. So no mountain ranges, no valleys, no river floodplains, no oceanic heat sinks. That means there can’t be any weather.”
“What about Coriolis effects?” Cuiller asked. “You’d still have moving air masses, trade winds, horse latitudes-any planet that’s turning has them.”
“All right, I’ll agree to trade winds. But on a smooth ball like this, they sorted themselves out long ago. Even flows without much intermixing. That’s the cloud banding we saw from far out.”
“Hugh said he detected a smooth surf ace, and it was
– even a hundred meters up in the treetops,” Cuiller said. “That’s what fooled me, I guess,” he added sheepishly. It was a close as a commanding officer could come to officially apologizing to his crew for that fiasco of a landing. “Daff, if you would rig a rope ladder or something like it, we can go down and check out the ground.”
“Aye, sir.” Gambiel climbed back down through the hatchway.
The commander looked off into the distance, a perspective of spaced tree trunks vanishing into a brownish-green mist. Something about the trees… He turned his head one way, then the other. He moved his head sideways, left then right, along the baseline of his shoulders. He widened that line by taking two steps to the side. As the angle changed, the trunks seemed to line up in a geometric pattern. And then the pattern faded out as he moved farther to one side or the other
“Sally? Does it look to you like the trees are -“
“Lined up? Yeah, I was thinking that, too. They’re spaced in a matrix, actually.”
“Like an orchard,” he agreed.
“As if they had been planted on purpose. But it’s not a simple design of rows and columns. More like pentagrams or hexagons.”
Cuiller itched to get down and begin taking measurements.
Gambiel returned with a length of spare optic-fiber cable in which he’d tied small, tight knots at half-meter intervals. He anchored it inside the open hatchway and dangled the rest across the smooth curve of the hull. They all heard its trailing end thump on the ground.
“We might be needing that cable to make repairs,” Cuiller observed quietly.
The Jinxian stared at him. “We won’t. I checked with Jook.”
“Well,” he went on, “you might have brought up a spider rig from the EVA equipment.”
Gambiel turned to show his left shoulder, where three of the rigs hung like loops of uniform braid. “We have one each. And we’ll all need them.”
“What for?” Krater asked.
“Climbing.”
“Climbing where?”
Gambiel pointed over his head. “Deep radar was your station, Sally. You saw the return image. Whatever made it, it’s still up there.”
“In the treetops? But-”
The Jinxian turned toward his commander. “That was why you tried to land in the canopy. You were watching the deep display instead of the navigationals… Keeping your eye on the prize.”
“Well, yes…“ Cuiller hesitated. Was that the cause of his error?
“Honest mistake,” Gambiel offered with a shrug.
Climbing down was not as easy as Cuiller had thought it would be. They had to go one at a time, walking backwards and paying out the knots hand over hand, until their bodies were laid out almost parallel to the ground. Then they rappelled from the ship’s side, slipping cautiously down the knotted cable until they were under the overhang. Finally they dragged their feet on the hard-packed ground to kill the final swing. Climbing back up was going to he harder and take longer.
With his heavyworld muscles, of course, Gambiel went up and down like a monkey.
Krater, who had the advantage of height and not much mass to go with it, seemed to step from the ship to the ground.
Cuiller, despite Beanstalk’s lighter gravity, still found it a workout.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Krater asked, looking around when they had assembled under the bow. Gambiel scuffed the soil with the side of his cabin moccasin. The ground was smooth and crusted, like a section of sun-baked clay in exposed terrain. He turned over no ground cover, no dead leaves, no animal droppings or pieces of bark, nothing. They found no undergrowth, either, not even around the tree trunks. None of the vines that wove through the canopy reached down to the forest floor.
Cuiller walked over to the nearest trunk. It was at least two meters in diameter with a hard, scaly bark. He pried at the bark with his fingers but could not break off a piece. No room for invading insects, small birds, or snakes.
He looked up. The overhead leaves were as still as the underside of a green cloud. Of course, if any wind were stirring in the treetops, the sound and movement were cushioned by 30 meters of netted foliage.
Cuiller squatted down to examine the trunk’s base. The bark was scraped and scarred raw there, at least on the side facing him. The wounds went a third of the way around the bole and extended more than a meter up from the ground. They wept a thick, ruddy sap. He duck-walked along the trunk’s circumference and discovered that the cuts faded out into white, scraped wood, which looked almost dead. Beyond that, by another third of the circumference, was a patch of new, green bark-but even there he could see a pattern of parallel scrapes and gouges. Areas of sap, clean wood, and new growth alternated around the trunk.
Something had been abusing this tree on a regular basis, coming at it from all sides.
Cuiller stood up and walked toward the next tree, counting his paces as he went. He knew his stride was just less than a meter. Factoring the correction into his count gave him a distance of twenty-five meters between the two trees. He examined that base and found the same pattern of abuse.
He walked on to a third tree-again, covering just twenty-five meters-and saw the same thing. And he confirmed that the three trees were growing in a line.
On a hunch, he walked back to the second tree and sighted to the third. A patch of white wood there matched a similar patch here. In the same way, running sap faced sap on a tree sighted 120 degrees around the trunk’s circumference. Green bark matched green bark on yet another facing tree.