He’d reached Stair Street. Tegger began to climb.
The houses had bands and patches of dirt around and between them. For most of Stair Street’s length the wide dirt patch stretching out from the front door of one house was the flat roof of the house below.
Some of these plots were flooded. Some had been washed away or reduced to sand by hundreds of falans of rainfall. Here grew tall grass; here grew nothing. There were dead trees, fallen trees, live trees, fruiting trees. Here a straggling line of pomes ran from the topmost house nearly down to Rim Street. They looked planted, at first; but two topmost pome trees were dead, and the bottommost were just beginning to produce head-sized fruit. Tegger pictured tens of thousands of spherical pomes rolling downhill over hundreds of falans, seeding this whole slope from one tree.
Here was a window-flat, not like a vehicle window, as big as the Thurl’s bed. Awesome. Its surface was murky. Tegger peered through it, but the interior was dark.
Next door, a huge tree had uprooted and cracked the wall of a house. This house, too, had one great window facing the earthen plot. Tegger picked up a chunk of fallen rubble and tried to smash it. It was the rubble that cracked.
But the cracked wall. Might he squeeze through that opening?
Yes.
The place was big by Tegger’s standards: larger than a tent. The scale was larger, too: not quite Grass Giant size. A chair he sat in left his feet dangling.
He found an oval bed on the other side of the picture window. Five skeletons on the bed. Three adults, two children. They were a friendly group and seemed at peace. One more, child size, was off the bed, reaching for a door.
The space behind that door looked very dark.
He used rotted bedding to make a torch and went in.
No windows here. There were furnishings … controls? Levers that would wiggle, anyway, above spouts that came out of the wall. Two were at either end of a tub with a drain in the bottom. Water spouts, but no water ran from them.
Tegger continued his search.
Another windowless room. Another skeleton, adult size, lay near a shallow opening with tens of tiny knobs inside. More controls—Tegger thought, reaching for his pack—like the recessed control panel in the hauler.
Towel. Wedge-bladed knife. Strips of Vala-cloth already cut. He began pushing them into place.
Nothing, nothing, nothing … a miracle happened.
Light. A point in the ceiling was blazing too bright to look at.
Tegger got out of there.
Lights were shining throughout the house. Tegger left them that way. It surprised him that there was still power. Where did it come from? Thunderstorms? Power was directed lightning …
He moved up the line of houses, faster now, looking through windows. Here and there he saw skeletons. Always inside. Bodies outside were gone, meat for birds.
There were scrubby grasses, some he knew as edible to hominids. Plants too weird to be anything but ornamental. Unless that one with big purple leaves … ?
He dug a bit, pulled, and found fat roots. Cloudy River Delta Farmers would eat those boiled.
These were miniature farms!
Tegger settled himself cross-legged on the roof edge of a plot of earth, slumping within his earth-colored poncho, letting the rain wash over him like just another lump on the landscape.
These little patches of dirt were farms no longer. The plants were no orderly array of crops. Untended since the Fall of the Cities, likely enough. But was it not strange that in this restricted space the occupants would seed croplands too small to feed a smeerp?
Tegger found it more than interesting. He hadn’t been nibbled by pests last night. Maybe he’d climbed out of their reach. Maybe nothing lived here save for the makaways who foraged below. But if there was anything like a food chain up here, it would begin with growing plants.
So, he would hunt.
What else was worth noting here?
Vines had grown from two narrow strips of soil to engulf the house behind him and tear it down. Windows and their frames had buckled. He could see furniture ruined by rain.
The houses were flat surfaces and right angles. But Stair Street was crowned by a dome of window-stuff as big as two or three houses. He’d compared it to an eyeball, but he was only seeing reflections of white clouds. It had no color of us own. The tube that was the City’s peak loomed above even that.
He was among the topmost houses; and they were the biggest, with the widest of garden / farms. It seemed the City Builders liked a view.
The wilderness before and below him was almost a perfect square. The center was an empty pool in the shape of a scallop shell. Four trees had been planted at the corners, but rain had carved runnels, undercut one of the trees and felled it. Its roots poked into the air beyond the roof’s edge.
Tegger liked the pool. It might have been some Cluster Islands grotto. Its rounded bottom was smooth blue City Builder stuff, and there were stairs leading in. There was even a running waterfall, a spout in the pile of boulders at one edge. He could see where the outflow from the waterfall, and the rain, all ran into a drain at the bottom and disappeared.
There was dirt in the pool, too, but it didn’t belong. There wasn’t enough. It had washed in. Still, plants had taken root and were cracking the blue bottom.
A pool for swimming. Why? Stairs to get out: you could drown otherwise. Maybe City Builders swam; maybe Homeflow River Folk came visiting.
But having built it, why leave it empty?
Nothing was happening among the patches of plants. Tegger supposed he would have better hunting during halfnight. Between light and dark was an active time for things that were used to evading predators. Maybe he could chase something into the pool, trap it there.
Meanwhile—he dropped to the grass, then walked into the pool.
Mud had half choked the drain. It had not quite hidden the cover.
A round drain and a pipe below. A round cap the size of his spread fingers, on a hinge, with a rusted chain hanging from it. Tegger could see where it ought to lead, up there at the edge. You’d stay dry while you pulled the chain to open the cap.
He tried to close the cap. It resisted. He leaned his weight on it and the hinge snapped. He set the loose cap on the drain. It stayed. He watched as the pool began to fill.
Chapter 11
Guard Duty
Daylight was glowing on his eyelids. Louis tried to roll over, then stopped. He’d wake her.
His memory oozed into place. Sawur. Weavers. Shenthy River valley. Hindmost, vampires and vampire killers, a hidden protector …
She turned in his arms. Gold and silver fur; thin lips. Her breasts were near flat, but prominent nipples poked through the fur. She was awake in an eyeblink. Bare black eyelids made her brown eyes look huge.
Sawur studied him to verify that he, too, was awake. Then—he hadn’t asked, but he had guessed. Morning was Sawur’s time for rishathra, and Louis needed this in the worst way.
The worst way. She certainly sensed something wrong. She pulled back two inches to see his face. “Do you hunger in the morning?”
“Sometimes.”
“Something is distracting you.”
“Something was. Is. Sorry.”
She waited to be sure he had no more to say, then, “Will you teach today?”
“I should go looking for plants I can eat. We’re omnivores. Our guts need roughage. Hey, the older children go hunting—”
“Yes, we’ll go with them,” Sawur said. “They’ll learn more from you in the woods than they would from me in a hut. Here, this would be your parting gift, but you need it now.”
From a corner she pulled something with straps. Louis took it into sunlight to admire it. It was intricately embroidered weavework, a valuable gift: a backpouch.