It was amazingly difficult to concentrate. The thing in her hand was so complex, so various; too much for her scattered wits.
it was her pressure suit, stripped of all the plastic and rubber seals. Most of the suit had been plastic. Nothing remained but the metal.
She made a pile of the parts, and in the process realized just how naked she was. Beneath a coating of dirt her body was com- pletely hairless. Even her eyebrows were gone. For some reason that made her very sad.
She put her face in her hands and began to cry.
Cirocco did not cry easily, nor often. She was not good at it. But after a very long time she thought she knew who she was again.
Now she could find out where she was.
Perhaps a half hour later she felt ready to move. But that decision spawned a dozen questions. Move, but to where?
She had intended to explore Themis, but that was when she had a spaceship and the resources of Earth's nest technology. Now she had her bare skin and a few bits of metal.
She was in a forest composed of grass and one species of tree. She called them trees by the same reasoning she had used on the grass. If it's seventy meters tall, has a brown, round trunk and what looks like leaves far above, then it's a tree. Which did not mean it might not cheerfully cat her if given the chance.
She had to get the worries down to a manageable level. Rule out the things you can do nothing about, don't ftet too much about the things you can do little about. And remember that if you're as cautious as sanity would seem to dictate, you'll starve to death in a cave.
The air was in the first category. It could contain a poison.
"So stop breathing, at once!" she said, aloud. Right. At least it smelled fresh, and she was not coughing.
Water was something she could do little about. Eventually she would have to drink some, assuming she could find it-which should go right to the top of her list. When she found it, perhaps she could make a fire and boil it. If not, she would drink, microscopic bugs and all.
And then there was food, which worried her more than anything. Even if there was nothing around that wanted to make a meal of her, there was no way of knowing if the food she ate would poison her. Or it might be no more nourishing than cellophane.
if that wasn't enough, there was the calculated risk. How do you calculate what is risky when a tree might not he a tree?
They didn't even look that much like trees. The trunks were like polished marble. The high branches were parallel to the ground and ran for a precise distance before making a right angle. Above, the leaves were flat, like lily pads, and three or four me- ters across.
What was foolhardy and what was overcautious? There was no guidebook, and the dangers would not be marked. But without a few assumptions she could not move, and she had to get moving. She was getting hungry.
She set her jaw, then stamped over to the nearest tree. She smacked it with the palm of her hand. It just stood there, supremely indifferent.
"Just a dumb tree."
She examined the hole she had emerged from. It was a raw brown wound in the neat expanse of grass. Patches of sod held together by a feathery root structure, lay up- side-down around it. The hole itself was only half a meter deep; the sides had crumbled to fill the rest.
"Something tried to eat me," she said. "Something ate all the organic parts of my suit, and all my hair, then excreted the junk right here. Including me." She noted in passing that she was glad the thing had classified her as junk.
It was a hell of a beast. They knew the outer part of the torus- the ground she was sitting on-was thirty kilometers thick. This thing was large enough to snag Ringmaster while the ship orbitted 400 kilometers away. She had spent a long time in its belly and for some reason had proved indigestible. It had burrowed through the ground to this point, and expelled her.
And that just didn't make sense. If it could eat plastic, why couldn't it eat her? Were ship's captains too tough?
It had eaten her whole ship, pieces as large as the engine module, others just tiny bits of glass or tumbling, dwindling space- suited figures with dented helmets...
"Bill!" She was on her feet, every muscle in her body straining. "Bill! I'm here. I'm alivel Where are you?"
She slapped her forehead with her hand. If only she could get through this muddy-headed feeling when thoughts were coming so slowly. She had not forgotten about the crew, but it was not until that moment that she connected them with the new-bom Cirocco standing naked and hairless on the warm ground.
"Bill!" she shouted again. She listened, then collapsed with her legs folded under her. She plucked at the grass.
Think it through. Presumably, the creature would have treat- ed him as another piece of debris. But he had been injured.
So had she, now that she thought of it. She examined her thighs and found not even a bruise. it told her nothing. She might have been inside the creature for five years, or only a few months.
Any of the others might arrive and be pushed out of the ground at any time. Somewhere down there, about a meter and a half deep, was some kind of excretory outlet for the creature. If she waited, and if the creature didn't like the taste of all humans and not just ones named Cirocco, they might all get together again.
She sat down to wait for them.
Half an hour later (or was it only ten minutes?) it didn't make sense. The creature was big. It had eaten Ringmaster like an af- ter-dinner mint. It must extend through a great part of the underworld of Themis, and it didn't make sense to think this one orifice could handle all the traffic. There could he others, and they could be scattered all over the countryside.
A little later she had another thought. They were coming far apart, but they were coming, and she was grateful for that. The thought was simple: she was thirsty, she was hungry, and she was filthy. What she wanted most in the world was water.
The land sloped gently. She was willing to bet there would be a stream down there somewhere.
She stood and poked at the pile of metal pieces with one foot. There was too much to carry, but the junk was all she had for tools. She took one of the smaller rings, then picked up the larger one which had been the the bottom of her helmet and was still connected to the dangling electronic components.
It wasn't much, but it would have to do. She slung the large ring over her shoulder and started down the hill.
**********
The pool was fed by a two-meter fall from a rocky stream which wound through a little valley. The huge trees arched over- head, completely blocking her view of the sky. She stood on a rock near the edge of the pool, trying to judge its depth, thinking about jumping in.
Thinking about it was all she did. The water was clear, but there was no telling what might be in it. She jumped over the ridge which produced the waterfall. it was easy in the one-quar- ter gee. A short walk brought her to a sandy beach.
The water was warm, sweet, and bubbly, and easily the best thing she had ever tasted. She drank all she wanted, then squatted and scrubbed with sand, keeping an eye open. Watering holes were places for caution. When she was through she felt reasonably human for the first time since her awakening. She sat on the wet sand and let her feet trail in the water.
It was cooler than the air or the ground, but still surprisingly warm for what looked to be a glacier-fed mountain stream. Then she realized it would make sense if the heat source in Themis was as they had deduced: from below. The sunlight at Satum's orbit wouldn't provide much ground heating. But the triangular fins were under her now, and were probably designed to capture and store solar heat. She envisioned huge subterranean rivers of hot water running a few hundred meters under the ground.