"We could go back to where we started and wait there." Gaby did not seem enthusiastic about that idea.
"Damn! I thought sure we'd find a place to look around if we went far enough. Do you think the whole inside of Themis is one big rain forest?"
Gaby shrugged. "I don't have enough information, obviously." Cirocco chewed it over for a while. Gaby was apparently willing to let her make the decisions. "Okay. First we go to the top of this hill and see what it's like. One more thing I'd like to try if there's nothing worthwhile up there is to climb one of these trees. Maybe we could get high enough to see something. Do you think we could do it?"
Gaby studied a trunk. "Sure, in this gravity. That's no guarantee we'll be able to stick our heads out, though."
"I know. Let's go up the hill."
It was steeper than the countryside they had come through. There were places where they had to use hands and feet, and Gaby led the way through those because she had more experi- ence in rock climbing. She was agile, much smaller and more limber than Cirocco, and soon Cirocco felt every month of the age difference between them.
"Holy shit, take a look at that!"
"W.hat is it?" Cirocco was a few meters behind. When she looked up she saw only Gaby's legs and buttocks, from a distinctly unusual angle. It was odd, she thought, that she had seen all the male crew members naked, but had to come to Themis to see Gaby. What a strange creature she was with no hair.
"We've found our scenic viewpoint," Gaby said. She turned around and gave Cirocco a hand.
There were trees growing on the brow of the hill, but they did not approach the height of the ones behind them. Though they were dense and overgrown with vines, none was over ten meters tall.
Cirocco had wanted to climb the hill to see what was on the other side. Now she knew. The hill didn't have an other side.
Gaby was standing a few meters from the edge of a cliff. With every step Cirocco took the view adjusted itself, receding, encompassing more area. When she stood beside Gaby she still could not see the cliff face, but she had some idea of how long the drop was. It would he measured in kilometers. She felt her stomach lurch.
They stood at-a natural window formed by a twenty-meter gap between the outermost trees. There was nothing in front of them but air for 200 kilometers.
They were at the edge of the rim, looking across the breadth of Themis to the other side. Over there was a hairline shadow that might have been a cliff like the one they were standing on. Above the line was green land, fading to white, then to gray, and finally becoming a brilliant yellow as her eyes traveled up the sloping side to the translucent area in the roof.
Her eyes were drawn back down the curve to the distant cliff. Below it was more green land, with white clouds hugging the ground or towering up higher than she was. It looked like the view from a mountaintop on Earth, but for one thing. The ground seemed level until she looked to the left or right.
It bent. She gulped, and craned her neck, twisting, trying to make it level, trying to deny that far away the land was higher than she was without ever having risen.
She gasped and clutched at the air, then went down on hands and knees. It felt better that way. She edged closer to the abyss and kept looking to her left. Far away was a land of shadow, tilted on its side for her examination. A dark sea twinkled in the night, a sea that somehow did not leave its shores and come spilling toward her. On the other side of the sea was another area of light, like the one in front of her, dwindling in the distance. Beyond it her view was cut off by the roof overhead, seeming to belly down to meet the land. She knew it was an illusion of the perspective; the roof would be just as high if she stood beneath it at that point.
They were on the edge of one of the areas of permanent day. A hazy terminator began to blanket the land to her right, not sharp and clear like the terminator of a planet seen from space, but fad- ing through a twilight zone she estimated to be thirty or forty kilometers wide. Beyond that zone was night, but not blackness. There was a huge sea in there, twice as large as the one in the
other direction, looking as if bright moonlight was falling on it. it sparkled like a plain of diamond.
"Isn't that the direction the wind came from?" Gaby asked. "Yeah, if we didn't get turned around by a curve in the river." "I don't think we did. That looks like ice to me."
Cirocco agreed. The ice sheet broke up as the sea narrowed to a neck, eventually becoming a river that ran in front of her and emptied into the other sea. The country over there was moun- tainous, rugged as a washboard. She did not understand how the river could thread its way through the mountains to join the sea on the other side. She decided the perspective was fooling her. Water would not flow uphill, even in Themis.
Beyond the ice was another daylight area, this one brighter and yellower than the others she could see, like desert sands. To reach it, she would have to travel across the frozen sea.
"Three days and two nights," Gaby said. "That worked out pretty well from the theory. I said we'd he able to see almost half the inside of Themis from any point. What I didn't figure on were those things."
Cirocco followed Gaby's pointing fimer to a series of what looked like ropes that started on the land below and angled up- ward to the roof. There were three of them in a line almost directly in front of them, so that the nearest partially concealed the other two. Cirocco had seen them earlier, but had skipped over them because she could not understand it all at once. Now she looked closer, and frowned. Like a depressing number of things in Themis, they were huge.
The nearest one could serve as a model for all the rest. It was fifty kilometers away, but she could see that it was made of perhaps one hundred strands wound together. Each strand was 200 or 300 meters thick. Further detail was lost at that distance.
The three in the row all angled steeply over the frozen sea, rising 150 kilometers or more until they joined the roof at a point she knew must be one of the spokes, seen from the inside. It was a conical mouth, like the bell of a trumpet that flared to become the roof and sides of the rim enclosure. At the far edge of the bell, some 500 kilometers away, she could make out more of the ropes.
There were more cables to her left, but these went straight up
to the arched ceiling and disappeared through it. Beyond them were other rows that angled toward the spoke mouth she could not see from her vantage point, the one over the sea in the mountains.
Where the cables joined the ground, they pulled it up into broad-based mountains.
"They look like the cables on a suspension bridge," Cirocco said.
"I agree. And I think that's what it is. There's no need for tow- ers to support it. The cables can be fastened in the center. Themis is.a circular suspension bridge."
Cirocco eased herself closer to the edge. She stuck her head over and looked down two kilometers to the ground.
The clifi was as near perpendicular as an irregular surface fea- ture can be. Only near the bottom did it begin to flare out to meet the land below.
"You aren't thinking of going down that, are you?" Gaby asked.
"The thought had entered my mind, but I sure don't feel good about it. And what would be better down there than up here? We've got a pretty good idea we could survive up here." She stopped. Was that to he their only goal?
Given the chance, she would take adventure to security, if se- curity meant building a but from sticks and settling down to a diet of raw meat and fruit. She would be crazy in a month.
And the land below was beautiful. There were impossibly steep mountains with shining blue lakes set in them like gems. She could see waving grasslands, dense forests, and far to the east, the brooding midnight sea. There was no telling what dan- gers that land concealed, but it seemed to call to her.