"Mnemosyne is a desert," he said. "It looks odd, because the dunes stack up a lot higher than on Earth, from the low gravity, I guess. There's plant life down there. I saw some small animals when we went down low, and what looked like a ruined city and a few small towns. Places that might have been castles a thousand years ago perched up on vertical rock spires, crumbling apart. It would have taken a thousand years of coolie labor to build them, or some pretty good helicopters.
"I think something has gone badly wrong in here. It's all going to dust. Mnemosyne might have looked like this place once, right down to the empty river bed and the corpses of huge trees being eaten away by sandstorms. Something changed the climate, or got away from the builders.
'lit was probably this worm we saw. There's only one of them, Whistlestop says. Mnemosyne is only big enough for one. If there were two, they fought it out long ago and only this grand- daddy worm is left. It's big enough to eat Whistlestop like an olive."
Both Cirocco and Bill looked up at Calvin's mention of giant worms.
"I never did see the whole thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's twenty kilometers long. It's just a big, long tube, with a hole at both ends as wide as the whole damn worm. It's segmented, and the body looks hard, like an armadillo shell. it's got a mouth like a buzz saw, teeth an the inside and the outside both. it spends its time under the sand, but sometimes it isn't deep enough and it has to come to the surface. We watched it one of those times."
'There was a worm like that in a book," Bill said. "A movie, too," Cirocco said. "It was called Dune." Calvin seemed annoyed at the interruption, and glanced up to see if the blimp was still close.
"Anyway," he said, " I wondered if that worm might be what's giving Mnemosyne such a had time. Can you imagine what it'd do to tree roots? It could wreck the whole area in a couple years. The trees die, pretty soon the soil is going bad, can't hold water anymore, and right after that the rivers go underground. They must, you know; Ophion goes through Mnemosyne. You can see where it disappeared and where it comes up again. The flow isn't broken, but it doesn't do Mnemosyne any good. "
"So then I thought that nobody who was planning this place would have put a worm like that in it. It must not like the dark, or else it would go right through Oceanus and wreck the whole place. I think it's just luck that didn't happen, and if this place is .getting by on luck, it can't have too long to go. That worm's got to be a bad mutation, and that means there's nobody around with enough power to kill it and get things back on the track. I'm afraid I think the builders either died out or reverted to savagery, like those stories you were telling us, Bill."
"It's a possibility," Bill agreed. Cirocco snorted. "Sure it is. It's also possible you're reading too much into that worm. Maybe the people here like worms and couldn't bear to leave this one behind. Then he grew until he needed a bigger house, and they gave him Mnemosyne. Anyhow, we've still got to try to get to the hub."
"You do that," Calvin agreed. "I'm going to sail around the rim and see who's still alive down here. The builders could have taken a tumble, and still have enough technology to make a radio. If they do, "I'll come tell you, and you folks are home free."
"'You folks'?" Cirocco said. "Come on, Calvin. We're all in this together. just because you won't stick with us doesn't mean we'd abandon you here."
Calvin frowned, and would say no more.
Before Whistlestop got under weigh, Calvin tossed out a few smilers attached to parachutes. He was using them as weights to draw chutes out of the dispenser, because the bluish silk and the shrouds were the most useful items they had yet found.
Gaby folded the chutes and stowed them carefully, vowing that she would dress Cirocco like a queen. Cirocco resigned her- self to it. It was a small price to pay to keep Gaby happy.
And once again Titanic was launched, this time with a new sense of urgency. They had to contact a race advanced enough to help with antiseptic surgery or find a way to build a fire, and it had to he soon. The thing in her belly would not wait.
She thought about it a lot in the following days. Her revulsion was like a tight fist inside her. Most of it stemmed from the unknown nature of the beast that had planted its seed in her.
And yet abortion would have been her course even if she had been sure she was nurturing a human foetus. It had nothing to do with the idea of motherhood itself; she planned to become a mother when she retired from NASA, probably at age, forty or forty-five. She had a dozen cells in cryogenic suspension at O'Neil One, ready to be fertilized and implanted when she felt ready to give birth. It was a common precaution among astronauts, and even the Lunar and LS colonists: a hedge against radiation damage to reproductive tissue. She planned to raise a boy and a girl while old enough to be their grandmother.
But she would choose the time. Whether the father was a human and a lover, or a shapeless monstrosity in the bowels of Gaea, she would control her own reproductive organs. She was not ready, not by many years. Notwithstanding that Gaea was no place to be burdened with an infant, she had many things yet to do, endeavours where a child would be as great a problem as it would be here. And she fully intended to get out and do those things.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The support cables came in rows of five organized into groups of fifteen, and rows of three standing alone.
Each night region had fifteen cables associated with it. There was a row of five vertical cables that went straight up the hollow horn in the roof that was the inside of one of the spokes of Gaea's wheel. Two of these came to the ground in the highlands and were virtually a part of the wall, one north and the other south. One emerged from a point midway between the outer- most cables, and the other two were spaced evenly between the center and the edge cables.
In addition to these central cables, the night regions had two more rows of five that radiated from the spokes but attached in daylight areas, one row twenty degrees east and the other twenty degrees west of the central row. The spoke above Oceanus, for example, sent cables into Mnemosyne and Hyperion. The set of fifteen cables supported the ground under a region equal to over forty degrees of Gaea's circumference.
The cables that went from daylight through a twilight zone and into a night did so at a sharp angle to the ground, an angle that increased with altitude until approached sixty degrees at the point of juncture with the roof.
Then there were rows of three cables, associated solely with daylight areas. These cables were vertical, rising straight from the ground until they pierced the roof and emerged into space. It was the middle of Hyperion's row of three that Titanic and her crew now approached.
It grew more magnificent and more intimidating with each passing day. Even from Bill's camp it had seemed to lean over them. The lean was no more pronounced now, but the thing had grown in size. It hurt to look up at it. Knowing that a vertical column is five kilometers in diameter and 120 kilometers high is one thing, Seeing it is something else.
Ophion made a wide loop around the cable's base, starting at the south and going north before resuming its general eastward direction. It was a feature they had seen while still distant from the cable. The annoying thing about traveling in Gaea was that the landscape could be seen easily while they were far from it. The closer they approached the more foreshortened the view be- came, until surface features were flattened beyond interpretation. The land they traveled through always looked as flat as the Earth. It was only far away that it began to curve.