“As I hoped,” Ling said, nodding. “The layout’s standard. We may actually have a chance.”
“A chance for what?”
She turned back to look into the vault, which Lark now saw to be quite vast, filled with a maze of crisscrossing support beams … all of them draped with varied types of vegetation.
“A chance to survive,” she answered, and took his hand, drawing him inside.
A jungle surrounded them, neatly organized and regimented. Tier after tier of shelves and platforms preceded from view, serviced by machines moving slowly along tracks. Arrayed on this vast network there flourished a riot of living forms, broad leaves and hanging vines, creepers and glistening tubers. Water dripped along some of the twisted green cables, and the two of them rushea to the nearest trickle, lapping eagerly.
Now Lark understood the meaning of the aroma symbol that had led them here.
In the middle of hell, they had found a small oasis. At that moment, it felt like paradise.
Emerson
HE DID NOT LIKE GOING DOWN TO THE WATER. THE harbor was too frenzied.
It hardly seemed like a joyous reunion to see Kaa and other friends again. He recognized good old Brookida, and Tussito, and Wattaceti. They all seemed glad to see him, but far too busy to spend time visiting, or catching up.
Perhaps that was just as well. Emerson felt ashamed.
Shame that he could not greet them with anything more than their names … and an occasional snippet of song.
Shame that he could not help them in their efforts — hauling all sorts of junk out of the sea, instructing Uriel’s assistants, and sending the materials up by tram to the peak of Mount Guenn.
Above all, he felt shame over the failure of his sacrifice, back at that immense space city made of snow — that fluffy metropolis, the size of a solar system — called the Fractal System.
Oh, it seemed so noble and brave when he set forth in a salvaged Thennanin scout, extravagantly firing to create a diversion and help Streaker escape. With his last glimpse — as force fields closed in all around him — he had seen the beloved, scarred hull slip out through an opening in the vast shell of ice, and prayed she would make it.
Gillian, he had thought. Perhaps she would think of him, now. The way she recalled her Tom.
Then the Old Ones took him from the little ship, and had their way with him. They prodded and probed. They made him a cripple. They gave him forgetfulness.
And they sent him here.
The outlines are still hazy, but Emerson now saw the essential puzzle.
Streaker had escaped to this forlorn planet, only to be trapped. More hard luck for a crew that never got a break.
But … why … send … me … here?
That action by the Old Ones made no sense. It seemed crazy.
Everyone would be better off if he had died, the way he planned.
The whole population of the hoonish seaport was dashing about. Sara seemed preoccupied, spending much of her time talking rapidly to Uriel, or else arguing heatedly with the gray-bearded human scholar whose name Emerson could not recall.
Often a messenger would arrive, bearing one of the pale paper strips used for transcribing semaphore bulletins. Once, the urrish courier came at a gallop, panting and clearly shaken by the news she bore. An eruption of dismayed babble swelled as Emerson made out a single repeated word—“Biblos.”
Everyone was so upset and distracted, nobody seemed to mind when he indicated a wish to take the tram back up to Uriel’s forge. Using gestures, Sara made clear that he must come back before sunset, and he agreed. Clearly something was going to happen then. Sara made sure Prity went along to look after him.
Emerson didn’t mind. He got along well with Prity. They were both of a kind. The little chim’s crude humor, expressed with hand-signed jokes, often broke him up.
Those fishie things are cousins? she signaled at one point, referring to the busy, earnest dolphins. I was hoping they tasted good!
Emerson laughed. Earth’s two client-level races had an ongoing rivalry that seemed almost instinctive.
During the ride upslope, he examined some of the machinery Kaa and the others had provided at Uriel’s request. Most of it looked like junk — low-level Galactic computers, ripped out of standard consoles that might be hundreds or millions of years old. Many were stained or slimy from long immersion. The melange of devices seemed to share just one trait — they had been refurbished enough to be turned on. He could tell because the power leads were all wrapped in tape to prevent it. Otherwise, it looked like a pile of garbage.
He longed to squat on the floor and tinker with the things. Prity shook her head though. She was under orders to prevent it. So instead Emerson looked out through the window, watching distant banks of dense clouds roll ominously closer from the west.
He fantasized about running away, perhaps to Xi, the quiet, pastoral refuge hidden in a vast desert of color. He would ride horses and practice his music … maybe fix simple, useful tools to earn his keep. Something to help fool himself that his life still had worth.
For a while he had felt valued here, helping Uriel get results from the Hall of Spinning Disks, but no one seemed to need him anymore. He felt like a burden.
It would be worse if he returned to Streaker, a shell. A fragment. The chance of a cure beckoned. But Emerson was smart enough to know the prospects weren’t promising. Captain Creideiki once had an injury like his, and the ship’s doctor had been helpless to correct such extensive damage to a brain.
Perhaps at home, though … On Earth …
He painted the blue globe in his mind, a vision of beauty that ached his heart.
Deep inside, Emerson knew he would never see it again.
The tram docked at last. His mood lifted for a little while, helping Uriel’s staff unload cargo. Along with Prity, he followed the urs and qheuens down a long, twisty corridor toward a flow of warm air. At last they reached a big un der-ground grotto — a cave with an opening at the far end, facing north. Hints of color gleamed far beyond, reminding him of the Spectral Flow.
Workers scurried about. Emerson saw g’Kek teams busy sewing together great sheets of strong, lightweight cloth. He watched urs delicately adjust handmade valves as gray qheuens bent lengths of pipe with their strong claws. Already, breaths of volcanically heated air were flowing into the first of many waiting canopies, creating bulges that soon joined together, forming a globe-ended bag.
Emerson looked across the scene, then back at the salvaged junk the dolphins had donated.
Slowly, a smile spread across his face.
To his great satisfaction, the urrish smiths seemed glad when he silently offered to lend a hand.
Kaa
THE SKIES OPENED AROUND NIGHTFALL, LETTING down both rain and lightning.
The whale sub Hikahi delayed entering Port Wuphon until the storm’s first stinging drizzle began peppering the wharves and huts. The sheltered bay speckled with the impact of dense droplets as the submersible glided up a slanted coastal shelf toward an agreed rendezvous.
Kaa swam just ahead, guiding her through the narrow channel, between jagged shoals of demicoral. No one would have denied him the honor. I am still chief pilot, he thought. With or without my nickname.
The blunt-nosed craft mimicked his long turn around the sheltering headland, following as he showed the way with powerful, body-arching thrusts of his tail. It was an older piloting technique than wormhole diving, not highly technical. But Kaa’s ancestors used to show human sailors the way home in this manner, long before the oldest clear memory of either race.
“Another two hundred meters, Hikahi,” he projected using sonar speech. “Then a thirty-degree turn to port. After that, it’s three hundred and fifty meters to full stop.”
The response was cool, professional.
