by John Varley
Calvin was as good as his word. Two days after Cirocco hailed a passing blimp, Whistlestop hovered overhead and a blue flower blossomed with their wandering surgeon dangling beneath it. August was close behind him. They hit the water just off shore.
Cirocco had to admit that Calvin looked good. He was smiling, and there was a bounce in his step. He greeted everyone and didn’t seem to mind having been summoned. He wanted to talk about his travels, but Cirocco was too anxious to hear what he thought of the new situation. He turned very serious long before they had finished telling him about it.
“Have you had a period since we got here?” he asked August.
“No, I haven’t.”
“It’s been thirty days,” Cirocco said. “Is that unusual for you?” From the way August’s eyes widened, Cirocco assumed it was. “When was the last time you had intercourse with a man?”
“I’ve never.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
Calvin was quiet for a while, considering it. Then he frowned more deeply.
“What can I say? You all know it’s possible for a woman to skip a period for other reasons. Athletes sometimes skip a whole lot of them, and we’re not sure why. Stress can do it, emotional or physical. But I think the chances of it happening to all three of you at the same time are slim.”
“I would tend to agree,” Cirocco said.
“It could be dietary. There’s no way to know. I can tell you that the three of you, and … uh, April, were undergoing some convergence.”
“What’s that?” Gaby asked.
“It sometimes happens to women who live together, like on a spaceship where they’re in close quarters. Some hormonal signal tends to synchronize their menstruation. April and August have been in rhythm with each other for a long time, and Cirocco was only a few days off their cycle. Two early periods and she was in step. Gaby, you were getting erratic, if you recall.”
“I never paid much attention to it,” she said.
“Well, you were. But I can’t see what that would have to do with what we have here. I only brought it up to point out that strange things happen. It’s possible that you all just skipped one.”
“It’s also possible that we’re all knocked up, and I shudder to think who the father is,” Cirocco said, sourly.
“That’s just flat impossible,” Calvin said. “If you’re saying that the thing that ate us did it to you all … I can’t buy that. There isn’t another animal even on Earth that can impregnate a human. You tell me how this alien creature did it.”
“I don’t know,” Cirocco said. “That’s why it’s alien. But I’m convinced it got inside us and did something that might seem perfectly reasonable and natural to it, but is alien to what we know. And I don’t like it, and we want to know what you can do if we are pregnant.”
Calvin rubbed the tight curls on his chin, then smiled slightly. “They didn’t prepare me for virgin births at med school.”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
“Sorry. You and Gaby aren’t virgins, anyhow.” He shook his head in wonder.
“We were thinking of something more immediate and less sacred,” Gaby said. “We don’t want these babies, or whatever the hell they are.”
“Look, why don’t you wait another thirty days before you start getting excited? If you miss another period, call me again.”
“We’d like to get it over with now,” Cirocco said.
Calvin looked upset for the first time. “And I’m saying I won’t do it yet. It’s too risky. I might make the tools for a D. and C., but they’ll have to be sterilized. I don’t have a speculum, and the thought of what I might have to improvise to dilate the cervix is enough to give you nightmares.”
“The thought of what I’ve got growing in my belly is giving me nightmares,” Cirocco said, darkly. “Calvin, I don’t even want a human baby now, much less whatever this might be. I want you to do the operation.”
Gaby and August nodded their agreement, though Gaby looked slightly ill.
“And I say wait another month. It won’t make any difference. The operation would be the same, just scraping out the inner walls of the uterus. But maybe a month from now you’ll have found a way to make a fire, to boil some water, to sterilize whatever instruments I manage to make. Doesn’t that make sense? I assure you, I can do the operation with a minimum of risk, but only with clean tools.”
“I just want to get it over with,” Cirocco said, “I want to get this thing out of me.”
“Captain, take it easy. Settle down and think it out. If you get infected, I’m helpless. There’s different country to the east. You might find a way to make a fire. I’ll look, too. I was clear over in Mnemosyne when your call came. It could be there’s somebody who uses tools and could make a decent speculum and dilator.”
“They you’re leaving again?” she asked.
“Yes, I am, after I give you all a check-up.”
“I’m asking you again to stay with us.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Nothing Cirocco could say would change his mind, and though she flirted again with the idea of holding him, the same reasons still made that a bad idea. And one more thing had occurred to her since his departure; it might not be wise to harm someone with a friend as big as Whistlestop.
He pronounced all four of them fit and healthy, despite the missed periods of the women, then stayed a few hours, seeming to begrudge even that. He told them what they had seen in their travels.
Oceanus was a terrible place, frozen and forbidding. They had crossed it as quickly as possible. There was a humanoid race down there, but Whistlestop would not go down for a close look. They had thrown rocks from a wooden catapult even when the blimp was a kilometer above them. Calvin described them as human in shape, covered with long white hair. They shot first and asked questions later. He called them Yeti.
“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.
“It 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 granddaddy 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 on 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 bad 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 disapp
eared 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, 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 there. 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 underway, 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 herself 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 be 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 fetus. 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 L5 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, endeavors 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 outermost 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 it 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 became, 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.
“You want to tell me again why we’re doing this?” Gaby shouted ahead to Cirocco. “I don’t think I got it.”
The trip to the spoke was harder than they had expected. Before, they had followed the river when traveling through the jungle. It had made a natural highway. Now Cirocco knew the true meaning of impenetrable. The land was covered with an almost solid wall of vegetation, and their only cutting tools had been fashioned from their helmet rings. To make it worse, the ground rose steadily as they approached the cable.
“I could do with a little less griping,” she called back. “You know we have to do this. It should get easier soon.”
They had already learned some useful information. Most important so far was the fact that it really was a cable, composed of wound strands. There were over a hundred of the strands, each a good 200 meters in diameter.
The strands were tightly wound for most of their length, but half a kilometer from the ground they began to diverge, meeting the ground as separate entities. The base of the cable became a forest of huge towers, rather than a single gigantic one.
Most interesting of all, several of the strands were broken. They could see the twisted ends of two far above, curling like split ends in a shampoo ad.
As she broke through to clear land, Cirocco saw that whatever was under the soil, the rubbery substance the cables attached to, had stretched. Each strand had pulled out a cone of it, and the cones were heaped with sand. It was possible to see between the outer strands to a forest of them diminishing to blackness.
The land between them and the cable was sandy, with huge boulders scattered through it. The sand was reddish-yellow, and the rocks were sharp-edged, showing few signs of erosion. They looked as if they had been ripped violently from the ground.
Bill tipped his head back, following the cable to the glare of the translucent roof.
“My God, what a sight,” he said.
“Think of how the natives must see it,” Gaby said. “The cables from heaven that hold up the world.”
Cirocco shielded her eyes. “It’s no wonder they think of God as living up there,” she said. “Think of the puppet master who would use these strings.”
The ground was firm as they started up the slope, but the higher they went the more it began to slip. Nothing grew there to hold the soil together. It was sand, wet on top but dry underneath. It formed a crust which their feet broke into unstable, shifting plates that skittered down behind them.
C
irocco forged ahead, determined to get to the strand itself, but before long she was sliding back as far as she struggled up, still 200 meters from the top. Bill and Gaby hung back and watched her try to get a grip in the unstable ground. It was no use. She went down on her face and rolled back, sat up and glared at the cable, so tantalizingly close.
“Why me?” she asked, and slammed her fist on the ground. She wiped the sand from her mouth.
She stood, but her feet slipped again. Gaby reached for her arm and Bill nearly went down on top of them when he tried to help. They had lost another meter.
“So much for that,” Cirocco said, tiredly. “I still want to look around here, though. Anybody coming with me?”
No one was too enthusiastic, but they followed her down the slope and started into the forest of cable strands.
Each strand had its own pile of sand heaped around it. They were forced to follow a winding path between them. Tough, brittle weeds grew in the hard-packed soil at the bottoms of the giant molehills.
It grew dark as they worked their way in—dark, and much quieter than it had been in their weeks on the river. There was a far-away howling like wind through long, abandoned hallways, and far above, the tinkling of wind chimes. They heard their own footsteps, and the sound of each other’s breathing.
The sense of being in a cathedral was impossible to escape. Cirocco has seen a place like it before, among the giant Sequoias of California. It was greener there and not as quiet, but the stillness and the feeling of being lost among vast and indifferent beings was the same. If she saw a cobweb, she knew she would not stop running until she reached daylight.
They began to notice hanging shapes above them, like torn tapestries. They were motionless in the dead air, insubstantial shapes in the shadows high overhead. Fine dust drifted around them, eddied by the slightest breeze.