She unclipped her torch from her belt and played it over the vertical surface below. Seen up close, Jao’s “smooth face” was pocked with great pits and hollows. Looking at this cross section of a world, Bram could see where the crust began, a few miles below, like frosting on a slice of cake. The artificial material beneath was thinly covered with dust, and all sorts of domes, bulges, and the craters of burst bubbles poked above the rubbish of the sundered planet that had been used as a starter.
Closer at hand, vacuum welding over the eons had cemented a rocky cliffside in place. But here, too, even the languorous stresses that the diskworld was heir to had from time to time torn great chunks of material loose and left a pattern of cracks and cavities.
Ame’s beam found one of the holes. “I wonder bow deep—” she began, and stopped.
A pair of animal eyes shone in the beam of light for a startled second, then whisked out of sight.
“Oh!” Ame squeaked. She dropped the torch. It seemed to hang in space beside her; the light beam revolving in lazy circles. Ame recovered before the torch had drifted down more than an inch or two, caught it by the wrong end, and got it pointed at the cave again.
“Did you see it, too?” she whispered.
“Yes,” Bram said.
There was life in this place. And it was shy.
They stayed clinging to their dizzy perch until Lydis’s radioed warnings about their reserve air supply became too impatient to ignore. But the beady, luminous eyes never reappeared.
“It’s hunkered at the back of the cave, waiting for us to go away,” Ame said.
“Or there’s a way out through the rear,” Bram suggested. “There may be a whole system of burrows.”
She had tried the light in every opening it would reach. Far below, at the limit of the beam, they thought they saw a pair of pinpoints of reflected light for the briefest flash, but it was impossible to be sure. Finally, when Lydis began making threats, they gave up and hauled themselves back along the gigantic crane arm to the security of the rim.
They had left the walker parked a short distance away in a square at the intersection of two avenues of raised gravel. As they approached it, there was an explosion of movement around it, and dozens of small furry forms streaked away into hiding.
Bram gave a start. The little beasts were gone in an instant, before he had time to react.
“We scared them off,” he said.
“They must have been watching us the whole time, everywhere we went,” Ame said. “The ones here got up the courage to investigate the walker when we were gone so long.”
A wary little face peered out from around a block of stone, then jerked back as Ame’s light beam found it. Bram had a quick impression of huge round eyes, button nose, tiny mouth, and the flash of a bushy tail.
He found himself laughing. “They’re curious,” he said.
“They’re descended from terrestrial life,” Ame said. “That’s for certain. Like every picture I’ve ever seen. Everything in pairs—eyes, ears, limbs—just like us! And they’re furred—they’re not only vertebrates but mammals, too!”
“But how do they breathe vacuum?”
“I wonder … they’ve had millions of years to adapt to this place. Have you ever heard of whales?”
“I know the word. Stands for something big.”
“It was a real animal once. It adapted to a new environment, too. It learned to go for long stretches without breathing.”
They were at the walker now. The biovehicle was in the same kneeling position they had left it in. Bram gave Ame a boost, and she hoisted herself up to the passenger bubble. Then she froze.
“Bram-tsu! Look!”
He levitated to a position beside her, and she grabbed his arm. One of the little animals was trapped inside the bubble, scurrying about frantically, looking for a way out.
He stopped her as she as about to insert herself into the bubble. “Wait. Let’s see if we can shoo that thing out of there first.”
“Why? What harm could it do?”
“I don’t like the look of those little teeth.”
“It’s more afraid of us than we are of it. Oh, look at it, Bram-tsu! It’s so small! It’s just a little baby! It must have gotten separated from its mother. It’s terrified.”
Without waiting for a response, she swan-dived through the lips of the bubble. Bram followed, letting out at least a pound of air pressure in his haste.
“The poor thing,” Ame said, reaching for the small creature. It cowered against the far side of the transparent bubble, chittering at them. It was a little roly-poly thing, a ball of soft brown fluff with enormous golden eyes that were mostly round pupil.
“Ame, don’t touch it.”
“Nonsense! It couldn’t bite me through my vacuum suit even if it tried.”
She picked the creature up. It squirmed in her grasp, then seemed to give up. A moment later it was in the crook of her arm, clinging to her with four tiny grasping paws.
“It wants its mother,” Ame said. “Look, Bram-tsu, there’s a third eyelid for when it’s outside.”
He bent closer and saw the transparent nictitating membrane flick across the golden eye when the creature blinked at him.
“And little flaps for the ears, too,” he added, noticing the folds of pink flesh that creased reflexively to close off the entrance to the ear canal when he leaned too close, as if the little animal were trying to shut him out of its world.
“I think you’re scaring it,” Ame told him.
“No, it’s getting used to me.”
There were similar little flaps for the nostrils, but the creature’s nose twitched as it sniffed at him, and the flaps stayed open.
“I’ve seen pictures of fur, but I never dreamed it could be so soft,” Ame said dreamily. “Sort of like the twins’ hair, only all over. It makes you want to stroke it.”
“Ame, you keep those gloves on.”
“All right,” she said, patting the little beast with a gauntleted hand. It responded to the touch by snuggling up closer against her and wrapping its tail around her arm.
“We’ve got to start back,” Bram said. “We’ll come back and study them.”
“Jorv will be pleased,” Ame said. “All of a sudden, zoology isn’t a theoretical science anymore.”
“We’d better leave it here. We don’t have the facilities for keeping it alive during the trip back to the tree. It might not survive.”
“Bram-tsu, I love you. You’re a biologist, but it never even occurred to you to take it back as a specimen.”
“Well, I…” He flushed, “There’ll be plenty of time to study these animals at our leisure, find out what they eat, take tissue samples without hurting them.”
It was the Nar influence, he supposed—growing up among beings whose respect for any sort of conscious life was innate. Bram hoped the human race wouldn’t lose that trait with the passage of generations, but he had heard a few rather cold-blooded remarks from some of the younger tree dwellers.
“I hate to give it up,” Ame said. “It’s so cuddly and cute. You know, Bram-tsu, it’s all fluff. Underneath, it’s all scrawny.”
Reluctantly, she pried the small clinging creature from her body and eased it through the lips of the bubble. Bram saw the little fleshy flaps wink into place over ears and nostrils, and the creature’s fur seemed to puff up still further. Then it was floating to the ground with chubby grace, its tiny prehensile paws outstretched for contact.
It scampered off immediately. A larger beast darted from a cranny to intercept it, bowled it over, and nudged it with a button nose to a perch on her back.
“It’s found its mother, anyway,” Ame said with relief.
The mother beastie stood up on her haunches to bare her teeth at Ame and Bram, then scurried away with the baby fluffball clinging to her fur.
“I discovered them, and I’m going to name them,” Ame said. “I’m going to call them Cuddlies.”
CHAPTER 8
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br /> The airless streets were filled with space-suited tourists from the tree these days. They gawked at the massive excavated buildings, hunted for souvenirs in the rubble, and generally got in the archaeologists’ way. About a quarter of the population could be found on the surface of the diskworld at any given time, and the proportion was increasing as quickly as pressurized accommodations could be provided and atmosphere plants cloned.
Bram strolled down the broad, roughed-out avenue with Mim at his side, trying to keep his feet on the ground and rubbernecking like anybody else. A lot had been accomplished since his last visit; duties aboard the tree had kept him busy there for several Tendays. The tops of more buildings had emerged from the gray dust, and the tallest of them now stood at a height of twenty feet or more.
“It’s coming to life again,” Mim said, reading his thoughts. “You can almost imagine what it must have been like.”
“Hundreds of thousands of people going about their business—more than ever existed on the Father World, let alone gathered in one place,” Bram agreed. “We’ve found shops, theaters, even a sports arena where they played a game in midair with a ball and stick, and you were out of bounds when your feet touched the ground. And we’ve only begun to dig.”
Mim said wonderingly. “So many! As many as the Nar! And it looks crowded to me with only a few thousand here!”
“Most of the shirt-sleeve traffic between buildings would have been through the tunnel system. Still, it must have been pretty lively on the surface.”
Two space-suited people walked by, bearing a huge slab of granite that seemed to be covered with bas-reliefs. They were walking almost normally, thanks to the tons of mass that kept their boots pressed to the ground. One of them freed an arm to wave at Bram and Mim as they passed. The slab dipped, but the person caught it before it floated too far down out of its inertial path.
Bram waved back, frowning within his helmet. “I wonder where they got that,” he said. “They’re supposed to leave things in place till an archaeologist can have a look at the site. There are too many helpful amateurs wandering around.”
“Does it matter?”
“Very much, apparently. Ame says that the way finds are sited tells them as much as the finds themselves. And with bones especially, there’s a question of missing pieces.”
“Those long-footed skeletons?”
“She’s got some fairly complete ones. There’s a question about the dating. She sent word that there’s something she wants to discuss with me.”
“And lots of Cuddly bones?”
“Yes, and some they can’t identify. She thinks that they may have been pets of Original Man.”
Mim gave a subdued shudder and linked arms with Bram. “Ugh—bones! Still, it makes a good excuse for an excursion. The view gets more spectacular all the time.”
They both looked toward the horizon at the half-risen disk. It was a swollen red orb that stretched across most of the sky, its oblique angle squashing it out of shape. A smaller disk, back-to, made a black shadow across the glowing field. With the overhead moon brightening up, the diskworld was a reasonably well lit place these days—about on a par with the Father World nights when the lesser sun had been in the sky.
They had been in the system long enough for the diskworld’s rotation to bring this segment of the rim down almost to the plane of orbit. Yggdrasil, after some complicated maneuvering, was about a quarter diameter behind them again and catching up fast. At present, the trip from the tree took eleven days, the trip back even longer, but that didn’t stop the excursionists. With Yggdrasil renewed and the crust of the diskworld itself to tap, there was fuel literally to burn.
They continued their shuffling stroll. A Cuddly popped up out of a hole in the ground in front of them, sat up on its haunches, and gave them a fearless, big-eyed stare. The little animals had quickly allowed their natural curiosity to overtake their initial caution of human beings, and now they were all over the place.
Mim gave a cry of delight. “Aren’t they cute? Look at those clever little paws! They’re almost human! Can we take one back with us?”
“Why not? Half the people on the tree seem to have adopted a Cuddly. Or vice versa. They’re easy to tame, they eat anything, and they’re nice to have around.”
There had been some fear at first that the little burrowing beasts would spread uncontrolled through Yggdrasil’s vessels and passageways and perhaps interfere with the tree’s internal ecology. But that hadn’t been the case. The Cuddlies seemed to prefer human company, and they hung around the living quarters, attaching themselves to a particular person or family. They were affectionate little things, rubbing against a person’s leg until picked up and stroked, or even forcing matters by climbing up themselves to an arm or a shoulder. They were also shameless little beggars. Few people could resist them. They had quickly discovered all the outside exits, and during Yggdrasil’s “night” they liked to prowl about in naked space, among the leaves and branches. They could go an hour or more without breathing, living off the compressed oxygen in their accessory lungs or trapped in their amazing fur with its overlapping erectile follicles.
“Oh, look, I think it’s begging for food,” Mim exclaimed. “Do you have anything with you?”
“Afraid not. I had half a cornwich in one of my seal-pockets, left over from the shuttle snack bin, but I threw it away when we helmeted up.”
The big-eyed little furball, its coat fluffed out for vacuum, was balancing itself on one foot and its tail, holding out its right paw and right foot in tandem, like a pair of tiny human hands. It held the pose for a long moment, decided that Bram and Mim weren’t worth bothering with, and scooted off to find a better prospect.
“Oh!” Mim said, disappointed. “What are they, Bram? Were they brought here by Original Man?”
“Ame doesn’t think so. They’re too recent. She’s found the bones of what seems to be a transitional form they may have evolved from—and that only goes back about twenty million years. Before that, there’s a gap. All we know so far is that they have terrestrial DNA.”
The avenue they were walking along was one of the spokes of the great circular plaza that centered on the moon ladder—the initial dig had started here, and so far about a square mile of the surrounding city had been dug up. Now, as Bram and Mim emerged into the open spaces of the plaza, they both looked up.
A climber was coming down from the moon, an angular leggy shape that was silhouetted against the eerie red glow of the rising disk. As they watched, the artificial creature detoured around the stalled moon car, stepping carefully over the smooth surface and finding a foothold on the rope below. The climber was wearing a transparent ten-legged space suit that had been designed by, of all people, Marg; it included an extra tuck of material that fit over the passenger cup and billowed out to provide a habitable bubble for the five-hour climb.
“They’ve found Cuddlies on the moon, too,” Bram said. “Whole colonies of them. They’ve been established there for millions of years—and apparently they still travel back and forth. We’ve found fresh footprints around the rope. How they do it is a mystery. Even with a stop at the turnover station. Young Jorv thinks they have some way of taking extra air along, but that seems farfetched, clever little beasts though they are.” He gave a wide grin. “Of course, now they’re spoiled—they hitch rides with us in the climbers.”
“Are they digging up there, too?”
“Yes. We’ve found the remains of some tremendous engineering structures—extrusion devices on a scale that can hardly be imagined. Evidently, the original engineers played out the supporting filament from both ends when they were manufacturing this world.”
“So Ang told me. Jao can hardly contain himself now that his theory of suspension construction’s been vindicated.”
“We’re trying to verify it at this end, too. We’ve sunk several shafts at a slant and found that the moonrope extends as far down as we’re able to reach. We’ve gone past the crust now�
��it’s easy with digging machines in this low gravity—and penetrated through to the foamed understructure. We have to proceed carefully, though, to avoid disturbing the Cuddly burrows. They’re thick in the vicinity of the rope—it seems to be a main travel route downward. When the excavators started, they burst some of the bubbles and let the air out.”
“Oh, Bram, did they—”
“Relax. You can’t kill a Cuddly by taking away its air—they had plenty of time to squeeze through their little tunnels to the adjoining cavities. We messed up their gardens, though, No wonder the little rascals are such beggars.”
“Gardens?”
“Yes, we’ve uncovered a whole ecology down there. Jorv thinks that the ancestors of the Cuddlies carried seeds back from their surface foraging expeditions to the old granaries and warehouses of Original Man. Buried the seeds in their dens or excreted them—and some were still viable enough to sprout. Millions of years of evolution would have done the rest. And they would have carried bacteria, fungus spores—even algae—too. There’s insect life down there as well, marvelously adapted to the environment.”
“How can things grow in the dark?”
“There’s no visible light, true, except for bioluminescence. But the whole interior of the diskworld is suffused with infrared because of its energy-trapping structure, and the plant life’s learned to use it. For that matter, the Cuddlies themselves see quite well in the far red. Jorv suspects that the Cuddlies may even take a hand in cultivating some of the edible plants. That’s not unheard of in the animal kingdom. Something called an ant once did it—grew a fungus crop in its nest. Planted it, fertilized it, even chewed leaves to mulch it.”
“Could the Cuddlies be that smart?”
“It would be instinctual behavior. A survival characteristic developed through the ages. Mim, we’re finding out so much about terrestrial life from the books and microrecords in the libraries we’ve unearthed and from studying the organisms in the Cuddly burrows. Earth must have been a wonderful place! There were flying things that wove nests, rodents that built dams! Animal societies that cared for their young cooperatively! And we’re a part of that richness and diversity!”
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