Resurgence

Discomfort? Ben felt rage. He wished that he could be anywhere but here. To everyone else in the party he was a useless dead weight. He had missed his chance. He could have walked thirty meters to the transfer field. Given the choice he would rather be back in the middle of Iceworld, talking to Guardian of Travel. They had left before learning everything that the ancient Builder construct might be able to tell them. There was some sort of super-vortex at the heart of this very planet. Suppose that Ben had asked to be sent there, rather than to the surface? That might have thrown him a million or a billion lightyears. It might have killed him—Guardian of Travel had not described it as a transport vortex. So it killed him. In his present mood he didn’t care.

“Are you feeling all right?” Darya’s voice itself seemed to come from a distance of a million lightyears. The walking car had reached the top of the hill and was making its slow way down the other side.

“If you mean, do I hurt, I don’t.” Ben saw towering objects ahead, shaped like the truncated cones that dotted the area where they had arrived. But these were ten times the size. “If you mean, do I feel pleased at the idea I’m going to be spending the night inside this crapheap, I still don’t.”

“You won’t be. None of us will.”

The car was lumbering toward one of the squat towers. Darya halted it ten meters away.

“Can you walk? If not I’ll get some help.”

“I can walk.” Or die trying

. Ben eased himself to an upright position and carefully climbed out of the car. Now his right side did hurt, no doubt about it. Maybe that was a good thing. He had heard that when broken bones were knitting together it was the most painful time. True or not, he moved like an old man.

“A few more steps.” Darya was on one side of him, and now Hans Rebka walked on the other. He brushed away their offers of help.

The outside of the cone structure was an overlapping layer of giant leaves, each one as tall as a human and much wider. As Ben shambled forward, Teri Dahl pulled one leaf aside and gestured him through.

“Home, sweet home, Ben. At least for the time being. In you go. It’s safe and dry.”

He saw that she and the others were not wearing suits, and he envied them. He would love to get out of his own, even though he knew that would be a disaster. It was working hard on his behalf.

The layers of great leaves ran four deep. Once past them Ben stood in a wide space, dimly lit by light diffusing in from high above. The structure was supported by a thick central trunk at least a meter wide. The floor was dry, proof that the outer leaf layers were dense enough to keep out the rain that seemed to fall every few hours. The floor was bare, but not naturally so. Someone had been busy with housekeeping of an unusually gruesome kind. A stack of small mummified bodies stood at the far side of the clearing.

“Don’t worry. We’ll get them out of here in the morning.” Teri Dahl had followed Ben in and seen what he was looking at. “They’re not Marglotta, they’re some form of wild animal. We think they made those, and they probably lived up there.”

Ben turned his head back, feeling the pull on his ribs as he did so. Ten meters above him, the inside of the hollow cone bore drooping interlaced layers of thick white fibers, spreading out from the central trunk and connecting to the outer leaves. Above them, Ben could see bunches of rounded globes, glowing golden-orange even in the faded light, each one as big as his fist.

“They’re edible,” Teri said, “but climbing up to get them is a pain. We could do it if we had to, but Hans Rebka says there are better things to eat within easy walking distance. Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

Ben didn’t have an easy walking distance, and he was not sure he could ever be comfortable again. He moved to the place Teri had indicated and sat down on a pile of springy undergrowth that someone had cut and dragged in from outside.

“Not luxury, but a lot better than getting drenched,” Teri said. “Hans Rebka claims that the really heavy rain will come at night, when the temperature drops a few degrees.” She came to sit beside him. “We have food, we have shelter, and we certainly have water.”

The others of the group had one by one entered, until now all stood or sat inside the cone-house. Julian Graves, coming in just in time to hear Teri’s final words, added, “Probably more water than we’d like. We are safe enough here, but we have no idea how we might leave the planet unless some others of the expedition show up. I wish I understood how our two groups came to arrive in the same place, when we took such different paths. Fortunately we need be in no hurry to learn that, or to leave. We can take our time.”

Ben saw the others nodding, until Darya Lang said abruptly, “Sorry to be the company killjoy, but that’s just not true. Marglot might seem safe enough, and in one sense it is. But we can’t stay here very long. If we do we’ll be in deep trouble.”