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68.
The atmosphere had a wild, rank freshness, with damp, loamy undertones.
The light was changeable and surprising. At times it could be wild, with gray rain clouds forming stormy, slow-motion corkscrews above. At the moment it was muted, as was the air around them. It was almost restful, a kind of greenish glow like that inside an ancient bottle toward evening, sepulchral, churchly, mesmeric—but Alex knew the dense vegetation around them could be harboring instant death for all he knew.
In a golden, dappled glade they broke a pair of saplings and used rounded stones lying in the lumpy hillside to grind one end of each sapling into spear points. Alex missed his sky island. So far, he had not spied any significantly high ground. Maybe up in the galleries under the city...? He looked up at the pinkly glowing round stone or ceramic wall that separated the city from its agricultural zone, several dozen square miles of so of the wall, pitted with age around the windows that were still intact. He wondered if any rooms up there that contained air. The city seemed to still have some atmospheric pressure, even if its air could not sustain life.
Alex and Maryan heard that trumpeting scream again, and returned to the urgency of fashioning their weapons.
A snapping noise, a twig breaking, came from the forest nearby. Maryan grabbed him by the arm, and they ran for cover behind a berm near the city wall.
“What was it?” he said.
“Did you see anything?”
“I didn’t.”
“Sounded like a fairly large animal,” she said.
They waited. They minutes went by. They lay side by side, peering over the top of the berm with their newly made weapons ready. Sweat rimmed Alex’s forehead, stung his eyes, ran down his cheeks.
Nothing.
Slowly, they rose. “Can’t stay here forever,” she said.
“Wonder if it gets darker or lighter,” he said looking into the distance.
She put one hand on his shoulder and pointed with her other hand. “Look through the haze, far away.”
He did. “My God.” Distantly, he saw a dark smudge, and a number of spattered lights. “There it is. Outer space.”
She pressed his shoulder lightly. “Keep looking, Alex. See it? We’re turning. This whole thing really is revolving.”
“Looks like were not going to point at the sun directly,” he said. “They probably have mirrors and filters down there so they can control the amount and quality of light coming in.”
She pointed up. “There are some secondary light sources.”
His gaze followed where her finger pointed, and he saw big squarish shafts of light that seemed to come right out of the ground near the city wall a few miles further along. “Maybe we should head toward the light.”
She shrugged. “What have we got to lose?”
Jogging at a light clip, they carried their spears loosely at the ready, on a constant lookout for danger. Keeping the wall to their right seemed to offer at least some kind of protected flank. Alex noticed that their Earth-toned muscles carried them forward with considerable strength for now, although they might lose their tone in the lesser gravity here. The air was rich and didn’t tire them. They were used to surviving off the land, and this space-bound forest seemed to consist of vegetation remarkably like that they’d known on the planet. Soon enough, they became aware of small birds, insects, and tiny mammals scurrying among tree roots. Whatever dangers one might fear, at least this place was teeming with life.
They came to a place in the wall where water gushed out in a strong, thin stream. Approaching cautiously, circling around to outflank any possible predators, they found that the life forms enjoying the water were small and looked harmless. The water splashed out from a hole in the wall, jetted about six feet in a glittering, twirling arc, and splashed into a small pond the water had long ago carved out of rock and sand. The pond was covered with lily pads and contained fish that raised their open mouths to capture insects that buzzed loudly in a sepulchral glade under thick tree cover. Alex peered into the cool gloom and noticed vines knotted around each other above, with huge thorns. Other than that, it was delightful to listen to the splashing of the water and watch small birds taking turns flying up to the fountain and fluttering their wings as they drank in mid-flight.
“Looks safe to drink,” Alex told Maryan. Covering each other’s backs, they took turns drinking thirstily. Alex wished they had a container to carry water with them. All in good time, he was sure. From the rust stains around the mouth of the water source, he deduced that there had once been a metal pipe there. At that moment, another snapping sound echoed through the forest paths nearby, and Alex felt that creeping feeling again. “Something is watching us,” he whispered.
“Or someone,” she said with a shudder. “I feel my skin crawling.”
“We shouldn’t hang out around a water hole. The whole neighborhood comes here to drink.”
She snapped her fingers in a sudden insight. “We can lurk nearby and see what lives in this area.”
“That would be a good safe thing to do. You hungry yet?”
“Starving.”
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