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69.
The station had its succession of days and nights, though unlike anything Alex and Maryan had seen on Earth.
At periods resembling Earth days, the light would fade and grow strong again. This happened in a slow, mostly imperceptible fashion. It was noticeable in the way that central mass of clouds seemed to darken, and the light grew murky. It was noticeable in the way the air would lighten again at the same slow steady pace, until some corners of the clouds sparkled with light. There was a lot of moisture in the clouds, and large patches of them were dark bluish-gray, almost black in certain angles of light. Others were pleasant billows of white cumulus with golden highlights when the noonday sunlight poured through whatever mirrors and filters closed up the far end of this world cylinder.
Sometimes it rained. Usually it was a misty drizzle that descended into the treetops and seemed almost to emanate from the ground. At other times it was a brief but driving rain that seemed to curve slightly even while falling straight. Sometimes a wind, reacting to changes between hot and cold areas in the atmosphere, would drive spiraling, needle-like droplets that stung the face and neck. Most of the time, a near-tropical stillness sweltered over the dark forests and swamps. The stillness was punctuated now and then with an animal cry, and there was a perpetual low twitter of birds and rustle of air in grasses and leaves.
Here and there, thick billows of mist roved over still ponds and streams. Parts of the station were more thinly forested than others. In some places, particularly on low rolling hills, the trees were sparse and the ground tended to be covered with lower bushes and patches of flowers. Always hovering on the periphery, however, was the thick forest. Some of it was pine. Many groves of trees were deciduous. The hillocks varied from high to low by a matter of as little as six feet or as much as sixty feet.
Then again, in places, the hard undersurface of the station had become visible near the bottom of a ravine or in the side of a hill covered by tree roots and hanging moss. It a stony, battered fundament that was very durable like ancient concrete, and helped explain the station’s longevity.
Alex and Maryan began a roving existence that reminded him of how they had lived after their escape from Nizin and his horde. After several days of climbing up and down hillocks near the wall, they found themselves back at their starting point. By Alex’s estimate, they had traveled a little over fifteen miles. It had been at times tortuous going, to get past swampy, thorny, impenetrable areas. In several places they had found holes gouged in the wall long ago. The holes were so old that their edges were rounded and blackened. Their edges were softened by years of soft wind and water. As a finishing touch, the holes were sealed with that spider goo to a texture like dirty glass and beeswax. In several spots, Alex and Maryan found the pitted skeletons of boats similar to the one in which they had arrived. Two such boats were embedded in the wall along with vines and flying blankets and other debris sealed with spider-spit superglue. Other wreckage (so ancient and jumbled it wasn’t clear if it represented one or two craft) lay half-buried in soil and flowers on a low hill over which butterflies fluttered. Nearby was a balcony cocooned in debris.
Alex’s mind turned elsewhere as he found his breath short and his legs aching. “Our strength will decline as we get spoiled by this gravity,” he said. “We need to get back to Earth.”
“Meanwhile,” she countered pragmatically, worriedly watching thunder clouds a mile away, “we could climb up the wall and reconnoiter.”
Tthey clambered up the sloping wall in low gravity to a place where once a series of balconies had stair-stepped, giving city dwellers lovely views of sunsets falling in long over orderly miles of farmland, neatly tended orchards, country roads, rivers and ponds, the entire vista. Alex and Maryan climbed up the balcony ledges, aware that they would be visible to any predator like tiny specks from miles away on the vast grayish expanse dotted with other specks that had been windows and portals. They went slowly, putting their fingers in the little square holes in the stone where long-gone railings had rusted and disappeared, blown away like dust in the breezes of eons. Here and there, they surprised a flying thing that flew off in a sudden explosion of flapping wings and angry cries. Now and then, a rat-like animal scurried away with finely rippling long tail.
“If we can find one of those silvery boats,” Alex said, squatting on a high ledge and squinting toward a distant amber dawn, “we could be back on the Earth in an hour or two. I really miss a fresh breeze and the wide open blue sky.”
“Me, too.” Maryan clung to a half-crumbled balcony nearby, as they hovered 200 feet above the jungle treetops. “Maybe there aren’t any more boats.”
“It’s possible,” he said grudgingly. “The station has been sending them down for ages. I’m surprised they lasted this long. That last one was a wreck on the inside.”
She nodded. “You’d think they would have crumbled from age.”
As they sat outside the lair they were considering living in, daylight grew brighter. The proposed new home was little more than a niche with a leafy, overgrown collapsed hotel room behind them. Alex peered in and dreaded to think what might dwell in such a black place. He could make out thick glass, dark with age, that fronted on the near-vacuum of the city beyond.
Alex and Maryan gazed at the emerging new day. Unlike the other days they’d experienced so far, the light did not stop growing in that bluish haze they’d come to know as daylight. Instead, a yellowish brightness flared. It made the long cylinder of the station look more like a dark tunnel. Clouds swirling in the center obscured the vision somewhat, but Alex and Maryan recognized a looming apparition beyond the far, broken end of the cylinder.
“The moon!” Maryan said.
“Look how close it is. You can look down into the craters.”
“Looks so close...” She frowned as she pondered. “Fifty thousand miles, I bet. You can see the curvature up around the top, and space beyond.”
“No atmosphere, no haze,” he added, “so the transition between moon and space is abrupt.” The distant mountains stood out bright and stark against the black nothingness beyond. Stars spattered the blackness in close and endless profusion.
Maryan said: “I think it pretty much confirms what I’ve been thinking. The station sits at L5. That’s one of the two major Lagrange points, caught between the gravity fields of the Earth and the Moon.”
Alex added: “Can’t go up, can’t go down, and if it drifts sideways for any reason it gently drifts back into position at L5. No orbital decay, no gradual flaming descent into Earth’s atmosphere...perfect design for a station meant to last forever.”
She pointed. “Look, something is happening.”
As they watched, a dot of white light moved in a straight path over the surface of the Moon.
“Definitely is a line down there,” Alex said. He’d only begun to notice the fine hairline because of the dot moving with increasing speed among pale rays and olivine plains. The line stretched over gray dust fields without touching any craters.
She said: “Looks like a long road or a track maybe. I can’t make it out for sure.”
“There goes that dot of light,” he said. The pinprick of light seemed suddenly to lift from the surface and wink out of existence. “Think it blew up?”
“Possible. Could be a meteorite that somehow flew just past the Moon at a low altitude.”
“Or a ship? A boat maybe?”
She looked at him. “You think they are launched from the Moon?”
He exhaled, baffled, and shook his head. “Anything is possible. Our people are extinct, or they’d be around, inhabiting their city, this whole station, growing crops, and they certainly wouldn’t have surrendered Earth to the Siirk.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Ah...” He looked down at his stomach. “Back to reality. Yes. And thirsty. I hate to keep climbing down to that watering hole every time we need a drink.” He sighed. “Starting over again is a drag.” He brightened. “We can probably scavenge some simple things like knives and cups if we can figure out how to get into the dead city.”
She nodded. “Yes, without suffocating or imploding or whatever.”
He grinned. “You can do it. Just hold your breath.”
“Your mama, pal. You’re the one that’s full of hot air, so you go.” She made a wry face. “We don’t even have enough sunlight or heat to fire a clay pot or two. We’ll have to use a hollowed tree trunk to store water.”
“If we can find a sharp rock suitable for scraping and cutting.”
“This isn’t easy,” she said with a long sigh, casting her eyes down.
“Cheer up. I’ll go down and hunt a little lunch. That will make us feel better.” He started down the wall.
“I’m coming with you,” she said with a near-wail of anxiety. “If we go, we go together.” She looked nervously over her shoulder. “I don’t even want to think about being alone if those spiders come climbing down.”
He dreaded the big crab-like creatures too, but he brushed his fear aside. “I think they just fix things. As long as we don’t look broken, they won’t come to lick us with their goo.”
“Ee-yoo-www,” she said, wrinkling her face.
They climbed down the face of the wall in the light gravity. Alex felt the momentum of the massive wall and the jolt as he jumped to the spinning inner surface of the cylinder. They followed the dry higher ground, avoiding the mucky dark marshy lower areas. They held their spears ready and moved carefully through the gloom with its drifting wisps of fog. The silence was interrupted by a low susurrus from insects humming over the water, and the scurrying of tiny feet—mammal and otherwise—in the trees around them. The light above was almost sunny as it shone in the laundry-twirl of clouds at the gravity-free center of the cylinder but down here it was still that somber coppery twilight. The leaves, however, were turned fully upward and glistened with the light that drove the photosynthesis in their veins. Lower to the ground, the leaves were huge, to catch as much light as possible, while higher up they were small as the plants optimized their exposure to the wan light.
Alex and Maryan had long ago overcome their ancient prejudices. They considered it an invigorating treat to capture a large beetle, mercifully kill it by tearing its tiny head off, and break it in half. Holding the broken carapace up, they could suck the liquid from its interior the same way they treated any lucky finds of bird eggs. Anything to get the protein and fat their bodies craved. “I’d really like a chocolate easter egg sometime with vanilla filling,” Maryan said wistfully as she tossed a large, empty beetle aside. “Or a nice ice cream, you know, vanilla on the inside and dark, brittle chocolate around the outside.”
“Stop torturing us. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find some cacao plants,” Alex said. “I’m not sure we’d recognized them if we fell over them.”
“Do you smell something odd?”
He sniffed and wrinkled his nose. “Something faint. Dead.”
“Let’s be careful,” she whispered.
They trod one step at a time along a grassy ridge. They went up a slope and emerged in a wide brushy area. For a moment, Alex had the illusion of being earthside. The intense moonlight flooded the air, making the clouds shine bright-blue with whitish trailing wisps. The hillock smelled of flowers, and the ground felt firm and dry under Alex’s feet. In the same moment, both he and Maryan caught a stronger whiff of that dreadful smell.
“What is that stench?” she said holding her nose.
“It’s coming from over here,” Alex said. Against his will, curiosity and instinct drew him to an area of taller grass along one side of the hillock, and there he spied what looked like a reclining form. “Here it is.”
“That’s it,” Maryan added with finality as they clung together and stepped closer. The corpse in the grass was that of a tiny person, maybe half of Maryan’s size. It was neither Siirk nor Takkar, but a new species. At first glance, this looked like the body of a young boy, with fine silvery hair on its limbs and chest as well as its head and face, but the head was large in proportion to the body and the shape was like that of the Takkar, blunt and angular. From the wrinkles on the cheeks and around the eyes and mouth, as well as the webbing of fine scars on the coarsened hands, Alex suspected this was a full grown adult. “Look at the skull,” Maryan said, still holding her nose as she stepped around the body.
“Nizin or some of his people,” Alex said. “That has to be their handiwork.” The creature’s skull had been severed on top and its brain was gone. The skull was empty except for a mass of silvery ant-like insects swarming around the remaining edible scraps inside. Alex knelt and examined the edges of the skull. “It was bashed open, then pried apart. Look, you can see gnawing marks around the edges.”
“Can it be?” Alex whispered with a pang of horror. He pictured the Siirk leader with his amulet, rubbing his belly in cruel and ruthless self-love.
“Do you suppose Nizin is alive?” Maryan said in a hushed voice. Her eyes were large, no doubt remembering the horror of their capture and journey with the Siirk.
Alex nodded reluctantly. “It’s possible. We just thought he vanished into space but it makes sense—if we got here in one piece. I almost hope it’s just him, and not a whole bunch of predators like him.”
“I will bet he’s up here, looking for a way down and killing everything he finds for food or fun.”
“I almost hope you’re right,” Alex said rising. He held his spear close. “If we can find him before he finds us, we can probably have him for lunch instead of the other way around.”
Maryan made a face. “I don’t mind eating bugs, but I wouldn’t want his meat in my stomach.”
“Yes, I think I’d rather go hungry too.”
They slipped back down the jungle trail heading back to their roost. Along the way, she said: “We can’t really go back up the wall. We’re too visible.”
Alex shuddered. “What were we thinking, exposing ourselves like that?”
“What we really should do is go to the other end of the station. If he’s operating down around here, he might never get to the other end.”
He stopped and pulled her into the shade of a large tree. “Let’s try our best to find a boat. I think they are all down here, on the city end. There is probably nothing on the other end.”
She looked uncertain. “You mean in the Reception Center we flew past? It’s all dead in there.”
“The boats have to be controlled by an automated process, particularly if it turns out to be true that they get launched from the moon somehow. There can’t be humans left alive. All we’ve seen has been these canned Spectors and Nectars.”
“But I’m afraid of Nizin. We can put twenty miles between ourselves and him.”
“And a possible boat.”
“You may be wrong. So how would we get into the city?”
“There has to be a way.” He looked toward the forest. “Those flying blankets now...and the spiders. I have an idea.”
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