Ahead, the forest was splattered with random patches of kudzu. Display webs were scattered everywhere. There was more blue and red and silver than green.
Della supplied an explanation. "Marta's plantings spread outward from her signal line. This is where the new forest meets the old; sort of a jac civil war."
Wil smiled at the metaphor. Apparently the two forests and their spiders were different enough to excite the kudzu reflex. He wondered if the display webs were like animal displays at territory boundaries. The colorful jumble passed slowly below, and they were over normal jacs again.
"We're way beyond Marta's furthest trip in this direction, Wil. You really think anyone's going to believe we're doing a serious search here?"
He pretended to ignore the question. "Follow this line another hundred kilometers, then break and head toward the lake where she got the fishers."
Thirty minutes later they were floating above a patch of brownish green water, more a swamp than a lake. The jacs grew right to the edge; it looked like the kudzu web stretched into the water. Fifty thousand years ago there had been ordinary woodland here.
"What's our defense situation, Della?"
"Cool, cool. Except for the suppressor thing, no enemy action. The NMs and Peacers have buttoned up, but they've stopped shouting accusations. We've discussed the threat with all the high-techs. They've agreed to keep out of the air for the time being, and to isolate their forces. If anyone strikes, we'll know his identity. The bottom line, Wiclass="underline" I don't think the enemy has been bluffed."
There was no help for it, then. "Exactly which way is north, Della?" Damn this flier: no command helmet, no holos. He felt like the inmate of a rubber room.
Suddenly a red arrow labeled NORTH hovered over the forest. It looked solid, kilometers long; so the windows were holo displays after all. "Okay. Back off eastwards from lake.
Come down to a thousand meters." They slid sideways, near in free fall. Most of the lake was still visible. "Give me a gin around the original lake site. Mark it off in degrees." He studied the lake and the blue circle that now surrounded it. "I war to get into the forest about ten klicks from the lake on a bearing of thirty degrees from north." They were close enough to the forest canopy that he could see leaves and flowers rushing by The cover looked deep and dense. "Are you going to have an problem finding a place to get through?"
"No problem at all." Their forward motion ceased. The were just above the treetops. Abruptly, the flier smashed straight down. For an instant, negative g's hung Wil on h harness. Sounds of destruction were sharp around them.
And then they were through. The spaces beneath were 1. by the sunlight that followed them through the hole they ha punched in the canopy. Beyond that light, all was dark an greenish. Junk was drifting down all around them. Most of was insubstantial. The underweb carried centuries of twigs an insect remains, flotsam that had not yet percolated to the surface. It was coming down all at once now, swinging back an. forth through the light. Some debris-branches, clusters c flowers-was still in the air, supported by fragments of the web More than anything else, Wil felt as if they had sudden? plunged into deep water. The flier drifted out of the light. H eyes slowly adapted to the dimness.
"We're there, Wil. Now what?"
"How well can the others monitor us down here?"
"It's complicated. Depends on what we do."
"Okay. I think the cairn is southwest of us, near the bearing we took from the lake. After all this time, there won't be au. surface evidence, but I'm hoping you can detect the rocks
"And if f you can't, I'll have to think o f something else.
"That should be easy." The flier glided around a tree. The were less than a meter up, moving at barely more than walking pace. They drifted back and forth across the bearing the sunlight from the entrance hole was lost behind then Della's flier was five meters tall, and nearly that wide, yet the had no trouble negotiating the search path. He looked out the windows in wonder. Much of the ground was absolutely smooth, a gray-green down. That was the top of fifty thousand years' accumulation of spider dung, of leaf and chitin fragments. The abyssal ooze of the Jac forest.
The forest floor was as Marta described, but much gloomier. He wondered if she had really thought it beautiful, or said so to disguise a melancholy like he felt here.
"I-I've got something, Will" There was real surprise on Della's face. "Strong echoes, about thirty meters ahead." As she spoke, the flier sprinted forward, dodging intermediate trees. "Most of the rocks are scattered, but there is a central cluster. It-it could really be a cairn. My Lord, Wil, how could you know?"
Their flier settled on the forest floor, next to the secret that had waited fifty thousand years for them.
TWENTY-THREE
The door slid back. Wil stuck his head into the forest air. And jerked it back even more quickly. Phew: take mil dew and add a flavoring of shit. He took another breath, and tried not to gag. Perhaps it was the abrupt transition that made it seem so awful; the flier's air was full of alpine morning.
They stepped onto the forest floor. Gray-green humus lapped around their ankles. He was careful not to kick it up. There was enough junk in the air already.
Della walked a large circle tangent to their landing point "I've mapped all the rocks. They're not as big as Marta generally used, and not as well shaped. But backtracking their trajectories..." She was quiet for second. "... I see they were piled in a pyramid at one time. The core is intact, and I think there', something-not rocks or forest dirt-inside. What do you want to do?"
"How long would a careful dig take-say as good as a twentyfirst-century archeologist could do?"
"Two or three hours."
Now that they really had something, they had to protect V, -and get themselves off ground zero at the same time. "We could bobble the whole thing," he said.
"That would be awkward to haul around if shooting starts.
Look, Marta never left anything of importance outside the core. That's less than a meter across in this case. We could bobble that and be out of here in just a few minutes."
Wil nodded agreement, and Della continued with scarcely a pause. "Okay, it's done. Now stand back a couple of meters."
Dozens of reflections of Wil and Della suddenly looked up from the forest floor; the ground between them was covered by close-packed bobbles.
She walked back, around the field of mirrors. "Bobbles are hard to miss against the neutrino sky; if the enemy has decent equipment, he noticed this." Sonic booms came from beyond the treetops. "Don't worry. That's friendly."
The new arrivals slipped through the hole Della had made in the canopy. They consisted of one auton and a cloud of robots. The robots settled on the bobbles, rooting and pushing. The top layer came off easily, revealing more bobbles beneath. These were pushed aside to get at still deeper layers. On a small scale, Lu was using the standard open-pit mining technique. In minutes, they were looking into a dark, slumping hole. The bobbles were scattered on all sides, glowing copies of the forest canopy above.
One by one, the robots picked them up and flew away.
"Which one is... ?"
"You can't tell, can you? I hope the enemy is similarly mystified. We've supplied him with seventy red herrings." He noticed that not all the bobbles were flown directly out. One had been transferred to the auton, and one to Della's flier.
Della climbed aboard the flier, Wil close behind. "If our friend doesn't start shooting in the next few minutes, he never will. I'm taking all the bobbles to my home. That's a million kilometers out now. From there we can see in all directions, shoot in all directions; no one can get us there." She smashed straight through the forest's roof, kept rising at multiple g's.