How much time passed while that strange contest went on I have no idea, but the forest began to thin again, and I saw brighter light ahead of me. Encouraged by the prospect of an end I dashed forward, and the assailing branches fell away. There were no more groping tendrils, no more stabbing thorns.
I came out of the forest into an open space, and threw up a protective arm as I was momentarily dazzled by the glare of an unnaturally bloated yellow sun. But there was a pavement beneath my feet, and the air was filled with sound emitted by countless clamorous voices, and I knew that this was no desert isle, but a busy place.
When I dropped my arm again, and looked to see where I was, I found myself confronting a ring of men, each one as tall and as muscular as Myrlin, and each one armed with a gleaming sword. They were like enough to one another to be clones, and I realised that they were probably automata like the ones that had manned the deck of the magical ship on which I had approached this shore.
I took half a step forward, and they brought up their weapons, pointing the blades at my torso. I glanced sideways, and could see no end to their array, so I turned on my heel. There was no sign of the forest through which I had come—the pavement was all around me, and so were the warriors. There were sixteen of them in all, and they had me completely hemmed in.
“You have done well, Michael Rousseau,” said a voice, which spoke in English rather than parole, “but we know you now, and you are at our mercy.”
27
For the first few hours the ride was a veritable nightmare. It wasn’t so much the slug-things, which were too slow to bother us once we were alert to their existence. Nor, for that matter, was it anything that was genuinely dangerous. In the light suit, which seemed so much more fragile than the cold-suits I was used to, I felt virtually naked. The last time I’d worn a suit like that to cross an alien wilderness, Scarid stormtroopers had been on my tail, and they’d come within an inch of killing me. That kind of experience is enough to make anyone feel paranoid, and though I’d been assured that I was now a superman, I hadn’t yet seen much hard evidence of my superhumanity.
The headlights of our motorbikes attracted flying things: mothlike creatures bigger than any I had ever seen before. They came at us in great swarms, clumsily bumping into one another as they tried to get into the light. Some of them would stall in the confusion and fall into my path, and I couldn’t help running over them, feeling their soft bodies busting beneath the bike’s tyres. They continually spun out of the beam that lit my way, colliding helplessly with my helmet like balloons filled with flock.
The low gravity here made gliding easy and powered flight was to be had on the cheap, in energy-economic terms; these things didn’t need wings a metre across to bear them aloft, even when they had bodies the size of my arm. Their wings were coloured in exotic patterns, although I couldn’t see them to their best advantage as they jostled one another to flit through the beam. Their eyes weren’t compound, and reflected the light like cats’ eyes, but their mouth parts were insectile, with jaws and palps like cockroaches. The combination seemed bizarre, and though I’d recently seen enough of alien life by now to know how very ingenious DNA can be, the creatures still appeared to me to be monstrous and unnatural.
The trees were no better, if “trees” was the right word for the elements of the forest through which we rode. They were rooted top and bottom, to the ceiling as well as to the floor, and their foliage formed a curious double canopy. The thermosynthetic tegument covered the roof of the world as well as its floor, and weight was such a minor problem that most of the organisms made little distinction between up and down. I saw that the slug-things were just as happy wandering across the sky as the ground, held tight by their big suckers, and there were a couple of occasions when I had to ride directly beneath one, with tentacles snaking down at me from above. They couldn’t quite reach me, because they were used to catching taller prey in that fashion; the indigenous herbivores on which they fed had taken equal advantage, in their range of forms, of the low gravity.
The local fauna leaned conspicuously toward molluscan and arthropodan forms; the branches of the double-rooted trees were swarming with things that looked like a cross between a beetle and a crab. Anchored to the tougher boughs were creatures the size of a man’s head, which had tough shells shaped like barnacles. They opened their tops periodically to shoot out “limbs” like the tentacles of the slug-things. They didn’t look big enough to be a threat to anything but the moths that were their prime targets, but I did my best to keep clear of them anyway.
The larger herbivores looked like giant lobsters, harvest spiders, and walking radio masts, but they were easily spooked and ran away from our lights when we came close to their herds.
We rode for hour after hour without a pause. We weren’t going very fast, though it wasn’t too difficult to find a clear, flat path between the trees. We probably averaged about fifty kilometres per hour, though our route had twists and turns enough to ensure that we covered less than two-thirds of that distance in a hypothetical straight line.
My mind gradually settled into an acceptance of the surroundings, and I stopped caring about the moth-like things bouncing off my helmet. I concentrated on keeping my eyes fixed on the tail-light of the bike ahead, following the route which it mapped out for me. I must have settled eventually into a kind of trance-like state, because I lost all track of time. I really have no idea how long we had been riding by the time we arrived at our destination.
I had been expecting another wall and another airlock. I had paused to wonder whether the bikes could clamber down an evacuated shaft as easily as the larger vehicle had, but had simply shelved the question, knowing that there was no point in worrying about it ahead of time. The Nine had so far been equal to everything, and there would be time to worry about the limits of their competence when we found them out.
It was another airlock, but it wasn’t set in a wall. It was set in the floor, and it was big, like a vast drain-cover. It was in the middle of a patch of bare ground, which had a protective fence around it, presumably to keep the local wildlife away; we approached with care lest it should still be electrified, but it was harmless now, and presumably had been since the power went off. There was still the possibility of another booby-trap, though, and we didn’t throw caution to the winds. We checked all around the fence—a perimeter of nearly a hundred metres. We located the point at which Tulyar and Finn had gained access, and found their vehicles abandoned outside the fence.
Urania took the magic suitcase into the compound and got to work. I arranged the bicycles in a semicircle, with their headlight beams pointing out into the darkness. They didn’t show us much because they were still attracting swarms of the flying creatures, and I went to turn them off, but as I did so I noticed something odd about the trees that were faintly illuminated by the beams. They grew more thickly there than on the side from which we’d approached, and there were evident slash-marks where someone—or something—had widened a pathway through them.
I showed the evidence to Myrlin. “You think Tulyar met some friends here?” I asked him.
“Not necessarily,” he said. “Someone switched the power off, and if your logic is correct, that someone needed hands to do it—it wasn’t just a trick of the tapeworms. Perhaps Tulyar’s friends were already down there, waiting for him.”