She stood on the cliff edge overlooking the thing she had come half a world by airship and a thousand kilometers on foot to find, and pebbles crumbled from beneath the toes of her adaptshell, and she raised a hand to her face as if Kraken were really speaking into a device in her ear canal instead of into the patterns of electricity in her brain. The cavernous ruin stretched farther than her eyes could see—even dark-adapted, once the shell made the transition for her. Even in this strange, open forest filled with colorful, flitting, flying things.
“Love?”
“Yes?” Kraken said, then went silent and waited.
“I’ll call you back,” Dharthi said. “I just discovered the Lost City of Ishtar.”
Dharthi walked among the ruins. It was not all she’d hoped.
Well, it was more than she had hoped. She rappelled down, and as soon as her shell sank ankle deep in the leaf litter she was overcome by a hush of awe. She turned from the wet, lichen-heavy cliff, scuffed with the temporary marks of her feet, and craned back to stare up at the forest of geysers and fumaroles and trees that stretched west and south as far as she could see. The cliff behind her was basalt—another root of the volcano whose shield was lost in mists and trees. This … this was the clearest air she had ever seen.
The trees were planted in rows, as perfectly arranged as pillars in some enormous Faerie hall. The King of the Giants lived here, and Dharthi was Jack, except she had climbed down the beanstalk for a change.
The trunks were as big around as ten men with linked hands, tall enough that their foliage vanished in the clouds overhead. Trees on Earth, Dharthi knew, were limited in height by capillary action: how high could they lift water to their thirsty leaves?
Perhaps these Cytherean giants drank from the clouds as well as the soil.
“Oh,” Dharthi said, and the spaces between the trees both hushed and elevated her voice, so it sounded clear and thin. “Wait until Zamin sees these.”
Dharthi suddenly realized that if they were a new species, she would get to name them.
They were so immense, and dominated the light so completely, that very little grew under them. Some native fernmorphs, some mosses. Lichens shaggy on their enormous trunks and roots. Where one had fallen, a miniature Cytherean rain forest had sprung up in the admitted light, and here there was drumming, dripping rain, rain falling like strings of glass beads. It was a muddy little puddle of the real world in this otherwise alien quiet.
The trees stood like attentive gods, their faces so high above her she could not even hear the leaves rustle.
Dharthi forced herself to turn away from the trees, at last, and begin examining the structures. There were dozens of them—hundreds—sculpted out of the same translucent, mysterious, impervious material as all of the ruins in Aphrodite. But this was six, ten times the scale of any such ruin. Maybe vaster. She needed a team. She needed a mapping expedition. She needed a base camp much closer to this. She needed to give the site a name—
She needed to get back to work.
She remembered, then, to start documenting. The structures—she could not say, of course, which were habitations, which served other purposes—or even if the aboriginals had used the same sorts of divisions of usage that human beings did—were of a variety of sizes and heights. They were all designed as arcs or crescents, however—singly, in series, or in several cases as a sort of stepped spectacular with each lower, smaller level fitting inside the curve of a higher, larger one. Several had obvious access points, open to the air, and Dharthi reminded herself sternly that going inside unprepared was not just a bad idea because of risk to herself, but because she might disturb the evidence.
She clenched her good hand and stayed outside.
Her shell had been recording, of course—now she began to narrate, and to satlink the files home. No fanfare, just an upload. Data and more data—and the soothing knowledge that while she was hogging her allocated bandwidth to send, nobody could call her to ask questions, or congratulate, or—
Nobody except Kraken, with whom she was entangled for life.
“Hey,” her partner said in her head. “You found it.”
“I found it,” Dharthi said, pausing the narration but not the load. There was plenty of visual, olfactory, auditory, and kinesthetic data being sent even without her voice.
“How does it feel to be vindicated?”
She could hear the throb of Kraken’s pride in her mental voice. She tried not to let it make her feel patronized. Kraken did not mean to sound parental, proprietary. That was Dharthi’s own baggage.
“Vindicated?” She looked back over her shoulder. The valley was quiet and dark. A fumarole vented with a rushing hiss and a curve of wind brought the scent of sulfur to sting her eyes.
“Famous?”
“Famous?”
“Hell, Terran-famous. The homeworld is going to hear about this in oh, about five minutes, given light lag—unless somebody who’s got an entangled partner back there shares sooner. You’ve just made the biggest Cytherean archaeological discovery in the past hundred days, love. And probably the next hundred. You are not going to have much of a challenge getting allocations now.”
“I—”
“You worked hard for it.”
“It feels like …” Dharthi picked at the bridge of her nose with a thumbnail. The skin was peeling off in flakes: too much time in her shell was wreaking havoc with the natural oil balance of her skin. “It feels like I should be figuring out the next thing.”
“The next thing,” Kraken said. “How about coming home to me? Have you proven yourself to yourself yet?”
Dharthi shrugged. She felt like a petulant child. She knew she was acting like one. “How about to you?”
“I never doubted you. You had nothing to prove to me. The self-sufficiency thing is your pathology, love, not mine. I love you as you are, not because I think I can make you perfect. I just wish you could see your strengths as well as you see your flaws—one second, bit of a squall up ahead—I’m back.”
“Are you on an airship?” Was she coming here?
“Just an airjeep.”
Relief and a stab of disappointment. You wouldn’t get from Aphrodite to Ishtar in an AJ.
Well, Dharthi thought. Looks like I might be walking home.
And when she got there? Well, she wasn’t quite ready to ask Kraken for help yet.
She would stay, she decided, two more sleeps. That would still give her time to get back to base camp before nightfall, and it wasn’t as if her arm could get any more messed up between now and then. She was turning in a slow circle, contemplating where to sling her cocoon—the branches were really too high to be convenient—when the unmistakable low hum of an aircar broke the rustling silence of the enormous trees.
It dropped through the canopy, polished-copper belly reflecting a lensed fish-eye of forest, and settled down ten meters from Dharthi. Smiling, frowning, biting her lip, she went to meet it. The upper half was black hydrophobic polymer: she’d gotten a lift in one just like it at Ishtar base camp before she set out.
The hatch opened. In the cramped space within, Kraken sat behind the control board. She half rose, crouched under the low roof, came to the hatch, held out her right hand, reaching down to Dharthi. Dharthi looked at Kraken’s hand, and Kraken sheepishly switched it for the other one. The left one, which Dharthi could take without strain.
“So I was going to take you to get your arm looked at,” Kraken said.
“You spent your allocations—”
Kraken shrugged. “Gonna send me away?”
“This time,” she said, “… no.”