"It sure feels that old," Bill agreed. "I know something of the complexities involved in maintaining a biosystem," Gaby went on. "Gaea is larger than O'Neil One, and that makes her more flexible. But in a few centuries things would break down without control. Things have not broken down completely."
"It could be robots," Bill said. "That's fine with me," Cirocco said. "As long as there's some intelligence behind this, I plan to contact it and ask for help. Computers might be easier to deal with."
Bill, who had read a great deal of science fiction, could make a dozen theories about any aspect of Gaea. He was partial to the ever-reliable plague mutation: something that came out of nowhere and killed enough of the builders to leave Gaea in the hands of automatic safety devices.
"She's a derelict, I'll bet on it," he told them. "Just like the ship from Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky. A lot of people set out in Gaea thousands of years ago and lost control on the way. The ship's computer put it in orbit around Saturn, shut down the engines, and is still up there keeping the air pumping and waiting for more orders."
They took a different route out, partly because it was impossible to tell how they had come in. Cirocco did not worry because as long as they went toward the light they were all right.
They reached the sunlight at a point far to the north of where they had gone in, and now could see something that had been concealed at their point of entry by the cable itself. It was a broken strand, but this one was on the ground.
Cirocco's first thought was of the giant sandworm Calvin had described. The strand looked like a living thing, shining in the
yellow light. Then she recalled the Brazilian pipelines she had seen on survival training: great silver tubes that knifed through the rain forest as if it were a contemptible obstacle.
The strand had cleared its own path when it fell, bringing down the tallest trees, crashing inexorably to the ground. The jungle had closed over it since that time, but the great mass still looked as if it could rise at any moment and shake off the encroaching vines, turning the trees into matchsticks.
Five hundred meters above, the severed upper end of the strand curled away from the body of the cable. It was ragged, and the inside revealed by the break glistened and threw back reflections of red and blue-green and tarnished copper. Gray discolorations like bread mold grew in the stump, and from the bottom a waterfall went straight down to a clump of vegetation widely separated from the forest. The volume of water was substantial and noisy, but issuing from the huge and twisted strand it looked like nothing more than a drip from a broken pipe.
They approached the fallen strand, found it to be composed of an array of hexagonal facets only a few millimeters across, cloudy with swirls of gold just beneath the surface. it threw back dull, broken reflection,, as if they were using the eye of a giant insect for a mirror.
They followed it down the hill and into the jungle, where the broken end turned out to be hollow but so clogged with brush and vines that entering it was impossible.
"Whatever was inside, the plants like it," Gaby said.
Cirocco said nothing. The advanced state of decay was de- pressing. The strand's open end was big enough to have flown Ringmaster right through it. It was a small thing on the stale of Gaea, only one of 200 strands in this cable alone. And yet it was such a towering wreck, going so quickly to rot and dissolution. When it parted, the whole surface of Gaea must have twanged in sympathy.
And no one had done anything about it.
She said nothing, but it was hard to look at the remains and feel there was someone still watching the machines.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Two days after their exploration of the cable interior, the crew of Titanic found themselves leaving the tropical forest. The land had never been hilly except in the neighborhood of the cable; now it turned flat as a billiard table and Ophion sprawled for kilometers in every direction. There was no longer a shoreline as such. The only things to mark the end of the river and the beginning of the marshlands were strands of tall grass rooted in the bottom and the occasional meter-high mud bank. A sheet of water stretched over everything seldom more than ten centimeters deep except in the winding mazes of sloughs, bayous, inlets, and backwaters. These were kept clear and gouged deeper by big eels and one-eyed mudfish the size of hippos.
The trees in the region came in three varieties, growing in widely scattered clumps. The kind that appealed to Cirocco looked like glass sculpture, with straight, transparent trunks and regular branches in a crystalline arrangement. The smallest branches were filaments that could have been used in fiber optics. When the wind blew, the weakest branches broke off. Re- covered and wrapped with chute cloth on one end, they made excellent knives. From the flashing effect when the filaments
moved, Gaby named them xmas trees, pronouncing it "exmas." The other major vegetation was not so much to Cirocco's liking. One plant--it seemed wrong to call it a tree, though it was large enough -resembled a pile of what can be seen on the ground at any cattle ranch. Bill named them dung trees. on their closest approach to one they could see that there was an internal structure, but no one wanted to get too near because they smelled all too much like what they appeared to be.
Then there were trees that did a better job of looking the part They had something of the cypress and a little of the willow in them, growing in untidy tangles festooned with creepers that struggled to pull them down.
It was alien in a much more unpleasant way than the high- lands had been. The jungle they had left behind was not too different from the Amazon or the Congo. Here, nothing looked familiar, everything was misshapen and threatening.
Camping was impossible. They began tying the boat to trees and sleeping in it. It rained every ten to twelve hours. They rigged chute cloth tents over the bow, but water always leaked in and pooled in the bottom. The weather was hot but the humidity was so high that nothing ever dried out.
With the mud, the heat and dampness and sweat, they grew irritable. They were short on sleep, often managing no more than a fitful doze while off duty, doing even worse when all three tried to sleep and ended up competing for the limited space an Titanics sloping bottom.
Cirocco awoke from a nightmare of being unable to breathe. She sat up, feeling the cloth of her robe peel away from her skin. She felt sticky between her lingers and toes, under her neck, and in her lap.
Gaby nodded to her as she stood up, then turned her attention back to the river.
"Rocky," Bill said. "There's something you'll want to-" "No," she said, holding her hands up. "Dammit, I want coffee. I'd kill for coffee."
Gaby smiled dutifully, but it looked like an effort. They knew by now that Cirocco was a slow starter.
"Not funny. Right." She stared bleakly out at the land that
looked as decayed and rotten as she felt. "Just give me a minute before you start asking me things," she said. She struggled out of her clothes and jumped in the river.
It was better, but not much.
She bobbed, treading water and holding the side of the boat and thinking about soap until her foot touched something slippery. She didn't wait to find out what it was, but pulled herself over the edge and stood with water pooling at her feet.
"Now. What is it you wanted? "
Bill pointed toward the north shore.
"We've been seeing smoke over that way. You can see some of it now, just to the left of that bunch of trees."
Cirocco leaned over the edge of the boat and saw it: a thin line of gray sketched against the backdrop of the distant north wall.