The Seeds of Time (18 page)

“Now, you bitch. Throw out the gun now.”

Clio finally managed to put her hand on the gun, and pitch it to the side.

Blackness swarmed over them. The night flooded in on all sides as every light in the camp winked out. She hurled herself through the fence and ran. Ran hard, wanting to shout for Zee to run, but afraid to draw fire with her voice. Sprinting toward the jungle wall, not knowing how close she was, but running with the power of terror, hearing the Dharhai thumping out rounds, ripping the night air with its metal stitches. Crying under her breath for Zee, Zee, Zee.

She hit the brush at the jungle edge, dove into it, burrowing like a rabbit fleeing a wolf. She clawed her way through the barrier of undergrowth, and emerged finally into the humming, black nest of the forest.

Ever since first light the Niang monkeys began dropping onto the jungle floor. They lowered themselves on the vines, slowly, methodically. Some vines were solid with monkeys as they streamed down from the tree canopy, forming a pillar of black, glistening movement.

The Niang monkeys kept their distance from her at first, intent upon their foraging. After a time, some approached her, observing her from close range, making tentative moves toward her, then away. They lacked faces, which made it hard to think of them as mammals. Their two eyes protruded from the hump between their six legs. Their mouths were beneath their bodies so that their normal feeding stance was raised up on two legs, braced against a plant with two more, and pulling food to their mouths with their forward legs.

The sun was up full, lighting the jungle floor with a submerged glow. Like the bottom of a shallow sea, the Niang forest was a world apart, touched by sunlight deeply stained with turquoise. The voices of the forest depths filled her ears with alien cries. Small clouds of flying insects swam in formation through the murky spaces, while dragonflies swooped to feed on them, wings glinting.

Clio tried once again to plan her next move. Through the night she had stayed close to the forest edge. After the first few hours, she crawled to the edge of the clearing and saw that the camp lights had come back up; there was no sign of Zee. When she heard Teeg calling nearby, she had fled into the jungle, fearing him and fearing the game that they played: he the hunter, she the prey; he, the wronged
lover, she the mocking woman. And Teeg was angry, no doubt about that. Maybe crazy, too.

Hunger began to gnaw at her. Finally she ate part of a succulent leaf she saw the Niang monkeys eat. It was too coarse to swallow, but she sucked the sugar from it and her stomach felt a little appeased.

She began following what looked like a path, a narrow indentation in the matted floor. Behind her, Teeg’s voice was faint now, growing fainter. At last his voice was subsumed by the jungle, though from time to time she thought she heard her name, as though the Niang chorus had learned it from Teeg. Perhaps Estevan was right. The Niang birds repeated what they heard.

By the slant of the sun, Clio calculated she was moving away from camp. She turned off the path at a right angle and headed in the direction she called north, thinking to circle back to camp, coming upon it at a different point on the perimeter. That was the best scenario. The worst was that she was already lost.

She trudged on, drenched in morning dew and her own sweat. The rankness of her uniform was cloaked with the heavy sweetness of the forest, especially the trees, their trunks slick as water slides with their oozing stream of sugars. She stopped for a minute, listening for Teeg, her limbs trembling. The old shakes got to her even here, reminding her of all the ways her body had betrayed her, had given her Dive flights and then taken them away.
Tried
to take them away. She pushed on.

When she rested again it was in a clearing where a slight breeze lifted the dampness from her clothes. She filled her lungs, leaned against an overgrown rock, and stared into the clearing, unseeing.

She must have been gazing at the shape for a quarter of an hour before her brain clicked in. Dazed, Clio stood up. Before her in the clearing lay a streamlined mass about twenty meters long and fifteen wide. She circled it, heart thudding. Though completely covered with jungle growth, it appeared symmetrical. It had the look of a gigantic racing car, draped with a heavy cloth.

After several minutes of probing, she found an opening in the thing, covered with a drape of vines. She peered inside. In the gloom, she saw a passageway leading back into the interior. She pushed through the vines. In the dim light from the entryway she saw that the walls, floor and ceiling, every surface and protuberance, were covered with brocades of plant life. Small eruptions of flowers and woody stalks of mature vines ran rampant along with a pervasive turquoise moss.

Deeper in, a muted light beckoned her, and she came upon a circular room with slanting panels at the height where instrumentation should be. The sun trickled through a hole in the bulkhead, revealing panels padded with airy ferns. To Clio, the room was unmistakable. It was a cockpit or flight deck. And it was an alien ship. Must be, since no Earth ship had ever been here. No Earthly craft. She rested her hand on the bulky form of the pilot’s chair, then cautiously sat down. Who had sat there before her, and died there, she wondered. A Niang pilot? Or some unlucky visitor, unlucky as she herself?

She rose and turned to a ledge on the opposite bulkhead. Here, the odd colors of tan and white lay untouched by biotic growth. Barely visible tracery showed what Clio immediately recognized as star charts. She bent close to examine the lines and runes, but the dim light revealed little except, here and there, what might be a number.
A recognizable number
. Her eyes must be making things up. Too dim to be sure. She lifted the page and found others beneath it, but the top one crumbled, littering the next sheet with debris.

She turned to the instrumentation again, poking at the console, peeling a layer of moss from a small section. Her hand shook slightly as the thought took root.
There are explorers in the universe. Like us. At least a little like us
. Using her small utility knife, she dug into the panel itself, which gave way like the soft threads of banana skins. Beneath, green fuzzy wires looped methodically through a series of small, corrugated sections. As she scraped at them, clear, faceted protrusions sparkled. Though everything supported its growth of plant life, each ship component was
strangely intact, each wire separately coated in Niang turquoise.

At last she made her way back down the corridor and pushed into another doorway leading into a large room where most of one bulkhead had caved in. The bulkheads curved to meet floor and ceiling, scrupulously avoiding strict right angles. A platform to Clio’s left was about the right length for a bed. She sat on it, and examined the blanket still covering the pallet. The coverlet was turquoise green and flexible, as though made of delicate, low-growing ground cover. She pulled at it to tear, couldn’t.

Then the thought that had been growing for the last few minutes formed clearly: the ship was not overgrown with plants. It was
replaced
by plants. Each thing retained its shape, and sometimes its fonction, but the metal of the ship and its other materials had not rusted and decomposed, but had transformed. The star charts were the only things that were not metamorphosed. Those, and the crystal-like studs under the instrumentation console.

The ship had crashed. That was obvious from its major structural damage. Its occupants had fled, or died. And Niang had moved in. Eating the ship, eating its metal. And mimicking it.

A chill flitted across Clio’s neck. She quickly glanced up, nervous all of a sudden. Nervous about this unearthly place, about Teeg finding her and cornering her here. She found the outside hatchway and quickly moved out of the ship, heading toward the cover of the forest.

Pausing at the edge of the clearing, she looked back at the ship. “So, you’ve got a flaw, Niang,” she said. The ship lay heavily in its green nest, all vine and wood and moss. “You like to play with metal. I don’t think Biotime’s gonna like that.”

She turned from the clearing and stepped into the jungle canopy. As she pushed on, she practiced ways to tell Hillis, to tell him Niang’s secret flaw.

Each time, she stopped, seeing the look in his eyes.

The forest brightened up ahead. Moving toward the light, Clio emerged out of the canyon of trees onto the edge
of a rock wall, its sheer face dropping out of sight below her. The sunlight stabbed into her eyes, and she sat abruptly, holding her head, trying to catch her wits. When her eyes adjusted, she looked out over an awesome vista. Thousands of feet of vertical cliff below her, the turquoise crown of the jungle spread out before her in a 180-degree panorama stretching to the world’s end. Far below, burrowing into the forest mass, a river wound away from the cliff face. After gaping at this sight for several minutes, Clio noticed a muted, rumbling sound off to her left, and headed in that direction, picking her way along the edge of the cliff.

She came upon the source of the noise, a waterfall, and stood on the rocks beside it, watching it plunge over the edge. A rainbow had formed some twenty feet below her, and the water cascaded through its prismed bow. Clio reached for a drink of water, but it was too far away. She lay on a flat rock nearest the spray, her arm stretched out. The sun was hot on her back. She was exhausted. She slept.

She drank from the canteen, gulping the water, even if it was warm and brackish. Finally the man pulled it away.

“That’s enough for now,” he said.

She came fully awake, and saw that it was Teeg, unmistakably, Teeg. Her stomach plummeted.

He wore a bandanna around his forehead. That and a day’s growth of beard gave him a pirate look. A rifle was slung over his shoulder; his pistol was in a holster at his side.

Anger swept over her. “Lieutenant Harper Teeg,” Clio said. “Look at you. Turned a science mission into a war movie. Hunt down the gooks. Get those women rounded up. Hasn’t this gone a bit far?” She reached again for the canteen.

He held it back, over his shoulder, out of her reach. Then a smile cracked over his face. “Now that’s the old Clio. Don’t try to fool me, ever again. Because I can tell. I can always tell when you’re lying.” He stood up, pressed the toe of his boot into her side. “Get up.”

She pulled herself to her feet. “I want to go back and have this out with the rest of the crew, Teeg. We’ve got a
real mess here, and we need to figure out what to do.” She looked him in the eyes. No good. Not getting through.

“Start walking, Clio. Just keep to the edge of the cliff. I’ll be right behind you.”

“Teeg, let’s go back. I want to go back to camp.”

“You do, huh? Well, maybe I’ll let you, but for now, I got something else in mind.” He grabbed her by the arm, and pulled her along with him, moving so fast she stumbled, and the bushes clawed at the shreds of her flight togs.

They were headed into the sun along the lip of the rock face. Teeg was pulling hard on her arm. Clio hurried to keep up, unable now to talk because of the exertion, and judging it best to keep silent until she figured out what he was up to.

They came to a place where the cliff face was deeply fissured and formed a series of ledges. Teeg pushed her on, and they descended the shallow, steplike indentations. The rock here was deeply pink, as though baked to a rosy glow in the hot sun. At last the terraces broadened out into a huge lip of rock, jutting out into yet another river whose own waterfall could be heard farther down the streambed. The river rushed below them, close enough to jump into and swim, which she thought about, hard. Teeg was at her elbow, between her and the river. She stumbled on.

Within a dozen meters they stood in front of a gaping dark hole, the opening to a large cave. Here, the jungle was kept at bay by the massive rock formation and the river beside it.

Teeg unslung his rifle and sat against a boulder in the sunlight, leaning his head back against the rock. He closed his eyes, as though he had forgotten about her.

Clio sat opposite him in the shade, on the other side of the cave opening. She realized, as he must have, that running was useless. He was bigger, faster, meaner. The law of the jungle. Now it was a matter of wits; she tried to summon hers, but her brain was warm and spongy.

“The cave is huge,” he said, eyes still closed. “I don’t know how far back it goes, but must be hundreds of meters. There’s water trickling back there, too. So there’ll be running water right inside our house.”

God
. Clio almost groaned, but her throat was too dry.

“There’s room for all of us,” he said. “It’s secure. It’s warm at night, but cooler than the forest during the day. It gets light in the morning and through half the day. We got the river, where there’s probably fish. We got rock at our back and water at our front. Nothing can get to us that we don’t see first. And it’s paradise, see. No people, no cars, no pollution, no bureaucrats to tell us what we can and can’t do. And it’s beautiful. Jesus, but it’s beautiful.”