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flexible container. Change scenery today, change neighbors tomorrow. Live near
the city for a while, and then in isolation. There were no real economic
necessities, for an explorer at least, what with all the technology a grateful
Interstellar Authority had provided for them.
Work was whatever one wanted to work at.
Two practiced flicks of his hand brought two seats out of the wall, melding
them into a bachelor's cot. Timmins slipped off his boots and sprawled on it
for a nap. The autopilot would stop the tractor and call him when it reached
the preset destination-if he should sleep that long.
He was roused in an hour by a steady rolling motion.
Looking out, he saw that he had reached the Sine Waves;
some called it the Sea of Azlaroc. The land here looked like a rather clumsy
imitation of a sunlit ocean. It was frozen in great, smooth, too-regular
waves, some blue, some green.
After watching abstractedly for a while, he fixed himself some food, sat down
and ate, and went through the brief and simple process of cleaning up. He
still had a long way to go before his destination came into sight. He turned
his music off and sat thinking until landmarks told him his journey's end was
near.
In the early years of their exile the men and women of
Yeargroup One had planned an elaborate permanent settlement in this area. The
generally held idea had been that their settlement would one day become a
great city,
perhaps rivalling those sprawled on a hundred other human-inhabited worlds
across the Galaxy. This particular area of Azlaroc had been chosen for
settlement because of the then-current idea that the land here was somehow
more
Earth-like than elsewhere. The theory about the land had been disproved along
with a lot of other early ideas.
This was rough country. The Sea of Azlaroc had been left behind. Squint across
this landscape with eyes almost closed and you might, if you had largely
forgotten Earth, almost convince yourself that this looked like part of it.
Some portion of the west coast of North America, perhaps, with the Sine Waves
imitating the Pacific glimpsed through a gap in rugged hills.
The attempt to terraform Azlaroc had got as far as bringing in plants and
animals from Earth and from certain
Earth-like worlds where humanity had been established for centuries. The life
forms had been treated to intensive genetic preparation before they were
imported, and also much work had been done here to prepare the land. But the
land of Azlaroc seemed capable of absorbing human work as a desert might soak
up water, or an ocean swallow snow, leaving no trace visible. But some of the
imported plants, at least, were evidently still surviving. Across
Timmins' path, as the autopilot steered him between towering landforms, a
mutant tumbleweed now blew, a bone-dry rolling yellow cage high as a man. It
looked almost like some offbeat variety of the native mobile spheres.
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His journey almost over, Timmins settled himself back into the driver's seat
and glanced at the instrument panel to confirm his position. Reclaiming manual
control, he throttled back the tractor and turned it on a course that appeared
to lead straight into an impassable wall of steep angular hills. Before he had
traveled more than two kilometers in this direction, a broad channel in the
land
came into view. He angled his car down into this and began to follow it.
He was within a few minutes of the site of the explorers'
city, very little of which had ever actually been built. It had never been
named, either. Maybe names tended to get lost on Azlaroc; more likely, they
just never become important.
He steered through the many sharp twists of the ravine, an inactive subduction
trench. It made a road through a belt of extremely rugged territory where the
best tractor would otherwise have had great difficulty. No chance now of
missing the way. Centuries of tractor tracks preceded him; their purposeful
though uneven curves, glaringly alien to this land, were all kinked sideways
at intervals by the land's erratic creep. Sporadically, the surface was cut
through by a gaping geometrically regular crack.
Groundquakes were one thing that this world shared with
Earth.
Around a hairpin bend in the jagged ravine he found its bed blocked from wall
to horizontal wall by a horde of the self-rolling spheres. The rollers were
the nearest thing
Azlaroc possessed to a native fauna. The spheres, of different sizes and as
varied in color as the land from which they came, sensed the vehicle's
approach even as
Timmins touched his brakes. The mass of them parted and flowed away as if
prodded by some invisible force, moving hesitantly but making room.
A final zigzag turn, and the ravine debouched abruptly into flatland several
kilometers across. Here, more of the spheres were widely enough dispersed that
it was easy to avoid hitting them. Whether they were life-forms or land-
forms was still being argued by the experts, but Timmins had always tried to
avoid destroying any. They drew energy from their environment in the forms of
conducted
heat and radiation. They moved about, in migrations that
Timmins sometimes thought made about as much or as little sense as those of
the trapped restless explorers.
Sometimes the spheres reproduced, by a primitive method of fission that left
succeeding generations trapped in the same year as their parent. This, unlike
the coral that seeded their descendants down through the veils by means of
quantum-spores of radiant energy. Every year seemed to produce some new
spheres spontaneously from its new land.
In the midst of these flatlands the explorers had once plotted their
individual estates, and roads, and plotted houses. Why any of them had ever
thought they wanted hard-walled houses, except for reasons of sheer nostalgia,
was more than Timmins could now recall or understand.
Certainly not for shelter against the weather. Here precipitation was nil and
the temperature invariably comfortable.
Nor was privacy a valid reason. Tents could have achieved that just as well as
houses, especially the new soundproof fabrics becoming available. Maybe their
real need-a need Timmins could not remember ever being openly discussed-had
been for a feeling of security.
Houses might serve as miniature strongpoints or forts, or give the feel of
stability at least. Just in case the billions of galactic humanity, from whom
the explorers had been so suddenly and permanently severed, should ever decide
to attack the outcasts. Crazy, of course, a thoroughly deviant notion, but
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they must all have been a little deviant then.
From the slightly elevated cab of the tractor, as it rolled on across the
almost perfectly flat plain, Timmins could see the remnants of the few
explorers' houses that had actually been built. The materials were native
slabs, painstakingly cut from the land and set on edge or used like bricks; [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]