Titan (GAIA) (35 page)

“Where does the air that comes in the top come from?”

“It’s either sucked up through the cables—some of it must be, we saw that—or it comes from the other spokes. They all connect at the top. With a few more valves, you can use the spokes against each other. Open and close a few, and you end up sucking air out of Oceanus, through the hub, and into this spoke. Then open and close some more, and force it down over Rhea. Now if I only knew why the builders thought it was necessary.”

Gaby looked thoughtful.

“I think I can give you that. It’s something that’s bothered me. Why doesn’t all the air pool at the
bottom, down at the rim? The air’s thinner up here, but it’s still okay because the air pressure at the rim is higher than Earth-normal. And in low gravity, pressure drops off less quickly. Mars’ atmosphere isn’t much for instance, but it goes out a long way. Then if you keep the air circulating, it doesn’t have time to settle. You can keep adequate air pressure all the way through Gaea.”

Cirocco nodded, then sighed.

“All right. You’ve just disposed of the last objection to the climb. We’ve got food and water, or at least it looks like we will. Now it looks like we’ll have air, too. What do you say we get going?”

“How about exploring the rest of the wall?”

“What’s the use? We might already have passed what we’re looking for. There’s just no way to see it.”

“I guess you’re right. Okay, lead on.”

The climbing was hard work: tedious, and yet requiring full attention. They got better at it as they went along, but Cirocco knew it would never get as easy as the climb up the cable.

The one consolation at the end of the first ten-hour climb was that they were in shape. Cirocco was weary and there was a blister on her left palm, but aside from a slight backache she felt all right. It would be good to sleep. They climbed out to the top of a tree for a look down before making camp.

“Will your system measure a height like that?”

Gaby frowned, and shook her head.

“Not well.” She held her hands out, made a square with them, and squinted. “I’d say—
yeow!
”

Cirocco grabbed her under one arm, steadying herself by holding a branch over her head.

“Thanks. What a fall that would have been.”

“You had your rope,” Cirocco pointed out.

“Yeah, but I don’t really want to swing on the end of it.” She caught her breath, then looked at the ground again.

“What can I say? It’s a hell of a lot farther away than it was, and the ceiling ain’t a meter closer. It’s going to be that way for a long time.”

“Would you say three kilometers is about right?”

“I will if you will.”

That meant one hundred climbing days, assuming no trouble. Cirocco moaned softly and looked again, trying to believe it was five kilometers but suspecting it was closer to two.

They went back in and found two branches nearly parallel and two and a half meters apart. They slung their hammocks between them, sat on one branch and ate a cold meal of raw vegetables and fruit, then got into the hammocks and strapped themselves in.

Two hours later, it began to rain.

Cirocco woke to a steady dripping on her face, moved her head, and glanced at her watch. It was darker than it had been when she went to sleep. Gaby was snoring quietly, on her side, her face pressed into the webbing. She would have a sore neck in the morning. Cirocco debated waking her but decided that if she could sleep through the rain she was probably better off.

Before moving her hammock, Cirocco edged out to the top of the tree. She could see nothing but a dim wall of mist and a steady downpour. It was raining much harder toward the center. All they were getting at the campsite was the water which gathered on the outer leaves and ran down the limbs.

When she returned Gaby was awake and the dripping was much worse. They decided moving the
hammocks would do no good. They got out a tent and, after ripping a few seams with their knives, converted it to a canopy which they tied above the campsite. They dried as best they could and got back into the wet hammocks. The heat and humidity were terrible, but Cirocco was so tired she quickly fell asleep to the sound of water beating on the tarp.

They woke again, shivering, two hours later.

“One of those nights,” Gaby groaned.

Cirocco’s teeth chattered as they unpacked coats and blankets, wrapped themselves tightly, and returned to the hammocks. It was half an hour before she felt warm enough to sleep again.

The gentle swaying motion of the trees helped.

Cirocco sneezed, and snow fluttered away. It was very light, very dry snow, and it had drifted into every crevice of her blanket. She sat up, and it avalanched into her lap.

Icicles hung from the edges of the tarp and the ropes that suspended her hammock. There was a constant cracking sound as wind whipped branches up and down, and a constant clatter of ice hitting the frozen tarp. One of her hands was exposed, and it was stiff and chapped as she reached across the gap and prodded Gaby.

“Huh? Huh?” Gaby looked around with one bleary eye, the other held shut by frozen lashes. “Oh,
damn
!” She was racked by coughs.

“Are you okay?”

“Except for a frozen ear, I guess so. What now?”

“Put on everything we have, I guess. Then wait it out.”

It was hard to do, sitting in a hammock, but they managed it. There was one disaster as Cirocco fumbled with numb fingers, then saw a glove quickly vanish in the swirling snow beneath them. She cursed for five minutes before recalling they still had Gene’s gloves.

Then they waited.

Sleep was impossible. They were warm enough in the layers of clothing and blankets, but they wished for face masks and goggles. Every ten minutes they shook the accumulation of snow from their bodies.

They tried to talk, but the spoke was alive with sound. Cirocco found the minutes stretching into hours as she reclined with the blanket over her face and listened to the wind howling. Over that sound, and much more frightening, was a sound like popping corn. Branches, overloaded with ice, were snapping off as the wind whipped them.

They waited five hours. If anything, the wind grew colder and stronger. A branch snapped near them, and Cirocco listened to it crash through the ice-crusted forest below.

“Gaby, can you hear me?”

“I hear you, Captain. What do we do now?”

“I hate to say it, but we’re going to have to move. I want to be on thicker branches. I don’t think these will break, but if one breaks above us, we’ve had it.”

“I was just waiting for you to suggest it.”

Getting out of the hammocks was a nightmare. Once out of them and standing on the tree limb, it
was worse. Their safety ropes were frozen and had to be painstakingly bent and twisted before they could be used. When they began to work their way in, it was strictly one step at a time. They had to attach a second safety line before going back to remove the first, then repeat the process, tying knots with gloved hands or removing the gloves and doing it quickly before their fingers grew numb. They used hammers and picks to chip ice from branches they had to walk on. With all their caution, Cirocco fell twice and Gaby once. Cirocco’s second fall resulted in a strained muscle in her back when the safety line stopped her.

After an hour of struggle they reached the main trunk. It was steady and wide enough to sit on. But the wind blew harder than ever with no branches to break its force.

They drove spikes into the tree, lashed themselves to it, and prepared once more to wait it out.

“I hate to bring this up, but I can’t feel my toes.”

Cirocco coughed for a long time before she could talk.

“What do you suggest?”

“I don’t know,” Gaby said. “I do know we’ll freeze to death if we don’t do something. We’ve got to either keep moving, or look for shelter.”

She was right, and Cirocco knew it.

“Up, or down?”

“There’s the staircase at the bottom.”

“It took us a day to get this high, with no ice to complicate things. And it’s another two days back to the stairs. If the entrance isn’t buried in snow.”

“I was about to get to that.”

“If we move, we might as well go up. Either way, we’ll freeze unless this weather breaks soon. Moving would postpone that a while, I guess.”

“That was my thought, too,” Gaby said. “But I’d like to try something else, first. Let’s go all the way to the wall. Remember earlier you talked about where the angels might live, and you mentioned caves. Maybe there’s caves back there.”

Cirocco knew the main thing was to become active again, to get the blood flowing. So they crawled along the tree trunk, chipping ice as they went. In fifteen minutes they reached the wall.

Gaby studied it, then braced herself and began attacking the ice with her pick. It fell away to expose the gray substance, but she did not stop chopping. When Cirocco saw what she was doing she joined her with her own pick.

It went well for a while. They hacked a hole half a meter in diameter. The white milk froze as it oozed from the wall, and they chipped that away, too. Gaby was a demon of snow; it caked her clothes and the woolen scarf drawn over her mouth and nose, turned her eyebrows into thick white ledges.

Soon they reached a new layer that was too tough to cut. Gaby attacked it viciously, but eventually conceded she was getting nowhere. She let her hand drop to her side and glared at the wall.

“Well, it was an idea.” She kicked disgustedly at the snow that had fallen around them as they worked, shaken down by the vibrations. She looked at it, then craned her neck and stared up into the darkness. She took a step back, grabbing Cirocco’s arm to steady herself when she slipped on ice chips.

“There’s a darker patch up there,” she said, pointing. “Ten … no, fifteen meters up. Slightly to the right. See it?”

Cirocco was not sure. She could see several dark places, but none of them looked like a cave.

“I’m going up to take a look.”

“Let me do it. You’ve been working harder.”

Gaby shook her head. “I’m lighter.”

Cirocco did not argue, and Gaby hammered a spike into the wall as high as she could reach. She tied a rope to it and climbed high enough to hammer in a second spike. When it was secure, she knocked the first one loose and drove it in a meter above the second.