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a stomach would be. She could feel theni moving past her hands. And they began
to narrow. She lodged, headfirst, in an uneven tunnel. The walls began to
contract. For the first time, she felt claustrophobic. Tight spaces had never
bothered her before.
The walls pulsed and rippled, pushing her forward until her head slipped
through into coolness and a rough texture. She was squeezed; fluid bubbled out
of her lungs and she coughed, in- haled, found her mouth filled with grit. She
coughed again and more fluid came out, but now her shoulders were free and she
ducked her head in the darkness to avoid getting another mouthful. She wheezed
and spit, and began to breathe from her nose.
Her arms came free, then her hips, and she began digging at the spongy
material that enclosed her.
it smelled like a childhood day spent in a cool, bare earth basement, in that
narrow space adults visit only if the plumbing is acting up. It smelled like
nine years old and digging in the dirt.
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One leg came free, then the other, and she rested with her head bent into the
air pocket formed by her arms and chest. Her breath came in wet spasms.
Dirt crumbled behind her neck and rolled down her body until it nearly filled
her air space. She was buried, but she was alive. It was time to dig, but she
could not use her arms.
Fighting panic, she forced herself up with her legs. Her thigh muscles
knotted, her joints cracked, but she felt the mass above her yielding.
Her head broke through into light and air. Gasping, spitting, she pulled one
arm out of the ground, then the other, and clawed at what felt like cool
grass. She crawled from the hole on hands and knees and collapsed. She dug her
fingers into the blessed ground and cried herself to sleep.
Cirocco didn't want to wake up. She fought it, pretending she was asleep. When
she felt the grass fading away and the darkness returning, she opened her eyes
quickly.
Centimeters from her nose was a pale green carpet that looked like grass. It
smelled like it, too.
it was the kind of grass found only on the greens of the better golf courses.
But it was warmer than the air, and she couldn't account for that. Perhaps it
wasn't grass at all.
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She rubbed her hand over it and snffied again. Call it grass.
She sat up and something clanked, distracting her. A gleaming metal band
circled her neck, and other, smaller ones were on her arms and legs. Many
strange objects dangled from the large band, held together by wire. She
slipped it off and wondered where she had seen it before.
It was amazingly difficult to concentrate. The thing in her hand was so
complex, so various; too much for her scattered wits.
it was her pressure suit, stripped of all the plastic and rubber seals. Most
of the suit had been plastic. Nothing remained but the metal.
She made a pile of the parts, and in the process realized just how naked she
was. Beneath a coating of dirt her body was com- pletely hairless. Even her
eyebrows were gone. For some reason that made her very sad.
She put her face in her hands and began to cry.
Cirocco did not cry easily, nor often. She was not good at it. But after a
very long time she thought she knew who she was again.
Now she could find out where she was.
Perhaps a half hour later she felt ready to move. But that decision spawned a
dozen questions.
Move, but to where?
She had intended to explore Themis, but that was when she had a spaceship and
the resources of
Earth's nest technology. Now she had her bare skin and a few bits of metal.
She was in a forest composed of grass and one species of tree. She called them
trees by the same reasoning she had used on the grass. If it's seventy meters
tall, has a brown, round trunk and what looks like leaves far above, then it's
a tree. Which did not mean it might not cheerfully cat her if given the
chance.
She had to get the worries down to a manageable level. Rule out the things you
can do nothing about, don't ftet too much about the things you can do little
about. And remember that if you're as cautious as sanity would seem to
dictate, you'll starve to death in a cave.
The air was in the first category. It could contain a poison.
"So stop breathing, at once!" she said, aloud. Right. At least it smelled
fresh, and she was not coughing.
Water was something she could do little about. Eventually she would have to
drink some, assuming she could find it-which should go right to the top of her
list. When she found it, perhaps she could make a fire and boil it. If not,
she would drink, microscopic bugs and all.
And then there was food, which worried her more than anything. Even if there
was nothing around that wanted to make a meal of her, there was no way of
knowing if the food she ate would poison her. Or it might be no more
nourishing than cellophane.
if that wasn't enough, there was the calculated risk. How do you calculate
what is risky when a tree might not he a tree? [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]