Richard laughed easily. “It’s a role you chose, Nicole,” he said, “not one that was forced on you.”
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He leaned down to kiss her on the cheek. Nicole turned her face toward him and kissed him strongly on the lips.
“Were you suggesting with that kiss,” Richard asked immediately with a wide grin, “that we should spend tonight in the igloo and begin our journey tomorrow?”
“I think that you have been reading my mind, Mr. Wakefield,” Nicole said with a coquettish smile. “Actually, I was thinking how much fun it would be to imagine tonight that we were young lovers again.” She laughed. “At least our imaginations should still work all right.”
When they were three hundred meters south of the two igloos, Richard and Nicole could no longer see anything except whatever they illuminated with their flashlights. Although the floor beneath them, mostly dirt with an occasional collection of small rocks, was generally smooth, from time to time one or both of them would stumble when not paying careful attention.
“This may be a very long and tiring walk in the dark,” Nicole said when they stopped for some water.
“And cold too,” Richard said, taking a drink. “Are you warm enough?”
“As long as we’re moving,” Nicole said. She stretched out her arms and adjusted her backpack.
It was almost an hour before they saw a light in the sky to the south. The light was moving toward them and was growing larger.
“What do you think it is?” Nicole asked.
“Maybe the Blue Fairy?” Richard replied. ” “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are. . . .'”
Nicole laughed. “You’re impossible,” she said.
“After last night,” Richard said as the light continued to move in their direction, “I feel like a boy again.”
Nicole chuckled and shook her head. They held hands in silence while the ball of light continued to grow in size. A minute later it stopped twenty to thirty meters in front of them and about twenty meters above their heads. Richard and Nicole switched off their flashlights, for they could now
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see the terrain around them for a distance of more than a hundred meters.
Richard shaded his eyes and tried to determine the source of the illumination, but the light was too bright. He could not look directly at it. “Whatever it is,” Nicole said after they were walking again, “it appears to know where we’re supposed to go.”
Two hours later, Richard and Nicole encountered a path heading to the southwest, with fields of growing plants on either side of the path. When they stopped for lunch, they wandered into the fields and discovered that one of their staple foods under the dome, a vegetable with a taste similar to a green bean but with the physical appearance of a yellow squash, was the principal crop being grown. These vegetables were interspersed with rows of a short, bright red plant that they had never seen before. Richard pulled one of the red plants out of the ground and dropped it immediately when the green, leathery sphere that had been beneath the surface began to writhe at the bottom of its red stalk. When it hit the ground, the creature scooted the few centimeters back to its original hole and buried its green sphere again in the same place.
Richard laughed. “I guess I’ll think twice before I do something like that again.”
“Look over there,” Nicole said a moment later. “Isn’t that one of the animals that built the staircase?”
They moved down the path and then back into the field itself for a better view. Coming toward them was indeed one of the large, antlike creatures with the six long arms. It was harvesting the vegetables with amazing efficiency, handling the three rows on either side of where its main body was located. Each arm, or trunk, was stripping the vegetables in a single row and stacking them in piles that were between the rows and about two meters apart. It was an astonishing sight, the six arms all operating simultaneously on different tasks, and at different distances from its main body.
When the creature reached the path, its arms qujckly recoiled. It then moved six rows down the line and entered the field going in the opposite direction. The field was being
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harvested from south to north, so when Richard and Nicole started walking again, they passed through the part of the field that the giant ant thing had already finished. There they saw swift rodentlike creatures picking up the scattered piles and scampering away with them to the west.
Richard and Nicole came to several intersections while they were walking along the path among the fields, and each time the hovering light indicated which route they should take. The fields extended for many kilometers. They came upon several different crops, but Richard and Nicole, who were becoming hungry and weary, no longer stopped to examine each new vegetable.
At length they reached a flat open area covered with soft dirt. The light above them circled three times and then hovered over the center of the area. “I’m guessing that this is where we’re supposed to spend the night,” Richard said.
“Gladly,” said Nicole, accepting Richard’s help in removing her backpack. “I don’t think I’ll have any trouble sleeping, even on this hard ground.”
They ate dinner and found a comfortable spot where they could sleep nestled together. When Richard and Nicole were both in the twilight zone between waking and sleeping, the light above them began to dim a little and then drop in altitude.
“Look,” Richard whispered, “it’s going to land.”
Nicole opened her eyes and watched as the light, continuing to dim, made a graceful arc and landed on the opposite side of the open area. It was still glowing slightly even after it was already on the ground. Although Richard and Nicole could not see the creature very well, they could tell that it was long and skinny and had wings more than twice as large as its body.
“It’s a giant firefly,” Richard exclaimed when they could no longer see its outline.
4
Bi
Iiology for lights, biology for farm and construction equipment—do you have the impression that our octospider friends, or perhaps whatever is above them in some amazing symbiotic hierarchy, are the great biologists of the galaxy?”
“I don’t know, Richard,” Nicole said as she finished her breakfast. “But it certainly looks as if their technological evolution has followed a markedly different path than ours.”
They had both watched with wonder as the giant firefly, upon hearing their first movements after sleeping, had ignited itself and taken its accustomed hovering position above them. A few minutes later, a second, similar creature had approached them from the south. The two lights now combined to provide local illumination that was equivalent to daylight in New Eden.
Richard and Nicole had both slept well and were fluite refreshed. Their two guides led them along paths through several more kilometers of fields, including one that was
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characterized by grasses over three meters tall. One hundred meters after making a sharp left turn in the tall grasses, Richard and Nicole found themselves at the edge of a vast array of shallow water tanks that stretched in front of them as far as they could see.
They walked to the left for several minutes until they came to what Richard properly identified as the northeast corner of the array. The system consisted of a series of long, narrow, rectangular tanks that were metallic gray in color. Each of the individual tanks in the array was about twenty meters wide and as much as several hundred meters long. The tanks were as tall as Nicole’s waist and were three-quarters filled with a liquid that appeared to be water. At each tank corner was a thick, bright-red cylinder, twice as high as the tank, that was topped with a white sphere.
Richard and Nicole walked beside the long edge of the array for several minutes, peering inside each individual tank and examining the thick cylindrical poles marking where adjacent tanks shared common sides. They saw nothing in the tanks except the water. “So is this some kind of purification plant?” Nicole asked.
“I doubt it,” Richard answered. They stopped at the western edge. “Look at that mass of small, detailed parts affixed to the inside wall of this tank, just in front of the cylinder. I would guess that those are complicated electronic components of some kind. There would be no need for all that in a simple water purification system.”
Nicole looked askance at her husband. “Come on, Richard, that’s quite a leap of faith. How can you possibly claim to know the function of a bunch of three-dimensional squiggles on the inside of an alien water tank?”