Keene’s head hurt, he’d ricked something in his back, now it seemed the rest of his body was stiffening up too, and given the choice he would have preferred just to lie down. “You know, Charlie, I was just wondering about that,” he said.
“Maybe there is another option.”
“What?”
“Going directly south from here, inland of the ridge, we know the going’s rough. But if my memory is correct, the upper part of one of the rivers parallels it on the other side before it turns west farther down, toward the sea.”
“That’s right,” Keene agreed. “I just copied the map.”
“If we got to the other side, we could make a raft and use the waterway. I’m almost certain it would have to flow into the long lake below Joburg. It would halve the time. And we wouldn’t have to go back and over. Not much farther south from here, there are ways through to the west.”
“Assuming there are reeds over there,” Keene pointed out.
“There’s bound to be some kind of suitable material around a river.” Charlie turned his gaze back finally and looked at him. “Which would you rather risk, Lan? A thirty-mile trek over this? Or trusting we’ll find something, in return for riding the current downstream and taking half the time?”
Put that way, it didn’t need a lot of thinking about. “You’re right. The river, it is,” Keene agreed simply.
They checked over the pile of discarded items for anything vital they might have overlooked. It contained two packs of inflatable plastic air beds that some Kronian back in mission planning had thought to provide for overland expeditions. Keene and Charlie had been about to leave them to save weight, but then Keene realized they would be ideal aids for raftmaking. He retrieved them, passing one to Charlie. “Pontoons,” he said.
Charlie took it and added it to his pack. “What have we got to cut reeds with?” he asked. The planners evidently hadn’t seen much use in the runabout’s tool kit for things like sickles or machetes. After some rummaging, Keene produced a general-purpose handsaw with exchangeable blades, and a pair of hand shears. He put them in his own pack with a shrug that said that was it. Then, wincing from the bruises they had collected, they heaved the packs onto their backs and began picking their way, slipping and sliding, across the foot of the slopes.
The ground became firmer as they moved off the mounds of fresh debris, with pools of intruding water already forming among them, and they were able to increase their pace somewhat. But Keene’s legs were soon beginning to feel leaden. Being away from Earth had affected him more than he’d realized. After maybe a mile, they stopped to catch their breath. A low rumbling sound came from behind them. They looked back. One of the towers above where the runabout lay was collapsing, burying the area in an avalanche of dust and rock. They glanced ominously at each other but said nothing. Hitching their packs higher on their shoulders, they turned away and resumed a slow but steady pace toward the south.
* * *
To President Xen Urzin of the Kronian Congress, it was so obvious that the universe and everything in it were fashioned by some creative force with a purpose that he was hard put to understand how rational minds could ever have thought otherwise; even more, why they should have been so insistent on contriving ways of clinging to their view after repeated demonstrations that all the numbers and probabilities showed it to be simply untenable. He suspected it was a hangover from the period of Terran development when notions of conquest and exploitation being the right of the strong, and survival the natural reward for excellence, served as a convenient justification for the political and economic ideology of the times.
It seemed as self-evident as anything could be that the cosmos functioned as an immense materials-processing factory for producing planetary systems and the suns to nurture them; planetary systems provided assembly stations for constructing living organisms, the purpose of life was to support consciousness; and consciousness existed in order to undergo experience. Beyond that, things got more conjectural.