It wasn’t as though they had a particular place to get to, after all. Daniel found two barrel trees on this side of the notch and saw another one across it. The squat trunk was hidden in the undergrowth but vast, billowing foliage marked the tree clearly.
Whenever he had a question, Adele squatted and brought out her personal data unit. When she’d come as close as she could from the parameters he gave her, she handed the miniature computer to him to refine the data.
The librarian’s face as she parted with the unit was like that of a mother letting a drunken stranger hold her baby. She didn’t protest, though, and only the perfect rigidity of her expression indicated the horror she must feel in her heart.
By midday they were only a few hundred yards from the sandy beach where they’d started their trek, but Daniel was even more confident that his plan of escape was practical. He could now point to the elements that would fulfill their needs instead of just being sure that he’d find them somewhere on the atoll.
“Time to head back, I think,” he said. Before him was another notch into the island’s fabric, this one only about five feet wide at the mouth. “I don’t much like that sky.”
Cumulus clouds had billowed into a wall across the western heavens. A thunderstorm had caught the Ahura on her first afternoon out of Kostroma. It was so violent that Daniel had shut down the foils, furled the solar sails, and ridden the waves for an hour and a half on waterjet alone.
“And besides, I could use some lunch,” he added with a grin. “I could catch us each a mudhopper—”
He gestured to the shoreline. Eyes apparently floating on the water vanished in a swirl of mud.
“—but I’m not quite hungry enough to eat one raw.”
Adele nodded. “I think I can live on stored body fat for long enough to get to the camp,” she said.
She stepped aside to let Daniel lead on the way back as well. He turned—and as he did saw something in the corner of his eye.
“Ho!” Daniel said. “Oh, will you look at that? Yes, we will stop here.”
He pointed down the narrow waterway to the clump of rough-barked trees some twenty feet away. On their branches grew fungus in stages of ripeness from white pimples all the way up to swollen yellow balls the size of a man’s head. When fully ripe they dangled from a narrow umbilicus.
“Soap bubble fungus,” Daniel explained. “It infects several species of nut trees. It doesn’t seem to injure the tree seriously, so it may be a symbiotic adaptation.”
Adele started to pull out her computer. “No, the Aglaia’s database covered soap bubble fungus adequately,” Daniel said. He spoke softly because of an instinct not to rouse danger, though at this distance he and Adele weren’t in danger. “The only really important thing to know about it is that you don’t want to come within ten feet of it, or twenty if you’re the cautious sort.”
“It’s poisonous?” Adele said. Even though Daniel had told her not to bother, she was calling up information from the material she’d downloaded this morning.
Daniel grinned. The way Adele turned to her computer was instinctive too: she didn’t own knowledge unless she’d seen it written. The same words from the same source had more effect written than they did spoken.
“They’re delicious when ripe, I’m told,” Daniel said as he continued to eye the infected grove. The fullest of the fungus bubbles seemed to quiver with internal life. That was actually possible. “They’d be eaten by every bird or animal within fifty miles before they could open, if it weren’t for the beetles that live inside them.”
He pointed to the darkest, ripest of the fruiting bodies. “Anything that breaches the rind is set on by a dozen or so insects with bites like red-hot pokers. There’s nothing on Kostroma that deliberately opens the fungus, and animals that do so by accident can be bitten to death.”
“Even humans?” Adele said, now looking toward the globular fungus. Her control wands were motionless.