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They rowed six or eight weeks before they reached land, and all that time they
lived on the little bit of water they could catch when there were rainstorms,
and the food that was only supposed to be rations for a couple of days."
She thought that over. Another month or two in this place, with nothing to eat
at all? And no realistic hope of rescue? "That's not particularly good news,"
she said.
Dannerman nodded. "We don't really need three meals a day, though. Two would
be enough, I think.
That ought to give us another couple of weeks, anyway."
But that wasn't really great news either.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
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Patsy
When everyone had eaten, Pat and Dan took off on their mission of exploration.
It surprised no one to see that they were walking hand in hand as they left.
No one said anything, though-well, no one but Jimmy Lin. "Hey, guess what?" he
said, grinning, pointing to where Pat's laundry still hung on the tree. "The
lady left her underwear behind. Probably figured it would just get in the
way?"
Nobody responded but Patsy, and she said only, "Shut your mouth." She turned
her back on him and walked over to where Patrice was sitting cross-legged on
the ground, studying some carved wooden objects pulled out of the yurts. "It's
none of his damn business what they do," she said-then, lowering her voice,
"Although, you know?, he's probably right. How about that bath?"
"In a while," Patrice said absently, looking at a piece of age-darkened wood
as long as her forearm, one end flattened and rounded. "Rosaleen wants to go
along, but she's resting. Patsy?
What do you think this thing is?"
Patsy considered the question. Although the object was worn and chipped at the
edges, she was pretty sure of its identity. "I'd say a snow shovel-if they
ever had snow here," she hazarded.
"Some kind of a shovel, anyway." She squatted beside the other woman, poking
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through the little pile of artifacts. Most were wood-the shovel, a rod with a
pointed, fire-hardened end (too thick to be a spear; maybe a digging stick?),
something that looked like a salad fork, several things that didn't look like
anything Patsy recognized at all. What wasn't wood was glassy rock-one pretty
obviously a sharp-edged knife, the others harder to identify. "They didn't
have any metal, did they?" Patsy discovered. "Sort of like the Stone Age?"
"More like pre-Columbian America," Patrice said thoughtfully. "Those yurts are
pretty well built.
. . and doesn't this look like writing?" She flipped over an oval chunk of
wood, and it was true, there were things that looked like wobbly characters
incized on the wood. "Makes you wonder who these people were."
But Patsy didn't want to wonder about these unknown people. They were tall and
skinny; they lived in tents; they farmed- there was the remains of an
overgrown produce plot along the stream-and they were gone. That much they
knew, and the only important fact in the lot was the last one. The
Skinnies were gone. There was no chance they would ever know anything more
about them; but when
Patsy said as much, Patrice got a funny expression. "You're sure of that? You
don't think we'll all meet up again at the eschaton?"
Patsy gave her a hard look, and got up to put some new pebbles in the fire to
heat. That was another thing she didn't want to think about.
Then, when Rosaleen woke up and announced it was time for the adventure of the
bath, there was another one. Patrice helped Rosaleen to the "ladies' room" in
the bushes; Martin, gathering wood for the fire, decorously diverted himself
to a part of the grove they hadn't investigated, and a moment later appeared
again, looking perturbed. "There's something odd here," he called. "Come
look."
As the others straggled over, Patsy saw what he was talking about. "It just
stops," she said, looking in wonderment at the vegetation. It did. The gnarly
trees they had used for firewood stopped short, in a mathematically precise
straight line; the branches on the near side swooped and dangled in all
directions, but on the side away from them the branches were bent at sharp
angles. Past them was a growth of quite different vegetation, equally dense,
but thick shrubbery rather than trees. There was no point where a shrub
crossed into tree territory or a tree branch into the shrubs'.
Rosaleen studied the line of demarcation for a moment, then painfully lowered
herself to grub at the ground. A moment later she had revealed the same sort
of line that had surrounded their cell, metal and glassy segments alternating.
"Do you know what I think?" she said wonderingly. "I
believe there used to be one of those walls here."
"I think so, too," Martin confirmed. "And it had to be here for a long
time-long enough for the trees to grow up against it."
Patsy was craning her neck to see what was past the shrubbery, and what she
saw made her catch her breath. "Look at that," she called. There was open
ground there, but planted- planted in regular rows of tall stalks.
"It looks like farmland," Patrice said, staring. "And there's a path-and, hey,
what's that thing over there on the ground?"
The thing along the path was definitely a machine. It had three wheels,
bicycle-size, though the spokes were wood-the whole thing was wood, as far as
Patsy could see, and it had a sort of basketwork thing in the middle. A farm
cart? But if there was a farm, where was the farmer?
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That was the next shock. There was a stirring among the tall, ruddy-leafed
stalks, and a creature appeared, holding half a dozen banana-shaped fruits (or
husks, or something) and staring at them.
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It was nothing Patsy had ever encountered before, though even at first glimpse
there was something about it that looked vaguely familiar. What it looked like
was a scale model of one of the ancient big-bodied, long-necked dinosaurs,
maybe the kind that was called apatosaurus-though in this case an apatosaurus
that was covered with curly hair all over its body, strands poking out from
the colorful embroidered shirt and kilt it wore on its tubby, watermelon-size [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]