He let in the clutch and they started off toward St. Martins’ central road with the diesel ringing. They had to pick their way down the street on which the mission fronted—Rick clutched frequently—but he didn’t brush pedestrians or even the barrow being wheeled ahead of them by a tradesman who wasn’t interested in giving way to the trike behind him.

  Rick decided there was no point in getting angry about that sort of thing—any more than there was about rain or a new puppy behaving any of the ways a puppy behaves. That wasn’t the sort of mood he wanted to put Rachel in as they picnicked on the volcano. He was very well aware of her warm body pressing against his back as they vibrated along the road.

  They turned right on the axial street, toward the smoking cone. There was traffic there too, but more room to dodge.

  “Oh!” Rachel said. “I’d meant to bring an extra sweater.”

  “We can go back for it,” Rick said. He clutched and checked the road, considering where the best place to turn would be. “Though I’ve got three or four blankets in the back of the trike for when we’re stopped.”

  “No,” Rachel said, “I left it in my apartment; and Rick, I’d really just as soon not show you my apartment. You’re a nice fellow, surely, but you’re going to be leaving Medlum in a week or so and not coming back. We’re going to take a look at the volcano and have a picnic. That’s all.”

  “Ah, well,” Rick said. “If that’s how you want it. But you can have an awful lot of fun in a week, you know?”

  They were out of town. Instead of pavement they were driving on compacted volcanic ash. It seemed to have been sprayed with a plasticizer at some time in the past, but patches had slipped off to the low side as they climbed.

  They came to a switchback. The cyclo’s transmission shifted power to the outside wheel as Rick threw his weight into the turn—though the vehicle itself couldn’t lean. They made the corner smoothly.

  The trail must’ve been expensive to build and maintain. “How much traffic is there coming up here?” Rick asked.

  “There are daily tours, two or three six-seat cars,” Rachel said. “After every passenger ship lands, I mean. Folks who’ve come for Meridan Spa usually visit here first. But for the past month the ground shocks have been bad, and the tour companies have cancelled all trips. They’re afraid that they’d lose a car sliding off the road. The tourist money’s good, but the cost of replacing a car would break most of them. And a lot of tourists decided to wait till the cone had quieted down, too.”

  “But you were willing to come with me?” Rick said. They’d come to the reverse switchback. They shimmied around the corner, but Rick was afraid that the outside wheel was very close to the edge this time.

  They made it safely. He opened the hand throttle a little wider on the straight.

  Rachel gave an embarrassed laugh. “Well,” she said. “I thought we were coming by aircar, remember.”

  “We’ll be fine,” Rick said. “I think we’ve got enough torque to go straight up the side if we had to. This is designed for a one-in-three slope. If the ash holds under the wheels, anyhow.”

  Behind them was a huge plume of dust, drifting back toward St. Martins. The dust would be following and probably catching up to them on their return. Rick wondered if the air filters had been changed recently.

  “We’ll be fine,” he repeated, hoping that he sounded confident.

  Even with the switchbacks, the slope was quite steep. As they climbed the next straight, Rick saw that the roadway was sprinkled with cinder that had shaken down from the higher levels. That wouldn’t be a problem but beyond that he could see that a fuming vertical chasm had opened across the road, engulfing the corner and much of the next straight above it.

  Bloody hell! Rick thought. Well, it was time to put up or shut up.

  “Rachel,” he said, his voice keying the intercom. “I want you to bend as far forward as you can get when I start up the hill.”

  If she replied, he was suddenly too busy to listen. He leaned left and cramped the front wheel up the hill, then opened the hand throttle full on. The back wheels dug in, their woven-wire structure stiffening as stress tried to deform them. Rick was bending over the front wheel, reaching back to keep the throttle open. If the thrust failed at this moment, they’d flip over on their back and skid down to the base of the cone.

  “Whee-ha!” he shouted as they ground over the edge of the next straight above the one they’d left. He cramped the front wheel left again and they were back on the road and no longer threatening to tip over. He backed off the throttle slightly and said, “How did you like the shortcut, Rachel?”

  “It scared me,” she said.

  Her quiet calm stabbed through his elation like a harpoon. “Love,” he said, “it should have. That was bloody dangerous and I should never have tried it with you aboard. I apologize.”

  “Could you have gotten around the crack another way?” Rachel said, still calm.

  “No way,” he said, making the next switchback, this one a right-hander. “But we could’ve gone back and that’s what we should’ve done.”

  “I wanted to see the top of the cone,” Rachel said. “I never have. Let’s go on.”

  He trusted the trike on this road more than he had before he’d had to take her off it, so they made most of the remaining two reaches with the throttle to the stop. He was smelling sulfur though it was an observation rather than a problem at the moment. He didn’t look up while he was driving, but he knew that the peak and the plume were close above them.

  Rick backed off the throttle when he saw a widening with pressed-steel picnic tables before them and they coasted to a halt among them. Now he looked up. The mild breeze was from the harbor, so the faintly iridescent smoke was slanting inland. It was noticeably warmer where they stood than it had been in St. Martins.

  Rachel got off also and stretched. They took off their commo helmets. With her hands on her hips, she peered up at the peak. Rick noticed that there was a woven metal cable running up the slope from the ground to the lip.

  “Well, let’s go see!” Rachel said.

  Rick would have been just as happy to have something to drink—his throat was dry from adrenaline and the touch of sulfur—but it was his plan to be agreeable. “Sure,” he said, and started climbing steps cut into the cone.

  Quite a lot of ash—grit to the size of pea gravel—had sprayed over the steps and the parking area below, but thanks to the cable the climb wasn’t dangerous. A path four feet wide ran twenty yards in either direction along the top of the cone.

  He looked into the crater without bending significantly over the edge. He’d thought he might be able to see the lava below but all Rick saw was stone, rough and stained in patches with a dozen different colors.

  He checked the rock at his feet. It was solid, so he moved a trifle closer to the edge. No spacer who works on the rigging of a ship in sponge space could be afraid of heights, but neither did he want to have his footing give way and drop him hundreds of feet into a pit with molten rock at the bottom—even if he couldn’t see it.

  A ledge fifteen feet below seemed to run the circuit of the crater, as though a later, larger cone had been set on top of the original one. He could see a tree growing on the ledge far to the right. It was dead and bleaching now. The sulfur smell became sharper when he leaned over the edge.

  “Oh, look at this?” Rachel said, crouching to his right. She was pointing at the splotches of flaky white on the edge of the rock.

  “Mineral deposits, isn’t it?” Rick said, walking closer.

  “No, I think it’s alive,” Rachel said.

  “Well, don’t touch it with your finger,” Rick said, taking out and opening his little pocket knife. He bent near the color. “If it’s alive—and it sure looks like a lichen—it might be something people are allergic to.”

  With the tip of his knife blade he teased up the edge of a patch. “It’s not just a stain, you’re right,” he said.

  “Look, it gets blue deeper down,” Rachel said, leaning over and pointing into the crater. The feathery patches of lichen seemed to cover quite a lot of the rock. Some of it shaded from gray to bright blue, mostly at lower levels. “Oh, what a lovely color!”

  “Look, Rachel,” Rick said. “Let’s go back to the trike and have some lunch. I’ll mention this to Harry, but he’s the biologist, not me, you know.”

  He went down the steps, keeping his hand close to the cable but not touching it. If he started to fall he’d grab the line and risk getting stabbed by a broken strand, but only if it was that or a bad fall.

  Rachel was coming down carefully behind him. He thought of offering her a hand, but that would probably make it more dangerous. He opened the trike’s cargo compartment and got the tarps out.

  “What are those for?” Rachel asked sharply.

  “Rather than sweep off the table and benches, I thought we’d sit on the ground like we were on a beach,” Rick said. “It’ll be more comfortable. But if you like, I’ll sweep the tables.”

  “Oh,” said Rachel. She ground her toe into the ground. “Oh, you’re right. Let me help spread them.”

  The sail-cloth tarps were ten by ten feet and he’d brought three of them. The fabric was extremely tough but not very soft. Rick hoped that stacked, the air trapped between layers would be cushion enough.

  He hadn’t packed a broom. Rachel’s initial guess about his intentions had been quite correct.

  The small duffle bag had a mixture of sandwiches: meat paste, egg paste, and sliced vegetables bought fresh on Quan Loi. Rick had no idea of her dietary preferences. There were also three bottles of wine charged to Rick’s account at the officers’ mess. They were from Keyser, two white and one red, and all proofed over fourteen percent.

  “Also there’s some fruit,” Rick said, “but I figured if you wanted a more substantial sweet we could get something in town after we go back.”

  “This is very nice,” Rachel said, taking a sip of wine as she considered the sandwiches. “You’ve thought of everything.”

  “Well, I’ve tried to,” Rick said. Also, he had a good deal of experience in seducing women; which he did not say. Rachel was a nice girl, so the main thing was not to push too hard. The Far Traveller would be on Medlum another ten days, after all.

  Rachel was crunching on a melon sandwich so Rick took one of the meat paste. He’d brought enough that they could both eat their fill from any of the varieties. He said, “Here, let me top off your glass. I won’t be drinking much because I’ll be driving us down. All you need to do is hold on, though, so drink up!”

  She set the glass down and took another small sandwich. “I wanted to look down into the crater and I’m glad I did,” she said. “But you know, the view down on St. Martins is even better and I hadn’t been thinking about that. Look at the way the sea changes color as you go out.”

  “It is lovely,” Rick agreed. “The part out there a quarter mile is such a dark blue it makes me think of cobalt glass.”

  He’d thought of cobalt glass when he realized he needed to say something about the water color. Speaking of glass, he took a sip from his own—the tumblers and dishes were actually high-density thermoplastic which didn’t mind being banged around a warship taking evasive action—before refilling Rachel’s.

  They talked about life on shipboard. “It’s really pretty boring,” he began, but when he got down to the tricks of astrogation and about working on the rigging in sponge space (“They tell you to always fasten a safety line, but sometimes you’ve got to work without one or a spar will carry you away. It’s a long way down if you fall, because there’s nothing else human in that universe with you.”) he heard the enthusiasm in his own voice.

  Rachel smiled and said, “You love your job, don’t you.”

  “I wouldn’t trade anything for it,” Rick said, and as he heard his words, he realized that they were true. That embarrassed him a bit: He didn’t want her to think he was a star-struck kid! Even if he was.

  Rachel had refused a third sandwich and also another refill of wine. She got to her feet and walked at the edge of the parking area. She looked down at St. Martins. “It looks so pretty from up here,” she said.

  “There’s a lot of prettiness in the universe,” Rick said. He stood up also and stepped to her. “You just have to have the kind of eyes that see pretty things. Not everybody does.”

  He put his arm around Rachel’s shoulder and tugged her gently to him. When she turned her face, he kissed her. She didn’t fight him, but neither did she respond.

  “No, Rick,” she said. “I told you—”

  She grabbed the hand he put on her breast and forced it down.

  “No! Stop that!”

  He backed up a step. “Dear,” he said. “This is a lovely place and a lovely time.”

  “No, I told you no!” She was flushed and breathing hard.

  “No problem,” he said easily. “We probably ought to be getting down before long anyway.”

  Rachel closed her eyes and squeezed her arms hard against her sides. Then she breathed out hard and looked at him again. “Rick,” she said in a calm voice that barely trembled. “I’d like to borrow your little knife. I want to look at that lichen again.”

  He took the knife out of his pocket and opened the longer of the two blades. He turned it over and handed it to her handle first. It was a standard slip joint which she could have opened as easily as he had, but he was making a point.

  Rick began to repack the unused food and the plates in the duffle bag, clearing the tarps. He didn’t put the bag in the trike yet.

  Rachel went up the steps holding the open knife in her left hand. She touched the cable repeatedly with her right hand. At the top she went to where she’d seen a blue lichen close to the rim. It was a lovely thing, and it was the right image to carry in her mind down to St. Martins.

  The royal blue had shifted almost to mauve and the feathery lichen had swollen like the leaves of a desert plant. Rachel scraped the knife point against the rock with her right hand and held her left under the lichen so that it wouldn’t drop into the crater when she separated it from the rock. Carefully she teased the knife under the base of the lichen the way she’d watched Rick do.

  “Rachel, do you want a hand?” he called from below. They’d taken off the commo helmets when they dismounted from the vehicle.

  The lichen lifted slightly. A mist of spores so fine that they looked like purple gas puffed from the purplish leaf she was raising.

  Rachel gave a strangled cry and tried to stand. Her muscles felt liquid. She pitched forward, into the volcano’s crater.

  * * *

  I went into the woods wearing a shooting vest. It was a perfect choice for my activity: loops for reloads, separate outside pockets for my beacon/compass and camera; inside pockets for little boxes to hold insects, minerals, or vegetable material; and large side pockets for any specimens I might bag. The last were waterproofed in case the specimens were leaking from the shot holes.

  “Is your beacon synched, sir?” Joss called as I opened the chamber of my gun and loaded a light charge of number six shot.

  She was being unnecessarily cautious, but rather than snap at her I set the gun down on my bunk with the breech still opened and got out the beacon. I thumbed it live. The tiny arrow in the tip began to pulse bright yellow in the direction of the base unit in the middle of the shelter.

  “All as should be,” I said. I put the beacon in its pocket again and started for the door with the shotgun. I wouldn’t close it until I was actually among the trees.

  “Good hunting, sir,” Joss said. “I’ll be going out on Hao’s boat shortly.”

  Before I’d arrived at Orontse, Joss had chopped a hole in the undergrowth at the edge of the forest—basically at the point the sea reached at high tide and salt water prevented large trees from growing. Farther within the trees, the canopy stunted the brush and saplings in the understory.

  There were no trails, but the only serious barriers to moving through the vegetation were occasional large fallen trees which hadn’t yet rotted and been reabsorbed by the rest of forest. I had no place in particular to go, so if a tree blocked my initial path, I simply changed my path.

  When I was far enough in that I no longer could see or hear sounds from the shanties on the beach—and twenty yards was more than enough for that—I stopped and put my goggles on. I scanned the forest at several wavelengths of light, then set the display to caret movement. Dull red light haloed more than fifty blips which proved when I magnified them to be Medlum’s equivalent of insects.

  Two slightly larger glows were insectivores prowling in the leaf litter. There were also creatures hopping about in the high branches, but they moved quickly and without any pattern. A shot would be at wild chance and would alarm the area. I might try one later if I didn’t find a more likely specimen deeper in the forest.

  For now I returned the goggles to optical clarity and proceeded, using my unaided senses. My hearing sharpened when I stopped using visual enhancement, though there wasn’t any direct connection.

  I heard a high-pitched ringing coming from ahead and to my right. After a moment it stopped. I moved in that direction, holding my gun muzzle up in front of me. I chose a path that would avoid big trees and tried to follow it while I concentrated on my surroundings rather than my feet. By shuffling I managed to avoid anything worse than stubbing the toe of my boot.

  The tallest trees rose two hundred feet—two hundred and seven according to my goggles on a tree ahead of me where I caught a clear sight of the top. Buttress roots flared from the trunks like flowing garments, spreading twenty or thirty feet out from the edge of the trunk proper.

  I came to a wide ravine. Its floor was relatively clear because the canopies overhead met from either side and the raw red clay hadn’t been particularly hospitable to seeds. I heard the ringing call again, more clearly.