Over the Darkened Landscape - By Derryl Murphy Page 0,18
compost of moldy leaves and bits of rancid fat, collected with great care by one of the high foreheads from an abiogenesis facility in a town near the launch site.
Jack carefully slid the tubule into a special slot in his dephlogisticator and sealed it in. Removing the cork took some delicate handiwork after all this, but with the help of some tweezers sewn into the inside of the leather cover, he managed to do so. A turn of a dial increased the flow of air into the tubule, and another dial released a special mixture of alchemical components apparently guaranteed to speed the process of spontaneous generation.
With the chronometer embedded beside the useless compass in Jack’s suit wrist, he counted out the minutes required. When time was up, he slid back the cover and pulled the tubule out of its pocket.
Sure enough, maggots swarmed through the mulch, wriggling madly as they ate their way through the disgusting mixture. Jack knelt down and poured the contents out onto the Lunar dust, watching carefully for adverse reactions from any of the pasty white grubs.
Nothing untoward happened. Indeed, some of the maggots were already covering themselves with a hard white shell, sure sign that they were preparing to give up their spot in the ladder of life to small flies.
Jack turned a third dial, listened as the hiss of incoming air slowly died away. When he could hear nothing but his own breathing, he inhaled deeply and detached his helmet from its locking mechanism. The air was cool, but temperate. A slow breath out, and then he breathed in, cautiously.
Everything was fine. The air tasted and smelled a touch rancid, but certainly no worse than his own body odors.
There was a spare microphone and earpiece in one of his pockets, so he put them on and plugged them in to the slot in the suit just under his left ear. Background noise and chatter still seemed to dominate the choralis, but he thought he could hear the Mission Specialist speaking, something about clouds, he thought. If so, a response was certainly in order.
“I am leaving now for the clouds. The air here is fine to breathe, and I expect to have answers shortly.”
A squeal of more Firmamental interference followed this pronouncement, high-pitched whine and harp music somewhat ludicrously combined, and then a distant voice, yet again, speaking vaguely familiar nonsense: “Ange! N’y va pas! Tu ne pourrais pas survivre là-bas! Je t’en prie, reviens tout de suite à la Strate Omniprésente.”
Turning the receiver volume down to a less-irritating background hiss, Jack unhooked his dephlogisticator and set it inside the Aquila, then strapped his pack over his suit and lifted the camera bag to his shoulder. He peeled off his gloves so that he would be able to handle the clarifying beads with greater dexterity, and then set off in search of what lay behind the clouds.
The Lunar desert he and his vessel had occupied soon gave way to a plain, fields of golden grasses waving in the soft, cool breeze. The grasses were taller than Jack, but fortunately they parted often enough for him to keep an eye on the bank of white clouds that served as cover for his mysterious destination. Jack stopped and took a picture here, making sure he got it from an angle that included the Earth in the sky.
The plain was soon followed by the gardens whose existence the astrologers had predicted. He stood on the crest of a small hill and looked down on row after row after row of vegetation, all recognizable as fruits and vegetables he would know, but all enormous, salads to feed an army; no, a nation. Perhaps they grew such for the same reason he felt less weight. Or perhaps whoever grew and ate them . . . And then the clouds parted for the briefest of instances, and Jack had a glimpse of the secret that stood at the edge of the lake. It was a castle, a giant stone edifice larger than any mighty wizard or high forehead on Earth could ever hope to possess. Jack saw brief details of high, steep stairs leading to a massive, dark keep, of crenellations, turrets, and uncovered parapets, all watched over by a motley collection of weathered, disturbed and angry-looking gargoyles. But then like a curtain being drawn back into place, Jack was no longer looking at the solid, ominous gray of old stone, but rather the unformed wispy slate of fog and