Down to a Sunless Sea

16 Many Marvels

At first, the travelers looked down. From the edge of the stone stoop where Doc Harbin sat, the ground declined in a gentle slope. The slope was thickly carpeted with tightly curled and interwoven moss of an amazing color, or variety of shades, which ranged from peacock blue to metallic azure to deepest indigo.

It was moist and beaded with dew, the moss that grew like a living carpet, and starred all over with tiny white flowers. They exchanged glances of utter amazement, especially Agila and the women. For, while Harbin and Brant had seen such moss carpeting back earthside (although perhaps not of the same amazing color), the Martians had never imagined such a sight.

Will Harbin had removed his boots and was working his toes blissfully in the dewy moss, much as a small boy might wriggle his bare toes in the deliciously damp grass of a meadow.

The dim opalescent luminance was everywhere, brighter than moonlight back earthside, but only a shade dimmer than the wan daylight of the Desert World. It seemed sourceless and omnipresent and cast no discernible shadows.

Brant looked up, to discover another marvel. The sky was dark, so dark that you could hardly see the rocky roof of the enormous cavern in which they found themselves. And enormous was the word—it seemed to go on for miles.

“Doc, just how big is this place?” asked Brant in awed, hushed tones. The older man shrugged.

“Hard to say: couple of hundred square miles, at least. Cavern’s too huge to be artificial; must have formed when the planet was molten and plastic—huge gas bubble got trapped beneath the surface and hardened. Mars is smaller than Earth, you know, and cooled a heck of a lot faster.”

“Yeah,” Brant nodded. “Also has a lot less gravity. Back home, the sheer weight of the continent above it would have made this place collapse early on.”

“Quite right,” mused Harbin. He seemed beside himself with delight at having discovered what must surely have been the most astounding of all the many mysteries of Mars.

Brant looked down the mossy slope to see what lay beyond, but a range of low hills blocked the distance from his view. Then Zuarra clutched his bare arm, pointing.

“What—what are those, O Brant?” she whispered.

He looked away to the right, in the direction the woman had indicated, and saw to his further amazement something remarkably like a forest. But it was not a forest of trees, or like anything he had ever seen before… .

It was a forest of tall, spongy things that looked for all the world like mushrooms or toadstools. But even back home, mushrooms had never to his knowledge grown so huge. Many of them were four or five feet high, but some stood as tall as ten or twelve.

Suoli gasped and clapped her hands with delight at the fungus forest. Even Brant had to admire the brilliant colors, and let his eyes feast on their delicious variety. The fungus growths were of every shade from chalk white to rich cream, canary yellow, tangerine, umber, rust brown. And they were spotted or striped or splotched with vivid green, rich crimson, purple and vermilion.

The Martians drank in the view delightedly. And this was only natural, since their dreary world offered so little by way of color or contrast upon which to feed the eye. Little more than red sand, slate gray rock, and dully purple sky.

Brant looked questioningly at Harbin, but the other man shook his head simply.

“Don’t ask me, Jim! We’ve never even found fossil records of anything like that, and precious little fossil vegetation of any description,” he said. “But, then, after all, we’ve only been here on Mars for a few generations, and it took us centuries to compile a fossil record of Earth, and even it’s still not complete.”

Brant made no reply, save for a slight, cynical smile. The Colonial Administration here on Mars, like most of the governments back earthside, were probably equally reluctant to expend any funds to support something as obviously unprofitable as fossil-hunting… .

Zuarra slipped her small, strong hand into Brant’s big paw and gently urged him in the direction of the fungus-forest. He followed, wanting a closer look at the huge, nodding stalks with their bulbous heads, and the others trailed behind. Following Harbin’s example, Brant removed his boots to enjoy the dewy carpet of moss under his bare feet.

Closer, they paused to breathe in the odd aroma of the forest. There was a muskiness that was not at all unpleasant, together with a sweetish-sour smell like cream that has turned, but there was also an indescribable scent that made Brant’s mouth water hungrily. It was something like the smell of fresh, hot gingerbread, and a little like hot buttered popcorn— neither of which he had tasted for many years.

“Suppose these things are edible?” he inquired of Harbin, who had followed them across the mossy lawn.

“I’ve no idea,” Harbin confessed. “No sign of animal life as yet, but if there is any to be discovered, it must feed on something. Look there—in fact, I believe something has been feeding on the mushrooms!”

He pointed to shallow gouges and dry pock-marks on the surface of the nearer growths. The marks reminded Brant uncannily of the bare patches on saplings, where hungry deer in winter have gnawed away strips of bark.

Just then, as chance would have it, their guessing was confirmed. For something remarkably like a dragonfly came whizzing through the air in their direction.

It certainly looked like a dragonfly, with its long, tubular body and stiff, thrumming wings like sheeted mica. But Brant had never heard of a dragonfly as long as a grown man’s arm, and sporting a wingspread of what must have been seven feet or more.

It flashed through the air toward them, and the sound of its flight was clearly audible—something about midway between the whine of a rifle bullet and the whistle of an arrow.

As they stared, the gorgeous winged creature alighted on one of the nearer mushrooms, and sank a long proboscis into the flesh of the fungus and began sucking greedily.

“O, how beautiful!” exclaimed Zuarra, clasping her hands together between her ripe breasts.

Brant had to agree. The torso of the insect was a gorgeous red-gold, the vibrant wings were veined with metallic azure, and glinted in the dim light like thin slices of opal. Its eyes were gemmy clusters of glistening black crystals.

A moment or two later, the thing whizzed off, leaving a small puncture in the side of the mushroom, which oozed a colorless sap. Doc cautiously dabbled his fingers in the sticky stuff, and sniffed it suspiciously. It smelled very much like apple cider, he decided. And was sour-sweet to the taste, when he touched a drop to the tip of his tongue.

“Careful, Doc!” exclaimed Brant. “Back earthside, you know, some of these things are good food, but others are deadly poisonous.”

“I know,” smiled Harbin, staring around dreamily. “But somehow I tend to doubt it … hard to believe anything in this beautiful garden could be dangerous or deadly … it’s like Eden before the Serpent. …”

They wandered deeper into the weird forest of giant fungi, Brant and Zuarra, and Agila and Suoli, naked and hand in hand—which reinforced Will Harbin’s comparison of this place to the fabled Garden of Eden. Nothing that they saw looked harmful: small crimson things like beetles scuttled and burrowed into the indigo moss, and tunneled into the dried stalks of the fallen giants; something as richly colored as a hummingbird, and of about the same size, whizzed by on all-but-invisible wings. When it alighted on a fallen fungus trunk they realized it looked more like a huge fly than a hummingbird, after all.

Harbin remarked that, insofar as the fossil record had proven, Mars had never supported avian life, either bird or insect. The winged serpents of Martian legend he dismissed out of hand as being that—merely legend.

“Where d’you suppose all of this light is coming from?” muttered Brant. “Not from the sky. Seems to be from the surface—see how brilliant it is beyond those hills?”

“Yep. Well … let’s take a look,” suggested Harbin. “Only way to find out for sure. May be in the very air itself, chemical phosphorescence—”

Brant cut him off with an abrupt gesture. He opened his mouth to yell a warning, but it was already too late. Agila had broken off a dripping chunk of the soft underflesh of one of the huge toadstools and was gingerly nibbling on it. Harbin uttered an exclamation, but Brant stopped his protest with an easy shrug.

“We’ll soon find out if the stuff is bad to eat,” he grinned. “What the hell, we can do without that treacherous devil to watch.”

But he warned Suoli not to taste the stuff, and strolled near to take a look. It was yellow and soft, like spongecake, and dripping like a fresh honeycomb.

“How does it taste?” he inquired.

“Very good!” mumbled Agila around a cheekful. “A taste such as Agila has never before encountered.”

He was lapping the stuff up as fast as he could claw another handful out of the soft trunk, and it didn’t seem to be making him sick, so Brant cautiously tasted a crumb of it himself.

It was sweet as honey and as tangy as wine, the dripping fluid, and the meat bore a distinct flavor of applesauce.

Just then a call came from some little distance away. Brant turned to see that, while he had gone to check out Agila’s reaction to the fungus, Harbin had continued on to climb the gentle slope of the hills, hoping to discover the source of the illumination.

“Anything to see, Doc?” Brant called back.

For a moment, Harbin made no reply, staring raptly into the distance. Then he turned to beckon to Brant, and the expression on his face was one such as Brant had never before seen, save perhaps in religious paintings of prophets and saints caught up in ecstasy.

“You must see this, my boy … a miracle beyond belief.”