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"She doesn't know," he said.
"You lied to her then. You hid it from her."
He shook his head. "Nobody told her any lies," he ' said. "She didn't want to
know."
So Linda didn't want to know about the Indris. So much for the noble pursuit
of pure knowledge. The idea of the Promised Land had already answered all the
questions. Don't confuse me with the facts, I've already made up my mind. I
shook my head sadly.
The city seemed like an exciting prospect. I'm not one of these people who
flip over ruins, but I was ready enough to take a look at anything
which offered an alternative to the incredible sameness of the
forest. And the thought that it was a definite somewhere that we
might possibly expect to find the elusive forest people was an
undeniably welcome one.
My natural pessimism, however, put in its usual sterling work in preparing me
for disappointment. It doesn't do to pin all your hope to one target.
Whatever happens, you always have to keep going. The first principle
of survival is the survival of effort.
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We found the city, all right. Another couple of hours saw us right into the
city square.
It didn't look like a city. The trees grew, the canopy of purple was unbroken,
the ground was still covered by the same sort of mess we'd been wading in for
a week. But here and there you could scrape away the gunge and find that the
surface underneath was stone. Smooth stone. Sculptured stone. The tree trunks
and their big roots didn't give a damn about stone they'd pulverized it
with no trouble. Ninety per cent of the city was rubble and dust.
No buildings remained. But here and there was the memory of a city street.
The city had been dead, I guessed, on the order of tens of thousands of years.
But who am I to guess about such things? It might have been a hundred times
that. But those trees were big and old.
They hadn't worked their way to perfect mastery of that city in a matter of
centuries. They'd invested some real time in it.
The forest people had been there, all right. But they were not there now.
We'd missed the boat.
15
The sole occupant of the buried city was a dead cropper. It was about the size
of a cow. I suppose that it fulfilled the same kind of function as
a cow. It lay in an open space which had been methodically cleared
of all undergrowth the site of the Anacaon encampment. The trail that the
forest people had left when they had decided to move on was like a major
highway. It wasn't wide these people respected the country code and
walked in a tight column, using each other's footprints but it had sure
been walked on by a lot of feet. It would take the forest a week or two to
reclaim it.
"Is the cropper still fresh?" I asked Micheal. It had seemed that way to me,
but I thought I'd better check.
"Yes," he said, "but we'd better cook the meat well."
"It didn't die of anything horrible, did it?" I asked. "Does it
signify anything that the forest people left it untouched?"
He shook his head slightly.
"I don't know," he said slowly. "I think it might mean..."
He hesitated, and I completed the thought for him. "You think they left it for
us?"
"Perhaps," he said. "But we can't assume that."
"They haven't left a message," I said. I'm not sure what kind of message I
expected. They could hardly have left a sign saying "Back soon help
yourself." The Anacaona had no written language. If they had a
direct sound-to-mind link, it was quite probable that their language couldn't
possibly be written down.
"Is it safe to light a fire?" I asked Micheal.
"Yes," he said. "Can you?"
I fished out a light "Never travel without one," I said.
"It can't spread here," he said, meaning the cleared area.
"Your people had no fire. There are no ashes."
"They wouldn't light a fire," he said. "They don't have the taste for raw meat
that you people have."
"What about you?"
"We eat meat.
Your people have taught mine a great deal."
The fire wasn't easy to start. The trees didn't drop twigs, and the fungus
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