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“It would have to. Building a basement in a rainforest was going to be a bad idea otherwise.”
She touches a palm to the table, then lifts it upwards, the light drawing following the path of her hand and rising out of the table. It does not rise up flat, though, rather taking the shape we have described.
“The table is a visualiser,” my Angie says. “It contains 3D projection equipment. We use it to show data to clients in more interesting ways. Normally you have to build the models in advance using a computer program, but… Dreamspace. Figured I could cut some corners.”
Maldek has spoken to me of the things Brooks did in the dreamspace, but it is still quite something to see what amazing things human headspaces are capable of. I lean over the table, getting my face as close to the light model as I can without touching it. It must draw on more than just my Angie’s memories, because at the top of the hill, is a tiny representationof the Mercenia hut - the hut she has only ever seen from the inside. I point a finger at it.
“This is another thing that puzzles me,” I say.
“The base?”
“No, the space around it.”
I shift us back into the forest, but this time, right at the edge of it, looking out across the clearing between the tree line and the Mercenia hut.
“This area immediately around the hut - the forest has not regrown here at all. It feels to me like a sign that the hut must be responsible for the blight somehow. Nineteen seasons is a long time for the forest to remain at bay.”
My Angie folds her arms across her chest, but it is in thought, not anger. “It’s a really long time for a blight to kill a tree as well, I imagine.”
I nod. “Also true. You are starting to see how this, like everything you have been thinking on, does not make any sense.”
She remains quiet for a moment, but when she turns to me, there is something like satisfaction in her expression.
“This, I can explain,” she says, gesturing to the space before us. “You see how the top floor of the base is smaller than the ground level? It’s hard to judge just for looking, but I expect the basement is bigger again.”
I nod. It is how the underground rooms have seemed to me, and I have not even been in all of them.
“Well, I think that the rooms people have been able to access - the pod room, the lab spaces, the office space, the showers-” A delightful blush comes into her cheeks. “-is only some of what’s down there.”
The table appears in front of us, looking somehow even more out of place than the Mercenia hut. My Angie nudges my map to one side, then draws a new flat picture with the light. It isa series of boxes, meant, I think, to represent the layout of the underground rooms.
“This is what you can see and access,” she says, then draws a large circle around it. “In this space here where the trees don’t grow, I think there’s more. At the very least, there must be some kind of power supply. A renewable one, because it’s kept the cryostasis pods ticking over for the last twenty years. Do you get hot springs round here?”
The question surprises me. “Yes. We use them for bathing.”
“Geothermal. Heat from the ground converted into power. There must be some kind of apparatus hidden away somewhere that does that converting.”
“I am finding it difficult to understand what you are saying here, linasha,” I admit.
“I know, I’m sorry.” She gives me a sheepish look. “It’s what everyone always says when I start talking work stuff, and you don’t even have the advantage of being human.”
She draws my attention back to the table and her drawing.
“All you really need to know is that there are more rooms underground. Rooms for the power-generating equipment. Big machines that need a lot of space. Some storage tanks, too, at least two of them. So instead of there being soil and space for the trees to grow roots, there’s just more concrete.”
She draws on more boxes, filling the space between the hut and the forest with more rooms. I can see how this would hamper the trees. Trees do not grow where the caves form - the rocks block their roots. It is not so surprising that the Mercenia hut would have the same effect. The substance that the humans used to build it might be unnaturally flat, straight, but in every other sense, rock is the thing it is most similar to.
“So the trees do not grow here because there is no room for them. Because of underground rooms that we cannot see.”
“Exactly.”
I nod, a feeling of satisfaction - of rightness - filling my chest. “It is a pleasingly simple answer. My heartspace likes it.”
“A simple answer is usually the right one, and it’s easy enough to prove. There’s probably a separate access tunnel to the other rooms somewhere. One the engineers would have used to make sure everything kept ticking over. Have you seen anything like this when you’ve been in the forest?”
The hut disappears, replaced by a large doorway cut into the side of a hill. It is clearly come from my Angie’s imagination, the environment not as crisp and sharp as it has always been when we have been in places she or I have actually seen.
“Nothing like that, no,” I say. “And we have explored the surrounding area thoroughly.”
