A tree has grown through an abandoned bus. There are shoes underneath it. An expedition toward the Lost City begins, reluctantly, on the wrong day.
The tree had grown through the bus.
Its roots entered through the windshield, passed between the seats, and emerged beneath the rear wheels. Pale flowers hung where passengers’ heads would once have been. Something inside the vehicle clicked softly.
Cam stopped.
“Is that one dangerous?”
“Yes,” said Gibbet.
“You answered rather quickly.”
“There are shoes underneath it.”
Cam looked. Several shoes protruded from the roots. None appeared to have been removed voluntarily.
Fallom studied the bus through the small camera mounted on Cam’s shoulder.
“Go around,” she said.
To the left, a carpet of silver grass covered the street. To the right stood the remains of a department store. A mannequin watched them through a broken window, wearing a coat that had survived a thousand years better than the building.
Cam chose the store.
Inside, the floor gave beneath his boots. He moved between collapsed shelves, keeping his hands away from anything green. Some of the plants had learned to resemble ordinary objects. Last winter, someone had mistaken a flowering vine for a length of rope.
The rope had objected.
Beyond the store, the city continued toward the hills: towers split by roots, streets folded upward, windows crowded with leaves. At night, portions of it glowed.
People still called it a city. Cam wasn’t sure the city agreed.
He adjusted the strap across his chest.
“We could have left yesterday.”
“You spent yesterday looking for your compass,” Fallom said.
“I found it.”
“In your pocket.”
“A very reasonable place to keep a compass.”
Neither of his companions replied.
Camembert Le Châtelain Sylon had packed food, water, a knife, three batteries, and a map assembled from accounts given by people who had never reached the place it described.
The Lost City occupied a small circle near the map’s northern edge.
Around it, different hands had added different warnings.
One promised machines that could repair the world. Another mentioned a library. A third had drawn a skull, then crossed it out and drawn a larger skull.
Cam preferred the library.
At the edge of the settlement, a woman tending a covered garden had asked what he expected to find.
“Answers.”
“To what?”
He had discovered, somewhat late, that this was a difficult question.
Now the settlement lay behind them. Ahead, a vine stretched across an intersection at ankle height.
“Stop,” said Fallom.
Cam stopped.
The vine tightened.
From a doorway across the street came a slow scraping sound.
Cam backed into the store. A branch slid through the doorway he had been approaching, felt along the pavement, and withdrew.
For a while, nobody spoke.
Then Cam unfolded the map again.
“There’s another street.”
“There are many streets,” said Gibbet.
“I meant a useful one.”
“That remains to be established.”
They took the stairs to the department store’s upper floor. From there, a collapsed wall offered a narrow passage onto the roof of the neighboring building.
Cam climbed into the morning light.
Beyond the last towers, the hills stood blue and apparently motionless.
Fallom turned her camera toward them.
“Well?” she asked.
Cam put the map away.
“North.”
Behind him, deep inside the bus, something clicked again.
—Robert
Orbit 88.7: Smooth Waves for Rough Space