THEY UNDERSTOOD EINSTEIN A LITTLE BETTER THE NEXT DAY when Kath Two flew all of them over the mountains in a glider and they saw just how difficult it must have been for foot travelers like him to have reached the site of the artifact. It raised the question of how he had ever found it in the first place. “Blind luck after getting hopelessly lost in a whiteout” seemed the most likely answer, but perhaps his people had combed the inland slopes of these mountains in a systematic way.
They were traveling in the same type of glider they had used on the leg from the Cayambe socket to Magdalena. Because it had no engines, it could fly through the Ashwall without mechanical damage, and because it traveled more slowly than a jet, they didn’t have to worry quite so much about Kath Two’s windshield getting fogged by abrasion from microscopic bits of rock. They did have to be somewhat concerned about the fact that she could not see where she was going as they flew through the densest part of the cloud. But she knew the altitudes of the nearby peaks and stayed well above them. Once the view had cleared a little bit, she was able to take advantage of the ash, which worked in the air somewhat like a drop of ink in swirling water, making currents and vortices obvious.
Einstein seemed exotic to the Seven in that he had been born on the surface and had never left it. This was his first journey in an aircraft of any kind. Seeing the mountains from above demanded some mental adjustments, which he made quickly. And in any case he knew the latitude and longitude of the artifact. After they had passed over the crest of the mountains and gotten into clear air, he directed Kath Two toward a high valley slung between the coastal range and a subsidiary crest beyond. Its upper reaches were devoid of life, but farther down the slope, tundra and low scrub were beginning to take hold. That these had been seeded from space was obvious from their regular spacing. Robot pods had fallen out of the sky in precise geometric formations and slammed into the ground in a hexagonal array before breaking open to spill their seed on the ground. Some wag in the bureaucratic bowels of TerReForm had dubbed these things ONANs: Orbital Neo-Agricultural Nacelles. As the years went by and the ecosystem spread out from the ONANs, the hexagonal pattern disappeared into the natural chaos of life. But in a place like this where plants grew slowly it would still be visible centuries from now.
Kath Two made a few passes up and down the length of the valley and identified a stretch of smooth seasonal riverbed, paved with frozen ash-paste, where she thought she could land and take off. The glider’s energy storage devices had been charged up the night before and were still at 100 percent. So she made another long orbit to bleed off velocity and then landed while traveling in an uphill direction. She made a gentle touch first, just to verify that the riverbed was in fact frozen solid, then set the glider down decisively. The wingtips dragged at the very end and there was some concern that one of them might strike a protruding rock, but she was able to avoid this and bring the craft to a full stop without damage. Beled and Bard climbed out first, and jogged in opposite directions to the two wingtips. After picking these up off the ground they were able to rotate the glider by walking clockwise in a large circle. Kath Two told them when to stop.