Lin Carter - Down to a Sunless Sea by Lin Carter, Ken W. Kelly - Cover Page B

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