The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  After a short walk the tunnel ended in what appeared to be a door, an iris of interlocked metal leaves. At the top of the door rim, a push button jutted from an ornately sculpted plate. The bas-relief depicted a baffled ant emerging from the spiral corridors of a snail shell. I knew how it felt. Beneath the picture, in Ur-Linguish, was the legend THE ONLY WAY OUT IS THROUGH.

  I pressed the button and the door irised open to a bare shoulder’s width. I crawled through it awkwardly, rolling to the floor on the other side.

  The tunnel continued before me, but this stretch was sheathed in leafy vines, a green lining broken only by a narrow margin of stone on either side of the light strip. The light burned hotter here, too bright with UV to stare at for long. Instead of running across the strip, the greenery doubled back through the loops I’d noticed before.

  The woody vines branched and tangled beneath broad leaves that overlapped each other in competition for the light. Though there was a faint smell of wet earth, I could not see any; lower down, the vines interweaved to form a dense brown mat or cushion several centimeters above where the true stone floor would be. It would be like walking on a mattress.

  It was all too neat and pat, like the eel airline. If the vine was so strong and vital, what kept it from choking the center of the tunnel? Was I going to run into plant-clipping robots? I decided to back out for the time being, perhaps wait for teammates to arrive. But when I turned to go, the door shut in my face. No button. No options.

  The tunnel curved gradually to the left. I followed it, bouncing from side to side as well as forward, sometimes having to grab at leathery green leaves or the underlying vines for balance.

  The entrance receded around a bend behind me, and the tunnel split into a Y. The left tine quickly branched three ways, and the way I chose led me around a curve into a dead end.

  It was another maze.

  I retraced my steps and kept going. It was almost like walking in low gravity, and thinking of it that way, I soon found a special flex of leg and foot that propelled me forward without too much dangerous upward bounce—a kind of lope. I’d just hit my stride, my head held high for balance, when I came to a sharp bend, brought my feet together on the downstep to make the turn, and crashed through the mat into empty space.

  I dropped more than three meters, then hit another vine mat like a trampoline and bounced. My head narrowly cleared the edge of the hole I’d fallen through, bobbing briefly back into the vertical connector—a glimpse of circular light-strips lining it—before I dropped again.

  This time, I bent my knees sharply when I hit the lower mat to kill the bounce. I was in a vine-walled tunnel, just like the one above. A frame of glowing light-strip outlined the hole overhead, less than a meter wide. The hole one floor above evidently lacked such a frame, and the vine mat had covered it—but only thinly, because of the connector’s hot interior strips.

  After a few practice hops I managed to bounce high enough to catch hold of the top of the connector and drag myself back up through the broken mat to my original level. I got dirt on my fingers doing it, and concluded that there was some soil between stone and mat.

  It took another hour to finish exploring the upper section, but I saw it all. The tunnels weren’t as confusing as the mirror maze had been, with its reflections and identical angles and computers changing the walls. Here, for one thing, I could tear away patches of leaves to mark where I’d been.

  At one intersection where I did this, I uncovered a small opening in the stone, with a mesh grill in front of it—to keep out the vines? The wall immediately below the grill was streaked as if by muddy water. Part of the nutrient system, perhaps? Too small for an exit.

  I doubled back to the door a few times, but it stayed closed, no surprise there. I found no connectors upward, and only two downward; I noticed the new one’s covering mat had been broken by someone else, the torn places white and fresh. Returning to the other hole, I dropped through it again, more deftly this time, and began to explore the next level.

  At first it seemed more extensive, but I mastered its twists and forks in less time. Practice. In addition to four connectors downward, I found two new ways up, into top-floor sections separate from the one I’d entered by; the three combined might have equaled the area of the lower level.

  But one of them I was reluctant to explore. Here the vines had not been deterred, but had invaded the connector; its interior light-strips and what I could see of the tunnel above glowed a dull and somehow disquieting red.

  I decided to leave the red section be, and come back to it if I had no luck elsewhere. I dropped down another level, explored a sub-section, then bounced back up and crossed over to another.

  I couldn’t decide whether there was just one type of vine or several. In two sub-sections the leaves were noticeably smaller and softer, but greener and more healthy-looking. In some tunnels these smaller leaves glistened with what I took to be exuded sap—clear, sweet-smelling, almost a gel—and elsewhere this gave way to a dull white dustiness that might have been the same stuff dried up.

  Several times I heard a rustling in the vines, but cautious poking among the leaves revealed only harmless-looking insects. Then I rounded a corner into an explosion of barks and squeaks. I jumped back and caught a glimpse of curious, intelligent eyes behind a sleek snout.

  A rat, and a big one. There was a furious flurry of leaves, and it disappeared beneath the vine mat.

  ◆◆◆

  Within a few hours I’d established the probable limits of the top three floors, though I’d stayed out of all the red-lit sections I’d found. And I knew there were more floors below, each following the same basic pattern—a simple one, despite the curving mazes within.

  Interior walls ignored, the floors were oblongs of the same size, each shifted forward relative to the one above it, like an enormous staircase going down.

  I was satisfied. Helen Hogg-Smythe had implied that within the Hellway, the correct direction of travel would usually be clear-cut. Forward and downward, for instance—the logical way to descend the mountainside I’d seen on the surface, and I could take the guideplate hint to mean that the only way out was to go through all the levels.

  But not yet. I was exhausted. I didn’t know which muscles the flexible terrain had stressed more—the small ones normally unused, or the major groups I’d used in unaccustomed ways. They all screamed, from toes to shoulders. Meanwhile, against the scrim of my mind, the leafy green walls, brown mat floor, and eye-searing yellow strips played on and on, forking and doubling back and hitting dead ends. And the mental jumble was echoed by the mad verses I’d composed to keep track of section after section—mnemonic lists of twists and branches, turns and choices, right versus left, e.g.:

  WhiLe RoyaLs feaR the faLse RepoRts

  Of Reds who scRibbLe LibeLs,

  DisLoyaL LawyeRs RuLe the couRts,

  And LiaRs sweaR on bibLes.

  Dozens of those. When tongue twisters aren’t spoken aloud, they spin the brain instead. I had to sleep, and see if my strategy for the maze sounded as good when I awoke.

  The vine mat was comfortable enough, once I returned to the top level—the only one where I’d heard no rustle of rats. I fell asleep in minutes.

  I found myself on a hillside, next to a ruined house. I recognized the setting immediately: Nightmare Number Five. As usual, I knew perfectly well that I was dreaming. But there was something different this time as well. I felt no heavy freight of dread and guilt; if anything, I enjoyed the breeze.

  The old beggar woman came, and we talked of the ruins, as always. I was visiting my old Master Summerisle’s home, two years after reemerging into history. It was the only way to learn what had happened to him in the century since I’d left. In Nightmare Number Five I always find out that, like me, he hadn’t aged much. Just five or six years—then they’d executed him as a subversive, torched his home, and defaced every name from his family crypt.

  I ask her about the holes in the groun
d, and she tells me the local legend about the soldiers who came and spent a year digging and searching for the Vice Book—or Book of Sin, as the name had come down to her.

  “But they never found it,” she says. “Because he would never use such a thing. He was a good witch, everyone said that. They say they’ll build a statue in Summerisle’s memory now, because the Consultant has ‘rehabilitated’ him. And that may be. The Consultant always likes to be kinder than his Column, when it doesn’t cost much.” She realizes what she has said, and cringes. “But he has made things better,” she adds anxiously. “When I was a girl, the tax farmers could hang a man’s children and laugh at him in court. But not since the Consultant came.”

  And I make the inevitable comparison. On one hand, the Consultant, tossing a few crumbs to the populace to earn the support of their children in the navy. On the other, a genuinely good man. Summerisle, who had spent seventeen years in a tent, tutoring a colony that had reverted to savagery. Summerisle, who had entered a burning university building three times to rescue smoke victims who did not have—as he explained it—his mastery of breath control. My valiant, wise, and sometimes laughable adopted father, whom I had abandoned when he needed me most. As I’d abandoned Kanalism, the Alignment, and, of course, the Barbarossa.

  Then the orgy of guilt begins. I tell the old woman about the Barbarossa, about the data log that should explain what sort of disaster overtook the ship. But decoding computers always return the same answer: the log is whole, and in navy format, but has been subjected to some method of “global distortion” to keep it from being read. And who could have done this but me, in that blacked-out stretch of time in the lifeboat? But, I explain to her, I haven’t destroyed the evidence, only the disk; I’ve kept the data itself on my person, in an artificial fingerbone. Having long since abandoned my fruitless search for scientific mention of the p-space bubbles that would make my Barbarossa dream more possible, my Barbarossa crime less likely, I would face the truth, no matter how shameful, if only I could remember it⁠…

  But suddenly, this time through Nightmare Number Five, I dropped all that. There was no nightmare. I looked around at the ruins, the hillside, the old woman, and knew them all for two-dimensional props. All my grief and guilt seemed phony and assumed. Self-important, too—to believe that I’d had the power to save the Alignment, for instance.

  It had been growing in me ever since entering the Hellway, the power to let the nightmares go. Somehow I’d picked up the golden thread again. Maybe I’d taken the easy way out when I left Nexus, but now I was back on the winding way through. I was exactly where I was supposed to be, in the Hellway’s leaf-gutter, hiding from rats, with someone shaking me awake. Not happy, exactly, but on the right path.

  “Alun!” An expression of urgency gave way to relief on Ariel’s face. “Alun!”

  “Hullo,” I said.

  “I was scared when I saw you lying like that.”

  I took a firmer grip on reality and sat up. Ariel knelt before me wearing a provision belt like mine, her blue hiking outfit sadly wrinkled. Our friar of the Green Church, his olive robe as drab as ever, made the sign of the tree behind her. “Blessed is the seed,” he said. “Blessed is the fruit of the vine.” I resisted the temptation to lie down again.

  “Better me than a merc,” I said as Ariel helped me up. “And just as glad to see you two. When did you arrive?”

  “A while before you, I guess,” she said. “It was just luck we decided to recheck the upper tiers for exits this morning. Maybe we shouldn’t have followed the ripped leaves, but we figured it might be better to meet whoever was ripping them face-on. We’re trapped together in any case. But are you alone?”

  I gave them a brief account of my first Hellway test—what had happened to Helen Hogg-Smythe, and the last I’d seen of her and Foyle.

  “That’s bad, about Helen,” Ariel said. “I have a lot of faith in Foyle, she’s strong and smart, but it’s bad news all the same. You might keep it from Harry; Helen was like a grandmother to him.”

  “So Harry Lagado is with you. And the others?”

  “Harry’s father and Wongama? Harry started out with them, and says they had no trouble with their first passage. Not really, anyway. Sounds like Ruy and Piet argued a lot.”

  “Well, it’s good to keep up the old customs in a new country. So let’s see—I guess the computers split them up afterwards, and sent Harry here. What about you? Weren’t you and Ken Mishima partnered with a dead merc back in the mirror maze—the bee-stung guy?”

  She made a face. “Not for long; the computers finally got straightened out and sent robots to take the body away, before putting us in a t-car. Their voice seemed to be asking lots of questions about the dead man, but we couldn’t understand much.

  “We’re going to have to be careful with them,” she added. “That’s one thing that has changed since colonial times. These old-style computers may seem as smart, within their domains, but they don’t have the overall grasp of ours. I’ll bet the Hellway was meant to function under human supervision. Right now, parts of it are running perfectly, but without a clue that others are out of order.”

  “I can believe that,” I agreed. “But you were saying?”

  “Oh, well, finally Mishima and I reached the Hellway. Between the two of us, thanks to the statue-chamber briefing, we were able to figure out how to proceed.”

  “What was your first test?”

  “No big deal. We had to walk a ledge, that’s all. The transport let us out on one end of a tall, narrow wall along a lakeshore, and we had to walk the top of it to the next stop. It was a long walk, and it got dark, and sometimes it got very narrow and very high, and at one point it crossed the water, and you could feel waves crashing against it…I mean, it was scary, but as long as you didn’t get scared and lose your head, it wasn’t really that dangerous.”

  She winced and took a breath. “Except one bit where it had crumbled away. That was tricky climbing—and Mishima didn’t come back for me, either; it was the sound of the waves, he couldn’t hear me. But I got back up okay. And I don’t think that the gap was part of the test, I think it was just out of repair. Let’s face it, six hundred years.”

  “I don’t know, Ariel. Foyle thinks the dangers are intentional, and she may be right. What did the guidepost say? That could be a clue.”

  “Guidepost? There wasn’t anything like that. Except—at the very beginning, there was this old-fashioned metal bootscraper. And there were four raised Oldstyle letters along the rung—you know, right where you’d wipe your feet. I don’t know the language, but the letters were f, e, a, and r.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Friar, I didn’t mean to be rude. You must have a story to tell, too. Last I heard, you were partnered with two of the enemy.”

  Friar Francisco looked deeply uncomfortable. “It was all very sad,” he said. “They were brutal, ignorant souls, who didn’t understand where we were or what was happening to us. None of us could follow the computer’s speech, but I revealed a little of what I had learned from my reading. I made them think we would have to journey for weeks, and so they agreed to let me live—as their guide, cook, and servant. They said they would ask their commanders, later, if they could spare my life. But I had no illusions about that.

  “In fact, our test was simply to move down a certain stretch of river. I think we were intended to tame and ride some deerlike creatures who visited the banks for water, but my companions scared them off. They were good woodsmen, though; they cut down some trees and made a handy little raft.

  “At this point I prepared dinner. I knew, of course, that the Titan flora and fauna were incompatible with our digestive systems, and could even be dangerous. But some Terran life-forms were included when the Elitists reshaped this park, and I was able to locate some harmless roughage. I pretended it would be a healthy meal. I think the mercenaries suspected something, because they made sure we all ate the same plants, and waited until I’d gone first…They
died a few minutes later.”

  “What? Didn’t you eat the same meal?”

  “Yes,” the friar said gloomily, opening one of the pouch pockets of his robe to show me a number of plastic vials, “but I didn’t poison mine.

  “My order’s drugs are medicinal, of course, but when necessary⁠…⁠” His voice trailed off a bit. “Poison’s traditionally a woman’s weapon, therefore sacred to the Triple Goddess, and permitted by her under the Dispenser’s Dispensation.” He looked up earnestly. “I was not without mercy, you understand. I gave the mercenaries the sacrament of abortion; they will get another chance to be human beings, the next time they’re incarnated.”

  “And who can ask for more?” I said. “Meanwhile, we’ll have their guns to use. Or are they crossbows?”

  He looked even more uncomfortable.

  “You did bring them with you?”

  Ariel rolled her eyes. “Says he’s not allowed to carry weapons made of iron or steel,” she murmured.

  “I know it seems silly to someone not of my faith,” he began.

  “No, no, of course not,” I said, not quite felling him to the ground with a sympathetic clap on the shoulder. “To hell with it. Weapons haven’t done the mercs any good. We’ll get more use out of your biology and zoology, and my Ur-Linguish. And with luck, we can finish our second test quickly.”

  I explained my strategy for finding the exit.

  “I’m afraid we haven’t been as systematic,” Friar Francisco said. “Spot checking, and trying to understand the ecology. But…yes, I’ve seen nothing to conflict with your analysis. Ariel?”

  “I think it’s worth a shot,” she said. “We can always come back and try every tunnel on every floor, but there are so many of them—it stands to reason we’re supposed to rule some out.” She turned back to me. “Were any of the sections you explored red? Red lights?”