The Sagittarius Whorl: Book Three of the Rampart Worlds Trilogy

by Julian May

  The subway station sign caught my eye. ST. PATRICK STATION. A church? … Many of them were open in the evening. Humans dozed in them all the time, but a sleeping alien would alert a suspicious sexton. A public database? … Lots of people rested their eyes in the library, but the nearest one was over a mile away, on Yonge Street. There was another in the university campus, closer but still at least twelve blocks away. I’d never—

  Oh, shit. They were here! The first Haluk hunters.

  I spotted them from the corner of my eye—I now had great peripheral vision—exiting from a northbound train. Two uniformed blue alien males and a female in casual attire. They found a vantage point near the escalator and stood slightly apart, carefully scanning the throng. One spoke into a handheld com device, no doubt reporting that I was no longer near the public phones. I pulled my cap even lower and hunched my shoulders, trying to look less conspicuous.

  Right, Helly, you moron. Why not just hunker down on the floor and put your fat blue head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye?

  I straightened up and readjusted the hat. Tried to look confident and ordinary. Began to drift toward the subway turnstile, figuring to hop over it when the next train was about to pull away, slip aboard through the closing door and take my chances. Wondered if I had enough energy left to make the leap.

  Stopped wondering when the female Haluk searcher spotted me and pointed me out to her companions.

  The trio walked purposefully in my direction.

  I panicked.

  There was only one way open to me where they didn’t dare follow. I dropped my gym bag, flung myself bodily over the turnstile barrier, and landed with a bone-jarring crash. A few people yipped and shouted. The three Haluk broke into a canter. I rolled to the platform edge and went over. This time the impact with the ceramalloy antigravity reflector grid did more than shake me up. Something in my left shoulder snapped and a white bolt of agony lanced through my brain. Broken collarbone. I’d suffered one before on Kedge-Lockaby when I fell off my sub’s flybridge, drunk as a skunk.

  Don’t pass out! One last push, Helly. Come on, you gutsy blue fucker. Get up up up!

  I struggled back onto my feet and scrambled into the subway tunnel. It was straight as a die, dimly lit with small yellow bulbs mounted along the ceiling every dozen meters or so. No sign of an approaching train.

  Unzipping my jacket halfway, I thrust my injured left arm into it in an improvised sling. Better. I jogged clumsily along the grid side, where there was very little clearance between the reflector area and the wall. An uproar of voices echoed behind me. I dared a look over my shoulder. The three Haluk weren’t following.

  Pain pain pain. My shoulder. My laboring lungs. My heart thudding like a punching bag going full tilt: whop-a whop-a whop-a. Another goddamned chase scene, starring me. Monotonous.

  My head ached like a sonuvabitch and I was starting to see double. My brain was losing contact with my legs and I tripped over a structural member and nearly took a header. Caught at the wall with my good hand and kept going.

  There had to be an emergency escape hatch along here somewhere. I’d seen them myself, looking through the windows of speeding trains, inconspicuous niches with doors in them.

  A soft breeze had begun to blow in my face and I heard a peculiar rushing sound, not very loud. Far, far away I could see twin starry pinpricks: train headlights. Shit. Not that ancient cliché! I tried to move along faster and failed. Picked up my heavy feet and laid them down. Felt giddy, sick, hopeless.

  The dancing headlights were brighter, closing in. Soon the sensors in the lead car would take note of an unauthorized object on the grid ahead. They would bring the train to a halt, leaving me jacklighted in front of it like a trapped deer, waiting for the arrival of the Transit Authority Police.

  I was staggering with pain and vertigo, ready to pack it in, when I finally came to the niche. Almost passed it by, not recognizing my salvation. Managed to pull open the narrow metal hatch, fell through onto my broken shoulder, screaming, and kicked the hatch shut.

  A surreal interlude followed. The place inside was spinning, or I was, engulfing me in a cataract of deafening sound and colored kaleidoscopic shapes. After what seemed like a long time—but was probably only minutes—the chaotic noise diminished into a nearly subsonic drone and the psychedelic light show coalesced into solid retinal images, blurry but bona fide.

  I sat up, hurting like hell, no longer suffering from incapacitating dizziness. My refuge was a lighted utility room less than ten feet square and about as high. The deep humming sound, which I presumed came from hidden antigravity generators, had just enough volume to set my teeth on edge.

  The walls of the place were crowded with pipes, conduits, and impressive junction boxes with high-voltage warnings on them. Through bleary eyes I saw a prehistoric nonvideo telephone on the wall beside the exit to the tunnel, along with a cabinet labeled EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT. An iron ladder was mounted on the opposite wall. It went up to a dark shaft in the ceiling and down through an equally dark hole in the floor.

  I opened the cabinet and saw a large canister of foam spark-suppressant, a pair of heavy insulated gloves, two ceram pry bars of differing lengths, a cutting torch, several oddly shaped wrenches, and a small first-aid kit. I took that, tucking it into my ever-handy kangaroo pocket, and turned my attention to the ladder.

  I decided to go down, no contest. I lacked the strength to climb.

  Slip, trip, get a grip. Here’s Supercop, descending into a spooky abyss with one useless arm, wincing in agony every time he jolts his busted bone, pursued by Haluk fiends!

  I found that I was grinning—even energized, in some weird way.

  Go figure.

  I must have slithered twenty meters down the narrow shaft before I came to a less constricted space, and then a solid floor. I pulled out the guard’s flashlight and turned it on, discovering that I was in another small chamber almost identical to the utility room above. It had a similar equipment cabinet but fewer conduits and pipes lining the walls. The light had burned out and the place had a disused look to it. The exit door featured a substantial latch, a key-card slot, and a sign that said:

  NO UNAUTHORIZED EXIT

  IF DOOR IS OPENED WITHOUT KEY, ALARM WILL SOUND

  I figured it had to open out into the University Avenue segment of the Path—useless as an escape route, even if I had been willing to risk setting off the alarm. The hunt was on, and soon there’d be Haluk strolling everywhere in the underground concourses. I knew what they’d tell the cops: “Officer, have you seen our poor deranged kinsman who wandered away from his sickroom? No, he’s not dangerous at all. Only extremely ill, suffering from delusions. We appreciate your assistance in our urgent search.”

  Thus far I’d heard no signs of pursuit from above. It would come, though.

  Andale! Going down, one more time …

  The ladder didn’t end at this level. Its uprights passed through two slots in a solid semicircular manhole cover set into the floor against the back wall. The cover looked old. There was a central inset ring to lift the thing, and I gave it a puny tug. The cover didn’t budge. I didn’t have the moxie to move the heavy thing.

  Emergency equipment cabinet. The longer of the two pry bars, used as a lever. Squat. Heave very slowly, using my good right arm and my flabby leg muscles. With a rusty screech the manhole cover tilted up a few precious centimeters and promptly fell back into place. It probably weighed about twenty-five kilos.

  Okay. Rest, then repeat the maneuver. This time, when the lid lifted, I kicked the tip of the smaller pry bar into the aperture. Then I collapsed. A smell compounded of mold and dampness wafted up through the crack.

  In a few minutes, when I’d recovered a bit, I used both pry bars to move the metal cover aside. It had another inset ring underneath. A long piece of rope was knotted through it.

  I felt a prickling along my spine. The rope was new.

  Below, it was absolute blackness and
a continuation of the ladder. I switched on the flashlight. The lower shaft was twice as wide as the one I’d previously negotiated and gleamed with moisture. Some sort of revolting crud was growing around the ladder brackets. The powerful little beam reflected from water that might have been another dozen meters below. The ladder continued into it.

  Above the level of the water were two sizable circular openings. One was beside the ladder on the west wall of the shaft, and the other was directly opposite.

  I didn’t hesitate. I replaced the short pry bar in the cabinet and closed it. Then I positioned myself on the ladder a few rungs down and painfully maneuvered the cover back into position, alternately levering with the long bar and pulling on the rope. Finally, I twisted the rope around the bar and used my body weight to help seat the cover, millimeter by millimeter. It was very dark. I’d been afraid to prop the flashlight on one of the ladder treads for fear my exertions would dislodge it, and it was too thick to hold in my mouth; so it had stayed safely in my kangaroo pouch.

  Finally, the lid dropped. So did I, nearly, as my foot slipped. But I clung to the rope and bar with my single hand, swung back to the ladder and wrapped my ankle around one of the uprights, sobbing with relief and renewed pain.

  When I recovered a little, I jammed the bar through the manhole cover’s ring so its ends extended evenly on either side of the semicircular opening and bound it in place with the rope. Now it was impossible for anyone to lift the cover from above. Then I crept slowly downward, dazed and exultant. The lit flashlight poking out of my pocket gave adequate illumination. A half meter or so above the water level, I stepped into the round opening beside the ladder. It was a huge pipe, completely dry, made of old-fashioned cast concrete. Perhaps one of the old storm drains.

  A short distance in from the shaft lay an empty Marlboro cigarette pack, a Starbucks coffee cup, and the bag from a McDonald’s Happy Meal. They weren’t dusty and old. They might have been dropped there yesterday.

  Oh, Christ …

  No. I wasn’t ready to think about the implication of my new find. Not until I rested and did something about the pain.

  I sat down and opened the first-aid kit. It had bandages, antibiotic ointment, and—best of all—some powerful analgesic self-dosers. I positioned one of the tiny pillow-shaped things on my left carotid artery—where I hoped it was, anyhow—and jabbed sharply with my thumb. The drug injected explosively. In a few seconds the pain from my broken collarbone vanished. So did my other miseries.

  I swabbed the gouge at the back of my neck with antiseptic, applied antibiotic goo, and rebandaged it as well as I could using one hand. Then I improvised a more efficient sling. To celebrate my repair, I had a belt of alien vodka from the steel flask. Then I started to walk. Correction: shuffle.

  I followed the storm drain for less than half a kilometer before finding a handmade ladder placed against a dry spillway. At the slope’s top was a flimsy grate with light faintly shining through. Using my last bit of strength, I crept up the ladder, unhooked the grate, and emerged at last into the Dark Path.

  I saw a ghostly subterranean concourse, eerily reminiscent of the familiar Path I knew so well, except it was in a state of abject ruin. The light came from portable camping glolamps someone had set out every ten meters or so along one cracked wall. My hole opened beneath a derelict escalator that had once led up into a long-vanished office building. Now it dead-ended in a ceiling slab of rough plascrete, swagged with dusty spiderwebs. A titanic structural pier made of modern material punched through the slab. Around its base heaps of rubble cut off the corridor on the far side of the broken stairs. On the other side stretched a line of decayed shops, some with familiar names. Their windows were gone and their interiors had been looted long decades earlier. Oddly, the corridor floor in front of them was fairly clean and dry. A couple of overhead ducts purred, drawing out stale air.

  At first my fuddled brain didn’t comprehend that the Dark Path was inhabited. Low walls of unmortared concrete block formed about a dozen open-fronted cubicles along the blank wall opposite the old shops. Each space held a few pieces of furniture and stacked small container pods. A dim night-light sat on one cinder-block wall.

  I drew my Ivanov and shambled out of my hiding place beneath the escalator like a zombie. Saw a community kitchen in front of a ruined Taco Bell fast-food joint, a “reading room” alcove with shelves of slates and e-books, a billiard table and a collection of video game machines, laundry pegged to a line outside an old public rest room. Heard snoring …

  Then a woman’s quiet voice said, “You won’t need the pistol, honey.” She was sitting up in her simple bed inside the cubicle with the night-light, watching me, not yet recognizing what kind of a creature had invaded her secret world.

  Tottering, I let my gun hand fall and must have groaned, because she said, “I’m Mama Fanchon. It’s all right, sweetie-babe. Have you just arrived?”

  Instinctively, I knew what she meant. “The—The police are after me. And the Haluk. I’m walking wounded, my collarbone and my neck. I can’t—can’t—”

  I stood there swaying, seeing colored flashes again and hearing the cataract work up to a roar.

  Mama Fanchon was putting on a robe and slippers. A moment later she turned up her glolamp and gave a sharp cry of dismay, seeing me clearly. “Santa! Mohammed! Leah! Sweet Lord, it’s an alien!”

  Muffled curses and squeals from the cubicles. A big old white-bearded guy whom I later learned to call Santa Claus demonstrated how he’d got his name by bounding out of his space and covering me with a Claus-Gewitter photon blaster. “Hoist ’em high or die, blueberry!”

  Two adolescents advanced on me, armed with pry bars. The female shrilled, “You heard the man! Hands up, xeno!”

  “I’m not!” I cried, consumed by despair. “Not an alien. They did this to me. I’m human. Human, for God’s sake!”

  “Bite me!” jeered the male adolescent.

  “Does anyone have a phone?” I asked politely.

  Then I crashed.

  Mama Fanchon believed me.

  She knew anatomy, being the tribal healer, and my thick neck alone was enough to show her that I was no true Haluk. She also regularly watched newscasts on her tiny portable TV and was aware of the accusations of illegal demiclonery being lodged against the Haluk by certain Delegates of the Commonwealth Assembly.

  Others of the Grange Place Tribe were less willing to accept her kindly assessment; but Mama overruled their objections, put me to bed in her “hospital,” and tended me during the three days of my recovery.

  For part of that time I was delirious. I’m certain that I told her my name, also fairly sure that she recognized it and drew certain conclusions.

  At one point, when I was only partially lucid, I pleaded again for a telephone. “Please, Mama! Have to call my sister Eve, CEO of Rampart Concern. To warn her! He’s not me. The syndic. She has to fire him. Denounce him. Tell the Assembly he lied. The impostor. Get me a phone! Call Eve, get her down here. Convince her. A phone. Oh, God, Mama, please get me a phone—”

  “No, honey-lamb. You’re not calling anyone, the condition you’re in. If that big-shot woman is really your sister, she won’t talk to a poor sick Haluk. Or a well one, either. You better think of somebody else to call later on, when you feel better. Sleep now and think on it, Helly.” I slipped back into unconsciousness.

  Later, when I was back on the road to rationality, she told me her own story. Nine years earlier, Fanchon had been a hospital nurse. She accidentally gave the wrong medication to the son of a Bodascon Concern executive, and the child nearly died. Thrown Away, her every asset confiscated to settle the massive civil judgment against her, she had no relatives or friends willing to support her or pay for a ticket to a remote planet where she might have made a new life.

  So she descended into the Dark and began another sort of career as a member of the Grange Place Tribe. There were twelve of them—eight disenfranchised adults, three runaway childre
n who had fled abusive families, and one man wanted for the murder of his unfaithful wife. They lived together, defending themselves against human predators and the violent insane who stalked parts of the underworld. Their food and supplies were gleaned by “shopping”—the tribal euphemism for scavenging and clandestine requisition—in the Bright Path, which they visited during quiet hours. They’d left the rope on the manhole cover that I’d found. They’d also disconnected the door alarm and broken the light in the utility room, which was only one of many exits into the other world.

  Fanchon’s nursing skills came to be valued by other Dark Path dwellers because she was willing to help others without asking for payment. Many patients gave her gifts anyway. She always shared them with her tribe.

  When I woke up at last with a mind that was fully clear, Mama Fanchon was the first person I saw, a woman in a red turtleneck sweater and padded goosedown vest, sitting in a folding chair just outside the hospital cubicle, smoking a briar pipe, knitting, and watching a soundless Maple Leafs hockey game on her small television.

  Behind her, in the communal kitchen, Santa Claus was grilling some sort of spicy meat and toasting buns. The aroma was inviting. He was dressed in a wool shirt and dirty Carhartt insulated overalls, with a striped canvas apron tied over them. Next to the two-burner Gaz stove stood a table spread with clean newsprint. It was set with mismatched plates and cups and also held a restaurant-sized jar of kosher pickles, a bunch of spotty bananas, and a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

  “How are you feeling, Helly?” Mama Fanchon inquired. She put her knitting away and came to stand over me, hands on her ample hips. “Is the bone-brace treatment working? The medicine was a bit past its expiration date, but no one’s been shopping in a clinic for nearly a month. Not since Johnny Guitar fell into the cistern under Spadina Chinatown and broke both legs.”

  “I feel much better, Mama Fanchon,” I said. Unzipping the sleeping bag, I sat up. I was naked as a jaybird. Same color, too. “Need to use the facilities. I can walk. May I have my clothes?”