He already knew how many paces would take him to the corner to his right; once there he turned and then opened the first door, which let him into the emergency stairwell. He knew that the stairs came down to the landing on one side, and continued downward on the other, but he wasn't concerned with that, but stepped straight forward, cautious in the darkness, until he bumped into the railing that shielded the long drop down the central part of the stairwell.
There he finally stopped long enough to reach into the bag and pull out, and don, trousers and a short-sleeved shirt. From the trouser pockets he pulled out gloves and slippers made of an unusual, plastic-feeling material, and he put them on as well. Slipping his arms through the straps of the cloth bag, so that he wore it like a miniature
backpack, he reached out into the darkness before him and swept with both arms, as if trying to pull the air in toward his chest.
He was immediately rewarded as his right arm brushed something, and he quickly had both gloved hands on a light, thin cord that was dangling down the stairwell. He could not feel the cord itself through the gloves, but they reacted to the cord's touch by generating a sensation like a hot wire.
Bleys pulled the cord in to locate the hardened loop at its end. He gripped the cord with his left hand and pulled at the loop with his right, but he found no hint of weakness. He pulled down on the cord, hard; and got an answering tug.
Imagining the long, invisible drop before him, he refused to let himself pause, but swung his right leg over the railing; and guided his slippered foot into the loop, so that he was standing in it as if it were a stirrup.
Still straddling the railing, he straightened that leg while reaching above his head to twine the still-loose cord about his gloved right hand and through his fingers. As the cord took his weight, he lifted his left leg over the railing; and in a moment he was dangling silently in the darkness.
He reached out with his left hand, to grasp at the cord at a place above his right hand; and plucked at it as if it were a guitar string. The cord vibrated, and he felt the edge of fear; but he clamped down on himself harshly.
With his free left arm he reached out and found the side of the stairs that came down from above; and even as he did so, the stairs began to move upward under his fingers, telling him that the cord had begun to lower him. He had only his body's sense of space to tell him that he was moving, unless perhaps there was some faint passage of air across his skin.
Up to now he had been in constant motion since his abrupt awakening; but now he had nothing to do but hang in the silent darkness, and he found himself possessed by an urge to sneeze, to cough, even to yell—anything to make some kind of impression on the dark nothingness.
His shoulder brushed against something, and he was surprised by the depth of the relief that rose in him, at this fleeting touch of solidity. He realized he must be rotating as he dangled on the cord, and that he had brushed against the side of a set of stairs—but on which side, he could no longer tell.
He was not sure exactly how much open space there was between the courses of stairs that made their way to ground level; but it could not be much. He raised his free left arm again before his blind face, as a man walking in a dark forest at night will instinctively raise an arm to shield his eyes from unseen branches; and slowly extended it.
For a few long moments he felt nothing, and he had to force himself to refrain from lunging outward in an effort to find some sort of solid surface. But after a few more seconds his hand met a downward-sloping piece of metal, which he identified as the railing shielding another course of the stairs.
How far had he come? With the railing to touch, he could gauge his speed as fairly fast: already the rail was gone into the darkness above him, and his hand was grasping one of the vertical members that held it—there was a word for those things, what were they called? But that, too, slipped away from him in the darkness, and his hands bumped the edge of the stair before sliding down its side and finding nothing more to touch in the darkness.
He reached behind himself, somewhat awkwardly, and found an identical-feeling stair on the other side, this one slanting in the opposite direction, but at the same time slipping silently away above him. And so he found a routine, reaching eagerly for each new set of stairs as it rose to meet him; and losing them in the darkness, only to be replaced.
There came a moment when his hand, reaching out in the rhythm he had fallen into, found nothing but air. He reached out farther, thinking he might have twisted as he fell, and swept the hand about him; but there was nothing.
He quelled an impulse to activate the control that would light the face of his wrist control pad, knowing that the pulse he had sent out from his room would have killed the pad. His mind wanted to reproach him for not having brought some non-electronic light source; but he thrust those thoughts from him.
But he could not avoid thinking of the possibility that something had gone wrong, that he was still dangling in the darkness high above the floor of the stairwell. The cord he was suspended on was a monomolecular fiber—so strong it could easily carry his weight, but so thin he had to use the gloves to keep it from slicing through his flesh. Could it have damaged the descent mechanism, somehow?
Or had he reached the bottom? He simply could not tell.
He reached out with his free arm, sweeping it about him; but again he found nothing, and his movements set him rotating and swinging as he hung there, like some great pendulum ... until the absurdity of that image made him control his body's frightened instincts.
—And there came a noise in the darkness, a kind of double-click and a tiny creak; and the stairwell, which up to that point had been totally silent, seemed now to explode into noise.
A door had opened, and through it came a buzz he recognized as the rising and falling of voices—voices that were generally angry, but now and then held a high pitch that spoke of fear.
As if that noise had broken a spell in the stairwell itself, he heard a thump high above him; and more voices began to echo down the stairwell.
Within seconds, more of the stairwell doors were thrown open. He hung in place, furious that he could no longer use his ears to try to discover what was happening about him. The hotel's guests, he supposed—those awake enough to have noticed the outage—had concluded there might be danger in this blackout, or perhaps they had simply been overtaken by an instinctive dread of the darkness. But he now had no way to tell whether the danger he had been signaled to run from might be pursuing him down the stairwell.
The lower half-dozen floors of the hotel were largely given over to businesses, which were presumably closed for the night; so if he had made it to the bottom of the stairwell, he had a few minutes before the guests from above could make their faltering ways down in the darkness.
He heard cries from above, and what sounded like a fight—and then a scream.
He shut his eyes. There was nothing to see in this darkness, but closing his eyes would help him concentrate.
He hung there, trying not to reach out, but only to receive. And in a moment he felt a small stir of pleasure awakening inside him— a pleasure that seemed to radiate from a source outside his body. He recognized it as the kind of reaction his brain had been trained to give when his tactile senses were detecting a nearby heat source.
His brain was registering the heat reaction the cord raised in the glove that held it, but there was another source nearby—a human body, silent in the darkness but surely there. Its presence gave him a reference point against which to gauge his existence.
"Are you all right?" a voice asked softly. He recognized it. As instructed, the man was not using his name.
"Yes," Bleys answered, also keeping his voice low. The voices from higher in the stairwell continued, coming slowly nearer. "I'm not sure how far above the floor I am," he said.
The heat source strengthened on his left side, and in a moment a hand touched his leg.
"You're about a meter above the floor," the voice said
. "Put your free foot in my cupped hands and you can step out of the loop and let yourself down."
In a moment Bleys was solidly on the hard floor.
"Now close your eyes," his companion said; and Bleys had barely done so before he heard a small click, and a flash of light penetrated his eyelids like a bright bolt of lightning. Cries sounded from above them.
"I broke the cord's molecular bonds," Bleys' unseen ally said in explanation. "We need to go. I have light-enhancing goggles, but they're not working very well in this stairwell; put a hand on my shoulder and try to stay directly behind me. They'll already be breaking out portable emergency lighting, which may or may not have been affected by the pulse that killed the circuits; it'd be a good idea to pass through the lobby before they do that."
"Do we have to pass through the lobby?" Bleys asked. "There must be an emergency exit opening directly off this stairwell."
"We're heading for a side door," the other said. "We'd been planning on using the emergency exit, but it's too dangerous now."
"What's the danger?"
"Police," the other said. "They were setting out to block the emergency exits just before the lights went out."
"Police?" Bleys said. "Why are they here? Is that the reason for the alarm?"
"We don't know why they came," the other said, "but Henry ordered us to take no unnecessary chances. But please, now—no more talking. I'm going to try to guide us past all the people stumbling around in the darkness, and while it won't surprise anybody to hear someone speaking nearby, your voice is very distinctive."
He chuckled.
"What?" Bleys asked.
"Sorry," the other said. "I was just thinking about all those people out in the lobby, stumbling around in the darkness and cursing—it reminds me of something I heard in church—here's the door: silence, now, unless you have to speak for some reason. And if you do speak, keep your voice as low as possible, and say as little as possible—and here we go."
His companion seemed to be a bit of an apostate, Bleys thought. It reassured him, with its implicit message of confidence.
The door opened.
All artificial lighting was out in a large area around the hotel, but once they were outside there was illumination from the city's lights, still on beyond the affected area. Bleys and his companion were met just outside the hotel. His first guide vanished, and Bleys found himself walking into the darkness between two shadowy forms. He was led away from the hotel through a parking lot and then across grass and between bushes and trees; once his face brushed a branch; he started at the touch, and the person in front of him apologized softly.
Noise was rising behind them, but they were well away from it; and now Bleys could see the lights of vehicles moving in streams on distant streets—vehicles that had evidently been far enough away to not be affected by the electromagnetic pulse, but were now moving into the affected area.
One vehicle turned their way, and Bleys instinctively started to duck to the side.
"It's all right," a voice said; "it's ours."
In moments Bleys was in the back of a silent float vehicle, its lights dimmed as it moved through a park toward an area where the nighttime lights were still on; until at last, turning on its lights, it slid over the edge of a trafficway to join the stream of vehicles. The lights in this area were on; and, looking back, Bleys could see what appeared to be a pocket of blackness surrounded by the city's night lights.
In another twenty minutes they reached a private landing pad, where the float drove right up to the side of a space-capable shuttle. As the vehicle settled to the ground, and the panel separating Bleys from the driver's compartment opened, a face he knew smiled at him: the face of one of Henry's Soldiers.
"The shuttle will take you up to a low-orbit transit station, sir," the Soldier said. "You'll get there in time to board a jitney that'll take you to High Africa—that's a high-orbit station—where you can catch a ride to your ship. Everything you need's in this packet—" She passed it over to Bleys. "But—" She stopped.
"Well?" Bleys said, after a moment.
"Sorry," the Soldier said. "I'm getting a message—you need to get on board right away."
"I was told it was police who came after me," Bleys said. "Do you know why they'd be interested in me?"
"No," the Soldier said. "We alerted you as soon as John saw them arrive and begin blocking exits."
It had been John Colville's voice that Bleys had recognized in the stairwell.
"Then you don't know it was me they were after?" Bleys asked. "No, sir," she said.
"But Henry's people take no chances," Bleys said, a little grimly. He wondered if he had not made that long drop in the darkness to no purpose.
They had reached the ramp at the shuttle's side, and the Soldier lifted a hand to an ear, listening; and then smiled.
"Our people say the police have made their way to your floor," she said. "You need to be in the air before an alarm goes out."
Rather than making his way through the corridors of High Africa, Bleys had the jitney's crew call for a shuttle to meet the craft as it docked. It was not so unusual a request as to raise suspicion: any traveler well-off enough to be embarking on an interstellar voyage would likely also be both able to afford the cost of a little extra service, and in a hurry to make a connection.
Thus, while the rest of the jitney's passengers made their way through the craft's main passenger hatch, now securely docked at the station's main concourse, Bleys was climbing down through a smaller hatch in the jitney's belly, to which the shuttle he had called for had locked itself. It took only a few moments for Bleys to give the shuttle driver the data for the orbital slot that Favored of God— once again traveling under a false name—was parked in; and they were undocked and on their way before the last of the jitney's other passengers had reached the concourse.
Wary of the possibility that any radioed message might be intercepted, Bleys had not spoken directly to Favored of God himself, but only had the shuttle driver call ahead to tell the ship that one of her passengers was coming aboard—Bleys had been provided with a false identity, and that was the name the driver gave to Favored of God.
Despite his discretion, Bleys found himself greeted by Captain Anita Broadus herself, her beaming dark countenance appearing, to his eyes, very like an emblem of safety. He could not prevent himself from smiling back.
"Great Teacher, it is so good to see you." The captain's voice fairly boomed throughout the entry corridor. "We were all hoping, when we were sent here, that we would be able to help you in some way!"
"Why, Captain," Bleys said, "surely you know by now that wherever you're sent, it's for our work?"
"That is my wish, of course, Great Teacher, and that of all my crew. But you must forgive me: Antonia Lu and Henry MacLean never tell us more than we must know to carry out our task, and in the times of silent waiting—as we have waited quietly in this boring orbit for three weeks now—sometimes we feel we are pushed to the side and forgotten. But please do not misunderstand me, Great Teacher—we are always faithful!"
"Of course you are!" Bleys said. "But everyone's mind plays the devil's tricks on them in those hours when there's nothing to do but wait. My uncle Henry will tell you that's the very time when faith and courage are most needed."
"And most hard to find," the captain said. "It can be a hard lesson."
'That's so," Bleys said. "I think you're aware that you're sometimes sent off to wait because I foresee the possibility of some need for you. But you must steel yourself to the fact that sometimes that need simply will not come about, and you'll be unused. But that doesn't mean the trip was taken for nothing. Simply in knowing you're near while I undertake some important work, I'm comforted."
The captain's smile blossomed once more, belying the seriousness of their conversation.
"Come, Great Teacher—would you like to rest? Or perhaps a meal? What would you like?" Without really waiting for a reply, the captain waved a hand, and
a young crewwoman stepped out of the background, all but coming to attention at the captain's side.
"Shira will take you to your quarters, Great Teacher," the captain said. Although her words were a simple statement to Bleys, they were clearly an order for the crewwoman.
"Have there been any messages for me, Captain?" Bleys asked; and the crewwoman, who had already turned away, stopped, looking over her shoulder.
"Nothing by radio, of course, Great Teacher," the captain said. "But we've had four courier deliveries in the weeks we've been here. They await you in the same lounge you used before, and your stateroom is nearby."
She waved the crewwoman on her way, and Bleys followed.
By the time Bleys had worked his way through the messages, Shira had reappeared. Perhaps emboldened by some prodding from the captain, she was carrying a tray laden with a large meal and several beverage containers.
As she silently put the tray down on the desk, Bleys looked at it distrustfully; but then his nostrils picked up the scent of some tangy spice, and he suddenly realized he was starving.
He looked up at Shira—she was short enough that he did not have to look very far up—and she interrupted her silent backing away.
"Did you prepare this, Shira?" he asked.
"Yes, Great Teacher," she said, her voice tiny in the large room.
"You're new on Favored of God, are you not?"
"Yes, Great Teacher," she said again. "I graduated from the crew training facility at New Earth City two months ago, and the captain hired me for my first job."
Antagonist - Childe Cycle 11 Page 34