Sign of the Labrys

by Margaret St. Clair

  Kyra caught my hand. The air was warmer here. We were both panting, but we did not dare to slow down much.

  She led me through a maze of turnings. We were running more slowly now. I had lost all sense of direction. At last she stopped by a frosted-glass door.

  Kyra’s shop was a big room, shadowlessly lighted, with rows of benches and glass frames stacked in tiers above them. “Some of my babies like the light,” she said. “The one we’re after doesn’t care, one way or the other. What it needs is cold.”

  She got out one of the glass frames. Its sides were opaque plastic, and a thermometer clipped to it showed that the temperature within was minus 14 degrees centigrade.

  “Do you smell anything?” she asked, looking up at me.

  I inhaled. “I think so. A summery sort of smell, like grass and privet hedges?” She nodded.

  “That’s what causes the hallucinations,” she said. “The fungus gives off that sweet scent as a by-product of its metabolism. Try to keep from breathing in very much of it.”

  “Can it get through the disposal people’s protective suits?”

  “I think so. It’s very volatile, and there’ll be a lot of it. When this little cryogen really gets started, it spreads fast. The CO2 is just what it needs for rapid growth.”

  “How are you planning to use it?”

  “It will walk up a gradient of cold. I think, if I scatter it in the hall, it will proliferate in the direction of the disposal squad.”

  She tucked the glass frame under her arm and started toward the door. Once more I had been asking questions and she had been answering them, but the relationship between us had changed.

  “Kyra, what I want to do is to try to get through to F1, sideways. You’re better at the sight than I am, by far. Before you go out in the hall, look and see where the squad and the guards are now.”

  Obediently she put the glass frame down on one of the benches. She closed her eyes and laid her hands crisscross over them. “I’m trying to find the entrance to F1,” she said after a moment. “Here it is. Yes, there’s a guard, a man with a hose and a gun, stationed there.”

  “How about the squad?”

  “Either they’ve split up, or there are two squads. One’s coming this way, though they may not turn… Yes, they’ve turned. They’re coming down this corridor, though they’re a long way off. They’re between us and the entrance to F1.”

  She took her hands down from her eyes and looked at me hopelessly. “It wasn’t any use,” she said. “I told you so.”

  There was reason for despair, but I did not feel it. “Have they got the corridor solidly blocked with the snow?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Then we’ll get through,” I told her.

  Her face was still full of doubt, but I picked up the frame with the fungus and went to the door. I opened it enough to see that the disposal people were still a good way off. Then I slipped off the cover of the frame, plunged my hand into it, and, with the motion of a man sowing grass seed, began to toss the cryogenic fungus out into the corridor.

  It was very cold, and burned and stung my hands; afterwards I found frost-bitten patches on them. The fungus itself was beautiful, glittering delicate stuff, icy-white, and shaped like the frost flowers on a window pane.

  It fell noiselessly from my hand and drifted gently toward the floor. For a moment nothing happened. Kyra had come to my side at the door and was peering out through the opening with me. But an icy breath blew toward us, and the pretty stuff began to respond to it.

  Slowly at first, and then with growing speed, it began to spread out. The motion toward the disposal men at first was almost imperceptible. But it increased, and the cryogen thickened away from us.

  Kyra was shaking with excitement. I felt her fingers digging into my arm. “If it—But there’ll still be the hoses,” I heard her saying.

  I put my arm around her waist and held her, while the fungus, always more swiftly, grew down the corridor toward the armored men. The last few feet of its progression were like a wave racing toward a rock.

  Something must have alarmed the disposal people, for all the fungus’ noiselessness. Two of them spun toward us, the mouths of their hoses giving billows of white. They made warding-off motions toward what must have been an unexpected and threatening sight. But the fungus leaped at them almost joyously. The concentration of cold around the hoses was a delicacy for them; and greedily the crystalline growth clustered and clung. In no time at all the mouths of the hoses bore great choking pendant blobs of the stuff.

  I don’t know whether the disposal people ever caught sight of Kyra and me or not. The fungus was climbing cheerfully from the hoses up along their armor and toward the face plates of their cold-proof suits. I caught a great gush of the summer perfume—white syringa and fresh-mown grass—that the cold-loving growth gave out.

  The men in the padded suits were staggering drunkenly now. One of them put his hose down carefully on a bank of fungus. He bowed politely at the man nearest him, thumbed his nose at him, and attempted an elaborate dance step. Then he collapsed face downward on a mound that was partly crystalline fungus and partly CO2 snow.

  The others reeled about in similar fashion. One of them spun dizzily like a dancing mouse; another seemed to be trying to chin himself on a non-existent horizontal bar. But at last they were all lying in abandoned attitudes on the whiteness that carpeted the corridor. The mouths of the hoses, stoppered by the fungus, had long ago ceased to eject new snow.

  I turned to Kyra. “Are they unconscious?” I asked.

  “No. But what they are seeing has no relation at all to the reality before their eyes.”

  “Then it’s time for us to try to get through.”

  “All right.” For the first time since the invasion of F had begun, Kyra seemed her old self-confident self. “Fill your lungs here, and try not to breathe as we go over the fungus. Very much of that sweet stuff, and we’ll be as high as they are.”

  I hesitated. Kyra saw what was in my mind, for she said, “I don’t think the cold will bother us. When my fungus grows, it warms things up.”

  “Fine.” I took her hand and opened the door.

  We had both filled our lungs. We set off at a pelting run toward the disposal squad, who by now were pretty well covered up by Kyra’s fungus. As soon as we hit sizable patches of the fungus, our pace slowed; it was fluffy under our feet, and running through it was like running through soft snow.

  Ahead of us there were the mounded forms of the disposal people, and then a rising slope of CO2 snow over which the fungus grew luxuriantly. Further on, the ice hill filled the corridor completely, except for a clear space at the upper left-hand side.

  Our run had slowed to not much more than a plodding walk; we had to lift our knees high at each step. I had had to breathe, and I had an exceedingly vivid picture of Ames, hanging from a rope ladder and grinning like a monkey, offering me a pair of snowshoes. In a moment I recognized it for what it was, a hallucination caused by the fungus. But it frightened me.

  We clambered over the bodies of the disposal people and started up the slope of ice. It was not unbearably cold here, but the summer perfume from the fungus was almost tangible. I kept slipping into patches of hallucination, and dragging myself out of them painfully.

  It was too much for me. The unreal appearances before me were no longer frightening, but welcome. I would sit down comfortably where I was and enjoy them.

  Kyra, or somebody, looked at me with a desperate face. With the last of her strength she twisted my hand savagely about on my wrist. The pain cleared my head for a moment, and I realized that we were at the very top of the long ice slope.

  Kyra had sunk to her knees, vanquished by the fungus she had reared. I caught her under the armpits and threw her forward over the crest and down the slope. Then—but this was really the last effort I could make—I launched myself after her.

  We went bumping and skidding down the other side. We reached bottom
with a thud and a crash. Here I think we lay for a considerable time. But the air that lapped our faces was cold, free of the summer intoxication of the fungus, and at last I got unsteadily to my feet.

  I looked about me. To the left, the direction from which the disposal people had come, the corridor was solidly blocked with the sub-zero CO2 snow. But the right fork lay free. And the ice barrier between us and the entrance to F1 lay behind us. We were on the other side.

  14

  Though the hill of ice lay behind us, between us and the entrance to F1 was the guard Kyra had seen, with a CO2 tank on his back, and a gun. He might shoot us, or he might freeze us; it wouldn’t make much difference to us which he did.

  What we must do, essentially, was to get past the guard at the entrance without his knowing we had done so. We had evaded the disposal people twice by causing hallucinations—once physically, by means of the cryogen’s exhalation, and once psychologically, by the mirror game. The mirror was out of reach, but could we use the cryogenic fungus again?

  As if she had picked up my thoughts, Kyra said, “The ice fungus won’t help us. There isn’t any snow near the guard for it to grow on. Besides, we couldn’t stand another exposure to it ourselves. It’s cumulative. We’d be seeing visions before he did. We’ll have to think of something else.” She gave me a questioning, hopeful look,

  I shook my head to clear it. The breath of summer still hung in the air, and I found it hard to concentrate.

  The light was bright enough everywhere on level F for a luminous object to be difficult to see. But the ice hill cast a shadow; and there, in a localized patch of darkness, pale blue and glowing against the wall, I saw the sign of the double axe.

  I thought it must be a hallucination. But Kyra was looking at it too, with wide eyes and parted lips. “I never saw the sign written like that before,” she said slowly. “With the head down and the handle pointing up.”

  “Do you think—” And then, realizing what the sign meant, my words came out tumbling over each other. “Kyra, is there an emergency exit in this part of the corridor? In the ceiling?”

  “Yes! Yes, there is!”

  “Then that’s it. Can you open it?”

  “I can try.”

  She began running her hands along the part of the side wall nearest us, apparently aimlessly. For a few moments nothing happened. But she repeated the sliding motions several times, and at last a square section of the corridor ceiling slid away, leaving a dark opening above us. I felt a faint down-draft of air.

  “Too bad we can’t really fly on broomsticks,” said Kyra, looking up at the hole. She was shivering violently—more from nervous tension, I thought, than from cold. “You’ll have to put me up on your shoulders, Sam, and help me through. Once I’m up, there’ll be a rope ladder or something I can throw down to you.”

  She kicked off her high-heeled shoes. I picked her up and, after a few fumbles, managed to set her feet on my shoulders. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds.

  She balanced unsteadily. Then, “Lift me!” she cried. Simultaneously she gave a spring upward and clutched with her hands. There must have been something for her to grasp, for in a moment I heard her panting above my head.

  The end of a knotted rope tapped me on the chest. “Hurry!” Kyra said. “They’re coming, only a couple of turnings off… Don’t forget my shoes.”

  I stuck the shoes in my pocket and shinned up the knotted rope. As soon as I was through the opening, Kyra pressed a button and it began to close.

  I looked down. Nobody was coming in the corridor, and the ice hill glinted brilliantly under the never-changing illumination of the level. For a moment I had the fancy that a new ice age had begun, and that F was a wide plain over which extended the silent lunar triumph of the snow.

  The hatch had closed. We were standing in a space about four feet square, with a narrow chute reaching upwards directly over our heads. It was not completely dark; the walls and chute had a phosphorescent covering, and we could see each other’s face dimly.

  Kyra laid her finger warningly to her lips and pointed to the chute. Once more I boosted her up—it was easier this time—and she let down another rope for me, which I went up. I gave her her shoes, and we began to climb.

  The chute was like a narrow chimney, with hand and foot holds cut at convenient intervals. We were only a few feet up when I heard a vague, confused noise from the corridor below and realized that the disposal squad must be there. Now I knew why Kyra had laid her finger to her lips.

  We climbed steadily. I could not believe that we had escaped the disposal people so, easily, but as the moments passed without pursuit and our immunity became more and more evident, I was dizzy with relief. I had a winy sense of being a favorite of fate.

  Still we climbed. It seemed to me that nothing in my past, not even the descent to Despoina, had prepared me for this. Then I had wandered through a phantasmagoria of past lives. Now I was climbing toward a future whose shape I could not even picture to myself.

  Kyra had stopped now and again to rest, leaning against the side of the chute and breathing hard. It was after one of these halts that she said softly, “It’s all right to talk now, Sam.”

  My high-flown, amorphous speculations dropped away from me abruptly. “Is this supposed to be an emergency exit?” I said in a whisper. “We’ve climbed far enough to get to E twice over. And in a real emergency, nobody would have been able to get into it at all.”

  Kyra chuckled softly. “The levels are full of foul-ups and bright ideas that didn’t work. They had so much money to spend when they were enlarging the caves and laying out the levels that they made plenty of mistakes. But it does get up to E eventually.”

  More climbing. The sides of the chute had roughened and grown darker. At last Kyra said, “I think this is about it.”

  “E, you mean?”

  “No, not yet. But there ought to be a place about here where we can rest.”

  She halted and leaned against the right side of the chimney. Looking up, I saw her push hard against the surface to her left. Nothing happened. She waited a moment, braced herself, and shoved again.

  This time it worked. The whole left-hand side of the chute cracked outward, away from her hands, with a dull snap. Through the irregular opening, the phosphorescent walls of a room were dimly visible.

  “What was that?” I asked. The wall had broken like a slab of peanut candy.

  “A lichen. It looks just like the rest of the chute, and it’s pretty strong. But if one knows just where to push, it breaks. There was a lot of use made of fungi and lichens just before the plagues began.

  “Let’s go in. I’m tired. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t rest.”

  I followed her into a room that reminded me of the attics I had played in in Peabody when I was a boy. It was large, with an unpainted wooden floor, and the only furniture was a wide bunk and a chemical toilet discreetly visible behind a screen.

  “Why was this built?” I asked, looking around.

  Kyra shrugged. “I imagine the designer had some sort of notion of guerilla fighters resting here between sallies out to harass the enemy after they had taken level F. But I really don’t know. Perhaps he was only trying to bolster up the economy by spending a little more cash.

  “Let’s sit down. No wonder I’m tired. We only had a few hours’ sleep, and ever since the disposal people came, we’ve been running, or climbing, or afraid. There’s something very tiring about being afraid.”

  She sat down on the bunk and, after a moment drew her feet up and stretched out on it. I sat down beside her.

  “Are we safe here?” I asked.

  “I think so. When I’m tired I only have the sight in patches. But as far as I can see, the disposal people are still at work in the corridors. The ones we gassed are slowly coming to. They don’t think that anybody escaped, you see.”

  I pondered. “Didn’t the game with the mirror make them suspicious?”

  “Not any
more than they were before. F has always had the reputation of being an odd place, where uncanny and ‘scientific’ things happen.”

  “It’s odd nobody else on F tried to get away,” I said. “The cold woke us both. But nobody else seems to have noticed it.”

  “I suppose the disposal people put a hypnotic in the air supply before they came down. It didn’t affect us because we’re not quite the same as most people, physically. Or there might be some other reason.”

  It was very quiet in the bare, lofty room. When Kyra stopped talking, I could hear the beating of my own heart. The quiet made me realize how constant the background of noise in F had been. Some of it had been meaningless, some of it had been threatening. But it had always been there.

  “You said Jaeger must have told. Who’s he?”

  “He’s the man who asked you about Tanith the other day. He goes around asking for her,” Kyra replied. “He’s one of the few people who got out of one of those plastic disposal bags.”

  I thought of the slowly moving dead man I had seen when I had been helping with the bulldozing. “Got out of it? You mean he wasn’t dead when they put him in?”

  “Yes. Or so he says. Myself, I think he saw them burying Tanith, his girl. Anyhow, it left him with a thing about people he doesn’t know. He’s apt to think they’re plague vectors. I stopped him from putting in an anonymous call to the disposal people once before.”

  “Would they freeze off a whole level just on the strength of an anonymous call?” I asked.

  “I don’t know what he told them,” Kyra said. She yawned. “If you’re done asking questions, Sam, why don’t you lie down too? A nap would do us both good. And then we can go on up to E.”

  “Just one more question. Why were you so hopeless when we first knew the disposal people had come?”

  “It reminded—None of your business, Sam. Lie down. Go to sleep.”