"And you quit."
"Yeah."
"To drive a truck."
"No, I went back to the farm. By that time, my eyes had been opened."
She turned over on her side to face me. "You gave up a lot. By now, you could have been a high-level Authority functionary with a six-figure income and a dacha on the resort planet of your choice."
"Instead, I have the freedom of the road, very few responsibilities, and a clear conscience. No punking money, no dacha, but I have what I need."
"I see."
We were silent for a long while.
Finally, I said, "Should be stalactites."
"Hm?"
"Seems to me there should be something like them here. Caves are usually formed by the erosion of water-soluble rock, like limestone. I don't know what this stuff is―I'm nobody's geologist. Gotta be gypsum, dolomite, something like that. But in that case―"
"Didn't the lava do some of it?"
"Yeah, there are definitely volcanic processes at work. But most of the weirder formations have to be the result of some pretty exotic geochemistry."
"Well, it's an alien planet," she said.
"Uh-huh. But we're the aliens here, honey."
"Move closer, you horrible alien beast." After a moment, she said, "my, what's this?"
"A stalactite."
"'Mite," she said, moving to position her body over me.
We even got lost down there, which bothered me not much. We had food, rivers of fresh water, more peace and quiet than I had had in a decade. It was the first real vacation I had taken in… I didn't know how long. Eventually, Susan became a little nervous, suggesting that it would be a good idea to begin a serious effort to find a way back. I told her we had time, nothing but time.
"But we're getting more and more lost," she protested.
"Not so," I said, crouching near the tunnel wall. "Getting some interesting readings here on this handy-dandy pocket seismometer Ragna gave me. Remember that room we called Chichester Cathedral? It's probably not more than five meters away, on the other side of this wall"
"But we were there days ago."
"Day before yesterday."
"How do we get through five meters of rock?"
"Oh, here's another way back. This just means we aren't really lost. We've been keeping to the same general area. All we have to do is find a shortcut back to Chichester. From there we'll have no trouble locating that last transponder."
"You make it sound so simple."
"Besides, Ragna and his people should already be looking for us. This was supposed to be an overnight trip originally, if you remember. They'll be worried."
"To say nothing of John and everybody."
"Well," I said, "they shouldn't be. This is the first non-life and-death situation we've had in weeks. We've been shot at, bombarded, and kidnapped. We almost got stomped by a Roadbug, and we shot a portal with a giant sugar doughnut for a roller. God! You name it, we've been subjected to it. How can you let a little thing like this worry you, Suzie?"
"It's my nature, I guess."
"Take off your clothes."
"Okay."
Before long, though, I had to concede that we really were lost. Susan was for probing farther, but I came down squarely for staying put, making camp, and waiting for a rescue party. I reminded her of her warning that wandering around blindly would probably just get us more lost. She remembered, and concurred for more than one reason. Food was getting low, and there was zero chance of finding anything down here. Limiting our activity would help to conserve it, and so would strict rationing. We were pretty good about the former, but we caught each other raiding the food satchel more than once. Neither of us could be totally serious about the situation, but as time progressed and the realization grew that we had set out fully four days ago, we gradually sobered up.
Then things got worse.
It happened in a narrow corridor whose walls were broken by side tunnels sloping up to vertical chimneys through which only Susan could squeeze to see if any of them led to higher levels. We had gradually descended over the past few days, according to the air pressure readings.
I was lying with my back against the pile of our backpacks and caving gear, just beginning to doze off. I was bushed. Susan had doffed her Ahgirrian hard hat (which fit just fine, by the way) with the mounted electric light, and had taken a biolume torch to explore a likely-looking chimney at the end of a short side tunnel. She had insisted I stay and rest, and I wasn't worried. I could still hear her boots scuffing and scraping at the end of the tunnel. She had said that she wouldn't climb up very far, just enough to see if it went anywhere and if it widened out farther up. If so, I would try to squeeze through and follow, after tethering our packs to the line and having Susan haul them up.
So I lay there, waiting, eyes focused on some interesting crystal patterns on the ceiling that glowed peculiarly in the light of my helmet lantern. It was a moue pattern, shimmering and shifting as I moved my head slightly and the light with it. The colors were indigo and violet, edged with pink and red. It was hypnotic, in a way, watching it weave and dance. I slipped into a strange reverie, thinking mostly about Darla, and about Susan, trying to sort out my feelings. I saw Darla's face after a while; it took form behind the pattern, or was superimposed over it. Darla's was a perfect face, if such can exist, except perhaps for a slight overbite (which actually I found irresistibly seductive―it gave her lower lip a sensuous pout). The symmetry was compelling, the graceful proportions almost approaching a work of art. That profile: what combination of curves and lines could be more subtle yet so mathematically precise? A millimeter's difference here or there, and the whale organic rightness of it would be gone. Mathematical, yes, but no equation, however abstruse, could describe it. Faces such as hers were meant to be taken in all at once, in one short intake of breath. Everything fit together well: the sculpted helmet of dark hair, the full tips, the elevated cheekbones, the slightly cleft chin… and the eyes, yes. Blue the color of same cold virginal sky viewed from stratospheric heights, as from the cockpit of a hypersonic transport; the blue behind which stars are barely hidden. Hers was an arctic beauty. But look a bit farther into the eyes―what do you see? Molten paints, tiny burning highlights: Inside, she burned far something; I didn't know what. The cause, her dissident movement? Maybe. Me? I doubted it. She had deceived me, even used me, though she adamantly maintained that it all had been for my benefit. At moments, I was inclined to agree. At others… The jury was still out on Darla's motives. Doubtless she bore me no ill will, but I had the nagging feeling that I was just another cog in some vast creaking mechanism―admittedly not of her own design or creation―for which she had appointed herself the maintenance engineer, responsible for applying daubs of oil here and there to broken-toothed gears and squeaking cams. She was dedicated to seeing that it all hung together, that it kept clanking and groaning until it completed whatever mysterious task its designers had set for it. It was the Paradox Machine, and it was running the whole show.
I realized that I was deeply in love with Darla. Despite everything. It was one of those facts that lurks about in the shadows, then steps out from a dark embrasure and says, "Hi, there!" as if you should have known all along. Despite everything.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci had me in thrall, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.
Susan?
Susan. I replayed scenes from the last few days. In one sense, a lot of it was porno footage; looking at it another way, here were two people who enjoyed each other's company, enjoyed giving each other pleasure. There was warmth, friendship… perhaps even love, of a sort. I found it impossible to compare my feelings for Darla and for Susan. They were not quantifiable. The rest is semantics. Call what I felt for Darla passion―it well may have been, but it was of a rarefied variety. I was not altogether sure that the emotion was not indistinguishable from my strong intuition that Darla's destiny and mine were in some way inseparably mated.
; And I was not sure at all whether I liked Darla. She tended to make people uncomfortable in strange and subtle ways. Perhaps it was only her striking beauty―most people, let's face it; are not beautiful, and a flesh-and-blood reminder in our midst stirs up odd feelings―but I suspect her aloofness was what put me off the most. She was a distant observer of events. She wasn't uninterested in what was going on; rather, she seemed disinterested. Unbiased, objective. I do not say cold. The Keeper of the Machine. However, I liked Susan. Semantics again. While she was not always easy to get along with, she was in the end always supportive, of me, of what I did. She trusted me, and I her. I could understand her. Her weaknesses were not blemishes on an otherwise admirable human, but reflections of what was infirm and uncertain in me.
Part of me hadn't wanted any of this. Part of me wanted to run… not from something, as I had been doing, but to something. Home. Back to safety, to the familiar. I wanted out of it all, to be absolved of all responsibility. I was no hero. I realized that somewhere within lay a part of me as deeply afraid as Susan had sometimes shown herself to be.
But that was unfair. Susan had borne up under unbelievable pressure. She hadn't come apart.
Why not say I loved Susan?
I played the footage again. I loved her sensuality, her willingness to please me. Easy things to love, perhaps, but between men and women, the tie that binds is of two interwoven strands, and these are part of what bound me to Susan: the palmfuls of warm flesh, the smooth planes of her skin in the darkness, the deep well of her mouth…
Something was standing just outside the pool of light cast by my helmet lantern.
I felt it as a presence first; then a shape began to grow in my peripheral vision, black-on-black against the shadows. Somewhere within my bloodstream, the cold-water tap turned on. I stopped moving my head and froze. My heart bounced within my chest cavity like a rubber ball.
I was unarmed. We hadn't brought weapons into the Ahgirr city. A very few options presented themselves. I could continue lying there, hoping that whatever it was would get tired of breathing significantly in the darkness and leave. Or I could leap up and run back into the tunnel in a mad gamble that I was faster than it. But what would I do at the end of the tunnel? Tight fit there. No. I needed a weapon. Ragna had given us some caving tools, one a pike tipped with a strange grappling hook, which I knew lay beside my left foot. If I could create a diversion…
I threw my helmet at the thing in the shadows, rolled, snatched the pike, and leaped to my feet brandishing it. The helmet had missed, bouncing off the wall and landing upside-down behind a low projection on the floor. I unhooked the biolume torch from my utility belt and snapped it on, playing its beam against a large shape with purple and pink splotches, standing not three meters away from where I'd been lying.
My actions startled the non-Boojum to no end. It staggered back, flailing its spindly forelegs as if to fend off a blow.
"Oh, my!" it yelped in a strangely familiar voice. "Dearie me!"
Then it turned and galumphed off down the passage, disappearing into the blackness.
Stunned, jaw gone slack, I stood there and watched.
After perhaps thirty seconds, not really knowing why, I followed it. Several meters beyond where the thing had stood, the tunnel curved to the right and began to descend, widening out until it flared into a large chamber with several tunnels branching off its farther end. I took the widest of these, madly dashing on into the gloom. I hadn't stopped to pick up my helmet, and the biolume torch was dim. The way grew serpentine, then straightened out. Numerous cross passages intersected the main tunnel, and I ran from mouth to mouth sending the feeble torchbeam down each. At the ninth one, I thought I saw something moving, and entered.
Ten minutes later I realized three things: one, I had been very foolish to run off; two, I was lost; three, the biolume torch was failing. Ten minutes after all of the above had dawned on me, the torch no longer even glowed and the subterranean night had closed in. The absolute, categorical darkness of a cave is difficult to appreciate until experienced. Only the totally blind know what it's like. There is no light at all. None. I groped and felt my way in the direction from which I thought I had come. I did that for hours, it seemed, all the while calling Susan's name. No answer. I moved slowly, trying to catch the slightest glimmer of what might be Susan's torch as she looked for me. But I had no assurance that she wasn't lost herself. I had lost track of time daydreaming back there, and it seemed that I had stopped hearing Susan's progress up the shaft for a good while before the non-Boojum made its appearance. She had the other biolume torch, but if it failed…
I got too tired to go on and sat down with my back against a smooth wall. There was no room in my mind for thinking about the non-Boojum, how it had followed me from Talltree, and why. Maybe they had non-Boojums here, too. My mind was blank with fatigue, quickly filling with a throbbing panic. I got up and moved on. If I sat and thought, it would be all over.
I was convinced that days were passing in the dark. I had banged my head so many times that I was becoming punch drunk. My shins were raw from barking them against low outcroppings, my fingers moist and sticky with blood. I had stumbled through rubble, fallen into holes, slid down mounds of gravel, splashed through pools of stagnant water, and had had enough. I found a flat, irregularly shaped table of rock, climbed up, and lay across it.
I must have slept for hours. I awoke with a start, disoriented, frantically blinking my eyes to force an image to come to them. None came. My throat was dust, my body a network of communicating pains.
Nonetheless, I sat up abruptly. I thought I had heard something. The scrape of a shoe, maybe―or the click of talons against stone. The thing that wasn't a Boojum? A thing that was?
A tiny beam of light reached my retinas, piercing them like a knitting needle. I shielded my eyes with one hand.
"Susan!"
"Jake! Oh, my God, Jake, darling!"
I got up and stumbled forward. Light grew around me until I had to shut my eyes. Susan slid into my arms and crushed me with hers.
We both babbled for a minute. Susan said she loved me, several times, and I informed her that it was mutual. A great deal of hugging and kissing went on between utterances. I had my eyes closed the whole time, thinking that more light could not have been attendant at the Creation. Had I been in the dark that long?
"… I looked and looked and looked, and then I realized I was lost myself," Susan was saying. "I sat dawn and cried, feeling horrible, just horrible! I'd lost you, and the food and all the gear, and I was thinking to myself, God, this is just typical behavior on my part, panicking when I should be thinking, letting my fears control the situation, and I―"
"It's okay, Suzie, it's okay."
"―said to myself, goddammit, I've got to get a handle on things, this simply will not do, you've got to―' She drew back a little, "Jake, what are you doing? Can't you see who's here?"
l had been taking off her shirt. I stopped, looked up, opening my eyes.
"Felicitations, my friend Jake," Ragna said, tilting his powerful torch slightly upwards so as to illuminate his blue face. His long white hair streamed down from the edge of his helmet. Behind him, other lights were moving toward us in the darkness.
"Is it that you are wishing to undertake sexual congress at this moment?" Ragna asked. "Being that this is perhaps the case, my companions and I are happily withdrawing. However on the contrary, I am saying that we would be immensely of interestingness for us to be observing you, if by and large to have us doing this would not be of inconvenience."
He smiled with thin pink lips, pink eyes glowing in the torch light. "Perhaps yes?" he said after a moment. Then he frowned, greatly disappointed. "No?"
Chapter 12
We were vulnerable in our immobile state. The caves were dark and warm and womblike, but I didn't want to be lulled into a false sense of security, so I was glad that the Time of Finding Deeper Levels was over. I wanted to finish the repairs an
d get moving.
The trip to the faln complex was on. Ragna would go along with Tivi, and both would act as interpreters and guides.
Everybody wanted to come, but I put my foot down. Then Susan stomped on my toe.
"I need to do a little shopping," she contended. "What's so hard to understand about that?"
"But what could you possibly―?"
"I left my backpack and most of my camping gear in that damn hotel. That was the third pack I've lost since this crazy business started. Clothes I don't expect to replace, but alien camping gear is as good as human."
"I really doubt we'll be doing much camping, Susan."
"Look, I'm a starhiker, albeit an unwilling one, and I want a complete starhiker kit. I need it. Besides, I haven't been shopping in a month of Sundays."
"But it's not fair to the others."
"Let her go, Jake," Roland said. "If she's left behind she'll bitch and bitch all day and we'll all be miserable."
I stiffened. "See here. Everybody's been telling me I'm the leader of this expedition. So, by God, I'm ordering you―"
She brushed by me. "Oh, shut up and let's go."
"Yes, dear." I slunk after her.
I had expected the faln to be immense structures, and they were… real big.
We were well off the Skyway on a local extension, riding in one of the Ahgirr's collectively owned vehicles, a low-slung four-seater with a clear bubble top. Endless stretches of desert rolled past. We had been chatting pleasantly but I had gradually drifted off into a reverie. I was gazing moodily into Ragna's side rearview mirror. A vehicle was following some distance back, a tiny blue-green dot almost at the road's vanishing point. I hypnotized myself for a while, watching it. Something about it rang a bell-just the color of the thing. I'd seen that exact color before… but no. The road swung away from the sun and the color changed. Just a reflection, I guessed. Just paranoia on my part. Presently, I looked away.
Susan gave a little gasp as the faln took form in the wavering veils of heat out on the plain. From a distance they had looked like mountains; now they were almost too big to be compared to anything.
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