“Hmm,” said Shoe.
Like the other sides, this side had stairs going down from it, but they didn’t lead directly onto the ground but onto a subsidiary stone floor, also paved in black and white marble, a little below the current ground level of the desert. A wall protected it from being overwhelmed with sand, though blown sand was still building up on the flagstones, and especially in what had once been an ornamental pond in the middle, where it had partly buried the dried bones of carp. Two huge urns, one on each side of the pond, held the brittle white skeletons of substantial trees.
Pennyworth and Shoe ran down the steps. They found that the stone floor opened into a hall underneath the raised platform they’d been walking on. The hall was a hundred meters long and twenty wide, its floor paved once again in black and white, its walls and ceiling very smooth with a faint decorative design of swirling organic shapes carved into them. Two thick columns like tree trunks stood in the middle of the long space, holding up the platform above. Away from the light of the three moons, the cavernous room was illuminated only by cube-shaped objects set at intervals into the walls that gave off a low pinkish light. Some of the light cubes were dimmer than others, and some were at their last ebb, not really illuminating anything at all, just glowing and flickering like old embers. A few had died completely.
“I don’t like this place one bit,” Pennyworth muttered, and, even though he spoke quietly, his voice seemed to echo right up and down the hall. “It’s like a museum or something.”
“Yeah,” said Shoe, “but if there’s going to be a way out, it’ll be somewhere down here, I reckon. Think about it, Pennyworth. That well back at Last Resort was way down below that old ruin.”
The odd thing about the hall was that there was nothing in it, and no doors off it either, other than the one through which they’d entered. But right in the middle of it, between those two fat columns, was the balustrade of a descending spiral staircase.
Shoe and Pennyworth leaned over the balustrade and looked down.
“Yes!”
Pennyworth’s triumphant cry echoed from the stone all around them and up and down the stairwell.
Shoe gave a triumphant hoot and kissed his fellow-criminal wetly on the cheek.
“Piss off, Shoe, you pervert,” protested Pennyworth, laughing and pushing him away.
The staircase wound straight down into the ground, dimly lit by more of the glowing cubes to a depth equivalent to four or five stories. There was a single landing half way down. But none of these details were of any interest just now to the two thieves, for down at the bottom of the stairs they’d seen just what they’d been hoping for: another well, like the one they’d uncovered at the archaeological dig at Last Resort. Even from five stories up they could see the same mysterious absence within it, neither a surface nor a gap: neither light nor dark, neither rough nor smooth.
Shoe smiled broadly.
“Lead on my friend,” he said.
“We did it!” said Pennyworth, setting off down the stairs at a run. “We are the best, you know that, Shoe? We found a way out of Last Resort, and now we’ve found a way out of this dump too. We are the best.”
“Where do you think it’ll take us this time?” asked Shoe.
“Who gives a shit? As long as it’s somewhere that’s not here.”
“Yeah,” said Shoe, “or back in Boringsville on Last Resort.”
But on the landing halfway down, deep below under the surface of wherever this empty planet was, he stopped and grabbed Pennyworth by the arm.
“What?” demanded Pennyworth impatiently, wincing at the sound of his own voice echoing up and down the stairwell.
They had been surrounded by silence ever since they arrived on that checkered platform, had heard literally nothing at all in their whole time here except for the sounds they made themselves. But down here, where every breath and footstep echoed and re-echoed from the silent stone, the stillness seemed even more intense. You really had to make yourself speak, for it felt dangerous to break that stillness with the rough echoey self-conscious sound of a human voice.
“Look,” said Shoe, “a door.”
“What?”
Pennyworth glanced, without curiosity, at an archway that led off the landing into a corridor. It had writing over it in the old, cursive script, quite different from the spiky letters that shouted from billboards and illuminated signs in the city where they’d grown up.
“You ran straight past it,” Shoe said.
Pennyworth looked at him incredulously.
“Of course I bloody ran straight past it, Shoe! There’s one of those well things at the bottom, remember? Who gives a shit about anything else in this place?”
“May as well check this out while we’re here, surely?”
“Why? What’s the point?”
“There might be something here we want. We’d be nuts not to have a look.”
“I guess,” Pennyworth reluctantly acknowledged, rubbing his bald head. “I don't like this place though. It’s like . . . Well, it’s like people were here a long time ago and . . .”
Shoe laughed mockingly.
“Afraid of ghosts, Pennyworth, my old mate?”
“Nah, of course not. It’s just that . . .”
“Well okay then,” Shoe interrupted and he passed through the arch. The corridor was cut into the rock rather more roughly than the hall or the stairwell, so it had something of the quality of a mine tunnel, and it was lit at intervals with the same glowing pinkish cubes as the stairs. The time was clearly approaching when all these underground structures would sink back into total darkness. Every fifth or sixth cube here was already guttering or entirely extinguished, and one of them gave a final flicker and expired just as they were walking past it.
After ten meters or so, a large chamber opened up on the right. Its whole floor space was stacked with plastic boxes, piled untidily on top of each other, perhaps put there by someone in a hurry, or perhaps disordered by previous intruders rummaging through them.
Pennyworth immediately ran forward to check them out.
“Holy shit!” he breathed “Look at this!”
“Diamonds!” murmured Shoe.
Diamonds! Every box they looked in was full of diamonds. Diamonds in their thousands, diamonds in their tens of thousands, were all around them.
Pennyworth shouted with incredulous laughter.
“Bloody hell, Shoe! We’ll be rich!”
Shoe smiled wryly, running his hands through jewels.
“Worth pausing on the stairs then was it, mate?”
“Too bloody right, my old buddy. Good job I've got you to knock some sense into me.”
They stuffed their pockets to bursting point. Then Pennyworth took off his shirt and tore two holes in the shoulders. He tied up the ends of the arms, stuffing them both with more diamonds until they bulged, then put the shirt back on with his arms through the torn holes, so that the shirt-arms dangled in front of him like bloated extra limbs.
“You dick, Pennyworth,” said Shoe. “You look like you’re wearing some dumb octopus suit or something.”
For some reason, Shoe’s initial elation had faded slightly, but Pennyworth was far too excited to notice or care.
“Who cares what I look like?” he retorted. “This is my future I’ve got here. This is my bloody future.”
He rubbed his shiny head.
“Now let me see. How am I going to carry more?”
He had an idea, hesitated, and made a decision.
“Damn it,” he said, “I’ll do it. We’ve all done it when we’ve had to hide stuff in prison, haven’t we? I can shove six big diamonds up my arse, and swallow half-a-dozen little ones too.”
“Whatever turns you on,” said Shoe with a slightly distant laugh, and he went back into the corridor.
Pennyworth wasn’t joking. He whipped down his breeches at once and winced and grunted as he shoved stones up himself, his eyes bulging and streaming. Then he picked out a ha
ndful of little diamonds, gathered what saliva he could in his dry mouth as lubrication, and swallowed them one by one, gagging as each one went down. Finally, he heaped up a box of diamonds with gems from other boxes until it was piled high, and picked it up to carry with him. It was quite a weight.
“At least take a box, Shoe!” he exclaimed, waddling uncomfortably out into the corridor, with the heavy box in his arms and the bulging octopus arms dangling down his front. He was in obvious pain. His eyes were watering, and he walked gingerly. Diamonds, after all, are hard and angular things.
“Yeah, I will,” said Shoe. “But later. I’ll pick up a box on my way back past here.”
Pennyworth stared at him, dismayed.
“Way back? Aren’t we going straight to the well now?”
“Hurts to walk, huh?” said Shoe laughing. “That’s your problem, buddy. I want to see where this leads.”
“Come on, Shoe, my old friend,” Pennyworth pleaded. “Don’t fool around, eh? Let’s just get down to that well.”
But Shoe shook his head and insisted on carrying farther on along the corridor.
“I’m not fooling around. Remember what you said when I wanted to come along here? If we’d done what you wanted then, you’d never have found all this, would you?”
“Yeah, okay, but . . .”
Reluctantly, Pennyworth conceded, picking his way painfully along behind Shoe, still for some reason clutching his box of jewels and still wearing his diamond-packed shirt, though he could have put both of them down and come back to them later.
At the end of the corridor there was another archway, this a very narrow one, leading to some descending spiral steps, very steep and narrow, and quite crudely cut into the raw rock.
Shoe examined the writing engraved above the arch, and noticed it was the same as the inscription over the entrance to the corridor.
“Your heart’s desire,” he read out.
“Crap,” said Pennyworth, laughing. “You don't know what it says. That’s not even written in our language. It’s not even in our letters.”
He shook his head.
“Sorry, buddy, nice try but I’m not going a step further. You go down there if you want to. I’ve got my heart’s desire, mate, I’m holding it now. I’ll wait for you up here.”
Shoe shrugged and climbed down the narrow stairs. At their foot, the equivalent of two stories down, he reached a small but pleasantly proportioned room, its walls and ceiling decorated with a fine tracery of stone in an abstract pattern vaguely suggestive of vines and seashells. In the middle of the room, and filling up a good proportion of its floor area, was a circular pool of still water. On the far side of the pool was a stone seat like a throne. Cubes in three of the four corners of the room gave out gentle pinkish light. The fourth light cube had died.
Suddenly aware of how weary he was, of how long a journey his life had been, and how long it might still be, Shoe felt an overwhelming desire to go and sit in that stone seat and rest. Never mind Pennyworth waiting up there with diamonds shoved up his rectum and diamonds like a yoke round his neck.
“More fool him,” muttered Shoe. “He can wait.”
“Shoe! Shoe!”
The voice came at first from far away and he didn’t take much notice of it, just noted it, and frowned slightly, and turned back again to his own quiet thoughts, which darted back at once into the silent and peaceful and endlessly absorbing chambers where they had been so happily engrossed, like fish released into a stream.
“Shoe! Shoe!”
Now, annoyingly, the voice was close by, coming not from some remote place but from just across the small space where he was sitting.
“Hey Shoe! What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”
With a start, Shoe looked up and remembered where he was. He saw fat Pennyworth standing in the doorway of the room, still laden with his heaped box of stones and his ridiculous octopus arms. Sweat was running down the bald man’s face, which was a caricature of outrage and incredulity.
“What are you doing? ” bawled Pennyworth, too angry to remember his unease about disturbing the echoey silence. “I’ve been up there all this time, trying so hard not to crap these diamonds out again that I've got a cramp up my butt, and you’ve not found anything at all, have you? You’re not even looking for anything.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry,” said Shoe, indifferently. “I didn’t notice the time passing.”
“You didn’t notice the . . . I don’t believe I’m hearing this! We’re stuck in the middle of a desert on some godforsaken planet, in case you’d forgotten, and here you are sitting around like . . . like some old guy in a movie sitting on his veranda in the sun. I could hit you, Shoe, do you know that? We want to get away from here, remember? We’re on an alien planet!”
Shoe reluctantly stood up.
“You should try sitting here,” he said, “It . . .”
“I haven’t got time for a sit down,” interrupted Pennyworth (for whom, it must be admitted, sitting down had every reason to be a particularly unappealing idea).
He eyed the water. “Might just wash my hands though. They’re a bit shitty.”
“Don’t you dare touch that water,” snapped Shoe.
Pennyworth frowned.
“Why shouldn’t . . . ?” He shrugged. “Oh suit yourself. If you want to act all weird, be my guest. But let’s get going to that well.”
“So what were you looking at anyway?” asked Pennyworth, after he had completed the painful ascent from the room with the pool and they were making their way back along the corridor toward the landing.
“I sat in the chair and I looked at the water, and . . . it was just peaceful. It was like I . . .”
They were approaching the room full of treasure and Pennyworth interrupted him.
“You going to pick up a box?”
“I guess.”
Shoe went into the room and absently tossed a few extra diamonds into one of the boxes to top it up.
“It was like I remembered something,” he mused, “like I remembered something really obvious which I keep forgetting. I remembered . . . Well, it’s hard to explain but I remembered that everything is . . .”
“Tell you what,” said Pennyworth, “we should carry a few boxes to the well down there, stack them up and come up for more. Then we could chuck the extra boxes into the well before we go through ourselves.”
“Uh. Yeah, okay. What I’m trying to say is that I remembered that everything is fine, you know? There’s no need to . . .”
“Are we going to move or what?”
Shoe picked up a box. As they made their way back to the stairs, he opened his mouth to try one more time to explain again what he had seen down there, but then changed his mind. It was obvious that Pennyworth wasn’t listening or interested or capable of hearing. But, more than that, he sensed that the simple act of trying to put it into words would dissipate the experience. With every word you spoke about a thing like that, the less you knew what it was you were trying to say.
“Now all we need,” said Pennyworth, panting and gasping, as they set down the boxes beside the well and headed back up the stairs for more, “is to get to a place that isn’t Last Resort and isn’t a desert. Anywhere with people in it will do. Anywhere with people in it, my friend, and you and I are going to be rich.”
Pennyworth was so excited about this prospect that he seemed to have temporarily forgotten his discomfort, though Shoe couldn’t help noticing, as he followed his companion up the stairs, that Pennyworth’s breeches were now soaked with blood. The dark stain had spread right across the seat and halfway down one thigh.
“I’m going to get a bloody great swimming pool,” Pennyworth said as they reached the room full of treasure. He was so short of breath that his words came out in short bursts. “A bloody great swimming pool with . . . with underwater lights and a bar and . . . and all of that . . . And twenty bedrooms . . . And a high wall . . . And one of those big metal gates with my own guard
s minding it . . . And I’m going to have a wine cellar, and drink wine that costs . . . that costs more than its weight in gold, if I feel like it . . .”
They picked two more boxes, headed back toward the well.
“Maybe I’ll buy my own . . . my own football team or something, to have a bit of a hobby . . .” Pennyworth went on as they headed down the stairs again, though he could hardly find the breath.
“Yeah,” he wheezed as they reached the well again, “and I’m going to get myself so . . . so many women . . . so many pretty woman. Actresses. Models. A different one every day . . . And every night of course.”
“Right you are,” Shoe said distractedly. “Now let’s jump into this thing and get it over with.”
Pennyworth looked at him in horror.
“No way!” he panted out, wincing as he carefully lowered his second box to the ground. “We need more boxes! We need two more at least.”
Shoe shook his head.
“We need to go,” he said.
“No, Shoe! Not yet!”
Pennyworth’s plump face was pale with blood loss and slimy with sweat. His hands were shaking.
“Man,” said Shoe, “you should really see yourself.”
He dropped the box he’d been holding into the well. The nothingness sparkled and hissed as the treasure fell through it.
Pennyworth looked up the stairs and then back at the well, his glistening face knotted up with strain. He ran his tongue round his lips as he struggled with the conflicting pressures of greed and pain. But he didn’t have the energy to argue any more. He looked longingly up toward the landing, but finally, wincing, he bent down, picked up a box, and tossed it into whatever lay beyond that surface that wasn’t really a surface at all.
Shoe picked up his other box. He too glanced up the stairwell, thinking about the room with the pool that he’d never see again.
“Are you ready?” he asked Pennyworth, who was now standing in a small puddle of blood.
With a grunt of pain, Pennyworth picked up his remaining box. Again he ran his tongue round his lips and he looked sadly up the stairs one final time. Then he turned to Shoe and nodded, and they both jumped.
The harsh white sunlight hurt their eyes and at first they could see nothing but its overwhelming glare. But they could feel the heat of a tropical sun on their skins immediately, and smell the city smells of sewage and sweat and rotten vegetables. And they could hear the shouting and screaming of a hysterically excited crowd.
Asimov's Science Fiction 01/01/11 Page 6