/Charlie!/
There was no answer. There was only emptiness.
Charlie was gone. And this time, he feared, it was for good.
Chapter 23
The Ice Caverns
"IF IT IS your intention to guide me, then let's be on our way." Antares gestured to the exit and began walking down the corridor with long strides, her satchel swinging on her hip. The norg named Copernicus rolled ahead of her. The hotel security norgs left them in the lobby, and they continued out into the Atrium. "I hope you know where we're going."
"Affirmative, Lady Antares," said Copernicus, whirring as it chose its course without hesitation. It had offered to carry her bag, but she wasn't going to let someone else be her porter, even if it was a norg. Once, as an empathic facilitator of rank and standing among her own people, she might have been happy to do that. But things were different now. Practice was turning self-sufficiency into a habit.
They passed over the atrium, then descended in a fastlift to an intercity train station. The norg led her to a streaktrain that was standing open for passengers, and settled in silence beside her after she chose a seat. Antares accepted the silence willingly; she was absorbed enough in her own thoughts. Soon they were underway, slipping at quiet speed across a wild and varied countryside.
"How far away are these ice caverns?" she asked.
Copernicus tapped softly. "They are in the interior of the continent. An hour on the train to meet the Maksu, a transporter jaunt with them to the far side of a mountain range, through several other environments, then down into a subterranean cavern system. Then we will be there."
"Oh," she said.
"It shouldn't take long at all," said the norg.
*
"John Bandicut, we must think of moving on." Ik hovered near him, his eyes gleaming through the half-mirror surface of the forcefield spacesuit.
"Right," Bandicut answered with difficulty. The loss of Charlie had hit him hard. By now, he thought dully, he ought to be used to Charlie dying. But this time, he had felt the very essence of the quarx's spirit being crushed out of existence by the boojum's trap.
# ONE OF YOU IS NO LONGER AMONG US. #
The magellan-fish's statement was a cell door clanging shut.
"What do you mean?" Li-Jared asked, turning to watch as Napoleon floated toward them. He suddenly turned again, toward Bandicut. "Is it—?"
"Charlie. Yes."
"Urrrr—"
"I thought I felt something at the end," Li-Jared said. "Was it—did the boojum attack you personally again?"
"Attack, yes. But this was not the boojum itself, I don't think. More like a trap it left behind."
"A—" rasp "—virus offshoot?" Ik asked.
"Possibly. It felt more like a bomb."
Ik peered at him for a long moment. "Are you harmed? Has it left you?" Ik's concern seemed to resonate in the open darkness of space.
How should I know? Bandicut thought, peering across the expanse of the tank farm, and the station beyond. There were already small maintenance units flying over the tank farm like bees, surveying the damage and starting repairs.
"Bandie?"
"I think so," he said. "I felt it leave, or disappear anyway, after it killed Charlie." And he suddenly realized that he had felt something else, too: the boojum had seen more in his mind than just the presence of the quarx. Something important. But what?
Napoleon drew close, sensors blinking. "Did the boojum kill Charlie?" His voice sounded strained, almost sorrowful.
"Yes," Bandicut said.
The robot's eyes flickered. "I regret that. I . . . knew Charlie."
"At least we succeeded in what we came here for," Ik murmured. "There seems nothing else for us to do here. I suggest we consider how best to move on."
"To the ice caverns?" Li-Jared asked.
Bandicut started to reply, and felt the words freeze in his throat. He suddenly knew what the boojum had seen. "Oh damn," he muttered. "Damn. I think—" His voice caught. "I think the boojum may know what we're intending to do next. And this might seem crazy, but—I think it's angry. Really angry. If it finds the ice caverns before we do, there might not be any ice caverns for us to go to."
"Rakhh!" Ik cried. "After all this? We must find a way to return! We must contact the Maksu!"
"I believe," said Napoleon, "that the shadow-people have already asked, on our behalf, for assistance in the next stage of our journey."
"Assistance? From whom?"
The tank farm shimmered and vanished, and Bandicut felt once more that quivering sensation of movement that was not quite movement. Blackness closed in around them, not of space, but of the n-dimensional transition zone, lit with swirls of magenta, where they had first met the magellan-fish.
The creature's thoughts rumbled in his.
# MAKE CLEAR YOUR NEED. CREATE. #
Bandicut blinked in confusion. Create? "Do you mean, the way we did with the boojum? The shark?"
Ik seemed to loom closer, though they were still in that curious confinement within the magellan-fish's eye. "Is it saying it can take us to the ice caverns?"
Li-Jared's eyes gleamed. "If it could bring us here—"
# MAKE CLEAR. HELP US SEE. #
Bandicut thought furiously. "I don't know what the caverns look like. Does either of you?"
"They look like—" Li-Jared's eyes pulsed, but he didn't finish his sentence. He seemed to be concentrating, perhaps trying to focus on a mental image.
# UNCLEAR . . . HOLLOW . . . #
Bandicut blinked.
# SHOW WHAT IS THE HEART. #
Charlie would have understood this, Bandicut thought, struck suddenly by an absurd danger: Where might they end up if the magellan-fish misunderstood their intentions? How far could it take them? To the wrong end of Shipworld? The wrong end of the galaxy? Home?
# NOT AS YOU THINK. PLACES WE GO, YOU CANNOT. #
Oh.
# WHAT IS THE HEART? #
And Bandicut suddenly understood. It didn't want to know the outward physical appearance; it wanted to know . . . "What is it like?" he blurted.
"Hraah?"
"The connection with the Tree of Ice. What will the magellan-fish feel when it makes contact with that? How will it know when it's found it?"
"Ah—" said Ik.
Bandicut recalled the recent battle with the boojum, and thought with horror: Could it have gotten a clear image of the caverns? Could it be destroying them even now? "Ik, if the boojum can find it before we do—" He interrupted his own words to try to form a mental image of . . . something like the datanet, or the iceline, but with far denser activity.
# WE BEGIN TO SEE. BUT THERE ARE MANY SUCH. #
Of course: the iceline, and other control systems. Too many threads of information.
Li-Jared seemed to pick up on his thought. "It would be a place of great convergence, of intersection, of cross-connection. It is a . . . microcosm . . . of the Tree of Ice."
"Tree of Ice?" Bandicut stared, struck by a sudden thought. "Why don't we ask it to take us right to the Tree and be done with it? Go to the real heart!"
Li-Jared seemed to shift and squirm inside his spacesuit, as if trying to absorb the thought. "Actually," he said, "I am not sure that the Tree exists as a discrete physical place. It may consist of many, many nodes—each one as complex and powerful as the ice caverns. And if it did exist in one place, I am not certain that we could—" He hesitated.
"Survive an encounter with it?" Ik said.
Bwong-ng. "Yes."
"You make it sound almost like a god," Bandicut said.
"A what?"
Bandicut shook his head. "I was thinking of Earth myths. There were gods that . . . well, if you met them face to face, you— never mind, you can't possibly know what I'm talking about. Look, we've got to show the magellan-fish, somehow!"
"But we don't know where it is," Ik cried in exasperation. "The Maksu were to have led us."
Napoleon rotated in space
. "Transmissions from the shadow-people have been erratic in this location—but the last message indicated they asked the Maksu to meet you at the caverns."
# SOON. WE MUST LEAVE SOON. #
"All right, maybe the magellan-fish can recognize the Maksu. Can you show it what they're like?" Bandicut had never met the Maksu. But he felt his own thoughts well up with images of the neurolink, a lifetime ago. He was sure it was a poor cousin to the ice caverns; nevertheless, he felt the magellan-fish's thoughts moving in his, observing his images, and perhaps understanding his reservations about them. And in another corner of the fish's mind, it was viewing Ik's and Li-Jared's memories of the Maksu.
# THESE ARE SEEN. AND KNOWN. #
"Yes?" said Ik.
# AND THE OTHER. #
The other? What other? Bandicut had felt the fish recalling Charlie, and puzzling over Charlie's absence; and he wondered if it was looking for Charlie, and he wanted to say, no no, Charlie's dead—he's gone.
But the magellan-fish wasn't responding directly. Something flickered from its thoughts through his. Something about the boojum. Was it looking for the boojum?
No! he began to cry out. He didn't want to find the boojum again.
With a soft shudder, everything changed again. The darkness began to shimmer with flashes of heat lightning, and for a moment, all he could see was the intrusion of light and its afterimages in his eyes. He heard Ik and Li-Jared crying out. He became faint from a dizzying shift that sent blood rushing from his head. He blinked, and the darkness was gone, but a mistlike veil surrounded him. He was standing on solid ground now, and all around him were surfaces of water-carved rock. Caverns. They were illumined by a glimmer of light from a source he could not see.
And not too far off through the caverns, he glimpsed something that shone with a diamondlike glitter. Ice?
He was startled to realize that his spacesuit was gone. He felt naked without it. His voice trembled. "Ik? Li-Jared? Nappy?"
"With you," rumbled Ik, from somewhere nearby.
The magellan-fish's voice echoed:
# IS THIS THE PLACE YOU SEEK? #
For a long moment, Bandicut felt an electric uncertainty. Was it? It looked like it could be. But . . .
Brrr-kkdangg. "I feel it. The activity. It's like a soft buzzing. This is it!" Li-Jared murmured in astonishment.
# THEN HERE WE WILL LEAVE YOU. #
"Wait! Not yet!" Bandicut tried frantically to confirm Li-Jared's statement, to detect any sense of neurolike activity. If they were left in the wrong place . . .
The veil of mist began to dissolve. The magellan-fish's thoughts seemed to be growing distant.
# WE ARE PLEASED TO HAVE KNOWN YOU. WE CARRY YOUR THOUGHTS. FAREWELL. #
"Wait!" Bandicut cried.
But the veil, and the magellan-fish, were gone.
*
The norg was true to its word. After leaving the streaktrain, Antares found herself peering up into a striking mountain range, its towering, fluted cliffs dark in the early twilight, but with edges and tips aglow from the sunset. Copernicus led her up into a cleft in the nearest mountain, perhaps a fifteen-minute walk. About the time they were deep enough in the shadows to feel lost, Antares began to hear a soft buzzing sound. She looked around in puzzlement. A cloud of flickerbugs emerged from the shadows, swirling and dancing in the air. They looked like flickerbugs, anyway; they were winged creatures about the size of Antares' smallest fingertips, and in their luminosity they resembled a kind of gossamer-winged insect from Thespi Prime.
The Maksu? she thought. She hadn't known what to expect, except that they were colony creatures, one consciousness in many. Was this contingent part of a much larger Maksu consciousness?
She stood erect, arms at her sides, studying them. From the cloud of bugs came a groan like that of a large metal structure under stress. "Friend of the Company—greetings," came their words, through her stones.
"Greetings," she answered. "My name is—" she hesitated "—you may call me 'Antares.' However, I am unsure of your reference to 'the company.' "
"Lady Antares," said the norg, with a sharp tapping sound. "I believe they refer to the company comprising Ik, Li-Jared, and John Bandicut. You have been invited as a friend of that company."
"I see. Shall I clarify that I am at best barely acquainted with one of the individuals you mentioned?"
"I believe that the shadow-people may have presented you as a member—in part due to your ownership of translator-stones. You are entitled to clarify, certainly; however, I am unsure of the benefit of your doing so."
"I see." The shadow-people are choosing my friends for me? she thought. But her annoyance wasn't really genuine. She was here by her own choice, after all.
"We were advised," groaned the Maksu, "that you desired guidance to the ice caverns, to join the company so named. Has there been a change? We are prepared to renegotiate—"
"No, no," she said, adjusting the satchel strap over her shoulder. "You are correct. If you are prepared to proceed, so am I."
"Then so," said the Maksu. They whirled in fast sparkling orbits, then flew off in an arching arrow into a nearby crevice. A glowing oval outline appeared in the rock; then the oval filled with a pale golden light that seemed to filter out as if through a fogbank. "Come," groaned the Maksu.
The robot rolled cautiously up toward the oval, but Antares strode ahead of it. She passed through the glowing transport door, and found herself surrounded by what looked like bright morning sunshine over magnificent, grass-covered steppes. And yet, she was not quite there among the steppes, but felt more like a passing spirit, pausing momentarily to take in the view. The Maksu whirled in front of her, their luminescence seeming like a reflection of the golden morning sun.
The steppes vanished, and a marshland appeared, surrounding her with tall spiky fronds and cottony blossoms. That lasted a few heartbeats, then they were deep in a green-hued forest. Three eyeblinks later they were underground, in a large, irregularly lit cavern. She heard voices echoing distantly, and far off to one side, she saw a troop of—tourists?—walking along a more brightly lit trail. Was this their destination? The Maksu continued to whirl, and suddenly they were in another cave, one that felt colder, as though deeper underground. She stood on a rocky ledge, peering down into a huge, and strangely luminous, crevasse.
Ice gleamed down there, glowing from within.
"The caverns," said the norg, beside her.
*
Bandicut and the others had walked cautiously to the entrance of a long cavern that gleamed with stalagmites and stalactites of ice. There were tall, vertical columns and deep, horizontal fissures, buckled surfaces, and erupting crystals of ice. It was everywhere, glimmering with a diamondlike inner light; it flickered here and there with hues of astonishing colors. They stood staring in amazement, their wonder edged with trepidation. Was this really it? Had they gotten here ahead of the boojum?
Bandicut saw Ik's breath steaming in front of him. The Hraachee'an's dark eyes flickered with their own inner fire. It was impossible to tell what he was feeling. "Are we absolutely certain that this is the right place?" Bandicut asked.
"Who can say?" said Ik. "I was counting on the Maksu to identify the location and help us make contact. Failing that, I had hoped that the magellan-fish would stay. But we appear to be on our own."
"I am certain," said Li-Jared.
Bandicut grunted and tipped his head back. Sharp-tipped, icy stalactites glistened far overhead. He imagined how they might fall if they were shaken loose by a tremor. Best not to think about it, he thought sternly, lowering his gaze. The cavern before him was an intricate and convoluted space, with numerous slender, curved pillars and arching passageways, all gleaming translucently. There was a mazelike feel to the place, with pathways carved deep into the frozen, jumbled floor.
Behind them, a path led back toward what looked like a shaft of daylight. He didn't remember seeing that before, but he wondered if it might help them find thei
r way out when they were done. He shook his head. If Ik and Li-Jared found what they wanted, maybe they wouldn't be walking out at all. Maybe they'd be launched out through some portal directly to the stars. Bandicut felt a sudden tightness across his chest. Even if he found a way to leave Shipworld from here, he'd be leaving Charlie behind—in a way, at least—and Copernicus. Was he ready to do that?
"Shall we explore inward?" Ik said.
Bandicut took a deep breath. "What exactly are we looking for? Besides signs of the boojum's tampering." He was hopeful that they'd gotten here in time to prevent the latter; but as to what to look for, he was at a loss. He'd somehow assumed the name "ice caverns" to be metaphorical; he hadn't expected to find some phantasmagorical recreation of the cavern on Triton where he'd first met Charlie and his translator. Were they actually proposing to neurolink with ice?
"The fish said the Maksu would be here," said Li-Jared.
"That was Nappy, actually. Nappy, how sure were you about that?" Bandicut peered at Napoleon, who seemed so knowledgeable in matters Shipworld now that he felt as if he hardly knew the robot anymore.
"I cannot be sure," said Napoleon. "The shadow-people clearly implied the likelihood of it. But I am no longer receiving transmissions from them. I believe this area may be isolated from their signals."
"Well," said Li-Jared, vaulting over a table-sized obstruction of ice to land on what appeared to be a clear path, "no point in standing here. Let's go."
They proceeded cautiously, walking entirely now on a frozen surface. Bandicut was not entirely sure whether it was water ice, or some other kind. He didn't feel cold, despite being surrounded by ice. Was that because of his "normalization"—or because this was not ordinary ice? It was slippery, at least. Napoleon, following behind, was sliding and staggering as he adjusted his metal-footed gait to the new surface.
Within minutes, they were deep in the cavern's interior— surrounded by translucent pillars, blocks of ice like waist-high crystals of salt, and clifflike fracture-walls of every size and shape. Behind them, the entrance was lost to view.
"It all seems to be moving," Li-Jared said. "Is it alive, do you think?"
The Chaos Chronicles Page 60