by Max Carver
“Couldn't you do it less destructively?” she asked.
“If you can figure out a way, go ahead.” Bartley rammed the hammer again, cracking the trunk of a willow tree that overhung the river. The upper half of the tree broke loose and crashed down on the blue quartz, its leaves shattering. “Until then, someone needs to help me clean up.”
“Malvolio, clear the debris out of the road,” Eric said. Then he looked at Iris. “We should get out of the way so we don't get hit by flying rocks. Bartley is actually holding back right now.”
“Let's keep moving up the river,” she said. “I want to see more of this place.”
“Don't go too far,” Bartley told them. “If you see any scorpions or climbers, soak them in poison. And if you find the guys who've been blasting down here, break their necks for me.”
“Count on it,” Eric replied.
Eric rolled up the corridor on his exoskeleton's treads, warily watching the space ahead and the vaulted ceiling above. He felt exposed, with the rock walls sloping up on either side of them. Climbers or rock scorpions could swarm down on them. If the mysterious blasting and shaking resumed, they could get buried in rock.
The geologist drove behind him, the treads of the scouter slapping the blue rock floor as she trudged forward. They had to weave past a number of plants, trees, and life forms sculpted from rock. Bartley was right; they really had little choice except to clear a path for the trucks. They were lucky to have small exploratory vehicles with them; full-sized mining trucks, huge enough to have ladders and staircases, couldn't hope to fit through these strange old tunnels.
After they'd traveled several meters, well out of sight of Bartley's hammering and smashing, Iris braked her vehicle and told him to stop.
“Look.” She climbed off and approached a wide, flat section of wall, inscribed with rows of simplistic flower drawings, each flower encircled by insect-forms made of triangles, circles, and lines. Colored quartz had been worked into some of the designs, while others were just chiseled into the rock.
“More flowers and bugs,” Eric said, nodding, but not really sure why they'd stopped for this. They were trying to find a way out of a deadly situation, not study the graffiti of lost civilizations. He cast a worried look up along the steep wall, decorated with so many stone plants that real creatures could be hiding among the rocky foliage.
“I think it's more than that. Look how straight the rows and columns of flowers are.” Iris chewed at her lower lip, her eyes huge as she studied the inscriptions. “Each flower shape has these insect figures around it. Look how this figure repeats here. And here. And here.” Iris pointed at a design that looked like a fly—circle eyes, square head, oval body, triangle wings. The same fly was in several places on the wall, orbiting different flowers. “The flowers themselves only come in about...four or five different shapes? And each insect shape seems to show up a few dozen times, scattered all over this wall.” Iris spoke faster and faster, snapping pictures with her pocket screen. Absorbed in her work, she became animated and talkative, no longer quiet and hesitant when she spoke. “Do you realize what this means?”
Eric looked among the rows of bug-encircled flowers, trying to figure out what she meant. “You're saying...they...used stencils?”
Iris gazed at him for a long moment, her mouth hanging open. Maybe his answer had been wildly off the mark.
“I'm saying this could be a kind of alphabet,” she said, touching the closest inscriptions. “The insect forms might be individual letters, in which case each flower and its surrounded insects form one word. Or...the insect forms could be ideograms, each one representing an entire word. That would mean each flower and its surrounding insects form an entire sentence. Or maybe the information is even more compact, and each flower-insect combo forms a paragraph...this is so exciting!”
Eric shrugged and nodded along while she took more pictures.
“There could be so much communicated in these subtle differences, too,” she murmured, inspecting the figures more closely. “The angle of the insect, its distance from the flower...”
She sounded to Eric like one of those fortune-tellers who claimed to find meaningful patterns in numbers, or ancient texts, or radio waves from distant stars, patterns that supposedly foretold the future. But maybe she knew what she was talking about.
“When did you start studying with the gatekeepers?” he asked.
She looked at him for a long moment before answering, as if studying him, maybe deciding whether to trust him. It was hard to process what happened behind her large, dark eyes.
“I was eleven when the Antikytheran Society contacted me,” she said.
“I didn't know they started that young.”
“They did during the war. My math and science scores were exceptional, they said. And my parents were proud rebels, from Luminaria. Have you heard of it?”
“Yeah, that's...” Eric wracked his brain, trying to remember the inhabited worlds he'd memorized in high school geography class. “Uh. Sorry. Coach Nuriyaki shoved them all into my head at one point, but I kind of forgot after the final exam.”
“Luminaria's a moon,” she said. “Smaller than this planet, even. A little over half an Earth mass. It's a lovely place, lots of steep mountains and deep rivers. It orbits Karthikai, the most beautiful gas giant you've ever seen, purple and silver. That's what our sky looks like most of the time.” She shook her head. “I miss home so much sometimes.”
“I know. I mean, me too.” Eric thought of the big rambling ranch house back home, his mother baking bread in the kitchen, his father chopping wood with an old-fashioned hand ax, one of the stern infantry veteran's many ways of keeping in shape. He remembered watching his brothers play kickball in the backyard, occasional inviting him to join in so they could laugh at his failed attempts to swing his stiff, slow leg and connect his shoe with the ball.
And of course he thought of Suzette, clinging tight to his back as he rode Ranger hard and fast across open prairie, the soft orange sun of Gideon melting into a sunset in the distance. Her hand gripping him by the belt, occasionally daring to stray lower. Her breasts against his back, her breath in his ear.
“How long's it been for you?” Iris asked.
“Six months. I'm saving up for a return visit. Hopefully I'll have enough by Christmas. What about you?”
“It's been fourteen years for me,” Iris said, and now her voice had the small, quiet quality from before. “I haven't been home since I left with the Antikytherans. I had to leave my homeworld to study with them. And I haven't been back. Partly that's because of wartime secrecy. Without the Antikytherans, there would be no gatekeepers supporting the rebel movement—no way for rebel ships to travel between star systems. So everything about the gatekeepers must be kept a complete secret, including the location of their school. It's the Allies' most valuable target, if they could only find it.”
“Fourteen years?” Eric was horrified at the thought of being away from home so long, never seeing his parents, his brothers, or Suzette in all that time. “But what about the armistice?”
“The armistice came too late. The Allies had bombed Luminaria, and our town was just rubble. My parents...” She shook her head. “There was nothing left. Nobody left to defend, not my own flesh and blood. But at least I got to be a gatekeeper, right? At least I helped the war happen.”
“I thought you said you didn't become one.”
“I was being sarcastic,” she said, looking at him sharply. “Do farm boys from Gideon not know about sarcasm yet?”
“We don't,” he replied. “Why, I'm so innocent, I still think babies are brought by storks, and the Easter Bunny really does crawl up through your root cellar bringing candy and gifts every spring.”
“I've never heard the bunny-in-the-cellar thing. Sounds creepy.”
“I'm really sorry about your family,” Eric said, and he meant it. He couldn't imagine going home to find the ranch bombed into ashes and his whole family dead. He resi
sted the urge to reach out and touch her, not sure whether she'd welcome it or freak out.
“Yeah, sorry to bring it up.” She wiped her eyes, blinked twice, and was all business again. “It makes me think, though. What if the aliens who built this had once lived on the surface, back when this planet was greener and nicer? Then they were driven underground by a surge of volcanic activity, of dangerous gasses. Forced to live down here, they used the materials at hand—quartz, gold, other minerals—and tried to copy the world above? Tried to remember how nice it had been?”
“Wow. That's sad, too.” Eric shook his head.
“Well, it's interesting to consider—” she began, and then the world shook.
Rumbles echoed up and down the corridor, and the blue crystal floor vibrated beneath them.
Eric extended the industrial arms of his exoskeleton over Iris's head, doing his best to create a steel roof over her while she dropped to her knees and covered herself with her arms. He was already protected by a curved plate several centimeters above his head, shaped like a tortoise shell.
Thick spills of dust rained down from the ceiling high above them, along with rocks that plinked like hail against his exoskeleton.
Then the shaking stopped, and the ground settled.
“This tunnel seems to have held against...whatever that was. So that's a good sign,” Iris said, gazing up toward the roof of the cave. Her eyes shifted to the two big arms just above her, then to Eric's face. “Thanks for looking out for me,” she said, and gave him a smile that warmed his chest. She was small, birdlike, not his usual type—not like Suzette, who was tall and blond, curvy and soft, warm and welcoming under his hands. For a moment, though, something in Iris's large, dark eyes seemed to click with something inside him, like an electric current in the air between them.
He looked away first, reminding himself he was practically engaged. Iris clearly saw him as something of a bumpkin, too, compared to her years of intense gatekeeper training; she seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the entire galaxy, of mysteries he'd barely suspected existed.
“It's something any hick farm boy from Gideon would do,” Eric said.
“I knew you'd heard of sarcasm before,” she replied.
They looked at each other a moment longer.
“We'd better finish the job,” he said.
They continued ahead until the tunnel branched into two passages, either one of which would be wide enough for the trucks. Then they doubled back to collect the others. Eric kept his eyes on the blue quartz river below, occasionally glancing from one wall to the other, looking for obstacles. He kept his eyes off the back of the intriguing geologist as she steered the scout vehicle ahead of him on the return trip.
Hold it together, man, he told himself. We've got work to do. And a girl back home.
But he thought about Suzette's last video letter, and he wondered.
Chapter Ten
The group advanced together, with the two robots in the lead. Malvolio unicycled ahead, ready to take the brunt of any sudden danger. The loader followed, squatting on the front platform of its dump truck, holding out both of its excavator-bucket hands to clear out any remaining debris on the river path. Bartley had shattered a couple dozen small animal statues and a large number of willow tree sculptures to make way for their caravan.
Alanna and Prentice rode inside the dump truck's cab again, followed by Eric and Bartley in their exoskeletons. Naomi drove the scouter behind them, and Iris rode with Hagen in the cement truck at the back of the line.
They moved quickly, eager to leave the tunnels and reach the surface. They'd all felt the vibrations, but the explosions hadn't been in the same rooms and corridors as any of them, not this time. There was no telling about the next time.
They reached the point where the tunnel branched into two, and Hagen called a halt to the caravan. He and Iris left the cement truck for a closer look at the fork. Alanna and Prentice stepped out of the dump truck to join them.
“Whither shall we wend?” Malvolio asked, twisting his unicycle back and forth to align with one road, then the other. “For surely one path leads on to glory; the other, to perdition. Perhaps a dramatic reading of Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' would be appropriate here. I can also perform an interpretive dance based upon it by the highly discussed twenty-second-century performance artist Nelu Grigio—”
“Shut up,” Hagen said. He waved a radar wand at the tunnels, mapping each one as deep as possible before they twisted out of reach beyond thick rock, the images appearing like rough sketches on his screen.
Eric and Bartley pointed the lights of their exoskeletons into the tunnels, trying to discern what they could about their options.
The path to the right led slightly uphill, and it was ringed in bands of colored quartz arranged in a repeating rainbow sequence. Milky white-quartz clouds had been set high on the walls. Far beyond that, just before the tunnel turned out of sight, a huge circle made of red quartz and copper hung near the high, vaulted ceiling.
The other tunnel was wider but with a lower ceiling, and sloped downward, lined with smoky black quartz. Hints of silver glinted deep within tunnel, possibly meant to portray stars or moons. Red-quartz eyes seemed to glow within black-rock statues of bats that hung like stalactites from the roof of the tunnel. The bat sculptures reminded Eric of the bird statues he'd seen in previous rooms—predatory, demonic-looking creatures threatening to swoop down and attack from above. Eric wasn't wild about the idea of walking underneath those oversized rock bats if the tunnel complex started shaking again.
“I vote for Rainbow Road,” Naomi said quickly, pointing to the brighter, higher, many-hued tunnel. “Not Highway to Hell.”
“The lower path is wider,” Hagen said. “That's better for us.”
“The surface is up, not down.” Naomi shifted on her idling scouter, clearly impatient to get moving.
“Could everyone be quiet for a second?” Iris asked. She stepped toward the rainbow tunnel, closed her eyes, and held her arms wide with her fingers splayed apart.
“What are you doing?” Naomi asked. “Trying to be psychic? Searching for vibes?”
“Hey, yeah, we need to drive through the tunnel, not read its horoscope! Am I right?” Bartley said, then looked around to see if anyone laughed. He slumped a little when nobody did.
Iris ignored them. She moved to the mouth of the black tunnel and took up the same position, spreading her limbs wide like a satellite desperately searching for a signal.
“Iris? Everything okay?” Alanna finally asked.
“We must go this way.” Iris opened her eyes and pointed down the black tunnel. Her voice was flat and declarative, no longer hesitant and half-apologetic.
“Oh, is that what your spirit guides told you?” Naomi asked.
“The air,” Iris said. “There's a very slight breeze from the dark tunnel. From the colorful one, nothing. The colorful one will turn out to be a dead end, and we'll have to double back. That way's a waste of time. And fuel.”
“What are you talking about?” Naomi licked her finger and stood in front of one tunnel, then the other. “There's no difference, kid. You're making things up.”
“I am not,” Iris said, speaking more quietly now, as if intimidated by Naomi. The blasting engineer stood more than a head above the geologist, and she was sinewy with muscle, like she lifted weights daily. If the two got into a fistfight, Eric would bet all his savings on Naomi. Iris looked at the ground as she continued: “In the Society, we had mindfulness training. Those of us who...succeeded, who went on to become gatekeepers, would need intense concentration and focus to communicate with the ancient wormhole gates. To turn them on, and to twist the dial, so to speak, to select the destination. I can, when necessary, sharpen my focus on any one sense, to the exclusion of all others, to dilate my attention to pick up much smaller minutiae than the average person—”
“This is sounding like a horseload of donkey crap to me,” Bartley said.
>
“Me, too,” Naomi said.
“I'd rather go with the wider tunnel,” Hagen said. “And the geologist's opinion.”
“You're both crazy,” Naomi said.
“Yeah, I don't want to be a nega-Nancy, but that lower tunnel has 'Horrific Painful Death' written all over it,” Bartley said.
All eyes settled on Alanna. Naomi opened her mouth, then closed it again, as if deciding not to plead directly with the big boss. Maybe Naomi was intimidated by Alanna, or maybe she didn't want to disrespect Hagen by going over his head.
Alanna looked from the group of people to the two tunnels.
“Prentice, what do you think?”
“The rainbow path,” Prentice said. “Not a doubt in my mind. It looks more pleasant, and it does lead up.” He approached the rainbow-hued tunnel, gesturing at the slightly inclined floor. “I do not even see why there's a debate.”
“And you?” Alanna looked at Eric. “You're the only miner here who hasn't given an opinion.”
“I'm not sure,” Eric said, striving for honesty. He looked at Iris. She turned her head slightly, letting her dark hair fall like a curtain across the side of her face, then gave him a wide smile that nobody else could see. Eric felt his heart lighten and swell for a moment, before reminding himself to stop it. There was no reason to like her, certainly no reason to trust her. He barely knew her.
He looked at Hagen instead—the sturdy old miner, old-time war veteran, full-time grouch. The voice of experience.
“The dark tunnel,” Eric said. “We can't afford a dead end, or a tunnel that gets too narrow and makes us turn back.”
Alanna nodded. “We take the dark tunnel. Now let's get moving.”
There was mumbling and grumbling.
I'm going to kill you, Naomi mouthed at Eric, looking furious.