by Phillip Mann
‘Give me the worst.’
‘Well, the bad bad news is that if we want to get to the valley down there, we’ll have to retrace our steps right back to where we started this morning and then drop down to follow that stream. I should have been thinking this morning when we set out. But then again we did want to see the old man, didn’t we?’
‘We did. So what’s the bad news?’
Mack pointed down into the valley below them. ‘Look there. The troops are gathering. Are they taking over the whole bloody planet or just the bits where we are?’
Hera had seen them too, the Tattersall weeds. They were standing in the valley just where she and Mack would have to descend. They would have to pass right through them. And they did look like troops, massed. Beyond them, in the far distance, right at the bottom of the valley, they could see where the small river, swollen by many tributaries, tumbled over rapids and emptied into a lake. ‘There you are, Mack,’ she said, pointing it out to him, ‘Redman Lake. Remember Sasha’s story?15 And those are the rapids the Dendron came down, and the river there, that’s the old Mother Nylo.’
Mack nodded, but he was not paying close attention. ‘The question I’m pondering is whether the old fellow came up that long way or took a short cut. Come and see what I’ve found.’
He led her across to the large and broken mouth of one of the tuyau. It was to this that the statue of Pietr Z seemed to be pointing. ‘There, look at that.’ Chiselled into the wall inside was Pietr’s name and an arrow pointing down the dark passage within the pipe. Below the arrow were other words. Mack pointed at them. ‘I can’t figure these out.’
‘Nor can I,’ said Hera. ‘That’s his own language. None of us understood it. But, knowing him, it’ll be something basic like, “This way to the best umbrella tree plantation on Paradise.” ’
Mack scratched his head. ‘Why would he write directions in a language no one could understand?’
‘He was like that. The message was for himself, his own mark, something personal. The arrow was for everyone else. It’s clear enough.’
Mack was still bothered. ‘You said he was escaping.’
‘He was. He was afraid the authorities would send him off Paradise because he belted one of the inspectors during the Disestablishment. He came to a place that he thought of as his own, a place he knew well and where he would be safe. And make no mistake, Mack. He came up here to die. He’d got it all ready. And the message on the wall there is to help anyone who found him. Like us.’
In all of this Hera was correct – except, crucially, in her guess about the meaning of Pietr Z’s hieroglyphics.
‘So you reckon he climbed up and down here regularly?’ Mack pointed down inside the dark tuyau.
‘I’m sure of it. For years. This was his private path. And I reckon that if he used it, so can we. Why do you look so worried?’
‘Look at it, Hera.’ They both stared down into the pipe, which curved steeply away into the darkness. ‘It’s like a pathway to the underworld.’
‘Well, it isn’t. It is the internal cavity of a long dead plant and a short cut used by a kind old man whom I wish you could have met.’
‘You’re not afraid?’
‘Of course I’m afraid. But if old Pietr points this way, that’s good enough for me, and besides . . .’
‘What?’
‘Think about it. Mack. I’ve nearly been hung, drawn and quartered by a Tattersall weed; I’ve had a sexual experience with a Dendron – not to mention another big beast; I’ve dangled above a black sea at midnight on a boat that was nearly capsizing . . . This –’ she nodded at the dark tunnel ‘– is nothing. All I want to do now is get you up and off this planet as quickly as I can. Then I’ll start wearing white frocks for you and smell of lily of the valley and be a demure lady afraid of the dark, but till then bring on the demons. I’m Hera, remember, and my vengeance is legendary. Don’t look so worried. You asked me to look after you and I am. Deal?’
‘Deal! But I don’t understand you sometimes.’
‘Nor do I. But even so. Look over there.’ In the valley below them the mist had settled, and rain had started to fall. The mist was already drifting past them. ‘Are you telling me you want to go scrambling down through the wet and the Tattersalls? Or do you prefer a nice quiet stroll through a long-dead tuyau?’ Above them the tuyau pipes called and answered across the misty valley, the sound stronger than before. ‘Wait till these boys get going. They’ll make Mahler sound like a Sunday school choir. Come on, Mack. The worst may be over.’
‘Do you mind if I consult the pendulum?’
‘I’d be delighted if you consult your pendulum. And if it says we don’t go? We don’t go. Meanwhile I’m going to bring the packs in out of the rain.’
While she did this, Mack fished out his ring with the twist of Hera’s hair. By the time Hera had brought both packs up he was smiling. ‘This is the best and safest route to the valley,’ he said.
‘Happy now?’
‘Happier.’
‘Then let’s go.’
We may wonder what Mack had seen when he looked down that dark pathway into the earth. Was it another frightful memory from his dreams of childhood? Or some deep and almost inaccessible racial memory of the path to sacred knowledge? That path often traverses death and terror. Or was it simply that he associated the hole with the trap of the funnel web spider from his native Australia, or perhaps the dark place at the heart of a Michelangelo-Reaper?
Or was it none of these? My guess is that his instincts as a demolition man were jangling like a tocsin bell. The basements of a dying building are dangerous – you don’t just go barging in. But since his intuition gave him no clear assistance, he turned to his pendulum, which never lied and always answered the question asked. And did it lie on this occasion? Perhaps he did not ask the correct question.
33
Down the Tuyau
They walked in single file. Hera went in front with the torch. This suited Mack, as he could see over her head. Above him there was ample clearance.
About a hundred metres down into the tunnel, at the place where it started to curve and they lost the daylight, they came across Pietr’s campsite. His billy, his small stove, a sleeping roll, a spare backpack with clothes and a miner’s helmet with a light, all were there. They took what they could use. As she was leading, Hera wore the helmet. Most important to her was the discovery of Pietr’s wishbone walking stick. Pietr had carved the handle himself and he was rarely seen without it, even when doing routine work round the plantation. He had laid it flat on the ground, set apart from his other possessions. It was like an arrow pointing the way. Hera claimed it as her own.
They trudged on, getting deeper.
Rarely was their pathway straight. There were always bends in front, and surprises such as places where the tuyau wall had broken and branches poked in from the outside. At such places they had daylight and damp fresh air and, if they wanted, they could have climbed right out and made camp. But they went on, and as they got deeper such places became less and less frequent.
They found that walking in the tunnel took on its own reality. The outside world vanished. Their world contracted to what they could see with their small bobbing lights. There were just the walls, segmented by the slow growth of the plant, and the soft damp floor. The only sound, apart from the occasional tuyau moan, was the regular pad-pad-pad of their feet. They lost all sense of time and played games guessing how long had passed since they had entered. And they always guessed too short.
Talking as they walked was not easy and each remained in the private world of their mind. Having Pietr’s stick gave Hera confidence and steadied her. For Mack’s sake, she tried to look and sound braver than she felt, and when they stopped to talk she made jokes and teased him. But behind all this she was alert for any sign of a change in Mack. She had noted that he had become more passive since the visit to the bay of the Valentines. In part she knew that this was because he had tried t
o be a good crew member on The Courtesy of MINADEC – not the boss – but there was something else. He was, she knew, listening for a call and at the same time frightened of hearing it. He was like someone who is recovering from an illness and fears to feel the return of the symptoms. In trusting her, he had to some extent given up his mastery of events. So it was up to her.
Hera tried to keep her mind focused and practical, but it wandered to daydreams too. When she had mentioned wearing a white dress and smelling of perfume she was not joking. That was part of the new world waiting for her, a different world – not better, not worse than the one she knew, but a world she wanted to explore with him. She thought about how lonely she had been all these years. She had never realized. She wondered if Mack would ask her to marry him, formally, properly, in the old-fashioned way men used to. He more or less had, hadn’t he? But then, when she became lost in such happy thoughts, she would stumble, or the light in her helmet would flicker, and she would be instantly on her guard. Daydreams could wait.
Mack, meanwhile, was trying to keep a grip on his fear. It was the dark, and it was being underground – but most of all, it was the growing feeling that there was something he had not understood. In those few moments in the Valentine bay, when the red globes danced in the breeze, he had heard a sweet siren call promising immortality, a new life, and it was still resonating in him. But for the life of him he did not know what it meant. It did not feel like death. But would he ever be free of it? Would he have a choice? Was he now condemned to wander with that tip of knowledge broken off inside him? And what of this woman who walked so confidently in front of him? She offered a new world too, a world in which he could let himself be vulnerable, because she was on guard. Sometimes he just wanted to pull down the shutters and curl up at her feet. Perhaps it would all be better when they were off this world, out of it, away. They would sit and talk, heads touching. And he would give her his granny’s ring. When his mind settled on this, it became calm.
Several times as they were walking they felt wind sweep past them. Sometimes it came from in front. But most often it was from behind, and then it did strange things to their ears, making them feel dizzy. At such times they would hear a deep resonating growl which grew and grew until they could feel the air vibrate and they had no choice but to stop and crouch down with their hands over their ears. Sometimes the sound was like hammering. This made Hera sick, and she drank water and spat it out to clean her mouth. And then they would say things like, ‘Lucky we weren’t higher up or that would have been a real blast.’ Or, ‘Imagine what it must be like on old Pietr’s seat now.’
Hera found that as long as she didn’t let herself think about the weight of soil and rock above them, she could cope quite well. She told herself that the tuyau did not dig unnecessarily and hence most of the time they would be above ground, even if they could not see it. She studied the segments, each of which marked a year’s growth, and wondered if old Pietr had ever counted them. Sometimes the segments were packed together. Not much climbing then, or perhaps all its energy was going into offshoots. At other times the segments were extended, up to ten metres between ridges. That was awesome growth. And did it just grow like a cucumber or did it wriggle? She would have to come back one day and . . . No, she wouldn’t.
Quite often they could see where Pietr Z had walked. The imprints of his boots and stick were distinct in the soft floor. The sight of the footprints was comforting, and Hera matched them, counting the paces for as long as she could. She was doing this, watching his footprints instead of looking ahead, when she almost fell down a hole. The tunnel suddenly dropped vertically, and when she looked down all she could see was a spiral and the reflection of her light in the water at the bottom. The tuyau must have been burrowing through rock here, as the growth was small from year to year and the walls were very segmented. Steps, thought Hera.
Pietr Z had hammered a cleat into the floor and sealed it with resin. A rope was attached to the cleat, and this vanished over the lip and down into the dark.
‘Do you want me to go first?’ asked Mack.
‘No. If I go down and get stuck, you can pull me up. If you go and get stuck, you’re stuck.’
‘You’re the boss.’
‘And don’t you forget it, sunshine.’
She took a grip and slithered backwards over the edge. This was the hardest thing Hera had done so far. She managed to dig her toes into the segments of the sides, but she hated the damp walls and the feeling of being totally enclosed, and she had no idea how deep the water might be at the bottom. But her training on Mars came to her aid again. Concentrate on procedure. She had an escape route. A man she trusted had come this way before. She had a rope and a big strong man on the other end of it. Mars had been worse. She would cope.
At the bottom her feet touched the water and she lodged her toes in one of the folds in the wall. She turned and, reaching out, could feel where the wall of the tunnel started to angle and become the roof of the new passage. She took another step down . . . and she froze as she felt something brush against her ankle and move away. Her cry was involuntary.
‘What’s wrong? Drop your specs?’
‘Ha! Ha! Very funny. I’m going into the water here and I got a surprise.’
She lowered herself one more segment and felt for the bottom with her toe. Still nothing. And so she went down one more. She was now well past her knees in the cold water, and again something brushed her leg. It felt like an eel. Twisting her body round, she could look down and see, in the light from her helmet lamp, where the tunnel curved and became level. The water did not extend far up it, so she must be in some kind of sump, and there was no telling how deep it might be. It could be very deep. It occurred to her that this might be the place where the plant rooted, the way all the plants did in Paradise. She thought about the Dendron and the Tattersall. Was that what she had touched? She tried one more step and the water came up to her waist, and this time she trod on the root – or whatever it was – but it didn’t wriggle and she was on the bottom. Cautiously she released the rope and began to wade. She came to a hidden step and almost fell forward. Now she was able to climb up onto the tunnel floor. The bottom was thick with sediment and the water became like thin mud, but she got through it by taking small steps. She was going up and, apart from the squishiness under her feet, she was all right. Moments later she was on dry floor again.
‘Can you hear me, Mack?
‘Yes.’
‘I’m in the tunnel. On dry ground. The tunnel comes off that chimney. I’ll shine my light so you can see. No problems. Except there’s a hidden step, which was exciting. Could you just lift the rope for a minute and let me see its end?’ The rope began to rise slowly. Where it had been immersed in the water it was twisted and muddy. There was more rope than hole, so that was what she had felt, and that was what she had trodden on. She shook her head at herself. ‘You’re getting too old for this kind of lark, m’gal,’ she murmured, and then called out loud, ‘OK, Mack. Start lowering the packs. No problems.’
She made two trips, wading back and forth through the water, and soon the packs were on the dry bed of the tunnel. Mack was descending. She saw his boots, and when they were about to enter the water she called, ‘Hey, Mack. I think there’s an eel or something in the water there. Gave me a bit of a bite. Just try and tread on it, would you?’
‘You what?’
‘Yeah. An eel. It’s not too big. Might get up your trouser leg though.’
She saw him descend, and waited for the moment when he trod on the rope. And she heard him swear and then laugh.
‘You’ll pay for that.’
They moved on.
Steadily down.
The little adventure with the rope had been good for both of them. The tunnel had christened them, as it were, given them a fright, and now it was less threatening.
They came to a place where the tunnel opened up and became wide and high. To the sides were smaller tunnels. These were where
the tuyau had sent out offshoots. Pietr Z had drawn little maps on the floor at these entrances, indicating where they led to. But Mack had no inclination to explore. He was looking at a blanket on the floor and the stub of a candle in a niche on the wall.
‘The old bugger used to sleep here on the way through.’
‘Well, he was older than you. A bit fitter probably, but he needed his rest.’
‘But can you imagine that? I mean. Sleeping in here? Could you do that?’
‘In the subterranean caves on Mars we had to sleep in the water sometimes.’
‘Yes, but you had the right equipment.’
‘Too right we did. The temperature was just above freezing.’
‘But look at this, will you? A blanket and a candle. A bit bloody primitive.’
‘He was a primitive man.’
‘Even so!’
‘I’m getting worried about you, sunshine. You’ll be wanting milk on your muesli next.’
‘Knock it off, Hera. And enough of that sunshine business! All I’m saying is that I admire someone who could sleep down here. I couldn’t.’
‘And he was alone too.’
‘Yeah, that’s true. He had some advantages.’
And so they went on.
If their humour seems a bit forced I invite you to put yourself in their situation. Forget the creepy VR games you play in which you are looking for Tutankhamen’s bedroom or some such. Smell instead the damp air that Hera and Mack breathed. See the darkness in front and the darkness behind. Here you can’t press SAVE and take time out. There is no sudden EXIT. Here any joke is welcome. Here any mistake is fatal.
Well? Say something funny.