“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 down 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?”
I 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?”
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 and 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.
I leaned forward and spoke over Ragna’s shoulder. “What’s the average population of those things?”
“Oh, several of millions. They were being very crowded even with respect to their immensehood.”
Tivi said, “We were not meant to be living in this manner—that is to say, we of our species. Yet Ahgirr are the very few of whom it may be said that they are in agreement with this statement.”
“Yeah,” I said, and sat back.
“My God,” Susan whispered. “If they have this kind of population level on a colonized planet, and on a backwater one at that—‘
“Right, think of what the homeworld must be like.” “Look. There are more of them on th
e horizon. Tivi told me there were at least fifty faln complexes on this world alone.” “These people couldn’t have stayed in caves,” I said. “They would’ve been trodding on each other’s faces.”
“And ganging together into arcologies was the only way to keep from totally destroying the environment.”
I noticed Ragna eavesdropping as he drove.
“Sorry, Ragna,” I said. “Susan and I were just speculating.” He laughed. “Oh, all of what you are saying is being of indubitable truth, partly. Ahgirr have always been believing in rational control of the population. Not so of many cultures. Alas and shit.”
We came to the edge of a vast parking area crammed with vehicles. Ragna swung off the road and entered it.
“Now we are being faced with the heartrending task of finding a space in which to insert this conveyance for purposes of parking therein. I heave a great sigh.”
I was surprised how crowded it was. “Where do all the people come from?”
“Oh, all from over the place,” Tivi said. “Many aliens too. This is being a major shopping and commercial faln.”
“A shopping mall!” Susan laughed. “I haven’t walked a mall in a coon’s age.” She turned to me. “It’s in my blood, you know. I spent my childhood as a mall brat.”
“Oh, you’re a maller? You never told me.”
“Didn’t think it was anything special. There are millions of us.”
“You were born in one?”
“Born and raised. South Gate Village, very near Peoria, Central Industry.”
I sat back. “You know, at one time people only used to shop in those things.”
“I know. Then they became arcologies, just like these. Lots of factors contributed. I can go on and on about mall history. Every mall brat learns it in school.”
“I’d be very interested in hearing about it.”
“Right.” She gave a sarcastic grunt. “It’s history. Terran history. Who needs it.”
Ragna swerved to pull into an empty slot but was cut off and usurped by an electric-blue, beetle-shaped gadabout. The occupants, their purple lizard faces impassive behind darktinted ports, nodded in what seemed an apologetic manner. Sorry; but every being for himself, you know.
“Nasty slime objects!” Ragna shouted, then grumbled to himself in his own tongue.
But a little farther along, another unoccupied slot presented itself and Ragna slipped in, cackling triumphantly. “We are having luck for once, by gosh.”
The faln complex was still some distance off, titantic mushroom-shaped hulks baking in the fierce desert sun. They were a striking salmon pink in color. I counted six separate structures of varying heights, all linked by a web of walkway bridges with transparent polarized canopies. Service buildings, tiny by comparison, huddled about the bases of the larger structures.
“Do we have to walk?” I asked. “Looks to be a good hike from here to the base of that nearer one.”
“Ah, no,” Ragna said. “We may be taking the girrna falnnarrog, the underground conveyance below the faln: What is it called?” He tapped his blue headband. “The subway. Over there.” He pointed right to a descending stairwell. It looked like a subway entrance all right.
Steps led down to a landing from which we took a descending escalator that was at least ten meters wide—sort of a moving grand staircase. Other, people and a few aliens had come down with us, and we found a crowd waiting for the next train. The station was well lighted, clean, expansive, and looked spanking new.
I noticed something while we waited. Compared to their brethren, Ragna and Tivi were rather drab figures. Most Ahgirr, male and female, seemed to dress alike, favoring tight-fitting tunics of gray or brown cinched at the waist with a white sash. The other Nogon flounced around in garish, flamboyant gowns and robes, all brightly colored, elaborately designed, busy with embroidery and woven and printed patterns. Hairstyles ranged from the highly imaginative to the entirely outrageous (judging by human standards in general and mine in particular, of course). Ahgirr, it seemed, were the Plain People of their race.
The train was a beauty, levitating along the track on magnetic impellers. Bullet shaped, gleaming white with pink trim, it whooshed into the station and slid along the platform, coming to a smooth stop. Doors hissed open, and the crowd began to board. We entered a nearby car and ensconced ourselves in comfortably overstuffed seats: ,
I asked Ragna, “If you can get from faln to faln in these things, why does anybody drive?”
“These are people who are not living in faln. No, they are living outside and waiting to be permitted to live in faln. There is no room for them.”
“Oh, so there are some who live out on the land besides you people,” Susan remarked.
“Yes, many,” Tivi answered, “but they do not wish to be living there. Residential privileges in the faln are being passed from parents to children. Privileges may be bought and sold, but there is being great competition for them. Many legal fights and also violence resulting. Oh, my.”
“Funny, we didn’t see any small communities off the road,” I said.
“Oh, few have been built on this planet. It is desert, phooey on it. They are coming here from planets which are more hospitable. This commercial faln is being usually less congested than others. More parking, too.”
Susan and I looked at each other.
The train started forward, gaining speed in a smooth, powerful surge, then shot into a tunnel.
“It’s always somehow disconcerting,” Susan told me, “when you realize that alien cultures are just as complex and screwed up as ours.”
“Yeah. Must have been all that fiction that was written in the twentieth century. You know, superbeings in silver spaceships saving the collective butt of mankind—that sort of thing.”
“Must’ve been. Of course, I haven’t read much of anything that far back.”
“Ideas like that tend to stick in the mass mind,” I said.
“That’s me all over,” Susan lamented.
I clucked. “You have a habit of putting yourself down, did you know that?”
“Just one of many bad habits,” she said, “which is why I’m down on myself so much. Ipso facto, .Q.E.D., and all that.”
“That’s quite a hole you’ve dug for yourself.”
“Got a shovel?”
I kissed her on the cheek instead and put my arm around her. Ragna and Tivi smiled appreciatively at us. Weren’t we cute.
Some of the Nogon were staring at us. Most of the aliens weren’t. Ragna had said that word of our arrival on the planet had been spreading and that there was great interest in us. It looked more like a detached kind of curiosity, to me. I couldn’t imagine the general public getting worked up over the discovery of yet another alien race, no matter how interesting.
We passed through three stations, each progressively more congested, before reaching the end of the line, by which time the train was packed with passengers standing elbow to pincer. The train slid to a smooth stop and we joined the crush to get out.
The next hour or so was a succession of visual, aural, and perceptual wonders. Susan and I walked goggle-eyed through a series of spaces that defied description. The scale was immense. It was a shopping mall, yes; it was also a vast strange carnival with attractions at every turn—here, street musicians and acrobats, there, some sort of sporting event, here, an orchestra pouring out ear-splitting cacophony … and everywhere all kinds of activity that anyone would have a hard time describing. There were festivals within festivals, there were celebrations and ceremonies; there were public meetings with people up on platforms shouting at one another—politicians? Or a debating society? Maybe it was drama. There were sideshows and circuses, pageants and exhibitions, shows and displays. There were flea markets and bazaars, agoras and exchanges. There were stalls, booths, rialtos, and fairs, with hawkers, wholesalers, vendors, jobbers, and every other variety of merchant in attendance. You could buy anything at any price. You could eat, drink, smoke, injec
t, or otherwise assimilate everything imaginable into your body, if you so chose. You could purchase hardware, software, kitchenware, and underwear. There were trade fairs of strange machinery, appliances, and unidentifiable gadgets and gizmos. Salespeople demonstrated, prospective customers looked on. Huge video screens ran endless commercials extolling the virtues of myriad products. There were presentations, parades, dog-and-pony shows, and every sort of inducement.
And all of this took place in a nexus of interpenetrating spaces whose complexity was overwhelming. There were levels upon levels, series of staggered terraces, promenades and balconies, all connected by webs of suspended bridges, cascades of spiraling ramps and stairways, escalators, open-shaft elevators, and other conveyances. Walls and floors were variously colored in soft pastels and metallic tints. Surfaces of shiny blue metal formed ceilings and curtainwalls, stairwells and platforms. There were hanging gardens, miniature forests, waterfalls, small game preserves, lakelets, parklets, and playgrounds. Hanging mobile sculptures wheeled above, towering alien monuments rose from the floors. And everywhere there was activity, action, color, movement, and sound.
And noise.
“Plenty loud, eh?” Ragna said.
“What?” Susan answered. “Oh, Jake, it’s all so familiar yet so utterly strange. I can’t get over it.”
“What I find strange is all this chaos contained within a controlled environment.”
“Maybe this is how they keep from feeling confined.”
“Hard to realize we’re indoors. Where’s all this light coming from?”
“I’d swear that’s sky up there,” Susan said, pointing to the distant roof.
“They must pump in sunlight through a series of mirrors,” I guessed.
“This is being true,” Ragna said. “Quite a neat trick, but it is also being much too damnably bright in here.”
Neither of our guides had bothered to take down their protective hoods and both still wore wraparound sunglasses. I wondered if their aversion to sunlight was more psychological than physical. The other Nogon seemed to be at home, though I did notice some wearing wide-brimmed hats and some with dark glasses.
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