Aubry followed Leo Sherman down a maze of passageways, always leading farther away from the more traveled corridors of the bolsa and toward—well, Aubry had never been in such places before. The passages grew narrower, then stopped being passages at all and became ducts. Aubry and Leo Sherman squeezed through a series of narrow openings, crawled along a few hundred feet of floor, then squeezed through more. Not only were the passages getting narrower, they were getting wetter. Aubry wanted to ask Leo Sherman about this, but he kept a good pace up and wouldn’t stop and talk until at least two hours after she’d parted with her father. Finally, they twisted and turned their way through a cavelike tube that no regular-sized person could have navigated. Aubry understood why they had sent the littler man to pick her up. Whoever they were.
The tube fed out into a large round room, where other tubes joined it. There was a changing breeze in the room, and Aubry was almost certain she could see the walls move in and out slightly—as if they were breathing.
“Now,” said Leo Sherman, “we rest.”
“Where in the world are we?” asked Aubry. “I didn’t know places like this existed in the Met.”
“There’s the chemical Met, and then there’s the biological Met. Where we are now—this whole area just under the skin of the bolsas—it’s called the Integument. It’s kind of a hodgepodge thing, the Integument, neither vegetable nor mineral. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around in it. It’s kind of my specialty actually. I’m a merci reporter, I guess you might call me, though what I actually do is write these things called essays about nature in the Met—”
“I know what an essay is,” said Aubry, feeling a bit annoyed. “I can read, you know.”
“You or your software?” he asked her.
“I learned to read when I was four years old,” Aubry told him. “But I have excellent translation algorithms and top-of-the-line Broca grist.”
“Pleased to hear it,” Leo Sherman said. “My work is available on the merci. Maybe someday you might want to read it. But first, we have to get out of here.”
“Where are we?”
“This is a recycling sac—keeps some of the e-mix of the gases stable before shipment.”
“Shipment?”
“You’ll see.”
“What are those?” Aubry asked, pointing to some black cables that fed in along the bottom of one of the tubes.
“Power cables. They work sort of like nerves in our bodies—through ionic transfer of a charge. It’s slow, but amazingly efficient.”
“And somebody came up with all this?”
“Yes and no,” said Leo Sherman. He pulled a water bottle from a small pouch on the waist of his pants, drank some, then passed it to Aubry. “You have to fend for yourself when you’re in the Integument. The grist around here won’t recognize your pellicle’s interaction nodes. So you can’t order up water from out of the walls, like you’re used to doing. And you just have to be careful in general. This place is not designed with your safety in mind.”
“But, Mr. Sherman—”
“Nix with that! It’s Leo. There’s already a Sherman who likes to go by his title.”
“Well, Leo, then,” said Aubry, feeling a little funny using the man’s first name. On Mercury, it wasn’t done for children to address adults so familiarly. “What do you mean when you say ‘yes and no’? Did somebody build this place, or didn’t they?”
“People laid down the parameters,” Leo said, “the basic principles of biological interaction. But this is all self-replicating.” Leo pointed around him. “These walls, the ducts, the other layers—they’re all made up of bioengineered living matter. It’s made of something like cells. The Integument is something like a forest, too. Like a forest somebody planted nearly four hundred years ago. Things have grown here that nobody knows about. Things have evolved. You must have wondered why the walls started to feel so sticky?”
“I had noticed that,” said Aubry.
“They are alive!” Leo continued. “They need to respire. They have to recognize certain substances that come in contact with them. They are actually able to capture and analyze molecules with that thin layer of goo that coats everything. It’s a method of communication.”
“Like smell?” said Aubrey.
Leo smiled. “Now you’re catching on,” he said. “There’s some wonderful stuff I could show you around here, only we haven’t got time.”
“Where are we going, anyway?” Aubry said, taking a drink of the water and passing it back to Leo.
“There is another method of transportation in the Met besides the pithways. It’s a lot slower, but it has the advantage of being completely unmonitored by the Department of Immunity.”
“There’s something the Department of Immunity doesn’t know about?” Aubry asked.
“Oh, they know about it,” said Leo. “They just don’t think anybody would be crazy enough to use it.”
“But we’re crazy enough, huh?” said Aubry.
“Aw, come on. It’ll be fun.” Leo stood up and helped Aubry to her feet. “We’d better get a move on. We’ve still got a ways to go.”
They were three more hours working their way through narrow passages and gaps. The farther along they got, the more the walls and floors began to resemble the internal cavities of some great beast.
And, according to Leo, that’s exactly what they were.
“But does it have a brain?” Aubry asked as they wound their way around what looked for all the world like a gigantic tonsil suspended like a stalactite.
“Good question,” answered Leo. “What do you think? Does the Earth have a brain?”
“I’ve never been to Earth.”
“Use your imagination. Think about the jungles and rain forests that you’ve read about, the ecological balance that we’ve restored by basically letting the place alone and allowing it to go back to wilderness.”
“I don’t see how it could,” Aubry said, after she’d thought for a while. “But sometimes it acts as if it did.”
“Good question and good answer,” Leo replied. “The same thing applies here. Everything has come to work together so beautifully that sometimes you think there must be a controlling intelligence, but in every case—at least every case I know of—if you start looking at what you imagined to be thoughts, you find simple processes.”
“But you can do exactly the same thing with a brain,” Aubry said, pleased to have found a way to continue the conversation. Leo, unlike most adults, seemed to think of her as his intellectual equal, even if she didn’t know as many facts as an adult did. She got the feeling he was really telling her his own ideas, and not trying to play some kind of teaching game with the end already in mind. Aubry was much too bright for most games of that sort to trick her for very long, and she usually could see where the teacher was going and then some long before the teacher realized he or she was found out.
“And a brain very definitely thinks thoughts,” Leo answered. “I know.”
“So why couldn’t the Met be a gigantic developing intelligence, and me and you being like neurons or something?”
“You may be right,” said Leo. “But answer me this. If we assume that we are actually neurons in some kind of giant overmind, how would you ever know? Can you think of some means to find out? Some experiment we could do that would tell us?”
By this time they were squeezing through an extremely narrow passage, and Aubry was glad to have something else to think about rather than her sense of claustrophobia, which was fast closing in on her.
“We could . . . maybe use some kind of entropy test. Couldn’t we assume that an intelligent system would create more order than another system that was alive, but not intelligent?”
“Pretty smart idea, but then the problem is the same as trying to tell whether you’re floating around in space or falling down a black elevator shaft—that is, there’s no fixed point of reference. Are you going to assume that the Met is supersentient, but the Earth isn’t? Or the other way around? What living system are you absolutely certain isn’t sentient, that could serve as a measuring stick?”
“What about some alien life-form? Isn’t there some kind of lichen or something on the bottom of the Lost Sea on Europa?”
“That’s . . . we don’t know about that. Some good people were lost trying to find out.” For a moment, Aubry caught a glimpse of Leo’s face, and it seemed very sad. Then he continued the argument. “But how do you know that its ecology is not sentient? You’d be assuming what you wanted to prove, either way.”
“So it may be that the Met is sentient, but there’s no way of proving it?”
“I can’t think of one,” Leo replied, “other than the World Spirit sitting us down and saying a personal hello to each of us.”
“Bummer,” said Aubry.
“I don’t know about that,” Leo said. “To paraphrase Raphael Merced, there’s something to be said for acting locally as if the world had meaning and needed us to do what we think is right, but letting the bigger picture remain cloudy. At least for me, it kind of serves the necessary function of getting me off my ass and doing something.”
Finally, they arrived at a terminus, where it was impossible to go any farther.
“Time to give Mother Nature a hand,” said Leo. He held out his own hand, and a thin sheath of fire sprang up on it. Aubry had spent most of life being told never to do this with one’s grist, and it was kind of exciting to be breaking the rules. She lit up her own hand. The two of them applied the flame to the end of the tube they’d been walking through. After a moment, it seemed to shudder, and then the sides contracted. At the same time, the tube “floor” under them convulsed, so that they were thrown forward through the new opening, head over heels. They landed in a soft mass of greenish material that looked like a mound of penicillin.
They were in an enormous cavern. The walls were lit by a bioluminal glow, and what at first glance appeared to be a stream flowed through the middle of the cavern. When she got to the stream, though, Aubry saw that it wasn’t flowing water at all.
“What is that?” she asked. “It looks like snot.”
“Remarkably similar consistency,” Leo said. “But it’s actually something like limbic fluid. There’s a lot of reduction processes going on inside, and it’s crammed full of oxygen.”
“You mean . . .”
“You can breathe it.”
“Gross.”
Suddenly, as if it had sneezed, the entire cavern convulsed. Aubry was almost thrown off her feet by the wave motion that passed through the floor. And the little cataract of fluid was covered over, squeezed as if it were a tube, and squirted toward the cavern’s edge, where it disappeared into a hole in the wall.
“Here we are at our train station,” said Leo. “All aboard!”
“Train station?”
“Or pithway stop, or what have you. We have arrived at our transportation.”
“Where?”
“Here. We call this the sluice. And the stuff in it we call the sluice juice.”
“You can’t mean—”
“The sluice interconnects all the bolsas strung along the Met. It maintains ecological balance and serves all kinds of secondary functions. It keeps the Met healthy, and it’s the healthiest place in the Met, as a result.”
“I am not getting in that stuff.”
“It’s perfectly breathable, Aubry.”
“I am not going swimming in a river of snot.”
“It’s healthy, life-giving snot.”
“I can’t believe you want me to do this.”
“It’s really fun, Aubry, after you get over the initial . . . idea of it. With a proper map, which I’ve got in my noggin”—Leo tapped his head—“the sluice juice will take you anywhere in the Met that you want to go.”
Aubry approached the edge of the little stream. She bent down and put her finger in it. Her finger came away dripping and trailing an elastic slime. She backed up, and the cavern convulsed again, sending more slime on its way throughout the Met.
Leo jumped in and spread the sluice juice all over his body. He ducked his head under and came up looking like a baby kitten that had just been given a complete bath by its mother.
“Come on in,” said Leo. “The juice is fine.”
Aubry was afraid to think about it anymore—afraid she might throw up if she thought about it anymore. At least the stuff didn’t smell. Too bad, that is.
She closed her eyes and stepped into the snot. It came up to her waist, and was just as warm and gooey as she had suspected it would be.
“I know it’ll feel strange at first,” said Leo, “but you have to go under and take a deep breath. Fill your lungs full of the stuff. I promise you—you won’t drown.”
“But—”
“Give it a try, Aubry, I think you’ll—”
The cavern convulsed again, and Aubry was sucked under, down into the goo. She held her breath for a moment. She had gulped in a mouthful of the juice when she’d fallen, and it oozed around in her mouth. Could you swallow the stuff? Not and keep from vomiting it back up. She was pushed forward rapidly by the walls of the cataract—now becoming something like a blood vessel. Pushed and not let up, pushed . . . could she open her eyes in this stuff? Leo hadn’t said anything about that. But she had to see where she was going, what was happening.
She opened her eyes. The bioluminescence of the cavern was present there, too. In fact, the sluice juice itself seemed to have a faint green glow, like radioactive mucus.
But the act of opening her eyes somehow gave her new courage, or at least made her feel less repulsed by the juice. She felt as if she were swimming in the beautiful center of a wave in a green ocean. She was perfectly buoyant, and it felt so serene. Maybe it would be all right, maybe . . .
She took a breath. Just sucked in as hard as she could. The sluice juice filled her lungs.
And it was fine. Immediately, Aubry felt the oxygen rushing into her blood through her lungs. She could breathe this stuff! She really could. She breathed out, and in. The effort was greater than normal breathing—you had to consciously push and pull harder with your chest muscles. But she was breathing it, all right, and not drowning in it.
As abruptly as it came, the contraction relaxed. Aubry found herself next to Leo. Both of them were about halfway across the cavern from where they had started out before the contraction.
“Wow!” Aubry exclaimed. “I did it!”
“What did I tell you?” said Leo. “This is just kind of like a capillary. When we get into the main sluiceways, we can reach speed that you wouldn’t believe.”
“And we just swim the whole way? How do we stay together?”
Leo smiled mischievously. “There’s one other thing that I’m going to show you. I’m not exactly sure of the physics of it, but these giant bubbles form in the sluice passageways. You have to push pretty hard to get inside them, but once you do, you can actually stand on the bottom and it will orient itself like a ball with a weight on one side. After we get to the main passage, we ride in style. That is, unless we have to change bubbles. That can get a little tricky . . .”
“Let’s go!” said Aubry. “This is going to be fun!”
“Sure it is,” said Leo. “But you have to be careful at all times. This ain’t the regular Met, kid, with lots of built-in safety features. We’re in the Integument. It’s supposed to be no-man’s-land.”
“Okay, I’ll be careful,” said Aubry, a bit impatient to try the dunking again. “What’ll I do?”
“You start by holding on to my leg and letting me lead us to where we’re going. No need to swim. Let the juice do your work for you . . . ready? I think this cataract’s getting ready to pop again.”
Aubry knelt until the juice was up to her neck. She wrapped her arms around one of Leo’s legs. “Ready,” she said. They ducked under, and the walls of the cavern contracted.
It was incredibly fun, if a little bit scary at the same time. The juice rushed you so fast! Leo seemed to guide them effortlessly through the maze of passageways at breakneck speed.
There must be something he’s noticing, Aubry thought. She began to watch the tunnels that Leo took and the ones he avoided. There was a peculiar red rim at the top of the tunnels that they traveled down. But still, they were moving so fast, she wondered if Leo could possibly notice and react in time. He had obviously done this many times before.
The passageways got bigger and bigger, and soon they were in an artery that was as big around as a house. There, they encountered their first bubbles. But Leo waited until they were diverted into an even bigger passage before he pushed his way inside one.
He wriggled inside as if he were a snake, then turned around and pulled Aubry in after him. They both sat dripping on what was now the “floor” of the bubble. Outside, through the refracting sides of the bubble, Aubry could see many other similar bubbles, and chunks of something else floating around as well. Then there was a flash of light as a tribe of what looked like spinning prisms floated past.
“Those are kind of like vitamins,” Leo said. The bubble was an air bubble, with a regular e-mix, as far as Aubry could tell, and they could finally speak. “I saw that you figured out how I knew where to go,” Leo said. “Outbound passages have that faint red coloration.”
“Is that part of the design?” Aubry asked.
“Nobody knows. It isn’t mentioned in any of the historic specs. My own personal theory is that some early sluice runner who was also a bioengineer coded it into the structure so he could find his way around.”
“You mean, people have been doing this for a long time?”
“It used to be a hobby some people were into,” said Leo. “Now everybody does group activities and group sport. Hardly anyone remembers the glory days of the sluice runs anymore.”
“That’s good for us, I guess,” said Aubry. She sat back and began to enjoy the view. This was not as exhilarating as the trip down the capillaries had been, but it was beautiful in its own right. “Where are we headed, anyway?”
“We are headed to see a man . . . sort of a man . . . who knows people who can help you get away.”
“A sort of a man? Is he a LAP?”
“Yes,” said Leo, “but that’s not the half of it. Have you ever heard of the time towers?”
“Some special kind of Large Array of Personalities. We haven’t covered that yet in identity class. It’s for ninth graders, I think.”
“You’re about to get a quick education, kid,” Leo said. “Looks like you’re going to be growing up a little faster than is maybe for the best, but there’s not much to be done about it.”
“I can handle it,” said Aubry. And floating along in a giant air bubble through the hidden integument of the Met, she almost thought she could.
“I’m a little worried, because this man—his name is Tod—it’s been a long time since he was a kid and he isn’t around kids that much. It’s a real adult place we’re going to.”
“I’ve been running from the secret police for the past six hours,” said Aubry. “I think I can handle some old fart time tower.”
Leo smiled his big, face-splitting smile at her again. “Yeah, I’m not too worried about you, to tell the truth.”
Leo settled back on the floor of their bubble and put his hands behind his head. “Relax while you can, I always say. I’d smoke a cig, but this bubble is already filling up with enough carbon dioxide to make the two of us loopy. It would, too, but there’s a bit of gas exchange with the sluice juice, and you know that the juice is full of oxygen.”
“My mother smokes,” Aubry said.
“A convert? You’re kidding?”
“In virtual, I mean.”
“Well, it’s kind of a nasty habit, even though it won’t kill you anymore.”
“I wonder what’s going on with my mother.” For the first time in quite a while, Aubry thought of her family. She felt a little bit ashamed of herself for putting them out of her mind for so long. But then the shame turned to an overall sadness, and that would not leave her. She didn’t want to, but she thought about Sint getting his toy taken away back on Mercury, and it all seemed unfair and stupid. Why should a little kid have to hold in his frustration and take it like an adult? He was just a little boy, after all! Aubry tried to picture her father and Sint right then. Maybe they were on a cloudship and getting away from the stupid Met. And maybe her mother was on another ship, taking a more roundabout route. She hoped they were, but there was no way to know for sure, and Aubry was very afraid for them. She didn’t know what the Department of Immunity would do with them if it found a way to detain them, and not knowing was even more horrible, in a way. It was like staring down at a black abyss and being afraid of falling in yourself.