Calm down, urged the whisper.
I stopped, breathing heavily, to take stock of myself and of the situation. I was ankle-deep in cold, slimy water, and my flashlight was noticeably weaker. Perhaps I had every right to a touch of panic in my movements, but the wind obviously thought that I was overdoing it.
You can’t go much farther at this pace, he said. You’ll drive yourself to prostration. And there’s no point. They gave up chasing you twenty minutes ago. They’ve got better sense than to lose themselves down here.
He was only trying to be helpful. In his fashion, he was always trying to be helpful. I found his eternal vigilance and limitless fount of common sense to be overly patronising and rather irritating. I had not yet conceded him the right to be as concerned for my welfare as I was, despite the fact that he had a similarly considerable stake in it. (But there was one important difference, of course. He could always find new lodgings if his present slum was condemned. I couldn’t.)
‘This light,’ I told him, ‘is going to go out before we’ve covered many more miles.’
So? The locals don’t carry flashlights. They manage in the dark.
‘All very well if you know where you’re going, and have been walking blindfold around these caves since you were two years old.’
You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?
‘Yes.’
In that case, why did you ever start out on this idiot’s crusade?
‘You know damn well. You were there, remember? I didn’t start the thing. I didn’t want any part of it. It was Sampson and Johnny.’
They didn’t force you to leave your comfortable jail cell.
‘No, but with the door standing open like that, squatting in the cage till doomsday suddenly seemed to be a most unattractive prospect’
And so you ran. Well now, here you are. On the run and soon to be in the dark. We can go back, you know, and ask them to lock you up again. If that’s what you want, decide now and turn round. If that’s not what you want, then start thinking about where we’re going, and why.
‘At this moment,’ I said, ‘I’m not in a very good spot for sitting down to work out a strategy. Besides which, I’m in the dark in more ways than one.’
To this, he made no verbal reply. He held his peace, allowing me to go the way of my choice without further delay. I could sense neither approval nor disapproval when I went forward again. In all probability, he couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted us to do either.
I stumbled on along the tunnel. My right hand balanced me against the wall which I was following, while the left held the flashlight, swinging it in steady arcs to show me as much as possible of the way I had chosen to go. There was just black water and black stone, but it meant a lot just to be able to see it. The tunnel was wide here, and a comfortable height, and the flash couldn’t do a very efficient job of highlighting the far wall. There was a circular yellow blur, and that was all.
I tried to run, but running through shallow water is just not practicable where any sort of distance is involved, and I had to settle for slow, purposeful wading. But I still concentrated all my effort on progress, and spared no part of my mind for contemplating destinations.
We can’t just run, said the whisper, trying to prompt me. Not in a place like this. You can run until you drop, and still be nowhere. You’ve got to have some kind of a pattern in mind. You’ve got to decide the sort of hand you’re trying to play. It’s not enough simply to be down here. We have to have a reason. Now you’re here, you have to try to cut yourself some kind of slice of the action. It’s not enough just to wander around and get lost. There must be thousands of miles of cave and shaft in this honeycomb. You could die and your bones need never be discovered. You’ve got to have something in your mind.
‘I have,’ I said. ‘You.’
This is no time for indulging your ridiculous sense of humour.
‘On the contrary. This is exactly the sort of time to which my sense of humour is tailored’
Be reasonable!
There should have been a thousand reasons why the wind and I were incompatible. But that was the only one that really bugged him.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘For the time being, there’s only one way to go. We’re in a tunnel, right? When I get offered alternatives, that’s the time I begin making choices. And even then it won’t be too difficult. I don’t want to be any farther up, because it’s too damn cold where I am. Ergo I want to go down. And, if I remember correctly, the way to navigate to the lower strata of an alveolar system is to follow the current of cold air.’
You don’t know anything about navigation in alveolar systems.
‘I know enough of the jargon to provide excuses for anything I choose to do. And I know that hot air rises and cold air falls. That’s all that’s relevant at present.’
It’s not as simple as that, he said darkly.
I was slowing down. The water was creeping up my calves. The bitter cold was numbing my feet and sending shooting pains up my legs. The hand which I was using to support myself was suffering, too. Except where it was encrusted with lichenous growths, the rock was like sandpaper. It spoke well for the constancy and stability of the system that the water had never come up far enough to erode the surface smooth, but it was hell on my fingertips. The cold was beginning to soak into my insides, as well. I’d had to come up rather than going down in order to avoid the initial pursuit. Being linked to the surface lock, the reception area where we’d been imprisoned was above the capital and the highways. Hence, to go down would be to play into the hands of the enemy. But I’d shaken off the nasties some time back, and I’d covered enough sideways ground to be fairly certain that I wouldn’t drop back into the streets of the capital.
The problem was what to do when I did get back down to the inhabited strata. Before the breakout, Johnny had been rambling about some vague and ridiculous scheme to steal surface suits and win our way back to the Hooded Swan. No doubt he had some even vaguer idea of mustering the Swan’s considerable artillery and taking the entire world by force. But the whole thing was a joke. There was no chance whatsoever of reaching the Swan. That was one hole the miners would have well and truly stoppered.
Ergo, I had to play a different sort of hand altogether. I had to do whatever I was going to do down here, in the caves. And the obvious immediate aim was to find out what the hell was going on. This endless secrecy was getting on my nerves. At least two people—Charlot and Sampson—knew more than they were letting on, or they wouldn’t be here. I was grossly offended by the fact that they staunchly refused to let me in on their idiot schemes. Although I didn’t actually make any sort of firm resolution, I already had it in the back of my mind to do my level best to make a thorough mess of any plans either of them might have.
The first step in working my way back into the pattern of events seemed to necessitate making new contacts in the Rhapsody culture. The miners seemed to have suddenly become the police force, so that let them out. The Hierarchy of the Church I wouldn’t approach in an asbestos suit. But even considering the paucity of opportunity on Rhapsody, that still left a goodly proportion of the population which might be approachable and where I might be able to find friends.
It was not going to be easy, though. I knew virtually nothing about the culture beyond my contempt for its raison d’être. My prospects seemed very dubious indeed.
‘It would have been a great deal simpler not to get involved in this mess at all,’ I conceded.
Too late now, he said.
‘In fact,’ I went on, ‘it would have been even simpler to have stayed at home. The further this contract with Charlot goes, the more trouble I get into. At this rate, the odds against my surviving the two years look somewhat considerable.’
This is your mess, said the wind. You can’t blame Charlot for this.
‘I can and I do,’ I replied, perversely. ‘If it wasn’t for him, I’d likely be on Penaflor, in a nice, safe job.’
Working for nothing, the rest of your life.
‘True, but there’d be a lot of the rest of my life. With Charlot, I’m not so sure.’
This is just wasted effort, said the whisper. Regret is a waste of time. Keep your mind on the issue at hand.
The tunnel curved to the left, and I felt the water speed up abruptly as it flowed around my legs. I knew there had to be an imminent declivity, and I tested the rock carefully with my boot. The water was uncomfortably fast, and I had to stand carefully to avoid being dragged from my feet. I had no wish to try swimming in the stream.
The flashlight showed me the drop, and it didn’t seem to slope so steeply as to be unnegotiable. But visibility was only a few metres.
‘The principle of Let Well Alone,’ I said idly, while I contemplated the prospect, ‘is unusually good sense, to say that it came out of New Rome. If Titus Charlot had the sense to follow the principle, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Let Well Alone isn’t ethics or diplomacy, you know. It’s simple self-protection.’
A breach of the principle isn’t against the law, said the wind, drawn into the argument against his will. You can’t sue him for it.
‘Pity.’
I began picking my way down the slope. Very slowly. Very carefully.
The water dwindled from my calves to my ankles again, but it was no less treacherous for that. I hugged the wall as close as I could, and I had to use my left arm for balancing purposes, which meant that when I wanted to use the flash, I had to stop.
In the meantime, my thoughts rambled on.
‘If I ever take a Christian name,’ I said, ‘I think Job would suit me best. Job with the built-in comforter. Very apt. Poetic justice, even. You have no real appreciation for the sadness of my situation. How any parasite of mine could possibly take Charlot’s part against me is quite beyond me. It smacks of disloyalty and a total lack of sympathy.’
Are you getting hysterical? he asked.
‘Don’t be ridiculous. I have never been hysterical in my life. I am merely indulging my twisted sense of humour, in order to keep my mind from direr thoughts, such as the possibility of slipping, and what might happen to me if I do. It is quite deliberate, conscious and controlled, I’ve lived in this body a lot longer than you have, and I wish you’d let me handle it in the manner to which it is accustomed rather than the manner to which you’d like it to become accustomed. You cannot teach old bodies new tricks. If you’re going to live here, you’d better get used to the intellectual climate. We never have storms, but it isn’t a South Sea vacation paradise, for all that. Worry not, old friend. If this hill ever comes to sane, safe ground again, then I shall be off once again in pursuit of the plan which has burst from my head like Athene, in full armour—a stroke of genuine inspiration.’
What plan? he interrupted.
I didn’t like being interrupted. It wasn’t safe.
‘To play by ear, of course,’ I told him. ‘To take each moment as it comes, and to follow my feelings. To do as I see fit, at each and every juncture, and not to concern myself with how each action might fit into the grandiose plans of fate and fortune. I always have bad luck anyway. Ah! I apologise most sincerely to fate and fortune both. I’ll never say a bad word about them again.’
I’d found a ledge. Gratefully, I stepped out of the water. The ledge ran along the right-hand wall, and was just wide enough to accommodate me. The tunnel still sloped downward, though, and quite steeply. A few feet away, there was a crevice in the rock which wandered away at right angles to the lateral direction in which I was travelling. Had it been an upright passage, I might have followed it, but it slanted at fifty degrees or less from the horizontal, and looked even less comfortable than my present course. So I went on.
The wind seemed relieved that I’d broken off my uneasy monologue, and I suspected that he wanted to start up a more satisfactory (from his point of view) conversation, but couldn’t think of anything appropriate to say.
It was not often that he was tongue-tied, and I wasn’t sorry to get an extra moment’s rest from him. I suppose that some people might consider it a great convenience to be sharing their skull with another mind, on the grounds that two points of view are better than one. They might even consider it to be especially convenient that the alien mind couldn’t stay alien, but had to organise itself along lines similar to their own—become human, in fact. It means, after all, that one need never be alone. It means that one never need be completely isolated from one’s own kind. It means the everpresence of a friend, which might be necessary in times of dire need—such as when I blacked out at a most inconvenient moment in a hyoplasmic lesion surrounding a star in the Halcyon Drift. It means an extra force with which to oppose the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and illimitable seas of troubles, and an extra chance to end such troubles.
But as well as all that, it is also a bloody nuisance. There are times when one requires total peace, not simply as a concession on the part of a companion but as a private slice of one’s own existence. And that was what I didn’t have. Not any more. And since disadvantages are always more irritating than advantages are soothing, I was distinctly unappreciative of the alien commensalism. (I say commensalism because he claimed to be a symbiote, not a parasite.) He understood, and he wasn’t bitter about it, or overly impatient. After all, compatibility was very much in his interests. Indeed, it was his way of life. My way of life, previously, had consisted of wilful isolation, and even alienation. I was a loner, a confirmed outsider. It was difficult adjusting to the enforced change, but there was no point in resisting it. I couldn’t get rid of the whisper. No way. We were together until death us did part. I couldn’t afford to hate him, but I couldn’t help resenting him. We weren’t ever going to be soulmates.
It is, as many philosophers have observed, a hard life.
As the ledge narrowed, I was forced to stand sideways, with my heels to the wall, in order to move along it. The flashlight was now useless and I was forced to feel my way along the passage by fluttering my right hand over the surface of the rock face. I dared not lift up my feet but slid them along the ledge. As I progressed, the floor beneath the ledge, along which the stream ran, began to fall away at a much steeper angle. The water became noisy as it rushed down the declivity, perhaps ultimately to fall into a vertical pit. Once I was certain that to fall off the ledge meant death, I lost interest in the precise geometry of the watercourse.
Suddenly, my right hand encountered empty space, and I stopped dead. There was no question of reassuring subvocal patter now. I was frightened. I drew back my hand and blew on the cold-numbed, flesh-stripped fingertips to make sure that they were still adequately sensitive to touch, and then sent them scuttling along the rock.
I discovered the edge, and found that it was not simply a bend, but a hairpin reverse. The rock at my back was a wedge of what seemed to me then to be fragile thinness. Almost reflexively, I pulled myself erect, so that I did not lean on it so heavily. I inched forward, hoping that the ledge would not give out. As I reached the ultimate projection of the rock face, I shut my eyes—I could see nothing in any case, with the flashlight pressed to the rock behind me—and pushed my foot slowly around the corner, toe down.
In my mind’s eye, I could see myself balanced on the end of a chisel-shaped spur of rock projecting into nowhere, with an immeasurable abyss beneath me. The susurrus of running water now contained an ominous gurgle which suggested abysmal depths to my sensitive imagination.
Then my toe found a floor. It might only be a ledge as narrow as the one on which I was now standing, but I dared not contort my leg any further in order to explore its whole extent. The simple fact that a way out did exist was enough for me at that moment.
I had to turn round in order to negotiate the corner, and that offered difficulties. I transferred the flashlight from left hand to right, but decided it would be no more convenient there. I couldn’t stick it in my belt, where it would get in between me and the wall. It was too big to hold sideways in my mouth, as pirates were once reputed to have carried cutlasses. I came to the conclusion that the only place it would be out of harm’s way, and also in no danger of being lost, was dropped down the neck of my shirt at the back. This, of course, meant that I would be denied its light. Not that the light would be particularly useful, but it was a comforting thing to have around.
However, when needs must...
Turning myself face in to the rock wasn’t too difficult. The wall was almost plumb vertical, fortunately. Had it leaned towards me, I would very likely have lost my balance and fallen.
Once my body was correctly orientated, I began to curl myself around the chisel-head, with my arms at full stretch on either side of the hairpin, and my feet as close together as I dared put them without endangering my equilibrium. It took me only a few seconds to ooze my body around the corner, but they were precarious seconds, and living them was by no means easy.
When I had recovered myself fully, I began to explore with my toe again, sending my left foot out cautiously to investigate the width of rock available to me.
There was an awful lot of it.
I turned around where I stood, luxuriating in the space which made the manoeuvre comfortable, and then fished the flashlight out of the small of my back—a feat almost as difficult as rounding the corner.
When I switched it on, I saw that although the wall turned through an angle of about one-sixty-five degrees, the floor only turned through eighty or so. There was another wall some six or seven feet away.
‘Bloody hell!’ I said with feeling. It had been a lot easier than I’d thought.
Caution never did anyone any harm, said the wind, comfortingly.
‘Go to hell,’ I said. Then I began to walk along the tunnel, playing the light along the floor in front of me. It wasn’t so cold, either, though I was still walking down the airstream. The current was slower, here, though. I didn’t know nearly enough about the aerodynamics of alveolar strata to judge exactly what that meant. It was presumably a venous shaft rather than an arterial, but whether the strength of the current was determined by the architecture of this element in the system, or by the connections it made with other tunnels, I couldn’t say. Probably both.
I could hear the faint rustle of water behind the walls, and that too would have its part to play in maintaining the local temperature clines which determined the precise pattern of the airflow. The water itself was recycled by evaporation and dispersion throughout the infundibular hotshafts which dropped all the way from the summit of the alveolar rock-tissue to the surface of the hotcore.
I began to move quickly again, now that it was easy. There was no sense in dawdling—I was still chilled, and I would have to find warmer air than this in order to thaw out properly.
At first, the tunnel was high and wide, and might have been tailored. But there was no sign of stoneworking. I wondered whether there was some obliging principle of physics which determined that the optimum tube dimensions in alveolar rock were just about right for accommodating people. Or, conversely, there might be some ironic principle of the life sciences which determined that humans should grow to a convenient size for the troglodytic existence, rather than the star-conquering existence which many of them seemed to prefer (or at least aspire to).
In actual fact, it was only the fact that these honeycombs seemed to have been designed with man in mind that enabled worlds like this one to be colonised. A system like this one could take only so much knocking about. Once the architecture was altered beyond a certain point, extreme changes could take place in the air-and-water circulation patterns, with potentially disastrous consequences for cultures whose livelihood depended on things staying the way they were. Some highly civilised worlds of this type had the science and the scientists to determine exactly what they could and couldn’t do to a warren. Some could even alter warrens in order to make the air and water do what they wanted. But Rhapsody wasn’t a highly civilised world. It was a galactic slum—a religious alienist culture with a high regard for hardship and none for efficiency or safety.
So where are we going? the wind wanted to know. It’s all very well to play by ear and make up the plan of action as you go along. But we have to start somewhere. So where?
‘Well,’ I said, ‘we have to eat. To find food we find people. This offers us a choice between the shanty towns which are undoubtedly sprinkled around this big Swiss cheese and the mine-faces and conversion plants at which the world earns its collective living.
‘Now, as we have already observed, the miners have decided that they have a crucial part to play in this silly drama, and that part involves waving guns around. Assuming that the conversion plants, as the lifeblood of the culture, are protected from all forms of social irresponsibility, I therefore conclude that if we are going to eke out a temporary existence as a thief and a vagabond, the place to do it is the townships. Fair enough?’
He didn’t say anything, so he was obviously satisfied for the time being with my declared intentions. When I was going well, he was always content to leave me to it. He didn’t argue for the sake of it, as I was occasionally prone to do. I am a confirmed opponent. Say something, and I’ll disagree with it. On principle. And while I might not know what the hell I am talking about, I am occasionally disposed to defend it with considerable passion and obstinacy.
We all have our faults.
The corridor funnelled into a capillary, and I was forced to crawl. The passage seemed to be an unduloid rather than a cylinder, which meant that on occasion I had to lay myself out snake-fashion and work my way through bottlenecks, whereas at other times I was permitted to employ a fast shamble in order to progress. The air current became stronger as the air was pressured through the irised collars of rock, and its coldness became a great inconvenience. No doubt, of course, I caused the air concomitant inconvenience as I acted as a considerable obstacle to its natural flow. I was extremely glad that it was a tailwind. To crawl the other way would have been well-nigh impossible. When I stretched myself through the bottlenecks, I felt like a dart in a blowpipe.
It wasn’t a great way to travel.
‘Worms must feel like this,’ I said, half complaining, half sympathising with the lesser brethren of humankind.
The walls were slightly damp, and I occasionally came across patches of slime and grease that were undoubtedly protoplasmic. Despite the fact that alveolar systems lack the encouragement and assistance of solar radiation, they almost invariably contrive to evolve quite prolific life-systems. Because they are networks and not surfaces, and because a planet-wide stratum might contain hundreds, or even thousands, of unconnected warrens, the lifesystems tend to be incredibly diverse, and it is not unusual to find four or five separate evolutions in the one warren. The prospects of niche diversification are strictly limited, and unless the life-system is highly imaginative, it can rarely manage more than half a dozen different plasmid forms. Owing to the consequent lack of selective pressure, speciation tends to be very cursory, and divergent development tends to take place across boundaries which are solely defined by nutritional stratification. A life-system which might be regarded as ‘typical’, therefore, would probably consist of one ‘plant’ superorganism—a thermosynth, not a photosynth—one ‘animal herbivore’ type and one secondary consumer (often given a little assistance by a secondary thermosynthetic capability, and therefore unclassifiable as plant or animal). Plus, of course, the customary couple of parasites thrown in for the sake of that immortal ecological principle:
Big bugs have little bugs
Upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little bugs have lesser bugs,
And so ad infinitum.
Which is probably the only universal ecological rule.
Worms, contributed the wind, somewhat belatedly, have to eat out their own tunnels.
I hoped that this particular passage wouldn’t get so narrow that it would take an excavator to get me through. But that was unlikely, bearing in mind the confidence of the air current. At the time, I was extremely thin, having been given no period of free time long enough to allow me to recuperate from my sojourn on Lapthorn’s Grave, where I had been on the brink of starvation for two years.
And as it turned out, I was all right. The hole finally ducked into a sharp downslope and emerged into the ceiling of a much wider, taller tunnel. This one was engineered, if you can call beating your way through inconvenient outcrops with a pickaxe ‘engineering’.
I had been an hour or more squirming my way through the slimy sheath before I achieved this outlet, but the rock had become noticeably warmer as I progressed, and although I had never contrived to be comfortable, I had begun to worry less about dying of exposure and more about skinning myself alive.
After I dropped from the bottleneck into the new corridor, I took the rest to which I’d been entitled for some time. I curled myself up into a seated foetal position, and switched out the flashlight, which was still heroically shining on, although still weakening inexorably.
There was no light—natural or artificial—in the tunnel. Neither was there a groove or a set of rails for vehicles to run along. This was highly unusual in an alveolar culture, and I presumed that the religious tenets on which the colony was founded included the assumption that God gave us legs for walking on. The passage was obviously a thoroughfare despite its lack of provision for transport. The evidence of stone-clearing was quite obvious, and nobody clears rock unless they intend putting the cleared passage to regular use. I reflected on the inconsistency of a society’s being forced to employ sophisticated heat-powered food-producing conversion machines, with all the careful organic husbandry which that implied, yet at the same time denying itself even primitive—and cheap—wheeled transport systems. There’s no accounting for the way people choose to exist.
The air in the corridor flowed from left to right as I sat with my back to the wall below the hole from which I had emerged. Unless my sense of direction had totally betrayed me, the capital lay to my left, and this was an afferent vessel. The air was a little too cool for my personal taste, and a lot colder than warren dwellers usually preferred, but I put that down to the world’s personal eccentricities, and decided that it was not incompatible with the theory that this was a main road connecting the capital to a smaller township. The lack of traffic would also have argued against this hypothesis, except for the fact that there was something like a national emergency and the normal routines would have been completely obliterated.
‘I’m hungry,’ I complained unenthusiastically. Complaint is an unimaginative seed for a conversation, but the wind seemed to have nothing to say, and I was becoming bored with sitting in silence. The alternative—the resumption of my wandering—did not immediately appeal to me, as I was still extremely fatigued.
You should have reminded your impulsive friends that jailbreaks are more conveniently situated after meals, said the wind morosely.
‘You make the assumption, of course, that these religious maniacs were going to feed us pagans,’ I pointed out.
Only the nastiest of societies fail to feed their guests.
‘That’s what I mean.’
If you could overcome your distaste for religious communities, I think you’d find that there are much worse people to have to deal with than the Church of the Exclusive Reward. You should know, after the years you spent trading on the lunatic fringe.
‘The galactic rim.’
Call it what you will.
All this merry chit-chat, of course, wasn’t getting us any place. But it was helping to reduce my burden of fatigue. To look at the world with a kindlier eye is to be no less a realist, but serves to make fearsome the possibilities of failure and doom.
I suppose that I could even become amenable to the hardness of my fortune, if it wasn’t for the delight which Charlot took in keeping me firmly under his thumb. And also for the lunatic notions which he used as chessboards on which to push his pawns. Like recovering the Lost Star treasure from the heart of the Halcyon Drift.
And, in all likelihood, like the present jaunt.
Picking up Splinterdrift on Attalus, and giving them a free ride home....