I should have been dead tired, but I couldn’t go to sleep. It wasn’t simply a matter of not daring to go to sleep, even if I was sitting on a highway. I purely and simply couldn’t sleep.
After a while, I began to find the darkness oppressive. I once lived, for a while, on a world which was not unlike Rhapsody. The main difference was that it could be reached, even by p-shifters, because it was that much farther away from its primary. (Even so, it was never easy sliding the old Fire-Eater in and along an eclipsed groove.) But the culture could hardly have been more dissimilar. The air was always hot and loaded with odours. The background smell of sweat and the conversion machines was always masked by heavy perfume. Here, on Rhapsody, there was nothing like that. Not that the air smelled bad—this was a much bigger warren, and there were fewer people here—but where there were odours, in the towns and the mine workings, they were politely ignored, as if they did not exist. And it was a matter of politeness—the odours were never so perpetual that they could be blotted out of one’s consciousness.
And on that other world, light was a treasure of immense value. The aesthetic existence of the culture was built around the qualities and uses of light. The people thrived on light—soft light, kind light, warming light, soothing light, sad light, angry light, jealous light, callous light. The rarity of light within the caverns enabled the people to find all kinds of beauty in the mere presence of it that other cultures, saturated by abundant solar radiation, could not hope to discover.
Again, nothing of that sort here. The inhabitants of Rhapsody were apparently content with their darkness. If anything, they had come to abhor light in any quantity. Their capital had been illuminated only by dim lanterns, placed haphazardly rather than in the locations where they would be most useful.
The Rhapsody people had eyes, and used them; there was no doubt about that. But they seemed to be ashamed of their eyesight, and they apparently rejoiced in the hardship of doing without it whenever it was convenient, and often when it was not.
One could, perhaps, imagine that the warrens here might develop an alternative aesthetic life from that of the other world. One might imagine their coming to appreciate the qualities of darkness, rather than of light, finding beauty and inspiration in shadow and obscurity. But that had not happened either. These people seemed to have no art and no concept of beauty.
Even their language had been modified only by loss. They had abandoned all the words describing the quality of light: effulgence, brilliance, sheen, iridescence, radiance, lambent, pellucid, lustrous, rutilant, luminiferous, incandescent, coruscate. Likewise, they found no use for terms describing bodies of light; not merely sun, but also nimbus, corona, aurora, spectrum, beam, halo, ignis fatuus and spangle. They did not trouble to differentiate between a glitter and a gleam, a glow and a glare. They were ignorant of the whole appreciation of brightness in all its forms. They lived by muted yellow lamplight, existing in an environment of dismal gloom. As though they were born and lived and died in veils or blindfolds.
And the corresponding enrichment of their language, which should have adapted their speech to their environment, was simply not there. They knew darkness, and obscurity, and murkiness, and shadow. And that was all. Nothing new to allow them to be in closer harmony with their world. The entire culture seemed to me to be somewhat subhuman.
Time to move, said the whisper, jerking me from my train of thought.
I permitted myself a slight groan as I got to my feet. My arms and legs seemed to have seized up completely in belated protest against the long crawl through the narrow fissure by which I had come to this spot. I flexed my fingers and kicked my feet. My hands were torn and the wounds were filthy. They seemed to have no feeling in them at all while I held them still, but as I curled the fingers they burned with pain. The little finger of my right hand caught on my belt as I tried to clean some of the dirt from the palm by rubbing it on my equally filthy shirt. The flashlight which I’d lodged there fell from its precarious position, and clattered on the stone floor.
Frenziedly, I dropped to my knees and began searching the floor with my injured hands. I found it, and flicked the switch anxiously. The light came on, and for a few moments it seemed abundantly strong. But as my eyes adjusted, I realised that it was very weak indeed, and could not possibly last more than a couple of hours.
It’s not all that vital, the wind assured me.
‘I’m not used to stumbling around in Stygian darkness. I come from a normal world, where people use their eyes.’
I’ve lived without sight before now, he told me. It’s only a matter of using the other senses at your disposal. You have enough of them. With a little help from me, you can get by.
‘I’ll drive my own body, thank you very much,’ I said. ‘There’ll be no more takeovers.’
Your insistence on my maintaining a wholly passive role in this partnership is quite ridiculous. I can use your body more efficiently than you can. It makes no sense at all to be so determined that you and you alone should exercise control of it.
‘It makes sense to me,’ I assured him. ‘And you can’t gain control if I don’t want you to, can you?’
No.
Actually, I had my doubts about that. I wasn’t sure exactly how far I could trust what the wind said about the limitation of his abilities. After all, he had never once mentioned the fact that he could assume control over my body until the occasion had actually arisen, at which point he had simply gone and done it.
I moved off, walking briskly along the passage. I considered turning off the flash and making my way by feel, which would have been moderately easy. But I didn’t like the idea at all.
‘I hope we’re going the right way,’ I said pensively. ‘I don’t really want to end up back in the capital with all those angry miners.’
Don’t you know?
‘Do you?’
It didn’t occur to me to keep track, he said darkly. You’re driving, so I assumed you knew what you were doing.
‘I hope I do,’ I said serenely. ‘My sense of direction hasn’t let me down before. Not often, anyhow.’
Not, of course, that I’d ever been called upon to navigate in a place like this before. In total darkness, with no sky but only solid rock, orientating oneself could hardly be easy. However, I reflected, the tunnel only went two ways. If I had completely lost my sense of direction, there was still a fifty-fifty chance that I was going the right way.
The passage curved right, and was joined by another coming from the left. I tested the air currents in both corridors. The new one had more or less still air. It swirled around near the entrance, because of the current in the main corridor, but it had no real current of its own. I concluded that it served merely to connect two tunnels which were part of the circuit, and therefore had no part in the circulation itself.
I followed the airstream around the bend, and on into the darkness. I could have taken the connector and gone through it to the other tunnel, which might have been arterial, and therefore warm. But there didn’t seem a lot of point in searching out a warm tunnel when my real objective was habitation. Creature comforts could be attended to once I’d re-established contact with the human race—preferably some fraction of it which wasn’t after my blood.
Switch off, directed the wind suddenly.
I complied, and saw the reason for the directive almost immediately. In front of me, but a long way off, there was a faint glimmer of light. I glanced behind me, but there was only limitless darkness in that direction.
The light ahead seemed to be extremely feeble, but I knew that it would only be a dim electric bulb and it was probably not as far away as it looked. I hesitated, not over whether to go on or not, but over the matter of the flashlight. If I continued with it on, then I would be just as visible to an observer near the other light-source as that light was to me. It seemed sensible to keep my approach as close a secret as was possible, and therefore I eventually continued in darkness. I moved cautiously, and with a certain amount of trepidation.
When I reached the light, I found that it was a bit of an anticlimax. It was just a light, hanging from the ceiling. There was another some twenty or thirty yards on, and more after that. I presumed that I was coming close to a town. The abrupt termination of the ‘street-lights’ appeared to have no obvious rationale except that the supply of cable had given out. It seemed a little pointless to light a small fraction of a road, especially when the job was done so inefficiently, but it seemed typical of the way things were done on Rhapsody.
From my point of view, though, the transition from darkness into light was an important one. Quite apart from allowing me to conserve the power in my flashlight, it had a noticeable psychological effect. I no longer felt like a skulker pretending to be a shadow, no longer a worm in Rhapsody’s dirt, or a rat in Rhapsody’s walls. I could see, and I could be seen, and there were no two ways about it. If I went on, then I walked openly, as a man among men.
A particularly disreputable man, by all appearances. In the tentative glow of the yellow bulb, I could see at last how bad I looked. My clothes, from neck to toe, were completely begrimed. They were not simply black, but slick and greasy by virtue of the amount of native protoplasm which I had encountered. My face, I supposed, would be equally filthy. Certainly no one I might encounter was going to take me for an innocent citizen out for a healthy stroll, nor even a worker covered with the dirt of honest toil. It was patently obvious that I had been crawling through places where honest toilers were not wont to crawl.
But I hadn’t really any choice. I stuck the flashlight firmly in my belt, and set off regardless, striding confidently and trying to appear perfectly self-possessed. But the road was still absolutely deserted. The dust beneath my feet wasn’t the dust of centuries, by any means, but it was obvious that people didn’t tramp back and forth along the corridor every day. Apparently the principle of isolation which was an integral part of the faith of Exclusive Reward applied all down the line. Perhaps the people in the town that I was approaching didn’t even know yet about the state of affairs in the capital. If that was so, they probably wouldn’t be nearly so disposed to clapping me in irons or shooting me dead the moment they saw me.
That was the nicest thought I’d had in ages.
On the other hand, what I’d seen of Rhapsody’s children didn’t lead me into thinking I might be welcome. Human or otherwise, most people are willing to talk to people who help them. But even Charlot had had a hard time getting through to Mavra’s associates. Mavra himself had been forthcoming enough, but he was some kind of politician anyway. Anyone I was liable to meet in the caves would presumably be more like Mavra’s hangers-on—Coria and Khemis. And I didn’t much like what I’d seen of them.