Red Limit Freeway

Chapter 11

The beings who had colonized this maze were known by the general name of Nogon, but we came to know only a very special and unrepresentative group of them.

They lived in caves and called themselves the Ahgirr, a word which, in their liquid, gangly tongue, was roughly equivalent to The Keepers. Both an ethnic group and a quasi-religious sect, the Ahgirr preferred adhering to ancient ways and customs. Most of their race, both here and on their home planet, lived in huge high-tech arcologies, called faln, named after a giant plant that looks like a mushroom but isn't a fungus. The Ahgirr, however, loved their cave-communities, believing that creatures spawned from the earth should keep close to their origins. For all that, they didn't reject science and technology. No Luddites they, the Ahgirr, in their long history, had produced many of their race's most brilliant scientists. Hokar, the individual who picked us up and brought us in, was a geologist. He'd been out prospecting in the desert when he was surprised by the sight of vehicles on that little-used ingress spur. He saw we were in trouble and came immediately. The Ahgirr were like that―warm, friendly, outgoing… and very human. Their species was the closest to human that anyone, to my knowledge, had ever encountered on the Skyway. They were bipedal, mammalian, ten-digited, two-sexed, and breathed oxygen (Hokar's suit was merely a protection against bright sunlight, which his species couldn't tolerate). They had two eyes, one nose, one mouth, sparse body hair and lots of hair on the head―the whole bit. There were differences, though. You wouldn't mistake them for humans. They had joints in the wrong place. Their skins were translucent, and their odd circulatory systems gave them a distinct pinkish-purple cast. The eyes were huge and pink and structurally dissimilar to the human variety. Their long straight hair was the color and texture of corn silk. (Non Ahgirr―which meant, of course, the rest of the species―wore their hair in various styles. Coiffure was very important in distinguishing ethnic and nationality groups, of which there were many.) But after a while, it was hard not to think of the Ahgirr and their race as just an unusual variety of human beings.

The first task was to get Sam unstuck. The Ahgirr didn't have very much in the way of heavy equipment, but they put in a call (to a nearby faln complex, as we learned later), and an odd-looking towing vehicle came out by Skyway and did the job. We detached the trailer, and the towtruck hauled Sam over the desert to the mouth of the Ahgirr cave-community. Ariadne had to be left in the trailer, but Carl's buggy made the trip an its own power, which was a surprise to nobody. I was waiting for the thing to fly.

All interspecies communication up to this paint had been via the usual half-understood gestures and signing, but fortunately the Ahgirr were computer whizzes, and once they solved the problem of system compatibility, they waded right into Sam's language files―the dictionaries, word-processing programs, compilers, and such. In no time the Ahgirr were speaking to us in English that was completely understandable if a little fractured.

They gave us an apartment to stay in while the language barrier was being broken down. As it turned out, we stayed five weeks, and at no time did we feel as though we were wearing out our welcome. The Ahgirr were eager to make friends with beings similar to themselves. Word spread over the planet; we were something of a sensation.

The second task was to see about getting a new roller. That was going to be a problem. My rig was a bit unusual. It had been built to Terran specifications and design, but an alien outfit had manufactured it. I always had a hard time finding parts far it. Here, light-years away from Terran Maze, it might just be impossible. We were told that a few planets away there was a stretch of Skyway along which lay a number of used vehicle dealerships and salvage yards. We might try there. Carl and Roland volunteered to go and Hokar offered to act as guide. They were gone two days. Meanwhile, the rest of us set about the job of repairing the trailer. Fixing the buckled door wasn't so hard, but all the rear cameras and sensors had pretty much been totaled, which meant buying alien gear to replace them. And that meant a lot of fudging and jury-rigging. But we had to do it if we didn't want to be blind out our back side. We had to make a trip to a faln to buy parts.

Before we got around to that, Hokar, Roland, and Carl returned with an almost-new pair of rollers. A stroke of long-overdue luck.

"We scavanged through junkyard after junkyard," Roland said over dinner in our suite of rooms within the Ahgirr cave-city. "Nothing even remotely resembled the vehicles you usually see in Terran Maze or any of the contingent mazes. We were pretty discouraged, but Hokar said he was sure he remembered seeing vehicles similar to your rig, though not driven by humans. And sure enough-"

"We found a junked rig, just the cab, but very similar to yours," Carl interrupted. "Even had the same markings, same decals. "

"The owner of the wreck said the people who'd left it there hadn't looked anything like us, meaning they weren't human, of course," Roland said.

"The front rollers were in good shape," Carl went an, "so we bought 'em. Got a pretty goad deal, too, with Hokar advising us on protocol."

"Yes, the Nogon have strange rituals when it comes to bargaining," Roland elaborated. "You have to approach the seller on the pretext of wanting to buy everything he has to sell, at any price he chooses to set, and the seller in turn has to pretend that you couldn't possibly want any of the worthless junk he's got, no matter how low he's slashed the price."

"Traveling salesmen must have it easy here," I commented, reaching for a second helping of the delicious vegetable stew Darla had concocted out of the fresh produce Sean and Liam had brought along.

"As I said, it's all posturing. Pretty soon everyone's self-interest emerges crisp and clear, and then it's no holds barred."

"Sounds healthy," I said.

"Time consuming," Carl said. "Took an hour to close the deal"

I turned to Ragna, who was sipping thin gruel through a straw from a decorative ceramic bowl. "I take it haggling is a high art with your people."

Ragna stopped slurping, blinked his enormous pink eyes, then touched his blue headband, a biointerface gadget that was the closest thing to a universal translator I'd ever seen. It was merely a very-large-scale integration computer, but the software was powerful. However, my colloquialisms and abbreviated grammar gave it trouble now and then. Also, figurative speech gave the translation program headaches. But it was integrating our responses nicely.

"I am thinking that the haggling with my people is indeed, true, yes, a high or fine art, in the mode of hyperbole and colloquial exaggeration. In the literal or denotative mode, no, forget it, Charlie."

I suppressed a smile. "Ragna, your facility with the language improves daily. I must compliment you on it."

"Of course I am undubitably thanking you."

"I should think," John said, "you'll be able to doff that headband soon enough."

"Oh, yes, this is quite a possibility I am thinking. Even now, you may be seeing… " Gingerly, Ragna removed the flexible headband with both hands and laid it on the table. In a barely intelligible liquid slur, he said, "Unassisting brain capability speaking quite good, is it not? Is aiding the biological analogue to being able to function, learning is this not so to be speaking?"

"Eh?" John said.

"Interrogatory remark, what?" Ragna's thin white eyebrows lowered in puzzlement.

We persuaded Ragna to put the headband back on.

The remainder of the meal was devoted to chitchat. When we were all sitting back drinking beer and burping, Suzie looked gravely at me.

"What is it, Susan?" I said.

"Where do we go from here?"

"Good question." I fumed to Sean and Liam. "What've you guys come up with in the map department?"

"Damn little," Liam said, then nodded deferentially toward Ragna. "Of course Ragna and Hokar and the others have been very helpful. It's simply that none of the mazes we've had a look at seem familiar." He ran a hand through his mass of tousled blond hair, then sighed and pursed his lips. "We're bloody well lost all right."

I nodded. "Darla, can Winnie help us?"

Winnie, seated by Darla, looked sad as she munched the remains of her meal of shoots and leaves.

"Afraid not," Darla said. "I think it's clear now that Winnie's knowledge of the Skyway isn't all-encompassing. And she's not going to lead us back to the proper path by sheer psychic power."

"Well, I never expected her to," I said. "Roland, have we pinpointed where we are in the galaxy?"

"It was easy enough. The Ahgirr are about as advanced as we are in astronomy. Had a little trouble interpreting their maps, though…" Roland shifted his eyes toward Ragna, then looked up casually at the smooth rock ceiling of the cave.

I knew what he was implying. Every race does something badly; with the Ahgirr, it was cartography in particular, and graphics in general. I had seen their graphics on computer screens―plots and charts and such―and couldn't make head nor tail of them. You would think some symbology to be universal and cross-cultural. Wrong. Draw an arrow on a map for an alien, indicating which way he should go, and he'll say, Yes, that's very interesting. Whatever does it mean? The Ahgirr didn't know from arrows either. Their symbol for direction of motion, vectors, stuff like that, was a little circle at the beginning of the line. Interesting, but stupid. Of course, I'm human, therefore biased. It all made perfect sense to the Ahgirr, but we were having a hell of a time reading their roadmaps, both computer-generated and paper varieties. (In regard to arrows, I theorized that, since the Nogon had been cave dwellers for a good part of their recorded history, they hadn't invented the bow and arrow until very recently. Roland disagreed, contending that both the weapon and the arrow symbol were comparatively recent human inventions.)

"As nearly as we can ascertain," Roland went on, "we're well off Winnie's route, somewhere along the inner edge of the Orion arm. a want to go in the opposite direction."

"How far can we go in the right direction before we have to shoot a potluck?"

"About a thousand light-years, which works out to about ten thousand kilometers of road."

I clucked ruefully. "That's one hell of a lot of driving just to shoot a potluck. We might as well pick any old one and take our chances, since we're shit out of luck anyway."

Roland frowned. "I don't like the idea of wandering aimlessly. We could get hopelessly lost."

"What are we now?"

Roland shrugged. "True." He stared pensively at his empty plate for a moment, then banged his fist on the table beside it. "Damn. If we could only get something out of that Black Cube."

I looked at Ragna. "Have your scientists had any luck with it?"

Ragna eyed me dolefully. "Luck, I am afraid, we are also shit out of."

Again, everyone had trouble stifling a giggle.

"Howsoever on the other hand," Ragna went on, "we are slightly doubting that it is a map."

Raised eyebrows around the table, except for Roland's.

"What makes you doubt it?" John was first to ask.

Ragna made a clawing motion with the five digits of his right hand-an expression of frustration and regret. "Ah, my good friends, that I cannot be saying. I am not a scientist. I cannot be making you understand if on the one hand I am not understanding what they are saying on the other."

John narrowed his eyes momentarily, then nodded. "Oh, I see."

Ragna's status in the colony was roughly equivalent to that of a mayor, but his position wasn't official, so far as we could ascertain. He was simply an individual to whose judgment everyone deferred in matters of great importance. He didn't run for office, didn't rule by divine right. It was more an obligation on his part. Somebody has to drive.

"But I can be saying this," Ragna continued. "Our technical individuals are saying to me that there is something strange inside. Also, they say that nothing can be going into this Black Cube on the contrary, however, things can be coming out."

I said, "Can you tell us what they suspect is inside the Cube?"

Again, he made the clawing motion. "Ali, Jake, my friend, this is that which is difficult. They are saying that… that inside is a vastness of nothing." He blinked, milky nictitating membranes coming upward before his eyelids closed down. "But it is a nothing that they do not understand."

"I see."

Right.

A collective sigh at the table.

"Well," I said finally after a long moment, "what say we hit those maps and figure out something. Every maze seems to have legends or rumors concerning what's on the other side of its various potluck portals. With Ragna's help, maybe we can make a decision based on that."

"In that case," Roland said, "I'm for picking one at random."

"You never know, Roland," I answered. "Rumors always have some basis in truth. Legends, too."

"I agree," John said.

"But the Ahgirr haven't settled their maze long enough to have developed a road mythology," Roland countered, turning to Ragna. "Have you?"

Ragna touched his headband. "I am not sure… Ah, yes. A mythology. Yes, I can be answering that in the affirmative, which is truth. We are having those stories and legends."

"Then again," Roland said, smiling thinly, "I could be wrong."

Ahgirr tradespeople helped us fit Sam with the new rollers. I offered to pay them but they wouldn't hear of it. No one had brought up the issue of compensation up to that point, and no one broached the subject after that.

The newbies fit fine, and Sam and I went back to the road and picked up the trailer. Doing so eased my mind a little. The trailer was a dead giveaway just sitting there. I thought it improbable that Moore would follow us through a potluck portal, but you never know. He just might be crazy enough. I'd also been worried shout looters and salvagers, even though this ingress spur was seldom used.

With the trailer now at the mouth of the cave complex, we began the repair job in earnest. There was more damage than we had thought. The small motor that raised and lowered the door was completely useless, and the airtight silicone bushing around the door itself was in tatters. Where would we find replacements? Carl and Roland were willing to go out and search for a junked trailer, and I was ready to say go ahead, but the Ahgirr craftspeople said don't bother. They could manufacture most of the mechanical parts we needed in their shops. For the electronics we'd probably have to make a trip to a faln complex. They could breadboard same stuff for us, but it would be easier just to buy modular components off the shelf. They would send a technician, a female named Tivi, along to advise us. I felt I had to make the trip myself; the craftspeople knew the local technology, but I knew my rig, and I didn't want them making trips back and forth should I be dissatisfied with the goods they bought. Besides, I wanted to see what these fate things were all about.

But a big block of Ahgirr religious holidays came up and everybody knocked off for a week. There were strict laws―no work, no shopping, no nothing on high holy days, and these, called the Time of Finding Deeper Levels (rough translation), were the highest and holiest.

"No sex, I bet," Susan ventured. "Pity the way same religions are."

"I'm not even sure what they have is a religion." I thought a moment, then said, "I'm not at all sure that what you have is a religion."

"Teleological Pantheism isn't a religion… It's just a way of looking at the universe and its processes."

"Uh-huh. Tell me more."

"Later. Let's mess around."

Besides doing the above, Susan and I took advantage of the slack time to explore some of the vast system of caves in which the Ahgfrr had made their home. It was a marvelous place. There is something of the claustrophile in me. I love eaves, and I found a fellow spelunker in Susan. So we set out into the restful silences of the unoccupied regions. We toured vast smooth-walled chambers, many-leveled galleries, huge caverns with floors populated by fantastic rock monuments standing like sentinels in the dark. We walked along lava flows that had hardened millions of years ago, traversed vaginalike tunnels through which one had to push and squeeze in a psyche-stirring imitation of birth. Once, we followed a sinuous side passage that coiled endlessly through the rock, finally dead-ending in a delightful little grotto, walls sparkling in the light of our torches with millions of tiny multicolored points. An underground stream flowed through it, cascading down a small waterfall. We spent the "night" there, discovering more delights in the darkness.

There were other marvels. We found spherical chambers, hundreds of them, which had probably been formed by pockets of gas trapped within the magma. We dubbed them the "Pleasure Domes." And in the regions that had not been disturbed by vulcanism, strange geological formations presented themselves at every turn. The processes at work here were, for the most part, totally unEarthlike. There were chambers with walls glazed with a ten-centimeter-thick coating of frosted glass ('Twas a miracle of rare device!), rooms that looked as if they had been designed by Bauhaus architects under the influence of hallucinogens, caverns that looked like the interiors of great cathedrals, alcoves with intimate seating in the shape of contoured folds of rock like a couch, passageways with corbelled walls, vaults with grained ceilings, porticos with fluted columns, elaborate suites of adjoining rooms, and all were unmistakably natural formations. There were no right angles; slabs of rack were sheared, not cut; no chisels marks, no debris about that would be evidence of stonecutting; nothing. There was an undeniable randomness to it all.

And not one goddamn stalactite in the whole place.

"I always forget," Susan said. "Is it stalactites that hang down and stalagmites that stick up, or vicey versy?"

"No, that's right. I think."

"Always get it confused."

"Well, there aren't any here to befuddle you."

"Doesn't take much, for me."

In the womblike darkness, Susan snuggled closer.

"I wonder why," she said.

"Why what?"

"Why aren't there any?"

"Any what?"

She nipped my ear. "Stalactites, silly."

"Oh. No limestone, I guess."

"Limestone?"

"Yup. Makes sense. This is practically a lifeless planet, from what Ragna told us. Mostly microscopic organisms. Life never really got going here. Limestone comes from sediments containing coral, polyps, stuff like that. Back on Earth, that is. Here, who knows what they have going, if anything. You need water that's high in carbonate of lime to make stalactites."

"And stalagmites."

"And stalagmites,"

"Interesting."

"Hardly."

"No, I mean it. It always amazes me how much you know, for a truckdriver."

"Duh."

She giggled. "Sorry, didn't mean it quite like that." She kissed me on the cheek. "You're strange. So very strange."

"How so?"

"Well…" She lay on her back. "You obviously have some education. Quite a lot, it seems. True?"

"Oh, here and there."

"Right. U. of Tsiolkovskygrad, I bet."

"Right," I admitted.

"I knew it. Graduate work?"

"Some. A year, if I can remember back that far."

"Doing what?"

"I was going for a doctorate in government administration."

She was surprised. "How in the world did you wrangle your way into that program? Pretty restricted."

"Didn't wrangle at all. Actually, I was asked to sign up. Someone apparently thought I was bureaucrat material. They like to recruit from the provinces now and then. Or they did." I shifted to my side. "You have to remember, this was almost thirty years ago. U. of T. was a podunk school then, a bunch of pop-up domes and Durafoam shacks. It was the only university in the Colonies."

"The entrance requirements must have been stiff."

"They were. I'll admit to a certain native intelligence. I was young, in love with learning, tired of the farm. It seemed a good idea at the time."

"And you quit."

"Yeah."

"To drive a truck."

"No, I went back to the farm. By that time, my eyes had been opened."

She turned over on her side to face me. "You gave up a lot. By now, you could have been a high-level Authority functionary with a six-figure income and a dacha on the resort planet of your choice."

"Instead, I have the freedom of the road, very few responsibilities, and a clear conscience. No punking money, no dacha, but I have what I need."

"I see."

We were silent for a long while.

Finally, I said, "Should be stalactites."

"Hm?"

"Seems to me there should be something like them here. Caves are usually formed by the erosion of water-soluble rock, like limestone. I don't know what this stuff is―I'm nobody's geologist. Gotta be gypsum, dolomite, something like that. But in that case―"

"Didn't the lava do some of it?"

"Yeah, there are definitely volcanic processes at work. But most of the weirder formations have to be the result of some pretty exotic geochemistry."

"Well, it's an alien planet," she said.

"Uh-huh. But we're the aliens here, honey."

"Move closer, you horrible alien beast." After a moment, she said, "my, what's this?"

"A stalactite."

"'Mite," she said, moving to position her body over me.

We even got lost down there, which bothered me not much. We had food, rivers of fresh water, more peace and quiet than I had had in a decade. It was the first real vacation I had taken in… I didn't know how long. Eventually, Susan became a little nervous, suggesting that it would be a good idea to begin a serious effort to find a way back. I told her we had time, nothing but time.

"But we're getting more and more lost," she protested.

"Not so," I said, crouching near the tunnel wall. "Getting some interesting readings here on this handy-dandy pocket seismometer Ragna gave me. Remember that room we called Chichester Cathedral? It's probably not more than five meters away, on the other side of this wall"

"But we were there days ago."

"Day before yesterday."

"How do we get through five meters of rock?"

"Oh, here's another way back. This just means we aren't really lost. We've been keeping to the same general area. All we have to do is find a shortcut back to Chichester. From there we'll have no trouble locating that last transponder."

"You make it sound so simple."

"Besides, Ragna and his people should already be looking for us. This was supposed to be an overnight trip originally, if you remember. They'll be worried."

"To say nothing of John and everybody."

"Well," I said, "they shouldn't be. This is the first non-life and-death situation we've had in weeks. We've been shot at, bombarded, and kidnapped. We almost got stomped by a Roadbug, and we shot a portal with a giant sugar doughnut for a roller. God! You name it, we've been subjected to it. How can you let a little thing like this worry you, Suzie?"

"It's my nature, I guess."

"Take off your clothes."

"Okay."

Before long, though, I had to concede that we really were lost. Susan was for probing farther, but I came down squarely for staying put, making camp, and waiting for a rescue party. I reminded her of her warning that wandering around blindly would probably just get us more lost. She remembered, and concurred for more than one reason. Food was getting low, and there was zero chance of finding anything down here. Limiting our activity would help to conserve it, and so would strict rationing. We were pretty good about the former, but we caught each other raiding the food satchel more than once. Neither of us could be totally serious about the situation, but as time progressed and the realization grew that we had set out fully four days ago, we gradually sobered up.

Then things got worse.

It happened in a narrow corridor whose walls were broken by side tunnels sloping up to vertical chimneys through which only Susan could squeeze to see if any of them led to higher levels. We had gradually descended over the past few days, according to the air pressure readings.

I was lying with my back against the pile of our backpacks and caving gear, just beginning to doze off. I was bushed. Susan had doffed her Ahgirrian hard hat (which fit just fine, by the way) with the mounted electric light, and had taken a biolume torch to explore a likely-looking chimney at the end of a short side tunnel. She had insisted I stay and rest, and I wasn't worried. I could still hear her boots scuffing and scraping at the end of the tunnel. She had said that she wouldn't climb up very far, just enough to see if it went anywhere and if it widened out farther up. If so, I would try to squeeze through and follow, after tethering our packs to the line and having Susan haul them up.

So I lay there, waiting, eyes focused on some interesting crystal patterns on the ceiling that glowed peculiarly in the light of my helmet lantern. It was a moue pattern, shimmering and shifting as I moved my head slightly and the light with it. The colors were indigo and violet, edged with pink and red. It was hypnotic, in a way, watching it weave and dance. I slipped into a strange reverie, thinking mostly about Darla, and about Susan, trying to sort out my feelings. I saw Darla's face after a while; it took form behind the pattern, or was superimposed over it. Darla's was a perfect face, if such can exist, except perhaps for a slight overbite (which actually I found irresistibly seductive―it gave her lower lip a sensuous pout). The symmetry was compelling, the graceful proportions almost approaching a work of art. That profile: what combination of curves and lines could be more subtle yet so mathematically precise? A millimeter's difference here or there, and the whale organic rightness of it would be gone. Mathematical, yes, but no equation, however abstruse, could describe it. Faces such as hers were meant to be taken in all at once, in one short intake of breath. Everything fit together well: the sculpted helmet of dark hair, the full tips, the elevated cheekbones, the slightly cleft chin… and the eyes, yes. Blue the color of same cold virginal sky viewed from stratospheric heights, as from the cockpit of a hypersonic transport; the blue behind which stars are barely hidden. Hers was an arctic beauty. But look a bit farther into the eyes―what do you see? Molten paints, tiny burning highlights: Inside, she burned far something; I didn't know what. The cause, her dissident movement? Maybe. Me? I doubted it. She had deceived me, even used me, though she adamantly maintained that it all had been for my benefit. At moments, I was inclined to agree. At others… The jury was still out on Darla's motives. Doubtless she bore me no ill will, but I had the nagging feeling that I was just another cog in some vast creaking mechanism―admittedly not of her own design or creation―for which she had appointed herself the maintenance engineer, responsible for applying daubs of oil here and there to broken-toothed gears and squeaking cams. She was dedicated to seeing that it all hung together, that it kept clanking and groaning until it completed whatever mysterious task its designers had set for it. It was the Paradox Machine, and it was running the whole show.

I realized that I was deeply in love with Darla. Despite everything. It was one of those facts that lurks about in the shadows, then steps out from a dark embrasure and says, "Hi, there!" as if you should have known all along. Despite everything.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci had me in thrall, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.

Susan?

Susan. I replayed scenes from the last few days. In one sense, a lot of it was porno footage; looking at it another way, here were two people who enjoyed each other's company, enjoyed giving each other pleasure. There was warmth, friendship… perhaps even love, of a sort. I found it impossible to compare my feelings for Darla and for Susan. They were not quantifiable. The rest is semantics. Call what I felt for Darla passion―it well may have been, but it was of a rarefied variety. I was not altogether sure that the emotion was not indistinguishable from my strong intuition that Darla's destiny and mine were in some way inseparably mated.

And I was not sure at all whether I liked Darla. She tended to make people uncomfortable in strange and subtle ways. Perhaps it was only her striking beauty―most people, let's face it; are not beautiful, and a flesh-and-blood reminder in our midst stirs up odd feelings―but I suspect her aloofness was what put me off the most. She was a distant observer of events. She wasn't uninterested in what was going on; rather, she seemed disinterested. Unbiased, objective. I do not say cold. The Keeper of the Machine. However, I liked Susan. Semantics again. While she was not always easy to get along with, she was in the end always supportive, of me, of what I did. She trusted me, and I her. I could understand her. Her weaknesses were not blemishes on an otherwise admirable human, but reflections of what was infirm and uncertain in me.

Part of me hadn't wanted any of this. Part of me wanted to run… not from something, as I had been doing, but to something. Home. Back to safety, to the familiar. I wanted out of it all, to be absolved of all responsibility. I was no hero. I realized that somewhere within lay a part of me as deeply afraid as Susan had sometimes shown herself to be.

But that was unfair. Susan had borne up under unbelievable pressure. She hadn't come apart.

Why not say I loved Susan?

I played the footage again. I loved her sensuality, her willingness to please me. Easy things to love, perhaps, but between men and women, the tie that binds is of two interwoven strands, and these are part of what bound me to Susan: the palmfuls of warm flesh, the smooth planes of her skin in the darkness, the deep well of her mouth…

Something was standing just outside the pool of light cast by my helmet lantern.

I felt it as a presence first; then a shape began to grow in my peripheral vision, black-on-black against the shadows. Somewhere within my bloodstream, the cold-water tap turned on. I stopped moving my head and froze. My heart bounced within my chest cavity like a rubber ball.

I was unarmed. We hadn't brought weapons into the Ahgirr city. A very few options presented themselves. I could continue lying there, hoping that whatever it was would get tired of breathing significantly in the darkness and leave. Or I could leap up and run back into the tunnel in a mad gamble that I was faster than it. But what would I do at the end of the tunnel? Tight fit there. No. I needed a weapon. Ragna had given us some caving tools, one a pike tipped with a strange grappling hook, which I knew lay beside my left foot. If I could create a diversion…

I threw my helmet at the thing in the shadows, rolled, snatched the pike, and leaped to my feet brandishing it. The helmet had missed, bouncing off the wall and landing upside-down behind a low projection on the floor. I unhooked the biolume torch from my utility belt and snapped it on, playing its beam against a large shape with purple and pink splotches, standing not three meters away from where I'd been lying.

My actions startled the non-Boojum to no end. It staggered back, flailing its spindly forelegs as if to fend off a blow.

"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 dawn 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?"

l 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?"