The Star Below

IV

He was standing at the bottom of a vast tunnel whose walls curved up to become the ceiling an incredible distance overhead. The lines of light ringed it; the nearest, only an ell away, was a white ribbon that curved up, up, growing thinner until it was no more than a bright thread above. On either side of it were others, set three ells apart. In one direction they were dazzling bright, in the other much dimmer and more diffuse; he counted twenty of each. The reason for the difference, he saw now, was that the rings were lighted only on one side, so that in one direction he saw not the lights themselves but their reflections in the tunnel wall. As he looked down the tunnel, the farthest ones were perfect upright circles, but those nearer to him grew fatter at the bottom until they were vast egg-shapes that leaned together overhead.

He was trembling; why had the box not made him understand how huge these tunnels were? He felt himself tiny and exposed; the distant rings were like giants’ eyes staring. He glanced for comfort at the closed shield in the floor, then leaned to examine the nearest ring more closely. The floor was of some smooth, hard substance; embedded in it, the ring stood up two spans high, hollow on the bright side, flat on the other, with a flat dark edge the breadth of his hand. He touched the dark surface cautiously, then the bright; one was as cool as the other.

He hopped over it and took a stride toward the next ring. Far down at the black end of the tunnel, there was a flicker: a new ring inside the others. Thorinn stared at it; something was wrong. He turned, counting the bright rings, and there were still twenty.

He began to walk in long floating strides down the middle of the tunnel. Each time fie soared over one of the rings, a new one appeared ahead; the eye of blackness at the end of the tunnel remained always the same, He thought of the pictures in the box and of the egg-shaped things that darted along the tunnels, up and down the giant shafts. And the lights followed them wherever they went, so that where they were, there was light; and when they had passed, the tunnel waited in darkness …

He began to move faster, then to run, in order to see the bright rings run on ahead. A kind of exhilaration took him, and fie ran faster and faster, as if he could catch the fleeing rings of light. The tunnel slipped by him in sepulchral silence, and again fie began to feel that fie was not moving at all, but posturing motionless in the air while the illusory tunnel flowed past him, out of one nothingness into another.

Without warning, the black eye at the end of the tunnel flared bright. Thorinn stumbled to a halt, arms flailing. What had been a black disk an instant ago was now a globe of light, striped with faint dark lines as if it were a spinning top, and for a moment the illusion was so strong that fie almost turned to flee, certain that the monstrous globe, which filled the tunnel, was whirling down upon him. Then fie saw that it was not bulging, but hollow; He was looking through the end of the tunnel into some vast lighted space beyond.

As he approached, the last ring of the tunnel grew enormous around him, and he saw that the space beyond was a great shaft, striped with horizontal rings of light. Where the tunnel met the shaft, it flared out smoothly above and below; the floor dropped away with deceptive gentleness, like water pouring over the lip of a chasm, and the light-rings became ovals instead of circles. Using them as a ladder, Thorinn found that he could venture down the slope; and now he saw his way upward. To either side, the upright rings gave way to the horizontal rings of the shaft. He had only to descend to the lowest ring in the flared mouth of the tunnel, then step onto the nearest horizontal ring and begin to climb.

The dark upper surface of the ring was flat and level and two spans wide; he was able to walk on it with ease, knowing that if he stumbled he could reach up to catch himself against the lighted surface of the ring above. He was aware of the gulf beside him, but tried not to think of it Above, the shaft was lighted for sixty ells, then vanished into darkness. Below —

Some perversity made him want to see down into the depths of the shaft, even though it meant that he had to lean outward, bracing his hands against the overhanging lip of the ring above.

It was the same below, or almost the same — twenty rings of soft light merging into one another, then blackness. But in that blackness, close to the edge on which he stood, burned a fierce blue-white point of light. It was tiny and unwinking; he could not tell how far away it was, but he thought it must be very deep, or he would have been able to see it before.

He gazed downward awhile without moving, then straightened. He was dizzy, and he shook his head to clear it. The sight of that tiny brilliant dot had affected him profoundly, in a way he could not understand.

The brown man speaking his gibberish, and the tiny dots of light that moved …

He could not think, standing here on the narrow ledge. After a moment he turned back to the mouth of the tunnel and climbed the rings again until the wall began sloping back steeply, and he could sit down without taking off his pack and lean his back against it, with his legs dangling over the gulf.

Whatever he did, he must rest, eat and drink. He opened his wallet and took out a box of cheese. He unwrapped the magic jug and set it beside Him, without troubling to empty out the jewels. After a little he tipped it to his mouth and found, as he had hoped, that there was water in it, enough to satisfy his thirst. When he had finished, he wrapped it up again.

The question was what was he going to tell people when he got back? Nothing had turned out as he expected. The earth had not grown colder as fie descended; here in the shaft it was only as cool as a spring morning in Hovenskar. As for demons and giants, he had met none of them. How could it have come about that the Underworld was so different from what people believed?

It seemed to Thorinn that the vast emptiness was speaking to him, trying to convey some meaning which he could not quite grasp. He had touched it again and again, in the treasurehouse, in the caverns, in the dark tunnels and passageways, and each time it had slipped away from him.

He began to grow angry with Himself, for of course the only thing to do was to go straight up the shaft to the Midworld.

He put the jug back in his wallet, climbed down and worked his way out on the horizontal ring again. He leaned out once more to look at that tiny, brilliant point of light; and it was still there, unmoving.

There had been a word that the brown man spoke, over and over, when he was talking of the bright dots that moved in darkness: star.

Could that be a “star,” down there, in the depths of the Underworld? Perhaps if he knew what a star was, he would know what the brown man had been trying to say about the world; perhaps he would even learn why it was that all these great works, made by man, were now empty of man.

And now some demon began to whisper to him that it could not be so very far to the bottom of the shaft, that he could soon climb down and see the star, then climb back, with no harm done; and although he knew this was perverse and foolish, he could not resist it.

After all, what had he ever gained by caution? And how could he go back to the Midworld knowing that he had had the chance to see such a marvel and had refused it?

When he knew that his mind was made up, he felt a trembling of fear in his belly. But he knelt, put his weight on his hands; he let himself swing over and began to climb down the shaft toward the center of the Earth.