Triplet

Chapter 4

Hart was, unfortunately, almost as good as his word. By morning he was out of custody; and though the authorities in Gateway City assured Ravagin that he'd been "strongly warned" to stay away from the entire Reingold Crater area, it was with a nagging sense of being watched that Ravagin climbed into an autocar with Danae for the short drive to the Tunnel.

It was a typical Threshold day: cool, cloudy, and generally unpleasant—the sort of departure day, according to Courier superstition, that boded well for a trip to the Hidden Worlds. Not that Ravagin believed any of that nonsense... not really. But he'd spent a great deal of time traveling on Karyx, and no one who'd been there could ever again take a completely cavalier attitude toward the concepts of luck and fate. And with the trouble this whole trip had already generated.... Furtively, feeling more than a little foolish, he made the prescribed good-luck sign toward the gray clouds above. Just in case.

There was actually little danger of the gesture being seen. Danae's eyes, like everyone else's who came this way, were glued to the window, though what visitors saw in the remnants of an ancient nuclear bomb crater Ravagin would never know. That Reingold Crater had been the site of a tremendous blast was abundantly clear; even after some eight centuries of erosion, it was nearly two hundred kilometers across and easily visible from low orbit on a clear day. The biggest crater on Threshold; but at ground level it wasn't particularly impressive. There was little to see, in fact, but the same sterile gray-brown dirt that covered most of the rest of the world.

"I understand the whole planet's basically like this," Danae commented, still gazing out the window.

"Uh—?" he managed, momentarily startled at the way her thoughts had paralleled his. "You mean the ground?"

"And the giant craters and the lousy weather," she nodded, turning to look curiously at him. "All of it from the war?"

He shrugged. "Presumably, though we're hardly in a position to know what the place was like before they blew themselves to gray dust."

"I tried to look up information about the war before I came here," she said, turning back to the window. "No one's written much about it."

"That's because no one knows a hell of a lot about it," he retorted. "We know the civilization was composed of humanoids—probably true humans like ourselves and those of the Hidden Worlds—

and that it did a first-class job of wiping itself out. Everything else is pure speculation."

She made a face. "Including the theory that the Tunnel was one of their prime targets?"

Ravagin made a face. "It could be just coincidence that this part of Threshold was bombed the most.

It may have nothing at all to do with the Tunnel."

And as if on cue, the autocar topped a slight rise and the Tunnel came into view.

It wasn't particularly impressive, in and of itself, almost certainly by deliberate design of its unknown builders. A few small hills surrounding a longer mound, the latter with a small cave-like opening facing west. The prewar Threshold landscape had probably been riddled with similarly unremarkable hills, with these not worth a second glance... until after the war, when the mounds could be seen to have survived a near-direct nuclear blast....

Danae let out a long, wondering breath. "Incredible," she murmured. "It doesn't even look deformed."

"Not noticeably, anyway," Ravagin nodded. "Have you ever read Reingold's original log entry of its discovery? You'll have to when we get back. Poor woman nearly went nuts trying to explain how it could still be standing out here—and the crewman who first figured out the Tunnel itself really did slip his programming for awhile."

"I don't blame him. Shamsheer must have been a real shock."

The autocar negotiated the gentle ramp that had been built up to the mounds and rolled to a stop.

"Last chance to change your mind," Ravagin warned as they got out.

"Don't be silly," Danae retorted, striding ahead of him into the Tunnel mouth. Ravagin took a careful look at the landscape behind them and then followed, feeling marginally better. Hart could still be skulking around the background somewhere; but from here on he'd have a hell of a time keeping up with them.

For the first fifty meters or so the Tunnel went straight into the mound with only a slight slope downward, and by the time it began its lefthanded circular bend the last traces of light from the entrance had been left behind. The feint glow of Danae's dimlight waited for him at the bend; lighting his own, Ravagin caught up with her. "Stay clear of the walls," he warned her as he brushed past and took the lead. "They're rough in places—and the material is just as unyielding as the stuff the outside is made of, so you can get a bruise you'll long remember."

"It would help if you people would give us decent lights," she grumbled as they walked. "Even fire matches would be brighter than these things."

"And would be very noticeable to anyone from Shamsheer who happened to be wandering around the Tunnel. We try to discourage travel from that end."

"But—oh." She fell silent. Perhaps, Ravagin thought, the other reason for the dim lighting had suddenly occurred to her.

The trip, taken in near-absolute darkness, always seemed longer than it really was, and Ravagin was beginning to sense restlessness in his client when the first of the marker dots came into view along the wall. Standard procedure was to immediately point them out to newcomers... but nothing yet about this trip had been particularly standard, and just for the hell of it he decided to give Danae a more direct introduction to what Reingold had dubbed the Unwelcome Mat. They passed the camouflaged lockers... the triangle marker loomed just ahead... Ravagin increased his lead a step—

And abruptly he was five meters behind her.

The shock of his disappearance kept her feet moving another two steps; and by the time she gasped and twisted around it was too late. Her motion brought her elbow across the invisible line of the telefold—

And abruptly she was a meter behind him again.

She spun again to face him, and he heard the breath go out of her in a wumph. "That was a rotten trick," she muttered, sounding more awed than angry. "Your information packet doesn't nearly do the thing justice."

"I don't think anything can," he agreed, vaguely disappointed she'd recovered so fast. "You have to experience it to really believe it."

"I don't even believe it now." She took another deep breath. "The really scary part is that I didn't feel a thing. You could keep crossing that same five meters of Tunnel forever trying to reach the other end."

"Reingold's people damn near did that. It was sheer desperate inspiration that anyone thought about trying it naked."

He could almost hear her wince. "... right. Well. We ought to get started on that ourselves, I suppose.

Shouldn't we?"

"Yeah. The lockers are over here, built to look like part of the wall..."

He showed her how to open them, and in the dim light they stripped off their coveralls and stowed them on the hooks provided. Ravagin had long since stopped being embarrassed by the necessity of crossing the telefold naked, but a surprising percentage of his clients—even though they knew what to expect—got their backs up at this point and tried like hell to bend the rules. Usually it took several trips across that same five meters, as Danae had put it, to convince them that nothing but their own personal bodies could make the trip through from Threshold to Shamsheer. No one knew exactly why the Tunnel's builders had set things up that way, but it was abundantly clear that there was nothing anyone could do about it.

"Okay, I'm ready," Danae said at last, flipping off her dimlight and closing the locker door. "Now what?"

"Take my hand," Ravagin said, reaching it out toward her voice in the darkness. "Crossing the telefold sometimes plays tricks with your balance."

Her hand was stiff and unwilling, but at least she didn't argue the point. Walking carefully, taking both balance and direction cues from the faintly luminous marker dots, he led her forward... and abruptly, for just an instant, the floor seemed to tilt sideways.

Danae gasped and lost her balance, falling heavily against him. He caught her, and for a moment they were pressed together—

She got her feet under her again and jerked away, pulling her hand out of his in the process. "Sorry," she muttered, sounding both angry and embarrassed.

"That's all right," he assured her, the words somehow coming out a lot more sincere than he'd planned them to. "That generally happens during a person's first time," he added, a bit lamely. Her skin had felt extraordinarily good against his.... "Come on—the next set of lockers are down the tunnel a ways. Give me your hand and I'll lead you."

"I'm all right, thank you," she said, a bit tartly.

"Up to you." He headed off down the tunnel, leaving her to find her own way as best she could. The pathway continued to curve to the left, and he let his fingertips graze the righthand wall until he felt the gentle swelling that was one end of this set of camouflaged lockers. The bulge swelled further and further out into the passageway, and a few steps later Ravagin's fingers found the hidden catch and swung open the door. A handful of firefly rings sat on the top shelf; picking one up, he slipped it onto his left hand. "Let there be light," he said, cupping his palm... and a glowing ball of hazy light appeared. "Now," he said, glancing back at Danae, "let's get dressed and get out of here. Here—try this on for starters." He handed her a flowing dress of the sort worn by the minor Shamsheer nobility.

"Thanks," she said, hugging the dress close to her against her nudity and the firefly's light. "What was that you said?—'let there be light'?"

"All you really have to say to a firefly is 'be light,' or 'be lighted,' " he shrugged, searching through the locker for the garb he wanted for himself. "I was just being a little theatrical."

"But you need to give these commands in Shamahni, don't you?" she asked.

"What do you think we're speaking now?" he countered.

"We're—? Oh! I didn't—I mean...."

She stopped short, in confusion or embarrassment, and Ravagin smiled to himself in the dim light.

Deep-implant language training was far more thorough than most people realized. "Don't let it bother you—I've had clients go halfway across Shamsheer before they realized the rest of the population wasn't speaking Standard. Do you need more light?"

"This is fine," she said, her words muffled as she fought with the unfamiliar clothing style.

He smiled again to himself, and they finished getting dressed in silence. Afterwards, he brought the firefly's light up a few lumens and studied the various tools and weapons stored on the equipment shelf. The selection was always more limited than he liked, a problem that was normally more an annoyance than anything else. But with Hart's veiled threats echoing in the back of his mind—and Hart himself God only knew where—the lack of weaponry especially was feeling a lot more critical than usual. But there was nothing he could do about it, at least not until they could get to one of the way houses.

"Well?" Danae asked impatiently as he hesitated in indecision. "What're we waiting for?"

"Just relax," Ravagin growled back at her. "We're not on any schedule here." Gritting his teeth, he picked up the largest sheath knife available—an ordinary one, unfortunately, not a target-seeking watchblade—and his own personal favorite, a scorpion glove. Both weapons went onto his belt; scooping up another firefly and a prayer stick, he slammed the locker closed and started down the Tunnel. "Come on," he called over his shoulder.

She caught up with him within a few steps. "Here," he said, thrusting the extra firefly into her hand.

"You might as well have your own light."

"Thank you," she said, sounding almost subdued.

Ravagin glanced at her, noting with mild surprise the tightness in her face. "You getting nervous?"

"Me? No. Why?"

He felt his lip twitch. "Never mind."

The half of the Tunnel they were in now was exactly the same length as that on Threshold's side of the telefold, but already Ravagin could smell the subtle aromas of Shamsheer's plant life wafting through the passageway toward them. It brought back memories, not all of them pleasant, of all the visits he'd made to this world. I'm getting old, he thought morosely. Only thirty-eight, and already I'm getting old.

The curved section of the Tunnel came to an end and they started up the slight slope toward the mouth. After the relative darkness the light pouring through the opening ahead was blindingly bright, but by the time they actually reached it their eyes had had sufficient time to adjust. Ravagin, a cautious step in the lead, they stepped through onto Shamsheer.

Danae gasped, a long exhalation of pure wonder Ravagin had heard from countless clients over the years. "Ravagin," she breathed. "It's beautiful."

He nodded silently, drinking in the view himself with unashamed eagerness. There was never a mood so low, or an anger so burning, that this first view of Shamsheer's countryside couldn't make a severe dent in it in short order. The brilliant blue sky, the equally brilliant flowers and plants dotting the green hills surrounding the Tunnel site, the darting insects and trilling birds—it was a section of paradise transplanted onto another world.

For several minutes they just looked about them, Danae moving a few steps away from the Tunnel mouth at one point to peer northward at the Maiandros River wending its twisted path across the landscape. "Beautiful," she repeated, turning in a slow circle with almost child-wide eyes taking it all in. "Is all of Shamsheer like this?"

"Most of the countryside sections are," he said absently, doing his own three-sixty turn with something other than sightseeing in mind. To the south and east, the Harrian Hills rose up in a halfcirle around the Tunnel mouth—good visual protection from the villages around Castle Numanteal to the east, but also ideal hiding places for anyone bent on ambush.

But if anyone was up there, he wasn't giving his presence away. "I'm sorry," Ravagin said, suddenly realizing Danae was speaking again. "What did you say?"

"I was asking how far away Castle Numanteal was," she repeated.

"It's about ten kilometers east-northeast as the birdine flies," he told her.

"Over all those hills?"

He snorted gently. "Don't worry—no one has to walk anywhere on Shamsheer that they don't want to. And you're right; let's get moving."

Taking one last look around, he pulled the prayer stick from his belt and raised it to his lips. "I pray thee, deliver unto me a sky-plane."