The field mouse made a chittering noise at them, but didn't bother running.
Davis clambered into the rubble, stopping here and there to look down the spaces between the fused debris. There was a soft light welling up from somewhere very far below, and it illuminated a ragged but possible sloping corridor. “It looks,” he said, as Leah came to his shoulder and looked downward with him, “as if the generators have never run out.”
“It hasn't been too many years,” she said.
“The rubble looks fused the whole way down. There shouldn't be any slides. I'm going to try to pry my way in there.”
“It's packed too tightly,” she said, looking over the expanse of mangled construction materials. “You won't find a way.”
“I'll make a way,” he said, grinning. “Proteus!”
The robot floated quickly to his side, main manipulator barrel unstopped, sensors flashing excitedly.
“Gun left.”
Proteus slid a barrel from his smooth, seamless belly, turned left.
“Ground level,” Davis ordered.
The angle of the barrel dropped until it was pointing at the melted beams and concrete hillocks.
“Fire one!”
Proteus shot a small, explosive rocket, large enough to blast a hole through any animal as large as a horse. It struck the ruins five yards away as Davis and Leah stopped behind a slab of concrete. There was an almost instantaneous explosion that shook the entire crust of ruin, and a section of the floor they stood on gave way and crashed down into the open spaces beneath. For a long moment, the sound of things rebounding from the walls and outcroppings of the regions below echoed up to them, a mournful noise. When the quiet returned, Davis ventured forth and carefully inspected the entrance Proteus had made, found that the crust immediately around the hole was still solid and trustworthy.
“I'll try not to be long,” he said.
“I'm going with you,” she protested, pouting her face.
“I've got Proteus. That's one of the burdens as well as blessings of having a robot guardian. He goes with you whether you want him to or not.”
“I'm going with you,” she repeated.
He saw the determination in her face, the tightening of the muscles along her jawline, and he knew there was no sense arguing. “The way's going to be a little tough, and there isn't room to spread your wings and fly if you should fall. But if you're still all that set on going—”
“I am.”
The way was not as rugged as he had thought. His perspective, peering through the jumbled rubble earlier, had made the slanted corridor below look longer than it was. In ten minutes, they were in what had been the bottom floor of the shelter, a three-level affair. Here, the Demosians in hiding from the Alliance gases had not been killed by the force of the explosion itself, but by the firestorm which it had engendered. The bodies of about two hundred winged men and women and children laid about the room, mostly against the walls where they had been caught and suffocated so swiftly that they had not had a chance to move. The suction of the explosion and the intense heat must have snatched the air from their lungs in one instant and replaced it with flames the next. At least, he thought, it had been a swift end. There was nothing now but bones, a few skeletal masts of cartilage that had once been the bearers of membranous wings. And four hundred eye sockets, oval eye sockets, staring accusingly…
Proteus soared the length of the chamber, certain that there must be an adversary in such an uncommon place. When he reached the far corners of the room, forty yards away, the rat overhead screeched its battle cry, spraying spittle down onto Davis's head…
He looked up, saw red eyes as large as quarters.
The rat leaped, striking Leah's shoulder and sinking tiny, razorlike claws through her toga.
To the modern Alliance man, the ability to commit violence, against either another man or an animal, was something distasteful, barbaric, something that only an Alliance soldier had. And since most Alliance soldiers were power soldiers, robotic devices, machines, and cybernetic systems, there were relatively few men capable of violence in the entire system of settled worlds. The Proteus robots had, after all, all but negated the necessity to know how to defend yourself.
This atrophy of the violent ability very nearly meant the winged girl's death, for Davis found himself staring with fascination at the rat which scrabbled at her, tore her toga as it tried to sink claws into her flesh and gain a purchase from which it could bring its wicked, yellowish teeth into play as well. It was as if he were in a dream, moving through syrup or suddenly turned to stone just when it was essential that he act most swiftly. Then, fleeing across the back of his eyes like a specter across a moor was a vision of Leah with her face chewed up, an eye torn loose by the vicious fingers of the ratlike thing. In a moment, the anti-violence tendencies which had been nurtured through his entire life evaporated and were replaced by a manic and uncontrollable rage.
Had he looked over his shoulder, he would have seen that Proteus was rapidly returning to do battle, but he did not even think of that. He reached out and seized the animal by the back of the neck, tore it loose from her. He saw blood on its claws, matted in the thick fur of its paws. Her toga was stained crimson where it had had hold of her. Screaming, not aware that he was and wondering who was making that ungodly noise, he grabbed the head of the rat with his other hand and simultaneously attempted to crush its skull and strangle it.
It wriggled loose and leaped at his chest where it gouged its nails into him, struck upwards toward his neck with its deadly teeth…
He grabbed its head again, pulled it away from him just in time, though it still held onto him with its rear feet, claws dug deeply into his flesh. He wrenched at it, ruthlessly unconcerned about what such an action would do to his chest, ripped it loose, turned, and slammed it into the wall. It screamed, wiggled and kicked to get free again. But he clenched it tightly, ignoring the dozens of scratches it inflicted on his hands. He slammed it again, again, twice more until its back was broken, its spine shattered. Its blood ran down his fingers and dripped onto the floor.
He was no longer screaming, but he found himself mak-ing heavy, rasping breathing sounds as air rushed raggedly in and out of his lungs. And he was whimpering, deep inside, like a child. And he was squeezing the lifeless rat as if he would squash it beyond recognition, would compress its very bones into powder…
He looked up at Leah, who seemed not to notice the slight wound on her own shoulder. She stared wide-eyed at him. He wondered if she realized what had happened, understood the depth of his actions in these last few minutes. He had risked his own life to save hers, had broken the conditioning of his social training and had resorted to violence. He had not even thought to wait for Proteus, to summon the machine to the task, for her life had been too precious to endanger for even the briefest of moments. In that first instant when he had seen her blood, he had ceased to think in terms of “you” and “me” but, instead, in the sense of “us.” Her blood suddenly seemed as valuable as his own, and he had acted swiftly, insanely, without hesitation to protect this new extension of himself. Which meant it was not lust, as he had been working so hard to convince himself.
He dropped the rat.
He tried to say something, anything.
He choked and fell forward into unconsciousness…
Later, when she had finished using his speedheal ointments and bandages on their wounds and they had eaten a light lunch she prepared in the kitchen of the aviary where he was living, she leaned her elbows on the table, smiled at him, and said, “Can we go someplace special now, like I've been wanting? It will make the day seem a little happier after all the ugly things that have happened.”
He did not much feel like pursuing the research plan he had outlined for the day. His nerves still trembled from memory of the rat squirming and screeching within his hands, striking for his throat. And his mind was plagued with the realization that things had gone too far with Leah, entirely too far. They would have to be brought to an end before the silent attachment he felt for her — and, he thought, she felt for him — was brought into the open and made turning back impossible.
“Where do you want to take me?” he asked.
“To the temple,”
“Temple?”
