holding time. The water was ancient.
'This water – it's been living here for over a half-million years,' the hydrologist
Chelsea told her. It had a scent like the deep earth.
Ike stirred the sea with his hand and let a few drops onto his tongue. 'Different,' he pronounced. After that, he drank from the sea without hesitation. He let the others make up their own minds, and knew they were watching closely to see if he sickened or his urine bled. Twiggs, the microbotanist, was especially attentive.
By the end of the second day, all were drinking the water without purifying it.
'It's delicious,' said Ali. Voluptuous, she meant, but did not want to say it out loud. It was somehow different from plain water, the way it slid on the tongue, its cleanness. She scooped a handful to her face and pulled it across the bones of her cheeks, and the sense of it lingered. It was all in her head, she decided. It had to do with this place.
One day they saw small sulfurous flashes along the black horizon. Ike said it was gunfire, maybe as much as a hundred miles away, on the opposite side of the sea. Walker was either making trouble or having it.
The water was their north. For nearly six months they had advanced with no foresight, trusting no compass, trapped in blind veins. Now they had the sea. For once they could anticipate their geography. They could see tomorrow, and the day after that. It was not a straight destiny, there were bends and arcs, but for a change they could see as far as their vision reached, a welcome alternative to the maze of claustrophobic tunnels.
Although everyone was hungry, they were not famished, and the water was always there to comfort them. Two and three and four times a day, they would bathe away their sweat. They tied strings to their plastic cups and could scoop up a drink without bending or breaking stride. Ali's hair had grown long. She loosed it from its braid and let it hang, lush and clean.
They were pleased with Ike's regime. He did not drive them. If anyone tired, Ike took some of their load. Once when Ike went off to investigate a side canyon, some of them tried lifting his pack, and couldn't budge it. 'What does he have in there?' Chelsea asked. No one dared look, of course. That would have been like tampering with good luck.
When they turned their last light off at night, the beach gleamed with Early Cretaceous phosphorescence. Ali watched for hours as the sand pulsed against the inky sea, holding back the darkness. She had taken to lying on her back and imagining stars and saying prayers. Anything not to sleep.
Ever since Walker had overseen the massacre, sleep meant terrible dreams. Eyeless women pursued her. In the name of the Father.
One night Ike woke her from a nightmare. 'Ali?' he said.
Sand was sticking to her sweat. She was panting. She clung to his hand.
'I'm okay,' she gasped.
'It's not quite that easy,' Ike breathed, 'with you.'
Stay, she almost said. But then what? What was she supposed to do with him now?
'Sleep,' said Ike. 'You let things get to you too much.'
Another week passed. They were slowing. Their stomachs rumbled at night.
'How much longer?' they asked Ike.
'We're doing fine,' he heartened them.
'We're so hungry.'
Ike looked at them, judging. 'Not that hungry,' he said mildly, and it was cryptic. How hungry did they have to be? wondered Ali. And what was his relief?
'Where can Cache V be? We must be near.'
'What's the date?' said Ike. He knew they knew the next cylinders were not scheduled to be lowered for another six days. That didn't keep them from trolling hopefully for the cache signals. All of them had tiny cache locators built into their Helios wristwatches. First Pia, then Chelsea, used up their watch batteries trying to get some signal. It was magical thinking. No one wanted to talk about what would happen if Walker and his pirates reached the cache before them.
The six days passed, and still they didn't find the cache. They were covering only a few miles a day. Ike took on more and more of their weight. Ali found herself struggling with barely fifteen pounds on her back.
Ike recommended they ration themselves. 'Share one packet of MREs with two or three people,' he suggested. 'Or eat just one over a two-day period.' He never took away their food and rationed it for them, though.
They never saw him eat.
'What's he living on?' Chelsea asked Ali.
For twenty-three days Gitner led his castaways with eroding success. It seemed impossible, but in their second week they had somehow misplaced the river. One day it was there. The next it was just gone.
Gitner blamed Ali's day maps. He pulled the rolls of parchment from her leather tube and threw them on the ground. 'Good riddance,' he said. 'Nothing but science fiction.'
With the river gone, they had no more use for their water gear. They abandoned their survival suits in a rubbery pile of neoprene.
By the end of the third week, people were falling behind, disappearing.
A salt arch they were using as a bridge collapsed, plunging five into the void. Unbelievably, both of the expedition's two physicians suffered compound fractures of their legs. It was Gitner's call to leave them. Physician, heal thyself. It was two days before their echoing pleas faded in the tunnels behind.
As their numbers dwindled, Gitner relied on three advantages: his rifle, his pistol, and the expedition's supply of amphetamines. Sleep was the enemy. He still believed they would find Cache III, and that the comm lines could be repaired. Food ran low. Two murders soon followed. In both cases, a chunk of rock had been used and the victims' packs had been plundered.
At a fork in the tunnel, Gitner overrode the group's vote. Without a clue, he led them straight into a tunnel formation known as a spongework maze, or boneyard. At first they thought little of it. The porous maze was filled with pockets and linked cavities and stone bubbles that spread in every direction, forward and down and up and to the rear. It was like climbing through a massive, petrified sponge.
'Now we're getting somewhere,' Gitner enthused. 'Obviously some gaseous dissolution ate upward from the interior. We can gain some elevation in a hurry now.' They roped up, those still left, and started moving vertically through the pores and oviducts. But they tangled their ropes by following through the wrong hole. Friction braked their progress. Holes tightened, then gaped. Packs had to be handed up and through and across the interstices. It was time-consuming.
'We have to go back,' someone growled up to Gitner. He unroped so they could not pull on him, and kept climbing. The others unroped, too, and some became lost, to which Gitner said, 'Now we're reaching fighting weight.' They could hear voices at night as the lost ones tried to locate the group. Gitner just popped more speed and kept his light on.
Finally, Gitner was left with only one man. 'You screwed up, boss,' he rasped to
Gitner.
Gitner shot him through the top of the head. He listened to the body slither and knock deeper and deeper, then turned and continued up, certain the spongework would lead him out of the underworld into the sun again. Somewhere along the way, he hung his rifle on an outcrop. A little farther on, he left his pistol.
At 0440 on November 15, the spongework stopped. Gitner reached a ceiling.
He pulled his pack around in front of him, and carefully assembled the radio. The battery level was near the red, but he figured it was good for one loud shout. With enormous exactitude he attached the transmission tendrils to various features in the spongework, then sat on a marble strut and cleared his thoughts and throat. He switched the radio on.
'Mayday, mayday,' he said, and a vague sense of deja vu tickled at the back of his mind. 'This is
