meaning of his words eluded her. He took her hand and helped her up. She did not resist.
Always, they continued downward.
Jan led Mischa on, following the insubstantial beam of Kiri's flashlight. He became more and more aware of his debt to her; blind, he would long have been lost.
Mischa was paying no attention to him or to their surroundings. He progressed from being glad she had survived her brother's death to
worrying whether she had survived intact.
The caverns were beautiful in their changes, but so many subtle variations slid by, obscured by the dimness, that Jan felt effects of sensory deprivation. He had to force himself to listen for sounds of pursuit; then, with the concentration, his mind began to play games with the echoes of their footsteps and their breathing, until they might have been walking with an army. He had no count of hours. He searched for anything he might have done to change what had happened, and found nothing, until his self-inspection arrived at the immediate past, and memories he tried to avoid.
The religious rituals kept in his father's house had been re-created or invented to uphold the old man's delusions. The rituals had never meant anything to Jan, nor had he ever found a faith that suited him. Though he had never made a conscious decision not to believe in anything at all, disbelief was easier, now, after Mischa's mumbled words. Whole philosophies had been built on less. He had to keep telling himself not to take too seriously what she had said in the midst of exhaustion, nightmare, and grief, but he could not stop thinking about what they might mean. He had nowhere to go... But perhaps she had not been able to follow Chris far enough to know what happened.
Jan knew he was only trying to comfort himself in the face of eternity, infinity, entropy. It was not what he wanted: a destruction rather than a justification or confirmation. Yet, if he was not to begin ignoring unpleasant information, perhaps all philosophies were wrong: no afterlife, no vengeful and malevolent hell, no meretriciously sentimental heaven, not even the unself-conscious awareness of Nirvana. Simply, finally, nothing. He glanced at Mischa, moving expressionless and uncomprehending, and wondered if anyone who understood what she had seen would be destroyed.
The passage jogged and ended in a steep and narrow tube. Above it, painted on the stone, a spidery symbol flashed back the light, then phosphoresced, pale silver-green. The delicate design was the only evidence Jan had seen of human beings in the deep underground. Jan held the light at the tube's mouth, but saw only shadows below. He grasped Mischa's shoulders. 'Mischa, try to understand, do you know where we are? Do you know what's down there?'
Mischa looked into it blankly and shook her head. Jan could not tell if she were answering, or refusing to answer.
'We'd better try another way.'
She suddenly put her hands in her tangled hair and clenched them into fists. 'No.'
Just the fact that she had spoken gave Jan great relief. 'Are you all right? Can I do anything?'
'Just. be calm.' Her words were slow and carefully formed. 'Be quiet, the way you were,' and he understood she did not mean word-silence.
'I'll try.'
Jan crawled into the narrow shaft. It was barely wide enough for his shoulders; he did not want to think about getting out should it narrow any farther. He heard Mischa following. He hoped she would keep on; he wished they could move abreast instead of in single file. Following her, he might drive her into a danger neither of them saw; leading her, he might not know if she stopped.
In places the tube widened slightly and he could see her. She did not speak again, but seemed to have retreated from even partial awareness. Several times the passage narrowed almost beyond Jan's ability to slide through. It twisted and turned, always leading downward, now dry and solid rock, now damp, terrifying, and muddy. It continued for hours, like some topological freak that led onward forever. Jan's knees and elbows began to ache with bruises; his hands were rubbed raw. His shoulder muscles screamed from the constant downslope. Before him the tunnel stretched out or closed in as the angle of the light changed. It was awkward to carry the flash and crawl.
He thought he could feel a slight air current; then he thought he glimpsed an open space beyond the confining walls. Incautiously, impatiently, he plunged forward. The light glinted from the floor and ceiling, but he could hear the hollow echoes of a cave. He pushed on.
His hands came down in knives. He gasped and pulled himself back reflexively, away from the pain. Above him, blades ripped through his jacket and into his flesh, breaking with the sound of wind-chimes. He cried out and fell forward again, over the rim of the tube and into the empty space beyond. The light rolled away, clattering, metal on stone. The point of his shoulder hit rock and he slid down an incline; he fell into sand and lay curled around his hands. Blood gushed from his palms and wrists, and down his back. He felt on fire. His hand brushed a shred of cloth and the nerves shrieked.
'Mischa—'
He could not see; fear that the light was broken or that he was blind were almost equal. He realized he had called Mischa into the same trap and tried to warn her, but heard only his own shaky, disembodied moan. He tried to get up, struggling to elbows and knees, trembling there, unable to raise his head. When he tried to move, shards of shattered crystal ground against each other, cutting deeper, working their way toward bone. Hearing seemed the only sense he had left, except pain, and every sound was thunder. He tried again to warn Mischa, and even his hearing dimmed. He lost consciousness.
Mischa heard the crystalline music, and felt Jan's cry of pain and warning. She knew that she should understand what had happened, but the effort was too much. Without Jan's calmness and unspoken encouragement, she stopped, confused and apathetic. The stone beneath her hands was cool and comfortable; she lay down and put her forehead against it. She felt battered and numb. Needing time to rest and sort her thoughts and feelings, she had let herself be pushed on, withdrawing to the interior of her mind, leaving free only an isolated bit of reason.
No echo of Chris remained. Always before, no matter how far apart they were, a resonance had existed between them. That contact was gone, leaving scattered bits of blankness, like a painting leached of a single color. Mischa did not believe anything could replace the loss: she might fill in around the spaces, close them off, but the spaces themselves would still remain. She found herself unconsciously reaching out for contact with her brother, and stumbling into his nonexistence. She did not yet accept his death, though she had slipped with him from half- sleep to unconsciousness to coma. She had been pulled into the dissolution of his personality, losing contact only at the last critical moment, when she realized how deeply immersed she was, how closely her own thought processes paralleled his disintegrating ones, how near her mind was to fragmentation.
After freeing herself, she had still had to watch and feel Chris die.
She had never thought very much about death, deflected, perhaps, by Gemmi's terror of it. That, at least she now understood. With no belief in any afterlife, nor any philosophy of a soul, she had still felt that beneath the intricacies of personality every person must possess some basic and immutable core. Yet she had seen that there was nothing left of Chris. Each facet of him had shattered, and the shards had collapsed into uniformity: complexity into homogeneity. An end product of entropy. Nothing.
That seemed very welcome now. She was so tired, and all her chances were gone, worth as much as a cat's tenth life. She had tried as long as she could, longer.
Yet she heard the crystals shatter again. with some satisfaction, that she would not have to face them. Then she felt a hesitant touch on her shoulder. and tried to ignore it, but the presence of a living being drew her back up.
'Leave me alone.'
A soft clicking sound echoed in the narrow tunnel, and the creature that made the noise reached out to her with its mind, resonating on familiar overtones, sharp, clear, unverbal. Human, yet ninety degrees skewed from any human mind she had ever encountered, the square root of minus one. It was not an infant, it was not unintelligent, but it had no words. It met her and pulled her back to life with the joy of its greeting. Its kinship was unmistakable. It latched onto her, urged her, dragged her, forced her to return.
Sighing, unwilling, Mischa opened her eyes, turning her head so her cheek lay against the stone. The creature bubbled and shifted, and the crystals sang again.
