bone.
His breath rasped softly, then louder. He flung the bone away, and he felt the weight of water and organic matter impregnating his clothing, and blindly ran, clawing frantically at bits of damp matter that clung to him like leeches, crying faintly from deep in his chest.
The underground had won; this was to be his final resting place, the complete antithesis of all he had ever believed in.
Now, alone, totally alone, Subtwo stumbled down the corridor. His clothing seemed to crawl against his skin. He began to pluck it off, holding the material by corners and fastenings, in the tips of his fingers, even though he was wearing gloves. The gloves were last to go; he threw them down and they thudded wetly to the floor. He abandoned them gladly; naked, he proceeded, for he could not turn back, even to try to find his people. He retained only his laser lance, which he clenched tightly in his fist, as though it could stop the trembling of his hands. Unused to nudity, he felt uncomfortable and vulnerable, and wished for improvements in the male human body, or for Subone to take his place. Yet even the exposure was better than remaining in those stinking garments. The reek still clung to him, to his skin, to his hair. With vague gratitude he clung to the memory that he had not breathed the stuff, it had not flowed into his nose or mouth or lungs. If it had, he surely would have gone insane.
His body threatened to revolt again with nausea, so Subtwo dragged his attention completely back to the present.
The corridor ended abruptly with an elevator. Subtwo entered it, quite conscious of his peril. It looked very old: perhaps it would jam, and he would starve or suicide. But it was the only path. He did not even know if he was still following any kind of trail: he strained to remember if he had noticed footprints to this hallway, but he could not force himself to recall the scene. He touched the single button on the wall panel, a control without markings. The door slid shut, without a sound, but slowly like an ancient wraith.
Panic touched him again, when the cage fell. He did not want to go deeper into the earth.
As he moved downward, on and on, it seemed to him that Subone should be here; it seemed to him that his pseudosib had changed, since they had come to Center, in ways that would have permitted him to endure this trial much better.
Subtwo braced himself against the deceleration. The elevator door opened.
He was prepared for darkness, so the light startled and disturbed him. Much brighter than the dim illumination his eyes had become accustomed to, the glaring blue-white radiance dazzled him. He blinked into it, and gradually made out a long, wide, high chamber, as regular in design as the corridor and the elevator. Thick pillars rose in a pleasingly regular manner. Moving into the room, Subtwo felt a gentle whisper of air, which alerted him for the presence of other human beings. But the place had a calm and deserted feel about it, dustless, odorless; chromed machines clustered about the bases of the columns, metal shiny and unfingerprinted. He felt, he knew, no human beings lived here. The ventilation would be automatic, the machines self-sustaining. No organic matter soiled this vault.
Suddenly he stopped and spun around, staring up at the columns, straight-sided, sloping to a narrower radius at their centers and again near their tips, with round black holes above them; they circled him as though they were moving and he were standing still, as he recognized them for what they were.
Chapter 15
Mischa drank sparingly from her flask. The water soothed her sore throat, which hurt less than before she had slept. Nearby, Jan returned his notebook to his pocket. He was covered all over, even his hair, with a dry gray dust of lightcells. Mischa brushed at her own sleeve, but the dust remained.
'Can you talk?'
'Oh. yeah.'
'You sound better.'
'What did you write?'
'That I didn't like this place.'
'There's another on the other side of Center,' Mischa said. 'Not quite so far from the city. I used to go and look and wish the rockets were for people instead of bombs.'
'That would have been better all around.'
A soft sound whispered back and forth. Mischa moved to the entrance of the small alcove they had chosen as a hiding place for its view of the elevator. Jan had heard the sound too, and came to stand beside her. They watched in silence as the door slid open, and a single naked man stepped out.
'Is that—?'
Mischa could understand Jan's uncertainty, for Subone and Subtwo were very much alike in form. Their faces had both changed recently, but this man's face was smeared with dirt and filth. 'It's Subtwo,' Mischa said. She had no doubt of that.
He did have hair on his body, after all, but only around his genitals, not on his arms or legs or even under his arms. The small and insufficiently modest dark diamond made him seem faintly ridiculous.
'He must have fallen.' Jan's voice trailed off. 'He's alone. His raiders broke.'
Or they were hiding and waiting, but Mischa could catch no drift of deception in Subtwo, only barely repressed hysteria.
Subtwo moved slowly, gazing about. In the center of a square marked by missiles at its corners, he halted. His gaze moved slowly from the base to the tip of one of the graduated shafts, pausing at the symbols on its sides, hesitating at its summit. Then he spun, around and around, eyes wide open and head straight, with no attempt to avoid dizziness.
'He can't be thinking he could use them.' Jan's voice was low and taut with disgust.
Subtwo stopped his solitary dance. It did not seem to have affected him, for he walked without a stumble to one of the missiles, and reached out hesitantly, gently, to touch its metal flank.
'Subtwo!'
Jan started, gasping, and grabbed her arm. Her hoarse voice reverberated, each echo more distorted than the last.
Subtwo jerked himself around, laser lance ready, but he could not find his quarry. 'Who is it?'
'It's me and Jan Hikaru, of course,' Mischa said. 'Who did you think?'
'Ah,' he sighed, and Mischa thought, but could not be certain, that the sound meant an instant's regret. If it did, the instant passed, and the regret with it, leaving only rigid anger. The muzzle of the lance wavered back and forth, searching.
'I don't want to kill you,' Mischa said. 'All I ever wanted was to get away from here. Before Subone—'
'There is only him and me,' Subtwo said.
'But it's all one-way. It's always you doing what he wants.'
Subtwo hesitated, and when he spoke was betrayed by the abrupt belligerence of his tone. 'Come out! I refuse to speak to shadows.'
'Throw away your weapon.'
Subtwo laughed.
'It's useless,' Jan said. 'You can't take the chance of using it here.'
Subtwo's good humor did not lessen. 'Ah, generalists,' he said. 'You know a little about everything, but not enough about anything. Do you think I could trigger a fusion reaction with a pocket laser?'
'You could break the case of the fission trigger,' Jan said. 'These are bombs, not generators. Old ones. Dirty ones.'
Subtwo lowered the lance and backed away from the nearest missile. Knowing approximately how the bombs worked, Mischa saw he was afraid of stray radiation, though the triggers might be too many half-lives old even
to explode.
