I was lying with my back against the pile of our backpacks and caving gear, just beginning to doze off. I was bushed. Susan had doffed her Ahgirrian hard hat (which fit just fine, by the way) with the mounted electric light, and had taken a biolume torch to explore a likely-looking chimney at the end of a short side tunnel. She had insisted I stay and rest, and I wasn't worried. I could still hear her boots scuffing and scraping at the end of the tunnel. She had said that she wouldn't climb up very far, just enough to see if it went anywhere and if it widened out farther up. If so, I would try to squeeze through and follow, after tethering our packs to the line and having Susan haul them up.
So I lay there, waiting, eyes focused on some interesting crystal patterns on the ceiling that glowed peculiarly in the light of my helmet lantern. It was a moue pattern, shimmering and shifting as I moved my head slightly and the light with it. The colors were indigo and violet, edged with pink and red. It was hypnotic, in a way, watching it weave and dance. I slipped into a strange reverie, thinking mostly about Darla, and about Susan, trying to sort out my feelings. I saw Darla's face after a while; it took form behind the pattern, or was superimposed over it. Darla's was a perfect face, if such can exist, except perhaps for a slight overbite (which actually I found irresistibly seductive?it gave her lower lip a sensuous pout). The symmetry was compelling, the graceful proportions almost approaching a work of art. That profile: what combination of curves and lines could be more subtle yet so mathematically precise? A millimeter's difference here or there, and the whale organic rightness of it would be gone. Mathematical, yes, but no equation, however abstruse, could describe it. Faces such as hers were meant to be taken in all at once, in one short intake of breath. Everything fit together well: the sculpted helmet of dark hair, the full tips, the elevated cheekbones, the slightly cleft chin… and the eyes, yes. Blue the color of same cold virginal sky viewed from stratospheric heights, as from the cockpit of a hypersonic transport; the blue behind which stars are barely hidden. Hers was an arctic beauty. But look a bit farther into the eyes?what do you see? Molten paints, tiny burning highlights: Inside, she burned far something; I didn't know what. The cause, her dissident movement? Maybe. Me? I doubted it. She had deceived me, even used me, though she adamantly maintained that it all had been for my benefit. At moments, I was inclined to agree. At others… The jury was still out on Darla's motives. Doubtless she bore me no ill will, but I had the nagging feeling that I was just another cog in some vast creaking mechanism?admittedly not of her own design or creation?for which she had appointed herself the maintenance engineer, responsible for applying daubs of oil here and there to broken-toothed gears and squeaking cams. She was dedicated to seeing that it all hung together, that it kept clanking and groaning until it completed whatever mysterious task its designers had set for it. It was the Paradox Machine, and it was running the whole show.
I realized that I was deeply in love with Darla. Despite everything. It was one of those facts that lurks about in the shadows, then steps out from a dark embrasure and says, 'Hi, there!' as if you should have known all along. Despite everything.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci had me in thrall, and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.
Susan?
Susan. I replayed scenes from the last few days. In one sense, a lot of it was porno footage; looking at it another way, here were two people who enjoyed each other's company, enjoyed giving each other pleasure. There was warmth, friendship… perhaps even love, of a sort. I found it impossible to compare my feelings for Darla and for Susan. They were not quantifiable. The rest is semantics. Call what I felt for Darla passion?it well may have been, but it was of a rarefied variety. I was not altogether sure that the emotion was not indistinguishable from my strong intuition that Darla's destiny and mine were in some way inseparably mated.
And I was not sure at all whether I liked Darla. She tended to make people uncomfortable in strange and subtle ways. Perhaps it was only her striking beauty?most people, let's face it; are not beautiful, and a flesh-and- blood reminder in our midst stirs up odd feelings?but I suspect her aloofness was what put me off the most. She was a distant observer of events. She wasn't uninterested in what was going on; rather, she seemed disinterested. Unbiased, objective. I do not say cold. The Keeper of the Machine. However, I liked Susan. Semantics again. While she was not always easy to get along with, she was in the end always supportive, of me, of what I did. She trusted me, and I her. I could understand her. Her weaknesses were not blemishes on an otherwise admirable human, but reflections of what was infirm and uncertain in me.
Part of me hadn't wanted any of this. Part of me wanted to run… not from something, as I had been doing, but to something. Home. Back to safety, to the familiar. I wanted out of it all, to be absolved of all responsibility. I was no hero. I realized that somewhere within lay a part of me as deeply afraid as Susan had sometimes shown herself to be.
But that was unfair. Susan had borne up under unbelievable pressure. She hadn't come apart.
Why not say I loved Susan?
I played the footage again. I loved her sensuality, her willingness to please me. Easy things to love, perhaps, but between men and women, the tie that binds is of two interwoven strands, and these are part of what bound me to Susan: the palmfuls of warm flesh, the smooth planes of her skin in the darkness, the deep well of her mouth…
Something was standing just outside the pool of light cast by my helmet lantern.
I felt it as a presence first; then a shape began to grow in my peripheral vision, black-on-black against the shadows. Somewhere within my bloodstream, the cold-water tap turned on. I stopped moving my head and froze. My heart bounced within my chest cavity like a rubber ball.
I was unarmed. We hadn't brought weapons into the Ahgirr city. A very few options presented themselves. I could continue lying there, hoping that whatever it was would get tired of breathing significantly in the darkness and leave. Or I could leap up and run back into the tunnel in a mad gamble that I was faster than it. But what would I do at the end of the tunnel? Tight fit there. No. I needed a weapon. Ragna had given us some caving tools, one a pike tipped with a strange grappling hook, which I knew lay beside my left foot. If I could create a diversion…
I threw my helmet at the thing in the shadows, rolled, snatched the pike, and leaped to my feet brandishing it. The helmet had missed, bouncing off the wall and landing upside-down behind a low projection on the floor. I unhooked the biolume torch from my utility belt and snapped it on, playing its beam against a large shape with purple and pink splotches, standing not three meters away from where I'd been lying.
My actions startled the non-Boojum to no end. It staggered back, flailing its spindly forelegs as if to fend off a blow.
'Oh, my!' it yelped in a strangely familiar voice. 'Dearie me!'
Then it turned and galumphed off down the passage, disappearing into the blackness.
Stunned, jaw gone slack, I stood there and watched.
After perhaps thirty seconds, not really knowing why, I followed it. Several meters beyond where the thing had stood, the tunnel curved to the right and began to descend, widening out until it flared into a large chamber with several tunnels branching off its farther end. I took the widest of these, madly dashing on into the gloom. I hadn't stopped to pick up my helmet, and the biolume torch was dim. The way grew serpentine, then straightened out. Numerous cross passages intersected the main tunnel, and I ran from mouth to mouth sending the feeble torchbeam down each. At the ninth one, I thought I saw something moving, and entered.
Ten minutes later I realized three things: one, I had been very foolish to run off; two, I was lost; three, the biolume torch was failing. Ten minutes after all of the above had dawned on me, the torch no longer even glowed and the subterranean night had closed in. The absolute, categorical darkness of a cave is difficult to appreciate until experienced. Only the totally blind know what it's like. There is no light at all. None. I groped and felt my way in the direction from which I thought I had come. I did that for hours, it seemed, all the while calling Susan's name. No answer. I moved slowly, trying to catch the slightest glimmer of what might be Susan's torch as she looked for me. But I had no assurance that she wasn't lost herself. I had lost track of time daydreaming back there, and it seemed that I had stopped hearing Susan's progress up the shaft for a good while before the non-Boojum made its appearance. She had the other biolume torch, but if it failed…
I got too tired to go on and sat down with my back against a smooth wall. There was no room in my mind for thinking about the non-Boojum, how it had followed me from Talltree, and why. Maybe they had non-Boojums here, too. My mind was blank with fatigue, quickly filling with a throbbing panic. I got up and moved on. If I sat and thought, it would be all over.
I was convinced that days were passing in the dark. I had banged my head so many times that I was becoming punch drunk. My shins were raw from barking them against low outcroppings, my fingers moist and sticky with blood. I had stumbled through rubble, fallen into holes, slid down mounds of gravel, splashed through pools of stagnant water, and had had enough. I found a flat, irregularly shaped table of rock, climbed up, and lay across
