compassionate man. I don' want Sandy hurt, and telling her would hurt her. I already have enough women. If I let this one go she might hurt for awhile, but I think it would be a pleasant hurt and she would recover. Unless somebody else tol' her.'
'Aw, shit, why do you beat around the bush?'
'Rafael Sabado from Houston did not beg favors, and Lufo Albeniz of Wild Country does not beg favors.'
'No, by God you sure don't,' Quantrill grumped. 'Now I know why you guys never overpopulated Texas; you kill so many of each other off! Anyway — no, I won't tell her if I don't have to. As you say, telling her would hurt her. I guess. Christ, how would I know? I haven't seen her since she was a scrubby little kid! For all I know she might be happy to squirm around in your bed with all your other women watching!'
'Hey,' Lufo broke in, harsh and bellicose, 'you don' talk that way about my woman!'
Quantrill's reply was a guffaw. After a moment the big latino joined in, peals of laughter resounding inside the tarp as their tensions drained away.
Sandy's journal, 2 Oct,'
AAARrrgh! MEN! The laughing embrace of Ted Quantrill (!!) should have made this a day to remember, yet ten minutes later I was denouncing him and Lufo. It cannot be pleasant to be compared unfavorably with swine. Still, I spoke the truth. Or did I? I have only Lufo's word for Ted's reputation. & what of my reputation? What must they think & say of me? I hear them now, hooting & hoorawing out there, I hope the woodpile falls on them both!
Ted has changed, of course. The scars, the broken nose, the sparse hair behind one ear similar to Lufo's. Some dreadful initiation rite, perhaps. But his laughing mouth & those malachite eyes are the ones I knew, however briefly, however long ago…
I remember seeing him making love with that woman on the ground, the day he says they searched for me. Some search! & why do I feel anger at that? He gave me only kindness & owes me nothing.
Imagine! The mere appearance of my first love-object, & I am babbling about him to Lufo's exclusion. I must not forget that men, especially men like Lufo, can be violent children. Shall I be mated to a violent child? Dear God, are they all alike?
Tomorrow we ride near Sonora in search of more destruction. Childe will be off riding with him.
Must remind her to keep an eye on the place. Wish I had never told Lufo of that frightful device in my cave. It makes me resent the cleverness of the human race. Were it not for gadgetry, Lufo would not be gallivanting all over hell & Wild Country. (Nor would I have a holo or aspirin or a water pump!) Perhaps by making us more independent, gadgets help us alienate ourselves.
Sorry, journal, I feel doggerel coming on. Well then:
THERE IS NO GOD OF MACHINES
Now then O cunning poet: who the hell is 'thee'? I doubt that I shall know before I'm an old crone of thirty.
Holo promises good weather. Must remember buckskins & parfleche of jerky, just in case. Dread this trip. MEN! AAARrrgh!
CHAPTER 66
They encountered the broad shallow arroyo of Devil's River Canyon late in the morning of the next day, Sandy's outflung arm lancing past Lufo's shoulder as she recognized a rock outcrop. They passed old tire tracks in hardened mud, now crumbling with recent fall rains, and the scant shrubs were green with that memory.
Sandy, lithe in tight buckskins, was first to approach the rockfall that sealed her father's tomb. 'Mom carved this,' she murmured, stroking the weathered wooden cross with the legend, Wayland F. Grange 1955-Quantrill remembered the man whose choice had been to let radiation sickness complete its ravages in the small cavern, attended by his daughter and his pregnant wife. Quantrill swept off his Aussie hat and knelt silently at Sandy's left, while Lufo knelt at her right.
Finally, 'Thank you,' said Sandy, and trudged away from the fallen entrance. She could not at first locate the second entrance. Lufo found it by stumbling at its lip, a sinister trapezoidal hole in brittle spongy limestone, masked by agarita shrubs that grew at the entrance in perfect camouflage.
Lufo had never taken S & R courses, and proposed to go below with only his flashlamp. Quantrill's training made him cautious. 'Whoa, com-padre; let's get the rope and harnesses. And you might describe the layout again,' he added to Sandy.
While they brought equipment from the 'cycles, she told them of the sloping shaft, the first 'room' with its jumble of fallen stalactites, the passage leading downward, the huge sand-floored room with its mighty treetrunk stalagmites.
'Is it still a live hole?' Quantrill asked. 'I mean, does water still drop from the stalactites?'
She supposed it did. Six, or six hundred years were finger-snaps of time in a cavern. 'Below the big room — I called it the church — is a pool with a slight current. You can wade in it to the next room. That's where I stored my things.'
'Okay. If the cave's still alive, there's less worry about dislodging dried-out formations. Buckle this harness on and let Lufo be your rear guard. I'll take point position,' he said, using a jargon Lufo would appreciate.
Their flashlamps revealed signs of animal burrows near the surface. Twenty meters inside the first shaft they encountered a room gleaming with damp pillars and fingerlets of limestone. Fallen stalactites, some as thick as a man's arm, lay among the up thrusting pillars.Quantrill anchored one end of his rope to a stone stump and paid the stuff out as he continued at Sandy's direction. No point in dwelling on the fact that they could be walking over a thin crust with a long fall beneath, but he kept well in the lead.
A bend downward to their right, then a chute flanked by solid pillars like monoliths poured from wax. By now they had passed the realm of natural light and their flashbeams showed no dust in the air. Quantrill climbed down far enough to see a phalanx of gypsum sheets, petrified draperies sparkling in the beams of light, before he heard chittering peeps nearby. Sandy was five meters behind, sliding her harness friction link along the rope. Very softly he said, 'What kind of bats are down here?'
'I never tried to catch one,' she replied. 'There weren't many except at dusk. They came out in clouds then.'
'Well, there's bagsful of 'em now,' he said, and played his flashbeam toward a dome that arched away past intervening pillars. The dome seemed to ripple, but his mind refused to accept the carpet of fur that covered its surface. The powerful flashbeam swept across the black carpet, a surface that moved and flickered and then, the faint chittering silenced by the disturbing light, began to denude the dome.
A half-acre of bats left their perches on the dome and fled up the chute down which the interlopers climbed.
