darkness. It might have been a thousand miles high, the core of a hollow Earth.
“We have to breach the wall,” Snow Goose said. “Everyone needs to push. Come on.”
Swell. But Max could see what Eviane was doing: choosing a big, nearly flat boulder for her perch; setting her feet, hands flat against the monolithic wall. The boulders were not big enough for two. He chose one next to hers.
Charlene and Hippogryph took Eviane’s other side. Like Max, they tried to imitate Eviane. Strange, wasn’t it, that she always seemed to know just what to do? So she was just a bit quicker than anyone else. Was he the only one who noticed?
Kevin was giving it his all, but he had climbed no higher than Orson, who was sweating and glaring up at his brother. Trianna and Johnny Welsh had reached the top. Welsh said, “Hulk smash?”
Snow Goose grinned and nodded. Welsh chose a boulder and set his feet. “Push?”
“Push. All at once.”
“One, two, three, heave!”
They heaved. Max pushed with everything he had. He could sense the mass of his companions: if they had anything going for them at all, it was mass! But the mass of the stone wall felt infinite. And yet… there was a gritty, crunchy sound against his ear. They’d done something.
Orson and Kevin reached the top, paused a moment to suck air, then joined the effort. Push harder Snow Goose dropped back, gasping. “All right, take a rest. And then-”
The rest of Snow Goose’s sentence was lost in a growing rumble. The rocks began to shimmy.
Eviane’s eyes flew open. “Oh my gosh! This is about to-”
All at once and nothing first, the wall disintegrated. The pile of boulders spilled outward. Screams sounded muffled; bubbles streamed from their mouths; and the party was falling through dark water in a cloud of shattered rock.
The entire cavern had dissolved, crumbled. Max was on a falling boulder… for that matter, everyone was on a faffing boulder. They sank in a murky cloud of detritus, but they sank faster. Smaller boulders, rocks, pebbles, grit, all rose out of sight and left the view clear. Each Adventurer, astride his own individual boulder, sank sleekly into depths that graded from dark to utter black.
Max felt his ears pop. He laughed. That was too realistic! He hooted, and waved his arms to brother Orson, whose rock was spinning in a slow, lazy circle.
(He could breathe! He had only just noticed that. He was breathing underwater. Unself-consciously he rubbed the side of his neck, looking for gills. Nope, nothing there…)
Although they had to be far below the surface of the ocean, and the water was murky, shafts of light pierced the darkness like silver pillars. The travelers sank down into the depths on a gentle diagonal, slipping through dark and light, past the finny denizens of the deep.
A school of ugly blind fish cozied past him. Showing more good mammalian sense than their cold blood should have allowed, they waited for Trianna. They made kissing motions at her, following almost close enough to touch.
Vaguely through the murk, the bottom was taking shape. Max could almost… he could make out the titanic outline of a woman in repose, though the head was wrong: lumpy, misshapen.
A flutter of panic: the Paija? Nahhh. Too big.
It was a woman, and she was huge. Three hundred feet high if an inch. Bigger. Sedna.
The surrounding murk made anything but a vague impression difficult, but it seemed to him that she sat in an attitude of sorrow. Her arms and knees hid her face. She might have been carved of alabaster or of mud; it was just not possible to make out detail. Her shoulders were gently rounded, slumped.
Although she was a giantess, a goddess, Sedna, the mother of life, Max felt the burden which hung heavy upon her. He wanted to hold her, shelter her, protect her.
Well, damn-that was why he’d come, wasn’t it?
A wayward current was floating them down toward the gigantic head. He’d been right: Sedna’s head was misshapen. A pale brownish mass capped the back and left side of her skull and was spreading down her neck. It had an angular look, less like fungus than like a growth of crystals. White, veinlike threads intersected everywhere, like… roads?
Orson screamed, “Max! They’ve built a goddamn city in her hair!”
Charlene called, “We’re going past!”
The current was sweeping the falling boulders past that growth. Good. Landing in a parasite city would have given them no time to think, to plan; but the current was dropping them toward flowing black locks.
This close, Sedna’s hair looked like tangled cables. Max began to feel like a wind-caught flea. Their impossible little rock-chariots sifted like sand grains into Sedna’s scalp. Max squeezed his eyes shut and braced himself for a bump.
There was none, only a gentle settling sensation.
The boulder seemed to have landed on solid ground, but damned if he would just assume that. Max got down on hands and knees, and backed off the boulder, feeling with his toes until solidity pushed against the metatarsals.
He stood ankle-deep in a mass of cables… of hairs. He reached down and hefted one: a quarter-inch thick, soft to the touch, running back out of sight. The hair was relatively sparse, thank God, or the Adventurers would have been choked immediately upon arrival.
He checked that the others had arrived safely. There was no need to wonder: each and every boulder had dropped without mishap onto the glorious head of Sedna. Max had an absurd urge to plant a flag. Was this how Neil Armstrong had felt?
His peripheral vision caught something on a strand of hair. Something crawled away, disappearing as he watched, something bigger than his hand.
It gave him the creeps.
Hebert was the first to comment. “I see some kind of big bugs around here. I don’t know what to call them.”
Johnny Welsh volunteered, “Water bugs, maybe.”
The rest of them began to look around, peering in the mesh of cables for “water bugs,” but found nothing.
Snow Goose called them to attention. “All right. I think we can safely assume that we made it here in one piece. Which way do we go?”
“Aren’t you the one who knows that?”
She laughed. “Please. I’ve just about run out of magic. Why don’t one of you take control of that point?”
Robin Bowles looked very serious. Just as serious, in fact, as he had been when passing sentence on the psycho-killer in Judge Knott. A little more puzzled, perhaps. “I think I heard something from over in that direction,” he said finally. “Let’s take a look.”
The hair was piled into thick rows. It was (he hated to admit) slightly greasy to Max’s touch. “You’d think that a Goddess could wash her hair twice a week, wouldn’t you?”
Orson shot him a dirty look. Trianna said, “She can’t comb her hair. That much I remember. No fingers.”
Something crunched under his feet, and he heard a high-pitched squealing noise. Peering carefully through the forest of follicles, he saw three more “water bugs.”
They gave him the creeps. Smaller than a dog pack, but far too big for bugs. Yerch.
Before he had any clue as to what was happening, a net of webbing had settled over him. Before he could respond to it effectively, a second flew over from the opposite direction, and he was entangled. Then his feet were gone from under him, and if the hair hadn’t been so spongy and resilient, he might have had a nasty fall. As it was, it was a lot like faffing into a stack of fresh-cut grass. Embarrassing, but not at all uncomfortable.
Dream Park wants no lawsuits.
Behind him, Bowles shouted something that Shakespeare never wrote, and grabbed at hair with one hand while trying to keep his balance with the other. It didn’t matter: he went down anyway. All of the Adventurers were going down. Kevin dodged and ran, and there were multiple sputt sounds before they managed to catch him and drag him down.
Max tumbled and rolled as unseen forces pulled him along. At the lowest threshold of hearing, he could hear
