‘Dear God,’ Elegy said.
‘That’s the “they” I meant. Maybe we’d do better, though, to refer to the whole stinkin’ crew as “it” – one vast body, one vast mind.’
‘And The Bachelor’s huri?’
‘It’s a monitor, a receptor/transmitter of the huri over-mind. That’s what each one of the creatures is, separated from the transcendent superorganism.’
‘Ben, how the hell can you suppose they’re anything but some kind of hairless alien chiropteran? That was a flock of Denebolan bats that just flew by, not a great sentient cloud worthy of worship.’
‘What makes you so sure? Left-brain logic?’
Elegy put her hand on my sweat-drenched back and held it there. She looked at me appraisingly, not without compassion. ‘Do you want to get out of here, Ben? I’ll go with you if you do – and I’m not just looking for an excuse to abandon this nasty business, either.’
‘Not now, Elegy. We’re committed.’
She kissed me on the cheek, then ran her tongue through the stubble spiculing my jaw. ‘You’re my salt lick,’ she whispered, and we both burst out laughing.
I stood, took Elegy’s hand, and pulled her to her feet. Then she preceded me down the next three staggered platforms. As we got lower, the dimensions and the weird topographic furnishings of the chamber revealed themselves with striking clarity. Either our eyes had adjusted or the light beneath us had grown appreciably stronger during our descent. In either case, we saw that the chamber to the east was divided by honeycombed grids or walls of living amethyst like the windows in the pagoda. These grids or walls, laid out at varying angles to one another, were at least twice as tall as a full-grown Asadi, and they comprised an enormous labyrinth in the eastern half of the subterranean chamber. Although I had no way of knowing, I supposed that a similar labyrinth dominated the western half of the chamber as well.
As we stared down, the huri superorganism wheeled ventrally into view above our right shoulders – a huri thunder-head crackling with pale phosphorescence and stirring the slow, hot air. Its tremendous bulk scraped the chamber’s ceiling, altering the very consistency of the light. Then it stooped and leveled out and rode like a bank of shredding black cirrocumulus toward the east, individual huri separating from the mass and gliding downward like grains of dark sleet. In fact, the superorganism – which kept reconstituting itself on a small scale as huri after huri broke free and plunged – sometimes seemed to be dropping not only living segments of itself but an erratic firefall of cinders.
‘What in Christ’s name is that?’ Elegy cried.
At the moment, I wasn’t absolutely sure. All I truly understood was that the superorganism was decaying before our eyes, hundreds of individual huri plummeting to hidden roosts in the labyrinth on the chamber floor. The cinders plummeting with them were . . . well, a special form of bioluminescence. The huri were defecating in concert. The grains of their excrement glowed because the huri sustained themselves on molds and fungi that glowed. Bioluminescence in, bioluminescence out. And if a degree of fire was lost in the digestive process, the huri absorbed it into themselves as a nutrient with brilliant side effects; namely, the hollow bones in their wings sometimes shone like gone-amok isotopes of Plutonium.
Now, the wheeling superorganism, greatly diminished on our left, was sculling westward out of view.
I activated my radio: ‘Jaafar, can you hear me? Jaafar, can you hear me?’ It seemed imperative to make contact with someone outside, even if he happened to be traversing great stretches of jungle in a Dragonfly. But Jaafar didn’t respond.
‘We’re too far underground for that, Ben. Let’s just hope he’s able to find the pagoda – that it doesn’t conceal itself as successfully again this morning as it’s done these past six years.’
‘Maybe it won’t. The huri control the pagoda, Elegy, and we’ve diverted their attention. They know we’re here.’
We gazed down. A good many of the honeycombed partitions constituting large sections of the labyrinth were draped with ruffled fungi or cottony spills of mold. These otherworldly thallophytes were antique gold, pale blue, death’s-head white, and they shone with a radiant faintness that gave the whole scene a faery unreality. Moreover, broad compartments of the labyrinth were mounded with hills of lambent guano. Gardens of bioluminescent waste, landscaped and adorned with statuary.
We continued downward, dropping from platform to platform. The cavern’s temperature dropped with us, and the noise of beating wings eventually ceased. Because the huri had disappeared into the labyrinth’s myriad plastic dovecotes, a terrible silence and stillness descended upon their fetid underworld.
At last Elegy and I were down. The floor of the catacombs was aglow with the ghostly luminescence of the fungi and the amethyst walls. The column of stairs, scaffolds, and platforms by which we had reached the floor, however, disappeared into utter blackness above us. We were too far down to see its summit.
The Bachelor awaited us. He stood in the mouth of a nearby corridor, the huri riding his shoulder with its wings spread and its chest outthrown.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Chrysalis
The corridor was wide enough to accommodate four columns of Asadi marching abreast. How long had it been since that many Asadi – or, more likely, proto-Asadi – had tramped these hidden corridors? Ages, certainly.
No thicker than a human hand span, the amethyst walls were just lucid enough to reveal inside them eccentric arrangements of tubes, lights, circuitry. A few walls were empty of anything but swirling glass,
