The sections of wall not containing equipment were capable of subtly deforming and warping: Sometimes elongated or oblate ‘windows’ opened in the glass, migrated a brief distance, and then closed up again. These short-lived windows permitted Elegy and me to see other parts of the labyrinth: nesting huri, pools of algae- and diatom-infested water, mossy fungi and molds, glowing heaps of guano.
Sometimes the walls themselves opened out to reveal these things. At one point, in fact, Elegy and I found ourselves in a doorway fronting the wide expanse of a guano garden. The chamber contained a number of vaguely humanoid figures – statues, you had to call them – fashioned from the long-since-desiccated droppings of the huri.
Most of these statues were better than half buried in the accumulated muck of millennia, only a torso or a snout or a raised arm visible above the hellishly radiant mounds. One or two figures, however, stood atop the slag, their bodies perfect but for the warts and tubercles of fairly recent fecal bombardments. All of the statues in the garden were of Asadi. Among them were seven or eight huri hobbling about almost aimlessly.
Elegy tried to pull me down the corridor after The Bachelor, but I resisted.
‘Damn it, Ben, come on. You can’t stay here.’
I shook her hand from my arm and stared into the garden, fascinated by the scene, curious about the statues. When the huri in the compound became collectively aware of our presence, Elegy renewed her efforts to rouse me.
‘If you make me,’ she threatened, whispering, ‘I’ll leave you here.’ I didn’t respond. ‘All right – keep the wretched little demons for your own, Ben. I’ve got more pressing things to do.’
A moment later Elegy abandoned me in disgust and followed The Bachelor.
The huri in the garden congregated on a mound directly opposite me. Treading one another’s backs, knocking wings, and scratching at the hardened guano underfoot, they eventually settled into an arrangement that satisfied them all. Then they began fusillading me with echolocation pulses of such pitch and force I could actually feel them. Now I wanted to escape, to rejoin Elegy – but that option no longer remained. The huri’s continuous, high-pitched piping had paralyzed me. Even though I tried; I was unable to move.
Breaking away the guano crust to get at the pliable matter beneath, the huri began to shape a simulacrum of Thomas Benedict. In less than five minutes they had lifted a life-sized, three-dimensional effigy of me out of their own fluorescing waste, positioning it so that my double and I stood face to face – a feat that required a one-hundred-eighty-degree transposition of the biohologramic data they were receiving from their cerebral sonar. The statue stood higher than I did – it lacked identifying detail – but even in my paralysis I knew that it was meant to be me, and I felt that the huri had stolen some of my private essence in erecting it . . .
Then the fusillade of ultrasonic pulses ceased, my psycho-motor cortices were returned to me, and the huri scrambled off across the mounds in different directions. While I stood there numbly collecting my wits, they rose into the air and powered themselves over the deliquescing walls.
I turned to look in the direction Elegy had disappeared. The corridor ahead of me branched in an off-center V, and, frustrated, I murmured an expletive under my breath.
Aloud I cried, ‘Elegy!’
The entire subterranean complex rang. In answer, only a few moments later, a huri came swooping at me through the corridor from the right-hand branch of the fork. I threw up an arm to shield myself and pitched sidelong to the floor, which was as smooth and dark as obsidian. The huri, however, skimmed my head and landed atop the amethyst wall behind me. Then it skittered along the top of this wall toward the fork in the corridor, fluttered across the opening to the wall beyond, and resumed its tightrope walking. In this fashion it led me away from the compound in which several of its fellows had just memorialized me in bioluminescent shit.
This was The Bachelor’s huri, I realized, and it had come to reunite me with Elegy. We soon passed an entire wall of dovecotes in which other huri nestled like rubbery, headless fetuses. Only a short while before, they had been wheeling overhead in a noisy cloud.
We also passed a section of honeycombed wall on which three or four wakeful huri were grazing. Like monstrous houseflies, they walked the vertical plane of the wall, scissoring with their beaks at a glowing tapestry of woolly gold fungus. Several empty cells in the wall revealed complicated networks of plastic tubing which I assumed to be conveyors of water and nutrients. The Bachelor’s huri hopped single-mindedly along the wall, pausing occasionally to riddle me with ultrasonic birdshot. Finally, it lifted and flew again, disappearing over a wall into an open area containing a subterranean lagoon of considerable size.
I stumbled into this clearing and found Elegy and The Bachelor standing like old friends by the water’s edge.
The surface of the lagoon was oily-seeming, but diatomaceous plants floated at various levels in the water, illuminating it to a depth of at least two or three meters. Far out on the lagoon, drifting facedown like alien water hyacinths, was a pair of huri. Apparently they were drinking. Meanwhile, The Bachelor’s huri settled out of the air onto his shoulder and Elegy came forward to embrace me.
‘You get to look as long as you wanted?’ she asked me.
‘Longer,’ I said, and as The
