Kabe sat back. He had to crouch; the wind-rippled under-surface of the raft’s foil cover was just above his head. The canopy was reflecting the heat of the tunnel’s ceiling, but the air temperature was still extreme. Some of the humans were pouring water over themselves or spraying it onto each other. Coils of steam filled the little mobile cave that the raft had become. The light was very dark red, spilling from either end of the pitching, bucking craft.
“This hurts!”
“Well, stop it hurting!”
“Zap me out too!”
“Nearly out!… Oh-oh. We got hang-spikes.”
The downstream mouth of the lava tunnel had teeth; it was strung with jagged protrusions like stalactites.
“Spikes! Get down!”
One of the hang-spikes ripped the raft’s flimsy protective cover away and flung it onto the yellow-glowing surface of the lava stream. The cover shrank, burst into flames and then, caught in the thermals coming off the braided flow, rose flapping like a burning bird. A blast of heat rolled over the raft. People screamed. Kabe had to fling himself back flat to avoid being hit by one of the pendulous spears of rock. He felt something give beneath him; there was a snap and another scream.
The raft flew out of the tunnel into a broad canyon of craggy cliffs whose basalt dark edges were lit by the broad stream of lava coursing between them. Kabe levered himself back up. Most of the humans were throwing or spraying water around, cooling themselves after the final blast of heat; many had lost hair, some were sitting or lying looking singed but uncaring, staring blankly ahead, blissed out on some secretion. One couple were just sitting hunched up on the flat deck of the raft, crying loudly.
“Was that your leg?” Kabe asked the man sitting on the deck behind him.
The man was holding his left leg and grimacing. “Yes,” he said. “I think it’s broken.”
“Yes. I think it is, too. I’m very sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“Try not falling back like that again, not while I’m here.”
Kabe looked forward. The glowing river of orange lava meandered into the distance between the canyon walls. There were no more lava tunnels visible. “I think I can guarantee that,” Kabe said. “I do apologise; I was told to sit in the centre of the deck. Can you move?”
The man slid back on one hand and his buttocks, still holding his leg with the other hand. People were calming down. Some were still crying but one was shouting that it was okay, there were no more lava tunnels.
“You all right?” one of the females asked the man with the broken leg. The woman’s jacket was still smouldering. She had no eyebrows and her blonde hair looked uneven and had crisped-looking patches.
“Broken. I’ll live.”
“My fault,” Kabe explained.
“I’ll get a splint.”
The woman went to a locker near the stern. Kabe looked round. There was a smell of burned hair and old- fashioned clothing and lightly crisped human flesh. He could see a few people with discoloured patches on their faces, and a few had their hands submerged in water buckets. The crouched couple were still wailing. Most of the rest who hadn’t blissed out were comforting each other, tear-streaked faces lit by the livid light reflected from the glass-sharp black cliffs. High above, twinkling madly in the brown-dark sky, the nova that was Portisia gazed balefully down.
And this is meant to be fun, Kabe thought.
~ Does it become any more ridiculous?
“What?” somebody yelled from the raft’s bows. “
~ Not really.
Somebody started sobbing hysterically.
~ I’ve seen enough. Shall we?
~ By all means. Once was probably enough.
(Recording ends.)
Kabe and Ziller faced each other across a large, elegantly furnished room lit by golden sunlight that spilled through the opened balcony windows, already filtered through the gently waving branches of an everblue growing outside. A myriad of soft needle-shadows moved on the creamily tiled floor, lay across the ankle-deep, abstractly patterned carpets and fluttered silently on the sculpted surfaces of gleaming wooden sideboards, richly carved chests and plumply upholstered couches.
The Homomdan and the Chelgrian both wore devices which looked like they might have been either protective helmets of dubious effectiveness or rather garish head-jewellery.
Ziller snorted. “We look preposterous.”
“Perhaps that is one reason people take to implants.”
They each took the devices off. Kabe, sitting on a graceful, relatively flimsy-looking chaise longue with deep bays designed especially for tripeds, placed his head-set on the couch beside him.
Ziller, curled on a broad couch, set his on the floor. He blinked a couple of times then reached into his waistcoat pocket for his pipe. He wore pale-green leggings and an enamelled groin plate. The waistcoat was hide, jewelled.
“This was when?” he asked.
“About eighty days ago.”
“The Hub Mind was right. They are all quite mad.”
“And yet most of the people you saw there had lava-rafted before and had just as awful a time. I have checked up since and all but three of the twenty-three humans you saw there have taken part in the sport again.” Kabe picked up a cushion and played with the fringing. “Though it has to be said that two of them have experienced temporary body-death when their lava canoe capsized and one of them—a one-timer, a Disposable—was crushed to death while glacier-caving.”
“Completely dead?”
“Very completely, and forever. They recovered the body and held a funeral service.”
“Age?”
“She was thirty-one standard years old. Barely an adult.”
Ziller sucked on his pipe. He looked towards the balcony windows. They were in a large house in an estate in the Tirian Hills, on Osinorsi Lower, the Plate to spinwards of Xarawe. Kabe shared the house with an extended human family of about sixteen individuals, two of them children. A new top floor had been built for him. Kabe enjoyed the company of the humans and their young, though he had come to realise that he was probably a little less gregarious than he’d thought he was.
He had introduced the Chelgrian to the half dozen other people present in and around the house and shown him round. From down-slope-facing windows and balconies, and from the roof garden, you could see, looming bluely across the plains, the cliffs of the massif that carried Masaq’ Great River across the vast sunken garden that was Osinorsi Lower Plate.
They were waiting for the drone E. H. Tersono, which was on its way to them with what it called important news.
“I seem to recall,” Ziller said, “that I said I agreed with Hub that they were all quite mad and you began your reply with the words ‘And yet’.” Ziller frowned. “And then everything you said subsequently seemed to agree with my original point.”
“What I meant is that however much they appeared to hate the experience, and despite being under no pressure to repeat it—”
“Other than pressure from their equally cretinous peers.”
“—they nevertheless chose to, because however awful it might have seemed at the time, they feel that they gained something positive from it.”
“Oh? And what would that be? That they lived through it despite their stupidity in undertaking this totally unnecessary traumatic experience in the first place? What one should gain from an unpleasant experience should be the determination not to repeat it. Or at least the inclination.”
“They feel they have tested themselves—”
