trunks. Nowhere would the descent be a straight rappel, because six-meter mushrooms curved out from the walls like dancers' upraised arms, their caps great round mattresses clogging the center of the shaft.
Benedick and Chelsea could not see below themselves except in glimpses, and after five minutes of climbing they also could not see above. What light fell was cut in shafts, progressively vanishing, and it wasn't long before only the sweep of their armor lamps revealed surroundings grown eerie and strange.
The walls had never been smooth. Designed as hanging gardens, in the darkness their honeycomb terraces were home to amazing things, such as woody, pale fungi tall as trees, which bled faint, contagious, greenish light where his gauntlets broke their surfaces. His handprints glowed for seconds afterward, until the sap wore away. Other mushrooms flourished in crevices--some pinhead-tiny, brilliant futile purples and golds on thread-fine stems revealed in Benedick's helmet light; others broad and shelf-level, hard as tabletops, ledges you could sleep on. Chelsea and he used those to belay each other, anchoring around slippery-skinned, porous, but unyielding trunks.
The ghostly forest teemed with tiny, eyeless, pale animals, insensible to the glare of Benedick's lights. Spiders translucent as window polymer, the joints of their articulated exoskeletons wraithlike around the shadowy organs within. Sticky-footed salamanders that flicked away from the air pressure of a descending gauntlet. Crickets spun of crystal.
Endless water dripped behind it all. The irrigation system must have broken centuries ago, along with the illumination, and in the humid darkness this was what had grown. Benedick was conscious of the wet, the ice that rimed the back corners of the terraces where even the heat of decomposition could not entirely stave off the chill of the Enemy behind. Still rotting, five hundred years later, and some of that ice must be nearly as old.
The smell tempted him to order his armor to filter--but odors could transmit vital information, and with the helmet sealed the toolkit huddled against his neck like a warm fur collar, whiskers tickling his cheek with every hesitant sniff.
He swung himself around a delicate-seeming fungus that he trusted with his weight only because his armor's scanners told him it was reinforced with biomechanicals--internal carbon monofilament cables leveraging its grip on the nearest terrace--and caught sight of Chelsea's lights and her sap-daubed armor below. She was paying out cable attentively, one hand on the winch, providing sufficient slack but ready to stop his descent at any sign he was in trouble. He touched down to the main trunk of the fleshy, branching mushroom she'd chosen to ground herself on and squatted deeply to make a little extra slack. When he stood again, he unlocked the cable release and began cautiously to reclaim his side of the line. Chelsea moved away to perform the same maneuver.
'Break,' she said, and lowered herself to the trunk. Benedick, after a glance around, stretched out beside her. They could not afford to pause for long, but they would lose more time to a fall and recovery than to a few minutes spent letting their heartbeats slow and their colonies repair damage to their muscle tissue.
They rested on their backs, lights illuminating the delicate moth gray gills that formed their temporary sky. Benedick thought of feathers, of filters, of narrow leaves of ceramic seen edge-on. A haze of spores drifted over them, graying their faceplates. If they were to lie here long enough, the spores would blanket them over like snowdrifts until the filaments of rooting fungus enveloped their armored shells. They would lie entombed, encapsulated, beneath the lofty white pillars and the parasol caps. People-cysts, like frogs in mud turned to stone, like parasites burrowed into muscle tissue.
With a stretch of his hand against the sensors in his gauntlet, Benedick shut down his helmet floods, imaging, sonar. Incautious, but he wanted to feel the space they had entered for itself, and if anything attacked, he trusted his armor. His lights died abruptly, with none of the flare and fade of cooling incandescents. After a moment, without being told, Chelsea did the same. Now she was a ghost in the darkness, like the spiders, luminescent in pale smeared patches that seemed to grow brighter as his eyes adapted. Blackness settled around them, as bottomless as the Enemy. There were even stars: tiny sparks of life scurried along the walls, moved through the miniature forests around the bases of the tree-fungi.
Through the armor, Benedick could not hear Chelsea breathing, though other things moved in the dark.
He was giving her the opportunity. It only remained to be seen if she tried to take it. If she didn't, it would prove something. If she did, he would be anticipating the attack. He'd have to place his trust in that, and in the hopeful truth of all those old expressions about the superiority of age and treachery.
'When you did this by yourself,' he asked, 'how did you manage?'
'I free climbed.'
He imagined her here in the darkness, the flash of her lights, nothing between her and the fall but her skill and strength and balance--and the technology on her back. Age and treachery, all right. In that she made him feel old.
'I'm impressed.'
She stirred, just a little, but he heard her armor scrape. He waited for her to find what she was groping after, to see if she would fill the silence with it. He breathed as he waited, and as he listened to the slow hiss in and out, it struck him that he
But then she said, 'Thank you,' in a voice so small he only recognized the phrase because it was familiar.
Benedick gave her a few moments longer, and when she spoke again her tone had the smooth, ironic featurelessness so common to conversations around dinner table in Rule. What she admitted, however, would have been blood among piranha in that house. 'Father never would have said that to me.'
No, Benedick couldn't make up paternal neglect of his daughters by throwing a bone to another young woman, but that didn't mean that Chelsea had no needs of her own.
Such vulnerability deserved an answer. He cleared his throat and closed his eyes. 'He said it to me once.'
Benedick could still hear the words, dripping sarcasm thick as the blue blood that had drenched his hands and arms. Amazing how one's organic memory could cling so tightly to the worst moments of a life, and lose everything that surrounded them.
Chelsea said, 'Wow. That must have been some accomplishment.'
In the darkness, Benedick sat up sharply. He reached to key his lights, and stayed his hand.
He said in plain tones, 'He didn't mean it.'
She didn't answer, but he heard her sigh, felt her reach for him across the space between and stop her hand before it connected. For a moment, they sat together, the understanding silence between them almost big enough to fill that space.
Whatever had been moving in the dark moved again, and this time Benedick caught a glimpse of rippling bioluminescence, impossibly pure azure and crimson, trembling like the gills of a fish. 'Sister,' he said.
Chelsea's armor clicked as her head turned. 'Big,' she said, as the train of light flowed across the underside of the trunk not four meters overhead. It left two parallel tracks of glowing green dots behind it, matching the smears on the Conns' armor. It must be taking pinprick holds on the surface of the fungus. The entire organism looked three meters long or longer, estimated with his own eyes. His colony suggested a tip-to-tip measure of 3.2, and a width of half a meter.
Against his throat, the toolkit compacted itself, shivering. Under all that fluff, its tiny body might have been twisted of wire.
'What do you think it is?' Benedick asked, using the suit mike directly to Chelsea's earpiece, so external noise would not distract the creature.
'Arthropod,' she said.
He would have been content to sit in the dark and play guessing games a little while longer, but Chelsea triggered her floods and bathed the cozy vertical dell in light. Brilliance washed reds and blues from the countless legs of a three-meter centipede, which froze when revealed as if the glare had pinned it to the trunk to which it clung. Like the spiders, it was transparent in places, translucent in others, only a few of the internal organs pigmented and solid-seeming. Benedick had the uncomfortable misapprehension that if he stood up and reached out to it, his hand would go through--though whether it should feel like gelatin or mist, he couldn't quite decide.
