The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  Where Ariel played the flash we saw a narrow vertical crack in the tunnel wall. It extended all the way to the light-strip. A few tendrils of vine had dug into the hairline of exposed dirt.

  “A break,” she announced. “So these are in fact emergency red lights, to warn us of unsafe tunnel walls.”

  “Oh, I doubt that,” the friar said. “If the Titan cavern complex can maintain its integrity for a million years⁠—⁠”

  “But Titans didn’t plan the Hellway,” Ariel pointed out. “Humans improvised it with Titan construction equipment. We don’t know what earth tremors⁠—⁠”

  “Your fear of the unknown comes from a secular education,” the friar interrupted. “Stop and think. Do we have any reason to believe that similar cracks aren’t a feature of the white-light tunnels, too, hidden behind the leaves? They could be like the gaps in a concrete sidewalk, protection against temperature change. Or they could be extra anchor points for the vine, to make sure it hugs the wall as intended. Without trust, how can we even turn a new corner?—or use the exit door if we find it?”

  “But⁠—⁠”

  “Look out!” Harry cried. Our gaze jerked to where he pointed.

  Intestines floating in midair. Just another slug, I realized an instant later—if anything, smaller than the first one I’d seen, but transformed in the red light to something more ghostly and ghastly, its outer skin almost invisible, its interior structures pale and prominent by contrast. Ariel shot the flashlight in its direction, and it flared white, more opaque. It seemed as startled by the change as we were, retreating down the tunnel. The beam flickered, the creature seeming to cycle large-small-large-small in its strobe. Was it an optical illusion, or did the light also make it flinch? The slug backed around a turn and disappeared.

  The friar had fumbled out a wax marker and a book of sample labels—the only way he could take notes, I realized, with his wristcomp gone. “Am I right in thinking it was less than full-size?” he asked us. “And that it showed photosensitivity?” We muttered replies, still a little spooked.

  “Why is it here in winter?” he muttered. “Smaller than the others—bullied into undesirable territory, hmm?” He took back the flashlight and sat down to write, legs folded yogically. He soon put the flickering torch aside, holding the tiny squares of paper close to his eyes.

  “Let’s hurry and finish here,” Ariel said. She sounded fed up. “Have we exhausted the network in this direction?”

  I consulted my mental maps. Right and left, and null for special choices, this time a sequence of couplets, ending

  ReNted LoveR, moRNiNg afteR⁠—

  RumpLed LiNe(n), RibaLd LaughteR.

  “We haven’t done the left-branch-first variations yet,” I said, and we left the friar behind.

  It was no go. The way out was not through a red zone.

  “Creepy place anyway,” Harry said as we rejoined the monk. He kicked at a gnarled trunk of vine, and half a dozen rats scurried away. Even Friar Francisco started.

  “Rats,” he said.

  ◆◆◆

  We reverted to my original plan. Although we couldn’t always rule out side tunnels without some inspection, we managed within a few hours to find the descending forward path through another dozen floors. Slug sightings became more frequent. So did red sections, all of them showing hairline cracks.

  And finally we hit bottom—a floor that broke the pattern. It was longer and wider than the others, and all of its sections connected. This made for a much more complicated and convoluted maze, in which even the backward-starting tunnels might snake around to hit the front perimeter—which I hoped would be close to the mountain face. Most of the tunnels were red, which tired both eyes and brain.

  There were no more holes downward, aside from some small drainage grates—a good sign. But we couldn’t find an exit, either. The main problem was the five or six roaming slugs that blocked path after path. Retreating from them and doubling back later, we sometimes lost track of which turns we’d already covered, and argued over which ones still had to be checked.

  It felt like late morning. We had returned to a key intersection, not far from a short red tunnel that was my best guess for the exitway. It was blocked by a particularly sluggish slug. We sat down to eat and think; perhaps the slug would move on while we waited.

  “I may be wrong about everything,” I said. “Those slugs aren’t just keeping us from the ends of tunnels, they may be keeping us from the down-holes to even more floors.”

  “No,” Friar Francisco said. “Everything seems to indicate that you were right from the beginning. And you, too, Ariel.”

  She looked up in surprise, silent behind a mouthful of synthetic food.

  “I’ve reconsidered,” the Green Monk went on. “Your hypothesis about red tunnel walls serves to explain where the rats come from. That’s the other thing I expect to find, somewhere on this floor, on the same side as the exit. A red tunnel crack large enough to admit rats from the surface.”

  “Why are you so sure they don’t belong here?” I asked.

  “Rats are tunnelers and killers, altering the environment on the macro level. A Gyal-wa environment has to be simple, simple, simple. With hypertrophied specimens like this, even more so.”

  “Because Gyal-was don’t reproduce?” I hazarded. “They can’t evolve to deal with changes in the environment?”

  “No, they evolve too well,” the friar replied. “The billions of individuals that make up the colony run through many generations in a day, and their interrelationships are meant to be flexible and accommodating. An adaptive mutation can run through the whole colony like wildfire.

  “We’ve already seen that smaller Gyal-was, bullied into the poorer feeding grounds of red tunnels, have become afraid of white light. Why? Where there is no brain, there can be no thought. Instead, an adaptive mutation tends to protect outer-skin cells from being killed in intercolonial conflicts over white-lit feeding grounds. A small example, but it demonstrates the point. The only way to keep the Gyal-wa you intended and designed, the one that will do what it’s supposed to do, decade after decade, is to insulate it from all environmental change.”

  “But what are they supposed to do?” I asked. “They’re just getting in our way.”

  “That’s not deliberate,” the friar said. “You see, there’s so much more energy cost to climbing up as opposed to flowing down, they naturally congregate⁠—⁠”

  His mouth hung open, and it was a moment before he continued. “Naturally! You asked me what the Gyal-was are for, Commissioner. They’re precisely for getting in our way! That’s the test, to realize that. The only way out is to go through one of them, just as Harry went through one before.”

  “Oh hell, I hope not,” Ariel said. “And I wish I’d finished eating before you mentioned it.”

  “I don’t want to—go through that again,” Harry objected.

  “It may not even be safe,” I said. “As you say, Friar, they have no brain. They have no way of knowing not to squeeze our ribs a little too hard, or hold onto us too long. Harry may just have been lucky.”

  “But not if this is the intended way to reach the exit door,” said the friar, beaming. “I am perfectly willing to test the hypothesis myself. After all, we put our trust in the transport tubes—and isn’t a mechanical system more likely to break down then a life system? I have faith, if you do not. Be truthful—isn’t your real objection just silly squeamishness?”

  “Common sense says we should eliminate the less risky options first,” Ariel said firmly. “For instance, you just gave me an idea. Let’s see how much the red-tunnelers dislike light. Let’s use the flashlight on this guy around the corner, see if we can prod him out of our way.”

  “There’s a thought,” I said.

  “Punitive rather than cooperative,” the Green monk said. “But I suppose we could try it. More positively, I could try to lure the colony out with a branch of big ripe leaves from one of the white sections.” />
  “Better and better,” I said.

  “But ‘The only way out is through.’ ” He smiled. “You’ll see. If necessary, I’ll do it without you.”

  “First the flashlight,” Ariel insisted. Friar Francisco shrugged good-naturedly and went through his pockets.

  But as it turned out, he didn’t have it. “I must have left it in that first red section,” he said. “When the colony distracted us.”

  “That was the only red section on the fourth level, with access from Three,” I said. “We can be there and back in under half an hour; the vertical path is short. And finding the flashlight won’t take long if we all fan out.”

  “I’ll stay here and try to coax the colony out instead,” the friar suggested. “I don’t approve of this aggressive approach.”

  Ariel and I looked at each other. “All right,” I agreed, “but wait for us before trying anything else.”

  He shrugged and smiled.

  ◆◆◆

  “Maybe we should have pressed him,” Ariel said to me from the lip of the red zone after we’d retrieved the flashlight.

  “That would have made it into a challenge. Now he doesn’t have to prove anything. And you can be sure the prospect of being engulfed will seem scarier when he’s all alone.”

  “It scared me enough when we were all together,” she said.

  Harry was the last to climb back up the connector into white light. He’d been hampered by something in his hand. “What have you got there?” Ariel asked.

  “The friar’s sample bag. I found it near the flashlight.”

  “Oh great,” she said. “We certainly couldn’t leave that behind.”

  “But we’re scientists!”

  “And we leave no turd unstowed,” I added. This got the reception it deserved.

  “But he’ll want this,” the boy continued. “See, he thought it was green, like the samples from white tunnels, but it really is brown.”

  Ariel was quicker on the uptake than I. “What?” She grabbed his wrist as though it were the plastic bag’s handle, holding it where she could see it. “What are those white things in it?”

  “The friar said stems,” Harry replied. “Undigested. They do look funny, though.” He shook the bag a little, and the white fragments shifted in the dry flaky dung. A larger piece came to the top, a delicate elongated structure with hollow eye sockets and sharp teeth. A skull.

  “Rat bones!” Ariel said.

  “Well, we always hear more rats in the red tunnels,” Harry pointed out. “They like dark places.”

  “Which is lucky for the red-tunnel slugs,” she said. “They don’t get many leaves to eat. Don’t you see it? They’ve adapted. Red-tunnel slugs eat meat.”

  Harry’s eyes grew big and round. He choked a few times, like his father, but got out two words: “Friar Francisco!”

  ◆◆◆

  We couldn’t run in a pack, not on those mats, and the connectors would have strung us out anyway. I reached the bottom floor first, at the cost of two head bashes against the ceiling, and reached the suspected exit tunnel a few seconds before the others.

  I took in the scene at a glance. The friar and the slug were much farther toward the end of the red tunnel than before; the Gyal-wa must have retreated before the unfamiliar two-legged creature. It was now possible to see, past its wildly waving eyestalks, the shape of a door.

  An untouched bunch of large green leaves lay discarded. The friar had removed his robe and balled it up under one arm, perhaps to protect it from slime. He looked as if he’d been standing in the same tentative posture for long minutes, unsure—a sturdy brown figure in pale green shorts, less than a meter from the agitated slug.

  He looked backward at my approach, balanced on the edge of a decision. The others puffed into place behind me.

  Perhaps I said the right thing, put the danger across in just the right words to pull him back in time. Perhaps Ariel’s formula was just as good, or Harry’s.

  But we all shouted at once and he didn’t understand. He saw only our panic, and called back something at the same time, nothing but the words “silly” and “trust” distinguishable. And he stepped forward.

  The slug reared back, grew broader and taller. But it did not flow over him. Instead the vertical mouth slashed open, the “head” rose, and we heard a gassy moan of…anticipation? It took only a second. The wood-rasp tongue whipped out and smoothly, deliberately, licked the flesh from Friar Francisco’s belly and chest. The friar screamed as he fell backward, and there were other screams in my ears when the slug dropped on him with the finality of a bootheel crushing a bug. It mounded forward, a ton or more of cloudy jelly in the hellish red light, the mouthparts swimming down to where they were needed.

  And Harry ducked under my arm to run toward it. His usual coltishness was almost spastic now, terror fighting with rage for control, and he must have snatched the flashlight from Ariel, because he held it in front of him like a spear, screaming, “Get…off! Get…back!”

  And as the flickering white light jabbed into it, the slug did back off. A glance at the disjointed scraps of the friar showed it was too late. But Harry—stiff-legged with hysteria—continued to force the slug back, meter by meter.

  Ariel and I rushed forward to grab the boy. But now the thin mat beneath our feet began to boil and erupt with fist-sized gray bodies.

  Streams of rats flushed toward us. They must have been piling up in the rear of the tunnel, trying to avoid the advancing slug; but now, as Harry forced the Gyal-wa to the very doorway, they were cornered and had to tear their way out under and around it. Even as the slug continued to retreat, its tongue whipped from side to side to catch or kill fleeing rodents. And as I reflexively hopped back and forth to avoid the hurtling gray shapes, I realized what was about to happen. The slug, too, would be cornered, its front-rank cells unable to get cooperation backward; their only other escape from the light would be to roll down and under, and then⁠—

  It happened. The whole colony began to flow back toward us, fast, the eyestalks bobbing up and down, riding the wave. Ariel got the flashlight back; I jerked Harry around by one arm; he seemed to snap out of it—and then the three of us ran for our lives.

  At least the thinner mats of the red tunnels were easier to travel. We slammed into an intersection we recognized, but the shortest path toward a safe, white-lit corridor was blocked by another red-tunnel slug, slowly drifting toward the vibrations of our passage. The two other tunnels facing us were unknowns, but as Gyal-was closed on us from opposite directions Ariel made the choice. We pounded after her. She’d followed the fleeing rats, but I didn’t know why. Our new tunnel angled back into the direction we thought of as “forward” and came to an end. But not the usual dead end.

  Logic had led Ariel to what the friar had predicted, the rats’ own crack in the wall. And the actual gap in the stone surface looked wide enough for us, too. The bad news was that it was choked black with earth and vines. The rat exodus found its own tiny pathways to freedom—but now it was our turn to be cornered.

  We moved to face the slug that had pursued us. Which one? No matter. It slowed to a near stop ten meters away.

  “Why doesn’t it finish us?” Ariel gasped.

  We stood there panting.

  “No brain,” I said finally. “Or at least not much. No purpose, no memory. Just impulses, tendencies. That doesn’t mean it’ll go away. It’ll probably come after our noise and movement sooner or later.”

  “Let’s try this.” She shone the flashlight at it, and it slowly retreated.

  “Easy!” I said. “Little doses. If you start the whole thing rolling, a little beam has no effect. That’s what happened back there.” She let the colony come to a stop a few meters farther away. It remained where it was, pulsing, and began to probe the undermat with its tongue.

  I found to my surprise that Ariel was smiling. “It’s okay now, Harry, Alun. Now we can dig our way out. See how thick the vines are, going into that c
rack? We must be close to the light of the surface, or they wouldn’t be that healthy. And the rats will have tunnels along the same line, which should loosen the dirt some. Harry, you keep the first slug-watch with the flashlight, and remember what the commissioner said if you have to push it off. He and I will be digging.”

  I turned to face the meter-wide crack of earth and tugged on one of the thick vines that led into it. “Solid as a rock,” I said. “And without tools⁠—⁠”

  “They are tools,” she said, pushing me aside. She jerked a vine back and forth until it was looser, then began to move it in circles, as if coring an apple. Loose dirt was screwed out, and the hole widened.

  All of the vines could be worked that way, and she was right about the rat holes, too; when we broke into them, we could scoop out kilos of earth with our bare hands.

  In the next three or four hours, I learned what it was like to work construction under Ariel Nimitz. It was hard labor at top speed, and I was the drillhead. As rocks and dirt accumulated around my feet she shifted them to the sides of the tunnel, out of our way. She threw a few of the sharper rocks at the slug, too, but they sank out of sight in the Gyal-wa’s mass; the creature seemed more agitated than hurt, and she had to give up on that idea.

  By the time I was too tired to continue, we’d created standing room for more than a meter past the crack. A boulder blocked the way forward, but I had made some progress above it, following the course of vines and ratways. I’d whittled through a few of the thicker vines with my belt buckle to make more space, only to find their far ends still as firmly anchored—the surface as far away—as ever. But I didn’t have enough vitality left to challenge Ariel’s inhuman optimism.

  Finally she rotated us. She’d been waiting for me to make squatting room for her on top of the boulder, from which she could go higher. Now Harry would clear dirt away while I rested on guard, and they’d switch places when his extra height was needed. I listened to her almost without comprehension as she cheerfully told Harry how small cave-ins would “play right into our hands!”