by Bill Adams
Harry handed me the flashlight, whispering that it was nearly dead. The slug had shown a definite tendency to drift toward us except when pushed back; to husband the power of the failing lamp, Harry had let the creature settle only five meters away.
The diggers made soft noises behind me. The slug pulsed hypnotically as I gazed at the shapeless forms that swam inside it. I did avoid meeting its eyes. But I noted that the friar had been right about many things. For instance, the “head” of the creature was largely shaped by big interior flotation bubbles. Pneumatophores, he’d called them. I wondered what sort of gas the colony manufactured to fill them. Hydrogen again? No, what did grazers usually produce?—methane, maybe.
Another half-hour passed. I tried to understand the shifts that took place when I was forced to use the light, tried to intimidate the creature more efficiently. But the flash was failing. It was a disposable, unfixable unit, power source unknown. All I could do was screw off and discard the transparent guard up front and inspect the little acorn-shaped bulb.
The filament looked wrong, spotted with black. I found the bulb would wiggle slightly from side to side. The first few times I did this, it brightened and I was able to push the slug off a few meters. Then it just made things worse. The filament still glowed and sparked, but cast no beam.
The Gyal-wa slid forward, stopped, pulsed, and slid forward a little more. But I didn’t see any point in calling to the others, creating more attractive vibrations. I faintly heard Harry’s voice saying that he could see the sky, a pinhole at the very top of their tunnel, and I lived for a moment in the torture of hope, but then I heard Ariel’s cheerful reply that yes, a few more hours and we might be free.
Everything had come clear. I was at peace. The slug was moving forward steadily now, beginning to build upward, too, beneath the ruby ceiling strip. Something sharp would be nice to have at the end, but I didn’t want to ask Harry and Ariel for my belt buckle back, didn’t want them watching this. I reached into a pants pocket with my left hand and ripped out the lining, wearing it like a glove. The slug had reared up two meters tall now, only a meter away, and I could see the vertical puckering where the mouth hole would appear, the tongue assembly swimming into place in front of the huge cluster of pneumatophores. I took a last glance at the flashlight’s exposed acorn bulb; just a blue flicker was left along the filament, but I was almost happy. I knew what I had to do, and that was a first for Slugland.
The great mouth was opening, a hole within a cloud, like the eye of a hurricane…The friar had been right about many things. The way out, for instance—not his fault the rules had been changed. And as the slug came down on me like a red wave, I thought, Hell, the only way out is still through.
Chapter Twenty-one
I bent my knees, angling to fit inside the descending maw. The slug’s grass-whip tongue snaked toward my face and I deflected it with the hand I’d gloved—Not quite yet!—the toothed muscle scratchily coiling around my arm, carefully tasting and testing the stiff, dirty uniform jacket. And it had to be now, before it flexed to rip my arm off, warm jelly pouring all over me, now.
I sprang erect, driving up and through the mouth, deep inside the slug with the flashlight in my extended right arm, the sharp little bulb aimed at the largest of the gas pockets. The pneumatophore had a protective outer layer, rubbery, resistant—that was inevitable—but I went up on my toes to force bulb and air through the last centimeter. The slug wrapped my body in a clammy embrace, but the bulb broke through even as it broke apart, one chink! one tiny blue spark along the filament—
And for just an instant the spark flared into a big ball of blue flame.
The methane explosion died almost immediately, just one tubercular cough, but the backlash nearly tore my head from my shoulders. The slug’s long tongue spun free, its limp trailing end slicing into my neck and ear. A gelatin undertow yanked my feet out from under me. Thrown against one side of the tunnel by what felt like a high-pressure hosing of slime, I heard Ariel’s scream.
She shook me back to consciousness where I lay; she was calling for someone named Alun, over and over. I threw an arm over her bent knees and pulled my head up to see. The slug had retreated down the tunnel. It couldn’t be dead; it wasn’t alive, only its trillions of cells were. But it had lost some or all of its pneumatophores, and lay puddled, unable to summon any height.
Ariel wiped slime from my face with her sleeve. The sticky-sweet smell everywhere made me want to vomit.
“If it got that far, it can come back,” I said. My voice sounded strange.
“Not all the way,” she said. “Didn’t you hear us? Look. Look.”
I had to roll over to see what she was pointing at, the opening we’d dug into the crack. The hole to the surface, high above, was still quite small, and we were hours away from getting out. But the light came in. Bright light, white light, flooding the excavation with safety. Ariel helped me crawl into it.
◆◆◆
It was dusk by the time the last of us wriggled up onto the surface of the Hellway. We looked like creatures made of mud, and the surroundings suited us. We were near the bottom of a narrow mountain pass, its sides a jumble of slag and trash rock and a few scanty bushes. That’s why rats would risk the slug tunnels, I would think later—for vines to eat; but now I only wanted to find the t-station.
We realized, but never said aloud, that we might not be able to get at the station from here. There was no reason why the exit door we’d sought down there had to reach the surface; it might connect directly with a t-tube. But I wasn’t surprised when, after a short walk, we found a closed door into the mountainside, and a t-booth facing it. The only way out is through. A direct connection would just be more through; out means within sight of the sky. So I told myself, in a cavern six kilometers below the surface of Newcount Two.
The transport tube opened at the push of a button. The travel capsule inside was narrow and transparent. Two people might share it, in great discomfort, but a stern computer voice warned in Ur-Linguish that it would go nowhere if so loaded.
We had to split up. Harry and I sent Ariel on first; she kissed us each good-bye as warmly as our filthy faces would allow. Then I groped for some manly reassurances to feed the kid as we waited for his capsule to arrive. He beat me to it with a wan smile: “Can’t get much worse, can it, sir?” And then he was gone.
My turn.
Each new transport car in the Hellway seemed to be of a different design. This one, the fastest yet, shot through tubes as transparent as itself. After a brief plunge beneath the mountain range, it took me along a stomach-churning U-bend upward and ascended with increasing speed high above a barren, broken plain. Higher, higher, until there was a sickening reversal of perspective: the ground below blurred into skylike haze, while the underworld’s ceiling became all too clear, its gray tiles looming well-defined and larger, larger. I was going to smash into it.
And I did, the tube extending into darkness and another lateral bend. After a longer horizontal trip I reemerged into light, and took a terrifying fall into the depths of a large lake. Then darkness and sideways travel again. The car slowed to a halt and the entry panel reopened. I stepped out unsteadily into a small featureless chamber lined with blood-red velvet. Doors closed behind me. The floor pushed against my feet, and I knew I was in an elevator, but at least its pace was bearable.
It opened at the top of a lighthouse.
Or so I would always think of it. In fact there was no lamp. But it was a circular tower jutting out of a sea, not far from a rocky coast, and the top floor was the right shape, all windows. A singsong robot voice emanating from hidden speakers informed me that I would be “in limbo” for a day or two, until I could be suitably teamed with another “seeker.” I tried to talk back to it, explaining that I wasn’t really a candidate for adulthood but a castaway in need of help, but the thing couldn’t deal with me. Limbo.
But it made sense. We pilgrims were supposed to be regrouped after each
trial, but no one could be sure how long the separate adventures would take. Furthermore, the controllers might prefer certain team-ups over others. To make their game come out even, then, they would occasionally have to take a card out of play for a round or two—an ace, a joker, or just a lucky knave.
◆◆◆
It was a circular one-room apartment with a table and chair on one side and a crude pallet bed on the other. There were no other furnishings. In the center of the circle stood the elevator and a small bathroom, back to back. I stepped inside the latter.
The fixtures looked ancient, but the plain yellow soap smelled new and the single coarse towel appeared freshly washed. I enjoyed a long shower, scrubbing the shallow cuts on my neck and ear until they bled again; I wanted scabs without dirt in them. The cabinet over the toilet turned out to contain a bandage kit as well as some primitive shaving equipment, which I also used.
When I emerged, music was playing, and one spot on the wall glowed a gentle green, as if it were a touchpoint. I pressed it and the music ended—didn’t turn off, but segued cleanly into a logical-seeming coda. A new piece in the same style began when I touched the point again. There was no way to change the selection or volume, but it was good stuff—a small chamber group improvising around melodies with the flavor of folk songs—and I let it play.
Tens of hours to spend and nothing to do. Music, but no book to read. Still wrapped in the towel, I washed my clothes in the shower, killing as much time as I could by carefully rubbing in the soap, rinsing, wringing out, and doing it again. I tried in particular to restore the whiteness of the uniform jacket—in memory of the way Ariel had once looked at it, perhaps. Then I opened some windows, and on their hinged metal braces I hung the clothes to dry.
The moment the full sound of the sea came in, the music changed. The strings that would have been half-drowned vanished, and the same tune continued, without dropping a beat, in a version for solo piano. Maybe I imagined it, but the computer improvisor even seemed to be taking some multiple of the wave period for its tempo.
I lay down on the bed and opened my eyes a seeming second later to find the clothes nearly dry and my arms and legs stiff and sore. I walked out the kinks, around and around the compass of the room, and dressed when the air got cooler.
An hour or two later the elevator door opened, revealing a hot meal on a wooden tray. I lifted it onto the table and sat down to eat. The plate, silverware, and wineglass looked old but sturdy. A china mug held strong coffee, its saucer inverted on top to keep it hot. The food was plain but hearty: fresh bread, a meat like veal with some sort of cheese sauce, peas and potatoes on the side. If it was all synthetic, it was skillfully done, especially the coffee. The wine smelled all right, but I saved it for later. And what was that other smell in the room? Wood resin, lacquer? I reinspected table and chair and realized that they had been freshly manufactured for me. Of course—the original furniture might well have gone rotten in six hundred years.
Another restless walk, yawning all the time, feeling the sea air heal me. Another nap with the same wonderful sharp edges, no sense of consciousness held hostage, just a replenishing of spirit.
Dusk fell, and mermaids swam up onto the nearby rocks to sing. Actually, the creatures resembled hairy seals with birdlike beaks, but their voices were eerily human in timbre, like a boy’s choir. I decided they were calling back to the piano, and soon the piano began to phrase its tunes around them. Just a few would sing at a time, the rest grooming the seaweed out of each other’s fur with their strangely twisted beaks. I watched them until it was too dark to see, and later heard them slip into the water and swim away.
I paced the tower circle into the night, watching the underworld sky go through its puzzling repertoire, simulations of stars, rainbow cascades, the occasional spotlight stab at something out of sight. And the crest of every wave below me burned a witchy blue-green with the phosphors of tiny surface creatures, on a sea as full of life as any found in nature.
In time I sat at the table, and a concealed spotlight in the dome above immediately illuminated its surface. I ran my fingers up and down the clean fresh grain, feeling as I hadn’t in a long, long time. I suddenly knew, beyond question, that the average candidate for adulthood had carried a journal and a pen, and that this writing desk would not have been wasted on those earnest boys and girls in the key week of their lives.
But I had no pen, and what I felt—the light lifting of my fingers, the soft breath on the back of my neck—was just a tease, the Muse’s revenge for having forsaken her so long. Besides, I had no subject—the Hellway was already living poetry, an epic series of “objective correlatives” for official Elitist virtues.
I sipped my spotlit glass of wine and considered. In one way the Elitists had the later Kanalists beat all hollow. They’d built the ultimate initiation maze. Not just symbolic of the world, but a world in itself, with still more worlds inside it, and a wealth of living creatures tailored to each.
Foyle had also reviewed the big picture, looking down from our eel-balloon. She had found the Hellway monstrous, not just in consequence, but in conception. To her—as to most—artificial is simply the opposite of natural, while randomness and ragged edges, however unsatisfying, are the only freedom we can hope for. But that’s wrong. Unless humankind and its works don’t belong in the world at all, subatomic particles and sonnets must be equally natural, part of one continuum linking freedom and order.
Foyle had said that the Hellway trapped us like characters in a play—but this prospect doesn’t scare anyone who’s actually written a play. We know how much independent life and will even those paper humans can acquire, enough to alter the storyline unless other characters maintain it; we know that the framework of plot does not imprison, but provides a stage.
My own part, I acknowledged to the fire-capped sea, was one of comic relief in a historical tragedy, slated to catch a yard of steel in the guts, like Mercutio, before my line of chatter diverts too much attention from the leads. In the past I’d allowed myself to be written into a number of cheap thrillers; I would not turn down the honor of a subplot in the Elitists’ epic cycle. It was full of horrors, of course, like every epic, but not to be rejected for that—unless we were to reject the larger world for the same reason, as philosophers and winos do. No, better to embrace the whole, and duck the bullets.
I finished the Elitists’ wine and saluted their craft. But I reserved judgment on their society. They had forged something awe-inspiring for posterity; but if it was true that they’d meant half their posterity to die in it, just to keep up standards, then to hell with them.
And so to bed. Guilty over the luxury of clean sheets, I forced myself to think about Hogg-Smythe’s face as she tried not to be a straggler in the land of vampire moths; of Friar Francisco, killed by trust; of the good chance that Ariel had been partnered with mercenary rapists this time around. But the punishment didn’t take. Some gentle spirit of the air continued to ward off the suspend-sleep nightmares.
◆◆◆
I am sitting at a plain wooden desk, in a tiny university room, an hour before dawn. I have just finished The Enchanted Isle. It will never be perfect, but it will never be better. Revisions will come, and may be cruel, but they will not touch these last five pages. For I have not written them, they have written me instead; they have drawn me out of myself and above my intentions; they have set down, in letters of blood and gold, what I must realize and become. I am like a child half-awake on Christmas morning, as yet unable to name the particular thing that elates me, but sublimely certain that it is all I could want, and unstoppable, because the whole world is being carried into it with me…
So many things won’t matter any more, once this celebration of the Kanalist mysteries is played before my schoolmates. For once you know that you were born a king, that this world is your forest and its creatures your deer, all else falls into proportion. You will not want to be warlord or warden or hoarder now, nor ward heeler, nor who
re. The only politics not utterly beneath you is noblesse oblige, the helping hand to those who have not yet remembered that they are your peers.
I’ve done my part there. I have crept through a maze of errors to discover that the golden Kanalist thread is still in place. We took the right steps all along, and said the right words, and nothing remains except to remember that they mean just what they say and are true: the secret of Everyman’s noble birth is that it lies outside history, and can be experienced at will, like memory itself, like a work of art. The mystery has written itself out, and I will have it played on a stage, and all who see and hear will laugh and cry and marvel, saying, “I remember now, he’s got it down exactly. The old story and the only one. My own, and my lover’s, too…”
◆◆◆
I woke up with tears on my face, feeling magnificent. I recalled everything without embarrassment. Not one fact of history or memory from my past could keep me from believing that I had once done great things, that I belonged at the top of the tower, shedding a little light—and that I should be happy. If this were the only elitism, no harm, I thought, wishing I could have presented my plays to the builders of the tower in time to make a difference. Maybe they, in their earliest stage, had been the ones I could have reached.
◆◆◆
Sometime early in the morning the robot functionary told me to report to the elevator. I descended to a small briefing chamber, where I found Ken Mishima. He started to say something, but so did the robot, and Mishima had the brains to stay quiet while I tried to absorb our instructions. I didn’t like what I heard.
“Did you get it?” he asked when it was over. His work clothes were dirtier than before, but he looked in good shape, and for some reason glad to see me. “It’s good to see another fighting man,” he added. These mystic warriors go through life like owls, dangerous in the dark, but blind all day. “Are we to supply ourselves for the next test?”
