The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  I’ll never forget the look on Principato’s face when he saw where I was. The rumbling died away. A strange mewling came from the pipe, and Principato hunched his shoulders at the sound; on reflex I turned and flashed my light inside.

  The pipe slanted steeply downward. I lost some of my stuff down a shaft, he’d said. This shaft had a faint light at the end of it, and in between, fewer than twenty meters away, lay a half-naked young woman, bound and gagged. It was Ariel. She’d been screaming for a long, long time.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  I didn’t have time to shout her name, or react at all. I heard a shout behind me and then Mishima tackled me from the side. As I twisted out from under him, I had a glimpse of Principato escaping through the main entrance with the blowgun in one hand; he was limping, but not much.

  Mishima got to his feet as I did. Dark blood dripped from his left arm. “Son of a bitch threw a star at you,” he said, gesturing to a flat metal object on the floor. I picked it up and gave it to him. It was a wheel of razor-sharp knife blades with a hole in the middle, about ten centimeters across.

  “Not poisoned, anyway,” he said, after examining it. “What was it about?”

  “He has Ariel Nimitz stashed down that pipe,” I said as I helped him out of his jacket. The gash on his upper arm was superficial, though bloody. I was more concerned with Ariel, but I owed him one; if that thing had hit me in the head⁠…

  “Ah, that explains it. Brotherhood contracts always guarantee against rapine, and we enforce that with summary execution.” He handed me a pressure bandage from his utility belt and I ripped open its envelope. “Constantly causes this sort of blowup. Stupid regulation anyway. Instead of worrying about venereal disease, we should be glad to spread martial genes. But when the brothers in public relations come up with one of their marketing ploys⁠…⁠”

  I stopped listening, since it would only have led to wrapping the bandage around his throat. He paused, but showed no other reaction, when I squeezed the skin flap into its proper position, sprayed sealant on the wound, and later pulled the bandage tight; and talking or silent, he kept watch on the main exit.

  “That’s it,” I said. “I’ll go get her.”

  A faint drumming under our feet signaled the beginning of the next temblor.

  “This place’ll be coming down around our ears soon,” Mishima said. “You owe it to the Consultancy to⁠—⁠”

  “Keep going? Take a look. The pipe is facing north, and there’s light at the other end. We can beat Principato to the t-stop.”

  He did look, but shook his head. “It’s not tactical,” he said. “We’d be rats in a trap. Principato can’t go fast with that leg; I’ll follow him and take him out.”

  “With your arm?” I asked, but perhaps he couldn’t hear me over the rising tide of noise; he took off for the exit, and I returned to Ariel’s pipe.

  It was big enough to walk into, though I had to duck my head and keep my knees bent. It was corrugated, which should have given me traction, but a heavy streak of dirt along the bottom had been turned to slippery mud by the steam rising at the pipe’s far end. I could just straddle the slick, fighting the steep downward slope with every step, and now the metal skin of the pipe began to squeal and vibrate as the quake returned in earnest.

  By the time I reached Ariel, she’d managed to squirm into the best position for freeing her hands, her back to me. Her jacket was missing and she was naked to the waist; the white fabric that gagged her appeared to be a shredded remnant of her blouse. I knelt next to her and gingerly sawed at her bonds with the camper’s knife I’d been issued in Mothland, afraid of cutting her.

  The temblor wasn’t dying down, it was increasing in force; so much dust was shaken free that it was hard to breathe. When I finally got her hands free and the gag off, I tried to ask Ariel how she was, many questions in one. She couldn’t hear me over the noise, just turned with a gutsy smile. She was too practical to shield her breasts from sight—she had to brace her arms against the pipe wall—but I could see the self-consciousness in the way she held herself, one feather-touch against my heart, before the flashlight jerked from my hand, the earthquake reached its crescendo, and we were shaken out of the pipe like ants from a boot.

  It was terrifying to shoot fifty or a hundred meters on our rear ends, a slide greased by mud, speeding faster every second—but it was also painless. When we rolled out onto the valley floor north of the concrete honeycomb, safe and sound, we both whooped with relief. Ariel was up first, and helped me to my feet, saying my name over and over and laughing. But this was cut short by a tremendous metallic creak from directly above us, where a huge culvert pipe crossed the valley. It was a crack in this pipe, and not a geyser, that had filled the valley with steam, all but obscuring the t-stop to our north. And as the earthquake continued to rumble beneath us, that crack kept tearing wider, and the agonizing sound alone would have sent us running.

  We’d covered no more than a hundred paces when a final shriek of tortured metal was followed by an explosion, and we looked back to see a cataract of boiling water pour from the now-split culvert pipe. Perhaps the rain-forest air was going to be a little dryer tomorrow; meanwhile, a scalding river raced toward us. We ran headlong.

  The vanguard of the flood must have been cooled by the ground it covered, though it was still as warm as a bath when it hit our legs from behind, nearly bowling us over. It was hip-deep when we reached the transport-tube opening, but the door stood open just the same. The t-capsule inside was one of the smaller ones, and the same robot voice we’d heard at the Slugland exit announced that only one of us could leave at a time.

  “No!” Ariel said fiercely. “We could both fit if we tried. They’re not splitting us up again.”

  The robot couldn’t have understood her modern Interlingua, but it repeated its message when we tried to squeeze in together. “Choose your order of departure now,” it added insistently, pushing us back with the door buffer. “The water will get hotter.”

  I translated, fast. “That’s a fact, too, it’s beginning to steam. Sorry, Ariel, but maybe we’d better⁠—⁠”

  She suddenly dodged behind me, then reached around in a tight hug to thwart my attempt to turn and face her, a parody on her seminudity. “No,” she said behind my shoulder. “It won’t let us boil, you’ll see.” She pushed me forward to jam the entryway again. The robot repeated its warning, Ariel her desire.

  Inanimate object, meet the irresistible force. In the absence of a medieval philosopher, I decided to rely on my own specialty, and lie.

  “We can’t separate,” I told the machine in Ur-Linguish. “Our, uh, climbing rope is tangled. We have to leave together.”

  There was no immediate response. Had it failed to understand me? Or was it testing what I’d said against its sensors’ image of us?

  “Tell it we’re boiling,” Ariel prompted below my ear, and I translated with real feeling, for the water was perceptibly hotter every second. “This isn’t a test,” I went on, “it’s a rescue. Are you going to let us die?”

  We never received a verbal reply, but the buffer snapped back and let us through. A moment later we were inside, packed tightly in water, like shrimp. And the capsule began to move.

  ◆◆◆

  It was a long, long trip.

  The computer controllers flushed out the water, and for the rest of the journey hot air blasted through the top and bottom vents of the capsule. A robot voice informed us that we should remove our clothes and hold them out to facilitate drying. Actually, it addressed us in the singular—had probably already forgotten that there were two of us, with no room in which to maneuver.

  I did manage to get my uniform jacket and pullover shirt off, and held them in either hand. We would have had a hard time getting out of our soaked pairs of pants, though, jammed together so tightly our legs couldn’t bend, and we didn’t try. So we swayed there in the hot breeze, stripped to the waist and constantly shifting against each other to
accommodate the g-forces as the capsule followed one of those fast, crazy-curve routes the Hellway designers loved so.

  At one moment Ariel might be on top of me, chin hooked over my shoulder, her damp hair a sweet smell in my nostrils, forearms braced between her breasts and my chest; then we might nosedive, her ankles clamped around the backs of my knees, each of us reaching up with both arms to protect our heads, eye to eye and breath to breath; and with any luck at all I’d be on top again before she got her hands down.

  A tantalizing mixture of sensations, but to tell the truth, a little too strong. Even when my Column-inscribed silver fly-buttons threatened to pop, I was never far from throwing up—and Ariel looked, if anything, less sure of herself.

  We desperately needed a distraction from our distractions, and so, during the horizontal stretches, God help me, we talked. That’s when I filled her in on Mishima’s real status, and heard the first part of her story.

  ◆◆◆

  After Slugland, while I’d been held in limbo, Ariel had arrived in a wild country of rolling hills and steep gorges. She’d been captured immediately. The merc who got the drop on her was past middle age, and wounded, his ribs self-taped. He wanted no more of Ariel than to use her as a pack animal for his gear.

  She slowly gathered from his rambling talk that he’d originally arrived with one comrade, and that they’d found tracks indicating that a third person had arrived some hours before them. They’d made the mistake of following the tracks, straight into a tree-fall mantrap that had wounded the older merc and killed his companion.

  “They tend to underestimate us, you see,” Ariel said. “They think we’re a few old professors and their students.”

  Whoever had set the trap—Mishima hadn’t mentioned it; could it have been Piet Wongama?—had long since found the transport out of the area. The surviving merc had gone back to the entry tube, hoping an exit car would show up there. “That’s the other thing: they have only a vague notion of what’s going on, or how this place works.” But Ariel’s arrival had demonstrated that the transport only ran one way.

  So they set out on the trek north together, Ariel and her captor. Although he was wary of her, and made her work hard, the merc shared the food and did not abuse her. His bandages made him clumsy, and while the local test wasn’t difficult—something about a swinging rope bridge; she didn’t go into details—he slipped, and fell to his death.

  The next t-station capsule took her to the desert I’d seen in the west. Without a translator, she couldn’t make any sense of the travel instructions she was given. Afraid of getting lost in the featureless west, she headed for the high ridge, and found the valley beyond. Unfortunately, Principato and another merc arrived from the rain-forest side soon after.

  “Captured again,” she said, with a smile that surprised me. The two mercs had quarreled over her. Principato didn’t want to share. There was a fight. Principato knocked the other merc unconscious, tucked him into one of the wrecked machines for some reason, and took Ariel along with him.

  “Maybe he hit that guy too hard,” I said. “We didn’t see any signs of life when we passed by later.”

  “Why did the controllers send so many of us to the same place?” Ariel wondered. “You and Ken made five.”

  “None of you were supposed to be in the valley,” I said. “It’s off-limits, for reasons that are now obvious—even robots seem to have a hard time there. Ken and I were only sent to bring the rest of you out…It’s strange. I didn’t think about it at the time, but since when did the controllers start worrying about our safety? That doesn’t fit.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Ariel asked. And, somehow ignoring the imperative double nudge of two highly placed nipples, I told her everything Foyle and Helen and I had discussed about the ultimate purpose of the Hellway. I wanted to get back to Ariel’s own story, but instead she questioned me closely about the meaning of the Elitist fasces, the contrast with more humane cults like Old Rite Kanalism, Foyle’s disillusioned attitude—a host of things I wouldn’t have thought important to her. But it killed time. And then we arrived.

  “Are we? We are! We’re on the surface!” Ariel said at the first sight of a lighter, bluer sky than anything we’d seen in the underworld. Standing outside, she stretched her arms and spun like a pinwheel—a sight to file for future reference.

  I pulled myself out after her and got a confused impression of a darkly shadowed bower of leaves with bright sky peeking through it everywhere. “How can that be?”

  “I’ve been hoping for this,” Ariel said. “Remember, you said three tests or so per person, and we’ve each had that. We’ve graduated.”

  “But there are only two exits from the Hellway,” I objected. “The crypt we came in by, and somewhere near the north pole.” I stood and tested the mossy, leaf-encrusted ground with my feet. The branches around us swayed in an unmistakable sea breeze, and I could hear gulls and other birds not far away. “Isn’t the pole cold, a wasteland?”

  “Well, yes,” Ariel admitted. “And what are we inside, exactly?”

  It was true, we were semi-enclosed. Although the sky was visible through the leaves on all sides, there was a framework ceiling high above us, covered with vines. And as I looked closer, I saw a similarity between that underside and the surface we were standing on—both reinforced with some sort of metal mesh, as well as tight-packed dirt and tenacious vegetation.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll have to explore.” I reached back down for my dried clothes; once I’d retrieved them, the t-tube closed for good. I offered Ariel the jacket, but she wouldn’t hear of it. “Not your uniform,” she said with that peculiar intonation she always used for the word. She wore my shirt instead, and then helped straighten the jacket on me, like a tailor, with two careful tugs at its silly epaulets. Shining with her usual optimism, she headed off toward the nearest clearing, and as usual I followed her lead.

  In order to get to the “clearing,” we had to go down a flight of stairs, composed of the same planes of metal-reinforced dirt we’d been standing on, to another level. The lattice structure of our environment became more apparent as our eyes adjusted to the rain-forest contrast of light and dark. At one point I stopped just short of walking into one of the vertical metal shafts, as thick as a big tree trunk, that bound it all together. And later, when the breeze was particularly strong, every branch and vine around us swaying, we felt the ground sway a little, too. “Could it be we’re in a tree house?” Ariel asked. Then we reached the opening we’d been looking for—a square of uncovered ground that fell off in a dead straight line, like the edge of the world—and saw that it was true.

  We were up a tree. Over a kilometer up.

  Of course, I could only guess the distance at the time. But our view of an ocean flecked with a few little islands in the distance was an airship view, higher than any tree could draw its sap. The greenery extended all the way down to water level, though; we peered over the edge to confirm that. And it extended upward, too, in the same spiral of overlapping squares, though not very far.

  “Not one tree,” I said. “A vertical stack of arbors. Vines and trees starting fresh on every floor, but everything blending together. Water must be pumped up. The birds and animals don’t even know what altitude they’re at.”

  “Arboria,” Ariel said in a small wistful voice. “But not on the surface of the planet.”

  “No, you would have known if there were anything this tall on the surface. And I’ll bet there have to be cables to the ceiling to help hold this thing up.”

  “It doesn’t look like the ceiling, though.”

  “No. For some reason, they’ve made a more realistic sky here. Something the humans put in, instead of the Titans. Maybe that’s good. Maybe that means you were basically right. We’re near the end of the rite of passage, and they’ve given us an Old Earth kind of sky to graduate under. But where do we go from here?”

  “Up,” Ariel said without hesitation.

  “
Okay. But why?”

  “Down,” she explained, as if to a child, “is too far.”

  “Fair one,” I said, “you are a born leader.”

  Now that we had an overview, it wasn’t so hard to trace the structure upward; it was something like a vast spiral staircase, with more human-sized stairs or ladders to connect the giant steps. We took the climb with as much zest as if our cramped lie-down in the transport tube had been eight hours of sleep. The freshness and vitality of Arboria were contagious.

  The sea air tasted delicious, and we walked through contrasts of sunlike light and green coolness. Scented fruits and wildflowers bobbed at the outer edges of the platforms. An endless variety of birds nested in the dark places and flew through the arbors at every angle, adding their songs to the rush of leaves and distant lap of waves. It was an enchanted land, a god’s reward for surviving the desert.

  This had to be the terminus, all right, the heart of the Elitist dream. What was it poor Brother Francisco had said, at the beginning, in the briefing chamber? He’d been talking about that heroic statue group, the six bronze Elitists recoupling a Titan cable in order to alter Newcount Two’s magnetic field to Earthlike proportions—but he might have been talking about this, the inmost bower of the maze in which the refugees had planned to find themselves again: Making this planet a little Earth, you see; restoring the Garden.

  More evidence. On every other level we passed transport outlets, as if this had been the final gathering place of Hellway survivors in the old days, when hundreds had gone through the tests at a time.

  I took less interest in the other machines we saw half-buried in vines and creepers: outfeeds that bubbled black with dirt to replace the stuff that sifted away with each breeze; an unobtrusive gardener robot, with no ears to hear questions; lanternlike shapes raised up on little pedestals, purpose unknown, evidently kept clear of vegetation by the robots. The spur of fear was gone. I didn’t really care how this environment worked, if it wasn’t a test and a trap.