by Bill Adams
“I think I see the top ahead of me,” Ariel said. “Just a few more turns now. And there’s something there.”
But I had stopped when the aerial shape fluttered down and hit me. Moth! I thought, and nearly smashed it from my forearm. Then I recognized an old friend, just in time.
It was an Earth-style butterfly, with the same near-Monarch markings as the one Ariel and I had seen on the surface. I called back to Ariel and showed her, and continued to marvel at the thing after it had flown away.
So it wasn’t the life bombers who’d had the good taste to put that species on this planet. It was the Elitists, nee Avalonians, who had preserved it all the way from Old Earth—who’d had to have it with them even in exile, those first few months when they considered farming the planet’s surface. My kind of people, I thought, not for the first time—and how could the same people have loosed the vampire moths on their own children? Would we ever understand this place, now that we were so close to leaving it?
For so we seemed to be. The transport station at the very top was different from any we’d seen before; it was the first one large enough for more than a few people, a huge vine-covered cabin as broad as one square of the arbor lattice, perhaps twenty-five meters across. The largest exit—hence the last? But we weren’t quite out of these woods yet. The door wouldn’t open.
The usual befuddled computer voice spoke with me when I pushed the single button next to the door. Ariel pressed close behind me; I could feel her body warmth, and the tickle of breath on my ear. By this time my Ur-Linguish skills were almost up to speed, and I was pretty sure of what I reported back to Ariel: “This is the place, all right. Not the finish line itself—but a place where the finishers assemble before going on to the graduation ceremonies. We’re the first ones to arrive. And we’re officially in limbo for at least eighteen hours.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning no one will interrupt us—or arrive, I mean, for eighteen hours. We can take it easy.”
“Idyll in Arboria,” she said with that same wistful inflection. “Where do we sleep…and eat, and so forth?”
“Back down the stairs. I’ll show you.”
We stopped at the first pedestal we came to. “The lantern thing on top is what we cook on, and camp around,” I explained. I found the button to press, low on the stone base of the dais. It opened up to reveal bundled blankets and, next to them, cans of food and the hardware to prepare it.
◆◆◆
“It’s like being castaways on an island, isn’t it?” Ariel asked dreamily a little later, as we sat on stools disguised as stumps, ate, and watched artificial dusk fall amid the tidal sound of the leaves.
Discomfort is the first thing to fade from memory; with every moment, our transport-tube trip seemed more like an unbelievably wasted opportunity. I was currently recalling Ariel’s flesh tones, so white behind the pink that here and there the dawn blue of veins showed through. Knowing that every concealed centimeter was now pressed to my own borrowed shirt, my second skin…But eat your dinner, Evan. Build up your strength, as she finishes her story at last. About Principato, remember:
“Well, I knew what would happen when we finally settled in. But I’d thought—he was so arrogant and sure of himself about everything that I thought he’d expect me to want it. To at least talk to me first. But he didn’t bother. Smiled, made little jokes; to himself, really. I tried to get around him one way and another and he heard me; he just didn’t listen. And after he’d torn my blouse off, and tied me up in a way that would, you know, make things easier for him, and taken off his bandolier, and undone his belt—he stopped, as though something were wrong, as though it were spoiled for him before he started. And you know what?”
“Uh, what?” I was a little startled at the cheerful and matter-of-fact way she was relating all this potentially traumatic stuff—and at the greed with which she ate, too, perfect white teeth gleaming in the lanternlight. Now she paused and considered her words. Her face was screwed up thoughtfully in the way that kept reminding me of a child. But there was nothing unripe or lacking there. What was it I felt, aside from affectionate lust? Something like the revelation I’d once had watching a housecat, and recognizing in it the essential tiger, something stripped down and polished to survive infinitely more keenly than a dodger and dreamer like me. Oh, I’m a survivor, too—going on a hundred-and-something every year now—but of a different and lesser order. The Sneakiae. I love life; but life loved Ariel, and that is all the difference in the world.
“I think I know what it was,” she went on finally. “He wanted to have his rape, but not with someone watching. He’d finally noticed there was someone else in the room, me, and that was no good. He had to knock me out first. Bashed me on the side of the head. Is the bruise bad, by the way?”
I assured her it wasn’t, and she tore into another meatcake, resuming with her mouth full. “I didn’t quite black out, but I faked it. Don’t know how that would have helped me, though, if we hadn’t heard the voices then. God, that was creepy, the echoes and whispers coming from all those pipes. But I didn’t let on, kept my eyes closed. Thought I recognized Mishima’s voice, wasn’t sure about yours. But I hoped, I prayed. And while he took his blowgun and went to take a shot at you, I managed to work my hands half-loose from behind my back and get at one of the spare darts from the bandolier he’d taken off. Hid it behind me. And when the son of a bitch came back for his bandolier, I stabbed him with it.”
She shook her head ruefully and wiped a few crumbs away from her mouth. “But I had to keep my eyes shut until the last second, you know—and it’s hard to just stick someone, too, no matter how much they deserve it; I’d never done anything like that before. So he was able to deflect it, some, and I only got him in the leg.
“He belted me harder that time, and when I came to, he’d already retied and gagged me. He was just finishing his talk with you.”
“When did he move you into the shaft, though?” I asked. “I guess he had plenty of time while Mishima and I were climbing, but the poison—”
“He didn’t take any chances on getting paralyzed too soon. Alun, he had me stowed down there before he even gave you two the signal to climb. My weight didn’t bother him at all on the way down; he did the round trip in, I don’t know, two minutes.”
I shook my head and swore.
“Oh, he was something, all right,” she said. “Something out of a nightmare. I can’t tell you how I felt, trapped down there, nothing to keep me company but earthquakes. Then I started to hear bits of conversation, all distorted and echoed. And one voice sounded like yours, but I knew that it was just wishful thinking when I started calling out to you.” She paused, a long moment with weight to it. “Just a silly fantasy out of a kid’s book, you know, hero in Column whites coming to the rescue. But then the voice was louder. And there you were. And…and here we are.” She put her plate aside, and I did the same—I know a cue when I hear it. She crossed over to where I sat, and very simply pulled the shirt over her head.
I reached for her waist where she stood and drew her close, my lips pressed, in that position, against her pale, taut belly. I could feel a distant tom-tom heartbeat, hers or mine, and tasted lightly salted girlflesh. There was a brief moment of civil war—north or south?—but two things had preyed on my mind all that long teasing t-trip, and I nuzzled upward to attend to them. A few full but pointed moments later and I had to stand up, too, long enough for Ariel to drink off a deep kiss and unbutton my jacket.
She slipped her hands under it then, but when I started to shrug it all the way off, she pulled her lips from mine. “Please,” she said. Her eyes were shining with the strongest kind of fantasy, the kid’s-book kind, and her voice already had the perfect confidence of a lover, of one who can ask anything: “Please, Alun, leave it on.” Even as one hand dropped to undo my belt, the other came up and out to secure that jacket, fingers twining passionately in a crisp white epaulet. “Wear it the first time, anyway
…”
And a man in uniform doesn’t argue with orders.
Chapter Twenty-four
When it first drifted into view, around “dawn,” the butterfly seemed uninterested. But at the first sight of Ariel he hitched up short, in midair—and then lit on her shoulder, stunned, wings out flat. Taking us in.
I was trying to make sense of it myself, newly wakened after little sleep. Somehow we’d managed, in a night of urgent and endless entwining, to weave our bodies into an outward-sloping wall of vines just past the edge of an arbor, I not quite on my back and Ariel sprawled across me. There was nothing beneath our green mesh mattress except a straight drop of over a kilometer, ending in the gray underworld sea.
The butterfly on Ariel’s shoulder remained flat and stunned. My girl even slept greedily, not a muscle moving. What in God’s name, the Monarch must have been thinking, had these two wingless, naked, incredibly fragile humans thought they were doing, to put themselves in such a situation?
Seemed like a good idea at the time. It had been darker then, of course—and busier—and we’d both been feeling rather immortal. Extrication would be a delicate business. As always.
But now Ariel has raised her head and blinked those cornflower eyes at the Monarch on her shoulder, and the wings remain poised, their poetic owner captivated. I see it now, her wondering half-drowned look and slow smile, the aimless drift of fine blonde hair in the sea breeze that swings us, the cloud color of her shoulder at first light, and the Monarch’s wings like sunrise against it. I feel her against me, the fingers clutched to my shoulders, the warmth here and the moistness there. And smell the scents and hear the sounds, too.
Please. Let me recall it all, just as clearly, when I am very old.
◆◆◆
Problem: if the arbor was an assembly point, then mercenaries would be arriving alongside our own people. There wasn’t much we could do about that; there were too many entrance tubes to guard, even if we had weapons. We could only take cover, as near as possible to the locked exit door.
But first I took one more crack at interrogating the computer there, and the more I learned, the less likely it seemed that we had to hide. Only as the eighteen hours’ grace period came to its estimated close did Ariel succeed in dragging me away to play it safe.
We cut it close. Scant minutes after we’d carefully worked our way into the secret center of a large bush, we heard someone approach—not by the tread, for the eternal rustling masked such sounds, but by the sudden agitation of the birds.
It might be Harry, or Piet Wongama. Or Mishima, if he’d survived the quake. But we feared it would be none of them, and it wasn’t.
It was Foyle.
If we hadn’t called her name as we broke cover, she might have accidentally fired the big crossbow she’d picked up somewhere, but seeing Ariel, she lowered it with a shaky smile.
We saw she’d also made a spear for herself—a polished straight branch with a hunting knife’s blade whipped into its split tip. Her clothing showed similar Robinson Crusoe touches: she’d converted one of the heavy blankets from Mothland into a surcoat over the harness of her old backpack, and had replaced her stiff boots with moccasins made from something small, furry, and luckless.
Lowering the bow, she looked doubly glad to see us—both for who we were, and for who we might have been but weren’t.
“Another safe team-up. Luck of the draw?” she said after less coherent greetings had been exchanged.
We told her what little we knew about that. First Ariel filled her in on the death toll in Slugland and the Valley Backstage, and then I relayed what I’d just learned from the computer.
“Up until now, the computers’ goal has been to keep mixing and matching the pilgrims, to team each individual with as many others as possible,” I said. “But this final phase is different. Sort of a celebration of the comradely ties we’re supposed to have made earlier. At this assembly point—and at another Arboria like it, the door said, just over the eastern horizon—pilgrims are to be reunited with all their earlier partners to form a larger team. There will be two of these reunion teams, of roughly equal size. And our Hellway trip will end with a race between them, across the sea to the surface exit at the north pole.”
Foyle looked puzzled. “And in Elitist times—”
“The scheduling was more complicated, lots more people, but the basic idea was the same. In fact, our small numbers have made us harder, not easier, for the computers to deal with. The door computer kept asking me about the deaths along the way, but couldn’t understand my answers. They were outside its experience.”
“Alun, you act like this is all good news,” Ariel said.
“It is, once you hear the numbers. There are only fifteen pilgrims still in the game, that’s what it told me. And for this final ocean race, they’re to be divided as evenly as possible. Well, work it out. Seven or eight on a team. Which four or five will be sent to join us at this Arboria? The people who’ve been teamed with us in the past. That includes all our original party!”
“We’ve been with plenty of mercenaries, too.”
“But how many of them survived being teamed with one of us? It’s a pretty grisly record, when you think about it. Father Francisco poisoned his two, you survived one who’d already lost a comrade, Principato probably killed another and may be dead himself, Mishima and Lagado saw a few drowned…Our knowledge of the language has been worth a hell of a lot more than their military training. So it’s mainly our friends who are coming here to join us, and if Mishima survived, there’ll only be one or two mercenaries in addition. We’ll outnumber them here.”
“There’ll still be an all-merc group over the horizon, then,” Foyle said. “Racing us to the pole, which is right where we don’t want them.”
“But however this race works—the door won’t give the details yet—the mercs are going to be at a disadvantage,” I said. “Because without one of us to interpret what’s going on for them, how will they know where to go, or how? I’d say that for the first time the odds are definitely in our favor. At least, if—”
“If Mishima and Harry and Piet Wongama are still alive,” Foyle broke in. “If it’s not just twelve mercenaries and us three.”
“It can’t be,” Ariel said. “Not if the mercs have lost as many as we think.”
“I’ve done my bit there, at any rate,” Foyle said matter-of-factly. “And as long as I’m still armed and ready, maybe there’s time for me to eat. Show me how; I’m famished.”
◆◆◆
“I’m still surprised to see you alive, Commissioner,” she said, tucking into her second sandwich. “From the air, that pool you jumped into looked solid with eels.”
Despite grime and exposure and makeshift clothing, Foyle was still sharp as a knife. She’d already let me know, with the cock of an eyebrow and a certain smile, that she could guess my new relationship with Ariel. Imagination, or bad conscience, made me read a warning in that expression as well: Don’t use her badly; she’s my friend. And she was always looking for more information, more control of events.
“The eels didn’t bother me, though,” I told her, and gave a few details. “…In fact, something occurred to me later. It could be that the eels were programmed to lose their power to shock during the mating period—it makes sense, for their own sake. So the worst thing I experienced in the pool was seeing how badly my plan had screwed up for you and Helen.”
“We took a calculated risk,” Foyle said, shaking her head. “Yours worse than ours. But the landing was bad, all right. We overshot the lake so high and so far, the balloon eel didn’t even try to redrop. We kept bobbing up and down as we drifted—I guess all it could think to do was try to find an altitude where the wind would blow us back south. But of course there wasn’t one. Its control became worse and worse, and after a few hours we crashed into the side of a hill.”
“That’s when Helen…?”
“Died? Yes. One way or anothe
r. The watchers came for her while I was knocked out.”
“Watchers?” Ariel asked.
“The robots that must referee this game,” I told her.
Foyle nodded. “The tracks I found the next morning were robotic. They’d left behind extra food and water for me, having determined, I guess, that I was still fit enough to hike back to the pool. But they must have decided that Helen couldn’t. She’d failed the test, and she was gone. I like to think she was still unconscious when they passed judgment on her.”
Ariel opened her mouth, then paused as if thinking better of what she’d meant to say. “And you found the pool again?”
“It wasn’t so hard. Walking against the wind kept me going south to the ridge, and the plateau was visible for some distance.”
Apparently the controllers counted her hike back as a second test, since she’d only been one more place since then.
She’d been able to tell, inspecting the soft ground around her entry tube, that she was the first to arrive there. Since her new partners might be mercenaries, she laid a path into the forest that ended in a trap, and sprang it when she saw their uniforms. So it was she who wounded one merc and killed his companion, whose crossbow she had subsequently recovered. Of course, she’d had no way of knowing that this would cause Ariel to be sent in as a reinforcement for the man killed, leading to more trouble later.
While she finished her meal, I digested her story. Neat work, to contrive a falling-tree mantrap in a few hours. One of those guerrilla skills she’d picked up…where? On the Vesper Preserve, I guessed, when the government tried to open that wildlife sanctuary to colonists—and when, if I was right, her husband’s Kanalist ideals had started the war of resistance that had killed him. Yes. If the Column government had hired the Iron Brotherhood to take Vesper for them, that would explain where she’d dealt with mercs before, and why she showed cold pleasure at having to kill some of them now.
