The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  An adequate theory, and the few questions it left unanswered—such as how a former rebel against the Column had obtained amnesty—were none of my business. But she was certainly a fascinating woman, in her dangerous way.

  And she’d been digesting our stories, too. “I’m trying to fit this final race business into the overall picture,” she said. “I guess it makes sense. Another Hitler Youth Camp activity, building team spirit for a soldier people.”

  I nodded.

  “The question is,” she went on, “whether the ordeals are over. Or will sharks attack the boats we race in—that sort of thing?”

  And now Ariel spoke up, as if she’d been holding something back for a long time. She looked better than ever that morning, once more in my shirt. There was a certain glow about her that I could take credit for, having polished all her surfaces the night before. But she’d stopped smiling, and looked ready for any argument she might start.

  “I’m not sure I understand this theory you two have about the Hellway, its purpose and all,” she said. “Or maybe it’s just that I don’t believe it. Foyle, why would you think the Elitists would subject their children to…ordeals, as you call them?”

  Foyle patiently explained the political significance of the “sign of mastery” we’d encountered at the entrance to the Hellway. “Somewhere along the line,” she said, “the Elitists must have become fascists, just the way the Kanalists of a hundred years ago became the first Columnards.” At this Ariel glanced at me, but I let the seditious statement slide; I’d already established that Commissioner Parker was a tolerant character. “I don’t pretend to understand the full fascist mentality, but clearly the Hellway exists to weed out the less hardy elements of a master race.”

  “But that’s not clear to me at all,” Ariel argued. “Maybe I’m the one who’s wearing blinders here, but to me it’s just the other way around. It’s clear to me that the Hellway isn’t supposed to kill people.”

  “How can you⁠—⁠”

  “Look, the place is broken. You’ll concede that much, won’t you? It’s been without human supervision for hundreds of years, and the robots haven’t been able to keep it properly maintained.”

  “Yes, but⁠—⁠”

  “And isn’t it always the broken parts that kill people? Let’s just take it piece by piece. The only danger in my first test came from a wall that had crumbled away with age. And it was tunnel damage that caused those slugs to adapt into meat-eaters.”

  “Yes, but what about our first test?” Foyle said—almost furious for some reason. “The moths, the electric eels?”

  Ariel just looked at me, and sure enough, I found myself supporting her. “Remember, the plaque there did warn us about a danger to the west, Foyle. I said it even then—judging by the piñata gourds, it looked as though the moth territory might have drifted across the pilgrim path from the west. The robots should have prevented that, over the centuries, but since the system is partly broken⁠—⁠”

  “And the eels?”

  “We were warned against them, too, really—we were given canteens so that we wouldn’t go into the river for water. But we needed the eel-balloon to make the trip in one day, by air, instead of enduring a dull march of three days or more. ‘Endurance or ingenuity,’ remember? And I did see a staircase next to the waterfall at the end of that test, for pilgrims who had made the whole distance on foot. I remember thinking, How could anyone have reached that staircase, given the moths?”

  “Whereas, if the moths weren’t supposed to be there⁠…⁠” Ariel said.

  “But we were supposed to ride an eel-balloon,” Foyle said. “And remember, we used a piñata gourd for a gondola, and those gourds were created by moths.”

  “We didn’t need that, though,” I countered. “With the supercord and those heavy blankets, there were plenty of other ways we could have harnessed ourselves to the balloon. The gondola was convenient for us because Helen was so weak then—a problem that wouldn’t have come up if we’d all been eighteen years old, and if there had been no moths.”

  “And the pool of electric eels at the end of the flight?” Foyle said.

  “You and I assumed that the pool was deadly. So we made arrangements that caused the balloon to crash. If we’d allowed the balloon to make the landing that it was supposed to make, though—you would have found out, as I did, that mating eels are harmless. Helen might have drowned, but again, she wasn’t meant to be there, in that condition. As it was—she may have died in the crash. We don’t know that the robots killed her.”

  “You’re buying it, aren’t you?” Foyle asked me. “You’re rationalizing everything.”

  Ariel shook her head. “There are no inconsistencies to rationalize. The other deaths have occurred because we and the mercs are at war, another hazard that clearly wasn’t built into this place. Notice, the robots keep asking us why so many of us are dying. And they kept sending reinforcements into the Valley Backstage when it looked like we were having trouble with it. I mean, it all fits. Am I the one who’s being dumb about this? Tell me where I’m wrong.”

  Foyle no longer looked so angry. “I…don’t know,” she said. “Back at the beginning, at the Elitist cemetery, reading the notices on the family plots, we noticed that a lot of rich families seemed to have adopted children of Hellway age—as if they’d lost their own. And we definitely found some funeral markers for children who’d died in the Hellway.”

  “Very few, though,” Ariel pointed out. “There were bound to be a few. This place was meant to be an adventure, to take people to the edge of danger; that’s why it’s turned so bad without maintenance. But no matter where you grow up, no matter how humane the planet is, the rite of passage involves risk. On my home world, you knew you were an adult when they gave you your license to drive—and every year, a few of us crashed and died.”

  Foyle didn’t say “Good point”—so I did.

  “Understand, I’m not arguing with you about the Elitists’ politics,” Ariel said. “You two are the archaeologists; you know the symbols and the implications, not me.

  “Oh, I admit, when Helen and the friar laid out the history for us, back in the statue chamber, I did identify with the Elitists a little bit. Their rebellion against the Avalonians seemed to me a lot like my own rebellion against the place where I was born—another overdeveloped welfare state, founded by much the same people. And I liked to think that the Elitists were all like me, just individuals looking for room to be themselves in. It would be nice to think that you could build a whole society around that sort of person—the way old-timers talk about the Federal Alignment.”

  Ariel paused thoughtfully. “And I’d still like to believe it. I could see a society like that using the Hellway, unbroken, to give its children a special self-confidence. Where I come from, you just graduated into adulthood; it must make a difference to feel you earned it. And that you earned it with friends, that you can cooperate with all sorts of people even in tight groups. Your young individualists would need that lesson, or else you’d just get an every-man-for-himself society.

  “But I admit it, Foyle. Fascists would have just as much use for self-confident kids with good teamwork skills. Who wouldn’t? The politics behind the Hellway could come from almost any direction. But the one thing I don’t see is the parents killing off their children in bunches, for no reason. There’s no evidence.”

  Foyle looked subdued. “No argument,” she admitted finally.

  “It’s strange,” I said. “There really is no argument. You have everything on your side, Ariel, but I never saw it either. Foyle was sure the Elitists had to be monsters, and something inside me was sure she had to be right. Fatalistic, I guess.”

  “I can’t explain it.” Foyle gave a crooked smile. “Even now, I want to think you’re wrong, Ariel. I want the Elitists painted the blackest black—a people who died out six hundred years ago. Why the hell do I care? What’s it to me?”

  “I…have a notion,” Ariel began. “I
’d like to run it past you, just out of curiosity, but it is a little personal.” And I realized that they had been friends of some sort, for weeks before I met them, and that Ariel might know more about Foyle’s past than I did. “I don’t want to offend you⁠…⁠”

  “Go ahead,” Foyle told her. “I can stand it.”

  “Well,” Ariel said, “is it possible that you have some personal identification in this matter, too? Every time you—and Alun, too, for some reason—every time you talk about the Elitists, you always wind up talking about the Kanalists instead. One group dead and gone, the other alive and powerful; there’s no special similarity I can see. I mean, history’s full of secret societies and religions and political movements. Is Kanalism so important to you that everything has to be compared to it?”

  “Kanalism isn’t alive,” I protested. “Not the real thing.”

  “Only the Old Rite lodges⁠—⁠” Foyle said simultaneously.

  Ariel smiled as if she’d won a point but wanted to be a good sport about it. “The Kanalists reformed—or sold out—and the Alignment became the Column. And that’s the great tragedy of this century, isn’t it? I mean, to someone who really believed in Federalism, who identified with the Old Rite?”

  “It was Roger—my husband who really loved it.” There was something hurt and broken in Foyle’s voice, though her face remained the same. And Ariel knelt next to her.

  “Not just him,” Ariel went on. “Even—even our commissioner here feels the attraction of those old ideals; it’s obvious every time he talks about them. Now to me, government is something you work around, that’s all. Old people tell me that the Alignment was a better place, and maybe so. Still, it’s a hundred years gone. But for some reason you two care. You’re archaeologists, historians; for you the past is alive, and—and beautiful, I guess. You see yourselves living like Kanalist heroes in a free republic⁠—⁠”

  “But it’s just a dream,” Foyle said dully. “There never was such a time or place. Not for long. If you listen to the pretty lies, and try to make them come true, as my Roger did, they’ll just kill you. That’s the way it’s always been.”

  “Is it?” Ariel asked. “Or isn’t it just less painful to think so? Less of a tragedy, anyway. If a people somewhere die fighting for freedom, well, you can tell yourself that they would only have become tyrants in their own turn. If that always happens, you never have to feel sorry for the Elitists, or the Alignment, or⁠—⁠”

  “Or Roger. Or myself, you mean,” Foyle finished for her. An astonishing thing had happened, in this place where the ground shook with every scented breeze: Foyle had begun to cry. “Sold out by others before I was born, you see. Poor thing.” She swore. “It’s so sick, and I always knew that. But I didn’t know that it could keep me from seeing straight.”

  “God, you’re hard on yourself,” Ariel said. “You lost your husband, you lost a whole world you loved. Don’t you have a right to be sorry? What are you supposed to be, superhuman?”

  Foyle laughed through her tears. “Yes! It’s the only way I do keep the faith. Oh, don’t try to understand me, girl—or that handsome sellout behind you, either. I don’t know why, but he’s another one like me. He doesn’t know if he’s ten times better than everyone else, or a hundred times worse. It’s the Kanalist disease: hypertrophy of the free will. We hold ourselves responsible for everything we do—and everything we don’t do, too. So this one wears the uniform of a state he doesn’t believe in, probably does more good than harm, but hates himself all the same. Like me, like every true Kanalist, he knows he could have been something great instead—a rebel, an artist, an explorer. Another Evan Larkspur.”

  Birds sang, and the leaves shushed them. Foyle wept on Ariel’s shoulder, and Ariel searched my face for God knows what.

  But I turned away and left. That’s what I’m famous for, if you think about it.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Soon others came. We tried to play king of the mountain, get the drop on each new arrival, but it wasn’t possible.

  We’d been hoping for Harry Lagado to show up. He did, and ran into someone we were past hoping for, a few leafy levels beneath us, before we could find and “ambush” them. So we missed a family reunion—Harry’s father, Ruy, had survived, despite the report Mishima had given me of their test together. Ariel and I hadn’t seen Harry since Slugland, which seemed like weeks before. Forty-eight hours! Now, after more essential information had been exchanged, he told us that his next stop had been a sub-world of snowy highlands—a ski run, in fact. The test—considering the sheltered nature of former Elitist life—was probably just figuring out how to ski. The mercs who’d arrived before him had left tracks in the snow, making it easy to trail cautiously behind. He’d brought both his ski poles on to Arboria for possible use as weapons.

  His father’s story was more complicated. Although he did not accuse Ken Mishima of having abandoned him back in the land of fjords, he certainly couldn’t explain how they’d become separated. Wandering a rocky shore, he had survived something like a tidal bore to eventually meet up with referee robots. They’d failed to understand his attempts to communicate, but had sent him to an even more luxurious-sounding limbo than mine, and twenty-four hours of rest.

  It was good to see them together, the skinny boy hovering protectively over his dad, as usual. They felt like family to me, too; the whole archaeological party did. Oddballs and misfits, with nearsighted enthusiasms and a sleepwalker’s talent for survival—no wonder they considered me their natural leader. Was it another argument against the Elitist fascism theory that the Hellway tended to favor our kind but killed the professional hard guys right and left?

  But no, we’d taken losses, too, and now I felt them more keenly. I hadn’t registered the fact of Helen Hogg-Smythe’s death before—it had seemed somehow impossible that she would not be with us when we reached the center of the riddle. The Hellway had belonged to her, because she’d accepted it; she’d still found it beautiful, even after the moth attack. We were not beyond needing her special comprehension, but the world had slipped from her embrace.

  And what about Piet Wongama, first-rate problem solver and fair sprinter? He belonged on the team if anyone did, but had been lost from view since he’d shared his first test with the Lagados. That meant two team-ups with mercs. Would we see him again, alive?

  Yes and no.

  We heard one sharp scream above the birdcalls. Amazingly, Foyle let me have the crossbow, since she was the only one who’d practiced with her spear, and we descended several levels—a party of five, four armed. Tendrils grabbed at our ankles, branches slashed at our heads, fans of foliage baffled our eyes. And yet we were only seconds too late.

  The little clearing was neatly square, with a supply pedestal standing in the middle like an enlarged chess pawn and two transport tubes facing each other from opposite edges. The dead bodies broke the symmetry like litter.

  The merc’s head had been bashed in. A bloody shillelagh lay not far away, and Piet Wongama lay just beyond that—skinny limbs splayed but not relaxed, like a junked marionette’s, his freckled face twisted in a final expression of anger and pain. There was blood on his back, but the knife that had killed him was elsewhere, in the fist of the one man still standing.

  Ken Mishima.

  ◆◆◆

  Mishima’s poker face served him well. His only reply to our hostile stares was:

  “I was too late.”

  Foyle and Harry were moving in on his flanks, poised to lunge with spear and ski pole. But he seemed more concerned with the crossbow bolt I had aimed at him.

  “Too late to get rid of the knife?” I asked.

  He knew what I was getting at, but shook his head.

  “I arrived through that tube,” he said, gesturing. “They had come before me. They were struggling. Piet’s stick fell when the knife struck home. I picked up the stick and used it—but I was too late. Perhaps I should have attacked the trooper barehanded instead, bu
t I know Brotherhood training; we teach the knife well.”

  “ ‘We’?” Harry said, his voice high and strained.

  That, at least, shook him. He started to ask me something—“You haven’t told them?” perhaps—but shut his mouth again as Ariel breathlessly filled the kid in from the sidelines.

  “He’s supposed to be on our side now, though?” Harry asked.

  “We have an agreement,” Mishima said to me. “And I’ve held to it. I’ve killed one of my own brothers in defense of your party. What more can you ask of me?”

  “I understood your story the first time,” I said. “But I think there’s plenty more to ask…If the rest of you don’t mind, I’d like to conduct this interrogation in private.”

  They left us alone. I was amazed at the trust they placed in my integrity and prowess at arms. The only genuine superiority I had over Mishima, of course, was that my cover story had stood up better.

  Mishima had not gone pale; he was not sweating; his eyes were not searching for some means of attack. But I could feel the hairs on my arms stirring as if the air around me were charged, and pulling the crossbow trigger would have felt like pulling the ripcord on a parachute.

  “I know you too well to think you’d do anything rash now,” he said.

  “Do you?”

  “I admit I underestimated you at first. Your technique is flawless—the master who appears a dilettante. Even when I caught you going through my tent at camp and you blocked my Cobra Opening so naturally, I thought it a lucky move. But I have been the fool. No one could have survived so many perils on mere luck.”

  “It’s hard for anyone to survive around you, it seems.”

  Deftly misinterpreting, he shrugged and gestured, not at Wongama’s body, but at the merc’s. “We made a deal. I agreed to protect the civilians, even at this cost.”