The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  Through the opening, with sickening lurches from side to side as I flattened out and hit the expected turbulence, an airstream shaped by the tunnel. Hand-steering all the way in the semidarkness, cold rock and the stink of guano all around, the exit circle my only hope. I tried to keep close to the curved rock ceiling, as far from the bird nests ten meters below me as I could. But there was an air cushion along the ceiling; I would hit it and bounce down, alarming the scores of birds below, and at least once overcorrected for it, crashing my engine up against the rock with a terrible scraping noise.

  That was too much for some of the birds. They came after me just as I cleared the lip of the exit cave. Now!

  It was all one move, the dip forward, chin down, looking back between my toes—and yes! Principato hadn’t gone the long way around when he was so close to nailing me; he was still on my tail, unaware of what we’d been warned against—as my arm snapped down and hurled the crossbow backward at the hawklike pursuer. The bow was another bird shape, coming back at them low and aggressively, and they were sure the nests were under attack now, and I was retreating, no danger, but Principato was deep in the tunnel when the whole flock rose up and went for him.

  Powerful pinions drove the hunters’ beaks and talons. Their battle cries were like knives against stone wheels, sharpening, sharpening. Principato vanished in an angry whirlwind of white and red.

  You’re the one with the birdshot, Killer.

  I pulled up and away, jinking from side to side and flailing with my free hand to discourage the one or two birds still following me, until they returned to the nests. I hadn’t covered much distance when Principato broke free.

  I suppose the romancer in me had expected them to tear him to shreds, like piranha fish. In fact, they didn’t even follow him too far from their cave. But his face and body were bloodied, his wings torn. And he’d lost the gun.

  None of which stopped him from locking onto my course and closing with me, drawing a short machete from a sheath on one thigh. Vengeance? Military professionalism? Or a superman’s need to win at all cost? At least I’d anticipated it, and had a plan, however flimsy.

  And when he reached my altitude I turned head to head with him and locked in as my free hand took the heavy rubber stopper from between my teeth. There was no help for it. I had to let him get close. Almost—but not quite—as close as he wanted to. Because I, too, had always suffered from a sense of destiny—I, too, was willing to end the contest with one cast of the dice.

  And so he came to me, pointing like an avenging angel with his outstretched steering hand, chopping blade upraised in the other. To change the angle, face his whole body and not just the top of it, I broke off into a steep climb that turned into a stall.

  He swooped up to match me exactly. For a moment we were face to face at full-length, only a few meters apart, and before he could throw the machete—he was mad enough to do it, his white teeth bared in a contorted, blood-spattered mask of a face—I hurled the rubber stopper at him.

  He had a champion’s reflexes; the machete arm went sideways to protect his face, and as the stopper bounced harmlessly off his chest instead, I heard his bark of contemptuous laughter.

  It drowned the click that came from my target, the silver disk at the yoke of his wing harness.

  I will never forget his look of shock and horror as his wings unstrapped themselves, peeled back, and shot away from him. For an instant he seemed to hang in the void, stalled as I was stalled. Then I dipped and caught the air, while he went down like a brick. He finally did throw the machete, too late, but with all his strength; I didn’t see where it went, but the action changed his course, put a slant on it. As the green figure shrank against the distant background of the sea, it also skimmed ever closer to the rock wall of the pylon island we’d just left.

  And so he hit the long pole jutting from the side of the pylon, the one with the gold hoop on it. His body jackknifed with the impact, whipped around the pole and down again, and spun head over heels all the rest of the way.

  He never released his parachute. Five seconds later, quite a long time, a tiny white circle blossomed on the sea. It opened up and became a hollow pale wreath, into which, a moment later, the gold hoop also disappeared.

  ◆◆◆

  I went south, climbing slowly over the cloud on my tattered wings, scanning downward on the other side. I found my party alive and well, with Mishima still under wings, towing both women, making slow time.

  I glided back to them. The trivial birdshot wounds in my leg ached dully. The savage satisfaction I’d felt at my own lethal cleverness had passed. Moral hangover had set in.

  Was it incredible that the mercs should lose to us? But we’d taken losses, too. And we’d had Mishima and Foyle, professional soldiers of a high caliber. And I, of course, had cheated the mercs at every turn—I’d used my brain.

  I was glad we couldn’t talk when I joined up with the others, though I signaled that all was clear, and felt their relief and pleasure at seeing me alive. I took Ariel’s towline from Mishima’s hand and shared the duty. Tired and torn up, I just wanted to finish.

  The remaining trip north took an hour, the last hour of the day. It was an eerie and valedictory experience, as if careless stagehands had started to take the set apart before the actors had quite reached the end of the play. We were finally approaching the apex of the V-shaped Hellway cavern, which meant that its walls were becoming visible through the blurring of the atmosphere. At first we saw them only to the far left and right, a column of gray tile on either side. But the columns widened and flattened toward the middle of our view until foreground and background reversed.

  Now there was only one column, consisting of blue haze, directly in front of us as the enormous wall tiles passed flatly on either side. And in the center of this dimming column of daylight glowed an orange patch, like a setting sun behind light clouds, and I somehow knew this would be the exit. As we got closer it dazzled us and retreated, became a fading orange tunnel. We flew into it, and onward.

  Orange subsided to shades of red and violet. We were the setting sun; we were going where a sun goes, rolling up into a new country; and the Hellway was behind us at last, gone down into night, a dream.

  PART THREE

  THE MIRROR

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The rest is mist. We flew and we flew…Possibly we were drugged. I have a vague impression of a gray fog, anesthetically cold⁠…

  And we finished in a whirlwind.

  It was a fraud, a wonderful melodramatic trick, but for a moment I thought it was real, the four of us spaced around a circle facing each other in midair, slowly whirling, coldness blasting in our faces—the roar of great winds everywhere, annihilating thought. Some invisibly fine web at our backs was really holding and directing us, though, not the dark tornado column we thought we could see above and below us through gray rings of simulated dust. Part of it may have been real, spun out of some sort of mesh, but most of it must have been a holographic projection.

  In any case, we whirled in perfect safety, the men in wings and the women without. The parachutes that would have complicated the situation had been conveniently removed during the lost, blacked-out minutes.

  As soon as we had time to grasp what was being simulated—an ascent via whirlwind to a higher world—the mists beyond the dust rings faded away. We could see the “landscape” we were supposed to be rising from, a golden harvest country of china-blue streams and gentle hills. White temples stood here and there on hilltops. Next to them human figures in togas or chitons were consigning part of their meal to a fire, as if in sacrifice. Wraiths of white smoke ascended from these circles, gathered speed and shape, and passed us going upward. I recognized various characters from Roman mythology: Hercules in a lionskin, Ulysses with an oar on one shoulder.

  So we, too, were joining the Olympians, as heroes—was that it? I tried to decide whether this told me anything new about the enigmatic Elitists, their goals and val
ues. But I was too weary.

  And then the gray curtains closed again and new forces affected our motion, my comrades swirling below me at different altitudes until we were in single vertical file. Suddenly something cold and hard and unyielding pressed against my back, something that magnetically gripped my wings and stopped me in place. The wing-release mechanism triggered itself; I cried out as I slipped down; but then my feet met resistance and I found myself standing on a rocky ledge.

  I looked down. Far, far below⁠…

  Wait a minute.

  The mountain face we clung to was not really as steep as the holographic scenery made it appear. But with that yawning chasm “below,” one could not help but take one’s time creeping along the narrow ledges upward.

  I was the first to reach the cave mouth. It opened nearly two meters above the level of my feet, and I had to reach up and pull myself in. I helped the others up as they arrived: first Ariel—a quick kiss from her in passing, almost an afterthought—then Foyle.

  Mishima could doubtless have heaved himself up without help, but I knelt down and grabbed him by belt and armpit anyway, and brought him to his feet. It was an interesting moment.

  He stepped away from me and brushed himself off, as if embarrassed. Perhaps he was thinking that he hadn’t kept his end of our bargain, hadn’t taken the four scalps promised. But that didn’t matter now. We had pulled through anyway, most of us.

  Now that we could hear one another again, I had to supply the details of what had happened to the Lagados. The others took it expressionlessly. Perhaps they felt as I did, washed out.

  There was a brief silence. A door began sliding down to convert the “cave” into a room, and before we lost all the light from outside I found a bank of switches against one wall and lit the overheads.

  “Is this it?” Ariel said. “What a disappointment.”

  Just a round room with doors and a few open archways, like the statue chamber, but smaller. Artificial light, canned air. Nothing of interest.

  “What could we expect?” Foyle replied. “This is where we break with the pilgrims. Those kids had their people to meet them, to give them gifts and lead them through that final affirmation maze.”

  She pointed to an archway at the far end of the room, the largest, marked with the sign of the fasces. “There’s a glimpse of open sky somewhere in there, the only time an Elitist child would ever see the real thing in his life. And then the trip back to the parents and brothers and sisters, celebrations and solemnities. But that’s all ghost stuff. It’s not for us.”

  Even the stolid Mishima looked depressed.

  “We have our own celebration ahead of us,” I said quickly, “if we can get the word out to the satellites in time to stop them from being taken over. Break up a senator’s assassination and we’ll be feted as heroes, never fear. Let’s get on with it.”

  “Foyle,” Mishima said, “didn’t you say you would have a way of contacting your ship if we reached this point?”

  Foyle’s answer sounded hollow, guarded. “All I meant was, if we could break out to open sky, we ought to be able to rig some sort of radio transmission to my ship. Its orbit will bring it directly overhead, and it has standing orders to scan for low-power distress signals from me.”

  “I see. I thought you had more direct means at hand. Very well.” Mishima thought a moment. “All right, this was one of the control centers of the colony. If there was any provision at all for contacting their scout ships in space, its transmitter would be here, far from the main population, for security. All we have to do is find it.”

  “The sooner the better,” Ariel suggested. “We’ll have to split up.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “Pick your doors.”

  “I’ll find the upper exit in the maze,” Foyle offered. “We’ll need to know where it is in any case.”

  Ariel’s door revealed a passageway, and an arrow-shaped sign cryptically marked CRANK ROOMS. Mishima took an elevator. I was left alone with Foyle.

  “Mishima’s pretty sure you have a transmitter on you,” I said. “Theoretically, we’re all on the same side, but I think I’ll stick close to you. Just in case.”

  “Besides,” she said after a moment, suddenly smiling, “you have to see the affirmation maze. You want the complete experience, don’t you?”

  “Guilty. And it’s not as though we need to find another transmitter. Do we?”

  She pulled the aqua pendant from within her jumpsuit and rubbed it like a lucky charm. “No,” she admitted. She looked at it closely, read something in its chatoyance. “Still at least an hour before my freighter is overhead. I don’t think this is a puzzle maze. We should solve it in plenty of time.”

  We stared up at the Elitist fasces over the entryway, the birch rods for whipping children, the squat little axe for executing enemies of the state. “The sign of over-mastery,” or whatever the phrase had been.

  “I say ‘solve’ it,” Foyle went on. “But I don’t suppose we ever will. Not without those people to meet us, not without knowing what was in their hearts…They’re still a thousand years away, and always will be, now. Older than the Green Church and the Kanalists, and more secret. Closer to Old Earth than to us…It’s not fair. We’ve made it. We are adults of their tribe now. We were meant to understand them, their history.”

  “That’s not what initiations promise,” I said gently. “To know ourselves, that’s the promise. I don’t think the secrets of Elitism would have helped either of us with that.”

  “No.”

  We entered the foyer of the maze, passing a little curtained-off nook with speakerholes in it. “A singer would have been here, during the affirmation walk,” Foyle suggested. “Or maybe a Questioner, after the style of Masons or Kanalists.”

  The walls were dark and featureless. At the first branching Foyle went unhesitatingly to the right, following the turns of that passage as if she knew where she was going. But we soon reached a dead end.

  “Not even a picture to look at,” she said.

  “What was that all about?” I asked as we returned to the fork.

  “Just a whim. Didn’t matter which way we went. Thought I’d start out like a Kanalist. Silly. A salute to my husband’s sad old cult.”

  “Okay, but that would be this way, to the left,” I said as we took that branch.

  She laughed. “I forgot your literary theories. In the Larkspur play, it is to the left, isn’t it:

  The Questioner begins to sing,

  ‘Nothing is left—but everything.’

  However, in an actual initiation⁠—⁠”

  “The actual path is the one encoded in The Enchanted Isle,” I said. “Your husband’s chapter must not have used a canonical maze.” How could I put this, and still stay in character? “My own initiation may have been Reform, but it was held in the maze at Nexus University, the oldest known. Trust me, it starts with a left.”

  “Nexus?” she repeated as we turned a forced corner. “You went⁠—⁠”

  We came to a dead halt, staring.

  The gleaming point of the arrow was aimed in our direction. Drawn to the furthest, the bow did not even quiver in those powerful arms. The eyes behind it did not blink, despite their anger and the long, long wait for us.

  “It’s…not…possible,” Foyle whispered.

  But there he stood, in rags, aiming the great bow that only he could draw, ready to fire through the row of double axes the drunken suitors had set up for him as a target.

  Odysseus’s homecoming. The first mosaic on the Shining Fare. Nothing is left—but everything⁠…

  Foyle shook her head and tried to speak again.

  “That’s the left turn,” I heard myself say, in a strange, creaky voice. “And the next one is a right.” And I took her unwilling arm, and pulled her along the path, hearing the turn in the lines I said aloud:

  “The wanderer, his end in view,

  Will thread the shining axes through.

  Like him, you must retu
rn. Take aim.

  You have your own birthright to claim.”

  The coding gets more subtle after that, but I had no trouble following it, turn for turn and strophe for strophe.

  The story of Odysseus comes first, of course. It always did. You know that one. The crafty man, the enduring man. The man who gets home.

  My voice echoed as a Questioner’s would have, bringing the pictures to life for Foyle as we passed. We’d seen such images in the Hellway, too, but under the spell of the fasces had taken them for Roman lore, not the Greek the Romans copied.

  And so we treaded my measures, and read the walls, all the archetypal tales. Persephone—not Proserpine—accepted the seeds from Hades, as her mother arrived too late: Hephaestus—not Vulcan—displayed Aphrodite and Ares under the net, and the other gods laughed at him; Pandora opened the box; Orpheus looked back⁠…

  And I was in the moment, lost to Time entirely. It was as if my whole tortuous life had reraveled to this. I didn’t know or care how I had come to the Shining Fare again. A true Kanalist knows that he can always return, always be reborn, it’s merely a question of admitting his own freedom to affect the current moment. That’s why our proper peers are gods and goddesses—because we can create worlds when we choose.

  Foyle followed me as if we were dancing, occasionally looking from the mosaics to my face as I interpreted a particularly arcane directional clue…but never less than entranced, a true participant in the rite.

  Up the stairs, to the second level.

  We shuttled through the final twists and turns, ignoring the dead ends where the Midases and Minoses were pictured in their self-inflicted misery.

  The story of Daedalus, the talented man, comes near the end.

  ◆◆◆

  We see him as a brilliant young inventor and artist, devising statues that talk and paintings that weep. Then older, jealous of the rising generation, he throws his talented apprentice Talos from the roof of the Acropolis, murdering him.