The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  “How so?”

  “I have a one-seat shuttle. No fuel to spare, but it can just manage to retrieve me from a planetary surface and achieve orbit. From there on, the freighter has to complete the pickup. It’s a risk, but I take it when I have to.”

  “Nice.”

  “Used to be. Port authorities have heard about that model now. The senator’s people reprogrammed the shuttle doorlock when they checked me in; without a password from them I can’t use it. So we’re restricted to sending a warning by radio.”

  “Did I ever tell you about the merc spies on the satellites?”

  “Yes. But I have enough power to beam a few compressed data bursts. The satellites may not even monitor them. Then my ship’s computer can decompress them and transmit the warning in an endless loop to the ground camp.”

  “And that little thing can reach a ship in orbit?”

  “Well, only when it’s overhead. And⁠—⁠” She consulted the link, though I could not see what she was reading. “And it won’t be overhead for another twenty minutes. I recorded the warning message days ago; I had plenty of time, hiking. So there’s nothing else we can do out here just now. Except freeze.”

  “Okay. Let’s check in with the others. Maybe they’ve found hot food. We can get back here in minutes, now that we know the way.”

  ◆◆◆

  We were back in the junction room, standing next to the bank of switches that controlled the overhead lights. “Now, didn’t one of these bring an elevator for Mishima?” Foyle asked.

  “Let’s try this door first,” I said. “It’s where Ariel went.”

  We entered the passageway with the arrow-shaped sign.

  “ ‘Crank Rooms,’ ” Foyle read. “What could that mean? It’s not another one of those Deutsch puns, is it?”

  “I don’t think it would be spelled that way.” We turned a corner. “There is a German word krank, means ‘sick,’ and I suppose a ‘krank’ room could be⁠—⁠”

  Footsteps, as Ariel met us, her face aglow.

  “It’s the infirmary,” she said.

  She grabbed my hand, and would have dragged me if I hadn’t run. Foyle followed without comment.

  “I told you, I told you,” she was saying, “the Elitists weren’t monsters. Look!”

  Harry Lagado. Helen Hogg-Smythe. Alive.

  We leaned against a glass wall, staring at them where they lay, in hospital beds. A robot tended them. They looked fine, but couldn’t see or hear us, even when we pounded on the wall.

  “Don’t bother,” Ariel said. “The door’s around the next corner. I need one of you to get in, someone who can talk the door’s language. Alun.”

  “Foyle, you try,” I said. “I want to collect Mishima. No reason for us not to stick together now. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Their excited voices faded behind me as I closed the door to the junction room. It took me a while to get the elevator button to work, as though it were stopped on override. And then it lit up and indicators at the shaft door followed its rise.

  Foyle joined me, closing the passage door behind her. “I got her in,” she said. “Then I had a bad feeling. Two of the other hospital beds have been slept in.”

  The elevator opened before her words could register. Three men stepped out. I felt Foyle stiffen next to me.

  “Thought they were supposed to shoot you if you didn’t have an identification code, Colonel,” I said.

  Mishima smiled.

  One of the mercs was tall and vaguely familiar, the other short. Their uniforms were reasonably clean. The short one carried a knife. The tall one cradled a curious two-shot weapon: not just two arrows, but an extra bow stacked on top of the first, and two triggers to work them independently.

  A double crossbow.

  “I was lucky,” Mishima answered. “My brothers here are still recovering from the poison your treacherous friar spilled into their food; they say the robots had them in intensive care for days. I was able to surprise them and establish my rank. I’ve established a number of things, in fact.

  “There is a communicator down there. An intercom to a number of key city centers. Including Level Null, where my brothers are headquartered.

  “I’ve spoken to the main force. It seems that when the search party failed to return, their commander got nervous and moved up his schedule for the attack.

  “It’s all over. They took the construction camp without firing a shot, and secured the satellites yesterday morning. Prisoners have been cooperative; when the senator arrives, he will be greeted with all the right codes. The trap should work.”

  “Except that you’re calling it off,” I said, playing out the hand. “That was our agreement.”

  “An agreement is not binding if it is secured by fraud,” Mishima said gently. “My lieutenant here”—and he gestured at the taller merc, whom I suddenly, sickeningly recognized as Pro, the ranking officer of the search party—“has clarified your role in this matter, Commissioner. I no longer believe that the Column has any inkling of Sir Max Condé’s plans to dethrone the Consultant. I don’t believe the great families of the Column will care, either, once he agrees to be their satrap. And I’m told Condé even has backing among a secret faction within the top levels of the navy⁠—⁠”

  “ ‘The Few’?” I said—and Mishima’s face registered the lucky hit. “So that was true, too. They do exist!”

  Mishima must have thought I was trying to con him again. “True? Everything you’ve told me has been a lie. That being the case, my union can afford to take a fee for helping to bring Condé’s coup about. For one thing, the Column doesn’t even have to know. Our role will end when his militia navy uprising begins. And there aren’t going to be any witnesses to say we were ever here.

  “Anything to say? Anything at all? You’ve always been so good with words⁠…⁠”

  Chapter Thirty

  For some reason I’d always fascinated Mishima. Even now, the commonsense order to shoot me wouldn’t come—I saw questions in his eyes instead. But you must never give even a minor poet the time to take a breath; we can spin whole worlds on those diamond points.

  I opened my mouth as if to speak, my hands obediently at my sides—and threw my whole body out of the line of fire and into the panel of light switches. Blackout. Managing to find Foyle’s arm in the first flush of darkness, I yanked her up after me. Wordless shouting. One of the mercs almost immediately found the door to the infirmary and opened its light onto the intersection but by then we’d reached the maze, and vanished into it.

  The lights went on, then off, then—after a few moments of muffled argument in the distance—on again. I’d counted on memory to let me solve the maze in the dark, but Mishima had the sense not to try following that way. It didn’t make any difference, though; all we had to do was move quietly, give them no cues. We lost them in seconds, and proceeded to the end, the center.

  Foyle and I found ourselves once more beneath the true sky. Catharensis, polestar for refugees, glowed like a votive candle, light-years too far away.

  “Mishima should find this exit in twenty or thirty minutes,” I said. “The maze is complicated, but not large. All you need is a system.” I explained the ancient trail-one-hand-against-the-wall technique. “If he’s never heard of it, he’ll figure it out for himself. He has that sort of mind. He pares problems down.”

  She shivered and hugged herself in the arctic air. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she said. “There’s no one left to radio.”

  “What about your shuttle?” I asked. “If you could get back to your freighter, you could try to intercept the senator’s ship before it arrives.”

  “I told you. The senator’s people reprogrammed the shuttle doorlock so I can’t use it while I’m here. I could bring it down, but I’d never get in without something like⁠—⁠”

  “A skeleton coder?” I said. Handing her one.

  She gaped at me.

  “It’s Mishima’s,” I exp
lained. “He used it to sabotage the Otis system, and other things. I’ve always thought it would be less dangerous, and more useful, in my possession. Do you remember that touching moment, after the whirlwind, when I helped him over the ledge? Think of it as sleight-of-hand.”

  She laughed, shaking her head. “Okay. But the mercs have the defense satellites now. My escape shuttle is tiny, but not invisible. Safe enough coming down, probably, but then the observers will compare notes and lock onto it as it comes back up.”

  However, she squared her chin and produced the pendant again. After whispering something briefly to it, she aimed it into the sky for a few moments.

  I waited, shivering, while multicolored pennons of aurora waved between the stars.

  Then Foyle’s pendant changed color and she put it away.

  “Might as well risk it,” she said, “if Mishima doesn’t get here first. And we might be able to hold that trap door against him, if he does.”

  But even as she spoke, I moved along the platform’s west wall to the open edge that looked north, and surveyed what I could of the steep mountainside beneath us. “I think we can do a little better than that.”

  She joined me. Hope warred with reason in her voice. “You mentioned something about a stairway, before. But—even if there is, even if there is a door somewhere down there and it works…What’s your plan? To get behind them? They already expect that; they’re in a maze. And we’d still be unarmed.”

  “Here’s the staircase,” I said. “It’s tricky to make out in this twilight. See how this”—I patted the rock wall—“extends downward, in a sort of spiral ridge?”

  “Maybe,” she allowed.

  “The Elitists made the steps uneven, to fit into the contours of the rock. And there’s some ice and weathering, that’s why they’re not flat. But if you assume we take a big step down, right here, look—you can keep going, down and clockwise. They’re steep, but they’re still just stairs.”

  She hugged herself again, rubbing her upper arms vigorously. “What about that ice?” she asked doubtfully. “And what I said before—What would we gain even if we made it?”

  “Remember what I said before,” I replied, removing from my belt a coil of fine supercord. “About how I never understood the way the lodge ceremony on Nexus ended, the fire-escape descent—never saw the point to it, ritually? It seemed like such an anticlimax, to get to the bottom of the stairs and open the door, only to see one more mythological painting. After you’d already ascended to the heavens. The subject of the painting was wrong, too, didn’t belong at the end of the story. But now we know that the lodge ceremony was just a pale copy of the original ritual. Beyond the door at the bottom of these stairs is the real icon, which could only be hinted at on Nexus—something awesome, the Elitist holy-of-holies.”

  “And what did you say the painting was again?” she asked with just a touch of irritation.

  “The marriage of Gaea and Uranus—Earth and Heaven.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “And it had a title, was never referred to by any other name…‘The Great Coupling.’ ”

  She looked blank, but only for a second. “The control coupling,” she said. “In that heroic statue at the entrance to the city—the governor for the planetary magnetic field! Of course. As you said, almost a religious icon to the Elitists…Well, okay. Clever of you to realize. But so what?”

  I laughed at her—a rare pleasure, to run ahead of someone you suspect is smarter than yourself. “You’re like Mishima. A simplifier. But a magician knows when it’s more useful to complicate. Think of the Great Coupling as a big switch, hooked into all the complexity of earth and sky—what happens if we throw that switch?”

  “Move the cable back into the Titans’ governor, you mean? Well…assuming we could do it, the magnetic field would start to grow stronger again. Gradually, I guess; we don’t have any idea how it works. Are you thinking it will signal something to the senator before he lands?”

  “Naah,” I said. “I agree with you, the field figures to change only gradually. But it’s still a huge change, because it ripples across a million kilometers of space…Come on, class, what do we call this?”

  “A magnetic storm!” She shook her head, swearing—then surprised me with a kiss on the cheek.

  “With a little luck,” I said, “it might screw up radio, radar, everything. Communication reduced to tight beams. False images all over the scanners⁠—⁠”

  “And my shuttle slipping away in the general confusion—scot-free!” She laughed delightedly. “It’s a lousy bet, of course; I can think of a half-dozen things that might go wrong. But I don’t care. At least this way we play to win.”

  “I think we’ve got a shot,” I said. “We’ve already told your escape shuttle our location, and if you want to give it an extra fix at the last minute, that’s line-of-sight stuff, the storm probably won’t affect that.”

  “But if Mishima gets here first⁠—⁠”

  “No problem, except for those last few minutes. Up until then, we’ll be down the mountainside, out of sight. He’ll stick his head up and see no one. Maybe he’ll keep looking elsewhere. Remember, he doesn’t know about the shuttle—or any other reason for us to wait in this cold.” I took the long step down to the first stair and turned to face the mountain, groping across the rock face.

  “What are you looking for?” Foyle asked.

  “If the stairs ice up now, then they probably always did. There’s got to be someplace to tie a safety line, maybe here on the side…something low down…Damn!” I crouched and spat on my hand.

  “Problem?”

  “I found it, but my skin stuck to it. I’m loose now. It’s a metal loop, it’ll be good. You’re the pro with knots, why don’t you do this?”

  Five minutes later we were properly yoked up, one end of the fine unbreakable cord tied to the metal loop, the coil held in my hand, and the other end knotted around and through my belt across to Foyle’s empty backpack harness, with two meters’ slack between us. We would now be fully exposed to the wind. Foyle had a hood to raise against it. I didn’t. But my tunic and hers had pockets, and after I showed her the trick of ripping out the linings to make gloves, she suggested tearing a big interior swatch from where the double-breast of my uniform overlapped, and tying it around the top of my head.

  Without that protection, I wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes.

  Ice, snow, hail—they’re all visible, they force us to allow for them. But cold by itself is a killer we don’t figure on. Foyle and I hadn’t gone a dozen steep meters before I realized we might not make it up again, not unless there really was a door we could open at the bottom, a chance to restore body heat. The winds run high at the top of an Earthlike world, and when the sun is just a faint glow on the horizon the chill is like ice-water, then ice-needles. You finally pass through numbness to the other extreme, a sensation more like burning. Without the heaviest clothing, life is measured in minutes.

  Your eyes may adjust to the polar twilight, but less blood reaches hands, feet—and brain: the other mountains in the distance become hazy and unreal, a jagged purple jumble, while nearby details take on portentousness and mystical clarity, each sight perhaps the last you’ll see. A cranny of ice in the gray grain of the rock face, a vein of white marble that echoes it. The hypnotic swirl of loose threads edging the cloth that wraps your hand, the meatlocker blue-pink of the naked wrist below that⁠…

  Fortunately, the climbing wasn’t mechanical; it was treacherous enough to keep resharpening mind and senses, even as they weathered away. Foyle would take each new step first. I’d hold her wrists and then lean backward, letting her put her weight down gradually, testing, testing…At these polar temperatures, ancient ice would feel just like rock, providing if anything more friction, until the temperature change of a boot’s pressure turned it slick and slippery a second later. And at one point a clear stair, wind-scoured, gave way beneath Foyle—the rock itself crumbling beneath her. I
f I hadn’t dropped to my knees I’d have lost my grip, and we’d have found out how strong the line and my broad uniform belt really were. But we didn’t fall, and we made the stair below that. I just don’t remember how⁠…

  The fire escape on the lodge building at Nexus University had been only two stories tall, but—not for the first time—I’d relied too heavily on a metaphor. Now we’d run nearly to the end of my cord, an estimated sixty meters. True, I might have left a little slack behind us as we went along, but I couldn’t guess how much; all but the nearest meter of the ultrathin line was invisible in the twilight. I was just about to ask Foyle whether we should proceed without line—a grim prospect, but so was the twenty minutes back up, our strength gone—when she spoke. “I think we’ve made it.”

  The step just below her was broader than the others, a ledge, and she said she could see a door facing it. I delivered her there, but could feel the weight of the line tugging back now, wrapped maybe a twentieth of the way around the narrow peak and riding up as the slack disappeared. “I’ve reached the end of the line,” I said, and the words sounded odd on various counts, odd and thin in the jeering wind.

  She looked up, and her hood blew back. Her hair showed only an underpainting of red in the dimness, but her face was angled to catch what light there was, and shone palely. Taut, lineless, the eyes sharply slanted. She’d hit her limit, but she’d hit it strongly, quite beautiful in an inhuman way. She untied herself.

  “Stay secured…until I get it open,” she said. “I’ll feel stronger then…more help for each other.” I understood what she meant, even if the words didn’t make much sense.

  The wind let up for a second and I took in the view. It was savagely unreal, shadowed gulfs and sharp masses that faded in and out of perspective. And above—was that the aurora, or eye fatigue? Stick to business, look at Foyle.

  I had a one-quarter view of her standing a few meters below me and to the side. She was facing inward, her makeshift glove poking at something chest-high and out of sight. Her lips moved and I caught the word “frozen,” and then she pounded at the unseen door controls with the heel of her fist. And something happened.