The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  A wave of dull red light swept across the ledge, then rose up her legs and body to the top of her head, and she looked over to me, yelling, “It’s open!” But even as I fumbled at the restraining cord around my belt, a sharp-edged shadow descended over her face once more, and she hit the controls frantically, crying, “It’s closing again—can’t stop it!”

  “Get inside!” I called out. “Handle it from in there!”

  “But you⁠—⁠”

  “Don’t be stupid!”

  She didn’t wait for further permission, but ducked into what remained of the red glow, and a moment later I was alone on the mountain face. But not for long.

  I’d been hearing crackling noises for some time; presumably echoes of icefalls from the valleys around us. But this one sounded more immediate. I looked up the rough-hewn stairs to where they curved out of sight and saw Ken Mishima come around the bend, less than ten meters away.

  He was wearing work gloves and extra shirts, perhaps taken from the other mercenaries, and some sort of headband as well. He carried no safety rope, but he’d evidently made better time that way; his boots gleamed with the ice-gripping strap-on cleats he’d taken from the equipment shelf before the Backstage climb and he moved with Zen assuredness. He’d commandeered the double crossbow I’d seen before, and now, without raising to aim or otherwise telegraphing his intent, he fired.

  The bolt whiffled past my cheek and off the edge of the world.

  “Missed!” I shouted, flattening against the mountain wall, behind the protection of its curve; the bow’s lower cross was still loaded and cocked.

  “Sorry!” Mishima called back. “Windage. I’ll try to make a clean job of it next time.” Something—the cold, victory, malice—put a harsh edge on his usual tone of philosophical detachment, but he went on conversationally, “How far down do these stairs go?”

  “All the way to the bottom,” I said. “Why not let us chance it? You can’t follow much longer—you’ll freeze, too.”

  “But why would you be going down, then?” he asked. I heard confused scraping noises. His voice sounded no closer.

  “Perhaps to suck you in. It’s the only way I can take you with me, isn’t it?” I risked a glance and saw that he was having trouble with the stair that had crumbled away. The necessary slide would be much riskier without a safety line. Hence this conversation; he’d be just as glad to stall me in place.

  For my part, I gave up the panicky tugging at Foyle’s impeccable knot. If she got the door open, I could always unbuckle the belt itself—even my increasingly numb fingers could manage that—but in the meantime, with nowhere to go and my strength dwindling, I was better off secured. I could play Mishima’s game, and stall.

  “Think about it,” I went on. “I just have to stay a little bit ahead of you, always around the bend, and you won’t get a shot. Maybe you can resist hypothermia longer than I can—but twice as long? When I finally fade, you still have to make it all the way back up. It may already be too far. I may already have won.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “You underestimate the powers of a directed spirit. And I no longer overestimate you. Your little tricks.”

  I stuck my head back out again, still hugging the mountain, and discovered I could watch him with impunity for a while; he was not in firing position, his free hand extended for balance. One boot tested the stub of the missing stair. “Do I detect a note of pique?” I asked. “That’s it, isn’t it? You have to finish me off personally, because you think I’ve made a fool of you.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “It’s my duty because I’m in charge. Because the others refused to believe that these were stairs, or that anyone would use them. The lower ranks see only what they want to, and never volunteer.” Yes, he was clearly padding his lines; it would be the simplest solution, if he could keep me listening until I dropped. “But I have a responsibility to tie up loose ends,” he went on. “Nothing personal about it. It’s just neatness—completeness⁠…⁠”

  “Like leaving Lagado to die when you were teamed with him—Ariel, too, on a crumbling stair like the one that’s about to kill you⁠—⁠” He didn’t turn a hair, though, just kept probing. “At that point you still didn’t know how badly your brothers had compromised the union, or what you’d have to do to clean up the mess. But whatever else was true, civilian witnesses to Brotherhood involvement were an unwelcome complication. I guess you didn’t need any more motive than that, in your line of work. Especially since you wouldn’t have to raise a hand yourself, just let the Hellway do the killing. Until you saw Wongama take out your fellow mercenary, that is. I recognized your knife in his back, you see, because I’ve always taken a keen interest in the tools on your belt—looking for the skeleton coder. Why’d you kill him, after cutting a deal with me? Force of habit?”

  “I thought you’d died in the earthquake,” he said. “That voided my agreement to protect the others. Otherwise I would certainly have kept it. But I don’t expect you to understand what it means to follow a clear line of duty.”

  “By killing your own brothers for me, for instance, later on,” I said. “Yes. It may have been your duty, but won’t it grieve your comrades on the grievance committee, when you make your report? They’ll also wonder why you failed to eliminate me when I first arrived on Newcount Two. You couldn’t quite guess my true role, but you should have simplified me out of the situation anyway. The flitter crash wouldn’t have had any political blowback—if you’d made it work. But it was stupid to use the same skeleton coder you’d already used on the Otis. Not as undetectable as you thought, which made your denial later pretty pointless⁠…⁠”

  Speaking of pointless, though, why the delay? Why didn’t he just use my own safety line, if not to climb down with, to yank me up with? But of course—wrapped low against the mountain all the way down, it was neither visible nor underfoot. Which explained why his underlings had doubted that the stairs were in use.

  “The truth is this,” I went on. “As a troubleshooter, you haven’t hit a proper target yet. Mainly your own men, just because I told you to. And who am I?”

  “You’re nothing,” he said, “an empty mask. I admit it, you fooled me for a long time. There are so few real warrior spirits in any age. We look to each other as to candles in the dark. We welcome any chance to learn from a peer, especially from a spirit with its own style, a centered master.”

  This was stalling, too, but deplorably sincere. I kept glancing back at the ledge, looking for the red light that would spill across it if the door opened again.

  Mishima had reached his peroration. “But there’s another archetype we may encounter, Parker. The trickster. At first he appears to be a centered master in disguise, but he is only a master of appearances, the center of attention. To such as you, everything is personal, ego is all. You had a direction to follow, Condé’s commission, and you went back on it—for what? The good opinion of women? A distaste for dirty work? Do you even know?

  “I do. Ego is a vortex, and you are slipping down its funnel. Even the tricks have dwindled, Parker—‘The stairs go all the way,’ ‘I’m sucking you in,’ ‘Don’t slip, now!’ Pathetic. A balanced spirit doesn’t have to rely on tricks. Watch.”

  He held the bow sideways above his head, flexed his knees—and skated down the broken rock incline to the next complete stair, sparks streaming off his crampons like shooting stars. He came to a stop without jerking or bobbing, just straightened up. The wind moaned in wonderment. His next step down was confident, another meter closer, and he lowered his weapon into firing position. I glanced back at the ledge—no glow, no escape—and gripped my belt with both hands; everything seemed to be receding from me, darkness and emptiness in all directions.

  “That was no trick,” he said. “No ego trip. Just balance, Parker. That’s all. We’ve reached the end together. Nothing personal.”

  The end of the line, the end of all tricks? But I know more directions than your simple compass-points, Colone
l. And while life lasts, I have the death card yet to play—not necessarily a loser, for it is the ace of spades.

  I backed to the outer edge of the stair as if to give Mishima a better shot, and from there, with a jump, into the vast gulf behind, beyond, below.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  I’d pushed off as hard as I could, but still experienced only a moment of free-fall—mountain flying up before me, the skull’s smile of an ice river kilometers below—and then the line yanked back at my belt. At first I was swung sideways more than anything, spiraling outward, as the cord unreeled invisibly from the rough staircase above. But then there came the sharp but yielding tug that must have been the line catching Mishima at ankles or knees and hurling him off the edge.

  I didn’t even see his death scene, just felt the jerk as my swing changed to downward and inward. I braced myself for the first impact. With the line connected near my belt buckle, my feet came forward naturally, and when they hit the dark mountain-face I let my knees bounce like springs. But my lateral momentum was too great; I went into a helpless spin on the rebound, and as I swung in again there was nothing I could do but protect my head as I slammed at full length against the rock, only to bounce sideways and hit again, and a third time, skipping along as if I’d been thrown onto a highway from a moving vehicle.

  But only the first smash was at full speed—that was the one that must have cracked a few ribs on my left side; the rest just left superficial bruises and abrasions, and a sprained wrist from fending off once—and oh yes, a hoarse throat from the screaming.

  Could have been worse, in other words. Could have let Mishima have the satisfaction of shooting me. Worse still, I could have missed my chance to send him ahead of me to hell through wishful thinking—if I’d tried the cord-swipe from where I stood, yanking with my hands, both angle and force would have been insufficient. At least this way, dangling against a cold rock wall, I could die the relatively painless death of freezing: not much left to it but going to sleep.

  Climbing the cord was out of the question—it was too fine, would slice through my frozen hands like piano wire. And the wall before me was too smooth for fingerholds. But the wind kept blowing, stinging, hurting. It wasn’t getting any easier, this death business. And I found myself drawing my feet up again, scrambling and swinging to make wider and wider arcs sideways, looking for a crevice I could grab with my hands, chasing the dream of a series of crevices all the way back up to the stairs.

  I didn’t find a one. But I burned off the adrenaline the jump had engendered, and when I finally swung to a halt I was truly finished, twisting in the wind—black mountain, blue night, black mountain, blue night. It was soon after that when I began to hear the voice.

  “I have aged, I have aged internally⁠…⁠”

  Ur-Linguish. I tried to translate in the light of a flickering mental candle. The hallucination’s style was conversational, everyday but somehow oblique, vaguely reminiscent of⁠—

  “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear out batten-lines, if triple-rolled⁠…⁠”

  Scribbles of a student night, fragments from one of the ancients I’d had to give up on, ironic cadences too brittle for translation⁠—

  “And there will be time, there will be time…The evening is spread against the sky like a point array, or simple two-D table⁠…⁠”

  “Uh, help?” I called. Sounds of fairy pickaxes and power drills offstage. Possibly what happens when frozen eardrums crack. But then the creaky metallic voice began again:

  “No, I am not pre-sentient, nor was meant to be…Automatic, cautious, and meticulous…Almost, at times, a tool…I have measured out my line in coffer spools⁠…⁠”

  But it was real; some strange shape had eclipsed the stars above me. “Help! I’m down here!” I cried, and did it again in the old tongue, remembering to sound the h’s, the l, the w.

  And faintly, faintly, far above, Foyle’s answering voice, a command. “That’s him, that’s him, bring him up!” And from somewhere between us:

  “Shall I port a stair behind? Do I dare to make a reach? I have heard the humans calling, each to each!…Should I, now I see how caked the ice is, halve the length to solve a momentary crisis?…I should have had a pair of rubber claws⁠…⁠”

  And then it was upon me, still muttering dementedly to itself, a steel spider more than two meters in diameter. It descended from directly above to block all view, its batten arms manipulating shiny metallic support-lines as they unreeled from internal spools. Now its spindly jointed legs extended to bracket me, tipped with tiny drillheads that whined and drove securely into the solid rock on either side. The headbox eyed me with penlights and cameras; scanners whirred and clucked.

  “There will be time, there will be time,” the robot assured me, even as terrifying shears emerged from its body to clip the cord I hung from. “Let us go, then, you and I.” I heard my line snap, but instead of falling I was caught and drawn into a possum-pouch in the machine’s thorax, where I curled up in darkness and warmth. I felt a great lurch, a smooth ascent, a bobbing traverse; heard Foyle’s voice, too faint for words, and then the robot’s, all around me, “Glad to be of use”; wondered when I’d really blacked out; and blacked out.

  ◆◆◆

  “Hell and back in half an hour,” Foyle was saying. “Or forty minutes, anyway. Lucky if you don’t throw up—I did.”

  She was in a crouch; I lay at full length with my head in her lap. Beneath us was an open-grill catwalk, and empty space. Stone walls loomed dim in the distance, indirectly lit in red and marked with heavy dark lines and squares. The air was warmer, and dry—and in gentle motion, back and forth, like breathing. Strange.

  Foyle was wearing a heavy hooded parka, and in her right hand she brandished the hypodermic air-needle she’d just injected me with. I felt as though she’d changed my blood to brandy.

  “What is this stuff?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. One hell of an upper. Three minutes from now you’re going to think you’ve had ten hours’ sleep and twenty cups of coffee. But we’d better accomplish our business as fast as we can, because when we come down, we’re going to come down hard.”

  “Where…did you get it?”

  “A kit inside the rescue robot. And don’t worry, there’s a fresh inspection sticker on it—all pharmaceuticals have been replaced since we put the Hellway into use again.”

  “⁠…⁠Rescue robot?”

  “Oh God, did you hit your head when you fell? You told me a minute ago about your ribs—do you remember that?”

  “No. But I remember I hurt them. And I didn’t fall, I jumped. And I remember the robot rescuing me. In a surreal sort of way…You found it here? ‘Here’ being the inside of the mountain?”

  “That’s it, now you’re tracking. When I ducked in, either the door clipped my head or I just passed out and hit the floor. Anyway, the robot came and gave me an injection. Then I had some trouble getting it to understand there was someone trapped outside—the language barrier. But I just enunciated letter for letter, and finally it showed me where the warm coats were and opened the door again. When I realized you’d gone over the side—what do you mean, ‘jumped’?”

  “Mishima was going to shoot me anyway. Thought I’d take him with me. Sweep him off with the safety line, see.” But she didn’t see. I explained it in more detail, but she just stared at me sympathetically.

  “Are you really sure any of that happened?” she asked. “Couldn’t it have been a hallucination—or a blackout dream?”

  “Don’t…ever ask me that, about anything,” I told her, and she looked back, scared.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot.”

  “I’m sorry, too. And the answer is, I don’t know.” I found I could sit, now, and even stand. She had described the stimulant’s effect precisely. Aside from some throbbing ribs, and a vague desire to puke, I felt dangerously terrific.

  The spider robot sat at one end of the catwalk, crouching complexly. I approached it
, saying, “Lucky for us it was here.”

  “Not luck,” Foyle said. “Ariel was right about the philosophy behind this place. You go down the stairs with nothing but a safety line, because the danger is fun, but no one’s supposed to die just for slipping. This machine’s the safety net.”

  “Am I right that this thing talks a lot?”

  “Certainly kept trying to report to me,” she replied. “I couldn’t make much out, of course.”

  I had a brief conversation with the device in my halting Ur-Linguish. It was indeed eager to make reports, and concerned that it was not maintained often enough—some of its parts were in need of replacement, and so forth. It formally requested a lexical update because it could hardly understand my companion. A smart, adaptable machine. The voice was as I remembered it, but uttered nothing suggestive of either insanity or Imagism. I had to wonder if Foyle was right, if I’d hallucinated Mishima, too.

  I conferred with it another few moments, then turned to Foyle. “No problem,” I said. “We’re back on course. When you’re ready to go up and meet your shuttle, this thing can carry you to the top in a minute. I didn’t try to explain the cops-and-robbers aspect of the situation—that’s beyond its ken. But I can’t believe the mercs have been waiting for us out-of-doors, not all this time, and if you just park our friend here on top of the trap door, that should keep them from making an appearance while the shuttle comes down.”

  “Excellent!”

  “So if your forty-minute guess is anywhere near right, we still have enough time to replug the Great Coupling first. But I’m afraid this machine doesn’t know anything about that—the Coupling’s location, for instance.”

  Foyle’s end of the catwalk ended in a set of lockers, a control turret, and what I assumed to be the door to the outside, currently shut. In the spider’s direction, the catwalk faded off into darkness.