The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  “Oh, you were right about that, the Coupling’s right here,” Foyle said. “We’re on the viewing stage, I guess. Wait a second…I found the switch before⁠…⁠” She reached for one of the controls, and a moment later spotlights came on.

  We were suspended in the middle of a vertical shaft, narrower than the lake elevator, but bottomless. The catwalk we stood on bisected it, and the far side, past the spider, led to a steep ladder that ended in a small steel door. The rescue robot had confirmed that its relief and maintenance robots came from beyond that, presumably the control levels beneath the infirmary and maze. So much for the human superstructure; the rest of what we saw was Titanic, a million years old.

  The Great Coupling itself was lit up for drama’s sake, looking much as it had in the bronze statue at the city entrance: a half-meter-thick serpent extending horizontally along the wall, then bending upward from its former socket to a new socket almost two meters higher. Just below was the scaffold the humans must have bolted into place to facilitate the work. A side ladder, I saw, could be unfolded from our catwalk to the scaffold. A piece of cake.

  “You had this lit before?” I asked. “Why did you turn it off again?”

  “Didn’t like the scenery,” she said shortly, gesturing downward.

  With the spotlights on, one had an attenuating view of the seemingly infinite drop beneath us. And there was something oppressive and dwarfing about the details of the walls, too. Other cables, and sockets, and larger but equally simple structures, traced geometric patterns all the way around and down, a vertiginous spiral.

  “I suppose it must hit the roof of the Hellway, eventually,” I said.

  “I think we’re just north of that. I don’t like to think how far down it might go.”

  “I don’t care anymore,” I said. “All normal fear of heights has been burned out of me. Ever since the shuttle from orbit, Newcount Two has been one long fall, with occasional breaks for lunch.”

  She laughed, and I realized we were both a little high. “But I don’t like any of it,” she said. “Know what it reminds me of? Artifacts from the days before organic cybernetics—as though we were grains of dust on the side of a silicon chip. And listen.”

  “⁠…⁠I don’t hear anything,” I lied.

  “High and faint in the background. Like breathing, all around us. Wouldn’t be so bad if we could get the whole place really bright, but this fading off into the unknown⁠—⁠”

  “Yeah, well, that’s enough of that,” I interrupted. “Help me get this ladder unfolded.”

  A minute later we crossed over to the scaffold and stood beneath the Coupling. “Looks simple enough,” I said. “May be heavy, but you probably don’t need the six people we saw in the statue. That was just ceremonial choreography.”

  “If you say so.”

  “See, I think if you stand just one step behind me here, your right shoulder behind my left, our necks will bracket it, and we can ease it down by bending our knees. It’ll want to haul back, so prepare to lean forward, pushing at the flange here.”

  “How do we release it?”

  “Looks to me like we just push the studs. How did the friar describe it? Just a scaled-up version of the sort of connector you’d see in a small machine. I can push two, and you can push two, and that’s where we hold it.”

  “Look,” she said. “Are you sure you want to do this? We got our information from the equivalent of a child’s schoolbook. You can’t just replug planetary electromagnetism into some sort of transformer and step it up or down, it’s crazy.”

  This wasn’t like her—it was the stimulant talking. “No, it’s what you said before, Foyle,” I told her. “We’re on the chip. Only it’s not one micropulse of electricity in this circuit, more likely millions of data strands inside the cable, and I don’t know what the data relates to or what vast mysterious thing the couplings do with it. But it’s supposed to affect the field, and nothing else matters. If we can’t foul up the surveillance net, you don’t get away. If you don’t get away, Condé wins and all of us are eliminated as witnesses; other planets will be enslaved or even exterminated. If replugging this thing is a colossal mistake, and turns Newcount Two into a fireball or a pumpkin, it’s the same death for us, but it at least ruins his plans, and saves those people…Would you find this speech more eloquent in verse?”

  “No, that’s all right.” She braced her shoulder behind mine. “The threat is enough.”

  But she’d spooked me with her misgivings. I told her we’d hit the studs at the count of three, but delayed after two, and found myself whispering the last word.

  The studs resisted for an instant, then slipped all the way down. The cable was heavy, but we were braced against its backward pull. Silence rolled over us in a great cold wave.

  Was I imagining it, or had the cosmic breathing stopped?

  Bending our knees in unison, lining up the cable-end with the socket, driving it forward like a ram…we did it with desperate quickness, and above the sound of the studs snapping back up, retainer bolts springing into place, came a high-pitched, all-encompassing gasp—and the breathing noise was back, perhaps a little different, a little stronger.

  “Please,” Foyle said. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  ◆◆◆

  There were actually two doors between us and the surface, forming a long airlock through a wall six meters thick. I stood next to Foyle on the ledge at the foot of the great stone stairs, looking out over the jagged valley as the rescue robot came up behind us. It wasn’t so cold, knowing I could duck back inside.

  “Wait a minute,” I said before Foyle could step into the machine’s carrying pouch. I pointed at an object on the staircase and ordered the spider to retrieve it, which it did with a speed and dexterity that must have relieved Foyle.

  “What is it?” she asked me as the machine handed it over.

  Mishima’s crossbow.

  “The line must have caught him very low,” I said. “Maybe ankle-high. Natural for him to drop the bow and make a snatch for the edge as he went over. But he must not have made it, or he wouldn’t have left this…I think it was the only weapon the mercs had. Now I’ll go back in, across the catwalk, and come up on them from below.”

  “Good luck,” was all she said, pressing my hand. She’d withdrawn into her own future now, and I couldn’t blame her. The robot bore her away, and as I looked up after them I saw the aurora. It had grown larger, a blanket rather than a pennon, and was still billowing out, its chatoyant folds shimmering with new power. Had we done that, with the coupling?

  I hefted the crossbow. It had discharged when it fell, but I found some spare bolts in a compartment in the stock. Mishima was going to save my life one last time.

  I’d seen a lot of deaths, living on the run in the ragged fringes. Few had been worse or more gruesome than Friar Francisco’s, for instance, but it suddenly struck me that Mishima’s was one of the scariest, because the purest. Death distilled. One minute you’re standing there on the upper stair, full of purpose, knowing exactly what’s going on and prepared to enjoy it. And then you’re not. Just thrown away, into the night and cold—nothing you did, no warning, no time to figure it out. No chance to modify whatever your last words might have been. Nothing personal.

  ◆◆◆

  As it turned out, the rest was easy. After some blind wandering around in an intermediate level, I found an elevator with labeled buttons and ascended to the infirmary floor. Ariel met me with kisses at the door, putting aside a weapon she’d made from a chair leg. She told me that Mishima and the mercenaries had never returned from the maze, though she’d occasionally heard voices from within it. It figured; Mishima must have ordered them to wait for him, just beneath the trap door, and they would have cleared off only after the robot’s arrival changed the situation. I didn’t go in after them, but waited for them to come out instead, sitting inside the recess next to the entrance, behind the semitransparent curtain, where the Questioner us
ed to sit as he chanted.

  I heard the voices, too, occasionally. The two mercs were apparently lost; Mishima had not explained his system to them. But eventually they found their way out. They were if anything more formidable-looking without the shirts they’d loaned to Mishima. I eased past the curtain into position behind them. On the basis of experience and general psychology, I aimed at the one who was shorter than average height.

  “It’s all over,” I said. “Nobody has to get hurt.”

  “Hey sure, no problem,” said the one I was aiming at as they both turned, and his hand made a few flickering motions, so I shot him.

  I’d had plenty of time to nerve myself to the likelihood, sitting and waiting. He pitched over backward, the bolt I’d aimed at his belly lodged in his shoulder. Pro, the taller one, was already three steps into the split-up-and-flank routine his buddy must have signaled—but as I locked onto him, one cross still loaded, he dropped to his knees and bent his hands in front of his forehead, open palms facing me. “Okay?” he asked. “Pax?”

  “Okay.”

  “That was stupid, Rolf,” he told his friend.

  Stripped of its rhetorical flourishes, Rolf’s reply expressed basic agreement, regret, and discomfort. Maybe I should have guessed that this sort of weapon would throw high at short range, but I was just as pleased with a nonfatal result.

  “Look, guys,” I said, “let’s wrap this up. You got a message off by intercom. We just got a message off by shuttle. Larger forces are going to fight, and nothing we can do inside this mountain will affect that. Whichever side wins will rescue us. So if you give me your full parole, we can put weapons aside, get the medical robots to work on Rolf, and wait out the war. Winners will swear that the losers were model prisoners. Fair enough?”

  “Hell, yes,” said Pro.

  “Sure,” agreed Rolf. “Don’t know what I was thinking of. You were the colonel’s responsibility anyway, he said so. That is the bow he made us give him, isn’t it?”

  “’Fraid so.”

  He sat up, nodding, already very pale. “What did I tell you?” he said to his friend as we helped him to his feet. “Fucking union is a fucking joke.”

  ◆◆◆

  The mercenary guilds have a tradition of scrupulous parole; otherwise, no government would bother holding a union’s prisoners for exchange. Rolf and his leader, whose real name was Achmed, gave us no trouble at all during the next few days, and it was only to humor Ariel that I found a way to lock them in a room of their own at night.

  I crashed pretty hard when the emergency stimulant wore off, just as Foyle had predicted, and the medical machines did good work on my ribs, cuts, and frostbite lesions while I slept. The next day the mercs and I went down and put the Great Coupling back the way it had been. Foyle had either gotten clear or not by then, and I thought we’d be better off in some contingencies if normal radio conditions were restored. But the disturbance I’d started would be a long time fading; in the radio monitor room we still heard nothing but static. No one had ever returned to Level Null’s intercom post. We could do nothing but wait.

  Helen Hogg-Smythe and Harry Lagado occupied themselves with reading texts from the old Elitist computer library on their bedside terminals. Although the old woman had evidently been in terrible shape when the watchers rescued her from the wrecked eel-balloon, she was almost fully cured now; her blood had been cleansed of contaminants, and the damage these had done her liver and kidneys was being repaired.

  Harry had broken one leg in the confusion when his wings burst through the sky barrier, which had been no more than an electrostatic illusion. A robot device had caught the wings before they could smash into the true ceiling above, but Harry—thinking it was attacking him—had twisted in his harness and hurt himself.

  I think he’d been hoping that his father would be resurrected like Helen, but had known better. He was bearing up well. He read quietly or listened, with his apparently genuine historical interest, to Helen’s reminiscences about the days of her youth—the early decades of the previous century.

  For my part, I found it hard to concentrate. Bad futures loomed. A week before, making our plans in the cemetery, we’d only needed to get word to the construction crew in the satellites, and the mercenaries’ attack would have collapsed before it could begin. But now that the mercs owned the satellites, it was not clear what Foyle could do; we hadn’t had time to discuss it. I believed she’d make it back to her freighter—and even pull the freighter out of orbit—without opposition, but then the mercs would be on to her. There were message boats on those satellites; if any of them were armed, they could follow and harry her.

  If she sunplunged, and took word back to authorities in the Column’s central worlds, she and the senator would cross like letters in the space mails, and Mehta would be captured anyway. The fence sitters in the higher circles of the Column would probably just accept the fact of Condé’s victory and cut a deal with him. But if she didn’t sunplunge, her only chance was to intercept the senator’s vessel soon after it emerged into this system—at an unpredictable point in tight solar orbit, where communications would be lousy—and warn him to turn back before her merc pursuers blasted him. Little time in which to maneuver, and too much distance. The more I thought about it, the less chance I thought we had.

  I didn’t burden Ariel with my thoughts, but my attitude depressed her anyway. I was not acting cheerful and righteous as a white-uniformed hero should. She took me aside on the third day and asked if it was really necessary for me to play cards with the mercenaries.

  It was, actually. I’d lost a few hundred munits—on paper—but in the meantime, when Ariel was not around, had managed to brainwash them into accepting the “political agent” story again. Clever, wasn’t it, how I’d infiltrated Condé’s operation as an actor…easy to convince him I could impersonate a government official, since I really was one…not good form to discuss these operational details when the civilians are listening, of course, but have you guys ever considered the advantages of government service? That sort of thing, a form of mental needlework: patching the old cover.

  “Oh, they’re not such bad guys off-duty,” I said. “And it keeps their hands occupied. Speaking of which, if you’re bored, there are some romantic little nooks in the maze⁠…⁠”

  But this didn’t go over either. I could see from the half-horrified, half-baffled look in her eyes that full female sexual amnesia had set in. The old malady. The most passionate woman in the world need only go forty-eight hours without it, and she may suddenly and entirely forget what it’s like, or that she enjoys it. Some bizarre psychobiological short-circuit takes place, causing her to mistake the subject under discussion for something else, satisfying, but too taxing: something no one could expect to do very often at all, or within anything except the cleanest and most quiet surroundings, or at less than a peak of mental and physical readiness—i.e., childbirth.

  This confusion always passes in time, of course. Maybe the delay is its only evolutionary purpose—to winnow out the men who won’t be around next year, next month, next week. The unreliables, the pretenders. The butterflies.

  “Injustice is relatively easy to bear,” said Mencken, a classical sage. “What stings is justice.”

  Another four days passed.

  We didn’t hear the rescuers land on the mountaintop above us, but the confused calling back and forth in the maze brought those of us who were ambulatory out to meet them. I shouted directions into the entrance. Achmed the Pro stood at my side, waiting to receive the crossbow from me if the next uniforms we saw were Iron Brotherhood or militia navy; meanwhile, Ariel wished audibly for a loyal Column marine.

  “It’s all over,” the first arrival said, adding inevitably, “No one has to get hurt.” And I handed the crossbow to Achmed, who assured the merc officer we’d been model prisoners.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The voice crackled at us from over two million kilometers away. “Code responses al
l seem to be in order. Has anything changed since my scout checked in with you? Over.”

  Condé’s voice. The trap I’d entered the first time I’d heard it, weeks that seemed like years ago, was only smaller and tighter now.

  The Iron Brotherhood’s local commander—my Pro, Major Achmed Dubbs—bent over the radio. “No, Sir Maximilien. Ground camp and satellites still secure. Repairs have been made to the senator’s vessel, but I’m afraid his medical condition continues to decline. His own fault for resisting, of course, but⁠…⁠”

  He let his voice trail off—a rhetorical failure, due to the necessity of adding, “Over.” And then there was the time lag; it took the tight beam ten seconds to reach Condé’s yacht, and as long for the Knuckle-Cracker’s reply to come back to us:

  “I want to see the senator alive, one last time. Over.”

  “So your scout informed us. But even three days ago he was too weak to be moved, and he’s worse now. I’m glad you got here before we lost him, Sir Maximilien. Over.”

  Twenty seconds elapsed. Not a short time.

  “You may call me Admiral now, I think. Over.” The merc major twisted his face in frustration. At these distances, most people avoid small talk.

  “Considering the time factor, Admiral, we expect you’ll want to dock directly with the senator’s yacht. I am already here. The prize crew will be standing by. Suggest we reconcile orbits when you’re somewhat closer. Over.”

  Another twenty-second lag, and—I reflected gloomily—Condé already thousands of kilometers nearer.

  “At my current rate of deceleration, we should be able to dock in just under two hours,” he said. “Over and out.”

  “Base out.” Major Dubbs stretched, leaning back in one of the roomy swivel chairs. The bridge of Senator Mehta’s yacht was lit like a nightclub—no overheads, pools of intensity on low surfaces, a colorful central holo tank.

  “Well,” said the mercenary finally, “he seems to have bought it. Do I get to attend the party?”