by John Grant
"Any signs of life from the other side of either of the doors?"
"Nothing. But I'm not surprised. After all, the damn' things are about a meter thick. And solid."
Suddenly she smiled, like dawn. She put her right hand in the light of his torch and he could see a massive bruise across the back of it, staining the darkness of her skin even darker. She must have done some hammering on the doors as he slept.
His immediate reaction was to take her hand in one of his own, but she pulled her arm swiftly away.
"It doesn't hurt," she said. "I've told it not to. I'd teach you how to tell your foot to stop hurting, too, but it would take more time than it's worth."
Her mention of his foot reminded him of its presence. The effects of the painkiller were beginning to wear off. This was something he could deal with himself, without her help. He opened his medikit, dug out the hypo and sprayed himself on the back of the wrist – as good a place as any. He saw her watching him do this and interpreted the expression on her face as patronizing. She looked away boredly. As the pain began to ebb again he nodded at her, not really liking her, far too aware of the fact that he was having to rely on chemicals for analgesia. It seemed she could do without.
Her hands were moving rapidly over the contours of the box as if she were trying somehow to sense through her fingertips what might be hidden within. Her attention was completely devoted to the task; she didn't see his nod. The skin of her face was drawn tautly across her cheekbones as she concentrated, the peaks pale against the darkness, and he realized how birdlike her whole body could seem. Yet normally she didn't give the appearance of being slight.
She looked back at him abruptly and saw he'd been observing her. Behind the windows of her thin-rimmed spectacles her dark eyes tightened in irritation, and then she turned once more to her exploration of the box. Her lips formed a single straight line.
"D'you think we're likely to get out of here?" he asked, more because he wanted to hear the sound of a voice – even his own – than because he seriously expected an answer.
"Fount of silly bloody questions, aren't you, Makreed?" she said, but without any malice. "Either we will or we won't. I'm hoping one of these boxes might turn out to be a key to the doors. Now, stop interrupting my thoughts and let me get on with it. Besides, remember the air. Again."
He was offended. The emotion annoyed him by its pettiness, but there was no escaping it. She was assuming he was an incompetent simply because his foot had been damaged. He had an insight into what it must be like for all those sorry people who'd irreversibly maimed themselves or had one of the debilitating diseases yet had no wish to choose to euth out of it. The thought of spending eternity being treated as useless appalled him. It hurt him to realize that, as far as Mouse was concerned, he was just an additional factor to be taken into account while she tried to find some way of getting the doors open.
He shuffled on his knees across to the next box, dusted it off like last time, and began running his hands across it in imitation of her. All he felt was smooth, cool metal, as he imagined the black planes of Mouse's back must feel. But this thing – it was an object, nothing more. It was a blank cuboid that some unknown ET had planted here for alien reasons the human species would never discover. He was getting nothing from it, not even a sense that it had been crafted rather than being a product of nature. He shoved at it impatiently, hoping to get some idea of its mass, but his senses refused to tell him anything.
He sat back and again watched Mouse at work. Once more he felt that curious magnetism emanating from her body. How come, then, that he'd never really noticed her before? The position she'd adopted, squatting down intently, was making her uniform trousers stretch over her buttocks, and he felt a foolish urge to reach out and touch the tautness. Only the thought of her contempt stayed his hand.
Makreed was an old acquaintance of lust, but he'd never expected it would wind its webs around him in a situation like this – trapped hundreds of meters underground with little hope of escape, his right foot wrapped in a bloodied bandage. He wondered if the heaviness at his loins was a natural response to the prospect of death.
Mouse froze.
~
"Hello."
"Hello there."
"I recognize you. Haven't we met somewhere before?"
"I don't think so, but if that's what you'd like to believe then please feel free to carry on believing it."
"I like the way you're touching me."
"Why, thank you. It gives me very great pleasure to touch you like this."
"Are you sure we haven't met somewhere before?"
"Very sure. But why should that stop us from becoming friends now? I feel that you and I could become very close to each other – don't you?"
"Yes ... yes. It's a good feeling, this learning to know you better. I'd like to be your friend. Syor was very kind to me when she made me, you know; she allowed for the fact that I could make friends whenever I wanted to. It's been a very long time, though, since someone has asked to be my friend."
"You must have been lonely."
"'Lonely'?"
"Sad when you were without friends."
"No. No, not at all. That was one of her further kindnesses. I feel all the joys of being close to others, as we are becoming, but in the intervening times I do not feel any sorrow that I am not in this pleasurable state. That would not be constructive. Or perhaps it was simply something Syor forgot to give me: she was a very simple person, in many ways, before she became our god. I am sorry you feel this sense that you call 'loneliness.' It must be very painful for you."
"It gives me no pain. It is simply something I feel. I feel many things, but few of them cause me either pain or pleasure. And none intolerably so."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, of course I am."
"But now I am beginning to come so very, very close to you, Qinefer, now you have permitted me to venture within your wall, I find you are capable of feeling pain. You have a greater capacity for pain than any of the other Qinefers who have come to me."
"I do not want to discuss this subject any further. If you're really the friend of mine you say you are, you'll know it would be better to talk about something else."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hurt you."
"You didn't hurt me. You can't hurt me."
"But I know I did. You perplex me, friend ... lover. (I may call you that, may I not? 'Lover'?) There is no reason for you to lie to me. I spoke with you about the pains and pleasures you feel, and you told me they did not exist. Now I sense – as if it were through your own senses – that my thoughts have hurt you very deeply, and I wish to make reparation. Please, if you are my friend, let me do so."
"You intrude into my privacy."
"Friends as close as we are have no privacy, one from the other. Everything of me is laid out naked before you, for you to look at as much as you will. I have no secrets from you."
~
"No!" yelled Mouse, throwing herself backwards from the box, scrabbling clumsily across the dusty carpet of the floor. "Leave me alone, fuck you! Leave me alone!"
~
Makreed was shocked out of his reflections. Instinctively he moved towards her, but she was crouching against the far wall, her eyes fixed on him with feral intensity, her narrow chest moving in time with the harsh sounds of her breathing. He remembered once having come across a motto that read "Touch not the cat, but with a glove." He eased himself back out of range.
"Are you OK?" he said after a while, carefully modulating his voice so that it was as unobtrusive as possible.
"Sod off."
Another extended silence between them. She wasn't any longer panting in those great tormented gusts, but she was still breathing more loudly than he was. He remembered her admonitions to him about the need to conserve the air in this confined space, and found that his lips were beginning to curl into a smile.
Eventually he spoke again.
"Did the box give you som
e kind of a shock? Are the boxes dangerous?"
"No. Yes."
"Ah ..."
"No, it didn't shock me. Yes, they're dangerous. Not dangerous to you, perhaps. I would guess you don't dream very often."
"What are you talking about?"
"The boxes are dangerous to me. At least, that one is. I don't want you here. Go away."
"If I could do that, neither of us'd be here at all." He gestured with his torch at the walls surrounding them. Then, in an attempt to reassure her, he manoeuvred himself on hands and buttocks until he was an extra meter or so further away from her.
She moved her hands in a small gesture of gratitude, an empty recognition of courtesy. He could still feel the hatred radiating from her.
"What happened?" he asked softly. "It wouldn't hurt you to tell me what happened."
"I don't want to talk about it. Only ... could you please turn your torch away so that the light doesn't reflect on your face?"
Puzzled, he obeyed, directing the beam into what he thought of as a neutral corner.
"Is that better?"
"Much. Thanks."
There was just enough stray light on her that he could see her shudder. He shifted uncomfortably on the hard floor.
"Can I help?" he said.
"No. No one can. For now. Maybe later – I just don't know that. But not now. Certainly not now."
~
She didn't know what she could say to him. She had always been fairly good at reading body language, so that she usually had a reasonably clear idea of other people's unspoken thoughts. Sometimes she got it wrong, of course, and that could be embarrassing, but most often she was uncannily accurate. On several occasions she had had very good reason to be grateful to the ability.
She pulled her spectacles off her nose, and the poorly lit chamber became a reassuring dim blur. For a few moments she let all knowledge of Makreed's existence drop out of her awareness and appraised her situation.
This was worse – much worse – than anything she could have imagined. The box, with its intrusive "closeness" to her, had made new linkages in her mind, or maybe they'd always been there but she'd consciously or unconsciously left them neglected, like a dark alley down which, although it would shorten the journey, one chooses not to go. Now she had no option but to go down all the alleys.
Makreed changed his position again and, even though the movement represented just a tiny change in the fuzz of her vision, it conveyed to her precisely his emotions and to a great extent also his conscious thoughts. There was bafflement, of course – but she could have guessed that much; she must, as far as he was concerned, be acting in a completely irrational, inexplicable way. There was also a fair measure of irritated impatience, directed both towards her and towards the situation in which he found himself trapped. Fear; there was no obvious indication that they'd be able to escape from this place before the air ran out. And then there was ... her mind recoiled. He was also wondering, in a curiously unwilling affectionate way, how to suggest to her it might be good if the two of them made love.
Now?
Here?
With him?
Was he nuts?
And then she found herself smiling. She didn't want to make love with Makreed – here or anywhere else – but the mere fact he was thinking along these lines was oddly cheering. And there was sufficient genuine affection in his thoughts that it might be possible for her to explain to him the changes the box had wrought in her mind. It had been a very long time since she'd wanted to share any part of her burdens with another human being. It would be a relief to do so now. She could have been stuck here with companions a lot less sympathetic than Makreed.
"No," she said abruptly, "I don't want us to make love."
He made a small startled movement. There was a little guilt in it, and she regretted that. There was no reason for him to have to feel guilty.
She explained as much to him, and then went on to tell him all the rest of it.
~
"Telepathy," he said at last. He'd taken yet another shot of the painkiller, and his speech was beginning to slur a little.
"No, I don't mean that at all," she snapped, then wished she'd been able to keep the worst of the acerbity out of her voice. As if to divert attention, she picked at the nails of her foot, fastidiously discarding the detritus on the floor beside her. "No," she said more calmly, "it's not at all like telepathy. Shine your torch into your face – just for a moment – and I'll tell you why this is so different."
Makreed found himself reluctant to obey. Had she asked him to strip naked he would have felt the same sort of reluctance. He was aware he had already come to regard Mouse as a person who was very special; only an hour ago he had rather disliked her, and until a few hours before that he'd dismissed her as a nonentity. He was by no means confident she'd experienced the same shift in affection towards him. She might look at his nakedness and not like what she saw – not have the willingness to forgive the fleshly bulges. She might be unable not to laugh at him.
He was aghast at his insecurity; he thought it was something that he'd lost long ago, after the first time he'd slept with Direna and he'd been for once impotent from nerves, and it hadn't mattered. The women he'd slept with since the split with Direna had never produced this sort of reaction; he guessed, now, that he hadn't really cared about them enough as people to worry what they thought about him. But Mouse was a person. And she was asking him to bare himself to her in a much more intimate way than sheer physical nakedness. He didn't know if he could.
He decided the issue by pointing the torch so briefly onto his face that the light scarcely had time to touch his features. He let out a great sigh of relief as his eyes tried to accommodate to the gloom once more.
"If I were a telepath," Mouse was saying, "I'd be able to tell you the name of your ex-whilemate. No. Hang on. She's still your whilemate. The two of you haven't got round to divorcing each other yet. Anyway, even though there's no way I can tell her name, I can read that you're still missing her – not to mention the child, I'm pretty certain it's a son, you had with her. You liked kicking a football around with your child and generally being a father; that's the main thing you miss about your child."
Makreed couldn't stop a thin little hiss of pain. He'd thought he'd finally persuaded himself to forget about Branden except as a sort of abstract fact. Now he saw a moving portmanteau image composed of freckles and bruised knees and shitty nappies – that had been a long time ago, surely – and, yes, just like Mouse had said, kicking a ball around. He wanted to see Branden's face, but the image vanished too swiftly.
He wished he could remember for himself what Branden's face looked like.
"I'm sad for you," Mouse continued, not looking up. By now she'd moved on to the toes of her other foot.
"In what sense?" he said at last. Keeping the words calm hurt him more than his injury had done.
"Oh, I don't know. In your attitude toward me. In your attitude toward other people – especially women. I was able to read from your face that you still yearn after your lost whilemate, even though nowadays you never let yourself think so. That's a pity. You've been like an alcoholic or a junkie ever since, except it's been with sex. Each new fix is vaguely pleasurable but it doesn't give you the kind of transcendental high you think it ought to, so you keep on going, taking another fix and another and another, each time expecting that this time it's going to be everything you ever hoped it might be."
She wasn't looking at him now.
"If you want my advice," she added, "I suggest you try to get things together with your whilemate again."
"Direna," he heard himself say. "That's her name."
For several long seconds he toyed with vivid fantasies of killing Mouse. She'd said the boxes were dangerous to her, not to him. Then the anger ebbed, leaving behind it a glow of some emotion he couldn't readily identify.
"Why did the box affect you this much?"
"Because it brought me to the edg
e of what I am," she said, very quietly. "Because it made me face up to the fact that we're extremely unlikely to get out of here. You. Me. The cusp of the two of us."
"The box has given you something?"
"Too true."
"Could it maybe give you that something again? More than that. Could it tell you how we might get out of this fucking place?"
He picked up a handful of dust from the floor and threw it away from him – a pointless gesture that made him feel better. He was cleansing himself of the memories of Direna, and Branden. Direna hadn't just left him, she'd left him for somebody else, with whom she was manifestly much happier. In a moment of honesty, before the memory died, he admitted to himself what Mouse had been unable to read in his face: that he'd rather Direna had died.
"Yes, I think it might," said Mouse. It took him a second or two to realize she was talking about the box. "But I don't want to try."
"Aw, for ..."
"It touched me," said Mouse.
He snorted theatrically, consciously revitalizing the fading embers of his anger. "And that's more important than getting us out?"
"In some circumstances, yes."
Her voice was very small, but he chose to ignore that.
"You're so kind," he said. "If you want to die, that's your affair. I'd rather like to try to keep on living. Do you think the box would speak to me?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because the box loves me, and it doesn't love you."
"Thanks."
"Sorry."
"Do you think," he said with heavy sarcasm, "I might be permitted to ask the box's opinion?"
Makreed hauled himself forwards, letting the beam of his torch wander where it wanted to. He threw himself onto the box beside Mouse, wrapping both of his arms around it, and waited for it to speak to him.
Nothing.
The box was an inert lump of metal, just as he'd known it would be. It was like all the other boxes he'd touched down here in the complex.
"All right," he said resentfully, after a long while, "the only way we can hope to get these doors open is if you speak to the box a little while longer. I can't do it."
