The Wave and the Flame

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  “It is the story when Valla forget…” His surgeon’s fingers mimed a one-handed tying of a knot. “She forget tying the clouds on the Vallegar.” He lowered the lamp. On the next panel, the staunch figure of the goddess, long curls and garments flying, pursued across fanglike mountain peaks a herd of amoebic shapes that had grown heads and tails.

  Stavros smiled in spite of himself, and was relieved to see a broad grin stretch Liphar’s face as he read the panels. This was his first hint that not all the SisterTales were deadly serious. “So Valla can be forgetful… What happened?”

  Ghirra consulted the door. “It’s hard to explain,” he stated finally.

  Stavros started, hearing Susannah’s exact intonation in his reply. The man’s a superb mimic! No wonder his English is so good.

  “I’ll bet Lagri took full advantage of that,” he suggested.

  Liphar finished reading with a laugh, pointing out the bottom panel. “That time much wager lost!”

  Ghirra’s smile was tolerant, but clearly implied that he had not come this far to reread old legends. He lowered the lamp to check its oil reservoir, then passed it to Liphar. He grasped the stout door handle and pulled. The huge door swung on its hinges without a sound.

  Inside was a small chamber, disturbingly reminiscent to Stavros of a ship’s airlock. A second, less decorative panel with practical wooden knobs confronted them, set in a faceless wall. Liphar cradled the lamp protectively, nodding his readiness as Ghirra reached for the door.

  It opened with a whoosh that sucked at the insides of their ears. Beyond the opening was darkness and the deep hollow moan of air rushing upward. A place of infinite possibility, of genuine storybook mystery. Stavros’s spine tingled. He was already having a very good time, despite Ghirra’s somber mood, and knew he would have to watch himself carefully.

  Liphar went in first, with the lamp. The flame danced against the glass chimney like an imprisoned djinn. It lit up a brief landing, and a wide spiral stair that curled both up and downward from where they stood, wrapping around a giant hollow sheath of tubing, fat white pipes like those in the BathHall, slimmer ones of glazed terra-cotta, and bundles of still-thinner pipe, greenishly translucent, all surrounding a dark inner shaftway whose height and diameter could only be hinted at by the howling insistence of the updraft.

  Lamp in hand, Liphar started down the stairs. His earlier surprise at their destination had been subdued by his obvious eagerness to get there. Stavros followed at Ghirra’s signal, and found himself hugging the outer curve of the wall, wishing for handholds or a railing. The singing void of the shaftway was visible in long night-black gaps between the runs of pipe. He could feel its vertiginous presence like a worm in the pit of his stomach, and for the first time in many days, he worried for his grip on his old panic reflex. It was one thing to go with the excitement of the adventure, another entirely to disgrace himself before the Master Healer, whose opinion had begun to matter a great deal to him. Beyond the few steps within the circle of Liphar’s lamp, the stairway dropped into darkness. Stavros put a hand to the wall for psychic anchoring and discovered that it was extraordinarily smooth, like polished marble.

  Or glass.

  It glimmered faintly in the lamplight, seamless, crackless, without bump or blemish. His fingertips were mesmerized by the perfection of its arc. No anchoring to be found there, not in such dreamlike flawlessness. Then he began to notice the heat.

  The updraft was not just warmed, as if from the cozy body heat of the inner living quarters. It was hot. And dry. The impossibly smooth glass wall, enclosing them like a giant crystal tube, was warm to the touch.

  Stavros’s control slipped another notch, almost without his noticing. His brain conjured a mammoth furnace waiting below. The literary image of a descent into hell brought a curve to his lips. He followed Liphar with building excitement, down, down and around in endless dizzy spirals, until the heat and his growing giddiness and the rush of air lifting his damp hair awoke a seductive thrilling in him.

  And he knew he had missed walking the edge, during these many days of keeping himself wrapped tight, of driving himself without rest for the sake of his newly assumed purpose. In this singeing darkness, it was hard to recall the responsibilities of the daylight, easy to forget why the restraints were necessary. He regretted that such fearful pleasures required the sacrifice of his dignity, but as always before, the precipice drew him and he made the trade willingly. He heard music and let it vibrate through his internal spaces. The mystery of it enveloped him, the mystery he had waited to see revealed. He was descending into it, step by dizzying step, with Liphar his Virgil, the flame held high to light the path. He laughed in great gulping breaths and felt he must kneel in gratitude for this revelation, but as his knees buckled, a strong arm caught him from behind. A slight muscular body supported his fall and pressed a practiced hand to the back of his neck to force his head between his knees until the dizziness passed.

  When Stavros could breathe evenly again, Ghirra eased him against the wall and tipped his chin into the lamplight, firmly prying back an eyelid, brushing back his hair to feel his brow. He pressed both palms to Stavros’s temples and let them rest there. Their gentle pressure seemed to suction the panic from behind Stavros’s eyes. He groaned and struggled to sit upright, to shake off these hands with life and energy all their own. He inhaled deeply, met Ghirra’s calm gaze, then let his head slump to his chest.

  Ghirra read his shame accurately. “Sleep you need,” he commented with faint disapproval.

  “Ibi?” Liphar knelt beside him in concern. He, who knew Stavros better than any other Sawl, was no stranger to these moments, yet this had seemed worse than a mere outburst of panic.

  Stavros raged inwardly at his own weakness. “I’m hopeless, Lifa,” he whispered.

  “No,” stated the healer with casual conviction. “But you hear too well the voice inside, ’TavrosIbia.”

  Stavros looked up at him, astonished. “Yes. How did you know?”

  Ghirra smiled gently. “Ibi, it is my work, as the words are yours.”

  Moved, Stavros nodded, though the gesture felt hugely inadequate.

  “And I say sleep you need.” Ghirra grasped his arm. “Come, you walk now, yes?”

  “Yes. My thanks, GuildMaster.” Stavros stood with their help, then eased himself free to stand alone. That Ghirra should treat his fit of imbalance as merely exhaustion-induced was somehow stabilizing. “I’ll be fine now,” he assured them, for of course he would be, until the next time he was indulgent enough to let his unconscious take him by storm. He was tired, but mostly of his own weakness, that he had indulged for so long, that kept him now from truly trusting his own ability to cope with responsibility. He thought of his purpose, of Megan’s plan, of the Sawls’ future, all dependent perhaps on his success or failure. How could he presume to take on such responsibility for others if he must always rely on having a McPherson around to slap him out of panic, or a Ghirra to hold him back from the void? Praying for strength, Stavros swore there would be no more indulgences.

  Maybe Ghirra’s right. Maybe what I’ve needed all along was a little more sleep. The absurdity of it made him laugh, and the laughter too was steadying. He urged Liphar onward and followed with a firmer step.

  Moving downward, he counted stairs, and the tiny landings where other levels and half-levels accessed into the shaft. At major intersections, sections of the central pipe column bent away from the shaft, crossed over the stairs and vanished into horizontal tunnels of their own. The black gaps leading to the void widened.

  He wondered where he was. They had entered the shaft on the third level, the level of the RangerGuild and the MeetingHall, among others. Stavros had kept track that far before surrendering to Ghirra’s lead. So far they had passed three major landings on the way down the shaft, the second or stable level, the unused first level and… and what? They were now on a stretch of stair that had descended unbroken by landings or openings of any sort fo
r quite a while.

  Well below plains level, then, Stavros guessed. Have to be.

  And then, surprisingly, there were others on the stair. Two old women came toiling upward in the heat, sharing a lamp and identical peaceful expressions. A young priest bounded past, a tiny lamp clutched in one hand, his embroidered wave-and-flame tabard bouncing against his chest. He panted a hurried greeting to Liphar without breaking his breathless ascent. As they continued downward, the roaring of the updraft lessened but the darkness and the heat did not, until a deadening of the echoes announced the bottom of the spiral and a cooler crossdraft floated past to refresh them.

  Liphar stopped on the last step and held up the lamp. Above their heads, the pipes angled out of the shaft to run along the high ceiling of a corridor that led out of the shaft and slanted still deeper into the rock. At the bottom of the shaft was a broad circular depression. Stavros stepped down into the middle of it and stood gawking upward in wonder. He could see nothing but fat pipes fading into a central core of darkness, but the configuration struck resonances with other more familiar structures, such as the lift shaft of the Lander or the inner service columns common to the high-rise architecture of Earth. But what might be common on Earth was on Fiix such a miracle of engineering that even his wonder seemed inadequate.

  He looked to Liphar, then to Ghirra with a feeble shrug. “So big. And so… perfectly round.”

  Ghirra motioned him out of the shaft bottom with a laugh. “Wait, you,” he promised. He took the lamp and led the way down the tall ramping corridor. Heat radiated from the suspended piping but the cooler draft continued to whisper across their faces. In the bouncing lamplight, Stavros could see that unlike the more rough-hewn excavations of the upper caves, this corridor had exact corners. Floor and walls and he assumed the ceiling, invisible in darkness, met at clean right angles. Their surfaces were as utterly smooth as the wall of the shaftway, but they were not glass, rather a pale granular stone. The floor hollowed slightly toward the center of the corridor, a mark of long wear and the passage of countless footsteps. The walls bore faint areas of darkness at the heights of hip and shoulder. Stavros touched the staining.

  “Old, old, old,” he murmured, and knew Weng’s speculation was right. Some other Sawls, some former technological giants. had built these corridors. What had become of them? How could the Sawls have no memory of such a glorious past? Could it be, as Ghirra implied, that their histories were completely buried in myth?

  A gargle passed through the’ pipes overhead, some liquid message speeding uplevel. He felt no drips, heard no hiss of escaping steam. The joints were tight and clean.

  Still. After how many hundreds of years?

  Ahead, there was light. Ghirra extinguished the lamp, and carried it swinging at his side to the light station at the end of the corridor. The light leaked through a pair of towering double doors, one of which was ajar. Ghirra pulled it open and motioned Stavros in.

  He entered a vast space suffused by a cool greenish glow. A vast space but not an empty space, so that an understanding of its monumental size could only be grasped from the number and enormity of the objects within it. These objects were cylinders, at least fifteen meters high and six or seven wide, like mammoth Doric columns but too broad and too closely spaced for their purpose to be mere support. Stavros had a flashing vision of the PriestHall and thought he understood now what architecture it attempted to mimic. From the entrance, their surfaces appeared smoothly glossy. As he moved in among them, dwarfed by their bulk, Stavros saw that the shine was actually a glint off fine vertical ribbing. Light penetrated the furrowed surface until swallowed within the depths of the material. The cylinders were greenly transparent if viewed sideways along their curve, but opaque if looked at straight on, attempting to peer into their interior.

  More glass, thought Stavros. He knocked the ribbed surface with a tentative knuckle.

  “This is Eles-Nol,’ Ghirra said with quiet ceremony.

  “What is it?”

  The Master Healer shook his head. “First, you look.” He let his arm sweep the hall, then pointed upward.

  A grid of slim pipes was suspended from the ceiling to join the tops of the cylinders to the bundles of smaller pipe entering from the shaftway. Stavros traced the route from cylinder to corridor and back again. The fatter pipes, the terra-cotta and white, continued on between the rows of cylinders without connecting. Liphar danced at Stavros’s side, urging him onward, but Ghirra stayed him, waiting for Stavros’s reaction to what he was seeing. He touched the linguist’s elbow and led him around one immense circular base. On the far side, a slender glass pipe dropped from above, nestled in the ribbing. It passed through a low tiled shelf set with a small ceramic valve. Embedded in the shelf was a glass disk with a tiny hole in its center. Ghirra crouched, reached under the shelf and drew out a hand-sized box. It was a more elaborate version of the wood-and-emery strikers carried in the base of every large oil lamp. The physician twisted a valve gently and put the striker to the glass disk. At his spark, a flame jumped up, hot yellow and orange, then as Ghirra adjusted the valve, settled into a pencil-thin blue spear. He rose and stood back. Liphar whispered a small priestly incantation and settled himself on the floor in front of the flame.

  “Gas.” Stavros gazed around, trying to take it all in slowly. “Storage tanks. Giant glass storage tanks.” He decided that nothing he might learn about the Sawls would amaze him anymore. He reached down and passed his finger quickly through the flame and felt the compact sear of its heat. “I saw this in the StoryHall.”

  “Yes. Shallagri,” replied Ghirra, none too reverently.

  “The Breath of Lagri,” Stavros translated. “But you have it in Physicians’ as well.”

  “And in the StoryHall of Valla. Then the priests say the small fire is the color of her eyes.” Ghirra stooped and adjusted the flame more to his liking. “But in Physician’s, we use to make sterile. Also to cook the medicines.” Practical uses, his half-smile implied.

  “Natural gas?” asked Stavros. Clausen’d sure like to know, if it is!

  “Hjuon. I do not know how you name it.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “It is there, in the nol, the rock. From the Goddesses, the priests say.”

  “And you say?”

  For an answer, Ghirra laid a gentle hand on Liphar’s shoulder to break the young man from his contemplation of the flame. Liphar smiled up at them as radiantly as if Lagri herself had been speaking to him. Ghirra bent to close the valve and the flame died. “Come. More there is.”

  He allowed Liphar the choice of path through the towering forest of cylinders. The air was still abnormally warm but not unpleasant. A faint continuous whispering filled the hall, reminding Stavros of the sighing of a quiet sea at night. As they wandered, they passed several cylinders where the tiny gas flame burned in its glass disk. At each flame, a silent Sawl or two or three sat cross-legged, staring into the blue fire with the rapt concentration of deep meditation. Farther along, they met a trio of elderly priests walking along the rows, chatting quietly like monks in a cloister. They nodded a serene greeting and passed on. Liphar’s nervous pace had relaxed into calm elation. He led them proudly, without urgency, finding a joy in his surroundings that Stavros could not help but envy. Even Ghirra seemed willing to let their progress take its own time. The green luminescence of the glass was restful, the soft warm air as comforting as sleep. Stavros held back a sigh. Once he had stood in a redwood grove at dawn. Not until this moment had he sensed a deeper, older peace.

  Then, as they came around the glimmering base of a cylinder, they faced a series of wide steps leading down to a stretch of open floor. At last, the astounding dimensions of the hall were fully visible. A half acre away, within a space the height of a five-storied house, sat three final cylinders. They were larger than the others by half, and set in a close triangle around a circular tiled platform. Laid into the stone floor in slabs of white marble, so that each cylin
der sat within a circle, was the same three-ringed symbol that decorated the floor of the FriezeHall. But here, the circles were unbroken.

  Again, Ghirra drew Stavros’s attention to the tops of the cylinders. A halo of heavy white pipe hung above each domed summit, receiving the big white pipes entering from the shaftway. The halo connected with the cylinder at several points around its perimeter. The smaller terra-cotta pipes ran directly to the cylinders’ sides. From the apex of each cylinder’s dome, a single greenish pipe rose and angled across the vast open plaza to join the network above the storage tanks.

  At Ghirra’s nod, Liphar led them down the wide shallow stairs and across the plaza to the steeper steps of the circular platform. A horseshoe of pipes filled the space between the platform and the three cylinders, making connections with them here and there, then running off behind. From the top of the platform, a triangle of railed wooden gangways arched over the horseshoe of piping, one to meet each cylinder. The smooth-milled ancient wood seemed worlds apart from the sleek tech of the glass and ceramic, yet within the confines of the giant underground cavern, curiously at home. Where gangways and cylinders joined, there seemed to be a hatch in the glass. At least Stavros could see what might be handles, though no openings were apparent.

  Liphar laid a thin hand on Stavros’s arm and guided him up the steps as if bringing him into a Presence. Ghirra followed almost reluctantly, hands shoved into the pockets of his smock. A circular structure dominated the center of the platform. It was nearly two meters across, waist-high, like a drum of greenish glass, but topped with a clear glass dome. Stavros leaned over to peer through the thick transparency of the lid, and saw a rosy lavender sparkle.