by John Farris
When it seemed to be too much trouble, he let go of Lem and fell back, turned over on his side, let himself drift in the compelling tide created by the core.
Raun's face, lugubrious as a clown's, was close to his. Her mouth moved slowly. The sounds she made bore no relationship to speech. He had to laugh. His head rolled slowly, drunkenly, on his shoulders.
So this was what it was all about. In the end, Death teased, cajoled, seduced. There was no trauma, no pain. All the psychic agony of his own grim advances, his attempts to push himself deeper into the mystery without forfeit, had not prepared him for the ease he felt at this moment of transition.
"No!” Raun screamed.
She was pulling at him. Jade felt vaguely irritated, and opened his eyes.
The Catacombs trembled. The power of it, counter to the gradually increasing vibrations in his own body, the low hum of forgetfulness, disturbed him. He sat up. Raun's voice was a low-comedy basso.
"Matt–commmmingggg–toooo–helppppp–ussss." Then he saw them: the woman with the cast on her arm, beside her a tall bony hooded figure. He felt his heart constrict. Here was Death personified. He looked again. Death was wearing mud-caked sneakers and carrying a flashlight with a vivid pink beam.
A flood of weeping burst from him; thick tears oozed down his face. He crawled to Lem and took him by one arm. Oliver Ijumaa grasped the other arm. Erika embraced Raun, then pointed the way they had come and shook her head. Raun didn't understand at first.
"What's the matter?"
"Blocked. Rockslide. Can't get out."
Jade, realizing something was wrong, left Lem with Oliver and came slowly to Erika. She explained their predicament through gestures and groaning words.
"Another way out?"
Erika shook her head, a big lolling motion. "Don't knowwww."
"Have to–get away from that," Jade moaned. He meant the mad redness of the core. "How?"
Erika plucked at his sleeve. "One of the chambers. Inside. Maybe a chance."
With a huge effort Jade and Oliver lifted Lem to one of the entry ports and dragged him through it to a second-level chamber. Erika and Raun followed. Inside there was almost no light at all. Jade, feeling his movements somewhat less restricted this far from the core, took the flashlight and shone it through the red haze.
He saw chaos. Sarcophagi were upended, the machines of a long-dead civilization had been jammed together by a seizure of the mountain. The diorama at the far end of the chamber was buckling, and razor-edged shards of crystal showered down at each new convulsion.
Erika touched him again. "Wait." Jade turned the light on her face.
"Who are you?"
"Erika Weller." Their speech was still distorted, but not as drastically as it had been close to the core. Still she had the feeling that it was only a matter of time, they would be caught again as the death throes of the core continued.
"What happened outside? Where's the Russian?"
She shrugged, too tired for lengthy explanations. "Dead."
"The way out?"
"The gully is jammed with rock and debris. We barely made it back before–we were trapped."
"You spent a lot of time in the Catacombs," Jade said. "You must have found other entrances."
"No." She sagged. "There's nothing. God help us all."
He lost patience and shook her. "There has to be a way! How many rooms are there like this one?"
"Dozens."
"That's several million cubic yards of material. They may have been supermen, but they still had to have a way of getting rid of the excavated rock. Their best bet was just to dump it down the side of the mountain."
"I don't know how they did it."
Raun came up to them. "Matt? What are we going to do?"
"Stay here with the others," Jade said. He turned to Erika. "Do you have another flashlight?"
"Yes," Erika said.
"Okay. Don't use it unless you have to."
"Where are you going?" Raun asked him.
"Exploring." He had a coughing fit. "While I can still move." He had begun to feel the lethargy again, the longing for the peace of the oscillating core. He bit his tongue for the taste of blood, the mind-clearing pain, and set off, still carrying the pack with the plastic explosives and detonator.
A dozen feet away he could no longer make out the others, waiting behind him in the bloody darkness. The beam of his light wisped through the haze of the chamber. The floor was uneven, made treacherous by pieces of crystal that were sharp enough to slice through boot leather.
In sidelong tombs he saw imperial catlike faces, eyes that in a better light would have been amber. Erika had cautioned him; he avoided looking directly into those eyes. He was chilled. He came to a fallen tomb that had been cracked lengthwise, exposing a shaped cavity roughly the size of one of the small but princely men. The floor trembled; bits of pulverized glass pattered down and though he covered his face with his arms he felt the bite of hall on the backs of his hands, the welling of blood.
When Jade looked up again he heard the chirp-cry of an excited cheetah not far away. He swung the light to his left and had a glimpse of spotted hide, a feline grin, as the animal rose from the littered floor in a manlike playful leap and nearly disappeared behind a block of odd-looking metal machinery. All that remained was a tall twitching tail, two thirds the length of the supple body he had seen.
He advanced cautiously on that tuft of tail, which was motionless for eight or ten seconds. He felt a hammering excitement against the wall of his chest. If the cheetah was here, then it had sought shelter from the impending catastrophe outside. Which meant a passage of some sort. One way of finding it was to drive the cheetah back the way it had come.
The tail abruptly disappeared. Jade ran forward, stumbling, almost losing his balance, casting the light around. From the dark he heard a spitting sound, and momentarily was confused. Had the cat doubled back on him? It might have been half crazed by the continual shaking of the Catacombs. Perhaps it meant to attack him. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck going stiff with alarm. He stopped and listened, moving his light slowly. He was sweating heavily, losing strength as he neared the point of dehydration. Not much time, he knew. The odds favoring survival had become incalculably long.
Then he saw it again, the face this time, the small neat head, the alert rounded ears. The cat was looking down at him from a perch a few feet above the floor of the chamber, barred face inscrutable. Nothing frenzied about the way the cheetah sat and observed him. A kind of distant curiosity in the somnolent eyes.
Jade felt a dizzying apprehension, because he couldn't be sure that he wasn't hallucinating.
He pressed on, trying to keep his light on the face of the cheetah. Its eyes became slits. It snarled at his approach but rather half-heartedly, and showed no signs of tension or a willingness to bolt.
When he was within ten feet, the big cat, with the deftness of a stage magician, went almost straight up in the air again. It came down facing away from him then leaped sinuously over a crooked line of sarcophagi, a jump that might have taken it ten feet from the floor, and just vanished, despite his efforts to keep the light trained on the tawny body.
He was sure then that he was in a dreaming state of shock, that nothing he'd seen for the last few minutes was real. He was as lost as if he were shipwrecked on a vast stretch of sea, with no hope for salvation. But he approached the massive wall of sarcophagi, some of which had been jarred out of place by the repeated quakes. Perfectly preserved cat-men looked down on him. He felt humbled by their immortality.
Jade felt too tired to continue. The flashlight in his hand dipped. The beam picked out a shaft in the floor partly uncovered by the movement of one of the sarcophagi, not quite enough space for a full-grown man to squeeze into.
In the shaft he saw the glowing upturned face of the cheetah; a wide-open, toothy snarl that was like a soundless command.
He made his way back across the floor to the others.
"I found something. Don't know what. It may be a chance."
Lem was semiconscious, helpless. Jade gave him oxygen, then Oliver carried Lem on his back. Oliver's sneakers were in shreds, his feet bleeding. He uttered no word of complaint.
When they reached the tomb that had concealed the shaft, Jade had Oliver put the wounded Lem down.
He put a hand on the crystal tomb that still blocked most of the entry to the shaft. "We have to heave it over," he said to them. "All of us together might be able to do it." Along with the offensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers, he thought. The tomb was a monster. He hoped that fear would give them strength. He hoped for a miracle.
They all had enough left for one desperate try. For four or five seconds the sarcophagus withstood their screaming, grunting efforts. Then it moved. Six inches, eight. The four of them collapsed in a dazed heap beside the opening to the shaft. The Catacombs trembled anew. The diorama above their heads cracked loudly; the air was filled with flying shards.
"Inside!" Jade grabbed Raun and then Erika and pushed them down into the shaft, which descended at an angle of thirty degrees to the horizontal. Jade and Oliver passed down equipment, including the remaining cylinder of oxygen. Then they wrestled Lem into the hole. Lem screamed dismally and passed out again.
There wasn't room to stand in the shaft, but they could crouch, an agonizing posture to maintain while they pushed and dragged a prostrate and crippled man. The shaft was an obvious construction, about five feet square, close and very hot and frightening inside. They had no idea of where they were going, or what would happen if the shaft had been destroyed farther along by an earthquake. The air might give out, they could suffocate or bake to death. But going back was out of the question. Jade had staked everyhing on his glimpses of the will-o'-the-wisp cheetah, which was nowhere to be seen now.
"Has to be–the way out," he gasped, when Raun began to sob in terror. She froze in front of him. He pushed her jarringly.
"Just keep moving!"
"How f-far?"
"How the hell do I know?"
"Matt, I can't breathe! I'm choking!"
He paused to let them all have a few whiffs of oxygen. Lem's eyelids fluttered, but he seemed to be sinking deeper into shock.
"Go on, go on!" Jade shouted, shoving the women ahead of him.
He guessed that they had progressed two hundred feet or more through solid rock; at least they were going down and not up, which made it easier. He was convinced that it was one of many shafts through which excavated material had been removed during construction of the Catacombs. The thought of the lone cheetah was the only thing that gave him hope at this point. But how long was the shaft?
He and Oliver made one of their frequent stops with Lem. Erika and Raun went ahead. He heard their sobbing breaths. And then Raun screamed.
"Matt!"
He looked back over his shoulder and saw a smear of light on a gleaming wall of obsidian, and knew they had run out of luck.
"Matt, it's blocked, it's blocked!"
He crawled down to the women, saw that the builders had plugged the shaft when it was no longer needed. Jade rocked on his heels angrily, staring at the barrier. What had happened to the cheetah? It had to have come this way. He wasn't crazy, he'd seen it. He looked around, and saw a red gleam on the floor of the shaft. Reached for it. He had one of the bloodstones in his hand. It felt as hot as a living heart. He wondered if Erika had dropped it. But Erika wasn't paying attention to the red diamond. She covered her face with her hands, gasping. Raun began to cry hysterically.
Jade slapped her hard. She stopped crying and looked dully at him.
"Get back out of the way! Both of you!"
He threw the red diamond down, tugged at the straps of the pack, and tore it open. He pulled out the plastic explosives and the timer. He was nearly reeling from lack of air. He crawled forward to the obsidian wall and ran his hands over it. The obsidian wasn't smooth; he found bubble-sized hollows and crevices, a couple of them deep enough for shaping charges.
"Careful, boss," Oliver warned him.
"I know, I know." Frantically Jade packed crevices with the explosive, all that he had. No way to judge if it would be enough. Working in the feeble glow from Raun's flashlight, he set the timer of the detonator. Two minutes. They had no more time left in this world. Either they were going to suffocate, or be crushed by the collapsing walls of the shaft if he had miscalculated the strength of his charge. Either way, it no longer mattered.
Raun and Erika had moved slowly back, but not far enough. He went after them, shoving, pushing, whacking them with his hands.
"Get down–lie down!"
Oliver bent over Lem, shielding him with his body. Jade piled on top of the women.
The explosives went off with a concussive roar. The shaped charges fragmented a chunk of obsidian the thickness of a bank vault door and fired those fragments as if from the muzzle of a cannon several hundred feet down the flank of the mountain.
When the survivors rose shakily to their knees, the shaft was flooding with the thin cold air of the high mountain, and with a refracted light that blinded them.
They followed the light to the sharp jagged hole that had been blown in the obsidian plug and looked out, still dazed, at a clearing sky and the sun rising over an alpine meadow. Water trickled nearby, runoff from the glacier. They were below the fulminating cloud at the summit and Kilimanjaro, for now, was quiet. All around them was space, air, light, and freedom. They had nowhere to go but down.
EPILOGUE
CHANVAI
May 29
From his office at the Kialamahindi Hospital in Dar, Robeson Kumenyere walked to the inverted pyramid and took the elevator to the top floor. It was seven o'clock in the morning, and the arbovirus lab was deserted. He locked the door anyway and set to work, removing with a screwdriver the enameled front panels from the computer-run board that kept track of the complicated experiments and programs of analysis.
On the backs of the panels were the twenty-four FIREKILL diamonds he had substituted for ordinary red glass reflectors. He opened an attaché case fitted with a piece of socketed Lucite for the stones and placed them inside. He put the reflectors back where they belonged and screwed the panels into place.
A military helicopter was waiting for him on the landing pad outside. He climbed in through the crew entry door of the Sikorsky and settled down in the cabin, alone, for the three-hundred-mile journey upcountry to Chanvai.
As the helicopter soared away over the hospital complex, Kumenyere looked down nostalgically but without regrets. The excellent health-care facility had been his inspiration, his achievement, but after today one of his associates would be in charge. Kumenyere's true destiny was about to be fulfilled. A metamorphosis from a little-known hospital administrator to the powerful leader of a bloc of African nations, forged by swift masterstrokes that would have the rest of the world gasping–he smiled and relaxed and let his imagination play at will for a few minutes. It was pure delight. Washington, London, Paris–he envisioned crisis meetings at the highest levels, emergency sessions of the U.N., the clamor from the press for official policy statements. Only the Russians would not be caught out, wondering what he was up to. Their missiles were making it all possible. They ultimately would have all the benefits of his control of the vital sea lanes around the Cape of Good Hope. Without a steady stream of supertankers from the Persian Gulf ports, a steel artery of oil, the giants of the West would be, in a few years' time, shriveled mummies, relics of capitalism.
From another case he removed the documents and manifestos he'd prepared, messages for heads of state in Africa and abroad. He reviewed the anticipated sequence of events for the next forty-eight hours.
IRBMs and the crews to man them were now on their way from the U.S.S.R. to Tanzania. Expected time of arrival, 1600 hours. All of the resources of the Jeshi la Wananchi la Tanzania had been concentrated at Kilimanjaro airport in anticipation of military action b
y South Africa. SAM missiles secretly obtained from Libya would be employed for the first time against attacking bombers.
Shortly before 1600 hours Robeson Kumenyere would release the terrible news that Jumbe Kinyati had died in his sleep, and announce that he was temporarily assuming control of the government for the duration of the crisis.
His first official act would be the offering of a conciliatory proposal to Zambia to settle their desultory border war. Then would come a communiqué announcing hostile action by the South African government, and an impassioned cry for help from other African nations, particularly the well-armed Zaire air force.
An IRBM with a nuclear warhead would be launched against South Africa, resulting in a minimum loss of life but maximum panic.
With more warheads of devastating power at his disposal, the IRBMs dispersed and invulnerable to further raids by the South Africans, Robeson Kumenyere's ultimatum to the Praetorian government would be broadcast, along with his modest proposals for a workable coalition government of blacks and whites in South Africa.
Great pressure from the superpowers, particularly the Russians, would be brought to bear on the Afrikaners to accept the proposals of the charismatic new president of Tanzania.
Meanwhile he would be consolidating his power at home through the time-honored methods of persuading the weak and intimidating the strong.
Perhaps another launch would be needed to convince the Praetorian government of the wisdom of this course of action; Kumenyere wasn't sure about that. He knew only that eventually they would have to give in.
Black nationalists imprisoned in South Africa would be released. They would emerge like moles from the darkness of their confinement into the light, momentarily confused and in need of well-thought-out plans for the immediate future, which Kumenyere was ready to provide.
