He had not the slightest idea how his companions were to accomplish their mission, either. But that was out of his hands now. He trusted that they would find a way.
*
Napoleon spoke as they waited on the platform for the next streaktrain. "The shadow-people affirm that they have contacted the Maksu and informed them of the delay."
"How do you know that?" Bandicut asked. "Are they talking to you now, too?"
"Affirmative. I should have been hearing them before. They gave me that ability when they repaired me, but their procedures were interrupted by the call to pursue Li-Jared. The data from Copernicus included some error-correcting code, which I have inspected and implemented."
Bandicut could only stare at him.
The streaktrain arrived like softly gonging windchimes, and they stepped aboard. But Napoleon hesitated, halfway in the door. Bandicut glanced back. "What is it?"
The robot whirred back into motion, crowding in behind him. "Nothing, John Bandicut. It's all right."
"Nappy. What just happened?"
The entryway sealed, and the train rocked almost imperceptibly as it accelerated from a standstill. The robot's eyes seemed to darken. "Copernicus just called to say good-bye."
Bandicut opened his mouth. "He—"
"Yes." Napoleon recited the message he had just received. "I replied, but received no response. What do you think he's doing, Cap'n? The shadow-people won't say."
Bandicut shook his head. "I wish I knew, Nappy. I really wish I knew." He found a seat beside Ik and watched as Napoleon plugged himself into a power source for recharging. He thought of all the questions he still wanted answered; but instead of asking them, he closed his eyes and went to sleep, as the streaktrain sped across the unwinding countryside.
*
He awoke to the sensation of the train slowing. "Our station?" he murmured.
"Apparently," said Ik, stretching.
Bandicut closed his eyes again, savoring the last moments of sleepiness. He didn't want to give it up. Especially not to go into battle with an invisible foe.
"Perhaps no one will be here to meet us, and we can all go home," Li-Jared said in a droll tone that Bandicut was beginning to recognize as Karellian humor.
"Perhaps," Ik said, leaning to peer out the window as they glided alongside a platform. "But I thought I just saw some shadow-people out there."
"Pity," Bandicut said with a yawn. He hoisted his backpack. "If we're going, let's go."
On the platform, however, there was no sign of shadow-people. Bandicut gazed around, wondering what sort of settlement they had landed in this time. It wasn't the emptiness of the Wild West anymore. Rising above a sculpted wall were humped buildings that appeared carved out of living stone. A dozen or so other passengers had gotten off the train with them, mostly a group of giraffe-headed centaurs, who disappeared straight into the waiting room. When Bandicut peered after them, he saw the last one vanishing down a ramp. Toward a subway?
Napoleon headed that way, also. "We are to proceed to the underlevel transport, then northward," he said. Bandicut followed, with a shiver of déjà vu. As they stepped off the ramp onto what looked like an Earthly subway platform, Bandicut glanced around for the giraffe-people. They had already disappeared. He peered up at an overhead dome and remarked to Charlie, /Just like the subway in Nuevo L.A., but without the graffiti. Wait a minute, where are the tunnels?/ He looked up and down the length of the platform. At each end were huge silver disks, like plugs. He stepped close to the silver ribbon-track, and found himself pushing against a sudden resistance. /Well, you can't jump off onto the track here, I guess./
/// John, I find it difficult sometimes
to picture what your homeworld was like. ///
/You and me both./ Despite this reminiscence, he was aware of an increasing difficulty in summoning memories of the past. It was not that he had forgotten, exactly, but more as if his memories were being silted over with slowly hardening sediments of newer cares.
"This is the way to the—" rasp "—underbelly," Ik said, pointing to an engraved sign on the wall.
"Huh? Underbelly?"
/// I think he means,
into the substrata of the continent,
toward the underside of the metaship. ///
/Ah./ Bandicut studied the sign. It was covered with incomprehensible glyphs. "Aren't there any maps of the place?"
"Well, just this." Ik pointed to a smooth panel flush with the wall.
Bandicut moved sideways a little, and a spidery line drawing became visible. It was a complex, three-dimensional puzzle; the only thing he could decipher was a flat domed section at the top, spanning the map. That must be the open land above, where the streaktrains ran. Below "ground" level was a bewildering maze of subsections, which seemed to scroll endlessly, like a computer display, as his eyes moved downward. He would have to study this a long time, he thought, for it to make any sense.
"Is this for us?" called Li-Jared.
Bandicut turned to see a burnished, snakelike vessel glide into place beside them. He glanced to the right, where it had come from, and saw only the silver plug. A door appeared in the vehicle, and Napoleon stepped toward it. "Nappy, are you sure this is it?"
Ik was squinting at some symbols on the side of the train. "It says 'Maintenance Only.' Weren't we supposed to take the northbound train?"
"I believe this is the correct train," said Napoleon, and stepped aboard. Bandicut glanced helplessly at his friends, and shivered at the thought of the door closing and the train whisking Napoleon away, while the rest of them stood here debating the question.
The robot peered back out. "It is empty. It appears to be waiting for us."
Bandicut shrugged, and they boarded. The doorway disappeared, and through the forward window they could see the silver plug in the platform wall glimmering. The train did not seem so much to accelerate as to dim like a light, then brighten again, flashing down a smooth-walled tunnel.
The streaming movement of lights in the tunnel walls turned into a mesmerizing flicker. Bandicut was scarcely aware of any other movement around him.
Whreeeeeek!
He nearly jumped out of his skin—and whirled like a drunken ballet dancer.
"Hraachh!" Ik cried.
Apparently the shadow-people had been hiding in the back of the train, or perhaps in some pocket dimension that had disgorged them into the others' presence. Whatever the case, three whiplike figures of shadow were now fluttering among them like frantic dervishes. It took Bandicut a moment to get his breath back. "What are you doing—trying to scare us to death?"
Whreek whreeek! ". . . urgent, urgent, grateful . . . come with us . . ."
"Yes, yes! Who sent you here? Was it Hroom?" Bandicut blinked from one to another, trying to decide who was talking.
". . . message from Hroom'm'm . . . great trust in you . . . great victory . . ."
Bandicut's thoughts darkened. Great victory. The factory floor? It was practically an accident. He hated to think of the false confidence that could engender. "So," he said cautiously, "you are friends of Hroom? Is he involved in this?"
The shadow-people jangled back at him. It was like listening to a roomful of first-year violin students. His translator-stones were buzzing. ". . . unable to be here . . . Hroom'm'm sent us . . . is elsewhere now . . ."
Ik interrupted their choir. "Can you explain what this is about, tell us what we're supposed to do?"
Whreek-reek-reek. ". . . will take you to a maintenance node . . . show you the danger . . . the way to it . . . the others who may help . . ."
Others? Bandicut thought.
The shadow-people fiddled almost harmoniously. ". . . we have arrived . . ."
Bandicut hadn't even noticed that the train was slowing. But in fact it had come to a stop. Not at a station platform, however. They were still in the tunnel.
At that moment the left-hand tunnel wall glowed and vanished, and a sparsely lit cavern yawned, looking more l
ike an industrial space than a subway platform. ". . . subway maintenance stop . . ." the shadow-people twanged. ". . . unscheduled stop . . . will proceed downward from here . . . make our movements inconspicuous . . ."
Smart, Bandicut thought. As long as the boojum isn't watching on some maintenance camera, it should be just fine.
/// The shadow-people do seem to know
what they're doing. ///
/Yeah./
". . . follow? . . ."
"Yeah," Bandicut murmured and led the others off the train.
*
"One could easily become lost in these corridors," Ik observed, as they descended the fourth or fifth winding ramp, through a shadow-world of girders and walls and heavy, incomprehensible equipment.
"Feels like we're in the belly of a whale," Bandicut murmured. "Now I know how Jonah must have felt."
Ik glanced his way.
He shook his head. "Sorry. Human reference. An old story."
Ik hrrrm'd and moved on.
They were definitely in the belly of the shipworld now. Bandicut doubted he could find his way back to the subway if his life depended on it. They had made at least a dozen turns, and each level and corridor looked different from the one before—usually darker and gloomier. And yet there was a dreary sameness to it all. The lighting was never quite right, as if centuries of grime covered the light fixtures, whether they were long tubes and crevices along the walls, or globes erupting from the ceiling. It felt much like the bowels of any immense urban or industrial facility on Earth, except that they hadn't seen anyone even marginally resembling a human. Perhaps that was part of the resemblance, though; places like this on Earth had always seemed designed to squeeze the humanity from anyone unlucky enough to be stuck in them.
Such inhabitants as they did see were mostly squat, multilimbed beings who looked as if they had been born to drive forklift modules. No one spoke to the passing company; the workers all seemed occupied by custodial or maintenance tasks, none of which looked pleasant. Was it just in the nature of the surroundings that no one talked, or did these creatures somehow sense that they should ignore the interlopers? Bandicut wondered if those squat beings were bred to enjoy—or tolerate, anyway—work that no one else wanted to do.
He also wondered how much farther down they could go before they hit the bottom of Shipworld. He began to imagine that they were descending through the underdecks of a sunken, sea-going vessel, miles below the surface of a midnight-dark ocean; he imagined them drawing ever closer to the bottom of the hull, where mud and pressure squeezed against frigid steel, against plates that at any moment could buckle and cave inward. A wave of lightheadedness passed over him, spinning dizziness, as he saw a wall of seawater thundering in to crush him and everything else in its path.
/// Whoa, John!
This is no time for a fugue! ///
The quarx did something, and he started, as if waking abruptly from a nightmare. He took a sharp breath, and carefully looked around and counted his companions: Napoleon, Ik, Li-Jared, the shadow-guides . . . yes, they were still here; and yes, they were safe, and not under an ocean. No one seemed to have noticed anything wrong. /Thanks,/ he whispered.
/// You gave me a hell of a scare. ///
He let his breath out. /Me, too./
They descended one more time, to a level lit only by small, phosphorescent markers. Even with Charlie augmenting his vision, Bandicut could scarcely see, and he instinctively crowded closer to his friends. He realized suddenly that he was seeing new shadow-people around him instead of forklift drivers. They were passing pockets of even deeper gloom on either side, pockets of seemingly bottomless darkness—doorways of spatial transformation, perhaps. He shivered, crowding closer still to his friends.
Their shadow-guides surrounded them. Whringingg ". . . will pass through . . . n-space channel . . . take you closer to what you must face . . ."
The shadow-people brought them to a rectangle that looked almost like the door to a freight elevator . . . until it became transparent, and beyond it there was blackness streaked with soft, slowly shifting brushstrokes of magenta light. One shadow-person flitted in; the others wheeked and urged their guests to follow.
Ik strode ahead, and vanished as a streak of light. Li-Jared followed. Bandicut glanced back at the desolation behind, not sorry to be leaving it. With a murmured, "Thanks for the tour," he stepped through with Napoleon.
There was a brief flicker and he felt himself falling, then floating, in near darkness. He had become enveloped in a thin, silvery forcefield or spacesuit. His friends were nearby, similarly clad. He glimpsed the movement of shadow-people, nearly invisible in the dark. But there was something else here, too. Or someone. He rotated slowly, and saw them: three vast, luminous creatures that looked like something from the bottom of a very deep, alien sea. It was impossible to judge their size; they stretched out in undulating waves like enormous, luminescent bead-curtains in the night. They were a kind of jellyfish, perhaps, hanging in space—or ocean—he couldn't quite tell which; there were no stars here, but neither did he feel any sense of watery movement.
/// I believe we are in a transitional continuum,
not of your space. ///
/Ah./ Bandicut cleared his throat, wanting to break the silence, but not knowing what to say. "Hello?" he croaked at last.
The shadow-people fluttered, trying to respond. Wheeeek wheek!
There was no translation.
Whreeeuuuu. ". . . are the . . ." Whrreeeeee.
Bandicut's translator-stone jangled, trying to find words to fit the sounds. /What—?/
Charlie seemed to catch some meaning.
/// Far-flung travellers? ///
The stones found something in his memory that suited and completed the translation: ". . . magellan-fish . . ."
He blinked, confused.
Whreeeek. ". . . n-dimensional travellers . . . explorers . . . returned to this safe harbor . . ."
"What does that—" Ik began.
". . . here, the boojum cannot listen . . . or interfere . . ."
"Are you saying," Bandicut said dizzily, trying to absorb the implications, "that these magellan-fish are going to help us against the boojum?"
". . . guard you . . . take you where we cannot . . ."
As they spoke, one of the magellan-fish turned in a ponderously graceful movement, revealing a row of huge eyes like darkened glass. For a moment it simply stared; then the nearest eye grew like an enormous pupil dilating. It expanded silently until it engulfed Bandicut and his friends; and everything changed in an eyeblink. Bandicut felt himself suddenly enfolded in the being's sensory sphere, looking outward through its eye.
It took him a dozen heartbeats to comprehend what he was seeing: an etched surface bewildering in complexity, a tremendous maze illuminated by . . .
The perspective shifted, and he saw a vast whirlpool of light.
Whirlpool of light?
The perspective shifted again, and at last he understood what it was: the outside of Shipworld, illuminated by the distant light of a vast galaxy stretched across the sky. The individual features on the surface were indecipherable, but the viewpoint shifted in three more quick jumps, until in the center of his view was an image that was unmistakable: a tremendous assembly of spheroidal storage tanks, nestled into a sheltered crook of the vast expanse of the metaship.
He could not begin to gauge the dimensions of the tank farm. It looked almost like a cluster of fish eggs. But something told him that Earth's orbiting L5 City might easily be swallowed up in a single one of those tanks. And there were a lot of tanks.
He felt something new, from within. A presence, expanding in his mind, almost like the quarx when he was imitating the neurolink. But it wasn't the quarx. It was something less quick, something deeper, more ponderous . . .
It spoke, and its voice reverberated like the thrum of a blue whale.
# IS THIS THE PLACE IN DANGER? #
Stunned, Bandicut whispe
red, /I think so. Yes./
# AND IF THIS IS DESTROYED, THE DESTROYER WILL CONTROL ALL THAT WE SEE? #
Bandicut struggled to respond. He didn't know enough to answer. But he had not been alone in hearing the question. A metal voice resonated in his ears. "This is the target. The boojum moves as we speak. If the tanks are destroyed, all life on the continent must migrate or die. Five hundred million sentient beings. And the boojum will control all the power systems that remain."
As he listened to Napoleon's voice, Bandicut could only think, Five hundred million people may die! Why isn't the bloody thing defended?
But before he could do more than reel at the question, something began happening out in the tank-farm. It started with a ripple of blue light at one edge, a not-quite-focused shimmer, momentarily obscuring the tanks. The line of light brightened, then began to move, to creep across the field of tanks, in a slow procession that spanned the width of the field. As it passed over the tanks, it generated white sparkles of light.
And behind those sparkles, the first tanks exploded.
Chapter 22
Tests of Will
COPERNICUS WAS IN the city and he was lost. He swung his sensors, looking for a map-terminal. Getting to Atrium City by streaktrain had been simple enough, but finding the one he sought here was not so easy. Atrium City was a large and confusing place, and the visual identifiers he'd been given did not always correspond to the electronic position markers that the shadow-people had passed on to him. Perhaps by consulting a map he could reconcile the differences.
He finally located a terminal, and connected briefly to download the map information. A brief analysis suggested where he had gone wrong, several levels below. He turned to begin backtracking.
It made him feel uneasy to be venturing into the same city that not long ago had given refuge to his friends. Now, they were off to a new danger, while he prowled their recent locale. There was nothing wrong about it; it just felt odd. He wondered what John Bandicut would have thought about these latest instructions. Copernicus could not himself decipher the purpose of the shadow-people's request; he had agreed to it, trusting that in time he would understand the reason.
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