by Paul Lucas
We did not stop to dress until we were five levels down, shivering only slightly more from the cold than from our own dread.
We returned six hours later at dawn with a small army. All the humans, Dumas in his entirety, as well as Flier, Windrider, and Cloud.
The Lab hadn’t changed at all since we left. The new doorway still gaped open. Upon cautious approach, we discovered it led to a short corridor that ended in another door. Dumas sent one of his element bodies down it to investigate, and the spider spanned nearly three meters in a single leap back when the door at the far end swooshed open as it drew near. That portal led to a small cubical room.
The humans investigated and discovered that the far doorway was composed of two sets of walls, one belonging to the corridor and another belonging to the small room, with a finger’s width of space between them. All the humans reached the same conclusion simultaneously: the small room was an elevator.
Jacqueline squealed in pleasure, and both Louis and Amethyst smiled broadly to themselves. The Outland Exploration Committee in the KN made it a policy to hand out generous bonuses for significant Builder artifact discoveries. Jacqueline’s crew had been instrumental in discovering the Laboratory, so would get the lion’s share of the OEC’s discovery bonus for it. Jacqueline figured it to be about a hundred thousand credits each, enough to get the bank off her tail for at least several months, as she put it. I was part of the discovery team, and both Amethyst and Jacqueline insisted I get my fair share of the take. It was generous of them, but I had little need for KN money here.
Now we had found a possible means to access other parts of the Tower and that may have previously been denied us. Depending on what was found, the OEC bonuses could mount into the millions. The humans from the helistat were well aware of this as they excitedly began preparing an expedition to use the elevator.
Comparing different maps of the Tower Lerner had prepared years before, it was determined that the elevator was right over the central axis that ran the entire length of the Tower. Dumas even speculated that it might even lead into the Underworld.
The Shard was one vast disk over ten million kilometers across, but for all its girth it was very thin relatively, only two hundred kilometers thick at most. The habitable surface covered the sunward side, the atmosphere covered by a millimeter-thin “roof” one hundred or so kilometers overhead. The microscopic shutters on this roof layer of unknown material create the day-night cycle on the Shard.
But a kilometer or so below us, beyond a mysterious interface layer explorers from the KN have so far been unable to penetrate, was the Underworld. A vast maze of millions of miles of tunnels and chambers waited there, mostly empty. The humans first discovered the Underworld shortly after finding the Spider Swarms on their island home thirty years before, which led not only below the Shard but to the KN's Spaceport and its relic ships.
Of all the theaters of exploration the KN engaged in, the Underworld received the least attention and was therefore still the greatest unknown. The humans’ initial expeditions confirmed that, at least around their own territory, the Underworld had been abandoned for apparent millennia; millions of cubic kilometers of gargantuan corridors and chambers, some of which could swallow up the entirety of the Tower. And even worse, it was airless except for a few small, pressurized chambers scattered at seeming random.
Because the elevator might bring whoever took it to the airless Underworld or some other equally unpleasant chamber, pressure suits from the helistat were deemed essential for the initial foray. At first I had been surprised that a helistat carried such equipment; when would an airship ever have to worry about going into space? But Jackie explained that explorers had to be ready for anything, and the pressure suits could double as all-purpose hostile environment suits. KN explorers used them mostly for radiation protection, as many artifact sites were composed of radioactive metal debris. The suits are also sometimes used in places with compromised air quality and even on the few occasions another entrance to the Underworld was found.
Jackie had first bought her two pressure suits ten years ago when she had first become an independent explorer. They had since remained mothballed in the cargo hold of the Niven’s Folly ever since. What that meant was a six hour delay as Dumas ran extensive system and integrity checks on both suits.
With a wide array of straps and adjustable clasps, the suits could fit most body types of baseline humans. Unfortunately, that precluded everyone except Jackie, Lerner, and Louis. The suits couldn’t accommodate Myotan wings, Amethyst was simply too big, and Dumas was, well, a herd of spiders.
After much debate, it was decided that Lerner and Jackie would be the ones to investigate where the elevator went, if it went anywhere at all. Jackie, because she was most experienced of the human explorers, and Lerner, because he was a sophontologist. Louis protested that his skills as a mage might prove more valuable, but Jackie vetoed him. He and Amethyst had originally been in on the discovery of the Lab; now it was her and Lerner’s turn.
I was as unhappy with the selection as Louis. Couldn’t Lerner let someone else take the risk? I pulled him aside and told him so.
He looked at me askew. “This from the female who decided to take on the Xique twice now?”
“My recklessness does not excuse yours. Let Louis go instead. He does not have a Mate sitting here making herself sick with worry before he even leaves.”
“Gossamyr...”
“We don’t know what’s on the other end of that elevator. It could be anything.”
“And that’s the reason why I have to go. We only have two scientists here, and I’m the only one who can fit into the pressure suit. We could find something important. I have to go.”
I nodded silently. I did not like it, but I understood.
I hugged him fiercely. A half-hour later, he and Jackie, clad in their bulky air-tight suits, disappeared behind the door to the elevator.
* * *
Hours passed. Flier, ever practical, returned to the community far below to recruit others who would bring up food, water, and sleeping rolls in case we had to wait the night.
I was never more than five meters from the elevator door. I sat against the cool wall, basking as much as I could in the warmth from a space heater. Windrider came up and sat beside me, content to wait away the hours at my side. We talked occasionally about many things. Anything but whatever dangers my husband might be facing at that moment.
We were quiet, too, for long periods of time, content just to be in each others’ company. It was in one of these long pauses that I told her, “Lerner and I decided we’re ready for children.”
Our shaman started, picking out a small knot in her arm fur. “I thought you would have to go back to his old people for that.”
“That is right.”
“Oh.” She looked crestfallen.
“Do not worry, Windrider. We will not be going for a while yet.”
She looked at me askew. “But it will not be soon enough for you.”
“It is not--”
“I know you, Gossamyr. You will leave without a glance back, and forget about us.”
“Windrider, please. We will be gone a few years, yes, but we will come back. This is our home.”
“Lerner had a home, too, before he came to us. He never speaks of anyone he left behind in his homeland. He has parents and a sibling there, yes?”
“Yes, they all live near Lyra, which is a very large city in Borelea. Also, an aunt and a number of cousins, who came to Lyra at the time to see us. They were all very nice.”
“But he left them, left everything he knew, to stay with us.”
“He originally volunteered to stay in order to survey the Tower.”
Windrider nodded. “He said he was only supposed to stay six months, until the helistat which dropped him off would return. But he stayed on longer anyway.”
I squared my shoulders, holding my chin slightly higher. “Maybe he had a good reason.” I actually got her
to smile slightly. “Do you really think I will go to the KN again and never come back?”
She was silent for many minutes. “The humans believe they have magic fully explained don’t they?”
“In a way. They believe that Magic is really something called the Nanotech Matrix.”
She flicked her hand at me in a dismissive gesture. “Yes, yes. You explained it to me once. But they have not explained everything. Someone has yet to tell me how Builder science can explain away my visions.”
“You have had a vision?”
She nodded slowly, suddenly looking very old. “Yes. The spirits speak to me. They may use this Nanotech Matrix or something else for the means of their communication, but they speak nonetheless. And they tell me you will go away soon, and for a long time.”
“What? Windrider, that is silly.”
“Is it? You have told me of the wonders in the human lands. You and Lerner will leave, spend years there using human magic to bear your children. You may well get used to the comforts there, and quickly forget about us.”
“I could never do that. This is my home. I cannot tell you how desperately I missed you and Flier and all the others while I was away in the KN. Every day I wished I had you there so I could share with all of you everything I was seeing and doing.”
The Shaman’s voice lowered to a near-whisper. “When your parents died and you came to live with Flier and me, I prayed so hard to the spirits every day to help you through such a horrific time. I never felt I did enough to comfort you. I was not the mother to you I should have been in Softpetal's absence. You were always so angry and distant, and I could not reach you.”
“That was not your fault. I was angry at everything, then. There is no reason to feel guilty.”
“You have not yet been a mother, Gossamyr. You cannot know what a torture it is to see your child suffer. And through the spirits I have known since even before the humans came that you were destined for an unusual life. Your Mating with Lerner only confirmed that. And I fear now that it is going to be even more eventful, after everything that has happened in the last few weeks. It just pains me to think that soon you will go away, undergoing the spirits-know-what trials, without me there to help you.”
“I wish you could come with us to the KN, Windrider, when we go. There is no one I would rather have with me.”
“But the community needs a Shaman, so I must stay here. Just promise me, Gossamyr, that if you do go away you will come back, if you can.”
I reached an arm across her shoulders and hugged her to me. “Of course I will, Windrider. I promise that no matter what happens, I will come home. I will come back to you.”
She leaned into me. “That is all I want.”
A loud pop made us jump, followed by a low hiss. I helped Windrider to her feet as the Elevator door slowly pulled open, revealing Lerner and Jackie, pressure suit helmets cradled in their arms.
We all rushed forward, but I pushed my way to the front to hug my husband. It was awkward, with the bulky pressure suit between us, but welcome nonetheless.
Both humans seemed very pleased with themselves. Jackie, who was not having her breath squeezed out by her Mate, was the first to speak. “You won’t believe what we found!” she exalted to her crew. “We are so rich!”
Louis asked excitedly, “What? What is it?”
“A teleport node!”
THIRTY-THREE
“I hate people.”
--independent explorer Jurgens Ming-na Walthiem, when asked what motivated him to spend so many months at a time away from civilization.(Personality magazine, December 545 issue)
* * *
Like many things the Builders created, the teleport node was awe-inspiringly huge.
Its main chamber was a hollow metallic UTSite sphere thirty meters across. Small handles protruded from the sphere at about human height, connected to a door which made up a vertical quarter-slice of the sphere. It was surprisingly easy to manipulate, despite it having to weigh at least a dozen tons. As slight as I was, I had no trouble swinging it open by myself and locking it tightly into place. Controls besides the entrance both inside and out could open and close it automatically.
The sphere was attached to nearly a cubic acre of mysterious-looking machinery bound behind tight UTSite bulkheads. These were what supposedly powered the teleport node, with the sphere just acting as the transport chamber.
The node itself was nestled in just one of the immense pressurized chambers my husband and Jackie had found here in the Underworld. These spaces were dotted here and there with a number of odd-looking devices. A huge, delta-wing aircraft of some kind that was obviously way too huge to fit through any of its room’s openings. A room filled with racks upon racks of small, reddish pearls, with a bluish globe about the size of a fist sitting on a pedestal in the chamber’s exact center. One chamber had strange furniture that “popped” up from the floor but was still part of it, like a thin sheet of rubber someone was pushing real furniture against from underneath. And there were a dozen more, all just cursorily explored in the few short hours we had been wandering around down here.
The humans and Dumas were ecstatic. This find was worth over a million credits after they registered it with the OEC. After Lerner and Jackie reported back that it was safe to traverse the elevator, most of us went down in small groups to see the discoveries for ourselves.
I went down with the first group, accompanied by Lerner, Louis, Dumas, Flier, and Cloud. I had been on elevators in the KN, but this experience had little in common with those clunky metal boxes. The elevator walls were rounded and smooth, devoid of any obvious controls or even any blemishes of any kind beyond the soft blister of light on the ceiling. Even the doors, when closed, were only barely-visible outlines. Lerner spoke simply, “descend,” and the elevator began to move. My stomach seemed to drop away from me as we accelerated down at a dizzying speed, not fast enough to cause us any real trauma but just swiftly enough to really feel the discomfort of it. And that was just us Myotans, who were used to the gut-wrenching accelerations and stops that came from flying. The humans looked much more distressed than we were, but endured it in silence. The Builders had obviously been much more interested in speed than in comfort, or perhaps knew of a way to modulate the elevator’s descent that we did not.
After several minutes the elevator did an odd flip-flop, reorienting itself. We were held to the floor by some weird gyrations involving centrifugal force. We had been told to expect this, but it still came as a surprise.
We had just passed the interface layer of the Shard, the kilometer-thick layer that had so far proven impenetrable to Lerner’s people. Many of the maintenance machinery thought to regulate the function and habitat of the Shard were thought to be located there, including the focus points for the gravitational generators located at the Shard’s rim. In simpler terms, the Interface layer was where the Shards’ gravity field was focused, stretched out in a circular plane that girdled the entire Shard. Thus, the layer was always “down,” no matter which side of the Shard you were on. The elevator had to reorient us as we passed through the interface, as the direction that was “up” on the surface would be the new “down” in the Underworld.
We descended over two kilometers by Dumas’ estimate. Apparently the Underworld chambers were the only destination accessible by the elevator. Lerner and Jackie had tried to get the elevator to go elsewhere, but to no avail. We had stopped just as abruptly as we had started.
After several hours, I grew bored with everyone doting on the teleport node. I grabbed a flashlight and a canteen and said I was going to explore a little on my own.
“Goss, are you nuts?” my husband said. “We’ve only cursorily explored the chambers down here. You could run into all sorts of trouble by yourself.”
“It seemed safe enough for you and Jackie,” I said. “Besides, someone has to see what else is down here. We might as well start now.”
Flier said, “Your Mate is right, Gossamyr.
It is too dangerous for you to wander around down here alone.”
“Are you forbidding me from going, Flier?”
He rolled his eyes. “And have you impale me with one of your glares that can ferment juice?” My husband choked back a laugh, then pretended to have heard nothing. “I did not say you could not go, just that I do not want you to go alone. Cloud, go with her.”
Cloud and I looked at each other in alarm, then back at our chieftain. My ears tapered against my skull. “Flier...”
“Cloud is not doing anything else, and he is a good fighter in case you run into something. And he will behave. Will you not, Chief Hunter?”
From the way Cloud recoiled from Flier’s stare, I was apparently not the only one who had picked up a talent for harsh looks. Cloud swept the floor with his eyes and said sheepishly, “yes, Chieftain.”
We left, my husband warning me one last time to be careful. Was I so reckless, that he always had to repeat that? Perhaps I should remind him that if it hadn’t been for my impulsiveness, we probably would never have ended up together. After all, what “careful” Myotan female would even have considered a human Mate?
The corridors were wide and vaulted, with sharp angles near the floor but arcing into a seamless curve nearly five wingspans overhead. Side corridors, yawning chasms of mysterious darkness, appeared out of the gloom at seeming random, as did human-sized doorways. We occasionally ran across what appeared to be immense portals, large enough to swallow trees, but they refused to open for us. The entrances to smaller rooms opened readily enough, shushing open on their own as soon as we touched their surfaces.
I brought along an electronic notepad, and began to draw a rough map of the chambers we passed. My husband had done that when he had first surveyed the Tower, so we would not get lost and to serve as a reference for his first serious drafts of the Tower’s blueprints. It was a good idea, so I followed suit in the Underworld.
“You do not like me any more, do you?” Cloud grumped as soon as we were out of earshot of the others.
