by Terry Carr
The first monitors had been monks and priestesses: Seanne, Ram-tseu, Alyxandra. Saint Seanne, of course, and The Venerable Ram-tseu; they had all been people touched with grace. They had seen a central oneness of existence and had thought to teach it to others by showing them what they saw with their minds. And they had been so successful that no one even thought of it as a miracle any longer.
The broadcasts were no longer thought of as religious in nature; they were simply experiences that were available to all, and people didn’t always tune in to them. When their minds were open enough to receive an incoming broadcast, or when they cast their thoughts to the monitor, they tuned in, and that was that.
The monitors were no longer venerated; no one in Cirque even knew the name of the current monitor. Few cared to wonder where she lived. Most thought, if they thought about her at all, that she must be mentally retarded, a kind of idiot savant.
The monitor, who lived in the consensus of their minds, agreed.
In her sleeping quarters at the Cathedral of the Five Elements, Salamander had a personal shrine to which she sometimes retreated. A candle danced in the draft from a chink in the wall; it sat on an island of earth in a small basin of river water. The room was dark even in mid-morning: there were no windows. Salamander knelt before her shrine, watched the flame dance and called Spirit to her.
She felt Spirit descend on her as distinctly as the falling of rain; once again she heard the silence of darkness. The sound of her breathing became a part of that silence.
Spirit appeared to her in different Elements at different times; today she saw it manifest in the candle flame. Fire swelled and leaped as it stretched upward into the dark, a bright undulating line of light. And it sang a high, clear note that filled her mind and filled the room.
She merged with the sound and the flame; she felt herself as rising heat, touched lightly by the draft from the wall and singing the Fire song. The warmth of the song suffused her; she left her mind and became Fire.
Without the handicap of her mind, she was able to think.
Salamander’s true thinking was more feeling than anything else: she sensed the darkness as a cool, peaceful color, tasted the sparkling life force of Air, experienced the spiritual hunger she had felt as … fear.
Fear? That surprised her, but immediately she understood it. The Beast, of course, the Beast was loose in Cirque, was rising from the depths of the Abyss and would engulf the city, the planet, everything. …
Fire seemed very small suddenly, a thin tapering line of light; and she, who was part of Fire, felt even smaller.
For a moment she could not even feel her heat; but then the sense of it returned to her, and she thought again of the Beast. She needed to understand it if her fear was to pass, if she was to know how to fight it. She must see it clearly, not through the red veil of her memory. (A night in the Cathedral alone; the cold touch of the Beast at her neck …) She must see it through Spirit.
Everything was part of Spirit: the grasses of the fields and riverbanks, birds in flight, the stones of streets and buildings, every person in Cirque, every person in the universe and each thought that he or she had … every one was part of Spirit. She understood this; she felt it.
When the people of Cirque remained close to Spirit, they kept the Elements pure; but there were so many in these late years who had no awareness of Spirit, and they brought corruption to the world. Cirque was losing its belief in the higher truths, growing complacent with the passage of eventless years. How long had it been since her Cathedral had been filled with worshippers?
It could be no accident that the Beast had appeared in the Abyss. It was the place where people had dumped their refuse for centuries beyond counting. Not only their physical wastes, but the wastes of Spirit too—all had gone into the darkness of the Abyss. People had said that the shaft was bottomless, that it would receive their discards forever.
Salamander had always known that the Abyss had a bottom. And now she knew that what filled the Abyss was not melon rinds and sewage, but the discarded sins of the people. The spiritual refuse of humanity had collected there and piled up, till now it was reaching for the very rim of the shaft. And it was alive, a writhing, crawling thing whose body was refuse, whose mind was sin. Its awful hunger drove it upward.
It must be enormous, she thought, to have filled the entire Abyss. The enormity of human sin through the centuries appalled her. She thought: If it gets free of the shaft, will there be anything to stop it?
Then once again she took comfort in Fire, warmed and calmed herself, sang its supernal note and returned to full understanding. Nothing was inevitable; tomorrow would be made from the Elements of now. The rise of the Beast could be halted … if only the people of Cirque would stop feeding it.
This was clear to her; but with the understanding came weariness, uncertainty and the renewal of fear. Fire’s light dimmed, its heat drew away from her; once more she felt herself within her body, seated on the packed-earth floor in her dim room, and now she felt the tautness of her muscles. She shifted uncomfortably and tried to refocus on Fire … but it was only a candle flame now.
After a while she rose from her place before the shrine. Controlling a shudder, she brushed dust from her robe and went out into the greater dimness of the Cathedral. She went to the great chimney and stood before it, staring into the soft flames of the Cathedral Fire.
She heard a footstep behind her and turned quickly. Erich stood staring, his eyes wide, face pale. He was shaking.
“I saw your vision,” Erich said. “I saw it all—it was broadcast.” He looked anxiously into Salamander’s eyes. “You will be able to send the Beast away, won’t you?” he asked, and Salamander heard the boy’s doubt echo through the dark reaches of the Cathedral.
Jamie had never been in one of Cirque’s new gravity fliers, and he found it exciting. The craft lifted from the ground so smoothly that for a moment Jamie didn’t realize that they were aloft; then he felt the unmistakable sensation of movement in air and saw that already they had risen above the level of the Guard field house. The one-story building fell away below, its grey flag stirring in the wake of displaced air from the flier.
“Go straight for the Final Cataract,” Gloriana told the pilot. “Then circle till we find it.” She twisted in her seat to look back at a grey-uniformed woman who cradled a holo camera. “How much time are you holding?” Gloriana asked.
“A full hour,” said the woman. She shifted the heavy camera in her lap and the planes of its octagonal lens glinted like an insect eye.
Gloriana said to Jamie, “Remember, if she should need to move forward to get her holos, we both move out of her way. We’ve seen this thing; she needs to record it.”
“Of course,” he said. He had never been with Gloriana when she was working, only when she had erected her light social facade; now he watched in fascination as she concentrated on business.
The Guard airfield was below the South Edge, where the estates were larger and less built-up: Cirque had originally been settled from the north, along the river. The estates here belonged to families Jamie knew only by name; this was an area of Cirque’s society into which he had no entry. They held their vast estates undivided even in the face of offers from the newly moneyed families of the North and West Edges.
The flier left the land behind and flew out over the lip of the chasm. Jamie stared downward into the huge darkness, and on impulse he asked, “Does this flier have a lightbeam?”
Gloriana was making notes in a battered pocket journal; she said abstractedly, “Up front—the pilot controls it.” Then she looked up at him. “You have something in mind?”
He felt foolish: he was an outsider, a civilian. “What if we trained the light on the walls of the Abyss? I know we’re not likely to find anything by shining a light down into the center, but what if something’s trying to get out of the shaft? Wouldn’t it try to come up the walls?”
“We’re clear across the Abyss from where
we saw that thing earlier,” she said. But she leaned forward to touch the pilot’s shoulder. “Giovan, bear east to the Edge, then follow it north. And train your lightbeam on the wall as far down as you can.”
The pilot nodded and banked the flier to the right. The craft flew almost as silently as Jamie’s glider, the soft hum of its gravity repellers lost in its passage through the air. In a few minutes they again approached the plunging walls of the chasm, where the Edge fell sharply into black shadow. The pilot turned north, flying less than a hundred meters inside the Edge; he switched on the lightbeam, and it swept along the rocky face of the shaft like a bright bird.
“Take us lower,” Gloriana said. “Let’s get right down into the shaft.”
The flier descended, the walls of the Abyss rose past them, and they were flying in darkness, the clear blue sky above only a distant mirage. Jamie felt as though he were under water—the demarcation between light and darkness was so sharp in the Abyss. He followed the flight of the lightbeam as it leaped across the sheeted rocks of the Abyss walls.
The walls were bare and stark; it was as though the planet were solid rock, and in this one place a gigantic slippage had occurred in which a hundred kilometers of rocky crust had fallen into some unimaginable cavern. The naked innards of old Earth lay exposed in cross section.
“I can’t see where we’re going,” the pilot said nervously. In the dim light from the control panel, his face looked harsh and strained.
“Just stay away from the walls,” Gloriana told him. “You don’t think we’re going to run into anything in the middle of the Abyss, do you?”
“No,” said the pilot, and Jamie suddenly realized how young the man was. That one word, the uncertainty in the way he said it, betrayed the youth his uniform had hidden. Jamie watched his hands on the controls—they were practiced and sure, at least.
“You’ve never flown down here before, is that it?” Jamie asked the pilot. The lightbeam danced along the cliff to their right, picking out rough rock formations and occasional growths of pale lichens.
“I was on a search crew down here once,” the pilot said. “Last year. Some kids tried climbing down the rocks, for a prank or something. They said they were questing, but their temple said no. When they didn’t come back, we had to go find them.”
“Their temple threw them out,” said Gloriana. “You know how the temples are about the Abyss.”
“They were lucky to get back alive,” said the pilot. His voice was steadier now; he seemed to take assurance from conversation. “Dumb kids tried climbing down here with nothing but ropes and piton guns. The heat got them, and they couldn’t climb out again. One of them almost died—they had to clone his heart, and it was a month before he could walk again.”
The flier descended into the darkness, pacing the lightbeam along the wall. Jamie had left his heavy sabertooth coat behind, but as the heat from the planet’s core increased he had to unfasten the upper buttons of his body-suit.
“What would make anybody try to climb down in here?” the pilot wondered. “No matter how loose their temple teaching might be, plain common sense ought to—”
“Wait!” said Gloriana. She leaned forward, peering into the air. “Sweep the beam back … below us.”
The pilot obeyed hurriedly; the lightbeam flicked back and forth in the darkness, slicing brightness across rock. Jamie saw nothing, only the stark vertical walls of the shaft. Behind him he heard the woman with the holo camera shifting position, moving forward.
“Circle,” Gloriana said. “I’ll handle the light.” She leaned over the pilot’s shoulder and grasped the knob that controlled the lightbeam. As the pilot banked left and curled the flier back to where they’d passed a moment before, Gloriana braced herself and played the light low down on the wall of the Abyss. The woman with the holo camera climbed into the seat next to Jamie.
The flier completed its circle, but the light hadn’t shown anything. Gloriana said, “Lower. Circle back again, but this time take us down.”
The pilot’s face was taut, but he obeyed. The flier dived in a sweeping arc, dropped a hundred meters, two hundred. The heat rose in the flier’s small compartment. Gloriana kept the light on the empty cliffs, slicing back and forth, finding only rock—
“There!”
It was the holographer who cried out, but they all saw it. A pale shape that scuttled out of the light as it swept by, leaving only a flickering impression of something faintly luminescent that trailed light like rising bubbles in water.
Gloriana swung the lightbeam downward as they passed, and they caught another glimpse of the thing. Jamie saw pale-furred tentacles, ghostly in the darkness, moving so quickly that he couldn’t be sure he hadn’t seen more than one creature.
Whatever was there disappeared into the deeper reaches of the Abyss, running straight down the cliff wall.
The woman beside Jamie shut off her camera. “I didn’t get it,” she said. “I know I didn’t.”
“Go down after it,” Gloriana told the pilot.
The young man shot a frightened glance at her, fumbled with the flier’s controls.
“Hurry!” Gloriana said.
The flier slipped sideways and plunged straight downward into the darkness and the heat. The holographer wasn’t used to free-fall; she clutched at her seat, nearly lost control of her camera. Jamie had set his gravity harness before they’d taken off, but he too felt anxious: it was one thing to dive in his glider in the sky above Cirque where he could see clear air below him, but to dive into pitch blackness like this … He felt perspiration on his forehead, under his eyes, and knew it was from more than the heat of the Abyss.
The lightbeam streaked down the rocks so fast that they could see no details. Gloriana said, “That’s enough; level off and circle.” The calm of her voice seemed unreal to Jamie.
The pilot pulled out of the dive sharply; Jamie was crushed into his seat. He saw the lightbeam darting crazily back and forth in the darkness, searching, finding nothing, disappearing into the enfolding black. The flier leveled, and Gloriana swept the light in a flat circle till she once again found the cliff wall. They had moved away from it as they came out of their dive, and it seemed incredibly distant to Jamie.
“Take us closer,” Gloriana said. “Slowly.”
She searched the wall with the light as they approached; the beam slashed up, down, across. Naked stone, sheer rock faces that had probably never been seen by a soul. The barrenness of the chasm was awesome.
A movement—
As the light leaped after it, it flashed across something pale and scuttling. The light jumped back, but the creature was gone.
“It went down!” said the holographer. She had her camera in position now and was making adjustments even as she peered out into the dark.
Gloriana sent the lightbeam down as the pilot began to dive again. They saw the creature then, moving so fast it seemed to be falling, but Gloriana was able to track it with the light. It was huge—a mass of crawling limbs and a mottled grey body that pulsed with life.
Jamie heard the hum of the holo camera beside him, but his eyes were riveted on the creature running down the wall. Once, twice Gloriana lost it with the light, but each time she focused again on it before the thing could dodge away into the dark. The holographer was muttering, “Yes, yes, yes.”
Suddenly the creature stopped; it clung to the rock wall as they approached. Its body seemed to be a gigantic breathing sac, four meters in diameter; its blotchy markings undulated as it breathed, appearing to change the shape of the creature, like some shifting ghost in the dark.
Then it shuddered, its limbs convulsed, and it fell.
Gloriana followed it downward with the lightbeam, but she lost it in the depths. For several seconds Jamie kept thinking he could see the creature, but it was only a faint afterimage in his vision. The holographer switched off her camera, and Jamie heard silence in the flier. He heard his own breath coming fast and shallowly. Gloriana continued t
o sweep the light back and forth on the rocks as far down as they could see anything. They saw only the bare walls and the empty shaft.
“It was afraid of the light,” Jamie said. “It ran from the light every time you caught it.”
“Go down,” Gloriana said to the pilot.
The young man shook his head, his face flushed from the rising heat. “Please, no more.”
“Go down,” she said. The pilot’s eyes pleaded with her and lost; shakily he put the flier into another descent, slower this time.
“What do you think we’ll find by going farther down?” Jamie asked. “We’ve lost that thing; we have the pictures you wanted—”
“It didn’t come from nowhere,” she said. “There’ll be a cave, a nest, something. We’ve got to know.”
“Look,” said the holographer. She pointed downward with the faceted lenses of her camera, then flicked a switch to turn it on. The camera’s hum began again, and Jamie looked at what she was recording.
The light picked out movement below—slow, oozing movement of something nearly shapeless. Something pale in the dark, something that shook as the light touched it and tried to flow away from it. Shadows crawled. There were other moving shapes outside the focus of the light. …
Then Jamie realized that these things weren’t on the walls of the chasm, they were below. He thought: A ledge? Some overhanging growth? But he knew better: this was the bottom of the Abyss.
It crawled with life as Gloriana swept the lightbeam back and forth; shapes bulged upward, writhed in the light, fell back. Was it one giant creature or a colony of them? Everything below seemed to be moving; Jamie couldn’t tell. The hot floor of the Abyss pulsed, flowed and quivered, and the light moved across that pale mass like a knife: the dead-white creatures parted as it touched them.
Some of the shapes did not move; they were as dead white as the tentacled creatures, but as Jamie got a better look at the scene below, he realized that there were masses of fungoids down there—huge, shapeless blobs that loomed up out of the floor of the Abyss. Some of them seemed torn, eaten away in huge chunks: the food on which the tentacled monsters fed?
