Clutching his ankle, Teresa hadn’t time to wonder how he had stopped so suddenly. She held on tightly with both arms. Her flippered feet bumped the barricade and instinctively she kicked at it.
Miraculously, it gave way! Glancing quickly downstream, Teresa saw the current sweep away what remained of the precarious barrier. All it had taken was one extra nudge and the impediment was gone. What luck!
She almost let go to continue the journey. But then she paused. How is he holding on? a voice insisted. And why doesn’t he let go now that the way is clear?
Something else had to be wrong. Involuntary shivers were coursing down the man’s legs. He’s in trouble, she realized.
Fighting the current, worming her arms forward one at a time, Teresa climbed up his legs inch by awful inch, seizing at last a solid grip on his belt. She lifted her head to see what Alex was doing.
My God! Bubbles escaped Teresa’s mouth as she tried not to cry out. The goggles prevented her from looking within the circle of darkness framing the man’s face. But she didn’t need any look in his eye to know panic and despair. With growing feebleness, Alex clawed at a thong that gouged deeply into his neck, releasing thin trails of blood every time the current let up a bit. That same current almost dragged Teresa’s goggles off as she shifted to try to see around the black circle, to whatever had him trapped.
It was the map plaque. Somehow it had jammed into a crevice left by the cave slide! It was what had stopped them both from crashing among the razor-sharp rocks just seconds ago. Now wedged in place by Alex’s struggles, it also anchored the noose that was strangling the life out of him.
There was no time for thought. Teresa’s knife was at her ankle, while Lustig’s was convenient at his thigh. It would have to be his then. But to take it meant she’d have to let go with one arm! And Teresa knew she couldn’t hold on … unless.
She took three deep breaths, spat out her mouthpiece and bit down hard on his belt, fastening her teeth as hard as she could. Gripping tight with her left arm, she released the right and fought to bring it to the knife. The river buffeted them like flags. But in spite of the pain, her jaw and shoulder remained in their sockets as her right hand fumbled with the sheath snap and at last brought out the gleaming blade.
Teresa squeezed both arms around him again and wriggled the pungent belt out of her mouth. Now came the hard part—holding her breath while worming her way up Alex’s body, centimeter by centimeter. His shirt was in tatters of course, and blood streamers stained the chill water as she noted with one dim corner of her mind that the man’s chest was even hairier than Jason’s.… And that, of all things, he had an erection!
Now? Males are so bizarre.
Then she recalled the old wives’ tale—that men sometimes grow tumescent when they are close to death. Teresa hurried.
Her arms were close to giving out and her lungs were burning by the time she wrapped her legs around his thighs, held tight with one arm, and reached upstream with the knife. She tried not to stab him in the face or throat as the fickle, trickster river tore and twisted at her grip with sudden surges, forcing her hand this way and that.
He had to be alive and conscious still. Or was it just a reflex that caused Alex to run a hand along her outstretched arm, nudging her aim? All at once, through the metal blade, she felt the taut, bowstring tension of the thong, thrumming a bass tone of death.
Now! Bear down, bitch. Do it!
With a force of will Teresa drove strength into her arm. The thong resisted … then parted with a sharp twang that reverberated off the narrow walls.
Suddenly they were tumbling downstream, bouncing against the floor and ceiling. Teresa had to choose between protecting her goggles from the tearing slipstream and cramming the breather tube back into her mouth. She chose breath over sight and grabbed the aerator, quenching her agonized lungs even as the high-tech optics were torn off her head, turning everything black.
The wild ride ended just a few chaotic moments later. Abruptly, the bottom seemed to drop out as she flew into what felt like open air! The former low, thrumming growl now crested to a clear, crashing roar. Gravity took her, and the plummet lasted a measureless time … ending at last in a splash at the foot of a noisy waterfall.
The pool was deep and cold and utterly black. Teresa struggled toward what she devoutly hoped would be the surface. When her head finally broached again, she treaded water, spat out her mouthpiece, and drank in the sweetness of unbottled air. Up was up again, and down was down. For a moment it didn’t matter that nothing—not even the green glimmer of worms—illuminated her existence. Other people, after all, had gone blind and lived. But no one had ever managed very long without air.
“Alex!” she shouted suddenly, before even thinking of him consciously. He might be knocked out somewhere in this inky lake, drifting away silently, unconscious … and she without sight to look for him!
She swam away from the falls until the clatter and spume faded enough to let her hear herself think. “Alex!” she called again. Oh God, if she was alone down here. If he died because she passed within inches, just missing him without even knowing it …?
Was that a sound? She whirled. Had someone coughed? It sounded like coughing. She kicked a turn, seeking the source.
“Uh … over …” More coughing interrupted the faint, croaking voice. “Over … here!”
She thrashed the water in frustration. “I lost my goggles, dammit.”
The current seemed to be drawing them closer, at least. Next time his voice was clearer. “Ah … that must be …” He coughed one last time. “… must be why I can see your face now. You look terrible, by the way.”
He sounded nearby. Alex kept talking to guide her. “Go left a bit … um … and thank you … for saving my life. Yes, that’s it. Gets shallow about there … left a bit more.”
Teresa felt sandy bottom beneath her feet and sighed as she dragged her heavy, shivering body out of the clinging black wetness. “Here, this way,” she heard him say, and a hand grabbed her arm. She clutched it tightly and sobbed suddenly with emotion she hadn’t been aware of till that moment. Now that all the furious action had stopped, a sudden wave of lygophobia washed over her and she shivered at the intimidating darkness.
“It’s all right. We’re safe for the time being.” He guided her to sit down beside him and put his arms around her to share warmth. “You’re an impressive individual, Captain … um, Teresa.”
“My friends …,” she said, catching her breath as she clutched him tightly. “Sometimes, my friends call me … Rip.”
She knew he was smiling, though she couldn’t even see the hand that brushed her stringy, sopping hair out of her eyes. “Well,” he said from very close. “Thanks again, Rip.” And he held her till the shivering stopped.
Some time later, Teresa borrowed his goggles to look around. The Hadean lake stretched farther to the left and right than the tiny beam could reach, and the ceiling might as well have been limitless. Only echoes confirmed they were underground—and her fey sense, which told her countless meters of ancient rock lay between them and any exit from this place.
She gasped when she saw the extent of poor Alex’s scrapes and bruises. “Whoosh,” she sighed, touching the noose mark around his throat. It was certain to be permanent.
“A Scotsman, one of my ancestors, died this way,” he commented, tracing the bloody runnel with his fingertips. “Poor sod was caught in bed with the mistress of a Stuart prince. Not wise, but it makes for good telling centuries later. My famous grandmother says she always expected to wind up on the gallows, too. Finds the idea romantic. Maybe it runs in the family.”
“I know a thing or two about ropes and nooses also,” she told him as she dressed his worst cuts. “But I’ve got a feeling that when you go it’ll be a lot flashier than any hanging.”
He agreed with a sigh. “Oh, I imagine you’re right on about that.”
Their supplies were meager, since their hip pouches had been pac
ked in a hurry and hers was torn in the struggle. Besides the first-aid kit and one capsule containing a compressed coverall, there were two protein bars, a compass, and a couple of black data cubes. Carefully scanning the pool, Teresa failed to find her lost goggles or anything else of value.
“How well do you remember George’s map?” she asked when they were both a bit recovered. Alex shrugged in what was, to him, utter darkness. “Not too well,” he answered frankly. “Had I it to do over again, I’d have made a copy for you. Or we ought to have taken the time to memorize it.”
“Mmm.” Teresa understood after-the-fact regrets. Her entire career had been about avoiding rushed planning—parsing out every conceivable contingency well in advance. And yet she trained for the unexpected, too. She was always ready to improvise.
“You had no time,” she replied. “And Glenn Spivey’s no fool.”
Alex shook his head. “Back in the conference room he spun out a scenario so reasonable, it almost had me convinced.”
“You seemed to be going along when I left. What changed your mind?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t so much change my mind as decide I didn’t want it made for me. We’d all worked so hard. It was starting to look as if we might be able to deal with Beta ourselves. Though how to expel it safely at the very end—that I still hadn’t figured out, yet.”
Teresa recalled her dream about the fireball, erupting into the sky from a boiling ocean … rising, but certain to return.
“So maybe Spivey’s plan’s a good one … keeping it inside the Earth, but up so high it’ll lose mass slowly?”
“Maybe … if it loses mass fast enough while in the mantle to make up for its gains lower down. If there aren’t instabilities we never calculated. If constant pumping on the gazer doesn’t crumble too many farms or cities or change the Earth’s innards somehow—”
“Could it do that?”
His face took on a perplexed look. “I don’t know. Last time I looked over my big model on Rapa Nui …” He shook his head. “Anyway, that’s where we’ve got to go now. From there we can answer Spivey’s proposition with one of our own.”
What an optimist, Teresa realized, and wondered why she ever thought him dour or lethargic. “How are we supposed to get there?”
“Oh, George says that will be surprisingly easy. Auntie Kapur can get us aboard a Hine-marama zep to Fiji, which isn’t a part of ANZAC and has an international jetport. From there, we travel under our own names, quite openly. Spivey won’t dare try to stop us … not without revealing everything, since, naturally, we’ll leave complete diary caches with Auntie before we go.”
“Naturally,” she nodded. “Knowing Spivey, he’ll just wait to talk with us when we get there. He still holds a full hand. And we can’t deal with anyone else.”
Of course Teresa knew what she and Alex were doing. They were talking as if their fates were actually still in their control. As if they would ever meet that clandestine zeppelin to begin a journey across the Pacific to the land of haunting statues. By putting off their predicament, even for a few minutes, they gave themselves time to calm down, to equilibrate. Time to engage in denial that they really were doomed, after all.
Alex recalled George saying something about exiting the Waterfall Cave via a dry channel, cut halfway up a jumble slope about a quarter of the way forward from the falls themselves. Unfortunately, he couldn’t recall whether that was a quarter of the way clockwise or counterclockwise. They tried the former first—taking turns peering through the goggles for any sign of an exit—before moving on to the latter. Fortunately, they found the opening at last, not too badly hidden behind a jutting limestone wall.
Unfortunately, one of them would always be effectively blind at any given moment. Because Alex was still a bit shaky from his misadventure in the river, Teresa insisted he lead, wearing the goggles. She assured him she could follow so long as he provided some spoken guidance, plus a hand wherever it got complicated.
The experience of climbing over glassy-smooth boulders in pitch blackness was a unique one for Teresa. At times she had the illusion this wasn’t a cave at all, but the surface of some ice moon. The sky was occulted not by stone but by a sooty nebula, hundreds of parsecs in breadth. But at any moment, the moon’s rotation might reveal bright stars, shining through a gap in the vast space-cloud … or perhaps even some alien planet or sun.
Those were moments of fantasy, of course. And always they were cut short, refuted by her other senses … by the bouncing echoes of the receding waterfall and the strange feeling of pressure from the rock overhead … reminding her she was actually deep inside a world. A dynamic world, with a habit of changing, shifting, shrugging in its fitful slumber.
New Zealand, especially, was a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. And though all that activity went on slowly in comparison to human lives, Teresa felt a sense of danger beyond the prospect of getting lost and starving to death.
At any moment the mountain might simply decide to squash them.
Somehow, strangely, that patina added to all their other jeopardies seemed to compensate a bit. It felt thrilling, somehow. In that respect we’re alike … Alex Lustig and I. Neither of us was meant to die in a boring way.
She thought about all this while, with other parts of her mind, she paid close attention to each stone and every tricky footing. Alex helped her squeeze finally through a narrow slot, into a passageway that coursed with a stiff breeze. Her fingertips brushed the wall to her left, tracing dripping moisture. Alex stopped her then and slipped the goggles into her hand.
The interactive optics read her pupils’ dilation and damped power accordingly. Nevertheless, the return of sight left her momentarily dazzled. Pyrites and other deceptively gaudy crystalline forms glittered back at her from all sides, their shine accentuated by the gleety dampness, giving the impression of some hermit’s deeply buried shrine. It was lovely. For a moment she was reminded of holos she’d viewed of the Lasceaux and Altamira caves, where her Cro-Magnon ancestors had crept by torchlight to paint the walls with haunting images of beasts and spirits, blowing ocher dust around their hands to leave poignant prints upon the cool stone—markers denoting the one thing she and they intimately shared … mortality.
Teresa consulted her compass—though such things were notoriously unreliable underground. Then she took Alex’s hand to lead him in what seemed the only direction possible, away from the growling river into the heart of the mountain.
So they alternated, stopping frequently to rest, each taking turns being the leader, then the blind, helpless one. She became quite knowledgeable about the contours of his hands, and their footsteps slowly joined in almost the same subconscious rhythm.
Along the way, to pass the time, Alex asked her to talk about herself. So she spoke of her school years and then her life and Jason. Somehow that seemed easier now. She could speak her husband’s name in past tense with sadness but no shame. Teresa also learned a few things about Alex Lustig when his turn came. Perhaps one or two that only slipped between the lines as he told her about his life as a bachelor scientist. In fact, Teresa marveled at how much better a storyteller he was. He made his own labors, in front of chalk boards or holo screens, seem so much more romantic than her own profession as a spacebus driver.
Of course their conversation went in fits and starts. Every third phrase was an interruption. “… Lift your left foot …” or “… duck your head half a meter …” or “… twist sideways now, and feel for a cut to the right …” Each of them took turns verbally guiding and often physically controlling the other one. It was a heavy responsibility, demanding mutual trust. That came hard at first. But there was simply no alternative.
It was during one of her turns to be led that Teresa suddenly felt a passing breeze as they crept along a narrow passage. She turned her head. And even though the fleeting zephyr was gone, she sniffed and began to frown.
“… so that was when Stan told me I’d better shape up my …”
She stopped him by planting her feet and tightening her grip on his hand.
“What is it, Teresa?” She heard and felt him turn around. “Are you tired? We can—”
She held up her free hand to ask for quiet, and he shut up.
Had she really sensed something? Was it because she was blind and paying attention to other senses? Would she have walked right on by if she had been sighted and in the lead? “Alex,” she began. “On which side of the corridor was the next branching on George’s map?”
“Um … as I said, I’m not too certain. I think it was on the left, perhaps four klicks past the lake. But surely we haven’t gone that far yet.… Or have we?” He paused. “Do you think maybe we’ve gone past?”
Teresa shook her head. It was a gamble, but the breeze had come from the left.…
There were always breezes though, little gusts that blew down the cavern from who knew where, bound for places impossible to guess. Still, something in her internal guidance system had seemed to cry out that last time.
“Did George write a note next to the turn?”
She heard him inhale deeply and imagined him closing his eyes as he concentrated. “Yes … I believe I see some writing … do you think it was something like ‘watch out for the skull and bones’?”
She punched fairly accurately and struck his shoulder. “Ow!” he grunted, satisfyingly.
“No,” Teresa said. “But the turn must have been unobvious. After all, they don’t have to be clear forks in the road. Usually they won’t be.”
“I guess not. Maybe that’s what he wrote down … how to look for it. Did you—”
She dragged his wrist. “Come on!”
“Wait. Shouldn’t I give you the gog—”
He stumbled just to keep up as she led him back through the utter blackness purely by memory, waving one arm in front of her, trying to find that elusive whisper again.