I put a hand up to the knot on the back of my head. My eyes weren’t working just right, and I couldn’t seem to think about more than one thing at a time. I decided to think about getting up front to Joraleman. Getting help. He must have a radio, or something.… The doors were sprung, and I knew I ought to feel happier about that than I did. I started to climb up and out.
As I reached the doorway, the whole snowtrack shifted and dropped a few centimeters under me. I froze, swallowing my heart again as the ’track didn’t slide any farther, and pulled myself through into the snow. The snow lay in a wide fan around me, against a long concave wall of ice; snow that had given way and dumped us into this.…
I looked past the doors and down. And down. And then I sat back slowly in the snow, pulling my knees up to my chest, and hugged myself against a fit of shuddering. The snowtrack was resting on a ledge, barely. And below it translucent walls of green fluted ice fell away for a hundred meters or more into caverns of shadow. One slip, one shifting, even the tiniest wrong move …
After a while my body began to let itself go, too cold and beaten to sit there huddled in a knot forever. My mind eased out of its blind terror the same way. I started to inch forward finally, crawling, trembling, to look down again into the crevasse. Holding my breath, I saw the cab of the ’track hanging over the edge, resting on air. There was no way I could reach it, or Joraleman, or the radio without killing us all. I backed up again, wondering about Mikah. As long as he stayed unconscious, he’d be better off where he was than he’d be if I tried to move him. If he woke up …
But I couldn’t make myself climb back into the snowtrack’s hold, couldn’t even make myself touch it. And I couldn’t stay where I was, either, waiting for all of us to fall or freeze. So I started to climb, floundering up the face of the broken snow.
I made it to the surface, panting, covered by clinging white powder. Before I brushed it off, I wadded a handful in a palm of my glove and looked at it. I’d never seen more than a few flakes of snow at once before. Frozen water.… I put the handful into my mouth. I spat it out again as my mouth started to burn, remembering too late that this snow had some kind of acid in it.
I got to my feet. Up ahead I could see the Green Mountains, but they were on the other side of the crevasse from where I stood. They might as well have been on another planet. My throat tightened as I thought about how close.… I turned and looked back the way we’d come, shielding my eyes against the bloody glare of sunset. The snowtrack’s trail disappeared in the distance. There was no sign of the mines compound at all. The wind moaned and cried, sucking up whorls of dry snow, letting them sift down again as its voice fell away into sighs. The snowfields glittered like broken glass. I’d never seen so much open space before. I’d never been lost all alone in so much space; cold, bleak, and empty … so empty. I stumbled back and covered my eyes.
But I couldn’t panic; I couldn’t. I brought my hands down. Because the shaking that had hold of me now wasn’t just fear. I didn’t know how cold it was, but it was colder than anything I’d ever known; and with the sun setting it wasn’t going to get any better. I had to keep sane and keep moving or I’d freeze right here. I made myself start to walk back along the snowtrack’s trail, the only thing I could think of to do. The crust held my weight, so long as I was careful. This was a small world, no matter how it looked to me. It couldn’t be that far back to the dome, and warmth, and help.… I kept walking, shivering harder.
Something caught my eye as I reached the first long curve of the trail, coming out of blue shadow below the foot of a buckled sheet of ice. I stopped, glancing up the sunlit slope; stood still, with the freezing air catching in my throat. The wind stirred. Sweet chiming music broke the silence, and a shower of rainbow sparks danced on the snow. Not real. I shook my head. My eyes weren’t seeing this: not a garden of glass fracturing the sunset, a fantasy forest spun out of ice crystal, thorn and teardrop and gossamer.… “Not real.” I whispered it, remembering the stories the bondies told, wondering if this world was haunted after all.
I picked up a chunk of fractured snow crust, ready to throw it—and then I dropped it again. I stepped out of the rut and started up the open hillside, breaking through the snow crust, staggering and sinking, but always getting closer. I reached the trees at last, plunged into rainbow as I fell down on my knees below their glistening fingers. They laughed and chimed and sang to me. I got up slowly, reaching out to the final proof of my sanity.…
And as I reached out, I saw the other, standing like my own reflection beyond the fragile garden of crystal spines. My hand jerked, hitting the branch. It burst open with a sound like shattering windowpanes. Splinters of burning ice flew into my eyes. I cried out, losing the stranger and everything else in a haze of fire. I dug at my eyes. Suddenly a hand was on my arm, solid and real, turning me, pulling my hands away from my face. I looked up but I couldn’t see anything, only a fiery blur.
An alien thought probed deep into the core of my mind. Suddenly all my senses burst open—and then I was wrenched into blackness.
* * *
I was sitting on my knees on a floor of rough stone; my mind was still trying to settle back into my skull. I wiped at my oozing eyes, swearing.
Mikah was lying on his side staring at me, when my eyes finally cleared. I hoped I didn’t look as scared as he did. “You”—he gulped—“you alive?”
“I am if you are.” My voice didn’t sound very sure of it. I felt the lump on the back of my head again, glancing past him. Joraleman was lying beside him. We were in a blue stone room with no windows. “How … how long’ve I … we been like this?” Trees—where were the trees?
“I just woke up. Where the hell are we? I can’t see anything.” There wasn’t anything to see, but I didn’t bother to mention it. He pushed himself up and started to run his hands over his body, wincing and cursing at the bruises.
“Not the mines.” For one sick minute after my eyes cleared I’d thought we were back where we’d started. Now I was sure it was somewhere else. But where? “How’s Joraleman?”
“I don’t know. He’s bleeding. Maybe he’s dead.”
“Well, hell, why didn’t you check?”
“Because I was out cold, you asshole.”
I crawled over to where Joraleman lay. His pale hair was covered with blood from a cut across his forehead, but it looked like the cold had stopped the bleeding. He groaned when I shook him. “He’s alive.” I noticed that his stun gun was gone.
“Too bad.” Mikah rubbed his hands together.
“Shut up,” I said, feeling guilty somehow. “He’s the only one who might know what happened to us. You better hope he stays alive till he tells us that much.” Mikah shrugged. I shook Joraleman and he groaned again. There was a first-aid kit on his belt. I got it open, but I didn’t know what to do with the things I found inside it. There was a wet cloth sealed in plastic; I pulled that out and wiped off his face.
Mikah peered past my shoulder. “Sure is a lot of blood.”
“Too bad it ain’t yours,” I said, disgusted.
He pulled back, starting to cough again. When it was over, he said, “You know, at first I thought we were all dead, and the real hell was just like Cinder. Jeezu, I don’t ever want to die, if…” He didn’t finish it. “Did you see anything? About what happened to us? I don’t remember shit till I woke up here.”
I sat back on my heels while everything I’d seen played through my senses again.
“Well?” He gave my arm a poke.
I pulled away from him. “Yeah. We—” I pressed my lips together. “We fell into a big hole. Somebody must’ve got us out. I don’t know how.” Or who. Who else was there? Who had I seen, in that last second before …
Joraleman’s blue eyes opened, and for a second there was pure terror in them. He’d been conscious before, for long enough: the view through the windshield of the snowtrack was burned into his memory like a brand. “It’s okay,” I whispered, touching him.
“You’re safe.” He stared at me, and at Mikah, for a long minute before he tried to push himself up. He fell back again, running his hand over his face. “Hell and devils.…”
“Yeah, maybe so,” I said. “You hurt bad?”
He didn’t answer me at first. “My—ribs. I think something’s broken. Feel dizzy.” His voice slurred.
“There’s a cut on your head.”
“Aid kit. Get out the large white pills—two of them.”
I handed them to him. He chewed them up and swallowed with an effort. He started to breathe more easily then, and he sat up, staring at the walls just like we had.
I leaned back on my hands. “Where are we? What’s happening to us?”
“I don’t know.” He was sticking on patches of painkiller. He looked back at me, annoyed. “How would I know if you don’t?”
I shrugged, and got up. He stuck out his hand, so I helped him stand. He peered around like it was too dark to see clearly. I suppose it was, for them. My cat eyes didn’t have any trouble. He went over and ran his hand along a wall. The room was long and high, but rough around the edges, like a hole, and nothing but blue rock. I saw a telhassium crystal glitter as I glanced past. There were no windows, and now I realized there were no doorways, either. There were no openings at all.… I let my mind skid on past that without stopping; trying not to think about suffocating, trying to believe that if we’d gotten in, there was a way out, somewhere. Nobody else said anything about doors, either. A couple of lamps that burned with a shimmering blue glow were set into holes in the wall; otherwise the room was empty. “All the comforts of home,” I said.
Mikah grimaced. “Where did you grow up?”
“Spooks. It has to be,” Joraleman muttered.
“What?” I looked back at him; so did Mikah. “You feeling all right? Maybe you ought to sit down.”
He shook his head. “I’ll hold for now.” Then he frowned at us; his hand went looking for his stun gun, and tightened when he didn’t find it.
“You—uh, figured out where we are?” I wondered if that crack he’d taken on the head had made him a little gorked.
“I think so.” He leaned against the wall and sighed. “We’re ‘guests’ of the Spooks. The snowtrack didn’t just drop into a crevasse by accident. Something happened to the instruments…”
“You think ghosts did all this to us?” Mikah said sourly.
Joraleman laughed once. “The sort of ‘Spook’ I had in mind would be one of Cinder’s natives.”
“I never heard of any natives,” I said.
“I know you haven’t.” He shrugged. “We don’t exactly advertise it while we’re mining here. Squatter’s rights aren’t legally supposed to apply when there’s a native culture. But the Federation needs telhassium—and the Spooks weren’t about to leave. The FTA did its best to get rid of them. The problem is that they’re psionic—they read minds, they can teleport. And they live underground. It makes them hard to back into a corner.” He was staring at the solid walls, and he smiled; but he didn’t think it was funny. “By the Seven Saints, I don’t know why I’m telling all this to you. The point is that the Spooks won’t even deal with us on a normal level. In the beginning they pulled some ineffectual sabotage, but it was barely even an inconvenience; I guess they didn’t have much to work with. After that they dropped out of sight, literally. And now…”
“Why shouldn’t they fight?” I said. “It’s their snowball.” I wondered why that even mattered to me.
“I know that! But why now? That’s why we needed a new driver, kid: the last one didn’t come back from a trip to town. Neither did the snowtrack.…” His voice faded. For a second the terror was back in his eyes.
I rubbed my arms. Green ice, falling away into the shadows.… “Why do they call them Spooks?” I remembered the figure I’d half seen waiting for me—and the sense-twisting wrench that had pulled me from the crystal garden to this freezing hole with no exits.
“I suppose ‘Spook’ was the first thing that came into somebody’s head. Nobody has seen one in years; I’ve only seen a holo, but you could say there’s a resemblance: dead white and spindly-looking. They appear and disappear. And they don’t speak—apparently they communicate only by telepathy, although as far as we know they can’t or won’t link minds with a human.”
“Look, what good is all this talk doing!” Mikah wiped his face on his sleeve. “We’re just wasting time—we have to get out of here before those things come and kill us!” His voice wavered.
Joraleman pointed a hand at the walls, his face set and gray. I felt his tension rising. “If you’ve got suggestions on how to get out, bondie, I’d like to hear them. Otherwise, you might as well just shut up and wait.” He didn’t know how bad he was hurt, and he was keeping his own voice calm with nothing but willpower. He folded his arms against his ribs and slid down carefully to the floor.
I sat down too and rubbed my cold-aching hands, wishing I had a camph. Psions … telepaths. I wondered. I shut the room out of my mind and stretched my thoughts. It seemed like forever since I’d even tried to use my psi. It was hard to concentrate; it hurt to search, hunting a doorway in the dark and falling over things I couldn’t see. I didn’t want to do it, I’d never wanted to, I hated it. But somewhere … somewhere … there.
“Hey, you, what’re you doing?”
Something snapped and I was looking at Mikah. “Jeezu! You stupid—”
“You looked dead, sitting there with your eyes unfocused.”
“Fuck off. I’m thinking.” I looked over at Joraleman. His eyes were shut. He wasn’t asleep; he was praying. He wanted to be out of this so much that it was almost a physical pain, merging into the pain of his broken body.
“Then think of how to get us out of here, smartass.” Mikah got up and started to cough. His own fear crackled like static.
I blocked them out of my mind. I’d done it; for a second I’d found someone, something. I loosened my mind, let it reach out again; this time knowing where to start, spinning out an invisible thread, casting into the dark waters … and then suddenly contact, feeling, sound, vision, everything: blinding, alien sensory feedback, twisting and warping my mind’s sight like crazy mirrors, roaring and ringing, shocking every nerve ending in my body.
I broke contact. I sat with my eyes shut tight, more grateful right then for the emptiness in my mind than I’d ever been for anything; not even wanting to face the real world. But I’d done it. And knowing that I had, that I could, I had to go back again.…
This time it was almost easy; I knew the way through the dark. But I took it slowly, keeping control, making the sudden explosion of images and impressions filter through blocks and byways to reach my mind’s eye. And I understood this time that I hadn’t contacted just one of the aliens. Somehow I’d contacted them all, more minds than I could ever comprehend, all at once. I was looking through hundreds of eyes at once, breaking in on a hundred different lives, plugged into the circuits of enough energy to burn out all my senses if I lost control again. I could barely touch the wild electricity of living a hundred lives at once. My own thoughts began to tangle helplessly. I started to struggle, to pull my mind free.… And then suddenly I knew that they knew about me.
I broke contact and tried to disappear. But they followed me back across the broken connections, and my defenses fell apart until nothing lay in their way. I was drowning in image—
I was back in the stone-walled room; Mikah and Joraleman were standing over me. My face hurt, and after a minute I knew someone had slapped me.
“He just went crazy. Dumb shit sits there staring like he’s seeing things and says he’s ‘thinking,’ then he starts—”
Joraleman said, “What’s the matter with you, kid? Can you hear me?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I made contact—with the Spooks.”
“What did I tell you? He’s crazy,” Mikah said.
“I’m not crazy! I’m a telepath. I got into their minds, and they found ou
t.”
“Is that the truth, bondie? You can read minds? Did you find out anything?”
“Yeah, it’s the truth. But there was too much, it all ran together.” I shook my head. “I’m still trying to get it.…” I looked up and away from him.
Two of them were standing there in the room with us. Spooks: a woman with hair like a cloud, whose moon-white skin was netted with age lines; and a man who looked almost human, I thought—I wanted to laugh but I didn’t. They wore heavy clothes, like our own but cruder-looking. I felt them searching us with their mind. I tried to deaden my own mind, not even thinking.…
“It’s him. He’s the one you want!” Mikah pointed at me.
EIGHT
THE ALIENS WERE startled; I could feel their surprise. As they moved toward us, I got up and backed away from Joraleman and Mikah, toward the far end of the room. The old woman stayed where she was, watching them; the man followed me. I looked back at the others and said, “Do something,” but they just stood gaping like none of it was real.
The man stopped in front of me, and I couldn’t look away from his eyes. They were green, all green like a cat’s. And when they met mine, the world stopped. Suddenly I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even think; my mind was paralyzed like my body. There was only the wall, behind me, holding me up—the only thing that wasn’t a part of an anger that didn’t belong to me, a thousand bright fluttering rags of image choking my mind … a sudden knife of focused thought sinking home behind my eyes, searching for my soul—
(Wait, stop, what do you want?) I felt my memories separating and coming loose, my mind being torn open. He was searching for the answers to a question I didn’t even know; and I couldn’t stop him, I couldn’t reach him—I couldn’t even remember how. I couldn’t remember my own name … I was disappearing, disintegrating, feeling my mind flowing out of me layer after layer.…
Until he tore away the last of my defenses, so deep in my mind that I hadn’t even known it was there. And the secret walled up behind it burst out: a nightmare of blood and screaming and agony. His own mind reeled back from it. Just for a second he lost control.