John DeChancie Skyway 00 Red Limit Freeway

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haul them up.
So I lay there, waiting, eyes focused on some interesting crystal patterns on
the ceiling that glowed peculiarly in the light of my helmet lantern. It was a
moue pattern, shimmering and shifting as I moved my head slightly and the
light with it. The colors were indigo and violet, edged with pink and red. It
was hypnotic, in a way, watching it weave and dance. I slipped into a strange
reverie, thinking mostly about Darla, and about Susan, trying to sort out my
feelings. I saw Darla's face after a while; it took form behind the pattern,
or was superimposed over it. Darla's was a perfect face, if such can exist,
except perhaps for a slight overbite (which actually I found irresistibly
seductive--it gave her lower lip a sensuous pout). The symmetry was
compelling, the graceful proportions almost approaching a work of art. That
profile: what combination of curves and lines could be more subtle yet so
mathematically precise? A millimeter's difference here or there, and the whale
organic rightness of it would be gone. Mathematical, yes, but no equation,
however abstruse, could describe it. Faces such as hers were meant to be taken
in all at once, in one short intake of breath. Everything fit together well:
the sculpted helmet of dark hair, the full tips, the elevated cheekbones, the
slightly cleft chin . . . and the eyes, yes. Blue the color of same cold
virginal sky viewed from stratospheric heights, as from the cockpit of a
hypersonic transport; the blue behind which stars are barely hidden. Hers was
an arctic beauty. But look a bit farther into the eyes--what do you see?
Molten paints, tiny burning highlights: Inside, she burned far something; I
didn't know what. The cause, her dissident movement? Maybe. Me? I doubted it.
She had deceived me, even used me, though she adamantly maintained that it all
had been for my benefit. At moments, I was inclined to agree. At others . . .
The jury was still out on Darla's motives. Doubtless she bore me no ill will,
but I had the nagging feeling that I was just another cog in some vast
creaking mechanism--admittedly not of her own design or creation--for which
she had appointed herself the maintenance engineer, responsible for applying
daubs of oil here and there to broken-toothed gears and squeaking cams. She
was dedicated to seeing that it all hung together, that it kept clanking and
groaning until it completed whatever mysterious task its designers had set for
it. It was the Paradox Machine, and it was running the whole show.
I realized that I was deeply in love with Darla. Despite everything. It was
one of those facts that lurks about in the shadows, then steps out from a dark
embrasure and says, "Hi, there!" as if you should have known all along.
Despite everything.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci had me in thrall, and there wasn't a damn thing I
could do about it.
Susan?
Susan. I replayed scenes from the last few days. In one sense, a lot of it
was porno footage; looking at it another way, here were two people who enjoyed
each other's company, enjoyed giving each other pleasure. There was warmth,
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friendship . . . perhaps even love, of a sort. I found it impossible to
compare my feelings for Darla and for Susan. They were not quantifiable. The
rest is semantics. Call what I felt for Darla passion--it well may have been,
but it was of a rarefied variety. I was not altogether sure that the emotion
was not indistinguishable from my strong intuition that Darla's destiny and
mine were in some way inseparably mated.
And I was not sure at all whether I liked Darla. She tended to make people
uncomfortable in strange and subtle ways. Perhaps it was only her striking
beauty--most people, let's face it; are not beautiful, and a flesh-and-blood
reminder in our midst stirs up odd feelings--but I suspect her aloofness was
what put me off the most. She was a distant observer of events. She wasn't
uninterested in what was going on; rather, she seemed disinterested. Unbiased,
objective. I do not say cold. The Keeper of the Machine. However, I liked
Susan. Semantics again. While she was not always easy to get along with, she
was in the end always supportive, of me, of what I did. She trusted me, and I
her. I could understand her. Her weaknesses were not blemishes on an otherwise
admirable human, but reflections of what was infirm and uncertain in me.
Part of me hadn't wanted any of this. Part of me wanted to run . . . not from
something, as I had been doing, but to something. Home. Back to safety, to the
familiar. I wanted out of it all, to be absolved of all responsibility. I was
no hero. I realized that somewhere within lay a part of me as deeply afraid as
Susan had sometimes shown herself to be.
But that was unfair. Susan had borne up under unbelievable pressure. She
hadn't come apart.
Why not say I loved Susan?
I played the footage again. I loved her sensuality, her willingness to please
me. Easy things to love, perhaps, but between men and women, the tie that
binds is of two interwoven strands, and these are part of what bound me to
Susan: the palmfuls of warm flesh, the smooth planes of her skin in the
darkness, the deep well of her mouth . . .
Something was standing just outside the pool of light cast by my helmet
lantern.
I felt it as a presence first; then a shape began to grow in my peripheral
vision, black-on-black against the shadows. Somewhere within my bloodstream,
the cold-water tap turned on. I stopped moving my head and froze. My heart
bounced within my chest cavity like a rubber ball.
I was unarmed. We hadn't brought weapons into the Ahgirr city. A very few
options presented themselves. I could continue lying there, hoping that
whatever it was would get tired of breathing significantly in the darkness and
leave. Or I could leap up and run back into the tunnel in a mad gamble that I
was faster than it. But what would I do at the end of the tunnel? Tight fit
there. No. I needed a weapon. Ragna had given us some caving tools, one a pike
tipped with a strange grappling hook, which I knew lay beside my left foot. If
I could create a diversion . . .
I threw my helmet at the thing in the shadows, rolled, snatched the pike, and
leaped to my feet brandishing it. The helmet had missed, bouncing off the wall
and landing upside-down behind a low projection on the floor. I unhooked the
biolume torch from my utility belt and snapped it on, playing its beam against
a large shape with purple and pink splotches, standing not three meters away
from where I'd been lying.
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My actions startled the non-Boojum to no end. It staggered back, flailing its
spindly forelegs as if to fend off a blow.
"Oh, my!" it yelped in a strangely familiar voice. "Dearie me!"
Then it turned and galumphed off down the passage, disappearing into the
blackness.
Stunned, jaw gone slack, I stood there and watched.
After perhaps thirty seconds, not really knowing why, I followed it. Several
meters beyond where the thing had stood, the tunnel curved to the right and
began to descend, widening out until it flared into a large chamber with
several tunnels branching off its farther end. I took the widest of these,
madly dashing on into the gloom. I hadn't stopped to pick up my helmet, and
the biolume torch was dim. The way grew serpentine, then straightened out.
Numerous cross passages intersected the main tunnel, and I ran from mouth to
mouth sending the feeble torchbeam down each. At the ninth one, I thought I
saw something moving, and entered.
Ten minutes later I realized three things: one, I had been very foolish to
run off; two, I was lost; three, the biolume torch was failing. Ten minutes
after all of the above had dawned on me, the torch no longer even glowed and
the subterranean night had closed in. The absolute, categorical darkness of a
cave is difficult to appreciate until experienced. Only the totally blind know [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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