Therefore, in my most secret inner soul, I swore a terrible oath to do so.
"Come now," I said to my friends, "we are wasting time, and perhaps I have little time left. Let us perform at least one great deed in our lives before we vanish forever."
I did not wait for them to answer — I strode down the dirt-caked tunnel, trusting that somehow I would find the Shaddill. My friends hesitated a moment, then followed close behind me.
24: WHEREIN I EXPLORE THE ENEMY’S LAIR
In The Tunnels
The entire stick-ship seemed filled with tunnels: some narrow with little head-room, some wide and reaching up into darkness. Darkness was indeed the most salient feature of these tunnels; there were occasional lights — dim orangey plates the size of my palm, set into the wall at waist level — but I counted a full twenty-two paces from one plate to the next, and considering the lights were scarcely as bright as a single candle, they did not provide substantive illumination. Their sole function must have been to prevent one from getting lost in total blackness.
Festina still had her glow-wand, but she used it sparingly: she only activated it when we came to an intersection. Since the floor was dirt, one could see which tunnels were more frequently used than others — the ones where the soil was tamped down more solidly, with the occasional discernible footprint. (The footprints were always from human boots, their tread identical to those worn by the robot admirals.) We always chose to follow the direction of greatest traffic, on the theory that this was most likely to lead us to Shaddill.[13]
[13] — At every intersection, we made clear deep gouges in the soil, pointing back the way we had come. Festina called this "our trail of bread crumbs"… which does not make me eager to eat Earthling bread.
Of course, the stick-ship did not merely consist of earth-lined tunnels — there were also multitudinous rooms opening off the tunnels. Many of these rooms did not have doors, just open entranceways… but the rooms were even darker than the tunnels, so peeking inside only showed bulks of anonymous machinery enclosed in metal shells. From time to time, we saw robots scurrying in the darkness, things that were no more than wheeled boxes with arms sprouting out of their tops. The robots took no notice of us; they were too busy with their programmed tasks to worry their mechanical brains about strangers.
As for the rooms with closed doors, we did not attempt to open them. I had no time to waste on side trips, since I did not know how much longer my brain would stay active. Besides, as Festina pointed out, doors are often closed to protect passers-by from dangerous things on the other side, whether those things were wild beasts, aggressive nano, or machines that produced incinerative quantities of heat. (Nimbus assured us he was keeping watch for high concentrations of nano; according to him, there were light sprinklings everywhere we went, but the nanites showed no more interest in us than the boxy robots.)
Minutes slipped by and still we did not see anything that might have been a living Shaddill. Of course, the stick-ship was huge; there might be millions of Shaddill in some other part of the craft, a residential section that was kept separate from the place where they imprisoned captives. But as time went on with no sightings, I wondered where the great poop-heads were. Was the entire stick-ship run by robots and nanites? Did the machines need no supervision at all? And if the ship could run itself, what about other Shaddill projects?
I knew the Shaddill had changed Melaquin from whatever it once was into a near-duplicate of Earth, with terrestrial weather and plants and animals… not to mention all the cities built underground and at the bottom of lakes. Was it possible such construction had been accomplished entirely by unsupervised machines? Perhaps so — aliens of advanced technical abilities might do everything with machines instead of physical labor. For all I knew, there might only be a handful of Shaddill left in the universe; they languidly gave a command, then years of work (including planning, design, and terraforming) were carried out by mechanical servants.
And if that were possible… why did there have to be living Shaddill at all? Suppose the old race, Las Fuentes, had created this stick-ship and programmed it to operate on its own. The living Fuentes then turned themselves to jelly, leaving the ship to work unattended.
It would be very most irksome if we reached the stickship’s control center, only to find it filled with more bulks of anonymous machinery: artificial intelligences running the whole show. One cannot punch a computer in the nose.
On the other hand, one can kick loose a computer’s metal housing and rip out its wires, dancing upon its circuit boards and smashing anything that says FRAGILE, DO NOT STOMP. Even better, the Leagueof Peoples would not consider me a bad person for doing so — if the League dealt with computers on a regular basis, they probably felt the urge to dance on circuit boards themselves. Perhaps they would appear before me in a pillar of fire and say, "Oar, most good and faithful servant, you have done exactly what we would have done ourselves, if only we had feet." It would turn out the League people were giant space butterflies; they would give me a medal for heroic achievement, then seat me upon their backs and we would ride off for Glorious Adventures on the far side of the galaxy.
That is what was going through my head when I saw the Pollisand.
In Good Paintings, The Eyes Follow You; In Stick-Ships, You Follow The Eyes
We had come to a junction and Festina was examining the dirt on the floor, trying to determine which way was used more often. Both left and right were quite trampled, indicating we had finally reached a major thoroughfare. While the others busied themselves debating which direction looked better, I kept watch for hostile elements… which is how I caught sight of familiar red eyes glowing in the darkness to my right.
The Pollisand was so far off in the shadows, I could not make out his body; but his eyes were unmistakable. They glowed for the briefest of moments, just long enough for me to recognize them. Then they winked out as if they had never been there.
"This way," I said, pointing in the direction of the eyes. "That is the proper route."
Festina looked up as if waiting for an explanation. I did not think she would be happy to learn I had seen the Pollisand again — Festina believed he was a Creature Of ill Omen, and perhaps she would insist on going exactly the opposite way. Therefore, I said nothing. Eventually, she shrugged and muttered, "Why not? Right looks as good as left."
So we moved in the direction I had seen the glowing eyes. I kept close watch on the ground as we walked, hoping to observe deep footprints from a rhino-like beast… but I saw nothing except packed-down soil. Perhaps all I had seen was an illusion inserted into my brain. Still, we pressed along the tunnel until we came to another intersection; and once again, I caught a fleeting glimpse of eyes down one of the passages.
"This way now," I said pointing.
Of course, it was not so easy as that — Festina wished to examine the ground, and we had to pause as Aarhus made grooves to mark our way back. In the end, however, Festina agreed the direction I indicated was as good a choice as any, and we proceeded accordingly.
Several minutes passed in that manner. None of the others noticed the glowing eyes: they were only visible to me. Nevertheless, at each junction, the Pollisand marked a reasonable way forward, so the others were willing to follow my lead.
Once or twice, Festina peered at me with suspicion — she obviously wondered why I had started to make snap judgments at each cross-tunnel. By now, however, she must have become accustomed to me behaving in a manner too deep for humans to understand; and as my Faithful Sidekick, she chose not to question my will. She simply made sure the sergeant continued to mark our way back, and little by little she took less time to examine the ground before declaring, "Let us do as Oar says."