She woke again—alone, exhausted beyond fear.
Was she blind? No. It was only the darkness of the diggers’ mound. Above ground it might be noon or midnight. Here, it was always dark.
But at least she was alone, at least for now. She moved, stretched tentatively … found a rocky ceiling just above her head, too close to allow her to stand, curving to arm’s-length walls and a floor somehow softer (but damper) than the entrance tunnel had been. The silence beat at her ears. The only audible sounds were the rattle of her breath inside the suit’s filter and the rasp of her movements. If she had a light—
But she did! She did have a light. Several, in fact: the firefly lamps strapped to her tool belt, the tool belt she had been using to mend the tractibles.
Stupid, stupid, languishing in the blackness when she could have been seeing! She fumbled at her belt almost fearfully, and indeed some of the small lamps had torn away during her struggle, but some of them remained, as small as bullets and with an activator built into each base. She extracted one and thumbed its switch.
The light it emitted was faint but welcome. Order was restored; she was in a place with contours and dimensions—a rounded pressed-earth hollow glistening with damp. The floor was carpeted with a pale, almost translucent growth through which small mandibled insects crawled, and on the wall there was the gauzy nest of some spider-like creature, a mass of cotton-floss thread to which the mummified bodies of insects adhered.
The firefly lamp was good for an hour or two. There were seven more remaining on her belt; she counted them with her fingers. She would have to be careful.
But of course she couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t even if she wanted to. No food. No water. She had some water reserves in her suit, which would recycle her urine, too, but that was an open loop and good for maybe a day or two at most without exterior replenishment. Basically, she needed to get to her base camp, find food and water and maybe a working tractible, then head back to Yambuku.
Resources, Zoe thought. She was perhaps not thinking very clearly; her head ached horribly where the digger had clubbed her, and when she touched her temple she felt a plump bruise under the excursion suit’s membrane. Resources: what did she have that she could use to her advantage? Telemetry, communication … the thought of talking to Tam Hayes was so enticing she almost wept. But when she called up her corns protocol there was no carrier— nothing from Yambuku, wide- or narrow-band, which meant that her gear was damaged, or theirs was, or perhaps the digger mound was blocking radio transmissions.
She wondered then how far below the surface she had been carried. She didn’t know—no one knew—how deep these tunnels ran. There had been a few seismic-imaging experiments conducted by remotely operated tractibles near the digger mounds, enough to suggest that the warrens were extensive and complexly interconnected. The digging might have gone on for centuries, might have reached down kilometers below the topsoil… But no, that was a bad thought. Impermissible. She felt panic rising like a lump in her throat. Daylight might be a kilometer away, but it also might be just an inch above this sealed chamber. She had no way of knowing and she instructed herself not to think about it.
She held her breath for a moment and listened carefully. Was she alone? A tunnel roughly as wide as her shoulders was the only entrance to this cul-de-sac. The firefly lamp would not illuminate that space beyond a meter or so; she saw only that the tunnel was circular and that it rose at a gentle angle, perhaps twenty degrees of slope. Listen. She held herself still and tried to calm the pulsing of blood in her ears. Listen. But the silence was absolute. Surely a digger traversing these tunnels would betray itself by the sound of its passage, claws on soil packed as hard as rock. There was no such sound. Good.
Maybe it was daytime, Zoe thought, and the diggers were outside gathering food. She tried to scroll a clock, but her corneal display seemed to be broken. Another effect of the blow to her head perhaps.
She hesitated for what might have been a moment or an hour, eyeing the crawl space suspiciously, reluctant to exchange this relatively spacious cell for the cramped enclosure of the tunnel. But then the firefly lamp began to sputter and dim, and anything, Zoe thought, anything would be better than more darkness.
She plucked another lamp from her belt and struck it, but it wouldn’t light. It was broken.
Her fingers shook as she worked the next lamp free. This one, when she pressed it, sprang brightly to life. She sighed her relief.
But that left only five more lamps … and none or all of them might have gone bad.
Now, Zoe, she thought. Go now.
She held the firefly lamp in her right hand and lay down on her stomach. The albino moss felt cool beneath her suit membrane. She would have to advance with her arms in front of her, squirming more than crawling, using her boots for traction. And what if she lost herself in this maze? What if all her firefly lamps burned out, one by one? Could she even take another one from her belt in such a narrow space?
No, she realized, not without dislocating her shoulder.
She backed off, removed her tool belt and slipped it over one shoulder. That way she could reach the remaining lamps, if need be.
Five lamps. Say, six or seven hours of light, if they all worked. And then—?
Another bad thought. She put it out of her mind and squirmed once more into the tunnel.
There was just enough space for her to lift herself on her elbows and inch forward, scrabbling with boots and knees in a sort of crab-crawl. She was grateful for the ubiquitous pale moss beneath her; it cushioned her knees and elbows where the vulnerable suit membrane might have torn or eroded.
The firefly lamp illuminated a narrow circular space perhaps a meter or two ahead of her. I need a plan, she thought. (Perhaps she said some of this aloud. She tried not to, but the gap between thought and word had narrowed and she caught the occasional echo of her own hoarse whisper coming back to her out of the distance. Giving herself away, she feared. But still, the animals hadn’t returned.)
A plan, she thought again. Here was a maze, and somewhere the minotaur. She decided that whenever she came to a fork in the tunnel she would always take the path that led upward, or if both paths were equivalent she would take the right-turning branch. That way she would eventually reach the surface, or at least be able (but please don’t let it happen) to back out of a dead end and retrace her route.
She could do that, she decided, even if, God forbid, she used up all her lamps. Even in the dark, she could do that.
The dark returned when her current lamp flickered and dimmed. Too soon, surely. How far had she come? She couldn’t guess. A long way, it seemed, but not far enough. The tunnel had not branched, not even once. Or perhaps, horrible thought, the diggers made new tunnels and sealed old ones; maybe she would reach a final wall and— No. Bad thought.
She fumbled another firefly lamp into her hand and pressed the base. To her immense relief, it flickered to life. Another hour lost. Bad thought, bad thought.
She had been imagining, vividly, what she would do when she got back to Yambuku—peel off her excursion membrane, stand under a hot shower, wash her hair, eat, drink sparkling water from tall crystal tumblers—when she came to a branching tunnel.
The first. Or was it the first? Here in this small arc of light it was hard to estimate time, to distinguish between events imagined and events actual. She had planned this, but had she already attempted it? She didn’t know. Nevertheless, Zoe thought, stick to plan. Did the left branch show an upward slope, or should she keep to the right?