"I'd say sit tight."
"How dangerous is this?"
"Brother. I don't know. There's going to, be quite a bang when that monster goes off. Our suits will protect us from most of it. But it's going to lift us and accelerate us very fast. That kind of sharp acceleration can mess up your insides. I'd say a concussion at the very least"
I gulped. "Then-"
"Just sit tight. I'm thinking."
So was I. I was frozen there with a hot knife somewhere in my back. I knew rd have to squirm sometime.
The damn thing was moving.
I blinked, afraid to rub my eyes, and looked again No, it wasn't. Not on the outside anyway. It was more like the movement you can see inside a living cell beneath a microscope. Internal flows, exchanges of fluids from here to there. I watched it and was hypnotized.
There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window into something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness. It was dark and wet without menace. It was growing, and yet complete as it came into being. It was bigger than this ball of hot mud called Venus and had its roots down in the core of the planet. There was no corner of the universe that it did not reach.
It was aware of me. I felt it touch me and felt no surprise. It examined me in passing but was totally uninterested. I posed no questions for it, whatever it was. It already knew me and had always known me.
I felt an overpowering attraction. The thing was exerting no influence on me; the attraction was a yearning within me. I was reaching for a completion that the jewel possessed and I knew I could never have. Life would always be a series. of mysteries for me. For the jewel, there was nothing but awareness. Awareness of everything.
I wrenched my eyes away at the last possible instant. I was covered in sweat, and I knew I'd look back in $ moment. It was the most beautiful thing I will ever see
"Kiku, listen to me."
"What?" I remembered Ember as from a huge distance.
"Listen. Wake up. Don't look at that thing."
"Ember, do you see anything? Do you feel some= thing?"
"I see something. I... I don't want to talk about it. I can't talk about it. Wake up, Kiku, and don't look back."
I felt like I was already a pillar of salt; so why not look back? I knew that my life would never be quite like what it had been. It was like some sort of involuntary religious conversion, as if all of a sudden I knew what the universe was for. The universe was a beautiful silk-lined box for the display of the jewel I had just beheld.
"Kiku, that thing should already have gone off. We shouldn't be here. I moved when I woke up. I tried to sneak up on one before and got five hundred meters away from it. I set my foot down soft enough to walk on water, and it blew. So this thing can't be here."
"That's nice," I said. "How do we cope with the fact that it is here?"
"All right, all right, it is here. But it must not be. finished. It must not have enough nitro in it yet to blow up. Maybe we can get away."
I looked back at it, then away again. It was like my eyes were welded to it with elastic bands; they'd stretch enough to let me turn away, but they kept pulling me back.
"I'm not sure I want to."
"I know," she whispered. "I...old on, don't look back. We have to get away."
"Listen," I said, looking at her with an act of will. "Maybe one of us can get away. Maybe both. But it's more important that you not be injured. If I'm hurt, you can maybe fix me up. If you're hurt, you'll probably die, and if we're both hurt, we're dead."
"Yeah. So?"
"So, I'm the closest to the jewel. You can start backing away from it first, and I'll follow you. I'll shield you from the worst of the blast, if it goes off. How does that sound?"
"Not too good." But she thought it over and could see no flaws in my reasoning. I think she didn't relish being the protected instead of the heroine. Childish, but natural. She proved her maturity by bowing to the inevitable.
"All right. I'll try to get ten meters from it. I'11 let you know when I'm there, and you can move back. I think we can survive it at ten meters."
"Twenty."
"But... oh, all right. Twenty. Good luck, Kiku. I think I love you." She paused. "Uh, Kiku?"
"What is it? You should get moving. We don't know how long it'll stay stable."
"All right. But I have to say this. My offer last night, the one that got you so angry?"
"Yeah?"
"Well, it wasn't meant as a bribe. I mean, like the twenty thousand Marks. I just... well, I don't know much about that yet. I guess it was the wrong time?"
"Yeah, but don't worry about it. Just get moving."
She did, a centimeter at a time. It was lucky that neither of us had to worry about holding our breath I think the tension would have been unbearable.
And I looked back. I couldn't help it. I was in the sanctuary of a cosmic church when I heard her calling me. I don't know what sort of power she used to reach me where I was. She was crying.
"Kiku, please listen to me."
"Huh? Oh, what is it?"
She sobbed in relief. "Oh, Christ, I've been calling you for an hour. Please come on. Over here. I'm back far enough."
My head was foggy. "Oh, Ember, there's no hurry I want to look at it just another minute. Hang on."
"No! If you don't start moving right this minute, I'm coming back and I'll drag you out."
"You can't do-Oh. All right, I'm coming." I' looked over at her sitting on her knees. Malibu was beside her. The little otter was staring in my direction. I looked at her and took a sliding step, scuttling on my back. My back was not something to think about.
I got two meters back, then three. I had to stop to rest. 1` looked at the jewel, then back at Ember. It was hard to tell which drew me the strongest. I must have reached a balance point. I could have gone either way.
Then a small silver streak came at me, running as fast as it could go. It reached me and dived across.
"Malibu!" Ember screamed. I turned. The otter seemed happier than I ever saw him, even in the waterslide in town. He leaped, right at the jewel... .
Regaining consciousness was a very gradual business. There was no dividing line between different states of awareness for two reasons: I was deaf, and I was blind. So I cannot say when I went from dreams to reality; the blend was too uniform, there wasn't enough change to notice.
I don't remember learning that I was deaf and blind. I don't remember learning the hand-spelling language that Ember talked to me with. The first rational moment that I can recall as such was when Ember was telling me her plans to get back to Prosperity.
I told her to do whatever she felt best, that she was in complete control. I was desolated to realize that I was not where I had thought I was. My dreams had been of Barsoom. I thought I had become a blast jewel and had been waiting in a sort of detached ecstasy for the moment of explosion.
She operated on my left eye and managed to restore some vision. I could see things that were a meter from my face, hazily. Everything else was shadows. At least she was able to write things on sheets of paper and hold them up for me to see. It made things quicker. I learned that she was deaf, too. And Malibu was dead. Or might be. She had put him in the cooler and thought she might be .able to patch him up when she got back. If not, she could always make another otter.
I told her about my back. She was shocked to hear that-I had hurt it on the slide down the mountain, but she had sense enough not to scold me about it. It was short work to fix it up. Nothing but a bruised disc, she told me.
It would be tedious to describe all of our trip back. It was difficult, because neither of us knew much about blindness. But I was able to adjust pretty quickly.