"I see."
We were silent for a long while.
Finally, I said, "Should be stalactites."
"Hm?"
"Seems to me there should be something like them here. Caves are usually formed by the erosion of water-soluble rock, like limestone. I don't know what this stuff is―I'm nobody's geologist. Gotta be gypsum, dolomite, something like that. But in that case―"
"Didn't the lava do some of it?"
"Yeah, there are definitely volcanic processes at work. But most of the weirder formations have to be the result of some pretty exotic geochemistry."
"Well, it's an alien planet," she said.
"Uh-huh. But we're the aliens here, honey."
"Move closer, you horrible alien beast." After a moment, she said, "my, what's this?"
"A stalactite."
"'Mite," she said, moving to position her body over me.
We even got lost down there, which bothered me not much. We had food, rivers of fresh water, more peace and quiet than I had had in a decade. It was the first real vacation I had taken in… I didn't know how long. Eventually, Susan became a little nervous, suggesting that it would be a good idea to begin a serious effort to find a way back. I told her we had time, nothing but time.
"But we're getting more and more lost," she protested.
"Not so," I said, crouching near the tunnel wall. "Getting some interesting readings here on this handy-dandy pocket seismometer Ragna gave me. Remember that room we called Chichester Cathedral? It's probably not more than five meters away, on the other side of this wall"
"But we were there days ago."
"Day before yesterday."
"How do we get through five meters of rock?"
"Oh, here's another way back. This just means we aren't really lost. We've been keeping to the same general area. All we have to do is find a shortcut back to Chichester. From there we'll have no trouble locating that last transponder."
"You make it sound so simple."
"Besides, Ragna and his people should already be looking for us. This was supposed to be an overnight trip originally, if you remember. They'll be worried."
"To say nothing of John and everybody."
"Well," I said, "they shouldn't be. This is the first non-life and-death situation we've had in weeks. We've been shot at, bombarded, and kidnapped. We almost got stomped by a Roadbug, and we shot a portal with a giant sugar doughnut for a roller. God! You name it, we've been subjected to it. How can you let a little thing like this worry you, Suzie?"
"It's my nature, I guess."
"Take off your clothes."
"Okay."
Before long, though, I had to concede that we really were lost. Susan was for probing farther, but I came down squarely for staying put, making camp, and waiting for a rescue party. I reminded her of her warning that wandering around blindly would probably just get us more lost. She remembered, and concurred for more than one reason. Food was getting low, and there was zero chance of finding anything down here. Limiting our activity would help to conserve it, and so would strict rationing. We were pretty good about the former, but we caught each other raiding the food satchel more than once. Neither of us could be totally serious about the situation, but as time progressed and the realization grew that we had set out fully four days ago, we gradually sobered up.
Then things got worse.
It happened in a narrow corridor whose walls were broken by side tunnels sloping up to vertical chimneys through which only Susan could squeeze to see if any of them led to higher levels. We had gradually descended over the past few days, according to the air pressure readings.
I was lying with my back against the pile of our backpacks and caving gear, just beginning to doze off. I was bushed. Susan had doffed her Ahgirrian hard hat (which fit just fine, by the way) with the mounted electric light, and had taken a biolume torch to explore a likely-looking chimney at the end of a short side tunnel. She had insisted I stay and rest, and I wasn't worried. I could still hear her boots scuffing and scraping at the end of the tunnel. She had said that she wouldn't climb up very far, just enough to see if it went anywhere and if it widened out farther up. If so, I would try to squeeze through and follow, after tethering our packs to the line and having Susan 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 welclass="underline" 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, 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.