“…All right.” Suddenly Constancy-of-Purpose, symbolically, moved aside. “Hurry. I’ll say I didn’t see you.”
Morrow reached out his hand, then let it drop. “Thank you.”
Constancy-of-Purpose frowned. “Just go, man.” She bent and, with the strength of her uninjured arm, began to prize up a partially welded plate, making a narrow gateway through the blocking platform.
After a moment’s hesitation the forest folk scrambled down the ladder and dropped to the platform, lightly. Constancy-of-Purpose glared at Spinner-of Rope. Spinner returned her stare, thoughtfully stroking the blowpipe at her waist.
“Go on,” Morrow told Spinner. “Through that plate.”
The forest folk hurried across the platform, their bare feet padding, and Spinner began to work her way through the hole.
Now Constancy-of-Purpose stared at Uvarov, still slung over Maker’s shoulder.
“Is he dead?”
“Who? The old man? Not quite, but as near as — damn it, I suppose… If I come by this way again, I’ll explain.”
“But you won’t be coming back, will you?” Constancy-of-Purpose’s blunt face was serious.
“…No. I don’t suppose I will.”
Constancy-of-Purpose backed away, her hands upraised. “You’re crazy. Maybe I should have stopped you after all.”
Arrow Maker, with Uvarov, was already through the platform, and Morrow sat down on the edge of the hole. He looked up. “Wish me luck.”
But Constancy-of-Purpose had already gone, out of the shaft and back to the mundane world of the Decks: to Morrow’s old life.
Morrow eased himself through the platform.
Before long Morrow’s shoulders and legs stiffened up again and began to hurt, seriously, and he was forced to take longer and longer breaks. The base of the shaft — illuminated by a ring of open ports — was a remote island of light that climbed toward him with infinite, cruel slowness.
Now they were far below the deepest inhabited level. Beyond the shaft’s cold walls, he knew, there was only darkness, stale air, abandoned homes. The cold seemed to pervade the shaft; he felt small, fragile, isolated.
They found ledges on which it was possible to rest — to stretch out, and even doze a little. Arrow Maker laid Uvarov down flat on the hard metal surfaces, and he showed Morrow how to massage his own muscles to stop them seizing up. Spinner produced food — dried fruit and meat — from a pouch at her waist; Morrow tried to eat but his stomach was a knot.
He counted the Decks as they passed them. Ten… Eleven… Twelve… The Decks above Four — all the world he had known, really — were an increasingly distant bubble of light and warmth, far above him.
And yet, if this journey was strange and disturbing for him, how much more difficult must it be for the forest folk? At least Morrow was used to metal walls. Spinner and her father had grown up with trees — animals, birds — living things. They must wonder if they would ever see their home again.
At last, though, the time came when he could count the last twenty rungs; then the last dozen; and then -
He staggered a few paces away from the ladder and laid himself out against a metal floor, spread-eagled. Here at the base of the shaft, a series of open, illuminated hatchways pierced the walls. “By Lethe’s waters,” he said. “What a day. I never thought I’d be so happy simply not to be in danger of falling.”
Arrow Maker lifted Uvarov from his shoulder and gently rested him, like a doll, against the wall of the elevator shaft. Morrow saw how Uvarov’s hand continued its endless, pendular tremble, and his mouth opened and closed with soft, obscene sounds. “Are we there? Are we down?”
Maker flexed his unburdened shoulder, swinging his arm around. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, we’re there…” He approached one of the hatchways, but slowed nervously as he approached the light.
Morrow got to his feet. He tried to remember how alien all this must be to these people; perhaps it was time for him to take charge. Picking a hatchway at random he walked confidently out of the shaft, and into bright, sourceless light.
The brightness, after the gloom of the shaft, was dazzling and huge. For a moment he stood there, by the entrance to the shaft, his hands shading his watering eyes.
He was in a bright, clean chamber. It must have been a mile wide and a fifth of a mile deep. The underside of the lowest Deck was a ceiling far above him, a tangle of pipes and cables, dark with age. The chamber was quite empty, although there were some dark, anonymous devices — cargo handlers? — stored in slings from the walls and upper bulkhead. Morrow felt himself quail; the emptiness of this huge enclosed space seemed to bear down on him. And below him -
He looked down.
The floor was transparent. Below his feet, there were stars.
12
After an unknowable, dreamlike interval, Lieserl became aware of a vague sense of discomfort — not pain, exactly, but a non-localized ache that permeated her body.
She sighed. If the discomfort wasn’t specific to any part of her Virtual body, there had to be something wrong with the autonomic systems that maintained her awareness — the basic refrigeration systems embedded in the wormhole throat, or maybe the shielded processor banks within which her consciousness resided.
Reluctantly she called up diagnostics from her central systems. Damn…
There had been a change, she realized quickly. But the problem wasn’t actually with her own systems. The change was in the external environment. There was a much greater flux of photons, from the Solar material, into her wormhole Interface. Her refrigeration units could cope with this greater influx of energy, but they’d had to adjust their working to do it — and that autonomic adjustment was what she had registered as a vague discomfort.
The increased photon flux puzzled her. Why should it be so? She ran some brief, brisk studies of the Solar environment. The remnant photons still diffused out on their million-year random walks toward the photosphere. Could it be that the core-killing action of the birds, their continual leaching away of core energy, was having some effect on the photon flux?
She looked for, and found, a structure to the increased flux. The flux strength was strongest, by far, in the direction of the orbits of the photino birds. That correlation couldn’t be a coincidence, surely; somehow the birds were influencing the flux rates.
And — she learned — the increased flux was quite localized. It didn’t show up more than a few miles from her own position.
Understanding came slowly, almost painfully.
The photon flood followed her around.
She forced herself to accept the fact that the photino birds were doing this deliberately. They were diverting the random walks of photons to flood her with the damn things.
For a while, fear touched her heart. Were the birds trying to kill this unwanted alien in the midst of their flocks — perhaps by seeking to overload her refrigeration system?
If so, there wasn’t much she could do about it. She didn’t have any help to call on, and no real way to escape. For a long time she limped after the birds in their endless circling of the core, monitoring the photon flux and trying to control her fear, her sense of imprisonment and panic.
But the flux remained steady — increased, but easily tolerated by her onboard systems. And the birds showed no sign of hostile intent to her; they continued to swirl around her in gaudy streams, or else they gathered behind her in their huge, neat, cone-shaped formations. They made no attempt to shield their young from her, or to protect their fragile-looking interior structures.