“You know,” he said, “you remind me of Spinner-of-Rope.”
Trapper twisted easily, as if her small, bare body had all the litheness of rope itself; her face was a round, eager button. “Really? Spinner-of-Rope’s something of a hero up there, you know. In the forest. It must have taken a lot of courage to follow Uvarov down through the Locks, and — ”
“Maybe,” Morrow said testily. “What I meant was, you’re just as annoying as she was, at your age.”
Trapper frowned; there was a sprinkling of freckles across her small, flat nose, he saw, and a further smattering that reached back across her dark-fringed patch of shaven scalp. Then her grin broke out again, and he felt his heart melt; her face reminded him of the rising of a bright star over the ice fields of Callisto. She craned her neck forward and kissed him lightly on the nose.
“All part of the package,” she said. “Now come on.”
She scrambled up her rope again; within seconds she had reached her grappling hook and was preparing to throw the next one across the Deck, in preparation for the next leg of the trek.
Wearily, feeling even older than his five centuries, Morrow made his way, hand over hand, along his rope.
He tried to keep his eyes focused on the scuffed floor surface before his face. Why was he finding this damn jaunt so difficult? He was, after all, Morrow, Hero of the Elevator Shaft, as Trapper had said. And since then he had been out, beyond the ribbed walls surrounding the Decks, out into space. He had walked the surface of Callisto, and watched the rise of the bloated corpse of legendary Sol over the moon’s ice plains; he had even supervised the excavation of that ancient alien spacecraft. He’d shown courage then, hadn’t he? He must have done — why, he hadn’t even thought about it. So why did he feel so different, now he was back here, inside the Decks once more — inside the metal-walled box which had been his only world for half a millennium?
He’d been apprehensive ever since Louise had asked him to lead this expedition in the first place.
“I don’t want to go back in there,” he’d told Louise bluntly.
Louise Ye Armonk had come down to Callisto to congratulate him on his archaeology and to give him this new assignment. She had looked tired, old; she’d run a hand through grizzled hair. “We all have to do things we don’t want to do,” she said, as if speaking to a child, her patience barely controlled. When she’d looked at him, Morrow could detect the contempt in her eyes. “Believe me, if I had someone else to send, I’d send ’em.”
Morrow had felt a sense of panic — as if he were being asked to go back into a prison cell. “What’s the point?” he asked, his desperation growing. “The Planners closed off the Decks centuries ago. They don’t want to know what’s happening outside. Why not leave them to it?”
Louise’s mouth was set firm, fine wrinkles lining it. “Morrow, we can’t afford to ‘leave them to it’ any more. The Universe outside — we — are impinging on what’s happening in there. And we’ve evidence, from our monitors, that the Planners are not — ah, not reacting well to the changes.
“Morrow, there are two thousand people in there, in the Decks. There are only a handful of us outside — only a few hundred, even including the forest on Deck Zero. We can’t afford to abandon those two thousand to the Planners’ deranged whims.”
Morrow heard his own teeth grind. “You’re talking about duty, then.”
Louise had studied him. “Yes, in a way. But the most fundamental duty of alclass="underline" not to me, or to the Planners, or even to the ship’s mission. It’s a duty to the species. If the species is to survive we have to protect the people trapped in there, with the Planners — as many as possible, to maintain genetic diversity for the future.”
“Protect,” he said sourly. “Funny. That’s probably just what the Planners believe they are doing, too…”
Now he looked around at the abandoned houses in their surreal rows, suspended from what felt like a vertical wall to him now, not a floor; he listened to the silence broken only by the plaintive cries of the klaxon. All the people had gone — taken, presumably into the Temples, by the Planners — leaving only this shell of a world; and now the elements of this oppressive place seemed to move around him, pushing at him like elements of a nightmare…
Perhaps it was the very familiarity of the place that was so uncomfortable. Coming back here — even after all these decades — it was as if he had never been away; the metal-clad walls and ceiling, the rows of boxy houses, the looming tetrahedral bulks of the Planner Temples all loomed closely around him, oppressing his spirit once more. It was as if the huge, remarkable Universe beyond these walls — of collapsing stars, and ice moons, and magical alien spacecraft with wings a hundred yards wide — had never existed, as if it had all been some bizarre, fifty-year fantasy.
In the old days, before his first encounter with Arrow Maker and Spinner, he’d thought himself something of a rebel. An independent spirit; a renegade — not like the rest of the drones around him. But the truth was different, of course. For centuries, the culture of the Planners had trained him into submission. If it hadn’t been for the irruption of the forest folk — an event from outside his world — he’d never have had the courage, or the initiative, to break free of the Planners’ domination.
In fact, he realized now, no matter what he did or where he went in the future and no matter how this conflict with the Planners turned out — he never would be free of that oppression.
Now he reached the end of his rope. He let himself drift away from the Deck a little, and launched himself through the air across the few feet to the next rope Trapper had fixed. He glanced back again; the little party was strung along the chain of ropes which led all the way back to the ramp from the upper levels.
There was a rush of air above his head, a sizzling, hissing noise.
Instinctively he ducked down, pressing his body flat against the Deck; infuriatingly he bounced away from the scarred surface, but he grasped the edges of Deck plates and clung on.
The noise had sounded like an insect’s buzz. But there were very few insects within the Decks…
Another hiss, a sigh of air above him. And it had come from the direction of the Temple which was — he sneaked a look up — still a hundred yards away. Another whisper above him — and another, and now a whole flock of them.
Someone behind him cried out, and he heard the clatter of metal against the Deck.
Trapper-of-Frogs came clambering back down the rope toward him; without inhibition she scrambled over his arms and snuggled against his side, a warm, firm bundle of muscle; her shaven patch of scalp was smooth against his cheek. She was no more than four feet tall, and he could feel her bony knees press into his thighs.
“It’s the Planners,” she whispered into his ear. Her breath was sweet, smelling of forest fruit. “They’re shooting at us from the Temple.”
He felt confused. “Shooting? But that’s impossible. Why should they?”
She growled, and again he was reminded of a young Spinner-of-Rope, decades ago, who also had spent a lot of time getting annoyed at him. “How should I know?” she snapped. “And besides, why hardly makes a difference. What’s important is that we get out of here before we get hurt.”