He rose again and walked slowly to Mischa. She appeared so limp that he was afraid, imagining that she might have joined the luminous multitude. But as he knelt, she stirred. His relief was greater than any horror he had felt. He helped her up. Her hair clung in glowing strands to her cheek. She looked out over the water.
"Gods," she said. "So this is where they come."
"Yes." But for all Jan's acceptance, he did not look again. He was afraid he would see a shroud of black silk, embroidered with bright figures. "Let's get out of here."
Searching for an escape, they found a door. They almost passed it, but Mischa noticed the regular rectangular indentation and began to scrape away the lightcells. After a moment Jan helped her. They bared a featureless slab of gray plastic, the first evidence of construction Jan had seen since leaving Center. He recalled the three symbols of warning. They had survived the crystals, and the pool.
Mischa reached out and pushed the door. It swung open slowly. The musty air that flowed across them seemed incredibly, sweetly, blessedly fresh.
Subtwo fled, revolted, from the obscene pool. Even the respirator he wore could not keep out the stench. He was going to vomit: he could feel his body preparing to scorn him. He had never vomited in his life. The retching started and the facemask strangled him. He tore it away so he would not soil himself. He was forced to halt his flight. He tried to disassociate his mind from his body to spare himself humiliation and disgust, but failed.
He stumbled to his feet and ran again, headlong, hardly noticing that the fungal carpet no longer slowed him, that the tunnel was no longer a natural cave, that his people no longer followed him. It was only gradually, as the putrescent odor faded from his nostrils, that he realized he had escaped. The first thing he noticed consciously was that the air was clean: musty, but sterile. He slowed and stopped.
The hallway around him was white self-luminous plastic, perfectly smooth, perfectly regular: a golden rectangle in cross-section, a beautiful, elegant, naked place. Subtwo laid his hands against the cool wall and pressed his forehead to the surface. The exquisite smoothness calmed him slightly; lifting his head, he looked around.
He was alone. The open door at the end of the passage seemed very far away, and he would not return to it. His people.
They had broken the crystal stalactites, erupting in an orgy of destruction Subtwo was powerless to temper or control. Yet he had not been too displeased by their childish violence, despite the dreadful cacaphony. The sharp spires would be easier to walk over than between, and Subtwo was dedicated to expediency.
He noticed the bright dust and stepped back, as was his fastidious habit. The smell of it, the taste, burned the mucous membranes of his nose and throat just as Draco, at the head of the laughing group, doubled up and began to cough. The laughing stopped.
In a brief, shocked moment of silence between the end of the destruction of mineral and the beginning of the destruction of flesh, Subtwo flung open one of the carrying machines and found the respirators. He protected himself first, and called to his people to retreat.
Draco collapsed beyond the carpet of shattered jewels. Subtwo dragged him to a place where the air was clearer. The raiders who had been behind the dust were helping those who had been in it. Draco clawed at his throat, struggling for breath. Subtwo rammed a breathing tube past his swollen tongue and fumbled with antihistamines in the injector. The hunting party was well supplied, but the medic had stayed with Subone. Draco convulsed, and Subtwo held him still with sheer physical strength, no art about it, clumsily struggling to inject the medicine.
Three people choked to death before they could be helped. There were not enough breathing tubes, and more than half of Subtwo's people were crippled, needing aid that could not be given. He raged at the trap into which he had been lured, no longer needing to draw on Subone's anger: his own was by far more powerful. He had always been the more powerful, even in the early days of their lives when neither knew of the other's existence, but each controlled the other.
Those of his raiders who were still able readied themselves at his order. Draco rose and staggered about, searching for his weapons, respirator, another painkiller, a stimulant. Passing near Subtwo, he looked up, his pupils dilated wide. Subtwo understood that the young man was willing to kill himself, and this disturbed him vaguely, but he could not take the time to trace out why.
"I must leave someone in charge," he said abruptly. "There may be attacks on our casualties. We must be certain they are secure. Are you able?"
Draco started to protest, Subtwo thought, but words failed him; he had to suppress another spasm of coughing.
"I require someone I can trust."
Draco's voice, finally, was a hesitant rasp, burned out, resentful. "All right." He seemed shamed as much by his failure to protest as by his incapacity.
Jan Hikaru's Journaclass="underline"
Mischa is sleeping. Her breathing is harsh, but it sounds better than it did earlier.
I'm very uncomfortable here. We're in a missile base, either for the defense of Center, or an offensive installation with Center as its backup—before the Last War. The third symboclass="underline" a place that humans made. It is indeed. But I can't feel any kinship with those humans.
But would we, in the Sphere, act any differently, given the same choices the people of earth had? We're very used to thinking of our home planet with contempt: they killed each other, they erupted in a tantrum of mass suicide and killed a whole world. There has never been another war.
We never mention that the same people drained their world dry to send us to new places.
Are we peaceful only because wars don't make economic sense
anymore? Do we have a right to assume our superiority?
The myths are strong, though, and I feel oppressed. These are nuclear warheads all around us, I think—fission-triggered fusion bombs. The dirty kind, the kind that do more damage with their by-products than with their original explosions.
But the ones here were never fired. I wonder if that's because Center was never directly attacked, or because communications were destroyed and no one here ever received the orders, or, perhaps, because one person was unable, in the end, to push the buttons that would set them off.
I'd like to believe the last.
After resting, after making the injured as comfortable as possible, leaving them guarded and supplied, the remains of the hunting party had continued, breaking through the rest of the crystals while well protected in respirators and coveralls, and without laughter. Subtwo's people were frightened, and he had never seen them frightened before. Their unease affected him, for he had thought them beyond fear, or incapable of it.
They reached the fungal growth, which revolted him; he ordered it burned. The weapons cooked and sizzled it. But the task proceeded much too slowly, and frayed the nerves. The power of the laser lances made smoke and steam and heat billow up around the people, and the limestone began to crumble. Subtwo was disgusted at himself for failing to predict that particular danger: simple chemistry, which should be virtually instinctive. Exhorting his followers, he abandoned the burning and led them onward through the vile growths, pointing out the footprints of their quarry: See, there is no water collected in the indentations. See, how fresh the tracks must be. We have not much longer to wait now. But his people had abandoned their rages. They were exhausted, their throats were sore, their ears rang; they could not even sit down comfortably to rest.