‘Sure there’s moral failure everywhere you look. But that’s because we’re just out of the caves. Already we help others because we instinctively feel it’s the right thing to do, even if it’s of no advantage to us. A few thousand years down the line and it’ll be so ingrained in us we won’t know any other way to behave. Okay we’re still apes, but cultural evolution is directing us towards a complete moral altruism. The signallers must have arrived there long ago.’
‘So moral capacity comes with the central nervous system. I buy that, Rosa, I really do. But what morality? How can you be sure the signallers have the same moral outlook as us?’
‘Because of ruthless Darwinian evolution. It works on societies. And that’s why I believe the signal — this make-believe signal — is motivated by a genuine wish to help.’
Hazel looked bewildered. ‘You’re losing me.’
‘It’s simple. In Nature you have survival of the fittest. In a primitive tooth and claw society you have the same. But as technology progresses it makes the killer instinct so destructive that you eventually have survival of nobody at all, except maybe a few cave men. Either evolution weeds out the killer instinct or everyone ends up dead. Either moral evolution goes hand in hand with technological evolution or we’re doomed.’
Hazel was saying, ‘You mean, the meek will inherit the Galaxy?’
‘Precisely. What we’d get from the signallers would reflect the moral altruism they’d evolved into.’
It was precisely the answer Hazel had been praying for. She stood up. Her head was dizzy with unfamiliar concepts, or maybe it was just the jungle heat after Camp David. The pink bird flapped its wings and took off to a safe height.
‘Would you like to visit the sharks, ma’am?’
‘I’d have loved to, Gene, while you tried to persuade me that the human race is about to let itself be obliterated by a clever doll, and Rosa here told me that if it speaks and acts like a human to the nth degree it’s still just a doll with no feelings and no consciousness. But I have to get back.’ Hazel Baxendale gave a lopsided smile. ‘I’m swimming with bigger sharks.’
34
Wormhole
Freya’s upper half disappeared, followed by her soaking jeans and finally her boots. A little cascade of rock dust sparkled briefly in Petrie’s lamplight.
He took a last look at the Styx. The river had definitely risen, and its thundering was louder, but it was the lights which attracted his attention.
Two of them.
No, three.
Petrie switched off his helmet lamp, his feet wedged against the Madonna. He was breathing heavily and aware of his heart thumping in his chest.
Four. Moving in single file.
And now he was seeing black silhouettes, moving swiftly along the pathway: wild dogs hunting.
Five of them.
Six. Seven. They must be deploying the lot.
Petrie stopped counting. His mouth dry with fear, he edged himself towards the entrance, on his knees, seeing by Freya’s receding lamplight. A final glance: eight, at a minimum. He forced himself into the crack, his breath noisy in the confined space.
Freya was out of sight. There were three entrances, none of them more than two feet high. He kept his lamp off and sure enough, light was scattering from the wall of the left-hand tunnel.
On to his elbows. Petrie had never caved in his life. He quickly found himself sweating with exertion.
The light from Freya’s lamp was getting fainter. Of course. She was smaller, slimmer.
Along the phreatic tube to a high vertical chimney.
How far along? He experimented with different ways of crawling but none of them seemed any better than the others. Freya’s light was becoming a flicker, sometimes seen, sometimes not. He turned his own lamp on; the sight of the rock enclosing him accentuated his claustrophobia. He wanted to scream and push the walls away.
What the hell is a phreatic tube anyway? It sounds Greek, he thought, trying to keep the panic demons out of his mind. Maybe to do with frenetic? Frantic? It made sense; the tube was round, as if it had been formed by water under pressure.
Water under pressure. Petrie thought about the melting snow half a mile overhead, percolating down through a million cracks and fissures in the limestone mountain. He wanted out of the phreatic tube more than he had ever wanted anything.
He pushed himself harder, fearful of losing his way in a subterranean labyrinth, of dying of cold and exhaustion, of stumbling into the enemy. After about five minutes, the roar of the Styx had vanished. The scrabbling of his boots and his own gasping breath cut into an unnatural silence, tomb-like.
The tunnel wall was closing in on him. A million tons of overhead rock were settling down. He was an insect, about to be crushed under the boot of the ancient Tatras. He found himself taking big, gulping, frightened breaths. The demons were now inside his brain, poking, grinning, gibbering.
Cut it out!
Twenty minutes into the climb, the tunnel was opening up and acquiring a steep upward slope. At last! A high vertical shaft: Tyson’s chimney.
He looked up, gasping with exertion. The chimney was a narrow, smooth-sided shaft. It rose almost vertically and it was higher, much higher, than he had visualised from Svetlana’s sketch. He could barely make out the top with his torchlight. Water was trickling down its walls. And there was no sign of Freya, no light reflecting from her lamp.
He scrambled up a vertical face and then eased his head into the shaft. There would be no room to spread arms in the chimney, and he switched off his lamp. He inched himself up by holding himself in place with his elbows, bending his legs and thrusting against the shaft wall with his feet. A spray of cold water kept him soaked.
He slithered, lost about six feet, scraped his face, twisted his wrist, cursed aloud. After some minutes the chimney broadened marginally and he was able to grip its sides with icy fingers. He clambered up quickly, the iron taste of blood on his lip. There was a ridge; he waved his hands in the dark and found he could now hoist himself into a crouching position. He switched on his light and looked around.
He had reached a little chamber: the grotto, its floor covered with the white flowstone, a congealed river of rock. Three narrow tunnels led into it, discounting the one he had climbed up.
Freya, where are you?
Petrie remembered Svetlana’s scribbled sketch. He now had to take the left-hand tunnel. He wriggled into it, crawled frantically along. It rose gently but he was making good progress. The tunnel was dry, but it smelled of damp and ancient air. The cold was intense now, into his bones, and Petrie thought it might be slowing him down mentally.
A long, narrow crawl, she had said.
A right turn and the tunnel narrowed to a mouth-shaped channel three feet wide and six inches high. Petrie stared. This wasn’t in the map.
Stay calm.
Back out, inching painfully; now the demons were attacking in force, claustrophobia washing over him like big waves. Back into the little grotto with the flowstone, half-expecting soldiers. He switched off his lamp once more.
Pitch black. Not just any pitch black, like a country lane on a dark night. Pitch black somewhere inside a mountain; and lost.
How long would the battery last? A couple of hours? One?
Switch on again. The light hurt his eyes for a few seconds. He looked at the tunnel entrances. Maybe ‘first left’ was ambiguous; there were two entrances sharing a larger one. He said, ‘Oh God!’ and crawled swiftly along this other tunnel, using his elbows to wriggle along like a lizard. Why not gamble when you have nothing to lose?