She was dog-tired, but she couldn't rest yet. She had to find shelter.
Following the rocky beach, she began to circle the island.
About halfway around, by her estimation, Caroline found herself facing the offshore object she'd spotted from the top of the mesa. Now she could tell what it was. It was some kind of spaceship. It was also huge.
From its obvious tilt and its location out in the water, Caroline also suspected it had not landed here easily. Of course, it probably hadn't landed here at all; it had been designed here, part of the landscape of Lawrence's Task. But the key to beating any game was to look at it both ways. Considered from the outside, the spaceship was something symbolically meaningful to Lawrence, or just something he thought was amusing. But she wasn't outside this world, she was now part of it, and the burns she had gotten from her brief exposure to the sun were quite real. Ergo, she should act as if it were in fact a crashed spaceship, at least provisionally.
She had seen nothing which promised shelter, much less to eat. She could continue around the island and hope, but if she did that and she didn't find shelter, she might get caught in the sunrise. Probably would, in fact. So she would try for the ship.
Just as there was nothing to eat, there was nothing that would obviously float. The ship was a good distance out. Could she swim a kilometer or more through half-meter waves? It didn't seem she had much choice. Rather than dither, she walked out into the surf and was hardly surprised when the bottom dropped out from under her feet less than twenty meters out. She was in good shape and had practiced swimming along with lots of other useless skills. She began to swim with confident, powerful strokes, holding her breath and letting the waves wash over her with their predictable rhythm.
The sun caught her half-way out.
So absorbed was Caroline in the rhythm of her swimming that she didn't even notice the sun until it was high in the sky and almost too late. She sucked a huge breath and dove under. Opening her eyes, she saw the water's surface above her had become a huge vault of liquid light. It penetrated far below her, to reflect off of the sea floor. The water was at least a hundred meters deep, a fact which saved her life.
Caroline held her breath until it seemed her lungs would burst, then reluctantly shot to the surface to gulp more air. She stayed up for a few moments, then dove again. Deep as the water was, it would not have time to heat up during the short "day." Even a meter or two beneath the surface she was protected. And when she surfaced to breathe, the air was bearable because the water cooled it, too. And Caroline's wet hair could protect her exposed head for a few moments.
Her eyelids could not shut out the brightness. Neither could the meter or two of water she dared put between herself and the sun. But she didn't cook, her hair didn't flame, the air didn't sear her lungs going in. She would survive.
Dive, surface, dive, surface. Finally the light grew dim, then with extreme suddenness went out entirely. Once again Caroline had been blinded. She relaxed and adopted the "drown proof" floating posture. This was definitely a good news/bad news sort of situation. She was alive, but this also meant other things might live in the sea. On the other hand she hadn't seen anything floating or swimming by when the sun was up, and she'd been able to see damn near all the way to the bottom.
She felt itching, and knew her sunburn was now much worse. Water is transparent to ultraviolet light. Well, there was nothing she could do about it.
Finally her sight returned enough for her to tell which direction to swim. She had drifted slightly off-course during her desperate cycle of diving and breathing. She corrected her course, and kept swimming.
The ship's metal wall was smooth and featureless, and it slipped out of the water almost vertically without obvious handholds or openings. Caroline swam around it, looking for a way up.
The ship had crashed hard, and its seamless hull was split in several places. The sea had entered through these, filling the ship's lower section with water. Caroline squeezed through one of these openings and found herself enveloped in nearly perfect darkness. It was cave darkness, and she knew her eyes would never adapt to it. Working entirely by feel she found the edge of what had been a wall or bulkhead or floor before it had been broken in the crash, and she hoisted herself out of the water.
The gap where she had entered was barely visible, a lesser darkness outlined by perfect black. She heard the waves lapping at the walls around her. The floor, if that's what it was, was tilted at a small angle, a few degrees at most. From echoes Caroline estimated that she was in a smallish room, less than three meters square for certain, but it was hard to tell because of the break.
Exhausted, she finally let herself collapse for a few hours of fitful sleep. She had been awake for twenty-six straight hours.
Working entirely by feel, she began to explore. An hour of careful work told her that the ship was more or less upright, and she was at least standing on a floor. She found the outline of a door, and mounting bolts where furniture or equipment had once been fixed in place. She supposed that the room's contents had all gone out the gap when the ship crashed.
The door wasn't latched, and she was able to slide it aside. The echoes told her this was a hallway.
Through her useless skills, an ability to think like someone of Lawrence's age and temperament, and not a little luck, Caroline had already passed tests that would have eliminated most of the good citizens of Cyberspace. But there were plenty of other surprises he might throw at her, depending on just how seriously he wanted to be left alone and by whom. If his intention was to limit his visitors to those who had been around before the Change, there might not be any more difficulties. On the other hand, if he wanted everyone to stay the hell away, her problems might have only just begun.
In the dark ship there would be lots of opportunities to kill her, Caroline knew. There could be holes in floors, airless or poison-filled chambers, sharp edges and dangerous objects galore. The ship could also be inhabited, though she'd seen no evidence of life yet and didn't really expect that particular challenge. Caroline thought about all of this as she edged down the hall, carefully testing the floor and following the wall, until she found another door.
It was locked.
Caroline found the fifth door was different. She was able to force it open, and almost stepped through when she realized it didn't have a floor. It was a vertical shaft.
She felt around the sides and almost fell through the door before she realized there was a ladder within her reach. Instinct told her to go up, and she wasn't eager to keep trying doors on the half-submerged level where she had entered. Working very slowly, she moved herself onto the ladder. She could hear the water lapping not far below her; it had filled the shaft to the level of the sea outside.
Hooking an elbow through one rung of the ladder, she hung on and clapped her hands sharply. The sound echoed several times, and Caroline smiled in the darkness as she worked out the period. There were three echoes in the time it took her heart to beat once. That meant the echo time was about a fifth of a second, which made the shaft (if Lawrence had not altered the speed of sound for some reason) about seventy meters high. The rungs were about a third of a meter apart, so she knew she should expect to find the top of the shaft after counting a couple of hundred rungs.