And, after a brief rest, down, and down, and down.
Calculating from the point where they had fought the Watcher, Tupaia estimated they had traveled at least a dozen, perhaps twenty or more kilometers straight down on the trail of the Purchased People, twenty times that in horizontal tunnels and gradual declines. It was good that their edited bodies were tough and strong; even Tupaia's own huge frame would have been seriously taxed by these exertions, and the boy would surely have collapsed long before. They seemed to need far less food and water than before— another blessing, for sometimes those were scarce. They moved on, through odd, dome-shaped rooms, with incomprehensible metal rods glowing in dozens of hues, and skirted the edge of a vast vortex of water, slowly spinning and emptying itself into some unknown farther depth.
And, as time passed and they descended deeper and deeper into the unknown, Tupaia found himself beginning to care about the boy. Tupaia was in a turmoil of confusion in any case. Free Polynesia, which had been the core of his life, was now irrelevant. He was scared, and raging, and confused . . . but there was David, who needed him.
If someone gives you trust, it is hard not to try being trustworthy.
Another gallery, opening into still another great abyss. This one had no railings at all, though spikelike projections jutted from it over the yawning gulf. This one they did not dare jump; they skirted the edge and found a continuation of the downward trail.
A shallower jump—ten hours later—which left them on a broad, flat plain, with the ceiling a hundred meters overhead and palely glowing. "It looks like a farm," David whispered; and it did. Geometric patterns covered the wide space, in every shade of green and black and brown, of gold and red and orange; and indeed crops were growing there. Growing for whom? Tended by what? Tupaia could not guess; but the tubers at the base of the dark-green plants were good to eat, and pale yellow fruits in the adjoining plot relieved their thirst; and they went on.
And down.
And the air grew warmer.
It was nothing like the searing, steamy heat of the great machine cavern with the ruptured pipes. The levels they passed through now were gentle enough in climate; there was really no longer any need for them to wear the horrid gnome shapes. But, definitely, it was warmer. They dropped from another gallery onto another great, wide space, but this one was no farm. It was sheer, burnished metal, almost ILke a steely, oil-smooth sea that reflected a steely sky a hundred meters above. Now Tupaia saw what he had not seen earlier: rows of thin columns, widely spaced, that joined floor to ceiling. "It's like we were in one shell after another," David murmured, staring around. And Tupaia nodded; so it was. But shells of what?
At the end of the next passage that question, with all other theoretical questions, was driven from his mind.
David saw it first and cried out in alarm. Then Tupaia, close behind, saw it too: a heap of three more dead bodies. One was the gnome-shape that had once been a young, long-haired blond girl; one a middle-aged woman; and one not human at all. It was the Sheliak, its crystal shell long gone, its body now stretched and still in death.
"What—what could have happened, Mr. Tupaia?" the boy gasped.
Tupaia was silent for a moment, then met the boy's bright green eyes. "They killed each other in a fight. They're criminals, David," he said harshly. "Same as me."
"No! You told me what you did—you were fighting for a cause—"
"I thought I was," Tupaia agreed, "and I still think the whiteskins wronged my people. But these others—killers, most of them. Psychotic killers! When they were released from ownership I guess it was only a question of time." He turned over the girl's body with his foot, then hastily turned it back before the boy could see. One whole side of the face was a cinder; evidently the Sirian eye had been involved in the fight as well. "Two here," he muttered, "and four others that we've passed on the way. Probably some others dead, too, that we didn't see, or that wandered off. It's been an expensive trip."
The boy clutched his arm suddenly, and pointed at an opening just beyond a cluster of bright red metal columns. Tupaia could feel him shaking, but his voice was steady as he said: "Real expensive, Mr. Tupaia. There's some more!"
It wasn't just a few more; if the little group at the end of the passage had indicated a fight, this one showed pure massacre. There were more than a score of bodies—all human, this time—and most of them showing terrible burns. Tupaia shook his head. "Something set this off," he said. "I wish we knew what."
David looked up at him. "Should we go look?"
Tupaia shrugged. "We don't have a choice," he said, and heard the echo of his own voice saying the same thing, over and over. "Come on—but be careful!" he commanded and led the way past the heaps of corpses—
And brought up short.
They emerged onto another gallery, this one, it seemed, the last. For there below them was . . . empty space.
David cried out, and Tupaia caught the boy to him, staring incredulously. The next level was transparent, and below it nothing but a distant, far-down bright star. A sun! It was redder and brighter than Earth's could have been at such a distance, but unquestionably a star, trapped inside a great crystal shell, with all the rest of Cuckoo enveloping it in spherical layers.
Tupaia knew then what had driven the Purchased People over the edge of sanity; he felt his own threatened by a terrible vertigo and fear.
And a new fear added itself, for between the savage blaze of the trapped sun below and the shining metal roof above, something moved. The movement was a swarm of things, and Tupaia's first thought was that they were Boaty-Bits. But that was wrong. They were far too large, and even at great distance he could see that they possessed structure—wings and tails—Boaty-Bits were not like that. They were clustered around a distant structure like a bridge, narrow and unrailed. It leaped across that terrible gulf without cables or piers for support, and at the end of it a strange object hung. It was ball-shaped, and one hemisphere of it was mirror-bright, the other dead black. It looked almost like the sort of diagrams they had shown at the mission school to explain the Earth's day-night cycle, half sunlit and half in shadow. The black half was on top, the bright half beneath. It seemed to float above the center of that vast, glasslike floor, but he saw other bridges spun to it, far away and looking tiny as the threads of a spider's web. Things here had little weight; perhaps they were strong enough to hold it up. If those bridges were like a web, the queer ball hung upon them was like the spider's nest. Could there be some kind of spider-thing inside?
He shaded his eyes against the glare of the sun below to see the moving things. Watchers! Scores of them, an army. They were not flying. Ugly wings folded, they were creeping on their bellies across the bridge, as if stalking the great spider he imagined. One of them carried a clumsy-seeming, boxlike tachyonic transmitter strapped to its back. Something else was strange. Peering again, he saw that all their ugly heads were covered with queer, ill-fitting helmets. Looking at the head of the line, he saw that the leader was not a Watcher, but one of the hateful triangular things called deltaforms. It, too, was queerly helmeted.
In the vast space above them, insects were swarming— no, not insects; these were indeed Boaty-Bits. A nearer cloud of them swept toward Tupaia and the boy, attracted by David's cry. And beyond them Tupaia could see the Sirian eye and the Scorpian robot, floating over the great translucent block and the bodies of the remaining Purchased People.