It had not been easy to be Robin, but she was a person to respect. No one had ever pushed her around. Once again she wondered why she kept on. It would be more honorable, she felt, to live her life here where no one could see her. To emerge into the light would be to expose her shame.
But sometime later, urged on by a force she did not understand and would have resisted if she had known how, she got up and resumed her long walk east.
It had seemed so simple when she explained it to Chris and Valiha. She would make her way through the cavern, heading always toward the east, until she reached Thea. Of course, that was assuming the direction they were calling east really was east, but if it wasn't, there was little she could do about it.
But it soon became apparent she would have to make more leaps of faith than that first, basic one. She had to assume that the cavern, which was one or two kilometers across at the west end and reached into the unguessable east, would keep going in that direction. And there was no reason to assume that. By the pinpoint lights of the glowbirds she was able to tell the general trend of the passage for two or three kilometers in each direction. It seemed to average out as a straight line, but there were so many twists and curves she could not be sure.
There was another possibility. It was impossible to tell if the cavern was rising or descending. They had started at a level she knew to be five kilometers beneath the surface because Cirocco had said so. She also knew Gaea's outer skin was thirty kilometers thick. There was room to miss Thea's chamber by quite a margin.
Two simple instruments could have banished her disorientation. To go up in Gaea was to become lighter, while descending would have made her weigh fractionally more. A sensitive spring scale could have measured those differences. Her own senses were inadequate. The gyroscopic Gaean clock could have been used as a compass because when its axis was oriented north and south, it no longer turned. By aligning the clock until it stopped and then turning it ninety degrees, she could learn east and west by whether the clock ran backward or forward. But neither Gaby nor Cirocco had ever needed a spring scale in her travels, so they had not packed one. And the clock had stayed with Hornpipe.
She wasted a great deal of time trying to fix her position and direction using simple equipment, and ended up being completely baffled. In particular, it should have been possible to determine east and west by the behavior of falling objects. She tried setting up long plumb lines and dropping things, with inconclusive results. So in the end she blundered on, lost in the dark. She had been doing it for at least three kilorevs, possibly more. She followed the north wall. It had seemed a good idea until she came to the end of a passage, no more than twenty sleeps into her trip. She had followed the south wall back until it began to bend and kept bending through 180 degrees, and she realized she had entered a side passage without knowing it. There was nothing to do but go back across the passage until she reached the marks she had made to guide Chris and Valiha, cross out one and chisel in a new one, directing them to the other passage. Until it, too, ended abruptly three sleeps later.
From that time it had been a nightmare of long treks and heartbreaking backtracks, of gaining slowly as she eliminated false trails one after the other by fighting her way to the ends of them. It was grueling, dangerous work. Her overriding fear was that there was, in fact, no way out, that after all the tears and frustration and the growing realization that she had no real idea where she was going, she would one day see Chris and Valiha's camp in the distance and know it had all been for nothing.
The possibility began to grow that Chris and Valiha would one day catch up with her. She would not have minded that at all. In fact, she often wondered why she did not sit down and wait for them to arrive. It would be nice to have some company. She longed to see the two of them... or it could very well be three by now. She wondered what the baby Titanide would be like.
The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. Three of them working together would do better than Robin working alone. It would be safer, there was no getting around that. Chris would bear some of the danger of leading the way, so her risk would automatically be halved.
And every time she thought that, she pressed ahead with more determination than ever. If she could no longer be fearless, she could at least be dogged. If she must face the fact that she was fearful, she would also face the fear and overcome it.
She entered an arched corridor much like the one she and Chris had fled through. There was nothing unusual about that fact; she had explored a hundred just like it. But she had come to expect so little of her journey that it was more than a surprise when she saw what lay at the end of it. For a moment she was too stunned to move. There was an unpleasant smell in the air. Robin looked vaguely to the left and right, then down, where a thin sheet of clear liquid lapped at her toes. The tips of her boots were smoking.
She jumped back and hastily kicked them off. She might have waded right into it. She could have fallen on her face. It might have gotten into her lungs... .
"Stop it!" she said, aloud, shocked to hear the sound of her own voice. It would never do to stand here and worry about the things that might have happened. She had to deal with what still could happen.
"Thea!" she called. But what if it was Tethys she faced, or Phoebe? She doubted she could tell the difference even up close, and from where she stood, several hundred meters down a dark corridor with the conical regional brain only a speck of light, there was no hope at all. It might be best to go back, to think it out better, maybe approach the problem later.....Thea, I need to speak to you!"
She listened intently, keeping her eyes on the level of acid covering the floor a few meters from her. If it began to rise even the tiniest little bit, she would teach the glowbirds a thing or two about flying.
But the voice of Crius had been faint-hardly a sound to reach down acid-filled tunnels-and though Tethys had sounded louder, it was probably because she had been so frightened, hanging on every word. There was no reason to think Thea could speak any louder than the others.
Robin shouted again, listened, heard nothing. She had not counted on this. She had expected trouble in a million variations but had never thought she might be unable to make Thea aware of her presence.
"Thea, I am Robin of the Coven, a friend of Cirocco Jones, the Wizard of Gaea, Empress of the Titanides, and..." She tried to recall the titles Gaby had rattled off in a bitter moment back at the Melody Shop, but had no luck.
"I'm a friend of the Wizard," she finished, hoping the assertion would be enough. "If you can hear me, you should know I come on the Wizard's business. I need to speak to you."
She listened again, with no better result.
"If you're talking to me, I can't hear you," she shouted. "It is very important to the Wizard that I be able to speak to you. If you could lower the level of the acid so I could get closer, it would be much easier for us to talk." She was about to add that she could not harm Thea, but something in Cirocco's attitude when addressing Crius made her change her mind. She had no idea if it was a dangerous thing for her to assume any of the airs Cirocco had put on. It might be the worst thing she could do. Yet it was equally possible that Thea understood nothing but strength and would slaughter her the moment she showed weakness.
That thought almost made her laugh, frightened as she was. What did she have but weakness? It was possible she would lose control of herself while in Thea's presence and lie helpless while the huge being decided what to do with her.
Never mind all that, she thought. She would get nowhere but back to the far end of the corridor, back to the darkness of bitter defeat, if she kept thinking like that. She must do what she had to do and ignore the trembling in her hands.