Robert Wilson - Bios

No, she realized, not without dislocating her shoulder.

She backed off, removed her tool belt and slipped it over one shoulder. That way she could reach the remaining lamps, if need be.

Five lamps. Say, six or seven hours of light, if they all worked. And then—?

Another bad thought. She put it out of her mind and squirmed once more into the tunnel.

There was just enough space for her to lift herself on her elbows and inch forward, scrabbling with boots and knees in a sort of crab-crawl. She was grateful for the ubiquitous pale moss beneath her; it cushioned her knees and elbows where the vulnerable suit membrane might have torn or eroded.

The firefly lamp illuminated a narrow circular space perhaps a meter or two ahead of her. I need a plan, she thought. (Perhaps she said some of this aloud. She tried not to, but the gap between thought and word had narrowed and she caught the occasional echo of her own hoarse whisper coming back to her out of the distance. Giving herself away, she feared. But still, the animals hadn’t returned.)

A plan, she thought again. Here was a maze, and somewhere the minotaur. She decided that whenever she came to a fork in the tunnel she would always take the path that led upward, or if both paths were equivalent she would take the right-turning branch. That way she would eventually reach the surface, or at least be able (but please don’t let it happen) to back out of a dead end and retrace her route.

She could do that, she decided, even if, God forbid, she used up all her lamps. Even in the dark, she could do that.

The dark returned when her current lamp flickered and dimmed. Too soon, surely. How far had she come? She couldn’t guess. A long way, it seemed, but not far enough. The tunnel had not branched, not even once. Or perhaps, horrible thought, the diggers made new tunnels and sealed old ones; maybe she would reach a final wall and— No. Bad thought.

She fumbled another firefly lamp into her hand and pressed the base. To her immense relief, it flickered to life. Another hour lost. Bad thought, bad thought.

She had been imagining, vividly, what she would do when she got back to Yambuku—peel off her excursion membrane, stand under a hot shower, wash her hair, eat, drink sparkling water from tall crystal tumblers—when she came to a branching tunnel.

The first. Or was it the first? Here in this small arc of light it was hard to estimate time, to distinguish between events imagined and events actual. She had planned this, but had she already attempted it? She didn’t know. Nevertheless, Zoe thought, stick to plan. Did the left branch show an upward slope, or should she keep to the right?

Hard to say.

She paused, hoping to divine some clue. Was there a breath of wind either way? There was not. Only the same stale, stinking air, hardly enough to fill her lungs. No sound. She thought perhaps the right-hand tunnel rose ever so slightly, and she turned in that direction.

Running into Theo’s arms.

“One of my children survived.” Running into Tam Hayes’ arms…

She woke hurting. Arms stiff, legs stiff, her head throbbing. Pressure all around her. And blind— No, it was the dark. The dark.

She had fallen asleep.

She cursed her carelessness—time had been wasted!—and fumbled for the next firefly lamp. She kept her eyes tightly closed as she worked her fingers, because she couldn’t see anything even if her eyes were open, and because with her eyes closed the darkness felt like a choice, her own chosen darkness, not something imposed by the weight of clay and stone around her. The warm darkness, perhaps, of sleep. Though she must not sleep again.

She scratched the lamp alight.

That was better. Only this endless tunnel to see, but the light was a blessing.

She crawled ahead a few meters—or maybe a lot of meters. There were no references here any longer, no time and no space. She might have traveled a great distance already, or she might be a scant few paces from her original cul-de-sac.

Bad thought.

The tunnel ahead of her began to widen. This was change at last, and the rush of hope she felt was intoxicating. She cautioned herself against it, but hope was like panic, irrepressible, a vast force no longer blocked by her thymostat.

The thymostat had been a kind of membrane too, Zoe thought—like her excursion suit, another barrier between herself and the world. Shutting out the viruses of panic and hope and love and despair. Lost now. She was naked and infected.

The tunnel continued to expand, became a larger chamber. She filled it with the sound of her labored breathing. Raised her hand and brought the light to bear. Lifted her eyes and saw—

—a dead end.

Another cul-de-sac.

She let her tears flow freely for a few precious minutes. The excursion suit, she thought idiotically, would recycle them.

She crawled back, sobbing intermittently, to the place where the tunnel branched.

How many lamps were left? Her memory was faulty; she was compelled to stop and count the remaining lamps with her fingers. One, two, three, four. Which meant that hours had passed since she left the chamber where she had been abandoned. She could even calculate the time, she supposed, if her mind were functioning a little more efficiently, if she had not lost an eternity to sleep.

Too much time, in any case. Too much time spent doubling her tracks.

She thought of open air. The memory was so vivid she could taste it. And sky, Zoe thought. Yes, and rain. And wind.

She heard faint sounds at the tunnel intersection. An exit missed? The sound of outside? But she had to be careful. She controlled her breathing. She put her head into the adjoining tunnel.

Where the black eyes of a digger regarded her coolly.

She held on to the firefly lamp even as the digger scuttled after her and clutched her ankles.

She hadn’t recognized the digger. It wasn’t Old Man. Absurd as that name was. This was simply an animal, or something as much insect as animal, long and too lithe in the close confinement of the tunnel, its thin body flexible, huge black eyes queasily mobile in their sockets, gripping claws tight as rings of tempered steel. She was shocked that she had ever found anything even faintly reminiscent of the human about these creatures. They were brutal but not even malevolent; their minds worked in strange, inhuman loops; whatever motivated them, she was opaque to it; their realm was not her realm.

It dragged her into another cul-de-sac—no, oh God, the same one, the one she had started from; she recognized the web on the wall—and rolled her over on her back.

Still she clutched the lamp. A small spark of sanity. The digger ignored it.

She closed her eyes, opened them.

The digger loomed over her. She supposed it was looking at her, though its eyes were as blank as bubbles of oil.

She looked back at it. Beneath her panic was a grim and wholly unexpected calm, an emotional deadness that was both relief and threat at once. A premature deadness … because she was almost certainly about to die.

The digger put one extended claw on her chest, on her sternum above her breasts.

She felt the pressure of it—enough to cause pain, perhaps enough to draw blood.

Then the digger began to slice at her excursion membrane, peeling away the broken material like pale, dead skin.

All roads lead to Rome, Kenyon Degrandpre thought, and out here at the edge of the human diaspora he had become the embodiment of Rome, and down those roads marched all the bad news in the world, rank on serried rank.