Robert Charrette: Find your own truth

Jason was the next down, dropping in five-meter controlled falls. Gray Otter was less ostentatious, but her more cautious approach was not enough to ward off bad luck. Halfway down she had a bad landing, and slammed shoulder-first into the cliff face. She slipped a dozen meters down the line before she could brake to a stop. When she reached his level Sam saw that her leathers were abraded and torn, but the ballistic lining remained intact. Though she made no com 8

Robert N. Charrette plaint, she favored her right arm. Jason did nothing but nod brusquely to the stiff smile she offered him. Sam had seen enough of Indian stoicism to know better than to offer help. Harrier joined them by executing a rapid series of small drops that seemed more like a scramble than rappeling.

The ledge they had reached was even narrower than the one they'd left behind, and McAlister's body lying there made standing room even more cramped. The guide's blood seemed to have soaked into the rocks, the stains becoming almost indistinguishable from the reddish sandstone.

Along the cliff face to the left was a darkness that had been hidden from above by an overhang. The cavern entrance was invisible from below as well, screened by the steep angle of the nearly sheer cliff. But it was here, just as McAlister had described it.

It would have been more direct to assault the cliffs from the plain, but McAlister had pointed out that such an attempt would require serious mountaineering equipment. He had strongly advised against driving as many pitons as the climb would require. "The rock," he had said, "wouldn't like it." So they had climbed along a circuitous path to the ledge, from which they had just dropped down onto the site. At the time Sam had thought McAlister's attitude superstitious, but now that the rock had sent the guide to his death he was not so sure.

A desert oak clung to a precarious foothold in a cleft on the far side of the entrance. The harsh location had stunted the tree, making it a natural bonsai. In his time as an employee of Renraku Corporation, Sam had known gardeners who would have sacrificed their retirement to have achieved such miniature perfection.

A flicker of motion at the edge of the tree's shadow caught his attention. At first he saw nothing on the sunlit rock; then he perceived a lizard clinging to the surface. Its back was decorated with stripes and lines of dots, but the patterns blurred as the lizard streaked away.. A shot cracked suddenly, and the lizard vanished in?: a gout of blood and tatters of flesh. Sam started back, feeling the heat of the bullet's passage near his cheek..!" "What in hell do you think you're doing? You almost hit me!"

"Zero out, Twist." Jason gave him a sardonic grin. "The 'ware's top of the line. Didn't even clip a hair of your fuzzy Anglo beard."

Sam knew Jason's smartgun link. The technology would keep the Indian from discharging his weapon while it was pointed at anyone the Indian recognized as a friendly. Killing the lizard was Jason's way of demonstrating that he would consider Sam a friend 'Ij. only as long as it was to his advantage, and that he f was capable of dealing with Sam anytime he wished. Jason was a dangerous man, a quality that made him j valuable to this run. The Indian was, in fact, the second-most-deadly samurai Sam knew. He would have preferred to have the first-most-deadly by his side, but that samurai wouldn't leave Seattle. Sam had known from the start that this run would be too dangerous with less than the best he could afford. He didn't like or trust Jason, but he had hired him anyway. Jason had offered a discount for his services to dem- f onstrate his disdain both for the danger involved and for that other samurai, and so was affordable muscle.

Affordable, deadly, and a future problem.

"You didn't need to shoot it," Sam said.

Jason gave him a look that was supposed to be innocent. "It mighta been poisonous. Coulda bit you."

"Damn fool street-runner," Harrier snapped. "Don't you know nothing? Rock monitors eat bugs. Ain't gonna bite nobody!"

"Shut up, little man." Keeping his eyes on Sam, Jason swung his arm around so that his gun pointed at Harrier. They all knew the samurai's smartgun link would let him aim the weapon without looking in the direction the muzzle pointed. Gray Otter leaned back against the rock face and out of the line of fire. With nothing between him and the weapon, Harrier began to retreat along the ledge.

"Don't let him shoot me, Mr. Twist. You're a shaman. Hex him or something."

Pointedly, Sam turned his back on Jason to demonstrate his disapproval of the Indian's bullying. "He won't shoot you, Harrier. I hear tell that you can't get anywhere around here without a guide, and you're the closest thing we've got to one."

The sound of a weapon being bolstered told Sam that Jason was done with his posturing for now. He hoped there would be no more problems until they got back to the Mules. The Indian usually went relatively docile for several hours, after having lost a play in the domination game. With all the dangers of travel, he would be quiet enough on the trip back to the coast. Once there, the odds would shift again. Sam expected that Jason would want an accounting for Sam's having embarrassed him in front of Gray Otter.

For now, though, they stood before the cavern McAlister had described. If everything the guide had hinted were true, they were facing more immediate problems. Even without shifting to his astral perception, Sam felt the stirring he had come to associate with the presence of powerful magic. He sat down cross-legged and shifted perceptions. The cavern mouth remained a dark hole in the cliff, his astral senses offering no clues to what lay beyond. Ayer's Rock itself buzzed with charged mana. He had no desire to assay the darkness within the cavern in astral form.

As he was easing himself back to mundane perceptions, Sam noticed a faint glow to one side of the entrance. With his worldly eyes, he saw a pictograph of a lizard where the flesh-and-blood lizard had clung to the rock. The red and ocher of the paint were bright and shiny and looked almost wet. It didn't smell wet, though. When he touched one of the lines, Sam's finger came away feeling damp but showing no sign of color. While pondering that mystery, he noticed another painting a meter or so higher. Faded, but recognizable, it was another lizard. Like the first, its head pointed toward the mouth of the cave. Now that Sam knew what to look for, he saw that the entire entrance was ringed with pictographs. All were lizards, and all pointed toward the cavern's gaping mouth.

Sam stood and started forward, but Jason stepped past him to be the first to enter the cave. Sam was more than happy to let the Indian lead the way into the unknown. Jason was the best equipped to handle a sudden physical threat, and would only get angrier if denied that honor.

As Sam stepped across the threshold behind him, the drop in temperature was like walking into a refrigerator. After the initial shock he realized it wasn't so much the great temperature differential, but that the escape from the blazing sun made it seem so. Straining to see, he took a few steps forward. Harrier and Gray Otter entered behind him. Unlike Jason, the three of them moved cautiously, almost unwillingly. None of them had the optic augmentation of the samurai.

It took several minutes for unenhanced eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, Sam saw that he was standing in a sort of antechamber. Gray Otter and Harrier were there, too, but Jason had probed deeper. More aboriginal pictographs adorned the chamber's walls. Hidden from the sun, these were less faded, but none had the fresh look of the one Sam had touched. Harrier identified some of them, speaking their names as though they were totems: Kangaroo, Koala, Bandicoot, Snake, and, arching overhead, Crocodile.