David Brin - Earth

Perhaps all our modern astronomy is wrong , she pondered, gazing across the ersatz starfields. Maybe the “real” constellations are just like those green dots. No more than lures to bait the unwary .

She shook her head as the ceiling slid slowly past, carrying with it whole implied universes. That was the problem with nightmares, they clung to you, affecting your mood for hours afterwards. Teresa couldn’t afford that now. Nor even settling into “passenger” mode. Action was the proper antidote. She whispered. “Can I help?”

The boat glided smoothly through the water. “Not yet…” Alex panted as he groped for something up ahead, almost tipping them over in the process. Teresa gripped the rocking sides. “Ah. Here it is. George’s special rope. From here we leave the main cave.”

Their craft made a sharp turn, scraping by towers of inky blackness and then embarking under new, unfamiliar skyscapes. A little while later Alex spoke again, now short of breath. “All right. If you take my hand, I’ll help you stand… carefully! Let me guide you to the cable… Got it? Now that there aren’t other ropes about to confuse you, I could use some assistance. Put an elbow on my shoulder to feel my rhythm. Keep to an easy pace at first. Let me know the instant you feel any motion sickness.”

Teresa forbore telling him her entire life had been a battle with vertigo. “Lay on, Macduff,” she whispered with an effort at cheerfulness.

“And damn’d be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’ ” he finished the quotation. “We’re off.”

Trying to stand in a swaying boat while dragging on a cable overhead in total darkness — it wasn’t exactly the easiest thing Teresa had ever attempted. She almost fell over the first few times. But leaning against him made it easier. They could brace each other on four legs. Soon they were breathing in the same cadence, gliding across the smooth pond with hardly a sound and only the green sprinkle overhead to give the cave walls outlines.

Soon those walls were closing in again, she could tell. The darkness and silence seemed to accentuate her other senses, and she was acutely aware of every faint drip of condensation, every aroma rising from her clothes and his.

The boat bumped once, twice, and then went aground on a rocky bank. “Okay,” he said. “Carefully, crouch down and help me feel for the bag of supplies.”

Letting go of the rope, they came closer than ever to tipping over. Teresa gasped, clutching him. Together they fell in a heap of arms and legs, gasping — and also laughing with released tension. As they tried to untangle, he grunted. “Ow! Your knee is on my… ah, thank you.” His voice shifted to falsetto. “Thank you very much.” They laughed again, in tearful relief.

“Is this what you were looking for?” she asked, as one hand came upon a nylon bag. She pushed it toward him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Now where’s the zipper? Don’t answer that! Here it is.”

There was something bizarre and really rather funny about all this fumbling in the dark. It made your hands feel thick and uncoordinated, as if smothered in mittens. Still, altogether, this beat languishing in a tiny room, feeling sorry for yourself.

“Here, take these,” he said, apparently trying to hand her something. But in reaching out she wound up jabbing him in the throat. He made exaggerated choking sounds and she giggled nervously. “Oh, stop. Here, let’s do it this way,” she suggested, and ran her ringers from his neck down to his right shoulder. She felt his left hand move to cover hers. Together they followed his sleeve down to his other hand.

Funny , she thought along the way. I had this image of him as being soft, mushy. But he’s solid. Are all Cambridge dons built like this ?

With both hands he pressed into hers an object — a pair of goggles. But he didn’t let go quite yet.

“We had to get you out,” he told her in a more serious tone. “We couldn’t let Spivey take you off to jail.”

Teresa felt a lump, knowing she had underestimated her friends.

“He’d have used your jeopardy as one more threat, to coerce George and the others,” Alex finished. “And we decided we just couldn’t allow that.”

Teresa pulled her hand away. Of course. That’s completely right. Have to stay practical about this .

“So you’re dropping me off now and going back?” she asked as she adjusted the elastic headband.

“Of course not. First off, we haven’t got you out yet. And anyway, I’m not staying to be Colonel Spivey’s tool!”

“But… but without you the gazer…”

“Oh, they’ll manage without me, I suppose. If all they want to do is keep the damn thing down there—” He paused and caught his breath. “But I’m not bowing out completely. There’s method to this madness, Captain Tikhana.”

“Teresa… please.”

There was another pause. “All right. Teresa. Um, got yours adjusted yet?”

“Just a sec.” She pulled the strap and toggled the switch by one lens. Suddenly it was as if someone had turned the lights on.

Unlike mere passive infrared goggles, which would have detected very little down here, these monitored whichever way her eyes turned and sent a tiny illuminating beam in just that direction, for just as long as she was looking that way. The only exception was where they detected another set of goggles. To prevent blinding another user, the optics were programmed never to shine directly at each other, so when Teresa looked around for the first time, she made out limestone walls, the inky waterline, the boat — but Alex Lustig’s face remained hidden inside an oval of darkness.

“Couldn’t have used them before because Spivey had spy sensors—”

Teresa waved aside his explanation. It made sense. “Now where?” she asked.

He pointed downward, and she understood why even the peeper colonel’s little robot watchers wouldn’t be able to follow them. “Okay,” she said. And together they sorted equipment from the nylon bag.

Claustrophobia was the least of her worries as they kicked along a deep, twisting tube, carried by the current of an underground stream. Nor did the bitter cold bother her much — though Teresa kept an eye on the tiny clock readout, calculating the time before hypothermia would become a problem.

Alex’s flippers churned the water in front of her, creating sparkling flecks in her goggles’ beam. Spectrum conversion always made things look eerie, but here the effect was otherworldly, other-dimensional. The taper of his legs seemed to stretch endless meters, kilometers ahead of her, like this surging hypogean torrent.

The river held their lives now and they were helpless to turn back if George Hutton’s map proved wrong or if they took some fatal wrong turn. She imagined they might, as in some old movie, be swept downward ever deeper into the Earth’s twisting bowels, to some Land That Time Forgot. In fact, though, washing ashore on a misty underground dinosaur refuge was less unsettling to contemplate than some likelier possibilities… like meeting their end pinned to a porous wall, the freshet plunging past them through crevices too small for human flesh to pass.

Was Alex planning to lead her all the way to the river’s outlet, somewhere on the Tasman Sea? If so, the timing would be tight. Their air capsules weren’t rated for more than a couple of hours.

Perhaps it was the coolness, but Teresa’s thoughts soon calmed. She found herself wondering at the sculpted shapes of the sweeping, curving tube… at the way different hardnesses of stone overlapped in smooth relief and how patient eddies had carved cavities into the ancient mountain, laying bare fine patterns, delicate to the eye.