David Brin - Earth

This can’t be George Hutton’s route anymore , she knew after a while. There couldn’t have been this many diversions, this many narrow, twisty crawlways indicated on the map they’d lost. Alex certainly realized it as well, but said nothing. Both of them knew they’d never remember how to retrace their steps. The easy banter of an hour ago (or was it four hours? six? fourteen?) gave way to clipped, hoarse whispers as they saved their strength and tried not to think about their growing thirst.

They were blazing their own path now… going places no caver must have ever seen before. Teresa didn’t see them even now of course, but that didn’t matter. The textures were new with every turn. Under her fingertips she became familiar with many different types of rock, without associated names or images to spoil the perfect reality. Substance unsullied by metaphor.

Alex made the tactical decisions, step by step, meter by meter, small-scale choices of how to move each foot, each knee and hand. “Watch your head,” he told her. “Bend a bit more. Turn left now. Reach up and to the left. Higher. That’s it.”

Not once was there any implied rebuke in his voice, for her having led them this way… a blind woman pointing vaguely heavenward one moment, the other way the next, quite possibly taking them in circles. I’m supposed to be scientific. A trained engineer. What am I doing then, trusting both our lives to hunches ?

Teresa quashed the misgivings. True enough, logic and reason were paramount. They were wiser ways by far than the old witchcraft and impulsiveness that used to guide human affairs. But reason and logic also had their limits, such as when they had no data at all to work on. Or when the data were the sort no engineer could grapple with.

We have many skills , she thought during one rest period, as Alex shared the last crumbs of protein bar and then let her lick the wrapper with her dry tongue. Some are skills we hardly ever use .

If only water-finding were one of hers. Occasionally they heard what could only be the plinking drip of liquid, somewhere beyond the beam of Alex’s goggles — often resonating tantalizingly beyond some rocky wall. Pressing your ear against a smooth surface, you could sometimes even pick up the distant roar and gurgle of the river, or perhaps another one that coursed and threaded these hidden countries below ground.

Sometime during their next stretch, she heard Alex gasp, backing up from what he described as a “bottomless pit.” Teresa remained calm as he guided her round an unseen trap that would have been their ossuary if he hadn’t spotted it in time.

They rested again on the other side. Hunger and thirst had long since become acute, and then begun fading to dull, familiar aches. But these didn’t worry Teresa as much as her growing weakness. Perhaps, a few rest stops from now, they would simply not get up again. Would their bodies then dessicate and mummify? Or was the dryness seasonal? Perhaps in a few months a slow seepage, rich in minerals, would return to these passages and gradually glue their bodies to the rocks where they sat, to seal their crypt and lapidify their bones. Or some wayward, springtime torrent might come crashing through this way, crushing and dissolving their remains, then carrying the bits all the way to distant seas.

Perhaps none of those things would have time to happen. It was still quite possible for Spivey and Hutton to lose control over the Beta singularity, in which case, even the mountain-tomb surrounding her now would prove no more solid than a house made of tissue. The distance between Teresa and her friends in the outer world seemed infinite right now, but would become academic once the taniwha reached its ravenous, final maturity, when all their atoms would rendezvous in a sudden, intimate, topological union.

Teresa wondered what that might feel like. It almost sounded attractive in a way, as she contemplated the immediate prospect of starvation. Did other lost explorers get this philosophical when they neared the end?

She wondered if Wegener in Greenland or Amundsen in the Arctic pondered the vagaries of human destiny as they, too, plodded on and on beyond all realistic hope. Perhaps that, more than cleverness, has been our secret power , Teresa thought as she and Alex got moving again, choosing yet another branching path. Even when you run out of answers, there are still possibilities to consider .

After a while though, even that consoling line of thought petered out. Tiredness settled over her like a numbing weight, thankfully dulling the ache of countless bumps and cuts and scratches. Her knee pads might have been lost some while back, or not, for she could hardly feel anything from those quarters anymore as she crawled or crouched or sidled edgewise through cramped or slanted defiles. All that remained to focus her attention was the rhythm. And an obstinacy that would not let her stop.

She had no premonition when Alex stopped suddenly. Through the hand on his arm, she felt a tremor run through his body. “Come here, Rip,” he urged in a hoarse whisper, pulling her alongside him and then over to an inclined shelf. When she was seated on the cool stone, she felt him take her head between his hands and turn it to the left, then downward a bit. “I can’t tell,” he said in a dry voice. “Is there something over there?”

Teresa blinked. By now she had gotten used to the speckles and entopic flashes the retina seems to “see” even in total darkness — the lies your eyes tell in order to pretend they still have something to do. So it took her a moment to recognize that one of those glimmers was maintaining the same vague, half-imagined, blurry outline, keeping position whichever way she tilted. Teresa gingerly bit her cracked upper lip so the pain would rouse her a bit. In a voice parched and scratchy from thirst, she asked, “Um… want to go check it out?”

“No, of course not,” he answered with wry, affectionate sarcasm, and squeezed her hand before beginning to guide her down the new channel, this one layered deep with some sort of dust that gave off a strong, musty aroma.

Teresa inhaled and finally realized what was so attractive about the smell. It was a rich pungency, and she could only hope her suspicions were true, that the fragrance wafting her way rose from the thickly lain droppings left by endless generations of flying mammals… animals who sheltered below ground, but made their living flying and hunting outside, under an open sky.

Round more bends and turns they followed the faint glimmer, until Teresa began making out the dim outlines of walls and rough columns, contrasting at first only in faint shadings of black, but then with hints of gray and sepia creeping in to lend a detail here and there. Soon she found herself no longer needing as much help from Alex, guiding her own footsteps, detecting obstacles miraculously at long range, while they were still meters away.

Sight… an amazing sensation.

It took more steep descending after that, taking care not to make some fatal error in their haste, but at last they came to a place where the floor leveled off and was littered with a carpet of small bones which crunched under their feet. Now, overhead, they could make out thousands of brown, folded forms, hanging from every crack and crevice. The denizens of the cave gave them little notice, wrapped within the cocoons of their wings, sleeping through the day.

Day. Teresa blinked at the concept, and had to hold up a hand to cut the glare reflecting directly off one last cave wall — one facing a source of light brighter than anything she had ever imagined. I’m sorry I doubted you , she told the sun, remembering how in her dream she’d presumed it could ever have a rival.