Timothy Zahn - Triplet

"I don't blame him. Shamsheer must have been a real shock."

The autocar negotiated the gentle ramp that had been built up to the mounds and rolled to a stop.

"Last chance to change your mind," Ravagin warned as they got out.

"Don't be silly," Danae retorted, striding ahead of him into the Tunnel mouth. Ravagin took a careful look at the landscape behind them and then followed, feeling marginally better. Hart could still be skulking around the background somewhere; but from here on he'd have a hell of a time keeping up with them.

For the first fifty meters or so the Tunnel went straight into the mound with only a slight slope downward, and by the time it began its lefthanded circular bend the last traces of light from the entrance had been left behind. The feint glow of Danae's dimlight waited for him at the bend; lighting his own, Ravagin caught up with her. "Stay clear of the walls," he warned her as he brushed past and took the lead. "They're rough in places—and the material is just as unyielding as the stuff the outside is made of, so you can get a bruise you'll long remember."

"It would help if you people would give us decent lights," she grumbled as they walked. "Even fire matches would be brighter than these things."

"And would be very noticeable to anyone from Shamsheer who happened to be wandering around the Tunnel. We try to discourage travel from that end."

"But—oh." She fell silent. Perhaps, Ravagin thought, the other reason for the dim lighting had suddenly occurred to her.

The trip, taken in near-absolute darkness, always seemed longer than it really was, and Ravagin was beginning to sense restlessness in his client when the first of the marker dots came into view along the wall. Standard procedure was to immediately point them out to newcomers... but nothing yet about this trip had been particularly standard, and just for the hell of it he decided to give Danae a more direct introduction to what Reingold had dubbed the Unwelcome Mat. They passed the camouflaged lockers... the triangle marker loomed just ahead... Ravagin increased his lead a step—

And abruptly he was five meters behind her.

The shock of his disappearance kept her feet moving another two steps; and by the time she gasped and twisted around it was too late. Her motion brought her elbow across the invisible line of the telefold—

And abruptly she was a meter behind him again.

She spun again to face him, and he heard the breath go out of her in a wumph. "That was a rotten trick," she muttered, sounding more awed than angry. "Your information packet doesn't nearly do the thing justice."

"I don't think anything can," he agreed, vaguely disappointed she'd recovered so fast. "You have to experience it to really believe it."

"I don't even believe it now." She took another deep breath. "The really scary part is that I didn't feel a thing. You could keep crossing that same five meters of Tunnel forever trying to reach the other end."

"Reingold's people damn near did that. It was sheer desperate inspiration that anyone thought about trying it naked."

He could almost hear her wince. "... right. Well. We ought to get started on that ourselves, I suppose.

Shouldn't we?"

"Yeah. The lockers are over here, built to look like part of the wall..."

He showed her how to open them, and in the dim light they stripped off their coveralls and stowed them on the hooks provided. Ravagin had long since stopped being embarrassed by the necessity of crossing the telefold naked, but a surprising percentage of his clients—even though they knew what to expect—got their backs up at this point and tried like hell to bend the rules. Usually it took several trips across that same five meters, as Danae had put it, to convince them that nothing but their own personal bodies could make the trip through from Threshold to Shamsheer. No one knew exactly why the Tunnel's builders had set things up that way, but it was abundantly clear that there was nothing anyone could do about it.

"Okay, I'm ready," Danae said at last, flipping off her dimlight and closing the locker door. "Now what?"

"Take my hand," Ravagin said, reaching it out toward her voice in the darkness. "Crossing the telefold sometimes plays tricks with your balance."

Her hand was stiff and unwilling, but at least she didn't argue the point. Walking carefully, taking both balance and direction cues from the faintly luminous marker dots, he led her forward... and abruptly, for just an instant, the floor seemed to tilt sideways.

Danae gasped and lost her balance, falling heavily against him. He caught her, and for a moment they were pressed together—

She got her feet under her again and jerked away, pulling her hand out of his in the process. "Sorry," she muttered, sounding both angry and embarrassed.

"That's all right," he assured her, the words somehow coming out a lot more sincere than he'd planned them to. "That generally happens during a person's first time," he added, a bit lamely. Her skin had felt extraordinarily good against his.... "Come on—the next set of lockers are down the tunnel a ways. Give me your hand and I'll lead you."

"I'm all right, thank you," she said, a bit tartly.

"Up to you." He headed off down the tunnel, leaving her to find her own way as best she could. The pathway continued to curve to the left, and he let his fingertips graze the righthand wall until he felt the gentle swelling that was one end of this set of camouflaged lockers. The bulge swelled further and further out into the passageway, and a few steps later Ravagin's fingers found the hidden catch and swung open the door. A handful of firefly rings sat on the top shelf; picking one up, he slipped it onto his left hand. "Let there be light," he said, cupping his palm... and a glowing ball of hazy light appeared. "Now," he said, glancing back at Danae, "let's get dressed and get out of here. Here—try this on for starters." He handed her a flowing dress of the sort worn by the minor Shamsheer nobility.

"Thanks," she said, hugging the dress close to her against her nudity and the firefly's light. "What was that you said?—'let there be light'?"

"All you really have to say to a firefly is 'be light,' or 'be lighted,' " he shrugged, searching through the locker for the garb he wanted for himself. "I was just being a little theatrical."

"But you need to give these commands in Shamahni, don't you?" she asked.

"What do you think we're speaking now?" he countered.

"We're—? Oh! I didn't—I mean...."

She stopped short, in confusion or embarrassment, and Ravagin smiled to himself in the dim light.

Deep-implant language training was far more thorough than most people realized. "Don't let it bother you—I've had clients go halfway across Shamsheer before they realized the rest of the population wasn't speaking Standard. Do you need more light?"

"This is fine," she said, her words muffled as she fought with the unfamiliar clothing style.

He smiled again to himself, and they finished getting dressed in silence. Afterwards, he brought the firefly's light up a few lumens and studied the various tools and weapons stored on the equipment shelf. The selection was always more limited than he liked, a problem that was normally more an annoyance than anything else. But with Hart's veiled threats echoing in the back of his mind—and Hart himself God only knew where—the lack of weaponry especially was feeling a lot more critical than usual. But there was nothing he could do about it, at least not until they could get to one of the way houses.

"Well?" Danae asked impatiently as he hesitated in indecision. "What're we waiting for?"

"Just relax," Ravagin growled back at her. "We're not on any schedule here." Gritting his teeth, he picked up the largest sheath knife available—an ordinary one, unfortunately, not a target-seeking watchblade—and his own personal favorite, a scorpion glove. Both weapons went onto his belt; scooping up another firefly and a prayer stick, he slammed the locker closed and started down the Tunnel. "Come on," he called over his shoulder.