“I know a thing or two about ropes and nooses also,” she told him as she dressed his worst cuts. “But I’ve got a feeling that when you go it’ll be a lot flashier than any hanging.”
He agreed with a sigh. “Oh, I imagine you’re right on about that.”
Their supplies were meager, since their hip pouches had been packed in a hurry and hers was torn in the struggle. Besides the first-aid kit and one capsule containing a compressed coverall, there were two protein bars, a compass, and a couple of black data cubes. Carefully scanning the pool, Teresa failed to find her lost goggles or anything else of value.
“How well do you remember George’s map?” she asked when they were both a bit recovered. Alex shrugged in what was, to him, utter darkness. “Not too well,” he answered frankly. “Had I it to do over again, I’d have made a copy for you. Or we ought to have taken the time to memorize it.”
“Mmm.” Teresa understood after-the-fact regrets. Her entire career had been about avoiding rushed planning — parsing out every conceivable contingency well in advance. And yet she trained for the unexpected, too. She was always ready to improvise.
“You had no time,” she replied. “And Glenn Spivey’s no fool.”
Alex shook his head. “Back in the conference room he spun out a scenario so reasonable, it almost had me convinced.”
“You seemed to be going along when I left. What changed your mind?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t so much change my mind as decide I didn’t want it made for me. We’d all worked so hard. It was starting to look as if we might be able to deal with Beta ourselves. Though how to expel it safely at the very end — that I still hadn’t figured out, yet.”
Teresa recalled her dream about the fireball, erupting into the sky from a boiling ocean… rising, but certain to return.
“So maybe Spivey’s plan’s a good one… keeping it inside the Earth, but up so high it’ll lose mass slowly?”
“Maybe… if it loses mass fast enough while in the mantle to make up for its gains lower down, if there aren’t instabilities we never calculated, if constant pumping on the gazer doesn’t crumble too many farms or cities or change the Earth’s innards somehow—”
“Could it do that?”
His face took on a perplexed look. “I don’t know. Last time I looked over my big model on Rapa Nui…” He shook his head. “Anyway, that’s where we’ve got to go now. From there we can answer Spivey’s proposition with one of our own.”
What an optimist, Teresa realized, and wondered why she ever thought him dour or lethargic. “How are we supposed to get there?”
“Oh, George says that will be surprisingly easy. Auntie Kapur can get us aboard a Hine-marama zep to Fiji, which isn’t a part of ANZAC and has an international jetport. From there, we travel under our own names, quite openly. Spivey won’t dare try to stop us… not without revealing everything, since, naturally, we’ll leave complete diary caches with Auntie before we go.”
“Naturally,” she nodded. “Knowing Spivey, he’ll just wait to talk with us when we get there. He still holds a full hand. And we can’t deal with anyone else.”
Of course Teresa knew what she and Alex were doing. They were talking as if their fates were actually still in their control. As if they would ever meet that clandestine zeppelin to begin a journey across the Pacific to the land of haunting statues. By putting off their predicament, even for a few minutes, they gave themselves time to calm down, to equilibrate. Time to engage in denial that they really were doomed, after all.
Alex recalled George saying something about exiting the Waterfall Cave via a dry channel, cut halfway up a jumble slope about a quarter of the way forward from the falls themselves. Unfortunately, he couldn’t recall whether that was a quarter of the way clockwise or counterclockwise. They tried the former first — taking turns peering through the goggles for any sign of an exit — before moving on to the latter. Fortunately, they found the opening at last, not too badly hidden behind a jutting limestone wall.
Unfortunately, one of them would always be effectively blind at any given moment. Because Alex was still a bit shaky from his misadventure in the river, Teresa insisted he lead, wearing the goggles. She assured him she could follow so long as he provided some spoken guidance, plus a hand wherever it got complicated.
The experience of climbing over glassy-smooth boulders in pitch blackness was a unique one for Teresa. At times she had the illusion this wasn’t a cave at all, but the surface of some ice moon. The sky was occulted not by stone but by a sooty nebula, hundreds of parsecs in breadth. But at any moment, the moon’s rotation might reveal bright stars, shining through a gap in the vast space-cloud… or perhaps even some alien planet or sun.
Those were moments of fantasy, of course. And always they were cut short, refuted by her other senses… by the bouncing echoes of the receding waterfall and the strange feeling of pressure from the rock overhead… reminding her she was actually deep inside a world. A dynamic world, with a habit of changing, shifting, shrugging in its fitful slumber.
New Zealand, especially, was a land of earthquakes and volcanoes. And though all that activity went on slowly in comparison to human lives, Teresa felt a sense of danger beyond the prospect of getting lost and starving to death.
At any moment the mountain might simply decide to squash them.
Somehow, strangely, that patina added to all their other jeopardies seemed to compensate a bit. It felt thrilling, somehow. In that respect we’re alike… Alex Lustig and I. Neither of us was meant to die in a boring way.
She thought about all this while, with other parts of her mind, she paid close attention to each stone and every tricky footing. Alex helped her squeeze finally through a narrow slot, into a passageway that coursed with a stiff breeze. Her fingertips brushed the wall to her left, tracing dripping moisture. Alex stopped her then and slipped the goggles into her hand.
The interactive optics read her pupils’ dilation and damped power accordingly. Nevertheless, the return of sight left her momentarily dazzled. Pyrites and other deceptively gaudy crystalline forms glittered back at her from all sides, their shine accentuated by the gleety dampness, giving the impression of some hermit’s deeply buried shrine. It was lovely. For a moment she was reminded of holos she’d viewed of the Lasceaux and Altamira caves, where her Cro-Magnon ancestors had crept by torchlight to paint the walls with haunting images of beasts and spirits, blowing ocher dust around their hands to leave poignant prints upon the cool stone — markers denoting the one thing she and they intimately shared… mortality.
Teresa consulted her compass — though such things were notoriously unreliable underground. Then she took Alex’s hand to lead him in what seemed the only direction possible, away from the growling river into the heart of the mountain.
So they alternated, stopping frequently to rest, each taking turns being the leader, then the blind, helpless one. She became quite knowledgeable about the contours of his hands, and their footsteps slowly joined in almost the same subconscious rhythm.
Along the way, to pass the time, Alex asked her to talk about herself. So she spoke of her school years and then her life and Jason. Somehow that seemed easier now. She could speak her husband’s name in past tense with sadness but no shame. Teresa also learned a few things about Alex Lustig when his turn came. Perhaps one or two that only slipped between the lines as he told her about his life as a bachelor scientist. In fact, Teresa marveled at how much better a storyteller he was. He made his own labors, in front of chalk boards or holo screens, seem so much more romantic than her own profession as a spacebus driver.