Of course their conversation went in fits and starts. Every third phrase was an interruption. “… Lift your left foot…” or “… duck your head half a meter…” or “… twist sideways now, and feel for a cut to the right…” Each of them took turns verbally guiding and often physically controlling the other one. It was a heavy responsibility, demanding mutual trust. That came hard at first. But there was simply no alternative.
It was during one of her turns to be led that Teresa suddenly felt a passing breeze as they crept along a narrow passage. She turned her head. And even though the fleeting zephyr was gone, she sniffed and began to frown.
“… so that was when Stan told me I’d better shape up my…”
She stopped him by planting her feet and tightening her grip on his hand.
“What is it, Teresa?” She heard and felt him turn around. “Are you tired? We can—”
She held up her free hand to ask for quiet, and he shut up.
Had she really sensed something? Was it because she was blind and paying attention to other senses? Would she have walked right on by if she had been sighted and in the lead? “Alex,” she began. “On which side of the corridor was the next branching on George’s map?”
“Um… as I said, I’m not too certain. I think it was on the left, perhaps four klicks past the lake. But surely we haven’t gone that far yet… Or have we?” He paused. “Do you think maybe we’ve gone past?”
Teresa shook her head. It was a gamble, but the breeze had come from the left…
There were always breezes though, little gusts that blew down the cavern from who knew where, bound for places impossible to guess. Still, something in her internal guidance system had seemed to cry out that last time.
“Did George write a note next to the turn?”
She heard him inhale deeply and imagined him closing his eyes as he concentrated. “Yes… I believe I see some writing… do you think it was something like ‘watch out for the skull and bones’?”
She punched fairly accurately and struck his shoulder. “Ow!” he grunted, satisfyingly.
“No,” Teresa said. “But the turn must have been unobvious. After all, they don’t have to be clear forks in the road. Usually they won’t be.”
“I guess not. Maybe that’s what he wrote down… how to look for it. Did you—”
She dragged his wrist. “Come on!”
“Wait. Shouldn’t I give you the gog—”
He stumbled just to keep up as she led him back through the utter blackness purely by memory, waving one arm in front of her, trying to find that elusive whisper again.
“Alex!” She stopped so suddenly he collided with her. “Look up! Up and to the right. What do you see?”
“I see… Yes. There’s an opening all right. But how do you figure… ?”
She waved aside his objections. It felt right. Her internal compass, her ever-nervous, never-satisfied sense of direction… called her that way. She suppressed a voice of doubt, one that said she was grasping at straws. “Let’s give it a try, okay? Shall I give you a boost up? Or want I should go first?”
Alex sighed, as if to say, What have we got to lose?
“Maybe I’d better go, Teresa. That way, if it looks like a true passage, I can reach down and lift you.”
She nodded in agreement and bent over, lacing her fingers to form a step. Gently, he took her waist and turned her around. “There, that’s better. Are you ready then?” He planted one foot in her hands.
“Ready? You kidding?” she asked as she braced to take his weight. “I’m ready for anything.”
Even after they had traveled quite some distance along the steep, twisty new path, half crawling, half slithering up slanted chimneys and narrow crevices, Teresa kept refusing his offer to share the goggles. He was doing fine as leader, and she used the excuse that they couldn’t risk a transfer in all this chaos. To drop them would be a catastrophe; they might slide or tumble out of sight and never be found again.
But in truth, Teresa felt a queer craving for sightlessness right now. It was strange — difficult to explain even to herself. Why should anyone prefer to stumble along, hands waving, groping in the dark, utterly dependent on another for warning about what low overhang might lay only centimeters from her forehead? What precipice yawned beneath her feet?
And yet, twice she stopped Alex from taking a route that must have seemed reasonable by sight — the wider or flatter or easier path — urging him instead to take a lesser route. They were climbing most of the time, and though Teresa knew that was no guarantee against some dead end just around the next corner, at least upward meant they had only a mountain to contend with, not an entire planet, twelve thousand kilometers across.
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.