When she heard the first explosion, Cadence sent the van lurching forward. We racketed past another stand of starved-looking trees and a battered plastic urinal. To the right of the road loomed a metal sign, so old and pitted with rust, it looked like an autumn leaf chewed by locusts.
WELCOME TO CASSANDRA
GATEWAY TO THE BLUE RIDGE
A few yards past it was a smaller sign.
WHEN IN CASSANDRA VISIT WORLD-FAMOUS PARADISE CAVERNS!
On the flaking metal someone had scrawled Ad astra aspera in blue paint.
“We mean to cleanse this world and find another,” said Cadence softly. She lifted her head to gaze at the shining gate that loomed before us, then raised her hand as an energumen sentry waved us on. Beside her, the cacodemon turned to regard Jane and me with coldly glittering eyes.
He said, “Your kind have always thought of us as monsters, but it is to us that this great task has fallen.” He spoke in a whisper, as though it hurt him to talk. “If we are truly monsters, perhaps then we are better suited to another world than to this one.”
Cadence nodded, adding fervently, “ ‘I have said to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother, and my sister.’ ” She yanked on a lever in the front of the cab, retracting the solex shields, and the engines died. “ ‘How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?’ ”
I said nothing. Jane drew me close as the caravan shuddered to a halt. With a low moan of greeting Suniata leapt from the van to embrace another of his kind waiting by the doors. In her seat Cadence turned and looked at Jane and me, her blue eyes flashing as she drawled, “Welcome to Paradise.”
Minutes later we stood before the entrance to the caverns, an arched steel gate three times the height of a man and with heavy iron bars so thick, I couldn’t wrap my hands around them. Rusted signs dangled from the bars; others were recessed into the stone itself, and had a slick green patina of moss and algae hiding the letters.
TOURS Begin Hourly and Last 90 Minutes
PARENTS, Please! Carry All Children Under Three Years of Age Caverns Close at Sunset Daily
High above the gate’s arch a sheet of metal had been embedded into the granite, its engraved letters worn but still elegant as they shone in the midday sun.
VELCOME!
TO
PARADISE CAVERNS
As Jane and I stared, several humans in rebel uniforms walked past. They stared at us curiously and, I thought, with sympathy. When they reached the gate, they saluted the energumen sentry and passed inside—all save the last, who hesitated. Looking back at us, he raised his hand and, in a furtive show of solidarity, grimaced. Then he too disappeared into that gaping darkness.
“Come with me, friend,” a soft voice sounded. I started as Suniata’s moist hand closed over mine. “We must go inside now. There is very little time left for our work here. You and Jane will have to meet with Dr. Burdock today.”
“Dr. Burdock?” Jane repeated incredulously. Behind us Cadence stood outside her caravan, laughing with a burly man who gestured extravagantly at the cavern entrance. Compared to the cacodemon’s soft tone, their voices sounded as shrill and meaningless as the cry of locusts. “Luther Burdock’s been dead for four hundred years.” The cacodemon said nothing, only folded his hands inside his sleeves and entered the caverns.
As we followed him, I knew why those other people had slowed their pace. Even an enormous bank of electrified lanterns couldn’t dispel the infernal darkness. Two van-sized solar generators stood to either side of the doorway, trembling from the effort of converting the light gathered outside, but it still wasn’t enough. Nothing would have been enough.
“Christ, Wendy, how can they live in here?” Jane’s fingers twined around mine. She craned her neck, her brown eyes so wide they gave her a slightly maddened expression. “This is like, like—well, shit. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It is a very great honor,” Suniata said in a hushed admonitory tone. “Tomorrow night we will have our first glimpse of Icarus and the exodus will begin. You are meeting the Doctor at a very precious time.”
“Oh, of course,” Jane said drily. “Please make sure the Doctor knows just how thrilled we are.” At Suniata’s disapproving glare she shrugged and added, “I mean it: a very great honor.”
The cacodemon turned away; he would waste no more talk with us. I pulled Jane to me and kissed her quickly on the cheek. Her hand tightened around mine as we followed our guide into the somber heart of Cassandra.
A faint damp breeze blew through the passage. From the ceiling naked bulbs hung between twisted spires of calcified stone. In places, the stalactites had started to grow around the lights, so that they glowed eerily from between flows of softly glowing white and yellow and dull orange, like molten wax. Softened knobs of stone welled up from the floor, some of them waist-high, others so small they looked like skulls, all that remained of bodies that had melted into the earth. The passage was wide enough to drive a van through, and one did pass us, the sound of its motor quieted to a wasp’s hum, the voices of its human and aardmen passengers muted within that echoing space.
Suniata led us through galleries filled with weapons stores; past lightless tunnels and black and silent lakes that reflected the crenulated ceiling and turned it into an endless plain, where mountains and tors needled upward to touch the very tips of the things they reflected. There were empty chambers covered with fine yellow shrouds of pollen blown in from unseen chimneys, so smooth and deep and soft that one could drown in it, and tiny cells that held nothing but corrugated pillars of amber-colored stone, bound about with coils of copper like sheaves to be brought to harvest. There were workrooms, bedrooms, dormitories, libraries, all couched within the rock and filled with silent uniformed figures, who were crouching or stooped or upright by turns, busily engaged in fitting weaponry or reading flickering monitors. Loveliest of all was an atrium where crystalline stars covered walls and ceiling, everything but the floor, glimmering coldly in the light of a single small lantern. Their fragile tines broke away at the faintest touch of my finger. The sound of them shattering upon the stones was the echo of my own dismay at having destroyed something so lovely.
“Nowhere else, our father says, nowhere else will you see these,” Suniata said, pausing to cup one of his white spade-fingered hands about a crystal but being careful not to touch it. “Anthodites, they called them. Because they are like flowers.”
We went on. I stumbled along beside Jane, my mouth filled with the lingering taste of the creosote trees we had seen hours earlier, my eyes always turning away from the steady, feeble gleam of the electric lights to seek something else in the midnight corridors, something like the sun.
I had always thought of darkness as something I knew: a half-wild creature that could be beaten back into corners and chained with light. Even the starless sky was not something to fear, because the sun was always there, a scythe upraised to fall upon the gloom.
But in Paradise Caverns I learned that darkness is not like that at all. Darkness cannot be put away, or cut back, or tamed. It is what Is: the last thing, the only thing. The rest of us, stars and suns and creatures squatting around the fire, are mere flaws in its fabric, rips and tears too small to mend, or bubbles floating on the surface of an infinite and tenebrious sea. Even on our Earth there are secret vales where there is no sun; but there is no place that does not know the night.