“No—it hurts too much.”
Myrah retied the transport bag. “Then you should stay in the Home.”
“Please, Myrah.” Geean caught her arm. “Don’t tell Lennar.”
“But if….”
“There hasn’t been any blood. There’ll be no danger for anybody.”
Myrah shook her head in doubt. “But what if it starts? You could bring sharks or razorfins or hagfish in among us.”
“I’ll be all right for a few days, at least.” Geean caught Myrah’s other arm and they floated in the blue morning light, face to face, almost like lovers. “Myrah, I don’t want to stay in there and just wait and wait. You can understand that, can’t you?”
Myrah smiled. “I can understand that.”
“Then you won’t tell?”
“No.”
“Thank you.” Geean closed with her, awkwardly because of the bulk of the metal cages, and they clung together for a moment. Although the difference in their ages was only six years, Myrah felt as if she was comforting a small child, and her sense of the futility and unfairness of life returned in greater force than before. Instinct told her there had been a ghastly mistake somewhere—when a girl of Geean’s age was grateful for the chance of a quick death—but her intellect told her that this was the inescapable human situation, and to hope for anything else was to be as naïve as those who talked about God and a life after that final rendezvous with Ka.
“We’d better go outside,” she said gently.
Geean nodded, wiping her eyes, and they went out through the folds of the entrance. Lennar was waiting with the other three members of the party—Treece, the mature and strongly built woman from the Netmaker family, Harld and another young hunter named Dan who both appeared to see participation in the journey as a quick means of achieving full adult status. Harld had announced he was going for no other reason than to escape the nursery watch, but Myrah had not been deceived, and knowing the life expectancy of a hunter she did not blame him for being in a hurry to claim the sparse privileges available. Treece and Dan were two members of the Clan whom Myrah did not know well, but she guessed each was driven by a private desperation as great as her own, and perhaps even as great as Geean’s.
For the purposes of what could prove to be a long excursion the group had been provided with a strong net in which to carry supplies of food and water, extra weapons and equipment, and a limited range of medicaments. Holding her breath, Myrah swam to it and put the rolled-up habitat inside. When she turned away to capture a free bubble she realised at once that the mysterious current had grown noticeably more powerful. The glimmering shoals of bubbles were migrating downwards like purposeful living creatures, and the six humans were actually having to tread water to maintain their positions with respect to the Topeast entrance.
Accustomed though she was to a zero-energy environment in which objects could usually be relied upon to remain stationary, Myrah began to get an inkling of the forces which were dragging at the Home. All the while Lennar was marshalling his little army and reminding them of necessary precautions, she stared at the haphazard slopes which curved away into the limits of visibility, for the first time seeing the Home as nothing more than a gigantic sac which might have been attached to the root columns by some unthinkable creature caring for its larvae. It dismayed her to realise that something as important as human life depended on a conglomeration of metal houses, nets and ropes retaining its precarious unity.
“That’s it,” Lennar said unceremoniously. “We’ll go now.”
A sentry who had been holding the supply net in place released it and retired back into the Topeast entrance with a wave of his arm. The bundle began to sink downwards at once and the group, taking hold, of trailing ropes, formated on it. They swam slowly, scarcely exceeding the speed of the drift, to avoid adding a vector of their own to the motion induced by the current. Myrah was relieved to find that, as soon as they moved off, it was again easy to capture air bubbles. She swam automatically, mainly using her legs, her left hand gripping a rope and the other holding a tubular spear at the ready.
The six humans kept to a strict defensive pattern, facing outwards, three of them swimming upside down in relation to the others for complete surveillance of their surroundings. They knew that as they moved down into the dysphotic zone their disadvantages would increase, especially in comparison to the Horra, whose large and well-developed eyes made them admirably suited to a predatory existence in perpetual dimness.
There were other deadly enemies at those levels, particularly the eel-like hagfish and several varieties of ray, but the Horra were feared most of all because of what seemed to be a malign intelligence and the ghastly nature of their attack. A male Horra had ten tentacles, one of which also served as a penis—hunters sometimes saw them in copulation, the female’s body gripped in a horrid simulation of a fist by the male’s other tentacles, while the sexual arm probed into her mantle. The dread these creatures inspired in humans sprang largely from the fact that the sexual arm was also used as a weapon against them, being driven into the victim’s body with lethal force.
Nobody in the Clan knew for certain if this was a standard killing technique used indiscriminately by the Horra against all vulnerable species, or if some element in the shape or scent of humans incited them to the grisly form of rape. What was only too well known was that, even when armed and trained, a human needed ice-cold nerves to survive an attack by a Horra—and that even the bravest individual could succumb to a deadly paralysis of mind and body in the actual event.
Like all other adult members of the Clan, Myrah had suffered nightmares about the Horra, and now—as she sank further into their kingdom—she fought, while maintaining the utmost vigilance, to reassure herself that none would be encountered. As the group followed the current down towards the abyssal core of the world, the light intensity gradually decreased and the colours red and green faded away completely. The swimmers saw their bodies as bluish shapes on which all features were drawn in black.
After three hours of the slow but continuous movement Myrah knew they were passing beyond the limit of any previous human exploration, and tension began to gather inside her. This was increased by the fact that the root columns, familiar backdrop to every facet of her life, began to thin out into occasional tapering tendrils. Finally they were left behind altogether, and the swimmers were descending through an unbounded universe of dark blue twilight. Although the root structures offered hiding places for enemies as well as for humans, Myrah felt dangerously exposed in the agoraphobic expanses of dim water. It disturbed her, too, to realise that the giant roots did not go on for ever and were, in fact, merely plants like all the other vegetation which grew near the surface. An alarming new thought occurred to her.
“I’m lost already,” she said to Lennar. “How will we find our way back?”
“I’ll take care of that.” His voice, propagated clearly in the still waters, was unnaturally loud.
“I don’t see how.”
“Perhaps you should try to see, in case something happens to me. Have you noticed that the current has changed direction?”
“No.” Myrah looked all around her, but in the absence of spatial referents found it difficult even to identify up and down. “Which way are we going?”
“We’ve stopped going straight down and are swinging to the east. Keep looking upwards every now and again. Learn to spot the centre of brightness and take your bearings from it.”
Myrah looked in the direction he was indicating and was just about able to differentiate the upper and lower hemispheres of her surroundings. “I’m not much good at this.”