He got lost in the tunnels. It had been twilight when he’d come in, the last of daylight filtering through the blue-ice, but it was deep night outside now and the only illumination was from the yellow electrical discharges surging through the living tissue all around him—Daeman was sure the blue-ice was organic, somehow part of Setebos.
He had left yellow fabric markers at the intersections, nailed into the ice, but somehow he missed one of those and found himself crawling to new junctions, tunnels he’d never seen before. Rather than backtrack—the tunnel was too narrow to turn around in and he dreaded trying to crawl backward in it—he chose the tunnel that seemed to head upward and crawled on.
Twice the tunnels ended or pitched steeply downward and he did have to backtrack to the junction. Finally a tunnel both rose and widened, and it was with infinite relief that he got to his feet and began moving up the gently sloping ice ramp on his feet, crossbow in his hands.
He stopped suddenly, trying to control his panting.
There was a junction less than ten feet ahead, another one thirty feet behind, and from one or the other or both came a scratching, scrabbling sound.
Calibani, he thought, feeling the terror like the cold of outer space seeping through the thermskin, but then a colder thought came. One of the hands.
It was a hand. Longer than Daeman, thicker through the middle, pulling itself along on fingernails emerging from the gray flesh like ten inches of sharpened steel, with black-barbed fiber hairs at the ends of the fingers grabbing ice, the pulsating hand pulled itself into the junction less than ten feet in front of Daeman and paused there, the palm rising—the orifice in the center of that palm visibly fluttering open and shut.
It’s searching for me, thought Daeman, not daring to breathe. It senses heat.
He did not stir, not even to raise the crossbow. Everything depended upon the slashed and worn old thermskin suit. If he was radiating heat from it, the hand would be on him in a millisecond. Daeman lowered his face to the ice floor, not out of fear but to mask any heat emissions that might be leaking from his osmosis mask.
There was a wild scrabbling and when Daeman jerked his head up, he saw that the hand had taken a tunnel to his right. The fleshy, moving arm-stalk filled the tunnel ahead, almost blocking the junction.
I’ll be goddamned if I’m going backwards, thought Daeman. He crawled forward to the junction, moving as quietly as he could.
The arm-stalk was sliding through the junction; a hundred yards of it had already flowed past but it seemed endless. He could no longer hear the scrabbling of the hand itself.
It’s probably circled around through the tunnels and is behind me.
“ ‘Listen! White blaze—a tree’s head snaps—and there, there, there, there, there, His thunder follows! Fool to give at Him! Lo! ‘Lieth flat and loveth Setebos!”
Caliban’s chant was muffled by distance and ice, but it flowed up the tunnel after him.
Inches from the sliding arm-stalk, Daeman weighed the possibilities.
The tunnel it slid through was about six feet across and six feet high. The arm-stalk filled the width of the junction and tunnel—at least six feet, compressed by the blue-ice, but it was broader than it was tall. There was at least three feet of air between the top of the endless, sliding mass and the tunnel ceiling. On the other side, the tunnel Daeman had been following broadened and headed gradually toward the surface. Through the thermskin, he thought his skin could feel a movement of air from the outside. He might be only a few hundred feet from the surface here.
How to get past the arm-stalk?
He thought of the ice hammers—useless, he couldn’t hang from the ceiling and cross that six feet. He thought of going back, back into the labyrinth that he’d been crawling through for what seemed like hours, and he put that thought from his mind.
Maybe the arm-stalk will slide past. That thought showed him how tired and stupid he was. This thing ended in the brain-mass that was Setebos, the better part of a mile away in the center of the crater.
It’s going to fill all these tunnels up with its arms and its scrabbling hands. It’s searching for me!
Part of Daeman’s mind noted that pure panic tasted like blood. Then he realized that he’d bitten through the lining of his cheek. His mouth filled with blood, but he couldn’t take time to slide the osmosis mask off to spit, so he swallowed instead.
To hell with it.
Daeman made sure the safety was on and then he tossed the heavy crossbow across the sliding mass of arm-stalk. It missed the oily gray flesh by inches and skittered on the ice of the tunnel opposite. The pack and egg were more difficult.
It’ll break. It will smash open and the milky glow inside—it’s brighter now, I’m sure it’s brighter—will spill out and it’ll be one of these hands, small and pink rather than gray, and its orifice will open and the little hand will scream and scream, and the huge gray hand will come scuttling back, or perhaps straight down the tunnel ahead, trapping me…
“God damn you,” Daeman said aloud, not worrying about the noise. He hated himself for the coward he was, for the coward he’d always been. Marina’s pudgy little baby, capable of seducing the girls and catching butterflies and nothing else.
Daeman slipped the pack off, wrapped the top around the egg as best he could, and heaved it sideways over the sliding mass of oily arm.
It landed on the pack side rather than the exposed eggshell and slid. The egg looked intact as best Daeman could tell.
My turn.
Feeling light and free without the rucksack and heavy crossbow, he backed up thirty feet down the almost-horizontal tunnel and then broke into a sprint before he could give himself time to think about it.
He almost slipped, but then his boots found purchase and he was moving fast when he reached the arm. The top of his thermskin hood brushed the ceiling as he dove as high as he could, his arms straight ahead of him, his feet coming up—but not quite enough, he felt the toes of his boots grazing the thick slithering arm—Don’t come down on the pack and egg!—and then he was landing on his hands, rolling forward, crashing down—the blue-ice knocking the wind out of him, rolling over the crossbow but not firing it by accident because the safety was on.
Behind him the endless arm stopped moving.
Not waiting to get his breath back, Daeman grabbed the rucksack and crossbow and began running up the gently rising ice slope toward fresh air and the darkness of the exit.
He emerged into the fresh, cold night air a block or two south of the Île de la Cité crevasse he’d followed into the dome. There was no sight of any of the hands or calibani in the starlight and electric glow from the blue-ice nerve flashes.
Daeman pulled off the osmosis mask and gasped in huge draughts of fresh air.
He wasn’t out yet. With the pack on his back and the crossbow in his hands again, he followed this crevasse until it ended somewhere near where the Île St-Louis should be. There was an ice wall to his right, tunnel entrances to his left.
I’m not going in a tunnel again. Laboriously, his arms shaking with fatigue even before he did anything, Daeman took the ice hammers out of his belt, slammed one into the flickering blue-ice wall, and began to climb.
Two hours later, he knew he was lost. He’d been navigating by the stars and rings and by glimpses of buildings rising from the ice or the shapes of masonry half-glimpsed in the shadows of crevasses. He thought he’d been paralleling the crevasse that ran along Avenue Daumesnil, but he knew now that he must be mistaken—nothing lay before him but a wide, black crevasse, dropping into absolute darkness.