Part of me hadn't wanted any of this. Part of me wanted to run… not from something, as I had been doing, but to something. Home. Back to safety, to the familiar. I wanted out of it all, to be absolved of all responsibility. I was no hero. I realized that somewhere within lay a part of me as deeply afraid as Susan had sometimes shown herself to be.
But that was unfair. Susan had borne up under unbelievable pressure. She hadn't come apart.
Why not say I loved Susan?
I played the footage again. I loved her sensuality, her willingness to please me. Easy things to love, perhaps, but between men and women, the tie that binds is of two interwoven strands, and these are part of what bound me to Susan: the palmfuls of warm flesh, the smooth planes of her skin in the darkness, the deep well of her mouth…
Something was standing just outside the pool of light cast by my helmet lantern.
I felt it as a presence first; then a shape began to grow in my peripheral vision, black-on-black against the shadows. Somewhere within my bloodstream, the cold-water tap turned on. I stopped moving my head and froze. My heart bounced within my chest cavity like a rubber ball.
I was unarmed. We hadn't brought weapons into the Ahgirr city. A very few options presented themselves. I could continue lying there, hoping that whatever it was would get tired of breathing significantly in the darkness and leave. Or I could leap up and run back into the tunnel in a mad gamble that I was faster than it. But what would I do at the end of the tunnel? Tight fit there. No. I needed a weapon. Ragna had given us some caving tools, one a pike tipped with a strange grappling hook, which I knew lay beside my left foot. If I could create a diversion…
I threw my helmet at the thing in the shadows, rolled, snatched the pike, and leaped to my feet brandishing it. The helmet had missed, bouncing off the wall and landing upside-down behind a low projection on the floor. I unhooked the biolume torch from my utility belt and snapped it on, playing its beam against a large shape with purple and pink splotches, standing not three meters away from where I'd been lying.
My actions startled the non-Boojum to no end. It staggered back, flailing its spindly forelegs as if to fend off a blow.
"Oh, my!" it yelped in a strangely familiar voice. "Dearie me!"
Then it turned and galumphed off down the passage, disappearing into the blackness.
Stunned, jaw gone slack, I stood there and watched.
After perhaps thirty seconds, not really knowing why, I followed it. Several meters beyond where the thing had stood, the tunnel curved to the right and began to descend, widening out until it flared into a large chamber with several tunnels branching off its farther end. I took the widest of these, madly dashing on into the gloom. I hadn't stopped to pick up my helmet, and the biolume torch was dim. The way grew serpentine, then straightened out. Numerous cross passages intersected the main tunnel, and I ran from mouth to mouth sending the feeble torchbeam down each. At the ninth one, I thought I saw something moving, and entered.
Ten minutes later I realized three things: one, I had been very foolish to run off; two, I was lost; three, the biolume torch was failing. Ten minutes after all of the above had dawned on me, the torch no longer even glowed and the subterranean night had closed in. The absolute, categorical darkness of a cave is difficult to appreciate until experienced. Only the totally blind know what it's like. There is no light at all. None. I groped and felt my way in the direction from which I thought I had come. I did that for hours, it seemed, all the while calling Susan's name. No answer. I moved slowly, trying to catch the slightest glimmer of what might be Susan's torch as she looked for me. But I had no assurance that she wasn't lost herself. I had lost track of time daydreaming back there, and it seemed that I had stopped hearing Susan's progress up the shaft for a good while before the non-Boojum made its appearance. She had the other biolume torch, but if it failed…
I got too tired to go on and sat down with my back against a smooth wall. There was no room in my mind for thinking about the non-Boojum, how it had followed me from Talltree, and why. Maybe they had non-Boojums here, too. My mind was blank with fatigue, quickly filling with a throbbing panic. I got up and moved on. If I sat and thought, it would be all over.
I was convinced that days were passing in the dark. I had banged my head so many times that I was becoming punch drunk. My shins were raw from barking them against low outcroppings, my fingers moist and sticky with blood. I had stumbled through rubble, fallen into holes, slid down mounds of gravel, splashed through pools of stagnant water, and had had enough. I found a flat, irregularly shaped table of rock, climbed up, and lay across it.
I must have slept for hours. I awoke with a start, disoriented, frantically blinking my eyes to force an image to come to them. None came. My throat was dust, my body a network of communicating pains.
Nonetheless, I sat up abruptly. I thought I had heard something. The scrape of a shoe, maybe―or the click of talons against stone. The thing that wasn't a Boojum? A thing that was?
A tiny beam of light reached my retinas, piercing them like a knitting needle. I shielded my eyes with one hand.
"Susan!"
"Jake! Oh, my God, Jake, darling!"
I got up and stumbled forward. Light grew around me until I had to shut my eyes. Susan slid into my arms and crushed me with hers.
We both babbled for a minute. Susan said she loved me, several times, and I informed her that it was mutual. A great deal of hugging and kissing went on between utterances. I had my eyes closed the whole time, thinking that more light could not have been attendant at the Creation. Had I been in the dark that long?
"… I looked and looked and looked, and then I realized I was lost myself," Susan was saying. "I sat dawn and cried, feeling horrible, just horrible! I'd lost you, and the food and all the gear, and I was thinking to myself, God, this is just typical behavior on my part, panicking when I should be thinking, letting my fears control the situation, and I―"
"It's okay, Suzie, it's okay."
"―said to myself, goddammit, I've got to get a handle on things, this simply will not do, you've got to―' She drew back a little, "Jake, what are you doing? Can't you see who's here?"
l had been taking off her shirt. I stopped, looked up, opening my eyes.
"Felicitations, my friend Jake," Ragna said, tilting his powerful torch slightly upwards so as to illuminate his blue face. His long white hair streamed down from the edge of his helmet. Behind him, other lights were moving toward us in the darkness.
"Is it that you are wishing to undertake sexual congress at this moment?" Ragna asked. "Being that this is perhaps the case, my companions and I are happily withdrawing. However on the contrary, I am saying that we would be immensely of interestingness for us to be observing you, if by and large to have us doing this would not be of inconvenience."
He smiled with thin pink lips, pink eyes glowing in the torch light. "Perhaps yes?" he said after a moment. Then he frowned, greatly disappointed. "No?"
Chapter 12