Every few steps, he rested his hands on his knees to gasp for breath. He was a warrior and hunter. The ground was as flat as a pond top. Yet he could scarcely stand on his feet! What a terrible place this was. He moved on, stepping over a set of bones. He came to a ghostly white line and lifted his drape of rags, squinting into the fog. The line was too straight to be a game trail. The suggestion of a path raised his spirits. Maybe it led to water.
He followed the line, pausing to rest, not daring to sit down. Sit and he would lie, lie and he would sleep and never wake again. He tried sniffing the currents of air, but it was too fouled with stench and odors to detect animals or water. And you couldn't trust your ears for all the voices. It seemed like a legion of voices pouring down upon him. Not one word made sense. Dead souls, he decided.
At its end, the line hit another line that ran right and left into the fog. Left, he chose, the sacred way. It had to lead somewhere. He came to more lines. He made more turns, some right, some left... in violation of the Way.
At each turn he pissed his musk onto the ground. Just the same, he grew lost. How could this be? A labyrinth without walls? He berated himself. If only he had gone left at every turn as he had been taught, he would have inevitably circled to the source, or at least been able to retrace his path by backtracking right at every nexus. But now he had jumbled his directions. And in his weakened condition. And with the tribe's welfare dependent on him alone. It was precisely times like these that the teachings were for.
Still hopeful of finding water or meat or his own scents in the bizarre vegetation, he went on. His head throbbed. Nausea racked him. He tried licking the frost from the spiky vegetation, but the taste of salts and nitrogen overruled his thirst. The ground vibrated with constant movement.
He did everything in his power to focus on the moment, to pace his advance and curtail distracting thoughts. But the luminous white line repeated itself so relentlessly, and the altitude was so severe, that his attention naturally meandered. In that way, he failed to see the broken bottle until it was halfway through the meat of his bare foot.
He cut his shriek before it began. Not a sound came out. They'd schooled him well. He took the pain in. He accepted its presence like a gracious host. Pain could be his friend or it could be his enemy, depending on his self-control.
Glass! He had prayed for a weapon, and here it was. Lowering his foot, he held the slippery bottle in his palms and examined it.
It was an inferior grade, intended for commerce, not warfare. It didn't have the sharpness of black obsidian, which splintered into razor shards, or the durability of glass crafted by hadal artisans. But it would do.
Scarcely believing his good fortune, the young hadal threw back his rag-headdress and willed himself to see in the light. He opened to it, braced by the pain in his foot, marrying to the agony. Somehow he had to return to his tribe while there was still
time. With his other senses scrambled by the foulness and tremors and voices in this place, he had to make himself see.
Something happened, something profound. In casting off the rags covering his misshapen head, it was as if he broke the fog. All illusion fell away and he was left with this. On the fifty-yard line of Candlestick Park, the hadal found himself in a dark chalice at the pit of a universe of stars.
The sight was a horror, even for one so brave. Sky! Stars! The legendary moon!
He grunted, piglike, and twisted in circles. There were his caves in the near distance, and in them his people. There lay the skeletons of his kin. He started across the field, crippled, limping, eyes pinned to the ground, desperate. The vastness all around him sucked at his imagination and it seemed he must tumble upward into that vast cup spread overhead.
It got worse. Floating above his head he saw himself. He was gigantic. He raised his right hand to ward off the colossal image, and the image raised its right hand to ward him off.
In mortal terror, he howled. And the image howled. Vertigo toppled him.
He writhed upon the cleated grass like a salted leech.
'For the love of Christ,' General Sandwell said, turning from the stadium screen. 'Now
he's dying. We're going to end up with no males.'
It was three in the morning and the air was rich with sea, even indoors. The creature's howl lingered in the room, piped in over an expensive set of stereo speakers.
Thomas and January and Foley, the industrialist, peered through night-vision binoculars at the sight. They looked like three captains as they stood at the broad plate-glass window of a skybox perched on the rim of Candlestick Park. The poor creature went on flopping about in the center of the arena far below them. De l'Orme politely sat to one side of Vera's wheelchair, gathering what he could from their conversation.
For the last ten minutes they'd been following the hadal's infrared image in the cold fog as he stole along the grid lines, left and right at ninety-degree angles, seduced by the linearity or chasing some primitive instinct or maybe gone mad. And then the fog had lifted and suddenly this. His actions made as little sense magnified on the live-action video screen as in the miniature reality below.
'Is this their normal behavior?' January asked the general.
'No. He's bold. The rest have stuck close to the sewer pipes. This buck's pushed the limit. All the way to the fifty.'
'I've never seen one live.'
'Look quick. Once the sun hits, he's history.' The general was dressed tonight in a pair of pressed corduroys and a multi-blue flannel shirt. His Hush Puppies padded silently on the thick Berber. The Bulova was platinum. Retirement suited him, especially with Helios to land in.
'You say they surrendered to you?'
'First time we've seen anything like it. We had a patrol out at twenty-five hundred feet below the Sandias. Routine. Nothing ever comes up that high anymore. Then out of nowhere this bunch shows up. Several hundred of them.'
'You told us there are only a couple dozen here.'
'Correct. Like I said, we've never seen a mass surrender before. The troops reacted.'