“Go ahead,” Joe says.
I move on, relieved to be out of the shaft, but there’s also that newness in my head. Feels right, feels good. Seems to help me find my way around. Problem is, I’m less and less sure I know who I am or who I’m with. I focus and try to hear those behind me. But I’ve lost them. Maybe I’ve turned left when they turned right.
I don’t mind.
Strong tea.
I’m surrounded by complete darkness but I switch off my fading helm light, touch fingers lightly to the grooves in the wall, feel the grooves rise and drop in an interesting rhythm.
I keep walking. It’s possible I’m just losing my grip, possible that the green dust is infiltrating my brain and I’m descending in a spiral to a place where no one will ever find me. There’s a certain comfort in that. I like it down here. Maybe I won’t have to deal with whatever’s happening with Captain Coyle and our sisters. I can leave that to Joe. But then, I won’t see Joe or Tak or Kazak or any of the others again, and I won’t even be able to compare notes with DJ, possibly the only other Skyrine feeling the tea as strongly as me.
I haven’t a fucking idea what’s happening, really.
But fairly contented.
I’M SOMEWHERE BELOW the neck of the homunculus that is the Drifter, winding down. After a couple of hours, I realize this is way down. It’s getting warmer. The air in the darkness is rich and moist. Electric. I’m smelling that living planet again. The walls are damp. Then I’m on my knees, crawling, occasionally touching the grooves to coordinate the noise in my head with where I am, possibly who I am, which is not at all clear.
I hear somebody or something up ahead. Down this far, deep into the chest of the Drifter, more than likely I’m about to meet up with one or more kobolds. That doesn’t concern me, though it should.
I like kobolds.
Then human instinct kicks back in and tells me to get my shit together, think of something to counter the strong tea.
I remember reading an article about cat ladies.
Brain really digresses here: there is such a huge difference between a cat lady and Catwoman. Funny how that works. Not funny at all, asshole. Get it together!
Cat ladies—not the slinky gal wearing a mask with perky little ears, rather the kind that just loves kitties and can’t stop filling houses with them: this article I read back on Earth said that cat ladies were more than likely infected by a parasite found in cat shit, toxi something something, that is supposed to end up in rats, where it takes over their rat brains and makes them unafraid and bold, but also makes the rats love the smell of feline urine; well, cat ladies are probably infected with this parasite and it’s in their brains and so they never clean the litter boxes, just keep piling on the kitties and rising to heaven on the smell of cat pee…
SNKRAZ!
I’m thinking the green powder makes DJ and me love darkness and depth. Makes us seek something, I don’t know what. I sure as fuck hope I don’t acquire the urge to dig. To keep myself as human as possible, I begin to hum pop tunes but somehow end up with Grieg, “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” “Dump dump dump dump dump da da, dump da-da, dump da-da…” Finally, the tune runs out of my head. Legs getting tired. Nose clogging; I sneeze a lot.
There’s a kind of dream I’m having as I walk, not at all unpleasant, but in other circumstances it would be an honest-to-God nightmare. Funny stuff. Weirder and weirder.
Very strong tea.
I’m swimming across a muddy plain beneath upside-down hills of ice, blue-green and white, festooned with hanging meadows of luminous flowers, and the hills are dripping shiny twisters, downward-flowing rivulets of supercooled brine, and I don’t know what I look like but I’m sure I’m more like a crab or a trilobite or a spiky worm than a human because, of course, humans could not survive here.
I avoid the brine—tastes bad, too many minerals—but those glowing flowers are food as well as light, and when I meet up with dozens of others like myself, in a low ocean valley, we’re all very interesting and good-looking (ugly—the ugliest fucking shelly things I’ve ever seen, multiple joints and grooves, waving arms and shit I can’t begin to describe, and they all seem to be ridden by, I’m being ridden by, a skinny, spidery parasite with a set of odd, multi-faceted eyes—I love this parasite, it’s my best friend, it keeps me safe and warns me of bad stuff)—
We’re each of us big, maybe four or five meters long—and as we gather, we look up in admiration and pride at something we’ve all made, something immense and beautifuclass="underline" a great pillar rising thousands of meters from the middle of the valley, all the way to a high, dark, inverted dome of ice.
Below us is the rocky, metal-rich core, the solid heart of our world, heated by internal radiation, heated also by tidal friction from outside, while above, the ice forms a protective barrier between us and the greater universe, allowing us to grow for a billion years—grow and develop in peace.
My God, how thick is that ice?
One hundred kilometers.
And only in the last thousand years have we managed to dig out and look around, like breaking out of an immense, frozen egg—
The cause of our long, gestating ignorance, and soon, of our destruction. Because we can infer what’s coming—
Moonfall.
We know it’s going to happen, we feel the changing tides, we’re no longer where we were, wherever that was, around a great, steady source of gravity and the constant rhythmic, reliable tides…
We’ve been knocked away from all that. Our world has been growing colder for a long time and we’ve been slowly dying off, but meanwhile building, encapsulating, encoding, and preserving.
Getting ready.
The walls of the pillar are made of tiny crystals from which slough great cascades of what can only be called slime, luminous, thickly elegant slime filled with writhing, transparent tubes that join and come apart within the cascades.
The pillar is working.
The pillar is ready.
Really bad things are about to happen, but we’re as prepared as we’re ever going to be.
I’m so distracted by this second life, this tea dream, that I barely notice I’ve bumped up against somebody in the darkness. Fumbling, I switch on my helm light, which is so dim and orange it barely illuminates anything. But it shows me whom I’ve bumped into.
Not a crab, no outer shell at all—very tall, very slender—female. Slowly I recall my humanity and this female’s name: this is Teal—nick for Tealullah.
She regards me with wide, calm eyes; no surprise that I’m here. Like DJ, she’s rubbed her pale face with green powder. Maybe I should do the same. Can’t get any weirder.
Then she looks beyond me.
I turn slowly and see Joe and DJ and Tak and Beringer and Brodsky. They were with me all along. I must have thought they were giant crabs.
Saying I’ve been confused does not begin to cut it.
“Didn’t want to interrupt you, Vinnie,” Joe says as if speaking to a child. “You followed the grooves. You found it.”
“Yeah,” DJ says in admiration.
Teal blinks at them, then focuses on me. “Come wit’ me,” she says. “Afore ’tis gone, you have a see it.”
“How’d you get away from the Voors?” I ask.
She shakes her head.