Part 4 (1/2)
Jodi nodded. ”Didn't have any doubt myself, love.”
Jodi and I each clipped one of the little boxes that contained the signal processors, memory, and whatnot that did the conversion to our belts, ran compact headphone wires up inside our clothing, and put on the slim-profile headphones that fit under our caving helmets. No one goes caving with a bare head, unless they want to end up with lumps or worse. We tested all the connections, made sure all the power packs and other gadgets-repeaters, lights, and so on-were well distributed, and then turned towards the door. ”Let's do it. Time's getting short. They've started testing the fence again.”
I led, Jodi followed, with Father, Jonah, Nellie, Adam, and Grandpa bringing up the rear. In the darkness the huge grating seemed even more grim and forbidding, and opening it was like watching a mouth opening up in the earth. We turned on our lights, checked all our equipment again, and descended the iron ladder set into the living rock; as agreed, Grandpa stayed topside to keep the exit secure, just in case, and to be the topside relay.
It's a long, solemn climb at the best of times; the iron ladder drops straight down into pitch blackness that first m.u.f.fles the sounds of the outside and then starts amplifying the echoes of your descent into a cadence of solemnly echoing drumbeats. Ninety feet down, my feet touched stone. I looked around, saw nothing in the immediate vicinity, and stepped away to let everyone else get down. The sounds of people and equipment echoed through the tomblike silence of Winston's Cave, silence normally only broken by water dripping from the ceiling.
”Okay. Everyone ready?”
”Ayup,” Father answered. ”Nellie?”
”Yes, Father. I'm first relay. I'll be right here at the base of the ladder.” She took out her iron truncheon, swung it around, and leaned back against the iron ladder. We heard her checking reception with Grandpa topside as we moved down the Snake's Belly, a twisting pa.s.sageway with scalloping where swift-moving water had carved it out. The lights glinted brightly off water-slick rock, giving back highlights of yellow, brown, and white from the flowstone that coated parts of the wall. We moved cautiously, waiting to make sure we could see as far ahead as possible.
A flash of light ahead. I stopped, then turned one of our Mag-Lites on and aimed it down the corridor.
Across the tunnel, just where the Snake's Belly exited into the Crossroads, five Nomes stood, weapons aimed at us, rockworms waiting at their feet. By now, only Adam and Father were with us, Jonah having stayed back about halfway down the Belly because the signal was starting to fade. We'd probably have to leave Adam at the beginning of the Crossroads. I took a deep breath. ”Guess this is it.”
I put on the headphones; Jodi did the same. We walked forward, Father and Adam following some distance back. As we approached, I heard ”Turano! Turano zom ku!” in a sort of whispered voice, and the figures tightened their grip on their weapons.
When we were within twenty feet, I stopped. My heart was pounding awfully fast, and for a minute I couldn't convince my hands to let go of my trusty iron bar. At this range, in this light, the Nomes and their rockworms were too eerie to contemplate for long. I forced my grip to relax and handed the weapon to Jodi, then took another slow couple of steps forward. They muttered something and gathered themselves. Something about the tone of voice and the way they almost bunched together actually heartened me. Why, they were afraid of us too!
”We don't want to fight you,” I said, the microphone taking my normal voice and catapulting its sound to seventy-five thousand cycles higher.
The reaction was everything I could have hoped for. They literally jumped backward in startlement, and I couldn't even sort out separate word-sounds from the gabble of Nome-talk that erupted from the headphones. Finally they settled down and one of them stepped slightly forward, stone sword still in his hand but lowered to a much less threatening position. ”Rennka ku? Mondu okh wendasa hottai rennka?”
I shrugged. ”Hey, I don't understand you, but I get the idea you're surprised I talk. We just found out that you did ourselves.” I reached very carefully inside one of my pockets and took out a small bag. I put the bag down on the ground and backed up a few paces to where Jodi waited.
Whatever senses they had, they'd been able to tell I did something there, at any rate. The spokesman came hesitantly forward and stopped, staring at the bag with his weird crystal eyes. Then his face snapped up, looking at me with a very human startlement visible in his pose despite the stony immobility of his features. ”H'adamant! H'adamant huran zom!”
Jodi and I looked at each other, startled. ”Adamant?”
It clapped fists together in what was somehow an exultant or agreeing motion. ”H'adamant!
H'adamant!” It scooped up the bag and emptied the three diamonds into its palm-last of Winston Slade's original cache, saved for sentimental reasons in our safe-and held the palm out to us. ”
H'adamant, vu!”
”I'll be d.a.m.ned,” I said. ”Wonder if they got that word from us, or we got it from them?”
Jodi shrugged. ”Don't have any idea. But he looks like he's coming down from his ecstasy.”
Indeed, the spokesman was now looking in his palm, and loosed a steady stream of words which included ”H'adamant” as a frequent occurrence.
”Sorry, sir, but we don't have any more of them.” I tried gestures to get the point across. ”Maybe we can reach some kind of understanding?”
He finally seemed to realize no more diamonds were forthcoming. He then pointed down the corridor-clearly, whatever senses they had must have some a.n.a.logy to sight, at least when used for that purpose-and made emphatic motions that I couldn't interpret as anything except ”Come with us.”
”Well, it's what we wanted,” I said, not feeling all that comfortable with the idea.
”So long as what they want isn't to cut us open to see if we have the rocks inside us.”
”You just had to bring that idea up, didn't you?”
”Clint. Best get along now.”
”Yes, Father.” We started following the Nomes. Adam stayed behind at the beginning of the Crossroads. When we reached the entrance to the Corkscrew, Father knew he would have to stay behind also. He gave me an unexpected hug. ”Be careful.”
”We will, Father.”
The Nomes talked with themselves in low undertones. They'd clearly realized we didn't understand them, and at this point had stopped trying to talk to us. We followed farther into the bowels of the earth.
After a while, I keyed in the radio. ”Father?”
The Nomes and the rockworms spun around at that, staring at me again.
”Hear you, son. Getting faint. Figure a few dozen more yards.”
The Nomes relaxed slowly, then continued on, but they were now talking with great intensity and animation. ”Something about the radio really set them off.”
Jodi nodded. ”Well, makes sense, doesn't it? You said they must sense things in the electromagnetic, and that's why the iron throws them off. That radio might be like a flashbulb or something to them.”
I dropped one of the relays. The rearmost Nome stopped, turned, and came back towards us. It picked up the relay. I stepped towards it, it backed up, studied the relay for a moment, then put it back down and glanced at me. I let it move away and then continued walking.
Soon we were entering areas of the cave that even Winston had never seen, past the Hall of Mysteries and obviously deep into what was the Nomes' territory. Now I really started to get worried. We were seeing other Nomes around us, who would stop and point and start to gabble amongst each other, just as prisoners being marched through a city would start to see the citizens point and whisper.
There were only two of our eight relays left. We were now in an immense cavern that I couldn't even see across. The Mag-Lite hinted at its great expanse, reaching the roof overhead, bearded with stalact.i.tes that were twenty feet long or more and still ended with well over a hundred feet of air between them and the ground. When we lowered the light it touched on more wonders: gargantuan columns, dozens of tunnel openings, flowstone curtains that glittered translucently, a s.h.a.ggy forest of helict.i.tes beneath a high-up opening that obviously vented air into this area.
Since the cavern was effectively open air, we wouldn't need a relay until we were all the way across it.
As we reached the far side, surrounded by the eerie rusty-gate hissing and screeching that was the audible-edge component of the Nomes' speech, something ma.s.sive came slowly into view. We slowed down and stared for a moment in awe.
If we'd had any remaining doubt that this was a civilized species, we would have lost it then. For the first time we saw an undeniably artificial construct in the depths of Winston's Cave. Towering before us, over sixty feet high, were a pair of what could be nothing but t.i.tanic doors. In a way they still seemed to belong here, their surface as smooth yet naturally flowing as the rest of the caverns. They were composed of what looked like marble, but with strange, almost interwoven components of a semitransparent black stone which looked like obsidian. They were covered with s.h.i.+mmering alien symbols that appeared to have been grown there as a natural part of the stone. We could not grasp what the symbols meant, though they were clearly the work of intelligence.
None of our guides made any attempt to open the door. There was a sound of rus.h.i.+ng water, and the great slabs simply pivoted up and rose smoothly out of sight as we approached; almost noiselessly, without any visible sign of the truly impressive force that must be needed to move. I saw the thickness as I pa.s.sed . . . four-foot-thick slabs of stone. I did a quick mental calculation. Mother Mary, together those doors must ma.s.s over a thousand tons! I dropped the next-to-last relay just outside the doors.
Jodi evidently decided that it was time for a clearer look, because she pulled out the big electric lantern and turned it on.
Beyond the huge doors was . . . the Throne Room.
Even if I hadn't been half expecting it since I was a kid, there was no way I could have called it anything else. The penetrating beam of the portable lantern barely made its way across the room, maybe over a thousand feet in diameter. Circle upon circle of Nomes, each with its weapon and companion rockworm, stood in what looked like a military attention pose, with a narrow gap through which we marched. The great domed cavern sparkled everywhere with the same alien designs. I wondered, vaguely, how they saw such designs, and what they ”looked” like to their eyes; surely what we saw was at best only a part of their symbology. In the center of the cavern, a series of concentric terraces were laid, with rough-surfaced ramps curving in a spiral fas.h.i.+on to each level. And at the top of this raised formation, on a perfectly circular polished dais of stone over fifty feet wide, was a throne, hewn from the living rock it sat upon, with a single Nome seated in it.
This was the meeting I'd half dreamed about, half feared for almost twenty years. I couldn't think ofthis Nome as ”it.” He looked down at us from an elevation of fifteen feet, counting the height of the throne itself. His crystalline crest seemed finer and higher, the fluting on his chin longer, and he looked to me to be somewhat larger than the others around the room, or those escorting us. In the shadowy light of the stupendous throne room, with my overexcited imagination working at double time, I could almost see the halo of white hair and long beard. This was Ruggedo, sometimes called Roquat, the Red-the Nome King.
I shook my head to clear it. I might not be able to keep from giving him the name in my mind, but there wasn't any other connection. This was a first contact between humans and whatever this race really was, and I wouldn't help matters any by letting kids' stories influence my behavior. And whatever they were, they had a lot of things in their civilization that we hadn't the faintest clue about. Behind the throne we could see bizarre and distorted shapes; things that looked like they might have been living things of the same general sort as the Nomes and rockworms, but jammed together, intertwined and almost sculpted in ways that hurt my eyes to look at.
”Father,” I said into the radio. ”We're about to meet the Nome King.”
”Then mind your manners, son.”