Part 19 (2/2)

”Like Hester!” They laughed.

”Yeah, I suppose that's what got her here. But a lot of us were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong politics or skin or whatever. Wrong look on your face.”

”That was me, I bet,” Solly said, and the others laughed at him. ”Well I got a funny face, I know I do! I can feel it.”

Jakob was silent for a long time. ”What about you?” Oliver asked. More silence. The rumble of a distant detonation, like muted thunder.

”I wish I knew. But I'm like you in that. I don't remember the actual arrest. They must have hit me on the head. Given me a concussion. I must have said something against the mines, I guess. And the wrong people heard me.”

”Bad luck.”

”Yeah. Bad luck.”

More s.h.i.+fts pa.s.sed. Oliver rigged a timepiece with two rocks, a length of detonation cord and a set of pulleys, and confirmed over time what he had come to suspect; the work s.h.i.+fts were getting longer. It was more and more difficult to get all the way through one, harder to stay awake for the meals and the geometry lessons during the off-s.h.i.+fts. The foremen came every off-s.h.i.+ft now, blasting in with their searchlights and shouts and kicks, leaving in a swirl of afterimages and pain. Solly went out one s.h.i.+ft cursing them under his breath, and never came back. Disappeared. The foremen beat them for it and Oliver shouted with rage. ”It's not our fault! There's something out there, I saw it! It's killing us!”

Then next s.h.i.+ft his little tendril of a vein bloomed, he couldn't find any rock around the blue: a big bole. He would have to tell the foremen, start working in a crew. He dismantled his clock.

On the way back he heard the footsteps again, shuffling along slowly behind him. This time he was at the entrance to the last tunnel, the pens close behind him. He turned to stare into the darkness with his third eye, willing himself to see the thing. Whoosh of air, a sniff, a footfall on the rail.... Far across the thin wedge of air a beam of light flashed, making a long narrow cone of white talc. Steel tracks gleamed where the wheels of the car burnished them. Pupils shrinking like a snail's antennae, he stared back at the footsteps, saw nothing. Then, just barely, two points of red: retinas, reflecting the distant lance of light. They blinked. He bolted and ran again, reached the foremen at the checkpoint in seconds. They blinded him as he panted, pa.s.sed him through and into the bullpen.

After the meal on that s.h.i.+ft Oliver lay trembling on the floor of the bullpen and told Jakob about it. ”I'm scared, Jakob. Solly, Hester, Freeman, mute Lije, Naomi-they're all gone. Everyone I know here is gone but us.”

”Free at last,” Jakob said shortly. ”Here, let's do your problems for tonight.”

”I don't care about them.”

”You have to care about them. Nothing matters unless you do. That blue is the mind of the moon being torn away, and the moon knows it. If we learn what the network says in its shapes, then the moon knows that too, and we're suffered to live.”

”Not if that thing finds us!”

”You don't know. Anyway nothing to be done about it. Come on, let's do the lesson. We need it.”

So they worked on equations in the dark. Both were distracted and the work went slowly; they fell asleep in the middle of it, right there on their faces.

s.h.i.+fts pa.s.sed. Oliver pulled a muscle in his back, and excavating the bole he had found was an agony of discomfort. When the bole was cleared it left a s.p.a.ce like the interior of an egg, ivory and black and quite smooth, punctuated only by the bluish spots of other tendrils of mon.a.z.ite extending away through the basalt. They left a catwalk across the central s.p.a.ce, with decks cut into the rock on each side, and ramps leading to each of the veins of blue; and began drilling on their own again, one man and robot team to each vein. At each s.h.i.+ft's end Oliver rushed to get to the egg-chamber at the same time as all the others, so that he could return the rest of the way to the bullpen in a crowd. This worked well until one s.h.i.+ft came to an end with the hoist chock-full of the ore. It took him some time to dump it into the ore car and shut down.

So he had to cross the catwalk alone, and he would be alone all the way back to the pens. Surely it was past time to move the pens closer to the shaft heads! He didn't want to do this....

Halfway across the catwalk he heard a faint noise ahead of him. Scrick; scriiiiiiik. Scrick; scriiiiiiik. He jerked to a stop, held the rail hard. Couldn't reach the ceiling here. Back stabbing its protest, he started to climb over the railing. He could hang from the underside. He jerked to a stop, held the rail hard. Couldn't reach the ceiling here. Back stabbing its protest, he started to climb over the railing. He could hang from the underside.

He was right on the top of the railing when he was seized up by a number of strong cold hands. He opened his mouth to scream and his mouth was filled with wet clay. The blue. His head was held steady and his ears filled with the same stuff, so that the sounds of his own terrified sharp nasal exhalations were suddenly cut off. Promethium; it would kill him. It hurt his back to struggle on. He was being carried horizontally, ankles whipped, arms tied against his body. Then plugs of the clay were shoved up his nose and in the middle of a final paroxysm of resistance his mind fell away into the black.

The lowest whisper in the world said, ”Oliver Pen Twelve.” He heard the voice with his stomach. He was astonished to be alive.

”You will never be given anything again. Do you accept the charge?”

He struggled to nod. I never wanted anything! he tried to say. I only wanted a life like anyone else.

”You will have to fight for every sc.r.a.p of food, every swallow of water, every breath of air. Do you accept the charge?”

I accept the charge. I welcome it.

”In the eternal night you will steal from the foremen, kill the foremen, oppose their work in every way. Do you accept the charge?” I welcome it.

”You will live free in the mind of the moon. Will you take up this charge?”

He sat up. His mouth was clear, filled only with the sharp electric aftertaste of the blue. He saw the shapes around him: there were five of them, five people there. And suddenly he understood. Joy ballooned in him and he said, ”I will. Oh, I will!”

A light appeared. Accustomed as he was either to no light or to intense blasts of it, Oliver at first didn't comprehend. He thought his third eye was rapidly gaining power. As perhaps it was. But there was also a laser drill from one of the A robots, shot at low power through a cylindrical ceramic electronic element, in a way that made the cylinder glow yellow. Blind like a fish, open-mouthed, weak eyes gaping and watering floods, he saw around him Solly, Hester, Freeman, mute Elijah, Naomi. ”Yes,” he said, and tried to embrace them all at once. ”Oh, yes.”

They were in one of the long-abandoned caverns, a flat-bottomed bole with only three tendrils extending away from it. The chamber was filled with objects Oliver was more used to identifying by feel or sound or smell: pens of cows and hens, a stack of air cylinders and suits, three ore cars, two B robots, an A robot, a pile of tracks and miscellaneous gear. He walked through it all slowly, Hester at his side. She was gaunt as ever, her skin as dark as the shadows; it sucked up the weak light from the ceramic tube and gave it back only in little points and lines. ”Why didn't you tell me?”

”It was the same for all of us. This is the way.”

”And Naomi?”

”The same for her too; but when she agreed to it, she found herself alone.”

Then it was Jakob, he thought suddenly. ”Where's Jakob?”

Rasped: ”He's coming, we think.”

Oliver nodded, thought about it. ”Was it you, then, following me those times? Why didn't you speak?”

”That wasn't us,” Hester said when he explained what had happened. She cawed a laugh. ”That was something else, still out there....”

Then Jakob stood before them, making them both jump. They shouted and the others all came running, pressed into a ma.s.s together. Jakob laughed. ”All here now,” he said. ”Turn that light off. We don't need it.”

And they didn't. Laser shut down, ceramic cooled, they could still see: they could see right into each other, red shapes in the black, radiating joy. Everything in the little chamber was quite distinct, quite visible. visible.

”We are the mind of the moon.”

Without s.h.i.+fts to mark the pa.s.sage of time Oliver found he could not judge it at all. They worked hard, and they were constantly on the move: always up, through level after level of the mine. ”Like sh.e.l.ls of the atom, and we're that particle, busted loose and on its way out.” They ate when they were famished, slept when they had to. Most of the time they worked, either bringing down shafts behind them, or dismantling depots and stealing everything Jakob designated theirs. A few times they ambushed gangs of foremen, killing them with laser cutters and stripping them of valuables; but on Jakob's orders they avoided contact with foremen when they could. He wanted only material. After a long time-twenty sleeps at least-they had six ore cars of it, all trailing an A robot up long-abandoned and empty shafts, where they had to lay the track ahead of them and pull it out behind, as fast as they could move. Among other items Jakob had an insatiable hunger for explosives; he couldn't get enough of them.

It got harder to avoid the foremen, who were now heavily armed, and on their guard. Perhaps even searching for them, it was hard to tell. But they searched with their lighthouse beams on full power, to stay out of ambush: it was easy to see them at a distance, draw them off, lose them in dead ends, detonate mines under them. All the while the little band moved up, rising by infinitely long detours toward the front side of the moon. The rock around them cooled. The air circulated more strongly, until it was a constant wind. Through the seismometers they could hear from far below the rumbling of cars, heavy machinery, detonations. ”Oh they're after us all right,” Jakob said. ”They're running scared.”

He was happy with the booty they had acc.u.mulated, which included a great number of cylinders of compressed air and pure oxygen. Also vacuum suits for all of them, and a lot more explosives, including ten Boesmans, which were much too big for any ordinary mining. ”We're getting close,” Jakob said as they ate and drank, then tended the cows and hens. As they lay down to sleep by the cars he would talk to them about their work. Each of them had various jobs: mute Elijah was in charge of their supplies, Solly of the robot, Hester of the seismography. Naomi and Freeman were learning demolition, and were in some undefined sense Jakob's lieutenants. Oliver kept working at his navigation. They had found charts of the tunnel systems in their area, and Oliver was memorizing them, so that he would know at each moment exactly where they were. He found he could do it remarkably well; each time they ventured on he knew where the forks would come, where they would lead. Always upward.

But the pursuit was getting hotter. It seemed there were foremen everywhere, patrolling the shafts in search of them. ”Soon they'll mine some pa.s.sages and try to drive us into them,” Jakob said. ”It's about time we left.”

”Left?” Oliver repeated.

”Left the system. Struck out on our own.”

”Dig our own tunnel,” Naomi said happily.

”Yes.”

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