He had flown for many days into the growing cold. The sun was gone and
the wind was rising as he searched the ground below him for a place to
pass the night. It must be sheltered, not so much from the elements
(though this too was important) as from the marauding bands of ground
wasps that lived in these northern regions. There was still far to go
and much danger ahead. He had no strength for useless battles.
At last as all light faded he came upon a towering pillar of stone in
the midst of a vast wasteland, split at the top as if cloven by a giant
axe. Reaching its heights, he descended slowly into its broad
embrasure. Detecting some deeper shadow in the blackness of the
eastern wall, he flew toward a narrow fissure in the rock. Landing
silently on the lip of it, he tested the air for vibrations. All was
still. He moved inside and huddled close together. He was empty and
cold and weary to the point of exhaustion. He remained in quiet
thought for many hours.
When he had taken the quest, he knew only that he must somehow continue
the labors of Shannon's life---find some way to avenge the death of it.
He had wandered alone for a period of days, remembering, until one
morning, at the rising dust of a fiery dawn, he had felt the North
calling to him. He felt it still, though less strongly, and he deemed
that this was right. What he hoped to find there he could not say. He
only knew that he must find it.
The most difficult aspect of his journey thus far had not been the long
flight on short provisions. To the mai such things meant nothing.
They lived to work and serve the greater need, that was all. No, it
was more the feelings and emotions that the long pilgrimage evoked in
him, seeming almost to rise from the vast loneliness of his world. For
though the man's spirit had died or moved on, his sensations and
experience had not. They lived on within Simin, and sometimes puzzled
or even frightened him. He understood, and knew this was necessary;
but the knowledge did not make it easier.
WHAT A TORTURED RACE THEY MUST BE, he thought. SO TORN BETWEEN DESIRE
AND FEAR. THEY ARE GIVEN NO ROLE, NO CLEAR PLACE. THEY MUST FIND IT,
AS WE MUST FIND MOISTURE IN AN ARID LAND.
It was this fear of frustration and fruitless searching that he felt
most deeply, because it had for so long been a part of his own
existence. Through all his twenty months he had sought after some
intangible, some elusive quality of being, with no more guide than a
restless and smoldering hunger inside him. TO NOT KNOW, really not
know who he was or where he was going.
This, he decided, must be the doom of humanity: to be born a burning
question of itself, a paradox of beauty and destruction, love and loss.
To take personally and introspectively the irresolvable conflict of
life and desire over stillness and the void. Again, he felt it so
deeply. That the struggle could also be beautiful he knew. But still,
such a hard and lonely fate.....
When dawn came he crawled out of the niche and looked about him. The
great crack was shadowed and still. He felt the presence of many
creatures, but they were not yet near him. The rockface offered little
resistance as he climbed, and soon he stood atop a hooked spire that
sprang from the pillar's crumbling eastern shoulder, high above the
plain. Two long lines of wingless wasps were mounting towards him.
The first of their number touched the spire. He took one last taste of
the dawn, then flew out beyond their reach.
He flew staunchly and steadily northward, now that he had some plan.
For the clarity of first-sun had told him what he must do. Stopping to
rest along the top of a shallow ridge, he ate part of a darkening
bush-bulb, nearly as large as himself. Its taste was bitter, but it
gave him strength. Then he set out again.
His mind had determined to search the farthest North. Shannon's memory
told him what he might find there: great frozen wastes of ice and
earth, underground hollows left from times when the water had been
greater. Sometimes as he pondered these, at the edge of thought he
would feel a sound, a sensation: deep throbbings in empty places
beneath the ground, a golden light that drew him onward. But then it
would vanish and leave him, wondering. He must find its source, if it
were real.
Three days more he journeyed toward it, till on the fading edge of the
third the wind forced him to land. It had been gathering strength
since the morning of the spire, and now carried with it a bitter and
biting cold that would not rest. His strength beginning at last to
fail him, he determined to go on on foot, until he found some shelter,
or a reason to stop. He felt the presence of no other creature, yet
still he was uneasy. He had reached the edge of the mighty tundra that
formed the cap of Newman's world.
Now more and more he reached into Shannon's past, trying to find the
thing that had kept him going. Genuine physical weakness, other than
simple hunger, thirst and fatigue, was something he had never known,
and dealing with it frustrated all the lessons he had learned as a mai.
Being alien to his experience, he had assumed that it did not
exist---that there was only weakness of will, and that so long as his
desire held, no barrier of the flesh would ever stop him. This lesson
in perspective he accepted, though grudgingly. It seemed that
everything he had known in three seasons of life must be relearned,
altered to fit this new reality. But his will remained undaunted.
He traveled many hours into the darkness of night, until he found a
small hollow of earth and root of stone at the base of a pummeled and
wind torn boulder. A thin lacing of ground-snow, carried by the wind,
swirled around him and whistled in its cracks, making a melancholy
sound that he felt still deeper for the lassitude of his body. Here he
rested, and tried not to think, until the coming of morning.
The morning was much the same as the night, with only a patchy gray
light to tell him when the day had come. He moved out of the shelter
and walked, across shallow hills, rising in monotonous rhythm through a
bleak and barren landscape. The earth was a dull and frozen brown,
broken now and again by rock, or gnarled scrub, or nothing. The thin
snow blew over all, trailing and whirling about in long wisps like the
twisting hands of witches. He continued on for many hours, until the
wind relented just long enough for him to exhaust himself in flight.
He landed again, and found the earth covered intermittently with thin
patches of ice, sometimes deepening and joining together into shrunken,
unmoving streams, or withered oak leaves of many fingers.
He continued and night came again but he did not stop. He had eaten
what hard and knotted brush he could find, and there was now no lack of
moisture; and though it was his mind he feared, denying it had not yet
become unbearable. He rested a short time, went on the next day. And
the next, walking because he could not fly, into the growing cold, and
thicker snow, and ice that began to dominate the ground. Until he was
alone.
Time passed.
*
He had reached the farthest North. The world was ice, layered with
snow. The wind blew the white softness above into dunes, sometimes
foaming against islands of rock, huddled together in groups or
branching straight like disjointed coral reefs, while its gusting
blasts wrapped veils over all, swirling and howling in relentless
defiance. The day lasted but four short hours, then all was swathed in
darkness, so that the swirling sheets were blind and crashed over him
like spray of drowning surf on the deck of a floundering ship. He was
utterly alone.
Simin's strength was gone; he did not know what kept him going.
Perhaps because he had never known defeat..... But surely it was more.
Through the numb slowness of his near-frozen body a heart beat that
carried no blood. He was dangerously crippled by the cold.
He had passed wide cracks in the ice, chasms and fissures that he knew
must lead down: sometimes he could almost see, or sense, uncovered
earth or the edges of rock far below. And this was what he sought.
But always the feel of them was cold. He sought an entrance, which led
to a passage. He must find it soon or perish.
On the seventh day since entering the tundra, an hour after the
disappearing of light, a vast abyss opened before him, wider and
emptier and deeper than any he had yet come across. Like a crushed
cylinder of otherworldly proportions, it yawned directly in front of
him, dropping deep into the earth. His forelegs hovered trembling
above the void.
This must be the passage, or he would die. He no longer trusted his
judgment; it had fallen in the snow many miles behind him. It could
well be madness, but he felt a presence far below, some wild hope.....
No. He must find shelter. Perhaps it was there. A shelter. If he
could find it. MUST CONTINUE ON. NO, HERE. IT MUST BE HERE, OR I AM
DYING. SO. . .EASY TO SURRENDER. LIKE FALLING ASLEEP. LETTING GO.
NO!
He turned his sinking body around, and forced it to descend: hooking
and digging, scraping into ice, forelegs stretched to the limit, trying
not to slip. To slip was death. Down. Down farther. A little
farther. THE WIND IS LESS HERE. Here. KEEP MOVING. MUST KEEP
MOVING. NO STRENGTH. . .BUT WARMTH COMING BACK. YES, WARMTH. MOVE.
FARTHER.
DON'T SLIP! DON'T SLIP. An overhang. CAREFUL. MUST STRUGGLE PAST
SOMEHOW. SOME WAY. PAST. WARMTH. IT MUST BE WARMER. KEEP MOVING.
IT WILL BE WARMER, OR I AM DYING. I AM DYING. IT IS WARMER.
After the long and grueling climb, stopping many times to marshal
strength, he found himself at the bottom. The cylinder had narrowed,
so that now it was scarcely thirty meters broad, a sharp cleft of
stone, rising sheer into ice that overtook it for perhaps a thousand
meters more. He rested there, his body pulsing, spent. The cold was
not as intense, and the wind was less, and the movement had warmed his
limbs.
But he was weak and near dead from hunger and exhaustion. He needed
sustenance badly, soon. Or it was over. He moved to a tiny pool of
snow that had formed from a trickle of the torrent above, and with his
trembling foreclaw worked small bits of it into his mouth. All done in
pitch darkness, and very little feeling left. Then moved to examine
the corners of the cleft.
The first was blocked, solid stone. He turned about. He did not know
he had reached the opposite wall until he passed through it, was
inside. A cave had opened blindly and taken him in, narrow and not
high, but a cave nonetheless. A passage. After a time he knew
instinctively that he was underground, but was far too weary for the
knowledge to have much effect. He continued forward. He must find
some kind of sustenance. Sustenance. He thought of his foreclaw, but
remembering the man..... No. Not yet.
He wandered on, stumbling, raising himself up to go on. Plodded
forward, sinking ever deeper, and onward, until the air around him
suddenly grew larger. A loosened rock rolled off another, and the echo
did not return for some time. He moved to his right, sensing
something, and stroked the tip of his claw against the slanting surface
which met it. The surface was sometimes soft and not smooth; it was
not part of the stone. He tried to break off a small piece. The layer
was thin, and it crumbled. He tried again, brought the wretched
substance---some kind of dried blood, or excrement---to his mouth. Its
taste was bile and bitter and acid. Then swallowed. Throat burning,
he repeated the motion perhaps a dozen times, then collapsed, half
holding, to the floor. And lay unmoving.
*
Simin woke from his delirium many hours later, somewhat stronger, but
still dizzy and confused. The little nourishment he had taken lifted
his mind back to awareness, strong, if subtly altered by the thick aura
of the place, and by the strange and pressing reality of his quest. He
rose slowly, careful not to spend the wavering hope he had found, and
looked around him.
Looked around him. There was a dim light in that place, that region of
vastness. And whatever the source, though all before had been
darkness, it was undeniable. The light was dim and surreal, softly
yellow and fallow gold, but nonetheless afforded him a glimpse of this
underground world, if it did not end, which he must now traverse. For
here, more than ever, he sensed a presence that was greater than his
own life, if distantly, not calling him but aware of his need.
Strangeness.
He was not alone in that ribbed, spine-ceilinged enclosure. Around a
far turning he caught movement, and was sure as an ebb and flow motion
of body and legs rounded the inward corner that was the edge of his
sight. He was still too weak to fight, or to go on, as the many legged
creature approached him blindly, unaware of his presence. It drew
closer, then seemed to slow in its movements, coming gradually to a
halt. Descendant of the centipede, it studied him from a distance of
forty meters, its poisoned forward spikes twitching with unease.
Though the centipede was longer, its bulk and his were nearly equal.
He had no strength for a fight, nor did he seek one. But perhaps his
quivering opponent could be daunted, backed down. Yet as he continued
to watch he felt no aggression, only puzzlement, coming from the other:
He was not part of its food chain, nor was its territory threatened.
It was only frightened, why so strongly he could not guess. He also
knew, with sudden sureness, that it was one of many. Somehow he knew.
He took a step forward, and it retreated swiftly along the way it had
come, moving onto the wall, perhaps instinctively, where it felt a
greater measure of safety. He followed it as best he could in the half
light, the flexing striped-brown body, hoping to find the source of its
food.
He passed the narrowing corner at the back of the high, curving chamber
and descended a long, often twisting, downward tunnel that branched off
from it. The other's speed was considerable, moving through the
regions of its birth, and try as he might he could not keep up. He
soon found himself alone in a roughly spherical vault, not large, with
five knife-slash passages opening off it.
The light here was thicker, and in a swift moment of recognition he
realized the reason for it. The soft glow was neither greater nor
weaker anywhere around him: it did not have a true source, nor did it
cast a single shadow. He felt a slight pulsing of moisture across his
face, like a fine drizzle-rain touched by the wind. The light was in
the mist itself. Also, there was the sensation of his flesh lightly
touching, warming against the inner edges of his armor. His senses
were heightened, and he was acutely aware of his hunger.
His antennae began to twitch, almost without his knowledge, turning him
to the left. He followed to a shallow rift at the lowest point of the
enclosure, where he found a tiny pool of dark water, sponged by a thick
and brackish black algae. He immersed his jaws and tasted. Again. He
filled his mouth, and painfully swallowed wave after wave of the wet
and mud sustenance.
Then he backed away and lifted himself up, feeling alive once more. He
moved to hide himself behind a jagged plate of rock, and waited for his
strength to return.