"Daddy Thunder?" called a voice.
"Here," said Ashes in his deep, dead voice. "D"jou get the ring?"
"Couldn"t get it off her d.a.m.n finger," said Bane. "Didn"t have my knife to cut the finger off. Figured you"d rather we got here on time than go off hunting for cutlery."
"d.a.m.nation. She had that ring when I knew her under the bridges. I wanted it. A souvenir. She"s dead?"
"By now, I"d say. Good thing we saw that picture at Madame"s place. Otherwise we wouldn"ta known which machine it was."
"You"da known. I told you the Machinist fixed it the way I told him. He fixed it so"s it couldn"t hurt our kin, not any of the sons of Thunder. He put sensors in the pads so it wouldn"t run if it was you, or me. That machine"s your friend, boy. You could"a got on it with her, it"d of killed her and set you down without a scratch. Well, that"ll pay her back for the daughter she owed me!"
"So how come she picked us? The way we smell, we figured n.o.body would."
The man smiled. "She"s addicted to the smell. Not that she knows it"s a smell. I can do the same to anybody when I"ve got a little time. Once they"ve got the smell in their head, they"re gone, lost, can"t do a thing against it."
"What"d you mean, paying her back for the daughter she owed you?"
"Arrgh. Three times I tried for a Rikajor daughter. They were said to run to girls. Rikajor refused me each time. He couldn"t refuse me Marool. Her, I bought with other coin."
"She asked who our mother was. Why"d she care?"
A gleefully gloating expression fled across the older man"s face. "No reason. Just trying to confuse you. Get on in here. I"m sick of towns. Time to go."
The boys climbed in, and Ashes took up the reins, starting the horses up the hill, along the road that led past the mansions into the wild, the same way Marool had gone when she investigated her parents" deaths in the badlands.
"Where we going now?" asked Dyre, yawning.
"Off into the wild to meet your cousins, boy. Our kindred. The first settlers of this world. The Wilderneers."
Ornery moved off down the tunnel, sped both by curiosity and by Questioner"s urgency. Mouche moved with more eagerness, though Questioner noted that both Mouche and Ornery seemed somewhat reluctant to look where they were going. Like guilty children handing around a dirty picture, they peeked at the darkness ahead, and pretended not to and peeked again. So long as they were all headed in one direction, it made little difference, though Questioner could imagine circ.u.mstances in which this preoccupation and inattention could be dangerous.
"Mouche," murmured Questioner, placing her heavy hand firmly on one of his shoulders, "stop trembling."
Instead of steadying, he quivered like an excited horse.
"Whoa," Questioner said. "Stop. Take a deep breath; stop."
She turned Mouche toward her, staring into his dazed eyes. "What is this business of not looking where you"re going?" She snapped her fingers in his face and shook him lightly. "What?"
Ornery had turned and came back to them. "It"s hard for us, Ma"am. They do not exist, Ma"am. So we are taught. We are not allowed to see or hear them. I can see them or not, depending, though I am still surprised at myself, but Mouche seems to be having trouble looking at them."
"You cannot see them?" Questioner turned her searching gaze on the sailor. "What do you mean you cannot see them?"
"I mean ... I can sort of not. Not look. I mean, I ... know they"re there, but I don"t. They wear brown robes that cover them all up, and we"re not allowed to look. Not once we"re six or seven years old."
"Why?"
"Because ... well ... they don"t exist."
"They what?"
Ornery cried petulantly, "They don"t exist! There weren"t supposed to be other creatures here. And they weren"t here when our people came, which means they probably came from somewhere else. But even if they didn"t, it wasn"t playing fair to hide all that time...."
"So, what"s the matter with your friend, here?"
Mouche"s life of sin had caught up with him all too swiftly. He quivered with mixed joy and shame, muttering, "I"ve been watching them. I"ve been watching them at House Genevois. I"ve been ... I"ve been ..." His sins had been settled, dependable. He had made a detente with his sins, taking his inspiration from his sins, but now he was in actual pursuit of the ideal, and he could not say what he had been. "... maybe wicked," he concluded, head hanging.
Questioner mused over this for a moment, shaking her ma.s.sive head as an indication of the astonishment she did not feel but knew was suitable to the occasion. "Young ones, listen to me. During this present time we are in, this now now, Timmys do indeed exist. During the near future, it will not be forbidden to look at them. During the near future, everything you learned ... when? When you were mere schoolchildren? Well, whatever you learned then was wrong. For the near future. Can you absorb that? When we catch up to them, or when they return to us, you will see them for they will be there, right? All this pretense has to end. Ending it is one of the reasons I am here!"
"Ahh ... if you say so, Ma"am."
"I do say so. And I am smarter than your teacher, so what I say, goes. You understand?"
Both of them nodded, Ornery obediently, Mouche equivocally. Ornery didn"t care one way or the other, but Mouche had set certain limits on his dreams and delights. He didn"t particularly want them to be sullied by reality. He wanted to have without the burden of having, to imagine without being imagined in return, and most, to be inspired without questioning his inspiration. Now, having heard Flowing Green"s voice so near, he alternately rejoiced and suffered. She had come to get him, him, personally. Why? What did she think of him? What did she see when she looked at him? Did she look at him? What would she think of his face now? Or did that even matter? Would she hate him?
Thinking was troublesome, hurtful, and useless. He gave up thinking and merely went.
They had left the sneakways of the house and entered a natural tunnel, or so Questioner identified it from the texture of the stone. There was no way to get lost, for there were no side tunnels, merely this partially dissolved stratum of limestone, floored with harder stone, naturally sloping downward and penetrated from above by rough tufts of root. Among the roots she heard the squeak and chitter of small creatures, and when one fled across the edge of her sight she saw a being the size of her hand, winged with tight membranes stretching between fore and rear limbs.
"What is that called?" she asked, directing her voice down the tunnel ahead of them.
"Dibigon," came a drifting voice, soft as the twitter of a drowsy bird. "Self-creators. You would say swoopers."
"I didn"t know they could speak our language," muttered Mouche, talking to his feet. "No one told me." Then, remembering his childhood, he flushed again. Of course they had spoken his language. How could he have forgotten?
Questioner called, "How far down do we go?"
"All way," whispered the voice. "To baimoi. To dwell-below."
As they went farther, the stones around them began to glow, at first with a hint of palest green along the edges, growing brighter the farther they went, enabling them to see the outlines of the stones around them, the fading distance of the tunnel ahead. Questioner reduced her own light to a soft, reddish glow, and soon the luminescence became a brighter yellow. Coincident with this brightening, they heard the murmuring of a stream.
They found the source of the liquid burbling at an intersection of their tunnel and a larger, more cylindrical one was half-filled with smooth, dark water, visible as a shadow against the bright luminescence of the opposite wall. The water, though silent elsewhere throughout its course, burbled at the conjunction of the two tunnels where irregular blocks of stone had fallen to interrupt its flow. There, also, were two podlike shapes drawn onto the shingle, each one about five meters long and less than a meter wide, each shining with the same light as the stone itself.
Questioner put her face close to the rock, amplified her vision, and saw that the luminescence was the product of bacteria acc.u.mulated in lichenous growths that covered every surface. Some were effulgently yellow, others emitted blue or green or even violet light.
Ornery looked over the pods, thumping them with her fist and finding them rather rubbery. "You don"t call these ships, I hope," she said in a disgusted tone. "Canoes, I"d call them, if that."
"Their size befits a small river," said Questioner. "Neither of these will bear my weight, however, so I will rely upon my flotation devices."
"Flotation devices?" asked Ornery.
"Some worlds are water worlds," said Questioner. "Some people swim or even dive about their activities. Some people are arboreal. Some are cave dwellers. I was designed to get about in any of them, to swim or dive or brachiate or soar or crawl, not always gracefully, but always efficiently."
Mouche and Ornery stared doubtfully at the pods, looking around for something more solid, seeing nothing that would float. It seemed to be the pod or nothing. Questioner, reading their minds, patted them on the shoulders comfortingly. "Many things will no doubt be made clear as we go."
Several Timmys leapt into one of the boats, which then slipped into the water of its own accord and floated a little way downstream, remaining there, quiet in the current. Mouche and Ornery started to push one of the boats into the river, only to have it slip along the rocky beach by itself. They climbed into it, sat in the rubbery bottom facing one another and felt their bottoms b.u.mping over small rocks that were easily discernable through the half-flexible substance of the vessel. Questioner waded into the stream and hooked herself to the back edge of the boat that held Mouche and Ornery, her mid parts ballooning until she bobbed on the ripples like a hollow ball. She was near enough that her reddish glow still illuminated both Mouche and Ornery, near enough to speak and be heard, though once they had pushed off into the river, she seemed disinclined to do so. There were no paddles or oars. Evidently it was intended they should simply float wherever they were going, though that did not explain the fact that the little boats maintained their relative distance and position, no matter how the tunnel twisted or how the water eddied.
From the front of the other boat a green glow swam upon the river. Mouche knew this was Flowing Green, that she led him to his destiny, that she knew he followed willingly even though he hadn"t wanted to approach her, not really. So far ... so far nothing had happened to disenchant him, but if it did ... oh, he would feel ... feel so ...
"What?" asked Ornery, leaning toward him. "You look as though you had lost your last shoelace and the race about to start."
Mouche managed a smile. "I was thinking how wonderful ... how wonderful they are." He gestured, making it clear who he meant.
"They always were," said Ornery. "I always thought so."
"You"ve both seen them?" Questioner asked. "I mean, without their coverings."
"Not recently," Ornery admitted. "But when I was a child, of course I saw them. They didn"t wrap themselves up with us us. Not when we were little."
"Mine did, mostly," Mouche confessed. "We had such a little place to live. Unless we were out in the woods, then my Timmy would take off her wrappers."
"Her wrappers? You knew she was female?" wrappers? You knew she was female?"
"No! of course not." Mouche subsided into a new fit of guilt. Thinking of Timmys as male or female was also forbidden. "We weren"t supposed to wonder about them, or to think of them being families or having babies or anything."
Ornery snorted. "Oh, well. Supposed to! We"re supposed to be veiled, but on ships we aren"t. We"re supposed not to see Timmys, but we don"t trip over them, so we must really see them, right? You can drive yourself crazy with stuff you"re not supposed to."
"And women aren"t supposed to be ... running around loose," murmured Mouche in a slightly angry tone.
Surprisingly, Ornery grinned. "Right. Not supposed to."
From behind them, the Questioner murmured, "And girls aren"t supposed to pretend to be boys, but I doubt you"re the first."
"How did you know?" Ornery asked, jaw dropping.
"I can smell you, child. My sense of smell is copied from Old Earther canines. Differentiating between s.e.xes is nothing. I can also tell about how old you are, where you"ve been and what you"ve been eating recently, what your state of health is, and what was in the soap you last used."
"Can you tell where we"re going?" asked Ornery in a slightly sarcastic voice.
"From the fact that water runs down hill, I a.s.sume we go down," she said. "Somewhere this streamlet runs into a river, and that, I should imagine, runs eventually into an underground sea. I believe so, for seas figure in the legends of this place and because Mouchidi"s little friend has told us we will cross them."
Mouche flushed. "She isn"t my ... my friend."
"Ornery is right, you know. She isn"t a she, either."
Astonished, Mouche tried to turn around, a maneuver that set the little boat bobbing. A Timmy voice came clearly through the darkness. "Still, sit, you make peevish Joggiwagga!"
Without moving, Mouche said, "She isn"t? I mean, it isn"t?"
Questioner murmured, "It isn"t, no. Is the one leading us the one you"ve been watching?"
Mouche nodded miserably. "One of them. I call her ... it, Flowing Green."
"Because of the hair, of course. Flowing Green is very attractive to you, is it not? Tim, not. I think we will find they do not say him, her, he, she, but merely tim. Mankind proposes, tim-tim disposes."
"No s.e.xes?" drawled Ornery, with a sidelong glance at Mouche. "That should simplify things."
"Not really," murmured Questioner. "Reproduction of nons.e.xual beings will inevitably have its own complications. We simply don"t know what they are, yet."
Questioner dimmed her light to the slightest, reddish glow, watching in fascination as the luminescence around them continued to grow brighter. The surroundings were in no sense illuminated. Much of their environment appeared as patches of darkness outlined or interrupted by strings, shades, lines, or clouds of light ranging from pale yellow through all possible greens to deep blue. Part of this, Questioner knew, was due to her reduced light and their own eyes adjusting to the lower levels of illumination, but part was a real increase in luminosity and a shift in color toward the slightly longer wave lengths. One did not actually see a rock, one saw a fuzzy angular yellow outline around a black patch partly filled in by pale green with blue prominences that one could decode as a rock. The green fangs that hung above them had been deposited there ages ago by water leaching through limestone. The green glow in the boat ahead of them was brighter now, and occasionally Questioner could detect twin silver eyes peering at them from within it as well as from other, accompanying glows, various shades from amber through blue. Flowing Green was not alone.
Questioner had already adjusted her senses to pick up the talk of the Timmys, which she was stowing away while her internal translator worked at it. Give her a few days, and she"d know their tongue as well as the fifty or so others she"d come equipped with.
Ornery leaned to whisper into Mouche"s ear. "What do you think of her, the Questioner?"
Mouche considered it. He had spent hours every day for some years considering what this or that individual woman was like, for if one could not know that, one could hardly be a Consort.
"I think she"s sad," he whispered back. "Not showing it, of course. Very soldierly about everything and taking a proper pride in her duty, but underneath, she could use a bit of happiness."
Ornery, surprised, sat back in her own place, thinking of what Mouche had said. All in all, she thought, Mouche was probably right. Questioner, who had heard every syllable, was slightly surprised.
The tube in which they were floating began to narrow slightly. From ahead came louder water sounds. Without interference from those aboard, the two little boats lined up end to end, their speed increased to a dizzying rush that carried them through the last narrow bit of small tunnel into another with a diameter several times as large. Beside the boats, a huge eye, like a pale balloon, emerged from the dark water and stared at them. Great dripping, weed-hung swags of line or cable pulled themselves above the water, dark against the background glow, heaving the boats into the slower current. Not cable. Too thick for cable. Tentacles. Far above, the higher, broader ceiling shone softly with fractal patterns of amber and emerald.
The two canoes stayed in line, as though they were linked, and the moon-eye ahead of them swiveled from left to right before turning in the direction of their movement, the joined boats holding steady in the slow current.
A voice drifted back to them, "Drink this water now. To make you visible."
Ornery began to laugh. "So now we"re we"re invisible." invisible."
"It isn"t funny," complained Mouche.
"You are only darkness, Mouche," said Questioner. "You"re a black hole in the middle of light. I"ve been a.n.a.lyzing the water. I detect no impurities that would endanger your health, but it does have luminescent bacteria in it. Presumably, if you drink the water, soon you will glow, and we can see you. I must admit, I"m curious to see a glowing Mouche, a shimmering Ornery!"
"The bacteria? They won"t make you glow?" asked Ornery.
"Probably not. But I can make myself glow, so you know where I am and what I"m about. I"d like to know what that thing was that came up just beside us?"
"Joggiwagga," whispered the darkness.
"Joggiwagga," murmured Questioner. "I"ve heard that before."
"It is Joggiwagga who raises the pillars," said Ornery. "It is Joggiwagga who keeps track of time, by the moon-shadows. I saw one once, by the side of the sea, setting up the stones!"
"Dangerous," whispered the voice. "To be seen by Joggiwagga on the land."
"I moved very fast," Ornery confessed.
"Wise," murmured the darkness. "Wise. It would not hurt us for we are part of it, but you are not."
"What do you mean, you are part of it?" asked the Questioner. "You are part of Joggiwagga?"
A verdant glow ahead of them billowed, then shrank once more, as hair was tossed wide and then fell into place. "Joggiwagga is part, we are part, all everything is Dosha, all is made in Fauxi-dizalonz, except you people and jongau people and Her and Niasa."
"What are jongau?" the Questioner asked.
"Bent people. People not put together right. That Ashes one is jongau. That Bane, that Dyre, they are jongau. All their kinfolk and like, many, many more! They are not finished. They are only half done, and they smell bad. They should have the courtesy to die, but they do not."
"And who are the Corojumi?" the Questioner pursued.