Earth

  WAITOMO CAVES. JUST AHEAD.

  COME SEE THE WONDER OF THE WAIKATO.

  One of the billboards depicted a family of happy spelunkers, helmet lamps glowing as they pointed at astonishing sights just offstage.

  “We’ve entered their security perimeter, by now,” Manella said. To seem more relaxed, he’d have to close his eyes and go to sleep.

  “You think so?” Teresa knew he didn’t mean the tourist concessionaires. She frowned at the blur of conifers rushing past her window. Manella glanced at her and smiled. “Don’t fret. Lustig isn’t a violent type.”

  “How do you explain what happened in Iquitos then?”

  “Well, I admit he is … highly accident prone.” When Teresa laughed bitterly, Pedro shrugged. “That doesn’t release him from responsibility. Au contraire. Unlucky people should exercise special caution, lest their bad luck come to harm others. In Lustig’s case—”

  “His message hinted he knew something about the destruction of Erehwon. Maybe he caused it! He might be working with Spivey, for all we know.”

  Manella sighed. “A chance we’ll have to take. And now we’re here.”

  Signs pointed left to public parking. Pedro swooped down, around, and into a slot with a display of panache Teresa could have lived without. She emerged to a syncopation of crackling vertebrae, feeling more respect than ever for the pioneers of Vostok, Mercury, and Gemini, who first ventured into space crammed into canisters approximately the same size of the tiny car.

  She and her companion crossed the highway to the ticket booth, paid for two admissions, and joined other tourists passing under one of the ubiquitous carved archways that seemed a New Zealand trademark. Teresa glanced at those gathering for the two o’clock tour, a sparse assortment of winter travelers that included hand-holding Asian newlyweds, retirees with Australian accents, and local children in quaint woolen school uniforms. For all she knew, any of them might be agents for the mysterious organization they’d tracked to this place.

  The meeting had been set up with delicacy and circumlocution, each side taking precautions against a possible double cross. It all struck Teresa as anachronistic, and hopelessly adolescent.

  Unfortunately, adolescents ran the world. Big, irresponsible adolescents like Jason or this Lustig fellow, whose dossier read like the biography of a high-tech Peter Pan. Even worse were serious, bloody-minded types like Colonel Spivey, whose games of national security were played with real multitudes serving as pawns. She recalled how intensely the man had worked during the recent space mission. Spivey was driven, all right. Sometimes that could be a good thing.

  It could also make some people dangerous.

  “You’re sure these people will keep their word?” she whispered to Manella.

  He looked back with amusement. “Of course I’m not sure! Lustig may be nonviolent, but what do we know about his backers?” Again, he shrugged. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

  Ask a foolish question … Teresa thought.

  Their tour guide arrived at last, a dark-haired, dark-skinned young man with broad shoulders and a pleasant smile. The guide cheerfully beckoned them to follow him along a wooden walk that hugged the steep hillside, and soon had them traversing along mist-shrouded waterfalls. Teresa kept close to Manella at the end of the queue.

  She caught herself glancing backward to see if anyone was sneaking up behind them, and made herself stop doing it.

  The vegetation changed as they passed under a rain forest canopy. Exotic birds flitted under moist foliage that looked so healthy you might never imagine how many other places like this were withering elsewhere on the planet. Here even the smells seemed to convey strength, diversity. This jungle felt as if it were a long way from dying. Inhaling felt like taking a tonic. That calmed her a bit. She took deep breaths.

  They turned a corner and suddenly the cave entrance yawned ahead of them. The gap in the mountainside was appropriately dark, foreboding. Steps proceeded downward between slippery metal banisters, with bare bulbs spaced at intervals apparently calculated to maximize eerie shadows, to thrill visitors with an illusion of creaking decrepitude and mystery.

  Teresa listened idly as the guide recited something having to do with great birds, cousins of the legendary moa, who used to get trapped in caves like these during prehistoric times, leaving their bones to be discovered by astonished explorers many centuries later.

  As they descended, he used a beam to point out features of the grottoes, carved over thousands of years by patient underground streams, then embellished with fluted limestone apses by centuries of slow seepage. In places the ceiling gave way to shafts and chimneys that towered out of sight or dropped into total blackness, lined with soda-straw draperies and crystalline, branchlike helicites. Curling galleries curved out of view, hinting at an interminable maze that would surely swallow anyone foolish enough to leave the wooden walkway.

  It was, indeed, quite beautiful. Still, Teresa felt little true surprise or awe. It was all too familiar from prior exposure on TV or in net-zines. She nodded familiarly at stalactites and stalagmites, acquaintances already encountered in the past by proxy. Rather than eerie or strange, they were neighbors she had learned a lot about over the years, long before ever meeting them in person.

  The good side of the world media village was the sense it gave ten billion that each of them had at least some small connection with the whole. The bad side was that no one ever encountered anything, anymore, that was completely new.

  Perhaps that was why I became an astronaut, in hopes of someday seeing some special place before the cameras got there.

  If so, lots of luck. The vast mountain ranges of the moon were still unclimbed. And at present rate, they probably never would be. Likewise the steep canyons, ice sheets, and red vistas of Mars.

  Teresa scanned craggy terraces, shaped over millennia by the slow drip-dripping of carbonate-rich water. No doubt she and Pedro were already being watched by Alex Lustig’s mysterious organization. Their instructions had been to keep to the rear. If Pedro knew anything more, he hadn’t told her.

  “Now we’ll be going down another set of stairs,” their guide announced. “Hold onto the rail because the lights grow dimmer, to let our eyes adapt for the Grand Cave.”

  The visitors’ voices grew hushed as they descended plank steps, put there to protect the limestone floor from the erosive rub of countless feet. Once, Teresa caught a white flash of teeth as Manella turned to grin at her. She ignored him, pretending not to see.

  Soon it wás hardly pretense. Colliding with Pedro’s broad back was her first warning the descent had ended. Whispers diminished to an occasional giggle as people bumped awkwardly. A cough. A faint, familiar hiss as someone in the crowd took oxygen from a hip flask, followed by a mumbled apology.

  Listening carefully, Teresa made out rhythmic thumping sounds and a faint splash. The tour leader spoke from somewhere to her left. “We’ll divide the group now and continue by water. Each boat will have a guide, standing in the prow, who will pull you along by hauling on ropes arrayed along the ceiling.”

  As her eyes adapted, Teresa soon made out smudges here and there—the edge of the dock and several small vessels moored alongside, with a man’s or woman’s silhouette at the bow. She even thought she could trace a webbery of cables draped across the rock overhead.

  “Interesting mode of transport,” Pedro commented as they watched the first boat depart. More tourists were helped into the next one and the queue moved forward.

  “As each boat rounds the bend ahead,” the chief guide continued. “You’ll leave behind the last illumination. Your pilot will be operating by memory and touch alone. But don’t worry, we only lose one or two boatloads a year.”

  A poor joke, but it touched off nervous titters.

  “A few more turns and you’ll arrive at the main grotto, where our famous worms will perform their unique show for you—the centerpiece of Waitomo Caves. Then, by another route, you’ll be returned here t
o the landing. We hope you enjoy your visit to the wonder of the Waikato.”

  Some wonder. So far Teresa hadn’t seen anything particularly impressive. Much bigger caves were regularly featured on the National Geographic net-zine.

  The tourists just ahead of them boarded a boat. There was room remaining at the back, but their guide held out a hand to stop Manella. “You, sir, look just a bit heavy to add here. I’ll take you two in the last one myself.”

  As Pedro sniffed indignantly, the guide helped them into the final boat. Then he moved to the bow and cast off. The dim remaining light disappeared behind them as he pulled the ceiling-spanning ropes hand over hand and they passed around a bend into pitch darkness.

  Teresa tried using biofeedback to speed her adaptation to the dark and found it disconcerting how little training helped. You couldn’t amplify what doesn’t exist.

  By now there were no signs of the other boats. They might have drifted over a cliff, for all Teresa knew. Or perhaps some stealthy monster waited just ahead, plucking each group silently and swiftly from their stygian barges.

  The waters were chill to her fingertips when she dragged them alongside. They also seemed to have a faint oily quality. Bringing a few drops to her lips, she tasted minerals. It wasn’t unpleasant though. The underground river was slow but clear and fresh. It tasted timeless.

  “Some years the water rises too high to let boats pass,” the guide told them in a soft voice. “And during droughts they can be stranded.”

  “Are there eyeless fish, down here?” Teresa asked.

  The native’s low, disembodied laughter seemed to dance along the sculpted rocks. “Of course! What sort of buried river would this be without such? They live on seeds, pollen, and insect larvae carried down here from ki waho, the outside world. Some of those larvae survive to become flies, which in turn feed …”

  Teresa grabbed the gunnels quickly as she sensed something massive approach from the left—moments before their boat grated against rock, tipping slightly. “Just a second,” the voice told them. “I have to step out to guide us around this column. Hold on.”

  She traced the faint scrape of a boot on a sandy bank. Without any sight at all, not even the dark eclipse of Manella in front of her, she sensed only vague movement as their vessel scoured along a limestone verge and then emerged round a corner into a starry night.

  Teresa gasped. Stars? Sudden disorientation left her staring at the brilliant vault overhead, amazed.

  But it was early afternoon when we arrived. How …?

  Automatically, she sought her friends, the familiar constellations, and recognized none of them. Everything had changed! It was as if she’d passed through some science fictional device, to a world in some distant galaxy. The swirl of stellar clusters arced overhead in vast, regal, and totally alien splendor.

  Teresa blinked, suffering from acuity of senses. Hearing told her she was underground. Her internal gyroscope said she was less than two kilometers from the car. And yet the clinquant stars screamed of open sky. She shook her head. Wrong. Wrong. Readjust. Don’t make assumptions!

  All this happened in a narrow instant, the time it took for her to notice that every one of these “stars” shone the same exact shade of bright green. In half a second Teresa settled the sensory clash, seeing how this artful hoax was perpetrated.

  The boat rocked as a figure occulted the false constellations, stepping back into the bow. The guide’s silhouette eclipsed bright pinpoints as he hauled away at a line of blackness overhead. “Our cave worms make their homes along the roof,” his voice echoed softly. “They produce a phosphorescence that lures newly hatched flies and other insects whose eggs and larvae were swept here from the outside world. The bright spots lead those insects not outside, not back into Te Ao-mārama, but onto sticky snares.”

  Something was wrong. Teresa sat forward. She whispered. “Pedro, his voice …”

  With uncanny accuracy, Manella grabbed her hand and squeezed for silence. Teresa tensed briefly, then forced herself to relax. This must be part of the plan. With effort she sat back and made the best of the situation. There was nothing else to do, anyway.

  Now she felt sheepish for even momentarily mistaking the lights overhead for stars. Their slow passage let her estimate parallax … ranging from one and a half to three meters above them. She could, in fact, follow the rough contours of the ceiling now. Anyway, there was no twinkle from atmospheric distortion. Some of the “stars” were, in fact, large oblong shapes.

  Still … She blinked, and suddenly rationalization departed once more. For another thrilling moment Teresa purposely enjoyed the illusion again, looking out on an alien sky, on the fringes of some strange spiral arm with fields of verdant suns—the mysterious night glitter of a faraway frontier.

  Their guide’s shadow was the black outline of a nebula. The nebula moved. So, she suddenly noticed, did a regular, straight boundary. A rectangular blackness, free of green, passed over them as if demarking a gate. Soon Teresa heard a low rumble of motors and sensed a barrier roll behind them. The emerald starscape vanished.

  “Now, if you’ll please cover your eyes,” the shadow said. She felt Manella move to comply, but only shaded hers. To close them completely would demand too much trust.

  A sharp glow suddenly grew ahead of them. Perhaps it was only a dim lamp, but the glare felt intense enough to hurt her dark-adapted retinas. It quickly drove out all remaining trace of the worm phosphors. Teresa bade them farewell regretfully.

  The boat bumped once more and stopped. “Come this way please,” the voice told them. She felt a touch on her arm and Teresa let herself be led, blinking, out of the swaying craft. Her eyes tearing somewhat from the brightness, she had to squint past rays of diffraction to see who had replaced their original guide. It was a brown-haired man, lightly freckled, who clearly owned no Polynesian ancestry at all. Right now he regarded Pedro with an expression she couldn’t read, but obviously carrying strong emotion.

  “Hello, Manella,” he said, apparently making an effort to be polite.

  It was Teresa’s first chance to scrutinize Alex Lustig in person. In photographs he had appeared distant, distracted, and some of that quality was present. But now she thought she perceived something else as well, possibly the expression of one who has sought strangeness, and found much more than he had ever bargained for.

  Pedro used a kerchief to wipe his eyes. “Hello yourself, Lustig. Thanks for seeing us. Now, I hope you have a good explanation for what you’ve been up to?”

  Here they were deep underground, out of contact with any of their own people or, in fact, any legal authority—and sure enough, old Pedro was slipping right back into the role of paternal authority figure.

  “As you wish.” Alex Lustig nodded, apparently unfazed. “If you two will follow me, I’ll tell you everything. But I warn you, it will be hard to believe.”

  Of course Pedro wouldn’t let someone else get the last word in, even with a line like that.

  “From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely preposterous and utterly calamitous.”

  An hour later Teresa wondered why she only felt anesthetized, when she really ought to loathe the man. Even if he hadn’t made the monster eating away at the Earth’s heart, he was still the one who had brought this thing to her attention.

  Then there was his role in triggering the burst of coherent gravity waves that drove Jason and nine others on their one-way journey to the stars. That, too, should be reason enough to despise Alex Lustig. And yet the only emotions she felt capable of right now were more immediate ones … such as the wry pleasure of seeing Pedro Manella for the first time at a loss for words.

  The big man sat across from Lustig, hands folded on a table of dark wood, his notepad completely forgotten. Pedro’s eyes kept flicking to a large holographic cutaway of the Earth, more vivid and detailed than anything their group had been able to construct back in Houston. Delicately traced minutiae cast orange, yellow, and reddish sh
ades across one side of Manella’s face, lending false gay overtones to his bleak expression.

  There were only the three of them here in a sparsely furnished underground chamber. After providing his guests with refreshments, Lustig had launched into his briefing without assistance, though twice he had lifted a headset to consult someone outside. Naturally, the man had help. Despite his “solitary wizard” reputation, there was no way he could have figured all this out by himself.

  The possibility of a hoax occurred to Teresa several times, but she recognized that as wishful thinking. Lustig’s calm thoroughness bespoke credibility, however insane or horrible his conclusions.

  “… so it was only this week, by combining gravity scans with neutrino observations, that we were able to pin down at last where the energy is coming from … the elevated state powering the gazer effect. It’s at the base of the mantle, where the geomagnetic field draws on currents in the outer core …”

  Technically, the story wasn’t hard to follow. While searching for his Iquitos black hole, Lustig and his associates had stumbled across a much more dangerous singularity already present at the center of the Earth. They tried using tuned gravity waves to trace that one’s trajectory and history, but that touched off internal reflections, amplifying gravitons much as photons are between the mirrors of a laser. In this case the “gazer mirrors” consisted of the mysterious Beta itself plus the experimental black hole onboard station Erehwon. What blasted forth was a great wave of warped space-time, spearing in the general direction of Spica.

  Lustig was a good teacher. He kept his math to low-level matrices and used figures to graphically lay out this tale of catastrophe. It sounded all too plausible—and she wouldn’t have believed a single word if she hadn’t witnessed so much firsthand. The sudden, horrible stretching and contraction of Erehwon’s tether, for instance. Or the relativistic departure of the Farpoint lab. Or those colors.

  What had Teresa becalmed in an emotional dead zone was the realization that all her concerns were over. What point was there in worrying about internal politics at NASA, or her next flight itinerary, or her failed marriage, if the whole world was coming to an end soon?