Survival (51 page)

The train pulled away—backward, not ahead as she'd expected.

So this was the end of the line
.

“This way.” Brymn didn't give her any choice, almost running down the platform in the opposite direction from the train. Mac swore under her breath but hurried after him.

The platform narrowed and became a ramp leading down to the tracks. There was a dim illumination in the distance. Mac squinted, trying to make out details of what looked like a large opening. She guessed the tracks continued into a cavern.

It wasn't their destination. Before they reached the tracks, Brymn halted in front of a section of wall. After studying what appeared to Mac to be more of the same glistening fabric, he spat onto one hand, then pressed it against the wall above and to the right of his head.

Smoke began to appear between his three fingers as the fabric shrank away to reveal an illuminated plate.
Finally,
Mac thought,
a civilized door control
. She wrinkled her nose at an acrid smell.
A being of unexpected resources, her Brymn.

Her mind flashed back to Pod Three and the Ro attack. She'd only a fuzzy recollection of their actual escape—being dumped into the ocean along with the gallery and kitchen tended to overshadow fine details. Not to mention fear, horror, and utter screaming confusion. Still, Mac had no trouble remembering one very unusual aspect.

Brymn had
pushed
them through a solid window.

Seeing how he'd cleared the fabric from the control, she also remembered how. He'd
spat
at the window wall; it had shattered when he rammed it.

Not typical behavior for the transparent, strong, yet flexible material. The Preds had been caught testing the ability of the pod window walls with harpoons. Needless to say the students had suffered more than the window.

Mac eyed the smoking, ruined edge of the shroud fabric wistfully.
Never,
she told herself,
ever, travel without sample vials
.

Meanwhile, in plain view of the dozen or more tiny vidbots stationed along the ceiling, Brymn was tapping what had to be an access code into the plate. “This is going to get us in trouble, isn't it?” Mac asked with what she considered remarkable aplomb, considering she stood in the bowels of an alien world, a world she was visiting on the sufferance of its leaders.

“Ah.” The fabric split along two lines that met overhead, the triangle thus formed moving away from them and to the side so Mac stared into a very unappealing and dark cavity. A cavity out of which rushed cooler, damper air.

She covered her nose with one hand. “What's that smell?”

Brymn was already half inside, his stooped body posture fitting perfectly within the available space, although he had no room to spread out his arms. “Hurry, Mac.”

Couldn't a Dhryn smell
that? Mac swallowed hard and obeyed, breathing as little as possible through her fingers. It wasn't so much sulfur, she decided, as rancid cream. With sulfur. And maybe the stomach contents of a five-days-dead seal.

Whatever it was, it diminished to a background misery after her first few steps. Either her sense of smell had overloaded and quit, or opening the door had released a pocket of collected fumes, rapidly diffusing into the tunnel.

Mac only hoped to avoid finding the source.

The cavity proved to be part of some kind of accessway, with a maze of branches to the left and right. They were free of 'bots, at least. There were lights, but they were little more than glows on the walls. Brymn moved confidently enough, so perhaps the lights were brighter in the nonvisible, to a Human, part of the spectrum.

Mac let her mind worry at Dhryn senses and experiments to test their differences. It was better than letting her mind think about the mass of planet mere centimeters above her head, or the way her imagination raced back to all the old horror films she'd watched with Emily, in which the heroes were inevitably lured into a dark, deadly basement.

She'd complained how unrealistic the scenario was.
Who would do such a thing?
Emily had argued that each basement was a test of courage. Until the heroes faced such a test, the audience couldn't believe in their ability to ultimately defeat the monster.

Mac didn't feel courageous. She felt trapped. And she didn't feel capable of arguing with one exasperating Dhryn, let alone defeating a monster.

If this was a trap, and she never left here again, what was the range of the bioamplifiers accumulating in her liver and bones? Even if the rock overhead didn't matter, what of the shroud lining every cavity down here? Was she as hidden from Human sensors as the Dhryn's
oomlings
were from the Ro?

Thinking of another Human was the last straw. Mac stopped, hands carefully away from the walls leaning together over her head. “Brymn! Wait!”

If anything, her shouts spurred him to move faster. His voice trailed back to her, low and anxious. “No, no. This is no place for us,
Lamisah
. The Wasted could come to die here. Hurry.”

“Wonderful.” At the thought of rotting, mad Dhryn waiting to grab her from the more-than-abundant shadows—yet another horror staple Mac could do without—she scampered after the Dhryn, almost running into him from behind. “I hope you know the way out of here.”

“As do I.”

Luckily for Human-Dhryn relations, Mac had no time to formulate a suitable response. The very next bend in the accessway brought them to where it almost doubled in width and height. A welcoming brightness streamed across the floor from an entrance larger than those they'd been passing. As her eyes adjusted, Mac sniffed cautiously. The breeze lifting the wisps from her forehead was warm and sweet. She took a step toward that beckoning light.

“We aren't going that way,” Brymn said. “Come, Mac.”

She paused. “Why? What's there?”

“A crèche. Come. It's only a bit farther.” He pointed down another of the dark, forbidding accessways.

Mac was already moving, Brymn's plaintive, “we've no time!” echoing in her ears.

The sight greeting her eyes made her forget the Ro, forget Emily, forget herself.

She wasn't standing in an entrance. This must be the opening of a ventilation shaft of some kind, for beneath her feet the wall dropped at least thirty meters to the floor of the cavern in front of her.

Cavern?
As well call Castle Inlet a rock cut, missing the glorious play of light, water, and life. This hidden place was nowhere as large, but it gave the same feeling of wonder. The far end of the crèche was so distant Mac couldn't make out its shape, but its tiled, colorful side walls swung out and open like the arms of a mother. Golden rays of light from suspended clusters on the ceiling bathed the floor below, crisscrossing so even the shadows were faint and welcoming.

The light was only the beginning.

The floor, which rose and fell in wide steps, was covered with what Mac could only think of as immense playpens, each carpeted in some kind of soft green and bounded by woven silk panels in rainbow shades. Each held one or more adult Dhryn surrounded by a mass of miniature ones. Her first impression was of ceaseless movement and Mac eagerly searched for patterns. Sure enough, within a 'pen directly below her, the
oomlings
— for the tiny copies of Brymn could be nothing else—were sitting carefully on their rears, heads oriented toward an adult who was gesturing with four arms, the way Brymn would do whenever enthused about a topic. In the adjacent 'pens,
oomlings
were milling around their adults, every so often hopping into the air with a random exuberance that brought a smile to Mac's lips.

And the sounds. Low booming voices almost disappeared under what could only be called cooing.
The oomlings?
The hairs on her arms and neck reacted to something—more infrasound.
From the adults,
oomlings
, or both?
Mac wondered. In such a large space, the lower frequencies could be heard by all. Perhaps something being taught to all at once? Or was it as simple as a communal lullaby, for many of the 'pens held jumbles of smaller
oomlings,
arms and bodies wrapped around one another in peaceful confusion as they slept.

As if all this wasn't enough,
Mac thought, thoroughly enchanted,
the
oomlings
weren't blue or rubbery
. From the tiniest to the ones almost the size of adults, they were white from head to footpad, and either wearing clothing like feathers, or their torsos were covered in down.

They might have six arms—she couldn't see any with a seventh—but they called forth parental instincts even from a distance and even from an alien.

Brymn had come to sit beside her, his arms folded. “Our future,” he said warmly.

“Are those the Progenitors?” Mac nodded into the crèche to indicate the adult Dhryn.

“Of course not.” A subdued hoot. “Why would you think such a thing?”

Mac was tempted to retort:
because you Dhryn keep your biology as secret from others as you to do from yourselves
, but settled for: “If these were Humans, the parents—Progenitors—would be responsible for caring for their offspring—
oomlings
.” She couldn't help but think of her dad.

And hope she'd be able to describe all this to him in person
.

“Ah. Our Progenitors are responsible for the Dhryn. What you see below are—” he paused as if searching for the right word. “These are caregivers. They remain with the
oomlings
at all times. Just as the
oomlings
must remain here until they Freshen.”

“To keep them safe from the—” Brymn touched her mouth to stop what she would have said.

“Please do not speak that name here,
Lamisah
,” he said as he took his hand away.

Mac nodded, seeing the crèche from a new perspective—that of a vault protecting a living treasure. She tried to estimate how many such vaults would be required to house the new generations of an entire planet, the organization to feed and care for them, and gave up. But her imagination could encompass the desperation of a species that had to bury its helpless young to protect them.

“A sight to warm the hearts,” Brymn said softly, “but we haven't time to waste, Mac. Come. It's not far.”

Mac turned to follow her guide, resisting the temptation to look back.

“It is here. The answer to everything.”

Given the conviction in Brymn's voice, Mac sat on the nearest cratelike tube, pulled out a water bottle, and studiously broke off a piece of cereal bar to chew. They were, barring any more secret doors and chambers the Dhryn hadn't revealed, sitting in a storeroom.

A storeroom packed to its ceiling with tubes marked: Textile Archives. Some were dusty enough to have been down here since the Dhryn began burrowing.

She watched Brymn dump his bags, then rush to one particular stack, running his hands greedily along the outside of the bottommost tubes as if they were treasure. “Help me,
Lamisah,
” he ordered, busy peering at labels. “We must find the oldest specimen. It will be marked the ‘year of beginning' or some such thing.” He gave a dismissive gesture to the packed corridor they'd walked through to come here. “Anything outside this area is too recent. The curator was adamant.”

“Why?” But she was already packing away her snack and coming to join him. “What are you looking for, Brymn?”

“Proof. I know it's here.”

That was all the explanation he'd give her, perhaps assuming, correctly, that Mac was ready to desert him if she had the slightest idea how to get herself back to civilization. The labyrinth they'd traversed to reach the crèche had been nothing compared to what Brymn had taken her through to reach this . . . this . . . storeroom. Twists, turns, another small access door to break through . . .

Implying,
Mac suddenly realized, looking at the large storage tubes,
that there must be another, more normal way in—something she could find and use herself.

She set to work with greater will, part of her attention on the labels, and the rest looking for any sign of a door. It wasn't going to be obvious, of course. Who'd worry about the inside of a storeroom, for one, plus shroud fabric lined these walls as well as those of all the accessways. The time and labor to shield nonessential areas had to have been staggering, a convincing display of the belief of the Dhryn in its effectiveness.