Reprisal (45 page)

Charis was at the lip, then back off it with no hesitation at all, and coming down fast.

It was such a relief-- "Slower. Slower, goddammit!"

No spoken words could cross the immense space they hung in, and would never reach the pit's floor, forty stories down. Joanna had shouted loud enough for the faintest delayed echo from distant walls. ... But from the depth of blackness below, only silence and a slow welling breeze, smelling of stone.

Charis braked ... braked again, and was drifting smoothly down.

"You keep it just like that," Joanna called up to her. "All right ... now we go together." She relieved her rack, and fell coasting away, matching Charis as she came down. It was going to be a trial, keeping tabs on Miss Hotshot.

Wasted lecture. ...

The faintest shafts of light, from surface cracks in the great dome, had quickly faded. They sailed and sailed slowly down, thirty feet apart on a single slender rope, and the distance and darkness devoured them.

Joanna landed on the long ridge of rubble-then stepped aside as Charis slid down out of darkness, her helmet light strobing left and right as she turned her head, surveying a boundless rubbled plain, its horizons dark as Erebus.

She landed and said, "Oh ... Joanna." And they stood together in a cool and steady wind, hoisting the duffel, rope braid, and packs. The ascender bags to be left behind, and the rope sack --weighting the working end of the Blue Water.

"--It's the Seventh Circle," Charis said. "It's wonderful."

"Used to be a lake, a few million years ago. ... We go down this side, and straight across to the north wall. It's a long way.--Watch your footing on this drift rock."

The last said to empty air, as Charis slid and trotted away down the great slabs of the ridge, following her small lemon circle of helmet light. Joanna went after, keeping up.

They traveled as if across the floor of forever, since no end to it could be seen. Joanna--rested as she always was by such darkness, strangeness, and indefinite space--picked her way, climbed up occasional low rises and over them, and watched the girl move ahead and around her. Charis, her helmet light diminished by distance, wandered wide and rock-strewn pastures--then through a metropolis of stone, questing, searching past building-sized boulders like a ferret--the darkness, depth, the oddness of everything disturbing her not at all. Same bone ... and same blood.

The girl circled back and they stood bright-faced in each other's helmet light.

"Well?"

"Oooh, I love it! It's so ... secret." And she was gone again.

Above them, an unchanging never-sky of silence, vaulted distance, blackness deeper than the dark of interstellar space.

Charis, after almost an hour, had reached the north wall's driftrock slope, had climbed it--and was ranging along the base of the wall when Joanna came up.

"Where does it "g"'?"

"Another twenty feet or so along here. ... The river's old tunnel is about forty feet up. That's our way in."

"Can I lead?"

"... All right. We won't rope-up on this short a pitch. There's a minor ledge at about twenty-five feet.--And Charis, it's damp on these rocks, and they're friable--so never trust one hold. These are unstable routes."

"I'll watch it." And as if her load of pack and duffel were only airy forms, she drifted down the base of the wall, found holds she liked, and started easily up beneath her shifting cone of light. She rose with a rock climber's rhythm, step up and swing from side to side, hold to hold. Poised climbing, with few pauses.-Cavers tended to caution, concerned with the quality of stone they held. Wet rock and rotten rock were always on their minds. ... Charis was climbing as if the wall were dry and pillared granite up some New York mountain.

Still, she was very good, good as young Joanna Reed had been. Maybe better ...

less self-conscious, less self-considering, self-questioning on the rock.

... Joanna moved beneath her, climbing more slowly, watching for trouble. If Charis slipped, she should be able to catch her, at least break the fall. ...

And contradict what must be done.

A few minutes later, when Joanna mantled the top of the wall--Charis, above her, had rolled it from a foothold and come to her feet in one motion--she found the girl standing at the wide mouth of the river's ancient route, the spillway into the great black lake that had lain beneath. Now, empty of its thundering flood for eons, the enormous tunnel, its limestone polished to pearl, reached away out of their lights into shadow, then dark.

Charis reached over, put her arm around Joanna and hugged her. "Oh, thank you for this," she said. "This is better than anything. An adventure. ..." And fled seeking away into darkness behind her small flare of lamplight, as if trolls might have left gifts for them under the hill.

In long hours of caving, Charis seemed to grow only more at ease with narrow places ... grand spaces, and the difficult ways to get to and through them.

She seemed as comfortable beneath the earth as she had been on it. Perhaps, like her mother, more comfortable.

They caved hard. Joanna led the squeezes and duck-unders--marking always a map in her mind. Charis, scrambling, curious as a kitten, led the climbs. In three hours from the bottom of the pit, they were deep in the labyrinth of the White River's past courses ... and the traps, chambers, and twisting tunnels of other, even more ancient streams that had submerged after wandering miles through the sunshine of drifting continents three hundred million years before.

The stone seemed to form and reform around them as they walked ... crawled ...

wormed their way along into passages that turned, dead-ended, broke into branches, and a few times opened higher, to form palaces of frost and glitter in the helmet lights ... their reflections mirrored in pools of water clear as air.--Then the stone might lower, press down so they scraped their elbows and knees raw to manage past.

... As they tried a fissured entrance to a possible new chamber, Charis, inching after Joanna through the squeeze, got caught--her helmet wedged--and was unable to bring a hand up to shove or yank it loose. She lay sandwiched between thousands of tons of stone, in space too small for easy breathing.

"Sweetheart ... relax and rest in there. The stone will never get closer--and I got through it, and I'm bigger than you are."

"No sweat," Charis said, panting like a puppy, better breathing not possible.

Joanna could see the white top of the helmet, an Ecrin. She saw how it had jammed between the slabs, wedged in--and could see the girl's shoulders, but not her face; her face was turned to the stone, held by the helmet strap cupping her chin.

Charis would not be able to back out. The helmet would wedge tighter, and hold.

She could not back out. And she could not come forward. The helmet, so superb a design for safety, had happened, this one time, to trap its wearer absolutely.

Joanna knelt back on damp stone, and thought for a few moments. Then she dug in her coverall's side pocket, took out her Leatherman, opened the serrated blade, and reached into the squeeze to the length of her arm ... slowly forced her knife hand through the only opening the wedged helmet left. She felt Charis's soft cheek against her knuckles ... and little by little turned the blade, blind. Turned it, feeling its keen edge's position like a fencer. She heard Charis murmur as the cool steel touched her, stroked slowly along her lips ... to rest at last against the helmet strap's taut webbing.

Then began cautious slicing, in the smallest motions. "You'll be out in a minute," Joanna said, though she wasn't sure that was so.

"Not worried. ..." Words barely breathed out.

Joanna slowly sawed, her cramped fingers and wrist alert for a change from the strap's resistance to something softer.

It took a while ... and when the chin strap parted suddenly, the blade jarred through, touched Charis's face. She made no sound.

Joanna pulled the multitool carefully out--then reached in with her other arm and a clenched fist, and hit the crest of the helmet hard. The smooth rounded surface sprung and popped sideways with a "tock" ... and Charis butted it free, and writhed out as if born from the stone, pushing the helmet before her.

Joanna helped her stand ... haul her tethered pack and duffel through behind her. Then she examined the girl's face by helmet light, looking for knife cuts

... any injury. "Are you all right?"

"I'm great--thanks. It was like it was hugging me." Charis examined her helmet strap.

"Here; we'll substitute a piece of prusik cord ... change our lamp batteries while we're at it."

They traveled awhile after that, crawled to a blind passage end through slick mud--backed out a distance, and found another way to go, an entrance over a low slide of stone.

Past that, a short dry passage opened into a small chamber forested with slender pearl stalactites and stalagmites meeting, and snowy soda straws delicate as spiderweb. The small space cupped a shallow pool, its surface perfectly still as it had been still for a thousand years ... or a million years ... or more.

"Everything old--and new," Charis said. Mud-streaked, and looking at last a little weary, her too-large coveralls torn, the girl knelt at the pool's edge and looked down into it ... into the orange reflection her helmet lamp created of her.

Joanna, standing beneath the ceiling's brilliant decoration, watched her daughter at the little pool --immortal water reflecting a creature lovely and temporary as a flower.

"Tired, sweetheart?"

"I feel great. We can keep going."

"No. We're in far enough. It was going to rain, up above--that'll affect water levels of the streams coming down through here. We don't want to stumble into really deep duck-unders with only two cavers working.--Besides which, I am tired."

"Okay--we camp here?"

"Good spot, and we'll take it. ...I'll set us up, get the sleeping bags out, and food bars ... if you'll take the filter and pump us some water from the pool."

"Right."

"We'll put a candle out for light, Charis, save our helmet-lamp batteries.--I don't like to use candles much; they smoke-stain the rock. But we've got a breeze blowing through here. ..."

"Joanna, it's wonderful." Charis, sitting cross-legged on her sleeping bag, paused for a bite of protein bar, and chewed by candlelight. "... This is all ours--there isn't anybody else here. It's a whole huge country, under the ground."

"Dark country."

"But it's ours."

"Tell me ..." Joanna reached over to stuff the food bar wrappers into the supply sack. "Are you happy, Charis?"

"You mean not just about the cave? About everything?"

"Yes."

Charis smiled. "Yes, I'm happy.--And it feels really strange."

"I know. I know how strange that feels."

"Poor Captain Lowell. ..." The girl apparently reminded of unhappiness by its opposite.

"Yes, it was too bad."

"I suppose he'll be in the hospital for a while. ..." Charis, golden in soft candlelight, turned her head slightly aside in absent consideration, certainly of a task incomplete. Unfinished business.

"I'm tired," Joanna said. And she was; tired to sickness, and past sickness.

Tired to death.

"Bedtime. ..." Charis finished the protein bar, and drank a canteen cup of water to wash it down. She unlaced her hiking boots, pulled them off, and set them on the passage stone ... then turned and tucked her feet into her sleeping bag--Joanna's bag--thrashed her way down into it like a child, then reached out a hand to zip it up.

"Good night, sweetheart."

"Joanna ..."

"What?"

"Thank you for this, for bringing me down. I love it. It's like being lost ...

and found, at the same time."

"Yes, that's what it's like. And you did very well ... a natural."

"Good night. ..."

"Good night."

Joanna sat on her sleeping bag-Frank's sleeping bag; she'd smelled faint reminders of his odor, unrolling it. ... She sat looking into the candle's flame, its warm little circumference of moving light. She sat for a while, the cave's silence allowing her to hear the pulse thumping softly in her ears, measuring time's passing. The candle's light, as she watched, seemed to slowly expand to fill the passage, the small chamber and its pool--growing ...

growing to become light enough to brighten the cavern's tangled passages, tunnels, and dark streams' flowing, until there could be no shadow left in it, but everything revealed.

Charis murmured in her sleep ... shifted in the sleeping bag. A tired girl.

The excitement, the newness of this underworld--even more than the hours of hard labor, discomfort, and occasional risk--had wearied her. ... Soon, youth and her great vitality would bring her back, elastic in energy. But not for a while.

She had said she was happy.

The candle's light now shrunk to ordinary. Joanna got to her feet and went down the passage quietly as she could. She found one of several quartzite rocks, worn from a wall's softer limestone by water flowing long ago. The rock was a heavy double handful, one side a ragged crystalline edge.

She picked it up and brought it back, moving carefully, quietly ... and came to kneel by Charis as she slept. The girl was breathing the deep sweeping breaths of dreaming.

Joanna held the rock high in both hands. She'd decided what must be done, and wanted for Charis only a half-known instant of impact-its cause and effect as much dreamed as real, and never to be understood. She would be--then not. And lie in her great cool dark palace forever, a princess never discovered for waking.

It was an easier death than any she'd given.

Joanna held the rock high in both hands ... and slowly discovered that she would hold it there forever, hold it until she herself became stone--rather than let it fall.

It was not that she was unwilling to do what must be done. It was not that she couldn't kill Charis-couldn't kill her just because she was her daughter, and beautiful, and the last left of those who'd loved her.

She could kill Charis--but she couldn't bring herself to hurt her. And how to do what must be done, and not do that? To hit the sleeping girl with a heavy stone ... to tear her skin, break the bones of her face. To beat her to blood, splinters, and a broken eye--that simply wasn't possible.