Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (36 page)

At that, I tell him we will be leaving.

"Are you in a hurry?" he asks sadly.

"I must return to town before sundown, then go to work," I say.

"I understand. I wish I could accompany you to the entrance to the Woods, but I cannot leave the Power Station."

We part outside the small house.

"Please come back. Let me hear you play the instrument," he says.

"Thank you."

Gradually, the wail of the wind weakens as we walk farther from the Power Station. At the entrance to the Woods, we do not hear it at all.

Lake, Masatomi Kondo, Parity Hose

THE girl and I wrapped up our belongings in spare shirts, and I balanced the bundles on our heads. We looked funny, but we had no time to laugh. We left behind the rations and whiskey, so our loads were not too bulky.

"Take care," said the Professor. In the scant light, he looked much older than when I first met him. His skin sagging, his hair going to seed like a scraggly shrub, his face blotched with liver spots. He looked like a tired old man. Genius scientist or not, everyone grows old, everyone dies. "Good-bye," I said.

We descended by rope to the water's surface. I went down first, signaled with my light when I reached bottom, then she followed. Plunging into water in total darkness was bound to be therapeutic. Not that I had a choice. The water was cold catharthis. It was plain, ordinary water, the usual aqueous specific gravity. Everything was still. Not air, not water, not darkness moved a quiver. Only our own splashing echoed back. Once in the water, it struck me that I'd forgotten to ask the Professor to treat my wound.

"Don't tell me those clawed fish are swimming around in here," I called back in her general direction.

"Don't be silly. They're just a myth," she said. "I think."

Some reassurance. I imagined some giant fish suddenly surfacing and biting off a leg or two. Well, let 'em come.

We swam a slow one-handed breaststroke, roped together, bundles on our head. We aimed for where the Professor trained his light like a beacon on the surface of the water. I swam in the lead. Our arms thrashed the water alternately. I stopped from time to time to check our progress and realign our course/

"Make sure your bundle stays dry," she shouted this way. "The repel device won't be worth a thing if it gets wet."

"No problem," I said. But in fact, it was a great struggle.

I was swimming. Orpheus ferried across the Styx to the Land of the Dead. All the varieties of religious experience in the world, yet when it comes to death, it all boils down to the same thing. At least Orpheus didn't have to balance laundry on his head. The ancient Greeks had style.

"You aren't really mad at Grandfather, are you?" asked the girl. An echo in the dark, it was hard to tell where the question was coming from.

"I don't know, but does it matter?" I said, shouting, my voice coming back from an impossible direction. "The more I listened to your grandfather, the less I cared."

"How can you say that?"

"Wasn't much of a life anyway. Wasn't much of a brain."

"But didn't you say you were satisfied with your life?"

"Word games," I dismissed. "Every army needs a flag."

She didn't respond. We swam on in silence.

Where
were
those fish? Those claws were no figment of even a nonhuman imagination. I worried, after all, that they were cruising our way. I expected a slimy, clawed fin to be grabbing hold of my ankle any second. Okay, I may have been destined to disintegrate in the very near future, but I wasn't prepared to be pate for some creature from the black lagoon. I wanted to die under the sun.

"But you're such a nice guy," she said, sounding like she'd just stepped fresh out of a bath. "At least I think so." "You're one of the very few," I said. "Well, I do."

I looked back over my shoulder as I swam. I saw the Professor's light retreating into the distance, but my hand had yet to touch solid rock. How could it be so far? Decent of him to keep us guessing.

"I'm not trying to defend Grandfather," the girl started in again, "but he's not evil. He gets so wrapped up in his work, he can't see anything else. He had the best of intentions. He wanted to save you before the System got to you. In his own way, Grandfather is ashamed of what he's done."

Saying it was wrong did a hell of a lot of good. "So forgive Grandfather," she said.

"What's forgiveness going to do?" I answered. "If he really felt responsible, he wouldn't create a monster and run off when it got ugly. He doesn't like working for big organizations, fine, but he's got lives hanging on his line of research."

"Grandfather simply couldn't trust the System," she pleaded. "The Calcutecs and Semiotecs are two sides of the same coin."

"Tech-wise, maybe, but like I said before, one protects information while the other steals."

"But what if the System and Factory were both run by rhe same person?" she said. "What if the left hand stole and the right hand protected?"

Hard to believe, but not inconceivable. The whole time I worked for the System, I never heard anything about what went on inside System Central. We received directives; we carried them out. We terminal devices never got access to the CPU.

"True, it'd be one hell of a lucrative business," I agreed. "One side pitted against the other; you can raise your stakes as high as you like. No bottom dropping out of the market either."

"That's what struck Grandfather while he was in the System. After all, the System is really just private enterprise that enlisted state interests. And private enterprise is always after profit. Grandfather realized that if he went ahead with his research, he'd only make things worse."

So the System hangs out a sign: In Business to Protect Information. But it's all a front. If the old man hands over technologies to reconfigure the brain, he seals the fate of humanity. To save the world, he steps down. Too bad about the defunct Calcutecs—and me, who gets stuck in the End of the World.

"Were you in on this all along?" I asked her.

"Well, yes, I knew," she confessed after slight hesitation.

"Then why didn't you tell me? What was the point? You could have saved me blood and time."

"I wanted you to see things through Grandfather's eyes," she answered. "You wouldn't have believed me anyway."

"I suppose not," I said. Third circuit, immortality— who'd believe that straight out, cold?

The next few breaststrokes brought my hand in contact with a stone wall. Somehow we'd managed to swim across this subterranean lake.

"We've made it," I announced.

She pulled up next to me. We looked back to the tiny light in the distance and adjusted our position ten meters to the right.

"Should be about here," she said. "An opening just above the water line."

I carefully undid the bundle on my head and removed the pocket-sized flashlight, then shined it up the wall.

"I don't see a hole," I said.

"Try a little more to the right," she suggested. I swept the flashlight beam over the wall, but still no hole.

"To the right? Are you sure?" "A little further right."

I inched to the right, my whole body shaking. Feeling my way along the wall, my hand touched a shield-like surface. It was the size of an LP record, with carvings. I shined my light on it.

"A relief," she said.

Maybe so, but it was the same two evil-clawed fishes. The sculpted disk was a third submerged in the water.

"This is the way out," she said with authority. "The INKlings must have placed these as markers at all exits. Look up."

Shining my flashlight higher, I could barely make out a shadowy recession. I handed her the light and went to investigate. I couldn't really see the hole, but I felt a damp, mildewy air.

"I found it," I shouted down. "Thank goodness!" she exclaimed.

I pulled her up. We paused there at the mouth of the passage, drenched and shivering.

Undoing our bundles, we changed into dry tops. I gave her my sweater and threw away my wet shirt and jacket. This left me still sopping wet from the waist down, but I didn't have a change of slacks.

While she checked the INKling repel device, I flashed a signal to the Professor that we'd arrived safely. The yellow point of light blinked two times, three times, then went out.

All was pitch black again.

"Let's go," she prompted. I looked at my watch. Seven-eighteen. Above ground, morning news on every TV channel. People eating breakfast, cramming their half-asleep heads with the weather, headache remedies, car export trade problems with America. Who'd know that I'd spent the whole night in the colon of the world? Did they care that I'd been swimming in stinking water and had leeches feeding on my neck, that I'd nearly keeled over from the pain in my gut? Did it matter to anybody that my reality would end in another twenty-eight hours and forty-two minutes? It'd never make the news.

The passage was smaller than anything we had come through this far. We had to crawl on all fours. It led us through intestinal twists and turns, sometimes angling up near vertically, dropping back straight down or looping over like a roller coaster. Progress was hard. This was nothing the INKlings had bored out. Nobody, not even INKlings, would make a passage this convoluted.

After thirty minutes, we exchanged INKling-repel porta-packs, then another ten minutes later the narrow passage suddenly opened up into a place with a high ceiling. Dead silent, it was dark and musty. The path split left and right, air was blowing from right to left.

She trained her light on the divide. Each way led straight off into blackness.

"Which way?" I asked.

"To the right," she said. "Grandfather's instructions put us at Sendagaya, so a right turn should take us toward Jingu Stadium."

I pictured the world above ground. We were directly under the Kawade Bookshop, the Victor Recording Studio, and those two landmark
ramen
shops—Hope-ken and Copain.

"We're close to my barber shop, too," I said.

"Oh?" she said without much interest.

I thought about getting a haircut before the end of the world. It wasn't, after all, like I had lots of better things to do with twenty-four hours left. Taking a bath, getting dressed, and going to the barber shop were about all I could hope for.

"Careful now," she warned. "We're getting close to the INKling nest. There's their voices and that awful stench. Stay with me."

I sniffed the air. I couldn't smell anything. I couldn't hear anything either.

We shortened the rope linking us to fifteen centimeters. "Watch out, the wall's missing here," she spoke sharply, shining her light to the left. She was right: no wall, only a dark expanse. The beam shot off like an arrow and disappeared into thick black space, which seemed almost to be breathing, quivering, a disgustingly gelatinous consistency.

"Hear that?" she asked.

"Yeah, I can hear them," I said.

INKling voices. More like a ringing in my ears, actually. Cutting through like drill bits of high-pitched sound, like the humming of insects gone wild, the sound careened off the walls and screwed into my eardrums.

"Keep moving!" she yelled in my ear. I hadn't noticed I wasn't.

She yanked on the rope. "We can't stop here. If we stop, we'll be dragged off and liquefied."

I couldn't move. I was glued to the ground. Time was flowing backwards toward primeval swamps.

Her hand came out of the dark and slapped me across the face. The sound was deafening.

"To the right!" she barked. "To the right! You hear? Right foot forward! Right, you lamebrain!"

My right leg creaked ahead.

"Left!" she screamed.

I moved my left foot.

"That's it. Slow and steady, one step at a time."

They
were after us for sure, piping fear into our ears, conniving to freeze our footsteps, then lay their slimy hands on us.

"Shine your light at your feet!" she commanded. "Back against the wall! Walk sideways, one step at a time. Got it?"

"Got it," I said.

"Do not raise your light, under any condition."

"Why not?"

"Because there are iNtdings. Right there," she lowered her voice. "But you must never, ever, look at an INKling. If you set eyes on an INKling, you'll never look away."

We proceeded sideways, one step at a time, light at our feet. Cool air licked our faces, leaving the rank odor of dead fish. I wanted to puke. It was like we were in the worm-ridden guts of a giant fish carcass. The INKlings whined, frenzied, disorientingly shrill.

My eardrums turned to stone. Gulps of bile backed up my throat.

My feet kept edging along by sheer reflex. Occasionally, she called out to me, but I could no longer hear what she was saying. The blue light of her INKling-repel device was still on, so I guessed we were still safe. But for how long?

I noticed a change in the air. The stink grew less putrid; the pressure on my ears evaporated. Sounds resonated in a different way. The worst was over. We let out sighs of relief and wiped off a cold sweat.

For the longest time, she didn't speak. Droplets of water echoed through the void.

"Why were they so mad?" I asked.

"We intruded on their sanctuary. They hate the world of light and all who live there."

"Hard to believe the Semiotecs would work with them, no matter what the benefits."

Her only response was to squeeze my wrist.

Then after a bit: "Know what I'm thinking?"

"No idea," I said.

"I'm thinking it would be wonderful if I could follow you into that world where you're going."

"And leave this world behind?"

"That's right," she said. "It's a boring old world anyway. I'm sure it'd be much more fun living in your consciousness."

I shook my head, Hell, I didn't want to live in my own consciousness.

"Well, let's keep going," she said. "We've got to find the exit through the sewer. What time is it?" "Eight-twenty."

"Time to switch porta-packs," she said, turning on the other unit, then wedging the expended one clumsily into her waistband.