Nigel nodded. “Now you can ask me what it was like to talk to the Snark.”
Puzzlement crossed her face; her eyebrows curled downward. Then she exploded with mirth and slapped him on the arm. “I see! We must do this ritual sweeping out of the cobwebs! Of course.” She laughed merrily and Nigel felt a weight lift from them. “Very well, I shall—do you say, bite?”
“Right. English isn’t your—”
“Native tongue? No. I am Japanese.”
“So I’d gathered.” Yet, he thought, she has none of the shyness I expected her to have. But that, too, was part of the unwanted halo.
“And your friend the Snark?”
“It said our desk calculators will probably outlive us.” “So I’ve heard. But it always takes a Lewis Carroll to make a Snark.”
“Yes,” he said, sensing behind her laughing liquid eyes a more serious intent. “Yes, doesn’t it?”
TWO
Mr. Ichino dozed a bit, late in the morning. He spent most of the day making the cabin fit to live, and as he worked he thought of Japan. Already the images of his visit were fading. He had gone, thinking to regain some fraction of himself, and instead had found a strange parody of the Japan his parents had known.
Perhaps it was the National Parks of Preservation. His ticket to the Osaka Park, despite its price, gained him admission only to the lesser portions. There the grasses and foliage were soot-stained, a dead gray. The great towering trees were withered and dusty. To call this a park seemed a deliberate joke and Mr. Ichino had become angry, only to be soothed by a young woman attendant and then sold another, vastly more expensive ticket. This unlocked a wrought-iron gate at one edge of the grimy forest, in time for the daily appearance of the trained nightingales. Their song burst over him suddenly as he crossed a tinkling stream. Fog shrouded the treetops in the ravine and Mr. Ichino stood ankle-deep in the chill waters, transfixed by the lilting merry song. Later, there came larks. Their trainers assembled in a shoreside clearing. The cages were lined up in a row and simultaneously the doors opened, releasing a fluttering cloud of the birds. They flew vertically upward, hovered below the lazy clouds and warbled for many minutes. The lesser larks returned early and occasionally flew into the wrong cage; the best lasted eighteen minutes aloft, and returned un-erringly.
He could not afford many visits to the Parks, so he spent hours in the city streets. The pollution victims who begged on corners and in doorways disturbed him, but he could not take his eyes away. The healthy passed by these creatures without a thought, but Mr. Ichino often stood at a distance and studied them. He recalled his mother saying, in quite a different context, that the deaf seem as fools and the blind were like sages. Those who could scarcely hear, in their effort to catch what others were saying, would knit their brows, gape their mouths and goggle their eyes, cocking their heads this way and that. But the blind would sit calmly, immersed, their heads bowed a trifle as if in meditation, and thus appear quite thoughtful. He saw in them the half-closed merciful eyes of the Buddha images which were everywhere. They sang softly, chiri-chiri-gan, chiri-gan, and ate of parched soybeans and unpolished rice, and to Mr. Ichino they were the only natural people left in this jumbled island of sleazy cities. Amid the pressing crowds Mr. Ichino drifted, letting his time run out, and then came back to America. He had learned that he was not Japanese, and the truth was more than a little disturbing. He had felt a kinship with the remnants of the fragile natural world in Japan, but that was all. A strange logic, he knew: the deformed seemed more human than the abrasive, competitive, healthy ones. He had emptied his pockets into their alms bowls, and wished he could do more. But he could give only momentary shelter to these crippled beings. And in a truly natural world they would be quickly snuffed out. Yet they seemed, cowering there in twos and threes, brushed aside by the earnest business of the world, somehow in touch with a Japan he had once known—or dreamed of—and forever lost. Yes, an odd logic.
The Many Paths Commune, nestled into the Oregon hill country, had proved larger than he had expected. Mr. Ichino had already found five tumbled-down shacks, cabins or sheds within two hundred meters of the Commune Center. Since the property extended another kilometer along the riverbed, snaking down westward to the Willamette, there were probably many more.
With his own cabin made livable by late afternoon, he was moved to explore the Commune, to observe its ruins, its memories. Puffing slightly in the chill air, he angled down the face of a hill. The deer had worn their own vast system of interlocking trails. The hillside was wrinkled like a face, but the early fall rains had already blurred the paths again. Mr. Ichino had tried to follow the deer trails but it was hard to keep each step along the way from starting small landslides. He worked his way down toward the river. Half hidden ahead was a large Buckminster Fuller dome. Whatever had covered it was completely gone. The beams were of solid pine but the joint connections were rusted and decaying; several had broken away.
This must be the main cabin, where the patriarch lived with his reported two brides. The people in Dexter who rented him this site were full of stories about the rise and fall of the Many Paths, most of them rumors about sexual excesses committed by the patriarch. Mr. Ichino still didn’t have a clear idea why Many Paths failed after twelve years. The most prevalent theory in Dexter was that the patriarch had one revelation too many about the nature of expansive love. There were rumors of a murder or two that split the commune into factions.
Mr. Ichino stopped to rest by the dome. A rusted stove and some scattered brown bottles lay in mute testimony to the impermanence of man’s things. Further away there was a pile of lumber that might have been a woodshed and a lean-to outhouse near the river. The current was fast and deep here, rippling the cold water. The stream bed was filled with rocks and boulders of all sizes and a tributary creek exposed high layered walls of conglomerate soil. Some of the trees behind the dome had had to contort themselves to keep pace with the eroding bank; in places their exposed roots had grown huge for support.
Mr. Ichino studied it, hands in pockets. The cropland nearby was rocky and unforgiving. It seemed more likely to him that Many Paths failed more for economic reasons than for social ones. Apples and a few other crops took to this sort of land, but he couldn’t conceive of making a living from farming here. The Dexter people said Many Paths had had a novelist or two and an artist living here, so probably that was their main income.
Mr. Ichino made a trail through rotted leaves and loam back toward the cabin where he lived. He smiled to himself. The Many Paths people were probably city kids—(kids? He reminded himself that they were probably his age by now)—full of idealism and guilt. He could vouch for the fact that they knew little of carpentry. The support beams in his cabin were inaccurately laid and the shank fasteners not driven in far enough. The rest of the cabin was adequate, though, so probably they had somebody reasonably competent around when it went up. It was the only building left that was livable, mostly because Dexter folk had repaired it over the years for a hunting lodge.
Mr. Ichino disliked hunting, though he was no vegetarian. He hated seeing things die. It was alarming enough to note what an enormous effect your mere passage had on the forest, an unknowing giant lumbering through web after fragile web of biological universes. Mr. Ichino studied the deep bed of moist leaves he was walking over. Every step he took crushed a world. Chop a log for firewood and suddenly a panicky swarm of ants is covering the ax blade. Move a stump in your way and a warm, slumbering black salamander finds himself in the middle of winter and scuttles off. Kick a rock and a frog jumps.
He stood by the creek listening and something caught his attention. A rustle of leaves, the faint snap of a twig. Something was moving along the opposite bank of the creek. A thick stand of pine blocked his vision. Mr. Ichino could see a dark form flitting between the trees. It was difficult to judge distance and size in the quilted shadows but the form was certain: it was a man. Mr. Ichino brushed aside a frond to have a better look and instantly the shadow across the creek froze. Mr. Ichino held his breath. The dark form among the trees seemed to slowly fade away, with no detectable sound or sudden movement.
After a moment Mr. Ichino could not be sure he saw it any more at all. It seemed odd that a man could disappear so silently. For a moment Mr. Ichino wondered whether he had really seen anyone there or whether it was his own isolation playing tricks with his eyes. But no, he had heard the sound, of that he was sure.
Well, there was no point in worrying over shadows in the woods. He decided to put the matter out of his mind. But as he climbed upward toward his cabin some uneasiness remained and he unconsciously quickened his pace.
There were no signs of the Wasco blast here, two hundred kilometers from Wasco and deep in Oregon’s coastal margin of woods. The local people still told stories of the disaster, of hardships, of relatives or friends incinerated—but Mr. Ichino was fairly sure most of it had only a slim factual backing. How could he find the traces Nigel thought were here, among folk so given to tall stories?
He had rummaged through town records, consulted the cramped little libraries, talked to the elderly ones who had grown up here. From the detail and hyperbole he had extracted no concrete ideas. What next? Winter would come soon, confining him. What could he do? Mr. Ichino shook his head and labored back to the cabin.
THREE
Nikka allowed the weak lunar gravity to pull her slowly down the narrow shaft. She held her arms above her head; there was no room to keep them at her side. Her feet touched something solid. She felt around with her boots until she found a small hole in the side, off to an angle. She slowly twisted until she could sink into it up to her knees.
She looked up. The head of Victor Sanges was framed in the tunnel mouth six meters up. “You can start down now,” she said. “Take it slowly. Don’t be afraid of falling. There’s enough friction with the walls to slow you down.”
She wriggled into the narrow side channel and in a moment was stretched flat on her back, working her way forward by digging in her heels and pushing with her palms against the rough plastiform sheeting. Through the translucent material she could see the coppery metal of the ship itself. It had a dull sheen unlike any metal Nikka had ever seen. Apparently it puzzled the metallurgists as well, for they still could not name the alloy. Every few meters the walls had a curious semicircular series of whorls; otherwise this tube was featureless. Nikka passed one of the glowing white phosphors the maintenance crew had stamped into the plastiform when this section of the ship was pressurized. It was the only apparent lighting in the tube; perhaps the aliens had needed none. The tunnel narrowed here, following no obvious scheme. The ceiling brushed against the side of her face and she had a sudden unreasoning fear of the oppressive weight of the ship above her. Her breath was trapped, moist and warm, in front of her face and she could hear only her own amplified breathing.
“Sanges?” A muffled shout came in reply. She worked her way further on and felt her heels come free of the floor. Quickly she wriggled through and into a spherical room two meters in diameter. A chill seeped into her legs and arms as she waited for Sanges. She wore a thermal insulation suit and the air circulated well through the tunnel, but the ship around them was in equilibrium with the moon surface at minus 100 degrees Centigrade. During full lunar night things were much worse, but the thermal inertia of the ship helped take the bite of cold away. The engineers refused to heat the tunnel air, just as they refused to pressurize any more of the strange network of corridors than proved absolutely essential. No one knew what effect air would have on the ship as a whole—thus the plastiform walls.
Sanges slowly crawled out the small opening and into the cramped spherical room. “What is this?” he said. He was a small, wiry man with black hair and intense eyes. He spoke slowly in the ruby glow that enveloped them.
“The Bowl Room, for want of any other name,” Nikka replied. “That red light comes directly out of the walls; the engineers don’t know how it works. The lights are in a weak period right now. They get brighter later on and the whole cycle repeats with a period of 14.3 hours.”
“Ah.” Sanges pursed his lips.
“The natural assumption is that their day was 14.3 hours long.” She smiled slightly. “But who knows? There isn’t any other clue to back up that guess.”
Sanges frowned. “But—a room, perfectly spherical. Nothing else on the wall. What could they use it for?”
“A free-fall handball court, that’s my theory. Or a drying room for underwear. Maybe it’s a shower, only we don’t know how to turn on the water. There’s a patch over there that looks odd”—she pointed to a burnished splotch above her head—“but with that plastiform over it I can’t guess what it is.”
“This room is so small. How could anyone—” “Small for who? You and I are both here because we’re practically midgets compared to the rest of the human race. Alphonsus imported you especially for the occasion, didn’t they? I mean, you were on Earth when we found this. They shipped you up because you know electronics and you can wriggle through these tubes.”
“Yes.” The man nodded. “The first time I ever thought being small was an advantage.”
Nikka pointed to a hole halfway up the wall. “This next part is the worst squeeze in the whole trip to the computer link. Come on.”
She worked her way into the hole and down into a comparatively open length. Abruptly the passage narrowed. Nikka braced herself and got through by expelling her breath and pushing hard with her heels. There was an open space that temporarily eased the pressure, and then ahead she saw the walls narrowing again. She pushed and turned, trying to wedge herself flat on the tilted floor of the passage. Not only was it contracted here, but the tube was tilted at an awkward forty-five degrees.
She could hear the soft sounds of Sanges’s struggles behind her. The tunnel seemed to press at her and she gave herself over to an endless series of pushes and wriggles, rhythmically turning forward against the steady hand of gravity and the clutching of the walls.
