In the Ocean of Night (33 page)

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.

The passage became almost unbearably tight. She began to doubt that she had ever made it through this space before. The air seemed impossibly foul. The ship was a bruising presence, a massive vise squeezing the life from her. She stopped, thinking to rest, but she could not seem to get her breath. She knew there was only a little way further to go, and yet—

Something struck her boot. “Go.
Go on.
” Sanges’s muffled voice was very close. There was a thread of panic in it.

“Easy, easy,” Nikka said. If Sanges lost his nerve, they would be in a pretty fix. “We have to take our time.”

“Hurry!”

Nikka braced her feet against the walls and pushed. Her arms were above her head and with one more lunge she found the edge of the passageway above. She pulled slowly up the incline and in a moment was free of the constriction.

Here it was almost possible to stand. The open bay was an ellipsoid with most space taken up by dark oval forms. They were seamless, apparently storage compartments of some kind with no obvious way of opening them. A short path marked off by tape wound between them. No one was to venture beyond that tape or try to investigate the dead alien machinery that lay further on. That would come later when men knew more of the ship and how it worked. Only the white phosphors in the plastiform illuminated this room; they cast long shadows near the walls that gave the room an oddly ominous cast. Though it was almost possible to stand upright, the shadowed mass of the ship seemed to close on her from every direction.

Sanges struggled up out of the tube and slowly got to his feet. “Why did you slow down back there?” he asked sharply.

“I didn’t. You have to pace yourself.”

“What does
that
mean?” he said quickly.

“Nothing.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Claustrophobia is a funny thing and you have to keep your wits about you. You should try it some time the way I
first
went through—in an s-suit with oxygen gear and a helmet.”

“It’s a Godforsaken way to—”

“Precisely. God didn’t make this ship and men didn’t either. We have to learn to adapt to it. If strange things bother you that much, why did you volunteer for this job?”

Sanges clamped his lips together firmly and nodded. After a moment Nikka turned and led the way down the narrow path to an immense black panel set into one wall. There were two man-made chairs in front of it. She indicated one for Sanges and sat in the other. Sanges looked at the imposing board, with its multiple layers of switches laid out before him. He turned his head and studied the dark forms further away. “How can we be sure the pressure is good here?” he said.

“The plastiform is tight,” Nikka said as she turned on some extra phosphors. “The alien superstructure seems to be intact. The whole ship is modular, as far as we can tell. When it crashed, most of the other components were pulverized, but this one and two others—about forty percent of a hemisphere—remained intact. Some things in the other passages were thrown around, but otherwise this section is still in one piece.”

Sanges studied the room and tapped nervously with his fingers on the console board.