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human being!
The horror in her face went beyond ordinary squeamishness at the thought of
passage through a sewer. She was plainly shaken by some deeper emotion.
What s so bad about your pipes, Anvra?
They are& underground. Underground!Away from the light and the air.Away from
the sky!
Then he understood. He remembered the note in Jax s voice when Jax had spoken
about Earth s people as wingless, about the Earth as the Damned World. To a
flying people, being without wings would literally be hell. And being forced
underground where they could not use wings, where they were locked from their
natural open environment would be double hell.
All thebetter, thought Doug grimly. If such were the case, there was that
much more chance he could travel through the piping unobserved.
As you say. He rose again to his feet, fending her off as she tried to stop
him. I m different. Let s see if you can t find me a route to their tower
through its water or sewer pipes.
III
Less than an hour later, his thin brown legs were encased in hiphigh boots of
some thin rubbery material. He was clothed, all but his arms, in an insulated
one-piece suit of the same stuff. Anvra had found the garments for him.
Doug stood beyond a water-tight door at the top of three steps leading into a
tunnel perhaps ten feet in diameter. He was in the subbasement of the Water
Witches tower. The tunnel a great metal pipe seemed lit bya phosphorescence
covering all the surfaces above the ankle-deep water. The pipe ran straight,
losing itself in brilliance both far ahead and far behind.
The pipe was not one of the sewers, Anvra had said. It was part of the
storm-drain system. In case of a flash rainstorm, anyone in the drain would be
swept away and drowned. But this was not the time of year for thunderstorms.
Now only a bare trickle of water was pumped into the drains to nourish the
fungus that coated the drain walls and illuminated their interiors for the
benefit of the slave working crews.
Doug stepped down into the drainpipe and felt the water tugging at his
ankles. A splashing behind him made him turn. Anvra, carrying the pipe-charts
for the area between this tower and that of the Cadda Noyer Aerie, had entered
the water behind him.
All right. He reached for the charts. I ll take those.
Will you? she said, holding on to them. And how are you going to read
them?
He saw that she, too, had on a pair of the rubbery wading boots.
You aren t going with me?
I am, she said. You can t read the charts. You re no Water Witch! You
can t even read the pipe markings. You d never get there.
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He respected her courage. A flying woman, she was forcing herself to go
underground, swallowing her horror.
Your self-obligation at work again, I suppose?
That s right. She was tight-lipped.
Well& thank you, he said. He started forward. The rounded surface underfoot
obliged them to walk single file and he heard her splashing along behind him.
Doug was genuinely touched. Kathang must have been a damn fool not to have
appreciated this female more than he had. Loyalty such as Anvra showed was
something to admire.
Thus began the long wading trip through the phosphorescent corridor. They
said nothing except when they came to an intersection or a branching. Then
Anvra would stop briefly to compare her charts with the markings on the pipe
wall at that point. She would give directions and they would move on. She had
explained earlier that there was no direct route from the Water Witches tower
to that of the Cadda Noyer. In effect, the distance to the tower would be
almost doubled by the route they had to take.
Doug had held himself to a slow, steady pace from the start, remembering how
his legs on occasion had threatened to betray him. In spite of his
precautions, after a time he felt his thigh-muscles beginning to ache. The
ache woke him to the fact that had not previously registered on him. The water
through which they had been wading had deepened gradually until now he was
slogging through in knee-depth. Also, there was a new, strange ache across his
back. He discovered that he was, instinctively, holding his wingtips high
above the wet.
A sudden, different sound of splashing sounded behind him. He swung about to
see Anvra stumbling, going down into the water. He moved to catch her just in
time. She was a limp weight in his arms. Looking down at her in the eerie
light of the phosphorescence, he saw that her eyes were closed.
Her face looked like a death mask in old ivory. Her wings were soaked clear
to the feathers of their top joints. Plainly, the massed feathers took up
water like a sponge. Anvra, being shorter and weaker, had not been able to
hold her lower wingtips out of the water as Doug had done. She felt heavy in
his arms with the added weight of liquid, and she was icy cold.
Anvra! He had noticed that her hands were empty. She must have dropped the
charts.
He shook her. Her eyes fluttered open.
Anvra, he said, where are we? Are we headed for the tower?
Straight& ahead&
Her eyes closed again.
How far? he demanded. How far, Anvra?
But she was no longer answering.
He lifted her in his arms one hand up under her wing-sockets, one hand under
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her knees and waded heavily forward. After forty or fifty steps his arms began
to tremble with the load. He was forced to stop.
Supporting her with an effort, he pulled off one by one his two hip-length
leg-coverings. The thin material was as easy to handle as cloth. He knotted
the feet together and the tops to each other to form a loop. He put this loop
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| Cytat |
Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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